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hard for, all this after taking fights that I really should not have taken. I’m just going to follow and execute the game plan of my trainer and team.”
Boone’s last 14 opponents were a combined 169-9-3 overall and he posted a 3-10-1 mark against them, No less than 11 of those fighters were undefeated when they fought.
Calderon has been training Boone for two months.
“Darnell [Boone] has really impressed me in that he’s a very hard worker who knows what he has to do once he steps inside the ring,” Calderon said. “He just needs to be patient and not want to kill the other fighter right from the outset.
“He’s a pro who has settled down with his punches, is thinking more while moving in the ring and just flat out boxing.”
Calderon said Boone needs to get into a rhythm while keeping Stevenson off-balance.
“Stevenson is a power puncher whose only loss to Boone is already his motivation,” Calderson said. “Darnell must respect his power but at the same time, cannot let him control the fight. His game is to knock you out, so we want to work all of the angles. We need to make him box and work hard the entire fight.”
Since his loss to Boone, Stevenson, a Longueuil, Quebec, native, has won six consecutive fights — four by TKO and the other two by KO. Only one of those fights, his last time out against Don George in October, reached the final scheduled round.
The scheduled 10-round bout is the main event on the eight-bout card and will be shown live on Wealth TV and Wealthtv.com.
The undercard is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m.The skills of a philosopher and those of a novelist are often in tension, but they have much to learn from each other, says novelist and philosopher, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. She chooses her favourite philosophical novels.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein graduated from Columbia University, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy and receiving her PhD in philosophy from Princeton University. While in graduate school she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship. Goldstein is a MacArthur Fellow and has received the National Humanities Medal, the National Jewish Book Award, and numerous other honours.
You are quite unusual in having a degree in philosophy, being a philosopher in your own right, but also being a novelist. How did you begin writing philosophical novels?
I don’t quite know how it happened. I never had any intention of being a novelist. I started in physics, then went into the philosophy of science and mathematical logic. I wasn’t even interested in more literary philosophy like Sartre or existentialism. I loved novels but I felt somewhat ashamed, since I was a strictly hard-core analytic philosopher.
My experimenting with fiction might have been to do with what I then considered ‘mushy’ questions that I’d been thinking about when, having been raised in a very religious family, I lost any inclination towards religion. I had also given birth to my first child, and lost my beloved father. I was a young professor of philosophy wondering how to think about all these life changes as a philosopher, and found that the way I had been trained as a philosopher, with my great emphasis on precision, just closed it off.
“Where argument and empirical evidence end, having been exhausted, it’s often our philosophical temperament that swells up to fill the space, delivering to us our deep core intuitions.”
In the midst of these ponderings, I heard this voice, one morning as I was getting ready for work, delivering me my first line: ‘I’m often asked what it’s like to be married to a genius.’ It was not my voice, it was not my story. I was married to a very smart man at that time, a brilliant physicist, but still I was not often asked what it was like to be married to a genius. I simply knew it was the first line of a novel.
I followed that voice, which is something you have to do in writing novels. In philosophy, in contrast, you follow an argument. So by a strange turn of events in my life I started writing novels, and it certainly became a great stumbling block in my philosophical career. I lost a lot of ground that I spent many decades trying to regain. In my early twenties, I was on my way to a respectable analytic philosopher’s career – writing a novel was not the right thing to do.
But I’m glad, at this point in my life, that I did it. I think I have learned more about the kinds of questions I’ve come to be most interested in by writing novels and then returning to philosophy and writing about them in an entirely different way, than if I had stayed on the straight and narrow.
In two of your more recent books, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction and Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, you combine philosophical arguments with characterisation and story. You engage with philosophy through a character (in the case of Plato, one based on a real character with some mythological attributes now attached to him). Both are very philosophical works but they’re better than straight philosophy because of the narrative, the way you get inside the arguments. It’s a bit like Kierkegaard: showing something is far better than simply stating it.
I think there’s room for both. One of the things I’m very interested in is the interplay between character and philosophical intuition. Where argument and empirical evidence end, having been exhausted, it’s often our philosophical temperament that swells up to fill the space, delivering to us our deep core intuitions.
As Hume says, our nature is too strong for argument. Psychology will swell up and fill the space beyond philosophical argument. Only what I’m interested in is not just the intuitions that Hume was interested in, that we all share in common— such as our belief in the uniformity of nature—but the intuitions that vary between us. They are, in some sense, the product of our character and of our outlook on reality and our place within it. That’s why our deep philosophical intuitions vary so much between us.
“You feel the movement of a philosophically sophisticated ethicist moving behind the scenes of Middlemarch ”
I’m still a product of my training and very committed to philosophical arguments, but the extra-philosophical, extra-argumentative aspects of our individually variable intuitions fascinate me.
That’s something that I can get at within a novel. I guess it’s the psychology of philosophy that I can get at in fiction, rather than philosophy proper. I’ve just discoursed on it but it’s much more interesting to demonstrate it. That’s one of the many things you can do in a novel.
Read 1 Middlemarch by George Eliot Read
Your first choice is Middlemarch (1852) by George Eliot, which is visibly philosophical. She’s a highly intelligent, articulate, philosophically sophisticated writer who had actually translated Spinoza into English. She was immersed in moral philosophy and, in a sense, this is a touchstone for the philosophical novel for me. Why did you choose it?
Both the first two books that I’ve chosen—Middlemarch and Moby Dick, by Herman Melville—grew out of their authors’ preoccupations with Spinoza.
George Eliot produced the first English translation of The Ethics. Because of an altercation between her partner, George Henry Lewes, and her publisher, it wasn’t actually published until 1978. Eliot has that intimate, translator’s knowledge of Spinoza, and she takes issue with him on precisely the point that would lead her to write a philosophical novel rather than a philosophical treatise.
Not only is Eliot a great moral thinker—you feel the movement of a philosophically sophisticated ethicist moving behind the scenes of Middlemarch—but it’s also about the use of literature in moving us morally forward. This is an aspect that Middlemarch shares with all the novels I’ve chosen. I began my second career as a novelist in spite of my disapproving philosophical other half. All the five novels I’ve chosen were important in persuading that other half that it had a lot to learn and to shut up and listen.
“There has been a professionalization of philosophical thinking that is completely separate from the question of how we live our lives. So you can be a brilliant ethicist and a complete asshole.”
There are so many ways in which Eliot is a Spinozist and so, for her, the general problem is the same as for Spinoza, which is, ‘What do we do about human nature? We are stuck with human nature. How can we nevertheless make moral progress, become something more, given the smallness of human nature?’
Eliot has this wonderful quotation in Middlemarch: “We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.” In The Ethics, Spinoza famously says that the only way to move forward is through pure reason: “For the eyes of the mind, whereby it sees and observes things, are none other than proofs.” So there’s his answer to the question that Eliot also addresses.
Spinoza doesn’t discount emotion—in fact to make cognitive progress is to make emotional progress is to make moral progress—they’re all collapsed together for him, as well as for Eliot. But for Spinoza, it has to begin with tracing out and replicating, in our minds, the pure logical connections that constitute the nature of reality. It is this pure logical deduction and objectivity that will transform our emotions and expand us so that we take in more and more of reality, and become less identified with the very small creatures that we are.
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For George Eliot, what is morally relevant is not your making your way into an impersonally objective reality constituted of logical connections, but rather into the reality of others — to gain some insight into what it is like to be them. That’s the knowledge that’s essential for moral progress. For both of them moral progress is cognitive, but the relevant knowledge is different, as is the associated cognitive means.
Eliot makes imagination central, which also makes the narrative arts central. In Spinoza, the arts are not particularly central. They are mere pleasures. He liked theatre and mentions it on a list of innocent pleasures that “none but the superstitious” (i.e. the religious) would condemn: nice clothes, beautiful plants, perfume, and going to the theatre. I think that’s the only time he mentions the arts. But for George Eliot, the artistic imagination is key to the answer she offers to the question she shares with Spinoza: how do we make progress beyond our deplorably small selves? She’s trying to morally transform us through her fiction.
So this is very ambitious literature, coming out of philosophical conviction. It’s not only my favourite philosophical novel, it’s my favourite novel. I teach it again and again and each time I am flabbergasted by what she’s able to accomplish and what my students get out of it.
It seems to me appropriate that Spinoza writes in an objective geometrical way about reason, and logic, and how to deduce how to live, and George Eliot writes in a very specific, character-driven, situational way to bring out the importance of sympathy and the kinds of human connections that are possible: it would almost be perverse if it was the other way around.
Both of them promise us that reading their works in the right way will be a deeply emotional experience. That reading Eliot’s fiction arouses our emotions isn’t surprising, but The Ethics? But actually when you get to Part 5 and the kind of transcendence that it both deduces and induces—viewing things sub specie aeternitatis—you can lose your sense of self in the grandeur of it all, and it is profoundly emotional.
But there is this substantive question that lies between the two books: what is the kind of knowledge that morally transforms us and how do we acquire it? For Spinoza it’s objective reality itself; only reality in its infinite complexity is powerful enough to enlarge the smallness of our nature, and for George Eliot the essential knowledge comes about through the imaginative grasping of others, who are no larger than we are.
“She makes the limits of imagination—not the limits of reason— essential to how much moral progress a character can make.”
Middlemarch is deeply ethical. The differences between her characters are ethical differences which are shown as differences in the limits of their capacity for sympathetic imagination. All of her characters are driven by ‘conatus,’ the drive to persist and flourish that Spinoza talked about. They’re after their own wellbeing, but, for some of them, their characters are such that they are able to imagine themselves into others. They are the characters who undergo moral progress and moral expansion. She makes the limits of imagination—not the limits of reason— essential to how much moral progress a character can make.
Dorothea Brooke, who is her heroine, is a very real, and very flawed, character, especially in the beginning. She undergoes morally transformative experiences, and they’re experiences of imagining the inner reality of others, in particular the sad, small character of Casaubon, whom she marries. He’s a scholar, a dried-up pedant with no imagination whatsoever. Eliot is also demonstrating the dangers of the life of ethically unimaginative scholarship, of sterile pedantry.
It’s a great novel. Every time I re-read it I think, ‘Gee, I know this by heart. Am I going to have the full experience?’ And I always do: I always have the huge experience and find something else to admire in it.
Read 2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville Read
I’m intrigued that you said that your second choice, Moby Dick (1851), has Spinoza lurking behind the story of a young man finding himself, or an older man losing himself in pursuit of a whale who injured him. That doesn’t sound immediately Spinozan.
I actually have quite an idiosyncratic reading of this great metaphysical masterpiece. Michael Della Rocca, a philosopher at Yale, has a new Oxford handbook on Spinoza. He asked me to do a chapter on the literary influence of Spinoza, and it was in the course of writing that chapter that I discovered the astonishing role Spinoza played in literature: German and English and American.
My view of the Enlightenment is that it was seeded by Spinoza, who died in 1677, a hundred years before the Enlightenment. He was pounced on, denounced, he became the most dangerous man in Europe to acknowledge, even after his death, because he thought that ethics could be grounded on purely secular grounds. The two greatest reasons for believing in God—God as giving the answer to why is there something rather than nothing, and also as grounding morality—Spinoza pulled the rug out from.
So he was declared the great Satan on Earth, but, in order to denounce him, everyone was reading him. To get your degree in European universities and your entrance into ecclesiastical circles you had to have your refutations of Spinoza lined up.
“Goethe said that, when he was young, he never left the house without a copy of The Ethics in his back pocket.”
Then in 1785, in the midst of the Enlightenment, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, who was actually a convert to Christianity from Judaism, said that to be a Spinozist is to be an atheist, an immoralist, and a fatalist, and to sign on to the Enlightenment is to be a Spinozist. Ergo, the Enlightenment should be renounced.
This attack on Spinoza, as the essential figure in the Enlightenment, was a huge phenomenon in Germany that then spread to England. It was called the Pantheismusstreit—pantheism controversy—and it put Spinoza front and centre.
First in Germany, starting with Goethe, the German Romantics—the Sturm und Drang crowd—declared, one after the other, ‘If to be for the Enlightenment means to be a Spinozist, then I’m a Spinozist!’ Goethe said that, when he was young, he never left the house without a copy of The Ethics in his back pocket. Then Hölderlin and Novalis declared that they were Spinozists. In the process, Spinoza got transformed—one can say he got deformed—into a figure that a German Romantic could love.
This is all background to Moby Dick. Coleridge was immersed in German intellectual thinking, and, at first, was a Spinozist. But there was an aspect of Spinoza that bothered him. As you make progress in Spinoza and identify more and more with Deus sive Natura—the thing that can be thought of as God or Nature—you lose your sense of identity and personality. He didn’t like that. He said it was the “swamping of personality by Infinity.” And yes, that’s what Spinoza wants for us, for our personality to be swamped by infinity. That’s how we save ourselves. But Coleridge rebelled against this and wrote about it in his intellectual journal, Biographia Literaria.
“It’s amazing to me that the two greatest philosophical novels written in English in the 19th century, Moby Dick and Middlemarch, come out of a preoccupation with Spinoza.”
This was, in turn, read by Herman Melville, on the other side of the Atlantic, and he became obsessed with the same question: If we are Spinozists and persuaded by his deductive argument, what happens to our autonomy? We’re swamped by infinity. That, I believe, is at the heart of what’s going on in Moby Dick. What that great white whale represents is impersonal, logically constituted reality that has no regard for our autonomy, that would swamp us, that would reconstitute our individuality in its image, and it’s an insult to our very beings. It may be reality, but it’s a personal insult.
Ahab is defiantly denying this swamping. If you go back and look at the crazy, nutty things that he is saying—“Talk not to me of blasphemy,” he says to Starbuck, “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me”—he’s defiantly against the Spinozist logic that constitutes all of nature, including our nature. He’s not going to be determined! That defiance is the essence of his character.
The great irony is that it’s his defiant determination not to be determined that determines him and ultimately dooms him. He’s driven by his maddened desire not to be driven.
Spinoza had entered deeply into the literary consciousness by way of the attacks on the Enlightenment that he came to represent. It’s amazing to me that the two greatest philosophical novels written in English in the 19th century, Moby Dick and Middlemarch, come out of a preoccupation with Spinoza.
What about Ishmael? How does he relate to the Spinoza narrative?
All of the crew of the Pequod are doomed. Except for Starbuck and Ishmael, they all yield their responsibility to Ahab. At first they try to fight him, and then they just give up and become instruments of his will. The tricky thing that Spinoza asks us to do is to both have our minds completely reordered by the logical order of reality, while also maintaining responsibility for ourselves, both intellectually and morally. We must hold ourselves accountable, for our beliefs and our actions, even in the face of the most powerful determinism.
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So you both lose yourself and yet can’t lose yourself. This is incredibly tricky, and maybe itself logically incoherent. In any case, it’s what Spinoza requires and what The Ethics is trying to carry us toward. Everybody in the crew gives up their authority, their accountability, their responsibility to Ahab and that’s something you’re not allowed to do. They all go down with him.
Ishmael is the objective observer. He pulls back, he observes and he doesn’t get pulled into the orbit of Ahab’s madness. He maintains his own identity and his own judgement and he is saved. He is the only one who survives the catastrophe.
The way he survives it is also interesting. It’s one of the most amazing scenes in all of literature. There is a casket that Queequeg has prepared for himself, which is scribbled all over with his tattoos. Queequeg is a Polynesian, who at first Ishmael is horrified by. He thinks he’s perhaps a cannibal and he’s also covered with grotesque tattoos. He is the embodiment of the Other. But then Ishmael grows to love Queequeg and his individuality. When Queequeg is deathly ill, he prepares a casket for himself that can float because he doesn’t want to be submerged in the sea. He transfers all of his tattoos—that express his individuality—onto this casket. And that’s the thing that saves Ishmael. So there’s a clinging to individuality. In this extraordinary scene, with the casket floating and saving Ishmael, there is an embrace of individuality in the face of everything and also an embrace of our coming, in whichever strange and unpredictable ways, to the aid of one another. The instrument of Ishmael’s survival is Queequog, Queequog’s casket, inscribed with his superstitious beliefs, yes, but with his individuality, which is precious.
A novelist has got to believe in the moral supremacy of the irreducibly individual. You can’t write novels without embracing the something sacred in individuality.
As with Middlemarch, I could go on indefinitely about the way in which this novel wrestles with very specific philosophical problems.
Read 3 Death in Venice by Thomas Mann Read
You’ve described Middlemarch and Moby Dick as great novels — which they are in at least two senses. Death in Venice is a much slimmer book. Why did you choose Death in Venice (1912)?
Now we are going to get into much more idiosyncratic choices. One of the things about novels is our response to them is subjective. A great writer prepares a great experience, but the experience is going to vary from reader to reader. There has to be an elective affinity between the novel and your own preoccupations and character: intellectual, emotional, and philosophical.
I’m really interested in two philosophers who are, in some sense, enemies of literature: Spinoza with his downplaying of the imagination and the sense of beauty and individuality, and Plato. Plato banished the artists from his utopia, particularly the epic poets who were the novelists of his day.
“Philosophy is not a 9-5 job.”
And yet, the great irony is that Plato is the greatest literary artist of the western philosophical canon. He writes his dialogues with characters and scenes and sometimes even plots, particularly in the Symposium.
I’m really interested in novels that are deeply Platonic, and Death in Venice is deeply Platonic. The dialogues of Plato lurking in the background are the Symposium and, even more importantly, the Phaedrus. I love the Phaedrus. I think it is magnificent on every level. It’s so strange. You have to wonder what Plato was going through when he wrote it, because he reverses himself on many things. He actually calls attention to this reversal. He sets it out in neon, because he has Socrates deliver first one speech and then say, ‘No, no, no, everything I’ve said is off.’ Plato has Socrates completely reverse himself and deliver a second speech.
Martha Nussbaum says Plato must have been in love, and I tend to think that’s true. If he was in love—or if some other strange thing had happened in his life—that would make him completely reverse himself philosophically. For a real philosopher, life and philosophical thought are knit together. Philosophy is not a 9-5 job. There’s much evidence that that was true for Plato, and some of the evidence is to be found in the Phaedrus.
“I’m really interested in novels that are deeply Platonic, and Death in Venice is deeply Platonic.”
What he reverses himself about is the philosophical usefulness of certain forms of madness; he reverses himself on whether reason is all that we need to make intellectual and moral progress. In the Phaedrus, he says that we need a certain kind of madness. He calls it being possessed by the gods, but we can call it ‘intuition.’ To be struck by insights that we didn’t get to by way of argument and that we can’t make other people understand by way of argument.
In Socrates’s second speech of the Phaedrus, he says that there is good madness and bad madness. There is religious genius, aesthetic genius, and romantic genius, and all these depend on a kind of good madness, residing in powerful anomalous experiences that yield a new sense of the world. You can’t make the insights you arrive at accountable to others who haven’t shared the experiences themselves, and these new insights bring about a complete discontinuity with the rest of your life. Plato says it’s a good madness, when it opens one up to truth. Truth is what makes the difference. So if you go through a religious conversion, or fall madly in love, or are gripped by an artistic intuition, it can lift you up out of your life. Your friends think you’ve gone mad, and in some sense you have, but that madness alone can channel a certain kind of truth. This a-rational detour that Plato explores in the Phaedrus is quite at odds with the bulk of his arguments, and it provides the context for Death in Venice.
You see, the rub is that, from the inside, you can’t tell whether you’re in the grip of the good madness or the bad madness. With an argument, when you’re reasoning your way to a conclusion, you can put it out there and people can criticise it. If you’re a reasonable person, you’ll be open to their criticisms and revise your beliefs in light of them. That’s what it is to make rational progress — which is a thing that Plato is usually arguing for.
But in this kind of thing that he’s calling madness, you can’t make it understandable to others, because the only way to understand is to be inside the experience, which is, by its nature, unsharable. So there is no way to correct the just as forcefully rendered untruths that are yielded. The good madness opens one up to truth, while the bad kind closes one off in private delusion, but from inside the experience you just can’t tell the difference, and so it’s very tricky. That’s what Death in Venice is all about.
Von Aschenbach has been an artist but a very formulaic one. He’s had great acclaim, but he’s never been struck by the divine madness. And then he is struck. In Death in Venice—as in Plato’s Phaedrus—an erotic madness and artistic madness are merged together; for von Aschenbach the instrument of this merging is Tadzio, a young boy. The mad experience is falling in love with beauty, as embodied in this young boy. What the novel is really asking us to contemplate or judge is: is it the good, or is it the bad kind of madness?
“It’s an incredibly moving novel and I love the movie adaptation by Visconti as well ”
Von Aschenbach writes the most beautiful music of his life in the presence of this boy. But he also behaves in a mad way and also, maybe, in a very irresponsible and reprehensible way, not warning the boy’s family of the danger they are in from the sickness that’s spreading through Venice and that will eventually kill von Aschenbach. There are echoes from the Symposium, too, from Diotima’s speech about how she had saved the city from the plague. Socrates, in the Symposium, puts forth a rationalized view of eros—not mad at all—and he says that he’d learned this view from Diotima. And this is the view that he reverses himself on in the Phaedrus.
This is a problem that I find so very interesting: How eliminable is intuition, even in the most rational pursuits, like mathematics? That’s what Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, which I’ve also written a book about—Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel—are all about. Those theorems offer a proof that we can never dispense with intuitions—which may prove to be faulty, yielding dreadful paradoxes, even within mathematics. Mathematics can’t be completely tamed by formal systems with their algorithmic rules, that purge our mathematics of these intuitions—in Plato’s language, being struck by the gods. Mathematics can’t proceed without this madness, let alone such other aspects of the good things in life, like romance and art.
This is a question that I am terrifically interested in and Death in Venice dramatizes it brilliantly. It’s an incredibly moving novel and I love the movie adaptation by Visconti as well, even though its dialogue gets a bit heavy-handed at times. But it’s able to get to the heart of the Phaedrus-inspired paradox visually, which is an achievement. My students tend to hate the movie, which saddens me. But at least they like the book.
A lot of people see it as Nietzschean rather than Platonic, the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy. There’s the Dionysian versus the Apollonian forces in life at play in von Aschenbach.
That’s true, but Mann actually quotes the Phaedrus several times in the novel, thereby indicating that Plato is there. He talks about the path the cholera has taken—he replicates exactly the Dionysian path in the Euripides play, The Bacchantes—so he is certainly playing with the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy. But then so did Plato play with this dichotomy—not surprising since, if Nietzsche is right, this dichotomy lay at the heart of classical Greek culture.
In the Phaedrus there is a passage where Plato says that if anybody tries to enter the halls of the Muses without the gift of madness, his art will come to nothing. He reverses himself on the question of whether reason alone grants the path to truth in an amazing way, and in a way that, I think, Mann felt very deeply, inspiring him to produce a slim novella that is quite miraculous.
Read 4 The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch Read
What’s your fourth choice?
This is really idiosyncratic: The Black Prince (1973) by Iris Murdoch. Iris Murdoch means a great deal to me because, though I never meant to be a novelist, I always loved her novels very much, even back when I didn’t tell any of my colleagues that I read novels on the sly.
Again, the feeling, when you read the book, of someone who is philosophically talented and ferociously knowledgeable, and who creates her art out of the tensions that this philosophical talent and knowledge produces. It was encouraging when I fell into writing a novel—and then wrote more of them—that Iris Murdoch had done so, too. She entertained a career as a philosophy academic as well. Her first book was on Sartre.
She wrote about Plato as well, in The Fire and the Sun.
She is a deep, Christian Platonist. To be a Platonist and a novelist is to feel a tension and that really comes to the fore in The Black Prince. It is a deeply Platonic novel so it’s one that I respond to strongly.
It’s also a really good novel, and I don’t think it gets enough credit. I don’t think Murdoch gets enough credit, actually.
The main character is Bradley Pearson. He’s a writer. He’s written very little because he’s the type who thinks of art as sacred and cultivates all this paralyzing solemnity around it. In some sense, if you’re a Platonist you’re a little torn about this attitude of solemnity toward art because yes, there’s great and inspiring art, but there is philosophy, and philosophy is more important. One of the things that I think she’s playing with in The Black Prince is desacralizing art.
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The Black Prince partly utilizes farce to dramatize its tensions. It can turn on a dime between profound philosophical insights into the nature of art, followed by sheer farce – just people behaving crazily. There’s a phrase that she uses, the ‘foul contingency,’ and that is all that life consists of. The narrative of our lives is not written out by logic, but by all of this ‘foul contingency.’ It’s kind of an insult to our intellect, how unpredictable and chaotic life can be and the novel is very interested in that.
It also takes up this great question of when you’re in the midst of a madness—in this case, again, it’s a romantic madness—can you tell whether it’s the good kind of madness or the bad kind of madness? Mann writes a tragedy out of this conundrum, and Murdoch writes a farce, and Murdoch’s is the riskier choice.
So Bradley Pearson has finally got some time to write his magnum opus, and he’s very good friends with this other guy, Arnold Baffin, who is a popular writer. Bradley looks down on him—perhaps it’s envy, perhaps it isn’t—and he tells the story of what happens when this popular writer calls him up because he’s beaten his wife and he’s afraid he’s killed her.
“It’s also a really good novel, and I don’t think it gets enough credit. I don’t think Murdoch gets enough credit, actually.”
Then Bradley falls in love with the Baffin’s young daughter whose name is Julian and is 18. Then you don’t know, through the whole thing, whether this is the good kind of madness or he’s a creepy old man, a pervert who falls in love and has a brief affair with Julian.
There’s also a lot of play with Shakespeare. There are so many things going on and so many literary tricks at the end – there are postscripts by all the characters giving their versions. Everybody writes their own version of the story in which now they are the star and it’s all about them and how do we know what’s really the truth? This includes the editor of the book who signs his name A. Loxias. Loxias is, of course, the last name of the god Apollo. So there’s that playing in the background, lots of things to try to interpret and figure out and a basic preoccupation with the tension between art and philosophy that somebody trained in philosophy, who is also a novelist, feels very keenly.
Do you think that with the first four books you’ve described, a lot of readers will not get the philosophical allusions, will not understand the tensions behind them intellectually? Do you think they miss out when they read them for narrative-character interactions?
The thing you have to be aware of when you’re writing fiction out of your own philosophical preoccupations is that you’re writing on several levels, and it has to be enjoyable on every level. Writing a novel, you have to make it enjoyable; you have to use the literary devices to their utmost: character, plot, scenery, language-play, all that stuff. You have to make it a feast on a literary level. What you’re trying to do, as a novelist, is to prepare the ground for a big experience, the exact nature of which you can’t really control, because your readers are going to bring their own lives and their own characters into it to make it their experience.
That was very hard for me, I have to say, when I first wrote a novel. I would hear people discussing my novel and I would think, ‘What? I didn’t have that in my mind at all, how could they think that?’ And then I realised I had to let it go. You create the groundwork, and it has to be porous enough so that people can infiltrate it with their own inner beings and create something meaningful. That’s what you’re hoping, at least, or you wouldn’t risk your philosophical career by writing novels.
So if there is laid, in the groundwork, this philosophical cogitation as well as everything else, it makes it potentially a bigger and more meaningful experience. Not everybody is going to get it, but you have to prepare the ground so that people can move in with whatever they have and try to get something big out of it.
For me, for all of the novels I’ve chosen, the payoff is big. It’s big on many levels, but the philosophical is very important to me, obviously. And it’s there in these novels, whether people get it or not.
Read 5 Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace Read
So your final choice is Infinite Jest (1996), by David Foster Wallace. He also studied philosophy. Didn’t he work on time?
Yes, he did. He was an undergraduate major in philosophy, his father was a philosophy professor, and he wrote a senior thesis that was about Aristotle’s argument about determinism. The thesis, which I’ve read, got into modal logic and time, tensed and tense-less logic. Then he went to Harvard as a graduate student in philosophy and dropped out in his first year.
So, like Iris Murdoch and George Eliot, somebody immersed in philosophy, completely confident working with philosophical ideas. Now his essay-writing is fantastic but Infinite Jest is a huge complex book.
It is. I was resistant to reading it, just because it’s so very long and I knew it was going to be a long and immersive experience if I was going to give myself over to it. I teach a course at NYU called ‘The Literatures of Hope and Despair’ about literature that had been influenced by Spinoza—literatures of hope—and Schopenhauer—literatures of despair. Between the two of them you can explain so much that goes on in 19th century literature. Then a dean said, ‘Oh, all of our students are always clamouring to read Infinite Jest. Since you’re doing this course, would you teach it?’ So, at that point, not only did I read it, I read the book during the semester because I wanted to have the same experience that the students were having. I assigned it to myself as well – it only seemed fair. So we were all working under great pressure.
It’s an extraordinary book and I, of course, have my own interpretation about what is going on. I think it’s about recursion. Recursion is a somewhat technical term – we use recursion theory a lot in logic and mathematics. Recursion theory grew out of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Here’s recursion: When you have an operation that you perform on some element—say a number |
you have to deal with constant judgment by others, well, why bother?
I’m not trying to convert anybody (although a mass poly baptism does sound like a fun day out). And I know that when I talk about the potential benefits of poly, people can perceive it as an attack on monogamy: as if the statement “Poly people work hard to deconstruct the negative emotion of jealousy” is actually code for “All monogamous people are jealous arseholes”.
All the same, one obvious way to answer the question “Why poly?” is that it offers benefits that monogamy doesn’t (just as mono offers benefits that poly doesn’t). There’s something about the dedication to honesty and emotional work involved in poly that fosters self-knowledge, trust and compersion (poly-speak for happiness in your partner’s romantic happiness). I’m not saying that similar kinds of intimacy can’t be achieved in monogamous relationships; just that lots of poly people find the emphasis on honest, non-judgmental emotional communication a marked change from their previous experiences.
Another way to answer the question “Why poly?” is to look away from invidividuals’ choices and towards wider social structures. If you take the Marxist line that capitalism requires the nuclear family, because the logic of accumulating private property only really works if wealth is hereditary, then it’s interesting that we’re living in a time when the family is diversifying so rapidly. We have stepfamilies; gay families; single parent families; and – less common than any of these, but certainly on the rise – poly families. Perhaps these are not just the result of individuals’ choices, but a sign that the economic underpinnings of our society are in flux. Perhaps we’re in (or approaching) a period of late capitalism, and poly is one of the signs of this.
Enough philosophising! After my brief and unintentional period of poly as a teen, I returned to serial monogamy, endeavouring to make each relationship I embarked upon the relationship, experiencing all the exciting, loved-up highs and all the weepy, heartbroken lows. Jealousy – mine and others’ – was often an issue. Also, in two instances, relationships began when I was asked to be monogamous. I would have preferred something more open, but this wasn’t on the table. Each time, I caved to my partner’s needs, because I cared, and because I felt guilty for even wanting something different.
Near the end of my time in London, and coming out of a catastrophically awful breakup, I decided to stay single for as long as possible. I dated some great people, but my emotional needs weren’t being met. I talked about this with one of the aforesaid great people. “Maybe poly isn’t for me,” I mused. He laughed. “Emer, you’re not so much polyamorous as sleeping around.” Harsh, but fair.
Thankfully, I moved to Montreal, Canada: a city bursting with queer polyamorous anarcho-artivist yoga-vegans, where I am – at long last – the least out-there person at any party. Montreal offered me real-life models of poly relationships: of things working, not working and being worked on.
At the risk of sounding disgustingly smitten, my love life is pretty dreamy right now. I’m moving in with a partner for the first time ever, something I’d never seriously considered before. Love. It’s real! Even better, I could build this love without ending another very important relationship. Instead of feeling as though I’m living within a restrictive set of rules, guiltily desiring secret things, I feel as though we’re writing the rules together.
But that’s just me and I’m just one person. And since there are as many types of poly as there are poly people, I asked five friends if they would let me share their stories, too.
Illustration: Demetrios Psillos Photograph: Demetrios Psillos
The monogamish
Layla and her husband Dylan met at university; they’ve been together for 15 years and married for 12. They have a child. They’re still besotted.
“Near the beginning of our relationship, we had a conversation where we realised that, though we knew we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, romantic and sexual fidelity was just not that important to us,” Layla says.
Though we knew we wanted to spend our lives together, romantic and sexual fidelity was just not that important to us
Layla cheated on every boyfriend she’d had before Dylan. She was scared she’d do it again and mess everything up. Dylan had only had one serious partner before Layla and, partly because he’s a queer man, he felt there were important life experiences that he might miss out on. So they became monogamish. Over the course of a decade and a half, Dylan has experimented sexually all of twice, while Layla found that knowing she could have other loves meant she was less inclined to. In that time, she’s had two romantic friendships – not quite lovers, but more than just friends.
Layla and Dylan always talk when they have feelings for others, and they wouldn’t continue a flirtation without the other’s agreement. “We’re reasonable grownups,” Layla says, “and it works for us.” They don’t tell many people they’re poly, fearing judgment and even career repercussions. So now you’re part of the special club that knows.
The singlish
“I’ve always had crushes on everyone,” Sage says. “I used to feel guilty about it.” She doesn’t any more. In her early relationships, Sage was cheated on. It was painful, but her reasoned response was, “Why don’t we make this an OK thing to do?”
She shifted into poly by degrees, not using the word at first, but feeling increasingly fulfilled in relationships where she could be loving yet independent. Sage is one of the busiest humans I know – if she’s not teaching free workshops on how to create urban gardens, she’s organising a feminist protest or rehearsing with her latest bandmates. This caused problems in previous relationships, and it makes sense that she’s gravitated towards partners who respect the time and space she needs to be herself.
I’ve always had crushes on everyone. I used to feel guilty about it
Many poly people have a primary relationship and secondary relationships, but Sage doesn’t like the idea of hierarchies. She has two partners and many close friends. She thinks it’s important to remember all of the relationships in her life, not just the romantic ones.
Poly hasn’t always been easy for Sage. There was a period when she was going through some very difficult issues and her two partners (not her current ones) weren’t able to give her the support she needed. “When my mental health isn’t good, polyamory can add strain,” she says. Poly takes a lot of emotional work, after all, and sometimes you’re lacking emotional resources. “But then,” she muses, “it’s easier to maintain monogamous relationships when you’re in a stable place, too.”
The poly family
Yuli can’t talk about her partner without a kind of dazed smile. A parent to three small children, Yuli split with her ex just over a year ago, though things had been rocky for a while. Her new relationship has given her not just a new love, but also a poly family. She’s in love with Helen, who has a stable, happy and longstanding primary relationship. Helen’s primary, Sam, also has a secondary partner, Bea. It’s a poly Z.
It’s really nice to be in a place where I sincerely care about my partner’s partner
As a separated parent with a full-time job, Yuli can use the extra adults in her life right now. She tells me about trying to throw a brunch for the Z in its entirety, only to find herself exhausted after a difficult night with the kids. Helen, Sam and Bea arrived, told her to sit down, cooked, served, cleaned and took the children to the park.
Yuli feels supported as a mother, a lover and a friend, and she sees in Helen and Sam a model of how well poly relationships can work. “I admire Helen and Sam’s relationship, without wanting it for myself. And it’s really nice to be in a place where I sincerely care about my metamour [polyspeak for your partner’s partner].” While she’s had non-monogamous relationships in the past, this is Yuli’s first genuinely poly experience and she feels happy, grateful and, you know, in love.
The convert
Kelly met Rowan at a dance party and asked her on a date. On the date, Rowan explained that she was polyamorous and asked if Kelly might be open to it. Kelly was hesitant, but she really liked Rowan. She read some poly literature and they talked about it a lot. But, soon, Kelly and Rowan were all wrapped up in buzzy new relationship energy and only had eyes for each other. When they finally got around to having crushes on other people, they communicated well, but Kelly was still nervous.
Then Kelly’s company transferred her to another city for six months – it was a great career opportunity, but a challenging prospect in terms of maintaining the health of a new poly relationship. Kelly knew Rowan had a crush on someone, but asked her to wait until she came back before allowing something new to develop. Rowan agreed but, a few months in, tried to renegotiate this boundary, confusing and upsetting Kelly.
My poly relationship is less co-dependent than past relationships – we both have our own friends and social lives
Now that the pair are back in the same city, their relationship is a little shaken from the distance and the poly issues it raised. Rowan and her crush are developing a relationship, and Kelly has also started dating someone new. Kelly was surprised to find that Rowan, the more experienced poly partner, is feeling a lot of insecurity.
Does Kelly think long-distance and poly might be a recipe for disaster? “Not necessarily. If you had a well-established and stable primary relationship, it could even make things easier – you wouldn’t have to go weeks without intimacy.”
How does Kelly feel about poly now? “I like that my poly relationship is less co-dependent than past relationships – we both have our own friends and social lives. It’s been exciting transitioning from theory to practice. I realise now that it will take a lot more time and energy than I initially expected, but that doesn’t mean poly can’t work.”
The boomerang
“Poly is just really important to me,” Claire says. She’s been in poly relationships since her early 20s, with brief pockets of monogamy. And she’s loved Fred, her primary partner, for 15 years in various capacities. When they first got together, Fred told Claire he couldn’t do poly: it was monogamy or nothing.
When we met again, the passion was just as intense. But this time, it was me who laid down the ultimatum: poly or nada
It lasted four years. “I was strictly monogamous,” Claire says, “but couldn’t squish myself into a box small enough to make him feel secure. So, painfully, I broke it off. We didn’t see each other for years, and each grew up. I never stopped loving him and when we met again, the passion was just as intense. But this time, it was me who laid down the ultimatum: poly or nada.”
Claire knew that, otherwise, she’d end up resentful. “And, besides, there’s the greater principle that my body is mine.” As a queer woman, she doesn’t want to limit her sexuality. As a kinkster, she wants to attend play parties and remain part of the community. And as someone who’s been a sex worker at various points in her life, she wants sex work to remain an option for her. In short, she doesn’t think what she does with her body should be anyone’s decision but her own.
As their relationship deepened, Fred’s insecurities came flooding back. Despite being deeply in love, Claire and Fred aren’t sure they can reconcile their different needs. But they’re trying.
Let’s wish them well. Because that’s what poly is about: finding ways to love that work for you.
• Some names have been changed.Billionaire George Soros lost nearly $1billion after the stock market surged following Donald Trump's surprise November 8 election win over Hillary Clinton.
The veteran hedge-fund manager's former deputy, Stanley Druckenmiller, who helped Soros score nearly $1billion of profits betting against the British pound back in 1992 said that he foresaw that the market would surge and gained a nice sizable gain,The Wall Street Journal reported.
Soros has a net worth of approximately $24.9billion after years of making prudent investments centered on careful and emotionless analysis, similar to what he did in 1992 with the British pound.
The 86-year-old survivor of the Holocaust became'more bearish immediately after Trump's election', and that positioning has 'proved to be a mistake—the stock market has rallied on expectations that... Trump's policies will boost corporate earnings and the overall economy,' sources told the Journal.
Billionaire George Soros (left) lost nearly $1billion after the stock market surged following Donald Trump's (right) surprise November 8 election win over Hillary Clinton
However, both stocks and treasury yields increased in the wake of Trump's win.
Despite the billion-dollar hit to his wallet, Soros Fund Management LLC, which manages roughly $30billion for the businessman and his family, was up five per cent at the end of 2015.
In the wake of the election, many experts predicted that stocks would fall, but on the contrary the Dow Jones Industrial Average has climbed 9.3 per cent.
During the election, Soros was a supporter of Hillary Clinton and he contributed millions of dollars to super PACS supporting her campaign for the White House.
Soros Fund Management LLC, which manages $30billion for Soros (above) and his family, was up 5 per cent at the end of 2015
He also donated money to other Democratic groups.
Since Trump's election win, Soros has not held back in criticizing the new leader of the country.
Soros called him a 'would-be dictator' and also warned that Trump's win could mean long-term health of democracy.
He also pledged $10million from his Open Society Foundation in late November to help the increase in reported hate crimes since the election.
Soros told the New York Times at the time that due in part to the 'incendiary rhetoric' of the President-elect, 'dark forces have been awakened' since his win.
'We must do something to push back against what's happening here,' Soros told the newspaper.
He added that he was 'deeply troubled' by the increase in incidents of harassment.Like I was saying, the SJWs who hate the Confederate Battle Flag are equally offended by the sight of the Bible and the cross:
“But I don’t think Sen. Lee is crazy. In the 1983 Bob Jones University case, the court ruled that a school could lose tax-exempt status if its policies violated “fundamental national public policy.” So far, the Bob Jones reasoning hasn’t been extended to other kinds of discrimination, but someday it could be. I’m a gay-rights supporter who was elated by Friday’s Supreme Court decision — but I honor Sen. Lee’s fears. I don’t, however, like his solution. And he’s not going to like mine. Rather than try to rescue tax-exempt status for organizations that dissent from settled public policy on matters of race or sexuality, we need to take a more radical step. It’s time to abolish, or greatly diminish, their tax-exempt statuses. …”
Note: In case you haven’t already seen it, Politico is calling for the legalization of polygamy. We’ve been saying for years now that we live in a godless, degenerate culture and that “gay marriage” would open a Pandora’s Box. The League of the South has sponsored rallies against the sexual anarchist movement in three states.When reporters find out their source is dropping out of an interview hours before it’s supposed to happen, it’s usually bad news. That’s what happened to CNN reporter M.J. Lee on Saturday, but in the best way possible.
When Lee called James Comey’s father, J. Brien Comey, on Saturday morning for an interview, he agreed to do it but said he couldn’t at that moment, according to CNN. He was expecting “company,” the elder Comey told Lee, saying she should call back in a few hours.
Lee did as he requested and called back that afternoon. But instead of J. Brien Comey, on the line was James Comey ― the former FBI director ousted by President Donald Trump.
Well, I just spoke to James Comey on the phone. His father, who lives in NJ, told me on the phone this morning he had "company" coming. — MJ Lee (@mj_lee) June 10, 2017
According to Lee, the younger Comey told her, “His company is his son, Jim.”
On Thursday, Comey testified in front of the Senate intelligence committee about Trump’s alleged attempts to get the FBI to close an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Bars across the county held viewing parties for the testimony. Trump lashed out against Comey on Twitter the following morning. It was a pretty big deal.
Comey told Lee that his father wouldn’t be giving her an interview, according to CNN. Of course, Lee attempted to keep Comey on the line.
“Sir, while I have you on the phone...” Lee told Comey, according to her tweet.
When I called back a few hours later, a man answered. "His company is his son, Jim,” he said. It was Comey. https://t.co/NOAKonYtGa?ncid=edlinkushpmg00000313 — MJ Lee (@mj_lee) June 10, 2017
In Lee’s CNN report, she explained that she asked Comey for his reaction to everything that happened this week.
Comey replied: “You can ask that, but I’m not going to talk about that.”
Then, Comey wished CNN luck.
"Sir, while I have you on the phone..." I started, asking about his testimony. Comey declined to discuss, and was polite, wishing CNN luck. https://t.co/1OMEdwYpuE?ncid=edlinkushpmg00000313 — MJ Lee (@mj_lee) June 10, 2017
Read CNN’s full report on the accidental phone call to Comey here.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.Seasons Greetings from Comic-Con!
We wanted to give everyone a heads up that 2014 badge preregistration for Comic-Con will not occur in November. Expo Logic registration is fine tuning the process and needs a little more time to make sure everything is in order. As soon as we have a better idea of the timeline we will let everyone know at least 48 hours prior to preregistration going live. So in the meantime, please relax and enjoy your upcoming Thanksgiving weekend!
And while the team at Expo Logic Registration is working hard this weekend, here are some steps you can take to get ready for the big day.
1. Confirm that you are eligible to participate in badge preregistration.
Log in to your Member ID account by clicking here. If you are eligible to participate you will see a message on your homepage that says, “You are eligible to participate in Comic-Con 2014 Attendee badge preregistration.” For eligibility information, please click here.
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While logged in to your Member ID account, confirm that your Membership Type is correct. This information is found in the “Change My Preferences/Unsubscribe” section. If you are a junior, senior, or member of the military, make sure that your Membership Type reflects this status so you are shown the available discounts on the day of the sale. If your Membership Type is listed as “Adult,” you will not receive the discount.
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This information is found in the "Change My Preferences/Unsubscribe" section once you have logged in to your Member ID account. If you have selected to “opt-out” of email notifications from Comic-Con, you will not be notified of the preregistration sale date and time.
4. Double check your Expo Logic login information.
Once you are logged in to your account, select the “Show My Info” option. Your personal registration login info will be displayed at the top of the gray box. Be sure to use this information only when logging in to the Expo Logic registration system. Even if your last name is spelled incorrectly, enter the login info exactly as shown on the sale day or you may get locked out! You may change the spelling of your name after the sale.Hi Everyone,
Marc is on vacation this weekend so here’s a guest post I put together recapping the process of building a custom game table this summer. Enjoy
Orion
************************************
So I recently built a custom board game table. Board games have been a hobby for a number of years and while we had a nice big dining room table we used for games, I’ve wanted to build a custom one. I always enjoy working with my hands to build or fix something even though I spend most of my days on a computer somewhere. I’ve been looking at plans for a while and had drawn up what I wanted to do and finally planned to build it over the 4th of July weekend this year. I figured I’d have several consecutive days off work with nice weather for working outside and especially painting. I’ve documented my process below with some commentary. I wanted to do a recessed play surface with cup holders incorporated somewhere. Links to the plans are at the bottom.
Unloaded after a run to Home Depot. Set up my work space in the backyard and have all my materials laid out
Marc measuring out pieces for the support frame on the bottom of the plywood sheet serving as the base.
Here’s the finished frame screwed to the bottom of the surface to add support. Also have the legs on. The legs are made from two 2x4s screwed together to make a pseudo 4×4. Gives you additional strength while saving money on materials.
Here’s the table standing on its own. If that surface looks low, it’s because that’s the bottom of the inside recessed surface. Plenty sturdy too. I lay on it without feeling any movement unfortunately that picture got cut off by Marc’s phone.
All these boards will become the outer box frame around the edge. We’ll sand and stain them, then assemble the outer edge leaving the plywood as the recessed surface.
Here’s one side of the frame stained with a nice dark color and assembled. Then a shot showing the underside where I added 2×4 supports to stabilize things. This piece and the others like it are screwed into the edges of the plywood and into each other at the corners. I initially had some reservations about the sturdiness of this for leaning on but it is quite comfortable though it flexes a small amount if you lean on the outer edge.
Before screwing on the sides we had to put down the play surface. This is a 3mm neoprene sheet with a nylon surface on the top and a rubberized surface on the bottom to prevent sliding. This is an amazing surface and I’d recommend it to anyone looking to build a table. I got this sheet for about $50 from hook and loop outlet.
We trimmed down the neopren, nailed it into the edges of the plywood and superglued it to the bottom of the table. Then screwed in the outer box frames.
Finally for the finishing touches. I drilled holes for cup holders with jigsaw and you can see Ben marking out where to cut for the dice/pencil trays. There are 7 matching stations evenly spaced around the table each with a cupholder to the right and a tray in front. For the trays I glued some backing board for the bottom. The 8th position will be a fold down DM tray.
Here’s everyone for our “christening” of the table with Twilight Imperium 3. This worked out marvelously and I’m really pleased with how it turned out.
I finally got around to finishing the DM tray to complete the 8th station at one end of the table. This is made from the same 1×6” boards I used for the rest of the frame but has a hinged design on the sides to fold down from its closed position.
I also finally finished the combination DM screen/dice tower just in time for the first episode of the Half-Witted Scruffy-Looking podcast. The dice tower has two sides to roll out towards the party or privately towards the DM. I’d had this cut out and mostly stained for months, just never got around to putting it together. From what I hear it was a big hit for DnD. This was based off this design: http://imgur.com/a/9Mokv
All in all, this was a great project. I spent about $500 for the materials, saw horses, clamps and drill bits/glue/assorted supplies. I already had the four power tools I used (drill, circular saw, jigsaw, orbital sander). A miter saw would have been useful as I’m not very good at cutting perfectly straight lines with the circular saw, but I didn’t want to buy one and managed to get all the cuts close enough. I finished all the construction of it over the 4th of July long weekend then did some finishing touches later that week. I adapted the excellent plans put up here: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1471747/build-gaming-table-150 to make the table rectangular (3’x6’ inner play area) and replaced one end with the DM tray. I used pine wood then sanded and stained the visible pieces with a dark color. There are still a few finishing touches I would like to do, but since we’ve been using the table so much I haven’t bothered. Those include doing some touch up staining on a couple scuffed corners, around the cup holders, and the inside edges of the pencil trays. I’d like to get a coat or three of polyurethane on the whole frame to protect the wood from scratches and give it a nice semi-gloss finish. However those things are all incidental to using it and even so it looks pretty great and I’m extremely satisfied with it.
Good luck on your own builds.
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Like this: Like Loading...About
I've always kept fish and it was a steep learning curve in the early days - trying to maintain a tank properly, making sure my fish were healthy and had a clean tank. Fish keeping isn't as easy most people think - you'll know yourself if you've ever kept fish. There's important bacteria in the tank that need to be maintained, plus there's the weekly water changes and smelly filter cleaning needed to maintain a healthy tank.
After extensive research, speaking to many fish tank owners and experts I decided I'd design something that takes the stress out of keeping tropical fish and makes fish keeping simple, beautiful and above all enjoyable. After over three years of research and development, plus 18 months of testing I have designed Avo - a self-cleaning fish tank.
So what makes Avo better than all other fish tanks?
Avo is packed full of technology and clever design features that make it really, really easy to keep fish. Here are a few of the things that make it so special.
1. Self maintaining filtration system
No water changes. The fish, plants and bacteria work together to create a balanced micro-ecosystem. The harmful ammonia, nitrite and nitrate are removed from the water meaning the water never needs changing.
No filter cleaning. I've perfected a filtration system that is both natural and self-maintaining. The filter system is a moving bed filter system, this means the filter cleans itself so no filter cleaning ever.
2. Automated Lighting and Heating
Often fish tanks get algae, this usually means that there's too much light and too many nutrients (nitrate) in the water. Avo's plant specific LED lighting is automatic, which prevents algae. The light emitted is plant specific, providing the wavelengths that the plants need to photosynthesise and grow, making sure they are cleaning the water efficiently.
Avo's lighting produces some wavelengths of light that our human eyes can't even detect. To us they appear as three colors fading on and off automatically at different times of the day - soft red light in the morning, daylight white in the day and cool blue in the evening.
But don't worry if you want total darkness when Avo is on there's an override switch to turn the lights off until the next day.
The heating is taken care of too, a temperature of 27°C (80.6°F) is automatically maintained. This is the perfect temperature for most tropical fish. The heating elements are also cleverly positioned to create convection currents, helping the nutrients get efficiently to the roots of the plants.
3. Clever design features
Avo has some other unique design features that make it really easy to use.
Modular plating system. There are 7 individual pots for plants that slot neatly into place around the filter system. This makes it really easy to care for the plants, they can be lifted out for trimming or easily rearranged to change the look of the tank.
Modular potted plants are easy rearrage to create different looks
Magnetic light for easy access. The light looks pretty swirling around the bowl, but it does make it a bit difficult getting fish and plants into the tank. We've thought of this and the light is held in place by super strong neodymium magnets, plus a clever connector. If you need to get things in and out of the tank the light removed with an easy twist and snaps back into place.
4. Good things come in small packages
Avo is a nano aquarium holding 15 litres (3.5 gal) of water, this is the perfect size for your desktop, coffee table or nightstand and is just right for beautiful tropical fish such as a bettas, shrimps or guppies.
5. The perfect betta tank
Avo makes the perfect betta tank. These beautiful fish (also known an Siamese fighting fish) are from Asia and live in pools of water and rice paddies in the wild. This means they're happy in nano sizes tanks with a recommended minimum tank size of 10 litres. Betta fish also like a temperature of 25-28°C, lots of plants and a slow moving current. With the automated heating system set to 27°C, a modular planting system and 15 litres of water, an Avo fish tank is betta heaven!
My Betta fish Cassius chilling in protoype no.3
Where we're up to
As you can see from the photographs we have a working aesthetic prototype. We've been testing a working prototype for 18 months now so we know that the product works long term. Right at the moment we're finalising the design for manufacture - consolidating parts, applying draft angles and preparing the little details of the product so it can be manufactured both efficiently and to the highest standard.
The next stage is where you will come in, the design is 99% ready and we'll soon need to get going and make some fish tanks - this is why we are Kickstarting - we need the capital to pay for the tooling.
Cross section of the CAD assembly
Early thumbnail sketches exploring form
The very first prototype being testing back in 2011
Where will the funding go?
The funding will pay for the tooling, materials and production of the rewards. The pie chart below shows the breakdown of the £100,000 and what the money will be spent on.
What's the time plan?
If all goes to plan and we have no setbacks Avo will be delivered to your door in March 2015, The chart below shows the projected time plan.
A bit about Noux
My Name is Susan Shelley and I am the founder and director of Noux. I studied Industrial Design at University before going to work for a design studio in London. I left work in the design studio in 2013 to focus my efforts on developing Avo. I'm passionate about design, I believe products should be both beautiful and functional, good design should make life both richer and easier. I believe Avo embodies all of these qualities.
I'm not developing Avo alone, there's a team of folks. We have a top engineer who used to engineer at Dyson - he's helping us perfect our design for manufacture and assembly plus some of the more complicated features of Avo. We've also got experts in marketing and PR helping us to tell the world about Avo, plus we have an accountant who is guiding us through the confusing world of tax and managing finances. I know that one person can't do everything so getting the experts on board has saved me a lot of time and potential mistakes!
The Avo + starter kit
The Avo tank + starter kit includes
One white Avo fish bowl with integrated lighting, heating and filter.
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Rest of world add £45 / €56 / $76The Sports Guy weighs in with his take: The Seahawks are advancing to the Super Bowl, but will they be able to overcome their character concerns in time to win it all?
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Some days it is a struggle for me just to wake up and sit in front of my typewriter.
I am an old man, and old men like to do things a certain way. I believe in duty, responsibility, and good home cooking. If there is a fence that needs mended, I'm your man. If you need a garbage disposal fixed, I'll do it but please get out of the kitchen and don't step within twenty feet of any light switches. I guess that's just the way my daddy raised me: take care of your actions and act with care.
That's why I was sick to my stomach to see the Seahawks advance to the Superbowl in the way they did. With all their fanfare and excessive celebration.
I felt conned by their confetti. Bamboozled by their balloons. Is this really the team I want to rally for? A team that rubs their victory in the FACES of their opponents? A team that needs such tick-tack triteness like a trophy to to make them feel better than others?
You won with a P-A-S-S...
What happened to winning with C-L-A-S-S?
Ever heard of my friends RESTRAINT and COMPOSURE?
Confetti? More like thug-fetti. I guess that's just what young me...BOYS need these days.
My daddy was fond of saying: If you can't win without opening your mouth, then you better just lose. He never lost a game in his life. I can remember one hot and slick night back out in the country, we were all sitting around a table in the kitchen after supper, playing a few rounds of Boggle. My grandma was mouthin' and mouthin' about how her friend Agnes was the best. My pappy looked her dead in her one good eye, and scored eleven points off the word "Quagmire".
That sure shut up the old battleaxe.
And did he say a word? No. Did he need CONFETTI dropped from the ceiling? No.
He stood up, stood his ground, and cleaned off the table. Like a MAN.
So how about it, Seahawks? How about just winning a game, JUST ONCE, and not cheering? Maybe try to stop jumping in the air like Glory Boyz, and just go grab a seat on the pine. Win with dignity. But Sports Guy, you say, they are just young twenty-somethings who have a chance to play the game of their lives.
Fie on that. Fie on you.
Men are not born, they are crafted in the burning hot crucible of life. They are seared and scorched and scorned and scratched and scathed and scattered and reassociated into the men that they need to become, and right now, when I look at these Seahawks...all I see are a bunch of spoiled children.
Oh, you need a trophy because you won a game? Go home to mommy.
Countless men have bathed in the sweet praise of crowds without opening their mouths and spewing words all over themselves. Do you think Peyton Manning needs awards and titles and ribbons in his hair to feel validated? No, he lives for the game. He lives for the MEN on his left and other left, who fight and die beside him on that sanctified GRIDIRON ALTAR. He is a symbol for the American.
Cassius Clay is a man you can allow your boys to look up to. He was a fighter unmatched in the ring of boxing and the ring of life. Pound-for-pound he morally outweighed all who opposed him, and he did so by walking through life with respect for his peers. Did he need to put on a show? No. Did he need to belittle the achievements of others? No. Did he need to use racist remarks to get his point across about other fighters, like Joe Frazier? No.
He won with C-L-A-S-S.
Michael Jordan is the greatest MAN to ever pick up a basketball and then put that basketball into an apple barrel. He is widely regarded as a pretty good player. Did he need to berate his peers on or off the court? No sir, he defended the galaxy from a horde of body-snatching aliens without ever saying a bad word about anybody. He was kind to a fault, often letting other players score so they didn't seem so bad. And he was gracious and humble as all hell when he ascended to Valhalla, the immortal NBA Hall of Fame.
Tom Brady, Larry Bird, Shannon Sharpe, Money Mayweather, Gary Payton, Pennywise the Clown, Charles Barkley, John Rocker, Mussolini, Jim McMahon, Reggie Miller, Deion Sanders, Wes Welker, and Jake the Snake. What do these REAL MEN have in common? They are amazing at their craft, and did so with the silent will of a boa |
in Washington, D.C., ruled that employees’ right to talk about disciplinary actions is protected under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, and T-Mobile violated the act by restricting that right and then threatening disciplinary action against employees.
T-Mobile’s confidentiality rules infringed on the workers’ right to discuss “issues related to their terms and conditions of employment,” Biblowitz said.
The judge referred to a 2015 case in which the labor relations board similarly ruled that it was unlawful to prohibit workers from discussing workplace investigations. In that ruling, the board said discussions about disciplinary investigations were “vital to employees’ ability to aid one another in addressing employment terms and conditions with their employer. Accordingly, an employer may restrict these discussions only where the employer shows that it has a legitimate and substantial business justification that outweighs employees Section 7 rights.”
In his order, Biblowitz required T-Mobile to rescind its confidentiality requirement within 14 days and post a notice to employees in its Maine and South Carolina sites saying that it had violated national labor laws and inform them of their rights under the labor act.
In a statement released Thursday, T-Mobile spokeswoman Annie Garrigan called the ruling “puzzling, since T-Mobile’s approach to confidentiality is consistent with the National Labor Relations Board’s own investigation manual.”
“Best practices for maintaining the integrity of internal investigations include keeping the names of witnesses confidential and requiring witnesses to maintain confidentiality in order to ensure that information provided by subsequent witnesses is not tainted,” Garrigan added.
The company is considering whether to appeal Biblowitz’s decision. It has 28 days to file an appeal.
The Communication Workers of America, on the other hand, used Monday’s ruling to highlight what it termed T-Mobile’s continued “illegal corporate policies,” according to a news release from spokeswoman Kendra Marr Chaikin. In March, another administrative law judge ruled that T-Mobile had 11 separate labor law violations at its locations in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Wichita, Kansas; Charleston, South Carolina; and New York City.
The CWA represents about 30 T-Mobile employees in a retail store in New York City and a technical office in Connecticut. The company has workforce of about 45,000, according to Garrigan. The communications union doesn’t represent any of the 600 or so employees at the Oakland call center.
In an email Thursday, Chaikin said more workers have expressed interest in joining the union and about 1,000 T-Mobile employees have joined a group called TU, which is “joining workers together for a voice and fair treatment.”
“Like the workers in Connecticut and New York City, they too would like to vote for a union through the NLRB process,” Chaikin said.
“But as this spate of NLRB decisions has shown, the company has consistently harassed and intimidated workers who seek out fair CWA representation,” she added.
On Thursday, Garrigan said that CWA brings “up a lot of things that tend to be baseless.”
Peter McGuire — 861-9239
[email protected]
Twitter: PeteL_McGuire
ShareEditor's note: This article was updated at 12:01 p.m., Nov. 13, 2012.
9:41 a.m., Nov. 13, 2012--New Castle County Police are investigating the death of a 20-year-old man that occurred Monday, Nov. 12, in the Studio Green West Apartment complex in Newark. Police have identified the victim as Peter Disabatino, who lived in the apartment and who was a student in the University of Delaware Associate in Arts Program in Wilmington.
At 9:23 p.m., County Police, paramedics and ambulance personnel from the Aetna Fire Company responded to the 200 block of Thorn Lane for a subject who had been shot. When emergency personnel arrived, they observed an unresponsive man with an apparent gunshot wound to his upper body. He was tended by paramedics, taken by ambulance to Christiana Hospital and later pronounced dead.
Multiple units responded to the scene and immediately set up a perimeter and began canvassing the surrounding area in an attempt to gather information and locate possible suspects. A canine team also responded to assist, but they were unsuccessful.
Suspects are described at two black men, one of whom was wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt and the other a black hooded sweatshirt.
Anyone with information is asked to contact New Castle County Police at 302-395-8110. Tips also can be texted to 847411; begin the message with NCCPD and then type the message.The Swedish minesweeper HMS Kullen, left, and a guard boat in Namdo Bay, Sweden, on Oct. 21, 2014, on their fifth day of searching for a suspected foreign vessel in the Stockholm archipelago. (Fredrik Sandberg/TT News Agency via AP)
“… even if no one really knows what that means.” An interesting article by Nathalie Rothschild (Foreign Policy); here’s an excerpt, though you should read the whole piece:
Margot Wallström, the newly minted foreign minister, has said that under her leadership Sweden will become the only country in the world to conduct a “feminist foreign policy.” That’s a perspective that flows from U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325, a landmark measure that recognized both the disproportionate impact war has on women and the role women must play in ensuring peace and security….
By empowering women, the argument goes, there are better chances of snuffing out wars before they start and of ending them in more equitable ways. However, it is less clear what such a feminist foreign policy has to say about the old-school power politics that Putin has helped resuscitate in the past year.
During a recent debate in the Swedish parliament, Wallström said that her feminist approach is based on the American political scientist Joseph Nye’s concept of “smart power.” “The tools of foreign policy can, in varying degrees, be hard as well as soft. The situation at hand determines this,” Wallström said. “The half of the population that so far has been almost systematically excluded and forgotten — namely, women — will now be included.”
Asked how she believes a feminist foreign policy will help end Russian aggression, Wallström suggested it would be useful to review women’s participation in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and to look at what it does to address the problems women face — a statement exactly as vague as it sounds …The distinction of being the fastest-growing racial/ethnic group in the United States has alternated between Asians and Hispanics in recent decades. Since 2010, though, Asians have had the edge. New Census Bureau data estimate that the U.S. Hispanic population topped 54 million as of July 1, 2013, an increase of 2.1% over 2012. Meanwhile, the Asian population grew to 19.4 million, with a growth rate of 2.9%.
U.S. births have been the primary driving force behind the increase in the Hispanic population since 2000 and that trend continued between 2012 and 2013. The Census Bureau estimates that natural increase (births minus deaths) accounted for 78% of the total change in the U.S. Hispanic population from 2012 to 2013.
By comparison, growth in the Asian American population has been fueled primarily by immigration. Fully 74% of Asian adults in 2012 were foreign born according to Pew Research Center analysis of Census data, and international migration accounted for about 61% of the total change in the Asian American population from 2012 to 2013. (Asian American figures represent the population who reported their race alone or in combination with one or more races, and includes Hispanics. Hispanics are of any race.)
The different sources of population change are reflected in the demographic profiles of Asians and Hispanics. For example, the median age of Asians is 36.3, reflecting its larger share foreign born, compared with Hispanics at 28.1, reflecting the importance of U.S. births to populations growth.
Geographically, Asians and Hispanics are situated similarly across the country with majorities of each population concentrated in the west. For Hispanics, New Mexico still has the highest Hispanic population share at 47% while California has the largest overall Hispanic population (14.7 million). Texas, the second largest state by Hispanic population, saw the largest numeric increase in Hispanic population from 2012 to 2013, as it grew by 213,000 people. The Hispanic population increased the fastest in North Dakota—17% over 2012 to about 21,000 in 2013. (North Dakota boasted the highest population growth rates for every major racial and ethnic group except Native Americans and Alaskan Natives.)
California also has the largest Asian population (6.1 million) and Hawaii has the largest Asian population share (56%, the only state in which Asians are a majority). California was also home to the largest numeric increase between 2012 and 2013, with a net increase of 142,000 Asians. Just as with Hispanics, North Dakota saw the highest rate of Asian population increase between 2012 and 2013—up 8.4%.
Topics: Immigration Trends, Hispanic/Latino Demographics, Asian Americans, Demographics, Race and EthnicityGrand Prize - Drawing March 13th
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Winners will be announced via email daily. You must give a valid email address and you must open the email to see if you are the winner.CHESTER, Pa. – For the first time in his MLS career, Philadelphia Union center back Amobi Okugo wore the captain’s armband Saturday.
And it didn’t faze the fifth-year pro – at least once the game began.
“The pregame speech, right before we went on the field, I didn’t even know what to say,” Okugo laughed. “I was stuttering and all the guys were making fun of me.”
What followed, though, was a typically staunch game from Okugo, who anchored the Union’s defense in a 1-0 shutout of the New England Revolution while filling the leadership shoes of the team’s normal captain, Brian Carroll.
Carroll was a late scratch because he came down with flu-like symptoms that day, prompting Union manager John Hackworth to hand the armband to Okugo.
“We came in and BC wasn’t in the lineup and I was like, ‘What the heck? He was practicing yesterday,’” Okugo said. “So then I talked to BC and coach Hack sat me and [Maurice Edu] down and said he was going to give it to either one of us. They went with me and I was just honored to lead the group to the win.”
It certainly was an honor for a 23-year-old, who wasn’t even earning any playing time two years ago at this time. But since the middle of the 2012 season, after being switched from the midfield to center back, Okugo has emerged as one of the club’s most valuable players – to the point where Hackworth trusted him to captain the team in Philly’s home opener.
“Amobi got the captain’s armband and he was constantly looking over to me,” Hackworth said. “I told him to get our line up and don’t let us drop back and try to defend this one. We do that with our pressure. We think that our pressure initiates our attack.”
Find the latest Union news at PhiladelphiaUnion.com
In the end, the Union dropped back more than Hackworth would have liked in the second half as they tried to avoid giving up a late equalizer like they did in their season-opening draw with Portland. But they still kept the Revs from creating many scoring chances, even after starting center back Austin Berry left the game early in the second half with a hamstring injury and was replaced by converted forward Aaron Wheeler.
Okugo downplayed the difficulties of switching center back partners in the middle of the game, saying that it “wasn’t too tough.” But he didn’t make light what it meant to be the team’s captain, if only for one game.
“It was just a whirlwind of emotions,” he said.
Dave Zeitlin covers the Union for MLSsoccer.com. E-mail him at djzeitlin@gmail.com.Get the biggest celebs 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
Ready? OK, smile – say Grand Prix...
These tourists will wish they had turned the camera around once they realised it was Lewis Hamilton they had roped in to take their photo at the Sydney Opera House.
The Formula 1 champ, 30, was happy to get behind the lens as he enjoyed some down-time Down Under after his win at the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne on Sunday.
The couple who handed him their camera seemed not to recognise the star.
But at least they know he is a racing certainty to take a great picture.
Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play nowClick here for rankings table and here for interactive graphics
Things to remember... Scary fact: 37,461 people were killed on U.S. roads in car crashes in 2016
The U.S. traffic accident death count is the highest it’s been in nearly a decade
This in-depth study involves 50 states plus D.C. each ranked by five categories
Discover where our nations’ best drivers live and what they are doing right
Learn how you can save lives by minimizing fatal crashes in your home state
For the second year in a row, fatal car crashes spiked in our nation, causing the total death count to be the highest it has been in nine years.
US Deptarment of Transportation via the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), reported there were 37,461 traffic deaths in the U.S. alone in 2016.
Methodology
Our extensive research includes 50 states plus DC. Using NHTSA data from their most recent reports, we collected 1,632 data points to rank all 51 areas of the U.S. in five categories :
Fatality Rate – The rate of traffic deaths for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled.
– The rate of traffic deaths for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled. Failure to Obey – The percentage of road fatalities involving not wearing seat belts, ignoring traffic safety devices, and driving with an invalid license.
– The percentage of road fatalities involving not wearing seat belts, ignoring traffic safety devices, and driving with an invalid license. Drunk Driving – The percentage of fatal crashes involving a driver impaired by alcohol.
– The percentage of fatal crashes involving a driver impaired by alcohol. Speeding – The percentage of driving deaths involving a driver who was speeding.
– The percentage of driving deaths involving a driver who was speeding. Careless Driving – The rate that pedestrians and pedalcyclists are killed by motorists for every 100 thousand residents.
The rankings for each category were totaled for 51 final scores. The ten lowest scores belonged to the ten states with the best drivers in our nation.
Where the BEST Drivers in America Live
This topic couldn’t be more important with how much time the average American spends on the roads — over 293 hours annually!
“It’s clear that traveling by car remains a central part of American’s lives.” – Jurek Grabowski, AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety Director
That’s why our researchers completed an in-depth study to find out where the best drivers in our country live.
Read on to see if your state made the cut this year!
#10 – Michigan
Best Ranking: Failure to Obey – 2nd
Worst Ranking: Careless Driving – 36th
Being home to the car capital of the world, it’s great that Michigan sets a good example of obeying traffic laws for the rest of the U.S.
The indisputable problem is the 199 people killed while biking or walking on The Great Lake State’s public roads.
Michigan drivers are some of the best around at paying attention to traffic signals and obeying the laws, now they just need to learn to safely share the road.
#9 – West Virginia
Best Ranking: Drunk Driving – 9th
Worst Ranking: Fatality Rate – 39th
It seems its strict implied consent law, and weekly sobriety checkpoints are doing some good since West Virginia ranks in the top ten for the least deadly car crashes with alcohol to blame.
Sadly, the lower drunk driving rate isn’t enough.
The rate people are dying in traffic accidents in West Virginia is not only higher than that of the surrounding states, but it is a higher rate than the national average.
With nearly 75 percent of the state being covered in forest and winding roads, The Mountain State has some challenges ahead as they work to lower their traffic accident fatality rate.
#8 – Utah
Best Ranking: Drunk Driving – 1st
Worst Ranking (Tie): Failure to Obey & Careless Driving – 28th
Considering Utah has the strictest drunk driving laws in the nation, it is no surprise that this state has the least fatal crashes caused by alcohol-impaired drivers.
The maximum blood alcohol limit in Utah was lowered to.05 percent, which is a significant drop from the BAC.08, that’s legal in the rest of America.
It’s good that The Beehive State has cracked down on drunk driving, because the drivers here already struggle with paying attention to the roads and obeying traffic laws — their two worst rankings.
#7 – Massachusetts
Best Ranking: Fatality Rate – 1st
Worst Ranking: Drunk Driving – 41st
The Bay State has the lowest rate of traffic deaths in all of America. This is a huge accomplishment especially considering it’s home to one of the most congested cities in the nation.
Boston commuters spend an extra 154 million hours on the road each year thanks to traffic.
In addition to less traffic, this New England state could also benefit from less alcohol. In 2015 alone, 118 of the 306 total Massachusetts car crash deaths (39 percent) were alcohol related.
#6 – Vermont
Best Ranking: Drunk Driving – 4th
Worst Ranking: Speeding – 40th
Interestingly, Massachusetts’ greatest weakness is Vermont’s greatest strength — drunk driving. Now if Vermont drivers could only lighten their lead foot.
In 2015, 37 percent of the car crash fatalities in Vermont were a result of speeding.
It must be contagious because even a Rabbi was caught for speeding when in The Green Mountain State.
As you can see in this controversial video above, Vermont police take speeding (and eluding police) seriously.
#4 (Tie) – New Jersey
Best Ranking: Failure to Obey – 3rd
Worst Ranking: Careless Driving – 39th
What put The Garden State on this list was its drivers’ diligence to follow the traffic laws.
Sadly though, New Jersey has an overwhelmingly high pedestrian/pedalcyclist death rate. It’s a major safety concern when 188 pedestrians and pedalcyclists are killed in just one year in the fourth smallest state in the country.
New Jersey is the only Northeast or Mid-Atlantic state that doesn’t have any laws in place to protect cyclists.
Here are some safety tips from a man who commutes by bike every day all year from his New Jersey home in Red Bank to his job over three miles away in Eatontown:
These tips could save a life — drivers and cyclists should both pay attention. Finally, find your representative and urge them to consider laws to protect cyclists.
#4 (Tie) – Ohio
Best Ranking: Speeding – 8th
Worst Ranking: Fatality Rate – 19th
It’s impressive that The Buckeye State managed to land in the top 20 of the U.S. for all five categories we used in this ranking.
Although the state home to America’s first traffic light should have a better ranking than 18th for obeying such signals!
Every 7.9 hours someone was killed, and every 4.8 minutes someone was injured in an Ohio car crash in 2015.
Regardless of the exact cause, far too many Ohio drivers are dying. 1,110 people were killed on Ohio public roads in 2015, which was over 100 more lives this state lost each of the two previous years.
#3 – Virginia
Best Ranking: Speeding – 2nd
Worst Ranking: Drunk Driving – 32nd
With only 14 percent of all the traffic fatalities in this state being caused by speeding, Virginia is ranked the second best in the U.S. for driving at safe speeds.
The Old Dominion’s exceptionally high ranking for speeding, allowed it to make it in the top five despite its high rate of deaths caused by drunk drivers.
In 2015, 34 percent of those who died in car crashes on Virginia roads had a drunk driver to blame.
254 lives were cut short on Virginia roadways in that one year due to someone who thought it was okay to drink and drive.
#2 – Minnesota
Best Ranking: Fatality Rate – 4th
Worst Ranking: Drunk Driving – 36th
Like Virginia and Massachusetts, Minnesota’s driving flaw that’s causing the most traffic deaths is drunk driving.
There is no excuse to get behind the wheel impaired when there are always other options to catch a ride home. Minnesotans are well aware of this considering the first bus line, Greyhound, was born in this state.
411 people were killed in Minnesota car crashes in 2015, and 144 of those unavoidable, devastating deaths had a driver impaired by alcohol to blame.
As you can see in this video, DUIs are much more complicated and punitive than many realize, especially in Minnesota:
The North Star State ranks top five for having one of the lowest fatality rates in America, but in just one year, it had a 14 percent increase in traffic deaths.
Hopefully driving habits improve so Minnesota can find itself on this prized list again next year.
#1 – Iowa
Best Ranking: Failure to Obey – 3rd
Worst Ranking: Fatality Rate – 18th
The state ranked fourth on this list last year, made a big jump to earn first for the Best Drivers in America!
But, even the state at the top of this list has great room for improvements with 320 people killed in car crashes in 2015 alone.
Fortunately not only are Iowa drivers excellent at obeying traffic laws, but The Hawkeye State now has stricter laws in place to minimize distracted drivers.
Here’s some info on Iowa’s new texting while driving law:
Iowa has now made texting while driving a primary offense which means you can be pulled over for this activity and receive a citation of $100.50 at the officer’s discretion. Don’t text and drive!
Strengths and Weaknesses
Among the ten states on this list, these tied for being the most common worst ranking factors:
Careless Driving – Michigan, New Jersey, and Utah
Michigan, New Jersey, and Utah Drunk Driving – Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Virginia
Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Virginia Fatality Rate – Iowa, Ohio, and West Virginia
And these tied for being the most common Best Ranking factors:
Drunk Driving – Utah, Vermont, and West Virginia
Utah, Vermont, and West Virginia Failure to Obey – Iowa, Michigan, and New Jersey
Terrifying Totals
To help you understand why our nation so desperately needs more good drivers like the ones on this annual list, here are some of the shocking U.S. death totals for 2015:
“One person can make a difference, and everyone should try.” – John F. Kennedy
Only one fatal car crash can result in multiple deaths, just like only one person practicing safe driving can result in multiple lives saved.
How YOU can be the BEST
Regardless of where you live, you must realize that the five factors we used in this ranking all are very likely to cause traffic accidents resulting in sudden, devastating deaths.
Navigate through the below links for advice on how to safeguard yourself and others on the road:
– Following Traffic Laws
– Avoiding Drunk Driving
– Driving the Speed Limit
– Sharing the Road
Don’t make a mistake you will spend the rest of your life wishing you could take back.
Complete Rankings: Best Drivers By State
– To sort the table by category, click on header columns.
– Click here for complete data and sources. For all media inquiries, please email: Josh Barnes
State Fatalities Rate per 100 Million Vehicle Miles Traveled Failure to Obey (Traffic Safety Device, Seat Belt, & Invalid Driver License) Careless Driving Drunk Driving Speeding Total Score Ranking Iowa 18 3 8 10 5 44 1 Minnesota 4 11 6 36 11 68 2 Virginia 11 13 11 32 2 69 3 New Jersey 5 3 39 8 15 70 4 Ohio 19 18 13 12 8 70 4 Vermont 6 6 22 4 40 78 6 Massachusetts 1 7 12 41 19 80 7 Utah 14 28 28 1 12 83 8 West Virginia 39 17 10 9 18 93 9 Michigan 19 2 36 16 23 96 10 Maryland 10 1 29 41 17 98 11 Georgia 27 18 40 5 9 99 12 Nebraska 29 21 13 34 4 101 13 Washington 15 13 20 28 25 101 13 South Dakota 44 28 2 12 16 102 15 Kansas 25 32 7 2 39 105 16 New Hampshire 8 8 4 40 51 111 17 District of Columbia 3 8 38 35 30 114 18 New York 9 15 30 29 31 114 18 Indiana 21 40 25 3 27 116 20 Connecticut 7 24 18 44 24 117 21 Idaho 37 39 1 31 13 121 22 Pennsylvania 26 15 16 15 50 122 23 Tennessee 32 36 30 16 10 124 24 Alaska 36 8 25 24 35 128 25 Arkansas 47 30 24 22 6 129 26 Florida 43 27 50 12 1 133 27 Illinois 15 18 19 39 42 133 27 Oregon 31 5 34 45 20 135 29 Wyoming 45 22 5 30 33 135 29 Kentucky 48 48 27 6 7 136 31 Wisconsin 11 44 15 38 28 136 31 Missouri 27 37 32 7 38 141 33 Hawaii 11 12 33 45 47 148 34 California 15 35 43 27 29 149 35 Oklahoma 39 43 35 11 21 149 35 Colorado 22 46 17 21 44 150 37 Rhode Island 2 48 3 51 49 153 38 Mississippi 49 42 44 18 3 156 39 Maine 23 22 21 49 43 158 40 Alabama 34 38 42 19 26 159 41 North Dakota 38 33 9 50 34 164 42 North Carolina 30 30 37 24 45 166 43 Delaware 35 40 51 19 22 167 44 New Mexico 24 25 49 24 48 170 45 South Carolina 51 25 47 23 41 187 46 Nevada 32 46 45 33 36 192 47 Texas 41 34 41 47 32 195 48 Louisiana 45 50 48 41 14 198 49 Arizona 42 45 46 36 37 206 50 Montana 50 51 23 48 46 218 51
Previous Rankings:Parents who allow their 9-year-old to play unsupervised at a playground can be arrested, but handing a nine-year-old an Uzi is perfectly acceptable.
Unfortunately, that’s not hyperbole. It’s just the sad state of affairs in which we find ourselves, after a 9-year-old New Jersey girl accidentally shot and killed her instructor at a firing range in Arizona. The girl’s parents paid for her to fire a fully automatic machine gun, but she lost control of the weapon and shot her instructor, Charles Vacca, killing the military veteran.
The chilling ordeal was caught on tape, courtesy of the girl’s parents, but Arizona police officials have said no charges will be filed or arrests made. The Mohave County Sheriff’s Office concluded the incident was an “industrial accident,” and have contacted the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to investigate, according to published reports.
Let’s compare that to a story from earlier this summer, regarding a different 9-year-old, one in South Carolina.
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Debra Harrell is a working mother who faces a common problem for parents when school lets out for the summer: finding affordable child care. The McDonald’s employee couldn’t afford to have someone watch her 9-year-old daughter, so the girl was playing on her laptop in the restaurant during her mother’s shifts. However, when that laptop was stolen from their home, Harrell armed her daughter with a cell phone in case of an emergency and let her go unsupervised to an area playground. Another parent noticed the girl there alone and contacted the police, at which point Harrell was arrested and charged with child neglect. If convicted, she faces up to 10 years behind bars.
Is anyone else absolutely scared to death of the horrendous message we’re sending to parents?
Regarding the incident in Arizona, we’re talking about two parents who willingly paid $200 to put a fully automatic weapon in the hands of their 9-year-old daughter. This poor girl, who should’ve been learning to shoot with a.22 rifle or some other weapon she could handle (if indeed she had to learn to fire a gun) was given an Uzi capable of firing up to 600 rounds per minute—creating a recoil difficult for some adults to handle.
And the scariest part? The firing range has a minimum age of eight years old to fire such weapons – one year younger than the girl who is now surely scarred for life. The terrible judgment of the New Jersey parents (combined with the operators of the firing range to allow kids that young to fire Uzis) directly contributed to a man’s death. That stands in stark contrast to Harrell’s troubles in South Carolina.
Instead of a loaded weapon, Harrell armed her daughter with a phone, and sent her to a playground with lots of other kids and adults. The only shooting that took place was the cool water from a splash pad and some hoops on the basketball courts. There were even volunteers who came by the playground with free snacks. While perhaps not ideal since Harrell was at work, she sent her daughter to a family-friendly place with an environment geared toward fun and summertime frivolity. The same kind of place I routinely rode my bike to at the age of nine.
Yet Harrell is the one arrested. Who lost her job. Who spent 17 days in jail, temporarily lost custody of her daughter, and faces 10 years in prison.
So, when considering charges for the neglect of a child, playgrounds seem to be a greater threat in the eyes of the law than guns. And that is a travesty.
Wherever you fall in this country’s ongoing debate about guns and gun control, this should upset you. It should infuriate you. It should alert you to our disturbingly warped gun culture, and should be more than enough proof that change is desperately needed. And parents, let me state this unequivocally: It is never acceptable to let your 9-year-old fire an Uzi. Never. Under any circumstances.
Harrell’s detractors claim someone could’ve kidnapped her daughter at the playground, which is true. But while there is a low risk of child abduction at a public playground in broad daylight, it pales in comparison to the risks involved with letting a 9-year-old fire a machine gun. So please stop referencing the 2nd amendment, because I’m certain our Founding Fathers weren’t contemplating the benefits of letting children fire hundreds of rounds per minute when they drafted the right to bear arms.
If you’re a parent, you should be absolutely terrified that a 9-year-old’s constitutional right to fire an Uzi trumps your right to decide at what age your kids can play at the park unsupervised.
Something has to change. Now.
Aaron Gouveia is a husband, father of two boys, and writes for his site, The Daddy Files.
Contact us at editors@time.com.Loosening expectations might stop diets derailing
By CSIRO
Early February: it’s the time of the year when the sheen starts to wear off things. The weather’s still warm but the festive season is over and most of us are back at work. Our best-laid intentions for the New Year – #NewYearNewMe – are beginning to be tested.
Did you attempt to start a new diet for 2017? And are you still sticking with it? Don’t feel guilty if you’re not, because according to our latest research you are in the majority. Our research found that nine out of 10 Australian adults have attempted to lose weight in their lifetime, 50 per cent have made more than six attempts while almost 20 per cent has tried more than 25 times.
Despite the desire Australians have to lose weight, our obesity rates remain high. Why is this so?
Our research has identified five behavioural “Diet Types”, with the predominant mindset tending to over-think, expect perfection and be anxious about failure, all of which can derail a diet. The Diet Type survey was developed following Australia’s largest diet survey that we conducted between May 2015 and June 2016 – unfortunately it revealed that Australian’s diets are not as healthy as many think!
To help combat the issue, our researchers then conducted an additional investigation to understand why, despite repeated health messages and a dieting culture, Australians continue to struggle with adopting a healthy lifestyle and eating habits. Our scientists looked into the behaviours that influence weight loss, such as barriers to maintaining diets, eating behaviours and existing personality research. The emergence of patterns in this behaviour led to the development of 5 distinct ‘types’ and when it comes to diets, most Australians over analyse what to put on our plates. Here’s how we rate on the diet types scale:
Number 1: The Thinker – 41%
Forty-one percent of us tend to be goal-oriented and analytical about our diets. But overthinking and constant worrying about it can add anxiety and stress which can lead to over-eating and derail diet progress.
Number 2: The Craver – 25%
Craves delicious food and finds it hard to stop, leading to overeating in tempting situations. This was the second most common type and scored high for people who were obese, as well as a high proportion of young adults.
Number 3: The Foodie – 15%
As the third most common type, this group were more likely to be a normal weight, despite foodies that loves making, eating and experiencing food.
Number 4: The Socialiser – 15%
Flexibility is essential – you won’t let strict food restrictions stifle your social life.
Number 5: The Freewheeler – 4%
Makes spontaneous and impulsive food choices, finds planning meals hard.
Since we launched the survey last month, more than 55,000 Australian have completed the online assessment, going to show that we a pretty motivated bunch when it comes to trying to understand our eating habits. These results show that we’re keen to dig a little deeper to find out what will help us to have a more sustainable and longer lasting change to our diet.Since November 9th, we’ve heard a lot of talk about unreality, and how what’s normal bends when you’re in a state of incipient autocracy. There’s been a lot written about gaslighting (lies that make you feel crazy) and the rise of fake news (hoaxes that displace facts), and much analysis of Trump as a reality star (an authentic phony). But what killed me last year were the jokes, because I love jokes—dirty jokes, bad jokes, rude jokes, jokes that cut through bullshit and explode pomposity. Growing up a Jewish kid in the nineteen-seventies, in a house full of Holocaust books, giggling at Mel Brooks’s “The Producers,” I had the impression that jokes, like Woody Guthrie’s guitar, were a machine that killed fascists. Comedy might be cruel or stupid, yet, in aggregate, it was the rebel’s stance. Nazis were humorless. The fact that it was mostly men who got to tell the jokes didn’t bother me. Jokes were a superior way to tell the truth—that meant freedom for everyone. But by 2016 the wheel had spun hard the other way: now it was the neo-fascist strongman who held the microphone and an army of anonymous dirty-joke dispensers who helped put him in office. Online, jokes were powerful accelerants for lies—a tweet was the size of a one-liner, a “dank meme” carried farther than any op-ed, and the distinction between a Nazi and someone pretending to be a Nazi for “lulz” had become a blur. Ads looked like news and so did propaganda and so did actual comedy, on both the right and the left—and every combination of the four was labelled “satire.” In a perverse twist, Trump may even have run for President as payback for a comedy routine: Obama’s lacerating takedown of him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. By the campaign’s final days, the race felt driven less by policy disputes than by an ugly war of disinformation, one played for laughs. How do you fight an enemy |
the commission and clubs had signed a “binding agreement.”
But as one chairman said: “I thought we did that last December.”
In the statement, Grant said: “Under this agreement, the clubs will have the long-term financial security they have been seeking.”
Grant said money had been allocated to assist “financially distressed clubs” and a “65 per cent increase in funding for grassroots rugby league.”
In a strange move, the New Zealand Rugby League issued a statement supporting Grant, all while the meeting was taking place.
“John’s highly collaborative approach over the past five years has brought great benefit to rugby league in Australia and New Zealand,” it read.
FUNDING FARCE IS OVER
- Clubs to receive 130% of the salary cap
- Funding equates to $1 billion over five years
- Chairman John Grant gone by February 2018
- Two club representatives on ARL Commission
- NRL cries poor, saves $60 million in additional funding
- Three months of embarrassment for the gameDenver's annual April 20 rally still draws a crowd, but cannabis legalization has not led to an upswing in teen use, according to state government survey results. JASON CONNOLLY/AFP/Getty Images
High school students did not use marijuana at higher rates in Colorado as the state's pioneering market for recreational marijuana opened for adults.
The school survey results, published Monday, may dampen concern about the possible effects of marijuana legalization, and show that reported use among Colorado high school students remains slightly below the national average.
The Healthy Kids Colorado Survey -- conducted every two years -- found 21.2 percent of high school students said they had used pot in the past month, a non-statistically significant increase from 2013. Reported lifetime use was 38 percent.
In 2013, the first full year state law allowed adults 21 and older to use pot recreationally, survey data found non-statistically significant drops in high school use. The 2015 data reflects teen use after retail stores opened in 2014.
Despite the opening of stores, the reported use rates are below 2009 and 2011 rates, and below the national averages in the 2015 Youth Risk Behavior Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Colorado High School Pot Use (HKCS) 2009 2011 2013 2015 Past Month 24.8 percent 22 percent 19.7 percent 21.2 percent Ever 42.6 percent 39.5 percent 36.9 percent 38 percent
National High School Pot Use (YRBS) 2009 2011 2013 2015 Past Month 20.8 percent 23.1 percent 23.4 percent 21.7 percent Ever 36.8 percent 39.9 percent 40.7 percent 38.6 percent
The YRBS and two other federally funded surveys have found that U.S. teen marijuana use is static amid a surge in support for legalization and increasingly liberal state laws allowing for medical marijuana or adult use of recreational marijuana.
The unchanged teen use in Colorado -- often discussed as a pot policy guinea pig -- may affect politicians and voters mulling reform elsewhere. Voters in five states may legalize marijuana in November, and Florida voters will consider a lax medical pot measure.
"One of the concerns many people have about making marijuana legal for adults is it could fall into the hands of teens, and these statistics show teens will not necessarily use more marijuana just because adults are no longer being punished for it," says Mason Tvert, a spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project.
Tvert points out that the HKCS found drops in use among middle school students too, with reported lifetime use dropping from 8.8 percent to 7.6 percent.
But legalization opponents aren't ready to throw in the towel.
Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a group that opposes legal access to recreational marijuana, pointed in a press release to increases in reported pot use among high school juniors and seniors, under the subject line "New Data Shows Colorado Youth Marijuana Use on the Rise Since Legalization."
The release said: "This rise is a result of particularly pronounced increases among juniors and seniors, whose last-month pot use rose from 22.1 to 26.3 percent (juniors) and from 24.3 to 27.8 percent (seniors)."
But Leo Kattari, the survey's coordinator at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, says some changes appear significant when they are not.
The survey is a poll of students, and therefore cannot capture the precise use rates. So researchers establish margins of error within which changes are not considered statistically significant.
Kattari says changes in past-month and lifetime pot usage was within the margin of error for middle school students and for each high school class, with one exception.
The past-month use rate for 11th grade was.2 percentage points above the confidence interval, Kattari says. Lifetime use was within the margin of error, he says, and he resists a conclusive statistical conclusion.
"Further analysis would be needed to see if it's actually statistically significant or not," he says about the 11th grade change.
Kattari says one of the few changes that clearly was statistically significant was a "quite large" dip in the perception of marijuana's potential harm, despite the statistically static use rates -- something also seen in recent national survey data, perhaps indicating a break in the historical relationship between youth pot use and perception of harm.
The state HKCS provides the closest tracking of Colorado high school pot use, as Colorado in 2015 and 2013 had an insufficient response rate for a state-level YRBS survey. (Oregon and Washington, the only other states with regulated recreational pot sales last year did not participate in that survey.)
Of states that did participate in the YRBS supplemental survey, nine had higher past-month high school use rates than Colorado -- Arizona, California, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Vermont.
More data from the 2015 Healthy Kids Colorado Survey:
Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment
COLORADO DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENTThe VA Bought $20 Million in Art While Vets Died
I’m mad as hell, and I’m not about to take it lying down.
Over the weekend, I read a few stories about the outrageous spending by the Veterans Administration (VA). That is, some $20 million in excessive spending over the past decade.
Now this spending wasn’t on exorbitant administrator salaries, excessive employee perks, or even on fat expense accounts.
That $20 million was on art.
According to the watchdog group OpenTheBooks.com, the VA’s expenditures came during the following sordid period for the embattled agency:
While up to 1,000 veterans died waiting for VA healthcare; while many calls to the suicide prevention hotline were answered by voicemail; while the healthcare claims appeals process was described as "the hamster wheel"; and while the VA created 40,000 new positions, but hired only 3,600 doctors (2012-2015) …
If you’re not mad right about now, then you have no heart — and very little sense.
***
Of course, I know Uncommon Wisdom Daily readers have both heart and brains. That’s why I figured you need to know about how the VA is using your precious tax dollars.
I don’t care if you’re a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian or even a Democratic Socialist — this kind of wasteful government spending simply must stop. Especially considering it’s coming from the budget of an agency that can’t even properly schedule a doctor’s visit for the men and women who put their lives on the line to fight for America.
Now, if you want more fuel for that anger, I offer you the following verbiage from OpenTheBooks.com. It highlights some of the more outrageous expenditures on art:
Included in the expenditures is a 27′ artificial Christmas tree for $21,500 delivered to Chillicothe, OH and two sculptures costing $670,000 for a VA facility in California that serves blind veterans. Blind veterans can’t see fancy sculptures, and all veterans deserve to see a doctor.
The graphic below, also from OpenTheBooks, breaks down the annual expenditures on artwork by the VA since 2004.
I’m a fan of art, and I like aesthetically pleasing buildings and structures.
Yet I am pretty sure there are plenty of artists who would donate and/or offer to create objects d’art for the worthy cause of helping to beautify a VA facility.
I certainly don’t think the federal government needs to spend an average of about $2 million a year on art for VA facilities. No matter how beautiful that art may be.
I am pretty sure the brave patients at the VA could use another $2 million per year for more beds, more medical supplies, increased physician and nurse staffing — or maybe even just a little shorter wait to see somebody in their time of need.
This is the sentiment expressed by Adam Andrzejewski, CEO of OpenTheBooks.
In a Forbes piece I read this weekend, Mr. Andrzejewski was quoted as saying:
"Instead of hiring doctors to help triage backlogged veterans, the VA’s bonus-happy bureaucracy spent millions of dollars on art."
That same article reported on the results of a study done by Andrzejewski. That study revealed the VA added 39,454 new positions to their payroll between 2012 and 2015. But fewer than one in 11 of these new positions (3,591) were "Medical Officers" — i.e., doctors.
Today, nearly 500,000 sick veterans are still wait-listed for an appointment because there just aren’t enough doctors.
Ok, now I am really mad.
***
So, what is to be done about this situation?
Here Andrzejewski offered a rather interesting fix to the egregious spending situation, one that I endorse.
He said that rather than eliminating art purchases entirely, the VA should buy art created by veterans. This would have the double benefit of saving the VA money, and directly helping veterans.
It is this kind of thinking that we need more of, and certainly we need less bureaucracy. Veterans would benefit … and the VA could potentially save some money avoiding the boutique art market.
Is this likely to happen?
Unfortunately, you know already know the answer.
***
Are you riled up about how the VA spends nearly $2 million a year on art while our veterans are dying? If so, let me know by leaving a comment on our website or by sending an e-mail. And if you’re as mad as I am, don’t hold back. You can also Join us at the Sound Dollar Campaign, where together we are making our voices heard loud and clear.
***
It was the seventh day of losses on the Dow Industrials, which slid 0.5%. Meanwhile the Nasdaq broke its five-day winning streak, losing 0.9%.
On the S&P 500, all sectors but energy finished the day in the red. As our energy expert JR Crooks pointed out earlier this week, energy stocks still have yet to catch up with crude’s recent move lower. Speaking of which …
• Crude oil closed below $40 in front of tomorrow’s weekly inventory and production report from the Energy Information Administration. The September contract settled at $39.51 per barrel. • Meanwhile gold traded to its highest level in two years. Weakness in the U.S. dollar, an interest rate cut in Australia, a rate cut expected to come on Thursday from the Bank of England, and Japan’s approval of $73 billion in new spending helped to drive the safe-haven metal higher. • Amazon (AMZN) saw its market cap rise above ExxonMobil’s (XOM). This makes the online retailer the fourth-biggest company by market cap at more than $360 billion. The top three companies in terms of size are Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT) and Alphabet (GOOGL). • A U.S. ‘Car Recession.’ Last Thursday, Ford (F) reported its fifth-straight monthly decline in car sales. Shares have skidded 14% lower during the past four days. The end of the "car boom" may very well be nigh, as General Motors (GM) said its auto sales were down 2% in July. In Tuesday’s session alone, each stock gave up 4.3%.
Good Luck and Happy Investing,
Brad Hoppmann
Publisher
Uncommon Wisdom DailyMeanwhile Trump recently tweeted that Putin was'very smart' for not
As Donald Trump continues to shower president Vladimir Putin with praise, Sen. John McCain is leading GOP criticism of Russia's recent hacking.
The Arizona senator called Russia's alleged cyber attack to influence the 2016 presidential election an 'act of war' on Friday.
'When you attack a country, it's an act of war,' he said on Ukrainian TV after meeting with President Petro Poroshenko.
Arizona Republican Sen John McCain (pictured in Latvia on Thursday) alled Russia's alleged cyber attack to influence the 2016 presidential election an 'act of war' on Friday
McCain and Republican Sen Lindsey Graham (pictured together) issued a join statement saying they intent to 'lead the effort' in Congress for stronger sanctions against Russia
'And so we have to make sure that there is a price to pay so that we can perhaps persuade Russians to stop this kind of attack on our very fundamentals of democracy.'
McCain, who serves as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also scheduled a hearing next week on foreign cyber threats that will focus on Russia, according to CNN.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA Director Mike Rogers and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Marcel Lettre are scheduled to testify.
McCain is also pushing for the creation of a Select Committee in Congress to investigate allegations that Russia hacked the US to help Trump win the election.
Both he and Republican Sen Lindsey Graham issued a join statement saying they intent to 'lead the effort' in Congress for stronger sanctions against Russia.
'The retaliatory measures announced by the Obama Administration are long overdue,' the statement began.
McCain's calls for a tougher stance against Russia go directly against president-elect Donald Trump's desire for the country to'move on' from the hacking scandal
The president-elect put himself directly at odds with Obama as he tweeted that Putin was'very smart' for not retaliating against the president's sanctions
'But ultimately, they are a small price for Russia to pay for its brazen attack on American democracy.'
Obama's sanctions, announced on Thursday, included the expulsion of 35 diplomats the White House accused of being intelligence agents.
The president also ordered the closure of two luxury compounds used by diplomatic aides and the announcement of economic sanctions on Moscow's spy services.
While some GOP members, including House and Senate leaders Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, called the sanctions 'overdue' and a 'good step', Trump decided to praise Putin instead.
The president-elect put himself directly at odds with Obama as he tweeted that Putin was'very smart' for not retaliating against the president's sanctions.
'Great move on delay (by V. Putin) - I always knew he was very smart!' Trump wrote, even momentarily pinning the tweet to the top of his timeline.
Putin went against his foreign minister Segrey Lavrov's calls to retaliate against Obama's sanctions, saying he would wait to deal with Trump instead
The Russian government is sending this plane, an Ilyushin Il-96 - to the U.S. to ferry its expelled diplomats out of the country by New Year's Day
He then tweeted later in the day: 'Russians are playing @CNN and @NBCNews for such fools - funny to watch, they don't have a clue! @FoxNews totally gets it!'
The official Twitter account of the Russian Embassy in Washington quickly retweeted the message.
Putin went against his foreign minister Segrey Lavrov's calls to retaliate against Obama's sanctions, saying he would wait to deal with Trump instead.
'We will not create problems for American diplomats. We will not expel anyone,' Putin said in a statement inviting children of US diplomats to the holiday soiree.Return Of The Jedi is great, but the Ewoks are so annoying.” That’s a pretty common refrain from Star Wars fans. In fact there are whole fan edits dedicated to removing the little fuzzy bears from the film’s climax; I can only assume they’re made by the most hardcore of Star Wars lovers. The idea that a movie can be good despite its weaker elements is one of the most basic tenets of film criticism. Yet when it comes to dissecting films from a feminist viewpoint, we seem to have trouble keeping that in mind.
When I tweeted about my frustration with the female characters in Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes (one human, one primate, both of whom contribute very little to the plot), a friend replied, “Sorry to hear it’s a bad movie.” But it isn’t a bad movie. In fact, it was one of my favorite action blockbusters of last summer. Yet my specific feminist frustrations were extrapolated into a larger condemnation of the film. No one assumes that critiquing the Ewoks means you dislike Star Wars. So why did my complaints imply I hated Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes?
We’ve fallen into an all-or-nothing rut with feminist criticism lately. Battle lines are immediately drawn between movies that are “feminist” (i.e. “good”) and “sexist” (i.e. “bad”). And that simplistic breakdown is hurting our ability to actually talk about this stuff.
The best films generally feature complex, fully developed characters with diverse perspectives. So when female characters are one-dimensional tropes, the film suffers for it—in much the same way a film suffers when any of its main characters are one-dimensional tropes (and/or tiny, fuzzy bears). And when a character who’s supposed to be smart makes dumb choices—like running away from dinosaurs in high heels—it hurts the realism of the film (just like when tiny bears are able to take down Stormtroopers by throwing rocks at them).
But since Ewoks are fictional creatures, the way they’re presented has no impact outside of how well it serves the plot of Star Wars. Women, of course, are not fictional creatures, and study after study has shown that onscreen representation impacts both the self-confidence of those seeing themselves represented and the empathy of those exposed to new perspectives. In other words, the way female characters are presented has a concrete impact on millions of lives. That adds a level of urgency to feminist criticism, which, in turn, can make many people defensive about the movies they love.
That’s particularly clear in the conversations surrounding Mad Max: Fury Road and Avengers: Age Of Ultron, which came to represent the “feminist” and “sexist” sides of this summer’s blockbusters.
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But for all the awesome feminist themes in Mad Max (let’s plaster “We Are Not Things” everywhere, please!), there’s still plenty worth critiquing. The idea that the downfall of society immediately brings about the subjugation of women is the least innovative thing about an otherwise unique film. And while it’s awesome that Imperator Furiosa frees the model-esque wives from Immortan Joe’s tyrannical clutches, it’s perhaps not quite as awesome that the movie can’t muster the same empathy toward the less-conventionally-attractive women being used as milk bags who remain locked up. Nor is it great that the wives (who go on to be complex characters) are introduced hosing each other down like they’re auditioning for a Carl’s Jr. commercial. And as Anita Sarkeesian explained on Twitter, the film’s feminist message relies on defeating the type of cartoonish bad guys who seldom exist when dismantling real-life patriarchy.
None of that cancels out Mad Max’s amazing female representation nor the fact that it’s a kickass action flick. But the film’s relationship with its female characters is worth examining with a level of detail that the label “feminist masterpiece” doesn’t quite imply.
And things get even trickier when a film isn’t as universally beloved as Mad Max. Concerns about Black Widow (and some meta commentary about her in the press), meant Avengers: Age Of Ultron became an unexpected feminist battleground last May. Was the fact that Black Widow’s arc focused mostly on romance and infertility a blatant act of sexism? If so, had Joss “Strong Female Character” Whedon lost his feminist credentials? And were those who enjoyed the film in fact sexist themselves?
Personally, when I write feminist critiques they’re seldom meant to outright condemn a property and certainly never to attack its fans. (Hell, I’ve argued that Disney princesses can be empowering. I understand the idea of liking problematic things.) In fact, I’m more excited to engage with stuff I think has real artistic merit rather than point out that Furious 7 probably didn’t need so many close-ups of women’s butts. I want to highlight the weaknesses I see in Agent Carter’s gender politics or Game Of Thrones’ nudity because those shows have fantastic female characters I think could be treated even better by their respective narratives. And when I note the lack of women in X-Men: Days Of Future Past and Guardians Of The Galaxy it’s because I love the worlds those films create and would like to see more diversity in them.
Feminist criticism isn’t about ripping something to shreds or making others feel guilty for liking it. It’s simply about pointing out a specific creative weakness and then taking that a step further to explain the real-world social ramifications of that weakness, all in the hopes of dissuading future filmmakers from making the same mistake.
By far the easiest way to improve female representation is to demand more of it. As Geena Davis explains in her fantastic article “Two Easy Steps To Make Hollywood Less Sexist”:
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In all of the sectors of society that still have a huge gender disparity, how long will it take to correct that? You can’t snap your fingers and suddenly half of Congress is women. But there’s one category where the underrepresentation of women can be fixed tomorrow: onscreen. In the time it takes to make a movie or create a television show, we can change what the future looks like.
If the Avengers team were made up of three or four women it wouldn’t be such a problem for Black Widow to have an arc that involves romance. But as it stands, she has to be all things to all people when it comes to the film’s female characters, and the filmmakers who create her are (understandably) buckling under that pressure.
Indeed, what makes Mad Max so exciting is its sheer number of women. If one or two bore the sole burden of representation, it would be easy to dismiss Furiosa as an uber-competent “strong female character,” the wives as damsels in distress, and the female motorcycle gang as minor supporting players. But because they all appear together, none of them feel like stereotypes. The film acknowledges the vast diversity of the female experience and presents these women as active players in their own stories. That wealth of onscreen representation is a luxury men have long enjoyed and it’s precisely what feminist critics are demanding—that women not be presented as token characters but as living, breathing human beings.
Because even when we dream up stories set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, we can’t seem to imagine that they might contain more than one female character. And that should bother us just as much as those damn Ewoks.Former Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Michael Steele tells Breitbart News that Chris Christie’s endorsement of Donald Trump Friday was a pivotal moment in the campaign.
“One word, BOOM! Exclamation point,” Steele said in an interview. “Today after what we saw Marco Rubio do last night, he was out there attacking Trump on twitter and Trump was like, got one for you, BOOM!”
“Now the guy who defined Marco a few weeks ago is back in the game. He’s engaged, and he’s working with Trump. BOOM!”
Christie formally endorsed Trump in Texas at a press conference Friday before a major rally, calling Trump a longtime personal friend and saying that Trump is the most feared Republican to square off against Democrats in the general election. Christie previously scored a massive triumph when he mocked Marco Rubio’s memorized scripted talking points in a Republican debate in New Hampshire.
“The man is amazing,” Steele said of Trump. “I’ve never seen anything like this in politics. I don’t think there’s any descriptor for what Donald Trump has done to the political process and the Republican Party. There’s no one else playing this game better than him.”
Steele noted the size of the crowd at the Trump rally in Fort Worth.
“10,000 people in this stadium, those are general election numbers,” Steele said. “If there’s 10,000 in the primary what do you think the general is going to be?”
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich also declared Friday that Christie’s endorsement of Donald Trump is a great sign for Trump’s chances to become the standard-bearer of the Republican Party.Say, "Hello!" to Bernie2016.tv! We are a grassroots collection of volunteers working to bring a 24-hour, educational and inspirational medium to the internet to promote Bernie’s ideas and efforts for a better world.
The fire in Bernie’s ideas caught the attention of John Ellis (@johnetec on Twitter) who has an extensive history in media production. After taking note of the power and enormous possibility encompassed by Bernie’s historic run for the Presidency, John quickly decided to dedicate himself full-time to this project to help raise awareness for Bernie’s cause over the internet (and every town and city in the nation by necessity). The best part? It’s working. Using all free technologies and organizing on social media, he’s collected over 150 educated, empowered, and dedicated volunteers to help assist in this project. And that’s after just two weeks.
Bernie2016.tv has rapidly established itself as a central resource for Bernie’s grassroots following across all major social media platforms. With volunteer time, organization, and production, Bernie2016.tv has already successfully produced live, interactive broadcasts at two of Bernie’s most recent campaign stops -- Madison, WI and Portland, ME. Most recently, two amazing 15yo students in Alabama in the same small town hosted a 2+ hour show around Bernie’s speech in Portland, Maine. We coordinated with independent rally attendees for both events and brought them into our live broadcasts alongside the hosts for viewer interaction. In addition to our live productions, we’ve also received and shared recordings provided to us by local meetups, grassroots musicians, and grassroots video podcast producers. The Huffington Post also elected to include us in one of their articles recently.
In the coming days and weeks, Bernie2016.tv has active plans to not only continue live-broadcasting official campaign events with an important human touch from the 99%, but also broadcasting non-official gatherings and individual efforts to illustrate the international reality of this amazing Bernie-mania. We are currently focusing on producing and facilitating grassroots-generated content of all kinds to fill the 24 hours of available broadcasting space each day on our not-for-profit network. For example, we are broadcasting an independently produced, 2-hour LIVE "Berniecast" (video podcast) this Saturday morning and plan to cover the Birmingham rally live on Sunday afternoon from one of our volunteers’ cell phones (and probably more if we can reach them). The concept we are spreading is that we have created, currently, a professional news/production environment on the internet, streaming live over YouTube, which anyone can use if they have Hangouts and a reliable connection on their cell phone. This is the way major media is supposed to work to accurately reflect the People’s voice. And this was supposed to be an uphill battle. But the feedback we’ve already received from the online community has been, for lack of a better word, unbelievable. I guess that’s simply a trend that follows Bernie and we should all just get used to it :)
We aspire to serve as an authentic, free, and accurate source of information from the American grassroots community of the 99%. We do not feel this critically important community-based dialogue should be limited by the priorities of major media conglomerates and their majority shareholders. We want to serve as the example which proves crowd-sourced broadcasting can educate and improve our country far more efficiently than scripted, primetime broadcasting in between credit card commercials.
We have a fairly small number of core volunteers who are active daily in logistics planning, organizing, technical production, and social media management. We organize in our Google+ group and have existing, live chat rooms established for various projects and events. But the essence of the project commands widespread participation from intelligent activists like those who participate here. We promote and engage actively with the public during live broadcasts via the Youtube chat functionality and also record all broadcasts for subsequent use. These recordings will be included in our Youtube playlists along with our collections of videos and media uploaded directly by the 99% into our Public Google Drive storage space. Our content is already being re-broadcast by various online media aggregates to a surprising degree.
Our effort to educate the country from the bottom up allows us to draw on productions like "Brunch with Bernie," hosted by Thom Hartmann, ads from Bernie’s previous campaigns in Vermont, speeches from the House or Senate Floors, and literally hours and days worth of material to show who Bernie is and what he stands for and, most importantly, why he’s the BEST choice for the Democratic Nomination in 2016! We have volunteer audio editors, video editors, and translators standing by to assist in getting this message to every possible audience. But we need authentic, intelligent content NOW to start illustrating the power of this new kind of education, entertainment, and "news media."
Below is a link to an infographic we’ve created to quickly display the many ways we can use creative professionals in this online effort. Please take just a couple minutes to look through it and consider any possible ways you’d want to help to bring YOUR local narrative(s) to the national and international forefront. If you have Hangouts on your phone and a good connection, grab your Senator, Mayor, neighbor, and friends (hopefully they’re ALL your friends!) and reach out to us over any of our social media pages to put your voices on the air. There are no rules aside from the identity and morals Bernie chooses to exhibit himself. We have no commercials and no bosses. We are the 99%-- and we have a Presidential candidate who has brilliantly legitimized our ideas in formal politics. Now is our one and only chance.
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RedditThe Kremlin cried foul, accusing Washington of bullying tactics. | AP Photo U.S. seizes control of Russian posts in San Francisco, D.C., New York
WASHINGTON — The United States seized control Saturday of three Russian diplomatic posts in the U.S. after confirming the Russians had complied with the Trump administration's order to get out within two days, officials said.
As the Kremlin cried foul, accusing Washington of bullying tactics, the U.S. disputed Moscow's claims that American officials had threatened to "break down the entrance door" to one of the facilities, and that the FBI was "clearing the premises." Not true, said a senior State Department official, adding that U.S. officials had joined Russian Embassy personnel for walkthroughs of the three buildings.
Story Continued Below
"These inspections were carried out to secure and protect the facilities and to confirm the Russian government had vacated the premises," the official said in a statement emailed Saturday to reporters by the State Department on condition the official not be named.
Russia has been incensed by the move to shutter Russia's consulate in San Francisco and trade offices in Washington and New York, actions the U.S. took in retaliation for Moscow's decision last month to force the U.S. to cut its diplomatic personnel in Russia to 455. Moscow has accused the U.S. of violating international law by shuttering the facilities, a charge the U.S. disputes.
On Saturday, Russia's Foreign Ministry said it had summoned the U.S. deputy chief of mission in Moscow, Anthony Godfrey, to deliver a formal protest note calling the purported trade office search an "unprecedented aggressive action."
The Foreign Ministry also posted video on Facebook that it said showed FBI agents inspecting the consulate general building in San Francisco. In the video, a man in a tie knocks on several numbered doors and enters what appears to be apartment units, taking a quick glance inside before declaring everything in order.
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There was no additional comment from the U.S. about whether the FBI was involved in the inspections. The State Department declined to answer additional questions about whether the premises might be searched for intelligence-gathering purposes now that the Russians have left.
A day earlier, black smoke was seen billowing from the chimney at the consulate as the Russians rushed to meet the Saturday deadline, and workers could be seen hauling boxes out of the stately building.
The U.S. did appear to bow to one Russian complaint — that they were given a mere 48 hours to vacate homes used by diplomats and their families. Softening the original order, the U.S. said it had made "separate arrangements" to give families "sufficient time" to pack their belongings and vacate apartments on the consulate grounds.
In the meantime, the State Department will control all access to the properties, along with the responsibility for securing and maintaining them, the official said.
The closures on both U.S. coasts mark perhaps the most drastic diplomatic measure by the United States against Russia since 1986, near the end of the Cold War, when the nuclear-armed powers expelled dozens of each other's diplomats.
And it comes amid some of the broadest strains in their relationship ever since. The two countries have clashed over the wars in Ukraine and Syria, but most significantly over American allegations that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. election to boost President Donald Trump's chances of victory. Investigations continue into whether Trump's campaign colluded with Moscow.Local Weightlifting Committees (LWC)
Pacific WeightLifting Association : The PWA covers the State of California from south of Fresno to the Oregon Border and includes 10 Counties in Western Nevada.
Idaho Weightlifting: Idaho Weightlifting is Local Weightlifting Committee's Homepage and a great source for a variety of training routines.
Motor City Barbell: USAW Michigan Olympic Weightlifting Homepage.
New Jersey Weightlifting: This site contains information about the sport in the state of New Jersey including records, pictures, the Hall of Fame, entries and results.
Washington Weightlifting: Washington LWC President Al Reed's site with information about Washington State Weightlifting.
Regional Training Centers
Anderson/Cohen Weightlifting Center: The Anderson/Cohen Weightlifting Center is the home of Team Savannah.
High Altitude Sport's Training Center: Located in Flagstaff at Northern Arizona University, the site of the 1998 US Senior National Championships.
MIKE'S GYM: Home of Team Southern California is a Regional Training Center located in Bonsall, California.
USA Weightlifting Development Center: Dr. Kyle Pierce is the Director of this center located on the Campus of LSU Shreveport, LA. It's also the venue for many National Meets.
United States Olympic Education Center: At Northern Michigan University is the home USA Weightlifting's College "Scholarship" Program.
US WeightLifting Teams, Clubs and Training Sites
American Weightlifting: Founded with one simple goal in mind: to re-establish the United States as a dominating power in the sport of Olympic Weightlifting by bringing The Greatest Coach in the history of the sport to their facility.
Aurora Weightlifting Club: Founded and operated by Thomas Kraus, the Aurora Weightlifting Club trains out of West Aurora High School.
The Athlete's Congress: A New Weightlifting Team from the San Jose, California Area.
Calpian Weightlifting Club: From the Seattle Washington area, this club has consistently been among the top three clubs in the Nation every competitive season.
Coffee's Gym: The best Woman's Team in the United States. This club also includes 4 Male US Olympians.
Columbus Weightlifting Club: Hosts of The Arnold (Schwarzenegger) Classic Weightlifting Meet.
Devil's Power: Devils Olympic Training Hall at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey.
East Coast Gold Weightlifting Team: ECG, our Nation's Largest Weightlifting Team, comprised of Athletes and Coaches from all over the North East Region of the USA.
Gayle Hatch Weightlifting Team: From Baton Rogue, LA. This Team has had over 40 repesentatives on US International Teams including 1984 Olympian Tommy Colandra and 1988 & 1992 Olympian Brett Brian.
Lost Battalion Hall Weightlifting Team: New York City's home for Olympic Weightlifting for the past 40+ Years is still going strong!
McNeese State University: 2001 National Collegiate Weightlifting Champions from Lake Charles, LA.
Midwest Weightlifing Club: Host of the 2004 Senior National Championships, located in Schererville, IN.
Midwestern State University Strength Research Laboratory: Wichita Falls, Texas.
Minnesota High School Weightlifting: Their goal is to provide information on the sport of weightlifting in Minnesota to high school student-athletes and coaches.
Mustang Weightlifing Club: Part of Team Arizona, located in Mesa, AZ.
Nevada Barbell Club: In Reno, Nevada and sponsors of the High Desert Open in July.
Peaks Weightlifting Club: A Flagstaff, AZ Strength & Conditioning facility that specializes in developing and training weightlifting athletes.
Power Sport Center: Dave Gremore's Olympic Weightlifting Training Facility is located in Denmark, Wisconsin, 13 miles southeast of Green Bay.
Pure Strength: Sean Waxman's Sport Performance Institute in Southern California,
Rancho Buena Vista High School: Southern California High School coached by USA Weightlifting Senior International Coach, Mike Burgener.
The Sports Palace: The USA's "TEAM of the 80's", the Sports Palace Weightlifting Team, Coached by 3 time US Olympic Coach, Jim Schmitz now has 2 different training locations in San Francisco and South San Francisco, California.
Team Beaufort: Located Beaufort, SC they were the 2000 AAU Junior Olympic Games Team Champions.
Team Georgia Weightlifting: The vision of Team Georgia Weightlifting is to educate and develop the physical and mental aspects of athletes and coaches from around the State of Georgia.
Team Florida: Information about Olympic Weightlifting in the State of Florida with 25+ Training Centers throughout the State.
Team New Jersey: Established in 2000 by 1980 Olympian Bob Giordano. They train at Fairleigh Dickinson University, in Madison, NJ, where they are coached by Bobby "G" and Nik Curry.
Team Sacramento Olympic Weightlifting Club: Kathy Redcher-Bowling's Team Sac Page. It has Team Sac Bios, photos, maps, links, even the weather.
Team Sacramento Olympic Weightlifting Club II: Located at CAL State University, Sacramento, this growing Team has had great sucess Collegiately and is gaining notice on the National scene.
Team Savannah: One of the most sucessful teams in USA Weightlifting history. Half of the 2000 Olympic Team and the Woman's Coach came from this Team.
Team Wesley: One of the Premier Teams |
look at the situation.
Speaking to Salzburger Nachrichten he said:
"This will be verified by Uefa once we have received the competition entry forms from the national football associations after the end of the season in the respective leagues."
According to the BBC, a decision on the matter will be made next month.
Featured Image Credit: PALEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Rarely does a serving Army officer publicly unleash on the top brass of the Australian military. But tonight, a senior Defence psychologist has broken ranks to blow the whistle on Defence Force culture.
Lieutenant Colonel Paul Morgan is accusing his superiors of neglecting abuse victims, covering up abuse cases and ignoring his own complaints.
He's well qualified to speak. Not only does he play a crucial role in the mental health of Australian soldiers, but he too is the target of abuse, a vicious gay hate campaign.
Now after years of lobbying in-house at Defence, he's decided enough is enough.
He spoke to reporter Hayden Cooper.
HAYDEN COOPER, REPORTER: It's the annual Mardi Gras parade in Sydney. And a milestone moment for gays and lesbians in the military. They're marching in uniform for the first time.
NAVAL OFFICER: It makes us especially proud to carry the banner this year when we are marching as a uniform contingent. I'm very proud of our country.
NAVAL OFFICER II: Oh, it's fantastic. It's something that I've wanted to do for a very long time. Yeah, it's great.
HAYDEN COOPER: One man has fought harder than most for this breakthrough, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Morgan. He's given the honour of leading the Army contingent.
PAUL MORGAN, JOINT HEALTH COMMAND, ADF: Well, yeah, it's incredibly important. We haven't been allowed to march in uniform before. This is the first time. I wonder if it's the first time in the world that gays and lesbians have marched in uniform.
HAYDEN COOPER: Colonel Morgan is one of the most senior gay men in the Australian Defence Force. He's also a victim of abuse.
For the first time, tonight, he breaks ranks and breaks Defence rules by agreeing to this interview. His message is blunt, compelling and damning of the Defence Force's handling of abuse cases.
PAUL MORGAN: I'm speaking out because I'm concerned about the well-being of our junior soldiers who are experiencing abuse in Defence today. If I, as a senior officer, can't get Army to do the right thing, they have absolutely no hope. All forms of abuse are neglected within Defence, including sexual abuse victims.
HAYDEN COOPER: Over 16 years, Colonel Morgan has served all over the world, including Iraq and East Timor. Now he's a senior Army psychologist. At Defence's Joint Health Command, he's the leading policy officer responsible for the mental health of Australia's deployed soldiers and he's seen up close Defence's reaction to more than a thousand abuse allegations dating back 50 years.
Has Defence improved the way it treats these issues?
PAUL MORGAN: I can categorically say that no matter all of the cultural reviews, establishment of the abuse tribunal and the DLA Piper report, nothing has changed about the way Defence reacts to abuse.
HAYDEN COOPER: Nothing?
PAUL MORGAN: Nothing. From my personal experience, nothing has changed.
HAYDEN COOPER: Why not?
PAUL MORGAN: I'm not really sure why not, but I suspect that our senior leadership just doesn't care.
HAYDEN COOPER: It was a year ago this week that Defence released Pathway to Change, the official road map to ending abuse and discrimination.
But what was really changed?
PAUL MORGAN: Absolutely nothing has changed since the release of Pathways to Change a year ago. My personal experience tells me that the Army's abuse management strategies that I've seen of delay, deter and deceive are still in full swing.
HAYDEN COOPER: How would you describe the attitude of the senior generals in Defence to treating abuse?
PAUL MORGAN: Whenever I think about meeting a general, the first question that would come to my mind is, "So you've been in the Army for 30 to 40 years. Why didn't you do something about the culture of abuse? And why aren't you doing something now?"
HAYDEN COOPER: Lieutenant Colonel Paul Morgan's own case is confronting. In 2010, a Facebook page was set up by a former soldier targeting Colonel Morgan and several other gay members of the military. It accused them of a filthy lifestyle decision. Dozens of other Defence employees joined the Facebook group. Colonel Morgan also received an explicit death threat on email.
EMAIL (male voiceover): "I will cut your homosexual carcass into 100 pieces to feed you to the marine life in Botany Bay."
PAUL MORGAN: I remember flying to Melbourne to beat the morning newspapers to tell my parents about the fact that my colleagues were targeting me and joining in with someone who'd threatened to kill me. And not only that, but the Army was refusing to discipline them. I remember their tears, their fear and I still feel guilty to this day that I put them through that.
HAYDEN COOPER: What were the failures in Defence leadership in handling your case?
PAUL MORGAN: Every officer in my chain of command, every colonel and general, all the way through to the current Chief of Army, Lieutenant General David Morrison, systematically failed their duty in relation to the management of my complaint.
HAYDEN COOPER: Colonel Morgan says it was never taken seriously and key response deadlines were not met.
PAUL MORGAN: The Defence instructions are legal obligations and they require certain actions to be taken in the first 24 hours after an abuse complaint is made. What happened in my case is the actions required in the first 24 hours took 51 days to be completed. The actions required in the first seven days weren't completed for 21 months.
HAYDEN COOPER: Although a breakthrough, marching in last weekend's Mardi Gras was bittersweet for Colonel Morgan. He clearly doesn't hide his deep frustration with Defence bosses; nor he says does the gesture mask Defence efforts to cover up abuse cases. He recalls vividly the reaction at work after he made a written submission on abuse to a Senate inquiry.
PAUL MORGAN: The day my submission to the Senate was published, I was hauled in by a two-star officer for an unscheduled interview and hauled over the coals. I was told that they were concerned that I was too focused on abuse and should spend less time on that and more time doing my work.
HAYDEN COOPER: So stop talking about it.
PAUL MORGAN: Yeah.
HAYDEN COOPER: As a psychologist, Colonel Morgan is determined to stay in the Army, a job he does because he says he wants to serve the country. But he has no faith in the Defence hierarchy.
How would you describe Defence's performance in treating and handling case of abuse?
PAUL MORGAN: Defence is appalling at treating cases of abuse.... I don't have anything positive to say about Defence's handling of abuse and its mental health consequences. There's no support worker, there's no program, there's no policy on the abuse and mental health in Defence. Our senior leadership says one thing to the public and does another thing in private. The way Army deals with abuse is entirely consistent with how you would run a cover up.
HAYDEN COOPER: He also has little confidence in the abuse taskforce headed by a former military man, Len Roberts-Smith, and instead advocates an independent approach.
PAUL MORGAN: We need an outside body to step in immediately and look after the current serving victims of abuse in Army.
HAYDEN COOPER: In the meantime, Colonel Morgan wants serving abuse victims to contact him. He knows he's on dangerous ground. Merely speaking to the media could cost him dearly. But this Army veteran is undeterred and unwilling to stay quiet.
Do you expect any backlash for doing this interview?
PAUL MORGAN: Every time I or a member of my family has asked Defence to account for its inaction, there's been a backlash.
HAYDEN COOPER: You could lose your job over this.
PAUL MORGAN: Yes, possibly.
HAYDEN COOPER: But you're speaking out anyway.
PAUL MORGAN: The issue is that there are hundreds of abuse victims currently serving in the Defence force today and somebody has to say something. If not me, then who?
LEIGH SALES: Hayden Cooper reporting.
Lt Col Paul Morgan is urging other Defence Force abuse victims to contact him personally at shameofanation@hotmail.com(.)
You can also watch the full interview with Lt Col Morgan.VIDEO –
It's a tough job being a rabbi, especially for those who work in France's suburbs.
Fostering pride amongst congregants isn't always easy when most French Jews prefer to hide their Jewish identity out of fears of arousing anti-Semitism.
Video courtesy of jn1.tv
Many have left, but he remains. Rabbi Davide Altabe has run the Villepinte synagogue for 10 years. The building in a working-class suburb of northern Paris has been torched twice.
Though security has increased, anti-Semitism hasn't gone down.
Exodus Anti-Semitism drives French Jews to UK jn1.tv New report from Jewish Community Protection Service reveals anti-Semitic attacks in France increased by 58% from 2011 to 2012; many Jews move across Channel to English shores Anti-Semitism drives French Jews to UK
"Insults are an everyday part of life, and sometimes can degenerate into an attack," Rabbi Altabe says. "I've lost count of the number of times I've heard 'dirty Jew,' 'Zionist,' 'Free Palestine,' 'Death to the Jews'...
"Once I was with my daughter, who was five at the time. We were walking in the street and were hit with a beer bottle by someone calling, 'Dirty Jewish bastard.' How did they know I was Jewish? By my skullcap."
Out of the 30 men in his congregation, Rabbi Altabe is one of the few who still wears his skullcap beyond the synagogue's walls. The other men hide theirs under baseball caps to avoid attracting unwanted attention.
One synagogue member explains that "you can go out in the evening after a service at the synagogue and be confronted with a gang of youngsters, who will either look you up and down, insult you, or try to pick a fight, and it's been like that for years."
Encouraging Jewish way of life
Scarred by the surge in anti-Semitism, roughly half the Jewish families in Villepinte have left town and moved their children to Jewish schools.
"We have fewer and fewer Jewish families who come to the synagogue, and that is due to several factors," says Charly Hannoun, president of the Villepinte Jewish Community. "Not just the factor of anti-Semitism, but also because of a shift to Jewish schools, because in Villepinte we don't yet have Jewish schools in the area."
Anxious to curb the exodus, Rabbi Altabe holds regular Torah classes to encourage members' spiritual growth. He eyes the synagogue not only as a place of worship, but as a place of exchange.
"I am very attached to the synagogue," he says. "If tomorrow me and my family leave, there will be no more service, nowhere for Jews to go.
"Our objective is to create a Jewish way of life, a community, a synagogue, an atmosphere, and you can only do that if you have a rabbi, a synagogue and everything that goes along with it."
To protect the Jewish way of life, dissuasion has become a necessary measure. Surveillance cameras border each corner of the synagogue. If in 10 years there have been no new arson attacks, there is a worry that such tight security might reinforce Jewish isolation.
Anti-Semitic taunts and insults have become an occupational hazard for Rabbi Davide Altabe.
The rabbi of Villepinte, however, refuses to give in to intimidation. He hopes that by remaining, he'll encourage the suburb's dwindling Jewish population to do so as well.DENVER (KDVR) -- A customer at Damascus Restaurant in Denver left her waiter a 424 percent tip and a note that is sending a powerful message to the Muslim community in Colorado.
The customer dined at the restaurant on Nov. 9 when the waiter, Osamah Ajour, reportedly told her he felt uneasy about being a Muslim in America after the election.
Ajour recently moved to the U.S. from Jordan.
The customer left him a $100 tip on the $23.61 bill. She also wrote a note on the receipt that says "You belong here & I'm glad you are here."
One of Ajour's friends posted a photo of the receipt to Facebook with a caption saying "This is the America I know n (sic) love."
Photos of the receipt: 5 PHOTOS Customer leaves incredible tip for Muslim waiter See Gallery Customer leaves incredible tip for Muslim waiter A customer at Damascus Restaurant in Denver left her waiter a 424 percent tip and a note that is sending a powerful message to the Muslim community in Colorado. The customer dined at the restaurant on Nov. 9 when the waiter, Osamah Ajour, reportedly told her he felt uneasy about being a Muslim in America after the election. Ajour recently moved to the U.S. from Jordan. The customer left him a $100 tip on the $23.61 bill. She also wrote a note on the receipt that says “You belong here & I’m glad you are here.” One of Ajour’s friends posted a photo of the receipt to Facebook with a caption saying “This is the America I know n (sic) love.” Ajour commented on his friend’s post: “Brother you forgot to mention that I was a fantastic waiter! This lady made me happy today, I wish I get the chance to see her again, there're words deep in my heart left unspoken." The post has been shared more than 1,100 times. “I want to say thank you for your support, especially during this time, this crisis that we’re going through," Damascus Restaurant owner Mahmoud Kassir said. Kassir is also a Muslim immigrant. He moved to Nebraska 35 years ago to attend college, where he learned to cook his mother’s recipes. He said he had a brick thrown through the window of his Arvada restaurant in the aftermath of 9/11, but has not been harassed about his birthplace or religion since. “This is America. This is our country whether anybody likes it or not. I’ve lived here two thirds of my life and I’m here to stay and so are my kids,” he said. “Our president-elect says what he was. We keep going and move on and we don’t listen.” Up Next See Gallery Discover More Like This HIDE CAPTION SHOW CAPTION of SEE ALL BACK TO SLIDE
Ajour commented on his friend's post: "Brother you forgot to mention that I was a fantastic waiter! This lady made me happy today, I wish I get the chance to see her again, there're words deep in my heart left unspoken."
The post has been shared more than 1,100 times.
"I want to say thank you for your support, especially during this time, this crisis that we're going through," Damascus Restaurant owner Mahmoud Kassir said.
Kassir is also a Muslim immigrant. He moved to Nebraska 35 years ago to attend college, where he learned to cook his mother's recipes.
He said he had a brick thrown through the window of his Arvada restaurant in the aftermath of 9/11, but has not been harassed about his birthplace or religion since.
"This is America. This is our country whether anybody likes it or not. I've lived here two thirds of my life and I'm here to stay and so are my kids," he said. "Our president-elect says what he was. We keep going and move on and we don't listen."
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The best books of the year, according to AmazonNBA all-star LeBron James said President Trump "doesn't care" about race issues in the United States and isn't bringing people together.
"It's the most powerful position in the world and we are at a time where the most powerful position in the world has an opportunity to bring us closer together as a people and inspire the youth and put the youth at ease on saying that it is OK for me to walk down the street and not be judged because of the color of my skin or because of my race," James said. "And he has no recollection of that. He doesn't even care. Maybe he does. But he doesn't care."
James made the comments Monday during a news conference just one day after NFL athletes, coaches, owners, and others defied Trump following his comments that football players who protest during the national anthem should be fired.
Many NFL players across the country took a knee in protest of Trump saying that "any son of a bitch" who refused to stand for the national anthem should be fired.
James also said that he did not regret calling the president "a bum" on Twitter after Trump said he would not invite Golden State Warriors' Stephen Curry to the White House following that NBA star's comments about not wanting to visit.But Mr. Jones also said that he and the president-elect have been on the same side when it comes to trying to protect the livelihoods of blue-collar workers. He said he would happily collaborate with Mr. Trump to try to save the 550 Carrier jobs still scheduled to be moved to Mexico.
“If he in fact called today, and said, ‘Let’s get together to save the 500 jobs,’ I’d be glad to do anything I possibly could to work with him in any fashion,” Mr. Jones said. “I don’t foresee that happening.”
Veterans of the White House say they do not know what to expect from Mr. Trump, whose actions since the election have broken with many presidential norms.
David Axelrod, who was a senior adviser to President Obama, said he always advised the current occupant of the Oval Office to be mindful of the extra power that his words carried once they were amplified by the most powerful megaphone in the world.
“What you may think is a light tap is a howitzer,” Mr. Axelrod said. “When you have the man in the most powerful office, for whom there is no target too small, that is a chilling prospect. He has the ability to destroy people in 140 characters.”
Throughout the campaign, Mr. Trump dashed off Twitter messages in response to what he saw on television, sometimes calling out specific television personalities like Megyn Kelly or Joe Scarborough by name.It is something of an irony that the most well-known photograph of Virginia Woolf, captured by George Beresford in 1902, was taken well before she had composed her most famous works; in fact, it was taken before she had even become a Woolf. That image of the 21-year-old Virginia Stephen—ethereal, elegant, beautiful, haunted—has always struck me as intensely, almost painfully private. No matter that it was almost certainly posed; Virginia feels impossibly distant, possessed of an infinite inwardness, and what she offers the viewer pales in comparison to what she withholds. Her eyes, slightly downcast, seem attuned to the ineffable rhythms of an invisible world. Whenever I reread To the Lighthouse, something I try to do once a year, this is the image that rises to the surface of my mind, floating freely above the text. A gaze of both great softness and great intensity, a far-away face from whose slightly parted lips leapt the immortal lines: “All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.”
But when we let our gaze linger on the photographed faces of our literary heroes, how much of what we feel can be attributed to readerly intuition—and how much to fantasy? Affixed to the backs of book jackets, touched and smudged and gazed at longingly (or enviously, as it were), the image of the author has become an underappreciated accessory to the ritual of modern reading. These photographs, with the drama inherent to a human face, offer up a kind of ready-made narrative potential that we seize on, often before we’ve read a single page. We take in the glowing eyes, the spectral hands, the starched collar, the frozen smile, and in that encounter a feeling—a story—begins to unspool in our minds. That reflexive flash becomes a kind of echo that stays with us when the actual reading begins, a conversation between text and image, image and text. If ours is a culture of visual primacy, is it any wonder the photos of our authors come to inhabit the texts they write?
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Take Franza Kafka, whose final photograph, taken months before he died of a tuberculosis that had stalked him for years, reveals a lean, ascetic, almost unbearable intensity in which a visage has transformed into a kind of physical aphorism: Kafka’s face as a Kafkaesque story in and of itself. In that gaze I find the burrower, the hunger artist, and the insect, K. wandering outside the castle, the surreally thwarted country doctor; however, I also find a confrontation, as if Kafka is daring me to look upon him; as if, even after reading every one of his gorgeous obscurities, it is the mystery and terror of a face that lingers as his final literary challenge.
Or Sylvia Plath, who stares out at us as though seeing through a glittering darkness, an enigmatic smile playing about her lips. Plath’s confessional poetry, a ferociously varied tapestry of blight and sex and death, often revealed a consciousness at odds with itself as her productive periods ran aground on the agonies of a psychological disintegration. Plath’s face, half-shadowed, seems to speak to this divided consciousness, her features gathering in a perfect ambiguity: the poetess receding even while fully present. The beauty and mystery of her work is wreathed around this face and I can’t help but see it when I hear her name, an apparition that emerges from the ecstasy of her art.
But often, too, these faces are not what we expect them to be, as the physical particulars of a writer do not match with what we know, with what we’ve heard, with what we’ve read. I remember seeing a photograph of William Burroughs after having read Naked Lunch and Junky as a teenager. I don’t know what I was expecting—the louche elegance of a young Keroauc, perhaps, or the disheveled romance of Bukowski—but when I saw the tall, thin, nattily dressed, physically unremarkable man gazing back at me, I felt there had to be some sort of mistake. This was the man whose cut-up technique had dazzled and angered and opened me? This?
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Similarly, I remember Jean-Paul Sartre’s legendary ugliness taking my breath away. The traumatic haircut, the right eye not wandering so much as fleeing his face, the sense of a gargoyle-like grotesquerie, Sartre’s physical unsightliness is forever at odds with the intellectual beauty of his celebrated work. Sartre owned his ugliness though; when Camus found him laying it on thick with a girl at a Parisian bar he couldn’t understand it. “Why are you going to so much trouble?” Camus asked. To which Sartre replied: “Have you had a proper look at this mug?”
Camus, of course, occupied the other side of the spectrum, the intellectual Adonis par excellence. With his Bogart-style trenchcoat and a Gauloise cigarette dangling from his lip, Camus was the picture of literary elegance, envied and lusted after, the James Dean of existentialism—though this didn’t always work to his advantage. As the Australian cultural critic Clive James said, “The widespread notion that Camus’s mind was not really very complex at all is the penalty he paid for being blessed with good looks, the Nobel Prize, too many women, and too much fame.” One of his most famous lines from The Rebel, “Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes,” is poetically rich and effortlessly authentic—as it ought to be; Camus’s exile from his homeland of Algeria constituted a permanent form of solitude that always haunted his good looks, a melancholy that lurked behind his eyes. Of course, Camus being Camus, this only made him more handsome. “No modern writer I can think of, besides Camus, has aroused love,” said Susan Sontag, though one suspects he aroused a great deal more besides.
Emily Dickinson is an interesting case in that we’ve had to recalibrate our relationship with her image after a recent discovery. For decades, there was thought to be only one photograph of her: the much-discussed, much-studied image of the poet as a teenager in 1847. Austere and ethereal, her bone-white face set like a lamp against a gray backdrop, this striking photograph was the only visual record of her existence, and into that singular presence we were able to cast the dreams and presentiments that emerged from her staggering body of work. It made everything easier, in a way; a single photograph; a single face; a familiarity to tame the terse power of her paeans to death.
Then, in 2013, a new daguerreotype was found, soon authenticated as Dickinson, a grown woman now in her late twenties. The difference is striking: in the new image she shows a previously unseen strength and serenity, her arm thrown protectively around the back of a recently widowed friend. I resisted the new image when I first saw it, for reasons that weren’t clear to me then; looking back, I think I was attached to a particular representation, a particular visual understanding of her that nourished the written work itself, or at least my relationship to it. And even though I realize how unfair, even infantile, such a hang up might be, I couldn’t seem to help myself. Our investment in an author’s photograph can make us perceptually rigid, unresponsive to change. I learned then that there is nothing passive about our literary iconographies. We are always active, and often intractable, participants in such enshrining.
But really, how could we ever hope to resist? If, as Cicero had it, “the face is a picture of the mind,” we are its natural born interpreters, embellishers, idolaters. From the radiant humor and flaring intellectual force in the photographs of the ever-penetrating James Baldwin, to Eugene O’Neill’s studied brand of dark-eyed melancholy (the son of an actor, after all), part of the thrill of the author’s image is our willingness to submit to a visual seduction. But in crafting our own relation to these cherished photos, in allowing the image to enhance and intersect with the text, we, too, seduce our images in turn. Perhaps that is as good a definition of reading in an image-rich culture as any: a mutual manipulation.
Virginia Woolf last sat for a professional photographer in 1939; she would be dead in less than two years, drowned in the River Ouse. These photos, so important to me and my reading of her, have become something of a parallel text, one requiring a new kind of literacy. I often wonder what she was thinking here, perched on the edge of her genius and her madness. To better understand, I read, of course; but I also look.In 2010, the United Soccer Leagues and the Team Owner’s Association, a group of club owners who disagreed with the direction of USL, were at war. The TOA broke off from USL and would go on to form the new North American Soccer League. Intervening to save the 2010 season, the United States Soccer Federation forced clubs from both groups to participate a joint league called USSF-D2 for a year while it sorted out which group would be D2 and which would be D3 going forward. Ultimately, the federation decided that NASL would be D2 and USL would be D3.
Since then, the NASL and USL have had a contentious relationship, even though few people from the USL-TOA rift are still involved with either league. While NASL got off to the faster start, USL has gained ground over the past few seasons on the backs of its affiliation partnership with Major League Soccer, similar to a war between two small nations where a faltering rival receives backing from a regional power that shifts the tide. With USL now applying for D2 status, the USSF could take the opportunity to revise the system altogether, calling an end to this “soccer war.”
Ultimately USSF is closest to Major League Soccer among the professional three leagues, as MLS and the federation share a partnership in Soccer United Marketing. SUM is a key revenue generator for both organizations that sells the broadcast rights to the national team games and MLS matches as a bundle. The North American Soccer League aspires to grow into an alternative first division to MLS, as we explored in Part Two of this series. USL aspires to be a minor league supporting MLS, as explored in Part One. The situation has sandwiched second division NASL between a passive-aggressive first division MLS and an outright hostile third division USL. USSF may not particularly care to see NASL’s ambitions come to fruition. It could seize upon NASL’s loss of momentum and reshuffle the D2 and D3 deck before the league has a chance to regain its footing.
While the United Soccer League (no longer plural these days) may prefer to continue to fight an opponent that appears to be buckling at the knees, the federation may be more interested in stopping the fight to make sure strong NASL clubs in great markets such as Tampa Bay, Indianapolis and Raleigh-Durham are not irreparably damaged by a potential NASL collapse. Even if that call comes before it’s really necessary, stopping the fight benefits USSF partner Major League Soccer’s agenda.
It seems unlikely this could take effect for the 2017 season, but 2018 is also the rumored debut year for the Canadian Premier League. It seems possible that we could see sweeping changes in 2018 across North American soccer that shake up the landscape for the next decade.
What Would a Merged D2 Look Like?
While it is hard to speculate who might run a merged second division, or what it might be called, the structure is easier to guess. While NASL is a league of independent teams, USL is a league of both independent teams and MLS reserve teams. Simply combining both leagues would result in a second division with roughly 42 clubs today, not including the many potential expansion teams hotly rumored for both leagues. Even if you split such a sprawling second division into two, three or even four conferences, that is a massive league.
What would make more sense is to create both a second and third division from a merged NASL-USL, with the dividing line being strong, independent clubs making up D2, while weaker independent clubs and reserve teams make up D3. For the purposes of this article, we will draw the line between having an affiliation that consists of loans being acceptable for D2, while a team where an MLS club runs the entire soccer operations would not be able to rise above D3.
USSF could add further legitimacy to this second division by requiring that any ownership group that wishes to launch a team in MLS operate at the second division level for a minimum of three years. This would help ensure D2 expansion teams in Detroit, San Diego and Las Vegas happen.
Here’s a look at what USSF-D2 2.0 might look like, including some clubs from our expansion rumors updates that are targeting 2018 starts:
D2 Eastern Conference
New York Cosmos
Tampa Bay Rowdies
Carolina Railhawks
Jacksonville Armada
Miami FC
Indy Eleven
Puerto Rico FC
FC Cincinnati
Rochester Rhinos
Richmond Kickers
Charleston Battery
Charlotte Independence
Louisville City
Baltimore (rumored Wilmington Hammerheads relocation)*
Nashville SC (USL expansion team scheduled for 2018)*
Chicago NASL (Peter Wilt’s city-based club)*
D2 Western Conference
San Francisco Deltas
Sacramento Republic
Orange County (Blues today but rebranding per new owner
San Antonio FC
Saint Louis FC
OKC Energy
Tulsa Roughnecks
Arizona United SC
Colorado Springs Switchbacks
San Diego (new franchise owned by SD MLS bidders)*
Las Vegas (new franchise owned by Vegas MLS bidders)*
El Paso (new franchise owned by MountainStar Sports)*
Austin Aztex (return of Austin, whose owners covet MLS)*
FC Tucson (PDL team trying to move up)*
Albuquerque Sol (PDL team trying to move up)*
Los Angeles NASL*
*Speculated teams based on recent rumors catalogued in our monthly expansion tracker.
32 teams in total and 16 in each conference would allow for a balanced home-and-away schedule of 30 matches for the regular season. This would be fairly similar to what USL does today from a scheduling perspective, with clubs from each conference only meeting those from the other conference in the playoffs. In this scenario, two struggling NASL clubs drop down to D3. The Fort Lauderdale Strikers, who have had financial issues, and Rayo OKC, which could be abandoned by the Spanish club but kept alive as the originally planned Oklahoma City FC by the local minority investors at a lower cost D3 level.
MLS expansion will ultimately take its toll on this second division, with teams in Sacramento, St. Louis, Cincinnati, San Antonio, Oklahoma City, Nashville, Arizona and Louisville as well as possible clubs in Austin, Detroit and San Diego with their eyes on the MLS prize. Under this dynamic, former NASL clubs in Tampa Bay, Carolina and Indianapolis would likely step up their MLS efforts as well. It appears certain that a maximum of eight MLS berths remain to be handed out over the next decade, so as D2 loses some of those clubs, it can try to replace them with teams in good potential D2 markets like Hartford, Birmingham, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Omaha, Memphis, Virginia Beach, Grand Rapids, Inland Empire, Providence, Cleveland and Buffalo as well as hope a club like Pittsburgh gets the additional investment to step up.
How About D3?
The third division would become the home for the MLS reserve sides as well as provide a place in the system for independent clubs in that are in smaller markets than meet the D2 standards or those that lack the financial backing of D2 clubs. A city like Pittsburgh might have the potential to move up to D2 one day, but a market like Harrisburg is likely at its correct level in D3. The third division could experience even more granular regionalization than USL has today, starting with three regional divisions (East, South, West) and possibly moving to four (add the Midwest) as expansion continues. This could make it easier for NPSL and PDL clubs to professionalize and move up to D3, especially if USSF were to soften its ownership requirements at that level in light of the limited travel costs associated with greater regional play.
D3 Eastern Conference
Bethlehem Steel FC
NYRB II
Pittsburgh Riverhounds
Harrisburg City Islanders
FC Buffalo*
Lansdowne Bhoys*
Philadelphia Fury*
Cleveland*
Detroit City FC*
D3 Southern Conference
Fort Lauderdale Strikers
Rio Grande Valley FC
FC Dallas 2*
Swope Park Rangers
Orlando II
Oklahoma City FC* (successor to Rayo OKC by minority owners)
Chattanooga FC*
Birmingham*
As D3 expands, Swope Park, OKCFC and the Texan teams could shift to a Midwest conference.
D3 Western Conference
Seattle 2
Portland 2
LA Galaxy II
LAFC2
Real Monarchs
Reno 1868
Boise*
San Francisco City FC*
Fresno (the Fuego or the second Fresno group reported by Evan Ream)*
*Speculated teams based on recent rumors catalogued in our monthly expansion tracker.
The third division could grow as more lower league teams are able to make the jump up, or investors groups emerge in mid-market cities across the country. If D3 splits into Eastern, Midwestern, Southern and Western Conferences, the reduced travel could make it easier for a New Orleans Jesters, Memphis City FC or Virginia Beach City FC to join the South, a Grand Rapids FC, Des Moines Menace or Milwaukee Torrent to join the Midwest, or a North County Battalion, Southern California SC, Ventura County Fusion or East Bay Stompers to join the West.
How About the Canadians, Eh?
With the Canadian Premier League hotly rumored to start in 2018, it would make sense for Canadian NASL and USL teams to switch over the that league rather than slot into a revised US system. This would allow them to concentrate on developing Canadian talent with more focus, while the three MLS teams offer players coming through that system a path to a higher level. Add in the confirmed team in Hamilton, as well as rumored clubs in Calgary, Regina, Quebec City and Winnipeg to bring the CanPL to an even ten.
Canadian Premier League
Toronto II
FC Montreal
Vancouver 2
Ottawa Fury
FC Edmonton
Hamilton
Calgary*
Winnipeg*
Regina*
Quebec City*
Could There Be Promotion and Relegation Between D2 and D3?
Promotion alone makes sense as a way for D2 to cope with the loss of teams to MLS expansion. If there were ever a place to test out promotion and relegation, it would be between the second and third divisions. However, it would make sense to limit the clubs that could be eligible for promotion to organizations that can meet D2 standards and non-reserve teams, similar to how reserve teams are barred from the US Open Cup. This would provide a path to the second division for third division teams as they grow and get more financial backing. Relegation to D3 provides a way to lower expenses for any D2 teams that run into financial trouble. As long as the second division was at 32 teams, new clubs would have to start in D3 and fight their way up. It would put more at stake in a system where the top tier of soccer is locked away with MLS.
How Independent Would This System Be From MLS?
Today NASL does not take MLS territory rights into consideration when expanding. A key component of the Chicago NASL bid is that the team would be located in city limits, allowing |
U.S. Marshall service, the Secret Service - they were all chasing after you. You were even called, like, “the computer terrorist” in the 90s. Were you really that dangerous, and if yes, then for whom? For general public or for the state?
KM: The government obviously labeled me with these terms, like “terrorist”, and they locked me up in solitary confinement because they said I could whistle into a telephone and launch nuclear weapons. Basically, I became the example, and they created this myth of Kevin Mitnick to scare the public. But if the truth be known, I was fascinated with technology and telephone systems, and I became a hacker more for the exploration, for the seduction of adventure and pursuit of knowledge. I was able to compromise a lot of stuff, like, for example, most of the telephone companies in the U.S. and stuff like that, but it wasn’t to do damage or to sell to a foreign power or anything like that; it was more for my intellectual curiosity - and I ended up getting in a lot of trouble for it, I ended up getting sent to prison for 5 years. Four of those years were without trial.
SS:...I was going to say your intellectual curiosity actual you several times in prison - but why weren’t you able to hide your activities?...
KM: Curiosity killed the cat!
SS: Why were you always traced back, why couldn’t you hide your activity?
KM: Because you have informants. You have friends that you are hacking with and they inform on you and tell the government, because they get upset with you - and that’s how I was caught in 1988, for example, one of my hacker comrades, if you will, informed the FBI about what we were doing. They could not find us, they could not catch us, so no matter what you’re doing, no matter how smart of a hacker you are, and how clever you are, you could always get caught if somebody snitches on you. It doesn’t matter.
SS: So if you’re on your own, you’re operating on your own, then you’re safe?
KM: It depends. The more comfortable you get doing things, the more mistakes you could actually make. So the number one way how I was caught, for example, in my federal case, was because of the use of informants.
SS: So what was your biggest, coolest hack ever?
KM: My biggest, coolest hack was actually in McDonalds.
SS: Tell me about it.
KM: I figured out as a young boy how to take over the radio communications at their drive-up windows, so I could sit across the street and when a customer in drive up made an order, I would actually take over the system and I would be the guy inside the McDonalds, right, taking the order for the customer, and of course, you know, as a 16-teen year old, you could have a lot of fun doing that. So, customers placed their order, and I’d say “your order is absolutely free, please drive forward” and especially when the cops would drive up, I would say “hide the cocaine, hide the cocaine!”, and the manager inside this McDonalds was freaking out so much, he went out to the parking lot, looked around, he looked in the cars, he was looking all around, and he couldn’t see anything, and then he walks up to drive up window speaker, and he looks inside, as if there’s somebody hiding in there, and I key down my microphone “what the hell are you looking at?!” and this guy, like, flew back about 10 feet. So, hands down, that was my favourite hack.
SS: You sound like you had a lot of fun, but do hackers usually do this for fun and thrill like you, or are an exception?
KM: I was a prankster, I love pulling pranks, and why I got into hacking was my fascination with telephone system; kind of what Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had the same fascination back in 1975, fast forward to 1980, and I had the same fascination and I love pulling pranks, and what enabled me to be a great prankster is gaining control over phone company’s computer system to do things. I would change a friend’s home telephone to a payphone, so whenever he tried to make a call, it would say “please deposit 25 cents” - obviously there was no coin slot in his home phone, and I started in this pranksterism and that was what set me into this, kind of on this road into computer hacking, and then I got into a lot more sophisticated things, like I’ve been in quite a bit of trouble in 1999s.
SS: Now, when you’re hacking into the phone companies, you first had to call the workers, gain their trust - I mean, essentially, you really hack into people’s brains before you hacked into the machinery. Does it still work like that, nowadays?
KM: It works all the time, and it wasn’t just social engineering. What social engineering is, is when you use manipulation, deception and influence to get a target to comply with a request, release information, go to a particular website, or open up a document that’s been booby-trapped with malware. This is what we call “social engineering”, and I was extremely effective at compromising targets, using these attack method. To be really successful in hacking endeavours, you use both social engineering and you use technical means to break into the target, and when you combine these two, and it’s a hybrid attack - you’re pretty much unstoppable. In fact, every company that hires us to test our security, we have a 100% success rate - we always get in because we never give up, and what we do is we combine both social engineering and technical-based exploits to penetrate a target, and we do a lot of meticulous research and we’re very successful at it. So when I hear about companies like Sony or other, and these large companies being hacked, I kinda roll my eyes and go: “yeah, makes sense, it probably wasn’t too hard”.
SS: So, hacking in general, you’re saying it’s more about people than it is about technology.
KM: No, it’s both, but when you put both of them together, when you can manipulate people and you can manipulate technology and you have the intelligence to create a plan, to infuse both of them and attack a target, you’re likely going to win, you’re likely going to be able to break in. It’s not that one is better than the other, it’s actually a tool, and you take a tools that you have and you join it altogether, and you become very lethal. When we’re allowed to combine social engineering and technical-based attacks, and we’re testing our clients, we have 100% success rate, right. So, it doesn’t surprise me, when I hear about all these attacks in the companies, like that process credit cards and companies like Sony, that was recently hacked, it’s not a surprise to myself, and it’s not a surprise to other people that are security experts, because we realise it’s so easy, it’s not hard at all. What’s hard is defending yourself against these attacks.
SS: Well, actually, that was going to be my other question - tell me something, if someone who knows social engineering, and the computers and technology as well as you - could they hack into your computer if they wanted to, or do you know how to protect yourself?
KM: Want to hear something funny? About 30 minutes before I had to come to the studio to this interview...no, about an hour and 30 minutes, I apologise - I received a phone call from this guy with an Indian accent and he’s saying he’s from the Windows support center and he’s telling me first that my computer is sending reports that it’s infected, and this guy wants to help me over the phone to fix these “infection” - but what he’s trying to do, is to compromise my computer. And, he has no idea I’m Kevin Mitnick, so I’ve recorded this call, I’m going to edit it and publish it later, but it was actually pretty hilarious, because this guy, from India, was trying to social engineer me into installing his malware onto my computer, not realising whom he’s taking to.
SS: So, now, you operate a computer security lab….
KM: Not a lab, a company.
SS: A company, okay. What would you tell our viewers to do if they don’t want to be spied on through their devices?
KM: Well, okay, so you’re probably suggesting about the NSA capabilities and other spy agencies. That’s really hard, but what I would suggest is you never use a landline phone. I mean, If you have to do a sensitive call. If you’re calling to order pizza - who cares, right? But if you want to protect the contents of your communications whether it’s instant message, text message, or voice communications, you have to use secure voice-apps over the Internet. You have to use tools like, for Android there’s RedPhone, for Iphone there is Silent - there are different applications that do what we call end-to-end encryption, and you can do it for voice, you can do it for text, and if you use these applications properly - please, note the word “properly”, because there is a technique called “man-in-the-middle attack” where the bad guy inserts himself into the middle of the conversation and tries to fool each side - well, to prevent these “man-in-the-middle” attacks, these application put some sort of code or some sort of word, and you have to confirm on both sides that that’s what both parties see, right, and if you use these applications right, it makes it really-really hard for anyone, including intelligence agencies, to intercept those communications. So if you use, again, these applications - that will protect you. If you use regular cell-phone, or you’re using Imessage or whatever - forget it! Because you don’t manage those keys, those crypto-keys, there are other big companies that manage those, and you never know if they are being forced to cooperate against you.
SS: Also the latest smartphone trend is finger-print ID - it’s being created as an easy and fast way to pay online, verify your id, protect your information - what’s stopping hackers from stopping your fingerprint if it’s encrypted into your phone?
KM: I don’t know about fingerprint being encrypted, but that’s already has been compromised. If you’re talking about Touch ID, when it first came out, there was a group of security researchers that compromised it - but it’s actually dangerous when you’re crossing borders, and especially in the U.S., because you can be forced by a judge to press your finger across the phone to unlock it, and you can’t be forced to reveal the passcode, right, you can’t be forced to give testimonial type information about yourself, right. So, if you cross the border, and you, for example, have an Iphone, the smartest thing to do is you reboot the Iphone - you turn it off and you turn it on, and you don’t put in your passcode at first, because if you don’t put it in, your Touch ID doesn't work, you always have to put in your passcode first on the boot - so, if you don’t do that, then when you cross the border, if they try to force you to unlock your phone by touching your thumb or your fingers on the phone, it’s not going to work, right, because that’s the risk, having a foreign government get access to your communications because you’re crossing the border, and they’re allowed to force you to use your fingerprints or thumbprints.
SS: Kevin, thank you very much, you just gave us so many useful tips, especially for those who are just about to go to prison or being tried. Thanks a lot for this great insight into the world of hacking and protecting your cyberspace. Kevin Mitnick, cybersecurity professional, notorious hacker, thank you very much for joining us. That’s it for this edition of Sophie&Co, and I will see you next time.Britain’s former foreign secretary David Miliband has been accused of misleading the family of a Guantanamo detainee. Miliband allegedly told Shaker Aamer’s family he was trying to secure his return, while plotting to send him to Saudi Arabia.
According to documents obtained by the Daily Mail, the then Labour government had been trying to extradite Shaker Aamer to the authoritarian Arab kingdom, despite concerns he would face further torture.
David, who is the elder brother of current Labour leader Ed Miliband, is also said to have told Aamer’s family he was trying to bring him back to the UK. Aamer’s lawyers claim this was used to “silence” his client.
Aamer has been held in the controversial US prison since 2002, on suspicion of being a terrorist linked to former Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.
However, while he has been cleared twice for release by US authorities, his stay was extended as authorities attempted to extradite him to Saudi Arabia, his birthplace, rather than return him to his family in Britain.
Letters dated August 2007 show that talks regarding Aamer’s release between the UK and US had “broken down” and that the UK had instead sought to extradite him to Saudi Arabia.
Further documents dated 2008 show the UK Foreign Office guaranteed the US they would not seek to extradite Aamer to Britain if he were sent to Saudi Arabia.
Aamer’s lawyers claim their client had witnessed torture in the presence of a British security official, and that he was physically abused by a British MI6 officer known as ‘John’. He was also said to have been tortured through sleep deprivation and physical beatings.
However, the UK government denies it was involved in such acts of torture.
This is not the first time Miliband has been forced to apologize for Britain’s role in torture and rendition during the period after 9/11.
He was forced to admit to Parliament he had cordoned flights to and from Diego Garcia – a British overseas territory – as part of US rendition programs. He was also forced to pay compensation to Binyam Mohamed in 2010, after failing to block public disclosure of intelligence relating to his torture.
“It is shocking to hear that Britain was stabbing Shaker Aamer in the back seven years ago and explains why the Americans made this unique effort to send him to Saudi Arabia,” said Aamer’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith.
“The people who really did not want to see him back in Britain were the Blairites, including Mr Miliband, because they sanctioned the transfers to Guantanamo Bay where detainees were tortured.”
While the Foreign Office did not comment on the revelations shown by the documents, they asserted that Aamer’s case was a ‘high priority’ for the British government, and that they have continued “to make clear to the US that we want him released and returned to the UK as a matter of urgency.”
“Any decision regarding Mr Aamer’s release ultimately remains in the hands of the US government,” a spokesman added.Gay conversion therapy organization Restored Hope Network (RHN) has announced on their Facebook and webpage that they are holding their annual conference, Hope 2017, on June 16 and June 17, 2017 in San Diego. Although no venue has yet been named.
RHN is a network of Christian officials who believe that Jesus Christ forgives homosexuals for their past behaviors but also, by embracing their interpretations of scripture, can become empowered to live a heterosexual life.
These practices intersect between definitions of gay conversion therapy and ex-gay ministries.
In the past, conversion therapy has included lobotomies, castration, and electroshock therapies. Today, conversion takes the form of psychoanalytic therapy and spiritual interventions.
According to the American Phycological Association, sexual orientation conversion therapy, “refers to counseling and psychotherapy to attempt to eliminate individuals’ sexual desires for members of their own sex.”
While ex-gay ministries they describe as, “religious groups that use religion to attempt to eliminate those desires.”
The RHN say they don’t condone the former, but are heavily involved in the latter, blurring the line between conversion therapy and ex-gay ministries.
Both types of therapies have been deemed harmful by leading government health agencies including American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association to name a few.
Executive director of RHN Anne Paulk said in a recent interview with The Christian Post she doesn't agree with the term conversion therapy. She calls it a misnomer used to, "raise a fear response from those in the general public."
She continues to say that "a person cannot leave homosexuality unless they wish to leave homosexuality, whether they are a teen or an adult. But Jesus Christ still transforms lives. And for any who surrender to him there is a pathway out of homosexuality and it is something called discipleship and the transforming power of the Holy Spirit."
Reparative therapy is another form of reversing homosexuality, but is a specific kind started by Elizabeth Moberly and Joseph Nicolosi.
Jerry Reiter, who has been involved with exposing reparative therapy and an ex-gay groups from the beginning tells San Diego Gay and Lesbian News that RHN is a double threat.
"The particular group that is coming advances both ex-gay ministry and reparative therapy, and they have never met an anti-gay policy they did not like enough to speak out against it, including Uganda's 'kill the gays' bills of just a couple years ago."
Reiter was featured on OWN's Our America with Lisa Ling. In the interview (see below) he explains that after his son died, at the funeral a member of the conversion therapy group known as Exodus International blamed his homosexuality for the death.
He warns people that the group coming to San Diego in June are just as unkindly.
"They are bringing the old scams to San Diego this summer, and people need to know the old failed 'cures' are going to be advanced by the new administration."
Reiter is a survivor of reparative therapy himself. He tells SDGLN that he was in reparative therapy beginning at the age of 16-years old, “it was a scam that sucked $41,000 from me, but did not work."
Since then he has been an advocate against these groups, appearing on television and speaking with ex-gay leaders, eventually helping to shut down the ex-gay network Exodus International.
"I fought for making gay conversion therapy illegal for minors in my state of California," he said.
He says he also exposed the Restored Hope Network's executive director's ex-husband to come out.
"For this RHN group, I caused the husband of the current leader to be re-outed as a gay man," he explains, "I knew that John Paulk was divorcing Anne. She is the bisexual executive director of Restored Hope Network."
Reiter also says he was key in swaying the leader of ex-gay ministry Love in Action (now Restoration Path), John Smid, to admit reparation therapies don't work.
"I encouraged him for a long time before he publicly announced that nobody changed from homosexual to heterosexual, including himself," Reiter told SDGLN. "I spoke in long conversations on the phone with him to reassure him that he was doing the right thing in leaving his wife."
Given the outcome of the presidential election, Reiter is worried about the incoming administration and what impact Trump's anti-LGBT cabinet will have on the future of gay men and women.
"We find it unthinkable for our nation to go back to the days when gays were arrested in their own homes for having sex and forced into conversion therapy," he said. "Restored Hope Network has that as its wet dream."
Hope 2017 has chosen their keynote speaker as Pastor Ron Citlau, senior pastor at Calvary Church, Orland Park, IL.
In the past, RHN conference topics have included, "Homosexuality: A Case of Mistaken Responses,” “How Transformation Happens," "Why Gender Matters: Thoughts from a Transformed Transgender Person," and "Making Your Church A Welcoming Place for God to Transform Lives."
Restored Hope Network's Hope 2017 will be held in San Diego on June 16 and 17. There is no word on the location of the conference.
SDGLN reached out to RHN, but as of yet has not received a response.
San Diego Gay and Lesbian News will keep you updated as more information becomes available.MEXCLUSIVE!! ‘BLOOD’ GANG MEMBER who shot New York Firefighter WAS A DEMOCRAT ACTIVIST!!
Earlier today a “blood” gang member had a 6 hour standoff with New York police in Staten Island, after which a fire department officer was shot in the leg, and the loser was killed by the cops.
His name was Tyree Garland.
And he was a “Young Democrats” activist, in addition to being an anti-cop gang member – but I repeat myself.
Here are the screenshots from his website:
This was the last Facebook post update from Tyree:
Here’s another Dem pic!
Pretty sure that says “South East Queens County Young Democrats” and I’m pretty sure this guy:
…is John Liu.
He’s the New York city comptroller Democrat who ran for mayor and failed miserably. He’s also the moron who ate out of a Campbell’s soup can in the back of his limousine for the “Minimum Wage Challenge.” And here he is with a gang member! Those silly Democrats.
Here’s another image from the Dem party with the attempted murderer ex-convict gang member from his own facebook:
Does the older guy look like U.S. Representative Gregory Meeks? Kinda looks like it to me!! Will the media ask him how many gang members he likes to consort with? Yeah right!! LOL!
And more about the shooting:
U.S. Marshals arrived at the home early Friday to serve Tyree a warrant but he allegedly refused to open the door, Boyd said. That’s when authorities went to an upstairs neighbor to get a key into the apartment.
When they opened the door, they saw smoke inside and called firefighters to the scene, Boyce said.
A lieutenant responding to the call ordered the man to leave the home but he refused and a fight ensued, two fire department sources told PIX11 News.
Lt. Jim Hayes, 53, was shot twice allegedly by the suspect. He was taken to a hospital and listed in stable condition, police said. His injuries are not life-threatening, FDNY Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said.
After the lieutenant was hurt, the suspected shooter barricaded himself in the home. SWAT teams are trying to coax him out of a basement apartment, aerial footage shows.
A father of two, Hayes is a 31-year veteran of the department who made rescues on Sept. 11, 2001, and comes from a family of firefighters, FDNY sources said.
The attack on Hayes is the first time in 21 years that a New York City firefighter has been shot in the line of duty, Nigro said.
The shooting forced the evacuation of Tyree’s upstairs neighbors, Boyce said. No other residents were ordered to leave their homes but they are being told to stay away from the scene.
But will you hear from the mainstream media that he was a bigtime Democrat? Now imagine if he were a Tea Party member!There’s this thing called the “Twenty Year Rule” that pertains to collective cultural nostalgia, and if one is to give credence to this idea, then the recent resurgence of interest in The X-Files comes as no surprise. IDW Publishing has been running a well-received comic adaptation over the last several years, and just a few weeks ago Fox confirmed that they’re in talks to reboot the series, original cast and everything. And the nerdosphere rejoiced! Are you excited? I’m kind of excited! Kind of.
Okay, “mixed feelings” is more the appropriate descriptor.
I was one of those 7th graders that experienced The X-Files as a springboard into the world of media for grown-ups. The X-Files walked hand-in-hand with the likes of Independence Day and Men in Black, the more intellectual alternative to Independence Day’s mindless bombast. It crossed all the right wires at the right time—it was about a fun, timely topic, but not too topical. It was science fiction, but not too science fiction. But most of all it had that wonderful will-they-or-won’t-they tense chemistry between its two leads—topical premise or no, the show would neither have lasted as long as it did nor have remained in the popular consciousness without the Mulder/Scully dynamic. But the whole show would not exist but for the bedrock premise that is the romantic, tortured conspiracy theorist.
Conspiracy narratives are nothing new, and moreover, they’re fun. The “man who knew too much” narrative certainly didn’t start with The X-Files—that template was one of Hitchcock’s favorites. The “romantic conspiracy theorist” is an offshoot from the “man who knew too much,” perhaps an inevitable one considering how popular American conspiracy theories became in the wake of the Watergate Scandal and the nascent fascination with Roswell in the early ’70s.
And maybe we loved The X-Files growing up, but when the subject of the show comes up in conversations with my fellow children of the ’90s, it is often accompanied with the question: “Do you think conspiracy theories have become so mainstream and pervasive because of, you know, The X-Files?”
Well, maybe. But if so, who cares?
Obviously, there is no way to tell exactly how much The X-Files influenced our tendency to believe every vast conspiracy theory we hear, but we can see that the pervasiveness of conspiracy theory is increasing, and we can see how the proportion of American voters that believe in conspiracy theories is changing. We know, for instance, that 21% of American voters believe in the whole Roswell thing. That’s a lot when you consider the number of registered American voters—even at 21%, that’s still about 31 million people. Like most of the conspiracy theories on The X-Files, this one’s pretty harmless—but then there is the increase in belief in the harmful ones to take into account, as well. Nearly 40% of American voters believe that global warming is a hoax, and nearly 30% believe in the formation of a “secretive power elite with a globalist agenda,” or a New World Order, is in the works. That’s way more than the 9/11 truthers, a mere 11%, or about 16 million people. A drop in the bucket!
This is to say nothing of the unsettling chunk of Congressmen that continue to insist that the President of the United States fabricated his own birth certificate. These aren’t doomsday preppers, camping out on their inherited farmland somewhere on the prairie—these are US Congressmen elected to the most powerful legislative body in the world. On a more intimate level, many of us have anti-vaccination people in our lives, and on a charitable day you may find yourself feeling a bit like Scully trying to explain that, no, Mulder, vaccines don’t cause autism.
Big name conspiracy theorists also have a much bigger platform than they’ve ever had before. Blowhards like Alex Jones and David Icke have massive followings. Anti-vaccination advocates like Jenny McCarthy have become influential enough that we’re beginning to see resurgences in disease that were nearly wiped out in the United States. Some anti-government movements such as “Sovereign Citizens” have exploded in the last two decades, directly resulting in multiple deaths. Nearly every major event in the news media, from Sandy Hook to the Boston Marathon bombing, is met in some corners with the presumption that there is a nefarious, usually government-backed conspiracy behind it.
These beliefs are cut from the same cloth of what we saw on The X-Files, the same cultural roots, and they do have far-reaching negative consequences. And thanks to social media, information and ideas are traveling faster and wider than ever. This information does not need peer review, but belief by the reader, and it is accepted as gospel. Distrust in authority structures such as government and scientific peer review makes conspiracy even more believable.
Since The X-Files was partially inspired by the increasing mainstream-ification of conspiracy Americana, inevitably there is a real link between Fox Mulder and the type of person that inspired his character. Despite jokes the show would make at Mulder’s expense, The X-Files ultimately plays his quest straight—the conspiracy is real, and everything is, indeed, against Fox Mulder. By the end of the show, the vast majority of his paranoid delusions are vindicated. But the show also tended to ignore the very real pernicious aspects, as well. Conspiracy theorists in the real world are reactionary; observe the terror at the prospect of a Stalinesque “New World Order.” Conspiracy theories are anti-science; there is no place for peer review. Conspiracy theories often have horrific racist undertones; one need look no further than how “ancient aliens” theories belittle the accomplishments of ancient, non-white civilizations.
The show was never interested in these aspects of conspiracy culture, nor was it obliged to explore them; however, it is impossible to ignore how The X-Files drew from what popular culture, and the show’s topics du jour weren’t just about aliens. For instance Mulder’s co-conspiracy nuts, who went by the moniker “The Lone Gunmen,” were themselves named in reference to theories that challenged the idea that the assassination of JFK was at the hands of a single man. It’s also really hard to ignore that the pilot for The Lone Gunmen, the short-lived X-Files spinoff which aired in March of 2001, featured the US Government plotting to frame some terrorists for flying an aircraft into the World Trade Center. Yeeaahh.
Mulder was inexorably a product of his time, but times have changed. Our relationship to conspiracy theories and the people who purport them have changed, and the potential entertainment value for the 90s-style “truth seeker” conspiracy theorist has dwindled. I’ve heard it argued that, “We aren’t supposed to sympathize with Mulder’s crazy,” and, well, no, we really rather are. Mulder is constantly vindicated. It is he who wins Scully to his side by the end of the series, not the other way around. And I don’t think that conspiracy theory narratives are going to go away—nor should they go away—but I want to think that we’re reaching a level of sophistication in both our fiction and our relationship to conspiracy theorists that we need to more thoughtful about these kinds of narratives. The X-Files did absolutely romanticize Mulder’s quest for truth far more often than it played it for comedy or sexual tension, and that approach does, on some level, help to prop up this increasing proportion of the population who do believe in vast conspiracies.
Conspiracy theorists are no longer so fringe, no longer safely in the realm of “harmless wacko” or a “tortured lone wolf” like Mulder. And with that in mind, for a rebooted X-Files to have any relevance to a modern audience, the character of Mulder and his relationship to the world of conspiracy should evolve into a more complicated and problematic figure. This isn’t to say the show should dispose of its basic conceit that “The Truth is Out There,” but allow itself to look inward at the subculture it draws so heavily from, as well. The portrayal of characters like Mulder and the Lone Gunmen as, at worst, misguided eccentrics rings hollow in today’s atmosphere.
The most contradictory facet of conspiracy theorists with a platform is that they are the enemies of truth far more often than their adversaries, real or imagined. Jenny McCarthy has done far more damage to public education about vaccination than has “Big Pharma” in recent decades. Sometimes the person with a paranoid agenda is just as liable to obscure the truth as the government agent who does so intentionally. But need one jump to and marry themselves to extreme conclusions in order to question everything the Powers That Be tell them? In this era, in which figures like Edward Snowden exist alongside people like Alex Jones, how can we explore the idea of responsible skepticism in our fiction more thoughtfully? An X-Files reboot could well be the perfect place to do just that.
The show dealt with a wide variety of conspiracies during its run, but towards the end it was mostly tied up with the evil US government and their evil pro-alien agenda. The truth was out there, but after 9/11 the “truth” as per the show got pretty squirrelly—which was honestly probably a good call. No one wanted real-world terrorism theories dragged into their primetime sci-fi romance. The X-Files was always pulp drama, but it was pulp that appealed to a smarter, more sensitive crowd, the kind of crowd who could see themselves in both Mulder and Scully.
An X-Files reboot can’t be just the same thing over again. Nothing would doom this premise to failure more completely than keeping it locked in the time it was originally conceived, because the world has changed. And if the show’s attitude towards conspiracy theorists doesn’t evolve with the times, I have a feeling that this reboot is going to be short-lived and not well-remembered. And that would be a shame.
Lindsay talks movies, nostalgia and tropes on YouTube, co-hosts the book review series “Booze Your Own Adventure”, and is co-founder of ChezApocalypse.com. If you want your timeline flooded with tweets about old cartoons, feminism, dog pictures and Michael Bay, you can follow her on Twitter.A fixture in Bay Area veterans groups has been keeping a secret for more than a decade, and now that it's been uncovered by the ABC7 News I-Team, the man is under investigation by at least two federal agencies.Dan Noyes has spoken to so many people about "Lieutenant" Greg Allen, and none of them knew he is a convicted felon or that he has been lying about his service record. He has fooled people, gained their trust, sometimes taken their money, and now, you're going to hear the truth.Reconnaissance Marine Simon Duvall from Marin County is in the Philippines right now on a joint exercise. Noyes spoke to him by satellite phone this week about the training he received during high school, at a gym in San Rafael: "I thought it was a good experience, learned a lot from Lt. Allen, the man who runs the place, and definitely prepared me, gave me an upper edge."At first, Allen opened the "Fitness Boutique" with a "smile" sign over the doorway. Then, 10 years ago, fitness boot camps became popular, so he remodeled the boutique into the "House of Steel" featuring Marine-style workouts for soccer moms and for teens who want to join the military.Before the sun is up, you can see boys and girls training at the gym off 4th Street in San Rafael and in the parking lot of the nearby Whole Foods.Allen also upgraded his image -- adding a Marine uniform and a bunch of medals, including a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star with "V" for valor, and a new title -- first lieutenant.Duvall told Noyes, "We definitely knew he was a Reconnaissance Marine, a scout sniper and someone to look up to."Allen told his young clients war stories and the local paper quoted him in a profile saying, "I am a Vietnam veteran. I was in a lot of conflicts; there are ones I mention and ones I don't. I did two tours and was active from 1967 to '74."Allen was so convincing, he became president of the Military Officers Association of America, Marin Chapter. He joined the Marin United Veterans Council, and had his clients perform color guard at holiday parades.Ray Mullin is president of the Marin United Veterans Council. He said, "I like Greg, I like his attitude, his direction, how he presents himself, his Marine Corps je ne sais quoi."Even when Noyes raised questions about Allen's credentials, veterans stood by him at the American Legion post in Larkspur. Jackie Tribolet said, "I'm going to stick with believing Greg until Jesus comes down from heaven and tells me otherwise."Allen bristled when Noyes approached him about his service.Allen: "I'm done talking with you, partner, back up."Noyes: "Have you ever been a Marine?"Allen: "Yes, I have been."Noyes: "When?"Allen: "You're down here to do a hit piece on this place."Noyes: "No, only on you."Allen: "And on me."Noyes: "Are you ready to admit now that you've never been a Marine?"Allen: "No, I'm not going to admit anything to you because it's not true."The I-Team obtained Allen's service records under the Freedom of Information Act. And they show everything he has said about his military history is a lie. Allen was never in the Marines, never a lieutenant, never served in Vietnam and did not earn those medals.Allen did enlist in the Navy, but was discharged after only eight months because of a pre-existing knee injury from high school football.Noyes: "You've lied to these kids."Allen: "I have not lied to the kids."Noyes: "Have you ever been a Marine?"Allen: "Go away."Noyes: "You have not."Allen: "Go away."Noyes: "I've got the records, Greg."Allen: "Pull the records, I got, I got, you know when it's time..."Noyes: "Let's see your DD-214."Allen: "I don't need to show you anything, you do what you got to do and we'll respond to you."Allen declined to show Noyes his DD-214, which are discharge papers that every service member receives from any branch of the military.The extent of Allen's lies shocked the real veterans Noyes met at a Marines Memorial event to mark the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War.Paul Bucha is one of only 79 Medal of Honor recipients still alive. He tells Noyes, Vietnam vets had to count on the respect and accolades of their peers, and that Allen's lies are serious. He told Noyes, "Someone like this comes in and tries to horn in on that and steal that and misuse it through misrepresentation, it's disgusting."Bill Waldrop, a Purple Heart recipient, was stunned to learn the news.Waldrop: "He never served?"Noyes: "He was never in the Marines."Waldrop: "Oh, my God. Can you introduce me to him?"Carroll Starling, who was a Navy Chaplain during Vietnam, said, "If they're saying that and putting that on, they've got more problems than an algebra book."Three photos pose the biggest problems for Allen right now:He posted a picture on his Facebook page with the general at the Marine training center in San Diego. Noyes contacted the general's office and now Allen is banned from all Marine functions and |
't do Anything but sit there and seethe."
Fortunately our archaic response to stress does have some modern-day benefit. After an hour or so of being stressed, blood levels of the hormone cortisol rise. "Small amounts of cortisol make you process information faster. If you're very stressed in an exam and you're completely lost, your brain will work faster and better," says Grossman. But it's only useful on occasion. "Get stressed day in day out and you'll literally burn that part of your brain out," he adds.
Using mobile phones
Though demonstrably lethal when stuck to the ear of someone driving through a city during rush hour, the only other confirmed threat a mobile has to health is the kicking you get when the local 14-year-olds mug you for it on your way home.
But there's good evidence that mobile phones can be good for you too. Alan Preece, who studies the biological effects of mobile-phone radiation at the Bristol Oncology Center, found that people exposed to mobile-phone radiation were 4% faster at certain mental tasks than others. "It has the effect of making you about 20 years younger," he says. Preece believes the effect is solely due to the phone heating a region of the brain called the cortex. Radiation from phones has also been shown to increase blood flow in certain regions of the brain.
Watching a great deal of TV
Yes, you'll be labelled a couch potato, but rest assured it could be worse. According to researchers at Vandebilt University in Nashville, you'll use up 20% more energy watching television than lying in bed. At a burn rate of around 100kcals for an hour's viewing, television is about as exhausting as reading a book or writing a shopping list.
Listening to loud, repetitive music
Of course it'll hamper your hearing by causing a permanent ring, or deafen you completely, but since you're going to do it anyway, you might as well know why it feels so good. "What happens when you listen to loud music is it activates a primitive acoustic sense in the ear which is inherited from our swampy ancestors," says Neil Todd of the University of Manchester. Todd reckons our ancestors' mating displays involved lots of noise and prancing about. Loud bass notes trigger the same response in our vestibular system, he says, so loud repetitive bass music stimulates the same areas of our brains that makes us think we might be about to get some. "It's the pulsing, loud bass frequencies that are particularly effective," he says. But does the fact that it gives you the horn mean it's good for you? "Anything which gives you pleasure is good. It keeps you free from stress, it keeps you happy and that's clearly healthy," he says.
Smoking
Talk to physicians and they'll tell you there are few things you can put in your mouth that are worse for you than a cigarette. But it's not all doom and gloom. Smokers are at least doing their bit to slow down the runaway obesity epidemic that is sweeping through the western world. "In many studies, you often find smokers are slimmer. We've certainly seen it in our studies," says Jodi Flaws at the University of Maryland school of medicine. "Some people think it's due to certain chemicals in cigarettes somehow making them burn more calories, but others believe it suppresses appetite. It may well be both."
Drastically upping your chances of cancer and heart disease might not be the best way to avoid obesity, but it's certainly easier than running round the block.
Scientists have also found evidence that smoking might, in some circumstances, help prevent the onset of various dementias. Many dementias go hand-in-hand with a loss of chemical receptors in the brain that just happen to be stimulated by nicotine. Smoking seems to bolster these receptors, and smokers have more of them. The theory is that smokers may then have more to lose before they start losing their minds. "It does seem that nicotine has a preventative effect, but the problem is that the other stuff in the cigarette tends to rot everything else," says Roger Bullock, a specialist in dementia and director of the Kingshill Research Centre in Swindon. So if your time is nearly up anyway, and you have somehow managed to steer a course past the Scylla and Charybdis of heart attacks and tumours, smoking might just help you retain your marbles.
Riding fast motorbikes
There are fewer sure-fire ways of decimating your life expectancy than buying a large motorbike you are clearly ill-equipped to control. But spend five minutes with a biker and you'll soon hear how invigorating it is to hare through the countryside startling the pheasants. Although the thrill of speed is often called an adrenaline rush, adrenaline has nothing to do with it. Instead, the rush comes from the release of chemicals called endorphins in the brain that act to calm your body down, essentially countering the effects of noradrenaline that gets your heart thumping. Is thrill-seeking good for you? "Endorphins are the good guys, they slow down your heart rate and make you relaxed, so if they're being released frequently, it makes sense to believe that's good for you, but we don't have any actual evidence," says Grossman.
Flying economy class
Deep-vein thrombosis may be the curse of the economy-class majority, but sometimes the cheap seats are the best place to be. In the mid-90s, the Civil Aviation Authority carried out tests to see how passengers sat in different parts of a plane faired during a typical, survivable crash-landing. They found that those in economy class often came out better because they were cushioned against some of the impact by the chair in front.
"Your body doesn't get so stretched," says Russ Williams, ex-head of flight operations policy at the CAA. "If you're in a first-class seat, there's nothing in front to stop you." It doesn't help for all kinds of crashes though. "Clearly if the wing falls off, you're going to die. Simple as that." To really up your chances of getting out in one piece, your best bet is to sit no further than three rows from an emergency exit.
Eating fatty food
Fatty food is a great supply of energy, but before you go burger-hunting, you should know that too much (and few of us have too little) will raise your cholesterol, which points you firmly in the direction of heart disease. Regardless of how lame you may feel and barring any eating disorders, it's unlikely you have too little fat to survive. "Getting enough energy to stay alive isn't usually a problem in a western industrialised society," says Ian Johnson at the Institute of Food Research. "But there are some fats the body absolute requires," he adds. Certain polyunsaturated fats are needed to help cells work properly and are especially vital for nerve cells. "It's important for pregnant women to have a certain intake as it's vital for growing the infant's brain," he says.
Drinking heavily
We've all heard about the health-enhancing properties of the odd glass of red wine, but what about the odd tequila slammer? Studies comparing wine with beer and spirits often find wine comes out best, while spirits have less of a beneficial effect. The bulk of the benefit comes from ethanol which, according to Morton Gronbaek at the Institute for Preventive Medicine in Copenhagen, reduces the tendency of blockages to form in blood vessels.
Up to 21 drinks for men and 14 drinks for women tends to protect against coronary heart disease. "The risk drops by 30-50% if you drink a little alcohol," says Gronbaek. "By not drinking alcohol, you're increasing your risk of heart disease the same amount as people who either do no exercise or have high cholesterol," he says. Other studies have proven alcohol to be a good all-rounder, helping protect against dementia, increase bone mineral density in elderly women and even lower blood pressure.
Eating salty food
Salt is great for raising your blood pressure, which sadly isn't great for anything. But wipe salt out of your diet completely and not only will your food take on an impressive blandness, you'll gradually drift into a malaise of muscle cramps, nausea and dizziness. "Ultimately it can be very serious," says Amanda Wynne at the British Dietetic Association. Salt is necessary to ensure body fluids move in and out of your body's cells only when they are supposed to. Salt is also needed to send electrical pulses along your nerves. Few people get close to suffering from salt deficiency though. "The average person has around 20 times the minimum requirement in their diet," says Wynne.
Becoming a boxer
It's no surprise that people who regularly get thumped very hard in the head occasionally die from it or suffer terrible brain damage. You can't train your brain to take that kind of abuse. But if you're good enough to dodge the head shots, or bottle out of going in the ring, boxing is only going to be good for you.
"Boxing is a marvellous form of exercise from the cardiovascular point of view. It exercises the entire body, so it's better than running or cycling," says Robert Cantu, chief medical officer at the National Centre for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research in North Carolina. "The only downside is it's not advantageous to take blows to the head." The most damaging kind of punch, says Cantu, spins the head on the neck. "Things like left hooks and right crosses are the ones to watch out for."Hawaii enacted a law this week that mandates that all of the state's electricity comes from renewable sources no later than 2045. The bill makes Hawaii the first U.S. state to adopt such a standard. This renewable energy standard is being hailed as "the most aggressive clean energy goal in the country."
Hawaii just set a goal of generating 100 percent of its electricity from renewable resources: http://t.co/CMcQu38tqg #SwitchToClean — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) June 10, 2015
"Hawaii is making history, not only for the islands, but for the planet," said Jeff Mikulina, executive director of the Blue Planet Foundation. "We are making a promise to future generations that their lives will be powered not by climate-changing fossil fuel, but by clean, local and sustainable sources of energy."
Hawaii adopts nation's first 100% renewable energy requirement after a Blue Planet Foundation-led campaign. Photo credit: Blue Planet Foundation
The legislation was drafted by Blue Planet Foundation, whose mission is "to clear the path for 100 percent clean energy." Many believe Hawaii can reach the goal well before 2045 because the islands are already a renewable energy leader. "Analyses from the utility and elsewhere show that 100 percent renewable energy can be achieved even earlier than 2045, by 2030," says Blue Planet Foundation. "Hawaii's renewable energy use has doubled in the past five years, with the islands currently generating about 22 percent of their electricity from wind, solar, geothermal and other renewable energy resources."
Hawaii's renewable energy use has doubled in the past five years. Photo credit: Blue Planet Foundation
To make sure the Aloha state stays on track to meet its requirement, the bill has an interim requirement of at least 30 percent renewable electricity by 2020 and 70 percent by 2040. If Hawaii utilities fail to reach that target, it could cost them two cents for each kilowatt hour of excess fossil fuel electricity, according to Blue Planet Foundation.
"This week we put an expiration date on fossil fuel use," said Henk Rogers, president of Blue Planet Foundation. "Hawaii is sending a signal to the world that 100 percent renewable energy isn't just a vision, it's a commitment."
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25 of the Most Powerful Voices on Climate Change Brought to You by The Weather ChannelGlen Campbell (center) is seen onstage with Keith Urban (left) and Vince Gill (right) during the 45th Annual CMA Awards in Nashville, Tenn., in November. Campbell brought his Goodbye Tour to the Pabst Theater Saturday night. Credit: Associated Press
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Farewell tours have become one of music's great false clichés.
Aging rockers convince their fans that retirement is pending and construct lavish going-away shows, only to return in a few years when their need for glory (and often, cash) calls them back to the stage.
That pattern was broken by the honest finality of Glen Campbell's stop at the Pabst Theater Saturday night as part of his Goodbye Tour.
Diagnosed a year ago with Alzheimer's disease, the star won't have another swan song. After recording last year's darkly beautiful "Ghost on the Canvas," Campbell set out on one last musical trek before the disease steals his ability to perform.
The show was almost a microcosm of the effects of the terrible affliction. There was both joy and pain across an 80-minute set filled with the pop-country hits such as "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" and "Southern Nights" that defined his career, along with a handful of his intimate and personal new songs.
With the familiar opening strains of "Gentle on My Mind," Campbell stepped onstage in a black rhinestone-accented jacket and was greeted by a loving ovation. Before picking up his guitar, he exclaimed, "I'm happy to be here!"
He was supported by three teleprompters at the front of the stage, but his voice was mostly strong as he traded lyrics with a few initial guitar flourishes. Introducing "Galveston," he said, "I'm in a really good mood today." He wasn't lying. He smiled throughout the show, gushed as he introduced favorite songs from the past and seemed thrilled to be surrounded onstage by his three youngest children, who were part of his six-piece backing band (they also opened the show as Instant People with a 30-minute set of upbeat pop).
But there were also times throughout the night where Campbell's joy turned to confusion and frustration. A few flubbed lyrics were laughed off. He had a hard time grasping why he was handed an unfamiliar guitar until his daughter, Ashley, reminded him that his had been broken earlier in the day. Visible signs of dissatisfaction with the onstage audio monitors turned into an awkward verbal outburst in the middle of "Where's the Playground Susie," as he complained about the loud volume onstage.
These moments were palpable reminders of Campbell's diagnosis, but they didn't overwhelm what was mostly a joyous evening. When the singer stumbled, the audience was eager to offer support. And there was also one remarkable constant throughout the show: Campbell's guitar. As he strummed a surf rock-inspired riff on "Try a Little Kindness" and picked in an impressive musical duel with his banjo-playing daughter, Campbell became energetic and confident. When he and his son Shannon played the low trills of "Wichita Lineman," his fingers bounced up and down the frets, and the years melted away from the performance.
Closing the main set, Campbell looked down at the teleprompter and smiled, as if pleasantly surprised to discover which song was next. "Hey, I like this song," he said before triumphantly singing his career-defining hit, "Rhinestone Cowboy."
Surrounded by family and swaying in the glow of an adoring audience wasn't a bad way for Campbell, and Milwaukee, to say goodbye.Ethereum Price just broke $12 UPTREND!
Ethereum Price just broke $12 UPTREND! Ethereum just took out resistance at $12 to set a new high on news Bitinex will start trading Ethereum. The bulls are rejoicing looks like $15 would the next resistance level for Ethereum but are there really resistance levels for Ethereum? Taking a look at the chart below we see the all so stingy $12 resistance level.
Bitfinex is pleased to announce upcoming support for trading Ether.. While we are generally wary of adding new digital assets to the platform and believe that Ether’s future as a store of value is quite uncertain, it is, nonetheless, hard to ignore the Ether trading volumes at other exchanges and the many requests we have received from our customers to add Ether trading pairs. As such, we will begin trading Ether against both US dollar and bitcoin on Monday, March 14th at noon UTC. Starting immediately, however, customers will be able to deposit Ether into their exchange wallets.
It is our plan to allow shorting and margin trading on Ether as soon as we are comfortable with the book depth and availability of Ether for lending, but that will depend on the community’s support for Ether trading on our platform as Bitfinex itself is not a market participant in its own markets. Assuming strong adoption of Ether trading on our platform, we could enable shorting and margin trading in less than a week. We do not yet know what sort of leverage ratios we will permit on Ether, but given Ether’s substantial volatility relative to bitcoin, we may, in fact, initially allow less leverage than we do on bitcoin.
In order to encourage market making to help jumpstart our Ether markets, we will be offering introductory pricing on both Ether pairs. Through the end of March, it will be free to add liquidity (market maker) and 20bps to remove liquidity (market taker). Trading volumes in Ether during this time will not affect volume tiers for bitcoin and litecoin, but after March, Ether will be part of the existing aggregated volume pricing tiers.
We are also actively pursuing the addition of Euro trading pairs as well – we will naturally keep the community apprised of any further developments. Once again, we thank you for your continued support as we strive to deliver the best in cryptocurrency trading.
Ethereum has its own Turing complete internal code… a Turing complete code means that given enough computing power and enough time… anything can be calculated. With Bitcoin there is not this form of flexibility.Ethereum was crowd funded whilst Bitcoin was released and early miners own most of the coins that will ever be mined. With Ethereum 50% of the coins will be owned by miners in year five.Ethereum discourages centralised pool mining through its Ghost protocol rewarding stale blocks. There is no advantage to being in a pool in terms of block propagation.Triple-deckers can be seen from the belfry of First Parish Church in Dorchester in this 2011 file photo.
Much of Boston’s existing housing stock was built for a very different time — a city filled with families, with more than half of the adults married. Children made up approximately one-third of the population, and households averaged three people. If you were single, you likely lived in one of the downtown neighborhoods, such as the Back Bay or Beacon Hill.
Today, that’s all been turned on its head. Boston is now a mecca for young people, students, and job seekers. Children are a mere 16 percent of the population, and the average household size is closer to two. Two- and three-family homes now draw roommates in their 20s and 30s. What’s more, it’s the downtown that now draws families, where, according to top residential broker Beth Dickerson, newly created three-bedroom units are always the first to sell.
Yet, for decades, we’ve continued to construct housing as if we were still living in the 1960s. Indeed, all of society has moved on from the conventional family — except our housing. The result is a built environment that no longer fits the people who live here, as well as a changing definition of what it means to be a roommate.
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A new regional planning effort is providing an opportunity to get it right. Boston is running its first comprehensive planning process in 50 years, and with Cambridge and Somerville planning as well. But policy makers, and the neighbors who show up to meetings, need to follow the numbers, not nostalgia.
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Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville are filled to the brim with old housing stock, all once meant to accommodate far more families than now actually live in these cities. Today, many of these two- and three-family standalone homes inefficiently house unrelated roommates. It’s the human equivalent of a tiny snail rehousing itself within a far too big discarded shell.
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Layered on top of our housing constraints are both economic pressures and societal shifts. The high cost of housing necessitates the pooling of resources and living with others. Boston’s cost of housing as a percentage of income was only 22 percent in 1960. Today’s average is approximately 30 percent, and in some households, we know it is much higher.
Likewise, the lack of people getting married contributes to tenants doubling-up. According to Zillow, nationwide, more than a third (32 percent) are living in homes where two or more working-aged adults live together but aren’t married or with partners. This figure is up from 26.4 percent in 2000.
So how are these unmarried, housing-poor, renters-in-old-housing living today? Like the snail, they’ve adapted. Roommate living used to be a stop-gap measure to get through the period from college to full economic independence. But now, adults are getting used to it as a way of life.
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On Green Street in Cambridge, Samantha Yotts, 27, has been living with roommates “as a happy family,” for five years. Two of her roommates are a married couple, Emily and Evan, both 31. Along with two others, they live as a cohesive unit — cooking, vacationing, and being sure to watch “The Walking Dead” together.
“We’re like ‘Friends,’ but without the hallway,” Samantha says.
This collegial existence would be sweet, if its necessity didn’t belie a much more serious issue: a dramatic dearth of apartment buildings in Greater Boston. That problem is one that the latest planning processes could — and should — solve, but only with the political will to do so.
For example, it may sound great to call for family housing creation, but actually, that’s exactly what we don’t need. Boston’s numbers, provided by the Department of Neighborhood Development, back this up. Presently, there are 188,000 family-sized units, but only 58,000 families within the city. That leaves a difference of 133,000 units. Granted, many of those are filled with students, roommates, and seniors (baby boomers now represent the fastest-growing demographic). But once dormitories are built — the city’s proposed plan calls for 16,000 undergraduate beds by 2030 — combined with senior housing creation, and new multifamily developments, there will be more than enough family-sized units citywide, or as Barry Bluestone of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy says, “we probably have nearly all the larger units we will ever need.”
We also must not let nostalgia lead us to mistake the cohabitating phenomena of friends living together well into their adulthood as some sort of new housing desire. Rather, it is indicative of mismatched housing with people making the best of a bad situation. Even the most beloved of housemates get tired of their roommate’s dirty dishes.
Mike Ross writes regularly for the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @mikeforbostonEven Cardiff City's derby against Bristol City saw swathes of empty seats
Controversy has been a constant at Cardiff City in recent years but, this season, it seems to be apathy which reigns.
After a turbulent few campaigns of rebrands and relegation, the Bluebirds have stabilised on the pitch and currently sit eighth in the Championship table.
Despite a steady start to this term, however, Cardiff City Stadium crowds are dwindling.
Only 13,371 watched Cardiff beat Middlesbrough in October, the lowest league attendance at the ground since it opened in 2009.
That was no one-off. Instead, it was symptomatic of a malaise which had seen the previous three games attract gates of 13,980, 13,763 and 13,715.
Cardiff had an average crowd of 21,123 last season, while the figure was 27,429 when they were in the Premier League for the 2013-14 campaign.
So why, with the team enjoying on-field consistency, are the fans staying away?
'Fair-weather fans'
A large part of supporters' disillusionment can be traced back to the controversial change to a red kit in 2012.
Although Cardiff returned to their traditional blue shirts in January, some fans have boycotted the club since the initial rebrand while others followed suit later.
Cardiff City marked their return to blue with a 1-0 win against Fulham in January 2015
"The red kit had a delayed reaction," says Ben James, a blogger who runs the 'View From The Ninian' podcast.
"Most fans were happy to put up with it as long as success was coming with it but, as soon as that started fading away, most fans lost interest.
"Most fans would admit, even when we were in Ninian Park, we've always had floating fans. Fans have always been a bit fair-weather.
"When the price freeze [on season tickets] went, a lot of fans took the decision alongside the terrible football and the overriding anger towards [owner] Vincent Tan over the red kit.
"It culminated in a perfect storm of two or three seasons which meant a lot of fans turned away from it."
Slade sure of fans' return
If a residual disdain for the rebrand may be difficult to remedy, Cardiff will at least feel they can lure fans back with success.
Having lost only once at home this season, promotion remains a realistic aim, with the hope of strengthening in the January transfer window.
Asked about the falling attendances in September, manager Russell Slade was upbeat.
"Fans want to see a winning team," he said.
"Of course you want more and more numbers to come and watch your team and I'm sure in time, if we continue to progress, they will be there.
Cardiff's FA Cup win against Colchester in January was watched by 4,194 at Cardiff City Stadium
"I think we're playing a decent brand of football. I'm sure they'll come back if we can maintain it."
Cardiff have the third best home record in the Championship this season, but have scored only eight goals in their seven games.
As James argues, the lack of entertainment on the pitch has compounded the disenchantment originally caused by off-field issues.
For other supporters, the problem lies with the diminishing atmosphere in the stands.
'It's like a school trip to the library'
Cardiff City Stadium was expanded to a capacity of 33,280 in 2014 but, as attendances dropped towards the end of last season, the Bluebirds decided to close the new section for this campaign, reducing the capacity to 27,978.
It was hoped the move would help condense the atmosphere, but some fans claim overly zealous staff at the stadium are spoiling their match-day experience.
As part of the Bluebirds Unite group, Sian Branson played a prominent role in the campaign for Cardiff to return to their blue kit.
"It's almost like a school trip to the library. You're constantly being monitored and told what you can and can't do," she says.
Sian Branson (left) with Cardiff chief executive Ken Choo (centre) and chairman Mehmet Dalman when the club announced their return to a blue kit in January 2015
"That's not down to Vincent Tan," she added. "He and his representatives seem interested in what we have to say.
"The people involved in the day-to-day running don't seem to get it.
"The stewards need better training. They're constantly telling people to sit down."
Even a Severnside derby against Bristol City failed to rekindle the passion.
A crowd of 15,287 watched a dour 0-0 draw, in stark contrast to the 25,586 present when the teams last met at Cardiff City Stadium in 2013.
"We really don't understand why they can't let Cardiff City fans express themselves," adds Branson.
"Even people who've renewed their season tickets don't want to go down there and be treated the way fans are being treated. It's stifling.
"I work in Bristol and Bristol City fans at work were asking me 'What's happened to Cardiff City? The atmosphere's gone'.
The BBC has asked Cardiff City if they would like to respond to Branson's comments.Russian legislation aimed at battling pirated video content online went into effect Thursday despite complaints by the industry against the alleged crackdown on free Internet.
Branded the “Russian SOPA” after the US anti-piracy initiative, the law makes it easier to block websites that post or link to copyright video content without permission.
Copyright holders would have to provide documents to the Moscow City Court for a court order before contacting Russia’s communications watchdog Roskomnadzor to block the offender.
Companies in the industry have lambasted the law, saying the measure makes it possible for anyone to block any website with ease and was put together without taking any suggestions from experts into account.
Roskomnadzor announced the launch of the new register online where copyright holders can file complaints against violating webpages. The register’s website (nap.rkn.gov.ru) would not open Thursday morning, possibly due to an overload or an attack.
Google has called the law a “time bomb” for the Internet, and Yandex, the most popular search engine in Russia, said it “is directed against the logic of the Internet,” not copyright violators.
“The new law makes it possible to shut down unwanted Internet resources by linking any piracy video to the website and submitting a lawsuit”, and the “lack of clear wording” leaves ample room for abuse, VTB Capital said in a note to clients Thursday.
Russian television on Thursday hailed the new law as a measure to fight piracy. “Bad luck for lovers of freebies,” Channel One called it on its newscast.
Popular webpages in Russia have launched a formal petition on a government website to push the authorities to reconsider the so-called “Russian SOPA,” which gathered over 60,000 signatures by Thursday.
“Vote and share, otherwise tomorrow you will be able to open VKontakte only with the written sanction of a policeman,” wrote anti-Kremlin protest leader Alexei Navalny, referring to Russia’s most popular social network.
Marginalised by state television, Navalny has built up much of his popularity through the web.
He called on all Internet users to “start a political campaign to defend our right to information and access to the web without censorship.”
The website popular with tech professionals Habrahabr.ru called on popular web pages to block themselves in an Internet strike for one day Thursday.
Popular website Lurkmore.to had a black screen up saying “Blocked by Roskomnadzor decision” in a protest.
Russia has been phasing in a number of measures that observers say aim to severely limit freedom of expression on the web.
The Russian parliament plans to expand the piracy law to include music later this year.
A new measure banning the media from using expletives also went into effect in April. In July the online publication Lenta.Ru said that authorities demanded blocking three articles, including an interview with a language professor about the origins of Russian obscene words.
Last year another law went into force that allows the blocking of websites with content that contain child pornography, calls to commit suicide or information on drug use.
That law was also criticised by the industry as containing wording that can be exploited. In November, the authorities briefly put the entire YouTube service onto the blacklist due to what they later said was a “technical mistake.”This post is inspired by The Art of Manliness post on How to Use Reddit to Become a Better Man. As an avid redditor and long time frugal person – I thought it would be a good idea to write a post on the various subreddits that help me save even more, learn new ways of being self sufficient and discover new unique ways to make money online.
You see, Reddit is a powerful curation tool for the web. It’s a social news channel that delivers the hottest stories through user submissions. The community comment and take part in the conversation, as well. It’s not a fancy Google+ layout. It’s plain text and doing fine. (Who says design is everything?)
And when you land on Reddit.com you see this long list of links with the number of times it’s been voted up. On the right, you’ll see a place to submit your link or to create your own community. It’s all very eighties-ish, but very, very influential since it makes up the best of the Internet (Reddit’s tagline – The Front Page of the Internet).
Once you’ve lost an hour of your life browsing the default subreddits on the homepage, you’ll want to check out the other lesser known communities (there are over 65,000 in all). These are the subreddits under which uber-niche content and links are submitted. Since we’re about saving money and being frugal, this is where we spend most of our time.
And if you’ve not explored the frugal side of Reddit before here are the Top 10 subreddits all money-savers need to keep up with:
1. /r/Frugal
This community is over 220,000 readers strong and a great resource for not only monetary frugality, but also frugality in time, convenience, and more. Each week they focus on a theme like food, winterizing, and getting ready for college so it feels very organized.
2. /r/DIY
DIY saves loads, especially if you need to make repairs to your home, furniture or cars. So when you take part in this community, don’t submit pictures of finished projects! They want to see the process of what you’re doing. You can get help with your current project or see what others are working on here.
3. /r/FinancialPlanning
Truly love this sidebar of this subreddit. They remind users to share the articles that help them the most and to help answer questions for others. There are great articles on everything from saving money at home to stocks and investment.
4. /r/thrifty
This community calls itself the crossroads of “saving money and saving the environment”. Noble way to think of being thrifty, don’t you think? Great ideas for things like saving money and energy, and what to do if you have no more for a week.
5. /r/simpleliving
Can I hear a vote for simplicity? You get inspiration and ideas for living a “simpler, saner life”. There are powerful tips on making the transition from a cluttered life to peaceful one and things like making a positive lifestyle choice. (One of our faves!)
6. /r/BuyItForLife
Buying items two or three times because they’re cheap doesn’t make sense financially. In this community, you get a line on durable products you only have to buy once to save money.
7. /r/investing
When it comes to putting away money, investing is hard to beat. This community holds competitions and post stock picks and more. They even have a section to help you find out how to get started in the stock market.
8. /r/personalfinance/
Learn how to manage your money – and your debt – for the long and short terms in this community. There are great resources in here for things relating to job salary questions to different apps to help you get organized and manage your funds.
9. /r/frugalmalefashion
Ok, fashion is something that many of us struggle with – especially when it comes to being frugal and saving money. This subreddit gets you a line on coupons, sales, and discounts for anything male fashion.
10. /r/frugalfemalefashion
Just like it’s brother community, this is a great place to get in on savings with coupons, sales, and discounts. They also do looks-for-less posts as well. Fulfil your dreams to look awesome and save at the same time.
Combine all of these subreddits into one feed and you stay on top of trending frugality without getting lost in the massive amounts of information on this power curation site.
Do you know of a frugal based subreddit we have missed?
Written by Tania Dakka. Tania Dakka blogs for Happier.co.uk among many others. As the Fit Freelancer, she does the heavy content lifting so entrepreneurs can take back their lives and move their businesses forward.
You might also be interested in:EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Waterston, who co-starred in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, is set to star in Alien: Covenant, the Ridley Scott-directed sequel to his Prometheus. In what will be the biggest role of her career to date, Waterston has been cast as the lead, Daniels.
Scott, of course, had put the 20th Century Fox project on hold to do The Martian, which is in the thick of the awards-season race. Covenant is his next pic. Specific plot details are being closely guarded, but it is believed to follow the crew of the colony ship Covenant, bound for a remote planet, who discover what they believe is an uncharted paradise. But in fact it’s a dark, dangerous world whose the only inhabitant is David (Michael Fassbender), the “synthetic” and survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition.
Covenant is believed to be the first in a conceived trilogy of new films that will link the events of Prometheus with the Scott-directed 1979 classic Alien.
Waterston is next up in the Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them with Eddie Redmayne. She also co-starred in Steve Jobs.
She’s repped by UTA and Silver Lining Entertainment.The CTA has released the list of nearly 20 buildings in the Lakeview neighborhood it says must be torn down as part of a $320 million project to build an elevated bypass and untangle trains on the Red, Purple and Brown lines.
Many of the buildings are in the 3200 block of North Wilton Avenue and the 3300 block of North Clark Street, as well as the 900 block of West Roscoe Street and West Newport avenues. Sixteen of the buildings are near the proposed elevated bypass at the Clark junction north of the Belmont station, and three buildings are between the Lawrence and Bryn Mawr stations on the North Side.
Eleven vacant lots would also be affected, bringing to 30 the number of properties involved in the project.
You can see the entire list of affected properties HERE.
The properties, according to Google maps, include:
• Residential buildings from 3240 N. Wilton Ave. to 3252 N. Wilton Ave.
• Smokers Zone at 3328 N. Clark St. (rear building only)
• Moksha yoga center at 3334-3344 N. Clark St.
• Bolat African Cuisine at 3346-3348 N. Clark St.
• Peg's Pantry, 3366 N. Clark |
You must enter the characters with black color that stand out from the other characters
— A debate is brewing about a course that is being offered at the University of North Carolina.
It all started when freshman student Alec Dent wrote an article about a course called “Literature of 9/11” and claimed that the seminar course sympathizes with terrorists.
Dent said that he stands by what he wrote and believes that the seminar course offers a one-sided view of the September 11 attacks from the perspective of the terrorists. Since the article was published, Dent has received feedback from people who applaud him and some who say his article is way off-base.
UNC offers more than 80 seminar courses to its students but “Literature of 9/11” struck a chord with Dent. The course claims to explore a diverse number of themes related to the September 11 attacks, but for Dent it was not diverse enough.
“The class reading list is what first stuck out to me because it really got me thinking, is this a fair and balanced way of looking at the situation,” Dent said.
The freshman journalism major said that he looked at the reading list as well as the class syllabus before writing a piece for an online student publication called “The College Fix.”
Dent admits that he has not taken the class, nor has he read any of the books on the list, but he still felt the course was too one-sided.
“The more research I did into it, the more it seemed like the readings were sympathetic towards terrorism.”
UNC officials were not available for interviews and Professor Neel Ahuaj, who teaches the course, did not respond to emails. The university did release the following statement regarding the course:
For any student, part of the college experience is the opportunity to grow by learning about yourself and how you engage with and learn from those who have different points of view. Carolina's first-year seminar program is part of that growth. The University isn't forcing a set of beliefs on students; we're asking them to prepare for and engage in every lesson, debate and conversation, and share what they think. Carolina offers academic courses to challenge students - not to advocate one viewpoint over another.
The seminar program is voluntary and the students select the class they wish to attend. More than 80 seminar courses on a wide variety of topics were available to incoming freshman this semester. The ability to bring differing points of view goes beyond the classroom; each year, student organizations invite speakers representing their own platforms that, collectively, offer an array of diverse ideologies from the left and right that lead to intellectual debate and discovery.
Students who actually took the course, which has been offered by the university since 2010, offered opinions as well.
One former student left a comment on Dent’s article saying that he is a conservative through and through but strongly disagrees with Dent. He argued that the course was valuable and challenged his opinions and allowed him to explore the subject in a deeper way.
“I think it’s important to have our ideas challenged. I think that’s a part of education,” Dent said. “But at the same time, I think you have to give equal showing to both sides of the issue.”
A few people who commented on Dent’s article said that he can’t know for sure that the course is one-sided without ever taking it, but he says he has received thank you notes from family members of September 11 victims.
Dent says that he doesn’t want the class removed, perhaps just modified.× University Of Arkansas Launches Razorback Ticket Exchange To Sell Unused Season Tickets
FAYETTEVILLE (KFSM) — Season ticket holders for University of Arkansas football games will have the chance to sell back tickets to individual home SEC games, the university announced on Tuesday (Sept. 6).
The Razorback Ticket Exchange will let season ticket holders receive cash back, up to the face value price of the tickets, if they are unable to attend the games, according to an Arkansas Razorback press release. The ticket exchange will be powered through Lyte, an online ticket exchange platform.
Those tickets will then be sold to the general public at prices determined by real time market data. The release states that these resold season tickets will be available for lower prices than through other unsanctioned resale websites.
The exchange tickets will be available for the Oct. 8 game against Alabama, Oct. 15 game against Ole Miss, Nov. 5 game against Florida and the Nov. 12 game against LSU.
This program is designed to help our loyal season ticket holders by providing them an easy and secure way to get a return on their investment when they are not able to use their tickets,” said Jeff Long, vice chancellor and athletics director. “By working through the Razorback Ticket Exchange, tickets that may have gone unused previously, will get into the hands of other fans who want to attend our games at prices more affordable than the traditional secondary markets. It is an added benefit for all of our fans and will help us in our efforts to provide a full stadium on game day.”
People looking to purchase tickets can make reservations starting Tuesday, when the system was activated, and their requests will be filled on a first come, first served basis. Season ticket holders can begin returning their unused tickets starting Sept. 22.
All tickets are backed 100 percent by the University of Arkansas, so there is no risk of fraud for Razorback fans.Story highlights A GOP senator questions Comey's work in the hedge fund industry
James Comey could replace Robert Mueller as FBI director
He was deputy attorney general in President George W. Bush's administration
Officials said he "vigorously opposed" a surveillance program and threatened to quit
President Barack Obama plans to nominate James Comey to replace Robert Mueller as FBI director, officials familiar with the nomination process said Wednesday.
Comey is a former prosecutor who worked in New York and Virginia, where his caseload included terrorism, organized crime and fraud prosecutions, the latter including executives from WorldCom, Adelphia and Imclone, an official biography notes.
He served as a deputy attorney general in President George W. Bush's administration beginning in 2003.
Comey testified to a Senate committee in 2007 that he considered resigning his high-profile administration position over a disagreement about the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program.
That happened in 2004, when he was acting attorney general while John Ashcroft was hospitalized following emergency gall bladder surgery. Government officials had told CNN that Comey had "vigorously opposed" aspects of the warrantless wiretapping program and refused to sign off on its continued use.
Comey's opposition prompted then-White House chief of staff Andrew Card and then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to visit Ashcroft, the attorney general, in the hospital. Comey was in the room at the time, and he recalled later that "I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man."
The program was reauthorized the next day without a Justice Department signature, and Comey prepared a letter of resignation, he recalled. But he didn't turn it in, staying at the Justice Department until 2005.
From there, Comey worked as a senior vice president and general counsel for the aerospace and defense company Lockheed Martin. More recently, he had been general counsel at the Connecticut-based money management firm Bridgewater Associates.
Currently, Comey is a board member of HSBC Holdings and a Hertog Fellow in national security law at Columbia University's law school, his profile on the school's website says
Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he hadn't heard anything from the White House about Comey's nomination. That said, the Iowa Republican lauded Comey for having "a lot of experience on national security issues,... and (he) has shown integrity in dealing with these matters."
"But if he's nominated, he would have to answer questions about his recent work in the hedge fund industry," Grassley said, referring to Comey's time with Bridgewater Associates. "The administration's efforts to criminally prosecute Wall Street for its part in the economic downturn have been abysmal, and (the FBI) would have to help build the case against some of his colleagues in this lucrative industry."
If nominated and approved by Congress, Comey will replace the man who will have led the FBI for the past 12 years -- officially starting the job days before the September 11, 2001, terror attacks and later seeing the agency through terrorism and other high-profile cases.
Mueller's term had been set to expire in September 2011 -- per the 10 years that FBI directors typically serve -- but, at Obama's request, Congress approved a two-year extension. He's now scheduled to step down in September.The immigration activists have been fasting since Nov. 12. Obama visits immigration activists
President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama met informally with immigration activists on the National Mall on Friday.
They visited individuals taking part in Fast for Families to “offer their support for those who are fasting on behalf of immigration reform,” a White House official told the pool report. The Obamas spoke with the activists for about half an hour.
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The immigration activists have been fasting since Nov. 12, abstaining from all food except water and “are calling for the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives to take up action on comprehensive immigration reform,” the official said.
( PHOTOS: Immigration reform rally on the National Mall)
The Obamas were joined by 18 people who are fasting for one day and two who have been fasting for 18 days, the White House official said.
”The President told them that it is not a question of whether immigration reform will pass, but how soon. He said that the only thing standing in the way is politics, and it is the commitment to change from advocates like these brave fasters that will help pressure the House to finally act,” a White House official told the pool report.
( PHOTOS: 10 wild immigration quotes)
According to the White House, others who have visited Fast for Families in recent weeks are Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, chief of staff Denis McDonough, Director of the Domestic Policy Council Cecilia Muñoz and Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett.
This article tagged under: Immigration
Barack ObamaFor more about Kill Screen’s ratings system and review policy, click here.
A few months ago, The New York Times and several other outlets ran a story about an unlikely extinction happening in Japan: the Aibo, a robotic dog manufactured by Sony, was slowly but surely dying out. The company stopped repairing them in March 2014 due to a scarcity of spare parts, leaving Aibo owners unable to do much to resuscitate their moribund companions when technical failure eventually occurs—as it inevitably will. As a result, some owners are already holding Aibo funerals, mourning the loss of an object that received as much emotional investment as any flesh-and-blood canine. As the officiant at one of these funerals, captured on video by the Times, intoned, “The inanimate and the animate are not separated in this world. We have to look deeper to see this connection.”
Has Tetsuya Takahashi ever owned an Aibo? His games make me wonder, because they seem hell-bent on examining—and in a lot of ways, dissolving—the philosophical boundaries that intercross at a funeral for a robot dog: boundaries between the inanimate and the animate, the organic and the synthetic, the familiar and the alien, the physical and the spiritual. His career in JRPGs began with his designs for the Magitek armor in Final Fantasy VI, marking the series’ first flirtation not only with sci-fi but with the idea of a human-machine interface that called humanity itself into question. After that, he took the reins and directed Xenogears, a sprawling, philosophically ambitious JRPG about humans, robots, and God; then Xenosaga, a sprawling, philosophically overambitious three-part saga—it was supposed to be six—about humans, robots, and God; then Xenoblade Chronicles, a game of beautiful and surprising restraint that neatly allegorized the same big questions about … well, you get the idea. In Xenoblade Chronicles, you play as dwellers of the Bionis, an organic titan frozen in perpetual conflict with his robot nemesis, Mechonis. The Mechon are your enemy. And yet, some of them have faces. Some of them have human voices—albeit angry Cockney ones. Could it be that this elemental conflict between flesh and metal isn’t as elemental as it seems?
Xenoblade Chronicles was a triumph, but it was also always going to be an exception: a JRPG crafted for accessibility at a moment in the genre’s history when it, too, like the Aibo, might’ve seemed like a fetish object with a cult following whose days were numbered. The game worked. The story was as simple and complex as a fairytale; the systems were traditional yet reformist, distilling everything that makes JRPGs feel so alive despite their studious, often baffling artificiality. The translation of basic party strategy into impossible, flamboyant combos. The feeling of exponential—not linear—development: at level 1, you’re fighting crabs; at level 70, you’re fighting God. The essence of the horizon: to not know exactly where you’re going, and to be thrilled when there’s another place to go.
Xenoblade Chronicles X is big
Xenoblade Chronicles X retains almost none of that. The game is in every single way a disappointment. And maybe it’s unfair to compare it to its “spiritual predecessor” when that predecessor was so self-consciously exceptional in the first place. The game is a lot more like the worst parts of Xenogears and Xenosaga: overambitious and therefore incomplete; addicted to clunky, interminable exposition rather than the (relatively) subtler medium of capital-A Allegory; geared toward placating only the most veteran JRPG players rather than serving as an ambassador for the genre to everyone else. At the same time, I think its greatest failure has more to do with the big themes that bind together all of Takahashi’s games, Xenoblade Chronicles included. Everything about it is so synthetic that it has no possible way of being organic.
Xenoblade Chronicles X is big. You’ve probably heard that already. The game takes place on the planet Mira, where humans aboard a giant ship named the White Whale—like MGSV, the game is strangely preoccupied with Moby-Dick—have crash-landed after fleeing the destruction of Earth. Your task is simple: find the Lifehold, the part of the ship that contains the majority of its human population in stasis. The White Whale itself was pretty big, but Mira is bigger, comprising five huge, freely explorable areas with different climates that the game wants you to think of as continents. There’s Primordia, which is like a radically expanded version of Xenoblade Chronicles’ Gaur Plain; there’s Noctilum, a bioluminescent megaforest ripped straight out of Avatar (like many of the game’s fauna, which look like gross, lizardy alien versions of Earth animals, and also like a few of its characters: Vandham, the game’s gruff commander figure, is essentially a nicer version of Stephen Lang’s mech-suited imperialist asshole). Oblivia is perhaps the most captivating environment, a desert landscape punctured by the enormous wreckage of ancient alien ships, which become mountains in themselves. Much of the game—scratch that: the game’s essence—is about exploring these stark, concept-art wonderlands, first on foot, then in a mech-suit (“Skell”) that doubles as a car. And then by air.
The game provides proof of its own concept the first time you fly directly, seamlessly, from the streets of New Los Angeles (the game’s only human colony) to the highest peak in Primordia, high above the lakes and plains where the bizarro brontosauruses roam. It really is an amazing update to the airship in RPGs of old, or the heavenly wings in Dragon Quest VIII—that moment when you finally master the scale of the world, after struggling in the beginning to walk across a fragment. (In that respect, given genre tradition, the fact that you only get the ability to fly around 40 hours into the game makes sense.) Unfortunately, the sublimity of that moment is shadowed by the ever-present sense that it really is the game’s point, pursued with monomaniacal, Ahab-like fixation. Xenoblade Chronicles X is a game of great scale. But scale means nothing when it’s pursued for the sake of scale.
The game might be “big” in a literal sense, but it feels very small in a conceptual and emotional sense. Part of the reason is that you can traverse it at great speed, effortlessly and weightlessly, like some sort of hyperactive space squirrel: it doesn’t really matter that you’re crossing a plain that’s five miles wide if you can run at 60 miles per hour. But the other problem is the GamePad, and everything it represents. You’re always holding a map screen that not only tells you a lot about the five continents from the get-go (including where they are, what environmental theme each one falls into, and what kind of enemies to expect), but divides the world into a rigid grid of hexagons. Place more “data probes” in each area, and the hexagons will fill themselves with potential tasks: kill a giant monster here; find a treasure there. Each area map prominently features a percentage counter that records, to a double-decimel, the completeness of your “survey” (which means not just how much stuff you’ve found but how many sidequests you’ve done). For a game explicitly about exploration, its world feels profoundly pre-explored. Even worse, it turns exploration itself—ostensibly all about encountering the unknown—into systematic busywork that revolves around a literal checklist.
For a game explicitly about exploration, its world feels profoundly pre-explored.
Final Fantasy XIII’s Pulse, that wide-open area at the end of a game so notorious for its stifling linearity, “felt” bigger than anything you can traverse here—in part because, in that classic JRPG move, it was a space that wasn’t available at the beginning of the game, a suddenly and dramatically expanded horizon. Think of the bigness of the overworld after 10 hours spent in the streets of Midgar. Think of a world with one continent suddenly becoming a world with four in Final Fantasy IX—that quintessential example of the JRPG’s Magellan effect. There’s nothing dramatic about the scale of things in Xenoblade Chronicles X—nothing revelatory, nothing sudden or strange. You’re not really exploring. At most, you’re collecting, through the mediating screen-door of the GamePad’s insistent clutter: this vista and then that one; this cave, this promontory, this rock. And it’s all empty, depopulated, unsatisfying—including New Los Angeles itself.
That still wouldn’t be a huge problem if the game had a narrative that transcended its busywork structure, but it doesn’t: the story is simply one giant, prolonged exploratory task, interwoven into the web of tasks you’re doing already. Why do we need to look for the Lifehold? Because Mira is so big! What do we need to do to find the Lifehold? Explore more of Mira, because it is so big! Every single thing in the game is rooted in the same obsession with sheer expansiveness—the same misguided ethos that seems to believe that expansiveness is a virtue in itself (No Man’s Sky, take note). On the level of battles, gear, and stats, this ethos manifests as infuriating abstruseness—a tendency to add systems on top of systems, complexity for the sake of complexity. The battle system is a cluttered mess; as a testament to its redundancies, consider the fact that your HP appears in two places on the already-crowded screen. Things do eventually click; if you’re like me, you’ll feel hugely satisfied when you “get it,” in the same way it feels good to untangle a giant ball of Ethernet cables and AC adapters.
But a lot of the complexity feels not only pointless but actively oppositional, as though indirectness were also a virtue in itself. As you plant more data probes, they start to yield “Miranium,” a resource that can be used to invest in arms manufacturers—another system, apparently borrowed from Borderlands—which will then eventually produce better gear. Every half hour, you receive more Miranium from your precious probes, until you reach a cap that can only be increased by “storage probes,” at which point you have to return to NLA and invest your stockpiled Miranium. You cannot buy storage probes, despite the mundanity of their function; you can only find them or receive them as quest rewards. In practice, all they do is stifle you. Why do they even exist? Why not uncap the amount of Miranium you can mine every half hour—isn’t time already a limiting factor?—so that you don’t have to return to NLA over and over again? There’s only one answer: because having another kind of probe in the game means having more of something.
Here’s another example of needless, obstructive addition. Xenoblade Chronicles streamlined standard JRPG practice for the better by reviving dead parties almost instantaneously at the last landmark they visited—or, in a boss fight, nearby. Xenoblade Chronicles X does the same thing when your party dies on the ground. But if anyone dies in a Skell, a whole set of brand-new systems come into play. The Skell is destroyed, which means you have to go back to NLA to salvage it. In the best case scenario, you pay nothing because you still have “Skell insurance.” In the worst case scenario, you pay hundreds of thousands of hard-earned credits to gain back the Skell you already paid for—in a game that makes dying in a Skell about as easy as dying outside one, depending on the creatures you try to fight (or the creatures that decide to fight you, because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time in a game about … exploration).
It ought to remind us of what’s so good about the maximalism of other JRPGs
All JRPGs have bullshit like this in some form. The best ones find some way to coat their bullshit—the grinding, the fetch quests, the arcane systems—with a sense of epic urgency, or an atmosphere of against-the-odds oppression. The best Xenoblade Chronicles X can do in this regard, on the level of ludo-narrative continuity, is to remind you of your own insignificance: Skells are expensive, “storage probes” are prohibitive, Mira is already half-charted, because you are just a random human on NLA’s payroll, working toward a project that transcends you, a project on a greater scale than the individual self. Unlike its predecessor, which centered (like so many JRPGs) on a teenage messiah chosen by the divine, Xenoblade Chronicles X takes great pains to remind your customized avatar that he’s only one member of one team in one section of an eight-division organization called BLADE—an organization in which you can choose to be a monster hunter just as well as a miner, a social worker for NPCs, or a collector of little plants and alien garbage. In Star Wars Galaxies, it was interesting and cool that you could be a Jedi as well as a bartender. But there were other people in Star Wars Galaxies. Here, for all the game’s attempts to mimic MMOs, the multiplayer is mostly asynchronous—and besides, your division does almost nothing to determine what you actually do. The game’s pervasive anti-individualism is definitely something different, but it derives from the same obsession with scale that seems to have informed every other aesthetic, narrative, and design decision. BLADE has eight divisions because it wouldn’t feel big enough with four.
Where exactly did this obsession come from? It seems simultaneously rooted in a desire for realism—as in a game environment built “to scale”—and a desire to transcend realism, to be bigger than life. It accomplishes neither. If anything, the one thing it does accomplish is to remind us of the folly of maximalism for the sake of maximalism in games, where it’s an all-too-prevalent design philosophy that steals resources, and the spotlight, from other forms of aesthetic ambition. It reminds us of the same problem in any other medium, from panoramic triple-decker novels that assume that panorama itself is a virtue to three-hour superhero movies (or expanding cinematic universes) crammed with characters. And I think it ought to remind us of what’s so good about the maximalism of other JRPGs, Takahashi’s included, which always go big but seldom assume so blithely that size is everything.
The best JRPGs transform the synthetic into the organic, somehow creating pathos through artificiality and yoking abstract systems—repetition, machinelike behavioral loops—to melodrama. The best JRPGs have the potential to teach us a lot about precisely the things that seem to preoccupy Takahashi in game after game: the humanity of the inhuman, from objects to robots to videogames themselves; the inhumanity of what we tend to call human, given that the human self always seems to rely on things outside it, things unlike it, to give itself form, definition, and weight. This JRPG asks us to do nothing except buy into its synthetic religion of scale. You are big, Xenoblade Chronicles X. You are big because big is good. It’s like stroking a dead Aibo—an Aibo that was never alive in the first place.
For more about Kill Screen’s ratings system and review policy, click here.The IRS’s inspector general has told Congress that it may have discovered as many as 30,000 of the lost Lois G. Lerner emails, despite repeated IRS insistence both in testimony to both Capitol Hill and federal courts that they were beyond recovery, congressional committees said Friday.
Investigators are now trying to figure out whether they can get the data in a readable format — a process that could take weeks, according to a congressional aide.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) discovered the potential emails among 744 disaster recovery tapes that backup IRS systems, and found up to 30,000 Lerner emails from 2009 to 2011, which covers the period of emails she reported lost in a computer hard drive crash.
The revelation raised a host of questions about the IRS’s claims that the emails had been irretrievably lost — assertions the agency and its new chief, John Koskinen, had made both while testifying under oath to Congress and in court papers defending against lawsuits from several of the conservative groups who had been denied approval for nonprofit status.
Ms. Lerner ran the IRS division that improperly blocked and intrusively scrutinized conservative groups’ applications for nonprofit status. She retired from the agency last year, but remains a central figure in the investigation into the agency’s behavior.
Tens of thousands of emails she sent or received have been turned over, but the IRS said a computer crash caused the loss of potentially tens of thousands of other messages. The agency tried to recover some of those by asking employees to search their mailboxes for messages they may have sent to or received from Ms. Lerner, but investigators criticized the agency for not doing more to recover Ms. Lerner’s computer hard drive.
The emails are being sought by the Senate Finance Committee, the House Oversight Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee.
“Though it is unclear whether TIGTA has found all of the missing Lois Lerner emails, there may be significant information in this discovery,” said Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, California Republican.
He said his panel wants to see the emails in order to ascertain Ms. Lerner’s mindset and see who she was speaking with outside the IRS as the agency was holding up conservative groups’ applications.
Mr. Issa also said the revelation signals that the IRS again failed to give a complete story to Congress. The agency waited months before telling Congress it had lost the Lerner emails, and later said it had no way to recover them.
Senate Finance Committee leaders said in a joint statement they are in the “final stages” of their investigation, but said it’s unlikely they will finish until next year, when the GOP takes control of the committee and will have a bigger say in the final report.
“From the onset of our bipartisan investigation, we’ve remained committed to getting to the truth and ensuring that the IRS treats all tax-exempt applicants fairly,” said Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat, and ranking Republican Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah.
The IRS earlier this year, after prompting by Congress, reported to the National Archives that information required to be stored as official records may have been lost in the computer crash. That notification came years after the crash.
In a statement released late Friday the IRS did not explain why it didn’t try to recover the information from the tapes it had.
Instead it pointed to the 24,000 emails it had already tracked down from the 2009-2011 period. And the agency said it had “cooperated fully” with the inspector general by providing the disaster recovery tapes that investigators now believe have the emails.
“Commissioner Koskinen has said for some time he would be pleased if additional Lois Lerner emails from this time frame could be found,” the IRS said in its unsigned statement.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.I need to update Modern::Perl. I waited until the release of Perl 5.10.1. I'm going to add autodie as a dependency (but not enable it; that's for you to decide to use). I'm also going to load IO::Handle, per Yuval's suggestion in Are Filehandles Objects?.
Note that perl5i does this.
These are all simple and obvious changes. I've blocked on a larger change, related to a simple philosophical user interface question for the module:
What happens when what's "modern" changes?
Adding an installation requirement and loading two new modules won't hurt anything. It won't change any existing code. There are no compatibility concerns.
Future changes might have compatibility concerns. If you use Modern::Perl; by itself, you're taking a slight risk that you may have to revisit existing code after an upgrade. What's modern in August 2009 might not be as modern in August 2010 and certainly won't be modern in August 2019.
Elliot Shank wrote in A reasonable approach for Modern::Perl the example code:
use Modern::Perl as_of => '2009-06-23';
What do you think?
I'd like to avoid complex date parsing where possible. I've also considered changing M::P version numbers to dates like 2009.10.06. The unification is tempting and the implementation is, at worst, of only modest difficulty.
What do you think?Riding a Segway might have made it into Wii Fit Plus but not in the real world
The brainchild of budding entrepreneurs and research labs, these tech failures were intended to become commonplace in our fast-changing world.
Unfortunately, they turned into Frankensteins that no one wanted – mostly for scientific reasons, technical dependencies, or a poorly conceived business model.
Without further ado, let's get stuck in...
1. Mobile video chat
In the UK and US, video chat over a smartphone is still a distant dream. Part of the problem is bandwidth – there just isn't enough of it for two-way video. Part of the issue is ease of use: it should be as quick to place a video call as one where you only use your voice.
"Vendors didn't realise that the problems were more behavioural than technical and didn't approach the market properly," says tech analysts Enderle. Maybe Apple can turn this one around?
2. Quadraphonic sound
Another technology that never had a chance, quadraphonic sound put four channels of audio in four corners of the room, and it emerged in the 1970s as a way to emulate what you hear in a cinema or live performance.
The main issue had to do with a lack of standardised formats, and the emergence of Dolby and DTS surround sound – which were heavily supported by the audio industry.
3. Intel Viiv
A high-profile flop, Intel Viiv was the big announcement at CES in 2006. It was essentially the "Centrino of home media distribution" - chipsets and components designed to make it easier to store and retrieve digital media including music, movies, and photos. But it just didn't work.
The plan was for PC makers to proudly display the Viiv logo, but the failure was not in communicating the value of digital media – we'd already got that - Viiv was just too complex to understand, and partners never really warmed to it. The name was the ultimate death punch: no one knew how to pronounce it (it rhymes with "five").
4. Line of sight (LOS) wireless
LOS, or fixed wireless, emerged about 10 years ago as a way for cities to deploy their own network using the same model as mobile phone carriers.
According to IT analyst Charles King, LOS was just too complex and inflexible, especially compared to newer technologies such as Wi-Fi and WiMAX.
5. Virtual reality
One of the problems with VR is that the human brain has a hard time perceiving two worlds at once – especially when it means donning a pair of goggles that block out one of those worlds (the real one).
Videogames such as World of Warcraft pull you into the action, but you are still well-aware of your surroundings. Mind you, Microsoft Natal is a stage on from old-school VR, the latest attempt to meld the virtual world with the physical.
6. The driverless car
This one seems to have a host of problems – the high-cost of the infrastructure, AI that is not anywhere near ready, and obvious safety concerns. There's also the fact a train or a bus makes more sense in dense urban areas.
Adding robotics to cars does make sense though, and both Enderle and King suggested that driverless cars could possibly become a reality within the next 10 years for long road trips.Almost three years have passed since Saudi Arabia announced it was intervening militarily, with its allies, in Yemen, to remove the Houthis (officially called Ansar Allah) from power after they had taken over the capital. Western analysts saw it as a bold move from recently-empowered (deputy) crown prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS), weapons manufacturers and their political representatives were delighted. But what had been predicted as a swift military operation has turned into a humiliating stalemate. Unable to impose its will by force, Saudi Arabia and its bold prince have resorted to war crimes and collective punishment, imposing a humanitarian catastrophe on the Yemeni people.
The lack of media interest makes it seem like a crisis unfolding in slow motion. But that is only because outrage and compassion are now meant to be weaponised when they can be useful in justifying imperialist interventions. For the Yemeni people the agony is real and there is no escaping it. In what was already the poorest country in the region, the Saudi-led bombings of infrastructure and the blockade imposed on Yemeni ports have left millions on the brink.
According to UN estimates, 17 million Yemenis, more than 60% of the population, are in urgent need of food. Out of these, 7 million are facing famine. The destruction of infrastructure has also left 15 million without any access to healthcare and generated an unprecedented cholera outbreak, with 900.000 cases and thousands dead already. 50.000 Yemeni children have died in 2017 as a result of disease and starvation. There is no hyperbole needed, this is a humanitarian disaster that is beyond words. Only it is not a natural catastrophe. More than something that is being allowed to happen, it is something that is being deliberately imposed on the Yemeni people.
Western outrage and responsibility
As the Syrian army moved to re-take eastern Aleppo, a monumental PR campaign saw people who had never bothered before rise up from their Starbucks couches to proclaim that humanity had lost its ways. One day, hopefully, people will wonder how large swaths of western public opinion were manipulated into working in a propaganda stunt to defend a city held by al-Qaida (1). Months earlier we were bombarded by the media about the siege of Madaya, where 40.000 people were being starved to death (2). Yet now, with an entire country on the brink of famine, the media silence is telling.
Anyone can voice their horror at a hospital being bombed in Syria. The issue here is not one of comparing tragedies and demanding proportional levels of outrage. The issue is that the West is directly responsible for the tragedy in Yemen. Western companies supply the weapons, western military advisors are involved in the intelligence work and the selection of targets, US airplanes are refuellingSaudi (and coalition) jets as they carry out their savage bombings in Yemen. The supposed outrage is not connected to any concern for human rights, it is merely a foreign policy propaganda trick. And the main priority for people in the west should be to stop the crimes being committed, or abetted, by their owngovernments.
There is no point in invoking this or that convention, because all western governments and weapons manufacturers will claim that they do not sell weapons if they end up being used to commit human rights violations. But there is overwhelming evidence that war crimes are being committed left and right, from double-tap strikes to bombings of hospitals, schools, or even funerals, and nobody has suggested putting the brakes on this money train of weapons sales. Evidence of war crimes will be either ignored or, as British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson suggested, left to the Saudis themselves to investigate!
Some media outlets could even be mistaken for Saudi propaganda pieces. The media coverage of MbS is nothing less than fawning in outlets such as the Guardian, not to mention the ineffable Thomas Friedman. And Saudi officials always get to voice their positions and denials through western outlets. One recurring example has a Saudi official denying that a given airstrike has been carried out by the Saudis, and the western media are happy to publish this without reminding their readers that nobody else is flying over Yemen. It is as if wayward bombs just wander into Yemen.
Even the United Nations has all but sidestepped its responsibilities. Its role is reduced to calling on Saudi Arabia to stop blocking the ports of a foreign country. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a western puppet par excellence, is his latest report, mentions the horrific suffering in Yemen. But while the usual suspects (North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, etc) had all sorts of claims – real, exaggerated or fabricated – amplified in the report, Saudi Arabia is not even named as responsible for this situation, only “coalition airstrikes” are mentioned.
War, what is it good for?
Articles no longer wonder what this war is even about, and why it continues. Impunity on the global stage usually comes hand in hand with indifference in the media. For one, beyond the lucrative weapons dealing, it is a matter of letting the Saudis do what they want. With trillions of dollars looming |
to comedian Jimmy Pardo.[18]
In September 2008, Koenig served as best man at the wedding of his Star Trek co-star George Takei to Brad Altman.[19]
Filmography [ edit ]
Television [ edit ]
Videogames [ edit ]Since the 2003/04 season, Northampton have knocked out 13 teams from a higher division in the EFL Cup
League One Northampton Town came from behind to beat Premier League side West Bromwich Albion on penalties in the EFL Cup second round.
Zander Diamond put the Cobblers ahead when he nodded in Brendan Moloney's cross before James McClean levelled.
Gareth McAuley headed in Matt Phillips' free-kick to put Albion ahead but Alex Revell's goal led to extra time.
After a goalless 30 minutes, Kenji Gorre scored the decisive penalty following James Morrison's miss.
Baggies striker Saido Berahino, who had a short spell on loan with Northampton in 2011, put his penalty wide before the home side's John-Joe O'Toole saw his spot-kick saved.
Darren Fletcher and Alex Revell both scored with their efforts but Cobblers goalkeeper Adam Smith saved Morrison's penalty to give Gorre the chance to send his side through to the third round for the first time since 2010-11.
The victory extended Northampton's unbeaten run in all competitions to 26 games, their last defeat coming against MK Dons in the FA Cup fourth round in January.
Northampton Town match-winner Kenji Gorre: "When it left my boot I knew it was in and I started running before it hit the net - it was crazy.
"We had our fans close by and they were great throughout the whole game. To run over to them was class. They were so loud, I just started running to everyone."
West Brom boss Tony Pulis: "I wish Northampton all the best. They worked really hard and kept at it.
"If we have come here and didn't open them up and didn't play well then you can slaughter us, but we did that. We've not hit the back of the net and that's what you have to do.
"I understand supporters - if you're not winning you're not going to be happy, whether it's me or another manager."Ads support the website by covering server and domain costs. We're just a group of gamers here, like you, doing what we love to do: playing video games and bringing y'all niche goodness. So, if you like what we do and want to help us out, make an exception by turning off AdBlock for our website. In return, we promise to keep intrusive ads, such as pop-ups, off oprainfall. Thanks, everyone!
By Operation Rainfall Contributor / March 11th, 2016
Ar Tonelico Qoga: Knell of Ar Ciel was released on the PlayStation 3 in 2011. A year after it’s release, to accompany the video game, two light novels were created with the same name. The two books served as an epilogue to the the video game and provided deeper understanding of the story and characters.
Now in 2016-five years later-a fan, Aquagon, has taken it upon themselves to give the series a proper fan translation for Western readers. These novels are set five years after the ending of Ar Tonelico Qoga: Knell of Ar Ciel. Familiar faces join the cast of characters for this very dramatic story premise.
Aquagon has posted both translated light novels online-part 1, part 2-so be sure to give a thank you or a shout out if you enjoyed them.
Ar Tonelico Qoga: Knell of Ar Ciel is available for PlayStation 3. Both light novels are available for import.
SOURCE
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Like this: Like Loading...Police admit that there was no evidence of any crime beyond expressing outlawed opinions.
German police ransacked the homes of ten people in Berlin’s suburbs last week. Families in Spandau, Tempelhof, Marzahn, Hellersdorf,and Pankow were raided by police units because someone living in those homes had expressed outlawed opinions on the internet. Specifically, the ten were united by having been outspoken critics of Germany’s policy of accepting mass migration from the Islamic world.
The raids should be no surprise given that the Germans looked to a former Stasi official as who leads an anti-Nazi NGO as a partner for the official internet censorship unit. Police spokesman Stefan Redlich admitted that while many of the men had anti-migrant opinions, “the men do not know each other according to previous findings,” and police had no evidence of any conspiracy to commit crimes. The sole offense, for which nine were arrested and booked, was expressing officially-disapproved views towards Muslims.
According to Breitbart news:
In some of the homes searched police were forced to admit they hadn’t found anything at all, but Redlich justified the raids saying they were maybe, “people who just once expressed their hate-opinion.” One of the raids in particular was prompted by a Facebook comment… Police announced that the raids show Germans that they are not as safe online as they might think.
A useful lesson, no doubt, although ideally the dangers are not supposed to be from the police. This is what you can expect when the police are trained by organizations founded by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Germany has a long history of being less friendly to free speech than many places in the West. However, in the wake of the Cologne attacks the German authorities have seemed far more inclined to crack down on criticism of government policy than on migrants who engage in rape. The German government’s Interior Ministry reached down to local police to make them strike the use of the word “rape” from their police reports, and has arrested only thirty people in connection with more than a thousand rapes and sexual assaults on that occasion alone.
Meanwhile, the mass immigration has increased crime at a rate far beyond what the German police can handle. The sexual assaults, which Germany has proven totally incapable of either controlling or prosecuting, represent less than one percent of the increase in crime in just one year.
The censorship threats are not limited to Germany, either. Scottish police posted a warning aimed at internet users, suggesting that they use the internet “safely” or else they “might receive a visit from us.” The British police’s submission to Muslim Brotherhood doctrine was enforced by Prime Minister Tony Blair as part of his attempt to curry favor with the Muslim community. It impeded the investigation of a child-rape ring in Rotherham, England. It appears that the lesson has not been learned by police even yet.Hackers snuck a computer virus into Trump hotels across the United States and Canada, potentially stealing customer credit card data for an entire year.
The Trump Hotel Collection recently acknowledged the computer infection on its website.
Apparently, hackers managed to hide inside the company's computers for a long time. The hotel chain warned that anyone who visited a Trump hotel between May 19, 2014 and June 2, 2015 "may have been affected."
The list of hotels includes two locations in New York and one in each of the following cities: Chicago, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Toronto and Miami.
According to Trump hotels, hackers placed special software on the Trump hotel chain's payment systems. That malware touched sensitive payment information, like credit card numbers, expiration dates and security codes on the back of cards.
It seems that, as customers or hotel employees typed in payment information, the malicious software quietly grabbed it in the background. But the company isn't quite sure if the hackers managed to pull out that data from the computer system.
"An independent forensic investigation has not conclusively determined that any particular customer's payment card information was taken," the company stated.
The hotel chain is offering one year of free identity fraud protection to affected customers. And credit cards always have fraud protection. So, at most, this hack will be an inconvenience to any victims.
Trump hotels are only the latest addition to an increasingly long list of hacked companies. In the last two years, hackers managed to steal payment data from Albertson's, CVS Photo, Home Depot, Michaels, Neiman Marcus, P.F. Chang's, Staples, SuperValu and Target.
"Data networks are continuously under attack," said Kevin Watson, CEO of data security company Netsurion. "In the case of Trump Hotels, the bigger the name on the door, the bigger the target."BERLIN (Reuters) - About 90 women have reported being robbed, threatened or sexually molested at New Year celebrations outside Cologne’s cathedral by young, mostly drunk, men, police said on Tuesday, in events they have described as ‘a new dimension in crime’.
Cologne police chief Wolfgang Albers told a news conference officers described the men as looking as if they were from “the Arab or North African region” and mostly between 18 and 35 years old. “We have one complaint that represents a rape,” he added.
Integration commissioner Aydan Ozoguz warned against putting foreigners and refugees, hundreds of thousands of whom have entered Germany largely from Middle Eastern war zones, under “blanket suspicion”.
Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed shock over the attacks that police said occurred when about 1,000 men split into gangs as officers cleared a square to stop fireworks being thrown from the top of steps into the crowd below.
While politicians also urged people not to become wary of all refugees, the incident fueled calls from right-wing groups to stop letting in migrants.
Germany took in just over a million last year, far more than any other European country.
Cologne mayor Henriette Reker said it was “unbelievable and intolerable what happened on New Year’s Eve” but there was no reason to believe those involved in the attacks were refugees.
Justice Minister Heiko Maas said Germany would not accept such attacks which he described as “a new scale of organized crime”.
Women shout slogans and hold up a placard that reads "Against Sexism - Against Racism" as they march through the main railways station of Cologne, Germany, January 5, 2016. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay
Around 150 people gathered in front of Cologne’s cathedral on Tuesday evening to protest against violence against women. One of them held a sign saying: “Ms Merkel where are you? What do you say? This scares us!”
“TOUGH RESPONSE”
The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has gained in polls in part at Merkel’s expense thanks to a campaign against refugees, said she should close the border.
“Mrs Merkel, is Germany ‘colorful and cosmopolitan’ enough for you after the wave of crimes and sexual attacks?” tweeted AfD chief Frauke Petry.
Merkel told Reker in a phone call the attacks deserved a tough response.
“Everything must be done to investigate those responsible as quickly and completely as possible and punish them, regardless of where they are from,” she said, according to her spokesman.
There are almost daily attacks on refugee shelters.
“Events like that in Cologne foster xenophobia,” said Roland Schaefer, head of Germany’s association of towns and localities.
Slideshow (9 Images)
After a crisis meeting, Cologne mayor Reker said new steps would be taken to avoid a repeat, including increasing police numbers at big events and installing more security cameras.
She stressed that women must feel safe at traditional carnival celebrations next month when the city closes down for five days of drunken street parades and parties.
Reker was stabbed in the neck and seriously hurt in October, just a day before she was elected mayor. Police said that attack appeared to be motivated by her support for refugees.Middle-earth March Madness 2013 – Round 1 – Voting Begins!
at 9:00 am by March 19, 20139:00 am by newsfrombree
Middle-earth Madness officially starts today! We’ve split our field of 64 characters and objects into four divisions: The Shire, Erebor, Angmar and Mordor.
As noted in previous comments and on FB, there are some very interesting match-ups in this first round. In a semi-rematch, can the brave Hobbit Merry take out The Witch-king in a division that includes his own name? Who will win in the battle of brothers as Kili and Fili face off in the Erebor division? And what about last year’s champion Samwise Gamgee?! Can he really take out the ever popular Balrog of Moria? Imagine what “Bullroarer” Took will do against Shelob in the Mordor division. Can the dragon Ancalagon the Black take out Legolas’s father Thranduil in The Shire division?
A note to those of you whom may not know some of the names in the bracket. A great way to educate yourself on the vote is by simply googling the name. We found that Wikipedia has a plethora of information on each character.
Voting in Round 1 will remain open until March 21st at 10pm ET. At that point, we’ll calculate the winners and post the next round on March 22nd. Follow after the break for a complete bracket image (download it), and to vote on all of our Round 1 match-ups! [Round 1 Bracket] (If you are interested in how we came up with this bracket and why some characters are left off (*cough Legolas*), check the note at the bottom of this post)
The Shire – Round 1
March 19th – March 21st 2013
Erebor – Round 1
March 19th – March 21st 2013
Mordor – Round 1
March 19th – March 21st 2013
Angmar – Round 1
March 19th – March 21st 2013
A note on the selection process. TORn staffers got 32 votes to distribute as they saw fit across nearly 100 names. Some staffers are very fond of Silmarillion, some of the Hobbit and others of LOTR, and voted for their favorites. From the results was born the list of 64, who were then distributed across the 4 realms, as you see.Characters like Legolas did receive votes, but missed the final 64 by a single vote!Fernando Torres is digging his heels in at Chelsea and the Stamford Bridge club will have to pay £16million for him to leave.
The £50m flop has attracted interest from the likes of Roma, but any buying club will struggle to pay Torres' £150,000-a-week wages.
The Spanish striker therefore wants Chelsea to pay up the two years remaining on his deal - totalling around £16m - if he is to leave the club.
VIDEO Scroll down to watch Fernando Torres take on the ice bucket challenge
In or out? Fernando Torres is digging his heels in at Chelsea and it will cost £16million for him to get gone
Cough it up: Chelsea would have to pay £16m if he is to join Roma from the Premier League outfit
Freezing: Torres takes on the Ice Bucket Challenge during a break in Ibiza
Good cause: The striker was left out of Jose Mourinho's squad for the 2-0 win against Leicester on Saturday
FERNANDO TORRES FACT FILE BORN: Spain, March 20 1984 (age 30) 2001-2007: Atletico Madrid (214 app, 82 gls) 2007-2011: Liverpool (102, 65) 2011-2014: Chelsea (110-20) 2003-NOW: Spain (110, 38) HONOURS: Atletico Madrid: Segunda Division Chelsea: FA Cup, Champions League, Europa League Spain: European Football Championship (2), World Cup
There is frustration from both parties around Torres' future - Chelsea at Torres' refusal to see any potential move through and the striker at his lack of first-team opportunities.
The striker, who posted a video of himself undertaking the Ice Bucket Challenge in Ibiza to Instagram on Monday, didn't make the bench for Jose Mourinho's side's 2-0 win over Leicester on Saturday, with new signing Diego Costa and returning Blues icon Didier Drogba both preferred.
Despite leaving Torres out of the win, Mourinho insisted he needs three strikers in his squad: ‘I want three strikers in the team. Sometimes I want to play with two and have one on the bench. At other times, someone will be suspended, another will be injured.
'Someone will be needed as a third striker. I can’t do a season without a third striker. Our squad was made carefully the top structure of my club to give me what I want.
‘I believe he will remain. I want him. He will play. He will score goals. He will be very useful for us. He is a fantastic guy, fantastic professional, so no problem.
'I told the players yesterday that at this moment we are playing one match a week and they feel: “Oh, I’m playing, I’m not playing. I’m first option, I’m second, I’m third.”
'But this is over next week. After that we have Capital One cup and Champions League and three matches a week. Everything is much easier for them then because all of them will be playing.
‘The reason he wasn’t on the bench today was that I decided to have a balanced bench with one defender, one full back, one defence midfielder, one attacking midfielder on winger and one striker. Sometimes I can have two strikers on the bench sometimes I can’t.’
Is the exit that way? Torres looks ready to leave Chelsea after his initial £50million move from LiverpoolLove them or hate them, totems are a big part of the atmosphere at Electric Daisy Carnival. They are a fantastic way to keep tabs on your group, enabling everyone to be able to venture off, and easily return to the group. Let’s face it, no one wants to spend all their time on their phone, trying to find cell phone reception, when you could be enjoying the event. I personally love seeing the creativity and imagination that goes into peoples totems, it is like another piece of art to take in. That being said, here’s some tips and things to keep in mind when creating your own unique totem for EDC.
The Pole
This is probably the most important part of the entire totem, yet the most overlooked. If the pole isn’t able to support whatever it is that you decide is your totem, then you won’t have a totem come the end of the night. Many of you will be riding the shuttles to the speedway, so making sure your totem easily collapses to fit on the bus is very important. Maximum height for EDC totems is 10 feet, so keep that in mind when deciding on what kind of pole to use.
Pool Noodles: Traditional totem poles were pool noodles. If you decide to use a pool noodle as a pole, keep in mind how flimsy they are. Do yourself a favor and opt for the thicker, nicer pool noodles. Another option is taking a plastic pvc pipe, or even a dollar store plastic broom stick, and placing it inside the hole in the pool noodle. This will make it more sturdy, yet still soft and light weight.
PVC Pipe: This is a great light weight option. The biggest problem with PVC pipe is it does not easily collapse down. You also need a method of secure any joints in the PVC pipe so it does not fall a part when you are dancing around with it. Duct tape is great for this.
Light Wood: While this is a sturdy option, it does carry a bit more weight than the other options. It also does not fold down.
Aluminum or Polycarbonate Telescoping Poles: These are probably the best option in my personal opinion. Some options for this are telescoping flag poles, camera poles, and pool cleaner poles. Just make sure the pole is lightweight and not solid metal. Pool cleaner poles, once you remove the net, the frame of the net can easily support a sign with plenty of surface area to attach to.
The Totem
Okay, onto the fun part, the totem itself! This can be anything, so a great idea and imagination is key.
To help get you started brainstorming, here’s some ideas:
Internet memes
A saying or quote
Inflatable toys (must be deflated upon entry)
Something for your favorite DJ
A favorite character
Celebrity faces
No matter what you choose, keep in mind these key things:
Colors: The brighter the better, and pick colors that compliment each other. You want it to been seen. If it has words, make sure that they are clear and easy to read from far away.
Weight: The heavier the totem the more uncomfortable it can be to carry all night. So the lighter the better! Hopefully it is light enough to be able to dance with comfortably. Talk to your group about taking turns carrying it.
Wind: Although not always a problem, it was at EDC 2012. Signs can be very wind resistant.
Lights: My FAVORITE part!!! The majority of EDC is at night, obviously. So lights on your totem are very important. Unless your totem is a very unique shape, they will likely look similar to other totems when it is dark, especially signs. So light it up!! El wire, battery operated led lights, those foam light up tubes, or glowsticks. Get some kind of light on it that is easily seen from far away.
Totem Guidelines from EDC Website
Maximum height is 10 feet.
Totems must be made from a lightweight material (e.g., foam, PVC / no solid metal).
Collapsible/telescoping camera extenders that follow the above guidelines are OK (lightweight/hollow aluminum/polycarbonate).
PVC, light wood, aluminum poles must be no thicker than 1 inch in diameter.
Decorated pool noodles work great for easy entrance through security.
Inflatables attached to totems must be deflated upon entry.
Any item deemed dangerous will not be allowed.
Don’t forget to be respectful to those around you. Have fun with your totem! I can’t wait to see all the amazing totem creations people come up with this year at Electric Daisy Carnival.
Check out more stories from EDM Identity!I'm sorry about the bad quality of the pictures.
This is my first-ever Arbitrary Day and all I can say is thank you sooo much for these gifts! I'm absolutely stoked for college and these gifts will definitely help me out for when I'm faced with situations I have no idea what to do in! I'm glad that you picked up that I'm a reader and am into self-improvement, that really makes me smile! :) I'll have a really great time with reading and learning how to be a better person!
What's amazing to me is that you took time out of the kindness of your heart to donate this stuff since my original Santa was more of a Grinch. "Sorry that your first Santa was a bust, hopefully this will make up for it." Consider my Arbitrary Day MADE! :DImages are notoriously one of the most challenging aspects of responsive web design. Today we'll look at how the <picture> element, a solution to the problem of responsive images, can be used right now.
First, the Problem
The days of fixed-width, pixel perfect website design are well and truly behind us. In the present day of widescreen monitors, internet TVs, multiple sized tablets and smart phones our designs now have to cater for everything from 320px wide up to potentially as high as 7680px wide.
Along with this multi-resolution landscape comes a need for images to stretch or shrink to fit these wildly varying requirements. This can prove to be something of a problem given that, with the exception of vector graphics, the vast majority of images have specific pixel based widths that do not change.
So what do we do?
The Current, Most Common Solution
As a general rule, you'll find the following in just about any responsive site's CSS:
This code uses the max-width: 100%; setting to ensure images never go beyond the width of their parent container. If the parent container shrinks below the width of the image, the image will scale down along with it. The height: auto; setting ensures the images' aspect ratio is preserved as this occurs.
One fluid image for all circumstances
It solves the problem in one respect, allowing us to display the same image under many different circumstances. But it doesn't allow us to specify different images for differing circumstances.
A New Solution: <picture>
<picture> is a new element which is set to become part of HTML5.
It will bring the process for placing responsive images up to speed with the way the current <audio> and <video> elements work. It will allow you to place multiple source tags, each specifying different image filenames along with the conditions under which they should be loaded.
It will allow you to load an entirely different image depending on:
Media query results e.g. viewport height, width, orientation
Pixel density
This in turn means you can:
Load appropriately file sized images, making the best use of available bandwidth.
Load differently cropped images with different aspect ratios to suit layout changes at different widths.
Load higher resolution images for higher pixel density displays.
Different images served, depending on the circumstances
How Does <picture> Work?
The basic steps of working with <picture> are:
Create opening and closing <picture></picture> tags. Within those tags, create a <source> element for each query you want to run. Add a media attribute containing your query on things like viewport height, width, orientation etc. Add a srcset attribute with the corresponding image filename to load. Add extra filenames to your srcset attribute if you want to provide for different pixel densities, e.g. Retina displays. Add a fallback <img> element.
Here's a basic example which checks if the viewport is smaller than 768px, then if so loads a smaller image:
You'll notice that the syntax used in the media attribute is the same as you might be used to from creating CSS media queries. You can use the same checks, meaning you can query max-width, min-width, max-height, min-height, orientation and so on.
You can use these checks to do things like loading landscape or portrait versions of an image depending on device orientation, and you can still mix in size queries at the same time. For example:
The above code loads a smaller, landscape cropped version of the image on a smaller, landscape oriented device. It loads a larger version of the same image on a larger landscape oriented device.
If the device is portrait oriented it loads a portrait cropped version, at small size on a small device or at large size on a large device.
If you want to provide different resolution versions of your images for higher density displays, you do so by adding extra filenames to the srcset attribute. For example, let's look at our first snippet of code from above with handling for Retina's 2x resolution added:
The media query is still evaluated first so you can control the dimensions your image will appear at on screen. Then the display's pixel density will be checked and if higher densities are both supported and allowed by the user's preferences, the higher density version of image will be loaded.
Using <picture> Today
Right now native implementation for <picture> is in the works for Chrome, Firefox and Opera. In the future it's likely we'll see widespread support as other browsers also catch on. But for the moment that support is still yet to arrive.
In the meantime, you don't have to wait if you'd like to start using <picture> right now. You simply have to use Picturefill 2.0; a polyfill provided by those clever folks at Filament Group.
After downloading the picturefill.js file to your project it can be implemented by simply loading it in your site's head section:
There is also an option to load the script asynchronously for added efficiency, which you can read about in Picturefill's documentation.
With this script loaded, the <picture> element will work as I've explained, with only a few limitations.
Picturefill Limitations
IE9
Picturefill works just fine with other IE versions, however IE9 doesn't recognise source elements that are wrapped in picture tags. To get around this, conditionally wrap your source elements in video tags which will then make them visible to IE9, for example:
Android 2.3
Like IE9, Android 2.3 can't see source elements inside a picture element. However, it can understand the srcset attribute when used on a regular img tag. Be sure to always include your fallback img element with the default filename in the srcset attribute for Android 2.3 and any other browsers that may have the same issue.
Requires JavaScript and Native Media Query Support
With this being a JavaScript based solution, it accordingly requires JavaScript to be enabled in the browser. Picturefill 2.0 doesn't provide a "no-js" workaround because if it did, multiple images would appear when native browser support for <picture> is rolled out. However, you do have the option to use Picturefill 1.2 if a "no-js" option is a must have for you.
The other requirement Picturefill has is for native media query support, to enable the queries in the media attribute to work. All modern browsers support media queries, with IE8 and lower being the only non-supporting browser with a small remaining user base.
Possible Extra HTTP Requests
In browsers which have native support for srcset, but not yet for picture, it's possible the filename specified in the fallback img element might be requested before a better fitting image from the source elements is determined.
This is only a temporary issue and will go away once native picture implementation is rolled out.
More Information
Read more about Picturefill 2.0 and download it for your project on the Picturefill page
Get full information on the <picture> element from responsiveimages.org.D'Qwell Jackson’s contract numbers with the Indianapolis Colts were bandied about as a four-year, $22 million deal with $11 million guaranteed.
The details from ESPN's Roster Management System tell a little different story for the former Browns linebacker -- and indicate if things don’t go well, Jackson will again be treading in free-agent waters a year from now.
Jackson’s deal gave him a $1 million signing bonus and $4.5 million guaranteed salary this season. That’s $5.5 million of true guaranteed money.
In 2015, Jackson is due a $4.63 million roster bonus that is guaranteed only if he is on the roster on the fifth day of the league year. He then earns an $870,000 base salary, guaranteed for injury.
That $5.5 million in ’15, then, is truly not guaranteed. Because the Colts will be able to decide if Jackson’s play in 2014 merits the pay/bonus in 2015.
The deal looks even more iffy in ’16 and ’17. In those seasons, Jackson will turn 33 and 34, and is due salaries of $5.5 million and $5 million (with a $500,000 roster bonus).
Which means his base pay goes up as he ages.
Jackson, of course, can earn all the money by being productive on the field. And technically it is a $22 million contract.
But the likelihood of him seeing all $22 million might not be that high.
He might not even see more than $5.5 million.
In reality, it’s a one-year deal worth $5.5 million, with team options the next three seasons.Our education system is failing to inform young people about the true horrors communism has visited upon our world, says Chris Everett.
The New Culture Forum has released an excellent study into the perception of the revolutionary far-left among 16-24 year olds, in anticipation of the 100 year anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Surveying 883 youths and young adults, the study’s findings are shocking. Genocidal Cambodian dictator Pol Pot is considered responsible for fewer crimes against humanity than President Bush and Tony Blair, while Reagan and Berlusconi are considered by more to have been dictators than the Romanian monster Nicolae Ceaușescu, a man responsible for the deaths of untold thousands (there is no accurate estimate).
You’re probably noticing a pattern by now – that each of these hard-line communist rulers is deemed less bad than their capitalist, democratically elected counterparts. While this could be put down to lack of name recognition from a couple of the lesser known brutal dictators, the paper’s author, Dennis Sewell, goes on to reveal that socialism was the most positively viewed ideology among the respondents – as well as being the least negatively viewed. Point being: something has happened to young British people to make them at best sympathetic, and at worst supportive, of the murderous ideology of socialism: ‘the creed of ignorance’ responsible for nearly 100 million deaths in the 20th century alone.
Somewhat amusingly, the insult that the male dominated left is more ‘brocialist’ than socialist appears to hold true. Brocialism is left wing thinking being left up to the boys, visible in Corbyn’s multiple cabinets and staffing choices, in leading authors, film makers and artists of the hard left, and even in the causes modern day socialists find themselves being attached to.
The study shows that 29 per cent of males (compared with 15 per cent of females) believe the Russian revolution was “Something well-intentioned but then went horribly wrong”, while 8 per cent (6 per cent of females) think it was “Something that showed it is possible to build a fairer society without capitalism”. More than 20 million are estimated to have been killed as a direct result of communism in the Soviet Union, with the last forced labour camp closing just two years before the Berlin Wall fell. Give me unfair capitalism any day.
Perhaps in a week in which the centre right Conservative Party has crowned it’s second female PM out of the last four, most Tories should welcome the fact that young men seem inclined towards socialism while young women treat it with scepticism.
The point remains, though, that both male and female youths have clearly been failed in their education regarding the crimes and horrors of socialism. That men or women are more susceptible is irrelevant if a majority still believes that the experiments in tyranny that took place in Russia, China, Eastern Europe, Cambodia, Somalia, Iraq, Cuba, and a myriad of other places were not an overall negative for humanity, but instead represent the latest in a series of moral ‘grey areas’ that are not for the likes of individuals to pass judgement upon. Most concerning in Sewell’s report is the moral ambivalence of my peers – that cannot be tackled in the classroom alone.Does being #1 on a Billboard chart mean people are really illegally downloading an album?
Who would illegally download Christian music?
The world of illegal online music downloads has always been murky, so we set out to answer these questions.
Sure, Billboard says an album is #1, but does the world of illegal downloaders agree? Well, let’s just say it shouldn’t come as a shock to discover that the internet has a mind of its own. But what that mind is thinking is definitely going to surprise you.
Billboard Charts vs. Illegal Downloads
Our study looked at the top 10 ranked albums from the Country, Rock, Alternative, Rap, R&B, EDM, Christian, Classical, Folk, and Overall Top Albums charts. We then looked up the downloads for each of those albums on Kickass Torrents, the world’s most popular site for illegally downloading music.
We wanted to see which albums predominated in illegal downloads, but first we decided to look at how each Genre Chart performed as a whole. The results were surprising:
As you can see, there is an enormous difference between genres. Rap and R&B dominate. The top 10 albums on the Rap Chart got illegally downloaded more than 17 times as much as those on the Country Chart. And downloads for R&B’s top 10 albums were more than those for Classical, Country, Christian, Pop, and Rock combined.
Let’s dig a little deeper into classical music… If you can find it on the chart, that is. Out of Classical’s top 10 albums, the average number of albums downloaded every day came out to a whopping… 3. This brings us to a question for the ages: who steals classical music? The final answer appears to be: 3 people a day.
In a related area, Christian music doesn’t perform quite that badly, but it’s also not exactly standing out. Feel free to attribute that to Christian values or simple lack of interest. I’ll leave it to you.
Even Rock comes in behind Alternative, Folk, and Electronic Dance Music (EDM) in terms of the overall downloads of their top 10 albums.
Folk is actually particularly interesting.
Folk has more downloads than Rock
The top 10 Folk albums get downloaded almost 1700 times a day on average. The top Folk album in terms of downloads (Beneath the Skin – Of Monsters and Men) has been downloaded more than all but the top 2 albums in Billboard’s overall top albums chart.
Even more interestingly, Rap outperforms the top 10 albums of Billboard’s Overall Albums Chart, no matter what their genre, in both total downloads and the average downloads per day. While Rap albums do pretty well in Billboard rankings (3 of Top Overall Albums’s ten best albums are Rap), the world of illegal downloading has clearly spoken that rap dominates even more here.
Does Billboard’s Popularity Have Any Connection with Illegal Downloads?
Billboard ranks seem to do a pretty good job representing what these illegal downloads tell us about popularity. As we see, a single album (thank Drake and Future) can certainly make a big difference, but that doesn’t change the fact that in both total download and daily downloads the album Ranked #1 doesn’t even come close to winning the most illegal downloads.
So it looks like Billboard moves on long before illegal downloaders do, they still love albums after they’re well on their way moving off the charts.
How does that play out? When we look at total downloads, we see that Drake dominates, but also albums ranked #7, #5, #9, and #4 (in that order) get downloaded illegally most often. Albums ranked #2 don’t even get 10% of downloader’s attention.
What’s worse than being #2 then? Being #2 with nobody stealing your music…
As for the daily downloads, Future’s DS2 takes the spotlight, and helps albums ranked #4 win in the “Most Illegal Downloads” category. This time, rank #8 competes with #2 for the worst spot. All this is to say, even if an album is ranked #1, you can be almost certain that it won’t be the hottest illegal download. You can’t win you ’em all…
Who’s Being Downloaded? Sorry Tay-Tay, but Not You…
Here’s a breakdown comparing albums’s total downloads. The colors correspond to the album’s genre.
As hinted before, Drake is obviously the |
clusive Communities Project, you have company. The issue of housing segregation has never captivated the nation’s attention like affirmative action or voting rights.
But today, two days after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the court will hear arguments in the Texas case that many fear could gut the Fair Housing Act, the landmark 1968 law that was passed just days after King’s assassination.
“This case has as broad of a reach as anything the court has decided in the last 10 years,” said Myron Orfield, director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School, because housing segregation is the foundation of racial inequality in the United States.
The case concerns whether the Fair Housing Act, which sought to end the longstanding segregation of America’s neighborhoods, should be read to only bar intentional discrimination. For four decades, federal courts have held that the law should be interpreted more broadly, ruling again and again that if the policies of governmental agencies, banks or private real estate companies unjustifiably perpetuate segregation, regardless of their intent, they could be found in violation of the Fair Housing Act.
All 11 of the federal circuit courts that have considered the question have seen it that way. As well, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the agency charged with administering the act, issued a regulation enshrining the principle in 2013.
The nation’s highest court does not typically intervene in cases unless there’s been disagreement in the lower courts. But this court has been determined to have its say on the housing issue and the legal theory that has come to be known as “disparate impact.” The Texas case marks the third effort in as many years by the current justices to consider the intent and reach of the housing act. The other two cases were withdrawn or settled in deals reached before oral arguments, as fair housing advocates feared they would lose before the Roberts Court.
“It is unusual for the Court to agree to hear a case when the law is clearly settled. It’s even more unusual to agree to hear the issue three years in a row,” said Ian Haney López, a University of California, Berkeley law professor.
The Texas case involves a nonprofit organization that works to promote integrated communities and the Texas state housing authority. The nonprofit, Inclusive Communities, showed that nearly all the affordable housing tax credits approved by the Texas housing agency had been assigned to Dallas’ black neighborhoods and almost none of it to white neighborhoods. A federal judge did not find intentional discrimination on the part of Texas officials, but held that the outcome unacceptably increased housing segregation and that the housing agency could have taken steps to ensure that affordable housing units were allotted more equally.
Texas appealed the ruling, raising the stakes when it decided to challenge whether the Fair Housing Act allowed such “disparate impact” rulings at all.
For many, the Supreme Court’s persistence signals a determination to install intentional discrimination alone as the standard for such cases. The Roberts Court is considered by a host of scholars and others to be the most conservative since the 1930s, and so such an outcome would be consistent with its more narrow interpretations of laws governing voting rights and school segregation.
“Those who care about eradicating housing discrimination have to be very concerned about the Supreme Court taking this case,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California School of Law, where he is a constitutional scholar.
Elizabeth Julian, president of the Inclusive Communities Project and the former Assistant Secretary of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at HUD, is among those who are worried.
“Reversing essentially four decades of case law would send a message that is very concerning,” Julian said.
A few generations ago, most housing discrimination was overt. Banks openly refused to lend to black homebuyers. Public housing officials used to announce that certain developments were for white residents, others for Latinos. But the nature of housing segregation has evolved over the years, and the fight against it has had to change as well. Today, banks may well charge higher loan rates in certain communities, but they can also insist it has nothing to do with those neighborhoods being black or Latino. Local planning boards can concede that most affordable housing efforts have been placed in black neighborhoods, but maintain that it was not by malicious design.
The theory of disparate impact, then, has often been the only tool to address ongoing housing discrimination. Landlords or lenders who implement policies or practices that disproportionately impact racial minorities can be found in violation of civil rights law if they cannot justify those practices – even if no one can show they acted out of racial animus.
The U.S. Department of Justice has used disparate impact to win record settlements from banks that charged higher rates to black and Latino borrowers with similar credit histories as white borrowers, but could not justify the practice.
A fair housing group used disparate impact to topple a “blood relative” ordinance passed by nearly all-white St. Bernard’s Parish in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The ordinance barred homeowners from renting to anyone who was not kin. Civil rights lawyers were convinced officials passed this law to keep out black renters, but could not prove racist motivations. But when St. Bernard’s Parish could not come up with a plausible justification for the ordinance, a court struck it down.
This tool, for the first time, is in real jeopardy.
The Supreme Court has been weakening many civil rights protections for decades. The Rehnquist Court, for instance, was known for getting the courts out of the business of addressing racial inequities. But the Roberts Court has gone a critical step further, severely curbing efforts undertaken by Congress and the executive branch to address our nation’s long history of discrimination.
In 2007, the Roberts Court came down against two school districts that were trying to maintain gains in integration. In 2009, the court ended the attempts of New Haven, Conn., officials to ensure that the city’s promotion practices were fair after no black firemen passed a promotion exam, saying the efforts discriminated against white firefighters. In 2013, it held that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act intended to address the disenfranchisement of black voters had expired. And last year, it upheld Michigan voter-approved ban on affirmative action.
“The Supreme Court is newly aggressive in the area of race,” said Haney López. It is targeting efforts by other branches of society to remedy segregation and is striking them down.”
Strikingly, if it ultimately rules against Inclusive Communities, in under a decade the Roberts Court will have limited pivotal protections in each of the three landmark civil rights laws passed in the 1960s: the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
The Court’s aggressive tack has been welcomed by conservative groups, who believe the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, intended to ensure former slaves equality under the law, requires strict legal colorblindness.
The Pacific Legal Foundation, an advocacy organization that promotes individual rights, has long looked forward to a showdown over the Fair Housing Act. It filed an amicus brief in support of the Texas housing agency..
Ralph Kasarda, a lawyer at the Pacific Legal Foundation, said that disparate impact puts an unfair burden on landlords, lenders and local governments.
He gives this example. A landlord requires a certain credit score for renters in order to ensure that they will pay their rent. For a host of societal reasons, African Americans and Latinos tend to have lower credit scores. The landlord could find himself defending against a fair housing suit for a race-neutral policy.
“The problem that I have is imposing liability on someone for doing something without any intent to harm someone,” Kasarda said.
Of course, even under the legal theory of disparate impact, legitimate business practices that can be justified do not violate the law even if they lead to different results among different racial groups.
But the Pacific Legal Foundation’s chief gripe is race consciousness itself.
In order for Texas housing officials to ensure they were allotting subsidized housing in a racially balanced way, they would have had to take into account the racial makeup of the communities where the housing was to go. Kasarda and others argue that race-conscious policies designed to help racial minorities are no better than those designed to harm them.
“You have the case where a government or organization might resort to race-based decisions to avoid disparate impact,” he said. “The Pacific Legal Foundation believes that is unconstitutional.”
Julian, of Inclusive Communities, doesn’t buy the conservative argument. The Fair Housing Act was designed to address the effects of racial segregation, she said.
“It doesn’t require getting into the hearts and minds of people and motives of individuals because at the end of the day the motives don’t matter. It’s the perpetuation of segregation that is the harm,” Julian said.
She offered an analogy: Say a driver is texting and hits someone with her car and puts them in the hospital.
“The fact that you did not mean to is beside the point,” Julian said. “No, you didn’t mean to hit them, but you are going to be held accountable because you engaged in behavior that you knew could cause harm, and you did it anyway.”
The end of disparate impact policies and cases, she argued, would severely hamper advocates’ ability to go after systemic housing discrimination in a nation where the segregation of black Americans has barely budged in many cities and where it is growing for Latinos. “It would be taken as a greenlight to say you can do anything you want, as long as you do not have the offending email.”
Related coverage: For more about the fate of the country’s fair housing efforts, read Nikole Hannah-Jones’ story about how the government betrayed a landmark civil rights law.This report was originally published at Intellihub
Someone that goes by the name “John Silva” is being investigated by the Secret Service after posting threats to the President of the United States on Twitter.
On Monday local police were made aware of threats against President Trump that originated from the “@JohnnyKing663” Twitter feed beginning as early as Feb. 27.
The first tweet out of a series reads:
The tweet was later followed up with another:
Just kidding. Doing it soon though!!! https://t.co/T2qs9tOdDL — John Silva (@JohnnyKing663) March 2, 2017
Then…
#AssassinateTrump. Just got me a new JP LRP-07 Long Range Precision sniper rifle off the Darknet. She’s beautiful. pic.twitter.com/X13L1Zml09 — John Silva (@JohnnyKing663) March 2, 2017
and…
Best part……One for #killtrump and one for #killpence. Our country is about to get a whole lot more beautiful. pic.twitter.com/zVdpAW97ng — John Silva (@JohnnyKing663) March 2, 2017
…
With the color of @realDonaldTrump and @VP blood staining the concrete. Y’ALL READY!?!?! It’s coming soon. — John Silva (@JohnnyKing663) March 2, 2017
And finally…
got my JP LRP-07. Got it hidden but the time is almost right. https://t.co/AO9j7A7xFT — John Silva (@JohnnyKing663) March 6, 2017
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We believe that the world has reached a turning point as the corporate funded and controlled mainline media has become obsolete as humans are now seeking the truth. Intellihub.com™ strives and will continue to uphold it’s duties to inform humanity of what is really taking place in the world around them. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.Pin 1K Shares
Carey Wedler
March 7, 2016
(ANTIMEDIA) On Monday, a new, controversial app described as “Yelp for people” made its debut. The free app for Apple and Android, called Peeple, allows users to rank individuals based on their interactions with them. Though Peeple’s creators added privacy provisions following harsh criticism amid the product’s announcement last year, they still face scrutiny over the potential invasiveness inherent to the app.
According to Peeple’s website, the app is intended to be “a reference check for the people around us.” The app allows ranking in three categories: professional, personal, and romantic.
“The Peeple app allows you to better choose who you hire, do business with, date, become your neighbours, roommates, landlords/tenants, and watch, teach, and care for your children,“ the creators say.
The app’s site claims it is “revolutionizing the way we’re seen in the world, through our relationships,” while the logo bears the tagline: “Character is destiny.”
Indeed, in an age of online product reviews and star ranking systems for everything from restaurants to fitness studios to doctors, the emergence of a system to rank individuals is not exactly surprising. But opposition to the app, which takes modern society’s fetish with reviews to the next level, is widespread.
One commenter wrote on the company’s Facebook page:
“When character becomes currency, humanity suffers. We are not metrics, and you cannot ethically justify ranking humans against normative social ideals. We are #PeopleNotPeeple,” CBS reported.
Many users are concerned that the inherently critical nature of the app will enable and encourage cyberbullying. As another commenter on the app’s public Facebook page asked:
“How will you feel when someone is killed over what they said about someone on your app? Because it will probably happen.”
Others on the page have worried fake accounts will be made, while others complained the admins are deleting negative comments. In spite of the Facebook comment threads, however, the Calgary-based company insists it has safeguards in place to respect privacy and, above all, to prevent mistreatment.
“We do not tolerate profanity, bullying … name calling, degrading comments, abuse, derogatory comments, sexual references, racism, legal references, hateful content, sexism, and other parameters,” the website’s FAQ explains.
Further, users writing reviews must use their full names, and those reviews must be approved by the person they are written about, features that appear to provide for accountability by forcing reviewers to stand by their assessments of others. Users who are reviewed have the choice to keep these assessments hidden.
With a paid subscription, called the “truth license,” however, the dirt becomes available. This means even reviews individuals have chosen to keep hidden can be viewed. Co-founder Julia Cordray explained the system:
“If a mom wants to look up a coach for her kids, she can see all the amazing things on that person’s profile, but maybe there’s some areas of improvement for that person. So, when the mom upgrades to the truth license, she’ll be able to see all the recommendations on the back-end that the coach never published in their profile.“
The truth license feature will debut in April.
Other changes to the app following public outcry last year include the removal of a star-based system in favor of a simple ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ ranking, as well as the ability for users to delete their accounts.
“I’m really grateful for that global viral feedback that we got. It was almost like conducting the world’s largest beta test without beta-testing,” Cordray said of the widespread criticism the app received.
“That’s a way to try to have it both ways,” said Tom Keenan, a professor at University of Calgary and expert on technological privacy. Speaking on the app’s changes, he said, “I guess there might be a few nuns who want to give each other references and be honest and frank and friendly, but I don’t think the general public wants to do that,”arguing the modifications turned the app from “from controversial to irrelevant.” The Calgary Herald noted the app “could in effect be positive-feedback only without the [truth license].”
Other apps have wrestled with similar dilemmas. Lulu, a once-popular app for females, allowed women to rank men they had previously dated or known. After outcry from men and media outlets over privacy violations and sexism, the app made those rankings voluntary; the men were granted the ability to opt-in, as well as to delete their profiles if they didn’t like what was said about them. The changes, however, removed the app’s bite, rendering it the same as many others.
As a one-star review on the app’s iTunes profile complains:
“This app is no longer relevant and has lost its edge. If I wanted a dating app I would go for something that started as a dating app not a rating app. Poor business decision as this was a one of a kind app and now it’s just one of a the very many dating apps available on the App Store.”
It seems that without the appeal and possibility of negativity — what some might call honesty — human ranking apps tend to lose their appeal.
Nevertheless, Cordray says the changes were made for two types of users: “Those who want to safely manage their online reputation, and those who want to make better decisions about the people around them.”
Caught between the original intent of the app — to provide transparency and accountability down to the individual level — and attempts to appease critics, the fate of Peeple rests squarely in the hands of the internet. In recent months, the internet has been polarized between crusades against bullying and insensitivity, as well as tireless campaigns defending free speech.
In spite of the controversy, Cordray remains optimistic about the new app. “I really feel like we honoured our users and gave them what they asked for,” she said.
The iTunes version of the app was released Monday, while the Android version is expected out soon.
This article (The Internet Is Freaking out Over the New “Yelp for People App” That Launched Today) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Carey Wedler and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, please email the error and name of the article at edits@theantimedia.org.
Pin 1K SharesFor the second time over five days, a report of a shooting Monday paralyzed a Washington-area military installation, drew swarms of police, and had workers locked down and sheltering in place for hours.
This time, it was on the campus of the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, specifically at its iconic tower building, designed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s.
The report of a gunshot came about 10:48 a.m., police said, from one of the lower floors of the tower, known as Building 1.
The campus went into lockdown, and staff members were told to find shelter where they were, officials said.
Police and military security officers rushed to the site, and with help of bomb-sniffing dogs, began scouring the building floor by floor and room by room, evacuating personnel as they went.
Traffic quickly snarled in the area, and unconfirmed reports of an “active shooter” popped up on online.
Similar scenes played out Thursday when the Washington Navy Yard was locked down after a report of gunfire there.
[Loud boom prompts panic and massive response at Navy Yard]
Hundreds of security officers swarmed over the base in Southeast Washington, where a gunman killed 12 people on Sept. 16, 2013. Last week’s report turned out to be unfounded.
The medical center is located at 8901 Rockville Pike in Bethesda. It covers 243 acres and has 274 beds and a staff of 7,000 people. It was formed in 2011 after the consolidation of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the National Naval Medical Center.
The tower, designed for the old Bethesda Naval Hospital, was inspired by the Nebraska state capitol, which Roosevelt had admired during a visit in 1936, according to the National Archives. Roosevelt also picked Bethesda as the site for the hospital.
By 11:45 a.m., a local law enforcement official said that no shooter or victims had been located in the building, and police reiterated that about 1 p.m.
1 of 6 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × The scene at Walter Reed after report of a gunshot View Photos Police and security officers investigate a report of a gunshot heard on the campus of the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda. Caption Police and security officers received a report of a gunshot on the campus of the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda. July 6, 2015 A SWAT team member runs onto the campus of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, as police investigate a report of a gunshot in Bethesda. Kevin Lamarque/Reuters Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
“At this time, there’s been no injuries reported, no indication, no evidence of any kind, except for the initial call, that there was a shooting here,” Lt. Paul Starks, a Montgomery County police spokesman said.
Shortly after noon, the U.S. Navy tweeted that security officers were searching buildings and that there was no confirmation of an incident.
The Navy added in a statement: “Naval Support Activity Bethesda is currently in lockdown and all base personnel are sheltering in place as a result of unconfirmed reports of an active shooter. DOD Security Force, [National Institutes of Health] Police Force and County EMS and Medics have responded and are searching the area. More information to follow.”
By 1:30 p.m., police said that the search of the high-rise building was complete and that no evidence of a shooting had been found.
The campus, which was locked down for several hours, gradually resumed some operations Monday afternoon, but the hospital said it was closed for the day, except for emergency and in-patient services.
Shortly before 2 p.m. county police tweeted, “Police operations are complete.”× 1 of 4 Expand wfae.com × 2 of 4 Expand × 3 of 4 Expand × 4 of 4 Expand Prev Next
We're live here at the North Carolina General Assembly's special session aimed at making sure people use the correct restroom as indicated by the male or female designation on their birth certificate, and also at broadly cutting down the authority of local governments to make laws to protect their own employees. One fell swoop, y'all.
House Bill 2, which has yet to be released to the public, is expected to arrive in the House Judiciary 4 committee any minute...
10:47: The committee has been called to order. There will be public comment for 30 minutes, 2 minutes per speaker. The goal is to get us out by 11:30-11:45. If amendments take up too much time, speakers will lose time.
10:49: Sponsor, Rep. Bishop, will present, there will be committee discussion, public comments, then amendments, "with the idea of being finished by 11:45". Rep. Bishop will present the bill.
10:51: Actually, Rep. Stam is presenting an overview. "It's a commonsense bill that preserves the status quo, meaning nothing changes from yesterday but it prohibits deleterious changes in future. It protects privacy and clarifies what local governments can do when disputed issues...it makes clear what local governments can and cannot do." Riggght. "We need economic development a good intra-sate common market. With 100 counties and more than 500 cities, it is not a good idea to have different employment rules in different places where they do business."
10:52: Basically, he's saying, it streamlines what's going on county to county regarding laws about wages, employment, discrimination, and using the restroom. Because businesses were super confused about these issues before and NCGA is helping them out.
10:53: Rep. Bishop up now. He is from Charlotte. "What we're doing is preserving a sense of privacy people have long expected in private facilities, restoring and CLARIFYING the existing authority and limits of local government. In the case of the Charlotte ordinance passed in February, there was an exercise power never delegated to the city of Charlotte. The NC Constitution states forth that fundamental law, he says.
10:54: Consistent business regulations statewide is critical for the success of the state to create the kind of business environment people need to prosper. NCGA cannot make local acts on business, the constitution sets that forth, not to have a patchwork system of business law varying from place to place.
10:55: Ok so this is a business decision?? The bill has 3 parts. In public facilities in NC, policy will be bathrooms designated by biological sex, as will usage of them. That is the NC law/building code already for bathrooms and changing facilities. They'll be used as designated by biological sex, as designated on a person's birth certificate. People who have surgery to change their sex can amend their birth certificate, he says. It includes accommodations under various circumstances. Maintains single occupancy bathroom and changing facilities.
10:58: Next section deals with bathrooms operated by public bodies: the same policies will exist for them. No mandate on private business in this law, Bishop says. Businesses can regulate their own facilities as they see fit. Because freedom of choice.
10:59: Parts 2 and 3 of the bill relate to clarifying what authority exists for localities. Section clarifies local govs. lack authority to adopt regulation of wages. (So no living wage ordinances). Imposing minimum living wage on contracting parties and regulating employment policies of contracting parties is to be avoided. Because NC has its own "Wage and Hour Act," a scheme that already regulates wages. So this will explicitly prevent local govs from preempting wages.
11:01: Part 3: For the first time we are proposing to enact a statewide statement of public policy against discrimination in employment, Bishop says. There were reports in the media that we are curtailing protection for disabilities, which are completely incorrect. There is comprehensive protection for disabilities, including in public accommodation. So this is a statewide statement of non discrimination of public accommodation based on disability.
11:04: No one can point to a statute that has ever delegated authority to cities and counties to enact regulations on employment. "The matter appears to remain unclear and we are proposing to clarify," Bishop says.
11:07: So basically, the bill makes people use public restrooms per their birth certificate sex designation, takes away authority from local governments and "prevents employment and public housing discrimination against people with disabilities." OK!
11:08: Questions: Rep. Richardson is asking to read the bill, because they just got it and it was hard to follow along with it while Bishop was talking. Agreed! They have 5 minutes to read the bill. And so do you, here you go!
11:13: Committee is called back to order. Further questions? We're going to public comment.
11:14: Chris Sgro from Equality NC speaks first. "What Charlotte did is not unique or extreme. Their elected council members overwhelmingly passed a protection ordinance for LGBT people." There are 200 plus cities in the US that have these protections including (damn) Myrtle Beach, SC. There have not been public safety concerns in cities that have these ordinances. That is a fact. This special session is extreme, wasting $42,000 a day, more than a teacher's annual salary, is what you are doing. What the NCGA stands to do here is "worst practices." Republicans in other states have killed less sweeping bills. This would be the most sweeping anti- LGBT bill in the nation. This is done for political gain and out of fear. My community deserves to be protected in public places. This session is not common sense. The eyes of the nation are focused on you here today. Facts must trump the politics of this, vote against.
11:16: Next up, Chloe Jefferson. She is in her junior year at Charlotte Christian Academy. She was immediately fearful of the ordinance.."changing in front of my girl peers is already stressful enough due to societal standards from Hollywood etc. Now the possibility of males changing alongside of me makes me even more self conscious." Girls should never be forced to undress in front of boys. She says being a teenage girl is as confusing as being confused about your gender orientation, and that she has rights not be forced to change next to boys. "You shouldn't change laws to punish and single out most of us." This is a threat to her safety. Knowing a man could easily walk into a bathroom is completely frightening. There is no stopping what people may do. Charlotte is the first city and if lawmakers don't fix this more would follow. I am not the only girl who is scared, we deserve protection. WOw. Wow.
11:19: Sarah Preston from ACLU is here. ACLU is "very concerned" about this legislation. Charlotte's ordinance was a simple measure to protect all people in public places. A lot of people may not understand what it means to be transgender, but the realty is a transgender woman is a woman, a transgender man is a man and they should be able to access the bathroom of their gender. People are already harassed and assaulted in public accommodation. We are going to add to that harassment and violence. We need to do better by this community. We must protect gender identity and sexual orientation. Protect all groups, do not pick and choose.
11:21: Someone is reading a statement from Eliana Smith from Charlotte. She truly believes the ordinance creates dangerous and vulnerable situations for women, children and men. She was sexually assaulted as a child and feared men following her for a long time. She was nervous about living in co-ed dorms in college. She found healing and peace, but in recent weeks, her fear has come back as Charlotte voted to let men into women's bathrooms. She fears for her 4 young children, doesn't want them to experience fear and trauma. "The Charlotte Council chose its political agenda over safety, privacy and common sense." It's not fair to call her a bigot or a fear monger bc she wants to keep her family safe. (The all-about-me argument).
11:24: Angela Bridgeman, a transgender person, is up. She is a member of the business community, came here from Pennsylvania. She now pays taxes to finance the discrimination she faces each day. She is post-op and the bill wont affect her because her license and birth certificate say female. But she was denied a college education, at Sullivan University in Kentucky, because she couldn't use female restrooms. "I chose my safety," she says. "I was told i had to put myself in a position where I would be beat up or worse." She never went back to college. "I have a right to be safe too," she says. And get a college education that was denied to her. She's crying. "Nobody else should have to go through what I did."
11:26: Next speaker John Amanchukwu. He is the executive director of the Upper Room Christian Academy so you know where this is going. "This ordinance is the corrupt fruit of treason," he says. "It's common sense boys should go to the boys room and girls should go to the girls room." Quotes Genesis. And LOL, "most people [experiencing confusion identity confusion] eventually accept their biological sex after puberty." Most people or most people he knows?
11:29: Madelyn Goss is a mother, partner, software engineer in RTP. She grew up in Hickory, NC and was bullied and assaulted in men's rooms growing up. She left Hickory for places that are safe, like Charlotte and Raleigh. She has a daughter. "I wont go back to the men's room, it is unsafe for me there. It freaks people out when I go to the men's room," she says. These LGBT protections are commonsense. They make cities safe for people like me. Again, 200 US cities in the US have ordinances like these. "People aren't getting raped and murdered, they just going to the bathroom."
11:31: Great, it's Tami Fitzgerald from the NC Values Coalition. The bathroom ordinance is unconstitutional and will have a domino effect, it jeopardizes health and safety of citizens. It will make it harder to do business blah blah. Violates people's right to earn a livelihood free of government interference. (Or ya know, does the opposite). Local governments are usurping power! Roy Cooper not doing his job! The Charlotte ordinance was heavily promoted by a convicted sex offender (?) Sex offenders use these laws to their advantage. One transgender guy went in to some locker rooms where little girls were changing in Washington State and Oregon...and that's the end of the story. Enlightening remarks from Tami Fitzgerald.
11:33: Tracy Hollister is up. Taking a stand for trans brothers and sisters. "Consistency" argument: the bill is inherently inconsistent with NC values, commonsense of treating ppl with respect, local democratic policies and championing safety and protections. There is a mountain of evidence for how unsafe trans ppl feel. We cannot allow a show of hands of legislators who know a trans person personally. "You need to do your homework, be transparent about what you do and do not understand. This is not an emergency. Nothing bad about women using women's restrooms." Trans people have their own problems and traumas, the last thing they want to do is cause trouble, they just want to relieve themselves.
11:36: John Rustin, Family Policy Council president. Here we go with the sincere religious beliefs. Government dictated viewpoints violating them. Charlotte does not have the authority to do what it's done. It will undermine gov. authority etc. Support the bill.
There will be two more speakers, one from each side.
11:39: Vivian Taylor is speaking. She is from a Christian org. 11th generation North Carolinian. NC public schools grad, served in Irag with US National Guard. She is a trans woman. Calls ordinance commonsense, they do basic moral job of looking out for people and keeping them safe. No issues in other cities. We can protect everyone. I love this state and call on you to reject this bill.
11:40: Heather Garofolo: Small biz owner and mom. She has LGBT friends and family she loves. Every business owner in NC should be allowed to live freely without unjust fear from government punishment. Charlotte is beautiful because of its diversity. Equality means people can speak their piece without being punished. Not one case filed by ACLU against Charlotte for discriminating against LGBT. She thinks ti will have negative impact on commerce trade etc. (I don't get this argument at all!) She is asking for the right to provide for her family. People will have to cancel contracts and shit. She is not fearful of her trans friends but of "all the sexual offenders out there."
11:43: back to committee: A trans woman of color who wasn't allowed to speak was just escorted out. Bc this is a Trump rally now. Rep. Hamilton has a series of questions. 1. Biological sex= sex according to the birth certificate, and birth certificates can be changed. 2. Focus has been on bathrooms, what concerns me is we have expanded the conversation and are delving into local gov's ability to contract with private vendors. How will minority and women business owned entities be affected?
11:46: Bishop says it does not affect ability to contract. There are already rules that concern non-discrimination in contracting, and utilizing minority and women owned businesses. Hamilton follow: So many private corporations in NC address the use of bathrooms in their buildings, does this in any way deny a private corp. to enforce rules similar to Charlotte's ordinance rules? It does not impair private business' abilities to "accommodate issues like that." Only a government ability to have these in place is restricted? Only local government's. Hamilton folo: So if the City of Wilmington wants to contract with a private entity with those rules, they will not be precluded? Correct. It just restricts a city from imposing those rules. Hamilton requests a fiscal not based on comments that there will be contracts city of Charlotte would have to break...could cost jobs and public money. Ask staff to put that together.
11:49: Bishop says bill does not require breaking any contracts only affects those entered into in future. Rep. Richardson questions. "Might we lose federal dollars?" Stam says there is no change at all re. state policy of non-discrimination. "I can't imagine we would be denied federal money." Richardson folo: Can we add "handicap" to this bill so there would be total clarity and not flipflop to different documents? The disability nondiscrimination statute is referenced in the bill already. It could cause confusion to do that.
11:54: Richardson: I hope my elected officials in Franklin county are allowed to set policies unique to Franklin county. I hate to see us having uniform practices and policies for 100 counties when we don't have similar resources, needs and economic development.
11:55: Warren moves to send the bill to the floor. It's going to the House floor at 12:15. See you then!
12:22: I'm back in the House Chamber. Speaker Moore just called the House to order, and they're about to debate the bill. Stam's back at it again with the "commonsense bill that clarifies local authority."
12:23: "Will the House indulge me if I went into history for 3 minutes?" He's talking about laws in the 1600's and 1700's that protected debtors fleeing across state lines. Not a good thing, he says. Bad for commerce. We need free-flow commerce, which is why US is the economic powerhouse of the world. No local bills on trade in the state constitution, and this bill is 100 percent about employment rights and a common market throughout the state.
12:26: If a person travels to Hickory they don't expect a different rule about who can be in the washroom in Hickory. (They probably don't have any expectations about the washroom in Hickory.) Weak.
12:27: Rep. Bishop is going through the bill and its "constitutional principles" again. Part 1: single sex multi-occupancy bathroom and changing facilities will be the law. There is one section for K-12 public schools and one for state agency local government facilities. "In both instances we are establishing bathrooms etc. will be maintained and designated for biological sex (per birth certificate). Once again, the birth certificate can be amended. There can be unisex and single sex single restrooms. Regulations concern government businesses only.
12:30: The contracts thing: cities and counties cannot impose employment practices on contractors who are private businesses. They also cannot mandate wage practices on contractors, nor can they regulate wages on contractors any more. "The NC Wage and Hour Act" is the law; it preempts local governments from regulating wage policies on private businesses, but can still regulate their own wage policy.
12:33: Third section: nondiscrimination against people covered federally, and protects disabled people (not handicapped people) from employment and public accommodation discrimination. "This is historic, there has never been a statewide nondiscrimination policy on public accommodations," Bishop says. Localities are not free to adopt a patchwork of inconsistent laws governing business practices across the state.
12:38: Former Rep. Rick Glazier is here. Rep. Jackson has a question. There's language in the bill to eliminate civil lawsuits against public policy? Not correct, Bishop says. But that's what it says. Courts of NC under common law have |
the first time since 1991.
Northeastern went up 22 points with 3:41 to go, but the Tribe managed to score 16 unanswered to cut the lead to six with 36 seconds to go. But the lead was too large with too little time and the run was little more than a scare.
It's heartbreak for the Tribe: William & Mary will miss the NCAA Tournament for a 77th year, one of only five teams in Division I since the inception of the tournament never to have made it. This was the second straight year they got within a game of the tourney only to fall short, after losing the title game in overtime last year.
The Huskies couldn't miss -- Quincy Ford went 4-of-5 from three, Caleb Donnelly went 4-of-6, and the team shot 12-of-20 from deep in total. Add less-than-ideal nights from William & Mary's stars -- Marcus Thornton and Omar Prewitt combined for 24 the day after combining for 70 points -- and Northeastern was able to get up big.
Northeastern came out firing, taking an early 10-0 lead off of some W&M miscues and eight quick points from Ford. The Tribe bounced back quickly to make the score 15-15, but more hot shooting from the Huskies let them enter the halftime break up 36-26.Share On more Share On more
The tragic case of a gay man who died on his honeymoon and was recorded as "not married" due to Australian law was a powerful driver for change, says South Australian premier Jay Weatherill. David (left) and Marco Bulmer-Rizzi
Speaking to BuzzFeed News ahead of a bumper week in LGBTI law reform for South Australia, Weatherill said the tragic case of Marco and David Bulmer-Rizzi showed the devastating impact of discriminatory laws. As revealed by BuzzFeed News in January, English man Marco Bulmer-Rizzi was met with a series of distressing hurdles after his husband, David, died during their honeymoon in South Australia. Bulmer-Rizzi was told his late husband's death certificate would read "never married" and that had to have next-of-kin decisions approved by his father-in-law, as the Bulmer-Rizzis' marriage was not recognised in South Australia. Later, he received an email from the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection informing him that his dead husband had overstayed his visa. "I think the power of the Bulmer-Rizzi case is that it demonstrated that things that might be discarded as symbolic – the recognition of a relationship – can actually translate into real harm and real pain and suffering," Weatherill told BuzzFeed News.
"You saw that really powerfully demonstrated in this case, where a man and his husband were tragically torn apart through his death... [Marco Bulmer-Rizzi] was dismissed and marginalised and treated with disrespect, at a time he should have been treated with sensitivity. "That caused him an enormous amount of pain and made a difficult time even worse."
Morne De Klerk / Getty Images South Australian premier Jay Weatherill
On Thursday Weatherill will apologise to the LGBTI community for historical discriminatory laws in South Australia.
The symbolic gesture will accompany the most comprehensive week in LGBTI law reform the state has ever seen, with four bills slated for debate in the upper house.
The bills, which passed the lower house earlier this month, cover relationship recognition, same-sex adoption, same-sex couple access to artificial reproductive technology and altruistic surrogacy, and making it easier for transgender people to change the sex on their birth certificate. "There’s a lot of harm and pain caused by this discrimination," Weatherill said. "We thought it was an appropriate time to apologise to people who have been affected by it."
Weatherill added he was "reasonably confident" the four bills would pass the upper house, saying they passed the lower house by considerable margins. However, if any of the bills fail to pass, Weatherill could find himself apologising for discrimination that remains entrenched in South Australian law.
"I suppose that’s a risk," he said. "The House of Assembly has already expressed its views, so we’re seeking to apologise on [its] behalf. I believe that’s appropriate under the circumstances."
While the LGBTI community has welcomed the reforms, South Australia has come to some of them relatively late. It is one of only two Australian jurisdictions where same-sex couples are still unable to adopt, and the only one with an explicit law denying lesbians access to IVF.
Weatherill said it was a matter of priorities. "These things have tended to be advanced by private members," he said. "For one reason or another, the parliament has not been able to supply sufficient time to attend to these matters. "I used the resources of government to commission the report and government time to debate these issues. It’s a question of priorities, and I’ve sought to make this a higher priority during my time as premier." Weatherill also said the stark nature of the Bulmer-Rizzi tragedy assisted in making the bills a priority. "It’s not a small matter to devote a week of government time to these matters to ensure they have been effectively debated, discussed, and passed through the parliament," he said. "It was a really powerful impetus for change, sadly."
Bryan R. Smith / AFP / Getty ImagesImage copyright Shazam
Apple is close to buying the music recognition app Shazam for about $400m (£300m), media reports say.
Shazam, a UK company founded in 1999, allows people to use their smartphone or computer to identify and buy music through a snippet of sound.
Shazam, which says it has more than 100 million monthly users, makes most of its revenue from commissions paid on referrals to Apple's iTunes Store.
Neither Apple nor Shazam have commented on the reports on the TechCrunch site.
If the deal is confirmed, Shazam will become the latest in a string of UK technology firms to be bought up by larger businesses.
The influential Music Business Worldwide site points out that the reported price is significantly lower than the $1bn valuation placed on Shazam during its last funding round in 2015.
By acquiring Shazam, Apple would basically cut out the middleman and save money on commissions.
It would also hurt the competition, since Shazam would no longer be referring people to rivals Spotify and Google Play Music.
The deal would also help the Apple Music service gain ground on Spotify, by making it easier for users to find songs and add them to playlists.
At present, Spotify has 60 million users worldwide, while Apple Music has just 27 million.Request a FREE Quote
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We are quality driven organization, running with an objective to gain excellence in every sphere of business through our continuous integrity, timeliness and work improvement. Our professionals work in close co-ordination, and love to learn from the day-to-day business activities.By and large, modern societies (especially Western ones) protect historical landmarks from the whims of individuals. While these buildings, over time, often find themselves owned by private individuals or corporations, these protection laws prevent the owners from haphazardly renovating or destroying these architectural pieces of history. After all, a building with historical significance in the middle of an bustling urban center may not be worth all that much to the owner, but the land it’s sitting on sure would be.
On the other hand, owning a historical landmark can be a very good thing — because of the tourists it can attract. But too many tourists? That may sound like a good business, but to some, it’s a pretty big annoyance. Which is in part why William Shakespeare’s final home no longer exists.
Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the English town of Stratford-upon-Avon, but did not find success until he moved to London in his late teens or early 20s. By his early 30s, however, he was already considering what to do in his retirement. His son, Hamnet, had recently died, and in 1597, Shakespeare purchased a home in Stratford-upon-Avon called “New Place,” a sketch (from 1737) of which is above. In 1610, he and his family moved into New Place, which would become Shakespeare’s last residence; he died in 1616.
New Place was originally built in the late 1400s by a merchant named Hugh Clopton. The house was probably something Shakespeare took notice of growing up, as it is now known to have been one of the largest homes in the town at the time. Shakespeare’s daughter Suzanne inherited the house after his wife Anne’s death in 1623, and Suzanne, in turn, bequeathed it to her daughter Elizabeth. Elizabeth ended up marrying Thomas Nash, literally the boy next door. When Elizabeth died, for some reason (perhaps because Elizabeth abandoned it to move next door, although that’s pure conjecture), Hugh Clopton’s heirs took ownership of New Place. One of Clopton’s heirs restored the house and in time, sold it to a reverend by the name of Francis Gastrell in the mid-1700s.
By 1753, Shakespeare’s fame had grown far and wide, and Gastrell’s home became a well-known tourist attraction. Even a mulberry tree, allegedly planted by the Bard of Avon himself, was the subject of interest from transient visitors. Gastrell, however, wasn’t looking to sell tickets to people who wanted to peek in his bedrooms or trample his garden; if anything, as the BBC notes, he found these visitors unwelcome and annoying. So he chopped down the mulberry tree.
This, of course, made the problem worse. Townspeople and tourists alike retaliated, throwing rocks through New Place’s windows (which seems like a silly way to protest against the destruction of a historical landmark). The town government stepped in — but not in Gastrell’s favor. It declined Gastrell’s request to expand New Place’s garden and upped his taxes. In 1759, Gastrell fought back:
He burned the house down.
Gastrell left Stratford-upon-Avon soon after, becoming a persona non grata after destroying the last home of William Shakespeare (and besides, it’s not like he could still live in the rubble and empty foundation into which he turned New Place). In 1891, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (which was established in 1846 to buy the Bard’s childhood home, in part to prevent U.S. showman P.T. Barnum from buying it and shipping it, “brick-by-brick,” to the States), purchased both the remnants of New Place as well as Thomas Nash’s home. The site is now open to tourists, without threat of further destruction.
Bonus fact : The term “too much of a good thing” was originated by Shakespeare. He first coined it in the play As You Like It.
From the Archives: Building, Apart: A house in China which defied demolition.
Related: An antique print of New Place, purporting to be from 1855, which (given the above) is strange.Publishers are pushing micropayments into our premium games harder than ever before, and Battlefront II might be the most egregious of the lot. The multiplayer progression is wrapped up in a system you can buy into, rewarding players with more powerful abilities depending on how much cash you splash. Or at least, it was, until EA backpedaled and shut down the premium currency following a huge, unprecedented consumer backlash. It's a damn shame that this has to be part of the conversation because the gameplay is incredible, the visuals are on another level, and the story is fairly interesting. The tale of Battlefront II is one of incredible developers, artists, and programmers, versus the insatiable greed of its sickening monetization systems.
About this review EA didn't provide us us early access to Battlefront II, so this is a review in progress utilizing multiple EA Access trials on Xbox One X, and a retail copy. This review focuses on dozens of hours of play with the consumer-facing portions of the game, including arcade, multiplayer, and the game's story mode. All the images were captured on an Xbox One X at 4K, and then compressed by our system to 1080p. Visuals, audio, and setting On Xbox One, Battlefront II is a tale of two games. Much like its predecessor, DICE has created an incredible work of art spanning the entire library of Star Wars movie mythology. The marble palaces of Naboo, the lush forests of Kashyyyk, and the hive of villainy Tattooine itself, all rendered with an attention to detail that is simply unrivalled.
The Disney license has been put to good use, with sound effects ripped straight out of the movies for the game's various gadgets, gizmos, and high-powered blasters. The musical score rolls up and down based on the intensity of the action, much like in the theatrical versions. The final stages of a galactic assault always feel suitably climatic as a result, with gameplay to complement (more on that later). On the Xbox One X, Star Wars Battlefront II joins the likes of Assassin's Creed Origins as the most visually stunning titles on the box. Approaching 4K resolution, with 60 frames per seconds, Battlefront II is a feast for the eyes elevated with HDR. Explosions splash blinding light on every surface, taking advantage of the extra nits provided by your HDR-capable set. Light sabers, laser blasts, and vivid environmental lighting gives Battlefront II a next-gen veneer that few games can boast. Additional details like reflective surfaces on the marble floors of Naboo and rain-swept platforms on Kamino give Battlefront II layers of depth that will distract you with their majesty.
On the base Xbox One, Battlefront II pushes the box to its upper limits. The resolution on the base Xbox is rough, giving the game a blurry appearance that can actually hinder gameplay in certain situations. It might simply be the effect of going from 4K back to standard HD, but the slender models of the Clone Wars-era battle droids for example, are particularly hard to see on some maps. I think it might have been preferable for Battlefront II to reduce environmental detail to boost resolution for the sake of gameplay on the base Xbox, especially considering some of the prettier, but less "necessary" features like reflective surfaces are still present, albeit a little pixelated. You'll still have a blast on the Xbox One S, but man, after experiencing this game on the Xbox One X, even on my cheap 4K set, I simply can't go back. Story (minor spoilers) The previous Battlefront title was criticized for not doing more to leverage the Star Wars IP in a story context, and Battlefront II attempts to rectify that to some degree.
Taking place directly after Return of the Jedi, Imperial Special Forces Commando Iden Versio joins the embattled Empire remnants as it attempts to fight back against the Rebel Alliance. The destruction of the second Death Star leads Versio to begin questioning the strategy and logic of her superiors, including the Emperor himself, and her father, who is an Admiral in the Imperial Navy. Battlefront II continues the strange tradition that multiplayer-focused games need sub-par single-player campaigns. The cutscenes and digital portrayal of Versio and the supporting cast is simply top notch, featuring some of the most impressive, photo-realistic CGI on the market. The authenticity from Battlefront II's multiplayer extends to its campaign, featuring similar environments and locations to those you'll traverse in the game's competitive modes. The biggest problems with Battlefront II's story pertain to its writing, and gameplay, both of which fall well below the mark. The biggest draw of Battlefront II's story is its canonized lore, which Star Wars fans will relish, even if its delivery isn't so great.
The pacing of the campaign's plot, and behavior of Iden Versio and her companion, Del Meeko, are a little odd. They start off as dedicated Imperial assassins, happy to murder resistance fighters with impunity, but following a couple of events that I shan't spoil, they decide to suddenly defect. It struck me as quite odd, considering how clearly indoctrinated they are at the start of the game, regarding the Death Star's destruction with pure horror. Their reasons for quitting the Empire simply don't make sense, considering they were totally OK with a planet-killing weapon like the Death Star. Not only is it odd how happy they are to defect, but it's odd how quickly the Rebel Alliance welcomes them in with open arms. It's lightly mentioned how crazy the Rebels are for accepting two notorious Imperial spies and saboteurs into their ranks, as if that were enough for it to make sense. It just seems forced and silly.
The characters themselves are quite cool, and it's fun seeing Star Wars heroes in new settings bridging gaps between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, but it all comes off as a little rushed and haphazard. The gameplay might have saved it, but the A.I. is staggeringly stupid, and the levels amount to dull shooting galleries most of the time, playing like multiplayer levels, without multiplayer enemies. Battlefront II continues the strange tradition that multiplayer-focused games need sub-par single-player campaigns, sadly. That said, Star Wars fans will still find enjoyment in its funny scenes, references, and more pivotal moments. Some of its finer plot implications are particularly interesting, especially towards the end. Multiplayer Make no mistake, Star Wars Battlefront II represents some of the best and most explosive shooter gameplay on Xbox One right now, when you disregard the lens of micropayment-encouraging progression that strangles it.
Slicing up Yoda as Kylo Ren felt somehow... wrong. pic.twitter.com/6hq8HmHqUo — Jez☕ (@JezCorden) November 10, 2017
Battlefront II comes with various gameplay types, including close quarters combat, objective-based scenarios, and all-out Hero warfare, but you'll probably spend most of your time either in its 20 vs. 20 Galactic Assault mode, or 12 vs. 12 Starfighter Assault mode. Both of these come with attack/defend type gameplay across Star Wars Battlefront II's huge amount of locations, tasking players to either assault or defend various objectives as your team progresses to victory, or wastes your enemy's respawn tickets. Initially, you choose one of four classes. A defensive "heavy," a run n' gun "assault" class, a sniper-style "specialist," and a supportive "officer" class. I have spent most of my time playing the heavy class, which comes with light machine gun-style laser cannons and various defensive tools to help push forward your team's line.
Battlefront II follows its predecessors, allowing players to elect to use either first or third person views. It ditches the arcade-style power up tokens found in the previous game, allowing you to purchase upgrades mid-match based on your performance in battle. This makes battles feel a little more immersive than the previous game, where hovering random power-up tokens didn't really fit the game's aesthetic. Make no mistake, Star Wars Battlefront II represents some of the best and most explosive shooter gameplay on Xbox One right now. You get points for assisting with kills, making kills, playing the objectives, dealing damage, and even for dying. The more points you get, the better power ups you can buy on the respawn screen. Some of these include tank-like vehicles, special classes like a rocket trooper or Wookiee with boosted health and damage, and of course, hero classes represented by characters from the movies. The way the points system is handled builds up well in Galactic and Starfighter Assault modes, meaning more epic battles and situations occur dynamically as the matches progress, leading to climatic moments and desperate fights to the death. Hero classes are far more powerful than standard soldiers, with more health and damage, but they never feel overpowered. Only a few can be on the field at any one time. A concerted effort between 2-3 players can quite easily dispatch any careless hero, while a skilled player can skirmish in and out of fights, knowing when best to take a step back to recover. I was able to rack up a 20-player killstreak with Yoda during EA's early access period, it simply feels amazing to be in the driver's seat.
Yoda is hilarious to play as. Slice slice slice slice slice. pic.twitter.com/az9pP0lPht — Jez☕ (@JezCorden) November 12, 2017
While hero classes have a distinct advantage in combat, regular classes all their own tools to get ahead. The heavy can activate sentry mode, which grants increased damage output for decreased mobility. Using a gattling laser to mow down enemies feels incredible, and you can quite quickly dispatch hero classes who aren't paying proper attention in this mode as well. Other classes have similar abilities on varying cool downs, including a run n' gun powerful shotgun mode as assault, healing abilities as an officer, and detection abilities as a sniper. The class structure extends to the game's space combat mode, Starfighter Assault too, allowing you to jump behind the wheel of legendary ships like the Millennium Falcon and Boba Fett's Slave I. Enlisting racing aficionados Criterion was the right move for this mode, as the vehicular combat feels far superior to the previous game. While the controls are familiar, it ditches some of the simplicity.
The skills feel balanced over all (at least at their base level), although I haven't had time to play around with all of them. It's hard to fault Battlefront II on its multiplayer gameplay alone, it's simply incredible and authentic, encouraging team and objective play with its score system, and rewarding the best players with access to the franchise's most beloved characters. The issues arise with its intentionally convoluted progression system. The micropayment fiasco More and more publishers are chasing micropayment models, and Battlefront II follows this trend aggressively. Horribly so. Battlefront II's entire progression system revolves around boxes of random star cards that grant you classes, characters, and vehicles with passive bonuses and new skills. But to confuse matters more, Battlefront II also has separate levelling systems that attempt to "gate" progression, to prevent players with more cash from simply buying their way to an advantage. It reduces the "pay-to-win" nature of the system to some degree. EA removed the game's premium currency following a huge backlash= but admitted it will be reinstated later.
To progress your preferred class, you need to obtain more cards for that class. To obtain more cards, you have to rely on the luck of the draw. Trooper crates for the base classes cost 4,000 credits, and you obtain about 200 to 400 per match. It can take well over an hour to afford a new crate, and most of the time, you probably won't get the cards you want. As my challenges dried up, progression with my heavy class slowed to an abysmal, unrewarding grind – with no end in sight, due to the sheer randomness of the loot crates. The system is softened somewhat with crafting parts, which spawn out of non-paid crates in relative abundance. In about four hours of play, I managed to get enough crafting parts to simply buy all the base cards I wanted for my Heavy class without spending real money on extra cards. And the credit flow can be expedited with challenges, which grant extra rewards for performing certain feats, such as getting headshots or high kill counts. Initially, this gives you a decent boost of credits, particularly if you complete the campaign. However, as my challenges dried up, progression with my heavy class slowed to an abysmal, unrewarding grind – with no end in sight, due to the sheer randomness of the loot crates. At this point I realized just how aggressive these systems were, even if my initial feelings about them made me apologetic. It destroys the progression gameplay. The ability cards themselves can be levelled up, and some of them provide significant bonuses for doing so, usually in the form of reduced cool down times, bigger blast ranges, and health returned. Some of these upgrades include flat damage bonuses, too, and for those players who are buying crates, they will quite easily rack up a non-trivial gameplay advantage as a result, creating a digital caste system between players with disposable income and those without.
The upgrades themselves are also gated behind a global rank, which increases simply by playing, similarly to Battlefield games. I wasn't able to spend my crafting parts to upgrade my Heavy's star cards to level three (out of five), because I haven't played enough to obtain global rank 15 yet. You can obtain higher level cards directly out of paid loot crates, circumventing the ranking system. Once again, this provides gamers buying additional crates with real money an advantage. However, you can obtain higher level cards directly out of paid loot crates, circumventing the ranking system. Once again, this provides an advantage to gamers buying additional crates with real money. Originally, purchasing additional hero characters such as Darth Vader cost anywhere up to 60,000 credits. Considering you only get around 400 credits at most per match, this was far, far too high, especially as the boost from challenges dried up. Following a sizeable backlash, primarily on Reddit, EA responded by reducing the cost of heroes by 75 percent, down to 15,000 at most. This feels like a far better figure, considering how fast you can acquire credits by completing challenges. Players that save their credits by buying crates with real money will be able to obtain heroes far faster, again, but this is nowhere near as prohibitive and skewed as it was previously.The following home remedies are from the book “Library of Health.” Published in 1927.
Plate I
Chittim Bark- A shrub about seven or eight feet in height, with branches terminating in a sharp spine. The leaves, on the short footstalks, ovate and veined. The bark is officinal and the part employed. It stands without an equal in the treatment of constipation in all its varied forms. An infusion of one ounce of the bark to a pink of boiling water; infuse for one hour and strain. Dose: One teaspoon, morning and evening, according to symptoms or until the bowels are thoroughly regulated.
Stone Root- This plant is used in numerous complaints in practice. A decoction of the fresh root, one ounce to the pint of water, has been used with advantage in hemorrhoids or piles, catarrh of the bladder, gravel and dropsy. The dose is one tablespoon four times a day. The leaves are applied in the form of fomentation to wounds, bruises and sores, and in cases of internal abdominal pains.
Santal Wood- White sandalwood is a small tree indigenous to India. The volatile oil distilled from the wood is the part used. Given internally in moderate doses of 5 to 10 drops for gonorrhea. It is sometimes used as a stimulant to the respiratory tract in bronchitis and certain forms of asthma.
Ague Root- Height, from a foot to eight inches; leaves, pale and smooth; grows mostly in sandy soils. It has proved useful in Dyspepsia and flatulent colic, and is especially useful for the purpose of restoring the activity of the generative organs, giving them vigor and healthy action. A valuable agent to prevent tendency to miscarriage and falling of the womb. The dose of the tincture is from six to ten drops three times a day, and of the powdered root five to eight grains.
Plate II
Saffron- This plant is common in orchards and of a deep orange color. It is used as an infusion (tea); boiling once ounce of leaves in two pints of water. It is pleasant home remedy in the beginning of scarlet fever, measles and chicken-pox, serving to bring out the eruptions. Dose, from half to a whole wineglassful, three times a day. It is also good as a gargle in sore throats.
Yellow Goat’s Beard- A tea of the root, bark and leaves of this plant is used for diarrhea in children. Boil one ounce of root in two pints of water. Take two or three tablespoonfuls three of four times a day.
Hedge Mustard- Used cooked for table purposes as a stimulus to the stomach and to relieve coughing. Also used in the form of an infusion (tea) to cleanse ulcers and wounds. Boil an ounce of seeds, or a quantity of leaves, in a quart of water and wash the sore parts twice a day.
Common Hedge Nettle- Made into a tea and drunk freely is excellent for hemorrhages of lungs and stomach. In doses of half a wineglassful four times a day it relieves neuralgia. A poultice of the leaves also relieves neuralgic pain and aids in the cure of wounds. Used at times as a tea, and drunk in wineglass doses twice a day, to promote menstruation and kill worms.
Plate III
Cathartic Ramno- A tea of the bark, taken in tablespoonful doses, three times a day, opens the bowels. But caution is needed, lest it lead to purging.
Fennel- The seeds and leaves in the form of a strong infusion (tea) are excellent for colic. The seeds in form of a powder are also good for cramps. Doses of the tea, a wineglassful, repeated at half-hour intervals, if necessary. Dose of the powdered seeds, ten to twenty grains.
Tansy- Tansy tea, in doses of a teacupful twice a day, promotes menstruation. In the form of bitters, it strengthens weakened constitutions. Cold tansy tea, drunk freely, is good for dyspepsia.
Wood Sorrel- a poultice of the leaves was once a popular application in cases of cancer. Sorrel tea, drunk freely, also aids in giving relief to cancerous affections.
Plate IV
Stavesacre or Lousewort- The crushed seeds, made in a paste and rubbed on the head, is an effective way to kill lice.
Golden Thistle- A tea of one ounce of leaves or stems to two pints of water will relieve colic. Dose, a wineglassful, repeated every half hour, if necessary.
Lime-Tree- The juice of the lime, mixed with water, is a refreshing drink, in frequent sips, for fever sufferers. Lime juice in large quantities is carried on board ships as a preventive of scurvy.
Red-Berried Trailing Arbutus- A strong tea, made of one ounce of the leaves to a quart of water, and taken in doses of two tablespoonfuls three times a day, is used to relieve bladder trouble. It diminishes the irritation caused by the urine, and the inflammation and pain.
Plate V
Henbane- This plant, like belladonna, is a powerful poison. It is used in the form of an extract to soothe pain. Dose, one-eighth to one half a grain once or twice a day. It is frequently used in cases of delirium where opium cannot be used. Great caution is needed in its administration.
Mountain Balm or Calamint- Make a tea of the root, dilute with water and sweeten. Give in teaspoonful doses at intervals of half an hour to relieve wind colic in children.
Sage of Salvia- Sage tea, either alone or mixed with vinegar, honey or alum, is an excellent gargle for sore throats. Drunk freely it cured night-sweats. Simmered in lard and taken four or five times a day in doses of two spoonful’s each cures quinsy.
Mustard- Powdered mustard seeds are used o the table and in medicine. One or two teaspoonfuls in a glass of hot water is used to provoke vomiting. If necessary, repeat the dose till the desired result is reached. Mustard seed, in doses of a teaspoonful three times a day, relieves dyspepsia. Mustard plasters, applied to the extremities, serve to bring out again the eruption where it has gone in, in such cases as measles and scarlet fever.
Plate VI
Common Thorn-Apple- This plant belongs to the same family as henbane and belladonna. Cigarettes made from the dried leaves, and smoked, are good for asthma difficulties.
Asparagus- Used as a table dish gently stimulates the kidneys. In the form of tea, drunk at three or four hour intervals, it promotes a free flow of urine.
Marshmallow- The powdered root may be used as a poultice in cases of gangrene. A fresh infusion (tea), drunk freely, is of service in children’s diseases, and especially in Bright’s disease. Marshmallow drops are useful in sore throat, in scarlatina and diphtheria. The dose is indefinite. An infusion, drunk freely, is good for acute gonorrhea, and all affections of the mucous membrane of lungs and bowels, and inflammations of kidneys and bladder.
Hops- The root, used as a powder or pill, soothes the irritation of the urinary organs and pains of gonorrhea. Infusion of hops, or hop tea, is made by taking a tablespoonful of hops to a pint of water and is given in doses of two to five ounces, twice to three times a day. In delirium tremens hop-tea quiets drink craving and settles the stomach. In insomnia and restlessness it is useful in producing sleep. A hop poultice gives relief in local painful affections. Or the hops may be placed in flannel and moistened with hot whiskey and applied to painful cases, as in toothache or earache, where the warmth and steam are very soothing. The inhalation of the vapor of hops is often attended with good results, especially in diseases of the throat and chest.
Plate VII
Common Scurry-Grass- This plant is popularly eaten as a salad and is useful in scurvy, chronic rheumatism and chronic malaria. The juice has been used externally for the purpose of stimulating indolent ulcers and, diluted with water, as a mouth-wash for spongy gums and ulcers of the mouth.
Meadow Saffron- Saffron-tea, drink freely, is used in domestic practice to bring out the eruption in measles and scarlet fever and to cause sweating. Externally it is used in bruises, rheumatic and neuralgic pains and in the form of ointment for bleeding piles.
Garlic- Garlic, onion and leek are use in bronchitis and chronic cough. Here it can also be applied to the chest in the form of a poultice, or the oil can be used externally. A garlic poultice may also be successfully employed in the convulsions and intestinal and stomach troubles of children. Garlic is also given for worms. It is a domestic remedy in whooping-cough. Syrup of garlic is given in doses of five drops to a tea-spoonful, two to three times a day, or oftener, if the coughing spells are frequent and violent.
Horse-Radish- Used as a tonic for the digestion, and to promote the secretion of the kidney. Syrup of grated horse-radish and honey or sweetened water, taken in teaspoonful doses every hour, will cure hoarseness. Horse-radish tea, drunk freely, is beneficial in rheumatism and neuralgia.
Plate VIII
Common Juniper- By boiling an ounce of the barriers (pounded) in two pints of water an infusion is obtained which stimulates the action of the kidneys. A pint is drunk through the day in Bright’s disease with its attendant dropsy. The juice of the berried has been successfully used in doses of two or three teaspoonfuls daily in children to promote the secretion of urine. The oil may be dropped in boiling water and inhaled to produce the same effect.
Currant- The juice of the berry, boiled and sweetened, and in teaspoonful doses three or four times a day, is binding in infantile diarrhea.
Common White Hoarhound- The herb may be used in infusion (an ounce to a pint of water), taken hot and frequently in recent colds to produce sweating. The cold tea, drunk freely, is serviceable in chronic lung affections. Cough-drops are used for sore throat and cough.
Colt’s foot- The infusion of the dry leaves is used to soften the phlegm in chronic catarrh. It may be drunk freely.Last week, Rafael Mendes published a video of him training with 2014 Pan Super heavyweight champion Luiz Panza. In the roll at the Art of Jiu-Jitsu academy, Panza apparently seems to be rolling lightly working his open guard, while Rafael is going much faster and end up submitting Panza twice, even though he is almost 30 kgs lighter. Filming visiting BJJ stars is a common practice in the AOJ academy, just like at Marcelo Garcia’s academy. The problem lies in the time of publication of the video. The roll happened in November 2013 after Panza was visiting, however Rafa published the video one day after Luis Panza became super heavyweight champion at the IBJJF Pan Am in 2014. It seems that Rafael Mendes may have chosen this date to publish the video to prove a point or for marketing for his |
– but, says Jegla, “It certainly looks like they’re equivalent structures.”
“The key thing here that we don’t know yet, because the tools weren’t available is whether the channels that initiate the action potential are also there. That’s what everybody wants to know now, so that’s what we’ll be working on. And if they are there, then that AIS-like structure is going to work exactly like the vertebrate axon initial segment,” Jegla said. “But even without that piece, this discovery completely revises the story of the axon initial segment being the late-evolving, final feature of our polar neurons. It’s clear to us now that this function is actually an ancestral feature shared with all the major model organisms – much older than previously thought.”
“There are some very practical implications here, too, of the fact that the axon initial segment – along with many other cellular features of neurons – is conserved between us and simple model organisms like fruit flies: we can answer our questions much more efficiently and cheaply than if we were restricted to vertebrate model systems,” Rolls said. “So in addition to satisfying our curiosity about how our nervous system originated in evolution, knowing which features are conserved in simple, genetically tractable model organisms affects how we can do experiments to help understand, for example, what role the axon initial segment might play in neuronal injury response – things that ultimately are highly relevant to people and health.”
About this evolutionary neuroscience research article
Melissa Rolls is an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State, director of the Center for Cellular Dynamics, chair of the Intercollege Graduate Degree Program in Molecular, Cellular and Integrative Biosciences, and a cofunded faculty member of the Huck Institutes.
Tim Jegla is an associate professor of biology at Penn State and a cofunded faculty member of the Huck Institutes.
Other contributors: Other Penn State scientists contributing to this work include Michelle M. Nguyen, Chengye Feng, Daniel J. Goetschius, Esteban Luna, Damian B. van Rossum, Bishoy Kamel, Aditya Pisupati, Elliott S. Milner, Floyd Mattie and Michelle Stone.
Funding: This work was funded in part by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), grant number GM085115.
Source: Seth Palmer – Penn State
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Melissa Rolls, Penn State.
Video Source: The video is credited to Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences
Original Research: Full open access research for “Bilaterian Giant Ankyrins Have a Common Evolutionary Origin and Play a Conserved Role in Patterning the Axon Initial Segment” Timothy Jegla, Michelle M. Nguyen, Chengye Feng, Daniel J. Goetschius, Esteban Luna, Damian B. van Rossum, Bishoy Kamel, Aditya Pisupati, Elliott S. Milner, and Melissa M. Rolls in PLOS Genetics. Published online December 2 2016 doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1006457
Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article
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Chicago Penn State “Discovery Rewriting the Evolutionary History of the Nervous System.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 8 March 2017.
<http://neurosciencenews.com/evolution-nervous-system-6215/>. Penn State (2017, March 8). Discovery Rewriting the Evolutionary History of the Nervous System. NeuroscienceNew. Retrieved March 8, 2017 from http://neurosciencenews.com/evolution-nervous-system-6215/ Penn State “Discovery Rewriting the Evolutionary History of the Nervous System.” http://neurosciencenews.com/evolution-nervous-system-6215/ (accessed March 8, 2017).
Abstract
Bilaterian Giant Ankyrins Have a Common Evolutionary Origin and Play a Conserved Role in Patterning the Axon Initial Segment
In vertebrate neurons, the axon initial segment (AIS) is specialized for action potential initiation. It is organized by a giant 480 Kd variant of ankyrin G (AnkG) that serves as an anchor for ion channels and is required for a plasma membrane diffusion barrier that excludes somatodendritic proteins from the axon. An unusually long exon required to encode this 480Kd variant is thought to have been inserted only recently during vertebrate evolution, so the giant ankyrin-based AIS scaffold has been viewed as a vertebrate adaptation for fast, precise signaling. We re-examined AIS evolution through phylogenomic analysis of ankyrins and by testing the role of ankyrins in proximal axon organization in a model multipolar Drosophila neuron (ddaE). We find giant isoforms of ankyrin in all major bilaterian phyla, and present evidence in favor of a single common origin for giant ankyrins and the corresponding long exon in a bilaterian ancestor. This finding raises the question of whether giant ankyrin isoforms play a conserved role in AIS organization throughout the Bilateria. We examined this possibility by looking for conserved ankyrin-dependent AIS features in Drosophila ddaE neurons via live imaging. We found that ddaE neurons have an axonal diffusion barrier proximal to the cell body that requires a giant isoform of the neuronal ankyrin Ank2. Furthermore, the potassium channel shal concentrates in the proximal axon in an Ank2-dependent manner. Our results indicate that the giant ankyrin-based cytoskeleton of the AIS may have evolved prior to the radiation of extant bilaterian lineages, much earlier than previously thought.
“Bilaterian Giant Ankyrins Have a Common Evolutionary Origin and Play a Conserved Role in Patterning the Axon Initial Segment” Timothy Jegla, Michelle M. Nguyen, Chengye Feng, Daniel J. Goetschius, Esteban Luna, Damian B. van Rossum, Bishoy Kamel, Aditya Pisupati, Elliott S. Milner, and Melissa M. Rolls in PLOS Genetics. Published online December 2 2016 doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1006457
Feel free to share this Neuroscience News.First up from the God Machine this week is a second look at the Republicans’ presidential debate on Thursday night, with a specific focus on matters of faith.
In his opening remarks, for example, Ted Cruz noted that Iowans “have welcomed my dad to preach at your churches.” As Time magazine explained, Marco Rubio was far less subtle.
When asked to explain how is trailing Donald Trump in the polls despite being hailed as the “Republican savior” by TIME Magazine, Rubio cited a savior he feels trumps them all. “Let me be clear about one thing, there’s only one savior and it’s not me,” he said. “It’s Jesus Christ who came down to Earth and died for our sins.”
As if that weren’t quite enough, Rubio made multiple additional references to “Judeo-Christian values,” his own personal faith, and the senator’s closing statement was devoted to his belief that the Bible “commands us to let our light shine on the world.” The Florida senator also made four separate references to the word “apocalypse,” a word that carries its own theological significance.
At other points in the debate, Cruz talked about energy policy by saying, “I think God has blessed this country with enormous natural resources, and we should pursue all of the above”; Rand Paul referenced British theologian Os Guinness; and John Kasich said in reference to mental-health treatment, “When I study Scripture, I know that people who live in the shadows need to have a chance.”
There’s no great mystery here. As Time’s report added, “nearly 60% of caucus-goers in 2012 identified as born-again or evangelical Christians.”
Whether Iowa Republicans appreciated the faith-based politicking or got annoyed by ham-handed religious pandering will become clearer in a couple of days.
Also from the God Machine this week:
* Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders talked to the Washington Post in some detail about his religious beliefs this week. Among other things, the senator said, “I think everyone believes in God in their own ways. To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”
This seems like the wrong call: “Late [Monday] afternoon, a federal judge in Kentucky ruled that creationist Ken Ham’s controversial ‘Ark Park’ has a legal and constitutional right to receive a package of tax incentives from the state and, thus, the taxpayers.” (For more background on this story, check our previous coverage.)
* Unexpected Netflix news : “Alongside programs like ‘Orange Is the New Black’ and ‘House of Cards, Netflix now offers users another type of content: Christian sermons. The online video streaming service added lectures by four popular Christian pastors in early December. ‘I believe if Jesus were on planet Earth today in the flesh he’d be on Netflix,’ said Ed Young, one of the pastors, in a phone interview.”
* Ohio state House leaders seem to like invocations, but they prefer to keep things brief : “The names “God” and the “Lord” naturally come up in prayers to open government meetings, though often in nonsectarian ways. Then there was ‘Jesus,’ cited by name seven times and even more by inference in the Ohio Statehouse this week. ‘Jesus’ might have been mentioned even more times, had Ohio House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger not cut off a guest minister, Pastor B.J. VanAman of the Pickerington Baptist Temple. The pastor appeared to test the leader’s patience, and well as that of some other lawmakers, with a prayer lasting beyond five minutes” (thanks to my colleague Will Femia for the heads-up).Amid the uproar over the Qubeir killings, the fourth massacre in Syria in two weeks, multiple clashes flared in other Syrian locales on Friday, including Damascus neighborhoods close to the center of the capital.
International efforts to find a way out of the Syrian crisis intensified in Washington, where Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, an outspoken opponent of President Assad, met privately with Kofi Annan, the special envoy of the United Nations and Arab League. Mr. Annan, whose peace plan that placed the monitors in Syria is widely considered a failure, has insisted the plan can work if the big powers put more pressure on Mr. Assad.
Antigovernment activists who first reported the Qubeir mass killings on Wednesday night, which they blamed on government troops and plainclothes militiamen known as shabiha, said that as many as 78 people, half of them women and children, were slaughtered in the hamlet, a clutch of low-lying farmhouses with a population of 130 amid cornfields about 20 miles from the city of Hama.
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But Ms. Ghosheh, the spokeswoman, who accompanied the monitors, said the number and names of the victims had not been confirmed, the community was empty of residents, and “thus the observers were not able to talk to anyone who witnessed Wednesday’s horrific tragedy.”
She said it would take time to sort out conflicting information from residents of neighboring villages. “We need to go back, cross-reference what we have heard and check the names they say were killed, check the names they say are missing,” she said.
The monitoring team’s Qubeir video shows smoke outside homes, a large hole from an artillery shell, interior wreckage and bullet scarring, a bloodstained mattress, a congealed pool of blood and an unidentified man from a neighboring village holding a sheet with the remains of human flesh. Another unidentified man is seen pointing to a framed portrait, then breaking down in tears.
A third man is seen saying in Arabic: “Young children, infants, my brother, his wife and seven children, the eldest only sixth grade, all dead. I will show you the blood. They burned his house.”
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A few foreign journalists who were permitted to travel with the monitoring team also reported evidence of multiple killings and signs of attempts to hide the bloodshed. A BBC correspondent, Paul Danahar, said that neighboring villagers who approached the monitors blamed the shabiha for the killings, and that they said the militiamen trucked the bodies away. Another villager said sticks had been used to kill children.
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“This has basically been a scorched-earth policy by whoever this was; they’ve killed the people, they’ve killed the livestock, they’ve left nothing in the village alive,” Mr. Danahar said in an audio recording posted on the BBC News Web site. He called it “an appalling scene.”
In one house, he said in his reporting, he saw “pieces of people’s brains on the floor.”
“There is a tablecloth covered in blood and flesh,” he continued, “and in the corner, the blood has been pushed into a pile by someone trying to clean it up and, frankly, giving up because there’s simply too much of it.”
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The official Syrian account of what happened in Qubeir was starkly different. A report on the Syrian Arab News Agency Web site quoted witnesses as saying that terrorist groups, the government’s euphemism for the opposition, had attacked Qubeir with rocket launchers and machine guns, nine people had been killed, and the military and law enforcement authorities had been called in to protect the hamlet.
The report criticized unidentified “bloody satellite channels which are counterfeiting the truth to serve their interests,” an apparent reference to CNN, Al Jazeera and others carrying opposition accounts of the killings.
The Friday mayhem elsewhere in Syria included clashes between troops and activists in at least one restive district of Damascus, where explosions could be heard. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British group with a network of informants in Syria, reported clashes in at least three Damascus neighborhoods, while in Homs, a center of antigovernment sentiment, the group reported “the most violent shelling” it had seen since the anti-Assad uprising began.
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Some experts on Syria have described the Qubeir killings as part of a new stage in the conflict that has crossed dangerously into sectarian hatreds, fomented by Mr. Assad’s government, a situation for which efforts like Mr. Annan’s peace plan are too late.
“We’ve reached the point of no return,” said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar and a former United Nations official. “Diplomacy has not kept up with the reality on the ground.”
Mohamed A. Alsiadi, a Syrian émigré who is the coordinator of the Arabic Language and Cultural Studies Program at Fordham University in New York, said that he had never had much faith in Mr. Annan’s peace plan, and that the Qubeir killings proved his skepticism. “Assad is very smart,” Mr. Alsiadi said. “He knows when to put pressure, ease pressure. They’re playing games with us.”
Mr. Annan, who spoke briefly with reporters in Washington before meeting with Mrs. Clinton, has fended off criticism that his plan cannot work and that the Syrian president has never intended to honor it.
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“Some say the plan may be dead,” he said. “Is the problem the plan or the problem is implementation? If it’s implementation, how do we get action on that? And if it’s the plan, what other options do we have?”Controlling the weather with cloud seeding has previously proved popular with Chinese and Russian officials, but Moscow's mayor does not seem content with just keeping the rain off his roofs. Now Mayor Yury Luzhkov has hired the cash-strapped Russian Air Force to chemically spray clouds so that no snow will fall within his city limits.
Moscow already keeps the Russian Air Force on hire to prevent rain during parades on Victory Day in May and City Day in September. Time Magazine reports that the city easily coughs up $2 to $3 million for the convenience out of its $40 billion budget.
The Air Force arsenal for spraying the clouds includes cement powder, dry ice and silver iodide. Moscow residents can only hope that there's no repeat of an incident that happened in June 2008, when Reuters reported that a Russian cargo plane accidentally dropped a 55-pound bag of cement through a suburban home's roof.
This latest scheme represents only the latest development in Russia's love-hate relationship with winter weather. Moscow residents typically trudge through the snow from November to March, but the harsh winters have historically proved handy at least twice in freezing invaders in their tracks: Napoleon's Grand Armee and Hitler's Panzers each eventually ground to a halt.
So far Luzhkov has touted the benefits of his snow-stop plan for both city residents and farmers outside the city who would receive additional moisture. But suburban residents have begun lodging protests and concerns.
If the idea sounds somewhat extreme, just keep in mind that Russia has no monopoly on wacky schemes -- see the latest geoengineering scheme to reduce hurricanes, courtesy of a certain U.S. billionaire.
[Time Magazine via Yahoo News]Sylvain Jean Lefebvre (born October 14, 1967) is a retired ice hockey defenceman who played on five National Hockey League teams from 1989 to 2003. In 2012, he became the head coach of the Hamilton Bulldogs in the American Hockey League, the Montreal Canadiens' AHL affiliate. He remained with the Canadiens' owned AHL franchise as head coach when it moved to become the St. John's IceCaps in 2015 and the Laval Rocket in 2017.
Playing career [ edit ]
Sylvain Lefebvre signed with the Montreal Canadiens in 1986 and made the team's roster in 1989–90 as an undrafted free agent. He played three seasons with the Habs before being traded to the Toronto Maple Leafs in exchange for a third round draft pick prior to the start of the 1992–93 season. Lefebvre played two seasons with the Leafs before being traded to the Quebec Nordiques as part of the Wendel Clark-Mats Sundin trade on June 28, 1994. Lefebvre played the next five seasons with the Quebec Nordiques/Colorado Avalanche before signing a four-year, $10-million US contract with the New York Rangers that secured a club-option for him to play a fifth season at $3 million in the 1999 off-season. Lefebvre's productivity decreased after several injuries, including a shattered index finger which occurred while blocking a shot. The doctor compared the injury to taking a hammer and hitting his finger until the bone is shattered into little pieces. Lefebvre's career low came in the 2002–03 season. After four years with the Rangers, Lefebvre left the NHL and decided to join old friend Sebastien Bordeleau for one season to play for the Swiss team SC Bern where he and his team won the cup. He retired shortly thereafter.
After winning the Stanley Cup with the Colorado Avalanche in 1996, Lefebvre was involved in an incident that attracted media attention. As part of tradition, each player on the Stanley Cup winning team can take personal possession of the trophy for a day during the summer following the championship, a practice that has led to several misadventures. When it was his turn, Lefebvre decided to have his daughter baptized in it.
Retirement and coaching career [ edit ]
Lefebvre was named as assistant coach of the American Hockey League's Lake Erie Monsters. On June 4, 2009, the Colorado Avalanche announced that Lefebvre would serve as an assistant coach.[1]
On June 13, 2012, Sylvain Lefebvre became the head coach of the Hamilton Bulldogs of the American Hockey League, the Montreal Canadiens' affiliate. The Canadiens purchased and relocated the Bulldogs to become the second iteration of the St. John's IceCaps in 2015, keeping Lefebvre as head coach of their affiliate.[2] In 2017, the Canadiens' AHL franchise was again relocated, becoming the Laval Rocket, taking Lefebvre with the team.[3] After one season in Laval and finishing with the worst record in the AHL during the 2017–18 season, Lefebvre was released immediately upon the conclusion of the season.[4]
Career statistics [ edit ]I was a Clinton supporter. I'm now an Obama supporter. My message to Clinton supporters who are still pondering whether to support Obama; get over it, and get off the fence.
All across America Clinton supporters are licking their wounds. In Los Angeles, New York and Washington I have talked to prominent Clinton fundraisers and operatives who have told me they need a period of reflection before they can decide whether to support Obama. Some feel that Senator Clinton wasn't treated fairly. Others cite vague concerns about Obama's economic or security policy. A handful say they "just aren't sure" they can support Obama without bothering to explain why.
A peculiar self-pity has set in among Clinton supporters -- a phenomenon that threatens Barack Obama's election as president.
On a conference call with reporters this week the President of EMILY's List (a group that supports female candidates) summarized the emotional state of some Clinton supporters saying "those of us who supported Hillary go through a process of dealing with our many emotions of disappointment and sadness and some anger," she went on to say that this "the election is not today. We've got five months."
But we don't have five months. John McCain has already dispatched Carly Fiorina, the former head of Hewlett Packard (who as fired by her board of directors for the company's terrible performance in 2005) in an effort to take advantage of the sad emotional state of Clinton supporters and work to bring them to the other side.
McCain's campaign plans to hold a "Virtual Town Hall" this Saturday and has specifically said it is designed to reach out to Democrats and Independents. The McCain campaigns press release on the event even said "Many town hall participants are expected to be former supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton's campaign."
If Clinton supporters continue to feel sorry for themselves and wonder what might have been they will hand the White House to John McCain -- not the independent John McCain of ten years ago but the John McCain who promises a Bush-style economic policy, Bush-style foreign policy and Bush approach to appointing justices to the Supreme Court.
If you want the Bush tax cuts to be permanent, American troops to stay in Iraq for many years to come, Roe v. Wade to be overturned and Bush's legacy to also be America's future -- McCain's your man.
I was lucky enough to serve President Clinton, traveling across the country and around the world proudly promoting him and his policies. I have worked with his foundation on AIDS in Africa and continue to work with him through the Clinton Global Initiative. I have also worked with Senator Clinton, who has been a passionate advocate of the issues that I care the most about. Throughout their lives, both Clintons have helped me personally in many ways -- and both have embodied the best of Democratic politics.
But the stakes are too high to sit around moping on their behalf. The next American president will have a profound impact on this nation -- and the world. Anyone and everyone who has hated what George Bush did to America must come together urgently to support Barack Obama...SWTOR Upcoming Items from Patch 4.4
A list and gallery of upcoming items from Patch 4.4. These items are part of Plunder’s Alliance Pack scheduled to be released on May 3, 2016.
Note: There isn’t much new stuff if you have already seen the Plunderer Pack preview. Only things new are the images for mounts/weapons.
HK-55 Inspired Ship Droid Customization (May Subscriber Reward)
M4-16 Astromech Droid Mini Pet (May 4th reward)
Armor
Fallen Defender’s Armor Set – Silver
Triumphant Predator’s Armor Set – Gold
Shadow Corsair’s Armor Set – Gold
Zakuulan Preserver’s Armor Set – Silver
Weapons
Artful Trickster’s Heavy Blaster – Silver
Knave’s Quick-handed Blaster Rifle – Silver
Plundered TC-16 Spewy (Assault Cannon) – Silver
Unstable Arbiter’s Dualsaber – Gold
Unstable Arbite’s Lightsaber- Gold
Mounts
Analog Load Lifter – Gold (Flourish)
Aratech Verdant – Silver
Corellian Stardrive Spark – Gold (Flourish)
Regal Tauntaun – Silver
Stormcrest Vorn Tiger – Gold
Misc
Creature Companion: Ginx – Gold
Advanced Fuchsia Color Crystal – Silver
Glittering Varactyl – Silver
Mossrankle Blurrg – SilverPublished in February / March 2007 issue of Chip Design Magazine Editor's note: Consumers Forget the Real Cost of Commodified Technology Recently, I offered to interview Cory Doctorow - famous sciencefiction writer and Guest of Honor at the OryCon28 Science Fiction conference (www.orycon.org/orycon28/). To get the interview going, I asked Cory about his latest work, a novel called ThemePunk (www.salon.com). "This novel is about an economic singularity that occurs when all business comes to an end because it becomes too cheap and easy to do amazing, revolutionary things with technology," explained Cory. "As a result - with nothing to invest in - the capital markets fall apart, particularly when you only need $1500 to start a business."
Cheap and easy? I'm not used to hearing those words - especially when dealing with the complexities of SoC design and manufacturing. So naturally, I protested: "But the creation of any newer technology - especially in high-tech electronics - requires millions and even billions of dollars in R&D, manufacturing, etc." Cory agreed, but noted that as the technology becomes commodified, it becomes cheaper and easier for the average person to use. He was a big fan of boutique logic, whereby the average, educated but non-technical person can create customized logic applications by using low-price/lowtech FPGAs and existing electronic modules. Such customized, low-priced apps are wonderfully displayed in such magazines as Make (www.makezine.com), for which Cory is a contributor.
That's all well and good for older technology. But on the bleeding edge, a lot of money and guts are needed to bring new things to market. I asked, "What about nanotechnology?" This revolutionary technology enables the creation of electronic and mechanical systems at the atomic level. Consider the promise of nanobots that can travel between cellular structures within the body. Isn't that the stuff of science fiction? Surprisingly, Cory simply noted that the promise of nano is to make things cheaper. "The whole idea is that it lowers production cost. If nano is expensive, it defeats the purpose."
On a certain level, that statement is true. As I noted, "the progression of Moore's Law seems relentless." In that sense, the surface goal of nano is to make products that are cheaper and smaller yet with even greater feature sets. But there's an up-front price to pay for those achievements - namely, expensive research, design, and manufacturing costs by a highly educated workforce. Only decades later - after that price has been paid - will the technology enter the "commoditized" phase of its life cycle.
Cory agreed, but suggested that perhaps the market doesn't bear the cost of that expense. Maybe vast amounts of highpriced R&D and technological developments actually become boutique operations happening in garages throughout the world. At this point in the interview, I realized that we were talking about two very different worlds. One was the world of Make or today's equivalent to yesteryear's Popular Mechanics. The other is the world of Create - technically rigorous magazines like the IEEE conference transactions or journals. One world uses commoditized, older technology. The other helps create the technology of tomorrow.
Personally, I enjoy both worlds. I live in the "boutique" logic world whenever I teach the wonders of engineering to high schoolers: Saturday Academy, (www.saturdayacademy.org) and nontechnical graduate students at Portland State University (www. cecs.pdx.edu/systems). That is also why I enjoy talking with the folks who use older technology to make new things, like Cory Doctorow and Joe Arnt ("Hardware Hacking Can Be Truly Fun," www.wsdmag.com/Articles/ArticleID/8335/8335.html).
But it is a mistake to imagine that commoditization doesn't come at a great price - one that is paid by the creative energies of dedicated engineers and scientists as well as the business and investment community. My concern is that U.S. consumers - who already consider technology professionals to be little more than geeks - will continue to carelessly consume technology without realizing that it comes at a price. That price must be paid through the funding of education, basic government-sponsored R&D, and incentives for companies to create new technologies. Judging by ongoing funding cuts in all of these critical areas, this is a price that today's consumers seem unwilling to pay.Data Vis: The Met's Art Collection
446,029 objects from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed by creation date.
The chart below is a representation of the data made available by The Metropolitan Museum of Art under their Open Access policy. The data was downloaded from GitHub.
The original data used over 1000 distinct classifications which I grouped into 36 wider classifications as best as my understanding of the classification names allowed.
The data provides a text description of each object's date as well as "start" and "end" dates which bookend the possible timeframe taking into account any inaccuracy of the date. So for an object described "early 7th-mid 7th century BC" the start and end dates are -675 and -650.
For an object with a range of possible creation dates this visualisation distributes the object across the full range. So an article made between 1840 and 1850 is distributed as 1/11 of an object for each year in the range 1840-1850 inclusive. This is why some years are shown as having only fractions of an item.A new poll shows that a majority of Democrats believe that Russia actually fudged with the 2016 vote tallies, a belief that is clearly false.
The poll, conducted by The Economist/YouGov, asked voters if they thought the statement that "Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President" was true. Among Democrats, a total of 55% said it was "probably true" or "definitely true" while only 44% said it "probably not true" or "definitely not true."
Self-identified liberals were split on the matter: 50% said it was true, 49% said it wasn't. 53% of those who said they voted for Hillary Clinton in November believed that Russia messed with the votes while 46% did not think so.
On the other hand, a majority of Independents didn't think that Russia tampered with the voting numbers, 68% to 31%. Obviously, the vast majority of Republicans didn't think so either, 85% to 16%.
Voters as a whole rejected the conspiracy theory, 65% to 35%. Clearly, the majority of that 35% are Democrats.
The Democrats are believing in something that flies in face of testimony from government officials who have said under oath before Congress that there is zero evidence to suggest that Russia modified the voting tallies. Here is a rundown of them:
James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence in January: "They [Russia] did not change any vote tallies or anything of that sort."
Mike Rogers, NSA Director on if he had any evidence of Russian vote tampering in March: "No, I do not."
James Comey, then-FBI director on if he had any evidence of Russian vote tampering in March: "No."
Unfortunately, such basic facts seem to go by the wayside in an era of hyper-partisan, tribalistic politics. It is easier for the Democrats to believe that Russia cheated them out of an election than for them to face the truth that Hillary Clinton was such an awful candidate that even Donald Trump was able to beat her in the election.
The poll was taken from May 13 to 16 and had a margin of error of 3.2%.
Read the full results of the poll here.
H/T: Media Research Center
Follow Aaron Bandler on Twitter.Jemele Hill, an ESPN commentator, made more controversial remarks to her Twitter page Monday
ESPN's Jemele Hill is under fire once again for her controversial comments.
The SportsCenter co-host has been slammed for describing President Trump as 'a white supremacist' in a post on her Twitter page.
The sports commentator ignited the social media tirade Monday during a conversation regarding 'racist' singer Kid Rock's potential Senate run.
Hill transferred the conversation over to the President, writing in fiery tweets: 'Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists,' Hill said.
'The height of white privilege is being able to ignore his white supremacy, because it's of no threat to you. Well, it's a threat to me.
'Trump is the most ignorant, offensive president of my lifetime. His rise is a direct result of white supremacy. Period,' she added, alongside a message calling him a 'bigot' after.
'He is unqualified and unfit to be president. He is not a leader. And if he were not white, he never would have been elected.'
The comments, which have since been taken down, received backlash and praise.
Hill called President Trump 'a white supremacist' in the social media rant
She said Trump is 'unqualified and 'unfit' for the role presidency
The comments, which have since been deleted, received backlash and praise
ESPN PR addressed the comments on Tuesday as 'inappropriate'
ESPN PR addressed the matter Tuesday afternoon, citing the remarks were 'inappropriate,' uncalled for, and not a reflection of the network's views as a whole.
In the Twitter statement, ESPN wrote: 'The comments on Twitter Jemele Hill regarding the president do not represent the position of ESPN. We have addressed this with Jemele and she recognizes her actions were inappropriate.'
Just weeks ago, Hill was slammed for comparing police officers to the'slave patrols' that enforced discipline on pre-Civil War plantations.
Hill made the remarks in late July on Twitter again, echoing comments made by the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick.
Hill was lamenting that Kaepernick, who has struggled to find a new contract after making repeated headlines for his protests against the treatment of non-whites, had not been signed by the Baltimore Ravens.
The Ravens, looking for a passer after quarterback Joe Flacco suffered a back injury, instead signed complete unknown David Olson, who completed three passes in college and most recently played arena football in Kansas City.
Hill made more remarks in late July on Twitter, echoing comments made by the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick
Hill lamented that Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, had not been signed by the Baltimore Ravens or any other team after turning free agent
Kaepernick (number seven) courted controversy last season by refusing to stand for The Star-Spangled Banner before NFL games, and has struggled to find a new contract in the off-season
'Oh and ICYMI, the Ravens signed a dude who quit football to be a realtor and played in 2 games in college over a Super Bowl QB,' Hill tweeted, referring to Kaepernick's starting quarterback role in the 2013 season, in which the 49ers lost the Super Bowl to the Seattle Seahawks.
'I feel like it's been forgotten that he basically called (all) cops'slave patrol.' I mean, that's pretty inflammatory,' responded Nathanael Johnson, offering a possible rationale for the Raven's decision.
In June, Kaepernick, responding to the jury verdict that acquitted the police officer who shot Philando Castile, posted a picture that showed similarly shaped badges reading 'Runaway Slave Patrol' and 'Police Officer'.
Slave patrols were groups of white men who used force and violence to impose discipline on the black slave populations of antebellum plantations in the southern states.
Hill said the comparison of police to'slave patrols' was 'inflammatory, but historically accurate'
In June, Kaepernick posted this tweet responding to the jury verdict that acquitted the police officer who shot Philando Castile
'Inflammatory, but historically accurate,' Hill responded to Johnson's comment, endorsing the comparison.
Johnson replied: 'There's historically truth there, yes... but is it fair to say now to all the cops, esp when many minorities serve?'
Amid subscriber losses, ESPN has increasingly been accused of pushing a 'liberal' political agenda, accusations Hill has often been at the center of.
She responded to these claims at a June conference in Manhattan.
Hill has responded to claims that ESPN is increasingly pushing a 'liberal' political agenda
'Sports have always been political,' Hill said in remarks reported by Yahoo Finance.
Hill said that athletes often push political agendas, 'dragging' sports journalists who cover them along with them.
She also implied that complaints over the alleged liberal bent were really racist sentiment in disguise.
'As you see more ethnic diversity, then all of a sudden ESPN is too liberal,' she said. 'So I wonder, when people say that, what they're really saying.'In the early part of the 20 century, people around the world were consuming most fruits and vegetables with the peel intact, be it guava, apple, mango, banana or vegetables. But today, many of us strongly believe that it is unsafe to eat fruits without peeling off the skin. However, there are some among us even today who like to eat fruits with peel but fear doing so since we know that fruits harbor a lot of dangerous pesticide residues and the wax coating on the surface! Is it good to peel or not to peel? The question here is what is best for us.
For those who believe that the skin is an inert envelope designed by nature to protect the fruits from external threats, it certainly seems logical to remove the peel before actually eating them. However, data gathered on the quality and composition of peel from several fruits and vegetables appear to dismiss such belief as baseless. Scores of reports appearing on the nutrient content in peel strongly affirm the fact that the peel and the layer immediately beneath it, are a veritable mine of highly essential nutrients and health-promoting phytochemicals, besides being an excellent source of natural fibre |
since March, a BBC investigation has found. Albinos are targeted for body parts that are used in witchcraft, and killings continue despite government efforts to stamp out the grisly practice, the BBC's Karen Allen says. Winifrida Rutahiro (2nd left) says she is now scared even to leave her house Once, albinos used to seek shelter from the sun. Now they have gone into hiding simply to survive, after a series of killings linked to witchcraft. In Tanzania, 25 albinos have been killed in the past year. The latest victim was a seven-month-old baby. He was mutilated on the orders of a witchdoctor peddling the belief that potions made from an albino's legs, hair, hands, and blood can make a person rich. Sorcery and the occult maintain a strong foothold in this part of the world, especially in the remote rural areas around the fishing and mining regions of Mwanza, on the shores of Lake Victoria. Nobody seems to know why the killings are happening now, but Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete is now putting pressure on the police to identify where albinos live and offer them protection. This is not an easy task when BBC investigations suggest that some police are being "bought off" in order to look away when such appalling crimes are committed. 'We want your legs' The last adult albino to be murdered - just a few weeks ago - was Nyerere Rutahiro. Nyerere Rutahiro's body was laid to rest in a cement-sealed grave He was eating dinner outside in his modest rural compound, when a gang of four strangers burst in, and threatened to arrest him. As his wife Susannah looked on helplessly, the men began to hack at Nyerere's arms and legs with machetes. "We want your legs," they shouted, "We want your legs," his wife recalls, still deeply traumatised by what she saw. Nyerere was clearly being targeted for being albino - but in every other respect he was an accepted part of his community. A father of two in his 50s, farming cassava - just like everybody else. His body was laid to rest in a cement-sealed grave to protect against grave robbers who often steal body parts of the dead to give to witchdoctors. A builder had been hired to do the job. Looking on as the funeral came to a close, is Nyerere's sister Winifrida. She too is albino. Terrified, she pulls her six year-old-son closer to her. Though he is black (the gene that causes albinism is a recessive gene), he too is vulnerable. It is all too clear what is going through Winifrida's mind. Will they come for her next? Squinting her pale eyes against the midday sun, Winifrida whispers in a barely audible voice: "Please, ask the government to take me away from here, I dare not come out of the house since my brother was killed." BBC investigation This is the work of organised gangs, according to Tanzanian police in the commercial capital Dar es Salaam. When Amina was born my husband and the older two children moved away. They were so ashamed and thought Amina would bring us bad luck... but I am not leaving her
Ashura, mother of nine-year-old albino Amina Have Your Say
Witchdoctors, middlemen and the clients who pay for albino body parts are among the 173 people in custody so far for these macabre killings. None has been prosecuted. The BBC sought to investigate how sorcerers' tales of albinos are being channelled into gruesome crimes. An intermediary posing as a "client" with mining and fishing interests seeking to get rich quick, visited a prominent witchdoctor on our behalf at dusk. They were told that albino body parts could be obtained without difficulty, for a price. The police are now investigating these claims. Since then, a seven-month-old albino baby was killed nearby. Ostracised The sad reality is that albinos who can afford it, are now flocking to urban centres where they feel a little more safe. And nowhere is it considered more safe than at the Ocean Cancer Institute in Dar es Salaam - where so many of them come to get treatment for the skin and eye conditions that albinos often fall prey to. Away from the wards, under the shade of a mango tree, a black woman sits with her albino daughter. Ashura and Amina, her angelic looking nine-year-old. They may seem an odd couple at first, but the firm eyes of the mother reveals a woman deeply protective of her child. She is a woman who looks older than her years. Ashura and Amina now live on their own, ostracised by the rest of their family. "When Amina was born my husband and the older two children moved away," recounts Ashura. "They were so ashamed and thought Amina would bring us bad luck... but I am not leaving her... she's my daughter." Every parent nurturing an albino child has good reason to be frightened in today's Tanzania. The stories of youngsters being snatched from their parents' arms or attacked on the way to school are - quite frankly - horrific. Albino MP Albinism affects one in 20,000 people worldwide, but in Tanzania the prevalence appears to be much higher. Al-Shymaa Kway-Geer (right) is a former airline clerk The Albino Association of Tanzania says that although just 4,000 albinos are officially registered in the country, they believe the actual number could be as high as 173,000. A census is now under way to try to verify the figures. Demonised by the ignorant, prized by the superstitious, albinos are now getting organised in urban centres - putting their trust in Tanzania's first albino MP. Al-Shymaa Kway-Geer is an impressive woman, who was nominated by the Tanzanian president to give the albino community a voice. Not only is she trying to lobby for subsidies to assist her community for the medical treatment they invariably need as a result of their albinism, but she aims to lead by example. "When I used to go out, people called me zeru zeru (the derogatory term for albino). They used to chase me, follow me, but now I am someone, they call me honourable, the term we use for politicians," Mrs Kway-Geer says. Understandably, she is distressed and baffled by the recent spate of albino killings which do not appear to be replicated among Tanzania's neighbours. But she hopes that by standing up and being counted as possibly the world's first albino lawmaker, the rest of Tanzanian society will start to care.
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StumbleUpon What are these?I've accepted an invitation to do a question and answer session at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, DC on Thursday, February 6, 2014.I've been told anything related to the Council on Foreign Relations tickle's peoples Grand Conspiracy buttons, so I thought it would be best to be open about exactly what will happen. I hope it doesn't spark as long a thread as my visit to the CIA, but Bitcoin is a lot bigger than when I visited the CIA...Anyway, here's the invitation I received:The format of the event will be a 90-minute question&answer session, moderated by somebody yet-to-be-determined. It will be "on the record," meaning press could be invited to attend and recordings and/or transcripts may be posted on CFR's website.The audience will be CFR members and invited guests (and maybe press); it is not open to the public. I am not getting paid by the CFR.
On behalf of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), I write to invite you to speak to our Washington-based members as part of our Voices of the Next Generation series. This program seeks to bring together our members with fresh, young voices in the nations foreign policy discourse. Given your work with BitCoin, you would be an important addition to the series. In the past, the Voices of the Next Generation series has featured Esther Duflo, Abdul Latif Jameel professor of poverty alleviation and development economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ayman Mohyeldin, Middle East correspondent, Al-Jazeera English, and Jennifer Pahlka, founder and executive director, Code for America.CFR is a nonpartisan national membership organization and think tank, as well as the publisher of Foreign Affairs. Among our members are many past and present U.S. presidents, secretaries of state, defense, and treasury, as well as other senior U.S. government officials, renowned scholars, and major leaders of American business, media, and nongovernmental groups.
I've accepted an invitation to do a question and answer session at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, DC on Thursday, February 6, 2014.I've been told anything related to the Council on Foreign Relations tickle's peoples Grand Conspiracy buttons, so I thought it would be best to be open about exactly what will happen. I hope it doesn't spark as long a thread as my visit to the CIA, but Bitcoin is a lot bigger than when I visited the CIA...
One of the greatest intellectuals of the United States, Noam Chomsky, has some interesting things to say how forums such as the CFR operate: "The Council on Foreign Relations is essentially the business input to foreign policy plainning." [1] As far as I can tell inside the US Chomsky is seen as a conspiracy theorist or left-wing nut (which would be certainly the view inside of circles such as the CFR). But the view outside of the US is quite different. What I would like to see is the cryptocurrency system becoming more international. The foundation claims that bitcoin is "non-political online money", which is really absurd if one thinks about it.[1] http://www.chomsky.info/talks/19850319.htmAt the end of 2012, Richard Dawkins met with Mehdi Hasan to discuss religion as a force for good or evil, and if religion can coexist with science, at Oxford Union. During the talk, Hasan was asked if he believed that the Prophet Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse, in reference to al-‘Isrā’ wal-Mi’rāj. His answer was yes, and you cannot prove he didn’t. I wanted to address this answer, because it seems to be the argument from people from the three major religions, that their ‘miracles’ are believable, and thus, rational, because Atheists are unable to prove that they didn’t happen. Moses parted the sea, we can’t prove he didn’t. Jesus returned from the dead. We can’t prove he didn’t. Noah managed to fit millions of species into his boat. We can’t prove he didn’t. The Prophet flew 700 miles on a winged horse named al-Buraq (though, this detail is not mentioned in the Qur’an, but in later Hadith) and up to heaven from Jerusalem, met Jesus, Adam, Abraham, and Moses, all in one night. We can’t prove he didn’t. And so to believers, this suggests that if we can’t definitively prove he didn’t, it somehow increases the probability that it happened, to “checkmate Atheists!”. I find this a uniquely unintelligible position to hold.
Firstly, I wanted to discuss what I believe to be the motive behind Sura 17 of the Qur’an that briefly mentions the Night Journey. As noted in my previous article, the oldest Qur’anic text we currently have – Sana’a manuscript – dates back to the rule of fifth Uyammad Caliph, Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan. I have come to the conclusion that Abd al-Malik was an exceptionally gifted ruler and political genius. The foundations of the Islam we know in the 21st Century, can be traced back to him. The legends around the Prophet Muhammad, can be dated back to him. The bringing together of tradition, state power, dynasty legacy, and religion, can be dated back to him. He knew how to secure an empire. He was a master of PR. Muhammad’s name was used to strengthen Abd al-Malik’s position as Caliph. One of his most impressive shows of power and wealth, can be seen with the Dome of the Rock and the ‘expansion’ of Al-Aqsa Mosque. The importance of this project cannot be underestimated. It’s placement – in the centre of Jewish Jerusalem, and towering above the Church of the Sepulcher – was a show of power. In a single architectural blow, al-Malik had overpowered thousands of years of Jewish and Christian history, in their most Holy of places, and designated himself and his dynasty as its successor. The winged horse, the flight, is irrelevant. The point was the importance of Jerusalem.
To link the Prophet – who never stepped foot in Jerusalem – to Jerusalem, al-Malik needed to be creative, and to send out a powerful message that this city now belonged to the new empire, and the new dynasty. The first step, was to create the most impressive architectural marvel; the Dome. Now, he needed to link this to the new religion that would be the centrepiece of the new empire (religion and empire were intrinsically linked, this wasn’t lost on al-Malik). But there was no obvious link at first. Afterall, the Qur’an names the spot that the Prophet flew to as “the furthest place of worship“, not Jerusalem. There is no reason to suspect the Qur’an meant Jerusalem. Al-Aqsa mosque was not built during Muhammad’s life time. There was no mosque in Jerusalem at this time. The myth must have developed later (though some Muslim writers have found elaborately creative ways to get around this glaring mistake). And so, It will not come as a surprise to you, that the Mosque in Jerusalem, was built by the Uyammad’s, just as a narrative was developing. And so we see attempts from that era, to link the Ka’bah in Mecca, to Jerusalem. To do so, creates a city of Islam out of the city of Jerusalem.
There are two possibilities: Firstly, Muhammad flew on a winged animal, to the middle of Jerusalem, and then up to heaven, which he did either by passing through a portal to another dimension, or… there is a physical place called Heaven somewhere in the universe…. he then met with the obvious characters from the Biblical and Jewish narratives (coincidentally), and then came back (we can discount the spiritual interpretation, because Hasan is quite clear that he believes the Prophet DID fly to Jerusalem and then to heaven). He passed this story on, which continued to be passed on word for word, until the Qur’an was written down, and further discussed in Hadith.
Or secondly, it is all myth. And it started around the time we’d expect, given the PR effort the Umayyads were making to secure their dynasty by appealing to the earlier history of the Arab surge out of Mecca, in an attempt to forge an imperial identity.
I’m inclined to go along with the latter, and I say this because it is the only rational position one could possibly adopt, after studying the evidence, and weighing the probability of the two options. To believe the former, you dismiss the latter, and by doing so you must conclude that the laws of physics are in fact, not laws after all. They can be broken. You also have to decide whether ‘heaven’ is a supernatural realm, in which case al-Buraq managed to pass through a magic portal to get there, or ‘heaven’ is in the universe somewhere, in which case, where? How fast must the winged horse travel to get there? Either way, you see there might be trouble with the finer details of your story. If you chose to believe the story of the night journey, you have a lot of evidence building to do in order to destroy the very foundations of all science. I look forward to your thesis.
Indeed, belief in the validity of al-‘Isrā’ wal-Mi’rāj, means that the work of thousands of wonderful scientists, those who laid the foundations of our understanding of physical universal principles, must be wrong. That their work, built upon by thousands more well established, peer reviewed scientists from across the planet, repeated experiment, with centuries of thorough investigation and intense calculations and evidence building; must be wrong. To suggest that these principles that have been slugged out over centuries to give us a firm understanding of the way the universe works, are all actually wrong, requires more evidence than simply “well, you can’t say that he didn’t“. To believe it to be true, means you directly contradict, and in fact, dismiss, all known phsyical properties of the universe. You cannot claim reason, after abandoning reason.
The two positions; that of “he did fly to heaven“, and “he didn’t fly to heaven“, do not have equal weight. The evidence is weighed heavily in favour of science. It is true, I cannot prove beyond any doubt, that the Prophet Muhammad didn’t fly on a winged animal, to heaven. I wasn’t there. But I can make an educated guess, using what we know of the universe and the laws it operates under, because we have nothing to suggest those laws are untrue in any way. Even if suddenly evidence were provided to suggest that universal principles can be broken, we would then need to provide evidence that they were indeed broken on that particular day. A suggestion, in an 8th Century book is not evidence. It is no more evidence, than if I were to write down that I have an invisible monkey that flies me to the moon every Sunday. And it requires of me than just “You can’t prove otherwise.”
If I am to contradict & dismiss absolutely everything we know about the fundamental workings of the universe, then the burden of proof is on me to show that it is at least possible first, and then to show that it did happen as I say it did. As far as I am aware, no religious “miracle” has so far destroyed the foundations of modern science in that way. This includes the night journey.
Hasan asked Dawkins:
“Do you regard them all [people who believe in God and the supernatural] as intellectually inferior to you?”
– But I Think Hasan has the question the wrong way round. It seems to me, if you’re willing to so flippantly and easily believe a story that contradicts and disregards extensive research, studies, evidence of all those who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of understanding of the laws of the universe, and forcefully squeeze your book of unsubstantiated myths and legends, without any evidence to back up what any of it says; you’re the one who believes yourself to be intellectually superior, not just to the person you’re talking to, but to the entire scientific community. Hasan says “I’m willing to say, I can’t prove that he did“. This is irrelevant. If you’re a Muslim, you believe that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged animal, because the Qur’an and Hadith say so. You therefore believe it more probable than not, which in turn means you believe all scientists to be mistaken. This is a sense of intellectual superiority on an extreme level. Dawkins is simply reflecting the work of thousands of scientists – including many incredible Islamic scientists – when he suggests that the Prophet did not fly to heaven on a winged animal. This isn’t about what Professor Dawkins believes, it’s about what science has taught us. Belief of one Professor is irrelevant.
It seems more probable to me that the universal physical laws, which have never been observably broken, and show no reason to believe they ever will be; were not suspended to allow a man to fly around on winged animal that can either break the speed of light, or can travel between dimensions. It seems far more probable that the story of the night journey was created to provide more strength to a brilliant dynasty that had become obsessed with creating a narrative to justify its power. Thus, staking their claim over Jerusalem. Then came coins, huge stunningly crafted buildings of wealth and prestige in politically important places, patronage of great artists and poets, the centralisation of power into a more bureaucratic state, the nationalisation of Arabic as the language of Empire, and a need to link all of this back to the man that was – undoubtedly – considered the hero of the Arabs in the 7th Century, Muhammad. This all happened at the same time, for the same purpose. This isn’t coincidence. This is design. This is Abd al-Malik’s, and his sons design. The night journey conforms to that design perfectly. It is therefore more probable that the night journey is a myth, for reasons stated above, than it is probable that the physical order of the universe be broken.
The discussion between Dawkins and Hasan at Oxford Union can be seen here.
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Like this: Like Loading...It hasn’t been exactly smooth sailing for ABC’s Inhumans show. Meant to be a tentpole event for IMAX and Marvel Television, MCU fans were worried for the project after Netflix’s Iron Fist, which shares a showrunner in writer Scott Buck, became the first MCU property to be greeted mostly with negative reviews. Leaked set photos, a cast photo, and two trailers didn’t garner much enthusiasm, with fans citing the costumes, visual design, and dialogue. With the first two episodes of Inhumans getting closer to their September 1st IMAX debut, we have the first word on how the show is.
The folks at SpoilerTV received screeners for many of the new Fall television shows, and the website organized their writers’ hot takes for these pilots and episodes onto a convenient chart. Just today they added a single reaction to Inhumans, and well, it’s not very positive.
Simply awful. I’m so disappointed since I generally love everything Marvel does. But this is absolutely terrible. The dialogue is atrocious. The fight sequences are shockingly choreographed. The sets (or more-so the obvious green-screen) aren’t that crash hot either. It’s only saving grace is Lockjaw who is adorable. As one of the few people that actually liked Iron Fist, I can easily say that this is Scott Buck’s worst work yet. (Tyler | 8/3/2017)
This writer scores Inhumans a 3 out of a possible 10. Ouch. This brief write-up isn’t much of a full review, but its specific points overlap with concerns that MCU fans had from the show’s promotional material. If there’s any doubt to the validity of this snap-judgement, Redditor /u/magikarpcatcher posted the following screencap to /r/marvelstudios on Thursday, confirming that ABC is allowing press to view these screenings:
This redditor didn’t have too much to say about the episode (notice the all-caps text “NOT FOR REVIEW”), only briefly stating that Medusa’s hair “doesn’t actually look bad” and that they “couldn’t take Maximus seriously for some reason.” Not as scathing, but certainly not a ringing endorsement.
The team behind Inhumans are still hard at work on putting the show together, and this screening likely represents a work-in-progress. But the clock is ticking, and ravenous comic book fans still await to see the results. Hopefully we’ll have more reactions on Twitter and official reviews from publications closer to the IMAX premiere date. The parties involved (Marvel TV, ABC, IMAX, Jeph Loeb, Scott Buck) have much at stake, and I’m sure that they want to avoid another Iron Fist-esque snafu. Admittedly, it doesn’t inspire much confidence when Young Sheldon seems to be getting higher marks.
What do you think of these first reactions to Inhumans? Are you planning to go out and see it regardless?
Source: SpoilerTV...Yep, Garrus is my main LI.SO:Probably Spoilers.Read while applying vast amounts of cynicism:Urght, spirits have mercy upon my soul. Why so many bitches want Garrus in ME3?1. Doctor Chloe Michel. I don't know what to say. She liked Garrus before ME3? It was a surprise for me. -> [link] edit: I know about that damned e-mail from ME2!2. Fem!Shep. Don't get me started. That bitch can have any man in the Normandy. NEXT!3. Tali... TALI?! Who in the holy fuck wrote that crap-scene? I'm so mad about that. After a sweet romance with Garrus, what do I hear? That he likes being used for his body. Ok Vakarian, next time I want your ass on a leash in bed with me. -> [link] 4. Eve... Hm... Nope, she's ok. Garrus can fuck half of Tuchanka in my opinion if he wants. Have fun Garrus.5. And maybe it's not Garrus fault? Maybe it's all women's fault. In the end he is so awesome the whole galaxy drools over him. Garrus, you're space wife is talking, stop looking so good! For fucking great justice.DAMNED SWAGGGGG.... Ggggg.... ghhrrr...(c) : BioWare0 Suspect shot by WSP troopers dies
SEATTLE - A man who threatened troopers with a knife on Interstate 5 Monday evening has died.
Arson and bomb squad detectives told KIRO 7 they removed a plastic jug of flammable liquid from the pickup truck driven by a suspect shot by troopers while he threatened them with a knife.
Related Headlines PHOTOS: Interstate 5 closed after shooting
A detective told KIRO 7 they are trying to piece together the suspect’s bizarre behavior in the moments before the confrontation.
Trooper Cliff Pratt said several drivers called 911 just before 7 p.m. when they noticed the man weaving in and out of heavy traffic on southbound I-5, over Seattle’s Ship Canal Bridge.
After the man stopped the pickup truck, witnesses saw the driver get out, set his truck on fire and then spray paint a large green circle on the bridge deck.
One driver saw it all happening from 10 feet away.
”I was shocked, I didn't believe -- is it really happening you know,” said Mathias Assafa, who watched from his parked car.
Pratt said the man’s behavior was strange and unpredictable.
“Just looking back there for some reason we don't know," he said. “There's a very large green circle right in the middle of the freeway and we have no idea why."
After crews responded to the call of a car fire, one trooper and a WSDOT worker put out the fire while another trooper confronted the man, who pulled a knife.
“Our officer tried to talk him out of that knife or talk him into putting that knife down,” said Trooper Pratt. “The officer then tazed this person or attempted to Taser him, which had no effect on this subject."
Two troopers pulled pistols, and after several orders to the man to stop, both opened fire in front of dozens of other drivers.
“Then the police started telling him to stop what he was doing I guess,” said Assafa. “Then they kept on shooting, just keep on shooting him."
The man, who is said to be in his 20s, was taken to Harborview Medical Center with several gunshot wounds. He was pronounced dead shortly after he arrived. He has not been identified.Oklahoma quarterback Baker Mayfield has officially been named the winner of the 2017 Heisman Award. His great season has propelled Oklahoma to an undefeated season. It has also given his team the number two seed in the College Football Playoff.
The future looks bright for the quarterback who has finished in the top three in Heisman voting three times. Mayfield is expected to enter the 2018 NFL Draft, where he will be submerged in a handful of talent, and likely won’t be the first quarterback off the board. That’s good news for the New York Jets, who have been searching for a franchise quarterback for years on end. It is likely that they’ll be drafting somewhere in the top ten, and Mayfield should be high on their list.
Why It Makes Sense
Mayfield has been turning heads all year with his versatility on the field. His ability to throw the deep ball combined with his out-of-the-pocket play are only some of the reasons. He’s also been manageable in the clutch, and is a proven winner and leader.
That being said, he is exactly what the Jets have been searching for. A man with a voice who can back it all up with his game. While he remains cool and collect while leading Oklahoma to a slew of victories, his mind remains in the game, and winning seems to be his number one focus.
When looking at his play-style, it is exactly what the Jets are lacking. Emerging receivers Robby Anderson, Jermaine Kearse and currently injured Quincy Enunwa could feed off of that versatility. We’ve already seen flashes of it this season with Josh McCown at the helm. Mayfield has the arm to throw the the ball deep to speedster Anderson, and could sling bullets to the bigger targets in Enunwa, Kearse, and even Austin Seferian-Jenkins.
A Happy Marriage
While Mayfield’s athletic ability could add a powerful dynamic to the Jets’ offense, it would also pay dividends to the defense and coaching staff.
The Jets have remained a defensive-minded franchise for quite a while, attempting to build and develop a secondary similar to Seattle’s “Legion of Boom.” But the offense hasn’t received the same attention. We’ve seen with the unprecedented success of Josh McCown, that the defense has had room to grow. They’ve been fortunate to have been put in a handful of postive situations, allowing them to figure the game out as a young unit.
Mayfield could extend that development. While he may not come out of the gates firing, he’ll bring with him a confidence that could match that of the defense. It would allow the Jets to become threatening on both sides of the ball, similar to what Russell Wilson has provided to Seattle.
When you realize you can throw deep to Robby Anderson and Quincy Enunwa next year… pic.twitter.com/WXlqjJhAD1 — Joe Caporoso (@JCaporoso) December 2, 2017
The Jets Can Offer the Best Lecture
Every quarterback taken in the upcoming draft is going to need some development. It was the case for Carson Wentz, Jared Goff, Marcus Mariota and even Andrew Luck. The right situation can make development an easy process, and the Jets can offer that to Mayfield.
Development comes in many forms. First off, the Jets have the offensive pieces for Mayfield to succeed. He would have an abundance of targets to throw to, and his versality should open up the run game more than ever.
There would also be a higher chance that the Jets resign McCown, who presents many similarities to the Heisman winner. McCown’s mentoring could push Mayfield and would be crucial to his development. In the end it could pay dividends down the road for this franchise.
Lastly, the Jets’ coaching staff has been showed signs of strictness when it comes to off-the-field issues. Mayfield has dealt with that in college, and many NFL teams will be skeptical of it being a distraction. The Jets can handle it though, and have the pieces in place to put him on the right track. That may be the most important.
Recently, Jets’ head coach Todd Bowles has been the face of applying discipline. Most recently to second year linebacker Darron Lee and aging defensive end Muhammad Wilkerson. Both players have shown the potential to be great, and while Todd Bowles understands that, it is never an excuse when it comes to off-the-field issues. His focus has remained the same: Force them to understand the focus that is needed to keep a job. This type of mentality would mix well with Mayfield. It would allow him to unleash his potential for a team that desperately needs it.
Take the Risk
When it comes to draft day, the Jets will need to tighten up and take a risk. General Manager Mike Maccagnan has played it safe in his first few years in the front office, but no more. It is obvious what this team needs, and now it is time to pull the trigger.
Mayfield will be a huge risk, simply because nothing is ever guaranteed. He could flop. We’ve seen it happen before. But the Jets need to gamble on his potential, or they could remain in stagnancy for years to come. It’s all or nothing when it comes to selecting a quarterback (cough, cough…Hackenberg), but making a move like this could point this franchise in the right direction.
– Kyle Hirshkind is the Managing Editor for Full Press Coverage Jets and covers the New York Jets. Like and follow on Follow @kylehirshkind Follow @FPC_Jets
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Like this: Like Loading...Thanks for having me.I grew up in a suburb of Vancouver, Canada. Basically in the countryside. Where I lived, our only choices were to be “secular”, or to adopt Evangelical Christianity. A few became Jehovah’s Witnesses. My own family was not religious, although my parents brought me and my siblings to Sunday School at various churches. That was common practice in those days. Just to give kids a foundation of morality, or so the parents thought. Really it was about arts and crafts, a few fantasy-like Bible stories and silly songs. My generation of kids didn’t take it all very seriously.If I grew up in Saudi Arabia, I’m pretty sure I’d be a Muslim. If in Thailand, I’d be a Buddhist. Or in India, a Hindu. I think the planet’s citizens are most often tied to their religion by geography than anything else.Our elementary school allowed the Gideons, an Evangelical ministry, to give out free New Testaments to Grade 6 children. So I got one, and read some. I also found a Good News Bible kicking around our house. That was easier to understand, so I read it more. My neighbours were typical apple pie, goody-two-shoes Christians, the whole Pat Boone, freshly-scrubbed look and all. So they had a bit of influence on me. I used to argue about the “End Times” with one of their boys, who later became a good friend. When I did convert, I ended up going to church with them.Funny you say that. The day I “prayed the prayer” to follow Christianity was one where I woke up in the morning after having an embarrassing sexual dream about some girl in my 8th Grade class. I wanted to puke. After cleaning up and getting a fresh pair of underwear, I felt so guilty, so... dirty. I walked upstairs in my grandparents home, where my mom and sisters were staying for a weekend, and read part of the Sermon on the Mount in the book of Matthew. It said there that if I look at a woman in lust, it was counted as adultery. Cursing someone was equal to murder and would be lead to punishment in Hell. At the time, I and my high school buddies were listening to AC/DC, the Australian rock band, as they were just getting super popular. They had a song called Highway to Hell that freaked me out. I had a strong aversion to going to any eternal place of fire and brimstone.So fear was a factor in my conversion. Fear of God’s punishment. Also, the desire to be cleansed from all the wearying “filth” of secular culture, especially all the pornography magazines I had been reading for the past few years. Also, my parents had divorced a couple years earlier. I and my two younger sisters lived with our dad in a “broken” home. The Christians advertised about “God’s love” a lot. The promo worked; I was attracted. Who wouldn’t want a hug from a huge, invisible god? ; )Well, I also think that I was rebelling... rebelling against my father, who was quite an angry man in those days, and very, very anti-religion.My revolt was also a response to the culture, the Americanised commercial hustler-like culture that we young Canadians were exposed to. We were only 17 minutes by car to the U.S. border!Ironically, I also embraced another pillar of American society, its Evangelical Christianity. During my teen years, it was a time when American-style fundamentalism was gaining ground both in the US and Canada. It was on an upswing. And the bandwagon swept me aboard.For one, I took my pop records and porno mags and set fire to them all in our back yard burning barrel. I began reading the Bible more, and other Christian books. As I mentioned before, I started attending an Evangelical church with my neighbours, joined its youth group. I stopped cussing and focusing on attracting girls. And I have had a lot of wonderful friends over the years. So there has been some positive effects.But in a lot of ways, it’s been a tough road. My family wasn’t particularly supportive, although I don’t blame them. I was often way over the top. And they didn’t appreciate me preaching at them all the time.So it was quite an independent road I traveled for many years. I thought I had the truth. I faithfully attended church, but often felt that the rank-and-file of believers weren’t “spiritual” enough. I sought refuge in many kinds of “revival movements” and Christian subcultures over the years: King James Bible Only, Word-of-Faith charismatic, the Pensacola Revival, cell church, house church, the 10/40 Window missions movement, etc. From fad to fad. It was wearying.My worldview isolated me from a lot of people. We were taught by preachers not to get too close to unbelievers. They were headed for Hell, so our only motive for befriending them was to “share the Good News”. It’s a repulsive way to view humanity, if you ask me. And although there was a lot of talk about loving our neighbours, I’d say a lot of us weren’t so keen on that. You could even say we hated our neighbours.I became very judgmental and preachy. This put a lot of strain on my relationship with family and classmates. I disliked science classes. I was taught that the world was only six thousand years old, and that scientists were lying to us about evolution. So I went into the Arts in university and avoided learning much about Science, which I now regret. I would have benefited more by finding out how the world REALLY works.First of all, Evangelicals would argue that there is no such thing as deconversion. No one who is a true believer leaves. |
and the Thousand Sons.
These are both weird Legions. Really, outside of the Alpha Legion, I’d struggle to find weirder. And many of the shenanigans the Alpha Legion can get up to take place off the field – setting up a single, pivotal strike on the enemy command that in many ways at that point is a standard Legion attack.
The Thousand Sons are a very small Legion with an extremely high prevalence of very dangerous, powerful, and flexible Psykers. Even compared to other psyker-friendly Legions like the White Scars or Blood Angels, this is clearly the Thousand Sons’ thing.
And the Space Wolves are the Legion you send to kill another Legion. While it’s wrapped in opaqueness, there’s fairly strong suggestions that the fate of the II and XI Legions at least involved Leman Russ. And Russ was who was sent to bring Angron to heel, and while he failed to do so, there’s a fair bit of suggestion that by the end of the battle the Space Wolves had a tactical advantage. Lorgar even expresses concern when his Legion is censured that the Space Wolves will be dispatched. Beyond that, after Prospero you have little packs of Space Wolves sent all over the Imperium to keep an eye on the other Primarchs. It takes either supreme confidence, or utter delusion, to think that ten of your guys are a meaningful check on Sanguinius or Roboute Guilliman’s ambitions.
So, you have stupidly powerful psykers, and the Space Marines you send to kill Other Space Marines in a game full of…Space Marines.
And let’s talk about who else is at Prospero – the Sisters of Silence and the Custodes. One is an order of psychic blanks, and the other a group of individually powerful warriors that fall somewhere in the power level, fluff wise, of a skilled Space Marine hero.
Even internally balancing these so they felt right would be a tall order – you have to keep the Sisters from just shutting down the Thousand Sons, and the Space Wolves from slaughtering everything with a 3+ save. And beyond that, it has to be fun to play Thousand Sons vs. Word Bearers, or Space Wolves vs. Imperial Fists.
I’ve got faith that they can do it, but I also understand why they’ve been approaching Prospero slowly.
Which, to be honest, is probably a good thing for the game as a whole, and for my wallet in particular.
Enjoy what you read? Enjoyed that it was ad free? Both of those things are courtesy of our generous Patreon supporters. If you’d like more quantitatively driven thoughts on 40K and miniatures wargaming, and a hand in deciding what we cover, please consider joining them.The long awaited question, what are the theme parks in Sarawak? which has been asked for years, and to date, there are only two which are in operation. One is in Miri while the other is the newly re-launched project called Sarawak Sentosa Theme Park in Kuching. However, you should not get your hopes too high as these are both very small and does not qualify as world class theme parks, but more for the local family getaways.
I am only being honest here as I would not want to deceive readers or visitors heading to Sarawak to be disappointed, therefore I will do my best to highlight them here. In the list are also some of the upcoming theme parks in Sarawak which are scheduled to open in 2017 and 2018, so do look out for them.
Theme Parks in Sarawak
The water park at Borneo Tropical Rainforest Resort in Miri
Borneo Tropical Rainforest Resort Water Park
Many may not know of this water park, but it has been around for many years now. Located on the way to the Niah National Park is the Borneo Tropical Rainforest Resort and inside the resort, there is a mini water park with a racing slide and twist slides, a play pool and a mid sized swimming pool. The water park in Miri is free for guest staying here while visitors need to buy tickets.
This place is very popular with the locals and tends to get busy on the weekends and school holidays. The beauty about this water park is that it is located in a rainforest. Next time you explore Miri, do check this place out as it is a great place to stay at if you are heading to the Niah Caves or national parks here.
Sentosa Theme Park in Kuching, Sarawak (Photo from Facebook)
Sarawak Sentosa Theme Park
Recently re-branded and re-launched on the 26th November 2016 is the Sarawak Sentosa Theme Park is located along Jalan Stakan in Kota Sentosa, Batu 7, Kuching. Well, this theme park in Kuching is more of an "activity park" as the attractions here are not theme park related. They offer the largest indoor skating rink, indoor archery field, a 12,000 square feet Kuso 5D Museum, 9D VR or Augmented Reality Experience, a few types of Go Karts, bubble football, hover boards, electronic darts and a games area. Originally, this was called the Sentosa World Sports Centre and was opened on 15 Jan 2016, but it was re-branded and re-launched under the brand Sentosa Theme Park.
Well, those are most of the attractions offered and generally, it feels more of an activity park than a theme park, but somehow they got the branding Sentosa Theme Park. To be very honest, it is very confusing, especially for the tourist visiting Kuching as the title 'theme park' is very misleading.
For locals, this would be a great place to have your kids go crazy and the fun does not stop as adults too can also participate. Sentosa Theme Park is also open 11.00 AM to 11.00 PM, daily and has a cafe and sports section. Currently, this is the talk of Kuching as the city has never had a theme park and this is the first of its kind, well sort of.
The one month Mobile Water Theme Park at MJC, Batu Kawa in Kuching, Sarawak
Mobile Water Theme Park at MJC Batu Kawa
This interesting concept of a water park made an appearance in MJC Batu Kawa where a massive mobile water theme park was set up for a month in September 2016. This brought locals by the bus loads to experience this fun family concept but after opening it, there was no news of follow up on this mobile water park in Sarawak. Plans were to take this concept to other parts of Sarawak namely Sibu and Miri.
Senadin Water Theme Park in Miri, the scale model (Photo from www.miricitysharing.com)
Senadin Water Theme Park in Miri
The latest theme park in Sarawak which is scheduled to open somewhere in 2017 is no other than the Senadin Uptown Water Theme Park. Rumours had surfaced that the project was abandoned but the developers have stated that this theme park project is still on.
The RM7 million Senadin Water Theme Park will have wave generators, swimming pools, water slides and tubes, and even a water canoe track. There will be a shopping mall, cultural village, hotel, amphitheater and even a planned man-made island in the 36 acre site near Sungai Tujuh, which is very close to Brunei. This massive project is also by the Miri Housing Development Realty Sdn. Bhd. and it was scheduled to be ready by 2016, but judging from the news, it may only be launched in 2018.
Borneo Samariang Resort City Theme Park (Photo from ww.sentoria.com)
Borneo Samariang Resort City Theme Park
Another much talked about theme park project is the Borneo Samariang Resort City at Bandar Baru Samariang, which is a new satellite township rapidly taking shape to the north of Kuching. Plans to incorporate a theme park and water park similar to the sister project, Bukit Gambang Resort City will make this one of the top theme parks in Sarawak.
Once fully developed and launched in 2018, the project will have a world class theme park, a water park and a safari park, There will also be a resort with 2000 rooms, a team building area and also a river cruise. So visitors will have to wait till 2018 before the Borneo Samariang Resort City opens.
Sarawak Theme Parks That Never Made It
There was in fact a one theme park that was planned by never did take off and it was located in Sibu, central Sarawak. The ambitious plan sounded good, but unfortunately never happened. This is highlighted here just to show that there was in fact, plans for theme parks in Sarawak, especially around 2011 and if it did take off, it would have been pretty good.
Hornbill Bay at Pulau Kerto in Sibu, artist impression (Photo from Behance.com)
Pulau Kerto Theme Park in Sibu
An ambitious plan to build a theme park in Pulau Kerto in Sibu got everyone excited, but the project never did take off. It was also called the Rajang Basin Theme Park. The RM50 million project would have been spread over 50 acres of the island would have seen a an iconic gigantic hornbill sculpture standing at 150 feet high which would have made this into the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest bird statue in the world.
Rides would have included a river boat cruise, flying fox and a sky lift. A gallery was also planned to showcase Sarawakian historical and cultural artifacts and information of the various tribes of Sarawak. The Pulau Kerto Theme Park project would have put Sibu on the travel map, had this project gone through. It was also called Hornbill Bay, according to another report where the entire bay was shaped like a hornbill head.
The giant hornbill that was supposed to be at the Pulau Kerto Theme Park in Sibu (Photo from Behance.com)
If you have gone through this list, you may have noticed that all of them are water theme parks or water related, as someone once told me that building a water park is much more cheaper than building a full scale theme park. Anyway, since Sarawak is located in the tropical climate, it is only right to have water parks as visitors can head there to cool off and have fun.
For the record, the much talked about and soon to open 20th Century Fox World Theme Park in Genting will be opening in 2017 or 2018, which is the first of its kind in the world and is awaited by the whole world. You can also read this article if you want to know more about Theme Parks in Malaysia as it gives you the complete list.
Overall, these are the few theme parks planned for Sarawak and also those that are currently open and in operation. While Sarawak is more of a nature, culture and heritage place to visit, there are still those wanting theme parks in Sarawak as for most locals, they have to head to Singapore or Peninsular Malaysia to enjoy it.Former prime minister Kevin Rudd says more money should be put into "politically neutral" public broadcasters like the ABC to combat rising levels of discontentment with democracy.
And he's told the ABC's 7.30 program that the Labor Party must keep a distance from union-based factions if it is to win government in the near future.
Noting the June referendum vote in the UK for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in the US, Mr Rudd said the rising income gap between rich and poor as well as the politics of inequality and marginalisation had become mainstream concerns.
"Unless there is a radical continuing investment in what I describe as politically neutral public broadcasting, the essence of having a democratic conversation falls apart."
Mr Rudd said he had read recently in the press of the Labor Party's continuing problem with union-based factions.
"And unless that is dealt with, root and branch, then it will continue to be a cancer within the Labor Party politic."27% Only a quarter of Americans say it is necessary to give up some civil liberties to curb terrorism, down from 55% shortly after the attacks of 9/11.
Americans continue to see Islamic extremist groups like al Qaeda as the top threat to the United States (78% see such groups as a major threat), but eight years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 fewer feel it is necessary to sacrifice civil liberties to protect the country from terrorism. A few weeks after the attacks of 2001, 55% said it would be necessary for the average person to give up some civil liberties to fight terrorism. In January 2007, 40% said relinquishing civil liberties would be necessary. Today, just a quarter of Americans (27%) say giving up civil liberties is needed to curb terrorism; 65% say this is not necessary. The decline is especially sharp among Republicans. In 2007, 51% said it was necessary to sacrifice civil liberties; only about a third (34%) do so today. Opinions about warrentless searches of people who might be sympathetic to terrorists (a third approve) and denying free speech for terrorist sympathizers (half approve) have remained fairly consistent in recent years. Read MoreWhen a massive flash mob rampaged outside the Wisconsin State Fair injuring 11 fairgoers on Aug. 4, old-fashioned police work quickly led to the arrests of 31 people.
When 25 teens looted a 7-Eleven on Aug. 13, outside Germantown, Md., local police posted a surveillance video on YouTube and visited a local high school with pictures of the perpetrators. Within days, 15 of the 26 suspects were identified.
And just this week, two teens were found guilty of orchestrating a "flash mob" style beating in Philadelphia that left one man with a broken jaw.
"Downtown is not terror town," Judge Kevin Dougherty admonished. "Philadelphia will not be a laughingstock because of a few individuals who decide to hunt human beings and laugh about it."
Judge Dougherty is not alone in his outrage as cities across the US struggle with how to prevent and prosecute a new spate of violence organized over social media.
And while the ability to track perpetrators and even potential lawbreakers on Twitter and other social media platforms offers a powerful, futuristic vision for policing, the real-life police reaction to the "flash mob" phenomenon has so far been more Sherlock Holmes and less Blade Runner.
While New York City just established the country's first Social Media Unit, and the Los Angeles Police Department have hunted down criminals using Twitter hashtags as digital fingerprints, only 30 percent of US departments have an active social media policy according to International Association of Chiefs of Police's Center for Social Media study. "We don't have anyone who has social-media expertise," said Janelle Smith, a spokeswoman for Germantown, Md., police.
Indeed, the most common police strategy so far for preventing flash mobs has been the tightening of curfews and a boosted police presence, all of which have been at least somewhat effective in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Philadelphia. In Philadelphia 50 teens were arrested for curfew violations two weeks ago as Mayor Michael Nutter established a 9 p.m. weekend curfew.
In some ways, traditional law enforcement strategies are the best police can do, some experts say. "You cannot stop flash mob activity," Michelle Ferrier, an associate professor of communications at Elon University in North Carolina, told the website All Headline News. "It is a tactic of a frustrated citizenry that uses lax vigilance and group identity to hide individual criminal activity. The only response is greater vigilance and stronger penalties for those caught."
Outside the US, police have had even more success making arrests in the aftermath of urban riots. In Vancouver, police set up a digital "wanted poster" website after the Stanley Cup riots in June, allowing citizens to look at pictures and put names to those they recognized. Police arrested 101 rioters in the aftermath, partly with the help of the website.
In London, the city's massive network of CCTV cameras provided identification pictures for police, who caught more than 1,000 people after the recent riots mostly the old-fashioned way: on foot, asking people if they knew the people in the pictures. "It was really technology augmenting old-fashioned police work," says Lauri Stevens, founder of ConnectedCOPS, a blog about social media-enabled policing.
And though the power of social media policing — facial recognition software, for example, and Twitter apps that can clue detectives into broader criminal networks — seems formidable, there's another catch: Casting wide nets across cyberspace could tread on civil liberties and have a chilling effect on free speech.
"Social media creates a web of people involved in criminal activity and who might know those people, and to be able to see those networks is a pretty amazing thing from a policing perspective," says Kristene Unsworth, an information policy expert at Drexel University, in Philadelphia. "But that's also an incredibly wide, wide net to be searching for wrongdoing. That means we have to be really careful that we're vigilant about questioning these [police] activities, to make sure the checks and balances are rigorous enough that they can deal with this kind of technology."
"A lot of police officers are really concerned about using these technologies," Ms. Unsworth adds. "They don't yet know legally where things stand."
Those concerns are also being debated outside the US. Germany, for example, has banned police from using social media-based facial recognition software in fear it will trample on individual privacy rights. And in Vancouver, police attempts to match riot pictures – including of those who were not caught in the act of doing anything illegal – with the state's driver license bureau's database was cancelled after privacy advocates raised concerns.
In the US, where free speech is enshrined in the Constitution, authorities’ attempts to curtail mobilization via social media are also making news. The decision by Bay Area Rapid Transit to temporarily shut down four cell phone transponders on Aug. 11 to scuttle a planned protest against BART police drew widespread criticism from free speech advocates.
On Aug. 5, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson vetoed a city council ordinance that would have criminalized the use of social media to incite public disturbances. He felt it was too restrictive of rights to assembly and free speech. "Use of this technology in a criminal way and how we react to it – without throwing away the Constitution – is a challenge we all have," Jackson says.
To help combat "flash mobs" and other crime enabled by social media, a conference called "Social Media, the Internet and Law Enforcement" (SMILE) will convene in Dallas in September.
"With the flash mobs, police are struggling with the rapidity — it's just so fast, and it's new territory for them," says Ms. Stevens of ConnectedCOPS. "They'll catch up, though. I have a great deal of confidence that law enforcement is not going to be outdone."Image copyright None Image caption IS released the video on Tuesday
The so-called Islamic State has released a video purporting to show an Afghan asylum seeker making threats before attacking a German train.
The 17-year-old injured five people with an axe and knife, one critically, in the attack in Wuerzburg on Monday evening. He was shot dead by police.
In the video, a young man brandishing a knife says he is an "IS soldier" preparing for a suicide mission.
German officials say they later found a hand-painted IS flag in his room.
The teenager reportedly shouted the Islamic phrase "Allahu akbar" ("God is great") during the attack.
The self-styled news agency of IS said he had launched the attack "in answer to the calls to target the countries of the coalition fighting the Islamic State".
The attack comes days after a lorry ploughed into a crowd in Nice in France, killing 84 people. The self-styled Islamic State group said one of its followers had carried out that attack.
'Slaughterhouse'
In the video, IS identified the attacker as Muhammad Riyad, who can be heard speaking Pashto.
Joachim Herrmann, the interior minister of the state of Bavaria, said the flag had been found among the teenager's belongings in his room in his foster home in the nearby town of Ochsenfurt.
A text written in Pashtun was also found, he said, and it showed a strong indication that the teenager "could be a person who had been self-radicalised".
Mr Herrmann said those who had interacted with the young man in recent months described him as calm and quiet and they could not understand his actions.
The teenager had gone to the mosque "on special occasions", he said, but no-one had noticed any radical behaviour and there were no signs yet of a direct link to jihadist networks.
Image copyright EPA Image caption The IS-linked Amaq news agency said the teenager was an IS "fighter"
Image copyright EPA Image caption One witness said the train carriage "looked like a slaughterhouse"
Image copyright AP Image caption The body of the attacker is removed from the scene
Mr Herrmann said there was no indication Chinese citizens had been specifically targeted.
He also defended the police who shot the attacker, saying the teenager had run at officers brandishing the axe.
The Afghan teenager, who had claimed asylum after travelling to Germany a year ago as an unaccompanied minor, had been living with the foster family since moving from a refugee centre in the town two weeks ago.
Last year Germany registered more than one million migrants, including more than 150,000 Afghans, although the number has slowed dramatically this year since new EU measures were taken to stop the flow.
An ever-present division - Damien McGuinness, BBC News, Berlin
To get a feeling for the wider ramifications of this attack in Germany, you just need to take a quick look at Twitter in German. Racist and xenophobic comments against asylum seekers compete with equally impassioned arguments in support of refugees - including a tweet by Green MP Renate Kuenast asking why police had killed the attacker rather then injuring him.
This has provoked in turn another storm online, saying the perpetrator is getting more sympathy than the victims.
Over the past few months, since the EU agreed a deal with Turkey, numbers of migrants coming to Germany have dropped dramatically. And the issue has vanished from the front pages. The debate had shifted to a more nuanced one about how best to integrate the new arrivals. And the ferocity, fear and sometimes hate appeared to have dissipated. But the news that the attacker was an unaccompanied underage refugee shows that the division running through Germany about Angela Merkel's stance on refugees is still very much there.
The South China Morning Post said it was believed four of the people injured were a 62-year-old man, his 58-year-old wife, their daughter, 27, and her boyfriend, 31, from Hong Kong. The 17-year-old son travelling with them was not hurt, it said.
A source told the paper the father and boyfriend had tried to protect the other members of the group.
Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying has condemned the attack and expressed his sympathy to the victims. Immigration officials from the city will accompany family members to Germany.
Young migrants in Europe Unaccompanied minors (UAMs) 95,985 UAMs applied for asylum in Europe, including Norway and Switzerland in 2015 290% increase on applications in 2014 10,040 unaccompanied children applied for asylum in Germany in 2015
50% of all UAMs who came to Europe last year were from Afghanistan
15,500 unaccompanied children were registered in Bavaria, southern Germany in March 2016
1/2 were from Afghanistan Getty
Another woman was injured outside the train as the man fled. Fourteen people were treated for shock.
The attack happened at about 21:15 (19:15 GMT) on the train which runs between Treuchlingen and Wuerzburg.
Police said the attacker had fled the train but was chased by officers who shot him dead.
One local man told DPA news agency that the train carriage where the attack took place had "looked like a slaughterhouse".
In May, a man reportedly shouting "Allahu akbar" killed a man and wounded three others in a knife attack at a railway station near the German city of Munich.
He was later sent to a psychiatric hospital and authorities said they had found no links to Islamic extremism.
Image copyright EPA Image caption The teenager lived in this facility in Ochsenfurt before transferring to a foster family
Were you on the train? Have you been affected by the incident? Tell us your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.
You can also contact us in the following ways:Credit: DC Comics
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DARK KNIGHT III: THE MASTER RACE #4
Written by FRANK MILLER and BRIAN AZZARELLO
Art by ANDY KUBERT and KLAUS JANSON
Minicomic art by JIM LEE and SCOTT WILLIAMS
Cover by ANDY KUBERT
1:10 Robin variant cover by RAFAEL ALBUQUERQUE
1:25 variant cover by KLAUS JANSON
1:50 variant cover by GEOF DARROW
1:100 variant cover by FRANK MILLER
1:500 variant cover by JIM LEE and SCOTT WILLIAMS
On sale MARCH 16
32-pg comic: 6.375” x 10.1875”
16-page minicomic: 5.5” x 8.5”
FC, 4 of 8, $5.99 US
Retailers: This issue will ship with six covers. Please see the order form for more information.
The Master Race will rise. Cities will fall. Bruce Wayne is dead. What will the heroes of the world do to save it?
DARK KNIGHT III: THE MASTER RACE #4 COLLECTOR’S EDITION
Written by FRANK MILLER and BRIAN AZZARELLO
Art by ANDY KUBERT, KLAUS JANSON, JIM LEE and SCOTT WILLIAMS
Sketch cover by JIM LEE
On sale MARCH 30 • 40 pg, FC, 4 of 8, 7.0625” x 10.875”, $12.99 US
This oversized paper-over-boards COLLECTOR’S EDITION features both stories from DARK KNIGHT III: THE MASTER RACE #4 at the same size, with a cover that’s a pencils-only version of Jim Lee’s 1:500 variant for DARK KNIGHT III: THE MASTER RACE #4.
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LEGENDS OF TOMORROW #1
Cover by AARON LOPRESTI
On sale MARCH 9 • 80 pg, FC, $7.99 US • RATED T
It’s four powerhouse tales in one colossal comic, as some of comics’ most legendary talents launch new tales of Firestorm, Metamorpho, Metal Men and Sugar and Spike—that’s right, Sugar and Spike!
FIRESTORM
Written by GERRY CONWAY
Art by EDUARDO PANSICA and ROB HUNTER
Firestorm is back! To save Jason Rausch, Firestorm will need to retrieve Danton Black’s stolen research from Professor Stein’s lab. But if Jason can’t fuse with Ronnie by the Firestorm Protocol…who can?
METAL MEN
Written by LEN WEIN
Art by YILDIRAY CINAR and TREVOR SCOTT
Doctor Will Magnus’ Metal Men may be the next step in robotics technology, but when the mysterious cyber-terrorist known only as Nameless comes after them, they may have met their match!
METAMORPHO
Written by AARON LOPRESTI
Art by AARON LOPRESTI with MATT BANNING
Metamorpho—a prisoner of millionaire industrialist Simon Stagg! Now, the only person who can save him is Stagg’s beautiful daughter, Sapphire!? But can they defeat Stagg’s prehistoric bodyguard, Java?
SUGAR & SPIKE
Written by KEITH GIFFEN
Art by BILQUIS EVELY
The last time we saw Sugar and Spike, they were still in diapers! Now, they’re grown up, and they’ve become private investigators who specialize in cleaning up embarrassing problems for the DCU’s greatest heroes. Sugar & Spike’s first assignment: retrieve a cache of Batman’s retired costumes that have been stolen by Killer Moth!
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BATMAN #50
Written by SCOTT SNYDER
Art and cover by GREG CAPULLO and DANNY MIKI
Polybagged variant cover by JIM LEE
On sale MARCH 23 • 48 pg, FC, $4.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with a standard cover, as well as polybagged variant covers. Please see the order form for more details.
Batman has returned to Gotham City! In this extra-sized conclusion to Snyder and Capullo’s epic story “Superheavy,” Bruce Wayne returns to the cape and cowl to battle Mr. Bloom alongside Jim Gordon for the fate of the city they both love.
This issue features open-to-order variant covers that will ship in opaque polybags.
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SUPERMAN #50
Written by GENE LUEN YANG
Art by HOWARD PORTER
Cover by JOHN ROMITA, JR. and KLAUS JANSON
Polybagged variant cover by KAARE ANDREWS
On sale MARCH 16 • 48 pg, FC, $4.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with a standard cover, as well as polybagged variant covers. Please see the order form for more details.
Superman returns in all his glory in this very special issue that sees the Man of Steel back to full power as he faces his greatest enemy and also comes face to face with the pre-Flashpoint Kal-El! At last, it’s the meeting of the Supermen you’ve been waiting for!
This issue features open-to-order variant covers that will ship in opaque polybags.
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ACTION COMICS #50
Written by GREG PAK and AARON KUDER
Art and cover by AARON KUDER
Polybagged variant cover by MARTIN ANSIN
On sale MARCH 9 • 48 pg, FC, $4.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with a standard cover, as well as polybagged variant covers. Please see the order form for more details.
Clark battles his way through Vandal Savage’s hordes to reclaim what is rightfully his—the Fortress of Solitude and his birthright! This epic anniversary issue leads to the finale of “Savage Dawn” in this month’s SUPERMAN/WONDER WOMAN #27 and SUPERMAN #50!
This issue features open-to-order variant covers that will ship in opaque polybags.
Credit: DC Comics
AQUAMAN #50
Written by DAN ABNETT
Art and cover by BRETT BOOTH and NORM RAPMUND
Variant cover by JOSE LUIS GARCIA-LOPEZ
On sale MARCH 30 • 48 pg, FC, $4.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for details.
Dead Water is a killer and a monster. No matter where you go, he can reach you if there’s even one drop of water present. Pray that Aquaman finds you first! And the most famous oceanic hero on Earth is Aquaman, right? In our gala 50th issue, make way for…Aquawoman!
Credit: DC Comics
BATGIRL #50
Written by BRENDEN FLETCHER and CAMERON STEWART
Art and cover by BABS TARR
Polybagged variant cover by KEVIN NOWLAN
On sale MARCH 30 • 48 pg, FC, $4.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with a standard cover, as well as polybagged variant covers. Please see the order form for more details.
It’s the explosive conclusion of the epic that changed Barbara Gordon forever! The enemy lurking at the edges of Batgirl’s life has been revealed, as have the gang of heroes assembled to help her! From this point on, Batgirl doesn’t walk alone! It’s an extra-sized celebration of the greatest hero Burnside has ever known, from Cameron Stewart, Brenden Fletcher and Babs Tarr!
This issue features open-to-order variant covers that will ship in opaque polybags.
Credit: DC Comics
CATWOMAN #50
Written by FRANK TIERI
Art by INAKI MIRANDA
Cover by JOSHUA MIDDLETON
On sale MARCH 9 • 48 pg, FC, $4.99 US • RATED T+
Catwoman behind bars?! Thrown into jail with criminals who are still looking to collect a bounty on her head, Selina has to work with her shadowy helper, Mr. Blond, in order to escape and get to the bottom of the mystery behind the Frost Diamond. Shocking revelations will be made before the end of this extra-sized conclusion to Tieri and Miranda’s “On the Run” adventure!
Credit: DC Comics
DETECTIVE COMICS #50
Written by PETER J. TOMASI
Art by FERNANDO PASARIN and MATT RYAN
Cover by TYLER KIRKHAM
Polybagged variant cover by RAFAEL GRAMPA
On sale MARCH 2 • 48 pg, FC, $4.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with a standard cover, as well as polybagged variant covers. Please see the order form for more details.
Jim Gordon faces his past in this extra-sized conclusion to his most shocking cold case yet. With history itself forcing him to reflect on the last year as Batman, Gordon must make a decision about what his future holds in Gotham City.
This issue features open-to-order variant covers that will ship in opaque polybags.
Credit: DC Comics
THE FLASH #50
Written by ROBERT VENDITTI and VAN JENSEN
Art by JESUS MERINO
Cover by IVAN REIS and JOE PRADO
Variant cover by DUNCAN FEGREDO
On sale MARCH 30 • 48 pg, FC, $4.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for details.
In our massive 50th issue, The Flash must win back the trust of Central City! But to do so, he needs to outrun the police force that’s been charged with bringing him down—with the awesome power of the Rogues behind it all!
Credit: DC Comics
GREEN ARROW #50
Written by BENJAMIN PERCY
Art by SZYMON KUDRANSKI
Cover by SHANE DAVIS and MICHELLE DELECKI DAVIS
Variant cover by AARON KUDER
On sale MARCH 16 • 48 pg, FC, $4.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for more information.
In our anniversary 50th issue, Green Arrow and Deathstroke race across the globe to find the Miracle Man, whose blood can cure any disease! And the Tarantula returns—but even with her assistance, she and Green Arrow are no match for the perfect assassin!
Credit: DC Comics
GREEN LANTERN #50
Written by ROBERT VENDITTI
Art by BILLY TAN and MARK IRWIN
Cover by JUAN GIMENEZ
Variant cover by DOUG MAHNKE
On sale MARCH 2 • 48 pg, FC, $4.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for details.
In this extra-sized issue, it’s a battle for the fate of Earth! Parallax believes Hal Jordan has failed this universe—and now, he’s prepared to wipe Hal out of existence! Hal has to get over the shock that Parallax still exists so he can unleash the power of his gauntlet to stop him! It’s a battle neither Jordan can win, and one that will change both forever.
Credit: DC Comics
WONDER WOMAN #50
Written by MEREDITH FINCH
Art by DAVID FINCH and SCOTT HANNA
Polybagged variant cover by MASSIMO CARNEVALE
On sale MARCH 23 • 48 pg, FC, $4.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with a standard cover, as well as polybagged variant covers. Please see the order form for more details.
It’s a special super-sized 50th issue! Wonder Woman continues her quest to save Zeke and Olympus, but is she prepared for what she might find? Long-buried secrets suddenly brought to light will call into question everything she thought she knew about those she loves and trusts the most.
This issue features open-to-order variant covers that will ship in opaque polybags.
Credit: DC Comics
JUSTICE LEAGUE #49
Written by GEOFF JOHNS
Art and cover by JASON FABOK
Variant cover by MATTEO SCALERA
On sale MARCH 16 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for details.
In this, the penultimate chapter of the critically-acclaimed epic "Darkseid War," the fate of the Justice League and the entire universe is on the line! But can even the combined might of the Justice Gods contend with the secret machinations of Grail, the deadly daughter of Darkseid? Death, rebirth and the life of one of the members of the League changed forever!
Credit: DC Comics
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #9
Written by BRYAN HITCH
Art by BRYAN HITCH and DANIEL HENRIQUES
Cover by BRYAN HITCH
Variant cover by JIM LEE and SCOTT WILLIAMS
On sale MARCH 30 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for more information. This story was previously scheduled to appear in issue #8.
With Earth as collateral damage, the Kryptonian deity called Rao has the Justice League on the ropes! It would take a miracle to defeat him. Good thing the League makes miracles look easy…
Credit: DC Comics
BLACK CANARY #10
Written by |
. Yesterday, to much media fanfare, wailing, and gnashing of teeth NOAA pronounced that 2015 was the hottest year on record, ever! There’s only one problem with that…the Internet never forgets. Back in 1997 after the super El Nino made global temperatures soar, NOAA/NCDC produced this report:
Source: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/199713 (h/t to Tom Nelson)
Archived here: http://web.archive.org/web/20150504164341/http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/199713
In that 1997 report, they say clearly that the Global Average Temperature (GAT) was 62.45°F, based on a 30-year average (1961-1990) of the combined land and sea surface temperatures. Since we know the 1997 El Nino caused a record high spike in temperature, that means that for that 30 year period, there was no warmer GAT than 62.45°F up until that time.
Yet in 2015, the claim for the “warmest ever” GAT is different:
They say:
During 2015, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.62°F (0.90°C) above the 20th century average. This was the highest among all 136 years in the 1880–2015 record, surpassing the previous record set last year by 0.29°F (0.16°C) and marking the fourth time a global temperature record has been set this century.
Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/summary-info/global/201512
( Note that they link in that quote, to an image which does not exist: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/global-land-ocean-mntp-anom/201501-201512.png )
In the 2015 Annual State of the Climate report referenced above, NOAA says that the temperature was 1.62°F (0.90°C) above the 20th century average. That’s an important number. While they don’t reference the absolute value of the 20th century average temperature for the globe in that report, we can find it here in the November 2015 State of the Climate Report:
Source: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201511
==========================================================================
UPDATE: WUWT commenter “brian0918” points out that in other reports, NOAA give the 20th century global average temperature as 57°F – That may be they are referring to the 20th century average for the month of November in the initial report I cited, but don’t make it clear in the language used, or it may be a typo. Even so, it is still lower than 62.45°F. I made the corrections in the title and in the body of this post.
==========================================================================
So here is the math for the claims, for 2015, to get the number, we have to add the yearly variation from the 20th century average to it to get the absolute number:
GAT for 20th century = 55.2°F
GAT for 1997 = 62.45°F
GAT for 2015 is 1.62°F + 55.2°F = 56.82°F
In any universe, 56.82°F is lower than 62.45°F by 5.63 degrees Fahrenheit.
======================================================
UPDATE: (using the 57°F 20th century GAT mentioned in comments)
GAT for 20th century = 57°F
GAT for 1997 = 62.45°F
GAT for 2015 is 1.62°F + 57°F = 58.62°F
In any universe, 58.62°F is lower than 62.45°F by 3.83 degrees Fahrenheit.
======================================================
Of course, apologists and NOAA itself will run to their statistical hidey-hole and say that the 1997 value isn’t about the 20th century temperature comparison, but only compared to the “30-year average (1961-1990) of the combined land and sea surface temperatures.”, and therefore the comparison is not a valid one. (Meanwhile NASA GISS uses a 1951 to 1980 baseline for their historical temperature claims today, which is an arbitrary choice) But, I say it doesn’t matter what they say. NOAA is charged with presenting factual evidence in the context of climatic history, and when they make claims of absolute temperature, they need to be darn sure they get it right. Otherwise, the press, supporters of the cause like Seth Borenstein at AP, and the folks at the Washington Post just blindly regurgitate what NOAA says without questioning it.
To give an example of how the media can’t even do basic fact checking anymore, I calculated the GAT for 2015 is 1.62°F + 55.2°F = 56.82°F Simple math, right? Yet somehow, in press reports, that number got transposed to 58.62°F. Just look:
(UPDATE: If the 57F 20th century GAT value is used referenced in updates above, then we get the 58.62 number that is cited – while my math was correct, I relied on the context from the November, SOTC report, which was not clear, I’ve made the appropriate corrections.)
It appears that the source of that 58.62 number in error was Seth Borenstein at the Associated Press, though I can’t tell if he made the error himself, or quoted NOAA. This is what he wrote in the AP story:
NOAA said 2015’s temperature was 58.62 degrees Fahrenheit (14.79 degrees Celsius), passing 2014 by a record margin of 0.29 degrees. That’s 1.62 degrees above the 20th-century average. NASA, which measures differently, said 2015 was 0.23 degrees warmer than the record set in 2014 and 1.6 degrees above 20th century average.
The point to be made here is that NOAA professes to be an expert at telling the public what the temperature is, when so many contradictions and errors creep into what is presented to the public, we should all learn to take what NOAA says, and what the media says with a grain of salt.
When you look at temperature that isn’t biased by continuous adjustments, such as NOAA’s highly questionable fiddling with sea surface temperature data this year, you find that 2015 was not the hottest record at all according to the U.S> Climate Reference Network data, which is a state of the art system designed to need no “corrections” of any kind. 2015 comes in third for the USA:
Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/national-temperature-index/time-series?datasets[]=uscrn¶meter=anom-tavg&time_scale=p12&begyear=2005&endyear=2015&month=12
While that USCRN data only spans a little more than a decade, it is instructive for comparison to claims made. NOAA doesn’t seem to like referencing this state of the art USCRN system in their public reports, preferring instead to rely on their old, messy, error prone, and highly adjusted COOP/USHCN network which has been shown to have significant biases. They claim in their SOTC report from Jan 2016 that it was the 2nd hottest year on record for the CONUS:
In 2015, the contiguous United States (CONUS) average temperature was 54.4°F, 2.4°F above the 20th century average. This was the second warmest year in the 121-year period of record for the CONUS.
Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/201513
As I’ve said before, NOAA can’t seem to keep historical temperatures static, and thus the claims made referencing them, accurate. They change from month to month, and when there is no firmament to the history they present, why trust them?
Dr. John Christy said it best:
“If you want the truth about an issue, would you go to an agency with political appointees?” Christy said. “The government is not the final word on the truth.”
Reference: http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/17/exclusive-noaa-relies-on-compromised-thermometers-that-inflate-u-s-warming-trend/
If NOAA can’t keep a simple claim accurate, such as what the GAT was in 1997 versus 2015, why indeed should we trust them? We shouldn’t, we should question everything, always, because it seems the global temperature is not only nothing more than a statistical construct, it is as fickle as the political wind.
Meanwhile, satellite temperature data, which NOAA and NASA don’t like to use, shows the Earth as third warmest in 2015.
I’ll have more on this story via updates.
UPDATE: Dr Richard Lindzen notes:
MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen balked at claims of the ‘hottest year’ based on ground based temperature data.
“Frankly, I feel it is proof of dishonesty to argue about things like small fluctuations in temperature or the sign of a trend. Why lend credibility to this dishonesty?” Lindzen, an emeritus Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, told Climate Depot shortly after the announcements.
“All that matters is that for almost 40 years, model projections have almost all exceeded observations. Even if all the observed warming were due to greenhouse emissions, it would still point to low sensitivity,” Lindzen continued.
“But, given the ‘pause.’ we know that natural internal variability has to be of the same order as any other process,” Lindzen wrote.
Lindzen has previously mocked ‘warmest’ or ‘hottest’ year proclamations.
Read more: http://www.climatedepot.com/2016/01/20/mit-climate-scientist-dr-richard-lindzen-on-hottest-year-claim-why-lend-credibility-to-this-dishonesty/#ixzz3xueX8Qe4
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RedditDALLAS — Nobody seems to be noticing, but this month is the 50th anniversary of using the term “black hole” to describe the bottomless pits of outer space.
That’s probably because the traditional story gives the year of the term’s birth as 1967, when John Archibald Wheeler used it during a lecture in New York City in December of that year.
Wheeler, who died in 2008, said the term was suggested to him a few weeks earlier during another lecture, when a member of the audience got tired of hearing Wheeler repeatedly saying “gravitationally completely collapsed object.”
“Why not call it a black hole?” the listener urged, as Wheeler later recalled.
But in fact, the term had been used four years earlier at an astrophysics conference in Dallas, as science writer Marcia Bartusiak reported this month in a talk at the 50th anniversary of that conference, the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics.
Bartusiak, a professor in the science writing program at MIT and author of several highly acclaimed books, has been tracking down the history of black holes for a forthcoming book. She discovered that “black hole” was spoken in Dallas in December 1963.
“It was used right here at the first Texas symposium, somewhere, by someone.”
Wheeler himself spoke at the symposium, but no one recalls him naming black holes back then. But somebody did, because the term appeared in the January 24, 1964, issue of Life magazine. Life’s science editor, Al Rosenfeld, had attended the symposium and used the term in his report. Bartusiak tracked him down, and Rosenfeld confirmed that he had heard the term at the meeting (he didn’t make it up himself), but he didn’t remember who said it, either.
Life magazine does not, however, win the distinction of being the first publication to use black hole in print. That honor goes to Science News Letter, the early long-form name of Science News. It seems that the “black hole” label was also bandied about in January 1964 in Cleveland at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Science News Letter reporter Ann Ewing reported from that meeting, describing how an intense gravitational field could cause a star to collapse in on itself. “Such a star then forms a ‘black hole’ in the universe,” Ewing wrote — in the January 18, 1964 issue, beating Life magazine by a week.
Ewing’s report listed the names of several speakers at that AAAS meeting, but she did not identify who had uttered the black hole phrase. This is just the sort of thing that scientists and journalists discuss in the hotel bar during astrophysics conferences, especially when one of the scientists is Virginia Trimble, an astronomer at the University of California, Irvine. She’s more knowledgeable about the history of all things astronomical than Leonard Maltin is about Hollywood movies.
Just as Bartusiak, Trimble and I were discussing the Science News Letter story about black holes, along came Charles Misner of the University of Maryland, one of the physicists named in Ewing’s story as attending the 1964 Cleveland AAAS meeting. But he didn’t remember who used the term there, either.
Perhaps, someone suggested, it was Hong-Yee Chiu, who organized the session. Before Bartusiak’s talk, Trimble reached Chiu and asked him about the black hole mystery. And yes, Chiu said, he may have used the term at the meeting, but it didn’t originate with him. Chiu told Trimble that he recalled a seminar in Princeton, about 1960 or 1961, when the physicist Robert Dicke was talking about gravitationally collapsed objects. Dicke, according to Chiu, described the objects as “like the Black Hole of Calcutta.”
Bartusiak then related that Martin McHugh, who is working on a biography of Dicke, told her that Dicke’s children remember that “when something was lost at the Dicke household, Dicke would shout out, ‘Ah, it must have been sucked into the black hole of Calcutta.’”
So perhaps Dicke inspired the shortened version of the phrase that was used informally at the 1963 Texas symposium and the 1964 AAAS meeting. But it didn’t catch on until Wheeler began using it a few years later.
“Perhaps Wheeler still gets credit,” Bartusiak said. “He never said he originated the term…. What was important is that he had the authority to give the scientific community permission to use the term ‘black hole.’”
Follow me on Twitter: @tom_siegfriedONE of the state’s top cops has defended the two police officers who shot at a knife-wielding man at Hornsby Westfield yesterday but injured three innocent shoppers in the process.
Police have launched a critical incident investigation into the shooting.
It will be carried out by the Parramatta Local Area Command.
One of the issues to be investigated will be why a Taser or other options available were not used by the officers.
Assistant Commissioner Denis Clifford said the male and female officers were in a life and death situation when psychiatric patient Jerry Sourian ran at them armed with a large carving knife. He said Sourian was known to police.
“The officers have fired shots at the offender, he was wounded several times — unfortunately some bystanders were also injured with other bullet or fragment wounds,” Mr Clifford said.
“If a Taser was available a decision was made by those officers in a life and death situation.
Police on Hornsby shooting 2:19 Assistant Commissioner Denis Clifford addresses the media after the shooting at Westfield Hornsby
“This occurred in a matter of seconds... there was a matter of metres in it in the confined space of a shopping mall.”
Mr Clifford said using firearms in a situation like this was one of the options that was available to officers.
“There is a range of tactical options available to police in any situation,” he said.
“You can’t dictate exactly what option to use in every circumstance.
“The officers have made a decision, but we do know they were dealing with a person with a rather large knife who came at the officers and they made that decision to use their weapons.
“There was a Taser available as were other options like spray and batons.”
Mr Clifford conceded it was “alarming” that the bystanders had been hit.
“I wonder what may have happened if police had not intervened and stopped this person with the knife,” he said.
Scott Weber from the Police Association of NSW said they “fully support these two brave officers. It just highlights the nature of policing that at any given time a life-threatening situation can occur,” he said.
Stephen Blanks, the president of the NSW Council of Civil Liberties, said an independent review was crucial.
“Serious incidents like this where members of the public are injured as a result of the use of police guns require the most thorough investigation because public confidence depends upon knowing they did not do the wrong thing,” Mr Blanks said.
“The public needs to know that police have been properly trained in dealing with people with mental health issues and that they use their guns as a last resort when lives are threatened.”
Mr Clifford said the review would be independent.
This comes as NSW Health said it will be conducting a review into how Mr Sourian — an inpatient of the Hornsby Adult Mental Health Unit — was able to escape the premises after being “provided a very short period of supervised leave”.
“The patient was released to the care of family members and allowed access to the grounds of
the health facility,” NSW Health said in a statement.
“Shortly after starting that leave, the patient absconded. Staff at the facility were informed, and Hornsby police were contacted shortly after.”
Witness Raquel Redmond questioned whether the police “overreacted”.
Steve Middleton, who runs the Brasserie Bread stall, saw a male and female police officer draw their guns and fire when the knife-wielding man ran at them.
Mr Middleton said the attacker didn’t say anything but was he waving a large knife at the officers.
“He just had a little smile on his face, no shoes, tracksuit pants, baggy jumper,” he said.
Magdy Abdalla from the Java Lava Cafe on Florence St said he heard gunshots and immediately fell to the floor.
“I saw some people running and I just had a look,” he said. “I found three older ladies on the floor bleeding, one injured in the leg, one in the arm and the other one maybe in the back.”
Police have confirmed nobody was stabbed in the incident, despite earlier reports.
All four injuries were as a result of gunfire.
Last night all the injured remained in stable conditions in hospital.
The offender remains in hospital under police guard.
Yesterday’s shooting at Westfield Hornsby occurred just metres from a restaurant that was the scene of a stabbing in March. One man died and a woman was seriously injured in that incident.
HALF OF ALL POLICE SHOOTINGS IN NSW INVOLVE MENTALLY ILL PEOPLE
Bruce McDougall
MORE than 100 people have been shot dead by Australian police over the past 25 years — and almost half of them were found to be mentally ill.
In January this year a two-year-old boy saw police shoot dead a man who had threatened officers with a knife at a police station in Sydney’s northwest.
In March last year a knife-wielding man died after being shot by police who were called to a domestic incident at a house at Ettalong on the Central Coast.
The man allegedly became aggressive and was shot once in the chest by a senior constable after attempts to subdue him failed.
That shooting came less than a month after police killed a 22-year-old woman in Western Sydney.
Courtney Topic, who had Asperger’s syndrome, was shot outside a Hungry Jack’s restaurant at West Hoxton after officers failed to subdue her with capsicum spray or a Taser.
In April last year police shot a 20-year-old man armed with a knife in Gosford.
Among the most dramatic confrontations was the killing of French photographer Ron Levi who was shot by police as he brandished a knife on Bondi Beach in 1997. A coronial inquest into Mr Levi’s death was told that he was suffering from a psychiatric illness “at and immediately before his death”.
The man whom police shot yesterday in Hornsby had escaped from a psychiatric facility a few weeks ago.
ONE-DAY WORKSHOP ON MENTAL ILLNESS IS ALL THE TRAINING OUR POLICE OFFICERS GET
Ashleigh Gleeson
POLICE receive just one day of training to deal with cases involving mental health patients.
And NSW police yesterday refused to confirm whether the officers involved in the Hornsby shooting had even received this.
Mental health experts have questioned whether the one-day workshop was adequate considering as much as 40 per cent of the police workload involved dealing with those affected by mental illness.
The training was launched in 2014 to help the state’s officers deal with the “exponential growth” of mental health-related incidents. It was being rolled out to more than 13,000 general officers over two years.
Mental Health Carers NSW chief executive Jonathan Harms told The Daily Telegraph more needed to be done to prepare general police officers to deal with such complex cases.
“Given this is core business for police we believe this training is a baby step and we really need much more mental health capacity attached to the police force.”
Police Association of NSW spokesman Scott Weber said the mental health training was “really comprehensive” and a “world leader”. He said officers who made up the specialised mental health intervention team undertook a four-day course.
A police spokeswoman yesterday would not answer questions on whether the one-day mental health workshop had been fully rolled out or if the officers involved in yesterday’s shooting had received it.
She said that would form part of the critical incident investigation.
In 2013, the NSW police responded to more than 42,000 mental health related incidents.If you are working on a desktop application that you want to release on the Windows Store by packaging it with the Desktop Bridge, you’ll know that one of the requirements is that your application should work fine also on Windows 10 S, the new Windows edition that was introduced on 2nd May 2017. We have already discussed on this blog how you can test if your application is compliant in the following article: Porting and testing your classic desktop applications on Windows 10 S with the Desktop Bridge - https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/appconsult/2017/06/15/porting-and-testing-your-classic-desktop-applications-on-windows-10-s-with-the-desktop-bridge/.
Nevertheless, a few word about the two modes:
The Audit mode enforces the Code Integrity checks for logging purpose only. That is to say that instead of raising exceptions (and crashes for you application) when unsupported Windows 10 S operations are performed, every failure is written in the Event Log: Application and Services Logs –> Microsoft –> Windows –> CodeIntegrity
The Production mode with the AppxTestRootAgency Store certificate exactly behaves like a real Windows 10 S box. The only difference is that this mode allows us to install apps signed with the AppxTestRootAgency provided by the Store team (direct link download).
However, you’ll know that the test phase, especially with the second mode, isn’t so easy to achieve, because you need to create a specific version of your package for this purpose (since the application needs to be signed with a special certificate, which means that also the publisher declared in the manifest must be changed). As such, let’s introduce some tools that will make your tests faster and easier!
MakeAPPXForWin10S
Purpose
For testing purpose, if you want to install an Appx package, you can double click on the Appx or use the AddAppxPackage Powershell command (even if, for the final round of testing, always make sure to use a real app package, as explained in the following blog post). This will work only if the Appx is signed using a trusted certificate. Usually when developing apps, the certificate is self-signed and it is not trusted on other computers. Of course, we can install it in the "Trusted People" store but it can be really time consuming for testers or IT departments if the number of apps and computers is big (Besides the fact that you have to ask the developer to send you the certificate).
The MakeAPPXForWin10S.cmd tool allows you to install any Appx for testing purpose on a Windows 10 computer in Developer mode without worrying about the certificate used for signing the app.
The only one certificate you will have to install on the Windows 10 test box is the AppxTestRootAgency certificate.
Actions
Here are what this tool does for you under the hood:
It creates a new unique folder for extracting the Appx files It gets the content of the AppxManifest.xml in this folder. It modifies the Publisher identity to use the one provided by the AppxTestRootAgency certificate. It is: “CN=Appx Test Root Agency Ex”. Lastly, it saves the modified manifest It recreates the Appx file from the folder (with the modified AppxManifest.xml) It signs the Appx file with the AppxTestRootAgency certificate provided by the Store team
Usage
RepackageAPPXFolderForWin10S
Purpose
Let’s imagine the following scenario: you have used the previous MakeAPPXForWin10S.cmd script, then you have installed and tested the app and you have discovered that you are missing a content file or that the app failed the WACK because of bad images’ size for example. As such, to continue the testing phase, you must modify the files within the extracted Appx folder, recreate the package, sign it again, etc. Very time consuming, as you can imagine! Here is when the RepackageAPPXFolderForWin10S.cmd comes into the place! The tool takes the extracted app package (which, in the meantime, you have manually modified) and creates the signed Appx file out from it.
Actions
Recreates the Appx file with the content of the DesktopBridge folder already extracted by the MakeAPPXForWin10S.Cmd Signs the Appx file with the AppxTestRootAgency provided by the Store team
Usage
The easiest way to use these tools is to clone the repo located at https://github.com/Microsoft/Windows-AppConsult-Tools-DesktopBridgeRePack. You will find in the RepackageForWindows10S folder the tools and the AppxTestRootAgency.pfx certificate needed for signing. You can then use the tools in a standard command line.
Happy Desktop Bridge and UWP packaging and repackaging!
References“Sleep on it.” It’s time-worn advice for anyone trying to make a tricky decision. But does it work? Does it lead to better decisions, or at least ones that people feel better about? It’s an irresistible question for researchers who are already interested in the issue of how sleep affects emotion and memory — two important aspects of decision-making — and a new study in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making sought to shed some light on it with laptop satchels. The results were very mixed, but they point the way to new experiments that will be able to tell us more.
The authors, led by Uma R. Karmarkar of Harvard Business School, conducted two experiments in which they brought in volunteers and showed them a bunch of different attributes about laptop satchel bags, each displayed alongside a photo of the bag — some of them positive, some of them negative. The participants were told that all of the information they were viewing was real and that they’d eventually be tasked with actually choosing which of the satchel’s they’d most want to own. After they did, they’d be entered into a drawing for a chance to win that satchel.
Each group viewed all of the attributes-photo pairs and rated their interest in owning the satchels twice, with a 12-hour interval between the session, though they didn’t have to actually choose until the end. To figure out the effects of sleep, the researchers set things up so that one of the groups had its first session in the morning and its second in the evening, while the other had its first session in the evening and its second the next morning.
In addition to asking the participants which of the laptops they wanted, the researchers also had them try to recall as many of the attributes as they could, since they wanted to figure out whether sleep impaired the recall of positive attributes, negative ones, or both. Then, after the participants made their final decisions, the researchers asked them how positively they felt about the quality of their decision and how likely they’d be to spend real money on the satchel. (The researchers also controlled for the fact that, for biological reasons, there might be inherent differences in how people make decisions in the morning versus at night.)
Summing up their findings, the authors write:
Our results demonstrate that a time period that includes normal nighttime sleep has distinct and complex effects on several elements of the decision process. Sleeping on a decision engendered more positive thoughts about the choice set. It might be assumed that this would make people feel better about their choice and more interested in pursuing it. However, counter to predictions based on previous literature, as well as common assumptions, sleep failed to improve perceptions of decision quality and indeed seemed to make participants more reluctant to consider commitment to the preferred item (e.g., spending money to purchase it). Given the novelty of these findings, it will be important for future research to investigate the effects of sleep on a broad range of decision types.
In other words, it was a mixed finding: The sleepers were biased toward remembering the satchels positively but weren’t more excited about their choice. It’s hard to know exactly what to take away from this, and, as the authors note, “future research” would be helpful.
Part of the reason it’s hard to interpret this is that the researchers didn’t follow up with the folks who actually received the bag — that is, for whom the “choice” they made led to a concrete reality. There are likely good reasons for this: You’d have to hand out a lot of satchels and run a longer, more expensive experiment to track this stuff in a statistically meaningful way.
But future experiments seeking to drill down into what’s really going on here with sleep and decision-making should try to base themselves on actual decisions. It would be interesting to see the results of a similar experiment (perhaps with a cheaper item) in which participants went home with whatever they chose and were asked about it a few days or a week later. In the meantime, this remains a very fuzzy subject. We can say with confidence that sleep has all sorts of cognitive benefits, but we can’t say with certainty that it benefits decision-making as compared to same-day choices — even if this study does offer some hints.Stories leap from the page in this reissue of the Sri Lankan scholar’s classic study of women’s movements in Asia and the Middle East
In the early 1980s the Sri Lankan historian Kumari Jayawardena, travelling by train from Brussels to The Hague, wrote lecture notes for a course on the history of women’s movements. Many lecture notes crumble into dust – but not these. They were published in 1982, and later evolved into the influential work Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. The book has been republished, as one of Verso’s feminist classics, with a foreword by Rafia Zakaria.
More than three decades after it first came out, the book remains the best introduction to the history of women’s movements in Turkey, Egypt, Iran, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan. It takes us into the lives and ideas of a host of women and men who sought reform and revolutionary transformation.
Their stories leap from the page. The poet Qiu Jin, born in 1875, broke with her husband and children in Beijing to study in Japan, adopted western male clothing, identified with rebellious “new women” and organised a women’s army. Her prose-poem, “Stones of the Jingwei Bird”, written in a form popular among women and the illiterate, connected the subordination Chinese women experienced to the humiliation of her country through imperialism. Qiu Jin was executed by the Manchu regime in 1907 for plotting rebellion.
Jayawardena traces long-standing forms of resistance: female warriors who rode into battle, for instance, and women who became shamans in Korea. She also records the work of learned men, such as Ibn Rushd in 12th-century Iran, who questioned women’s restricted lives, and Li Ruzhen, whose 1827 novel, Flowers in the Mirror, imagined a world in which Chinese men, rather than women, suffered footbinding.
Adopting a broad definition of 19th- and early 20th-century feminism as action against women’s “oppression and exploitation within the family, at work and in society”, she insists that, like other radical ideas, it is not ethnically circumscribed. Her thinking, while rooted within specific historical contexts, defies enclosure; in her book, claims for women’s emancipation intertwine with the modernising impetus within nationalist movements.
As the contradictory impact of global capitalism impinged on colonised women they drew on western thinking and feminism, but recast ideas of emancipation for themselves. Transmitted through women’s journals, books, letters and verbal reports from travellers, these ideas crossed borders. Thus women in Egypt heard of modernising secular reform in Turkey, while tales of Japanese “new women” reached China.
Jayawardena shows how education was a vital first step. Indian reformer Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922) was taught Sanskrit by her father. She used her knowledge to challenge social injustices and became a campaigner for women’s schools and colleges. In Indonesia, Raden Adjeng Kartini (1879‑1904) was inspired by reading about Pandita Ramabai. She was also encouraged by correspondence with Dutch socialists and feminists who were agitating not simply for women’s suffrage but for economic equality and sexual self-determination. Aware how even these friendly connections were distorted through the prism of colonialism, she nonetheless recognised that merely copying the “European world” was not the answer.
Jayawardena reveals a multifaceted nationalism, driven by romantic ideals of motherhood
The growth of nationalism during the late 19th and early 20th centuries contributed to a questioning of, and rebellion against, customary assumptions among men as well as women. In Turkey the nationalist theorist Ziya Gökalp called for women’s equality, while in Egypt, the Muslim reformer Kassim Amin opposed both the veil and arranged marriages. He argued for education, access to employment and legal change. “Modern” nationalist women in Muslim countries rejected the veil; in China they cut their hair short and challenged footbinding; in the Catholic Philippines they fought against the Spanish.
Jayawardena reveals a multifaceted nationalism, driven not simply by visions of progress but by romantic ideals of motherhood. Women’s claims for emancipation emerged amid social and cultural dissonance. Global capitalism and colonialism affected poor women harshly, but also provoked revolt. In 1886 female silk workers initiated the first strike in Japan, and as women were drawn into India’s textile industry, communist female organisers, including the clothing worker Parvatibai Bhore fought for better conditions. Under British rule, Sri Lankan women were employed breaking stones for resurfacing roads and laboured in the tea, rubber and coffee plantations. Here too, during the 1920s and 30s, communists and Trotskyists helped to unionise them. In 1948 a group of leftwing women formed Sri Lanka’s first socialist feminist group.
The kingdom of women: the society where a man is never the boss Read more
Among them was Doreen Wickremasinghe, a progressive teacher and anti-imperialist who deeply influenced Jayawardena. I first met Jayawardena in 1986 because I had selected Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World for an award. She amazed me, on receiving the prize, by talking about Robert Weare, a working-class founder of Bristol’s Socialist Society in the 1880s. How was it, I wondered, that his name had reached Sri Lanka? The answer was simple: he was Wickremasinghe’s grandfather.
As a socialist feminist activist Jayawardena has made ceaseless connections, between the University of Colombo and workers in the community; between Sri Lanka’s different ethnic and religious groupings; and between feminists in South Asia and other parts of the world. In the 1980s she was already alert to the dangers that all forms of authoritarian fundamentalist interpretations of religion presented for women. Rather than responding by disavowing power, she once quietly observed that it need not take the symbolic form of a closed fist, but could be a hand held up with the palm facing outwards, radiating strength to others. As an activist and a scholar this is what she has striven to do. She is now 86; Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World not only retains its relevance in 2017, but has acquired even greater urgency.
• Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World by Kumari Jayawardena (Verso, £11.99). To order a copy, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.Good music is timeless, they say. But usually, that’s only talking about The Beatles or Elvis. So how well does a 3,400-year-old tune stand the test of time?
An excavation in the 1950s in the ancient city of Ugarit, a coastal town in modern-day Syria, discovered a set of 29 tablets from around 1400 BCE, at the near end of the Hurrian civilization. The tablets all denote some form of symbols, however only one of these tablets was legible: the now-famed text H6. The H6 tablet appears to contain music annotations for a nine-stringed ancient harp called a sammûm, along with lyrics for a hymn to Nikkal, an Akkadian goddess of orchards. This would make the tablet the earliest known surviving written musical notation of a melody.
Also, interestingly for an ancient “music sheet”, it contained instructions on how to tune the harps. Years of research has managed to decipher it and create new interpretations of the musical instructions, although difficulties translating the notes means |
The boy was so happy with his new skin that he wanted to show off.”
This Associated Press series was produced in partnership with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.Dwyane Wade played what must have been his worst ever postseason game tonight. With his team on the ropes in the second half, some might expect that his coach would be leaned on for leadership and advice on how to get things turned around. Not so. Instead, Flash berated Erik Spoelstra on the sideline, removing any semblance of authority that some may have kidded themselves into thinking his “head coach” title provided him. (Wait, what am I saying? Chris Bosh already made this CRYSTAL CLEAR, last season.)
Compare this to the player-coach dynamic between Tim Duncan and Gregg Popovich. In his excellent (seriously, take a moment to read this) 21 Shades of Grey about Tim Duncan, Chris Ballard described how the Spurs coach was “allowed to” yell at his star player.
Most important, he’s allowed Popovich to coach him. For 15 straight seasons Pop has gone after his franchise player in practice. We’re talking neck veins bulging, spittle flying, a Gatling gun of obscenities. And all Duncan has done is stare back, absorbing it. “He hasn’t always liked it,” says former teammate Sean Elliott, now a team announcer, “but he takes it. You know how important that is for the rest of the team to see?” Or, as one Spurs coach puts it, “How could a guy like Stephen Jackson complain when Pop was motherf—— Tim every day?”
Many would say that the Spurs scenario is ideal. The star player allows himself to be coached. By vesting all authority in Gregg Popovich, players feel like equals with a common agenda. It’s hard to argue with what San Antonio has accomplished under Pop. (And if you give them a chance you might even acquire a taste for enjoying their style.)
But what if the star player won’t be coached? What if it isn’t possible to get the ego(s) at hand to submit to a grey-haired, white board-carrying stiff who he can’t dream of relating to in any way off the basketball floor? If the star player WON’T buy in, then what?
How about going without a coach?
There have been 40 player-coaches in NBA history. Twelve of those coaches were Hall of Fame players. Two of them (Alex Hannum and Red Holzman) were eventually elected to the Hall as coaches (Holzman’s election was certainly unrelated to his player-coach stint.) Three NBA titles have been won by player-coaches. I haven’t done any extensive research on comparing player-coaches to the suit-wearing variety, but it doesn’t appear that it’s a losing strategy.
I have a basic philosophy about coaches that they either make their team a little bit better or a little bit worse than if they had no coach at all. With what seems like a growing number of superstar players that refuse to submit to coaching, wouldn’t it make sense to just let that player run the team his own way? Of course he’d have real coaches as assistants to help run practices, manage playing rotations, and drawing up plays. But rather than continue the ruse of somebody like Spoelstra “leading” Dwyane Wade, just hand the player the keys and put everybody on the same page. It would encourage unity and increase focus.
And who knows: slashing millions of dollars of coaching salary off the owners’ books might just prevent another lockout.
AdvertisementsBlockchain technology implications
Rok Gornik Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 27, 2017
You probably already heard about the cryptocurrency and the most famous representative Bitcoin. Lately, Slovenia has become increasingly popular for projects that want to take advantage of Blockchain technology. More and more domestic innovators are trying to develop their products on this global innovation. These projects ranked Slovenia high on a global map of innovative business models.
Technology has been released in 2008, which means that we are still at a very early stage of development. Just now, first application examples were introduced that will not only serve the financial world but also transfer the benefits of the technological solution to other sectors. Slovenian project SunContract aims to bring the energy sector closer to mainstream adoption through its platform based on transparency, clarity, innovation and ease of use.
How will this look like?
At first glance, the Blockchain technology seems very complicated. Due to rather early stage of development, current solutions and examples of practical use are limited and complex. That means enthusiasts and early users mainly use Blockchain applications. SunContract wants to take advantage of the technology and make it easy to use. Internet has gone through the same process in the past until it became easy to use.
In order for the Blockchain to be widely adopted, technology should be used in a way that is understandable for all. Today, every home owns at least one smartphone but at the beginning, those were accepted first by the younger population. This means that many day-to-day tasks can be moved to apps powered by smartphones. One can go to an online bank instead of losing valuable time, order food through the application instead of waiting in line, giving a tax return through a website, etc.
With Blockchain technology, it is no longer necessary to wait all day for funds transfer between different banks within the country or even wait few days for international transactions. Transfer of value is now much faster and cheaper as the funds transfer fees on blockchain networks are lower than in banking. Similarly, development teams are constantly upgrading networks to become more user-friendly and scalable.
New technological achievement can be widely adopted only if it is easy to use and user-friendly. Such application has to have pleasant interface and clear features. User should not need a lot of time to get used to the interface and has to be able to quickly grasp the most important functions. In this way, the application developers ensures user’s interest and loyalty.
SunContract project will do just that in the field of energy.
The idea of the project is to connect consumers and electricity producers on one place (platform), creating a common market (marketplace) where they will be able to trade with electricity. This type of trading is called peer-to-peer. At any time, one will be able to choose in an easy way from which producer one wants to buy electricity.
In practice, this will mean that neighbors John and Mathew can trade electricity to each other. For example, John has a solar power plant on the roof, which fulfills all of his energy needs. In addition, its domestic power plant makes enough energy that he could sell it to others. Therefore, he decides to sell excess energy on SunContract platform. For this reason, he joins local energy pool, signs the contract with the company that will operate the Platform and his offer is already on the market. In future, signing of a contract could be automated through the technology of Smart Contracts that are written to ledger however, the current legislation does not allow this.
Currently, classical retailer provides energy to his neighbor Mathew. He thinks that he could get more energy for his money and have a better user experience. That is why he is checking SunContract website and decides to download an application, which will allow him to run electricity. He chooses application because phone is simpler and handier than a web site. At the beginning, he also signs a contract, which gives him access to all functionalities. After that, he can easily operate on the Platform.
The system will work in a way that each user on the Platform will get its own wallet. Anyone who will want to buy electricity will have to load local currency on personal wallet or SNC tokens, which will be official payment instrument on the Platform. Electricity will be delivered to the consumer only if this particular consumer will have sufficient balance of funds on his wallet for supplied electricity payment.
Such a system will eliminate defaulters that are very common in current system. Electricity sellers must include unpaid services in their expenses and then charge them in the form of a higher margin to all those who regularly pay for supplied electricity. Of course, this is not fair because all regular payers indirectly pay electricity to those who do not pay for it. SunContract payment system will be fair to all. Lower costs due to elimination of defaulters will bring cheaper electricity to consumers, and at the same time guarantee small producers payment for services.
As already mentioned, electricity will be supplied only if consumer’s wallet balance is high enough. In the moment of electricity delivery, automatic system in the background of the Platform will trigger payment for services and transfer funds to the producer. In few minutes, he will see a new balance on his wallet. Data of supplied electricity and transaction will be recorded on the blockchain and will remain there forever. Both John and Mathew will be able to review data backwards, which will make easier for them to evaluate future production or consumption and monitor their own energy needs.
The Platform will also optimize other processes. This is why producers can expect higher redemption price for electricity and at the same time, consumer will receive more favorable price and better services. Everyone involved will receive better and more transparent service.
Website: https://suncontract.org/
Whitepaper: https://suncontract.org/res/whitepaper.pdfTickets for Pokemon Go Fest in Chicago are reselling for hundreds of dollars — but sponsor Sprint says it’s giving away dozens of wristbands to get into the July 22 festival.
Pokemon Go Fest is an all-day event centered around the augmented reality game, in which people wander the real world trying to catch digital monsters on their cellphones. Organizers have permission from the Chicago Park District to host as many as 20,000 people Grant Park’s Butler Field and the neighboring North Rose Garden but have declined to say how many people they’re expecting.
Sprint, one of the sponsors, is planning four events at its stores around Chicago where they’ll raffle off “a couple hundred” of the elusive general-entry wristbands, Sprint spokeswoman Yui Namiki said via email.
Sprint is also giving away several thousand early-entry wristbands for players to get into the fest an hour early, she said. She declined to say exactly how many of each kind of pass the company would have, but said they would be “divided pretty evenly” between stores.
The events will be held at these Chicago Sprint Stores:
• 4800 W. Irving Park Road, noon to 4 p.m. Saturday, July 15.
• 100 W. Randolph St. (the James R. Thompson Center), noon to 4 p.m. Thursday, July 20.
• 239 S. Halsted St., noon to 4 p.m. Friday, July 21.
• 24 E. Randolph St., 4 to 8 p.m. Friday, July 21.
To enter to win general entry wristbands, players use their ID number from the Pokemon Go Trainer Rewards program. The Trainer Rewards program is run by Sprint and Boost Mobile but is free to join for users of any cellphone company.
Players must come into the physical store to enter. General admission wristbands will be raffled off every 15 to 30 minutes, Namiki said. Early-entry wristbands, on the other hand, will be available to anyone who walks into a store and proves they already have a general entry Pokemon Go Fest ticket.
A spokesman for Pokemon Go Fest said there were no other planned giveaways that he could discuss at the moment.
Organizers separately unveiled more details on activities at Pokemon Go Fest in a blog post published Wednesday morning, including information on how players worldwide will be able to work in concert with those at the Chicago event.
bmeyerson@chicagotribune.com
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It is official. The deep state has admitted that Trump is now under their control and it is now business as usual — just like it was under Bush and Obama — and just like it would’ve been under Hillary.
For those who don’t remember, with the help of mainstream media—from The New York Times to Fox News—after 9/11, Americans were duped into accepting endless war by George W. Bush thanks to a constant bombardment of lies sold to the masses under the guise of “protecting freedom.” All one needs to do to realize no freedoms were protected by these wars, in which thousands of Americans died and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were slaughtered, is look around today.
With every action recorded, phone tapped, innocent family surveilled, right stripped, and citizen killed by their government, the term “Freedom” has become a mere symbolic representation of the brittle shell of America left behind after being gutted by unelected operatives in the deep state hell bent on total control and perpetual war.
Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and other neocons hailing from the notorious Project for the New American Century (PNAC), co-founded by neoconservative extraordinaire, William “Bill” Kristol, had their agenda of military hegemony clearly laid out, years before 9/11 which Bush would implement for them perfectly.
After Obama promised to end the wars, he quickly fell in line and started several more. And now, this very same thing is happening with Trump.
The deep state neocon/neolib faction has become so successful at shifting the narrative toward irrelevant infighting that no one even notices when their candidate gets into office and does a 180 on damn near every promise they made — Trump included. Here are just two powerful examples of Trump selling out to the deep state.
Saudi Arabia. Before Trump was elected, he admitted that he knew Saudi Arabia funded 9/11. Now, as the world finds this out, Trump gives them hundreds of billions in weapons and calls them our allies.
Afghanistan. Before he was elected, Trump was vehemently opposed to the quagmire in Afghanistan and called it “stupid,” “wasteful,” and “dangerous.” Now, just like his predecessors, he’s doubling down and send thousands more troops into an unwinnable war in which they will kill or be killed only to come home with PTSD or worse.
Dare we say, “We told you so”?
While many had faith that Trump would keep his promises, the fact is that all presidents are puppets and no matter who is in office, the shadow government always wins.
The deep state is so brazen, that the founder of PNAC actually took to MSNBC this week to admit they’ve finally gotten a grip on Trump.
After Trump made his UN speech, promising more war and to annihilate the millions of citizens in North Korea if they should make one wrong move, Bill Kristol himself went on MSNBC to praise him for it.
Kristol said Trump “sounded a little like George W. Bush to me” and that “for all of Donald Trump’s America First talk and repudiation of the Bush-McCain-Romney foreign policy,” it came across as “more standard,” even with the “Trumpian aspects.”
Kristol openly admitted that yes, Trump ran on a non-interventionist policy of peace and actually criticized Bush and Obama for their senseless wars, but now he is just like Bush. But it gets worse.
As to why Trump now sounds like Bush, according to Kristol, it’s because the deep state has officially attached their puppet strings.
“The people around Trump have gotten more of a grip on Trump, I think, in foreign policy, than I would have expected… This is a more normal speech by an American president than I might have thought three, four months ago,” said Kristol.
And just like that, on live TV, the neocon of neocons — who is an unmistakable member and policy writer of the deep state — said that Trump is now a puppet whose very strings are pulled by the Swamp he promised to drain, yet never did.
Yes, this is the same Bill Kristol who just two months ago called Trump a Jackass.
It’s not just the neocons who’ve noticed Trump’s transformation into a deep state neocon puppet either — lots of us have — including former Congressman Ron Paul.
“Who would’ve thought?” Paul noted before epically explaining Trump’s hypocritical transition.
Trump bashed W. and the Iraq War relentlessly during his campaign. Now, the very same people who brought us the Iraq nightmare are giddy with excitement. Neocons like John Bolton and Elliot Abrams are so happy to see this new Trump. Today, the king of the warmongers Bill Kristol says Trump “sounded a little like George W. Bush to me”. The people who have never been right, and have done unimaginable damage to the United States of America are gearing up to take us back into the abyss. Donald Trump is their new W.
Welcome to the deep state Donald Trump, we hope you enjoy selling out your base.Pushed into a corner by soaring prices, greedy landlords and a cap on benefits, one London council has embarked on a daring set of untested policies to provide more public housing
Christina is at breaking point. The thing is, so are the people she’s asking for help.
Christina and her three kids have nowhere to stay. Their private landlord chucked them out after she fell behind on the rent, poleaxed by the coalition’s cap on welfare benefits. When they pitched up at Enfield council’s homelessness centre last night, officers sent them to a hostel. Her appointment this morning will decide where the family sleeps tonight.
The meeting’s here, at John Wilkes House – although the invocation of that radical wit does nothing for a low-slung office block plonked next to a branch of Asda and a pound shop. This is where residents of the north London borough of Enfield pitch up when their housing benefits haven’t arrived. It’s also where they come if they’re made homeless.
All those headlines about runaway prices and impossible rents: John Wilkes House is where you see the human fallout. A meltdown happens daily here: one that’s forced the council to experiment with a string of new, unusual and highly risky interventions in its housing market. Many of its policies are untried. Some are radical enough to startle even the experts.
Just a few miles away from Westminster, Enfield’s local politicians are making a series of gambles that parliament’s big beasts wouldn’t dare try. They come with serious political and economic risk. But if even some of the things being tried by Enfield work out, they might help not only cases such as Christina’s, but also point to some radical solutions to Britain’s housing crisis.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kenny Wanogho (left) takes down the details of those affected by the housing crisis in Enfield and who have turned to John Wilkes House for help. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Guardian
But first, see what an outer London borough is up against.
This morning, Christina’s brought along her eldest, Si. “I’ve been crying from the moment I wake up, and trying to hide it from the kids,” she says. “I didn’t want the kids to be disappointed in me. I didn’t want them to be taken away from me.” She broke down during a recent school run, she says, “in front of about 100 other parents”.
Si turns 11 in four days. What would he like for his birthday? “WWE!” Seeing my confusion, he translates into old-speak. “Wrestling!” Small hands bounce on the ripped knees of his jogging bottoms.
First, the pair must wait. Waiting is built into the architecture of John Wilkes. It begins outside the office, with a long see-through shelter, where a queue forms long before opening time. The most desperate carry neon-pink suitcases, bulging Lidl carrier bags, plump binliners: the sum of their lives which, in the glare of morning, resembles nothing so much as the leavings outside a charity shop.
At 9am, the line pours past the security guards and into the reception – and the waiting begins all over again, in front of a big screen that, at one point, notes the average time to be seen is 84 minutes.
Inside, everyone hears everyone else’s business: the elaborate ringtones, the kids shouted at to pipe down, the official interrogations.
“You not got any friends who can help?”
“Why don’t you have no money?”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Wilkes House is also under pressure from austerity. On the day of this report, 10 staff were given notice of redundancy. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
They hear the answers, too. Wimbledon thwacks away on the reception telly, but no one watches.
At first, the balance of power seems starkly cliched: here gather the supplicants desperate for shelter; behind those glass partitions sit the local authority representatives deciding their fate.
But a day here reveals a council at the limit of its abilities and a workforce at the end of its tether. Those on the front desk each see about 50 people in need of housing every day – six or seven of whom have nowhere else to stay. “At the end of each afternoon, you just feel exhausted,” says Linda Ray. Especially when you have to tell dozens of faces that they don’t qualify for help.
On being refused by Linda a couple of weeks ago, a woman pulled out a jar, unscrewed the lid and lobbed it under the screen. It was full of bed bugs. I’m shown the desks they crawled over, the carpet that had to be fumigated.
And under the now-familiar arithmetic of austerity, more work and more stress is parcelled out among fewer staff. While the Guardian was at John Wilkes, 10 employees received redundancy letters.
Finally, there’s the big picture. “We’re being hit by a perfect storm: rising house prices, the squeeze in the rental market and the benefit cap,” says Sally McTernan, who runs Enfield’s housing service. Like the people turning up at John Wilkes, her team is being tossed about by forces beyond their control.
What do you do when your options are being cut daily by the market and central government? If you’re Enfield, you try and create a few more. To reduce its dependence on private rentals, the council has arranged a credit facility of £100m and begun bulk-buying homes. It’s introducing a scheme to license private landlords so controversial that it’s being challenged in court. And for the first time in 30 years it is building council houses. Furthermore, in defiance of Eric Pickles, it is using a loophole that means it won’t give tenants the right to buy.
Emergency, emergency, emergency
To see why these schemes matter, go up to the first floor of John Wilkes, where staff try to sort out Christina. The council has a duty to house her family, the question is: where? Her case-worker, Rob Andrew, marches over to the temporary accommodation team with a wad of paperwork and a pinch of self-deprecation. “You’re going to love me!”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The council is buying properties wherever it can afford to. It has already acquired one of the flats in this apartment block on Colyton Way. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
Nothing doing, says Andy Wheeler: “I’ve got at least three others waiting for three-beds before she gets even a look-in.” A colleague goes to the last resort: ringing around hotels.
Wheeler pulls out a yellow ring-binder, each sheet a ledger of the day’s appointees placed in a flat or house. But at the foot of the forms are handwritten entries of people who came in off the street needing somewhere to stay that night.
“Emergency,” he taps the sheets as he flicks. “Emergency, emergency, emergency, emergency: a bad day. Emergency, emergency, emergency …” As the days go by, the handwriting gradually fills up more of the papers.
After 30 years of right-to-buy and no new council houses, Enfield’s stock of homes has halved. “We’ve gone from being a provider of council homes to a provider of emergency homes,” says John Wilkes manager, Mike Bobbett.
The new walk-ins are typically people like Christina, evicted by a landlord wanting more rent than David Cameron’s benefits cap allows.
Conservatives initially promised that the cap on housing benefit would force landlords to accept lower rents. Instead, rents in London are rising at double the national rate. The bottom of the housing market is in turmoil, with an exodus of poor households out of inner London to traditionally low-rent neighbourhoods such as the eastern half of Enfield.
Central boroughs, such as Westminster and Kensington, are also shifting families to cheaper parts of London’s periphery.
“Authorities are now gazumping each other,” says Ahmet Oykener, Enfield council cabinet member for housing. “Croydon [council, on the edge of south London] calls our officers about properties in our backyard to warn, ‘Butt out, it’s ours.’ Where are we meant to put our homeless?”
One London authority has placed 1,000 households in Enfield, he claims. “Forget homes: think about what that means for local schools and GP practices.”
Making things worse, big landlords and their agents are cutting down on long-term lets. They prefer the vastly more profitable and insecure overnight rentals.
Here’s an email that’s just reached Wheeler, and presumably every other council homelessness department in London. It invites bids for a two-bed in Mill Hill, on the edge of north London, for £85 a night. Per calendar month, that works out as £2,585 – for which you could take a flat on Harley Street. Still, he reckons it’ll go.
Enfield has about 480 households in what’s called nightly paid accommodation. The cost is ruinous – and getting worse. Last winter, the council worked out that over a year each overnight rental would cost an additional £5,000 on top of housing benefits; now it estimates the premium has risen to £5,500.
House hunters
Peter Robinson is the only man in this house wearing a suit.
About 20 minutes up the road from John Wilkes, the auction property is heaving with young couples dreaming of getting on the ladder, and weekend developers. But Robinson in his Daz-white shirt doesn’t plan to move in.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of the properties bought by the council. Its remit is to buy cheap homes, and so it is more interested in the price and number of bedrooms than decor. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
For most people, buying a home is the biggest financial decision they’ll make in their lives. Robinson will be making dozens of such calls in just the next few months.
He’s bulk-buying homes for Enfield. Rather than keep paying profiteering landlords, Ahmet and fellow councillors established a company to purchase new houses, arranged a credit facility of £100m, and imposed targets for the number of units to be snapped up every month.
The programme began in March with one officer, an endearingly serious South African called Detlev Munster. Never having done anything similar, Munster did what boffins do: he drew up an intricate flow chart for how to hoover up homes.
But since flow charts don’t do viewings, he rapidly built up the team. Robinson was drafted in – a consultant surveyor, who travels up from the City to view property in some of the most rundown bits of Enfield. Then came Tim Bentley, who watches the local market for new listings, plugging them into a model to assess suitability. And Neo Georghiou has just joined to do the evening and weekend viewings.
Other London councils pick up the odd property, out of the same dire need as Enfield. But I haven’t heard of anything like this: a purpose-built team of municipal house-hunters.
These buyers aren’t fussed about character or location, but affordability. If the model deems a house too costly, it doesn’t get seen. Cheap properties needing expensive repairs are dropped. Before making an offer, Munster has to seek the assent of colleagues. “Everybody’s become Phil Spencer and Sarah Beeny,” he sighs.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andy Wheeler with his yellow folder, trying to book emergency accommodation for those who need it most. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
As property-buying goes, this process lacks all the usual dreams and heat. This auction home, for instance, has a 1970s-style avocado bathroom suite, which any owner-occupier would tear out with their bare hands, but Robinson reckons it can stay. His main worry is that the council will get outbid.
With good reason. Look at this spreadsheet kept by the team of its progress:
Properties viewed: 64
Offers placed: 44
The high ratio of offers to viewings proves the worth of Bentley’s sifting. But see what happens next:
Offers accepted: 23
Of these, offers proceeding: 18
Completed: 2
That drop shows how, in a fast-rising market, the value-conscious council is being elbowed aside by bigger spenders. Were Sisyphus around today, he wouldn’t be pushing boulders up hills, but trying to buy fairly priced housing amid a massive bubble.
Without making Munster’s task harder by revealing to estate agents his buying targets, let me just say that the total secured since March is less than the goal for one month.
The two properties he has bought are former council flats. To alleviate its housing crisis, the local authority is buying back, with public money, homes it was forced to sell at a steep discount under Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme.
And yes, Oykener and the council are keenly aware of the irony.
The temporary village
Back at John Wilkes, officers have unexpectedly good news: they’ve found Christina a house.
As Andrew explains to her, it’s outside London, which means longer school runs. And it’s temporary, so the family can be moved on at any time. But to look at Christina, who’s had nightmares of sleeping on the streets and her kids getting taken away by social services, is to see pure relief.
This isn’t a home, it’s an interim arrangement – but it’s one that, given the lack of other options, might endure for years. Andrew reels off a list of places where Christina could afford to rent on her reduced benefits. None are within the M25; one, Southend-on-Sea, is an hour’s drive.
Christina: “That’s miles away!”
Andrew: “We didn’t make the rules!”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Bury Street West site is several acres of derelict land that the council is going to build 180 homes on. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
The 300,000-resident borough has sprouted what is in effect a large village of 2,200 households, say 9,000 people, living in temporary accommodation. That’s the seventh highest of all local authorities, and it keeps climbing.
Housing families who no longer receive the benefits or other income to house themselves costs Enfield £3.3m a year. Growing demand and rising rents means that sum is projected to more than double this financial year, to £7.8m.
Imagine being a council seeing a housing crisis rip through your financial planning and chuck around some of your most-vulnerable residents. That is what’s forced Enfield to experiment.
London borough of Barratt
Off one of Enfield’s main streets, behind brick walls and locked gates, lies a patch of land about the size of three football pitches. It’s here that the civic centre plans its biggest housing gambit yet.
The parks department once used Bury Street West as a store for lawnmowers and to wash out wheelie bins. Soon it will form part of the council’s first programme of housebuilding for 30 years.
Munster is a key part of this project, too. Gesturing at the abandoned land in front of us, he talks about how it’ll soon be a mini-village, with up to 180 flats and houses. It will back on to a brook and adjoin a nature trail and put council homes in the same blocks as private ones.
This site is one of several on which the civic centre plans to build about 280 new municipal homes, starting this September.
It doesn’t sound like much. It isn’t much, considering the scale of Enfield’s housing crisis: only the tiniest puncture in a large balloon. But put this in perspective: Sheffield has more than 61,000 households waiting for a home; yet according to government figures, the city built no council homes last year.
So thoroughly has the post-Thatcher public sector lost the skills, confidence and financial scope to build, that – when a town hall either adds to or overhauls its housing stock – it usually sells the land to a developer, agrees some easily bent stipulations on social homes and retreats to a blameless distance.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ahmet Oykener, Labour’s housing and estate regeneration councillor for Enfield, is planning a major building project to provide municipal homes that they cannot be forced to sell under the right-to-buy scheme. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
Not so Enfield: it is funding the developments itself, holding on to the land, and retaining control of all building. And it’s doing this by, effectively, taking out a socking great mortgage and constructing private homes to rent, which will pay for its new council homes. As with the properties it’s buying, the stock will be owned by the council through a new company – which is not legally obliged to offer the right to buy.
Local government associations, academics; no one I’ve spoken to has come across the municipal entrepreneurialism being exercised by Enfield. I ran through its initiatives with Duncan Bowie, former planner for Ken Livingstone and a corporeal encyclopedia of housing policy. So, this local authority, I said: it’s not selling anything to a developer, it’s not doing any private-sector joint ventures…
As we ticked off the list of tried, tested and largely failed policies, Bowie’s frown of scepticism cleared, until he said in a tone of puzzled admiration: “Well … that’s good.”
While most of the modern public sector prefers the language of technical competence to values, council politicians and officers are clearly aware of the politics of what they’re attempting. One housing paper recently sent round the council cabinet dutifully trots through the alternatives before recommending: “A key aim of the council is to tackle inequality. The redevelopment … will help to reduce inequality by improving the living standards of some of Enfield’s least well-off residents.”
This Labour-run council didn’t start off radical. Across the borough are littered other council-house overhauls, led by some big developer with woefully low levels of affordable housing. But circumstances are forcing it to break old habits and try new things.
With hardly any guidance from Westminster (less than a year before the general election, Ed Miliband’s housing ideas are yet to fill a sheet of A4), and with a housing crisis on their doorstep, councils such as Enfield are having to experiment and learn from each other. Newham in east London was the first borough in the country to license private landlords; Enfield plans to follow suit.
All this requires a profound change in how council staff see themselves. The guy who goes to auctions to bid on houses is Munster, even with all those letters after his name. The municipal firm that will own these properties was partly set up by head of finance, Paul Reddaway.
After 27 years at Enfield, he says: “You think you’re going to coast.” Relax, Taxpayers’ Alliance, his council-issue tongue is in his municipal cheek. “But if you’d asked me how to start and run an entirely new company a year ago, I wouldn’t have had a clue.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emilienne Wabuza, a resident of Enfield, has required emergency housing in the past. Photograph: Guy Grandjean
Next door to Enfield is Barnet, a council that under the guise of cuts has outsourced so many of its services it may as well be called the London Borough of Capita. Enfield has responded to the economic crisis by doing the opposite. It’s trying to compete in the market, to secure things the market isn’t delivering for its residents: better jobs, houses, industries. That means building private homes, getting into market gardening, even setting up an energy company.
At John Wilkes, Sally McTernan once described the new emergencies turning up at her door. “They’re a couple who were pootling along, and then their world fell in.” The same could be said of Enfield’s housing policy: it just about got by – until the cuts began, even while the property market went red hot. Now the roof’s falling in, pushing council chiefs to try measures they wouldn’t have dreamed of a few years ago. The big question is how differently Enfield – and perhaps everywhere else – needs to act for things to get back to what was once considered normal.
• Video: a week inside Enfield’s emergency housing office
• The Enfield Experiment: London’s fortunes distilled into a single boroughThe Baltimore Ravens and Jacksonville Jaguars will face off at Wembley Stadium on Sunday, marking the first of four NFL games in London this season.
Baltimore (2-0) is coming off a 24-10 victory over the Cleveland Browns, behind Joe Flacco's two touchdown passes and stellar defense. Led by young talents Tyus Bowser and Tim Williams, the Ravens defense has allowed just 10 points through the team's first two games and has produced 10 turnovers in that span, joining the 1992 Pittsburgh Steelers and the 1971 Cleveland Browns as the only NFL teams since 1970 to force at least four turnovers in each of their first two games of the season. However, Sunday also brought unfortunate news for the Ravens as star right guard Marshal Yanda suffered a season-ending ankle injury.
Jacksonville (1-1) disappointed in a 37-16 loss to the Tennessee Titans on Sunday and is still dealing with a quarterback battle between Blake Bortles and Chad Henne. Bortles, who won the starting job before Week 1, threw one touchdown and two interceptions against the Titans. Rookie running back sensation Leonard Fournette also looks to improve on a 14–carry, 40–yard effort against Tennessee.
How to watch the game:
Game Time: Sunday, Sept. 24, 9:30 a.m. ET
Live Stream/TV: Yahoo! Sports
Next three games:
Jaguars: @ Jets (10/1), @ Steelers (10/8), vs. Rams (10/15)
Ravens: vs Steelers (10/1), @ Raiders (10/8), vs. Bears (10/15)Scott Hale Reiniger, Harlan Sahib Bahadur[citation needed], Prince of Ghor[1] (born September 5, 1948) is an American actor. He is best known as one of the stars of the 1978 classic horror film Dawn of the Dead.
Biography [ edit ]
Reiniger was born in White Plains, New York, in the United States. He is a graduate of Rollins College in Theater Arts.[2]
Following his appearance as Roger in George A. Romero's original Dawn of the Dead in 1978, Reiniger played Marhalt in Romero's 1981 film Knightriders. He also made a cameo appearance in the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead directed by Zack Snyder.
He currently teaches at the |
data such as age and ethnicity.
This is a veritable gold mine of data that Skyhook can then package and offer to marketers who want to reach only select segments of consumers, or to developers and device makers who can use the software to deliver highly relevant real-time content to users.
“We’re able to see at an aggregate level what 100,000,000 people are doing, so we can predict what areas of a city are getting busy or less busy, what types of people are in different areas of the city,” Morgan says. “So, if you want to know where to go out in Seattle tonight, I can tell you what the most active street corner is going to be, and I can tell you the high-level breakout of the type of people who will be there, because they’ve done that every Friday night for the last three years.”
So just how does Skyhook do all this profiling of individual devices while maintaining the anonymity of the people using them?
Morgan says that the company does not use device MAC addresses or phone numbers.
“Every time a new phone registers on our system, we give it an ID like a license plate. There’s no way for you to know what it is. There’s no way for anyone to see it. If you were able to look into our system and see what my phone’s ID was, the only thing you’d ever find out about me is that I’m a middle-aged white guy who makes over $100,000,” Morgan says. “It would never say my name. It would never say where I’m from. There’s nothing that could ever figure out the user, and that’s the bar we have for privacy. Nobody could get into our system, even ourselves, to figure out the name of a user.”
Skyhook and Google
The main thing you need to know here is that Skyhook is suing Google currently.
“Google recognized [the value of mapping the country’s Wi-Fi] and decided it wanted to have a similar system, so it copied the model,” says Morgan. “And because Google brings so much else to the table, where it’s giving away things for free [such as] maps and search and email, they became a competitor to us.”
The problem, Morgan says, came about after Skyhook won deals with Motorola and Samsung, and Google forced those companies to back out of their contracts. Google did not respond to a request for comment.
Even so, maps are undeniably a brilliant gem in Google’s crown--its turn-by-turn navigation is something that Android users universally adore. It only makes sense that the company would get involved in IPS services.
In November, Google announced that it was taking Google Maps indoors. Now, if you go to select U.S. shopping malls, airports, and retail locations, or certain Japanese transit stations, you can use your Android mobile device to see where you are. The idea is similar to the physical kiosk maps you see in malls, except this one is on your phone and adds Google’s famous little blue pin so that you can quickly figure out how to get from the shoe department in Macy’s, for example, over to the men’s department.
Google Maps 6.0 for Android updates your location as you move, and it will even refresh the map when you move to a different floor. It also labels all sorts of helpful information, such as bathroom locations, ATMs, and airport gates.
At launch, the application included floor plans for Tokyo's Narita and 17 U.S. airports; stores of the retail chains Bloomingdales, Home Depot, Ikea, and Macy's; and malls such as the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, Times Square Mall in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, and Liberty Fair Mall in Martinsville, Virginia.
To enable indoor mapping, Google created a desktop tool that lets venue owners and business owners upload the floor plans of their locations. After doing so, they download an app from Google Play that lets them share publicly broadcast GPS, cell-tower, and Wi-Fi information with Google. With that radio-signal information in hand, Google can allow Android users to track their indoor locations on its maps.
Currently Google isn’t pushing ads, discounts, or offers to consumers who use its IPS service. Since Google makes gobs of money on advertising, however, one can only imagine that we may very well see something like that at some point in the future.
As for whether the service profiles devices the way Skyhook does, Google’s new privacy policy doesn’t exactly say. It does state that the company keeps a consolidated record of how you use its services so that it can improve them as well as serve you more-relevant search results and ads.
Regarding location information specifically, Google’s privacy policy states: “When you use a location-enabled Google service, we may collect and process information about your actual location, like GPS signals sent by a mobile device. We may also use various technologies to determine location, such as sensor data from your device that may, for example, provide information on nearby Wi-Fi access points and cell towers.”
Next Page: IPS Offerings From Wifarer, Nokia, and BroadcomSearch strategist AJ Kohn has written one of the clearest explanations of Google's motivations—without ascribing evil! On his blog, Blind Five Year Old (the random sounding name actually refers to "a specific search engine optimization (SEO) philosophy – to treat search engines like they are blind five year olds"), Kohn explains the company's strategy in its simplest terms, "Get people to use the Internet more."
Duh! And I thought it had something to do with being driven in a driverless car to the singularity!
But according to Kohn's version of Google's (not so) evil plan, since everything we do online generates revenue for the company, all it has to do is "improve speed and accessibility to the Internet.… to shorten the distance between any activity and the Internet."
Kohn works systematically through 13 of Google's major initiatives and shows how this principle is at work in all of them. What is interesting about this approach is that it's easy to imagine that this is the way that many at the company conceive of what they are doing—making a faster, more enjoyable user experience—the side benefit of which is increased revenue.
If you've read any of my stories about Adrian Bejan and his Constructal Theory of how design improves flow in systems, the analogies to Google should be clear. From its initial search product, the company has continually innovated to improve the quality of search results (preventing multiple searches), return those results in fewer milliseconds and then auto-complete as you type to shave off still more. In typical Google fashion, it is attacking the engineering problem at each level between the user and the internet with products and services that change the physics of our engagement with data.
More than building market share, the goal of Google's Chrome has been about speed, as Kohn puts it, "Chrome is about reducing the friction of browsing the Internet." And what better way to reduce that friction than to make the web itself faster? Enter SPDY (no, not the Marvel superhero), which is an experimental protocol designed to reduce the latency of web pages. Think of spdy:// as a faster version of the http:// that you see at the beginning of web addresses. In fact, SPDY may become the basis for HTTP 2.0.
Kohn doesn't mention it, but Google has a whole initiative for developers called "Make the Web Faster," that includes SPDY, WebP (a new image compression format) as well as a host of services and practices that developers can use to build faster websites: the PageSpeed tool, Public DNS, Hosted Libraries, as well as Protocols, Standards, and Performance Best Practices. These tools have the potential to let savvy companies make their own products faster by following Google's lead.
Perhaps the most ambitious way that Google is making the experience of the internet faster is its ambitious Fiber program that it has rolled out in the Kansas City area. For a one-time fee of $300, customers can get free internet at acceptable current speeds (5MB down, 1 MB up) for a guarantee of seven years. The real action happens at $70 a month for gigabit internet and $120 a month for gigabit internet ("a connection speed 100 times faster than today’s broadband," according to the website) plus about 200 TV channels. Google TV has not been a game-changer, and The TV offerings of the Fiber program are far from being a cable killer, yet, but Google is betting that transcendent internet speeds will trump the raw channel count for many users.
Fiber is a pilot program that would be monumentally expensive to roll out nationally, but it shows the scale of Google's ambitions to shorten the distance between users and the internet (and, not incidentally, Google's own services.)
On the mobile front, Google has bets both on its Android platform and the new Firefox OS, assuring an Apple-beating global share of users consuming its services on their devices. And its purchase of Motorola Mobility is rumored to yield an advanced "X Phone," with "long battery life, wireless charging, and an unbreakable case" as soon as May of this year.
And more and more of these Google-connected devices will run the company's Siri-killing "Google Now," that uses contextual information to anticipate your every need. And Kohn writes, "it’s no mystery that predictive search is also about stimulating more Internet activity."
Google has also been experimenting with WiFi in an effort to make it easier for all of those devices to be connected all of the time. Google provides free WiFi in its home turf in Mountain View, and now in New York's trendy Chelsea neighborhood, as well. Google is investiogating how to turn the newly released white space spectrum into a kind of "super Wi-Fi," by taking advantage of its longer wavelength to increase the reach and penetration of local wireless networks. Google also appears to be testing some sort of a super-dense LTE network in another attempt to create faster connections in more places.
Google Drive and Chromebook are also free or inexpensive products that put users just a browser tab away from the internet, constantly. Similarly, the company is pushing its Google+ social network into all of its other products as a way of capturing more contextual data to make all of its other services work better and be more indispensable for its users.
The next step for Google is the world of ubiquitous computing with products like the soon-to-be released Google Glass. Even the self-driving Google cars have the side benefit of allowing constant (non-crash inducing) internet usage during the daily commute. And, as Kohn points out, commuting is less then 20% of the driving done in this country, so "a self driving car unlocks a vast amount of time that could be spent on the Internet."
All of these efforts, from the micro to the macro scale, are about creating a world where, in Kohn's words, the "friction to using the Internet would be nearly zero." In a world with this kind of physics, Google has an unparalleled advantage over other tech companies. And a big part of that advantage is that Google's well-being as a company is aligned, for the most part, with the needs and desires of its users. They make it faster, we use it more. They make it more useful, we use it even more. And the move to installing fiber and manufacturing its own hardware mean that the company is diversifying its business model to include more direct payments from users and not be wholly dependent on advertising revenues to fund all of this infrastructure. In a funny way, getting its users to pay for its services is a great way to assure that their interests are not superseded by those of Google's advertising customers. Sounds like a (not-so-evil) plan.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
To keep up with Quantum of Content, please subscribe to my updates on Facebook, follow me on Twitter or add me on Google+.1. No, they have not changed nor are they likely to change. As an author who writes about psychologically abusive relationships, I frequently get letters from survivors asking me if it’s possible for an abusive, narcissistic partner to change. Theoretically, if someone is willing to change and puts an active and consistent effort in modifying their behavior every day, it may be possible, but for narcissists on the high end of the spectrum, this is highly unlikely to happen.
Throughout the course of this work, I’ve communicated with thousands of survivors who’ve had abusive relationships with malignant narcissists and have yet to hear one testimony attesting to an abusive partner changing long-term.
What I do hear many stories of are abusive partners who temporarily shift their behavior to sweet and kind in order to hook their victims back into the abuse cycle. Once their victims are sufficiently invested again, their abusers revert back to their true cruelty and contempt. So if an abuser seems to be on his or her best behavior – beware. It’s likely he or she is merely biding their time before abusing once more.
I also hear horror stories of victims attending couples therapy, which serves as a site of further manipulation and invalidation for the victim. Even the National Domestic Violence Hotline advises against couples therapy for victims in abusive relationships, and it is no wonder why. Within the therapy space, the narcissistic abuser is able to triangulate the victim with the therapist, convince the therapist that the victim is the aggressor, and retraumatize the victim.
The therapist, if he or she is unaware of the abuser’s narcissistic tendencies and is not trauma-informed, will most likely focus on improving the victim’s reactions to the covert abuse, rather than address the harmful and abusive behavior itself. A therapist who is not well-versed about narcissistic abuse can fail to see that no amount of self-improvement in the victim will ever “fix” the abusive dynamics of the relationship. The only type of therapy a victim should probably be pursuing is individual therapy with a trauma-informed professional who can help them to heal from the abuse and detach from his or her abuser.
Here’s the thing: abusers with a fundamental lack of empathy and excessive sense of entitlement are unlikely to change because their behavior continues to reward them. Their toxic behavior has been hardwired since they were children. It would probably take a miraculous breakthrough as well as years of individual (not couples) therapy to ‘deprogram’ how a malignant narcissist behaves and navigates the world – and that might not even include effectively tackling the lack of empathy they have for others.
First and foremost, the narcissistic abuser would need to have a strong desire and willingness to want to change from within and follow through on all counts – not for their partner, but for themselves. And for that to occur, the victim would still have to wait a number of years to ‘wait and see’ whether change would occur – while potentially wasting years of their lives on an abuser who may never follow through with their promises.
Instead of investing in someone who has shown you time and time again that he or she will not change, why not invest in yourself, your goals and clear a pathway for a healthier and loving partner in the future instead?
2. Abusers have not morphed into a new person with their latest victim. Time and time again, the narcissist acts as a magician and presents the greatest illusion of all: the disappearing act, followed by a honeymoon romance with his or her latest victim.
Don’t fall for these cheap magic tricks. These are mere provocations staged to upset you and if you look closely at the idealization and devaluation phases in your own relationship with your ex-partner, you’ll realize it’s not a sudden transformation of character – it’s just a sleight of hand.
If someone doesn’t have the moral capacity to treat you with basic respect or act with integrity, it is doubtful they have changed overnight for someone else. Don’t believe in the hype when a narcissistic abuser puts their new victim through an idealization phase for the world to see. Remember – they idealized you too, and they are masters of impression management. Don’t forget all those times that the narcissistic abuser showed you off in public or treated you well in front of a witness – only to later berate, criticize and humiliate you behind closed doors.
They will devalue their new victims, just like they devalued you. The ones they appear to ‘settle down’ with are not the exception – they are the unlucky ones who will have to experience their depraved behavior within the context of a longer-term commitment. These victims are now deeply invested in a cruel, callous abuser who will continue to feed them falsehoods while living double lives. Be grateful you woke up and are privileged to pursue a life of freedom, peace and joy instead.
3. Yes, their abuse was deliberate and no, they don’t always suffer from low self-esteem. Many people are convinced that narcissists suffer from low self-esteem. I have seen friends, family members and partners of malignant narcissists dismiss, rationalize and minimize incredible acts of cruelty by justifying it as stemming from the abuser’s ‘lack of self-esteem’ rather than their outrageous sense of entitlement.
This myth that all abusers suffer from low self-esteem is why empathic people feel compelled to take care of their partner’s supposedly fragile ego while betraying their own basic needs in toxic relationships.
As Carrie Barron, M.D., notes in her article, “If You Are the Target of Narcissistic Abuse,” narcissists “take pleasure in successful manipulations” and truly believe they are superior, even if there is no objective evidence supporting these false notions of superiority.
It is this myth of all narcissists being suffering souls who lash out onto others that is preventing us, as individuals and as a society, from holding them accountable for their crimes. Recent research has shown that those scoring high in narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy all reported positive feelings when looking at sad faces. They had no problem assessing the emotions of their targeted victims using their cognitive empathy; yet they used this information to strategize how they could best fulfill their own needs. Their lack of affective empathy allowed them to overlook and dismiss the harm that they posed to their victims in the process.
Narcissists who fit in the more ‘vulnerable’ type and are lower on the spectrum may struggle with self-esteem, but for grandiose, malignant narcissists, you can bet that any demonstration of vulnerability is likely a pity ploy meant to further manipulate their victims.
Grandiose narcissists with antisocial traits truly believe in their own superiority and feel contempt for those who they deem ‘below’ them. They act aggressively to meet their own needs and feel very little shame or remorse about harming others in the process.
The insults that a malignant narcissistic abuser throws at you stem from their pathological envy, rage, false sense of superiority and entitlement to be the best – not low self-esteem. They feel they have a right to punish, control and demean you – they feel they own you. They will despise you for your success, your financial security, your desirability, and a number of other qualities and attributes that they feel are a threat to their control. They might idealize those same qualities in the idealization phase, but those are the same things they will ridicule so that you remain dependent upon them.
Their cruel behavior isn’t uncontrollable, either. Ask yourself: if it wasn’t deliberate, why would they be able to change their behavior in front of a witness? How are they able to don a false mask and convince others they are the innocent party? Anyone who is able to hide the evidence of their own manipulation to avoid accountability or judgment is able to control their actions.
They know exactly what they’re doing – and they like it. So instead of spending time and energy feeling sorry for a malignant narcissist, thank yourself for getting away when you did. You can show them any compassion you have for them from a distance.
I know none of us want to seem like we’re ‘judging’ others. But guess what? Sometimes people really do meet the criteria for malicious and character disordered. There is a difference between judgment and discernment. Discerning danger can save your life. Even what appear to be merely snap ‘judgments’ can save your life if they stem from your intuition. There is no benefit to sugarcoating the predatory nature of highly manipulative people or ignoring your inner voice when it comes to highly toxic people.
4. Prematurely trying to heal and ‘let go’ will only delay the healing journey. What you went through was a serious trauma and is likely to have long-term effects. It can’t be prematurely forgiven or let go of until it’s fully processed and healed. Don’t try to spiritually bypass the pain by wishing your abuser well out of moral obligation – if you’re truly not feeling that way, it does nothing but invalidate your authentic emotions and sweep them under the rug.
Don’t get me wrong: there are many healing benefits to forgiving when one is ready. Yet the problem is, many survivors proceed to force themselves to feel forgiveness before they truly are ready or willing. Don’t jump to forgiving your abuser before you’re actually ready to do so. If forgiveness isn’t part of your healing journey, that’s okay too – trauma therapists agree that some things are best left up to the survivor.
Although forgiveness and reconciliation are most certainly not the same thing, the idea of “forgiveness” was likely used by your abuser throughout the abuse cycle to further traumatize and shame you into staying, so you may even want to use a different word when releasing resentment. For example, therapist Anastasia Pollock, LCMHC, discusses how she uses the term ‘unburdening’ instead in her article, “Why I Don’t Use the Word Forgiveness in Trauma Therapy.”
There is another reason why prematurely forgiving someone before you’re ready can be dangerous. If you force yourself to bypass processing your painful emotions, it will only cause further resentment down the road as well as repressed anger that can come out in maladaptive ways.
5. All of your emotions – including anger – are valid and you can’t conveniently bypass them to get to the other side of healing. There are many survivors who would rather avoid acknowledging their emotions and sugarcoat them because they’ve been taught that certain emotions like anger are ‘toxic’ to feel.
Anger is a destructive emotion when it is uncontrollable or used to control others, but people forget that there is a very useful function of anger: it can save our lives. Anger is a legitimate, valid emotional response to being mistreated yet it is likely that survivors will struggle with having feelings of anger towards their abusers in the aftermath. Some survivors may even feel guilty or ashamed of being rightfully angry due to their tendency to engage in self-blame after the abuse.
Remember: it’s not necessarily about holding onto anger, it’s about addressing it, validating it and processing it. You can take the time to do so and you don’t have to rush the process. Anger can be used to initially stop us from going back to an abuser. It can be used to fuel our motivation to keep going, even when we feel like giving up. It is a very useful emotion that can bring us out of our sense of powerlessness and back into a state of motivation and self-empowerment.
When anger is used in a constructive, rather than destructive way to defend and protect yourself, channeling anger into healthier outlets can be a transformative part of the healing journey. Yes, it is possible to acknowledge and validate your emotions without using them destructively against someone else. Honor your anger without acting on it in maladaptive ways.
Let anger motivate you to seek the best for yourself, to see yourself as a divine human being worthy of love, safety, respect and compassion in all facets of your life. Use it to compel you to set firmer boundaries in your relationships. See anger for what it is: a reminder that you deserve so much better than what you went through. You may find that there are layers to your anger; there may be severe pain underlying it, as well as fear, anguish and a plethora of other emotions involved in grieving a person who never truly existed beyond their false mask.
Don’t rush the grieving process, either. You will have mixed emotions and that is normal. Your brain is likely trying to resolve its own cognitive dissonance about the seemingly loving, sweet person who turned into your worst nightmare. Allow the conflicting thoughts and emotions to arise, while redirecting them back to the reality of the abuse you experienced.
There will be days where your emotions are overwhelming. Don’t try to escape or numb your emotions by engaging in self-sabotage, like breaking No Contact or getting into a new relationship before you’ve done the healing work. Instead, work with a trauma-informed counselor and find different modalities to release some of the trauma stored within your body such as a daily exercise regimen, guided meditations and trauma-focused yoga.
Do not resist the emotional “apocalypse” by desensitizing yourself to the pain. Often it takes riding what feels like the cataclysmic waves of our various emotions – such as anger, fear, grief, loss – before we get through to the other side of healing. During this “dark night of the soul,” remember that you’re not actually being destroyed, even if it feels like you are. You’re being cleansed and reborn.
Remember that healing is not linear – it is cyclical. You may have to go through the journey many times, in many different ways, before you start to see progress. It’s okay to not be okay. It’s okay to be gentle with yourself. And most of all, it’s okay to trust in the integrity of your choices and of your inner guidance.
You’ll know you made the right decision by leaving your abuser when your spirit is at ease even in the midst of chaos. While the heart and mind may still be reeling from the trauma of the abuse, the soul quietly breathes a sigh of relief, and says, “Thank you.”
Want more writing like this? Read the book POWER: Surviving and Thriving After Narcissistic Abuse by Shahida Arabi.
“Shahida Arabi is ahead of our time. I couldn’t have been in a darker place in my life when I found this book, after suffering at the hands of an abuser who was also a narcissist. This book gives you hope above all else, and it’s easily relateable if you have gone through abuse. Arabi is a talented, strong, real force of nature kind of writer. I have learned, survived and thrived in the time that I have made this purchase.” – DesireeCardinals outfielder Jason Heyward said he doesn’t have any reason to rebuff talks about a contract extension once the season starts, according to a report from Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Heyward explained, “They asked me to be here and I was traded into this situation, and it’s a good situation. For me, I just feel like I need to show up and do my job, kind of follow their lead with certain things. Me, I’m going to show up every day and look to play the game the right way and have fun doing it. After that, we’ll see what happens.”
Heyward, 25, is entering the last year of a two-year, $13.3 million deal deal he had signed with the Braves. He can become a free agent after the season.
Heyward batted.271/.351/.384 while compiling 6.3 Wins Above Replacement last season, per Baseball Reference. The Cardinals acquired him and reliever Jordan Walden from the Braves in November in exchange for pitcher Shelby Miller and minor leaguer Tyrell Jenkins.
Follow @Baer_BillMike Johnson AuthorHouse, 2010 - 424 pages, 2010 - Fiction 0 Reviews Shadows of War tells the story of World War II as few Americans know it. In the mid-1930s a high school history teacher inspires a student to look beyond his small hometown. He becomes a Foreign Service officer, and they then anchor a World War II story that provides perspectives little known to Americans. A Romanian princess cares for more than 3,000 orphans and rescues more than 1,000 downed American flyers - and tussles with the SS to keep the POWs from their control at considerable risk to herself. On air raids over Romania, American crews must fly 1,200 miles - on creatively named planes such as Wingo-Wango and Jersey Bounce - at just 50 feet off the "deck" to launch attacks on the stoutly defended oil refineries at Ploesti. In Singapore and Malaysia a mild-mannered father of seven becomes a resistance leader after the Japanese invasion, and four gutsy nuns who serve as nurses try to stay a step ahead of the brutal conquerors. Preview this book »Buyers Dissatisfied With Car Technology, Reliability Study Says
A J.D. Power report finds problems with in-vehicle technology of 2015 cars. Consumers say unreliable navigation systems and other issues are eroding trust when it comes to rating a car's performance.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
It seems the quality of the cars we drive is on the decline, so says a report from J.D. Power and Associates. The thing bothering consumers, not the engine or safety, it's the entertainment. Here's NPR's Sonari Glinton.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Here's an interesting tidbit. If you're driving a car right now, the radio that my voice is coming out of or at least the infotainment system it's a part of is really important to you and how you rate your car. It's essentially a brand-new category in automotive.
RENEE STEPHENS: It's kind of a long title, audio communication entertainment and navigation.
GLINTON: Renee Stephens is vice president of quality for J.D. Power and Associates. She's been in the quality biz for more than 30 years.
STEPHENS: That category has now become the number one problem in the industry and whereas two years ago, it was number five.
GLINTON: J.D. Power put out a study on quality, and it shows because of consumers' annoyance with infotainment systems, they dinged the car companies. Stephens says it used to be that consumers talked about what broke on a car. But she says, in this survey, consumers said it's not about if the car works but how well it does.
STEPHENS: When consumers were talking about quality and talking about dependability, they were describing conditions where there really wasn't anything wrong with the technology. It wasn't usable. It wasn't intuitive.
GLINTON: The quirkiness and unreliability of nav systems, Bluetooth, et cetera, et cetera is eroding trust. And Stephens says trust is only going to get more important in the car business.
STEPHENS: If they're trying to, you know, navigate to Starbucks and the nav system, one, can't recognize what they're saying or two, sends them over to Ohio, that gives them - that makes them feel less confident in technology where they're going to want to, you know, take their hands off the wheel and eyes off the road.
GLINTON: Essentially, before the car companies make a self-driving car, they might want to make a car where you can, I don't know, easily turn off the radio. Just don't do that now. Sonari Glinton, NPR News.
Copyright © 2016 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.WikiLeaks Revealed New CIA Cyber Weapon called “Dumbo” that has been developed with Sophisticated functionality to hacking Webcams and Corrupt Video Recordings by physical Accessibility Control.
This Physical Deployment done by Special Intelligence group called PAG (Physical Access Group) which is performing special Task to gain and exploit physical access to target computers in CIA field operations.
Few Days Before WikiLeaks revealed CIA Hacking Tools “Achilles, Aeris, SeaPea” Revealed to Hack Mac and Linux OS.
This intelligence Tool Executed from USB Thumb Drive once Gaining Physical Access of the Target Computer that running the Windows Operating System.
Once Dumbo Gaining access the Target System, it identify the devices that installed with infected Systems such as webcams and microphones, either locally or connected by wireless (Bluetooth, WiFi) or wired networks.
Dumbo Execution Method
If the operator Physically injects the Exploit into the Target machine via USB Thumb Drive, its will identified and stopped all the connected Devices such as recording, monitoring or detection of video/audio/network streams.
Dumbo will Log all the actions in logging file called “log.txt” and will also log all processes running at the start of its execution in a file called “proclist.txt” located in the same folder as the program’s execution.
According to the Document,Dumbo supports 32bit Windows XP, Windows Vista, and newer versions of Windows operating system. 64bit Windows XP, or Windows versions prior to XP, are not supported.
Operator of this Malware can creating fake or destroying actual evidence of the intrusion operation by deleting and Manipulating the recordings.
Avoid the action that gets recorded, Manual suggest to turn of the Anti Virus by the Operator.
Camera And Microphone
Since CIA Tool infect the Windows Operating systems, it showing the list of Camera that Connected with Device.
Operator can select the camera to taking the desire action by using table of Process running in this target Computer and also it required System Level Privilege.
List of selected camera devices Displays with unique camera name and by default last camera detected as selected to take the relevant action by operator.
Operator can able to do any kind of action with the selected Devices later infection done by the Dumbo.
Also it shows all the Microphones that muted and unmuted and also Selectively corrupted or delete recordings.
Dumbo can’t Perform its Malicious action if the Camera being used by other Program.
USB Thumb Drive should be remain Plugged into the Target computer to being Maintain the control the targeted Machine.
Previous CIA Leaked Tools by WikiLeaks
Vault 7 Leaks : CIA Hacking Tools “Achilles, Aeris, SeaPea” Revealed to Hack Mac and Linux OS -WikiLeaks
Raytheon – Vault 7 Leaks : CIA Owned PoC Malware Development Surveillance Projects “UCL Under Raytheon” Leaked – WikiLeaks
HighRise – Vault 7 Leaks : CIA Android Ha Vault 7 Leaks : CIA Hacking Tools “Achilles, Aeris, SeaPea” Revealed to Hack Mac and Linux OS -WikiLeaks
Hacking Tool “HighRise” Steals Data From Compromised Android Phones via SMS – WikiLeaks
Gyrfalcon – Vault 7 Leaks: CIA Hacking Tools “BothanSpy” and “Gyrfalcon” Steals SSH Credentials From Windows and Linux Computers – WikiLeaks
OutlawCountry – Vault 7 Leaks: CIA Malware “OutlawCountry” Controls Linux Machine and Redirect the Victims Traffic into CIA Controlled Machine – WikiLeaks
ELSA – Vault 7 Leaks: CIA Malware “ELSA” Tracking Geo-Location of WiFi Enabled Windows Computers – WikiLeaks
Brutal Kangaroo – CIA Hacking Tool “Brutal Kangaroo” Revealed to Hack Air-Gapped Networks by using USB Thumb Drives -WikiLeaks
CherryBlossom – Wikileaks Revealed New CIA Wireless Hacking Tool “Cherry Blossom” Compromise Your Wireless Network Devices using MITM Attack
Pandemic – New CIA Cyberweapon Malware “Pandemic” installed in Victims Machine and Replaced Target files where remote users use SMB to DownloadCHICAGO, Ill. (WXPR) - The Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago has backed a federal judge's decision concerning a family's plan to build a religious camp on Squash Lake near Rhinelander.
The three judges affirmed the ruling of U.S. District Judge William Conley who said Oneida county, it's Board of Adjustment, and the town of Woodboro had NOT denied the religious freedom of the Jaros family. The family maintained the denials violated their rights under the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, which forbids denial of religious land use by governmental zoning. The family first filed in 2004 with Oneida county to get needed permits to build a religious camp on family property on Squash lake. In 2010, the Jaros family appealed to the federal court in Madison. Judge William Conley in February ruled Oneida county and the town of Woodboro did not violate the family's religious rights by those permit denials. The family appealed to the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago who late Wednesday affirmed Conley's earlier ruling. Oneida County Corporation Counsel Brian Desmond said he couldn't comment on the decision as there is a possibility of further litigation. A request for comment from the Jaros family was not available at deadline.BEIJING (Reuters) - Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s shares fell to a record low after China’s biggest e-commerce company posted its slowest revenue growth in over three years as its strategy to shift more services to mobile devices hurt advertising sales.
The company’s shares declined as much as 8 percent to $71.03 - just shy of their IPO price of $68 - wiping off nearly $16 billion from its market value on Wednesday. The stock has lost declined nearly 30 percent this year, up to Wednesday’s close.
Alibaba also announced a $4 billion share repurchase program over two years, aimed at offsetting the impact of its share-based compensation programs.
The company’s results come at a time when China’s economy is expected to grow at its slowest pace in a quarter of a century. Adding to investor concerns, China devalued the yuan on Tuesday, guiding the currency to its lowest point in almost three years.
Alibaba’s Chief Executive Daniel Zhang told CNBC on Wednesday that the company was closely monitoring the economy but was “confident for long-term growth”.
The company is now branching out from its core online-only shopping platforms in a bid to stem slowing growth in both revenue and the value of sales over its websites.
“(We) made significant progress monetizing our mobile traffic, with our mobile revenue exceeding 50 percent of our total China commerce retail revenue for the first time,” Maggie Wu, Alibaba’s chief financial officer, said in a statement.
But Wu conceded that mobile was still less profitable than business via personal computers, where profitability also decreased.
Revenue for the three months through June rose 28 percent to $3.27 billion, well below a forecast of $3.39 billion in a Thomson Reuters SmartEstimate poll of 28 analysts.
Gross merchandise volume (GMV) — the total value of goods transacted across Alibaba’s platforms — rose 34 percent to 673 billion yuan ($105 billion), also the slowest growth in more than three years.
“While we remain positive on BABA longer term, we see multiple overhangs for |
Centers don't want to cultivate a higher cbd strain. They prefer the higher thc strains because of higher yield.
Lifting the 3 strain limit benefits all patients.
Governor Christie is wasting precious time and risking lives while not signing this bill. These children already have their medical marijuana cards and the pharmaceutical cocktails that don't work cause brain damage. High cbd medicine works.
Susan Sturner is hoping that she does not end up blind. Having relief from the pain of Glaucoma, even for just a short time, is a cruel tease. This does not have to be this way.
Rowyn CapersIt’s Mock Draft Sunday, folks...well, at least for me, it is. Much like I did last week, I’m going to sit down and, using the fabulous “On the Clock” Draft Simulator from the folks at FanSpeak, see what sort of draft class I can hammer out for the Minnesota Vikings.
After using Matt Miller’s Big Board for everything in the previous edition, I’m going to switch things up a little bit and use the Big Board provided by the folks from Walter Football. They have a slightly different take on things a lot of times, and so it will be interesting to see how that alters things throughout the course of this mock.
With that, let’s get underway and see what sort of damage we can do.
Round 1 - Sam Bradford, QB, Oklahoma
Easily the best quarterback available to the Vikings this year. Good thing they acquired him beforehand.
Round 2
When it came time for me to make my selection in the second round, I had two trade proposals that would net me a whole lot of picks for the 48th overall selection.
In accepting the package of picks from the Rams, I would have three third round selections, four fourths, and two fifths, while the deal with the Jaguars would give me three picks in the third and fourth rounds and two picks in both the fifth and sixth rounds. Both would give Virtual Rick Spielman 11 picks to work with. Just for fun...and because this is, you know, not real...I take the deal with the Rams and get loaded up for the middle rounds.
Going into Round 3, we now have the following picks:
Round 3, Pick 5
Round 3, Pick 15
Round 3, Pick 22
Round 4, Pick 5
Round 4, Pick 13
Round 4, Pick 21
Round 4, Pick 34
Round 5, Pick 5
Round 5, Pick 16
Round 6, Pick 15
Round 7, Pick 14
So, here we go.
Round 3
When we finally get a chance to pick in the third round, here’s what the board looks like for us.
Since there’s no way that he should be available at this point, I’m going to go ahead and pounce on the best player available here.
Budda Baker, S, Washington
You can never have too many defensive backs in today’s NFL, and the fact that Baker is available here makes him a steal for this football team. He’s the perfect “center field” type of safety that would allow Mike Zimmer and company to be even more flexible with how they use Harrison Smith. He also played some slot corner in college, and if Mackensie Alexander continues to struggle he could be an option there, too. This pick really was a case of talent trumping need, as while the Vikings could use a safety, it isn’t necessarily a pressing issue.
A couple of trade proposals float in for our next selection, but I’m not sure how many more trades I’m interested in making, and neither of the deals were particularly intriguing anyway. Here’s the new board at this point.
Well, would you look at that? The top player on the board matches a position of significant need for the Vikings.
Nico Siragusa, G, San Diego State
Siragusa...who is not, in fact, related to Tony Siragusa...is a mauler. If the Vikings want to improve their running game, Siragusa is the sort of player that they could plug in between Joe Berger and Mike Remmers at the right guard slot and give themselves a serious upgrade. He isn’t terribly mobile and might have some pass protection issues at first, but everything is there for him to be a solid long-term answer at guard.
The board hasn’t changed that much as we roll into the third of our picks in this round, and it looks like it’s time to address the wide receiver position with another player that probably shouldn’t be on the board at #86 overall.
Cooper Kupp, WR, Eastern Washington
Kupp is a player that could be huge for the Vikings if they continue to rely on the short passing game. He’s not a burner or anything like that, but he’s a very good route runner and someone that could be as much of a threat from the slot as he is from the outside. He’s capable of making the big play, as his 37 receptions of 40 yards or more can attest, and could even contribute as a return specialist.
On to the next round, where we now have four selections.
Round 4
As we get to our selection with the fifth pick in the fourth round, here’s an update on what the board looks like.
Hey, it’s our old friend from the last mock, and we still need help along the offensive line, so let’s call his name again.
Ethan Pocic, G, Louisiana State
We went over Pocic’s attributes in the last mock. He’s someone that could see time at all three interior line positions, and could be a solid replacement for Joe Berger if this does turn out to be his last season.
The board hasn’t changed a whole lot over the course of the next eight picks, so let’s grab another player who...once again...probably shouldn’t be available at this point.
Carl Lawson, DE, Auburn
Just like a defense like Minnesota’s can never have too many defensive backs, they can also never have too many pass rushers. Lawson is the sort of guy that you take a shot on at this point in the draft if he’s available. He has all the physical traits to be outstanding, but missed significant time in college with a torn ACL and a hip injury. If he can stay healthy, he could be a long-term part of the rotation with Everson Griffen and Danielle Hunter at defensive end for the Vikings.
Eight picks later, we’re back on the clock again. Here’s what the new board looks like.
Why on earth is Pat Elflein still on the board?
Pat Elflein, C, Ohio State
Pat Elflein is no longer on the board. Seriously, I don’t know why he’d last this long. Maybe this big board is a little too different. Still, we’ll take him.
With our last fourth-round selection, we another player that seems to have fallen way too far and fills a need for the Vikings.
Jake Butt, TE, Michigan
Ha, ha...Butt. Seriously, though, Butt is the sort of player that could be a pretty solid complement to Kyle Rudolph at the tight end spot in the Vikings’ offense. At 6’5” and 245 pounds, he could present some matchup problems for opposing defenses. He’s coming off of a torn ACL he suffered in the Wolverines’ bowl game and could start camp on the PUP, depending on his progress, but would likely contribute at some point in 2017 and in the future.
On to the next round, where we only have two selections.
Round 5
Here’s what the board looks like as we roll into the fifth round.
According to FanSpeak, the Vikings’ needs that I haven’t addressed at this point are, in order: Running Back, Defensive Line, Offensive Tackle, Linebacker, and Quarterback. As you can see, there aren’t a lot of players on the board that presently match up with that. So, I’m going to go with a player that’s just off that list at this point that Walter Football has ranked at #173 overall.
Wayne Gallman, RB, Clemson
Sing it along with me, folks...there’s no way that Gallman should still be on the board at the top of the fifth round. But he’s here, so we’re going to take him. Gallman is a solid all-around back that should be able to contribute as part of the team’s new running back rotation right away.
We’re going to go ahead and fill the quarterback need here as well.
Joshua Dobbs, QB, Tennessee
This is actually just about the right spot for Dobbs, from everything I’ve seen. If the Vikings want a developmental type of quarterback, Dobbs is exactly the player they should be looking for, in my opinion. He’d almost certainly unseat Taylor Heinicke for the #3 spot, and could potentially be a longer-term option depending on how things work out with the team’s current signal callers.
On to the next round!
Round 6
This is the updated board as we get to our selection in the sixth round of action. Only one pick for us in this round, so we’re slowing down as we get to the end.
Let’s fill the need at linebacker with this selection.
Matt Milano, LB, Boston College
Milano, who actually came into college as a safety, might have a future in the NFL as a hybrid type of player. He’s also the sort of guy that could be a core special teamer for the Vikings, as he was solid in that role for Boston College. When you get to this point in the draft, the ability to contribute on special teams right away is important, and Milano would have a very good chance of sticking with the team in that capacity.
One more selection to go, folks!
Round 7
As we get to our final selection, here’s our final look at the Big Board.
We still need an offensive tackle, according to the needs chart. So, let’s go ahead and do that here.
Dan Skipper, OT, Arkansas
Skipper is huge. I mean, freaking huge. He’s 6’9” (or 6’10”, depending on your source). His height will obviously give him issues when it comes to getting low enough to create an initial push, but someone with size like this is a pretty intriguing prospect, particularly this late in the process. In time, he could end up as a solid right tackle at the NFL level.
With that, here is the entire 11-player list for my second fake Minnesota Vikings draft class of 2017.
You can see how the entire draft played out at this link right here.
That’s my mock for this week, ladies and gentlemen. I’ll be back next Sunday with another one. That’s right, not even taking off for Easter this time around.A couple of weeks ago, I bumped into a Boston police detective I know and, in the midst of a conversation about our kids, asked him if he had seen a recent segment of “60 Minutes” on the Marathon bombings.
“You mean,” he said, “the one where the FBI solved the whole case?”
That would be the one.
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It was classic FBI image-making. The former special agent in charge of the FBI in Boston, Rick DesLauriers, and Stephanie Douglas, the FBI’s assistant director in Washington, took turns earnestly explaining how the bureau painstakingly identified the Tsarnaev brothers as the bombers.
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There was a little pat on the head for the Boston Police Department and the Massachusetts State Police, who did most of the legwork. But make no mistake about it, the program suggested: This was an FBI operation all the way.
Unfortunately, neither DesLauriers nor Douglas was able to shed any light on what the FBI did when it came to the advance warning they had from Russian authorities about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. A “60 Minutes” spokesman said correspondent Scott Pelley asked the question but producers decided the FBI’s answers were, as he put it, “not newsworthy.”
Nothing the FBI has said about this is newsworthy, because they haven’t said anything. It’s standard operating procedure at the FBI. Wednesday’s hearing before the House Committee on Homeland Security in Washington raised more questions than answers because the FBI won’t give answers.
“Why would they be accountable to ‘60 Minutes’ or the Globe or whoever when they aren’t even accountable to Congress?” asks Bill Keating, the Massachusetts congressman who sits on that committee.
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Keating watched the “60 Minutes” episode, too, and almost fell off his chair because the FBI had been ducking Congress by suggesting they didn’t want to compromise the investigation into the bombing or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s upcoming trial.
“We asked the FBI to come before our committee three times, and they refused,” Keating told me. “And then I see them on TV pointing at one of the Tsarnaev brothers in a surveillance photo... So they can go on TV, but they can’t go before Congress?”
Yes, folks, there is something desperately wrong with this picture.
Now, to be fair, it appears the CIA was just as culpable as the FBI in not having Tamerlan Tsarnaev higher up on their radar. The difference is that investigating potential terrorists is the FBI’s purview, and the CIA operates as a clandestine agency. The problem with the FBI is they act as if they’re a clandestine agency when they expressly are not.
Right after 9/11, three very fine police leaders — Boston Police Commissioner Paul Evans, Lowell Police Chief Ed Davis, and John Timoney, of the New York, Philadelphia, and Miami police — went to Washington to see FBI Director Bob Mueller. They knew that everything had changed when those planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and that field in Pennsylvania. They wanted assurances that the FBI would change, too, and begin sharing information with local police.
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But nothing changed. The FBI doesn’t share information with other agencies. It never did.
I’ve talked to Cambridge police officers who would have been all over Tamerlan Tsarnaev if they had known Russian authorities told the FBI he had extremist leanings. They never got that intelligence because the FBI couldn’t be bothered sharing with local cops.
Nothing will change until the FBI’s internal culture changes. But don’t hold your breath.
As we prepare to formally remember Martin Richard, Lingzi Lu, Krystle Campbell, Sean Collier and all the people so grievously wounded last Patriots Day, as painful as those memories are, there is the gnawing reality that, at the end of the day, we will never know for sure whether all that suffering and loss of life could have been prevented.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.comNew Delhi: In a sign of increasing defence cooperation between the two countries, Israeli Navy Chief Vice Admiral Ram Rutberg will arrive here on Monday and will hold talks with top Indian officials.
Vice Admiral Rutberg, who is coming here on a three-day visit, will be presented Guard of Honour at the South Block Lawns, which houses Defence Ministry, official sources said today.
Besides, holding talks with the top Indian authorities in the capital, the Israeli Naval chief would also visit Mumbai as part of his itinerary, they said.
In a bid to bolster defence ties between the two countries, a frontline warship of Indian Navy-- INS Trikand - made a port call on August 19 at the port of Haifa in Israel. The previous port call at Haifa by an Indian Navy warship was in 2012.
During the four-day stay at Haifa, extensive engagements are planned with the Israeli Navy.
INS Trikand, commanded by Captain Vinay Kalia, is the latest warship of the Navy equipped with a versatile range of weapons and sensors enabling to address threats in all the three dimensions - air, surface and sub-surface.
Since establishment of diplomatic relations between the two nations in 1992, bilateral interactions between India and Israel have seen rapid growth across a broad spectrum. The bonds developed through such events strengthen the established mechanisms of maritime cooperation between the two countries while pursuing common goals of safe and secure seas, an official statement said.
In addition to professional interactions, various sports and social engagements are planned to further enhance understanding between the two navies.It’s no longer in dispute that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) administration crippled the community of Fort Lee last September on purpose. It’s also no longer in dispute that the governor’s team did so as an act of political retaliation. But what was it, exactly, Christie’s aides were retaliating against?
The working assumption has been that the administration sought to punish Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, a Democrat who didn’t endorse Christie’s re-election. But the governor’s incredulity over this explanation is not without merit – it’s unclear if the local mayor’s endorsement was ever even sought. Indeed, the governor’s insistence yesterday that he had no idea who Sokolich was seemed relatively persuasive.
And if Team Christie was in the habit of retaliating against fairly obscure Democratic officials who balked at endorsing the governor, there would be a more expansive record of statewide revenge from last fall.
So perhaps the working assumption is mistaken. Maybe Christie’s aides targeted Fort Lee, but it wasn’t related to a campaign endorsement that wasn’t even solicited. If so, we’ll need a different explanation for one of the key questions at the heart of the scandal: what happened to cause a top Christie aide to say it was “ time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee ” on Aug. 13 at 7:34 a.m.? What, specifically, prompted that message on that morning if Sokolich’s preference for governor was irrelevant? What was it, exactly, that Team Christie was retaliating against?
Rachel offered an alternative theory on the show last night and it’s important to consider it in detail.
In New Jersey, state Supreme Court justices serve an initial term of seven years, at which point the sitting governor decides whether or not to reappoint them. Since the New Jersey constitution was revised and adopted in 1947, every governor has reappointed every state Supreme Court justice without exception.
That is, until Christie took office. In 2010, soon after Christie’s inauguration, he did something unprecedented: he declined to reappoint one of the justices: New Jersey Supreme Court Justice John Wallace, the court’s only African-American member. Wallace was not burdened by scandal or allegations of wrongdoing; Christie simply didn’t want him on the high court anymore.
Democrats in the state Senate were livid. Rachel described the political firestorm that soon erupted in Trenton:
Senate Democrats made Chris Christie’s first nominee to replace Justice Wallace, they made her wait until somebody else’s seat came up on the court then they would consider her for that one, but not Justice Wallace’s. Then, Chris Christie nominated a man named Phil Quan for the state Supreme Court, Senate Democrats said no. Then, Chris Christie nominated a man named Bruce Harris for the court, Senate Democrats said no. Senate Democrats were so mad about what Christie did to take John Harris off the Supreme Court when he was up for re-nomination that they would not let anyone through. It’s been a big political crisis in New Jersey. Senate Democrats rejected every one of those Christie nominees, one after the other. And then when another of the justices on the Supreme Court, a Republican, came up for re-nomination just like John Harris had, and the Senate Democrats signaled that they were going to give her a whale of a time at her re-nomination hearing, Chris Christie just flipped out. He had enough. He pulled that justice off the Supreme Court rather than submit her to re-nomination before the Senate Democrats.
No governor had ever failed to reappoint a sitting state Supreme Court justice, but Christie had suddenly done it twice – once for the court’s only African-American jurist, infuriating Democrats, and then again for a justice he actually liked. The governor, enraged, held a press conference to tell reporters, “I was not going to let her loose to the animals.”
The “animals,” in this case, were the Democrats in the state Senate.
Christie said that on the afternoon of Aug. 12, 2013.
On the morning of Aug. 13, 2013, Christie’s deputy chief of staff told the governor’s guy at the Port Authority, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”Cruz campaigns in Barrington, N.H., February 8, 2016. (Matthew Cavanaugh/Getty)
What’s it like to have a friend run for president?
In the new issue of National Review, I have a piece about Ted Cruz. I’d like to expand on it here in Impromptus. I think that both pro-Cruz people and anti-Cruz people will find certain things of interest. Same with people in between.
Okay, here we go …
‐It’s really strange to have a friend running for president. It’s strange enough to have a friend in the U.S. Senate. There are only a hundred of them, you know. It’s the house of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Robert Taft …
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When Ted Cruz was elected, I called up another friend, David Pryce-Jones, in London. (P-J is my fellow NR senior editor.) He went to Eton and Oxford.
“Did there come a time when your classmates began to be elected to Parliament?” I asked. “Yes,” said P-J. “Was it strange?” I asked. “Yes,” he said.
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But look: When you go to Eton and Oxford, you expect your classmates to rise to the heights. To run the country. They always have.
And, no offense, Britain is a small country, compared with ours. We are a nation of more than 300 million people, “from sea to shining sea,” as Bill Buckley would say. To have a friend become a senator and run for president is … something.
‐I met Ted Cruz on the presidential campaign of George W. Bush in 2000. I had taken a leave of absence from NR to assist that campaign. This was in mid-September, for the last six or seven weeks of the campaign. (The campaign, so to speak, stretched into mid-December, but that’s a wholly different story.) Ted was a domestic-policy advisor on the campaign.
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We bonded, as they say. We had many a late-night discussion at Earl Campbell’s barbecue joint and other choice spots.
Did I mention this was Texas? Austin? It was.
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One of the things Cruz and I bonded over was Reagan: our admiration of. He and I were both deeply influenced by that presidency. He was in his teens; I was in my teens and twenties.
Ted’s father had been a refugee from Cuba. His son had an unusual appreciation of freedom, and an unusual detestation of tyranny.
Let me say some more about Ted’s father, and his mother. I’d like to excerpt from a column I wrote in ’09:
Ted is from an all-American family. His mother, Eleanor, was the first in her family to go to college. She earned a math degree at Rice, working her way through. His father, Rafael, was a Cuban immigrant. At age 14, he was fighting alongside Castro and the boys. At 17, he was nabbed by government forces — Batista forces — and thrown into prison. He was beaten and tortured almost to death. His father — Ted’s grandfather — bribed his way out. Rafael bolted for America, enrolling in the University of Texas. This was 1957. He was 18, didn’t speak a word of English. He had a slide rule in his pocket — the only thing they’d let him take out of the country. And 100 dollars sewn into his underwear. His mother had put it there. He worked like mad, learning English very quickly. And he soon started going around Austin to places like Rotary and Kiwanis, talking about the Cuban revolution and raising money for Castro. After the revolution triumphs, Castro reveals himself for what he is: and Rafael goes back to all those places, apologizing. He did not mean to mislead them. And his sister back in Cuba joins the counterrevolutionaries, fighting against Castro. She is captured by government forces — Castroite forces. And tortured. Let me say something blunt: Ted Cruz has no illusion whatsoever about Cuban Communism, or any other kind of Communism, or any other kind of tyranny. And that is something refreshing in an American. Would that we all had it.
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‐Ted had a fancy education. He went to Princeton University, where he was a debate champion, and to Harvard Law School, where he was an editor on several publications, including the Law Review.
But I noticed something on the campaign — the campaign in 2000: He had a scrappy, outsider’s heart.
More on his background: He clerked for Judge Mike Luttig, on the Fourth Circuit. In fact, Ted made me aware of Luttig, and I came to admire this judge almost as much as Ted did. Then Ted clerked for the chief justice of the United States: William Rehnquist.
In fact, I think Ted learned to play tennis just to play with the chief. I’ll have to check with Ted on that.
An additional note on Mike Luttig: When a Supreme Court seat came open in 2005, Ted pushed for Luttig’s nomination. So did I, in my capacity as an opinion journalist (not that I had great pull). When John Roberts got the nod, we supported this nomination, of course, as all conservatives did. But our heart was with Luttig.
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I wonder if George W. Bush has had second thoughts about Roberts over Luttig. Anyway …
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‐In light of his education, experience, and ability, Ted could have been making millions in private practice. Instead, he was toiling on this political campaign in 2000.
“Sure!” people have said, when I’ve noted this in the past. “It’s because he wanted a leg up on his own political future!”
Okay. So? If you want to do political good — as Ted does, and as I do, and as lots of others do — it helps to get elected.
But listen: Ted was advancing ideas in which he believes. He was doing that on that campaign, and he has always done it. Seldom have I met someone so devoted to ideas.
Tell you a story. Ted was, and is, an impassioned advocate of school choice. He thinks it’s shocking — immoral — that poor kids are trapped in hopeless, violent schools. One day, he was telling me about lawyers in the opposite camp: the camp of the education establishment. (For once, I think the word “establishment” is appropriate. Or Bill Bennett’s word: “Blob.”)
“You could practically smell the sulfur coming off them,” said Ted.
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I don’t have permission to tell that story. But what the hell. It’s done. (Ted can sue me!)
‐Ted was exceptionally versatile. He knew a lot about the law, of course. And about domestic policy, of course. He was a domestic-policy adviser. He had Medicare Part B and all that jazz down pat. I am still a little hazy about these things, never being able to get through a white paper. Even the abstract …
He knew a lot about economics, and was a big free-marketeer. When he was in high school, he took part in something called the Free Enterprise Institute. They read Hayek, Friedman, Bastiat, everything. Ted imbibed. And saw the reason of.
He knew a lot about foreign policy, and was a hawk. Also, he was a “social conservative.” That term is weak, but it will have to do. Ted opposed abortion, for example — and knew why.
‐This is important: Ted was amazingly free of cynicism. What do I mean by that? I mean, he really believed in America, free enterprise, and all that rah-rah stuff. Other people feel the need to roll their eyes a bit. Not Ted.
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‐You may have heard that he is not well liked by the people around him. Well, I liked him — loved him. But it’s true: Some people found him too cocky, too brash, and too ambitious for their taste.
I don’t know about you, but the older I get, the more patient I am with ambition — certainly if that ambition is directed to positive ends. I think of William Herndon on his onetime law partner, Lincoln: “His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.”
I also think of a kid I grew up with, Jim Harbaugh. He was cocky, brash, ambitious — and hugely talented. Ted would remind me of him. I loved Jim, though he was not universally appreciated. Certainly he was envied. He went on to be a quarterback in the NFL, and, after that, one of the most successful football coaches in America — at both the college and the pro levels.
But back to the Bush campaign. You know who else liked Ted? Loved him? Heidi Nelson, a bright economic-policy staffer. And a beautiful California blonde. Like Ted, she had a can-do spirit.
She had done some of her growing up abroad, as the daughter of missionaries. She hiked and trekked all over. She was sporty, fearless. Confident, capable.
One tiny example: She wouldn’t dream of water-skiing on two skis. That was for beginners, maybe. One ski would do (although I suspect she could have used her heels, too).
She and Ted were an excellent match. They were married the next year (2001).
Ted took his wedding party to the Reagan ranch. There, we gazed on the great man’s GE appliances, horse saddles, and so on. It was a totally Ted-like outing. We were in Reaganite heaven.
Had enough for one day? Thanks for joining me, and I’ll see you tomorrow for Part II.As a result, in one of the richest countries that has ever existed, about 15 percent of the population faces down bare cupboards and empty refrigerators on a routine basis. That fact alone meets any reasonable definition of the word “crisis,” but it is rarely treated like one. In a lot of states, benign neglect is the most that hungry Americans can expect from their government. What they get instead is usually worse: new restrictions on food-stamp eligibility, in the form of a reimposition of work requirements, mandatory drug testing, and so on.
The cumulative effect of those state-level decisions—combined with recent cuts to the food-stamp program on the federal level—has been a sharp decline in the number of claimants, an effect that far outstrips whatever meager gains have been made in the fight against food insecurity. Over the course of a single month in the first half of 2016, more than a quarter of a million people dropped out of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the official name for the food-stamps system. That was the sharpest month-long fall in SNAP participation in a decade.
The main reason for the decline is some states’ new work requirements, according to Lisa Davis, the senior vice president of government relations at the national food-bank network Feeding America. “Part of it is due to the fact that the economy is recovering, but unfortunately another big part of it is occurring in the states [that] reinstituted that three-month time limit for ABAWDs,” said Davis, using an acronym for “able-bodied adult without dependents.” Under federal law, ABAWDs can only receive three months’ worth of SNAP benefits every three years before they get cut off. In order to receive any more, they must either find employment or enter a job training program that meets federal requirements. When unemployment is high and job training is scarce, states have the option of waiving those work requirements.
Most governors took advantage of that escape clause in the years following the financial crisis. As recently as the first quarter of this year, the USDA, which oversees food-stamp programs, had granted full waivers to 29 states, plus the District of Columbia, Guam, and the Virgin Islands. But within months, the number of states opting into full waivers had plummeted to eight. The result was an immediate and dramatic decline in nationwide food-stamp rolls. “The reinstatement of the time limit is probably the single most significant issue in the national social safety net happening this year," said Davis.
Some state governments haven’t been satisfied with only reimposing work requirements. Over the past year, Wisconsin started requiring that some food-stamp applicants submit to a drug test, Missouri imposed a rule limiting the duration of residents’ enrollment in the program to no longer than four years, and Maine’s governor, Paul LePage, threatened to stop administering SNAP entirely.Well, this one is certainly going to get the Religious Right upset:
A federal court in Wisconsin decided Thursday that the country’s National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional because it calls on citizens to take part in religious activity.
U.S. District Court Judge Barbara B. Crabb ruled that the statute that created the National Day of Prayer violates the Constitution’s prohibition against the government establishment of religion.
Judge Crabb, an appointee of former President Jimmy Carter, wrote in her decision that ‘”some forms of ‘ceremonial deism,’ such as legislative prayer, do not violate the establishment clause.” But she said the National Day of Prayer goes too far.
“It goes beyond mere acknowledgment of religion because its sole purpose is to encourage all citizens to engage in prayer, an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function in this context,” she said. “In this instance, the government has taken sides on a matter that must be left to individual conscience.”
The lawsuit was originally filed in 2008 by the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation. The group said Thursday afternoon that a statement regarding its legal victory would be forthcoming.UPDATED SEPT 13, 3:00 PM PST: Added info for new $140 Digital Only Tier, new Add-ons
Hello Kickstarters!
It's amazing to think we are about 40 hours away from finishing up the project on Kickstarter. We weren't sure what to expect on Day One, but your response quickly had us believing in ourselves that we were really on to something. Over the course of the project, that something has evolved and gone way beyond our expectations because of your support and ability to dream big.
Really big. Like, Galactic war-big.
We've also updated our reward tiers a couple times since then to better reward the enthusiasm and support of all of our backers, as well as to encourage our prospective ones. We aren't allowed to edit each tier with additional items on the homepage once a pledge has been made however, so we know it's been hard to keep track of them as we update. To help clarify, we thought we'd just summarize and create a simple, single list below. There's also a little more explanation for Add-ons, shipping, etc.
No changes have been made to the tiers in this update.
Hope this helps!
Planetary Annihilation Pledge Rewards
Below is a list of all of the reward tier levels with a full break down of each item backers will receive. Bolded lines have items new to that tier.
The first few reward tiers include only digital rewards. $20 Tier (includes $15 Early Bird) A game key emailed to you & digital download
Exclusive wallpaper download
Exclusive PA Asteroid Pin flair item for Super Monday Night Combat (SMNC) $40 Tier
A game key emailed to you & digital download
Exclusive wallpaper download
Exclusive PA Asteroid Pin flair item for SMNC
Early download and access to the game during beta stage
Digital download of the soundtrack
Access to exclusive backer forums $50 Tier
A game key e-mailed to you & digital download
Exclusive wallpaper download
Exclusive PA Asteroid Pin flair item for SMNC
Early download and access to the game during beta stage
Digital download of the soundtrack
Access to the exclusive backer forums
Limited edition in-game Progenitor commander, only available to backers
$90 Tier
A game key e-mailed to you & digital download
Exclusive wallpaper download
Exclusive PA Asteroid Pin & PA Asteroid Belt flair items for SMNC
Early download and access to the game during alpha & beta stages
Digital download of the soundtrack
Access to the exclusive backer forums
Limited edition in-game Progenitor commander, only available to backers
Limited edition in-game Alpha commander, only available to backers
Digital art book
Your name in the credits $140 Tier
A game key e-mailed to you & digital download
Exclusive wallpaper download
Exclusive PA Asteroid Pin & PA Asteroid Belt flair items for SMNC
Early download and access to the game during alpha & beta stages
Digital download of the soundtrack
Access to the exclusive backer forums
Limited edition in-game Progenitor commander, only available to backers
Limited edition in-game Alpha commander, only available to backers
Digital art book
Your name in the credits
Your name will be used to generate planet names in game
PHYSICAL REWARD TIERS
In addition to the digital rewards, these tiers have some physical items that will be shipped to you and may require and additional $15 for international shipping. $100 Tier (includes $95 Early Bird)
A game key e-mailed to you & digital download
Exclusive wallpaper download
Exclusive PA Asteroid Pin & PA Asteroid Belt flair items for SMNC
Early download and access to the game during alpha & beta stages
Digital download of the soundtrack
Access to the exclusive backer forums
Limited edition in-game Progenitor commander, only available to backers
Limited edition in-game Alpha commander, only available to backers
Digital art book
Your name in the credits
Commemorative limited edition full size game box
Exclusive backer t-shirt (Choice of size in one of three unique designs)
Three limited edition commander miniatures each over 3” tall
$150 Tier
A game key e-mailed to you & digital download
Exclusive wallpaper download
Exclusive PA Asteroid Pin & PA Asteroid Belt flair items for SMNC
Early download and access to the game during alpha & beta stages
Digital download of the soundtrack
Access to the exclusive backer forums
Limited edition in-game Progenitor commander, only available to backers
Limited edition in-game Alpha commander, only available to backers
Digital art book
Your name in the credits
Commemorative limited edition full size game box
Exclusive backer t-shirt (Choice of size in one of three unique designs)
Three limited edition commander miniatures each over 3” tall
Your name will be used to generate planet names in game
$250 Tier
A game key e-mailed to you & digital download
Exclusive wallpaper download
Exclusive PA Asteroid Pin & PA Asteroid Belt flair items for SMNC
Early download and access to the game |
insect eating bats that live in caves and attics. People tend to find them in the dark or in their house and get surprised and scared because they’ve never seen them before.
A lot of people are also afraid of getting rabies from bats, but you’re not likely to be bitten or to get a disease if you just leave them alone and don’t go around picking up sick ones you find on the ground. Like any animal, a bat will bite in self-defense if it thinks you’re going to eat it or hurt it, but even a sick bat is very unlikely to become aggressive and attack.
In my entire 55-year long career studying bats, I have never been attacked by a one. I have never documented an aggressive bat attacking anyone, and I have never contracted a disease from a bat.
There is real cause for concern in South America where cattle farming has increased the population of vampire bats. Are you saying vampire bats are not aggressive? Convince me.
Well, a vampire bat is not gentle if you grab him. He will certainly bite and you won’t like the result. But vampire bats do not go around looking for trouble. You might hear of clouds of bats attacking people, but vampire bats are very shy. They might sneak up on you in your sleep if you’re out in the jungle without a mosquito net (a bad idea, bats or no bats!) You probably wouldn’t even feel a bite from a vampire bat, because they have a special way of making incisions so they don’t wake their victims.
I’ve captured vampire bats and they can be just as tame as hamsters. Scientists who have studied vampires find them to be very sociable; they recognize individual humans and express affection to their keepers. Bats in general live in sophisticated social systems, strikingly similar to those of higher primates like whales and dolphins.
The problem in South America started when we began cutting rainforests and replacing them with cattle ranches. I have worked extensively in South America and I’ve rarely ever seen a vampire bat away from where humans were keeping domesticated animals. Once people cut the rainforest and bring in cattle, pigs, or other animals, vampire bat populations grow.
You see headlines about vampires supposedly going after people. The sad thing is that 95 percent of what people hear about bats is about vampire bats and the risk of blood diseases. Vampire bats don’t even amount to a one-tenth of one
percent of the world’s bat species, and they’re found only in Latin America, mostly around cattle ranches.
In Austin, Texas, you were able to help conserve the largest bat colony in the United States, which is now a major tourist attraction that brings in 12 million dollars a year to Austin. Tell us about it.
View Images We tend to fear most what we understand least, says author Merlin Tuttle. This flying fox bat, Pteropus vampyrus, does some aerial acrobatics at the Columbus Zoo. Photograph by Joel Sartore, Nat Geo Image Collection
Although most people are uneasy about bats and a little fearful, the reality is that they have probably the finest safety record on our planet when it comes to animals living harmoniously around people without harming anybody.
Here in Austin, a million and a half bats live under a downtown bridge, eat 15 tons of insects a night, and bring in twelve million tourist dollars a summer. When the bat colony first moved under the bridge, health officials warned that they were dangerous, rabid, going to attack people.
Everybody panicked and wanted them eradicated. But I convinced the city that the bats were worth keeping and they did. In the 35 years we have had our bat colony, no one has been attacked or harmed by one of those bats. Bats make wonderful neighbors. Everybody loves them!
There are a vast variety of bat species. Give us an overview.
There are bats that would compete with pandas for cuteness; there are also bats that would compete with dinosaurs for weirdness. They vary from as large as a vulture to weighing less than a penny; from black and brown to brightly-colored.
There are more than 1,300 kinds of bats in the world—those that catch possums and rats; those that eat birds; those that eat frogs or lizards. Almost anything that’s edible there’s probably a bat out there that eats it. But the vast majority of bats eat insects, and we’re very lucky for that.
Your name, Merlin, suggests you might lead a magical life, and you’ve had some miraculous escapes. Tell us about some of your most dangerous moments.
Well, I have had some close calls. There was one particularly tense moment in Thailand when I was climbing into a cave and suddenly spotted a king cobra slithering out of it in the opposite direction. I froze. He was only a couple of feet away from me, but had no particular interest in attacking me as long as I didn’t look like I was going attack him, and I certainly was being careful to look like I wasn’t going to attack him! [Laughs]
Another time, we were up in the mountains above Caracas when we inadvertently ran into a group of Communist guerillas. They jumped in their jeeps and captured us. Luckily, I made friends with a local party boss, whose jeep we had borrowed.
So, when the guerillas caught us, they recognized the local party boss’ jeep. They radioed him for advice, and he just thought it was a big joke. He used to call me his amigo Yankee, and I always called him my amigo commie. [Laughs]
The worst thing that happened to me was when I was working in Bracken Cave in Texas, chronicling the free-tailed Bats. There is a weird synergy between bats and beetles that feed on bat guano. The beetles produce ammonia levels in these caves that can be lethal to humans. I had bought a respirator and spent nearly a month going down into the cave every day, spending hours photographing the bats.
One day I went down into the cave and I didn’t get 20 feet inside before I realized that I was never going to climb back out if I went any further. I was that faint. I turned around and ended up having to get to the hospital where they discovered I only had 35 percent lung capacity due to ammonia poisoning—my respirator had been leaking!
What are the most important things you want us to know about bats and how they influence our lives?
View Images There are more than 1,300 species of bats. Here, a Leache’s long-tongued bat, Monophllus redmoni, pollinates a Marcgravia flower in Cuba. Photograph by Merlin Tuttle, National Geographic
Bats are key role-players in insect consumption and keeping insect populations in balance, pollinating flowers and dispersing plant seeds. They sustain whole ecosystems from rainforests to deserts; they live on remote Pacific islands to the Andes. One bat can catch over 1,000 mosquito-sized insects in a single hour and are the dominant predators of night flying insects.
Without bats we could be buried in pests. They are critically important to the ecosystem and if we would let them, they would help us reduce our dependence upon pesticides by controlling crop pests.
I don’t know of any group that is more fascinating or diverse. They’ve been around since the age of dinosaurs; they were here tens of millions of years before there was ever a human on the planet. They’re just incredible animals, and anyone who understands bats ends up liking them.Mysteries of one of the most fascinating nearby planetary systems now have been solved, report authors of a scientific paper to be published by the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in its early online edition on 22 April 2014. The study, which presents the first viable model for the planetary system orbiting one the first stars discovered to have planets -- the star named 55 Cancri -- was led by Penn State University graduate student Benjamin Nelson in collaboration with faculty at the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State and five astronomers at other institutions in the United States and Germany.
Numerous studies since 2002 had failed to determine a plausible model for the masses and orbits of two giant planets located closer to 55 Cancri than Mercury is to our Sun. Astronomers had struggled to understand how these massive planets orbiting so close to their star could avoid a catastrophe such as one planet being flung into the star, or the two planets colliding with each other. Now, the new study led by Penn State has combined thousands of observations with new statistical and computational techniques to measure the planets' properties more accurately, revealing that their particular masses and orbits are preventing the system from self-destructing anytime soon.
"The 55 Cancri planetary system is unique both in the richness of the diversity of its known planets and the number and variety of astronomical observations," said Penn State Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Eric Ford, a co-author of the paper who is a member of the Penn State Center for Astrostatistics and the Penn State Institute for CyberScience. "The complexity of this system makes it unusually challenging to interpret these observations," said Ford, whose expertise includes the modelling of complex data sets.
In order to perform the new analyses, Nelson and Ford collaborated with computer scientists to develop a tool for simulating planetary systems using graphics cards to accelerate the computations. By combining multiple types of observations, the Penn State astronomers determined that one of the planets in the system (55 Cnc e) has eight times the mass of Earth, twice the distance of Earth's radius, and the same density as that of Earth. This planet is far too hot to have liquid water because its surface temperature is estimated to be 2100 degrees Celsius, so it is not likely to host life.
It was only in 2011, 8 years after the discovery of this innermost planet (55 Cnc e) that astronomers recognised it orbited its host star in less than 18 hours, rather than nearly 3 days, as originally thought. Soon after, astronomers detected the planet in transit as it moved in front of its star, allowing astronomers to measure the relative size of the planet too.
"These two giant planets of 55 Cancri interact so strongly that we can detect changes in their orbits. These detections are exciting because they enable us to learn things about the orbits that are normally not observable. However, the rapid interactions between the planets also present a challenge since modelling the system requires time consuming simulations for each model to determine the trajectories of the planets and therefore their likelihood of survival for billions of years without a catastrophic collision," said Penn State graduate student Benjamin Nelson.
"One must precisely account for the motion of the giant planets in order to accurately measure the properties of the super-Earth-mass planet," Ford said. "Most previous analyses had ignored the planet-planet interactions. A few earlier studies had modelled these effects, but had performed only simplistic statistical analyses due to the huge number of calculations required for a proper analysis."
"This research achievement is an example of the scientific breakthroughs that come from data-intensive multidisciplinary research supported by the Penn State Institute for CyberScience," said Padma Raghavan, distinguished professor of computer science and engineering, associate vice-president for research, and director of the Penn State Institute for CyberScience.
The 55 Cancri planetary system is just 39 light years away in the constellation Cancer. Because it is so close, by astronomical standards the system shines brightly when viewed from Earth, so astronomers have been able to directly measure the radius of its star -- an observation that is practical only for some of our closest stellar neighbours. Knowing the star's radius made it possible for astronomers to make precise measurements of its mass -- nearly the same mass as our Sun -- as well as the size and density of its super-Earth-size planet.
"Because 55 Cancri is so bright that it can be seen with the naked eye, astronomers have been able to measure the velocity of this star from four different observatories over a thousand times, giving the planets in this system much more attention than most exoplanets receive," said Penn State assistant professor Jason Wright, who led a program to scrutinise this and several other planetary systems.
Astronomers first discovered that 55 Cancri is orbited by a giant planet in 1997. Long-term observations by Wright and colleagues later made possible the detection of five planets orbiting the star, ranging from a cold giant planet with an orbit very similar to that of Jupiter to a scorching-hot "super-Earth" -- a type of planet with a mass higher than Earth's but substantially below that of Neptune, which has a mass 17 times greater than Earth.
Penn State Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Alexander Wolszczan and his colleague Dale Frail discovered the first planets ever detected outside our solar system. These planets orbit a distant pulsar star and were the first-known super-Earth-mass planets. Recent observations by NASA's Kepler mission demonstrate that super-Earth-size planets are common around Sun-like stars.
The study led by Nelson is part of a larger effort to develop techniques that will help with the analysis of future observations in the search for Earth-like planets. Penn State astronomers plan to search for Earth-mass planets around other bright nearby stars, using a combination of new observatories and instruments such as the MINERVA project and the Habitable Zone Planet Finder being built at Penn State for the 9-m Hobby-Eberly Telescope.
"Astronomers are developing state-of-the-art instrumentation for the world's largest telescopes to detect and characterise potentially Earth-like planets. We are pairing those efforts with the development of state-of-the-art computational and statistical tools," said Ford.
Nelson will present the results of the new study at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Namur, Belgium in July 2014. In addition to astronomers at Penn State, the study's co-authors include scientists at the University of Florida, Yale University, the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, the University of Hawaii, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.Experts question wisdom of prosecuting Mohamed Khweis with material support of terrorism rather than using him to encourage other defections
Federal prosecutors have charged a Virginia-born man who travelled to join and then fled from the Islamic State with material support for terrorism, even though a criminal complaint against him provides no connection to any acts of violence.
Mohamed Khweis, a 26-year old Palestinian American man who surrendered to Kurdish peshmerga forces in Iraq this March, neither trained with Isis fighters, participated in Isis attacks nor funded Isis operations, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Thursday.
Terrorism experts said it was inevitable for Khweis to face charges, as travelling to Isis-held territory violates US law. But some questioned the value of prosecuting Khweis, an apparent defector from Isis, at a time when the US is seeking to blunt the militant group’s propaganda.
“You have to build incentives for people to defect,” said Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.
Victoria Martinez, an FBI agent who interrogated Khweis in Iraq, stated in the complaint that Khweis told an Isis member that he wanted to be a suicide bomber, but Khweis “thought this question was intended to test his commitment” to the group.
The complaint also states that Khweis “voluntarily submitted to Peshmerga authority” after leaving Isis-controlled territory in Iraq, suggesting a defection rather than capture.
Khweis, whom the complaint says adopted the nom de guerre Abu Omar al-Amriki, acknowledged travelling from the US to the Isis-held cities of Mosul and Raqqa via Turkey in December 2015. While Isis members touted weapons, Khweis told interrogators he did not.
“The defendant stated that he only touched a firearm once, moving aside a firearm on a couch so he could sit down,” the complaint states.
According to a video released by the Kurdistan24 news agency after Khweis surrendered, the 26-year old said he regretted travelling to Isis territory. Ideological disagreements drove him to flee, he claimed. But Martinez stated without elaboration that Khweis provided “misleading information in the video for self-protection”.
The complaint accuses Khweis of meeting with an Isis branch charged with preparing new recruits for militant actions around Raqqa. “The defendant claimed he did not commit to this training,” the complaint states.
Additionally, the complaint states that Khweis’s electronic devices contained Isis propaganda, including images of the World Trade Center towers’ destruction. Khweis is said to have also had pictures of Omar Hammami, an American who joined and then rejected the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab, which killed Hammami in 2013.
Khweis is scheduled to appear on Thursday afternoon before a federal judge in Virginia, according to the US justice department, his first courtroom hearing since his March surrender. Charges of material support for terrorism typically carry sentences of 15-20 years in prison for each act.
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a terrorism expert and senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said charging Khweis was a “no-brainer”, as he had travelled to Isis-held territory after the group had conducted years’ worth of terrorist attacks. Prosecuting Khweis, Gartenstein-Ross said, would have to be weighed against his potential value “counter-messaging” other potential Isis recruits.
“It’s self-evident that the [justice department] decision process was that there’s more value in charging him and seeking to go to trial. There’s a deterrent factor for others that’d seek this path,” said Robert McFadden, a former navy counter-terrorism investigator.
Hughes of George Washington University said that charging Khweis provided prosecutors with leverage to turn Khweis into a US propaganda asset, while noting that he travelled “bright-eyed” to join Isis, per the complaint.
“I think that there is an important role here for the use of defectors, formers, whatever you want to call them,” he said. “It’s a powerful story to tell to prevent the next young kid from making horrible choices. It’s a difficult balance.”A trial date has been set for an unprecedented climate change lawsuit being brought against the federal government.
Begun when President Barack Obama was still in office, the suit was ordered to trial by U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Coffin.
Coffin set the date for arguments to begin as February 5th, 2018.
The lawsuit garnered significant media attention earlier in 2017, given that it’s spearheaded largely by youths between the ages of 9 and 21. The plaintiffs all claim that the federal government is infringing upon their rights to life, liberty, and property by refusing to take action against climate change. They also claim politicians are violating public trust doctrine, which holds the government accountable for taking care of ‘vital resources’ such as the ecosystem.
As part of his ruling, Coffin also ordered ‘three fossil fuel industry trade associations,’ who had joined the case last year as intervening defendants, to withdraw at their own request.
While the suit was filed when Barack Obama was still in office, the Trump administration is responsible for assuming the defense by default of its position as defendant.
The current administration is likely to play a more adversarial and vocal role, considering its dereliction of the Paris Climate Change Agreement and generally pro-industry, anti-environment stances.
The Washington Post reports that the lawsuit has already come a long way, having barreled over legal obstacles and triumphed numerous times in court. According to the Post, last November, U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ‘denied motions to dismiss the case filed by the federal government and the intervening fossil fuel industry groups. More recently, she also denied the federal government’s request to appeal that decision.’
However, the Post also notes that the Trump administration invoked what the paper called a sort of ‘legal Hail Mary’ – a rarely used procedure known as a writ of mandamus, ‘which calls for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to independently step in and review Aiken’s original decision to dismiss the case.’
“The United States – in both the previous and current Administrations – has endeavored to bring to an end this improper case that seeks to give one federal court control over federal energy policy,” said Mark Abueg, a public affairs specialist for the Justice Department, in an electronic correspondence with The Washington Post. “We have taken our arguments to the appellate courts.”
Experts consulted by the Post said they didn’t think any invocation of the writ of mandamus would be successful.
“I would say it would be extraordinary for the 9th Circuit to step in before there’s a full factual record in the case,” said lead counsel for the plaintiffs Julia Olsen.
Olsen said she expected a trial to last about six weeks.
Sources
This climate lawsuit could change everything. No wonder the Trump administration doesn’t want it going to trial
The Kids Suing the Government Over Climate Change Are Our Best Hope Now
A landmark climate lawsuit against Trump is scheduled for trial next year. Here’s what to expect.
LANDMARK U.S. FEDERAL CLIMATE LAWSUITHackers have broken into the database of Anthem Inc., the second-largest health insurer in the United States, allegedly causing the breach of personal data, including those of the company's employees.
© REUTERS / Kacper Pempel/Files US Reportedly Hacked N Korean Computer Networks Before Cyberattack on Sony
MOSCOW (Sputnik) – Hackers have broken into the database of Anthem Inc., the second-largest health insurer in the United States, endangering the personal information of about 80 million people, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Anthem said "tens of millions" of records could have been stolen, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, adding that the breach exposed names, addresses and Social Security numbers of the company's customers and employees.
© AP Photo / Nick Ut Obama: US to Respond Proportionally to North Korean Cyberattack on Sony
However, according to the health insurer, credit card or bank account numbers appear not to have been accessed during the attack, which occurred last week.
In January, US President Barack Obama announced a new cybersecurity legislative proposal, which encouraged private companies to share cyberthreat information with government agencies to protect them from hacker attacks.
The new cybersecurity proposal came in the wake of a cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, which resulted in the leak of personal data of the company's employees at the end of last year.Coming back from vacation I face a pile of unread magazines. I have far fewer subscriptions than I had 13 years ago, and this was only a two-week vacation, so the pile was manageable: four Economists (I like to know what the globalist Right is thinking), three New Yorkers (ditto the metropolitan Left, and of course the cartoons), and one Literary Review (for a round-up of the month’s books reviewed not by the metropolitan Left ).
I’ll leave New Yorker and Literary Review for another time. What was the Economist telling us to think those last weeks of summer?
The August 2nd issue has a finger-wagging piece headed: “Race and religion in South-East Asia—The plural society and its enemies.”
That phrase “the plural society” was coined, the Economist tells us, by John Furnivall, an early 20th-century British colonial administrator. However:
Furnivall’s original description of the plural society is very different from the way “pluralism” has come to be understood in the West. Rather than referring approvingly to a rainbow of ethnicities choosing freely to live together, Furnivall coined the term to criticise the imposition of immigrant races on indigenous societies in the name of commerce and free trade.
The nerve of the guy! But people were such racists back then.
The British and Dutch empires in the region imported great numbers of Chinese and Indians into what are now Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Burma. Many of the Indians who went to Burma, a Buddhist country, were Muslims.
With the colonial powers keeping the peace, all that diversity generated much wealth.
But as Furnivall saw it, the wealth came mostly at the expense of the indigenous Burmans in Burma, the Malays in Malaysia, the Javanese in Java and so on. Indeed, many such groups felt themselves to be elbowed aside by foreigners who came in under colonial protection … Colonial protection was the chief impediment to immigrants being attacked by resentful indigenous peoples …
Once that protection was withdrawn the diversity caused, and is still causing, no end of trouble ( some of which we have imported to the U.S.A. via our refugee resettlement programs).
This is the territory covered by Amy Chua in her 2003 book World on Fire, reviewed by me here; and covered more pithily by Lee Kuan Yew in his 2005 Spiegel interview:
In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.
Nearly all the evidence points to the benefits of diversity and immigration in terms of innovation and productivity.
What’s to be done? Well, these societies must embrace their pluralism, which is good, as they’d see if they’d only start thinking right.Of course it does! Why won’t they listen?
The next, August 9th, Economist caused something of a stir with its long, detailed cover story on the economics of prostitution, with charts comparing prices for different cities, races, physiques, and “specific services.”
The internet has shaken up the sex trade, allowing for more independence.
It also means more time, effort and expertise put into marketing. “You need a good website, lots of great pictures, you need to learn search-engine optimization … it’s exhausting at times,” she [Ana, a Spanish-American erotic masseuse who works in America and Britain] says. [More bang for your buck: How new technology is shaking up the oldest business, Economist, August 9, 2014.]
Hasn’t it always been somewhat exhausting?
There is an immigration angle:
Large-scale migration is another reason prices are falling. Big, rich cities are magnets for immigrants of all professions, including sex workers. Nick Mai of London Metropolitan University has studied foreign sex workers in Britain. He has found that as they integrate and get used to the local cost-of-living, their rates tend to rise. But where the inward flow is unceasing, or where the market was previously very closed, immigrants can push prices down.
So “unceasing” immigration lowers wages? Who knew?
Most surprising to me was the education premium:
A degree appears to raise earnings in the sex industry just as it does in the wider labour market … Graduates earned on average 31% more than non-graduates.
That suggests a play on one of Dr. Johnson’s apothegms : What the ladies gain at one end they also gain at the other.
On to the August 16th Economist, which has a feature and an editorial on the Camp of the Saints situation building up in the Mediterranean.
Landfall for illegal immigrants from Africa and the Middle East is the Southern European countries. Italy, for example:
The number of people arriving in Italy by sea this year may already exceed 100,000. By the end of July approximately 93,000 migrants had been rescued. The previous record for an entire year was set in 2011 when around 60,000 people reached Italian shores at the height of the Arab Spring …
Migrant arrivals by sea doubled in the first six months of this year to more than 25,000, according to Greek police, though this number only covers those they picked up. Most of the new arrivals were Syrians and Iraqis …
This week more than 1,200 illegal migrants crossed the sea from Morocco to Spain within two days …
Their ultimate destination is usually further north. [A surge from the sea: Illegal migration is causing strains across the continent, Economist, August 16th.]
In 2013, for example, German officials accused Italians of slipping refugees [Huh? What happened to “illegal migrants”?—JD] money so they could travel to Germany. [Europe’s huddled masses: Rich countries must take on more of the migration burden, Economist, same issue.]
Greece:Spain:But:The southern Europeans are only too glad to help illegals on their way to the more prosperous welfare states.The magazine’s advice to the Europeans is to share the burden more fairly, via a system “whereby member states who have few asylum seekers [sic]—Poland, for example—take more.”
How this can be squared with free movement between member states—the Economist ideal, and a reality in the Schengen Zone, to which 22 of the 28 EU member nations belong—is not explained.
Nor are Economist readers told why the illegal migrants/refugees/asylum seekers—most of whom, to judge from the pictures, are healthy young men decently well dressed—should not be landed back on the shores from whence they embarked.
Settling any of these people in Europe will only encourage more to come, as enclaves and networks are established.
The supply is limitless. This same issue of the Economist has an article on the population explosion in the West African nation of Niger:
In 2012, when the worst of the recent food crises ravaged the Sahel region, almost a quarter of Niger’s population was said to be going hungry, prompting desperate relief campaigns by international donors. This perpetual food crisis is compounded by doggedly high fertility rates. With an average of 7.6 children per woman, Niger has the world’s highest rates. [Population explosion: Runaway birth rates are a disaster, Economist, August 16th.]
How many “asylum seekers” does Europe want?
Elsewhere in this issue the Economist’s unnamed editors scold the white English working class for their xenophobia. The subject here is Tilbury, a down-at-heel suburb of London.
Parking himself in the front-room of a house in Poynder Road, a row of modest 1930s houses, your columnist listened at length to the views of his hosts, a pair of hospitable Labour [Party] activists, and their neighbours. They were united in resentment of the immigrants, mostly west Africans and Poles, recently come to the town. “Why aren’t they all on a slow boat to China?” asked one … Some of the ill will was generated by the usual autochthonous meanness—especially over the immigrants’ equal right to public housing. [My italics—JD] Yet mainly it arose from a deep and justified sense of inferiority. Immigrants are prominent commuters from Tilbury station, admitted one, “because they’re better educated than us” and, said another, “because they work damn hard”. Let UKIP cram the slow boat to the gunwales: it will not salve this insecurity. [The trials of life in Tilbury: Poor and demoralised, a Thames-side town stands for Britain’s white working class, Economist, August 16th.]
Perhaps not; but surely it’s worth a try.
And for sheer autochthonous meanness, I must say, it’s hard to beat a professional journalist sneering at his poorer fellow citizens for believing that they have a better claim than immigrants on their nation’s stock of public housing. But that’s the Economist for you.
(Two issues later the Economist, unusually for them, published a reader’s letter pushing back against the magazine’s immigration boosterism and contempt for low-class native whites. Writing from a Tilbury address, reader David Bissenden observes that: “High levels of immigration have also had an impact in Tilbury, but as usual the media chooses simply to put anyone who questions high immigration into the bigot box and walks away … Tilbury will carry on, and weather the storm of bad publicity that the metropolitan elite rains upon it. [Letters, Economist, September 6, 2014])
The next issue of the magazine, dated August 23rd, returns to the topic of African population growth:
The number of Africans under 18 may swell by two-thirds, to reach almost a billion by 2050, even if child-mortality rates remain relatively high. The new figures assume a reduction in fertility rates over time, as prosperity increases … Africa’s total fertility rate—the number is children a woman can expect to have in her lifetime—is 4.7. The figure in America is 2.0; in East Asia 1.7.
Africa remains a relatively empty continent. It covers a quarter of the globe’s land mass but hosts only 15% of its population. Asia, the most densely populated as well as most populous continent, has 137 people per square kilometre. Africa has 39. There should be room for more Africans. [Africa’s population: Can it survive such speedy growth?, Economist, August 23, 2014.]
Not to worry, though:Fingers crossed, then.
The Economist is the authentic voice of the globalist Right: Whiggish optimism, genteel snobbery, and ill-suppressed irritation at the stubborn inability of the general populace to see what’s good for them, even when the illuminati of the economics profession have been spelling it out for them week after week.
It is the voice of our masters: of those who get their way in matters of national policy, or at least are much more likely to get their way than are the proles of Tilbury.
This is their world; we just live in it.Lime prickly ash.
Funny name for a tree right?
It sounds like you have a, uh..inflamed dermis on the posterior.
The Latin name is weird too, and unpronounceable “zanthoxylum fagara”
It is in the citrus family somehow and it is also related to the Chinese pepper tree (zanthoxylum piperitum), a regular bonsai favorite (and culinary herb, Szechuan seasoning comes from it).
The leaf on the lime prickly ash and the Chinese pepper are similar:
Lpa-
Chinese pepper-
Definitely a family resemblance.
In doing my research I discovered that zanthoxylum species are distributed very widely throughout the world.
I mean, it seems that every country and region has its own special prickly ashes.
It would even be appropriate to say that prickly ashes are ubiquitous and endemic.
Some countries have spineless prickly ashes and some have really mean prickly ashes, with inch long thorns. Some places have big ashes, some, the ashes are small.
Some have no ash at all.
I think I’ve gone as far with that joke as I can go, so….. back to the tree.
This tree was collected by Erik Wigert several years ago.
The trunk is very unique. It looks like it was a green stick break that healed itself.
It’s a heavy feeder and grows pretty fast.
This tree is definitely a challenge.
I love it!
I think the best angle is this one
One aspect of the tree that I’ll harp upon (because you can’t hear me yell ouch every time I puncture myself) are the thorns
If you look closely you’ll notice they point inwards. Which doesn’t make too much sense unless they developed to trap animals within the canopy and the decaying carcasses are meant to feed the tree.
I’m serious, you can squeeze your way into the branch structure with nary a scratch but try to pull yourself out and your stuck.
I have had a hard time keeping this green, maybe if i try some bone meal, or…..there is that neighbor’s yappy dog…..
Sorry.
Anyway, getting back to the tree, the wood on it is persistent and will last.
There will be a carving on this bad boy in the future.
But not now. I will create some smaller jins on it with some pruning though.
The criteria I’m employing when choosing which branches to use for Jin or not is this
First, is it large enough.
Second, does it bend, if it bends it might be a branch.
Lastly, does it need to be there
Of the branches in the three pics above, the first branch doesn’t need to be there.
The second is not big enough but very bendable (branch candidate) and the third is as stiff as a Gump, but it is Jin-able material.
This branch
is a little big but I think I can still bend it and use it as a back branch
Good.
This whole branch structure will be jinned
Cut the branches down and leave a stub
(Making absolute sure that the photo is terribly out of focus)
Score around the base of the stub you wish to Jin, and crush the bark (not too hard that you crush the wood underneath)
It’s easier to use Jin pliers but needle-nose pliers work too. I didn’t feel like getting up to get my pair.
If you do it right the bark will come off like a sleeve
It takes a little practice.
And here’s the result
You have to perform this de-barking while the branch is still green; if you wait and the branch dries out, the bark will have to be carved off.
Like most of this above. Pain in the ass it is.
One more thing before I prune. This is one of those plants that have dieback the the next node. The nodes are where the thorns are
For the newbies, a node is the area where the leaf and branch bud emerge from (and often a thorn if the tree has them as well.) and if you cut above the node, all that branch above it will just die.
As illustrated perfectly here with colorful arrows and a nifty bracket thingy
The orange arrow indicates the growth direction. The red arrow is a node and the teal (TEAL!) bracket is the internode; that’s the part which will die back if I cut at the red arrow.
There will be an exam later, memorize it.
Here’s a real world example
Before I go further, I will de-thorn this tree
Bad joke warning!
I prefer prick-less ashes.
The thorn is a little like a rose thorn and you can almost just break them off by applying side pressure.
And my hands are tough enough to handle that…..ouch!
(Insert George Carlin joke -web search: prick your finger+George Carlin. Watch the video. You’re welcome)
The tip broke off and I ended up having to dig it out of my finger later with a pointy knife.
I’m here to testify, there’s nothing that hurts as bad as a thorn under the skin.
In retaliation, I butcher the tree mercilessly
It’ll grow back.
Now it’s time we turn our weird intelligences towards the root of our subject
(I have a million bad jokes, sorry)
If I could just focus on the roots, everything would be clear.
The roots on this tree are very fibrous and prolific. Which makes me believe that it can handle a pretty thorough root pruning with no problem.
Using my trusty chopstick I …
Damn.
I hate it when I do that.
Time to bust out a new one
Wow!
Where did I get this fancy thing?
I don’t remember…Dave, Jerry?
Anyway…
Rake, rake, rake…
I like when I get roots like this.
It makes me happy.
I would prefer for the tree to ultimately be potted in a round pot. But, since I am lacking round pots at the moment, this will have to do
And of course, I tie the tree into the pot (To answer my friend Rob, it is four children and three cats. A peril |
an election, but in 2004, there was one that came pretty close. It was done by an independent group called the Progress for America Voter Fund, and it was in support of George W. Bush.
The 2004 race, of course, was carried out in the long shadow of 9/11 and the ongoing misery of the Iraq War, and it became a referendum on whether or not Bush was keeping the country safe. Democrats seemingly had a strong factual case to make that he was not. Republicans had two responses, both of them emotion-based. One was to prey upon voters' fears by portraying John Kerry as feckless and weak, as this famous ad featuring Kerry windsurfing did. The other was to build up Bush as forceful and strong. The ad from the Progress for America Voter Fund did this, but in an unusual way.
It featured a 16-year-old Ohio girl named Ashley Faulkner, whose mother was killed in the 9/11 attacks, and an unscripted, emotional moment the girl shared with Bush. In May of 2004, Faulkner went to see the president at a campaign stop in her Ohio hometown, where a family friend caught his attention and told the president her story. Narrating her interaction with Bush over some sappy piano music, Faulkner recalls, "He turned around and came back and said, 'I know that's hard. Are you all right?'" Then Bush hugged her. "He's the most powerful man in the world," Faulkner says, "and all he wants to do is make sure I'm safe, that I'm okay." The spot wound up running in nine states and, at $14.2 million, was the most expensive ad of the 2004 election. As Eric Boehlert (no Bush fan, he) later put it, it was "perhaps the most widely seen, and effective, television commercial of the 2004 campaign."
I mention all this because today, Hillary Clinton released a campaign ad that, to my mind, rivals Bush's Ashley Faulkner one. It features an unscripted, emotional campaign-trail moment between Clinton and a little girl in Las Vegas. But, because this is 2016, the moment isn't re-created, it plays out in real time (the video almost appears to have been shot with a cell phone); and the moment isn't about terrorism, it's about immigration.
The ad shows a Clinton campaign event in Las Vegas this past weekend where, during a question-and-answer session, a Latino girl who doesn't look any older than 11 or 12 tells Clinton that her parents are undocumented immigrants and, her voice breaking, she's scared that they're going to be deported. Clinton calls the girl up to the front of the room and has her sit on her lap. There, seemingly blinking back tears herself, Clinton tells the girl that she's very brave (the title of the spot) and that she shouldn't worry. "Let me do the worrying," Clinton says. "I'll do everything I can to help, okay?" The ad ends with Clinton hugging the girl, applause, and a shot of a member of the audience dabbing at her eyes.
So far in this race, Bernie Sanders's ads—whether they feature Simon and Garfunkel or the daughter of Eric Garner—have packed an emotional punch that Clinton's have simply lacked. But with "Brave," I think Clinton has easily equaled Sanders's best spots, if not surpassed them. Clinton's ad is obviously targeted at Hispanic voters in Nevada, who play a critical role in that state's caucuses this Saturday. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if the ad keeps playing elsewhere—and strikes a chord with non-Hispanic voters as well.
In fact, I think the ad might even do more than that. Hillary is often faulted for not being as natural a political athlete as her husband. But this new ad reveals that, in at least one respect, she can perform at the same high level. As David Remnick showed in a 2006 New Yorker piece, Bill was a whiz with the kids. Observing Bill at a New Hampshire middle school, where he was doing an anti-obesity event, Remnick wrote:
After Clinton was introduced, he stripped off his jacket and sat on a high stool. “When I was a little boy,” he said to the kids, “I was bigger than almost all of you. Now there are more kids like I was.” He told them about learning to exercise more and suggested they watch a show on Nickelodeon called “Let’s Just Play Go Healthy Challenge.”
When the question period began, a chubby kid, no more than seven, nervously held the microphone and asked Clinton, “What if you don’t have the channel?” His quavery voice betrayed such a sense of terror and deprivation that a lot of the kids laughed. What? No Nickelodeon? It’s basic cable!
Clinton had clearly heard the laughing and seen the terror in the kid’s eyes, and he sensed the embarrassment that would likely haunt his nights, and so he said, “A lot of people don’t have the channel. So that’s a good question. A great question.” The jaws of life! The boy smiled. His whole body seemed to relax. The laughing stopped. It was a great question! And while Clinton went on to talk about other ways kids could learn about eating more sensibly, it was easy to believe that this kid—still a little shaken, but relieved of his shame—would vote for a Clinton one day if he could.
Bush’s and Clinton’s sensitive paternal image was a key element of their political success. There’s no reason Hillary’s sensitive maternal instincts can’t help her now.CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Former Canton Charge wingman John Holland will join the Cavaliers for training camp as a non-roster invitee, according to a team source.
Holland, who is 6-5 and 27 years old out of Boston University, was waived by the Boston Celtics in August. The Celtics signed him off the Charge roster in April -- he played in one postseason game for the Cs and didn't score. He averaged 16 points and 3.1 rebounds per game for the Charge, the Cavs' D-League affiliate.
The Cavs now have five players coming to camp as non-roster invites; the others are Markel Brown, Cory Jefferson, Eric Moreland and DeAndre Liggins. Camp starts with media day Sept. 26 and the first practice is the next day.
In the coming days, most (if not all) of Cleveland's roster players are expected to join LeBron James in the Los Angeles area -- Santa Barbara, if you're keeping score -- for voluntary workouts and bonding at James' invitation.
LeBron's annual pre-camp workouts heading West
Meanwhile, the Cavs are renegotiating the contract of assistant coach Larry Drew, who is set to become head coach Tyronn Lue's chief assistant and associate head coach. Drew, formerly a head coach for both Atlanta and Milwaukee, is under contract in Cleveland for another season (his third), but the new role warrants a bump in pay, and the two sides are negotiating a price.
The rest of Lue's staff is under contract for the upcoming season.AMES, IA–In the spirit of celebrating diversity at Iowa State University, a black guy was digitally added to the cover of the school's 2001 spring-semester course catalog, school officials announced Monday.
"Here at Iowa State, we have a remarkably diverse student body, with literally dozens of non-whites," Iowa State director of student affairs Andrea Driessen said. "We thought a picture with at least one non-white happily interacting with whites would be a great way to show off this fact. Unfortunately, we didn't have any pictures of whites and non-whites actually interacting, so we had to make one up."
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Said chancellor Dr. Michael Arbus: "An unaltered, or'real,' cover photo would not have adequately captured the glorious rainbow of multiculturalism that is ISU. We thought it best to take a more illusory, 'less-actual' approach in depicting this school's racial demographic."
The black guy, added using Adobe Photoshop, has been identified as Marcus Jamison. A Shreveport, LA, native, Jamison attended Iowa State for one semester in 1996 before transferring to Grambling University. His face was lifted from a photo of him attending a racial-sensitivity seminar during his freshman orientation and digitally added to the course-catalog cover by graphic designer Brian Tompkins.
"Believe me, this was not an easy task. We combed through hundreds of school-newspaper and yearbook file photos before we found a picture of a black guy," Tompkins said. "Even then, we had to keep searching, because we felt it was important that the black guy be smiling."
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Added Tompkins: "If you think it's hard to find a picture of a black guy, try finding a smiling black guy!"
In addition to the black guy on its cover, the course catalog features several inside photos of black guys, though only in single-person shots. University authorities stressed that all of those images are actual photos of actual minorities printed on actual paper.
"Each black guy you see in this catalog was, in fact, photographed at one point," Arbus said. "This booklet is our way of letting people know the importance of including black guys in official school publications. That's the Iowa State promise."
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Arbus noted that the school's football team also includes "a whole lot" of black guys not pictured.
"We have nothing against black guys at this school, as evidenced by our dedication to adding them to images of campus life," Arbus said. "That shows just how serious we are about our commitment to diversity."
Spokespersons for Iowa State, which added Jamison to the course-catalog cover with neither his knowledge or permission, expressed confidence that he would be pleased.
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"I'm sure Mr. Jamison, wherever he is, would be thrilled to see his image used in the service of uplifting the black community and promoting friendship between the races," Iowa State director of communications Bryce Jennings said. "In fact, I bet if he knew about this, he'd even thank us. You're welcome, Marcus!"
Iowa State's use of Photoshop has proven so successful, it is quickly becoming a model for other universities across the nation seeking to improve their schools' veneer of diversity.
"Photoshop opens up an exciting new realm of possibilities for America's institutions of higher learning," University of Montana president Karl Watson said. "Here at Montana, for example, we plan to Photoshop up to 10 percent more Latinos into orientation brochures. If we can get funding, we may also Photoshop handicap-accessible ramps onto exterior shots of campus buildings."Citigroup suffers $7.6 billion loss
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Citigroup reported a painful fourth-quarter loss of $7.6 billion Tuesday, even amid signs that the worst may be behind the troubled financial giant.
Last month's decision to refund $20 billion in outstanding bailout funds to American taxpayers was the primary reason behind the bank's loss.
The move, which helped alleviate some of the government scrutiny the bank has had to endure over the past year, including questions on how it compensates its top executives, resulted in Citigroup reporting a loss of 33 cents on per share basis.
That was in line with what Wall Street was expecting from Citigroup, although the company said it still would have reported a loss of $1.4 billion if it did not take a big charge to pay back the government.
Citigroup also said it spent $25 billion to compensate its employees in 2009, which broke down to roughly $90,000 per employee. A year ago, the bank paid $31.1 billion to its employees, but Citigroup had far more many workers in 2008. The bank sold several divisions in 2009.
Tuesday's results bring to a close a rather difficult year for the New York City-based bank that included talk of possible government nationalization and its stock price tumbling below $1 a share.
Even though many of Citigroup's peers returned to profitability last year, the bank lost $1.6 billion. Still, that was far less than the $27.7 billion it lost just a year earlier, one of the toughest period's in the company's nearly 200-year history.
Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, who has tried to lead the company back to profitability over the past two years, called 2009 a period of "enormous progress."
"As we enter 2010, we are strongly capitalized, significantly more efficient, and are executing on a clear strategy that is focused on clients," he said in a statement.
The bank also highlighted some encouraging signs within its massive loan portfolio. Credit losses fell to $7.1 billion during the quarter, down $800 million from the previous three-month period.
Citigroup also set aside less money for bad loans during the quarter, suggesting that related losses may soon start to moderate.
"Provisions and charge-offs were lower than we expected, suggesting that [Citigroup's] outlook for its loan book has improved," wrote Stuart Plesser, senior bank equity analyst with Standard & Poor's, in a note to clients after Citigroup's results were released.
But much of that improvement was outside the United States, particularly in countries like Korea and Mexico, just two of the countries where Citigroup operates worldwide.
Pandit noted however that the bank remains particularly concerned about loans tied to the American consumer, particularly with so many individuals out of work and the recovery in the housing market still tentative.
"U.S. credit in my view comes down mostly to the mortgage portfolio," said Pandit during a conference call. "That is what we are watching most carefully."
Much of those so-called troubled assets however remain within the company's Citi Holdings division, which was created a little more than a year ago as a dumping ground for assets it has been looking to get rid off. Losses within that division widened to $2.4 billion during the quarter.
But things were hardly rosy either within the company's Citicorp unit, which include the businesses the company has staked its future on. Sales at its consumer, investment banking and transaction services businesses declined from the third quarter.
Revenues at Citi's massive North American credit card business, for example, fell largely due to a new series of federal rules aimed at making banks' credit card practices more consumer friendly.
Despite the less-than-stellar results, Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) shares gained more than 3% in afternoon trading Tuesday, rebounding from losses earlier in the day after the results were first announced.
The company is the second major financial firm to report its fourth quarter results. So far, investors have been largely disappointed.
Although JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) posted a better-than-expected profit on Friday, the stock fell due to cautious comments about the economy from CEO Jamie Dimon. The stock was down again on Tuesday.
Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), Wells Fargo (WFC, Fortune 500), Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500) and Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500) are all due to release their results later this week.Roman architecture took off right where the esteemed builders from ancient Greece left after the decline of Greek civilization. But unlike their predecessors, the Roman architecture gave far more priority to the practicality of their architectural designs. It was a major diversion from the contemporary practice which gave primary focus to a structure’s exterior design and aesthetic appeal. The Greeks, Persians and Egyptians before them had a number of monumental architectures, but their magnificence was limited to the exterior only. With the discovery of concrete, arches, and other engineering marvels during the ancient Roman era, the Roman builders could now build majestic architectures with internal structures that were previously deemed impractical and impossible. Here is a list of top 10 magnificent ancient Roman architectures that reflects the engineering ingenuity of the Romans.
10. Arch of Septimius Severus
This monumental arch was constructed in 203 CE in recognition of unprecedented Roman victories over the Parthians in the dying years of 2nd century CE. It was under Septimius Severus’ rule that Rome was able to successfully suppress a raging civil war among the neighboring states. But the icing on the cake came when he immediately declared war on the Parthian empire and brought the Parthians to their knees. In recognition of his feats, the Roman senate had one of the most beautifully decorated triumphal arches erected on his return back in Rome.
It used to have a bronze gilded inscription placed as homage to Septimius and his two sons Caracalla and Geta for having restored and expanded the Roman Republic. It was quite a unique triumphal monument by all standards in the contemporary Rome. Even today, despite some heavy damages, it stands tall as a lasting reminiscence to the once flamboyant Roman Republic.
9. Temple of Baalbek
One of the major attraction and a remarkable archaeological site in present day Lebanon, Baalbeck is placed among some of the most spectacular wonders of the ancient world. It also happens to be one of the largest, prestigious and well preserved Roman temples built in the ancient Roman era. The first of the Baalbek temples were constructed in 1st century BC and in the subsequent 200 years, the Romans built three different temples – each dedicated to the god of Jupiter, Bacchus and Venus respectively.
The largest temple among them was the temple of Jupiter, which had 54 titanic granite columns lined up – each giant column was around 70 feet tall. Although only six of those columns survive today, the sheer scale of their massiveness gives ample of reflection to the grandeur of Baalbek temples. After the fall of Roman civilization, the Baalbek temples suffered from numerous thefts, war and natural calamities. But fortunately, it is still able to reflect its majestic aura to this day, with thousands of visitors visiting the famous Baalbek temples every year.
8. Library of Celsus
Named after the famous former governor of the City of Ephesus, the Library of Celsus was actually a monumental tomb dedicated to Gaius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus. This amazing piece of Roman architecture was constructed under the orders of Celsus’s son Galius Julius Aquila. It was also a popular repository for important documents and at the height of its use, the library of Celsus housed over 12,000 different scrolls.
It had beautifully carved interiors and equally mesmerizing architectural designs on the exterior – making it one of the most impressive buildings in ancient Roman Empire. The architecture of the library is typically reminiscent of the building style that was much popular during the rule of Emperor Hadrian. The entire structure is supported by nine-stepped podium which is 21 meters long. The surviving facade of the building retains its amazing decorations and relief carvings that simply add to the grandeur of the structure.
7. Pont du Gard
Pont du Gard or the bridge of the Gard (a literal translation) is one of the surviving aqueducts constructed by the Roman Empire. Located in present day southern France, it was built somewhere in the middle of first century AD. This aqueduct was constructed without use of any mortar – the Roman engineers built this three storey masterpiece by fitting together massive blocks of precisely cut stones. These huge blocks of stones weighed up to 6 ton, and the bridge itself measured up to 360 meters at its highest point.
Pont du Gard was a pivotal structure in an aqueduct that stretched over 50 kilometers in length. The success of this engineering marvel was essential to make the entire aqueduct functional which supplied water to the city of Nimes. In the end, the Roman engineers pulled off an outstanding feat in contemporary engineering and hydraulics. Pont du Gard was used as a conventional bridge all along the middle ages right up to the 18th century.
6. Aqueduct of Segovia
Located on the Iberian Peninsula, the Aqueduct of Segovia still retains its structural integrity to this day, making it one of the best preserved pieces of architecture from ancient Rome. It was built somewhere around 50 AD to facilitate the flow of drinking water from the river Frio to the city of Segovia. On its completion, it was an unprecedented 16 km long structure built using around 24,000 giant blocks of granite.
Just like Pont du Gard, the Roman engineers built the entire structure without using any mortar. With 165 arches all of which are over 9 meters in height, this architectural phenomenon has been a symbol of Segovia for centuries. The aqueduct had to go through an extended period of reconstruction during the 15th and 16th century after years of use and structural neglect. And by the 1970s and 1990s, some urgent and necessary conservation actions were undertaken to preserve the monument and its glory.
5. Maison Carrée
Maison Carrée boasts of being the only temple constructed in the times of ancient Rome that is completely preserved to this day. This marvel of Roman engineering was built around 16 BC in the city of Nimes. Maison Carrée is an architectural gem that stands at 15 meters tall and runs along a length of 26 meters, it was built by Roman General Marcus Vipanius Agrippa in memory of his two sons who had died young. With the imminent fall of the Roman Empire on the horizon, Maison Carree was given a fresh lifeline when the rising Christian society decided to transform it into a Christian church in the 4th century.
This decision largely spared this majestic temple from possible neglect and destruction as faced by many other Roman monuments and landmarks. Since then, it has been used for various purposes in subsequent years – as a town hall, stable, even a storehouse, and as a museum at present.
4. Diocletian’s Palace
This marvelous building was built by the famous Roman emperor Diocletian as a preparation for his retirement. Diocletian was the first Roman emperor who voluntarily retired from his position, citing his declining health issues. After his retirement in May 1st, 305, he went on to spend a quiet life in this majestic palace, he had constructed as his post retirement abode.
The palace covers around 215 meters from east to west and its walls are about 26 meters high. At a time when the Roman civilization was in transition from classical to the medieval era, the architects were able to envelope the different building styles that preceded it. It also helped that Christians used the palace as a cathedral in the middle ages – preserving its structural integrity throughout the medieval period. At present, Diocletian’s Palace is one of the most popular archaeological attractions in Croatia, and also a world heritage site as declared by UNESCO.
3. Amphitheatre Nimes
At the time when this famous amphitheater was built in the city of Nimes, the city was known by the name of Nemausus. From around 20 BC, Augustus started to colonize the city and give it a structure much similar to a typical Roman state. It had a number of splendid buildings, a surrounding wall over more than 200 hectares of land and a majestic theater at its heart. Better known as the Arena of Nimes, this astoundingly large theater had a seating capacity of around 24,000 spectators – effectively making it one of the biggest amphitheaters in Gaul.
It was so spacious that during the middle ages, a small fortified palace was built within it. In the modern ages, somewhere around 1863, the arena was remodeled into a huge bullring. Since then it has been used to host the annual bullfights to this day.
2. Pantheon
The Pantheon is arguably the most well-preserved architectural marvel from the ancient Roman era. Unlike many other contemporary Roman temples that were almost always dedicated to particular Roman deities, the Pantheon was a temple of all the Roman gods. The construction of this temple was completed in 125 CE during the rule of Hadrian. The Pantheon has a large circular portico that opens up to a rotunda.
The rotunda is covered by one of the most majestic domes that simply adds a whole new dimension to the grandeur of the Pantheon. The sheer size and scale of this dome gives a lasting testimony to the skills of ancient Roman architects and engineers. The fact that this astounding piece of engineering stands tall to this day, withstanding 2000 years’ worth of corrosion and calamities speaks volumes for its built quality.
1. Roman Colosseum
When the famous amphitheater by the name of the Colosseum was built in ancient Rome, it measured at 620 by 523 feet in area – making it the largest amphitheater of its time. The construction of the largest and most popular ancient Roman monument was started during the reign of Emperor Vespasian in 72 AD. By the time its construction was finished by his son Titus in 80 AD, a never before seem amphitheater with a seating capacity for more than 50,000 spectators was ready for use.
It could host such a large number of audiences that as many 80 different entrances were installed for ease of moving. It is said that on the opening ceremony, the grandest of spectacles were held for about 100 days. In that period of time, about 5,000 animals and 2,000 gladiators fought to their deaths in an unprecedented extravaganza of gladiator and bestiarius battles.
See Also,
Final Conclusion
Ancient Roman architecture in many ways is unique from the buildings and monuments from ancient Greece and Egypt. Of course, the Roman constructions were as grand in terms of scale and magnificence. But they were also far more practical in comparison to all the preceding architectural designs. And then, with the advent of Roman concrete, arches and other ingenious engineering ideas, the ancient Romans were able to take their architecture to new heights. We don’t have to look beyond monuments like the Colosseum, Pantheon and those spectacular aqueducts that survived couple of millennium courtesy of their impeccable built.Blockchain is so hot right now.
2015 was the year the narrative changed. Bitcoin is out, blockchain is in. Attend any financial conference and you’ll hear panels about the brilliance of private distributed ledgers. Private blockchain initiatives like R3 CEV have attracted over 25 of the world’s top banks to participate. Airports everywhere are displaying Bloomberg Markets’ recent cover story, featuring Wall St. tour-de-force Blythe Masters sitting elegantly behind a celebratory banner, “It’s All About the Blockchain.” Even investors who have long backed Bitcoin startups now make sure to convey in their promotional copy that they’re involved with “exciting Blockchain ventures.” What’s your blockchain strategy? Bro, do you even blockchain?
The ascent of this term in the media and financial industry has been dizzying.
And “Bitcoin,” as a thing somehow distinct from “blockchain,” has been left by the wayside, ignored like an embarrassing relative at a family gathering.
Some of us have been amused by this development, but many confounded. Why is everyone talking about the blockchain, and ignoring its central fuel, Bitcoin proper?
First, let’s understand why the change in narrative had to happen, why it was necessary and indeed inevitable.
Bitcoin, to many in the world who have casually heard about it, is an uncomfortable and cryptic creature, existing somewhere between Ponzi Scheme and “money used by bad people.” Didn’t Bitcoin go bankrupt in Japan? Wasn’t the CEO arrested? To others, it’s just downright weird and unnecessary. Visa works just fine, thank you.
More importantly, though, to professionals in the money realm – to bankers and investors and financial regulators – Bitcoin is an awkward and annoying development, a technology almost all of them dismissed as absurd and useless, and yet it keeps growing. Bitcoin promises a dangerous world without strict top-down financial control. Terrorism. Think of the children. Bitcoin made the term “fiat” a thing, and when something has a name, it can be critiqued. Every day Bitcoin exists, it demonstrates the naive idea that money may be able to work without central planning. Worst of all, Bitcoin brings with it an obnoxious cult spouting proletariat nonsense like “financial privacy is a human right,” and “money should move faster than an anvil FedEx’d to Singapore.”
What respectable banker wants to deal with that?
And while the technology brings with it vast promises of financial innovation, these cannot be discussed in terms of “Bitcoin,” because this term brings with it all the aforementioned baggage. One cannot discuss Bitcoin in polite company, for the conversation may veer into one of monetary theory, human rights, massive sovereign theft and bank fraud… better stick with the weather.
But how do you convince your boss or shareholders that you’re keeping pace with innovation? They read the news, they know that disintermediation is a thing. At the edges of their mind, they have a sense that, perhaps, charging $45 to send a money transfer message is neither logical nor sustainable. As Jamie Dimon recently warned in his annual letter to shareholders, “Silicon Valley is coming.”
Enter “Blockchain.”
Ahhh, what a term! It encapsulates all the magic, all the technological brilliance, all the promise and the sparkle of true financial innovation. And it does it without devolving into a discussion of Silk Road or Jekyll Island.
Blockchains, as a concept, are not controversial. Bitcoin is highly controversial. That is why the narrative changed – because “Bitcoin” makes financial professionals uncomfortable. There was no conspiracy to change the subject, it just happened naturally; the path of least resistance.
But what is it, exactly, that they hope to achieve by advancing private, non-Bitcoin blockchains? Without Bitcoin, a blockchain is just a distributed database – not exactly a novel technology. What is R3 CEV but a sexier and more social MySQL database? Why did banks not build such distributed ledgers long ago? If they are the arbiters of transactions, there is no need for mining, and thus no need for a blockchain, per se.
Perhaps such a distributed database never happened before because the banks haven’t felt the true competitive pressure to innovate. Banks’ biggest innovation in the last two decades was the Geithner Swap, in which loss due to excessive risk taking is swapped for taxpayer money. Banks aren’t so much financial innovators as they are lobbying cartels. But can you blame them? When Government forces its way into bed with you, who do you imagine you’ll wake up with?
It remains to be seen how long it takes for the financial industry to realize that the true valuable innovation is not the distributed ledger of the blockchain (which has existed in other forms prior), but rather the open platform of financial inclusion with no trusted party or cartel (which has never existed).
It is precisely Bitcoin’s openness which, like the internet before it, brings revolutionary change to how humans interact. Bitcoin wasn’t revolutionary because it could move money faster, or more cheaply, than banks. Most of the banks’ delay isn’t due to technology – they’re just sending digital messages representing virtual money, after all – it’s due to regulation, bureaucracy, and habit.
Supporters who are “all about the blockchain” may counter that the blockchain demonstrates truth, demonstrates finality, and thus as banks adopt this technology they will be made more efficient because the uncertainty of settlement will be resolved. Sure, blockchains can help with this, and banks can be more efficient for it. It seems clear that blockchain-based banking networks could settle payments in minutes, not days.
But that’s missing the point. A marginal gain in efficiency isn’t what we’re excited about, and indeed a centralized system like PayPal can always be faster than a blockchain, from a technical perspective.
This technology wasn’t created as a way to make things a little faster, though certainly that’s one of its benefits. The real purpose, the purpose which in hindsight will be hailed as the real innovation, is to remove censorship and central-control from money itself.
Is the internet remembered as the means by which Time Warner more quickly delivered its content to readers? Is the printing press remembered as the means by which the Church more aptly conveyed its prognostications to the devout?
It was the openness of these technologies – the fact that anyone, in any country, could access them, build with them, & experiment with them. One did not have to be 18 to sign up. One did not have to be on a government-approved list. One could write whatever she wished, communicate with whomever she felt relevant.
Blockchain technology, properly understood, is decentralized. It is an open platform. It does not pass judgement on human actions, it simply enables more action, more easily, to everyone. A blockchain strategy that doesn’t appreciate this is doomed in the same way and for the same reason as AOL and CompuServe. Does industry really need that lesson again?
How many billions will be wasted by banks seeking their own private distributed ledger, before they realize that the service of “ledger” is just one branch in the tree of broad human communication, and such communication tends to open over time, rather than close.
So industry – if you need to keep using the word “blockchain” to feel socially comfortable when discussing the renaissance, that’s fine. But for the sake of intellectual honesty, not to mention fiduciary duty to your shareholders, don’t fall into the hallucination that siloed financial networks are innovative or lasting. If your blockchain strategy ends at the edge of another bank, you’re doing it wrong.
Moving from a permissioned financial network between banks, to a permissioned financial network among banks, is no great step for mankind.President George W. Bush considered dumping Vice President Dick Cheney from his 2004 reelection ticket to dispel the myths about Mr. Cheney’s power in the White House and “demonstrate that I was in charge,” the former president says in a new memoir.
The idea came from Mr. Cheney, who offered to drop out of the race one day during a private lunch between the two men in mid-2003. “I did consider the offer,” Mr. Bush writes, and spent several weeks exploring the possibility of replacing Mr. Cheney with Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, before opting against the switch.
“While Dick helped with important parts of our base, he had become a lightning rod for criticism from the media and the left,” Mr. Bush writes. “He was seen as dark and heartless – the Darth Vader of the administration.” The president resented the caricature that Mr. Cheney really controlled the White House. “Accepting Dick’s offer would be one way to demonstrate that I was in charge,” he writes.
But in the end, Mr. Bush writes, “the more I thought about it, the more strongly I felt Dick should stay. I hadn’t picked him to be a political asset; I had chosen him to help me do the job. That was exactly what he had done.” Mr. Bush wrote that he trusted Mr. Cheney, valued his steadiness and considered him a good friend. So, “at one of our lunches a few weeks later, I asked Dick to stay and he agreed.”
Mr. Bush discloses the episode in a new book, “Decision Points,” to be published next week by Crown and obtained on Tuesday by the New York Times. The book and the accompanying media tour will be Mr. Bush’s first major foray back into the public arena after nearly two years of public silence. His reemergence coincides with the political resurgence of Republicans who were poised to make substantial gains in Tuesday’s midterm congressional elections.
The book may help Mr. Bush define his legacy in more favorable terms after leaving office with some of the lowest approval ratings in modern times. With his successor, President Obama, now mired in his own troubles and facing voter repudiation, Mr. Bush’s circle hopes the public will come to view the former president more sympathetically over time. But in keeping with his desire not to complicate Mr. Obama’s stewardship, Mr. Bush says almost nothing about his successor’s actions other than to praise him for sending more troops to Afghanistan.
Like his father, Mr. Bush chose not to write a traditional birth-to-Oval-Office autobiography, but instead selected 14 major decisions, or clusters of decisions, that shaped his life and presidency, such as the moment he quit drinking and his handling of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
For the most part, Mr. Bush offers a strong defense of his presidency, declaring that his decision to invade Iraq was the right one because “America is safer without a homicidal dictator pursuing” biological or chemical weapons and “the Iraqi people are better off with a government that answers to them instead of torturing and murdering them.”
He likewise defends his decision to authorize harsh interrogation techniques on captured terror suspects. When the C.I.A. asked him if they could subject Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Sept. 11 mastermind, to a form of simulated drowning called waterboarding, he writes that he said, “Damn right.” The interrogations, he adds, “saved lives.”
At the same time, he offers a more expansive self-critique than he did while in office, expressing regrets for his slow response to Hurricane Katrina, his acquiescence to reducing troops in Iraq after the initial invasion and his decision to nominate his friend and lawyer, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court. He had “a sickening feeling” when he learned there were no mass destruction weapons in Iraq and said “cutting troop levels too quickly was the most important failure of execution in the war.”
He also provides his first extended account of the internal debates that shaped his time in office. For example, he recounts that intelligence reports in mid-2002 suggested that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had a biological weapons laboratory in northern Iraq and prompted a sharp debate about whether to bomb it immediately. Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld urged him to attack, while Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and the national security adviser Condoleezza Rice convinced him to wait.
While the book is not a score-settling account, he does offer sometimes candid words about people. He “never clicked” with his first treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, who “didn’t gain my confidence.” He “was angry” at his father’s former national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, for publishing his opposition to the war in a newspaper rather than telling him directly. He refers to his longtime spokesman Scott McClellan, who later wrote a harsh tell-all book, only as “the White House press secretary” and never by name.
He takes Senator Harry M. Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, to task for saying during the worst of the violence in Iraq that the war was lost, calling that “one of the most irresponsible acts I witnessed” in Washington. Yet Mr. Reid’s Republican counterpart, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, privately told the president in September 2006 that he would cost them the election and urged him to “bring some troops home from Iraq.” Ultimately, Mr. Bush did the opposite, and Mr. McConnell agreed.
He also recalls sharp exchanges with other officials. When Senator Mary Landrieu made an “unproductive emotional outburst” during a Katrina meeting, Mr. Bush said he told |
(an iPhone, Android phone, iPod, an MP3 player, your smartphone, or burn it to CD using free software such as iTunes) and listen on headphones (this product must be used with headphones).
Sit in a comfortable chair or sofa and listen with your eyes closed, or lie down and listen either, whatever is most comfortable for you.
Listen to the full 30-minute track, on low volume. When the track has finished, rest with your eyes closed for at least another three minutes before opening your eyes to do anything else. This small thing is important.
Of course do not listen to binaural beats meditation program when driving or operating machinery, or when you need to focus on anything important.
Whilst listening, you may let your mind drift off in thought – whether you are thinking of something or not while using it doesn’t matter at all, as the low-frequency audio waves on the track create the deep meditative effect every time you listen.
Listen to any version (1-3) of the same level’s track once per day. You may after two to three weeks of use listen more than once a day.
Listen to Level 1 for a period of at least 60 days (2 months), or
until you are able to stay awake for the duration of the track, or
until such time as any emotional upheaval has completely passed.
** Do not move on to the next level until all above conditions have been met.
What is the best binaural beats frequency for meditation?
The low-frequency binaural beats tracks cause deep meditation each time you use – therefore most people will experience fast growth in awareness, energetic clearing and improved mental and emotional clarity. If you do not experience any noticeable changes using this level, do not fret as you may need to move to deeper levels in order to notice significant changes. This is not uncommon. This technology works for everyone, without fail, once its use is consistent.
Because the low frequencies function at a deep level in the mind and body, working on the unconscious mind as well as the conscious, you may at times feel a sense of upheaval or overwhelm, of which emotions such as guilt, frustration, anger, depression, melancholy, anxiety, and fear or sadness may be symptoms, among any other of the full range of human emotions possible. Most people will experience little or none of this, but some will.
If this happens, go easy on yourself, get some massage or reiki, and give the usage a break for a few days until you feel able to start regular use again. Such overwhelm, while in itself is not a good thing, it is, however, a good sign. It’s a sign that something is being worked through and released at an unconscious level. This is the process of making unconscious material and energies conscious, of growing awareness, and restoring you to a higher frequency and to higher potentials.
Check out the in-depth explanation of binaural beats frequencies.
{Infinite Beats}
Free Binaural Beats Meditation Program – Infinite Beats
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By using the Infinite Beats meditation program, you unconditionally agree that their use is entirely at your own risk. The owner(s) of the Infinite Beats Program or their affiliates shall bear no responsibility for any consequences of using the audio tracks or any other materials made available to you, the user.
Why You Should Use this Free Binaural Beats Meditation Program?
People are always trying new things that are supposed to be good for them; taking all sorts of new and different vitamins that are supposed to be better for them than the last ones. People are even taking new detoxifiers, as the human body supposedly needs a detoxification diet for every season.
People are inclined to drink different teas because they are supposed to help them calm down; the list of different fads in the ultimate quest for a perfectly healthy body and mind could go on forever. In other words, people have a constant need to improve their bodies and consciousness in any way they possibly can.
The real question, however, is do people really believe in the promises of such products? Do they really have the expected effect? If they did, I would expect nobody would need to try new health fads. After all, once you have found something that works for you, there is just no need to switch to another product. As a result, you can conclude that few people have found things that really work for them at all, and what they are really doing is looking for something that will finally offer them the sound mind and body that every other product promised but failed to deliver on.
What if I were to tell you that you could finally benefit from a remedy to bad moods, stress, and anger, all without having to swallow a pill, drink a nasty liquid, or painful injections?
What if you could shut out stress or anger whenever you felt like it, like slamming a door? Forget about taking bogus pills and drinking false cleansing teas! All you need to do, in order to get this effect, is to listen to music; something that we all do from time to time! Now this is something most everybody likes, to relax and listen to a few good tunes to take your mind off of things.
To make things clearer for everyone, I guess we should first establish what binaural beats are and what they can really do for you or anyone who decides to use them to affect your mood. I guess you could say that they are specific sound frequencies that resonate with your mind allowing you to use the music to your benefit. These frequencies can be found in different kinds of music and they can have miraculous effects on your brain. The two headsets will provide each ear with the necessary frequency that will tell your brain to combine them in the most beneficial way, offering you the most out of your binaural experience!
Why You should at least try using Binaural Beats Meditation Program?
The plain truth is that bad moods are often getting in the way of our most important activities. We often get angry, anxious or sad and have problems concentrating on all of our activities. Binaural beats will work wonders on your brain and allow you to have complete control over your moods.
Having control over them will offer you the chance to change them to your liking. This way, by simply using the right beat, you will be able to become stress free, eliminate sadness, anxiousness, and all other bad feelings that are keeping you down.
How would you feel about having the power to change your mood and your state of mind? Listening to the right music can do that for you in hardly any time at all! Being able to cheer yourself up and concentrate will have great benefits in all aspects of your life, from your family situation, to your professional life, and even your love life! If having control of your life and your feelings sounds good to you, than binaural beats should definitely be an option to consider. Check out our Transcendental Meditation free guide, you’ll enjoy it.The first three months of 2014 were cold in New England, but not that cold.
In January, temperatures dipped well below the 20-year historical average in New England, but only a few times and only for one or two days at a time.
"We had a cold winter, but we had spots of cold as opposed to, in 2004, where there was extended cold," said Commissioner Moeller, while speaking at a technical conference convened by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in early April. "We have to assume that we will have another winter, if not like this one, perhaps even worse where an extended cold snap could further expose our vulnerabilities."
These "spots of cold" created a series of crises for the electric grid that came dangerously close to becoming catastrophes.
For better or worse, oil was likely the only reason they didn't.
In New England, coal and oil-fired power plants ran at or near full capacity for most of the winter. By contrast, natural-gas-fired power plants produced far less than their total capacity.
Per the Independent System Operator for New England: "[O]n January 28, when temperatures were very cold, gas generators produced only about 3,000 MW during the peak demand hour, although there was more than 11,000 MW of natural-gas generating capability."
The economic consequences were bad, but not as bad as they would have been without oil.
Use of fuel oil by generators prevented in New England kept gas prices considerably lower than other parts of the Northeast during several cold weather events. For example, on January 22, natural gas prices reached $73/MMBtu at Algonquin Citygates in Boston. By contrast, spot natural gas prices at Transco Z6 Non-NY, prices spiked to $123/MMBtu, breaking all previous records.
Electric power prices also soared. The total value of the wholesale energy market in New England for the months of December, January and February, was about $5.05 billion, or roughly the same value of the entire 12 months of 2012.
All five natural gas pipelines that serve New England operated at or near full capacity. Needless to say, the natural gas pipeline system serving New England is far more constrained than anyone had previously appreciated – with the possible exception of the ISO-NE.
In early 2013, the ISO-NE created the "Winter Reliability Program" to address the problems created by pipeline constraints. The program paid about $80 million to oil and dual-fuel power generators to store more oil in their tanks than they otherwise would have. The program created an initial inventory of about 3 million barrels of oil. By February, about 2.7 million barrels of oil from program participants had been burned, or the equivalent of about 1.6 million MWh of electricity.
The strategy was expensive and dirty, but it was probably the only reason New England avoided rolling blackouts this winter. If anything, oil seems likely to become more – not less – critical for maintaining reliability in the near-term future.
By next winter, Vermont Yankee in southern Vermont and Salem Harbor units 3 and 4 in Massachusetts will be retired, reducing the region's non-gas resource by about 1,200 megawatts.
"To put this into perspective, the Winter Reliability Program procured less than the combined capabilities of Vermont Yankee and the retiring Salem Harbor units," said the ISO-NE recently.For the limited-time events, see Challenge Event.
The Challenges system is a new gameplay system in Ace Combat Infinity. It was developed following the feedback during the beta of Infinity, and formally announced through Aces at Operation: "Digital Hollywood".
Description
Challenges allow players to receive special bonuses for completing in-game tasks. The bonuses can range from extra credits to Stocked Fuel to special aircraft and more. The tasks can be anything from completing a certain number of online missions to gaining cumulative points in a certain mission.
Some Challenges are time-sensitive - they will only last until a certain date, after which they will no longer be available for players to complete. Other Challenges are repeatable, allowing players to complete the challenge an infinite number of times.
If a player has already completed the requirements for a challenge (e.g. purchased an aircraft before accepting a challenge asking the player to purchase that aircraft), they can simply accept the challenge, go to the area of the menu the challenge describes, and return to the challenge. It should have completed itself.
Trivia
If a challenge asks to destroy "a total of", then it allows the player to achieve the requirement over multiple missions. Otherwise, the player must achieve the requirement within one mission.
Challenges unfinished within its allowed time frame will deactivate it and initiate cooldown. You will not be able to accept it again until it has cooled down. If you are not sure you can achieve it right now within the given time limit but can achieve it at a later time of the same day (before 00:00 GMT), you are better off cancelling the challenge than let it expire by itself unachieved. However, standard challenges are the exception, as they can be restarted immediately if the player fails to complete them.One of the world’s leading physicists has warned Ireland risks falling behind other countries and losing its international reputation as a high-tech location if it continues to concentrate resources around silicon chip computing.
This could lead to large swathes of Ireland’s computer industry becoming obsolete and put many jobs at risk.
Ireland’s approach so far has been hugely successful, but a shift to quantum computing is already happening and the country is not sufficiently geared up for this, according to Prof Séamus Davis, who is based at Cornell University in the US. He is a native of Skibbereen and a graduate of UCC.
Quantum computing takes advantage of the ability of subatomic particles to exist in more than one state at any time. Due to the way the tiniest of particles behave, operations can be done much more quickly and use less energy than classical computers.
Prof Davis believes a significant proportion of resources in terms of research funding and development of expertise needs to become focused on the future of information technology, including the development of quantum computers and the pursuit of a new generation of superconductors.
His latest research breakthrough on “room temperature supercomputers”, the work of six research teams based in the US and Europe, is published today in the leading research journal Science.
It is a significant discovery on how electrons operate in subatomic material within an iron-based superconductor, which behaves like a perfect conductor of electricity, offering no resistance whatever to the passage of electric current through it. This will intensify a search which he predicts will ultimately lead to super fast computers that will use little or no energy and transform “uncountable things”, especially in IT, medicine, energy and transport.
In an interview with The Irish Times, Prof Davis said: “Ireland’s investment in information technology is based on silicon. That has been wonderful, miraculous in many ways. But it’s a risk.”
Research budgets
That policy, he added, including an emphasis on supporting high-tech industry, was correct for its time, and IT companies in Ireland continue to be highly successful. But the approach, in terms of best serving society, the economy and industry, would be to put 5-10 per cent of research budgets for starters in solid state physics, “to have a foot in the door of the future”.
If Ireland did not want to be left behind, that required asking “What form will IT take in 20 years; in 50 years?” and consideration of what happens “when silicon stops”. He added: “I take that question very seriously. Having worked in the US, I have seen an industry disappear in five years. That may be hard to swallow for some people. But it happens all the time.”
To answer the question, it necessitates conducting the right research, developing laboratories and training people. It requires applying resources to quantum computing, the generation of quantum materials and development of quantum technology. This troika is “the keystone of future research” that is being pursued in other countries, most notably in China.
It was not the role of business to do this, Prof Davis said. Intel, for example, was developing the most advanced Fab chips and CPUs in computers, but it was involved in manufacturing and operated to make a profit.
Prof Davis stressed he was not criticising the Government or those involved in science research or industry as “everybody is doing their job very well”, but if they wanted to stay in advanced technology, they had to look more to the future.
Concerns
He confirmed he had outlined his concerns last year to Science Foundation Ireland, the Government body which has an annual budget of €160 million and has successfully revamped science and engineering research in recent years. This has been reflected in Ireland’s improved standing in global research.
Quantum computing was going to happen, he added. IBM has already developed a quantum computer which makes use of the quantum states of subatomic particles to store information. Scientists, physicists and others working in advanced IT in Ireland were “acutely aware that these things are coming”, and conscious of the need to adjust the technology portfolio to ensure what will be needed in 25 years “if silicon is not going to do the job”.
Likewise, he predicted it was only a matter of time before the “room temperature superconductor” was going to become available, and that would be “before we have a laptop quantum computer”.Financial Crisis, US Unconventional Monetary Policy and International Spillovers
Author/Editor:
Qianying Chen ; Andrew Filardo ; Dong He ; Feng Zhu
Publication Date:
April 29, 2015
Electronic Access:
Free Full Text. Use the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this PDF file
Disclaimer: This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF.The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate
Summary:
We study the impact of the US quantitative easing (QE) on both the emerging and advanced economies, estimating a global vector error-correction model (GVECM) and conducting counterfactual analyses. We focus on the effects of reductions in the US term and corporate spreads. First, US QE measures reducing the US corporate spread appear to be more important than lowering the US term spread. Second, US QE measures might have prevented episodes of prolonged recession and deflation in the advanced economies. Third, the estimated effects on the emerging economies have been diverse but often larger than those recorded in the US and other advanced economies. The heterogeneous effects from US QE measures indicate unevenly distributed benefits and costs.Never has the need for forward-thinking American global leadership been more necessary. However, the "American First" national security strategy, unveiled by President Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE Monday, is a step in the wrong direction for the United States and our place in the world.
There is no denying that today’s world contains serious threats to our national security and shared prosperity. Solving such problems - terrorism, disease, disasters, climate change, famine and conflict - requires engaged American leadership that uses all the tools in our arsenal. An America in retreat – which is the reality of this strategy – will only make the United States and the world less safe.
ADVERTISEMENT
Despite saying his top priority is to protect the American people and our way of life, President Trump’s national security strategy as he describes it would actually make America less safe.
Though the strategy alludes to one of the greatest threats we face – a regime in Moscow using an asymmetric arsenal to assault democracies and Western values throughout Europe and here in the United States – in public and private President Trump has consistently downplayed or denied that threat. And instead of building our defenses following the 2016 attack on our election, the administration’s self-professed inaction has left us vulnerable to attack again in 2018. I also remain concerned the president does not comprehensively address security and economic issues with China, and continues to avoid raising human rights concerns in a meaningful way.
The Trump national security strategy would harm our alliances - which American men and women have fought and died to create and protect. It undoes the liberal international order we built out of the ashes of world war to deal with a range of national security challenges. The president has already walked away from the Paris Climate Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, undermined NATO and is threatening to undo the international accord preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
And on North Korea the president seems determined to place us on war footing, at every turn downplaying or undermining a diplomatic solution. The Trump administration's approach is a profound misunderstanding of how to link together our alliances, economic pressure, and military posture to create a genuine diplomatic roadmap to address Kim Jong-un's nuclear and missile programs.
With the U.S. dealing with unprecedented threats, President Trump is hollowing out the State Department by freezing hiring, forcing out career staff, closing offices and publicly undercutting his Secretary of State– eliminating the very diplomats and diplomacy needed to prevent conflict. The rhetoric does not match the reality.
For all the president's talk about 'America First,' his national security strategy also fails to fully support and develop better international trade systems to benefit American workers and replicate our nations' economic success for other countries, creating a level economic playing field and inevitably making us more secure.
The overarching flaw with the president's national security strategy is that it places an overemphasis on bombs and bullets without the full use of diplomacy, development, and democratic capacity-building tools to help us build the world we want to live in for ourselves and for future generations.
After World War II, the United States led the world toward unprecedented levels of peace, prosperity and freedom. It did not come easy. We faced down threats-from the Soviets, Saddam Hussein, Milosevic and others. As we have done so effectively in the past, we need to renew and revitalize American power and leadership to advance U.S. interests in the world, like continuing to take back ISIS' territory and fighting the warped ideology of Al Qaeda.
Building toward that success will require us getting it right at the foundation, and we therefore should not retreat from upholding democracy as the most effective form of governance.
Democracy does not defend itself. A genuine national security strategy must actively defend democracy by promoting good governance measures like fighting corruption, promoting transparency and supporting civil society, highlighting democracy as a model for others to considering adopting and living by. We know that America derives its strength from its values and we can never retreat from that core concept.
So be skeptical when you hear the president or his spokespeople talk about 'America First.' If this national security strategy is implemented and carried out as the president prefers, it will leave America isolated and alone.
President Trump may lack the foresight necessary to lead our country in the right direction, but we, the American people, cannot lose sight of what makes us who we are and cannot give up articulating and fighting for what's right.
Cardin is a United States Senator from Maryland and the leading Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.29/06 Performance Test, we need your help! *Finished*
Hi all,
We have just started the test. Hop onto the BETA_TEST server if you want to help out. All you need to do is just walk around, and do what ever :)
UPDATE 2: Just received a message from the devs, unfortunately the time it will take to upload the new patch will be a lot longer than expected due to the high amount of changes. This means that we will have to postpone the test until tomorrow.
On the bright side, lots of changes and tweaks have been made to increase performance and reduce lag.
Apologies from both me (Kap) and the Devs for keeping you waiting. Thank you all who stood ready to hop onto beta, I hope you guys will join us tomorrow!
UPDATE: As more and more fixes are being put into the beta patch the time has now been set to 21:00 for it to be ready. We will start the event as soon as the patch goes live on beta :)
Good Evening all,
The test will be slightly delayed by 30 minutes or so as there currently is a beta build with possible fixes in the works.
The test will be done on the beta server and the idea is to let people join 1 by 1 to see exacly when the lag starts and what causes it.
We have a sign-up from the following people:
A fine selection of devs
Brandon
Art
Gigou
Ligatorswe
Bierbaron
Maxstor
Tjaanie
Kap
Cant make it, want to help out or want more info? just let me know!Ella Josephine Baker (December 13, 1903 – December 13, 1986) was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist in the United States. She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and the South, she worked alongside some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists, such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks, and Bob Moses, whom she first mentored as leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).[1]
Baker criticized professionalized, charismatic leadership; she promoted grassroots organizing, radical democracy, and the ability of the oppressed to understand their worlds and advocate for themselves. She realized this vision most fully in the 1960s as the primary advisor and strategist of the SNCC.[1][2] She has been ranked as "One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement." She is known for her critiques not only of racism within American culture, but also the sexism and classism within the civil rights movement.[3]
Early life and education [ edit ]
Ella Josephine Baker was born in 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia to Georgiana (called Anna) and Blake Baker and first raised there. She was the middle of three surviving children, bracketed by her older brother Blake Curtis and younger sister Maggie.[4] Her father worked on a steamship line that sailed out of Norfolk and was frequently away. Her mother took in boarders to earn extra money. In 1910 Norfolk had a race riot in which whites attacked black workers from the shipyard. Her mother decided to take the family back to North Carolina while their father continued to work for the steamship company. Ella was seven when they returned to her mother's rural hometown near Littleton, North Carolina.[5]
As a girl, Baker lived in a woman-centered world of maternal relatives. Her grandfather Mitchell had died, and her father's parents lived a day's ride away.[6] She often listened to her maternal grandmother, Josephine Elizabeth "Bet" Ross, tell stories about slavery, emphasizing the resistance and strong survival of her people. Both sets of grandparents had been born into slavery and freed after the Civil War.[7]:1907 "Bet" said that she was the daughter of her master.[8] At first she was trained and served as a house slave but, when she refused a husband chosen by her master's wife, she was put to work in the field.[9] After emancipation, Josephine and Mitchell Ross, who had become literate, managed to buy a farm and he became a Baptist minister. Her father's parents, Teema and Margaret Baker, lived nearby in Warrenton, North Carolina, the county seat. They were illiterate tenant farmers who worked land of white owners.[10]
Ella attended local segregated schools. She went to the state capital to attend Shaw University, a historically black university in Raleigh. She graduated in 1927 as class valedictorian. As a student, she challenged school policies which she thought were unfair, specifically "the school's conservative dresscode...paternalistic racism of its president...and its methods of teaching religion and the Bible."[11] After graduating, Baker moved to New York City during the period of the Great Migration, when many blacks were leaving the South to escape its oppressive society.[12]
New York City [ edit ]
During 1929–1930 Baker worked as an editorial staff member of the American West Indian News; she next worked as editorial assistant at the Negro National News. In 1930 George Schuyler, a black journalist and anarchist (and later an arch-conservative), founded the Young Negroes Cooperative League (YNCL). It sought to develop black economic power through collective networks. They conducted "conferences and trainings in the 1930s in their attempt to create a small, interlocking system of cooperative economic societies throughout the US" for black economic development.[13] Having befriended Schuyler, Baker joined his group in 1931 and soon became its national director.[14][15]
She also worked for the Worker's Education Project of the Works Progress Administration, established under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Baker taught courses in consumer education, labor history, and African history. She immersed herself in the cultural and political milieu of Harlem in the 1930s. She protested Italy's invasion of Ethiopia and supported the campaign to free the Scottsboro defendants in Alabama, a group of young black men accused of raping two white women. She also founded the Negro History Club at the Harlem Library and regularly attended lectures and meetings at the YWCA.
During this time, Baker lived with and married her college sweetheart, T. J. (Bob) Roberts. Their respective work schedules often kept them apart. They divorced in 1958. Ella Baker rarely discussed her private life or marital status. According to fellow activist, Bernice Johnson Reagon, many women within the Civil Rights Movement followed Baker's example, adopting a practice of dissemblance about their private lives that allowed them to be accepted as individuals within the movement.[16]
Baker befriended John Henrik Clarke, a future scholar and activist; Pauli Murray, a future writer and civil rights lawyer, and others who would become lifelong friends.[17] The Harlem Renaissance influenced Baker in her thoughts and teachings. She advocated widespread, local action as a means of social change. Her emphasis on a grassroots approach to the struggle for equal rights influenced the growth and success of the modern civil rights movement of the mid-20th century.[18]
NAACP (1938–1953) [ edit ]
In 1938 Baker began her long association with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was then based in New York City. In December 1940 she started work there as a secretary. She traveled widely for the organization, especially in the South, recruiting members, raising money, and organizing local chapters. She was named director of branches in 1943,[19] and became the highest-ranking woman in the NAACP. An outspoken woman, Baker believed in egalitarian ideals. She pushed the NAACP to decentralize its leadership structure and to aid its membership in more activist campaigns at the local level.
Baker believed that the strength of an organization grew from the bottom up and not the top down. She believed that the work of the branches was the NAACP's lifeblood. Baker despised elitism and placed her confidence in many. She believed that the bedrock of any social change organization is not the eloquence or credentials of its top leaders, but in the commitment and hard work of the rank and file membership and the willingness and ability of those members to engage in a process of discussion, debate, and decision making.[20] She especially stressed the importance of young people and women in the organization.
While traveling throughout the South on behalf of the NAACP, Baker met hundreds of black people, establishing lasting relationships with them. She slept in their homes, ate at their tables, spoke in their churches, and earned their trust. She wrote thank-you notes and expressed her gratitude to the people she met. This personalized approach to political work was one important aspect of Baker's effective effort to recruit more members, both men and women, into the NAACP.[21] Baker formed a network of people in the South who would be important in the continued fight for civil rights. Whereas some northern organizers tended to talk down to rural southerners, Baker's ability to treat everyone with respect helped her in recruiting. Baker fought to make the NAACP more democratic. She tried to find a balance between voicing her concerns and maintaining a unified front.
Between 1944 and 1946, Baker directed revolutionary leadership conferences in several major cities, such as Chicago and Atlanta. She got top officials to deliver lectures, offer welcoming remarks, and conduct workshops.[22]
In 1946, Baker took in her niece Jackie, whose mother was unable to care for her. Due to her new responsibilities, Baker left her full-time position with the NAACP and began to serve as a volunteer. She soon joined the New York branch of the NAACP to work on local school desegregation and police brutality issues. She became its president in 1952.[23] In this role, she supervised the field secretaries and coordinated the national office's work with local groups.[24] Baker's top priority was to lessen the organization's bureaucracy and Walter Francis White's dominating role as executive secretary.
She did not believe that the program should be primarily channeled through White, the executive secretary, and the national office, but rather through the people out in the field. She lobbied to reduce the rigid hierarchy, place more power in the hands of capable local leaders, and give greater responsibility and autonomy to local branches.[25] In 1953 she resigned from the presidency to run for the New York City Council on the Liberal Party ticket, but she was unsuccessful.[26]
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1957–1960) [ edit ]
In January 1957, Baker went to Atlanta to attend a conference aimed at developing a new regional organization to build on the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama. After a second conference in February, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was formed. This was initially planned as a loosely structured coalition of church-based leaders who were engaged in civil rights struggles across the South.[27] The group wanted to emphasize the use of nonviolent actions to bring about social progress and racial justice for southern blacks. They intended to rely on the existing black churches, at the heart of their communities, as a base of its support. Its strength would be built on the political activities of local church affiliates. The SCLC leaders envisioned themselves as the political arm of the black church.[28]
The SCLC first appeared publicly as an organization at the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. Baker was one of three major organizers of this large-scale event. She demonstrated her ability to straddle organizational lines, ignoring and minimizing rivalries and battles.[29] The conference's first project was the 1958 Crusade for Citizenship, a voter registration campaign to increase the number of registered African-American voters for the 1958 and 1960 elections. Baker was hired as Associate Director, the first staff person for the SCLC. Reverend John Tilley became the first Executive Director. Baker worked closely with southern civil rights activists in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and gained respect for her organizing abilities. She helped initiate voter registration campaigns and identify other local grievances. Their strategy included education, sermons in churches, and efforts to establish grassroots centers to stress the importance of the vote. They also planned to rely on the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to protect local voters.[30] While the project did not achieve its immediate goals, it laid the groundwork for strengthening local activist centers to build a mass movement for the vote across the South.[30] After John Tilley resigned as director of the SCLC, Baker lived and worked in Atlanta for two and a half years as interim executive director until Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker]] started in the role in April 1960.[31]
Baker's job with the SCLC was more frustrating than fruitful. She was unsettled politically, physically, and emotionally. She had no solid allies in the office.[18] Historian Thomas F. Jackson notes that Baker criticized the organization for "programmatic sluggishness and King's distance from the people. King was a better orator than democratic crusader [she] concluded."[32]
In the 1960s, the idea of "participatory democracy" became popular among political activists, including those involved in the Civil Rights Movement. It combined the traditional appeal of democracy with an innovative tie to broader grass roots participation.
There were three primary emphases to this new movement:
An appeal for grass roots involvement of people throughout society, while making their own decisions
The minimization of (bureaucratic) hierarchy and the associated emphasis on expertise and professionalism as a basis for leadership
A call for direct action as an answer to fear, isolation, and intellectual detachment[33]
Ella Baker said:
You didn't see me on television, you didn't see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don't need strong leaders.[34]
According to activist Mumia Abu-Jamal (formerly known as H. Rap Brown), Baker advocated a more collectivist model of leadership over the "prevailing messianic style of the period."[35] Baker was largely arguing against the civil rights movement being structured along the organization model of the black church. The black church than had largely female membership and male leadership. Baker questioned not only the gendered hierarchy of the civil rights movement, but also that of the Black church.[35]
Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as other SCLC members, were reported to have differences in opinion and philosophy during the 1950s and 1960s. She was older than many of the young ministers she worked with, which added to their tensions. She once said that the "movement made Martin, and not Martin the movement." When she gave a speech urging activists to take control of the movement themselves, rather than rely on a leader with "heavy feet of clay," it was widely interpreted as a denunciation of King.[36]
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1960–1966) [ edit ]
That same year, 1960, on the heels of regional desegregation sit-ins led by black college students, Baker persuaded the SCLC to invite southern university students to the Southwide Youth Leadership Conference at Shaw University on Easter weekend. This was a gathering of sit-in leaders to meet, assess their struggles, and explore the possibilities for future actions.[37] At this meeting the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced "snick") was formed.
Baker saw the potential for a special type of leadership by the young sit-in leaders, who were not yet prominent in the movement. She believed they could revitalize the Black Freedom Movement and take it in a new direction. Baker wanted to bring the sit-in participants together in a way that would sustain the momentum of their actions, teach them the skills necessary, provide the resources that were needed, and also help |
105 practice, including, most notably, the volume of Repo 105 activity that Lehman engaged in at quarter?end (May 31, 2008). Hansen’s notes specifically recount Lee’s allegation that Lehman moved $50 billion of inventory off its balance sheet at quarter?end through Repo 105 transactions and that these assets returned to the balance sheet approximately a week later.
To wit:
Hansen’s notes indicate that Lehman’s “Rates [and] Liquid Markets” businesses engaged in “Repo 105/Repo 108 [to] reduce[] assets by 50B [by] moving off B/S [i.e., balance sheet] in Europe & back in 5 days later.” Hillary Hansen, Ernst & Young, Handwritten Notes (June 12, 2008), at p. 1 [EY?LE?LBHIKEYPERS 5826869]. This is consistent with the Examiner’s conclusions that at quarter?end in second quarter 2008, Lehman reduced its balance sheet by slightly more than $50 billion through Repo 105 transactions.
Amusingly, while yesterday we discussed the interorganizational scapegoating, today we arrive at the intra-version. Bill Schlich, the partner named above, is quick to make thing Hansen's fault.
When interviewed by the Examiner, Schlich did not recall Lee saying anything about Repo 105 transactions during that interview, although he did not dispute the authenticity of Hansen’s notes from the Lee interview. In spite of Hansen’s notes, Schlich maintained that Ernst & Young did not know that Lehman engaged in the following Repo 105 activity during the listed time periods: $49.1 billion at first quarter 2008 (Feb. 29, 2008); and $50.38 billion at second quarter 2008 (May 31, 2008).
Now Hillary Hansen, unwilling to be thrown under the bus without some token defense, also comes out with a scapegoating excuse. Left with little recourse, she blames incompetence.
During the Examiner’s interview of Hansen, Hansen recalled that while Ernst & Young questioned Lee about his May 16, 2008 letter, Lee “rattled off” a list of additional issues and concerns he held, one of which was Lehman’s use of Repo 105 transactions. Ernst & Young had no further conversations with Lee about Repo 105 transactions. Prior to her interview of Lee in June 2008, Hansen had heard the term Repo 105 “thrown around” but she did not know its meaning; according to Hansen, Schlich described Repo 105 transactions to her shortly after they met with Lee.
It is good to know that a head auditor on a top 5 investment bank was unfamiliar with its business practices, and the implications of SFAS 140, even though the firm, as presented above, was edumacating its partners about such things.
We are not sure, however, who Schlich and Hansen will be able to scapegoat this on. Full summary of key events follows:
On June 13, 2008 – the day after Lee informed Ernst & Young of the $50 billion in Repo 105 transactions that Lehman undertook at the end of the second quarter 2008 – Ernst & Young spoke to Lehman’s Audit Committee but did not inform the committee of Lee’s allegation, even though the Chairman of the Audit Committee had clearly stated that he wanted every allegation made by Lee – whether in Lee’s May 16 letter or during the course of the investigation – to be investigated. Ernst & Young met with the Audit Committee on July 8, 2008, to review the second quarter financial statements and again did not mention Lee’s allegations regarding Repo 105. On July 22, 2008, Ernst & Young was also present when Beth Rudofker, Head of Corporate Audit, gave a presentation to the Audit Committee on the results of the investigation into Lee’s allegations. Ernst & Young did not disclose to the Audit Committee – either during the meetings or in private executive sessions after – that Lee made an allegation related to Repo 105 transactions being used to move assets off Lehman’s balance sheet at quarter-end. Cruikshank told the Examiner that he would have expected to be told about Lee’s Repo 105 allegations. Similarly, Sir Gent told the Examiner that the alleged volume of Lehman’s Repo 105 transactions mandated disclosure to the Audit Committee as well as further investigation...Ernst & Young did not follow?up on either Lee’s allegations regarding Lehman’s Repo 105 activity or Reilly’s claim that he had no knowledge of Lehman’s alleged $50 billion Repo 105 usage figure. Ernst & Young signed a Report of Independent Registered Public Accounting Firm for Lehman’s second quarter 2008 Form 10?Q on July 10, 2008, less than four weeks after Schlich and Hansen interviewed Lee.
Not to beat a dead horse, but E&Y was at fault: as the Examiner points out:
Disclosure of the agreement to repurchase component of Repo 105 transactions was required in the MD&A. Lehman’s repurchase of the securities was a known event that was reasonably likely to occur and would have had a material effect on the company’s financial condition or results of operations. Lehman’s disclosure in the Liquidity and Capital Resources section should have included a discussion of what was known with respect to the timing and/or amounts of the cash flow created by the repayment of the Repo 105 cash borrowing in the first seven to ten days after quarter-end, specifically: (1) the availability of cash as a result of the repayment of the Repo 105 cash borrowing; (2) the ability to borrow more capital because of a reduction in debt rating or deterioration in leverage ratio due to the repayment of the Repo 105 cash borrowing; (3) the effect of the repayment of the Repo 105 cash borrowing on the cost of capital/credit rating; and (4) the economic substance and business purpose of the Repo 105 arrangements.
Indeed, there was a "duty to report":
SEC Rule 12b?20 requires that all filings contain such additional information necessary to make the information contained in the filing not misleading. Moreover, “Once defendants choose to speak about their company, they undertake a duty to ‘speak truthfully and to make such additional disclosures as…necessary to avoid rendering the statements misleading.’”
And here is why the plaintiff bar is really hung over today. The lawsuits are coming:
An investor reviewing Lehman’s 2007 Form 10?K and two 2008 Forms 10?Q would not have been able to discern that Lehman was engaged in Repo 105 transactions. Indeed, Lehman made no disclosures in its Statement of Income, Statement of Financial Condition, Statement of Cash Flows, or MD&A sections (including its section on liquidity) from which an investor could infer that Lehman treated a certain volume of repo transactions as sales under SFAS 140, thereby decreasing its net assets and its net leverage ratio...In addition, even a sophisticated reader of Lehman’s financial statements would not have been able to ascertain from Lehman’s 2007 Form 10?K or its first and second quarter 2008 Forms 10?Q the amount of Lehman’s Repo 105 usage, nor even ascertain the fact that Lehman was engaged in these transactions, by attempting to quantify the amount of liquid securities temporarily removed from the balance sheet, as reported in Lehman’s public financial statements.
We sure hope that Fuld, O'Meara, Callan, Lowitt and all of E&Y are promtly depositing money in their legal representation singking fund:
The Examiner finds that sufficient evidence exists to support the finding of colorable claims against Richard Fuld, Christopher O’Meara, Erin Callan, and Ian Lowitt in connection with their actions in causing or allowing Lehman to file periodic reports that did not disclose Lehman’s use of Repo 105 transactions and against Ernst & Young for its failure to meet professional standards in connection with that lack of disclosure... While there were credible facts and arguments presented by each that may form the basis for a successful defense, the Examiner concluded that these possible defenses do not change the now final conclusion that there is sufficient evidence to support a finding that claims of breach of fiduciary duty exist against Fuld, O’Meara, Callan, and Lowitt and a colorable claim of professional malpractice exists against Ernst & Young.
And focusing again purely on E&Y:
The Examiner concludes that sufficient evidence exists to support colorable claims against Ernst & Young LLP (“Ernst & Young”) for professional malpractice arising from Ernst & Young’s failure to follow professional standards of care with respect to communications with Lehman’s Audit Committee, investigation of a whistleblower claim, and audits and reviews of Lehman’s public filings.
This surely can not be good news to E&Ys current batch of existing banking clients, which are US Bancorp, SunTrust, CapitalOne, Regions Financial, KeyCorp, Comerica, Cullen/Frost Bankers, and Zions Bancorp, among the largest ones. In fact, we anticipate that the termination letters are already in the mail.
Meet Hillary Hansen.
The weakest link in the above presentation is surely E&Y partner, and co-head of the Lehman account, Hillary Hansen. For all of you who would like to get a glimpse of this presumably tireless workhorse which was supposed to be working 24/7 figuring out what the hell was going on with Lehman's books, you may be in for a disappointment. In this Fora TV presentation on the topic of "Women's Networks Help Level the Playing Field" from January, 2009, we get a glimpse into Ms. Hansen's busy lifestyle "I am a woman raising three small children, I commute from far away, I work home two days, usually I am not in on Fridays (laughter), I telecommute and often times I get asked how I fit it all together." Oh yes, Ms. Hansen we are confident you will be getting that question and many others very soon. What we found hilarious is Ms. Hansen's sentiment vis-a-vis her audit client Lehman Brothers. Fast forward to 17:15, where Hansen discloses that "We audit Lehman Brothers, UNFORTUNATELY." Once again prophetic. However in the wrong direction. Something tells us that Lehman's shareholders, despite knowing how great of a woman networker and a terrific partially-stay at home mom M.s Hansen may be, coupled with just how horrendous of an auditor, the lawsuits that are sure to follow will focus on the latter.
Full link of Hansen's brief and uninspired monologue after the jump.
With all this information, we are confident that (again, with the assumption that we live in some semblance of a sane/ration world), E&Y's Financial Services Office is done (even despite such ironically apropos warnings on the firm's website as "Top six liquidity risk management challenges for global banks "), and quite possibly the entire firm. Integrity is the number one currency for an auditor, and just like Anderson, E&Y's just went out in a puff of green-colored smoke. Then again, with America's population broadly distracted by the healthcare debate, by the phantasmagorical market, and by mass scapegoating campaigns in which nobody seems intent on getting to the bottom of the responsibility chain, we will be very much unsurprised if nothing ends up happening, and the well-greased machine of endless corruption keeps chugging along as per usual.
And here, due to popular demand, is E&Y's Global Code Of Conduct.About
Introduction: Gameshelf Games is producing Focused Fire with a highly refined combat system and a low entry cost for starting players. This Kickstarter campaign is aimed at producing our existing and upcoming models on a large scale, as well as developing vehicle cards and a final rulebook for distribution. This includes professional illustrations for the rulebook and packaging!
Gameplay: Fight in the air, on the ground, and in the water! Focused Fire’s unique tabletop system allows players to construct their force the way they want it! One player may specialize in naval forces while another prefers aerial, and the combat between them is seamless!
Although powerhouses like the Victorian Outlaw or the Pthalian Zealot are certainly a fearsome sight on the battlefield, scouting units are just as necessary for success due to Focused Fire’s unique “detect range” mechanic! Advanced radar systems allow scouting vehicles to call for fire on enemies that would have otherwise been too distant or small for larger vehicles to detect!
A PDF of the preview rules will be sent to backers of all tiers upon the completion of the Kickstarter campaign. This booklet will be updated with rules changes, further formatting, lore, and illustrations before being sent to backers in the final reward distribution. The rules preview doesn’t include the backstory and only includes crew specifications for models included in the reward ladder.
Rewards: In return for their support, backers will receive white, unpainted resin models in accordance with the tier of their donation. Backers are also able to donate in the range between tiers in order to make their own reward choices. For example, if someone wants to get a single starter without backing at the $100 tier, you can instead donate the $40 required for the starter of your choice.
While our initial rewards include only the Beam Engine, 3 ship platoon options, 2 Mega-Tanks, the Pthalian starter, and the Victorian starter, we've got several stretch goals for backers to reach as well. These include 2 more starter options (The Mezzelith and Rostreans) and a new mega-tank pertaining to each of these races. Once the stretch goals are reached, the models will be made available for backers to choose in return for their support! Here are the reward options!
The Beam Engine!
Designed with this Kickstater campaign in mind, the Beam Engine is a Victorian land presence that accentuates the both the steampunk and space sci-fi elements captured within the world of Focused Fire! The lowest priced model in the reward braket, this model is perfect for those who want to add to a Victorian force, or just have a unique piece of Focused Fire in return for their support!
When the Rostrean Empire invaded Earth, humanity knew that they were against overwhelming odds; but a determined will is hard to beat, even in the most advantageous position. Lewis Prodder, the world's most prestigious mechanical engineer, was drafted to reverse engineer captured Rostrean technology and give Earth a fighting chance. Thus the Beam Engine was born. Using the power of an advanced steam engine Prodder was able to rewire and improve the strength of the Rostrean HOX Cannon, a feat that surely changed the course of the war. These machines lumber slowly across the battlefield, decimating enemies with huge laser-blasts!
Starter Sets
All starter sets include enough models to play a 1000 credit game. Starters also include a single stat card for each type of vehicle and a PDF version of the final rules book.
The Victorian faction represents the remainder of humanity after Earth was invaded by the Rostrean Empire in the 1800s. As much of the planet was hydroformed, Earth's greatest engineers combined their steam machinery with captured Rostrean technology. Although the battles that followed forced the invaders back into space, the ecosystem and landmass had been too warped to sustain the entire human population. A search for a new planet began, and so the Victorian forces came to battle for the rights to Pardaxia and its resources.
The Victorian starter is perfect for the player who wants to sit back and fire at will! Their long range and significant damage output bring pain to other armies at a distance, but their defenses are subpar, so keep some space between you and the enemy! This starter comes with 1 aerial scout, 3 medium tanks, and 2 heavy tanks.
The Pthalian Empire is a hyper-religious race who bow to the will of Shaalor, their omnipotent god. For centuries they swathed across the galaxies, annihilating all "impure" races and conquering their territories in the name of Shaalor. Still, their reach became so far-stretched that their forces were thin and their militants nearly expended. Against the urges of their many religious leaders, the race settled among their conquered planets and for centuries more seemed to dismiss the call to please their god's genocidal wishes. Then the Mezzelith arrived, a powerful demonic presence that was seemingly spat out from a black hole on the edge of their home planet's solar system. The planet was decimated, and the leaders of the dwindling church riled up, convinced that the Mezzelith were Shaalor's punishment for their ancestors' idleness. The Pthalian military has since mobilized once again, prepared to please Shaalor and eradicate all other races in the process.
The Pthalian starter professes above average armor, decent mobility, and a strong punch in close quarters. Their goal is to move in close, as their weapon accuracy isn't quite that of other factions. This starter comes with 4 light tanks, 3 medium tanks, and 1 heavy tank.
The Mezzelith are a savage and evil race from an unknown dimension with countless forces and seemingly no purpose but an urge for death. Their weapons are simple and brutish with drills, rockets, and concussion weapons, but the technology they use to transport across huge distances instantaneously is still being researched by the best engineers of the other factions. Although their reason for fighting on Pardaxia is unknown, one thing is understood: a horizon of Mezzelith forces on the battlefield is a sure omen of death.
The Mezzelith are the basic hoard army, but have several specialized units to give their faction a certain flare on the battlefield. This starter includes 5 light tanks, 2 medium tanks, and 1 heavy tank.
The marine-based Rostrean Empire is the most evolved and intellectually superior race in the galaxies and, for most of their existence, also the most peaceful. Although their great knowledge is what gives them the ability to survive the harsh conditions of their home planet, Rostum, it has also given them a feeling of superiority over all other species. When their low reproduction rate finally overcame the population capacity of Rostum, they ventured out to claim other suitable planets to hydroform. As they didn't have much knowledge in weaponry, they instead reform planetary ecosystems by releasing Rostum's most vicious creatures and morphing the terrain with dissociation cannons. Earth was one of their first targets, and humanity earned their respect with their determination and ingenuity in reverse engineering. After several failed attempts at treaties with Earth's leaders, the Rostreans instead retreated with a new perspective of the mental capabilities of foreign races.
Although the Rostrean military is not notable for its strength, it's adaptability and maneuverability is beyond that of any other race. Many of their vehicles can move on both ground and water, giving them very diverse strategic options. This starter comes with 2 aerial fighters, 3 medium HOX Runners, and 2 medium dissocium treaders.
Mega-Tanks
Mega tanks represent the strongest ground forces in Focused Fire and have a base size of 3.25 x 3.25 inches. The number of mega-tanks that can be a on a Faction's are limited by the credit value of the game.
Marine Platoons
Marine platoons are marine vehicle kits that come with 3 vehicles each, just enough for a platoon! Although marine vehicles are not needed to play with a terrestrial starter kit they certainly add a lot of dimension to a game, especially for those who want to control naval forces!
The Cogger is a marine battlecruiser (medium ship). It's unique due to its fixed heavy frontal weapon, which is unusual for Victorian naval forces.
Similar in appearance to the Crucifier, the Penance is a smaller and faster blockade runner (light ship) with only basic fire-power. It's designed to outmaneuver larger ships while calling in fire on terrestrial vehicles near the shore.
The Crucifier is one of the largest marine presences that the Pthalian faction can offer. This battleship (heavy ship) is armed with 8 side-mounted cannons that can sink most targets without trouble.He's Back! Jamie Dimon's JP Morgan Chase Ponders Bitcoin Futures Move
The Wall Street Journal reports Jamie Dimon’s JP Morgan Chase & Co. is “looking at business opportunities in the planned bitcoin-futures market” in anticipation of Chicago Merc’s (CME) coming rollout by year’s end. Widely circulated accounts of Mr. Dimon’s notorious disdain for bitcoin seem to be no match for the decentralized currency’s undeniable growth in price and valuation.
Also read: Bankers Continue to Sound the Bitcoin Alarm
Jamie Dimon and JP Morgan Appear to Change on Bitcoin Prohibition
“J.P. Morgan is considering whether to provide its clients access to CME’s new bitcoin product through its futures-brokerage unit,” the Wall Street Journal announced, citing an unnamed source. “That means the bank’s customers could use it to place bets on whether the digital currency will rise or fall, while J.P. Morgan collects fees for such services.”
The bank would effectively be creating a market within CME’s marketplace, a go-between cryptocurrency futures and its customers. Mr. Dimon’s company would, in effect, not be engaged in bitcoin per se but rather act as bringing buyers and sellers together.
Indeed, as the Journal points out, “J.P. Morgan already handles client trades of Bitcoin XBT, an exchange-traded note designed to track the value of the digital currency. The bank has said it doesn’t take positions in the note and simply routes customers’ buy and sell orders electronically to exchanges.”
Still, this is the company, through its head spokesperson, that claimed if any staff dared so much as dabble in bitcoin, they’d be shown the door. Dimon’s also been on record as referring to enthusiasts as “stupid,” and portending a gloomy fate for the world’s most popular cryptocurrency. He’s even shouted to the heavens about not mentioning bitcoin ever again, only to, of course, change direction.
A Murky Futures Future
To be clear, JP Morgan is weighing such a move, and is “assessing whether there is demand among J.P. Morgan’s customers for the proposed CME bitcoin contract,” the Journal cautions, again from the unnamed source.
And CME’s launch is by no means in stone. Regulators at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) are under severe pressure to get this right, and few fully understand what they’re dealing with when it comes to bitcoin.
Morgan Stanley is “evaluating whether to provide access to the CME bitcoin contract, a person familiar with the matter said,” according to the report. And other competitors too are grappling with the as-now murky future of bitcoin futures: Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. among them.
A CME market has the chance to bring bitcoin into the mainstream of institutional finance. Bitcoiners are divided on what this might mean going forward. Hodlers and those cheering a “digital gold” perspective have long preferred such a scenario, as it does seem prices will continue to rise as a result. Others worry CME and its crowd will bring with them more law enforcement heat, barriers to entry, and make bitcoin even less of a fungible, everyday medium of exchange.
What do you think of JP Morgan’s change of heart? Tell us in the comments below!
Images courtesy of: Pixabay. We got it all at Bitcoin.com. Do you want to top up on some bitcoins? Do it here. Need to speak your mind? Get involved in our forum. Wanna gamble? We gotcha.Welcome back to Unknown Pleasures, our weekly deep dive into the deep, dark waters of Steam new releases. These are the games that we most liked from the past seven days (with the exclusion of those we’ve already wittered about in detail).
This week, we have Inner Space: The FPS, globular cats, rollerskate simulation, platforming goldfish and a spiritual Myth sequel.
($14.99/£10.99)
Sounding unfortunately (or appealingly?) like a Victorian school simulator, this is in fact Inner Space: the FPS. Well, kind of. It spins off into characterful nanobot foremen looking after someone’s liver and shooting anthropomorphised virii pretty quickly, and then throws in a grappling hook for good measure. I never say no to a grappling hook. Everything about Project Remedium would seem to scream cheap, but in practice it feels as though this has had a ton of resources pumped into it. The graphics are good, and appropriately other-worldly given the conceit of travelling through someone’s veins, while the English is non-garbled and the full voice acting decent.
I’d almost prefer it as an exploring game than a shooting game though, partly because virus-blasting is hard to buy into, but mostly because the particular approach this has chosen involves the initial weapon being click once per shot rather than hold down the mouse button, which gets old fast, even if it does, I suppose, mean vaguely medical precision as opposed to spray’n’pray.
($0.99/£0.79, Early Access)
Entirely retro Asteroids-meets-Space Invaders affair, in which you’re both pestered by flying rocks and zappy spaceships. The overall feel is Geometry Wars-esque, though less gloriously psychedelic. What sets it apart from Oh Another One-ness is a quartet of mega-powers, which take a few seconds to recharge, MMO-style, but if activated at the right time (and in the right direction) can take out a bunch of foes/rocks at once or speed you out of danger. So it becomes this careful dance across your keyboard, simultaneously trying to steer out of trouble and line up these killer shots. It also sets time goals to survive for, which coalesces the whole thing into a steady challenge. Put together far better than the rather my-first-game screenshots might suggest.
($19.99/£14.99, Early Access)
A latter-day Tony Hawk Pro Skater but with rollerskates, basically. Well put together, and straddles a line between comforting late 90s/early noughties familiarity and the inherent physicsy differences of boards and skates, though the Max Payneish fixed-expression photo-faces are a little creepy. There’s some real gnarly maps, such as the plummeting drops of an abandoned water park, and plenty of scope to customise both your skater and their skatepark. Rad! It’s Early Access, so hopefully later builds will introduce a much needed pop-rock-rap soundtrack too.
($4.99/£3.99)
Wildly characterful survival platformer, in which each of your 25 ‘lives’ is a contestant in a lethal gameshow. When you run out of contestants, you lose. The idea is you have a mere handful of seconds to bounce your way up each level of a colossal tower, which can only be achieved by pogoing off the heads of enemies. Touch the floor and you get zapped, take too long and you get thumped, so go go go. Each contestant is a randomly-chosen weirdo, from goldfish to horses to Mariolikes, and you get treated to the titular, fistular host intoning ‘ELIMINATED’ in an impressive variety of breezy tones when one dies.
It’s a lot of fun, propulsive and manic, but one fly in the ointment is that it’s over-dependent on a ‘press A again when you land to jump higher’ mechanic that is far too unforgiving about when you press, so you can end up losing a slew of contestants to what feels like the game simply not recognising your input. Let’s hope a future patch opens up the window of opportunity for that move by just a few more micro-seconds.
($5.99/£4.79)
Bitmap Bros-esque vertical shmup, but it’s one of those in which you gradually accrue increasingly ridiculous firepower as it wears on, as opposed to bullet hellish perma-dodging. I like the oddly organic enemies – spiders and wasps and prehistoric crustaceans and the like – which are both unusual for a spaceshippy shooter and have a vaguely nightmarish quality to them that puts me in mind of DOS horror-adventure games.
Behind that, it’s straight down the line for sure, but it’s a good time and, crucially for me, not designed for the twitchy hyper-reflex crowd.
($19.99/£14.99, Early Access)
Myth-style, formation-heavy fantasy RTS, which it turns out we wrote about enthusiastically back in 2014. If you’re into rock-paper-scissors strategy with a side order of spellpower management, this might scratch a few neglected itches – it’s sharing some territory with Total Warhammer, but it’s faster, smaller scale and has a fair old emphasis on resurrecting units in the heat of battle.
Good-looking and high-quality, with plenty of delightfully gruesome monsters to behold and slay, but do expect to be involved for each and every moment of its gory fights, not sitting back to soak it all in.
($7.99/£6.25)
Samorost-esque hand-drawn puzzler/chillout zone from Might & Delight, but where Samorost likes to go weird this opts for ambience. It’s gorgeous to behold, wandering calmly through a series of wonderful places, with an equally low-key soundtrack (which at times sounds like incidental Twin Peaks music). The puzzles flicker between simply seeing and doing as you wander and a certain element of mild deduction and backtracking, but it’s never arduous. It’s also wordless, and how much it communicates without ever speaking is remarkable.
A game you play for mood and tone more than anything like challenge, and it’s packed with small details and animations that really hit that living cartoon feel.
($9.99/£6.99)
Neat-o puzzler with a touch of sneaky programming to it. You have indirect control of a mouse which is attempting to safely reach its mousehole without being caught by one of the titular, blobular cats, who roll around the levels like feline takes on those giant death-balloons from The Prisoner. However, the mouse also rolls, helplessly colliding with walls and reversing direction, or tumbling straight into the cats’ path. To counter this, you can place a limited number of movement commands onto the levels tiles. If the mouse rolls into an up arrow, it’ll change direction to move upwards, if it hits a left arrow it’ll turn left, and so forth. So it’s a matter of figuring out the quickest route to the exit with minimal commands placed, and also factoring in the hungry movements of the cats.
Simple but ingenious, managing to use a slightly different sector of my brain from the average puzzler, and it uses the ol’ mobile game structure of star ratings depending on your speed and efficiency in order to motivate you to better yourself.
And finally, it’s time for Pick Of The Week. In all honesty, nothing super-super grabbed me from the latest selection, so apologies for no full-force enthusiasm, but I reckon the game I’m most likely to return to from this crop is Fist’s Elimination Tower. The controls need a little tightening up, but the concept of a large but finite pool of ‘contestants’, each one different but loads potentially squandered in the space of a single, five-second level, is a fascinating rethink of the concept of lives and permadeath, and lends with a new and weird form of tension.Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
The French eBay website has been accused of discrimination after it stated that a competition prize could only be won by a heterosexual couple.
The auction website is offering two people the chance to live rent-free in a 50m² central Paris apartment for a year to celebrate its tenth anniversary in France.
The winners will be given 8,000 Euros and ten weeks to kit out the unfurnished flat with items from eBay.
However, the rules state: “The game is open to any couple composed of a male adult and a female adult.”
Gay website Citegay said: “It is as if eBay does not want to associate itself with gay men or women.”
eBay said in a statement to Le Post: “We are looking for people who are representative of the range of products sold on eBay.
“We apologise if the gay community feels left out, but we have done nothing wrong.
“We did not draw up the rules thinking ‘absolutely no homosexuals’; Sexuality never entered into our thinking.
“We have quite a large vision of what counts as a couple: a mother and son could count. The only constraint is that the apartment only has one bedroom.”The Ministry of Social Affairs and Health requests opinions on a bill regarding a basic income experiment. The objective of the legislative proposal is to carry out a basic income experiment in order to assess whether basic income can be used to reform social security, specifically to reduce incentive traps relating to working.
The Finnish social security legislation does not include regulations on basic income, and this kind of an experiment has never been carried out before. It is suggested in the legislative proposal that a basic income experiment will be carried out in Finland in 2017–2018. The Social Insurance Institution of Finland (Kela) would be responsible for carrying out the experiment.
The primary goal of the basic income experiment is related to promoting employment. The experiment including a follow-up research aims to find out whether basic income promotes employment.
Persons receiving Kela’s unemployment-related benefits, under certain limitations, would be included in the experiment. From the target group, a test group of 2 000 persons would be selected by means of random sampling. It would be mandatory to participate in the experiment, which would ensure that the results will not be biased. According to the proposal, the level of basic income would be EUR 560 per month. Since the experiment would be mandatory, the level of the lowest basic income to be tested should correspond to the level of labour market subsidy and basic daily allowance. Basic income would be tax free for the receivers. Basic income would be paid by Kela. An experiment means that, at this point, basic income will not be paid to the whole population.
When assessing the effects of basic income, the test group would be compared with a control group comprised of such persons from the target group who do not receive basic income.
The target group of the experiment would not include persons receiving old-age pension or students, for example, because improving their employment situation is not the objective of the basic income experiment. Students’ primary goal is to complete their degree.
The aim of the bill is to carry out the basic income experiment included in Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s Government Programme. The basic income experiment is one of the activities aiming to reform social security so that it corresponds better to the changes of working life, to overhaul social security to encourage participation and employment, to reduce bureaucracy, and to simplify the complicated benefits system in a sustainable way regarding public finances.
The consultation period will continue till 9 September 2016. After that the Government will submit its proposal to Parliament. The government proposal is included in the budget proposal for 2017. The intention is that the acts would enter into force on 1 January 2017.
In a nutshell Basic income experiment in 2017–2018 Goal : To obtain information on the effects of basic income on the employment of persons participating in the experiment, and to survey other impacts of basic income.
: To obtain information on the effects of basic income on the employment of persons participating in the experiment, and to survey other impacts of basic income. Level of basic income : EUR 560 €/month, tax free benefit. According to calculations, this should produce an adequate incentive effect encouraging to accept temporary and part-time work.
: EUR 560 €/month, tax free benefit. According to calculations, this should produce an adequate incentive effect encouraging to accept temporary and part-time work. Target group : Persons between 25 and 58 years of age living in Finland who in November 2016 receive basic daily allowance or labour market support under the Unemployment Security Act.
: Persons between 25 and 58 years of age living in Finland who in November 2016 receive basic daily allowance or labour market support under the Unemployment Security Act. Target group: Persons between 25 and 58 years of age living in Finland who in November 2016 receive basic daily allowance or labour market support under the Unemployment Security Act.
Inquiries:
Timo A. Tanninen, Ministerial Counsellor for Finance, tel. +358 2951 63572, firstname.lastname@stm.fi
Liisa Siika-aho, Director, tel. +358 2951 63085, firstname.lastname@stm.fi
Basic income pilot studyUnite will be paying TWO general secretary salaries for the next five months as a result of Len McCluskey's decision to quit as the union's boss.
Mr McCluskey tendered his resignation yesterday, triggering an early general secretary election in which he will be a candidate.
Unite's executive committee agreed that the left-wing veteran could stay in his post until 28 April, when the election result will be announced.
But the union also announced that Gail Cartmail, one of Unite's assistant general secretaries, will become acting general secretary over the same period.
Union sources have confirmed that both Mr McCluskey and Ms Cartmail will receive full general secretary salaries throughout.
In 2015, Mr McCluskey's total pay package was £96,000, significantly less than the £133,000 he received the year before. That was because he reached 65 and began drawing his Unite pension on top of his wages.
A union spokeswoman said: "The acting general secretary will receive a temporary uprate in salary, in line with union policy for all employees taking on additional responsibilities."
Ironically, the official reason given for Mr McCluskey's resignation was that it would save the union money.
In a statement, Unite said: "This will ensure that the ballot for executive council members and the ballot for general secretary are conducted simultaneously, minimising the enormous costs caused to the union by the legal requirement to conduct the ballot by post and not by modern voting methods, thereby saving the union in the region of £1 million."
Meanwhile, Gerard Coyne, Unite's general secretary in the West Midlands, is expected to formally announce this week that he will challenge Mr McCluskey.
He has the backing of moderate figures within the union and the Labour party, which relies on Unite for much of its funding.
One senior Labour source said the defeat of Mr McCluskey would be a "game changer".
"Deposing Len as general secretary would give us a chance of winning the next election," said the insider.
"At a stroke it would remove Unite's support for Jeremy, leaving him vulnerable if there was another coup. The stakes are huge."Visual Studio 2017 is now available
Customized installer
Develop for WPF, WinForms, ASP.NET, Universal Windows Platform, Win32 |
naked women and children covered with greasy soap, surrounded by acrid vapor which filled all the pores of our bodies. We waited, like that.
The "schleus" took their time. Why not? They had the permission of the whole world to experiment on Jews, and they never missed an opportunity to do it. It was while we were waiting like that that the women whispered, crying, "That's it, now they'll turn on stronger gas and they'll kill us. What have we done to offend you, God?". There were screams, cries, moans. Some women fainted or threw up. People pissed and shit on the floor. Children cried and ran about wildly.
At those times, nothing and no one could help us. As I said, we could hardly see but we pressed against each other. Why? It's not easy to say. We were covered with soap, stinking of piss and shit, standing in it. For a few minutes, the shower room became a slippery mess. We would slide around and the "schleus" found the spectacle very amusing. We could hear them laughing.
And yet, these same "schleus" were the ones who had the power to decide to let us live. It's strange to say that the people who were killing us were also the ones who could save our lives. They could decide our fate by turning a lever or by pushing a button.
The brute who controlled the lethal gas and the water could decide to asphyxiate us by mixing more gas with the vapor and it would be all over. But after a few minutes he would yell, "Here comes the water, rinse off!" And the water would start to flow, first cold, then hot. We were rinsed and the water would stop. The "schleus" would laugh and there would be no more hiss of vapor. Long minutes went by, then we would hear, "That's all, move toward the door!"
There was a great scurry toward the door. We became a human mass whose only goal was to get out of that room. We were exhausted, drained, some clean, others covered in shit because they had slipped in it. We stunk of sweat and of the vapor that clung to our skin. Finally, the door would open and we rushed toward another room, passing through an outside alley first, under the eyes of the guards, even in the cold or rain. What did it matter? We were alive. The women who did not come out, who had fainted and not regained consciousness were loaded onto the platform of the waiting truck, to be taken to the ovens.
During these trips to the "showers", the prayers to God and other divinities must have done some good, since I am still here to tell you what happened. Did the "schleus" hear the women pray to God and implore His mercy? It's possible, but it didn't change anything. The savages knew what they had to do. They wanted to put us through all kinds of extreme torments to see just how much Jewish women and children could take.
They were experimenting to refine their skills and there was no better material for their tests than Jews. The worst was not that they sprayed gas and acrid vapor on us, but that they left us waiting, in suspense, not knowing what would happen next, to break our nerve and make us go mad. These so-called "showers" were really a sinister laboratory. I have more to say on this subject.
When I went there with the women, I always noticed the blood stains in the room where we undressed and in the shower room. The walls and the floor were covered in blood, especially near the door. That was the direction in which the women and children rushed, pushing and shoving, to get out as fast as possible. We did not crush each other, the women took care not to hurt the fragile children. But we knew that when the men went to the showers many of them did not come out alive.
Between the two rooms there was an exterior passageway about 20 yards long where we waited, naked, before going into the shower room. Armed German soldiers watched us, joking among themselves. We waited first to undress, then naked, then outside between the two rooms.
Once we were in the shower room we were still kept waiting. Then vapor would start to fill the room, and suddenly stop. We waited again. The water would start, would stop, first hot, then cold... We smeared ourselves with soap and waited, pressed against each other like sardines, for a little comfort. The water would start, we would try to see through the stinking vapor which surrounded us. Then, suddenly, there was no more water, no more hiss of vapor, no voice shouting orders. Silence.
At that moment we didn't dare speak. To say what? We were crying, overwhelmed with fear. Some of the women hugged each other and put their arms around the children. We all looked toward the door and waited. We waited for the door to open. At the height of the torture what else could we do but wait? What we really waited for was death; we were preparing to greet death as best we could. We humbly awaited the decision that would be made about us. And then the door would open, after the "schleus" in charge had given the order. We rushed out, there was some shoving, then the dash through the outside passage to the room where we had left our clothes. There, we dried our bodies and our tears.
For the children, these trips to the showers, the vapor and the gas, were a nightmarish hell. We cried because the women cried, but the women cried because they knew things we didn't know. The Jewish women of block 23 at Bergen-Belen endured these tortures fully aware of their meaning. Many of them were the mothers of children who were somewhere else, not at B.B., and had husbands who were fighting for freedom, dying for the right cause. These women of different nationalities were sent to B.B. on the orders of some brute who happened to be where there were Jewish women and children. [...]
Some of these women were "lucky" enough to wait several times in this alley which led to the accursed showers. Very few of the women of block 23 survived. Where are they? Would they dare to speak of it? I don't think so, especially after having met some of them. I am sure that they are still suffering the trauma of what happened and that they always will. [...]
People say that Bergen-Belsen was a camp where Jews and other war prisoners died in great numbers but not like at Auschwitz or the other famous concentration camps. This is only partly true. Given everything I have heard about Auschwitz, I can say that Bergen-Belsen was different. It was even worse. For example, at Auschwitz no one who went into the gas chamber ever came out alive. There, the Jews were taken to the gas chamber as soon as they arrived, and then the ovens disposed of them.
They waited a few hours or perhaps a few days, depending on the numbers that arrived at one time and on the speed of the extermination process.
Most of the Jews killed there died without fully realizing what was happening to them, or not realizing it until the last moment. At Auschwitz things had to be done fast. The camp was not designed to house large numbers of prisoners for a long time. Only those who were strong enough to work Were housed in the camp.
It was a slaughterhouse whose main function was to execute quickly, by asphyxiation, as many Jews as possible, and to burn them in the ovens. Those who were at Auschwitz certainly suffered, but the torture was more prolonged at B.B. For most of the Jews killed at Auschwitz, the period before they were taken to the gas chamber, after their arrival at the camp, was short. Some of them no doubt guessed, on the way to the camp, that they were being taken to their death. All of them no doubt felt the end coming and were overtaken by panic and madness at the last moment.
I don't want to minimize their hell in any way, but B.B. was something else. At B.B. the Germans killed us little by little. Anyone who says otherwise does not dare to speak the truth or does not know how it really was at Bergen-Belsen. Only those who were there can truly bear witness to what happened.
Of course, if I had been sent to Auschwitz no one would ever have known my story: the story of a French political prisoner. I would have passed through the gas chamber and then been thrown in the ovens. When I was nothing but smoke, the beasts would have inhaled me in big breaths. Is there a single survivor of the other concentration camps who can say that he or she has been in the gas chamber and has come out alive? I am someone who can say this. I passed through the gas chamber at least a half a dozen times, through this vapor-filled "shower" room which, at B.B., was used as a torture chamber for both physical and mental torture, and in which women and children died.
The men in our block would come back from the "showers" in terrible shape: exhausted, stinking of shit, covered with wounds and blood stains. The look in their eyes was frightening and there were fewer of them than when they had left. I can't really say what happened during their "shower", but it must have been horrifying. What I can say is that every time the "schleus" decided that the men of block 23 would go to the showers, many of them did everything they could not to go. The Polish kapos in charge of assembling groups and taking them out of the section ran after the prisoners and struck them with clubs. The men seemed to prefer this to going to the showers, even if it killed them. [...]
We, the children, waited with the women of block 23 who, when they were out of the "showers", knew that they owed their lives to the decision of a single "schleus" who, on the other side of the wall, was manipulating the levers according to the orders he had received. This idiot was playing dice with our lives by asphyxiating us to the limits of our endurance, until there was only one breath of oxygen left, checking our reaction the whole time, checking to see how we reacted to his gruesome game. Orders or not, the only maniac who saved some of the women and children in my group was the "schleus" who operated the gas valves. Who told him to stop in time? I have no idea. I can only say that the power of God is truly great!
This is what the "showers" were like at B.B. Once we were dressed, we gathered outside in rows and waited, standing, exhausted, hungry, pressed against each other like a frightened herd. We waited for the "schleus" to check the shower room to see if there were any women or children lying on the floor, unconscious, dying or already dead. After one last period of waiting, the soldiers led us out of the "showers" section and we walked to our block which was a few hundred yards away, on the other side of the central alley. While we walked, we could see, as usual, the platform truck driving to the showers and then going toward the ovens with its load. Those who had not left the shower room were never brought back to the barracks. They were reduced to ashes. The rest of us were going back to the Polish kapos to wait for the next vapor "shower", the next suspenseful gas chamber episode carried out according to B.B.'s sophisticated standards, which were set by Kramer, the camp's commander."
Mo Is, A Emeth (ed.), U.B.B. The Unforgettable Bergen-Belsen, Self-published in Montreal, 1993, ISBN 2-9803497-1-2, pp.49-71.
Lying as a form of respiration. From Winston Smith's inimitable blogHolocaust survivor "Moshe Peer" is fairly notorious because of an article about him that appeared in the Montreal Gazette in 1993, which claimed that as a boy of 12, he'd survived six separate gassings at Bergen-Belsen, a camp in which homicidal gassing are not claimed by historians to have occurred.As you can see above, "Moshe Peer" was a man of many names. I recently got hold of a copy of the 1993 English translation of his memoirs U.B.B. Unforgettable Bergen-Belsen which were originally written in French and first published also in 1993 as I.B.B. Inoubliable Bergen-Belsen. Nowhere in, or on the book does the name "Moshe (or Moshi) Peer" feature. The author of the memoirs is stated on the cover etc. as "Mo Is," which he states is a pen name "short for Moïse-Israël my given name a birth." He also writes: his surname is Przemyslawski; "at a certain time, my family name was Prémilat"; that Maurice is the French version of his name, and that the English translation of his memoirs was by "A. Emeth, the editor (myself), simply means the truth in Hebrew"! In fact, the only indication from the pre-owned copy of the book that I now possess that its author used the name "Moshi Peer," is in a signed message that he presumably wrote to the original owner of my book, probably at a book signing.Przemyslawski did write about the gas chamber of Bergen-Belsen at length in his memoirs, mostly in a chapter titled 'The "Showers": a Tribute to the Women.' Below I have reproduced approximately 75% of the text from the chapter.Mo Is, A Emeth (ed.), U.B.B. The Unforgettable Bergen-Belsen, Self-published in Montreal, 1993, ISBN 2-9803497-1-2, pp.49-71.
"Certainly the Protocols are a forgery, and that is the one proof we have of their authenticity. The Jews have worked with forged documents for the past 24 hundred years, namely ever since they have had any documents whatsoever." - Ezra Pound Print The Info Underground »
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» The Unforgettable Moshe "Gassed Six Times' PeerSo delicious… and even though it looks like a complicated thing to make it’s quite simple…unless of course you decide to make the filo pastry yourself… but we don’t make that kind of mistake in this blog 😉
I hadn’t tried this before because I’ve read that working with filo pastry was quite complicated as it dries out very quickly and crackles. However, after making my first ever strudel I can say, filo is not as hard to work with as it might seem.
The key is to have everything ready before you spread your filo pastry on the counter, because you are going to have to work fast, but if you have all the ingredients around you, it goes like a breeze. In 15 minutes you have the strudel ready and after 45 minutes in the oven you have a glorious dessert that smells like apple Heaven.
Ingredients (for 2 people)
4 sheets of filo pastry
2 Gala apples
30 grs butter, melted. (you could also use olive oil if you wanted to avoid dairy).
3 tablespoons raisins
3 tablespoons toasted, chopped almonds.
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon corn starch
1 fat teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
Optional: 1 tablespoon Maple Syrup (in case you like things very sweet or your apples are not sweet enough)
How to:
1.- Read the instructions on your filo pastry. Mine said to take out of the fridge 2 hours before using, I’m not sure this applies to all filo pastry brands. So make sure to follow the instructions on yours.
2.- Melt the butter and place in a bowl. Reserve for later.
3.- Cut the apples in half, core them and then slice them thinly. Place in a bowl.
4.- Add the lemon juice, then add the corn starch and mix well.
5.- Add the cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger to the mix and reserve.
6.- Now you are ready to bring out the filo pastry. Prepare your surface by placing some baking paper on the counter and make sure you have everything you need at hand: almonds, raisins, melted butter and apple mix:
Then place a sheet of filo pastry on top of the baking paper. With a brush, paint the filo with the melted butter.
7.- Add a second layer of filo pastry and paint with butter. Don’t worry if the filo cracks at some point, you are going to be adding a third layer, and that should cover any holes.
8.- After adding a third sheet of filo pastry you are ready to add the apple filling. On an end of the filo, place the apples alongside, then cover with the almonds and raisins:
9.- Cover with a 4rth layer of filo, make sure it encases the filling so it keeps its shape during baking. Paint with butter.
10.- Now, carefully start rolling the pastry until you have shaped it like a log and tug the ends neatly underneath it:
Then with a sharp knife make 4 incisions and using your fingers make sure they are well defined, so that vapour can escape during baking:
11.- Paint with butter and place in the oven at 180 degrees for 45 minutes, after which it should be a lovely golden colour and nicely crisp.
12. Enjoy warm, cold, alone or with ice cream…. YUM!!
Have a great Thursday!!
Namaste,
PaulaEMBED >More News Videos Driver rescued by rowers after car plunges into Schuylkill River: Dann Cuellar reports on Action News at 11 p.m., December 5, 2017
EMBED >More News Videos Woman rescued after car plunges into Schuylkill River. Jim Gardner reports during Action News at 6 p.m. on December 5, 2017.
A woman was rescued from her vehicle that plunged into the Schuylkill River Tuesday.It happened around 5:30 p.m. near Martin Luther King and Strawberry Mansion drives.Two rowers from the Penn Athletic Club were in their sculler racing shell about to start practice when they saw headlights from a car shining through the water. They jumped in the frigid water and managed to rescue the driver.One of the rowers, who wished to remain anonymous, gave the following account to Action News:"It was definitely shocking and I didn't know how to react at first. One of us jumped in and tried to open one of the doors, then went around and tried to open the other door. It wouldn't open; it was closed. Went back around to the first door and found the person that was in the vehicle and pulled them out. The person was unresponsive, but breathing slightly."The 61-year-old driver was taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. There is no word on her condition.Police are still trying to figure out how the car ended up in the river, but are grateful to the row team."We're thankful to these rowers, who heroically went into the water to rescue this individual and got them out of the water, got them to safety and provided first aid," said Philadelphia Police Lt. John Walker. "They did all the right things."The rowers said they were just glad they were able to help.----------The aim of the study was to assess whether utilization of geothermal hot-water is associated with risk of cancer. The cohort from census was followed from 1981 to 2010 in nation-wide death and cancer registries. The moving apart of American-Eurasian tectonic plates, observed in Iceland, results in high volcanic activity. The definition of the study populations was based on geological information. The target population was inhabitants of communities located on bedrock younger than 3.3 million years, utilizing hot-water supply generated from geothermal wells since 1972. The two reference populations were inhabitants of communities without this hot-water supply located on areas with less volcanic/geothermal activity, and bedrock older than 3.3 million years. Hazard ratio (HR), and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were adjusted for age, gender, education, housing, reproductive factors and smoking. HR in the geothermal hot-water supply areas for all cancer was 1.15 (95% CI 1.05-1.25) as compared with nongeothermal areas. The HR for breast cancer was 1.40 (1.12-1.75), prostate cancer 1.61 (1.29-2.00), kidney cancer 1.64 (1.11-2.41), lymphatic and haematopoietic tissue cancers 1.45 (1.08-1.95), and for basal cell carcinoma (BCC) of the skin 1.46 (1.16-1.82). Positive exposure-response relations were observed between the risk of these cancers and the degree of volcanic/geothermal activity in the reference areas. Increased incidence of all cancers, breast, prostate, kidney cancer and BCC of the skin was found among the population utilizing geothermal hot-water for decades. More precise information on exposure is needed in future studies.
Copyright © 2013 UICC.Setanta chief executive Michael O’Rourke and Hyundai Ireland managing director Stephen Gleeson will both join the board of Shamrock Rovers following the club’s forthcoming AGM after members of the club approved a restructure to facilitate an investment by long-time shareholder Ray Wilson.
O’Rourke and Gleeson, who have been brought in by Wilson as two of the four directors he will be entitled to appoint to the nine-strong board, will both be seen as hugely attractive appointments.
The deal also provides the funds required for the development of the club’s new academy at the Cement Roadstone Sports and Social club at Kingswood near Citywest.
Under the terms of the arrangement, Wilson – via the Wilson Family Trust and along with the Pepper Group’s Seumas Dawes – will loan the club €1.5 million, two-thirds of which will be put towards the provision of facilities at the new academy, with the remaining funds being used for the day-to-day running of the club.
The intention is to provide high-class facilities for an academy that has quickly established itself as a force in underage football over the last few years. Rovers have teams training and playing across a number of venues and the hope is to concentrate their efforts at the Kingswood venue where work on a full size astro pitch is to start in the summer with additional development work to follow.
Second Captains
Interest-free loan
Wilson already played a key role in helping the club out of examinership in 2005 and, as was the case then, the new arrangement allows for him to end up owning 50 per cent of the club with this stake halving upon repayment of the loan. It will reduce further as members of the 400 club continue to pay funds into the club and additional shares are issued.
Life-long supporter
It was recently reported that Plenary manages a portfolio worth in excess of €16 billion. Wilson’s friend Dawes is a regular on the Sunday Times Rich List with a net personal wealth estimated in 2014 at €157 million
“Listen, this is not a takeover or anything like that,” Wilson told The Irish Times. “What we’re doing here is really no different to what was done in the past. The board of the club has done a phenomenal job over the last 10 years but we have an opportunity with the Roadstone project and, to make the most of it, the club needs to invest in facilities.
“We have €150,000 in government funding and we will be knocking on a lot of doors, including the FAI’s, to see who else we can get to play a part in this, but we already have some great people involved. We have been tenants of Cement Roadstone’s Sports and Social club for a few years now and that won’t change.
“They have been great to work with,” he says. “The people there see that what we are trying to do as a club is potentially good for the country as well as the company. Irish football clearly needs to change. It’s starting to change but the days of sending 16-year-olds over to England and hoping for the best are clearly gone.”
Youth set-up
The club hopes in the long term to emulate the likes of Malmö which achieved not just domestic success but Champions League qualification with a team built around home produced talent. A more immediate target will be to steal a march on Airtricity League rivals, many of whom have formed partnerships with existing schoolboy clubs rather than establishing academies of their own.
Given the changes to the ownership of the club and the composition of its board, there had been some suspicion among members about the terms of the deal under which the money will be loaned but the addition of high-level outside business expertise appears to have been one of the selling points in the end and at a specially convened EGM on Saturday there appears to have been no significant opposition in the end.
Wilson will also be member of the board and says he will be in a position to name his fourth director nominee over the coming weeks.
Despite rumours linking him to the new initiative, Wilson says that Niall Quinn will not be immediately involved, although the two men have spoken and some future role has not been ruled out. Wilson also denies another rumour to have done the rounds in recent weeks; that West Ham expressed an interest in a youth development partnership or even an investment of their own. The Australian-based businessman is adamant that there was no contact whatsoever.Register to Vote
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Every year for the last four years I have co-run (with Scott Macmillan) an unconference in Boston called GameLoop. It’s a self-organizing conference where there’s no set agenda: everyone shows up and figures out what to talk during a one-hour organizational session at the start of the day. I could write a whole post about how we organized it, but for now I want to collect the notes from the sessions that I attended.
What is an outsider game?
This was the session I ran. There are a bunch of games that I really like, but don’t have a word for. Things like The war of the end of the days, which is an objectively bad Xbox Live Indie Game that is made by someone who is clearly learning how to make 3D games. Because this person doesn’t really understand things like texturing and shading, he accidentally causes the player to experience mind-bending vertigo at times, which is super-interesting to me and one of the reasons why I like the game so much.
I am tempted to call these things “outsider games” as in “outsider art,” but the phrase “outsider games” doesn’t really sit well with me for any number of reasons. I organized this session to help myself get a better handle on whether it’s a valid label or not. Some notes from our discussion:
A lot of this hinges of awareness of convention, in terms of both design convention and technical convention. For example, Xbox Live Indie Games, although they are not reviewed by Microsoft, are reviewed by a community before being placed on the service. The community will not allow games that have console-crashing bugs. As a result, a game like The war of the end of the days is not buggy, per se. It just has an overall bad user experience — which is mostly design convention. When it eschews technical convention, you get things like the untextured single color flat polygon labyrinth that is incredibly confusing and interesting to navigate even though the labyrinth itself is only the size of a 20×20 room and could be completed in seconds were it textured and lit properly.
Some asked whether there was a bias in the medium: in order to make a game that even runs you need some level of technical competency. Compare it to painting, where even a child can perform the basic mechanics of putting pigment on paper. The argument was something like, “Bad games are hard enough to make that game creators are by necessity not outsiders as they’ve had to do some research and be aware of conventions.” I don’t buy this at all: I’ve seen 10-year-olds create perfectly playable stuff in GameMaker. Also, technical competency does not mean it’s not outsider art: many outsider and folk artists show very high levels of technical competency.
you need some level of technical competency. Compare it to painting, where even a child can perform the basic mechanics of putting pigment on paper. The argument was something like, “Bad games are hard enough to make that game creators are by necessity not outsiders as they’ve had to do some research and be aware of conventions.” I don’t buy this at all: I’ve seen 10-year-olds create perfectly playable stuff in GameMaker. Also, technical competency does not mean it’s not outsider art: many outsider and folk artists show very high levels of technical competency. Can someone be “outsider” if they’re making money off their product? The answer to that was a firm “yes,” particularly if you’re looking at the model of outsider music.
Clara Fernandez-Vara pointed us to this article by Joel Goodwin about the game programmer Bill Williams, who had a terminal diagnosis of cystic fibrosis, and whose disease informed every game he made until his death in 1998.
In the end, I have to agree with Andrew “Zarf” Plotkin’s pithy analysis of the session: that the discussion led to the conclusion that the “outsider games” label doesn’t exist, at least in a meaningful way.
Mental health
This was the highlight of GameLoop for me. This was the highlight of any GameLoop I’ve ever put on, and indeed, probably the best conference session I’ve ever attended.
The session was hosted by Ray Merkler, who is one of the GameLoop Philly organizers. Ray (who gave me permission to talk about this) is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and opened the session talking about his experiences with trying to be an employee, develop games, and manage his mental health.
It was a small group of people: about a dozen of us, maybe five of whom I’ve known for years. The discussion ended up touching on a few topics:
People’s own experiences dealing with their mental health issues and the workplace.
How workplaces (particularly the in game industry) can exacerbate mental health problems.
Ways in which employers can help create a work environment where employees are able to manage their mental health.
We heard from people who can’t conform to a traditional 9-5 work schedule. For example, they can be extremely productive 2-3 days a week, but the other days they just can’t do anything. They get all their work done on time, but because they’re not always “looking productive,” they’re often targeted as bad workers.
One developer said that he absolutely needs physical exercise at 7pm every day or he’ll start to spiral down in terms of both his own health and his productivity. During crunch, while everyone is staying late to work, he gets up and leaves for 90 minutes and comes back to the office sweaty to keep working. Fortunately, he’s talked to his employer about this, and they understand that’s it’s just something he has to do. But I can imagine that it must have been difficult to have that conversation, and I know for a fact that there are employers out there who would not stand for such a thing.
My main reason for attending was to hear how employers can create better environments for employees. My big takeaways:
Make sure the healthcare plan you offer has a mental health plan, and communicate that very clearly to new employees. Remind current employees periodically. Some healthcare plans can provide you with brochures that you can distribute to employees.
Create an environment where employees spend time with each other. Something as simple as a culture where people eat together, rather than at their desks, can help employees forge relationships and provide each other mutual support. For one thing, as an employer you can’t say to an employee “Hey, we think you have mental health problems, you should get that checked out,” but a coworker and friend may be able to talk to them about it.
Also, don’t stop at lunch. There can be other activities, and they should be diverse. Just because your company has beer on Fridays doesn’t mean that activity appeals to everyone. Mix it up. Try a picnic or a movie or a game night.
If you can be flexible on work hours, that can be an enormous boon. For example, certain medications like antidepressants can screw with your sleep cycle. Being able to work a shifted schedule is a huge benefit. In a similar vein, you should consider allowing employees to work from home if possible.
What was most interesting about the session was that it ended up being about quality of life issues, but not in the tired “do we unionize or not?” sense. It was a far more personal QoL discussion, and I think as a result it was far more effective.
I also loved this session because it’s exactly the kind of thing that you would never, ever see at GDC.
Making and porting games to HTML5
This was a nice session in that most people in the room had already at least done a little bit of HTML5 work. As a result it ended up as a technically deeper discussion than the usual “what is HTML5 and how do I use it?” stuff. I don’t remember much, though I did talk through a lot of the performance metrics I’ve been taking on our WebGL port of Fieldrunners. I also introduced people to UglifyJS (web version here) as a really great JavaScript compressor and obfuscator.
Uncomfortable games
The last session I attended was organized by JP Grant. We began by going around the room and talking about uncomfortable moments in gaming. There were about 30 people in the room, so it took a while, but in the end things seemed to boil down to a few categories of discomfort. The most prevalent one was what JP called “body horror” — things from disturbing Giger-esque images to experiences like suffocating in your own gas mask in Metro 2033. There was also a lot of social discomfort: griefing someone and feeling good about it (and feeling awful about that), noticing that a friend playing GTA4 is maybe a bit more of a sociopath than you had expected, and “any interaction with a guild, ever.” I didn’t take great notes, but I know someone took a picture of the whiteboard. If it gets posted somewhere I’ll link it here.
Thanks to |
deaf.
More seriously, Mr. Modi has been criticized for being slow to address a mounting agricultural crisis. Heavy rains have destroyed many winter crops in northern India's fertile plains, and there have been suicides as the government failed to step in and compensate farmers. In rural Uttar Pradesh, standing at the edge of a flooded field, an 80-year-old Muslim labourer named Wazir, who has worked on the farm all his life, offers a grim verdict on Mr. Modi's first year in power: "He looks out for the industrialists only. He has done nothing so far."
On a narrow patio off the laneway office of the Centre for Equity Studies in south Delhi, Harsh Mander is enjoying the mild spring weather as a woman pulls down laundry from an adjacent rooftop. A social activist who resigned from the Indian civil service over the Gujarat riots, he has just eyed proofs for his new book on inequality and indifference in India – a book in which Mr. Modi appears multiple times.
To Mr. Mander and other social activists, Mr. Modi's promises of development ring hollow. "There's nothing in the growth model that actually provides jobs. That is going to be the Achilles heel of this government," Mr. Mander says. "For a big percentage of people, life is as hopeless as it ever was."
He's not the only one who is skeptical. Many of India's liberals and intellectuals, who are living through dark days after Congress's defeat, remain broadly disillusioned with Mr. Modi's plan.
Saumitra Chaudhuri, a former member of India's Planning Commission and an economic adviser to the last prime minister, says Mr. Modi has struggled because of his new government's inexperience. And he agrees with critics such as Mr. Mander that the Prime Minister is promising something that he never delivered in Gujarat: jobs. "There are no labour-intensive industries in Gujarat," Mr. Chaudhuri says over a whisky and soda at the India International Centre, a cultural hub in Delhi. "He just wants industry. But not jobs."
Activists also worry that, under Mr. Modi, civil society is getting squeezed. The government is giving extra scrutiny to foreign-funded environmental NGOs, such as Greenpeace, which it blames for stalled development projects. And just a few days ago, the Prime Minister made controversial remarks about "five-star activists" clogging up the judicial system, adding to the ominous sense that Mr. Modi's India may be becoming less tolerant of vibrant democratic debate.
Recently, the government also banned the documentary India's Daughter, by a British director, about a prominent New Delhi rape case, despite Mr. Modi's strident rhetoric about protecting Indian women. Charu, a medical student who only felt comfortable providing her first name to a journalist, says Mr. Modi does not back up his talk with action and has only paid "lip service" to women's safety in India. "I don't feel like Modi has done anything, he is talking only," she says. "It's not safe."
To Sunayana Walia, a women's rights activist from Gujarat, these developments are all too familiar. When her work brought her into contact with Muslim survivors of the Gujarat riots, her organization – SEWA, the Self-Employed Women's Association – found a project's funding abruptly cut off. And a national program through which NGOs helped run crisis centres for women was recently shut down, she says. "This stuff was already happening in Gujarat, but now one sees glimpses at the national level," she says. "It's making people very nervous."
What next?
Although Mr. Modi has a majority in India's lower house, or Lok Sabha, this does not enable him to implement a truly ambitious agenda. Under India's bicameral system, he also needs to win state-level elections, because it is possession of those state legislatures that gives parties advantage in the upper house, the Rajya Sabha.
The BJP is currently outnumbered in the upper house, which means that Mr. Modi's big-ticket reforms could stall unless he is permitted to call a rare joint session of the two houses – or he wins more state elections.
And that's important, because it is at the state level that businesses run into the most frustrations. Dinesh Singhal, who runs a big industrial business in the city of Meerut, applied one year ago to the state government of Uttar Pradesh to get permission to expand his plant. "I would have had to give a big bribe, which I am not giving, then I would get approved," says Mr. Singhal, the CEO of Kanohar Electricals, as the power goes out in his office. "The states are not serious. They take money and eat it up. They are not concerned about manufacturing or jobs."
For the Prime Minister, says Ambarish Datta, the CEO of the BSE Institute, a training arm of the Bombay Stock Exchange, the real work of his five-year term begins now. "Sentiment is good. Investor inflows are high. But people now want to see action on the field," he says. "The last year is doling out freebies and basically preparing for another election. And the first year is settling in."
"It's a little like cricket," he adds. "The real action is in the middle."
Shilan Shah, an India economist with the London-based research firm Capital Economics Ltd., says that Mr. Modi has made some progress on easing regulations and opening up some sectors – such as defence, insurance, and railways – to foreign investment, but that he has underwhelmed the market on the "really big-bang reforms."
He has not opened up the much larger financial and retail sectors to foreign competition – with retail, in particular, being politically sensitive in a nation with so many grocers and hawkers.
Another key area in need of reform: labour-market regulation, which is governed by a complicated system of roughly 200 laws at both the national and state levels. These prevent large-scale manufacturing, by making it necessary for firms with more than 100 employees to seek government approval for firing people. As a result, companies resort to hiring off the books. "The upshot to all of this is that the economy should slowly recover over the next few years," Mr. Shah says. "But growth will probably fall short of India's immense potential."
Vinod Sawhny, a prominent business executive in Mumbai, sees many of the current political difficulties as an extension of the sheer magnitude of Mr. Modi's task: trying to wrench India out of an economy – and a political system – that still treats, and seeks to preserve, India as a nation of farmers and villages. Taking full advantage of the country's demographic dividend – every second Indian is below the age of 25 – and turning the country into a manufacturing– and service-based economy is going to require a "a huge mindset change," he says. Not to mention more than just one year.
"We have a golden opportunity," Mr. Sawhny says. "The next 24 months will determine whether a new India takes shape. It will be an absolute lost opportunity if we don't prove it. The time is now."Airliner had near miss with UFO
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Advertisement A passenger jet bound for Heathrow Airport had a near miss with a UFO, Ministry of Defence files reveal. The captain of the Alitalia airliner shouted "Look out" to his co-pilot at the sight of a brown missile-shaped object shooting past them overhead. Civil Aviation Authority and military investigations could not explain the 1991 incident near Lydd in Kent. The unsolved close encounter features in UFO-related military documents made available by the National Archives. After ruling out the object flying past the Alitalia jet being a missile, weather balloon or space rocket, the MoD closed the inquiry. Nineteen files covering sightings between 1986 and 1992 are being made available online. Now you can look at the actual primary material - the stuff coming into the MoD every day - and make your own mind up
Dr David Clarke, UFO expert Almost 200 such files will be made available by the MoD over the next four years. The current batch also includes a US Air Force pilot's account of being ordered to shoot down a UFO that appeared on his radar while he flew over East Anglia. There is also an MoD request that army and navy helicopters not take photographs of crop circles, because of concerns about undermining the official line that the military did not investigate unexplained phenomena. And the files also contain a letter from a woman claiming to be from the Sirius system who said her spacecraft - also containing two "Spectrans" with "Mr Spock ears" - crashed in Britain during World War II. HAVE YOUR SAY The chances of there being nothing else in billions of cubic light years is too slim to consider Myles Harcourt UFO expert and journalism lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, Dr David Clarke, said the documents would shed new light on relatively little-known sightings. He said some conspiracy theorists would already have decided that the release of the papers was a "whitewash". He added: "Because the subject is bedevilled by charlatans and lunatics, it is career suicide to have your name associated with UFOs, which is a real pity. "The National Archives are doing a fantastic job here. Everyone brings their own interpretation. "Now you can look at the actual primary material - the stuff coming into the MoD every day - and make your own mind up."
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StumbleUpon What are these?Activision is the latest video game publisher to start taking e-sports seriously. Today the company announced the formation of a new Call of Duty World League, which will kick off in January 2016. The next big game in the Call of Duty series, Black Ops III, launches in November.
The league isn't just for pros
The new league will have an international focus, with players from North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, and will have a total prize pool of $3 million. But the league isn't just for Call of Duty pros. It'll feature two divisions: one for professional players, and another for amateurs aspiring to the pro ranks. The league will feature a number of regional competitions, and the top players will move on to the Call of Duty Championship. The tournament — which originally debuted three years ago — will be moved from spring to fall in 2016, to accommodate the new league structure.
The e-sports success of games like Dota 2 — which this year featured a record-breaking $11.4 million prize pool for its annual championship — has led to several big name developers and publishers entering the field. In addition to the expanded Call of Duty e-sports initiative, Microsoft has also announced a new championship series for Halo, with a $1 million prize pool. The Halo World Championship will debut later this year.
Meanwhile, as e-sports continue to become more mainstream, they've also come under greater scrutiny. Governing body the Electronic Sports League recently began testing for performance enhancing drugs in the wake of an Adderall abuse scandal.NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stable gasoline prices over the last two months have shielded U.S. consumers from the impact of galloping crude oil prices, but drivers will face more pain at the pump if the cost of crude remains high into next spring.
Retail gasoline prices have held in a tight range around $2.80 a gallon nationwide over the past two months amid a normal seasonal slowdown in road travel, even as the cost of crude oil has surged about 14 percent over the same period to a record over $85 a barrel.
The stability in gasoline prices prompted U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman last week to describe the U.S. economy as “remarkably resilient” in the face of surging oil prices.
But analysts expect gasoline prices could rise to a never-before-seen $3.50 or $4 a gallon if oil prices hold near current levels into next spring when drivers hit the roads in greater numbers. That could further strain consumers already facing a housing slowdown.
“Thus far we’ve been relatively insulated from the effect of higher crude prices by the narrowing of spreads (between crude oil and) refined products,” said Richard DeKaser, chief economist at National City Corp in Cleveland, Ohio.
“If those spreads revert to normal and crude oil prices remain high there is going to be a definite retail impact.”
As of Friday, crude oil futures CLc1 were up by over 14 percent since August 15, driven higher by expectations of tighter supplies in the winter amid ongoing production restraint by OPEC. However gasoline futures RBc1 have lagged crude oil, rising only 3.8 percent over the same period.
As a result, the spread between gasoline and crude oil has shrunk to $3.88 per barrel as of Friday, compared with over $20 for much of last summer and a peak $37.76 per barrel in mid-May — when extensive refinery outages cut deeply into U.S. fuel inventories.
The potential surge in gasoline prices at the end of winter would come at a time when U.S. consumers are already facing a declining housing market in many parts of the country.
Higher energy prices probably will cut further into discretionary spending, even if energy prices have yet to gobble up as big a proportion of household budgets as they did in the 1970s energy crisis.
“We cannot escape the reality that $80 oil induces consumers to practice energy conservation (and) modestly curtails ex-energy consumer spending,” wrote energy analysts at Raymond James in a research note on Monday.
LOW STOCKPILES
U.S. gasoline stocks are more than 22 million barrels, or about 10 percent, lower than they were at the same time last year, according to U.S. government data.
The current weakness in gasoline prices relative to crude has prompted leading U.S. refiners including Valero, Marathon Oil and Chevron to warn investors that their profits will fall in the third quarter.
But analysts expect gasoline prices will rebound. Average retail gasoline prices could surpass $3.50 per gallon next summer if crude oil prices hold at their current levels.
“If we go though another spring and summer where U.S. refineries have trouble operating above 90 percent of capacity, I think we will finally see $4 gasoline in some places,” said Stephen Schork, publisher of the Schork report, an energy futures newsletter.
SAVED BY A CORRECTION?
The one hope for drivers could be a correction in the oil market, which some analysts believe is becoming overvalued. Speculative investors have been buying crude oil and other commodities as a hedge against inflation and the declining value of the U.S. dollar.
“A lot of this market is dependent on what happens this winter and where supplies are when we come out of it,” said Eric Wittenauer of A.G. Edwards in St Louis.
“If the winter is warm as it has been forecast, we could see a correction.”
However any correction is likely to be limited by the rising cost of producing oil in non-OPEC countries and continued strong demand for crude oil.
OPEC itself raised its forecast for demand for its oil this winter on Monday, citing the resilience of the world economy despite the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States.Musicians use different kinds of imagery. This review focuses on kinesthetic imagery, which has been shown to be an effective complement to actively playing an instrument. However, experience in actual movement performance seems to be a requirement for a recruitment of those brain areas representing movement ideation during imagery. An internal model of movement performance might be more differentiated when training has been more intense or simply performed more often. Therefore, with respect to kinesthetic imagery, these strategies are predominantly found in professional musicians. There are a few possible reasons as to why kinesthetic imagery is used in addition to active training; one example is the need for mental rehearsal of the technically most difficult passages. Another reason for mental practice is that mental rehearsal of the piece helps to improve performance if the instrument is not available for actual training as is the case for professional musicians when they are traveling to various appearances. Overall, mental imagery in musicians is not necessarily specific to motor, somatosensory, auditory, or visual aspects of imagery, but integrates them all. In particular, the audiomotor loop is highly important, since auditory aspects are crucial for guiding motor performance. All these aspects result in a distinctive representation map for the mental imagery of musical performance. This review summarizes behavioral data, and findings from functional brain imaging studies of mental imagery of musical performance.
General Introduction
Mental imagery of a piece of music in one's mind is commonly used by professional musicians for instance to rehearse difficult parts of an already executed musical passage (Lotze et al., 2003). Famous musicians like Vladimir Horowitz and Walter Gieseking reported frequent use of mental practice (Gieseking and Leimer, 1972; Schonberg, 1987). Mental music rehearsal includes different images of a musical piece: motor, somatosensory and auditory, but also emotional aspects. Most commonly mental imagery in musicians is related to reading the scores of a piece and mentally rehearsing predominantly the auditory aspects. However, this is only one of several aspects of mental rehearsal of a musical piece. In all, three aspects of mental imagery used by musicians have been differentiated (Repp, 2001; Keller, 2012).
Firstly, there is the silent reading of musical scores, requiring an advanced skill referred to as “notational audiation” (Brodsky et al., 2008). Secondly, there is action simulation during musical performance, including thinking of the ideal sound during performance, which might guide the movements but is also associated with the technique of anticipatory auditory imagery in playing in an ensemble (Keller, 2012). Thirdly, musicians perform mental practice away from the instrument.
We will concentrate here on this last aspect of mental rehearsal, and especially on the kinesthetic imagery technique. In brief, this review will present data on basic research on kinesthetic imagery. It will then overview the usage and the effects of kinesthetic imagery training. Since sensory input is so important in the training of musical expertise we will depict how multisensory and motor images might interact in musical imagery. We will then describe some mapping studies on kinesthetic imagery, imagery training and focus on mapping studies of kinesthetic imagery in instrument-talists and singers. The last part will deal with challenging developments in the research of kinesthetic imagery in musicians.
Basic Research on Kinesthetic Imagery and Functional Equivalence Between Motor Execution and Kinesthetic Imagery
We know that musical imagery is multimodal but even very simple imagery tasks, where most research on imagery has been performed on, are multimodal, too. For instance, a simple imagined repetitive thumb tapping task, does include sensory feedback (somatosensory and auditory), motor imagery and imagery of temporal processes of tapping frequency. A typical instruction for this kind of kinesthetic imagery (or sensorimotor imagery) would be to first perform a certain movement repetitively and then go on doing it internally with prevention of actual movement. This example also illustrates that imagery following a period of prior experience of actual movement is widely used (e.g., Stinear et al., 2006). This is based on the assumption that motor imagery represents the result of consciously accessing the intention for a movement usually performed unconsciously during movement preparation (Jeannerod, 1994). A highly vivid conscious image of the movement might therefore most likely be accessible right after movement performance. Interestingly, good kinesthetic imagers have been identified as those who are able to selectively increase motor-evoked potentials over those muscles involved in the actual task being imagined, but not for those muscles that are not involved despite their nearby location (Lebon et al., 2012a). For finger tapping of the thumb only, the thumb muscle (opponens) but not the abductor of the fifth finger was increased in excitability for the good imagers, whereas the poor imagers also recruited the abductor digiti minimi. It is quite remarkable that both good kinesthetic imagers and professional musicians show parallels with respect to an increased focus on target muscles and decreased “enslavement” of neighboring muscles (Jerde, 2006).
There are several basic mechanisms which are common to both mental imagery of movements and their execution, as has been postulated by Jeannerod (2001). Firstly, the time taken to imagine the performance of a complex movement sequence is of similar duration to the movement execution itself (Bakker et al., 2008). However, very complex attention-demanding movements take longer to imagine than simple ones (Guillot and Collet, 2005). This is one indication that the process of imagination is not dependent only on the ability to execute a movement but also on central processing mechanisms. Another indication is that patients with lesions of the motor cortex and patients with Parkinson's disease show decreased movement velocity during both execution and imagery (Dominey et al., 1995), whereas patients with spinal lesions only show prolonged duration of execution—the duration of the imagery remains the same in this group (Decety and Boisson, 1990).
Secondly, physiological parameters, although not accessible voluntarily, are positively associated in executed and imagined movements with respect to observed changes in heart rate; increases in CO2-pressure and respiration frequency (Decety et al., 1991); and skin conductance responses (SCR) (e.g., Guillot et al., 2008). Decety (1996) proposed that during imagined activities a significant portion of the observed increase in autonomic response is of central origin. The authors interpreted this as an influence the mind exerts over the body, into believing that some movements are being executed. The third commonality between mental imagery of movements and their execution is the subjective rating of the mental effort to imagine a task and the fact that it is correlated with the amount of force needed for actual task execution (Decety and Lindgren, 1991).
The Usage and the Effects of Kinesthetic Imagery Training
As we have seen, motor imagery shows many parallels with motor execution with respect to physiological and behavioral parameters. All these findings point to the assumption that motor imagery could be based on the motor representations employed for actual movements. In fact several other data support this view. It has been shown for instance that the ability to imagine a movement is dependent on the posture of the body; incompatible postural signals affect imagery (Parsons, 1994). Imaging studies demonstrated that imagined and actual body position both influence the activity in neural structures during own-body simulation processes (de Lange et al., 2006).
Models of motor control provide a framework of the mechanisms by which the areas storing expertise in motor execution might be recruited and partially modified during kinesthetic imagery (Wolpert et al., 2003). An inverse model generates an appropriate motor command and the forward model maps the efference copy with the anticipated outcome of the action. The anticipated outcome might build a template against which the incoming information can be compared. Discrepancies between these require a rapid adjustment of the motor command and, on this basis, of the anticipated consequences of actions. Recently, a temporal framework of such a prior efferent copy has been postulated for the articulatory system: an auditory efference copy is presumably elicited approximately 170 ms after the somatosensory feedback from articulatory motor commands (Tian and Poeppel, 2010).
Overall, kinesthetic imagery might activate an internal model of a movement, which is dependent on the actual posture of the body. This involves an activation of a body representation in the reference space of the body itself and in relation to other objects. These spatial processes, providing a dynamic representation of the current postural configuration of the body utilised during movement planning and execution, are represented in the parietal lobe (e.g., Parkinson et al., 2010). As we will see later on, this area is quite important for kinesthetic imagery especially for more complex motor processes.
The idea that vivid kinesthetic imagery is based on experience in motor execution (Jeannerod et al., 1994) is in keeping with the reported positive relationship between expertise and imagery quality in athletes (Reed, 2002). The higher the expertise level, the more accurately a movement can be mentally rehearsed in tennis players (Fourkas et al., 2008); corticospinal facilitation of representation sites involved in actual task performance is only seen during imagery of the same tasks when the task has been previously trained actively. For imagery training these findings tell us that those athletes who have more detailed, more vivid and/or longer experience in motor execution are those who profit more from kinesthetic imagery training. Consequently, imagery techniques are most frequently applied for training in professional or high level athletes. It remains an open question whether this holds to be true for musicians, too. Imagery training is also frequently used for musical students and we know that there is an interference of the effect of training with the level of motor performance at the start of training. Those who start with a lower level are those who usually profit more.
It is also evident that mental training can be seen as a complementary technique to execution training but should not be used as a substitute to movement execution.
With respect to the training effect of kinesthetic imagery, it has been demonstrated that mental practice improves performance in athletes (Driskell et al., 1994). In addition, this technique has been shown to improve the dynamics of motor performance in a grapho-motor task (Yaguez et al., 1998) and the velocity of finger tapping movements (Lacourse et al., 2005). In musicians it has been demonstrated that mental rehearsal of the musical piece improves later performance (Theiler and Lippman, 1995).
Apart from the musicians group, it has even been demonstrated that training by using kinesthetic imagery improves the strength of an isometric movement (Ranganathan et al., 2004). Since no increase in muscle mass has been observed, the increase in strength may be caused by adaptive changes in the central processes. A decreased training effect of imagery compared to execution training may be caused by the lack of sensorimotor feedback, which might in turn explain the decreased progress in motor training in stroke patients (Floel et al., 2004). However, other authors developed training protocols, demonstrating that proper combinations of mental and physical training yield equal results in the same time than those applying physical training alone (Ross, 1985; Coffman, 1990). Furthermore, an increase of pitch accuracy was shown for mental practice compared to physical practice alone in guitarists. When using mental practice with a modeled recording of the music alternating with physical practice in guitar players, mental practice resulted in superior performance in tonal quality and memory coding in comparison to physical practice alone (Theiler and Lippman, 1995).
Interaction of Multisensory and Motor Images in Musical Imagery
Since the inverse model consists of both motor patterns and their sensory consequences, the content of musical imagery is multimodal and consists of a whole spectrum of kinesthetic (motor and somatosensory), but also auditory elements. Auditory aspects of imagery in musicians have been the topic of research for decades already (latest reviews: Halpern, 2012; Zatorre, 2012). The right auditory cortex seems to be of more importance than the left, since patients with removals of the right temporal lobe perform more poorly on both perception and imagery tasks compared with those with left temporal excision, and with controls (Zatorre and Halpern, 1993). When testing judgments of imagined musical pieces, such as pitch change (Zatorre et al., 1996), continuation of a melody (Halpern and Zatorre, 1999), musical timbres (Halpern et al., 2004), and tonal correctness of an imagined melody (Herholz et al., 2008), the involvement of different subunits of the bilateral auditory cortex, but also activation of other parts of the brain, such as the parietal lobe, have been identified. Overall, with more manipulations or transformations of the imagined known melody that are asked to be performed, there are more areas in addition to the auditory cortex that are involved in the task (Zatorre, 2012).
In the visual modality, the recruitment of primary areas during imagination has been shown to be highly correlated with the vividness of imagery (Cui et al., 2007).
Aleman et al. (2000) reported that musicians are not only better in musical mental imagery than non-musicians, but auditory musical imagery in general is increased in musically highly-trained subjects. However, other sensory imagery qualities, such as visual imagery capability, are not enhanced in musicians. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that there is a positive association between the musician's auditory imagery abilities and success at learning novel piano pieces from notation in the absence of auditory feedback (Highben and Palmer, 2004). Use of auditory imagery during mental practice is associated with better post-practice performance (Bernardi et al., 2013).
Mapping Studies on Kinesthetic Imagery and Imagery Training
Mapping studies support the notion of a partial equivalence of motor execution and imagery as postulated before (Jeannerod, 2001). Functional maps measured during circumscribed and well-defined motor execution show a large overlap with those assessed during the same movement imagined (Stephan et al., 1995; Porro et al., 1996; Lotze et al., 1999; Munzert et al., 2008). In addition it has also been demonstrated that the more vivid imagery is, the more the motor pathways are recruited in a realistic way (Lorey et al., 2011).
Most overlap has been reported for the supplementary motor area (SMA), the premotor cortex (PMC), for parietal areas and for the cerebellum. In particular the posterior SMA and the PMC (BA 6) seem to be the predominant areas responsible for movement imagery. Neurons in the SMA are involved in the preparation of movements and it is reasonable that preparatory aspects of a movement may be closely related to motor imagery. The PMC, can be subdivided into a dorsal (dPMC) and a ventral (vPMC) area. Whereas the vPMC lies adjacent to the posterior part (BA44) of Broca's area in the left hemisphere and Broca's analog in the right hemisphere, the dPMC is more associated with anterior parts of the primary motor hand area (BA 4a). Different imagery strategies involve different parts of the PMC; where kinesthetic imagery involves the dorsal PMC, visual strategies involve more ventral parts (Binkofski et al., 2000). BA 44 activation has been described during imagery of targeted hand movements (Grafton et al., 1996). In addition, patients with left lateral prefrontal lesions are unable to imagine a motor task (Johnson, 2000), underlining the important functional role of this area and a functional lateralization for motor imagery. vPMC and BA 44 is the human representation of the mirror neural network, which represents internal sequence patterns of trained movements (Binkofski et al., 2000). In fact, these mirror neurons are increasingly active in musicians during training of new finger sequences, even when the procedure used in the fMRI-experiment is not directly associated with the instrumental context performed in previously (Pau et al., 2013). When hands were visually presented performing guitar chords, the mirror neural system was more active in guitar players than in musically untrained subjects (Vogt et al., 2007). In conclusion, kinesthetic imagery and movement observation share functional resources located in the ventral PMC which seem to represent motor engrams of complex movement patterns.
The primary motor cortex is ~50–70% less involved [blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) -effects magnitude] during imagery than during execution of the same movement. Most of the studies describing primary motor cortex activation during kinesthetic imagery used an instruction method for mental imagery, with the executed movement preceding imagined movement. The studies controlled the execution of the movements via the use of electromyography (EMG) of the effector muscles (e.g., Lotze et al., 1999). Interestingly, the primary motor cortex is increasingly involved in more complex imagined movements (Kuhtz-Buschbeck et al., 2003).
Remarkably, the cerebellum is also activated during imagery of simple hand movements (Decety et al., 1994) although no actual sensorimotor feedback is present during imagery. A closer look revealed distinct areas activated during imagery compared with those active during motor execution; activation during imagery is located more posterior-inferior (centered in Larsell's lobule HVII) than that described during actual movements (centered in Larsell's lobule HIV; Lotze et al., 1999). It has been assumed that the decrease of activation in the anterior cerebellum during imagery is due to missing afferent information. The anterior cerebellar hemisphere is predominantly active during sensorimotor exploration movements (Gao et al., 1996) and receives sensory information via the spinocerebellar tract. Information about cortical control of movement is provided by the corticopontino-cerebellar tract, which is closely connected via the ventral part of the nucleus dentatus to the dorsolateral prefrontal parts of the cortex (Middleton and Strick, 1994). This tract closely links the upper part of the posterior cerebellum to the SMA and the PMC. Along this pathway, aspects of movement coordination— but also inhibition of movement execution— may be connected between the SMA and the posterior cerebellar hemisphere. This inhibitive pathway might well-suppress actual movement execution in the experimental setting of kinesthetic imagery. This setting includes a short sequence of movement execution and instructs the participants to avoid actual EMG-responses in target muscles in the imagery condition that follows (see also the previous chapter on basic characteristics of kinesthetic imagery research).
However, this might only be one network inhibiting motor execution during imagery. It has been proposed recently (Guillot et al., 2012) that inhibition of execution during mental imagery might take place in a network of different central representation areas, including parietal (Schwoebel et al., 2002), brain stem or cerebellar (Lotze et al., 1999) areas, or in prefrontal—basal ganglia circuits.
Cerebellar activation seems to be also interesting with respect to the cerebellum's role for forward processing of movement and fast regulation of movement control dependent on sensorimotor feedback (Imamizu et al., 2000). Whereas feedback is lacking during imagery, prospective mechanisms might be recruited in different interconnected areas which predominantly represent the following functions: vPMC for motor pattern storage; SMA for movement ideation and sequencing; the medial cingulate cortex for attention; and the posterior cerebellar hemisphere for processing an additional control loop of movement inhibition and motor sequencing. It is also important to mention that the cerebellar hemispheres do have a role in timing and the estimation of duration (Ivry et al., 2002), which might be a necessary feature for parallel processing. Interestingly, these forward models in the cerebellar hemispheres might also be involved in context- specific activations, as is the case in instrument-specific sensorimotor loops (Gebel et al., 2013).
For more complex motor imagery and sensorimotor integration, the superior parietal lobe is highly important; patients with parietal lesions were found to have problems predicting the time necessary to perform differentiated imagined finger movements and visually-guided pointing gestures (Sirigu et al., 1995). It has been shown that the parietal lobe is interconnected with the primary motor cortex during mental imagery of simple hand movements (Lebon et al., 2012b). A suppression of parietal-M1 interaction has been detected during kinesthetic imagery, underlining the inhibitive role of the parietal lobe during imagery. It is highly interesting whether different regions in the parietal lobe code for different aspects of imagined movement performance or movement inhibition, coding for the spatial qualities of the movement, and the access to the storage of the movement trajectory. In addition, it has been hypothesized that motor intention is represented in the posterior parietal lobe, and the same place has been proposed as being responsible for the evaluation of an efference copy and the prediction of movement (Desmurget and Sirigu, 2009). Recent magnetoencephalographic results showed that during both movement execution and imagery, a posterior parietal dipole near the anterior intraparietal sulcus can be identified. This was at its maximum 90 ms before the execution latency (Tian and Poeppel, 2010). Overall, the recruitment of functional areas is dependent on several factors, such as concrete content of imagery (Solodkin et al., 2004), the perspective of imagery (Lorey et al., 2009), the imagined movement effector (Stippich et al., 2002), the position of the body during imagery (Lorey et al., 2009), different levels of demand for movement precision (Lorey et al., 2010), and the subject's ability to imagine (Guillot et al., 2008). For instance, first-person perspective increases left hemispheric motor representation in comparison to a third-person view (Ruby and Decety, 2003). While there is extensive research on modulation of motor areas by motor execution, studies on modulation with imagery quality are less common. One study investigated the effect of precision on the functional representation of kinesthetic imagery of grip movements, demonstrating that imagery of particularly precise movements is processed in the anterior cerebellar hemisphere and superior parietal lobe (Lorey et al., 2010).
Mapping Studies of Kinesthetic Imagery in Instrumentalists and Singers
In contrast to mapping studies on imagery in general—and on kinesthetic imagery mapping—studies on musical imagery are rare and mostly unspecific. This might be due to the largely holistic approach typically applied for investigating imagined musical performance. However, it can be criticized that more specific paradigms need to be tested if we are to understand how different aspects of imagery might be modulated. Overall, during imagined musical performance a wide network of brain activation can be assumed. Furthermore, sensory coactivation might be increasingly involved not only for the somatosensory cortex. In addition, since some professional musicians have more experience in movement performance patterns, a high contribution of vPMC can be assumed in these subjects.
Training of finger sequences on a piano for 2 h over a period of 5 days, with both movement imagery and movement execution, results in a substantial performance gain. Furthermore, the representation areas of long finger flexors/extensors in the contralateral primary motor cortex, as assessed with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), is increased (Pascual-Leone et al., 1995). Movement imagery alone also results in a training effect, but a combination of imagery with execution training displays a greater increase in performance. Most interestingly the imagery group demonstrated the same training effect after one additional execution training session as the execution group, highlighting the importance of combining imagery and movement execution in musical performance training.
Contrary to these findings on the involvement of the primary motor cortex in kin |
fear" of trans people, notes Boom.
Republican legislators from Pogue to Florida's Frank Artiles, to Texas's Debbie Riddle and Gabriel Peña, have championed their bills, in part, with arguments often criticized by their opponents as inflammatory and baseless: promoting the false claim trans people, especially trans women, are predatory and threaten the safety of others in public bathrooms, locker rooms, or showers. Many have drawn attention to the fact that trans individuals are, in fact, more likely than their cisgender (nontrans) peers to be harassed or physically attacked in public facilitiles, while social media campaign #WeJustNeedToPee points out that trans people are not inherently dangerous.
"Fourteen cities and counties in Missouri and over 200 cities and counties across the county have passed laws protecting LGBT people from discrimination in public accomodations with no increase in public safety incidents," PROMO executive director A.J. Bockelman declared in a statement. "You would think the legislature had more pressing issues to address rather than pursue straw-man arguments."(CNN) What Harinder Bains did isn't unusual: He saw something suspicious and called police.
But who Harinder Bains is makes this story special.
Bains is the bar owner who led police to Ahmad Rahami, the suspect in the New York and New Jersey blasts.
While officials haven't pinned an exact motive to the Afghanistan-born Rahami's act, a handwritten note is said to have contained ramblings, including references to previous terrorists, such as the Boston Marathon bombers.
That's what makes Bains actions remarkable.
Bains is a Sikh American. And every time an attack has been carried out by an Islamic extremist, Sikhs -- mistaken for Muslims because of their turbans and beards -- have borne the backlash. And 15 years after 9/11, Sikhs don't feel any safer. The hate spewed toward them, as immigrants, has only spiked because of the xenophobic tenor in some quarters these days.
Which brings us to Bains - a Sikh man, an immigrant -- who had a hand in stopping a suspect -- another immigrant -- from getting away with a crime.
"Not for nuthin' the guy who recognized & called the police on the bomb suspect was an IMMIGRANT named Harinder Bains. IMMIGRANT= HERO!" tweeted Cecile Kazemi, echoing a sentiment repeated over and over online.
Not for nuthin' the guy who recognized & called the police on the bomb suspect was an IMMIGRANT named Harinder Bains. IMMIGRANT=HERO! — Cecile Kazemi (@CecileKaz) September 20, 2016
But talk to Bains and he'll tell you his actions had nothing to do with his Sikh faith.
"I did what I think every American would have done," Bains told CNN's Chris Cuomo. "My neighbor would have done the same thing. Any Jewish, Christian, Sikh, Muslim. Anybody would have done the same thing."
"I'm from Sikh faith," he added. "I've been taught always stand up against the atrocities, any kind of persecution."
The discovery
At first, Bains said he thought Rahami was a "drunk guy" wandering the streets.
"This has happened before also -- somebody loitering in front of the bar. And always I go there and confront people and I yell at them. But somehow maybe [because] it was raining, I didn't do anything. I felt bad for him."
Later, as he was watching CNN from another business across the street, he recognized the 28-year-old as the person wanted for questioning in this weekend's bombings.
He called 911.
JUST WATCHED Bar owner recognized bomb suspect from CNN coverage Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Bar owner recognized bomb suspect from CNN coverage 02:34
"I just told them the guy looks a little suspicious and doesn't look good to me," Bains told "Anderson Cooper 360."
When officers confronted him, Rahami pulled out a handgun and shot one of them.
"He shot twice and the glass splinters almost hit my store," Bains said.
A shootout ensued, and then the world watched as cameras caught Rahami being loaded into an ambulance on a stretcher.
Bains insists he is not a hero.
But he is using the spotlight to promote a message of inclusion: "We will be more stronger like this if we do everything together."Images from the Cassini spacecraft are most detailed ever taken, and include previously unseen features within the rings
Nasa has released spectacular images of Saturn’s rings, revealing that the rings may be home to millions of orbiting “moonlets”.
The images from the Cassini spacecraft resolve details on a scale of 550 metres – around the size of the tallest buildings on Earth. They include previously unseen features within the rings, including giant double-armed “propeller” structures that suggest a constellation of miniature moons are hidden within the planetary rings.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A region in Saturn’s outer B ring. The many small, bright blemishes are created by cosmic rays and charged particle radiation near the planet. Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
The rings comprise ice, dust and rocks, ranging in size from tiny specks to house-sized chunks. The so-called “propellers” are gaps in the material stretching thousands of miles across that scientists believe are created by moonlets.
Cassini reveals Saturn's true colours Read more
The moonlets, sized somewhere between a house and 1km in diameter, clear the space immediately around them, but are not large enough to sweep clear their entire orbit around Saturn, as seen with the “shepherd” moons Pan and Daphnis.
The images also show grainy structure within individual rings, which astronomers refer to as “straw”, indicating where material has temporarily clumped together for reasons that astronomers are still trying to understand.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest This image features a density wave in Saturn’s A ring (at left). Density waves are accumulations of particles at certain distances from the planet. Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Carolyn Porco, the Cassini imaging lead based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said: “As the person who planned those initial orbit-insertion ring images, which remained our most detailed views of the rings for the past 13 years, I am taken aback by how vastly improved are the details in this new collection.”
Cassini, which has been studying Saturn’s rings from orbit for nearly 13 years, is now about halfway through its penultimate mission phase of 20 orbits that dive past the outer edge of the main ring system. These “ring-grazing” orbits will continue until late April and then Cassini will begin its grand finale, in which the craft will repeatedly plunge through the gap between the rings and Saturn. The first plunge is scheduled for 26 April.The Connecticut women's basketball team is one win shy of its 100th consecutive victory. The Huskies can reach the milestone on Big Monday. Until then, we take a look at the streak by the numbers.
1: Game tied at halftime (34-34, Dec. 7, 2016, at Notre Dame)
2: Triple-doubles (Kiah Stokes on Jan. 28, 2015, and Gabby Williams on Jan. 24, 2017)
Gabby Williams, right, tallied the fifth triple-double in UConn history on Jan. 24 (16 points, 16 rebounds and 10 assists). AP Photo/Gerry Broome
3: Games played as the lower-ranked team
4: AP top-two matchups
5: Active Division I players who have beaten UConn: Stanford's Karlie Samuelson, Kaylee Johnson, Briana Roberson and Erica McCall (Brittany McPhee was on the Cardinal roster but did not play) and Baylor's Alexis Prince
Stanford senior Karlie Samuelson, older sister to UConn sophomore Katie Lou Samuelson, is one of five active college players who have a win over the Huskies on their résumés. Photo by Douglas Stringer/Icon Sportswire
6: Margin of victory vs. Maryland (Dec. 29, 2016)
7: Players to average double-digit points per game
8: Games vs. East Carolina (most frequent opponent during streak)
9: 60-point wins
10: Games scoring 100 points
11: Neutral-site games played in Connecticut
12: NCAA tournament wins
13: Conferences faced
14: Mississippi State 3-pointers attempted on March 26, 2016 (most opponent 3-point attempts without a make during streak)
15: Blocks, a streak high (Jan. 18, 2015, and Jan. 23, 2016)
16: Weeks outside AP No. 1 spot
17: Games at XL Center
18: Players to appear in a game
19: Most points allowed to an individual in an NCAA tournament game (Lashann Higgs and Ariel Atkins each scored 19 points for Texas on March 28, 2016)
20: Highest rank of conference opponent faced (South Florida)
21: Points scored before SMU made its first basket in UConn's 91st win
22: Length of South Carolina's win streak before it lost to UConn on Feb. 9, 2015
23: Date in November 2014 when the streak began with a win over Creighton
24: Fewest points allowed during streak (Nov. 28, 2014, and Feb. 28, 2015)
25: Wins in the month of January
26: Months since UConn's last loss
ESPN Stats & Info
28: Napheesa Collier's career high in points (Nov. 14, 2016)
29: Different cities
30: Jersey number worn by Breanna Stewart
31: Kia Nurse's minutes in her first career start (the first game of the streak)
32: Team assists vs. Tulsa (Feb. 5, 2017), a streak high
33: Approximate drive time (in minutes) from the UConn campus in Storrs, Connecticut, to XL Center in Hartford
34: Katie Lou Samuelson's points (Jan. 17, 2017), the most by a UConn player during the streak
35: Length of Notre Dame's home win streak, which was snapped by UConn on Dec. 7, 2016
ESPN Stats & Info
37: Games played by Katie Lou Samuelson in her freshman season (she missed the NCAA championship with a broken foot)
38: Different opponents
39: Average margin of victory (plus-38.7 PPG differential)
40: Margin of victory in record-setting 91st consecutive win at SMU
41: Most points scored in any quarter (March 19, 2016)
42: Opposing head coaches
43: Rebounds in 2016 national championship vs. Syracuse
After outrebounding Syracuse 43-27 in the 2016 title game, UConn celebrated its fourth straight NCAA championship. AP Photo/Michael Conroy
44: SMU rebounds on Jan. 14, 2017, (the most UConn allowed to an unranked team)
45: Most field goals made in a game during streak (Jan. 20, 2016, vs. UCF)
46: Florida State's missed field goal attempts (26 of 72) in UConn's smallest margin of victory (Nov. 14, 2016)
47: Games played outside the state of Connecticut
48: Largest road win over a nonconference opponent (Nov. 30, 2015)
49: Notre Dame field goal percentage (Dec. 5, 2015), the highest opponent field goal percentage during the streak
50: Games vs. unranked American Athletic Conference opponents
51: Points allowed in 2016 NCAA title game (April 5, 2016)
52: Point differential vs. Robert Morris in first round of 2016 NCAA tournament (March 19, 2016)
Kia Nurse and UConn beat Robert Morris 101-49 in a first-round NCAA tournament game on March 19, 2016. AP Photo/Jessica Hill
53: Games in which Gabby Williams scored in double figures
54: Wins vs. American Athletic Conference
55: Most second-half points in an NCAA tournament game (March 21, 2016)
56: Breanna Stewart, Moriah Jefferson and Morgan Tuck combined points in last career game
57: Crystal Dangerfield field goal percentage (8 of 14) off the bench vs. Baylor (Nov. 17, 2016)
58: Total margin of victory in AP top-two matchups
59: Rebounds vs. Charleston (Nov. 28, 2014), a streak high
60: Largest margin of victory in an NCAA tournament game (March 26, 2016)
61: Margin of victory in win over College of Charleston, the second game of the streak and the first of nine 60-point wins
ESPN Stats & Info
63: Fewest points scored (vs. Notre Dame, April 7, 2015)
64: Largest scoring margin through three quarters (March 26, 2016)
65: Largest margin of victory (Jan. 25, 2015, and Jan. 10, 2017)
66: Gabby Williams NCAA tournament points
67: Games Saniya Chong played off the bench
68: Games Breanna Stewart, Morgan Tuck, and Moriah Jefferson all appeared in
69: Games in which Breanna Stewart, Katie Lou Samuelson, Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis or Moriah Jefferson held at least a share of the team lead in scoring
ESPN Stats & Info
71: Points scored by starters in most recent game at XL Center (Jan. 28, 2017)
72: Games with a 20-point scorer
73: Starts by Breanna Stewart
74: Minutes Gabby Williams played in the 2016 NCAA tournament before making first start in title game
75: UConn's win streak entering 2016-17 season
76: Most field goal attempts (Nov. 22, 2016)
77: Natalie Butler height in inches (at 6-foot-5, she is the tallest UConn player to appear during the streak)
78: Driving distance (in miles) between University of Connecticut and Bridgeport, Connecticut (2016 NCAA Tournament Regional host)
A 6-foot-5 center, Natalie Butler is averaging 4.8 rebounds this season. AP Photo/Gail Burton
79: Offensive rebounds by Natalie Butler
80: Points from top-six scorers in 2016 national championship win vs. Syracuse
81: Most points allowed (Dec. 5, 2015, and Dec. 29, 2016)
82: Points per game vs. ranked opponents (82.2)
83: Games with double-digit lead at halftime
84: Primary interstate connecting Storrs, Connecticut, to Hartford (sites of UConn home games)
85: Games in Eastern time zone
86: Games in which the Huskies outrebounded their opponents
87: Points scored in win over No. 1 South Carolina, the only top-ranked team UConn faced during the streak
88: Difference between Breanna Stewart's block total and that of the next-closest teammate (Kiah Stokes) during the streak
89: Points per game in American Athletic Conference tournament games (89.0)
90: Length of UConn's first NCAA-record win streak, which it matched on Jan. 10, 2017
91: Points scored vs. No. 3 Notre Dame (Dec. 5, 2015), the most the Fighting Irish allowed in regulation during UConn's streak
92: Length of the North Carolina women's soccer win streak from 1990-94, which UConn tied Jan. 17
93: Combined point margin in Final Four and championship games (four games)
94: Combined assists in three 30-assist games
95: Most combined rebounds (Jan. 14, 2017: UConn 51, SMU 44)
96: Napheesa Collier steals
97: Double-digit wins during the streak
98: Games shooting at least 40 percent from the field
99: Games played by Kia Nurse & Gabby WilliamsPalit GeForce GTX 960 "Reference" 2048MB GDDR5 Graphics Card - Inc Heroes of the Storm Bundle Pack
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Download HEROES OF THE STORM KAIJO DIABLO Bundle for the PC FREE* at REDEEM.GEFORCE.COM and follow the on screen instructions.This code may be used once. NOT FOR RESALE. Offer valid from 23/09/15 until 05/09/2016.The GeForce® GTX™ 960 delivers incredible performance, power efficiency, and cutting-edge gaming technologies that only NVIDIA Maxwell™ technology can offer.This is the perfect upgrade to advanced gaming, letting you dominate the competition with 60% faster performance and twice the power efficiency than previous-generation cards*. Unleash its massive overclocking potential and push your performance even further. Plus, it features VXGI for realistic lighting, support for smooth, tear-free NVIDIA G-SYNC™ technology, and Dynamic Super Resolution that enables 4K-quality gaming on 1080p displays.The GTX 960 even gives you great gaming to go with NVIDIA GameStream™ technology that lets you stream PC games to NVIDIA SHIELD™ devices. *Compared to GeForce GTX 660- Voxel Global Illumination Technology (VXGI)- NVIDIA® Super Resolution technology- NVIDIA® GameWorks technology- NVIDIA® GameStream technology- NVIDIA® TXAA Technology- NVIDIA GPU Boost 2.0- NVIDIA PhysX® Technology- NVIDIA FXAA Technology- NVIDIA Adaptive Vertical Sync- NVIDIA Surround- Support for four concurrent displays including: Two dual-link DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort 1.2- Microsoft DirectX 12- NVIDIA® 3D Vision® Ready- NVIDIA SLI® Ready Technology- NVIDIA CUDA® technology- PCI Express 3.0 support- OpenGL 4.4 support- OpenCL support- NVIDIA SHIELD Ready- NVIDIA G-Sync Ready- GeForce GTX 960- GPU: GeForce GTX 960- Core Base Clock: 1165MHz- Core Boost Clock: 1228MHz- Memory Clock: 7010MHz- Memory Size: 2048MB GDDR5- Bus Type: PCI Express 3.0- Memory Bus: 128-bit- CUDA Cores: 1024- DirectX 12: Yes- DVI Port: 2x Dual-Link DVI, 1x DisplayPort & 1x HDMI- DisplayPort: Yes- HDCP: Yes- HDMI: Yes- Power: 1x 6-Pin- 350W PSU Required- 120W TDP- Warranty: 2yrThe secret auction is a stark contrast to an auction last year, where the Fed invited over 40 broker-dealers to participate. This year, however, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York only invited Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) and Barclays Plc (BARC) to bid on $13.2 billion of bonds offered in two sales this month. Last month, Goldman Sachs bought $6.2 billion of bonds in an auction.
Traders blamed regular and public auctions for damaging bond prices in 2011, prompting the Fed to switch to this closed process. The New York Fed was criticized last year for damaging credit markets using regular sales, and it promptly ceased these sales in June 2011 after selling $10 billion in face value of the assets.
On Jan. 19, sales resumed when the bank sold $7 billion worth of risky mortgage bonds to Credit Suisse Group AG. The Wall Street Journal estimates the bonds were sold for over $3 billion, based on comparable debt.
Goldman Sachs won the latest auction. The Fed sold $6.2 billion in face value of mortgage bonds from Maiden Lane II, meaning the rest of the outstanding balance of the $19.5 billion loan given to Maiden Lane II can be repaid.
Firms not included in the bidding, however, were annoyed at being left out. Many have questioned whether or not the Fed is getting the best price for taxpayers, who gave AIG $182.3 billion in bailout funds.
“I fail to see how running a limited participation, secret auction is any way beneficial to the owners of these bonds, the U.S. taxpayer,” said the president of a New York-based market data analyst. “Not to mention these bonds are now trading 15 to 25 cents” on the dollar “cheaper compared to when they were last auctioned in a more public manner.”
“The purpose should be to get the best price for the taxpayer,” explained Robert Eisenbeis, a former research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta who now works at Cumberland Advisors. “Anybody knows the more bidders the better, so it’s a little hard to understand why they would essentially pick potential winners and losers. That smacks of crony capitalism.”
“The exclusivity by which the process has shut out smaller dealers is a little un-American,” David Castillo, head of sales and trading at broker Further Lane Securities LP, said.
Maiden Lane II, LLC was created in 2008 with the sole purpose to buy holdings that AIG handed the Fed in exchange for a cash injection. Its portfolio includes bonds backed by some of the riskiest home loans with the highest default rates, including subprime mortgages.
Despite critics claims that the private, selective auction may not be good for taxpayers, the Fed turned a $2.8 billion profit from selling Maiden Lane assets, according to CNN Money.
The good news of the $2.8 billion surplus is dampened by the fact that the Fed still holds a separate portfolio, Maiden Lane III, which contains the insurer’s credit default swap business. When acquired, the portfolio was worth $29.3 billion, but it is now worth $17.6 billion. As of Feb. 1, the Fed was still owed $9.6 billion from its loan to Maiden Lane III.
The government currently owns 77 percent of AIG, down from 92.1 percent.
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Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.South Australia's Energy Minister is furious with the Australian Energy Market Operator after tens of thousands of South Australian homes were blacked out last night in scorching conditions.
As the temperature hovered about 40 degrees Celsius at 6:30pm, power was cut to more than 40,000 homes for more than half an hour.
Demand for electricity forced SA Power Networks to implement blackouts, prompting an angry response from the SA Government.
The temperature hit 46 degrees Celsius in outback areas of the state on Wednesday, including Port Augusta and Ceduna, while Adelaide saw a top of 42C.
As many people arrived home from work and cranked up their air conditioners in the evening, SA Power Networks announced it would start load shedding to cope with demand, plunging some areas into blackouts.
Thirty minutes after SA Power Networks announced the outages, it tweeted the load shedding had ended.
"The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) has instructed us to commence 100MW rotational load-shedding via a government-agreed list due to lack of available generation supply in South Australia," the power provider said.
"This issue is due to a lack of generation supply and we are required to operate at AEMO's instruction."
South Australian Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis was angry about the outage, blaming the national market operator.
"We had some people tonight without power because the national market didn't turn on the generation that we had in the state," he said.
"The market operator, who runs the national electricity market, got caught short today.
"There was obviously more demand than they had generation turned on in SA. There was an issue with the ElectraNet transmission lines in Port Lincoln, which meant that the Port Lincoln generators couldn't turn on.
"They were caught short by not instructing the second unit at Pelican Point [in Adelaide] to turn on."
Adelaide's expected top for Thursday is 42C, with Port Augusta, Coober Pedy, Woomera, Marree and Moomba forecast to reach 46 and Tarcoola 47.
Federal Government 'won't politicise' SA blackouts
The reliability of South Australia's electricity supplies has been in the spotlight after a statewide blackout in stormy weather last September, causing the Federal Coalition to criticise the state's renewables-heavy power mix.
Another storm in December forced the power distributor to announce compensation payments totalling $20 million to about 75,000 customers after lengthy blackouts.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has declared energy security will be the "defining debate" of the parliamentary year, but Federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg told the ABC the Federal Government would not try to make political gains on Wednesday's forced blackouts.
"Well we're not politicising the fact that there is an insecure energy system in South Australia and that high renewable energy targets, be it in that state or in other states, put in place by Labor governments is going to bring great instability," Mr Frydenberg said.
Mr Frydenberg said the Australian Energy Market Operator disputed some claims that it was to blame and it was preparing an "urgent report" on the blackout.
"The point in South Australia was that there was a lack of supply because the wind was only down to providing 2.5 per cent of South Australia's energy needs," he said.
"That's a lot less than is otherwise expected and that is one of the problems we have with intermittent sources of power."
Heatwave to intensify before the weekend
Weather forecasters say rising humidity will increase the severity of current heatwave conditions and health officials have urged groups such as the elderly to ensure they use available air conditioning whatever it adds to their power bills.
The weather bureau said South Australians could expect little relief from the heat until late on Saturday or early Sunday and forecasters said a burst of humidity would increase the severity of the heatwave before the weekend.
Forecaster Matt Collopy said the bushfire danger could rise in some areas over coming days.
"We're a little concerned about eastern parts of the state [for Thursday], but the fire weather team are working on that and working with the Country Fire Service on [assessing] the fire conditions," he said.
"But primarily this is a heat event rather than a bushfire event."
SA Health chief medical officer Paddy Phillips said vulnerable South Australians, including elderly people, needed to ensure they turned on their air conditioners, even if the cost of electricity concerned them.
"I think people should think about the false economy of saving a couple of dollars in electricity during this prolonged heatwave," he said.A s it’s the new year, the “season to be fit”, perhaps it’s a good time to talk about a time I lost weight – amounting to two to three dress sizes (sorry not to be more specific but, fat or thin, I’ve never felt the urge to weigh myself like cattle are at market). For some people, the only interesting thing would be that I had gained the weight because of a family hypothyroid condition, then lost it with no dieting at all and moderate exercise (two to three hours a week gloomily flailing about on a cross-trainer).
The weight gain was a surprise. After a lifetime of effortless skinniness, verging on outright scrawn, I blew up like a lilo. Bigger me was fine about it. I’d love to pretend that it was feminist defiance (“Sisters, hear my cry – I’m taking a holiday from skinny!”), but, in truth, I couldn’t care less.
The weight gain seemed like nothing compared to waking up exhausted and shivering with permanent cold. Some days were like a terrible hazy dream of trudging slowly though a dark, labyrinthine ice world. I would walk around the house swathed in blankets like a medieval queen and mainline coffee just to get through the day. Another weird symptom was skin so dry and flaky that one day my entire palm just peeled straight off in a single crackling strip, like the shedding of a snake.
Bizarrely, considering my family history, I didn’t suspect a wonky thyroid and was diagnosed by accident via an unconnected blood test (I am now on 125mg of thyroxine a day). The good news: I got enough energy back to eventually start exercising. The bad news is that exercising sucks – I continue to hate every tedious, sweaty, stupid minute of it. Where art thou, mythical endorphin rush? The weight fell off embarrassingly quickly, considering my mournful predictions about my challenging medical condition.
However, this doesn’t prove that other hypothyroid sufferers who say they can’t lose weight are lazy, delusional liars. The auto-immune problems of the thyroid (“hypo” and “hyper”), and the wider endocrine system, are myriad, bewildering, exasperating and far too complex to explain fully here. There’s an ongoing row about poor rates of diagnosis and treatment in this country (including a sidebar on natural versus synthetic treatments). There’s yet more confusion because the symptoms vary from person to person.
Hypo symptoms can include extreme fatigue, weakness, weight gain, difficulty losing weight, dry skin, hair loss, muscle cramps, depression and more. Like me, a fellow hypo may suffer from unexplained weight gain. Unlike me, they might find it nigh impossible to lose the weight. Like most conditions, it’s a lottery of symptoms – you get some but not others. Why do some people have such immense trouble understanding this – and why is an overweight person’s insistence that it’s their glands still viewed as a pathetic excuse to be mocked and disbelieved?
Certainly it makes me uneasy to think about how my own experience could be twisted to undermine a fellow sufferer (“They lost weight with exercise; why can’t you?”). Thyroid weight gain is real and medicine often doesn’t solve it; on thyroxine alone, I lost zilch weight. Some sufferers struggle to lose weight even though they medicate, exercise and follow rigid low-carb/anti-inflammatory diets. If you went to their online sites, read about the efforts they go to, the despair and confusion they feel, your heart would break in two for them. Just in terms of weight, their thyroid has trapped their metabolism in a flesh prison, with little chance of escape. And these are people it’s fine to mock and discredit?
Well, the new year isn’t just about fitness, it’s also a time for resolutions, so here’s a thought. Unless you’ve had direct experience of this little-understood, oft-misfiring gland, how about gaining a little humanity and knowledge before going on the attack?
Overkill? No, that was Lemmy’s way of living
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lemmy in 2004 in California. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian
The death of Lemmy from Motörhead didn’t only upset heavy metal fans. Lemmy appeared to represent rock’n’roll infamy for a broad cross-section of humanity. If we must all be, as the Motörhead song said, “killed by death”, then Lemmy’s death was a “good” one, after a life unapologetically ill-lived.
Elsewhere, there’s great excitement that Axl Rose and Slash are to reunite for a show. Some might describe both Lemmy and Guns N’ Roses as “cartoons”, in a way that is supposed to be reductive and derisive. Ozzy Osbourne is another one. It’s a criticism that many HM artists attract.
What these disparagers don’t realise is that sometimes people want the cartoon, particularly during a musical era dominated by Coldplay-style, carefully inoffensive ear drool.
In my opinion, Chris Martin isn’t good enough (loud, brilliant, funny enough) to be a cartoon – he’s fated to be a finessed corporate “word cloud”, encompassing all human emotion and therefore none. Faced with that, most would take a lively, colourful, charismatic cartoon any day. Which goes some way to explaining the widespread goodwill towards Lemmy and the hope that he’s rocking – wherever he is.
So much for being an empty nester...
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Don’t worry about them growing up. They’re going to be around for years and years and years. Photograph: Alamy
Christmas is well known for throwing evolving family dynamics into sharp focus. One of these is how many grown-up children don’t feel stable enough to manage without their parents and still need help from the bank of mum and dad (from moving out, to bills, loans and food shopping). A new study from the Skipton Building Society puts the age of financial independence at around the mid-30s.
I once used to marvel and scoff at such studies. In my youth, people couldn’t get out of the family orbit quickly enough, barely caring where (or how) they ended up – in my case, it was a squat with bin liners taped over holes in the wall. Now, continued “child dependence” has been rebranded as routine – just variations on a norm.
Escalating rents and job insecurity are turning varying degrees of progeny dependence into The Everlasting Story. The extended family is starting to be less about extended numbers and more about extended time. Along the way, parents of adult children seem to have ended up cast as property-owning, over-privileged baddies. Excuse me? It’s more likely that these parents are being soaked left, right and centre as penance for this generational shortfall. Too many years of that and they won’t be looking so “privileged” any more.
It’s not all grim, though. According to the study, the children make efforts to repay all the support and kindness later – from paying for parental meals and buying wine, to helping with bills and rent. So let’s get this straight – the parents go broke trying to help their children out and then the children go broke trying to help the parents out. Such is the cycle of family life in modern Britain. The really scary thing is that this sector of society counts as fortunate.The anti-Western demonstrations in Arab countries and the turn the "Arab Spring" is taking in several countries are shouting out a challenge to Europe. But Europe, looking inward to its economic and institutional crisis, prefers to shirk its responsibilities in the Mediterranean and to rely on the – helpless – United States.
Europe is living through a strange and insidious era, according to the Greek writer Petros Markaris: the only ones who are speaking of the crises rocking the continent are the economists and central bankers.
The upshot is that it’s the single currency that is becoming the essence of the Union – not an instrument, but its raison d'être, its sole purpose. The unity of the EU, Markaris writes, has been supplanted by the unity of the eurozone. Today we live in a Europe where only politicians and economists have the floor. “This is why the debate is so superficial, like most of Europe’s leaders, and one-dimensional, like the traditional discourse of economists.” Lacking a worldview, Europe has interests but no passions, and can be divided only into noble creditors and plebeian debtors. “We are headed,” he says, “towards a European civil war mentality.”
Like a sudden shot in the silence, a new earthquake is rumbling across the Muslim countries in the form of a broad offensive by Islamic fundamentalism against the West and its execrable videos: the violence is intensifying in the Mediterranean, and Europe, wholly occupied by its domestic affairs, is suddenly grasping that outside its doorstep bombs are raining down.
Satisfied, after the Arab Spring she dozed off, and is now waking to winter. The liberations, she had imagined, meant freedom – only to discover that revolutions are always preceded by fundamentalist sparks before they produce stable institutions and constitutions. Like Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the protesters cried out at us: “You taught me language; and my profit on't is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you, for learning me your language!”
Europe could say and do something if it gave up leaving the United States to do its own work for it. Not just in Afghanistan, where many Europeans are caught up in a lost war, and not just in Iran, but in and around our Mediterranean. It is Europe that the fugitives from North Africa are fleeing to – those that don’t die at sea at such a rate that one cannot help suspecting wilful negligence on our part.
A community with neither ideas nor resources
If it had its own foreign policy, Europe, capable of doing what faraway America cannot, could act: it could dominate events, set new priorities, and identify opportunities based on organised cooperation and not just on hawkish words and deeds.
Discussing a European Federation is no longer taboo. In talking about it, though, we only talk about the currency or make vague claims that a federation will make us “masters of our destiny.” Yet what policy – beyond internal order – do we want Europe to pursue? What vision of the world, of the relationship between the West and Islam, of Iran, of Israel and Palestine, the conflict between religions and within religions, does Europe hew to?
The |
The dragonfish uses this organ like a fishing lure, flashing it on and off and waving it back and forth. Once an unsuspecting fish gets too close, it is snapped up in the dragonfish’s powerful jaws.
The dragonfish also has photophores along the sides of its body. These light organs may be used to signal other dragonfish during mating. They may also serve to attract and disorient prey fishes from deep below. Dragonfishes live in deep ocean waters at depths of up to 5000 feet (1,500 meters). They are found in most tropical regions around the world.
5.Vampie squid
The vampire squid, known to scientists as Vampyroteuthis infernalis, looks more like something that swam out of a late-night science fiction movie. The squid has large fins at the to of its body that resemble large ears. It is very gelatinous in form, resembling a jellyfish more than the common squid. The vampire squid has the largest eyes relative to its body size of any animal. Though it is relatively small, growing to a length of only about six inches, it has globular eyeballs as large as the eyes of a large dog.
The Vampire Squid is almost entirely covered in light-producing organs called photophores. The animal has great control over the organs, capable of producing disorienting flashes of light for fractions of a second to several minutes in duration. The intensity and size of the photophores can also be modulated. Appearing as small white discs, the photophores are larger and more complex at the tips of the arms and at the base of the two fins, but are absent from the underside of the caped arms. Two larger white areas on top of the head were initially believed to also be photophores, but have turned out to be photoreceptors.
Vampire Squid is able to live and breathe normally in the OMZ at oxygen saturations as low as 3%; a feat no other cephalopod, and few other animals, can claim.
6.Bathysaurus
The deepsea lizardfish, Bathysaurus ferox, is a lizardfish of the family Synodontidae, found in tropical and subtropical seas worldwide at depths of between 600 and 3,500 m. Its length is between 50 and 65 cm.
The deepsea lizardfish is a heavy-bodied fish, rounded in cross-section with a broad flattened head containing a large wide mouth. The lower jaw protrudes further forward than the upper. Both jaws and all the mouth bones are heavily covered with conical barbed teeth and most of the jaw teeth are visible outside the edges of the mouth. The strong thick pelvic fins probably serve as props when the fish is resting on the bottom waiting for prey.
Deepsea lizardfish are covered in tough scales and are dark brown or black with black eyes and a black lining to the mouth and gill cavity.
7.Frilled shark
The frilled shark is one of two extant species of shark in the family Chlamydoselachidae, with a wide but patchy distribution in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This uncommon species is found over the outer continental shelf and upper continental slope, generally near the bottom though there is evidence of substantial upward movements. It has been caught as deep as 1,570 m (5,150 ft), whereas in Suruga Bay, Japan it is most common at depths of 50–200 m (160–660 ft). Exhibiting several “primitive” features, the frilled shark has often been termed a “living fossil”. It reaches a length of 2 m (6.6 ft) and has a dark brown, eel-like body with the dorsal, pelvic, and anal fins placed far back. Its common name comes from the frilly or fringed appearance of the gill slits, of which there are six pairs with the first pair meeting across the throat.
Seldom observed, the frilled shark is speculated to capture its prey by bending its body and lunging forward like a snake. The long, extremely flexible jaws enable it to swallow large prey whole, while the many rows of small, needle-like teeth prevent escape. It feeds mainly on cephalopods, while also consuming bony fishes and other sharks. Frilled sharks are occasionally captured as bycatch by commercial fisheries but have little economic value. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has assessed it as Near Threatened, since given its very low reproductive rate even incidental catches may deplete its population.Based on our hypothesis, we designed a new strategy to improve the sensitivity of bacterial detection. The principle is shown in Fig. 1. Gene A and gene B encoded by the genome (chromosome) are transcribed into one and nine RNA molecules, respectively. In terms of molecular detection, PCR can only detect genomic DNA, while RT-PCR can detect both genomic DNA and the transcribed RNA. For each bacterial cell, there is only one copy of each molecule that can be detected by PCR for genes A and B. However, when RT-PCR is used, there are two and 10 copies of each RNA molecule per cell to be detected for genes A and B, respectively. Since the sensitivity of PCR amplification is the same, reverse transcription of RNA into cDNA will increase the number of detectable DNA molecules and accordingly improve the sensitivity of the assay. Therefore, the selection of highly transcribed genes as signature sequences would increase the detection sensitivity. For the example of genes A and B, by selecting gene B as the signature gene, the sensitivity can be theoretically be improved fivefold using RT-PCR.
Figure 1: Principle of sensitive detection of bacteria by targeting abundant transcripts. (a) In a bacterial cell, one copy of gene A and nine copies of gene B are transcribed. PCR amplifies only genomic DNA, while RT-PCR could amplify both genomic DNA plus the transcripts. (b) The detected copies of gene A and B by PCR and RT-PCR. PCR would detect only one nucleic acid molecule, while RT-PCR would detect two and 10 nucleic acid molecules for A and B respectively. Full size image
To test this hypothesis, Brucella was chosen as a test model. Brucella is a bacterial pathogen that survives in host cells and exists at low concentrations in clinical samples12. For development of a PCR assay, a signature sequence, which is unique to the genus or species, must first be identified. Based on the principle of the above hypothesis, an ideal signature gene should be species-specific, with a high level of transcription. Whole genome transcriptome sequencing represents a highly effective means to identify such genes. To screen for Brucella-specific genes with high transcription levels, all transcripts of Brucella melitensis 16 M were sequenced by RNA-Seq. The relative transcription levels defined as RPKM (Reads Per Kilobase of exon model per Million mapped reads) values were analyzed for all the annotated genes. Four genes with high transcription levels were chosen as signature genes for subsequent analysis (Table S1).
The current consensus on PCR and RT-PCR is that PCR amplifies DNA and cDNA, while RT-PCR amplifies RNA. To test the amplification efficacies of PCR and RT-PCR for DNA and RNA, DNA and RNA extracted from Brucella cultures were detected with PCR and RT-PCR respectively. As shown in Fig. 2a, for the same DNA sample, PCR and RT-PCR generated similar Ct values, while for RNA samples, the RT-PCR Ct value was 10 lower than that of PCR. This indicated that RT-PCR could efficiently amplify both DNA and RNA, while PCR could efficiently amplify DNA but not RNA. The amplification efficiency of RNA by RT-PCR was about 6000 times that of PCR (Fig. 2b). To confirm further the difference in amplification efficiency of PCR and RT-PCR, DNA was mixed with increasing quantities of RNA and detected. With increasing quantities of RNA, the PCR Ct value did not change significantly (Fig. 2c), while the RT-PCR Ct values decreased (Fig. 2d). All these data confirmed that RT-PCR, but not PCR efficiently amplifies RNA.
Figure 2: Differential amplification efficiencies of DNA and RNA by PCR and RT-PCR. DNA and RNA were extracted from Brucella culture and detected by PCR and RT-PCR (a); Efficiencies of RNA amplification by PCR and RT-PCR were compared (b); DNA was mixed with increasing quantities of RNA and detected by PCR (c) and RT-PCR (d). Full size image
Amplification efficiency of DNA by PCR and RT-PCR was calculated, and the results showed that efficiency of RT-PCR is about 1.31 times that of PCR (Fig. 3a). Extracted RNA samples are usually subjected to DNA enzyme digestion to remove contaminated DNA. Concentrations of DNA in crude and purified RNA were tested. When the crude RNA sample was amplified with PCR, the Ct value was 24.66, indicating significant DNA contamination in the RNA sample. After DNA digestion, no Ct value was observed for PCR, while for RT-PCR, the Ct value was increased from 24.35 to 26.4 (Fig. 3b). This indicated significant DNA contamination in the extracted RNA. Because DNA and RNA were isolated from equal quantities of bacterial sample, the Ct values represented the concentration of the templates. The concentration of DNA was about 2048 times that of the digested RNA (Fig. 3c). The concentration of undigested RNA (including both DNA and RNA) was four times higher than that of digested RNA (Fig. 3d). That is, RNA molecules comprised only 22.7% of the undigested RNA sample. We tested several RNA extraction techniques; the results showed that although they showed different extraction efficiencies, all the extractions resulted in significant loss of RNA (data not shown).
Figure 3: DNA contamination in extracted RNA. (a) Efficiency of DNA amplification by PCR and RT-PCR; (b) Amplification of undigested and digested RNA by PCR and RT-PCR; (c) Concentration comparison between DNA and digested RNA; (d) Relative concentration comparison between undigested and digested RNA. Full size image
The above results showed that the RNA extraction efficiency is too low to be appropriate for RT-PCR detection. We speculated that this this might be due to the low efficiency of the assays or degradation of the sample during the extraction procedures. Therefore, we tested a simplified heat denaturation method for sample treatment. Bacterial cultures were suspended in DEPC-treated water and heat-denatured at 99 oC. The supernatant was used as a template for PCR and RT-PCR. The RT-PCR Ct value was five times lower than the PCR Ct value (Fig. 4a). To further test whether RT-PCR was more sensitive than PCR, 10-fold serial dilutions of the lysates were detected. Results showed that for each dilution, the RT-PCR Ct values were consistently five lower than the PCR Ct values, and the lower detection limit of RT-PCR was lower than that of PCR (Fig. 4a). For signature gene BMEI0567, the RT-PCR assay can only detect 103 CFU per reaction. To confirm the increased efficiency and to screen for a good candidate, another three genes, BMEI1305, BMEII0503, and BMEI0363, were selected and tested. As shown in Fig. 4(b–d), for any of these genes, the RT-PCR Ct value was one to five lower than that of PCR. The lower detection limit for RT-PCR was 10-fold lower than that of PCR for all of the three genes. However, the detection limits differed significantly. Sensitivity of RT-PCR for BMEII0503 was limited to 100 CFU per reaction; for BMEI0363, 10 CFU; and for BMEI1305, 1 CFU. That is, RT-PCR of BMEI1305 had the highest sensitivity, with a detection limit of 1 CFU, which was, in principle, the highest one for molecular detection.
Figure 4: Sensitivity of selected target genes with PCR and RT-PCR. Brucella culture with defined concentration was heat denatured and serially diluted. Serially diluted cultures were subjected to detection by PCR and RT-PCR with primers for BMEI0567 (a), BMEI1305 (b), BMEII0503 (c), and BMEI0363 (d). Sensitivity of RT-PCR was consistently higher than that of PCR. Full size image
Therefore, BMEI1305 was an ideal signature candidate for RT-PCR detection of Brucella. To evaluate the sensitivity of RT-PCR for clinical sample detection, blood samples were collected from brucellosis patients and detected using PCR and RT-PCR assays. RT-PCR is identical to PCR with the exception of an initial step in which reverse transcriptase is used to transcribe an RNA sequence into its DNA complement. Blood samples were hemolyzed and mixed with DEPC-treated water (1:1) and heat-lysed for 5 min. Lysed samples were centrifuged and 2 μL of the supernatant was used for detection. PCR and RT-PCR were used to detect 10 sera-positive samples RT-PCR respectively. Four samples were found to be positive using PCR, while six were found to be positive using RT-PCR (Table 1). The PCR Ct values ranged from 35.4 to 38.5, while the RT-PCR Ct values ranged from 32.2 to 38.1. For each of the samples, the RT-PCR Ct value was about three cycles lower than that of PCR. For the two samples found positive only using RT-PCR, the Ct values were 37.2 to 38.1. This is reasonable, because if the Ct values were increased by three Ct, they would be outside the upper Ct value range for PCR. DNA sequencing of the amplification products confirmed that the two samples were true positives. These data indicated that RT-PCR could diagnose brucellosis with higher sensitivity than PCR and reduce the false negative rate (two in six, 33.3%).
Table 1: Detection results of blood samples from brucellosis patients by PCR and RT-PCR. Full size table
To test whether this technique can be applied universally for bacterial detection, five other bacteria, including Proteus mirabilis, Streptococcus pneumonia, Escherichia coli UPEC, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Staphylococcus aureus, were also detected. Candidate target genes with high transcription levels were selected based on previously reported expression profile studies. Bacterial cultures were heat lysed and detected using PCR and RT-PCR. As shown in Table 2, for the selected genes, the RT-PCR Ct values were lower than those of PCR. The decrease in Ct values varied with the different bacteria genus and target genes. Decreased Ct values ranged from less than one to higher than nine. That is, the most significant decrease would theoretically increase the sensitivity by about 1000 fold. These data confirmed that RT-PCR for sensitive detection of bacterial pathogens could be extended to other bacteria and be used as a universal strategy for bacterial detection.The decision still didn’t sit well with Mickey Mantle, even 25 years later.
Plagued by leg and knee pain for the majority of his career, the 37-year-old Yankee icon wasn’t getting any younger in the spring of 1969. But the option of calling it quits plagued him just as much as his injuries had, going as far to occupy his subconscious mind years after he had announced his retirement.
“I used to have that reoccurring dream, I was trying to get back into the ballpark,” Mantle told Bob Costas in a March 1994 interview. “I could hear (manager) Casey (Stengel) and the team out there playing. All the gates were locked and I had to try and sneak through a hole in the fence to get into the ballpark. And then if I did get in, I’d hit a ball that should’ve been a hit but I couldn’t run and the outfielder would throw me out.”I’ve been getting a number of requests recently to write about building your own home bar. I am by no means an expert in this regard but am happy to speak to my own approach. Let me be clear- my home bar is very much a work in progress. I would venture to guess that it will never quite feel complete. But with a little attention and TLC, we’ve been quite happy with what we’ve been able to put together.
A note that everything in here should be taken with a grain of salt. If all you want to do is sip on a good bourbon at the end of the day, you don’t need 99% of the items listed below. But if you are looking to partake in some simple cocktails at home or entertain a couple of guests, this list is a decent starting point.
Basic Tools:
1) A jigger- for proper measurements of all ingredients. No need to get anything gold plated.
2) A strainer (Julep or Hawthorne)
3) A shaker (Boston or regular)
4) A solid pairing knife
Bonus Tools:
1) Bar spoon- You can stir your cocktail with a straw if needed. The mixing spoon is a nice addition if you want to invest
2) Mixing glass- Again, you can stir you cocktails in a pint glass if it works for you. If you’re looking for the next step up, consider investing in a Yarai.
3) A citrus juice press- feel free to squeeze ‘em by hand but this certainly makes the job easier.
4) A muddler- For all your muddling needs.
5) A Y-peeler- Excellent for garnishing your cocktails and for removing skin to add lemon or orange oil.
6) A Channel Knife- When a recipe calls for “a twist” this is what you need.
7) Ice Cube Trays- You can certainly pick these up at your local Dollar Store; however, I love having silicone trays at home. It’s going to sound pretentious, but the more you drink the more you realize the quality of your ice matters. Consider investing.
Basic Glassware:
1) Tumblers (pictured above)- These glasses are great for everything from an Old Fashioned to a Mojito. No need to invest huge amounts. You can get a set of four at a decent price point.
2) Coupes (pictured below)- For any cocktails served up. I use mine for Manhattans, Daiquiris, etc.
Bonus Glassware:
1) Copper Mugs (pictured below)- Generally used to serve a Moscow Mule.
2) Collins or Highball- Tend to use these for a Pimm’s Cup, Mai Tai, Long Island Iced Tea, etc.
3) Champagne Flutes- Nice to have for French 75’s and on New Years Eve.
4) Hurricane Glasses- because I’m cheeky and I’m a complete sucker for a Pina Colada.
If you’re thrifty and willing to take the time to hunt, many of these items can be found at your local second hand store (especially the glassware). Almost all of these items can be found at Parched Pengiun which carries a an amazing selection of glassware and bar tools with an emphasis on quality at every price point. If you’re living in Vancouver, many of their items can also be found at Atkinson’s which is my personal go-to.
On a final note, even if you’re working on a tight budget and aren’t looking to over-commit to your home bar, I’d suggest finding one piece that’s “yours”. This doesn’t have to involve dropping $100 on a single glass, but find yourself something that you’ll reach for on a day that’s extra special or extra hard.
A very special thank you to the folks at Parched Penguin for providing the stunning glassware and bar tools for this shoot! Cheers!I don’t buy into a lot of cyber-scares, but having my vital statistics accessible to anybody who feels like snatching it out of the air is definitely something I’d like to avoid. It’s not a new threat, but it seems that RFID-enhanced IDs are fast becoming the standard instead of a high-tech option. And since the security surrounding them is laughable to any serious hacker, it’s dangerous proposition to mandate them.
This AP story is a good summary of what’s been going on in the chipped ID world over the last couple years. If you’ve gotten a passport recently, or a driver’s license in certain states, chances are you’ve got RFID in there just waiting to beam its information to anyone who’s got $100 in easily-obtainable electronics.
Oh God, what can we do?! Well, it’s against the law to disable the RFID in any government-issued ID, so don’t you go off and put it in a microwave or something. But passports get a lot of use and sometimes accidents happen, like maybe you dropped your luggage on it? Or maybe you dropped a hammer on it, over and over?The Oklahoma City Thunder’s recent romp has spawned a whirlwind of approbative adjectives and accolades. Descriptors such as unbelievable, stunning, dominant, and unforgettable have defined the team’s current six-game undefeated march.
As OKC has fostered a penchant for dispatching foes while throwing caution to the wind, Russell Westbrook’s play has transcended the circumscript boundaries of NBA generational lines.
Overall, Westbrook has encroached upon rarefied status while averaging 29.2 pts, 14.3 reb, and 13.5 ast throughout the Thunder’s cold-blooded assailment about the Northwest Division ranks. While December blossoms, a robust 14-8 Thunder iteration sits comfortably aloft the division it claimed last season.
Naturally, with both singular (Westbrook) and collective success bright shining, Oklahoma City has risen as a hot-item within the NBA’s news headlines. Along that sentiment, here is a look at recent articles which highlight the Thunder’s unanticipated achievement.
Brett Dawson of News OK delineates the impact of Oklahoma City’s supporting cast throughout “the streak.”
ESPN.com’s Royce Young explains why Russ’ all-around efforts have lifted his supporting cast.
NBA.Com’s Nick Gallo eloquently recapitulates the Thunder’s recent victory over Atlanta. Addendum: What has happened to the Hawks?
Yours truly examines Westbrook’s protean production, while enumerating how each point, rebound, and assist is essential for OKC to thrive.
Enjoy the links, Thunder nation. And also, remember that Oklahoma City returns to on-court action Friday night (8 PM ET) when hosting the entertaining Houston Rockets.
Until next time.If you’re a little jaded after watching the world’s most advanced carbon fiber race machines careen over the highest mountains in France for the last three weeks during the 2011 Tour de France, Sacha White and his team at Vanilla Bicycles have the perfect remedy. Their lugged road bikes combine the ultimate in modern road-going components with the graceful classicism of a well-made steel frame.
While this creation reveals eye-catching details from every angle, like flawless metal flake paint and hand-pinstriping by Coat, it’s no show pony. It’s kitted out with a Campagnolo 11-speed Record group set and the DT hubs and HOPE skewers have been de-anodised and painted with matching stripes. A lot of Vanilla bikes bear matching hubs, Sacha says it’s an ideal way of bringing a bike’s paint scheme together into a cohesive whole. It’s those details that have earned Vanilla Bicycles their reputation. That’s important because, after today’s modern carbon fiber rigs have frayed and been shelved due to deterioration, these steel frames will be tomorrow’s highly sought after and still desirable classics.
Check out the Vanilla Bicycles website and flickr for more details.During the offseason I had this crazy idea to go grab every pitch from a single game and squeeze it into one GIF. Mission accomplished:
Note: if you are prone to seizures you'll want to skip this GIF and you probably don't want to stare at it for too long.
The game is from May 13, 2014, when Dallas Keuchel threw a complete game shutout against the Texas Rangers. David had the recap for the game and the theme of the comment section seemed to be that Keuchel had arrived as a major league starter. kdm59 had this comment:
Dallas Keuchel has a 3.06 era? Man is he in for some serious regression. Wait. What is that you say? His FIP, xFIP, and SIERRA are all lower? Who would have thunk it Somebody wrote an article proclaiming Keuchel as an ace. Maybe one should be written about all of the starting pitchers. What the heck - do it for the relief pitchers also.
Keuchel's 80 game score for this game would end up being his second highest in the 2014 season. His best mark came two weeks later when he posted an 83 game score after he threw another complete game on May 25, 2015, against the Mariners.
The GIF itself took about six to seven hours to put together. It took two hours to grab all the pitches. Another two hours to trim the video down and convert to a format I could import into Photoshop. Then I spent another two to three hours piecing together the GIF frame by frame.
Mind you, not every pitch is accounted for, but most of them are. They're also not in order. It "only" took about 80 frames to get through Keuchel's throwing motion, so I didn't need all 108 pitches. As for the order, I was at the mercy of CSN Houston's choice of shot when Keuchel started his windup. Sometimes they came back from shots around the ball park to Dallas in the middle of his motion. Other times he was in the stretch and I had to wait until I was further along in piecing together frames to start using the frames from those pitches.
Overall, I thought this experiment was a success. I have some other ideas for similar GIFs, but would love to hear any ideas you might have for similar types of projects.ACLU Had Argued Law Was Discriminatory and Violated Voting Rights Act
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org
WASHINGTON -- A U.S. District Court today blocked Texas’ new voter ID law because it discriminates against minorities and conflicts with the federal Voting Rights Act.
In doing so, the three-judge panel in Washington removed a stumbling block that opponents of the law argued could keep up to 1.5 million Texas voters from the polls in November, the majority of whom are Hispanic or Black.
“By blocking this law, the court reaffirmed the right of all people in this country to participate in our democracy,” said Nancy Abudu, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Voting Rights Project, which represented Texas-based organizations and individuals in the case.
The ACLU and other groups maintained that minorities are less likely to possess any of the six forms of acceptable government-issued photo ID required under the law.
Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, states with a history of discriminatory voting laws – including Texas – must have changes to their voting laws approved, or pre-cleared, by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) or the U.S. District Court in Washington. Texas originally sought preclearance from the DOJ, which the DOJ denied on March 12. Prior to receiving a final decision from the DOJ, however, the state requested approval from the court as well.
“This case demonstrates precisely why we still need Section 5 in 2012,” said Terri Burke, executive director of the ACLU of Texas. “Without the process of federal review it mandates, democracy would have failed the largely minority population who cannot afford to purchase the underlying documents, travel long distances – up to 100 miles in some cases – or take off work to get to the closest government office that issues photo identification.”
The ACLU was among several groups that intervened in the case on the side of the DOJ.
“The ACLU remains committed to helping enforce the Voting Rights Act, and we will continue to challenge any law that threatens the fairness of the voting process for any U.S. citizen,” Abudu said.
Rev. Peter Johnson, of the civil rights and social justice organization Justice Seekers, who testified during the trial, said the decision has implications beyond Texas.
“Historically, the federal courts have been the only place where minorities in the South could defend their right to vote. This decision today further confirms that the system works, that there still are processes by which we can ensure our rights are protected, and that those who fought for equality during the civil rights movement did not do so in vain.”
For a copy of the decision, go to: www.aclu.org/voting-rights/texas-voter-id-decision
To learn more about the ACLU’s work on voting rights, go to: www.aclu.org/pressroom/voting(CNN) Where better to tout a military spending hike than from the deck of the most expensive ship ever built?
President Donald Trump will head to the Navy's newest, most sophisticated vessel Thursday as he seeks to prolong the glow from his well-received address to Congress and provide a jolt of momentum to his governing agenda.
The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier is currently berthed in Newport News shipyard, Virginia, as it readies for its final sea trials as the first of a new class of flat-top ships to take to the seas. The hulking giant will provide Trump the showman with a dramatic $13 billion metaphor for his plan to boost the Navy's 270 vessels to around 350.
But before Trump gets too high on the success of his speech Tuesday night and the projection of power he will use as his backdrop, he might do well to pay heed to the pitfalls that could await him as well. Trump faces challenges to his military ambitions, in part because he has promised to "demolish and destroy ISIS," as he mentioned on Tuesday night, in connection to the plan he has solicited from his generals to combat the terror group.
He also will have to battle Pentagon bureaucracy to achieve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness he has pledged to deliver and battle Congress to get the funds needed to make the investment he desires in the military.
ISIS fight
Trump's plan to crank up the fight against ISIS comes as the long, slower strategy followed by the Obama administration appears to be bearing fruit, with allied Iraqi government and militia forces backed by US air power make progress in their bid to recapture all of the key city of Mosul, Iraq. The ISIS footprint in Syria is also shrinking.
An intensified plan to finish off ISIS more quickly could mean greater risks to US soldiers, who could be directly sent into Syria under plans currently being considered by US generals. There could also be a prolonged stay for American forces in Iraq to ensure stability after ISIS' expected defeat. Both were scenarios the Obama administration decided to avoid.
JUST WATCHED Graham: We need less of tweeting Trump Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Graham: We need less of tweeting Trump 02:16
Trump's apparent tolerance for risk was highlighted by the first major combat operation of his presidency -- the anti-terror raid in Yemen that killed US Navy SEAL William "Ryan" Owens. Owens' father has called the raid "stupid" and demanded an investigation. But Trump said in his speech that he had spoken to Defense Secretary James Mattis and received assurances that the raid yielded vital intelligence.
Trump quoted Mattis as telling him: "Ryan was a part of a highly successful raid that generated large amounts of vital intelligence that will lead to many more victories in the future against our enemies."
Then, in the emotional high point of the address, he singled out the SEAL's widow, Carryn Owens, as the House floor erupted in a prolonged standing ovation. Carryn, with tears streaming down her face, looked to the heavens and joined in the applause.
Many were moved by the episode, but several observers also warned Trump not to be overconfident about the raid's success.
South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham told CNN, "One thing I would caution the President to do is don't oversell."
He continued, "When a raid is being oversold, then you maybe won't learn from what you should learn from. So my advice is celebrate this young man as a hero and not oversell, and I don't know if they're overselling but we'll eventually find out."
Sequester endures
Trump won't be the only recent president to visit Newport News. His predecessor, Barack Obama, held an event in the submarine manufacturing works in 2013 to lobby against sequester spending limits that cut deep into the Defense Department budget -- curbs that Trump is now trying to remove.
Trump touted his plan to hike military spending by 10%, or $54 billion, to be paid for by cuts to the State Department and other government agencies, in his speech on Tuesday night.
"To keep America safe, we must provide the men and women of the United States military with the tools they need to prevent war -- if they must -- they have to fight and they only have to win," Trump told lawmakers, military brass and members of his Cabinet in the televised address.
"I am sending Congress a budget that rebuilds the military, eliminates the defense sequester and calls for one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history."
It will be easier said than done for Trump to fundamentally reshape the balance of defense and domestic spending. To begin with, 60 votes will be required in the Senate to lift the sequester spending caps on military funding, and there is no guarantee Democrats will go along.
JUST WATCHED Report: Massive cuts at State Department Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Report: Massive cuts at State Department 02:20
Some Republicans -- like Arizona Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Armed Services Committee -- argue that Trump's spending hike for defense is not sufficient to make up for the deep cuts that have been made during the time of the sequester.
And Senate GOP majority leader Mitch McConnell expressed doubts that a budget that slashes the State Department's funding -- as suggested by the White House -- could pass.
"I for one, just speaking for myself, think the diplomatic portion of the federal budget is very important, and you get results a lot cheaper frequently than you do on the defense side," McConnell told reporters on Tuesday.
Cost overruns
And while Trump is likely to highlight the Ford aircraft carrier as an example of American military might and advanced technological skill, the ship also provides the President with a warning about the unforeseen development snafus, cost overruns and delays that can accompany defense spending.
Trump has made reforming the procurement process and the high cost of defense articles something of a crusade.
"We've saved taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars by bringing down the price of fantastic -- and it is a fantastic -- new F-35 jet fighter, and we'll be saving billions more on contracts all across our government," Trump said on Capitol Hill on Tuesday night.
The 100,000-ton, 1,100-foot-long USS Gerald Ford (CVN 78), named after the president who succeeded Richard Nixon after the Watergate saga, was laid down in 2009. It's state-of-the-art electromagnetic catapult is designed to allow 25% more missions to be flown each day than by existing carriers.
Photos: US aircraft carriers Sailors spell out #USA with the American flag on the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in the Persian Gulf in late June 2015. When the Roosevelt leaves the Gulf sometime in October, the U.S. Navy will be without a carrier in the important region for two months. Hide Caption 1 of 31 Photos: US aircraft carriers A MV-22B Osprey, from Marine Operational Test and Evaluation Squadron 1, lifts off from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) on June 12, 2016. Click through the gallery to see other US aircraft carriers. Hide Caption 2 of 31 Photos: US aircraft carriers Tug boats maneuver the aircraft carrier Pre-Commissioning Unit Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) into the James River during the ship's turn ship evolution on June 11, 2016. This is a major milestone that brings the country's newest aircraft carrier another step closer to delivery and commissioning later this year. Hide Caption 3 of 31 Photos: US aircraft carriers The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) arrives at the U.S. Navy base in Yokosuka, a suburb of Tokyo, Japan, on October 1, 2015. The Reagan is the fifth U.S. carrier forward deployed to Japan following USS George Washington (CVN 73), USS Kitty Hawk (CV 63), USS Independence (CV 62) and USS Midway (CV 41), according to the Navy. Hide Caption 4 of 31 Photos: US aircraft carriers The aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) (Ike) transits through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea on June 13, 2016. Ike, the flagship of the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, is conducting naval operations in the U.S. 6th Fleet area of operations. It could be used to support operations against ISIS in the Mideast. Hide Caption 5 of 31 Photos: US aircraft carriers A rainbow forms over the bow of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis as the ship steams in the Pacific Ocean on February 3, 2015. Hide Caption 6 of 31 Photos: US aircraft carriers U.S. aircraft carrier classes – U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter (left) and Philippine Secretary of National Defense Voltaire Gazmin shake hands on a Marine Corps V-22 Osprey as they depart the the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74) after touring the aircraft carrier as it sailed in the South China Sea on April 15, 2016. Hide Caption 7 of 31 Photos: US aircraft carriers A photo illustration of the U.S. Navy's Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy (CVN-79). The ship's keel laying ceremony was celebrated Saturday, August 22, 2015, in Newport News, Virginia. The ship is expected to replace the USS Nimitz (CVN-68), scheduled for inactivation in 2025, in the Navy fleet. The newest Kennedy will be the second carrier of that name. The first John F. Kennedy (CVA-67) was the last conventionally powered carrier. It was decommissioned in 2007. Hide Caption 8 of 31 Photos: US aircraft carriers The aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) passes under the Friendship Bridge while transiting the Suez Canal on Dec. 14, 201 |
so as not to scare off developers and that the needs of moderate- income residents, like teachers, should also be considered.
Impact fees, a key strategy in the Road Map, have become a common way for California cities to generate affordable funds with the loss of state redevelopment money and cutbacks at the federal level. Essentially, after conducting studies to establish the need for affordable housing and its economic feasibility, cities can levy a fee on market rate housing developments. Fees, either by unit or per square feet, are then collected and administered through an affordable housing fund.
Neighboring Emeryville and Berkeley, among the 27 Bay Area cities that have adopted impact fees, have one city-wide fee of $28,000 per unit of housing. Oakland’s proposed ordinance, however, creates three zones with three different impact fees which, according to city staff, reflect three different market realities. (see below)
Attachment G, Map of Impact Fee Zones for Residential Projects, smaller size
Over two dozen speakers lined up to support a single impact fee and against expanding the reach of the funds to moderate income earners.
“There’s no major precedent for this. In all the comparable programs that we’ve researched, they are city-wide, one rate, one fee,” said Zack Murray of the Greenlining Institute. Acknowledging the needs of residents with moderate incomes, he emphasized that “the burdens are falling most on people of low and very low income and our priorities have to shape that.”
Until this meeting of the CED, the proposed affordable housing fund targeted Oakland residents with extremely low, very low and low incomes — from 30 percent to 80 percent of the Oakland’s Average Median Income (AMI) – $27,850 to $71,600 for a family of four. This latest plan before the CED — the last stop before the full council considers approval at the upcoming April 19 meeting — proposed to expand the definition of affordable to include residents with incomes from 80 percent to 120 percent of AMI ($71,600 to $111,500 for a family of four).
East Oakland resident Teddy K. Miller, and senior associate at Policy Link who helped write the Road Map, reminded the committee that this document “specifically called for impact fees to be targeted to low- income and very low- income households. These households are most vulnerable to displacement and are disproportionately black, brown, red and yellow.” He said the proposal represented a compromise with developers at the expense of Oakland’s poorest residents.
West Oakland resident Guitar Whitfield, himself homeless for a time, lamented the loss of 25 percent of black Oaklanders and urged the CED to “keep affordable housing funds focused on lower income folks.
Following an hour and half of public testimony, Vice Mayor Annie Campbell Washington described the perception that the CED is unaware or insensitive to the housing crisis as “very painful.” She said the policy was “ complicated and complex and we’re dealing with a lot of outside forces beyond our control.” The three zones reflected “not where the money would be spent on affordable housing,” she said, but rather the current market reality where there “is no market rate housing being built in East Oakland.”
Campbell Washington, a former school board member, also pointed out that by expanding the criteria to 120 percent of AMI, a family of four with two teachers might not be forced to leave Oakland.
“I am not ready,” she said, “to give up on the idea of funding housing for educators. Maybe we need to take the label off of it so it doesn’t say 120 percent of AMI.”
Council President Lynette Gibson McElhaney referenced her working class upbringing in affordable housing and called the current crisis “heartbreaking.”
“This is not a question of us not caring about our community as we seek to use these funds in a way that we balance the needs of our community,” Gibson McElhaney said
At Large council member Rebecca Kaplan questioned the advisability of expanding the definition of affordability in the proposal. She suggested taking up the issue separately along with consideration of placing limits on the various qualifying income levels.
Council member Larry Reid, who chaired the meeting, joined Campbell Washington and Gibson McElhaney, with Kaplan abstaining, in recommending that city council pass the ordinance at the April 19 meeting
Though disappointed with the policy shift, activists promised to continue the conversation.
“It is absolutely legitimate to be concerned about folks who are at 120 to 150 percent of the AMI,” said Gloria Bruce of East Bay Housing Organizations. “But for the people who testified at the meeting, the idea of making $100,000 (a threshold) they are not even in that realm. At this moment, I think we just have to look at people who are at the bottom of the income scale.”
——————
– A Roadmap Toward Equity: Housing Solutions for Oakland, California, https://www.policylink.org/sites/default/files/pl-report-oak-housing-070715.pdf
– If approved by city council, fee collection will start September 1 and be phased in at varying rates:
Zone 1 (roughly downtown and north to the Oakland hills): starting at $5,500 to $22,000 by 7/1/18;
Zone 2 (roughly W. Oakland with parts of the Embarcadero, a large square east of Lake Merritt to 23rdAve., and a postage stamp near the Coliseum), starting at $4,500 to $17,750 by 7/1/18; and
Zone 3 (the rest of E. Oakland to the San Leandro border), 0 fees through 6/30/18 to $12,000 by 7/20/20.
Each zone also includes varying fees for capital improvement (Parks, Fire, Libraries, etc.) and Transportation which, when included, make the final, phased-in fees of $24,000, $19,250, and $13,000 across Zones 1, 2 and 3 respectively. The resulting fees will be deposited in the City’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund (AHTF) to finance affordable housing projects.(CNN) Vincent Bugliosi, the Los Angeles prosecutor who became a best-selling author with "Helter Skelter" -- his true-crime account of the Manson Family killings -- has died at the age of 80, his wife confirmed Tuesday.
He died Saturday of cancer.
Bugliosi rose to prominence as the 35-year-old deputy district attorney assigned to try Charles Manson and several of his followers over a series of bloody 1969 murders meant to incite a race war.
The crimes, which Manson ordered to be as brutal as possible, shocked the nation. The victims were stabbed hundreds of times. One, Sharon Tate, was more than eight months pregnant.
Investigators found the words "rise," "pigs" and "helter skelter" written in blood at the crime scenes.
"As soon as I got on that case and I saw blood words, words printed in blood on a wall, immediately I told my wife, 'I don't know what the motive for these murders is,' " Bugliosi told CNN's Ted Rowlands last year. "But, I said, 'It's gonna be freaky and far out.' "
After securing death sentences for Manson and the others -- sentences commuted to life in prison when California's death sentence was abolished -- Bugliosi retired from the DA's office. He had won 105 of his 106 felony trials, including 21 murder convictions, according to his publisher.
In 1974, he published "Helter Skelter," his account of the murders and trial. The book became what publisher Simon & Schuster called "the biggest selling true crime book in publishing history."
Despite going on to a successful career as a writer after the Manson case, Bugliosi lamented to Rowlands that it was as if had had "never done anything else."
"But I'm so associated with him, I can no more disassociate myself from him than I can jump away from my own shadow," he said.
Manson, 80, remains incarcerated at Corcoran State Prison in California. He has been denied parole 12 times.
In 1991, Bugliosi scored another best-seller with "And the Sea Will Tell," his account of the double murder of a couple on a Pacific atoll. He represented one of the suspects in the case and won an acquittal.
His 2008 book on the O.J. Simpson trial, "Outrage," also reached the top of the New York Times hardcover bestsellers list, according to the publisher, making him the only true-crime writer with so many top sellers.
More recently, he had written books on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and an indictment of President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.
His last book, "Divinity of Doubt: The God Question," was published in 2011.
He told Rowlands that he kept talking about Manson mostly because people kept asking him about the killings and the trial, and he said that Manson to some extent got away with murder, because his death sentence was commuted.
"He doesn't deserve to be alive. If anyone should be executed, it should be Charles Manson," Bugliosi said. "Do I go around during the daytime, 'Geez, I'm upset that he's alive'? No, I don't even think about him. I don't think about this case."Will You be Miley Cyrus' Friend
Flashback: It's 1987 and I have been bribed into running for a local pageant. It gets down to the top 10 finalist and damn I have been chosen. The announcer gets to me, it is my turn to answer the million dollar question, "If you were to win Miss Pepper Fest, what would you hope to get out of the experience?" I stand there thinking what the heck have I gotten myself into and I have nothing. She asks me the question again and I mutter the word "friends" and nothing else. The manly lady says, "Is there anything else you would like to get out of this?" And I say "nope, just friends".
Miley Cyrus is on a quest to find more friends due to the fact that her parents are so strict. She said, "some people think you have more privileges than other teenagers because of what you do, and that not it at all. It's actually the opposite." Miley said both parents are strict but her mom is stricter when it comes to who she is hanging with (we're guessing it is because of all those pictures that you take with your friends).
Well Miley, why don't you try entering a pageant. You could definitely find some more friends or just embarrass yourself for life and be known as the girl who just wants friends. As for your friends, your mother needs to make sure to always send you out in your Sunday best and to make sure there are no cameras. Oh and one other thing, you should not share your candy with others under any circumstances - if you get my drift. Good luck on your quest for friends!
Hey, I have added a couple of Miley's questionable photos after the jump that I am sure are what make Mama Cyrus a wee bit worried.A Michigan man is getting a lot of help in the love department.Matt Hill works for a lawn and garden company in Grand Traverse County.His co-workers recently surprised him by putting his face and contact information on a billboard.The 6-foot-tall, 25-year-old says he was pretty surprised by the gesture, but he's making the most of it.So what should ladies know about Matt?"Like going out, hangout out, two tracking, working on my truck," Hill says. "My favorite color is lime green. I don't really have a favorite food. Lately it's been peanut butter and jelly. I don't know, Chinese. I really like Chinese food."Hill says his favorite movie "has probably gotta be 'The Hangover.'""I like a lot of chick flicks, perfect date is pretty much a bonfire out in the middle of the woods, at somebody's house, small party, something like that," Hill says.Hill says he's taken dozens of calls, texts and emails from potential suitors.He says he's not looking for just a fling, he's really hoping to find someone to settle down with.By Yeganeh Torbati and Richard Cowan WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration would support legislation allowing illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children to gain lawful permanent status and eventually citizenship, a Department of Homeland Security official said in testimony to Congress on Tuesday. The Trump administration last month ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, which began in 2012 under former President Barack Obama and offered nearly 800,000 young people who came to the United States illegally as children protection from deportation and the right to work legally in the United States. The administration said it ended DACA because Obama overstepped his constitutional authority by creating the policy unilaterally and without Congressional approval. President Donald Trump called on Congress to enact a law to protect DACA recipients, and last month angered some of his fellow Republicans by negotiating with congressional Democratic leaders on possible legislation. “Under a rational bill these individuals would be able to become lawful permanent residents with a pathway to citizenship,” Michael Dougherty, assistant DHS secretary for border, immigration and trade policy, said at a Senate hearing, in response to questioning on the Trump administration’s position on whether “Dreamers,” as they are often called, should be allowed to stay in the United States. A DHS spokesman did not immediately respond to a question regarding whether the administration’s stance applies only to individuals who had DACA status, or also applies to those who would have qualified had the policy not been rescinded. Earlier in the hearing, when asked what Trump would like to see in a “DACA fix bill,” Dougherty recited a list of the administration’s immigration priorities, including border control, expanding the ability to quickly remove people who enter illegally and do not claim asylum, better vetting, reducing visa overstays, reforming non-immigrant business visas and establishing a merit-based system that favours skilled immigrants.
BURDEN
DREAMERS
DACA
DACA
“AON” Several Republican bills have been introduced in Congress that address various aspects of that agenda, including one that has been endorsed by the White House, but many Democrats and immigration groups see those proposals as poison pills that would kill the chance for a deal on the issue. Democrats say it is unfair torecipients to make legislation helping them contingent on a broad suite of enforcement and reform measures. “Please do not put the burden on the Dreamers to accept every aspect of comprehensive immigration reform to get a chance to become citizens of the United States,” Senator Dick Durbin said during the hearing. Last month Trump said he was close to a deal with top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer and top House of Representatives Democrat Nancy Pelosi on protections forrecipients that would have border security measures including surveillance systems but not funding for his planned wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, a central 2016 campaign promise. After his meeting with the Democrats, Trump said, “We’re not looking at citizenship” for the Dreamers. But Pelosi and Schumer described their understanding with the president differently, saying that Trump had embraced the provisions of a bipartisan proposal called the Dream Act that would grant permanent legal resident status to Dreamers who qualify, and eventually, a pathway to U.S. citizenship. On Tuesday, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who was among a group of Republicans who had dinner with Trump on Monday, was asked whether the president’s tentative agreement with Schumer and Pelosi was still live. “I think what Nancy said when she left the meeting is different from what everybody else in the meeting had the impression of,” McCarthy said, declining to answer further questions. An aide to Pelosi, asked about McCarthy’s comments, said “there is no change in our understanding” after “subsequent conversations” with the White House. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity. Schumer, at a news conference after the Democratic caucus, said, “We were explicit that the president would support…the Dream Act. If they are backing off that, we ought to know.” (Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati and Richard Cowan in Washington; Additional reporting by Susan Cornwell; Editing by Leslie Adler)REYNOSA, Tamaulipas — As cartel violence continues to terrorize this border city, a leaked video appears to show teams of cartel gunmen holding a prayer meeting before heading out to commit unspeakable acts of violence. Nine days of ongoing cartel violence have led to 25 deaths including at least one police officer and one innocent bystander.
The video shows at least two dozen gunmen wearing street clothes with makeshift vests and ammunition pouches while carrying various assault rifles.
The gunmen line up in front of an authority figure within the cartel and they begin to loudly recite a prayer in Spanish. The short video ends with the group shouting praises for the Gulf Cartel.
The video appears to have been taken at night or during the early morning hours in the streets of Reynosa by one of the Gulf Cartel gunmen at the gathering. While the date of the video remains unclear, for more than one week, the border city of Reynosa has been ground zero for a fierce territorial war between rival cartel factions.
As Breitbart Texas previously reported, the raging violence has spread terror throughout the city as convoys of gunmen continue to roam the streets searching out rival forces. State officials have confirmed to Breitbart Texas 25 casualties including one police officer and one street food vendor who was caught in the crossfire.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to the Mexican States of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish. This article was written by “A.C. Del Angel” from Reynosa, Tamaulipas.Illustration by Nicole Ginelli
Dr. Sharon Giese is one of the most sought-after cosmetic surgeons in New York City. Focusing mostly on aesthetic procedures, Giese has been known for her excellent work, leaving women looking natural and refreshed instead of pinned and plucked—and moreover, for her signature alternative to the facelift, "the Natural Lift." However, Giese also does labiaplasty, a surgery that tightens the look of the labia and has become increasingly popular in the last five years.
"No one wants to advertise that they have had anything done," says Giese over the phone. With other procedures, she says, her clean work has come back to bite her; her clients are not walking advertisements for her practice. However, with labiaplasty—or "vaginal rejuvenation," or "a facelift for the vagina"—women aren't exactly flaunting their refreshed vulva as though it were a nose job anyway.
Today, labiaplasty and vaginal rejuvenation are in high demand, and not just for women who are post-menopausal or post-childbirth. According to a UK study, interest in vaginal rejuvenation increased by 109 percent in 2012. In 2013 more than 5,000 labiaplasties were performed in the United States alone, demonstrating a 44 percent increase in actual procedures performed in just one year.
The hottest trend in this realm is non-invasive vaginal rejuvenation through a technique pioneered in Europe called Protégé Intima. The 12-minute procedure requires four weekly treatments that are about $300 each and has earned the nickname "vontouring," after the makeup contouring ritual championed by drag queens and the Kardashians. Contouring allows people to completely reshape their facial structure with makeup alone, but Giese—who says she is waiting for success rates to increase before bringing the procedure to her own practice—explains that Protégé Intima is a bit more involved.
Using a fractional laser gentle enough for the face, Protégé Intima uses a beam that cuts through and stimulates natural collagen and elastic tissues in the lips of the vagina. While Giese has not tried it herself, it's said to be a painless procedure. (She sounds skeptical as she notes this.) Nevertheless, the lasers have been approved by the FDA (though not specifically for cosmetic use) and are making their way into the American cosmetology market for women.
But while the trend may sound ridiculous to some, it isn't all about the aesthetic. Not only does the process promise to improve the outward appearance of the vagina, making the labia look plumper and firmer, but it also improves sexual satisfaction.
"I have a lot of patients who, while doing liposuction surgery or breast surgery, want to also do some labial surgery after seeing I also do that," Giese says. "It only adds half an hour or an hour onto the surgery time."
Photo by Alan Shapiro via Stocksy
Women's reasons for wanting labiaplasty range as much as vaginas do themselves. The labia is meant to protect the vaginal opening, which is constructed of highly sensitive nerve endings, from bacteria, and women with larger labia have thought this to be the cause of pain during sex or even yeast infections. People most commonly go under the knife to mend post-menopausal or post-childbirth changes that can make looser inner labia uncomfortable in clothing or during sex.
However, aesthetic justifications for labiaplasty or the new, non-surgical vaginal rejuvenation procedure are becoming more popular. Giese comes from a long line of surgeons, but she's the first in her family to focus on aesthetic cosmetic surgery. During medial school, she was mentored by Dr. Donald Laub, a pioneer of transgender medicine in the US. Training with professionals nearly two decades her senior, Giese apprenticed in aesthetic genital surgery, and even though today her focus is mostly on the breasts, body, and face, she says patients prefer her to do their labiaplastic procedures.
"These are relatively simple surgeries, but they make women a lot more comfortable," Giese explains. "What is most common is that the inner lips of the vagina can get bigger as people age or after childbirth, and the [labiaplasty] fix takes a simple operation. Sometimes it's the outer lips—they can get bigger or even deflated, and with that, we can cut some of the skin out or do fat grafting. It's aesthetic, but also about physical comfort." Some OB/GYNs blame pornography for showcasing small labia as the norm, while other doctors claim their patients have noticed irritation when wearing tight yoga pants.
Porn star Sydney Leathers had a labiaplasty (along with multiple other plastic surgeries) and laughed off recovery. "This is going to sound nuts, but it was the easiest plastic surgery to recover from," the Indiana-based adult star says. "I was in absolutely no pain. I actually went for a walk on the beach afterwards. I had stitches for about four weeks, so I had one period where I could only use pads, and I couldn't have sex or masturbate during that time. Those were the only downsides." Leathers also attempted to sell the parts of her labia that were removed on eBay in a publicity stunt, but bids were quickly halted because the website has a strict policy about purchasing human body parts or remains.
"I have been doing plastic surgery for 15 years, and I think there is a lot more focus on the vagina, how it looks, because of the overwhelming popularity of Brazilian waxing," says Giese. "There has been a real change in the aesthetic of the vagina, more focus, and women are taking a lot more of the hair off. I see naked women all the time during liposuction, tummy tucks, so I see the change in grooming. It's not just a change in the younger population—it's in the mature population as well."
Female pubic hair is a topic that has become popular outside of quiet, women-only circles. In 2014, Men's Health published an article about the bush making a comeback (the author also stated that, based on her own research, 90 percent of men surveyed were strictly against their partners being completely bald), while Cameron Diaz famously declared in her book that, "The idea that vaginas are preferable in a hairless state is a pretty recent phenomenon, and all fads change." Maybe vajazzling and laser hair removal are trendy now, but what happens if the full bush comes back? Will Gucci start marketing the pubic wigs once used for syphilitic prostitutes in the 1450s? Are the trend-starved and totally hairless going to sport designer merkins?
I don't want to make women feel bad about themselves; from a marketing perspective, it can be easy to exploit any insecurity.
Giese thinks about trends when her patients request permanently removing all their pubic hair. "One of my personal hesitations, because we have laser hair removal treatments available [at my practice], is [not] leaving a certain amount of hair. Losing everything...that is really pre-pubescent looking," she says. And as far as aesthetics go, the look of your labia matters less if they're covered in hair.
Giese is positive about plastic surgery, and realistic about her career-oriented clientele who desire effective surgeries and quick recovery time. After all, she works in Manhattan, a city where, she says, upper-class women take very good care of themselves and age well, all over their bodies. Innovative, non-invasive aesthetic procedures that are fast but long-lasting meet the needs of today's female market.
While many plastic surgeons are seen as capitalizing on women's insecurities, however, for her part Giese seems very wary of innovations in vaginal rejuvenation. "There are so many variations of normal," she continues. "I don't want to make women feel bad about themselves; from a marketing perspective, it can be easy to exploit any insecurity. Women have a hard enough time being held up to airbrushed Hollywood standards. Women are taken advantage of at the makeup counter, with packaging, marketing, and [vaginal aesthetic] is another area where women can be taken advantage of—there is plenty of subjectivity to the scale."Ilmi Umerov, Deputy Chairman of the Crimean Tatars Mejlis waves to supporters in Boryspil International airport at a news conference in Kiev, Ukraine, Friday, Oct. 27, 2017. Ilmi Umerov and Akhtem Chiygoz, representatives of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis, had been unlawfully convicted by Russian authorities in the Crimea in 2014 for their public protest against Russia's illegal occupation of Ukraine's Crimea. Chiygoz and Umerov arrived in Ukraine on Friday after having been extradited to Turkey due to efforts of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
MINSK, Belarus (AP) — Two Crimean Tatar leaders released from prison in the Russia-annexed region have flown to Ukraine’s capital of Kiev and are vowing to continue their opposition to Russia’s control of the Black Sea peninsula.
Ilmi Umerov and Akhtem Chiygoz were released Monday and flown to Turkey, since Turkish President Reycep Tayyip Erdogan helped mediate their release.
Both are deputy chairmen of the Mejlis, a representative body for Tatars, a largely Muslim Turkic ethnic group that makes up about 15 percent of Crimea’s population.
Chiygoz had been sentenced to eight years in prison on a charge of organizing a riot during Russia’s 2014 annexation. Umerov had been sentenced to two years for criticizing the annexation.
Umerov says Friday that re-establishing Ukrainian control of Crimea will be “all of our fight.”THE kingdom presented its shift from the Islamic to the Gregorian calendar as a leap into modernity. In April the dynamic deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Muhammad bin Salman, chose to call his transformation plan Vision 2030, not Vision 1451 after the corresponding Islamic year as traditionalists might have preferred. Recently his cabinet declared that the administration is adopting a solar calendar in place of the old lunar one. Henceforth they will run the state according to a reckoning based on Jesus Christ’s birth, not on the Prophet Muhammad’s religious mission.
But puritans in Islam’s birthplace are wincing at their eviction from control first over public space, and now of time. Guardians of the Wahhabi rite, who seek to be guided by Muhammad’s every act, ask whether they are now being required to follow Jesus. A slippery slope, the clergy warn, to forgetting the fasting month of Ramadan altogether; the authorities are rewinding the clock to the jahiliyyah, or pre-Islamic age of ignorance. The judiciary, a clerical bastion, still defiantly insists on sentencing miscreants according to the old calendar.
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The clerical unease has been matched by that of government employees. Under his transformation plan, the prince has already docked their perks and slashed pay. To add to their misery, they now complain they will have to work an extra 11 days each year. Yet another example, they gripe, of globalisation favouring rulers at the expense of the ruled.
A lunar calendar made sense when the moon was the simplest way of counting passing days. But for measuring years it is a poor approximation. It loses some 11 days a year, ensuring that Islamic holy days rotate round the seasons every 32 years. The Saudi administration, hopes one official, should now be more orderly and in step with the rest of the world. But having spent a lifetime learning dates from the year Muhammad fled from Mecca to establish the first Islamic state in Medina (622 in the Gregorian calendar), counting from Jesus’s birth is likely to leave many scratching their headscarves.
Still, Saudi Arabia is not alone in wrestling with ancient calendars. It is 1395 in Iran, 2628 in Kurdistan, and 5776 in Israel’s Knesset. Nor is it just the Middle East that is out of sync with the times. It is 2559 in Thailand, though only year 28 (of the Heisei era) in Japan.President Donald Trump fired back at Stephen Colbert in an interview this week following the Late Show host’s profanity-filled attacks on him during a segment on his show this month.
In an interview with Time magazine published Thursday, the commander-in-chief took on Colbert, who told a series of crude jokes about Trump during last week’s Monday broadcast that culminated in the host calling Trump’s mouth a “c*ck holster” for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“You see a no-talent guy like Colbert. There’s nothing funny about what he says,” Trump told Time. “And what he says is filthy. And you have kids watching.”
In his opening monologue last Monday, the CBS funnyman said, “The only thing [Trump’s] mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c*ck holster.” The joke was panned as homophobic and drew outrage from fans, who quickly made the hashtag #FireColbert a trending topic on Twitter.
Colbert addressed the controversy surrounding the joke on his show two days later and said he didn’t regret attacking the president.
In his remarks to media Thursday, Trump said Colbert’s crude comments “only builds up my base.”
“It only helps me, people like him. The guy was dying. By the way they were going to take him off television, then he started attacking me and he started doing better,” Trump added. “But his show was dying. I’ve done his show. … But when I did his show, which by the way was very highly rated… The highest rating he’s ever had.”
Indeed, Colbert’s late-night show has seen a ratings resurgence since Trump took office.
The president also took aim at a number of mainstream media personalities.
Trump told Time that CNN host Chris Cuomo looks like a “chained lunatic” on TV and said CNN’s Don Lemon is “perhaps the dumbest person in broadcasting.”
“Chris Cuomo, he’s sitting there like a chained lunatic. He’s like a boiler ready to explode, the level of hatred. And the entire, you know the entire CNN platform is that way,” Trump said.
“This Don Lemon who’s perhaps the dumbest person in broadcasting, Don Lemon at night it’s like – sometimes they’ll have a guest who by mistake will say something good. And they’ll start screaming, we’re going to commercial. They cut him off. Remember?”
“Washington Post, New York Times, they’re really, really dishonest,” Trump continued before lashing out at Time reporters. “You people are quite dishonest in all fairness.”
Trump also said he said he no longer tunes in to watch MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who has repeatedly ripped the president and his administration. The president called Fox News the “most accurate” news network and says he tunes in to watch the morning programming.
“I do watch Fox in the morning, and their ratings have gone through the roof because everyone knows I’m watching Fox. But they’re pleasant. And if I do something wrong they report on it,” he said. “I don’t mean they – if I do something wrong. But it’s really, honestly it’s the most accurate.”
Read Trump’s full remarks to Time here.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @JeromeEHudsonJust when Liverpool look like getting back into the Champions League for the first time in four years, they release annual accounts that could get them kicked out again.
But, as followers of Manchester City and Chelsea are fast realising, massive losses do not necessarily equate to a breach of Uefa’s Financial Fair Play regulations – for which expulsion from Europe is the ultimate sanction.
On the face of it, Liverpool’s £90 million-plus loss between 2011 and 2013 is well in excess of the £37m FFP allows them to lose during that period, and the period 2011-14.
However, spending on infrastructure is exempt from FFP calculations and, as any Liverpool supporter worthy of the name knows, the club have wasted millions on stadium-related projects in the last seven years.
Despite ousting George Gillett and Tom Hicks as owners almost three-and-a-half years ago, Liverpool’s accounts show they were still saddled with debt related to aborted attempts to build a new ground at Stanley Park.
An interest-free, inter-company loan of £46.8m from parent company Fenway Sports Group was used to pay off debts from such projects dating back to the Gillett and Hicks regime.
When it comes to FFP, exactly how much money can be deducted from the £49.8m loss Liverpool announced overnight is something Uefa’s Club Financial Control Body will determine when it comes to forensically examine Liverpool’s 2011-14 accounts this time next year.
Those deductions will include other exemptions, such as investment in youth development, while the club are expected to plough even more money into the redevelopment of Anfield in the near future.
Their income, meanwhile, will also be boosted by their share of year one of the massive new £5.5 billion broadcast deal which began this season, although they will have to wait for a potential £30m of Champions League riches until next year.
Interestingly, their financial statement does include a forecast for the current season relating to transfers and wages – which are undoubtedly covered by FFP.
Liverpool revealed their transfer and contract activity – including the extention of Luis Suarez’s deal – cost them £53.3m.
How much that affects their ability to meet FFP will only become clear this time next year.The Quebec premier’s constitutional discussion paper – “Quebecers: Our Way of Being Canadian. Policy on Québec Affirmation and Canadian Relations” – was a surprising addition to the busy news cycle last week.
Over four years have passed with little comment since Premier Couillard first expressed his openness to engage in constitutional discussions that could lead to a vote in the National Assembly in Quebec endorsing the 1982 Constitution Act.
Whatever the motivation behind the Quebec proposal to reopen the constitution, the most troubling initial reaction was the now all-too-familiar nuance-free refusal by the prime minister to consider any constitutional reform whatsoever.
He employs the same categorical response to timidly sidestep other inconvenient debates and overdue constitutional initiatives essential to strengthening our democracy, like electoral reform or serious senate reform, and the use of consultative referenda.
The prime minister claims to act in the public interest, arguing that opening the Constitution in any way is just too difficult and distracting for Canadians, and that referenda generally are “bad things to happen” that “give people a chance to lash out at institutions…”
Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Constitutional debate and reform may be “difficult”, but it is an absolutely essential and ongoing component of a well-functioning representative democracy.
The Constitution is a “living tree” and belongs to the people of Canada.
Our elected leaders cannot shrink from their profoundly important obligation to serve the people and facilitate, whenever needed and with the consent of the people, changes to the fundamental law of the land for the benefit of present and future generations of Canadians.
In March 2013 I commented on Premier Couillard’s first announcement of his desire to engage in constitutional discussions. Among other things, I suggested that drafting a new preamble to the Constitution could be a mechanism for the recognition of Quebec’s distinctiveness that would constructively engage all Canadians. If the premier is now serious about pursuing constitutional reforms that strengthen both Canada and Quebec, would he be open to this approach? I include my earlier commentary below because the suggestions and cautions therein are still fully pertinent and applicable today. I look forward to the debate.
“I congratulate Philippe Couillard on his election as leader of the Liberal Party of Quebec, and I note with interest his openness to engaging in constitutional discussions that could lead to a vote in the National Assembly in Quebec endorsing the 1982 Constitution Act. I find it refreshing, but I have several notes of caution that must be raised.
Mr. Couillard proposes that a future Quebec government would undertake conversations with the other governments in Canada to determine how to proceed forward. He suggests that this could include other subjects, such as Senate reform, and could be concluded during the “symbolic window” of the 150th anniversary of Confederation in 2017.
In moving forward, it is important to remember a couple of lessons from the debates over the Meech Lake Accord and the Charlottetown Accord. First, it can be confusing to undertake multiple constitutional reforms at the same time. Linking different reforms can be unprincipled and deprive people of a chance to decide each on its own merits. Second, the Constitution belongs to the people of Canada, who must be consulted directly with respect to all significant reforms by way of referendum. If discussions proceed simultaneously on different subjects, there should be a separate referendum question on each.
In this light, discussions could proceed simultaneously on both Senate reform and what is the very important and serious step of drafting a modern and inclusive preamble to our Constitution. But whatever proposed reforms to the Senate and the preamble ultimately emerge must be put to Canadians in separate referendum questions.
By way of brief background, it must be noted that Quebec is not excluded |
morning, go to the villages and conduct transactions until they run out of cash. In the afternoon, they go back to the bank and repeat the process.
Since demonetisation, the number of customers has increased, even as cash availability has dropped. Reddy used to get around 20 customers each day. Now she has an average of 120 customers. With only Rs 50,000 in hand at a time, this translates into less than Rs 500 per customer.
Apart from pension accounts, business correspondents are disbursing payments under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, doling out around Rs 900 to Rs 1,200 per head each week.
As these transactions are necessarily of low amounts, it is essential for business correspondents to have access to notes of smaller denominations. But this depends on the cash flow at banks. For instance, Reddy received Rs 50,000 in Rs 2,000 notes one day. Her husband managed to get change for all the notes at a small cost. For the most part, she has received bundles of Rs 100 at a time.
Cashless push
As a cash-driven economy struggles to survive without it, the Chandrababu Naidu government has been aggressively pushing its promise of a cashless state.
On the same day that Padmamma made the laborious walk to Annoor, a self-help group in the village gathered at the house of one of its members. They have not been able to access loans since demonetisation, but this was not the subject of their discussion that day. K Mohan, a community coordinator for Annoor cluster, had asked them to gather for a workshop on mobile banking. Mohan was armed with three large banners with explanations written in Telugu. These he strung across the branches of a large mango tree.
You can use mobiles to do account transfers of Rs 200, Rs 500 and Rs 1,000, he told his sceptical audience. You can get your pension with a RuPay card. Soon, you can use your cards anywhere, in shops, to buy clothes, at chicken centres.
A woman called Jnanamani asked disbelievingly, “That is all fine, but can we use a card to get a bus ticket?”
Everyone laughed at the idea.
K Mohan explains the benefits of mobile banking to members of a self-help group in Annoor village.
All photos by Mridula Chari.Following months of media calls for deficit reduction, cable news channels spent just over 7 minutes reporting on a revised Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projection that the 2013 deficit will decline by more than previous estimates. Broadcast network news evening shows did not cover the new report.
CBO Announces New Report: Deficit Projections Lower For 2013
CBO: "The Budget Deficit Will Shrink This Year To $642 Billion." According to the Congressional Budget Office's most recent analysis, assuming current law remains unchanged, "the budget deficit will shrink this year to $642 billion... the smallest shortfall since 2008":
If the current laws that govern federal taxes and spending do not change, the budget deficit will shrink this year to $642 billion, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates, the smallest shortfall since 2008. Relative to the size of the economy, the deficit this year--at 4.0 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)--will be less than half as large as the shortfall in 2009, which was 10.1 percent of GDP. Because revenues, under current law, are projected to rise more rapidly than spending in the next two years, deficits in CBO's baseline projections continue to shrink, falling to 2.1 percent of GDP by 2015. [Congressional Budget Office, May 2013]
Wonkblog: CBO Has "Cut Their Prediction For 2013 Deficits By More Than $200 Billion." At The Washington Post's Wonkblog, Ezra Klein explained that the new CBO report cuts previous predictions of the 2013 deficit by more than $200 billion:
Washington's most powerful budget nerds have cut their prediction for 2013 deficits by more than $200 billion. They've cut their projections for our deficits over the next decade by more than $600 billion. Add it all up and our 10-year deficits are looking downright manageable. [The Washington Post, Wonkblog, 5/14/13]
Media Largely Ignores CBO's Lowered Deficit Projection
Network And Cable News Largely Ignore CBO's Revised Projection Of Lower Deficits. According to a Media Matters analysis, the May 15 ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news programs did not cover the CBO's announcement that deficits are projected to shrink more than previously estimated. On cable news, CNN devoted less than one minute to the announcement, while Fox News devoted 1 minute 44 seconds of coverage. MSNBC covered the announcement the most, with 4 minutes and 53 seconds of coverage.
Previously, Media Focused On Deficit Reduction More Than Other Economic Issues
In April News Coverage, Calls For Deficit Reduction Beat Out Mentions Of Other Economic Issues. A Media Matters analysis of economic news coverage in the month of April found that media continued their long-established focus on deficit reduction. In 45 of 123 total segments discussing policy impacts on the economy, guests or hosts on network and cable news advocated for deficit reduction as a priority. Calls for deficit reduction beat out mentions of other economic issues, most notably the need for economic growth and job creation, and economic inequality.
[Media Matters for America, 5/14/13]
In April Economic Coverage, Calls For Deficit Reduction Made Up Significant Portion Of Economic Coverage. A Media Matters analysis of economic news coverage in the month of April found that with the exception of CBS News, cable and network news organizations all devoted a significant amount of coverage to calls for deficit reduction. ABC News devoted the most, with a vast majority of their economic coverage focusing on deficit reduction.
Falling Deficits Absent From Segments Calling For Deficit Reduction. While 45 segments on the economy in April discussed the need for deficit reduction, only four total segments mentioned previous CBO estimates that deficits are projected to fall in coming years.
[Media Matters for America, 5/14/13]
Methodology
For the mentions of the May 2013 CBO report on revised deficit projections, Media Matters reviewed closed captioning transcripts and internal video archives for May 15, 2013, from 6 a.m. to midnight for MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, and the evening news broadcasts of NBC, CBS, and ABC News. We identified and reviewed all mentions of the word "deficit," and included any discussion of the CBO report.
For the review of deficit reduction as a percentage of total economic coverage, Media Matters conducted a Nexis search of transcripts of evening (defined as 5 p.m. through 11 p.m.) programs on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and network broadcast news from April 1 through April 30. We identified and reviewed all segments that included any of the following keywords: econom!, jobs, growth, debt, and deficit. When transcripts were incomplete, we reviewed video.
The following programs were included in the data: World News with Diane Sawyer, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Evening News (CBS), Face the Nation, Nightly News with Brian Williams, Meet the Press with David Gregory, Fox News Sunday, The Situation Room, Erin Burnett OutFront, Anderson Cooper 360, Piers Morgan Live, The Five, Special Report with Bret Baier, The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity, On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, Hardball with Chris Matthews, Politics Nation with Al Sharpton, All In with Chris Hayes, The Rachel Maddow Show, and The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell. For shows that air re-runs (such as Anderson Cooper 360 and Hardball with Chris Matthews), only the first airing was included in data retrieval.
Media Matters only included segments that had substantial discussion of policy implications on the macroeconomy. We did not include teasers or clips of news events, and re-broadcasts of news packages that were already counted on their initial broadcast in the 5p.m.-11p.m. window.
We define segments that call for deficit reduction as a priority as those where either the host or guest mentions deficit and debt reduction as a pressing need.I kill things when I start to feel and, as I'm gutting said thing, I remember where I stand on the food chain. Feelings are something I really only desire in a woman... or a maybe a really soft man. The winters can get mighty cold in these parts and nothing generates more heat than a power bottom, or so an army fella once told me...
seriously though, I'm not sure what your after here, if you know me, you know I'm not friendly. I'm not even friendly to my friends. Males, I'm sure have feelings, some even invert their penis' into vaginas they have so many feelings. In this instance one might say your approach is similar to a smart teenage girl. Men shouldn't wear their feelings on their sleeve or have rational thought swayed by them...I could give you examples, but that's really what dads are for...you should call yours and ask. I run, meditate, build, box, kill, shoot, dive, ski, bike, fly, race, travel, vacation, gamble, smoke, fuck and drink...not to mention I grow my own meat and vegetables, cook 5star meals 4 nights a week. I don't really have time to feel. Well, the lamb kabobs will "feel" good in my stomach. After I run later, the shower will "feel" nice... You know, I really did like that animal, fed it, groomed it, kept its sleeping area nice and clean.. even favored it among it's brethren.. Cutting it's throat and bleeding it out does make me pause...and think, why does my girlfriend cry when I have to kill her pets? Disney? I think it's Disney. Regardless, she'll enjoy the kabobs as well...Normally, in the scientific method, you make a prediction based on a hypothesis, then observe to see if your prediction comes true. If not, you discard the hypothesis and get a new one.
In the arena of climate science, apparently, different rules apply. If your prediction is wrong, you redouble your search for mechanisms to explain the “variance”. There is no chance the underlying theory is wrong, or even flawed.
How bad did the climate establishment miss their projections? Former NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer has collected 73 model forecasts, and compared them to observations (circles and squares; H/T wattsupwiththat.com):
Dr. Roy Spencer: 73 climate model predictions vs actual observed temperatures (see link).
Spencer says:
The discrepancy between models and observations is not a new issue…just one that is becoming more glaring over time. It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out in the coming years. I frankly don’t see how the IPCC can keep claiming that the models are “not inconsistent with” the observations. Any sane person can see otherwise.
But the New York Times is not any sane person. In an article called “What to Make of a Warming Plateau“ they attempt to explain the variance away. This article is worth a read as it has a howler in just about every paragraph. A few examples:
The slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists. True, the basic theory that predicts a warming of the planet in response to human emissions does not suggest that warming should be smooth and continuous. To the contrary, in a climate system still dominated by natural variability, there is every reason to think the warming will proceed in fits and starts.
“A bit of a mystery” indeed. As in, none of the models were accurate. And while there may be some “fits and starts” in individual models, the average increases every single year after 1995. The Times continues:
But given how much is riding on the scientific forecast, the practitioners of climate science would like to understand exactly what is going on.They admit that they do not, even though some potential mechanisms of the slowdown have been suggested. The situation highlights important gaps in our knowledge of the climate system, some of which cannot be closed until we get better measurements from high in space and from deep in the ocean.
The scientists may not understand what’s going on, but it is a 100% certainty that any prescription for the planet’s supposed malady is going to cost prosperity in the developed nations, but it will cost lives in the developing world. If you’re proposing heart surgery, you sure as hell better know what you’re talking about. This talk of “potential mechanisms” and “important gaps in knowledge” gives me a cold chill.
In fact, scientists can calculate how much extra heat should be accumulating from the human-caused increases in greenhouse gases, and the energies involved are staggering. By a conservative estimate, current concentrations are trapping an extra amount of energy equivalent to 400,000 Hiroshima bombs exploding across the face of the earth every day.
My first instinct upon reading this was that somebody dropped a decimal place or five in their calculation. Taking the factoid at face value, though, they’re saying that the energy equivalent of 2.2 billion “Little Boys“, or over 35 trillion tons of TNT energy-equivalent that has just gone missing over the last 15 years. Pooof, just like that.
Climate scientists, according to the Times, suspect the ocean is the culprit:
Exactly why the ocean would have started to draw down extra heat in recent years is a mystery, and one we badly need to understand. But the main ideas have to do with possible shifts in winds and currents that are causing surface heat to be pulled down faster than before. The deep-ocean theory is one of a half-dozen explanations that have been proffered for the warming plateau. Perhaps the answer will turn out to be some mix. And in any event, computer forecasts of climate change suggest that pauses in warming lasting a couple of decades should not surprise us.
Emphasis added throughout.
Well, I can pick out one of the 73 models in the Shepard graph that looks like it may have a 15-20 year flat spot. The rest of them more-or-less uniformly predicted year to year warming. The rest of that paragraph is scientist-speak for “if we fling a handful of spaghetti against the wall, some of it may stick!”
The problem is that the climate community cranked up all these computer models without really understanding all the mechanisms which influence climate. In modeling, history matching is the easy part. It is awfully easy to convince yourself that you are working with the most robust possible mathematical model based on the “goodness” of the history match. Put it in forecast mode, however, and it blows up.
It’s referred to as the “uniqueness” problem. In other words, no matter how good a history match a model gives, there are other possible explanations that match history just as well. If you don’t have a good grasp of all the mechanisms (which climate modellers clearly don’t), you cannot possibly have a true, unique match. You have a bad model.
This is a common pitfall with oil and gas reservoir simulation, with a lot fewer variables and reasonably well understood physical mechanisms and a scope that is many orders of magnitude smaller than “global”.
The admission of the degree of uncertainty and the lack of knowledge of controlling mechanisms is vindication for all of us skeptics who have been resisting the calls form James Hansen, Michael Mann, Al Gore and the Nobel Prize-winning IPCC to impose massive penalties on our economy.
Further reading: Alternate New York Times Headline: ‘Global Warming Saves Civilization’
Cross-posted at stevemaley.com.
Follow @VladimirRS
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+’://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, ‘script’, ‘twitter-wjs’);Finkel generally hangs out at the top of the ladder (peaking at #1) with decks that most other people aren’t playing (e.g. Elysian midrange, 4CC control). 4CC control begins with a Combrei control shell (Desert Marshal, Combrei Healer, Siraf, Sandstorm Titan). It splashes Primal for 4X lightning storm and card draw. There is a light shadow splash for Azindel’s Gift, which is good against other slow and durdle-ey decks.
This is a Tier 1 deck with a slightly favorable winrate against the overall metagame.
Decklist
4 Seek Power (Set1 #408)
4 Desert Marshal (Set1 #332)
4 Lightning Storm (Set1 #206)
2 Secret Pages (Set1 #81)
2 Vanquish (Set1 #143)
1 Amber Acolyte (Set1 #93)
4 Combrei Healer (Set1 #333)
4 Knight-Chancellor Siraf (Set1 #335)
4 Push Onward (Set1 #213)
2 Scorpion Wasp (Set1 #96)
4 Wisdom of the Elders (Set1 #218)
1 Rain of Frogs (Set1 #221)
4 Sandstorm Titan (Set1 #99)
4 Harsh Rule (Set1 #172)
2 Black-Sky Harbinger (Set1 #385)
1 Celestial Omen (Set1 #241)
1 Mystic Ascendant (Set1 #116)
1 Azindel’s Gift (Set1 #306)
1 Sword of the Sky King (Set1 #186)
3 Justice Sigil (Set1 #126)
3 Primal Sigil (Set1 #187)
1 Shadow Sigil (Set1 #249)
5 Time Sigil (Set1 #63)
1 Combrei Banner (Set1 #424)
4 Seat of Order (Set0 #51)
4 Seat of Progress (Set0 #58)
4 Seat of Wisdom (Set0 #63)
Key ideas
The deck runs all of the Combrei control cards (including 2X Scorpion Wasp to deal with aegis threats) with the exception of Valkyrie Enforcer. The deck runs the best sweepers in the game: 4X lightning storm and 4X harsh rule. So the deck has a pretty decent matchup against aggro as long as you don’t get influenced screwed.
For finishers, there are:
4X Siraf – Her ability will win the game if it goes unchecked.
4X Sandstorm Titan
Mystic Ascendant
Azindel’s Gift – This card slowly gives you card advantage since opponents can’t hold removal (and silences) in their hand for your threats.
Sword of the Sky King – Some control decks have difficulty dealing with this equipment.
1X Celestial Omen
These win conditions can be slow (or easily dealt with like Sandstorm Titan and Mystic Ascendant), so other decks have plenty of time to execute their own gameplan.
Metagame matchups
This deck has decent matchups against almost all of the metagame. This deck should be favored against durdle-ey midrange decks (e.g. Xenan, Stonescar Weapons, some forms of Feln, Felnscar). This deck may be weak to Stronghold’s Visage + Eye of Winter control, but the prison-style decks see very little play in the high ladder ranks. 4CC may be somewhat unfavored against the greediest Combrei decks that play Marshal Ironthorn and Mystic Ascendant.
Metagame tuning
If you are constantly facing aggro, then the 3-color version of this deck may work better. Azindel’s Gift is useless against aggro, so ditch the shadow splash. Perhaps substitute in Valkyrie Enforcer, which is strong against aggro and Combrei. The double justice influence requirement is less tough with 3 factions.
Specific matchups
Sometimes, this deck will lose to itself. You will not have the right power/influence base and you cannot cast anything. Otherwise, the deck is packed with cards that are good against Bandit Queen (Lightning Storm) and Rakano (creatures, removal, and Harsh Rule). Overall, the matchup against aggro is fine.
Combrei midrange and control: You want to hold silences for Siraf and Mystic Ascendant. Azindel’s Gift is fine in the matchup, but you may not have time to land it while dealing with their threats. Create boardstalls in the hope that the opponent will commit too much to the board so that you can play a Harsh Rule (hopefully not into Stand Together, which costs 3 power and gives all of the opponent’s units aegis and +1/+1).
When their Sandstorm Titan attacks into yours, you should pay attention to Stand Together. You may wish to gang block the Titan to play around Stand Together.
Like Combrei versus Combrei mirrors, sometimes you want to hold Siraf until you have 11 power so that you can play her and get a single ultimate activation before she is silenced.
Visage + Eye of Winter control: You are the beatdown. Carefully play around their 4X Harsh Rule.
Beating this deck
This deck has a greedy influence/power base. If you are playing aggro, carefully pay attention to the Justice influence since Harsh Rule requires double Justice. Otherwise you have to figure out the right amount of power to commit to the board based on the probability that the control player has a Harsh Rule. (Oftentimes 4CC may not have the correct answer for a particular threat.)
This deck has some trouble with 3/3, 3/4, and 3/3 flying creatures since they do not die to lightning storm or vanquish.
You can identify this deck based on the Combrei + Primal influence power base. Both the 3 and 4 faction version are greedy and somewhat slow… you are generally the beatdown if you see 3 factions.
Links
Oct 28 update post on Finkel’s newest list
Finkel’s post on some random play situations
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Google apparently has its eye on a cooler form of Google Glass – a smart contact lense with embedded sensors and cameras. Patent Bolt first reported that the the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Google that reveals a new multi-sensor contact lens computer system. Now, the same source says Google will add cameras to the contact lenses. The patent filings offer little information about how users would control remote devices from their contacts, or whether the lenses are meant to show a virtual reality.[Libreboot] libreboot is not GNU Libreboot anymore
From: Leah Rowe Subject: [Libreboot] libreboot is not GNU Libreboot anymore Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2016 01:34:02 +0100 User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Icedove/45.2.0
Hi, The Free Software Foundation recently fired a transgendered employee of the FSF, just for being trans, because some transphobic cissexist people wrote negativly about her. The FSF fired her because they thougdt she, rather than the assholes bullying her, was causing the FSF potential damage. As a result, she was fired from the FSF. As a trans person myself, I find this disgusting. I'm declaring here and now to the whole world that Libreboot is no longer part of the GNU project. I do not believe that the FSF or the GNU project deserve to exist. Please remove libreboot from the GNU mailing list infrastracture, and GNU Savannah admins please delete the "lr" account. I own libreboot.org and I have the ability to create my own mailing lists for the libreboot project. I do not wish to use the GNU/nonGNU mailing lists anymore. Libreboot is not part of GNU or FSF anymore. I hereby denounce both GNU and FSF. Long live the LGBT community, and long live the free software movement. Meanwhile, FSF and GNU can both go fuck themselves. -- Leah Rowe Libreboot developer Use free software. Free as in freedom. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Use a free operating system, GNU/Linux. https://www.gnu.org/ Use a free BIOS. https://libreboot.org/ Support freedom. Join the Free Software Foundation. https://fsf.org/ Minifree Ltd, trading as Ministry of Freedom | Registered in England, No. 9361826 | VAT No. GB202190462 Registered Office: 19 Hilton Road, Canvey Island, Essex SS8 9QA, UK | Web: http://minifree.org/
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reply via email toIraqi Federal Police display a captured ISIS flag in Mosul in July. (Reuters photo: Ahmed Saad)
The fate of ISIS reminds us that those who pose as superhuman savages often cannot stand up to payback by their outraged victims.
The Islamic State just lost its capital at Raqqa, and with it the last of the terrorist group’s fantasies of establishing a Middle East caliphate.
In recent years, ISIS has horrified global audiences with video clips of unspeakable atrocities. What sort of humans could behead, incinerate, drown, torture, and blow up innocent civilians, mock and record such horror, and then narrate their macabre videos for a world audience?
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How could such pre-modern psychopaths ever be defeated, given that in a matter of months ISIS had managed to overrun vast swathes of Iraq and Syria?
The zealotry of the Islamic State in celebrating the unthinkable added to its cult of invincibility. Young would-be jihadists from the Western world flocked to the group’s Middle East compounds, eager to engage in viciousness as if it were the latest video game.
Dejected Middle Eastern armies seemed to have no answer for the medieval violence of ISIS. Impotent Western leaders either ignored or denied the group’s homicidal appeal. Indeed, in 2014, pessimistic analysts were predicting that ISIS might soon carve out enough oil-rich parts of Iraq and Syria to spread its barbarism throughout the region.
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But recently, the entire Islamic State project began going up in smoke almost as abruptly as it was born. It turned out that squadrons of American bombers were not impressed by ISIS threats and bombed to smithereens its command centers and headquarters.
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Secretary of Defense James Mattis relaxed the rules of U.S. engagement and made it a veritable open season on Islamic State jihadists, while American forces trained entire new cadres of anti-ISIS fighters. Specialized drones and GPS-guided Western munitions made it almost impossible for ISIS leaders to escape constant attack.
Their past horrors had earned Islamic State jihadists only ill will. Tens of thousands of Iraqi and Syrian victims volunteered to fight ISIS with a ferocity that they had rarely exhibited in the past.
The net result is now mass ISIS surrenders. Half-starved jihadists in rags and in tears beg their captors for forgiveness — and not to show them the same savagery that had so often fueled ISIS slaughtering.
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The fate of ISIS reminds us that throughout history those who posed as superhuman savages, without any limitations to their cruelty, were often bullies who could not stand up to the determined payback of their finally aroused and outraged victims.
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After 9/11, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden frightened Westerners with his tough talk about the “strong horse” of radical Islam, for whose brutality and cruelty a supposedly weak and decadent West had no antidote. But after years of the U.S. and its allies whittling away al-Qaeda from Afghanistan to Iraq, and bombing its ringleaders wherever they appeared, bin Laden was killed in a dingy Pakistan compound.
In the early 1940s, the most feared killers in the world were Nazi kingpin Heinrich Himmler’s SS elite. The SS claimed they were the new racial supermen, overseeing extermination camps and spearheading the German army by executing prisoners and civilians alike.
But by May 1945, with Berlin in ruins and Hitler dead, former killers were trying to hide their SS tattoos. Like Himmler himself, most SS commandos were cowardly, fearing that their victims might do to the SS what the SS had done to others.
Before and during World War II, Japanese militarists slaughtered millions of civilians in China and butchered their way through the Pacific. They boasted that they would never surrender in World War II. Yet after the Allies had rooted out fanatical forces from their strongholds in the Pacific and bombed Japan into ruins, even the most diehard fanatics meekly gave up.
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Civilization in peace becomes complacent. People understandably hope that growing terror on the horizon will burn out on its own.
During calm periods, prosperous and more liberal nations certainly do not want to send their youth across the world to fight those who claim that they would enjoy nothing more than dying while trying to kill those who are more successful and better off.
But the true strength in arms is usually civilizational, not tribal. A modern state that lives by the rule of law and the consent of the governed, and is energized by free markets and a free people, can be a deadly force when finally provoked into rage. The same is true of innocent victims initially overwhelmed by tribal killers like those of the SS, al-Qaeda, or the Islamic State.
ISIS may have been able to invent ever more macabre ways of dismembering innocent victims, but it could not make a fighter plane or win the lasting allegiance and loyalty of the majority of Iraqis and Syrians.
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And so, like soulless killing machines of the past, ISIS is now finally being killed off.
READ MORE:
The Fall of Raqqa Is a Marvelous, Bipartisan American Victory
If ISIS Falls, Don’t Forget the Lessons of the Recent Past
Did Trump Beat ISIS?Space Blog
Hooray! Orion Trail Honored by Independent Games Festival Great news! Orion Trail received an Honorable Mention in Excellence in Narrative by the Independent Games Festival. We’re so tickled by this award, we could do a dance. Learn more about it here.
Be a Space Captain. Really! If you’ve always wanted the experience of sitting in the captain’s chair of an intergalactic space ship, then your wait is over! You can now experience Orion Trail in virtual reality on the Samsung Gear VR. Players will experience the same core gameplay found in the original version, but the game’s interface and characters have been adapted for a VR environment. Orion Trail VR is available on the Oculus Store. To read more about it, here’s the press release.
Anonymous asked: I am not seeing my name on the credits? I got the $25 tier. A few names did slip through, so we’ve been fixing those as we find ‘em.
If you backed us during the campaign, contact us on Kickstarter. If you pre-ordered on BackerKit, visit https://orion-trail.backerkit.com/ and contact support. We’ll get you sorted out!
atoolongurl asked: How can I ask for a press copy of your game? Contact us at info@schellgames.com and we’ll try and get you hooked up.
Anonymous asked: Who's the most handsomest captain? There are just too many to choose.
Anonymous asked: I just watched Sips' YouTube playthrough and I love it. Any chance of an Android version in the future? It seems like it's made for mobile!! We’ve definitely kept tablet as a platform in mind throughout the entire development. We have no immediate plans yet, but we’ll let you guys know as soon as we do.
Anonymous asked: Hi. Have the steam keys been sent out yet to Kickstarter backers? I backed the project at the $10 cheapskate level, and haven't received my key yet. Everyone should have received an email from BackerKit back in August with a Steam Key. If you can’t find your email, contact us on Kickstarter and we’ll get you sorted out.
Trading, Regulation Uniforms & Impending Launch (October 12th!) (This was cross-posted from our Kickstarter page) Exciting news, space-friends. Things are heating up in the cold vacuum of space. Have I used that one before? Probably. I don’t care, I’m super pumped to let you in on the latest developments for Orion Trail. Orion Trail leaves Early Access on October 12th! Warpin’ Weasels! It’s happening! It feels like only yesterday that we were a prototype on Steam Greenlight. I guess time really does fly when you’re hurtling through space at the speed of light. Or something. We’ve been in Early Access for about two months now and have received some great feedback for how to improve the game. Having acted on (and continuing to act on) that feedback, we’re confident that releasing the game to the greater public is the next step for us. Here’s a breakdown of what this means: On October 12th, we’ll be leaving Steam Early Access. All Early Access keys (activated or not) will still work and give you a full copy of the game.
People who have been waiting for their DRM-free copy of the game will get their first for-real build. This will likely be through the Humble Store, but we’ll let you know.
Just because we’re launching doesn’t mean we will stop supporting the game. We’ll be adding new (free) content to the game, fixing bugs, and still responding to feedback for at least a month after our official launch.
… But what about Hunting / [other cool feature]? When we were preparing for the Kickstarter, Hunting was one part of the game that we refused to cut, until it became obvious to us that the money needed with the Hunting mini-game wasn’t going to be realistic to ask for. So, we were forced to make a tough choice: do we risk the project not getting funded, or do we feel confident enough that the game can be strong enough on its own without shooting at space buffalo? Ultimately, after a lot of discussion, we believed that the game has enough to bring to the table without it, even though it could compromise what it means to be a “trail” game. We hear your desire for skill-based mini-games, and believe us, we want them, too. If we get enough interest in the game after launch, we’ll be looking for ways to try and make features like hunting a reality. So, tell your friends about our impending launch and help us get there! Those space jackalopes aren’t going to phaser themselves. Keep letting us know what you like and don’t like about the game. We’re listening, and want to make it better!
The T-Shirts have arrived! Seriously! They’re here! It’s been a long time coming, but they’ve all arrived in the studio late last week, and we’re getting ready for a big packin’ party here at the studio. We’ll let you know when they’re in the mail!
Upcoming Build: Trading Posts Mike hinted at this a few weeks ago, but this next build will have the first incarnation of Trading Posts appearing in our Starmaps! The structure is similar to an Away Mission, and you’ll be able to trade your less-needed resources for stuff that you’re running out of. Plus, they look super cool on the Starmap. Stream Tomorrow (9/25/15) at 2:30PM! Tomorrow is Friday, which means it’s time for another stream! Tune in and check out a preview of the next build on our Twitch Channel. It’ll be funzies.
Whew. That was exhausting. That’s all for this update.
Keep on keepin’ on, space pals. We’ll be in touch very soon.
- Dave
Tough Space Decisions in Space Why hello there. Long time no blog. We’ve been continuing to plug away at the game over the past week, workin’ on adding new content, polishing up the UI, transitions, and adding some fun flair to the Star Map. Oh, also, we’ve enabled Steam Cloud support for your save data, which’ll make switching between machines that much easier. In other news, we’ve been keeping a keen eye on balance. Specifically, we’re hoping to give you guys more of a reason to pick options that aren’t necessarily your best stat. Our first attempt at this was restricting your choices based on which resources you do or don’t have, but I think we can do better. In many cases, there are encounters where options will give you rewards based on the options you pick. However, we’re not showing you what said rewards are. So, we’re planning to add a little bit to the UI to call the rewards for each option you can pick. However, we’re keenly aware that we don’t want to flood the UI with too much information, so we’re treading very lightly. Expect to see these changes either in the next update, or the one following it, along with some cool additions of content. Mike talked about trading posts, and they’re just about ready to be added in the coming weeks! That’s all for this time! - DaveGabriel Valdez had high “high hopes” for his undocumented immigrant clients in June, when John Morton, the director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, issued a memo directing agents and prosecutors to use their “discretion” to focus resources on deporting the bad guys—immigrant terrorists, criminals, and other undocumented ne’er-do-wells—instead of booting out otherwise law-abiding unauthorized immigrants ensnared in the nation’s troubled immigration system.
After the Morton memo was released, Valdez, a Phoenix attorney who defends unauthorized immigrants in state and federal court, anticipated fewer deportations of his undocumented clients who’d been caught in workplace raids and convicted of state felonies associated with carrying fake work papers. Instead, he discovered, these clients faced a greater risk of deportation in the wake of the memo.
The reason: In Arizona, county prosecutors used the Morton memo to their advantage by offering his clients “only plea bargains that would result in [swift] deportation.”
Although immigrants tend to commit fewer crimes than the native-born, the feds |
making the transaction than before. If they felt otherwise, then they wouldn’t buy. That’s why every such exchange is, to use a hoary business cliché, a win-win scenario.
Granted, charitable individuals and companies routinely rush supplies to disaster-stricken areas. Indeed, countless volunteer organizations exist for precisely such a purpose, and many more leap to lend aid in the most extreme instances. Such efforts rarely suffice to meet the aggregate need. Hence, high prices — price-gouging — act as a force multiplier by enlisting yet more help from people who are either unmoved by compassion or unable to give help for free. The high prices also give for-profit companies such as hardware stores an incentive to ship goods where they’re most needed.
This is Econ 101 for Dummies: Higher prices are a natural response to surging demand. They (a) impede consumption and (b) encourage resupply. Yet Virginia’s price-gouging act is written with the assumption that there is some magical line prices shouldn’t cross. Below the line, they are simply the result of regular market forces. Above the line, they are “unscrupulous,” “artificially inflated,” and “exploitative.”
Where is that imaginary line? Wherever politicians think it should be. And what makes them capable of making such a judgment? Well — nothing, really.
There’s another argument against price-gouging laws that has nothing to do with basic economics and everything to do with fundamental liberty: Government has no business dictating prices in the first place. A proprietor who wants to sell, say, AA batteries for five dollars apiece — or $50 apiece, for that matter — has every right in the world to do so. Just as customers have every right in the world to go someplace else.
Market transactions should be arrived at through mutual consent — not the threat of force. After all, if a proprietor has no right to set his own prices, then what possible right could some third party have to set them for him?China’s decision to implement strong
international sanctions against North Korea has forced the regime to devise new
methods to smuggle in metals such as titanium that are essential in weapons
manufacturing. Daily NK has learned that Pyongyang is using its trade companies
to hide titanium plates on the bottoms of their trucks when crossing the
border, in order to enable uninterrupted supply.
“We heard that sanctions were kicking in
and not long after that, the supply for titanium plates used for weapons manufacturing
dried up,” a source from North Pyongan Province told Daily NK on Wednesday.
“The Dandong customs office (in China) is closely watching all goods related to
weapons production, so they haven’t officially been permitted to come through
since March,” the source explained.
Sources in the same province and South
Pyongan Province corroborated this news.
A titanium plate (20 mm x 200 mm x 200 mm)
costs approximately 1,000 to 1,500 RMB, and those manufactured for military
purposes are being smuggled into Sinuiju hidden underneath trucks, claimed the
source.
Due to its lightness and strength, titanium
has multiple applications in industries like shipbuilding, chemicals, and oil
refineries, and is also used as a material to build nuclear reactors and airplanes.
The metal has good thermal resistance, which is why it is frequently used in
the North to manufacture missiles and other weapons.
In other words, for Pyongyang’s nuclear and
long-range missile development plans, titanium is an essential material. “There
are titanium mines here as well, but the quality is not as good so we’re
dependent on imports,” the source explained.
Beijing’s participation in global sanctions
has threatened Pyongyang’s supply chain. The source reported that even if a
single titanium plate is uncovered during customs inspections in Dandong, it
can lead to the seizure of all goods on the truck and an investigation into the
Chinese counterpart who sold the titanium and the vehicle used to transport it.
In light of these developments, the
leadership has ordered its trade companies to “use all means possible” to bring
in the material, leading to creative methods such as attaching the plates to
the bottom of cargo trucks.
The Chinese government has also prohibited
trade in any materials that could be used for military purposes, additionally
putting the damper on solar panel production within the North.
“These days, they’re even placing
restrictions on the smaller titanium plates that are used to make solar
panels,” the source said. “Ahead of the 7th Party Congress, when they are
supposed to promote Kim Jong Un’s legacy of resolving the power shortage
through solar energy, panel production is on the brink of coming to a halt.”
For this reason, trade companies are under
increased pressure to find new ways to secure their supply of titanium plates,
offering their Chinese counterparts higher prices. Faltering solar panel
production could lead to negative “loyalty assessments” during the upcoming
chonghwa (self-criticism sessions) for the “70-Day Battle,” the source said.On Thursday two senior Catholics in Austria, where reports of the sexual abuse of children by priests and nuns have been in the news, suggested that the role of priestly celibacy may need to be discussed as Catholics seek to understand and end scandals that have erupted across Europe and in the United States in recent years.
The Archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Schönborn, wrote in an article for a Catholic magazine that it was time for the Church to undertake an “unflinching examination” of what might be at the root of the problem of celibate clerics sexually abusing children.
As The Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent, Riazat Butt, explained on Thursday, Archbishop Schönborn wrote that the discussion should “include the issue of priest training, as well as the question of what happened in the so-called sexual revolution,” as well as “the issue of priest celibacy and the issue of personality development. It requires a great deal of honesty, both on the part of the church and of society as a whole.”
On Thursday night, Archbishop Alois Kothgasser of Salzburg told Austrian television, “In the Church’s current situation, the question must be asked whether celibacy is an appropriate way of life for priests and an appropriate way of life for believers.”
As Reuters reports, “There have been daily reports of child sexual abuse in Austrian Catholic institutions since the arch-abbot of Salzburg’s St. Peter’s monastery quit Monday after admitting to sexually abusing a boy 40 years ago.”
On Friday, The Telegraph added, “Salzburg church officials revealed that a man said he was abused by a nun while a child – the first such accusation amid widening allegations of sexual misdeeds leveled against Austria’s Roman Catholic church.”
Neither of the Austrian archbishops directly suggested ending celibacy. In fact Archbishop Schönborn said on Friday that he was not saying that celibacy caused pedophilia. “If celibacy were the reason for sexual abuse,” he said, “there wouldn’t be any abuse in the rest of society.”
As this video report from France 24 explains, sex scandals have also affected the Catholic Church in Germany recently:
Pope Benedict XVI met with Germany’s highest-ranking Roman Catholic leader Friday at the Vatican to discuss allegations that priests in the pope’s native country sexually abused children for decades, as my colleagues Nicholas Kulish and Rachel Donadio report.
As Reuters reported, another leading German Catholic, Bishop Hans-Jochen Jaschk of Hamburg, told German Radio on Friday: “The celibate lifestyle can attract people who have an abnormal sexuality and cannot integrate sexuality into their lives. That’s when a dangerous situation can arise.” Bishop Jaschk added, “Just because one doesn’t live out one’s sexuality doesn’t mean it’s been turned off.”
Despite all these calls for a discussion of the issue, Pope Benedict defended “the value of sacred celibacy” in remarks on Friday and said that the ancient rule would not be changed because of “passing cultural fashions.”After an offseason where the trade rumors swirled, Rick Nash will (unless something crazy happens) be starting the season as the Rangers top left wing on what on paper is the strongest team we’ve seen in the Alain Vigneault era. Keeping him on the roster is an absolute blessing in disguise for the Rangers. There is a multitude of reasons that will be apparent as the season gets moving.
Roster Flexibility
Nash is a first line left wing. Nobody is really doubting that he’s got the ability to get back to the spot where he was when completely healthy. His ability to play at a high level on the first line gives Alain Vigneault a lot of flexibility within the forward core to have young talents like Pavel Buchnevich and Jimmy Vesey play on lines with less pressure to be great right out of the starting gates. This, in turn, lets the younger forwards progress at their own pace.
From THW Vault – Moving Nash Would Hurt More Than Help
With roster flexibility, the Rangers can mix and match the lines. Mats Zuccarello will likely end up on the opposite wing on the first line. That’s pretty close to a guarantee from what Rangers fans can see. Where do players like Kreider, Buchnevich, Pirri, Vesey, Zibanejad, Stepan, Grabner, and Fast slot in? With the first line having seemingly set wings of Nash and Zuccarello that allows the second, third, and fourth lines to be changed around until lines stick and perform up to the seemingly incredible potential that the roster has.
Potential Return to Stardom
Sitting just seven goals from 400 for his career and 99th on the all-time list, Nash looks to return to scoring 30 goals in a season for the ninth time in his career. If he can get back to his scoring ways of just two years ago, the Rangers will have a stronger roster than they’ve had in a very long time.
Nash isn’t just a great goal scorer — he plays two-way hockey at an incredibly high level. Ask any coach in the NHL and they will tell you that having a forward like Nash who can score goals and disrupt the opposing team in their offensive zone is very hard to find. Add on a superior passing ability that not many scoring forwards have and he is set to return back to the elite level he was playing at just a few years ago.
Two Way Standout
One thing about Nash that is special to him is his ability to play whatever type of game needed. He has been known as a big-body power forward for years, even dating back to his days in Columbus. While Chris Kreider fits that role as a speedy guy with the ability to play big with the best of the best, not many of the other Rangers forwards can play that style. Skaters like Zuccarello and Grabner are more finesse and less strength. Unlike many Rangers, Nash can get in the slot and by the crease, picking up some easy rebounds as well as create his own goals by taking on a defenseman one-on-one.
Equally as important is the ability that Nash has played defensively. Nash uses his large wingspan to plug up big parts of the ice and take away passing lanes that a less talented player probably wouldn’t see. Along with the passing lanes, the blocked shots and takeaways that come with great positioning seem to add up every year, with over 150 more takeaways than giveaways over his career.
Playing with Motivation
Nash should be playing with the most motivation he’s ever had in his career this season. Why is this? Well, he is coming off a quite mediocre season where he was constantly injured and missed considerable time. He may have returned to his usual self in the playoffs, scoring four points in five playoff games, but can he carry over that same ability to this season?
With all the constant trade rumors and even people saying he should be unprotected in the expansion draft this next offseason, Nash is essentially playing for his future and that can be a very dangerous motivator for a player of his caliber.
Rangers Related – New York Rangers 2016-17 Season Preview
Many Rangers fans have given up on Nash. Going into his fifth season as a Rangers forward, he will be fighting to prove that he’s still a high-level player to the Rangers front office and fan base. That in itself should be a huge motivator for him to put up a career year, especially just a few years before his contract is up. Long story short, Nash is an extremely talented player who will be playing with the ultimate motivation and with the strength of the team around him, he should perform as well as he has in his time with the Rangers.The Associated Press - GENEVA (AP) — Excessive weight, obesity, aging and population growth drove a nearly four-fold increase in worldwide cases of diabetes over the last quarter-century, affecting 422 million people in 2014, the World Health Organization reported Wednesday.
In a new report on diabetes, the U.N. health agency called for stepped-up measures to reduce risk factors for diabetes and improve treatment and care that has ballooned in recent years alongside an increase in obesity rates. WHO said 8.5 percent of the world population had diabetes two years ago, up from 108 million, or 4.7 percent, in 1980.
On Wednesday, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said:
"We need to rethink our daily lives: to eat healthily, be physically active and avoid excessive weight gain."
The Geneva-based agency blamed growing consumption of food and beverages high in sugar. Diabetes increased around the world but affects lower- and middle-income people more often than wealthier populations. The rates rose most in Africa, the Middle East and Asia — with the "Eastern Mediterranean" region more than doubling its prevalence to 13.7 percent of the population, the only world region with a double-digit percentage.
Diabetes is a chronic condition in which the body either does not make enough insulin to break down the sugar in foods or uses insulin inefficiently. It can cause early death or serious complications like blindness, stroke, kidney disease or heart disease.
In the "Global Report on Diabetes" released Wednesday, WHO says diabetes caused 1.5 million deaths in 2012, and another 2.2 million deaths were caused by higher-than-optimal blood glucose levels, by increasing the risks of cardiovascular and other diseases.
The report does not distinguish between Type 1 diabetes, which involves deficient insulin production in the body and requires daily insulin injections for survival, and Type 2, in which the body uses insulin ineffectively and is more often associated with obesity and relatively sedentary lifestyles.
The increase has coincided with growing rates of obesity: In Western countries like the U.S and Britain, two-thirds of people are now overweight or obese. The WHO report stopped short of any drastic new recommendations, suggesting for example that countries build political support and allocate resources for diabetes prevention, and "prioritize actions to prevent people becoming overweight and obese."
The report said WHO is updating its guidelines on fat and carbohydrate intake, but said adults can reduce their risk of type 2 diabetes through regular, adequate physical activity and "healthy diets that include sufficient consumption of dietary fiber, and replacing saturated fatty acids with polyunsaturated fatty acids."MSNBC's Joe Scarborough on Monday said White House counselor Kellyanne Conway's "stupid" arguments on behalf of the Trump administration are making his "teeth hurt."
"Kellyanne Conway again just doing the inexplicable, saying the inexplicable, saying things... that make my teeth hurt. When she's so stupid that they make my teeth hurt," Scarborough said on "Morning Joe." "Not her but the words that come of her mouth, when she's spinning talking about how Bob Mueller has, you know, given to Democrats."
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Scarborough's comments come in response to remarks Conway made the day before, when she said that the White House intends to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller despite his investigation's team being largely comprised of Democratic donors.
"Even though he just hired his 16th person — many of them are Democratic donors, but we'll continue to cooperate and comply," Conway said Sunday on ABC's "This Week."
Scarborough on Monday slammed Conway's attempt to spin Mueller's team as partisan when President Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE and many members of his team have donated large sums to Democrats in the past.
"Take all of Bob Mueller's entire team, and they haven't given as much money to Democrats as Donald Trump and his former communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, who he hired while making the complaints," he said, pointing to their donations to former President Barack Obama Barack Hussein ObamaWith low birth rate, America needs future migrants 4 ways Hillary looms over the 2020 race Obama goes viral after sporting black bomber jacket with '44' on sleeve at basketball game MORE, 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, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the Democratic National Committee.
Multiple outlets reported late last month that the president's legal advisers are digging into Mueller’s team in an attempt to find possible conflicts of interest that the White House could raise. Trump’s lawyers, however, deny the reports that they are engaging in opposition research of Mueller and his team.Women will be bishops in the Church of England after a historic vote in the General Synod, ending 40 years of wrangling.
An overwhelming 81 per cent of Synod members backed the change, during the sitting in York, and 75 per cent of the laity supported the move.
The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby chats to members of the female clergy (Getty)
However, despite the overwhelming support, the move will not be formally passed until two further votes this afternoon have been completed.
It clears the way for the first female clerics to be ordained as bishops by the end of this year, if the legislation is quickly ratified by Parliament.
The vote also means that the next Archbishop of Canterbury or York could be a woman.
Campaigners celebrated the breakthrough, just 20 months after the previous attempt to admit women to the episcopate failed despite overwhelming support in congregations, casting the church into its biggest crisis of authority in recent memory.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, pledged to ensure traditionalists with theological objections to women’s ministry would enjoy special provision in the church.
Despite signs over the weekend of a shift in views among opponents, the mood was tense right up until the final vote.
Overall 351 members of the 433 Synod voted in favour of the measure.
Under the Church’s voting rules major pieces of legislation such as this require a two thirds majority in all three “houses” of the General Synod – bishops, clergy and laity.
Among the laity 152 out of 202 voted in favour, meaning that three quarters voted in favour, easily clearing the two thirds mark.
This means that around 30 lay members of the Synod changed their votes.
Despite the tense atmosphere on the floor of the Synod there was a festive atmosphere in the public gallery.
Female clerics and supporters of the change - many of them dressed in pink ribbons and bow ties – had earlier queued for a seat in the public gallery to witness the sitting on the university campus.
As the debate neared its end Archbishop Welby stood up to issue a personal pledge that the culture of the church would change to ensure that traditionalists still felt welcome in the Church of England after women bishops are introduced.
“It will be hard work, progress will be all but impossible to achieve without a fresh embrace of one another in love,” he said.
“Today this legislation allows us to move forward together, all of us as faithful Anglicans, all of us committed to each other’s flourishing and the life of the Church not just in what we say but in how we now live and work together in the months and years ahead.
“That is as true for those who find this difficult to accept as it is for those who rejoice in it and vice versa.”
He said the legislation included a legally binding commitment to ensuring that those who object to women bishops continue to “flourish” in the Church.
“If I did not think that was likely I could not support this legislation.
“You don’t chuck out family or even make it difficult for them to be at home, you love them and seek their well-being even when you disagree.”
One of the most striking interventions was from Mr Vincent, a traditionalist Anglo-Catholics, who voted against in 2012.
He said: “I shall be voting in favour today - by doing so, I am betraying what I believe, I am betraying those who trusted in me.
“I hope that the promised commitment to ‘mutual flourishing’ is not a commitment that will run out of steam in a few years.”
Christina Rees, one of the leading campaigners for women bishops, broke down in tears as she spoke, singling out Mr Vincent’s intervention.
“Adrian Vincent has made a sacrificial decision today for the sake of the Church, he has shown his loyalty as an Anglican and as a member of the Church of England.
“I was not prepared for what he said, it absolutely stunned me.”
But Jane Bisson, a lay member for Winchester, held up a black leather clad Bible, urging members to vote against, and predicting a split in the church.
“Are we saying that the Bible doesn’t matter any more and it’s the world we follow?
“For good reasons Jesus did not have any male apostles – he did have women prophets, women praying but not women apostles.”
She predicted a split in the church if women bishops are approved and warned supporters they must be “as magnanimous as you said you would be”.Notorious marijuana activist
Marc Emery
will soon finish a five-year sentence in U.S. federal prison — and he expects he’ll be repatriated to Canada via Windsor, Ont.
The self-described “Prince of Pot” is due for release on Wednesday. According to
the last entry in his personal blog
, he will then be taken to a detention centre in Louisiana for processing, and eventually flown to Detroit for escort over the border.
“I get the … long, drawn-out, delayed route to an unceremonious drop-off — in Windsor, Ontario, at that, not even to my home in Vancouver,” Emery griped.
Emery estimates he’ll arrive in Windsor — under the care of two U.S. Marshals — sometime between August 10 and 25.
It’s his understanding he’ll be taken through the tunnel for delivery to Canadian citizenship and immigration officials.
Now 56, Emery has been incarcerated since September 2009 for selling cannabis seeds to U.S. customers through a mail-order business he started in 1995.
An outspoken proponent of marijuana cultivation and use, Emery is the founder of
Cannabis Culture magazine
and has made several attempts at political office on a pro-legalization platform.
His many run-ins with the law came to a head in 2005, when Vancouver police — acting on a request by the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration
— raided Emery’s bookstore and seed business.
Emery was arrested and charged with conspiracy to distribute marijuana.
In
a statement at the time
, the DEA described Emery as a “propagandist” who generated $5 million a year in illicit profits from the marijuana trade.
Emery fought the extradition in court until mid-2009, when he finally pleaded guilty and agreed to a five-year sentence.
Since then, he’s been held in federal prisons in Georgia and Mississippi. His release is 235 days early due to good conduct.
Emery wrote that he hopes to have his wife and fellow marijuana advocate
Jodie Emery
waiting in Windsor upon his return.
“We will have an impromptu gathering somewhere (in) Windsor after my arrival, and within twelve hours I will take the train or some transport to Toronto, where we will have another party at Vapor Central,” Emery wrote on his blog.
Emery added that he intends to resume the battle to “finish off marijuana prohibition” — a fight for which he has “renewed vigor.”
NOTE TO MEDIA: We don't know when Marc will be in Canada. I'll get very short notice. He'll cross Detroit/Windsor. Prepare for sudden news. — Jodie Emery (@JodieEmery) July 7, 2014
dchen@windsorstar.com
[pn_facebook_like /]With a bunch of news today involving signing bonus for the Braves 2016 draft class, the bonus pool is close to being maxed out in terms of dollars.
Yesterday’s news saw Brett Cumberland, Taylor Hyssong, and Marcus Mooney all sign while Zach Becherer saw his corrected bonus total posted. That leaves just two of the Braves picks from the first 10 rounds unsigned, and both are being held up by MLB rules- Ian Anderson can’t sign until after he graduates high school on 6/23, and Tyler Neslony can’t sign until Texas Tech completes play at the College World Series.
The big news was Brett Cumberland’s overslot deal being worth $1.5M. This is a significant number as it really helps to spend all to almost all of the bonus pool(more later).
Getting underslot seniors Taylor Hyssong and Marcus Mooney to sign for just $15k is also big, as it locks the Braves into their slot savings on each and gives us a better idea of how much money remains in the pool.
And here's a couple of @Braves senior signs: 8th-rder Taylor Hyssong for $10k, 10th-rder Marcus Mooney for $5k. @MLBDraft — Jim Callis (@jimcallisMLB) June 21, 2016
Finally Zach Becherer’s originally reported $275k bonus was over-estimated, and MLB’s Jim Callis reported the correct number of $175k.
15th-rder Zach Becherer signs w/@Braves for $175k ($75k vs pool). Rend Lake (Ill.) CC RHP, FB into mid-90s before TJ this spring. @MLBDraft — Jim Callis (@jimcallisMLB) June 21, 2016
The Bonus Pool
The Braves have a bonus pool of $13,224,100 if you add their slot values for each of their picks in the first 10 rounds from MLB. I chose to do the math myself because their bonus pool total differs from Baseball America’s and doesn’t add up with the total of their picks.
According to the rules of the draft the team is allowed to exceed the bonus pool by up to 5% by paying just a 75% tax on the overages. That amount is exactly $13,885,305. Anything spent over that amount leads to the team being over 5% over, triggering a penalty which would cost the Braves their top pick in the 2017 draft. The Braves will not do anything to jeopardize a likely Top 3 pick in 2017 as well as the associated bonus slot.
Only players taken within the first 10 rounds count towards that $13.885M amount. From round 11-40, only money spent over the first $100k of a bonus counts towards the pool.
Money spent
With that in mind now is a good chance to look at the current signings that factor into the bonus pool.
Ian Anderson and Tyler Neslony aren’t signed, and will be mentioned a bit later, but both must sign at this point because the Braves would be way over the pool limit without them due to each being an underslot guy.
Joey Wentz $3.05M
Kyle Muller $2.5M
Brett Cumberland $1.5M
Drew Harrington $900k
Bryse Wilson $1.2M
Jeremy Walker $275k
Matt Gonzalez $25k
JB Moss $10k
Taylor Hyssong $10k
Marcus Mooney $5k
Matt Rowland $400k(only $300k counts to bonus pool)
Zach Becherer $175k(only $75k counts to bonus pool)
Tucker Davidson $125k(only $25k counts to bonus pool)
If you add all of those guys together you get a total of $9,875,000.
Other guys that have signed like Roberto Osuna, Brandon WhiteX2, and Dalton Carroll among others aren’t being mentioned here because they are signing for likely under $100k and will not count towards the bonus pool.
Yet to Sign and Unconfirmed
The first guy I’ll get to here is Tyler Neslony, as he’s an easy one to go over. Based on the fact he’s a senior and drafted between guys who received $5-$10k, it’s safe to assume that he’s going to cost not much more than $10k when he’s able to sign. That brings the bonus pool to an estimated $9,885,000.
The next guy is Gabe Howell. Howell’s bonus figure isn’t public, but as a prep player who had some promise it is possible that he is going to cost the Braves more than $100k. It’s no guarantee, but it’s something to watch for. For the sake of argument I will assume he’s getting the maximum allowed without being overslot since he was only a JUCO commit- though Chipola is a very strong JUCO program.
This brings us to the last guy in the bonus pool, top pick Ian Anderson. It’s well known that Anderson is an underslot guy, but the question is how much? Originally BA’s John Manuel reported he was nearing an agreement for $3.5M. That would mean the Braves have spent $13,375,000M.
Expecting word on Joey Wentz any minute, and word pre-draft was Ian Anderson had a $3.5M deal in the works https://t.co/hu7akElJds — John Manuel (@johnmanuelba) June 14, 2016
However more recently Jon Heyman reported that Anderson’s deal is for roughly $4M. That would take the Braves to $13,875,000 if he got the full $4M.
braves will have deal w/No. 3 overall pick Ian Anderson for about $4M. approx $2.5M slot savings helped w/wentz/muller/etc — Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) June 20, 2016
What it Means
The Braves have somewhere between $510k and $13k left to spend depending on the actual value of Anderson’s deal. If Howell took over $100k, that’s even less to spend.
This is important because the Braves have two guys that fans would like to see signed, Josh Anthony and Nick Shumpert. Anthony reportedly is being offered around slot money($100k) and says that’s not enough to buy that him out of his Auburn commitment per a Twitter exchange. Shumpert doesn’t feel likely to sign for $100k either, as he likely had a larger offer than that on the table last year as a 7th round pick.
Conclusion
Yesterday pretty much finished off the Braves bonus pool, and depending on just how close to $4M Ian Anderson’s bonus is will determine how much money the Braves will have to spend on players like Nick Shumpert and Josh Anthony. Unfortunately, we won’t know much more for sure until after Ian Anderson signs his deal as to how much more room the Braves have to work with.An attack submarine that is sponsored by first lady Michelle Obama and will be named for her home state has been delivered to the US Navy.
Submarine builder General Dynamics Electric Boat, based in Groton, Connecticut, delivered the submarine that will become the USS Illinois to the Navy on Saturday after nearly five and a half years of construction.
The first lady, who's from Chicago, will be involved in the life of the submarine and the lives of its sailors and their families.
The submarine USS Illinois travels along the Thames River after departing General Dynamics Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut, for initial sea trials, where the ship's performance is tested prior to delivery to the U.S. Navy (July 2016 photo)
The submarine will officially join the Navy fleet in a fall 2016 ceremony
The submarine will become the USS Illinois, SSN 786, and begin its active service at a commissioning ceremony in Groton on October 29.
US Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said in a 2012 statement: 'Naval tradition holds that a sponsor’s spirit and presence guide the ship and her crew throughout the life of the ship.
'Illinois and her crew are blessed to have such a wonderful sponsor and I am grateful Mrs. Obama accepted my invitation to serve as sponsor for this submarine.'
The First Lady said in a 2012 statement: 'It’s an honor and a privilege to serve as sponsor of the USS ILLINOIS.
'I'm always inspired by the service and sacrifice of the men and women of the Navy, as well as the families who support them.
'This submarine is a tribute to the strength, courage, and determination that our Navy families exhibit every day.'
It took thousands of shipyard employees in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Virginia and submarine supply businesses nationwide to build the $2.7billion submarine, the 13th member of the Virginia class.
There were no major issues during construction, and the submarine performed'superbly' during recent tests at sea, said an Electric Boat vice president, Kenneth Blomstedt.
First lady Michelle Obama christens the USS Illinois with a bottle of sparkling wine (October 2015 file photo)
The first lady, who's from Chicago, will be involved in the life of the submarine and the lives of its sailors and their families
Electric Boat president Jeffrey Geiger said in a August 1 statement: 'The crew and shipbuilders worked together seamlessly to take this submarine to sea and put it through its paces.
'It was a superb effort by everyone involved, and reflects the commitment of the navy and industry team to sustain the success of the Virginia-class submarine programme.
'I deeply appreciate the contributions made by the navy personnel, shipbuilders and suppliers who made it happen.'
Capt. Michael Stevens, the Navy's Virginia-class program manager, said these attack submarines are needed to replace those that were built during the Cold War and are retiring.
'Every submarine counts', he said. 'Every submarine is needed out there.'
It took thousands of shipyard employees in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Virginia and submarine supply businesses nationwide to build the $2.7billion submarine, the 13th member of the Virginia class
First lady Michelle Obama, right, and General Dynamics Electric Boat president Jeffrey S. Geiger, exit the USS Illinois after Obama christened the sub in October 2015
Electric Boat, which has been designing and building submarines since 1900, had until August 31 to transfer ownership of the future USS Illinois to the Navy, per the contract.
It's the ninth submarine in a row to be delivered to the Navy early and on budget, Stevens said.
The submarine has a redesigned bow with two large tubes to launch Tomahawk missiles, instead of 12 smaller tubes.
The larger tubes were designed so the Navy would have the flexibility to also launch future weapons and unmanned vehicles, Blomstedt said.
Cmdr. Jess Porter, the submarine's commanding officer, described the Illinois as a'stealthy weapon' that can influence adversaries in a way that makes the US more secure.
The crew of about 130 men will take the submarine to sea for additional testing to prove its capabilities, Porter said.
Construction began in March 2011. Modules were built in Rhode Island, at Electric Boat's manufacturing facility, and in Virginia, at Newport News Shipbuilding.
The two shipyards build Virginia-class attack submarines under a teaming agreement and alternate the deliveries. The final assembly and testing took place at Electric Boat's headquarters in Groton.
Construction began in March 2011. Modules were built in Rhode Island, at Electric Boat's manufacturing facility, and in Virginia, at Newport News Shipbuilding
Obama, who has made it a priority to support military families, broke a bottle of champagne across the submarine's hull to christen it last year.
She has been invited to give the order to 'bring the ship to life' at the commissioning ceremony in October.
Inside the submarine, there's a metal plate inscribed with the first lady's initials, which each sailor will see several times a day. It's mounted where the crew eats.
The Navy has ordered 15 more Virginia-class submarines, and 10 of those are under construction. The last of the 15 is scheduled to be delivered in 2023 as the 28th member of the class.
General Dynamics said in a August 1 release: 'Virginia-class submarines displace 7,835 tons, with a hull length of 377 feet and a diameter of 34 feet.Seventeen former members of the European Commission get at least €96,000 per year in transitional allowances, money intended to help them ease back into the labour market, despite the fact that some of them already work as politicians or lobbyists.
The top earners in the group are former internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy and ex-fisheries chief Joe Borg, the Financial Times Deutschland reported on Wednesday (22 September).
Former members of the European Commission get EU money even if they have a job in politics or business (Photo: European Commission)
Since leaving his office in February 2010, Mr McCreevy has become a member of the supervisory board of Ryanair airlines, with an annual salary calculated by the Alter-EU anti-lobbying campaign group of up to €47,000.
But he is still said to get an additional €11,000 of transition money from the commission. The same amount is thought to go to Mr Borg who currently works for Fipra, a PR consultancy lobbying on maritime issues.
The commission's allowance rules say the transitional money is paid for three years and the sum is between 40 percent and 65 percent of the basic salary of a commissioner (€20,278 per month), depending on the length of service.
"This is to help former commissioners in the transition into the labor market," a spokesman of the commission is quoted as saying by FTD.
The transitional allowance is capped. "If the former commissioner takes up any new gainful activity, the amount of the new job's salary, added together with the allowance, cannot exceed the remuneration as a member of the commission," the rules say.
Dalia Grybauskaite, currently the president of Lithuania, who left the commission in July 2009, and Franco Frattini, the Italian foreign minister since May 2008 are also still on the Commission's payroll. Two members of the European Parliament receive the allowances as well - Poland's first commissioner Danuta Hubner and Belgium's Louis Michel.
Because of the increasing number of former commissioners taking part in |
making the program more efficient can help usher in changes in the way we deliver health care that can reduce costs for everybody. We have long known that some places, like the Intermountain Healthcare in Utah or the Geisinger Health System in rural Pennsylvania, offer high-quality care at costs below average. The commission can help encourage the adoption of these common-sense best practices by doctors and medical professionals throughout the system – everything from reducing hospital infection rates to encouraging better coordination between teams of doctors.
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Reducing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan. Much of the rest would be paid for with revenues from the very same drug and insurance companies that stand to benefit from tens of millions of new customers. This reform will charge insurance companies a fee for their most expensive policies, which will encourage them to provide greater value for the money – an idea which has the support of Democratic and Republican experts. And according to these same experts, this modest change could help hold down the cost of health care for all of us in the long-run.
Finally, many in this chamber – particularly on the Republican side of the aisle – have long insisted that reforming our medical malpractice laws can help bring down the cost of health care. I don't believe malpractice reform is a silver bullet, but I have talked to enough doctors to know that defensive medicine may be contributing to unnecessary costs. So I am proposing that we move forward on a range of ideas about how to put patient safety first and let doctors focus on practicing medicine. I know that the Bush Administration considered authorizing demonstration projects in individual states to test these issues. It's a good idea, and I am directing my Secretary of Health and Human Services to move forward on this initiative today.
Add it all up, and the plan I'm proposing will cost around $900 billion over ten years – less than we have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and less than the tax cuts for the wealthiest few Americans that Congress passed at the beginning of the previous administration. Most of these costs will be paid for with money already being spent – but spent badly – in the existing health care system. The plan will not add to our deficit. The middle-class will realize greater security, not higher taxes. And if we are able to slow the growth of health care costs by just one-tenth of one percent each year, it will actually reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the long term.
This is the plan I'm proposing. It's a plan that incorporates ideas from many of the people in this room tonight – Democrats and Republicans. And I will continue to seek common ground in the weeks ahead. If you come to me with a serious set of proposals, I will be there to listen. My door is always open.
But know this: I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it's better politics to kill this plan than improve it. I will not stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. If you misrepresent what's in the plan, we will call you out. And I will not accept the status quo as a solution. Not this time. Not now.
Everyone in this room knows what will happen if we do nothing. Our deficit will grow. More families will go bankrupt. More businesses will close. More Americans will lose their coverage when they are sick and need it most. And more will die as a result. We know these things to be true.
That is why we cannot fail. Because there are too many Americans counting on us to succeed – the ones who suffer silently, and the ones who shared their stories with us at town hall meetings, in emails, and in letters.
I received one of those letters a few days ago. It was from our beloved friend and colleague, Ted Kennedy. He had written it back in May, shortly after he was told that his illness was terminal. He asked that it be delivered upon his death.
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In it, he spoke about what a happy time his last months were, thanks to the love and support of family and friends, his wife, Vicki, and his children, who are here tonight. And he expressed confidence that this would be the year that health care reform – "that great unfinished business of our society," he called it – would finally pass. He repeated the truth that health care is decisive for our future prosperity, but he also reminded me that "it concerns more than material things." "What we face," he wrote, "is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country."
I've thought about that phrase quite a bit in recent days – the character of our country. One of the unique and wonderful things about America has always been our self-reliance, our rugged individualism, our fierce defense of freedom and our healthy skepticism of government. And figuring out the appropriate size and role of government has always been a source of rigorous and sometimes angry debate.
For some of Ted Kennedy's critics, his brand of liberalism represented an affront to American liberty. In their mind, his passion for universal health care was nothing more than a passion for big government.
But those of us who knew Teddy and worked with him here – people of both parties – know that what drove him was something more. His friend, Orrin Hatch, knows that. They worked together to provide children with health insurance. His friend John McCain knows that. They worked together on a Patient's Bill of Rights. His friend Chuck Grassley knows that. They worked together to provide health care to children with disabilities.
On issues like these, Ted Kennedy's passion was born not of some rigid ideology, but of his own experience. It was the experience of having two children stricken with cancer. He never forgot the sheer terror and helplessness that any parent feels when a child is badly sick; and he was able to imagine what it must be like for those without insurance; what it would be like to have to say to a wife or a child or an aging parent – there is something that could make you better, but I just can't afford it.
That large-heartedness – that concern and regard for the plight of others – is not a partisan feeling. It is not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character. Our ability to stand in other people's shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand. A belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgement that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.
This has always been the history of our progress. In 1933, when over half of our seniors could not support themselves and millions had seen their savings wiped away, there were those who argued that Social Security would lead to socialism. But the men and women of Congress stood fast, and we are all the better for it. In 1965, when some argued that Medicare represented a government takeover of health care, members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, did not back down. They joined together so that all of us could enter our golden years with some basic peace of mind.
You see, our predecessors understood that government could not, and should not, solve every problem. They understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom. But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, and the vulnerable can be exploited. And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter – that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.
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What was true then remains true today. I understand how difficult this health care debate has been. I know that many in this country are deeply skeptical that government is looking out for them. I understand that the politically safe move would be to kick the can further down the road – to defer reform one more year, or one more election, or one more term.
But that's not what the moment calls for. That's not what we came here to do. We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it. I still believe we can act even when it's hard. I still believe we can replace acrimony with civility, and gridlock with progress. I still believe we can do great things, and that here and now we will meet history's test.
Because that is who we are. That is our calling. That is our character. Thank you, God Bless You, and may God Bless the United States of America.Addressing, American Urban Radio Networks Washington Bureau Chief April D. Ryan, White House press secretary Sean Spicer defended President Trump, saying, "You're hellbent on trying to make sure whatever image you want to tell about this White House stays." (Reuters)
White House press secretary Sean Spicer finally seemed to reach a breaking point Tuesday when it comes to questions about President Trump and Russia.
Spicer got testy in an exchange with American Urban Radio Networks reporter April Ryan after Ryan announced a premise that Spicer disagreed with: that the White House has a Russia issue to deal with. By the end, Spicer accused Ryan of pushing her own agenda and even instructed her not to shake her head at him.
“No, we don't have that,” Spicer said when Ryan cited the White House's Russia issue. When Ryan continued with her question, he cut in again: “No, no. I get it. But I've said it from the day that I got here until whenever that there's not a connection. You've got Russia.”
Spicer then offered this zinger: “If the president puts Russian salad dressing on his salad tonight, somehow that's a Russian connection.”
When Ryan tried again to ask her question, Spicer said, “I appreciate your agenda here. … At some point, report the facts.”
Two separate incidents involving a black congresswoman and a black White House reporter sparked outrage on social media, leading to the hashtag #BlackWomenAtWork. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post)
Spicer pointed to those who have said there is no proof of collusion between Russia and the Trump team — which is true but is only a part of the inquiries and is still being investigated by the FBI. He added, “I'm sorry that that disgusts you. You're shaking your head.”
Spicer then told Ryan that she was “going to have to take no for an answer” when it came to the idea of collusion with Russia.
Ryan moved on, asking about former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's visit to the White House and the fact that she wasn't a Trump supporter. But Spicer again took issue.
“It seems like you're hellbent on trying to make sure that whatever image you want to tell about this White House stays,” Spicer said.
After some more back-and-forth, Spicer again spotted Ryan shaking her head and told her, “Please, stop shaking your head again.”
This is hardly the first time a White House press briefing has featured a pitched battled between reporters and Spicer. And Spicer hasn't been afraid to accuse reporters, including CNN's Jim Acosta and ABC's Jonathan Karl, of pushing their own agendas — especially on issues like Russia.
But the exchange with Ryan sure seemed to venture into different territory. Instructing her to stop shaking her head came off as demeaning, and a number of White House reporters took issue with it on social media.
What's even more puzzling about it is that Spicer continues to point to the lack of evidence of collusion while ignoring the fact that the FBI is investigating possible ties between Trump and Russia. The idea that an FBI investigation involving the administration doesn't amount to a hill of beans just doesn't make much sense. Yet the mere premise that Russia is an issue for the White House seemed to set Spicer off.
Ryan, meanwhile, had just one word:
Update: Hillary Clinton spoke out against Spicer later Tuesday.Panama’s frogs and other amphibians are in crisis.
The Central American nation—which is home to hundreds of frogs found nowhere else on Earth—has lost several species to extinction over the past 20 years. The cause is a deadly pathogen called the chytrid fungus, which infects amphibians’ skin and destroys their ability to breathe.
The fungus has been blamed for more than 100 extinctions worldwide and has been observed on hundreds of additional species.
Can future extinctions be prevented? A paper published this week in the journal Animal Conservation examines Panama’s 214 known frog species and comes up with a complex answer.
The paper, by a team of researchers from around the globe, concludes that targeted captive-breeding efforts will help to save a good number of these frog species from extinction.
It also concludes that a few of the 13 species in captive-breeding programs don’t need that help and can be left to survive on their own.
Perhaps most troubling, the study finds that eight Panamanian frog species are likely already extinct, while dozens more may be too rare to benefit from such programs because there are just too few left alive to collect and breed.
RELATED: A Rare Chance to Save an Entire Nation’s Frogs From Extinction
“This paper was very difficult to write because it involved so many people, but I think it was worth it in that it was time we actually did a clear-eyed view of what we’ve got and where we’re going,” said Brian Gratwicke, lead author of the paper and the international coordinator of the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project.
Related Now Palm Oil Is Killing the Frogs
Gratwicke said that some of the previous decisions about which frogs to breed in captivity were based on the species’ apparent uniqueness or even their popularity with certain herpetologists. The new paper develops a more rigid, systematic approach and looks at each species based on three criteria: whether a “founding population” of 20 males and 20 females could be located; whether the species could be successfully bred in captivity (not always easy); and whether a species would go extinct without help.
“If you ignore those three things, you’re doing yourself and the species a disservice,” Gratwicke said.
Using that approach, the paper came up with a list of 14 species that the authors concluded should be considered priorities for captive breeding. They include the Darien stubfoot toad, the horned marsupial frog, and the banded horned tree frog.
Not making the list were species like the La Loma tree frog, which researchers have never been able to successfully breed because life in captivity stresses it out too much.
Breeding frogs in captivity requires determining the adult frogs’ and tadpoles’ ecological needs, including food, water flow, lighting, and temperature. Learning those requirements will be critical to many species’ survival. “We need to learn to be effective frog farmers and do it sustainably,” Gratwicke said.
In addition to prioritizing species for conservation, the new paper may have another long-lasting effect. By compiling all of the known information about Panama’s frogs, it helped to identify the knowledge gaps for these species as well as the dozens of species that researchers have not been able to observe in the wild for many years. “There’s nothing like a blank in the data to get someone out into the field looking for a missing species,” Gratwicke said.EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. (AP) — In the wake of another disappointing New York Giants season, co-owner John Mara wasn't so sure about his own job. "Not according to my mother, it's not," the Giants president and chief executive officer quipped Monday in his first comments on the 7-9 season that left the team out of the playoffs for the fourth time in five years.
A candid Mara confirmed the feeling that Giants' fans experienced this season and expressed his own frustrations.
"Obviously, this was a very disappointing season, as disappointing as any in my memory," he said addressing the media at Giants headquarters.
Mara spoke about the many shortcomings of the team, including the offensive line, but did not point the blame at coach Tom Coughlin, general manager Jerry Reese nor quarterback Eli Manning.
Coughlin was told Monday the team wants him back for an 11th season as head coach.
"In terms of other changes that may or may not be made, that will be discussed later in the week," Mara said. "I'd like to think that the fans know we're going to do whatever we have to do. Not necessarily the moves they want us to make. Nobody wants to win more than Tom Coughlin and Jerry Reese, perhaps than myself. We're going to do what we have to do. We're going to do it in an intelligent fashion. Stability is important. There are times when changes have to be made. We'll do whatever we have to do to put a team on the field that our fans can be proud of."
Giants fans can be assured that Mara will be looking to improve the offense, especially the offensive line.
"I think our offense is broken," Mara said. "We need to improve on the offensive side. To me, that is the No. 1 personnel priority going into the offseason is we need improve the offensive line. My biggest concern coming into the year was if our offensive line could stay healthy. We were never able to protect Eli or get our ground game going well enough."
Mara said it was obvious Manning did not have a good season. The career-high 27 interceptions was evidence of that.
"With Eli, sometimes he tries to do too much," Mara said. "He competes so hard out there. We have all the confidence in him. He's still the face of the franchise and we need to help him. We need to give him some better tools and do a better job around him."
Mara admits he made mistakes in evaluating the team and during the draft.
"I was the same person who said in the preseason that this was as talented a team as we've had in years," Mara said. "I read some stories about our draft picks. We have missed on some guys and have had bad luck with some second or third-round picks. There were a few instances where we took a chance, knowing we were taking a chance, thinking we were going to hit it out of the park, and we missed.
"I think we have as good a group of scouts as there is in the NFL. It's as much as me as anything else. I knew the risks we were taking. To be successful in this league you have to do a good job in the draft, especially with those middle-round picks. No question over the last few years we've missed on people. I'm not sure why it took us three years to find out that Jerrel Jernigan can play."
When asked about Reese, Mara said, "Yes, I'm convinced he's the right guy. I like the way he deals with the players in a direct and honest way."
Since it seems obvious that Coughlin will be back, Mara was asked about the Giants philosophy of not letting a coach go into the season with a one year left on his contract.
"Extending Tom? That has been our philosophy in the past, whether that continues or not has not been decided," Mara said. "I'm not sure he knows how much longer he wants to coach. It's very tough to have an exit strategy in the National Football League."
Mara agonized over the 0-6 start as much as the fans. He thinks the team could have won its division if not for the horrendous start.
"It kills me to go into these other stadiums and see this large collection of Giants' fans come out to support us and we put on performance like we did in Kansas City, Carolina and San Diego," Mara said. "It's painful to watch that. There is no reason we couldn't win our division this. We needed to just make a couple of plays in those games.
"If there was one positive, at least the locker room held together. Three was no mutiny or finger pointing."
Both Eli Manning and GM Jerry Reese pointed to Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning as a reason that next season can be better.
"There are some really good quarterbacks who have come back from rough seasons and been really good players," Reese said. "Actually, his brother (Peyton) had 28 interceptions one season (1998). (Eli) has to play better, we expect him to play better. He expects to play better. One of the things that attracted us to him when he came out of Ole Miss was that he made everyone around him better."
Peyton Manning set an NFL record with 55 touchdown passes during the regular season.
"You can get better," Eli Manning said. "That's with Peyton having his best year at 37, so I know I can get better. I can make improvements and play at a high level these next years and get back to making playoffs and winning championships."The casting will keep the "How I Met Your Mother" actress in the CBS -- and 20th Century Fox TV -- family following her nine-season run as Lily.
How I Met Your Mother star Alyson Hannigan has already lined up her follow-up job -- and she's staying in the family.
The actress, currently filming the ninth and final season of the CBS hit, will star in the network's Ben Affleck-Matt Damon-produced half-hour More Time With Family pilot, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
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Hannigan will co-star opposite Tom Papa in the multicamera comedy about a husband and father (Papa) who makes a career change in order to spend more time with his family. The actress will play Cindy Rizzo, Tom's wife, who is described as an amazing mother who runs the house like a drill sergeant and has endless energy. She's tasked with trying to teach Tom how to handle the family.
Affleck and Damon will executive produce the 20th Century Fox Television entry through their Pearl Street Films, with 3 Arts' Dave Becky and Josh Lieberman also on board to EP. Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa will pen the script and serve as EPs alongside Papa, who previously worked with Damon on The Informant and HBO's Behind the Candelabra.
PHOTOS: On the Set of 'How I Met Your Mother'
The casting keeps Buffy the Vampire Slayer alum Hannigan in the 20th-CBS family following her nine-season run as Lily on the network and studio's How I Met Your Mother.
In addition to HIMYM, Hannigan's credits include her breakout role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer as well as the American Pie franchise. She's repped by APA, Brian Dow and McKuin Frankel.
Hannigan joins fellow HIMYM co-star Cristin Milioti as having booked follow-up pilots. Milioti, who plays the titular mother in the final season, will star in NBC's Rashida Jones comedy A to Z.
Meanwhile, HIMYM creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas are already prepping spinoff How I Met Your Dad starring Greta Gerwig.
Email: Lesley.Goldberg@THR.com
Twitter: @SnooditBrandon Jennings is limited to shooting and running on treadmills and in the pool. (Photo: Clarence Tabb Jr. / Detroit News)
Auburn Hills — The Pistons may be in trouble at point guard.
Backup Brandon Jennings, who still is rehabilitating from a left Achilles injury, will miss training camp and might not return to five-on-five drills until November.
That means means veteran Steve Blake (12 seasons, 10 teams) will battle second-year man Spencer Dinwiddie to back up starter Reggie Jackson.
Dinwiddie showed flashes last season, but struggled during the Orlando Summer League, turning the ball over and failing to run the team consistently. Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy believes knee surgery had something to do with Dinwiddie’s inconsistency.
Jennings, who is shooting and running on treadmills and in the pool, won’t be the only veteran to miss training camp, which begins Tuesday.
Danny Granger, obtained along with Marcus Morris and Reggie Bullock in a trade with the Suns, will remain in Phoenix to rehab a bad knee. A former All-Star with the Pacers, knee problems have threatened Granger’s career. He has played in 76 games the last four seasons with three teams.
Slam dunks
Pistons center Aron Baynes is still recovering from right ankle surgery and will participate in one of the two-a-day sessions. He was signed as a free agent after playing for the Spurs.
... The Pistons host a public practice at 11 a.m. Oct. 3 at The Palace. Admission is free.
terry.foster@detroitnews.com
twitter.com/terryfoster971Image caption Nearly a dozen civilians die violent deaths in Iraq every day
A top US adviser on Iraq has accused the US military of glossing over an upsurge in violence, just months before its troops are due to be withdrawn.
Iraq is more dangerous now than a year ago, said a report issued by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart W Bowen Junior.
He said the killing of US soldiers and senior Iraqi figures, had risen, along with attacks in Baghdad.
The report contradicts usually upbeat assessments from the US military.
It comes as Washington is preparing to withdraw its remaining 47,000 troops from Iraq by the end of the year, despite fears that the Iraqi security forces might not be ready to take over fully.
Assassinations
"Iraq remains an extraordinarily dangerous place to work," Mr Bowen concluded in his quarterly report to Congress. "It is less safe, in my judgment, than 12 months ago."
The report cited the deaths of 15 US soldiers in June - the bloodiest month for the American military in two years - but also said more Iraqi officials had been assassinated in the past few months than in any other recent period.
While the efforts of Iraqi and American forces may have reduced the threat from the Sunni-based insurgency, Shia militias are believed to have become more active, it said.
Image caption Responsibility for training Iraqi forces will fall to the US State Department after the pullout
They are being blamed for the deaths of American soldiers, and for an increase in rocket attacks on the Baghdad international zone and the US embassy compound.
Additionally, the report called the north-eastern province of Diyala, which borders Iran, "very unstable" with frequent bombings that bring double-digit death tolls.
Mr Bowen accused the US military of glossing over the instability, noting an army statement in late May that described Iraq's security trends as "very, very positive" - but only when compared to 2007, when the country was on the brink of civil war.
A spokesman for the US army in Iraq declined to respond.
Stay or go?
The findings come in the middle of what the inspector called a "summer of uncertainty" in Baghdad over whether American forces will stay past a year-end withdrawal deadline and continue military aid for the unstable nation.
Although the US is preparing to withdraw all its remaining troops by the end of the year, in line with mutual agreements, the Obama administration has offered to leave 10,000 to help train the Iraqi forces.
That is politically highly controversial in Baghdad, where Nouri al-Maliki's Shia-dominated government, dependent on support from strongly anti-American elements, has not been able to produce a clear answer, says the BBC's Jim Muir from Beirut.
The situation is clearly very much better than it was at the height of the violence in 2006-7, our correspondent says.
In fact, the overall figures for Iraqi civilian deaths in the first six months of this year, collated by Iraqi Body Count, show a very slight improvement over last year.
But patterns of violence have changed, he adds. There are fewer big bomb explosions, but more targeted killings of Iraqi officials or security forces.As briefly previewed with my other Stop Motion Projects, here’s a full Youtube format video of PVC Man coming to life:
This took a bit longer than I wanted to get processed because apparently Ubuntu Linux doesn’t handle this conversion from an animated GIF file to actual video quite as seamlessly as Windows XP does (I’m sure there is a way, but I haven’t found it yet). Apparently Windows 7 doesn’t natively support this either, so I’m glad I still have an XP machine running my CNC router.
As for how the video was made, it’s similar to my other Stop Motion projects. Things have been gradually upgraded along the way. The first few were made with my Env2 dumb-phone (see the mount I made for it), and soon thereafter I upgraded to my 7 year old Casio Exilim camera. With this though, I’ve finally come into the modern age using a Canon T2i with an infrared remote trigger that allows me to shoot without shaking the camera. The results seem to be quite a bit better with this equipment.
Some Items Used in this Post From Amazon:
Canon EOS Rebel T2i with lens – The camera I used in this project
NEEWER® IR Wireless Remote Control RC-6 – The IR Remote used (Extremely cheap, very effective!)
Once transferred to my computer, everything was downgraded to 640 x 427 pixels using “phatch”, which is a photo batch processor. It works great in Ubuntu, and there’s a Mac and Windows version as well. You can put a logo on these images too with Phatch, which is what I did on the little GIF file you may have seen in a previous post. These smaller photos could then be processed into an animated GIF using GIMP (see my tutorial). From GIF, this can be inserted into the Windows XP version of Moviemaker if you have that available, and it will process it.
As for how everything was photographed, the legs and arms of “PVC-Man” were left unglued (I’ll give detailed directions on how to build it in an upcoming post – subscribe to not miss anything!), so they could be adjusted slightly between each frame. The camera was setup on a tripod, and the remote trigger was used to capture each frame so that it didn’t disturb the camera position. The delay between each frame was set to 100ms for the stop motion video, which turned out pretty well. The human eye can see 24 frames per second, but 10 gives a pretty good approximation.
The first challenge while making this were that the eyes, made out of rolled up electroluminescent lights, (see my review of this set) started flaking out. The problem seemed to be in the splitter, not the lights themselves. To be fair, the battery pack was being dragged around by the wires a lot, and even hung from the wires, so avoid this if possible when working with EL.
The other challenge was making it stand up. At points in this sequence the center of gravity wasn’t over the feet, so we tied a fishing line to the torso. During some of these shots, Jason (hear his podcast!) was actually in the bed of the truck supporting PVC man with a fishing pole. We weren’t prepared to do this, so it took a ton of time compared to the other shots, even though the standing sequence was only a couple frames.
You can probably figure it out from the video, but be sure to check back to see how the “PVC-Man” itself was made!Several celebrities like Katy Perry, Drake, and Pharrell Williams have been spotted with the gold Apple Watch Edition ahead of the device's launch, but Apple gifted designer Karl Lagerfeld with something even more special -- a custom gold Apple Watch with a gold Link Bracelet.In an image shared on Instagram by Lagerfeld's assistant and bodyguard Sebastian Jondeau, Lagerfeld wears a yellow gold Apple Watch with the one-of-a-kind yellow gold Link Bracelet, which Jondeau says was "specially made" by Apple.Karl Lagerfeld is a well-known fashion designer who's the head of both Chanel and Fendi, in addition to his own fashion house. Lagerfeld was present at the Apple Watch's first public appearance at French Parisian boutique Colette and as a style icon, he could be an important asset for Apple's Apple Watch marketing efforts.Though there's a Link Bracelet for the Silver and Space Black stainless steel Apple Watches, Apple did not make a similar band available for the gold Apple watch Edition, presumably due to price and the sheer amount of gold that would be necessary for such a band. The existence of a custom gold Link Bracelet does, however, suggest that such a band could be made available to the public in the future.Just the gold used in the Modern Buckle band raises the price of the Apple Watch Edition from $10,000 (with Sport band) to $17,000, so the price of a pure gold Link Bracelet would likely be upwards of $25,000. The Link Bracelet for the standard Apple Watch is priced at $449 and is Apple's most expensive band.As we creep closer to the April 24 launch of the Apple Watch, we may see more custom designs like this on the wrists of celebrities and other fashion designers as Apple hopes to use these influencers to convince people to drive Apple Watch sales.(Thanks, John!)Have the Buccaneers finally found a use for Jeff Demps?
Rick Stroud of the Tampa Bay Times noted over the weekend that the U.S. Olympic track star "made a lot of plays" as a slot receiver during last week's three-day minicamp.
Demps barely contributed last season, but new coach Lovie Smith is determined to find a use for the former University of Florida running back.
"He is definitely the fastest guy in the NFL, and you see that quickness," said Smith. "We have to find a way to use that speed. He has good hands even though he dropped a long one."
Acquired last April in a trade that shipped LeGarrette Blount to the New England Patriots, Demps appeared in just two games before suffering a pulled groin in October.
The 5-foot-7 jitterbug also brings potential firepower as a return man, but Demps likely is done in Tampa if he doesn't emerge as a factor in the coming months.
The latest "Around The League Podcast" breaks down the draft with NFL Films' Greg Cosell.Law-enforcement authorities in Armenia have dropped criminal charges against a 32-year-old woman who has admitted killing her reportedly violent husband in May.
The 34-year-old man, Tigran Martirosian, was shot dead in his house in Gugark, a village in the northern Lori province, during a bitter argument with his wife, Liana Kirakosian. She was arrested and charged with excessive self-defense at the time.
Kirakosian was set free pending investigation three days later. Armenia’s Investigative Committee also ordered police to protect her against possible reprisals.
The committee announced late on Wednesday that Kirakosian will not go on trial and risk imprisonment after all. Presenting the results of its criminal investigation, the law-enforcement body said that she had been “periodically subjected to violence” by her husband and was again attacked by him late on May 24. It said Martirosian pointed an illegally owned gun at the pregnant woman’s head and threatened to kill her before she wrested it and fired gunshots at him “in the heat of passion.”
A statement by the Investigative Committee added that the criminal case against Kirakosian has been dropped because the woman “regrets” her actions even though she suffered “strong physical pain and mental suffering” at the hands of her husband.
The victim’s late father, Edik Martirosian, was a reputed crime figure better known to Lori residents as “Chachoents Edo.” The latter was gunned down in 2004 along with his elder son Hovannes and another relative.
The investigators announced their decision to clear the dead man’s wife of wrongdoing amid ongoing heated debates in Armenia on a government bill aimed combatting domestic violence. The bill introduced by the Justice Ministry in September met with fierce resistance from some conservative groups and nationalist public figures.
Senior members of the ruling Republican Party of Armenia (HHK) also voiced serious misgivings, saying that some of the bill’s provisions would undermine traditional “Armenian family values.” The ministry responded by amending the draft law. Its expanded title now states that the proposed legislation is aimed at not only preventing domestic violence and protecting its victims but also “restoring solidarity within families.”
The Armenian parliament’s committee on legal affairs discussed and backed the bill on Thursday, paving the way for its passage by the full National Assembly. Only one committee member, Gevorg Petrosian, objected to the bill, calling it a breeding ground for conflicts between police and married men. Vanik Asatrian, another lawmaker representing businessman Gagik Tsarukian’s alliance, claimed that many rural residents in his constituency in central Armenia are strongly opposed to any police intervention in family disputes.
The committee chairman, Hrayr Tovmasian, sought to dispel such concerns, saying that the police would be required to intervene only in cases where the lives or health of family members are at risk.
According to the Yerevan-based Women’s Resource Center, more than 50 Armenian women have been beaten to death or murdered otherwise by their husbands or other relatives in the last five years.HAVING upstaged Harry Kewell, Adelaide United playmaker Dario Vidosic is now targeting Brett Emerton's struggling Sydney FC.
At 24, with Bundesliga experience and 14 Socceroo caps, Vidosic is arguably the competition's most discerning marquee addition with Kewell's Victory and Emerton's Sydney Sky Blues so far winless and scoreless this season.
"Our understanding is only going to get better and better. I think we will see an even better performance against Sydney FC," predicted Vidosic, who cut up Victory in his Friday night Reds debut at Hindmarsh following a prolonged four-year stint with Bundesliga side FC Nuremberg.
"Hopefully we can knock off Sydney and then Brisbane who could have a 31-game unbeaten streak by round four."
Sydney FC coach Vitezslav Lavicka will ponder a switch for wing jewel Emerton to a central creative role but Vidosic says it will matter little where the former Blackburn Rovers favourite starts on Saturday at Hindmarsh.
"Sydney FC is a good team and we know we need to play with the same intensity as we did against Melbourne Victory to win," said Vidosic, who had been dogged by sickness, knee and hamstring strains since joining the Reds in July.
"We have to prepare for everything and not just worry about one player. Emerton is a quality player, dangerous but we need to worry about them all because the others can punish us."
While Flores was a big loss, new No. 10 Vidosic warmed hearts at Hindmarsh during the 1-0- defeat of Victory.
"I heard a lot about Marcos from last season but he has |
through asking for plugin configuration info. After the plugin is created, you can use some of the sub generators to add options pages, widgets, unit testing or even WP-API endpoints. A side benefit of using something like a generator especially in team development is all code comes from the same base and locating assets is fast. We have a few posts on this on this as well–check ’em out!
$ npm install -g yo $ npm install -g generator-plugin-wp //cd into plugins directory $ yo plugin-wp
wd_s is a fork of Automatic’s Underscores theme. wd_s has added development goodies to take Underscores from simple parent/child theme to a basis for creating amazing custom websites. You can read about the history of wd_s and how we use it for project scaffolding, too–we use it for most all of our projects! After downloading and installing wd_s, cd into the theme folder and run the install–then you can access grunt tasks.
$ cd /your-project/wordpress/wp-content/themes/your-theme $ npm install && bower install
Simple Page Builder is not a drag and drop page maker like you get with some themes; it’s a library/plugin you can add to your projects to create reusable template parts. We use this extensively in projects and has helped to reuse code/templates in a project or even across projects. Most site design can be broken down into stacked page blocks. SPB can help you create these as reusable blocks instead of one page. After activating the plugin you can place template parts in /your-theme/pagebuilder. Add the template tag below into a page or post template to add any SPB parts you’ve selected in the page admin. Read through the Github documentation there are some granular options. You can also check out this tutorial from Chris on using Simple Page Builder to add unique layouts to your content.
<?php do_action( 'wds_page_builder_load_parts' );?>
CMB2 is a developer’s toolkit for building metaboxes, custom fields, and forms for WordPress that will blow your mind. That’s the Github description and who could possibly disagree? If you’ve ever had to set up an option/settings page in WordPress then you know how tedious it can be. CMB2 alleviates most of the repetitive work for you and gets you adding meta boxes and fields right away. After adding the plugin or including the library in your project the code snip below would add a meta box and a field. Check the repo for basic examples, and check out the many articles we have covering different ways to utilize CMB2.
function cmb2_sample_metaboxes() { // Start with an underscore to hide fields from custom fields list $prefix = '_yourprefix_'; /** * Initiate the metabox */ $cmb = new_cmb2_box( array( 'id' => 'test_metabox', 'title' => __( 'Test Metabox', 'cmb2' ), 'object_types' => array( 'page', ), // Post type 'context' => 'normal', 'priority' => 'high','show_names' => true, // Show field names on the left // 'cmb_styles' => false, // false to disable the CMB stylesheet // 'closed' => true, // Keep the metabox closed by default ) ); // Regular text field $cmb->add_field( array( 'name' => __( 'Test Text', 'cmb2' ), 'desc' => __( 'field description (optional)', 'cmb2' ), 'id' => $prefix. 'text', 'type' => 'text','show_on_cb' => 'cmb2_hide_if_no_cats', // function should return a bool value //'sanitization_cb' =>'my_custom_sanitization', // custom sanitization callback parameter // 'escape_cb' =>'my_custom_escaping', // custom escaping callback parameter // 'on_front' => false, // Optionally designate a field to wp-admin only //'repeatable' => true, ) ); } add_action( 'cmb2_admin_init', 'cmb2_sample_metaboxes' );
I’m sure you’ve come across the conundrum of blocking a plugin deactivation when it has other plugins dependent on it. This library can be added to /mu-plugins and then an array of plugins can be added to keep a plugin from being activated. Keep sanity knowing someone won’t inadvertently white screen a site!
function wds_required_plugins_add( $required ) { $required = array_merge( $required, array( 'jetpack/jetpack.php','sample-plugin/sample-plugin.php', ) ); return $required; } add_filter( 'wds_required_plugins', 'wds_required_plugins_add' );
Creating custom post types can be laborious, but Custom Post Type UI, our most popular plugin, has an admin UI to ease the process. You can add/edit/delete Custom Post Types and Taxonomies. Save significant development time by using this plugin.
Activate this plugin and it creates a /login page automatically. But wait there’s more! If you want to create a custom form create a template page-*.php, switch * to the slug of your login page. By default it will be page-login.php. Then add wds_login_form() template tag below to your new template. Easy peezy.
<?php wds_login_form( $redirect, $echo );?>
We do a lot of BuddyPress development at WDS. The BuddyPress framework plugin was created to address customizing BuddyPress without editing the BuddyPress core plugin and to streamline the development process. Activate this plugin and it will override the template/assets from the BuddyPress plugin. After activation, run the following command lines to set up the project.
$ cd /your-project/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wds-bp-project-framework $ npm install && bower install
Want to add mobile app building to your repertoire? AppPresser core plugin is open source. Developers can use this plugin to make custom apps, or custom extensions for AppPresser. This core plugin is a bare bones starting point, so If you are not a developer, check out the AppPresser extensions you can purchase. The core plugin gets you started by adding the Phonegap/cordova files needed to load native device functionality.
That’s ten WebDevStudios development resources to up your game, folks. If you’ve used any of these or have used other must have WordPress open source plugins/frameworks/libraries, add then to a comment below.Image copyright Lefteris Pitarakis Image caption David Miliband is among those who has criticised his brother's campaign
"Some of those gimmicks - that tombstone, whatever idiot thought that up I do not know!"
I was talking to the former Mayor of Crawley in Sussex, John Mortimer, in the town's Labour Supporters Club about the vexed question of what went wrong, and where Labour should go next.
This seat is one of those southern seats Labour hoped to take, but failed.
I hear a whole range of views in the club.
"They didn't give nothing to depend on, they should be clear, and a little bit more down to Earth."
"Good party, wrong leader, they don't look after business enough."
Councillor John Stanley tells me: "I think in a way we did go too left, but now we can go a bit centre-left, or centre, depending who the new leader is."
The former mayor sums up the mood on the doorstep: "Whatever we told them, they didn't believe us."
Old divisions
Expect to hear all those views, and more, in the coming leadership contest.
Step back from the angst of supporters, and it may not be that hard to see why Labour failed.
An economic recovery, hailed by independent organisations as the result of government policy, undid a party that had loudly proclaimed for five years that the coalition's policies would lead to economic disaster.
Image copyright BBC/Getty Image caption Tony Blair and Lord Mandelson have been critical of Labour's campaign
Combine that with an uncharismatic and uninspirational leader, then you might argue no further debate is necessary.
Fat chance of that.
Defeat breeds resentment, and this one has opened up old divisions.
A chorus of Blairties, led by the man himself, has declared that Ed's problem was ignoring those with aspiration and ambition, failing to appeal to those running business.
Incidentally, I've been ticked off by the perspicacious editor of the New Statesman, Jason Cowley, for using the "unhelpful" term "Blairites".
I can't think of another description that fits Tony, Lord Mandelson, Lord Adonis and David Miliband quite so well.
But call them what you will, the message was clear - Ed was too left wing, Labour should move back to the centre, or, if you like, to the right.
Reading Mr Blair's pithy analysis, listening to Lord Mandelson's gripping and savage eloquence, describing a party sent out to shout: "We love the poor and hate the rich," and so ignoring the middle, and you realise strong emotions are in play.
But back to the future may not be sufficient.
Elephants in the room
Image copyright PA Image caption The stone pledge stunt attracted widespread derision
Of course elections are won on the centre ground.
But grandees grinding axes, affronted by the failure of boys who used to make their tea, may be creating so much noise that they can't hear more insistent sounds.
For there are several elephants trumpeting loudly as they cram into the small space of the shadow cabinet room.
Election statistics to worry Labour:
UKIP's share of the vote rose by 9.5% to 12.6%. The party came second in 120 seats
Labour came first or second in 485 seats - but the figure for the Conservatives was 511
In Scotland, the Labour share of the vote fell 17.7% to 24.3%, costing the party all but one of its 41 seats
Imagine these beasts are as gaily decorated as Berlin buddy bears. One is decked out in red, another in imperial purple bunting, and another, a mammoth, strong tusked and ice rimmed, painted yellow with tartan trimmings.
Take the last first.
The Scottish wipeout is Labour's biggest problem.
Fail to solve it, and Labour can forget ever having a comfortable majority again.
It is hard to argue Labour were wiped out in Scotland because the SNP outflanked them to the right with their appeal to the business community and the ambitious and aspirational.
But it is true the SNP drew in to people from left, right and centre, just as the modernisers say Labour should.
It was the politics of economic self-interest, but cast in a very different light.
Tribally sneering at "the reactionary ideology of nationalism" as Mr Blair does, will not reach the central belt of Scotland, the middle ground of Midlothian.
Rise of UKIP
What about that purple pachyderm? In Crawley - in fact in seat after seat - there is a similar pattern.
Labour did, in fact, often increase the size of their vote. So did the Conservatives, usually by a bit more.
Image copyright PA Image caption The rise of UKIP has impacted on Labour
But the real dynamic was the total collapse of the Lib Dems and the dramatic rise of UKIP.
The increase in votes for Nigel Farage's party wasn't translated into parliamentary seats, but, although it is early days in terms of research, it probably hurt Labour a lot.
If we believe - and I do - Matthew Goodwin and Rob Ford, authors of Revolt on the Right, these voters are often former Labour supporters - older, less educated, those left behind on the tides of globalisation, stranded on the shores of post-industrialisation.
They may have had too many disappointments to feel much ambition or aspiration.
They are a challenge for Labour, and any new leader will spend a good deal of time thinking how to deal with the concerns of Europe and immigration.
Whether to share their fears, or confront them will be a big decision.
Socialist voice
Which brings us to Red Nellie. Those members who still proudly call themselves socialist.
This is not about Old Labour - they are more likely to be baristas or barristers than boilermakers.
It is easy as an outsider, as a journalist, to treat politics as an intellectual game about how best to win power - but many people, particularly the foot soldiers, particularly after the death of purely tribal loyalties, are in it because they passionately believe in winning power to do something specific.
Image copyright AFP Image caption The SNP wiped out Labour in Scotland
Many of them are suspicious of the later incarnations of New Labour, not because it reached an accommodation with wealth and business, but because it seemed to worship at the same altar, to regard the party's core beliefs in redistribution and equality as childish fantasies from a past age.
Perhaps to Mr Blair, they are the problem, people who may equate "ambition" with greed.
They might point out that a man who claims to be worth "only" £20m may find it harder than most to squeeze through the eye of a needle to understand their point of view.
Most successful Labour leaders will confront the left at some point, but the concerns of this group go to the existential question "What is the party for?"
This is not a polemic - not an argument about what should be done, but a reflection on the complex conundrums that will face any new Labour leader, the tearing apart of the old alliance that made up a Labour majority, and so the political need to satisfy groups with very different, indeed, contradictory demands.
But looking for a Social Democratic universal theory of everything may be missing the point.
What the party desperately wants is a leader who can pull the disparate threads together and articulate them as common purpose.
Whether she or he exists is another matter.
Much more on that in the coming months.Mike Segar / Reuters Donald Trump said Sunday that he wasn't even sure what the presidential salary was -- but he wasn't taking it.
During his first television interview as president-elect, Donald Trump told CBS News’ Leslie Stahl Sunday night that he would forgo taking a salary while he’s president. He added that he did not even know how much the president earned.
“I think I have to by law take $1, so I’ll take $1 a year,” Trump said. “But it’s a ― I don’t even know what it is. Do you know what the salary is?”
“$400,000 you’re giving up,” Stahl answered.
“No, I’m not gonna take the salary. I’m not taking it.”
Trump will become the third U.S. president in history to not take a salary, according to Snopes.com. Herbert Hoover and John F. Kennedy both donated their salaries to charity.
The president-elect first said he would not take a salary on the campaign trail in September 2015, before reminding the crowd gathered that forgoing the pay “was not a big deal” for him.Mormon Historian Grant Palmer Meets with a 'General Authority' of the LDS Church Three Meetings with a LDS General Authority, 2012-2013 by Grant Palmer Editor Comment: Grant waited 6 months before releasing this report to the public because he wanted to make sure this is what the GA believed. In mid-October 2012, a returned LDS Mission President contacted me to arrange a meeting. Several days later, he called again and said that a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy also wished to attend. He said the General Authority would attend on condition that I not name him or repeat any stories that would identify him. He explained that neither of them, including the GA's wife, believed the founding claims of the restoration were true. He clarified that they had read my book, An Insider's View of Mormon Origins, and had concluded that the LDS Church was not true; was not what it claimed to be. The GA often went to the MormonThink.com website for information and there discovered my book. The Mission President said he received my book from the GA. We have at this writing met three times. We first met on Tuesday, October 23, 2012 and again February 14, 2013 at my house. On March 26, 2013 we convened at the GAs house. Upon entering my home for the first meeting the GA said, "We are here to learn." I recognized him. He has been a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy for a number of years. He has served in several high profile assignments during this period. The following are the more important statements made by the GA during our first three meetings. We now meet monthly. He said that each new member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles is given one million dollars to take care of any financial obligations they have. This money gift allows them to fully focus on the ministry. He said that the overriding consideration of who is chosen is whether they are "church broke," meaning, will they do whatever they are told. He said the senior six apostles make the agenda and do most of the talking. The junior six are told to observe, listen and learn and really only comment if they are asked. He said that it takes about two to three years before the new apostle discovers that the church is not true. He said it took Dieter F. Uchtdorf a little longer because he was an outsider. He said they privately talk among themselves and know the foundational claims of the restoration are not true, but continue on boldly "because the people need it," meaning the people need the church. When the Mission President voiced skepticism and named ___ as one who surely did believe, The GA said: "No, he doesn't." The one million dollar gift, plus their totally obedient attitude makes it easy for them to go along when they find out the church is not true. For these reasons and others, he doesn't expect any apostle to ever expose the truth about the foundational claims. When I asked the GA how he knew these things, he answered by saying that the Quorum of the Twelve today is more isolated from the Quorums of the Seventies now because there are several of them. When only one Quorum of the Seventy existed, there was more intimacy. During his one on one assignments with an apostle, conversations were more familiar. He said that none of the apostles ever said to him directly that they did not believe; but that it was his opinion based on "his interactions with them." Also, that none of the Twelve want to discuss "truth issues," meaning issues regarding the foundational claims of the church. He said that the apostle's lives are so completely and entirely enmeshed in every detail of their lives in the church, that many of them would probably die defending the church rather than admit the truth about Joseph Smith and the foundations of the church. The GA stated that my disciplinary action (which would have occurred on the final Sunday of October 2010 had I not resigned), was mandated/ordered/approved by the First Presidency of the Church. I said that if the apostles know the church is not true and yet order a disciplinary hearing for my writing a book that is almost certainly true regarding the foundational claims of the church, then they are corrupt even evil. He replied, "That's right!" The GA said the church is like a weakened dam. At first you don't see cracks on the face; nevertheless, things are happening behind the scenes. Eventually, small cracks appear, and then the dam will "explode." When it does, he said, the members are going to be "shocked" and will need scholars/historians like me to educate them regarding the Mormon past. The Mission President and the GA both said they attend church every Sunday and feel like "a hypocrite and trapped." The GA said his ward treats him like a king and when he gives firesides and speaks to LDS congregations they have high expectations of him. He would like to do more in getting the truth out besides raising a few questions when speaking and gifting my book to others when feeling comfortable. Perhaps this is why he has reached out to me. The GA is a man of integrity and very loving. Upon leaving each time, he always gives me a big hug. What is Anti-Mormon? from Sunstone Symposium, August 13-14, 2003 by Grant H. Palmer World renowned LDS scientist, Dr. Henry Eyring, spoke at a number of "Challenge Weeks" during my college years at the University of Utah on the subject of science during the 1960's. At the end of one of his papers, a student mockingly asked during the question and answer period: "Joseph Smith said that men live on the moon, are dressed like Quakers -- do you believe that Dr. Eyring? Professor Eyring answered without hesitation, "I'm glad you asked that question. You see, in my religion you don't have to believe in anything that is not true." His answer reflected the definition of Mormonism that he had learned in his youth, namely, what Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and other church leaders had said on the subject. For example, Joseph Smith taught that "Truth is Mormonism" in 1839. [1] And between 1862-1870, Brigham Young, in educating the saints said that, "If there is a truth among the ungodly and wicked it belongs to us, and if there is a truth in hell it is ours." [2] "Mormonism," said Young, "is all truth in heaven, on earth or in hell. -- All truth is ours. Now if anybody wants to make a trade, come on! If you have truths, and I have errors, I will give ten errors for one truth -- bring on your truth." [3] For "Mormonism embraces all truth that is revealed and that is unrevealed, whether religious, political, scientific, or philosophical." [4] "Mormonism includes all truth," he said. [5] There are usually two or more viewpoints for virtually every proposition under the sun, thus it comes down to how good is the evidence? For example there are people in the United States today that do not believe that Neil Armstrong stood on the moon. They believe the whole moon landing was staged in a studio with cameras, but how good is their evidence? Some people do not believe the Jewish Holocaust occurred, but how good is their evidence? There is still a Flat Earth Club of London, but the three dimensional earth photographs of the beautiful blue and white orb taken by Buzz Aldrin from the moon, cut their club membership in half. Nevertheless, nine people still believe in a flat earth and belong to the club. According to early Mormonism, "Truth is Mormonism" and thus it is falsehood itself that is anti-Mormon. Here are three clear examples that represent what I believe to be anti-Mormonism under this definition. Former LDS member, Ed Decker, has made several movies on the Mormon temple ceremony. In his second film, he notes that Adam and Eve's prayer petition to God in a foreign tongue, is in reality a prayer to "wonderful Lucifer." Prior to using this foreign language prayer in his film, Decker had asked a Hebrew and Greek scholar for his interpretation of the prayer. When the scholar said such an interpretation was unwarranted, Decker said: "I'm going to use it anyway." This action is anti-Mormon. Some people within the LDS Church itself are quick to rush to judgment about what is anti-Mormon. All too often religious literature and political positions are labeled anti-Mormon prematurely. For example, Juanita Brook's book on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, once called anti-Mormon literature, is now carried and recommended by Deseret Book employees for those inquiring about this controversial subject. Time has vindicated Brooks. Someone owes her descendants an apology. She was unofficially dis- fellowshipped for publishing her book. She was asked not to make comments at church, and even her husband was punished by never being asked to pray again in church. For a third example, I would observe that the early Mormon teaching that "Truth is Mormonism," needs to be re-emphasized in the LDS Church today, beginning with the Book of Abraham. Brigham Young University professor, Michael Rhoades, at the behest of Apostle Neal Maxwell and using the tithing money of the church has translated and published a book on the Joseph Smith papyri that were recovered by the church in 1967. The papyri have nothing to do with Abraham. Overwhelming evidence demonstrates that the papyri are about an Egyptian priest of Amon-Re, named Hor. In Facsimile 3, for example, Joseph Smith has repeatedly said that the Egyptian language above the hands and heads of the various persons in this document are all about Abraham. He is simply wrong, and it doesn't matter how he arrived at this information. Various writers who have published this evidence are not anti-Mormon, even though speakers at the F.A.I.R. conference called them such last week. Thus, in the best tradition of Mormonism, the Book of Abraham, now embedded within Mormon scripture should be dropped from the standard works of he LDS Church. To continue to spin the Book of Abraham as authentic, in light of the overwhelming evidence, is anti-Mormon. When something is shown by solid evidence to be false, according to the above definition, LDS prophets should be willing to modify or discard. It is not enough to say that it is through feeling that fact is found in the LDS Church, that "you shall feel that it is right," and therefore it is truth (D&C 9:8). Neither is it acceptable to encourage small children, who cannot read or write to repeat, "I know the church is true," "I know that Joseph Smith is a true Prophet." We all have hunches, intuitions and feelings and they certainly have their place in our search for truth. Sometimes the evidence supports our feelings. But when the facts and evidence do not support our hunches, intuitions and feelings, then we must decide, do facts and evidence trump feelings, or do I believe that feelings trump facts and evidence. I believe the mature person accepts the former. I hope the panel will allow ample time for those in the audience to share what you think anti-Mormonism is and what it is not. Thank you.
[1] Dean C. Jessee, comp. and ed., The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1984), 389, emphasis added.
[2] Brigham Young, January 12, 1868, in Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (London and Liverpool: LDS Booksellers Depot, 1854-86), 12:155.
[3] Brigham Young, July 3, 1870, Ibid., 14:280-81.
[4] BY, January 12, 1862, Ibid., 9:149.
[5] BY, April 8, 1867, Ibid., 11:375. Religious Feeling and Truth
MIDWESTERN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY (Spring 2010:115-118)
by Grant Palmer
Author Grant H. Palmer spent his career as a teacher within the LDS Church Educational System. In 2004, he was disciplined after writing a book that called into question Mormonism's claims about its founder, the Prophet Joseph Smith, while at the same time calling upon his church to place greater emphasis on Jesus Christ. Although Palmer is not a Southern Bapist -- indeed he still considers himself a Mormon -- we are pleased that he was willing to share with us how he came to the conclusion that one must not ultimately base the acceptance or rejection of religious truth on feelings. In making his case, Palmer challenges the central Mormon belief that the best (perhaps the only) way to be sure that the book of Mormon is true and that Joseph Smith really a prophet is to pray to receive a testimony, or "burning Bosom," providing assurance that they are. (The Editor) When Pontius Pilate interrogated Jesus shortly before his death, Jesus said, I came "into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice," meaning to follow him. Pilate then asked his now famous rhetorical question, "What is truth?" and abruptly ended the interview (John 18:37-38). Earlier in his ministry the Apostle Thomas had asked: "How can we know the way?" and Jesus explicitly replied, "I am the way, [I am] the truth" (John 14:5-6). The Apostles John, Paul and Peter later repeated that "truth came by Jesus Christ," that "the truth is in Jesus" and that Jesus is "the way of truth" (John 1:17; Eph. 4:21; 2 Pet. 2:2). The truth about God for the Christian is seen in the personality, character, wisdom, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament. For the Christian, Christ is religious Truth. How then does a person specifically come to know religious Truth/Christ? I like the fact that Jesus emphasized an empirical test of his teachings to "know" him rather than a metaphysical approach to truth. It is instructive to bear in mind that Jesus never invited anyone to know him by a religious feeling. Instead of advocating a controversial and highly subjective spiritual feeling methodology to know him and his teachings, Jesus taught: "If any man will do his [Father's] will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself." And in one of his recorded prayers, Jesus said that taking upon us the name of God and his character is to "know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent" (John 7:17; 17:3, emphasis added). The aged Peter reemphasized this doctrine to the saints --saying that the "divine nature" of Christ and his teachings can be known only by exemplifying the Christlike characteristics of: "Diligence [in our daily walk] -- faith [in God] -- virtue -- knowledge [of the scriptures] -- temperance [meaning self control, moderation and balance] -- patience -- godliness [goodness] -- brotherly kindness [gentleness] -- charity" [love and compassion]. Peter then explained that when these nine qualities "be in you, and abound'' then we "know -- Jesus Christ'' (2 Pet. 1:4-8, emphasis added). Paul also taught the saints "to put on Christ," to strive for these characteristics, until "Christ be in you," "until Christ be formed in you." His list of the fruits by which a Christian is known is almost identical with Peter's. He also lists nine qualities: "love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance" (Rom. 8:10; 13:14; Gal. 4:19; 5:22-23). Shortly before leaving the earth Jesus promised his disciples that he would send to them His agent the Holy Spirit. Jesus then described the mission and responsibility of the Holy Spirit to his apostles: (1) He will "bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you" --to sharpen and intensify all the words, teachings and example of Jesus' ministry to their "remembrance" (John 14:26, emphasis added); (2) "When the Comforter is come -- he shall testify of me" --he will bring "comfort," peace and tranquility to their soul that Jesus is Christ (John 15:26, emphasis added); (3) When "the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth [about me]: for he shall -- glorify me" --He will "guide" or "sanctify [them,] through the truth," which further "glorifies" Christ (John 16:13-14, emphasis added; cf. John 17:19); (4) And after the "power -- [of] the Holy Ghost is come upon you: ye shall be witnesses unto me" --He will empower, embolden, and enliven, to fill them with enthusiasm (God in us) and the confidence to compellingly testify of Christ to others (Acts 1:8, emphasis added). Shortly after the Day of Pentecost, all these promises are plainly manifested by the Apostles in Acts chapters 2-5. In summary, all of the statements made by Jesus about the Holy Spirit during his ministry have this in common --the Holy Spirit is all about Christ! One of the most emphasized teachings in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is found in the oft quoted passage found in the Book of Mormon: "And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things" (Moro. 10:5, emphasis added). In this verse we see a move away from the Holy Spirit's role of testifying of things Christ, as taught by Jesus in the New Testament, to the idea that one can know the truth about anything--about "all things." An extreme example of this teaching within the Book of Mormon is when Nephi stated: "I did obey the voice of the Spirit, and took Laban by the hair of the head, and I smote off his head" (1 Ne. 4:18). A more recent example of a Mormon being influenced by this teaching is when Ron and Dan Lafferty received a "revelation" of the "Spirit" to kill Brenda Lafferty and her infant child because, like Nephi's rationale, Brenda was interfering with the future progress of their religious movement. The Holy Spirit may well tell a person the Book of Mormon is true because it testifies and brings a person to Christ, who is the Truth, but not whether the Book of Mormon's theological doctrines are true. For example, does the spirit that is felt when reading the book mean that it confirms that God and Christ is the same being [Palmer alludes to the Book of Mormon modalistic tendencies] or that man is more evil than good --both doctrines taught in the Book of Mormon, but later reversed by Joseph Smith? Since Mormons now believe that God and Christ are two separate beings, and that man is more good than evil, taught since the early 1840's in Nauvoo by Smith, which confirming spirit is a true one? Nor does the Spirit confirm the truth or falsity of whether the Book of Mormon is a real record of a historical people of the distant past. The Holy Spirit testifies of all things Christ, not "all things" as Joseph Smith taught in the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants. When a church or group embraces the idea that when preacher and hearer "are edified," or feel the "Spirit of truth," and thus what they speak and hear is the truth (D&C 50:20-21), they open up a can of worms that leads to strange mis-directions and mischief, as witnessed throughout history. For example, many followers of the LDS and FLDS churches have received the confirming and edifying "Spirit" that Warren Jeff's or Thomas Monson is the "prophet, seer and revelator" for humankind. Moreover, some fundamentalist Mormon churches pass out literature quoting Brigham Young and others that polygamy is divine and is to be practiced. The promise being that one can know by reading, praying, pondering, and feeling the "Spirit." Some claim they receive the edifying "Spirit of truth," and join with these religious congregations. Some young Muslims become fully convinced through religious feeling that Allah wants them to strap bombs around their waist and detonate themselves and others for the glory of Allah. I was once invited by an enthusiastic promoter to invest $8,000 in a Fort Worth, Texas, oil well. After praying and pondering and feeling the "Spirit," I gave him the money but lost every cent. I also felt the "Spirit" strongly after hearing the inspiring World War II stories of Paul H. Dunn and Douglas Stringfellow, which were later found to be largely bogus. Some people claim they found their car keys only after praying and being led by the Spirit where to look. These kinds of stories are plentiful. The tendency of religious people is to report only those spiritual feeling experiences that actually come true, seldom those that fail. The reality is that God's purposes in giving the Holy Spirit did not include infallibly leading us into a very literal application of "know[ing] the truth of all things." Throughout my life I have heard the repeated phrase, "I know the church is true," "the only true church on earth" (D&C 1:30). I have come to believe that Christian churches are not true or false, but rather good or bad depending on the degree to which they focus on the life of Jesus, his teaching ministry, his character, his wisdom, atonement, and Christ-like service. Churches that emphasize Christ and his core teachings, such as the importance of being "born again" and the sanctifying role of God's grace in that process, resulting in Christ-like love and service to the less fortunate, are the most valuable. Churches that allow Jesus to fall through the cracks, that occasionally instead of regularly focus on Christ himself, that are largely preoccupied with their own peculiar beliefs and intuitional needs, with emphasis upon service within the organization, are less valuable. ----- Grant H. Palmer is the author of The Incomparable Jesus (Kofford Books, 2005) and An Insider's View of Mormon Origins (Signature Books, 2002). He has also penned articles for the Salt Lake Tribune and Sunstone magazine. He retired in 2001, after thirty-four years of teaching and counseling for C.E.S. He and his wife Connie, live in Sandy, Utah.national
The teacher had gone with a peon to the speech- and hearing-impaired boy’s house to speak about his irregular attendance
An eight-year-old hearing- and speech-impaired boy from Malad allegedly committed suicide at his house on Thursday afternoon.
Only moments after promising his class teacher — who had gone to his house to speak about his irregular attendance — that he would be regular at school, Sumit Sonkar locked himself inside his room and hanged himself with a thin rubber pipe.
School authorities are finding it difficult to believe that the student, who was known as one of the most naughty students of the class, could succumb to pressure and take the extreme step. Representation Pic/Thinkstock
He was found hanging by his aunt in the evening when she went to fetch him. His parents rushed him to a local hospital where he was declared dead on arrival. The body was later shifted to the Bhagwati post-mortem centre for forensic evaluation, where the doctors confirmed that he died due to asphyxiation, but also secured his blood sample in order to ensure that there was no foul play.
'He was neglected'
School authorities of Sanskardham Vidyalaya said that after taking admission, around two years ago, Sumit’s academic progress had been very |
for turbidity, alkalinity, bacteria levels, fluoride, chlorine and other additives or contaminants. Those testing samples are generally taken by utility staff at the plant. But with lead and copper, the samples are collected at home by the customer, usually in the morning, using instructions and a sample collection bottle provided by the utility.
The results depend greatly on the customer following the sampling directions properly. Virginia Tech researchers say there's a great potential for data distortion if the sample doesn't catch water that sat overnight in the service line.
"You have to count on it being done correctly," said Wrubel, who said testing targets older homes and the results are not indicative of the whole system.
In Marysville, the 12 ppb result was based on data from 30 homes. In Kalamazoo, the 13 ppb result was based on 59 sampled homes.
Sue Foune, director of Kalamazoo's public services department, which includes the water system, said three homes tested at or above the 15 ppb action level. Those had lead service lines that were subsequently replaced. Three homes tested between 9 ppb and 4 ppb, and the remaining 53 homes tested less than 3 ppb, which, in utility parlance, is a "non-detect."
Sue Foune, water plant manager in Kalamazoo, checks bacteria samples in this 2008 file photo.
Of the 15 ppb samples, the first came from an outside hose. Another came from a basement utility sink that contained a lead solder. The third was from a vacant house. The homes were all "Tier 1," or locations with lead service lines.
"We follow the EPA and state protocol," said Foune. "We believe we're fine."
Bear Lake officials did not return a message seeking comment. The DEQ and EPA have not taken action there or in Crystal Falls Township because the limits do not exceed 15 ppb.
Thomas Lesandrini, Crystal Falls Township supervisor, said the rural water system is lead sampling again in September after the 2013 test showed concerning levels of lead in some homes with lead in their plumbing.
"We have a lot of older homes up here that seem to be the problem."
As for the private water systems on the list, the highest contamination in the DEQ records is at Chateaux Du Lac Condominiums, a homeowners association in Fenton that tested at 79 ppb in December 2014; and the AuSable Valley Community nursing home in Fairview, which tested at 68 ppb in December 2015.
The Fenton condos get water from a private well, say managers.
"It seems high," said Mark Piper, president of Piper Management. "We do acknowledge the DEQ said there was a lead issue and we do have a corrosion control plan in place with them and we're implementing it as we speak."
In Fairview, Wellspring Lutheran Services administrator Michael Stephenson acknowledged an "anomaly" in its senior care facility private well water, and, in an email, said the facility has "replaced some fixtures and equipment."
Wellspring is working with consultants to develop long-range testing protocols, and has "informed its residents regarding what was found, what has been done to address it, and what will be done moving forward."
Database of Michigan private water system lead levels
Garret Ellison covers business, environment & the Great Lakes for MLive Media Group. Email him at gellison@mlive.com or follow on Twitter & InstagramAndrew Kress, the chief executive of SDI Health, cautioned that the data had not yet been published and was still being analyzed, but he confirmed that the trend had been toward fewer circumcisions each year.
He added that measuring the circumcision rate was not the purpose of the study, which was designed to measure the rate of complications from the procedure.
Opponents of circumcision hailed the trend as a victory of common sense over what they call culturally accepted genital mutilation. For federal health officials, who have been debating whether to recommend circumcision to stem the spread of AIDS, the news suggests an uphill battle that could be more difficult than expected.
C.D.C. officials last week declined requests for interviews about the study, but a spokeswoman, Elizabeth-Ann Chandler, answered questions by e-mail. She reiterated that the agency used the SDI figures to calculate the rate of complications, not of circumcisions.
“C.D.C. was not involved in the collection of the data that was cited, nor has C.D.C. undertaken any review of this particular data for the purpose of calculating rates,” she wrote. “As such, we cannot comment on the accuracy of this particular estimate of infant male circumcision.”
But she did not dispute the waning popularity of circumcision. “What we can tell you is that male infant circumcision rates have declined somewhat in this decade,” she wrote.
The study found a very low rate of complications associated with newborn circumcisions; most were considered mild and no babies died.
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Organizations opposed to circumcision said parents may be responding to the message their groups have been spreading through their Web sites and a video distributed to childbirth educators.
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“Word has gotten out that it’s not necessary, it’s harmful and it’s painful,” said Georganne Chapin, executive director of Intact America, a nonprofit organization based in Tarrytown, N.Y.
Greater awareness about female circumcision may have influenced parents as well, she said, asking, “How can you think it’s O.K. to cut little boys, when you are horrified by the idea of cutting little girls?”
Both the C.D.C. and the American Academy of Pediatrics have been reviewing the scientific evidence on circumcision with an eye to issuing new policy recommendations, but so far neither body has done so, although the federal agency was to have issued its new recommendations by the end of last year.
Officials from the pediatrics academy said its new policy would be issued by early 2011; a task force that studied the topic has completed its report, which is being reviewed by several other committees, said Dr. Michael Brady, chairman of pediatrics at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, who served on the task force. The academy is likely to adopt a more encouraging stance than its current neutral position and to state that the procedure has health benefits beyond H.I.V. prevention, Dr. Brady said.
The World Health Organization in 2007 endorsed male circumcision as “an important intervention to reduce the risk of heterosexually acquired H.I.V.”
“No one is going to tell a parent, ‘You have to circumcise your child.’ That would be foolish,” Dr. Brady said. “The key thing physicians should be doing is providing information on both risks and benefits and allow the parent to make the best decision.”
Several state Medicaid programs stopped covering circumcision after the academy issued its current policy in 1999, and Dr. Brady said that may be one reason fewer parents opt for the procedure. Other possible reasons include a growing Hispanic population that has traditionally been disinclined to circumcision, as well the anti-circumcision movement and a broader trend among parents to spurn medical interventions like vaccination.
Some 80 percent of American men are circumcised, one of the highest rates in the developed world. Yet even advocates of circumcision acknowledge that an aggressive circumcision drive in the United States would be unlikely to have a drastic impact on H.I.V. rates here, since the procedure does not seem to protect those at greatest risk, men who have sex with men.
And while studies in Africa found that circumcision reduced the risk of a man’s becoming infected by an H.I.V.-positive female partner, it is not clear that a circumcised man with H.I.V. would be less likely to infect a woman.Canada’s economy is in fantastic shape in 2017 and the idea of a recession in 2017 is as likely as Donald Trump going a week without tweeting.
Here are five reasons why Canada’s economy will do good in 2017.
The job market is recovering
It may be cold comfort to anyone still looking for work, but Canada’s job market ended 2016 on a bit of a tear, adding more than 200,000 jobs from August onwards. There were more than 50,000 new jobs in December alone.
On the whole, there were more part-time jobs created in 2016 than full-time ones, but one big bank economist says it may be time to give up the notion that such jobs are somehow less desirable.
It’s always good to take volatile monthly figures with a grain of salt. But even ignoring the positive headline figures, the latest numbers show that wages are up, and so is the percentage of working-age adults who are choosing to be in the labour force. That’s good news no matter how you slice it.
2. Oil could be headed higher — finally
Canada’s economy is intrinsically linked to the price of oil, which is a big part of what made 2015 and 2016 such a bumpy ride. From a high of over $100 US a barrel in late 2014, oil bottomed out at under $30 US a barrel last year, wiping out billions from the stock market — not to mention tens of thousands of oil patch jobs in the process.
But ever since last fall, crude has been on a steady, albeit slow, march higher, up $10 a barrel in the past month. The main reason is that the byzantine oil cartel known as the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) lurched back to life with a pledge to start turning off the spigots to get prices back to a level member countries are more comfortable with.
That move might actually be working.
Saudi Arabia has been pumping out 486,000 fewer barrels a day since October, and more and more countries are following suit. While OPEC nations compete with Canadian oil companies for market share, the latter are the unwitting beneficiaries of their rivals’ action.
3. The loonie could be headed higher, too
The loonie is currently hovering around 75 cents US, but one strategist with a track record of accuracy says it could be headed higher.
Bialas says the doom and gloom around the loonie is misguided, as Canada’s economy has been through the eye of the storm and is poised to grow. Believe it or not, the loonie was one of the best performing major currencies in the world last year, trouncing the yen, the franc, the euro and the pound.
“The beginning of the year could be difficult for the Canadian dollar, but we’re expecting the trend to start slowing down,” Bialas told Bloomberg this week, suggesting the loonie could end the year even higher than it is now, hovering around the 75-cent level.
“The Canadian economy will feel the positive effects of an acceleration of growth worldwide and the risks to trade with the U.S. — the worries over tearing down NAFTA — will drop,” he said.
4. Trade is picking up
There’s ample evidence that the trade winds are blowing, too. On Friday, Statistics Canada reported that Canada swung to a trade surplus for the first time in two years in November, as the economy exported $526 million more than it imported that month.
Everything from energy products, to potash, aerospace parts and canola was booming, an encouraging sign of broad and diverse strength.
After two years of deficits, Canada’s trade balance swung into surplus in November.
5. The TSX is near an all-time high
In the markets, the TSX came within a few points of its all-time high of 15,685 points this week, set back in September 2014 — before oil’s decline waylaid the market.
As economic indicators go, the TSX is far from perfect. But an all-time high for a country’s dominant stock index is the sort of thing that tends to draw attention. Witness the hubbub in the U.S. right now over the Dow Jones, which has been flirting with passing the 20,000 point level for the first time for about a month now.
The TSX fell just short of its all-time high mark this week, but strategist Colin Cieszynski at CMC Markets in Toronto says there’s every reason to think it could pass that mark soon.
Considering the slew of positive financial news, a surging TSX seems downright reasonable.
Like this: Like Loading...A prestigious US academic body has joined a growing movement to boycott Israel in protest at its treatment of Palestinians, in a move both welcomed and condemned in a bitterly divisive international arena.
The American Studies Association (ASA), which has more than 5,000 members, is the most significant US academic organisation to back a boycott of Israeli educational institutions following a two-thirds majority vote. Around a quarter of members took part in the ballot.
The ASA resolution was "in solidarity with scholars and students deprived of their academic freedom", the organisation said in a statement. It cited "Israel's violation of international law and UN resolutions; the documented impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestinian scholars and students; [and] the extent to which Israeli institutions of higher education are a party to state policies that violate human rights."
The resolution bans "formal collaborations with Israeli academic institutions, or with scholars who are expressly serving as representatives or ambassadors of those institutions".
The vote came amid renewed calls in the aftermath of Nelson Mandela's death for an international boycott drive against Israel similar to the anti-apartheid campaign.
Last week the major Dutch drinking water firm Vitens announced that it was severing commercial links, including joint projects agreed just weeks earlier, with Israel's national water company, Mekorot, in protest at its activities in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. "The company concluded that it would be very difficult to develop joint ventures together, considering the fact that they cannot be seen as divorced from their political context. We follow international law," Vitens said in a statement.
At the same time, the UK government issued an explicit warning to British businesses over the risks of involvement in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including potential damage to a company's reputation. There were "clear risks related to economic and financial activities in the settlements, and we do not encourage or offer support to such activity," it said.
Earlier this year, the EU established new guidelines that prohibit giving funds, grants, prizes or scholarships to Israeli bodies with links to settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, prompting a furious response by the Israeli government.
The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, drew a distinction last week between boycotting products and companies connected to settlements and a more widespread boycott of Israeli institutions and goods. "We do not ask anyone to boycott Israel itself," he said in South Africa. "We have relations with Israel, we have mutual recognition of Israel." But, he added, "we ask everyone to boycott the products of the settlements".
The ASA move, which is not binding on its members, drew angry responses from Israeli ministers. "This is an unworthy act that does not dignify the association," said the science minister, Yaakov Peri. "To our regret, in the recent past we have seen numerous examples of the mixing of politics with science, and we are acting to eradicate those phenomena."
Avi Wortzman, the deputy education minister, also condemned the decision. He said: "This is a disgraceful attempt to meddle in the internal policies of the state of Israel under the guise of an academic debate and equal rights supposedly. The state of Israel grants all of its citizens an equal opportunity in the academic world and encourages the integration of minorities in academia."
Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, said: "This vote to boycott Israel, one of the most democratic and academically free nations on the globe, shows the Orwellian antisemitism and moral bankruptcy of the ASA." The association was deeply biased and disconnected with reality, he added.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel hailed the ASA's "refusal to be intimidated by the persistent efforts of defenders of Israel's regime of occupation, colonisation and apartheid". The move was "a significant step in the direction of holding Israeli institutions accountable for their collusion", it added.
The US-based Jewish Voice for Peace also welcomed the ASA's move, saying it represented a "significant milestone in the growth of the BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] movement in the United States". Boycotts to pressure Israel to abide by international law were not inherently antisemitic, it said.
The American Association of University Professors, which has 48,000 members, has rejected calls for a boycott of Israeli institutions. In the UK, the University and College Union supports one.
Earlier this year, the boycott movement claimed a major victory when Stephen Hawking pulled out of a conference in Israel in protest at its treatment of Palestinians.
Other British personalities who have declined invitations to visit Israel include Elvis Costello, Roger Waters, Brian Eno, Annie Lennox and Mike Leigh. Many others, however, including the author Ian McEwan, have resisted pressure to join the boycott on the grounds that it is ineffective or misguided.Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
The man has been sentenced to life imprisonment after fatally beating his gay victim to death.
Darrius Aderhold pleaded guilty to the murder of 46-year-old Robert Ross.
Prosecutors in Georgia told the court they believe Aderhold and two other men – Jonathan Ray and Christopher Foreman – lured an unsuspecting Mr Ross to a motel room, before carrying out the attack as part of a gang initiation.
Once they got back to the room, the gang tied their victim to a chair, before beating him so badly that his skull was fractured and almost every bone in his face was broken said Deputy Chief District Attorney Anna Cross said during sentencing.
“Almost every bone in his face was broken, his skull crushed,” she said.
The court heard that the victim’s injuries were so severe that paramedics could not determine his sex or race.
Mr Ross was targeted purely due to his sexuality, claimed prosecutors.
Although Aderhold and his assailants initially faced the death penalty, all three have now been sentenced to life in prison after accepting plea deals, according to AJC.
“I want to apologise to the victim’s family for a situation that shouldn’t have taken place,” Aderhold said during sentencing.
“I’m not asking for their forgiveness because I don’t think they should. I just feel in my heart I should say I’m sorry.”
Last month, a violent sexual offender who carried out the “sustained and brutal” murder of a university student was jailed for life in the UK.
Richard Danter, 31, was told he must serve a minimum of 15 years and five months in prison for the killing of 20-year-old Billy Mankelow.REUTERS/Alexei Druzhinin/RIA Novosti/Kremlin
Russian President Vladimir Putin talks to reporters after a session of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council in Minsk, Belarus, on April 29, 2014.
On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin made two assertions that reflect how he wants the world to see the turmoil in eastern Ukraine: "I state responsibly: There are neither Russian instructors, nor special units, nor troops, no one there."
Moscow argues that the ongoing crisis across eastern Ukraine — separatists have violently seized official buildings in more than a dozen cities and are demanding referendums — was caused by a West-backed coup d'état.
“I think what is happening now shows us who really was mastering the process from the beginning. But in the beginning, the United States preferred to remain in the shadow,” Putin said, according to RIA Novosti.
However, it's becoming clearer that what's happening leads back to Russia through Crimea.
Igor Strelkov, a suspected Russian intelligence officer who has emerged as the face of the insurgency, recently told journalists that he and his men entered Ukraine from Crimea. Earlier this month, Putin admitted that the masked men in unmarked military uniforms who commandeered Crimea were Russian troops.
Furthermore, a medal being awarded by the Russian government to former Ukrainians says that the operation to "liberate" Crimea began on Feb. 20, the bloodiest day of the Maidan uprising, two days before Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev.
Strelkov also said that a third of the fighters, a mix of trained men in uniform with modern weapons and less organized local militiamen, are not Ukrainian.
Ukraine considers Strelkov to be " the chief commander of pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine in charge of Russian Military Intelligence personnel, subversives, militants, and a network of Russian and Ukrainian agents working on behalf of Russia."
And although there are fewer "little green men" — Russian forces without insignia — in eastern Ukraine, the indications of a professional operation is clear.
As Peter Leonard of AP reports, " the eerie skill with which the green men anticipate Ukraine's every security move offers strong circumstantial evidence of Russian involvement."
So while Putin says he has sent "no one" to Ukraine and the West caused the crisis to begin with, Russian provocateurs are hiding in plain sight.
"What is happening in eastern Ukraine is a military operation that is well-planned and organized," U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, NATO's supreme commander in Europe, wrote on the NATO website, "and we assess that it is being carried out at the direction of Russia."
ukraine More
REUTERS/Baz Ratner
Pro-Russian armed men stand guard at a checkpoint after pro-Russian activists set tires on fire when Ukrainian soldiers arrived on armored personnel carriers, on the outskirts of Slaviansk, eastern Ukraine, on April 30, 2014.
ukraine Moresemi-ready
Tesla’s going big — like, 18-wheeler big.
The Tesla Semi, unveiled last week, is a big, shiny sign of a changing industry.
Like the rest of the company’s fleet, it is battery-powered and aggressively designed to maximize cool factor. Space-age updates include a center-mounted driver’s seat and console screens. It will also feature autopilot capabilities like emergency braking and automatic lane keeping, though it won’t get all the way to self-driving status.
But it’s a long road from slick, streamlined prototype to an actual electric truck hauling freight cross-country. The company has been plagued by manufacturing delays on its long-awaited Model 3, making the Semi’s planned production date of 2019 feel tentative. Still, big-box chain Meijer inc has reportedly reserved four semis already, and Walmart put down for a whopping 15.
Some of Tesla’s claims may seem overly optimistic. Experts estimate an electric truck should be able to travel up to 300 miles on one charge, but Elon Musk claims his model will go 500 miles “at maximum weight, at highway speed” and recharge in just 30 minutes.
Then again, if we’ve learned anything about the Tesla founder, it’s that he’s not shy about aiming high:Mr. Christie emerged as a national politician because his constituents saw him as a leader who put New Jersey first. His state battered by Hurricane Sandy and his party riven by the Tea Party, he sought needed federal assistance, and if that meant embracing a Democratic president, so what. “So what?” was a positive Christie characteristic back then. One could disagree with his methods, but he managed to make his efforts on behalf of his state seem sincere.
It must have been rough for those who re-elected him to see him hold forth Wednesday in a debate that centered on the national economy, when he’s been a net failure on the New Jersey economy. On his watch, one of the per-capita richest states in the nation has become one of its biggest laggards in economic growth, its budget woes prompting an appalling series of credit downgrades. Mr. Christie’s promises, from fixing the state’s pensions shortfall to its infrastructure, have come to less than nothing. More galling still is that he was not the only such politician on the dais. Since when does shortchanging your home state — looking at you, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal — qualify a public servant to be president?
It has been four months since Mr. Christie, both eyes blackened by Bridgegate, jumped into the presidential ring. After months spent in Iowa and New Hampshire, he’s in 11th place, his support among likely Republican primary voters hovering between nobody and 4 percent. His most recent quarterly contributions totaled $4.2 million, compared with $20.1 million for Ben Carson and $13.4 million for Jeb Bush. Half of Christie’s vaunted “leadership team” of New Jersey politicos didn’t give him a dime.
While Mr. Christie talks tough to empty rooms in Des Moines, Trenton is running on autopilot. Take Mr. Christie’s breakout moment, his response to Hurricane Sandy. Today, one-third of New Jersey residents hardest-hit by the storm say they are “very dissatisfied” with the state’s response so far; two-thirds say they feel “forgotten.” His fellow Republicans in the Legislature are embattled, thanks in part to the example he’s set. Mr. Christie earns $175,000 a year, the fifth-highest-paid governor in the nation, according to the Council of State Governments. Yet he hasn’t offered to forgo his salary or take a pay cut, as nearly a dozen full-time governors have done. Florida’s Sun Sentinel demanded Tuesday that Mr. Rubio, who earns a nearly identical salary and has missed 99 votes while on the campaign trail, more than any other United States senator this year, simply resign.
In an interview Tuesday on CBS, Mr. Christie said no other candidate has been more tested than he has, including Hillary Rodham Clinton. “My responsibilities, I think in many ways, have been greater than hers have been,” he said.Sydney coach John Longmire has read his team the riot act, accusing his players of "picking and choosing" when to play their trademark two-way style, as the Swans were rocked by injuries and suspension on Monday.
As the fallout continues from Saturday night's horror show against Hawthorn, it emerged the Swans will be without Kurt Tippett, Craig Bird - both to injuries - and the suspended Ted Richards, for the trip to Perth to take on the red-hot West Coast this weekend.
Awkward contact: Swans veteran Ted Richards and Hawthorn's Ben McEvoy. Credit:Getty Images
The setbacks have come at a terrible time for the Swans, whose premiership credentials have taken a hammering. And it could get worse - they are at risk of being tipped out of the top four if they leave the Eagles' Subiaco fortress without the points.
Forced to give up several fringe players following the big-name signings of Tippett and Lance Franklin, the Swans now face a big test of their depth in the coming month.An American flag hangs on a burned home in Santa Rosa, Calif., devastated by a wildfire that President Trump has rarely mentioned in public. (Jae C. Hong/Associated Press)
“Where’s the president?” asks the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle, as California burns.
Well, it knows where President Trump literally is: the White House usually, if not one of his resorts.
The newspaper board means where is he on Twitter — or as the board says, “How many times has Trump tweeted about the fires since they were whipped by winds into life-threatening force early Monday: zero.”
Zero, true, as of early Sunday evening. As the Chronicle notes, Trump did speak once, offline, about the fires. A few days ago, he promised to “stand with” Californians and said he’s in touch with the governor — and then welcomed the Pittsburgh Penguins to the White House and turned to other matters.
But the death toll in California has doubled to 41 since then, thousands of homes and millions of acres have been burned — and “one voice has been conspicuously mute,” the Chronicle wrote.
[Death toll continues to rise as California wildfires burn on]
“Americans expect their president to step forward with empathy and resolve in moments of national trauma,” the paper observed. And: “This is not a man who is reticent to let Americans know what is foremost on his mind.”
“So how can it be that the loss of 40 human beings on American soil did not merit a single tweet?”
And then much of the editorial is spent listing all the things Trump is tweeting about instead of the fires: the NFL, and TV news, and a book about himself, and “what I’ve done for #PuertoRico with so little appreciation.”
Odd to mention that last one. The last time Trump was being castigated for Twitter negligence, it was Puerto Rico’s hurricane damage that he was accused of ignoring.
[From the NFL to San Juan and back to the NFL: Trump’s week of Twitter chaos comes full circle]
This was all of three weeks ago, when CNN kept a running tally of Trump’s tweets: Sports 16, Puerto Rico 0 — nearly a week after Hurricane Maria wiped out the U.S. territory’s infrastructure wholesale.
As with the wildfires, Trump had spoken in public about the destruction. He’d even tweeted. But his critics found his comments incommensurate to the attention he paid other topics, not to mention previous storms that hit the U.S. mainland.
Hillary Clinton’s former campaign spokesman straight up called him a racist for it.
Trump's racist neglect of Puerto Rico is threatening lives. It is time to start caring about the crisis there. — Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) September 25, 2017
And then Trump did start tweeting about Puerto Rico and his administration’s help for the island — over and over and over. Consequently, he was accused by some of bragging, including the San Francisco Chronicle in Saturday’s editorial.
It has been like this, more or less, since Trump took his Twitter addiction into the White House.
A few days after his inauguration, several people were killed in an attack on a mosque in Canada. Trump called the country’s prime minister the next morning, but he was nevertheless called out for failing to tweet about the attack.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corp., for example, compared Trump’s Internet silence on the mosque with his loud protests of other attacks — and criticism of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In some way, Trump faces the same optical quandary as his predecessors have in times of crisis.
President Barack Obama was criticized for golfing while Louisiana flooded last year. At the dawn of the Internet age, footage of President George W. Bush reading a children’s book while the World Trade Center burned went proto-viral.
But we now live in the thick of the Internet, in an age that expects instantaneous reactions, with a president who often is happy to give them.
And the San Francisco Chronicle wants to know what’s different about lethal fires in California.
“The most cynical speculation would be that he could not care less about a state that despises him like no other,” the editorial board wrote.
Trump has not responded. At least not yet on Twitter.
Read more:
Wildfires have burned an area the size of Maryland
Lost weekend: How Trump’s time at his golf club hurt the response to Maria
California wildfires have been devastatingly arbitrary. Some houses stand amid a sea of ash.76 Shares 0
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Hundreds of ISIS terrorists carried out a large-scale offensive on T4 airbase from the Eastern and Southeastern directions of the airbase with a large number of suicide vehicles and tanks.
The army men and National Defense Forces managed to destroy the suicide vehicles and repelled their attack after hours of non-stop clashes, inflicting also heavy losses on the militants.
A field source said that over 55 ISIS terrorists were killed and five vehicles and three tanks were destroyed in the failed attack.
On Sunday, the ISIS terrorists' offensives to prevail over government forces' positions in T4 airbase in Eastern Homs were repulsed by Syrian Army troops and National Defense Forces.
The ISIS carried out the first attack with several suicide vehicles to break through government forces' positions Southwest of T4 airbase but the army and popular forces fended off their assault, killing at least 20 militants and destroying their suicide vehicles.
The ISIS carried out another attack using suicide tanks from the Southern flank of T4 airbase, but the army men destroyed their tanks, killing over 15 terrorists.
The ISIS pulled back its force after hours of clashes.
Army reports said Syrian and Russian fighter jets played a crucial role in repelling ISIS's attacks.
In July Palmyra’s haunting amphitheater was used as a stage for the execution of twenty five Syrian soldiers by child executioners – described as no older than thirteen or fourteen – who shot each kneeling man through the back of the head.
Earlier March 2016 the Syrian Arab Army secured a victory against the Black Flag Army which was the pivotal moment which saw the balance of this war of attrition flip in favour of the Resistance.California leaders seek budget help from D.C. CALIFORNIA BUDGET Billions in cash, easing of mandates on wish list
State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, left, responds to a question during a news conference held with Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, to discuss the results of Tuesday's special election at the Capitol in Sacramento, Calif., Wednesday, May 20, 2009. The voters rejection of the five-budget-related propositions leaves lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger searching for ways to fill a projected $21.3 billion budget deficit for the new fiscal year that begins July 1.(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli) less State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, left, responds to a question during a news conference held with Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, to discuss the results of Tuesday's... more Photo: Rich Pedroncelli, AP Photo: Rich Pedroncelli, AP Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close California leaders seek budget help from D.C. 1 / 3 Back to Gallery
California's political leaders, who are facing the daunting challenge of closing an estimated $20.7 billion budget deficit this year, are looking to Washington for help. Just don't call it a bailout.
Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said he plans to head to the nation's capital "early and often" seeking federal assistance. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger already has put the federal government on notice that he wants billions he says the state is owed. And outgoing Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Baldwin Vista (Los Angeles County), said she would head east as soon as this month.
It is not just cash that California wants. Schwarzenegger is calling for permanent changes to the formula that determines the amount of money the federal government contributes to Medi-Cal, California's Medicaid program, noting that the state is among the lowest in the country in reimbursement rates. He also wants money for the costs of providing special education in schools and incarcerating illegal immigrants, both unfunded federal mandates.
Steinberg said he wants a "dynamic partnership" between the federal government and the states, led by California, to spend money for infrastructure.
"No one is looking for a bailout. We're looking for an investment," he said, adding that the state needs to "fight" for more money.
Fuel for the engine
"It's in the national interest because California is an economic engine, and if we continue to be bogged down in deficits that are largely the result of the recession, then the country is going to have a hard time recovering," he said.
California already has received just over $8 billion in federal stimulus dollars that helped the state close the budget deficit last year. On Friday, Schwarzenegger will release his initial budget proposal for the next fiscal year, and the Legislative Analyst's Office already has called on state leaders to "aggressively seek new federal assistance" to help close the projected deficit.
The stimulus money, some of which was supposed to last through the next fiscal year, has been spent, and the state must continue to adhere to the requirements that came with accepting the funds, such as maintaining certain levels of funding for health and human services.
Some Republicans in the Legislature said those strings should have been more closely examined before California accepted the federal stimulus dollars in the first place.
"We do the same thing to local governments," said Assemblyman Roger Niello, R-Fair Oaks (Sacramento County), who said he is wary about what new requirements the state could face with additional dollars. "I don't think it's realistic to think that any policymaker at any level would grant unconditional assistance to those over whom they have control."
Lifting federal rules
Niello said the best thing the federal government could do would be to remove mandates for state spending in all areas until there is significant recovery in the economy.
State Sen. George Runner, R-Lancaster (Los Angeles County), said he is open to the idea of pursuing more federal dollars but added that he would rather see an easing of federal payroll tax rules to encourage job growth.
Runner also said California needs to be treated equally with other states, a common sentiment among state leaders, many of whom don't believe California is getting its fair share of federal dollars.
California ranks 43rd in the country among states in the amount of tax dollars paid to the federal government versus the amount of federal aid that comes back to the state, according to the Washington-based Tax Foundation. The state gets 78 cents for every dollar sent to the federal government.
Bass, who will be succeeded this year as speaker by John Perez, D-Los Angeles, said she will push members of Congress and the Obama administration to look at those formulas in a host of areas, like transportation, health care and human services.
Changing the formulas
"It is about piecing together bits of a puzzle, that puzzle being looking for funding in various areas where California has to cut," she said. Bass said she did not know exactly how much money that would be, but said it is "absolutely in the billions."
The Schwarzenegger administration is planning a similar strategy, and the governor is using the debate over federal health care legislation to raise the issue. The governor sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and other members of the California congressional delegation calling for changes in the Medicare reimbursement rate for the state. Under current rates, the health care overhaul could cost the state $3 billion to $4 billion annually. That cost is due in large part to federal mandates on state spending.
At a recent press conference, the governor said federal mandates "make it impossible to live within your means. So we are trying to teach everyone to live within your means and we are trying to also work with the Legislature here in California to live within their means. But the federal government is telling you, as soon as you lower the spending on certain programs, then you lose all the federal funding."
Avoiding a'meltdown'
Adding increased Medicare reimbursements to payments for unfunded mandates, along with other dollars the administration said |
2015 budget will thus remain unchanged.
How will the emergency relocation system work?
To deal with the situation in the Mediterranean, the Commission will, by the end of May, propose to trigger the emergency response system envisaged under Article 78(3)[1] of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The proposal will include a temporary relocation mechanism for asylum-seekers in clear need of international protection to ensure a fair and balanced participation of all Member States in this common effort. The receiving Member State will be responsible for the examination of the asylum application in accordance with established EU rules. The Commission will define a redistribution key based on criteria such as GDP, size of population, unemployment rate and past numbers of asylum seekers and of resettled refugees.
Does the Commission also intend to propose a permanent system of responsibility sharing?
Yes, the EU needs a permanent system for sharing the responsibility for large numbers of refugees and asylum seekers among Member States. The Commission will therefore table a legislative proposal by the end of 2015 to provide for a mandatory and automatically-triggered relocation system to distribute those in clear need of international protection within the EU when a mass influx emerges. The scheme will take into account the efforts already made on a voluntary basis by Member States.
Will the United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark be bound by the rules and laws adopted under the European Agenda on Migration?
The United Kingdom and Ireland have an 'opt-in' right under the Treaties, whereby they may choose, within three months of a proposal being presented to the Council under Title V Part Three of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), whether they wish to participate in the measure.
The Kingdom of Denmark has an 'opt-out' right whereby they do not participate in Title V Part Three TFEU measures.
Article 78(3) TFEU is located in Title V Part Three of the Treaty of the Functioning of the EU. This means: the United Kingdom and Ireland will only be bound if they so choose. Denmark will not be bound by the rules and laws adopted under the European Agenda on Migration.
Will the Agenda make it easier for refugees to be brought safely and legally to the EU via resettlement mechanisms?
By the end of May, the Commission will make a Recommendation proposing an EU-wide resettlement scheme to offer 20,000 places. This scheme will cover all Member States, with distribution criteria such as GDP, size of population, unemployment rate and past numbers of asylum seekers and of resettled refugees, taking into consideration the efforts already made on a voluntary basis by Member States. The EU budget will provide dedicated funding of an extra €50 million in 2015-2016 to support this scheme.
Where will the €50 million for the resettlement scheme come from?
The additional money for the EU-wide resettlement scheme (€50 million, spread evenly across 2015 and 2016) will be added to the special Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) envelope for resettlement, relocation and specific actions. This envelope already has a volume of €360 million for the period 2014-2020, of which a small share (about €50 million) is for specific actions. The rest of the budget is planned to be spent on the existing (voluntary) EU resettlement scheme.
How does the Commission intend to mobilise EU Agencies and funds to face the current emergency situation?
The Commission will set up a new 'Hotspot' approach, where the European Asylum Support Office, Frontex and Europol will work on the ground with frontline Member States to swiftly identify, register and fingerprint incoming migrants. The work of the agencies will be complementary to one another. Those claiming asylum will be immediately channelled into an asylum procedure where European Asylum Support Office (EASO) support teams will help to process asylum cases as quickly as possible. For those who are not in need of protection, Frontexwill help Member States' in coordinating thereturn of irregular migrants. Europol and Eurojust will assist the host Member State with investigations to dismantle the smuggling and trafficking networks.
How will these 'Hotspot' actions be financed?
To underpin these initiatives, the Commission is mobilising an additional €60 million in emergency funding, including support to the reception and healthcare system of Member States under particular pressure. This additional emergency funding will come through the Internal Security Fund (ISF) (€10 million) and the Asylum and Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) (€50 million), foreseen for 2015 and 2016. It will be provided to frontline Member States as a necessary supporting measure for the reinforcement of the Triton and Poseidon operations to rescue migrants.
How does the Agenda plan to step up the fight against smugglers and traffickers?
As the death toll in the Mediterranean is mainly caused by smugglers who exploit migrants' despair and put their lives at risk, the priority for Europe is to dismantle the criminal networks that organise those journeys. The fundamental objective of EU action in this area will be to develop a comprehensive set of initiatives through a dedicated Action Plan that will be adopted by the end of May, aimed at transforming the smuggling networks from ‘low risk, high return' operations for criminals into ‘high risk, low return’ ones. In the Action Plan, the Commission will propose initiatives to step up investigation and prosecution of criminal networks of smugglers, to help disrupt them, bring the perpetrators to justice and seize their assets, through swift action by Member States' authorities in cooperation with the EU Agencies.
What are the main steps to establish better information sharing to combat smuggling?
The High Representative/Vice-President has already presented options for possible Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) operations to systematically identify capture and destroy vessels used by smugglers. Such action, which should be done in accordance with international law, will be a powerful demonstration of the EU's determination to act. More will be done to pool and better use information to identify and target smugglers. EUROPOL will establish as a single entry point for inter-agency cooperation on smuggling. Frontex and EUROPOL will develop profiles of vessels which could be used by smugglers. EUROPOL will also undertake initiatives to request the removal of internet content used by smugglers to attract migrants and refugees.
Will cooperation on migration issues be increased with third countries of transit and origin?
The EU will scale up its engagement with third key third countries, starting from a high level dedicated political summit that will take place in Malta with key partners on addressing root causes, protecting people in need, dismantling smuggling networks. The EU will step up cooperation with countries of transit, starting from Niger and Mali, where the existing CSDP operations will be reinforced to enhance border control. Regional Development and Protection Programmes (RDPPs) will be set up or deepened, starting in North Africa and the Horn of Africa. An additional €30 million will be made available in 2015-2016 and should be complemented by additional contributions from Member States.
In addition, the EU will further develop existing bilateral and regional cooperation frameworks on migration (Rabat Process, Khartoum Process, the Budapest Process, the EU-Africa Migration and Mobility Dialogue – for more information see MEMO/15/4832). These will be enriched by increasing the role of EU Delegations in the field of migration in key countries. Delegations will in particular report on major migratory related developments in the host countries, contribute to mainstreaming migration issues into development cooperation and reach out to host countries to ensure coordinated action. European migration liaison officers will be seconded in EU Delegations in key third countries, in close cooperation with the Immigration Liaison Officers Network and with local authorities and civil society, with the purpose of gathering, exchanging and analysing information. As a first step, liaison officers will be seconded to Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Niger, Senegal, Sudan, Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon and Jordan.
Where will the €30 million to finance Regional Development and Protection Programmes (RDPPs) come from?
The total amount of €30 million for the RDPPs, initially in North Africa and in the Horn of Africa, will be spent through the AMIF annual work programmes (AWP) for Union Actions. An amount of €8 million already available in the AMIF AWP 2015 will be topped up with 7m from the Amending Budget 2015 and with another 15m to be proposed in the Draft Budget 2016. This will allow the programmes to run at least until the end of 2017. As a first step, the two RDPPs are planned to be implemented through grants awarded directly to two transnational consortia, led by Italy (North Africa) and the Netherlands (Horn of Africa). UNHCR and International Organisation for Migration (IOM) will be implementing partners.
Will centres in third countries be established? What will be their role?
A pilot multi-purpose centre will be set up in Niger by the end of the year. Working with the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Niger authorities, the centre will combine the provision of information, local protection and resettlement opportunities for those in need. Such centres in countries of origin or transit would help to provide a realistic picture of the likely success of migrants' journeys, and offer assisted voluntary return options for irregular migrants.
How will the Agenda ensure a strong Common European Asylum System in the future?
The priority is to ensure a full and coherent implementation of the Common European Asylum System. This will be supported by a new systematic monitoring process, to look into the implementation and application of the asylum rules and foster mutual trust. The European Asylum Support Office (EASO) will also step up practical cooperation with Member States, to become a point of reference in providing centralised Country of Origin Information (COI) – the factual information on which asylum decisions are based. This would encourage more uniform decisions. Strengthening the Common European Asylum System also means a more effective approach to abuses. Too many requests are unfounded: in 2014, 55% of the asylum requests resulted in a negative decision and for some nationalities, rejection rates approached 100%, hampering the capacity of Member States to provide swift protection to those in need.
What about the Dublin system, will it be reviewed?
A strong asylum system also depends on the good functioning of the Dublin III Regulation. This system establishes the criteria and mechanisms for determining the Member State responsible for examining an application for international protection lodged by a third-country national or a stateless person. The criteria for establishing responsibility run, in hierarchical order, from family considerations, to recent possession of visa or residence permit in a Member State, to whether the applicant has entered the EU irregularly or regularly. Though the recent legal improvements date only from 2014, the Dublin system is not working as it should. In 2014, five Member States dealt with 72% of all asylum applications EU-wide. When the Dublin system was designed, Europe was at a different stage of cooperation in the field of asylum, when the inflows were of a different nature and scale. When the Commission undertakes its evaluation of the Dublin system in 2016, it will also be able to draw on the experiencefrom therelocation and resettlement mechanisms. This will help to determine whether a revision of the legal parameters of Dublin will be needed to achieve a fairer distribution of asylum seekers in Europe.
What about the long term strategy in the area of asylum?
The EU Treaty looks forward to a uniform asylum status valid throughout the Union. The Commission will launch a broad debate on the next steps in the development of the Common European Asylum System, including the possibilities of a common Asylum Code and the mutual recognition of positive asylum decisions between Member States. A longer term reflection towards establishing a single asylum decision process will also be part of the debate, aiming to guarantee equal treatment of asylum seekers throughout Europe.
Why does the Agenda focus on the need to make the EU's return system more effective?
One of the incentives for irregular migrants is the knowledge that the EU's return system – to return irregular migrants or those whose asylum applications are refused – works imperfectly. Smuggling networks often play on the fact that relatively few return decisions are enforced. According to Eurostat, of the approximately 425 000 persons issued with a return decision in 2013, only around 167 000 left the EU. The effort to dismantle smuggling networks is also heavily dependent on the capacity to deter potential irregular migrants from undertaking the journey.
To increase the return rate, we need to first ensure that third countries fulfil their international obligation to take back their own nationals residing irregularly in Europe. In parallel, Member States have to apply the Return Directive. The Commission will give priority to monitoring implementation of the Directive, with a more swift return system going hand-in-hand with the respect of the procedures and standards that allow Europe to ensure a humane and dignified treatment of returnees and a proportionate use of coercive measures, in line with fundamental rights and the principle of non-refoulement. New rules on the return of irregular migrants are now being put in place in the framework of the Schengen Evaluation Mechanism, and a ‘Return Handbook’ will support Member States with common guidelines, best practices and recommendations.
Will Frontex play an enhanced role when it comes to supporting Member States' return activities?
While the EU has common rules on return, it lacks effective operational cooperation. Frontex is currently offering considerable support to Member States, but its mandate must be reinforced to increase its capacity to provide comprehensive operational assistance. Currently, Frontex can only coordinate joint return missions but not initiate its own. On the basis of the ongoing evaluation to be concluded this year, the Commission will propose to amend the Frontex legal basis to strengthen its role on return.
What is the aim of the Agenda when it comes to better securing the EU's external borders and save lives?
The EU has an established policy to help Member States build up sound and consistent external borders. The Internal Security Fund already provides over €2.7 billion to Member States for the period from 2014-2020. But while rules on border control are in place, border management today varies, based on a patchwork of documents and instruments. In 2016, the Commission will put forward a Union Standard for Border Management to secure a high and uniform standard in the control of all aspects of the Union's external borders.
Will the Commission present a new proposal on Smart Borders?
Yes, the Commission intends to present a revised proposal on Smart Borders by the beginning of 2016, since managing our borders more efficiently also implies making better use of the opportunities offered by IT systems and technologies. A revised "Smart Borders" initiative will be presented to increase the efficiency of border crossings, facilitating crossings for the large majority of 'bona fide' third country travellers, whilst at the same time strengthening the fight against irregular migration by creating a record of all cross-border movements by third country nationals, fully respecting proportionality.
Does the Agenda propose to develop an EU System of Border guards?
Today, the management of external borders is still very much a shared responsibility. In 2016, the Commission will launch a comprehensive policy debate about the further development of operational cooperation at the external borders. As well as the possibility of a European System of Border Guards, this would cover a new approach to coastguard functions in the EU, looking at initiatives such as asset sharing, joint exercises and dual use of resources, including the possibility of moving towards a European Coastguard.
How does the Agenda address the need to open up legal channels for migration into the EU?
The EU wide resettlement scheme (see above) will serve as a means for people in need of international protection to safely and legally enter the EU.
With an ageing population, the EU is mainly facing skilled shortages on the labour market, particularly in sectors such as science, technology and engineering. That is why the European Commission will present a new Labour Mobility Package in 2015, and launch a public consultation of the Blue Card Directive to attract more highly qualified third-country nationals.
At the same time, the EU will invest in establishing a long-term business dialogue with the private sector, trade unions and other social partners, to better understand the varying needs of our economy and labour markets, and to exchange best practices.
The Commission will make available at least €30 million to support third countries with building up their capacity to effectively manage labour migration, focusing on empowering migrant workers and tackling exploitation. The Commission will also promote ethical recruitment in sectors suffering from a lack of qualified workers in countries of origin and will facilitate cheaper, faster and safer remittance transfers.
In the future, the Commission wants to look into developing an "expression of interest system" together with the Member States, where potential candidate migrants could be matched with interested employers across the EU.
For More Information
Press release IP on the Migration Agenda
[1] Art.78.3 TFEU: "In the event of one or more Member States being confronted by an emergency situation characterised by a sudden inflow of nationals of third countries, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may adopt provisional measures for the benefit of the Member State(s) concerned. It shall act after consulting the European Parliament."By Paul Reynolds
World affairs correspondent, BBC News website
The prison camp at Guantanamo Bay has been controversial since it opened Finally, there is the prospect that the Guantanamo Bay camp will close. President-elect Barack Obama's transition team has begun the debate about how this might be done - while stressing that no decisions have yet been taken. In broad terms, the idea seems to be to abandon the military tribunals authorised under the Military Commissions Act 2006. These have begun to get under way at Guantanamo Bay. A trial procedure would be set up within the United States instead. At the same time, a renewed effort would be made to find countries willing to take those prisoners already cleared for release. The first is a legal problem and the second a practical one. Legal problems The legal problems involved in trying terrorist suspects have not yet been resolved. Some say that the prisoners should simply be brought before normal US courts. It is thought there are about 50 or so prisoners who might face trial, out of the 255 or so in the camp. A new system would also come under the close scrutiny of the US courts and a case against it would probably go right up to the Supreme Court to test its constitutionality
The problem is that evidence against them might have been obtained either through coercion, or even torture, or from foreign agencies which have used similar methods. Some of this evidence might be admitted in a trial before a military tribunal. So might hearsay evidence, in which someone relates what he or she was told, if the military judge decides that it would have "probative value to a reasonable person". But neither would be acceptable under the normal rules of US courts. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for example, charged at Guantanamo with responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, was subject to waterboarding. It is true that he has expressed a wish to die but a civilian court in the US might not admit evidence against him gathered at Guantanamo Bay. Then what happens? It is hard to see him simply being released. There is also the problem of whether the source of some evidence should be withheld from the prisoner. Hybrid system So the idea being floated by one of Barack Obama's legal advisers, Laurence Tribe, a professor of law at Harvard University, is to explore the possibility of using a mixture of both civilian courts and courts martial. Guantanamo Bay: search is now on for alternatives "It would have to be some sort of hybrid legal system, rather than kangaroo courts," he said. "I think the answer is going to be, they can be as securely guarded on US soil as anywhere else. We can't put people in a dungeon forever without processing whether they deserve to be there." If the hybrid system under consideration did not distance itself from the military tribunals, it would attract criticism that Guantanamo Bay had simply been transposed to the United States. A new system would also come under the close scrutiny of the US courts and a case against it would probably go right up to the Supreme Court to test its constitutionality. There is likely to be political and legal opposition to the establishment of any new system for such a few cases. Practical problems Meanwhile, the question remains about what to do with the prisoners whose release has been approved. There is also a further group who are in limbo, with not enough presentable evidence against them nor confidence that they would not take up violence. Despite considerable efforts, the US has not been able to persuade the home countries of the cleared suspects to have them back. Often, of course, the prisoners oppose their home governments as much as they do that of the US and are seen a domestic danger. Five human rights groups have now proposed that those prisoners whose home countries have refused to take them back should be taken in by European governments or the US itself. Amnesty International's Daniel Gorevan said: "President-elect Obama has said that he will close [Guantanamo Bay]. Other governments can help make this happen by offering protection to individuals who cannot be released to their own countries." Amnesty said that about 50 of the detainees currently held cannot lawfully be sent back to their countries of origin because "they would face a real risk of human rights violations such as torture or other ill-treatment". They come from countries including China, Libya, Russia, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan. "Give us back America" The American Civil Liberties Union called for Barack Obama to announce the closure of Guantanamo Bay on the first day of his presidency. In a full page advertisement in The New York Times, it said: "Give us back the America we believe in." However, the White House, which took years to evolve the current policy after constant legal challenges, has been more sceptical, suggesting that closure was easier said than done. Spokeswoman Dana Perino said: "We've tried very hard to explain to people how complicated it is. When you pick up people off the battlefield that have a terrorist background, it's not just so easy to let them go. "These issues are complicated, and we have put forward a process that we think would work in order to put them on trial through military tribunals." Paul.Reynolds-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
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Features:
Detailed and accurate 3D model and animations
Six Degrees of Freedom (6DOF) capable cockpit
Professional Flight Model (PFM)
Campaign and missions
F-15C skins from a wide array of squadrons
Both Simulation and Game modes
The F-15 has often been labeled as the greatest fighter aircraft in the world from the 1970s until the early 21st century. Designed to counter the exaggerated capabilities of the Soviet MiG-25 "Foxbat", the F-15 has been the backbone of U.S. air defense for three decades. The F-15C, equipped with improved avionics and weapons over the original F-15A, has scored over 100 air-to-air victories in the service of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. without suffering any losses.The F-15C rules the Beyond Visual Range arena (BVR). No slouch in a dogfight, the F-15C excels at finding targets, positively identifying them as hostile, and engaging them with AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles before the enemy can respond.The F-15C's versatile pulse-Doppler radar system can look up at high-flying targets and down at low-flying targets without being confused by ground clutter. It can detect and track aircraft and small high-speed targets at distances beyond visual range down to close range, and at altitudes down to tree-top level. The radar feeds target information into the central computer for effective weapons delivery. For close-in dogfights, the radar automatically acquires enemy aircraft, and this information is projected on the head-up display.F-15C for DCS World focuses on ease of use without complicated cockpit interaction, significantly reducing the learning curve. As such, F-15C features keyboard and joystick cockpit commands with a focus on the most mission critical of cockpit systems.Read more about the F-15C for DCS World here: http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/products/eagle/ The F-15C for DCS World includes a Professional Flight Model (PFM). Highlights of the PFM include:Aircraft performance is constantly recalculated based on standard physics equations describing the translational and rotational motion of a rigid body under the influence of external forces and moments, regardless of the nature of their origin.• Trajectory and angular motion looks more natural due to the correct modeling of the inertial properties of the aircraft.• Unlike with Standard Flight Model (SFM) aircraft, the F-15C AFM does not show noticeable transitions between modes, which appear as unnaturally sharp attitude or position change. For example: when executing a tailslide, advanced flight maneuvers, landing when not wings level, and touching down with a single wheel.• AFM naturally takes into account the gyroscopic effects on the plane's rotation (SFM does not model this at all).• Asymmetric external forces (such as differential throttle), as well as external forces not applied through the aircraft center of gravity (eg, engine thrust and drag from asymmetric stores) are properly modeled throughout the flight envelope, causing properly applied torque.• Aircraft center of gravity can shift with AFM based on various in-flight events.• There is a concept of lateral and longitudinal center, which may shift depending on fuel load and external stores.• AFM naturally models asymmetrical external stores which properly influences performance depending on airspeed, G load, and other factors.The aerodynamic model of the AFM calculates aerodynamic characteristics of the aircraft, considering it a set of interconnected airframe elements, such as wings, fuselage, stabilators, etc. Each of these components has its aerodynamics calculated separately based on local angles of attack, airspeeds, mach numbers, and airflow, also considering pilot input as well as each component's damage state.• Aircraft aerodynamics are fully modeled for the entire flight envelope.• Lateral and longitudinal control effects as well as balance along each axis vary based on angle of attack and lateral and longitudinal static stability.• Wing autorotation is naturally taken into account when rolling at high angles of attack.• Kinematic, aerodynamic and inertial effects of each of the three axes of static stability is naturally calculated, such as in sideslip when rolling, or rolling during rudder movement, etc.• Sideslip angle is not just based on pilot input, as is the case with SFM, but also considers aircraft attitude.• For aircraft damage, changes in performance are not hard-coded but are calculated dynamically by fully or partially excluding affected components from physics calculations.• The aircraft stall is properly modeled, creating realistic wing rocking and wandering aircraft nose behavior.Dynamic jet engine modeling considers a complex set of parameters including the air intake, compressor, combustor, turbine, and the afterburner nozzles.• Engine RPM depends on altitude and Mach number, as well as atmospheric conditions such as temperature and air pressure.• Brief engine overspeed is modeled in throttle response.• Engine overspeed and throttling response, as well as general throttle control (response speed) vary based on current RPM.• Turbine exhaust temperature is modeled in intricate detail, considering multiple parameters such as engine RPM, flight parameters, and atmospheric conditions.• Fuel consumption is calculated realistically based on both engine RPM and flight parameters.• Engine operating parameters, such as RPM and exhaust temperature, are accurately modeled during the entire startup and shutdown process. F-15's AFM properly models such events turbine windmill in a disabled engine, engine relighting, and automatic air start.Happy new year everyone! VMware’s Cloud-Native Apps team kicked off the new year by hosting a half-day meeting today with a group of industry leaders with the goal of defining a common, totally open application blueprint definition. We had about 30 technologists representing many different companies: Amazon, Cisco/Noiro, Cloudsoft, CoreOS, Docker, Gigaspaces, Google, HashiCorp, Mesosphere, Microsoft, OpDemand/Deis, Pivotal, Telematica, and VMware. It was great to see so much industry participation here!
Big group, small room…
So what exactly were we discussing? Blueprints. “Blueprint” is certainly an overloaded term and indeed we spent the better part of the first half of the meeting discussing exactly what we meant by it. Thankfully we were all largely in agreement. We want to focus on applications first and foremost and thus the blueprint definition needs to take an application perspective. Modern applications are distributed and are comprised of many different components. The blueprint specifies all the components of an app, how they’re stitched together, network and storage requirements, other service dependencies, and more. It was widely agreed that the blueprints should support many app delivery formats: Docker, Linux container, VM, bare metal, and more. This way we can provide customers the choice to deploy with whatever technology suits their applications best. Further we all agreed that these blueprint definitions should be infrastructure agnostic. This means that the same blueprint can be used to provision an app on a developer’s laptop, in a staging environment, in an on-premises virtualized datacenter, and in a public cloud. The blueprint designer should be able to define the blueprint such that the requirements within it are properly mapped to whatever infrastructure is chosen. In this way, blueprints can drive the application lifecycle from dev to CI/CD to production, enabling greater business velocity. The group wanted to go even further, proposing that a single blueprint should be deployable by many different tools from different vendors.
It was very encouraging to see that there was general agreement on what we think a blueprint should look like. The next challenge is to do something about it. Given the size of the group and the number of individuals and companies involved, many felt that getting something done might prove challenging, so we decided to move quickly with specific deliverables both time- and scope-boxed. The first deliverable is to define a set of use cases that we want this blueprint definition to solve. Use cases are critical to keeping this effort grounded in reality so that what’s produced will be valuable to customers (after all, that’s what this is really about!). So within the next week we’ll be putting together a use cases doc that is at most three pages and has two use cases clearly defined and agreed upon by the team. Once we have that doc (which we’ll post here and would love your thoughts and feedback), we’ll get to work creating a prototype implementation. The plan there is just to set up a github repo, roll up our sleeves, and get to work. And yes, it’s all going to be open — open standard and open source. This means we’ll be looking for your input every step of the way.
While there are still many details to figure out and many contentious points of design to work through, I’m very excited by the progress we’ve made in this first meeting and the fact that pretty much all of the participants see eye-to-eye on the basics of what we think a blueprint should be. The goal here is to create a better experience for customers by getting all the players in the industry to agree on a standard. I think we’ve taken an important first step towards that goal today. Certainly a great way to start 2015!Former First Lady Michelle Obama on Friday claimed school children are “eating crap” due to President Donald Trump’s policies.
Speaking at an annual health conference in Washington DC, Obama criticized the Trump administration’s decision to relax requirements for “healthy” school lunches, labeling his motive “political.”
“You have to stop and think, ‘Why don’t you want our kids to have good food at school? What is wrong with you and why is that a partisan issue?” Obama stated. “Why would that be political?”
“Moms, think about this. I don’t care what state you live in, take me out of the equation, like me, don’t like me, but think about why someone is OK with your kids eating crap,” she said.
Obama was referring to the Trump administration’s decision to delay lunch rules included in the former First Lady’s “Let’s move” initiative, among which students were required to grab a vegetable and a fruit with each lunch line meal.
For many, the former first lady’s remarks come with a healthy dose of irony given that Michelle Obama’s name became synonymous with terrible school lunches during President Barack Obama’s second term.
As the Obama administration rolled out its Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act in 2012, students began rejecting the “healthy” lunches en masse, posting photos of the horrible meals to social media with the hashtag #ThanksMichelleObama.
According to the Government Accountability Office, more than 1 million school children stopped buying school lunches after Obama’s program went into effect.
“The new standards led to kids throwing out their fruits and vegetables, student boycotts, higher lunch costs, and odd food pairings such as ‘cheese stick with shrimp’ in order for schools to comply with the complicated rules,” reported The Washington Times.
Below are a few examples of why Michelle Obama has no room to say kids are “eating crap” under Trump:
#ThanksMichelleObama just what a 16 year old girl needs pic.twitter.com/yFtk2BQao1 — Amber Schroeder (@aureviorlune) November 21, 2014
Had a very #healthylunch today. The apple definitely made up for the "mystery mush" #ThanksMichelleObama pic.twitter.com/RWCnQRCxJK — Hunter Whitney (@huntwhitney4) November 13, 2014
my pizza today was so raw it stretched #ThanksMichelleObama pic.twitter.com/nXBxr7bZE2 — sassie kassie (@kassie_lives) December 12, 2014
Sausage at school looks weird … Never used to be this way…. #ThanksMichelleObama pic.twitter.com/oMVIx8Pj8l — futurebluejay3 (@joshchesler) December 17, 2014
Dear @MichelleObama for my school lunch. Hot dog bun with cheese called "Italian dunkers"? Wth #thanksmichelleobama pic.twitter.com/Dvc9wPfvKx — Jessica Villalobos (@JessicaTaylor_v) December 17, 2014
I would like to just take a moment to say #ThanksMichelleObama for our "healthy hamburgers" at lunch today! Yummy! pic.twitter.com/Q32KA5IKu9 — Ash (@ashlynnpriest12) December 9, 2014
I'm eating a "pulled pork sandwich" and all of the sudden there's this. #ThanksMichelleObama pic.twitter.com/CH60liqqf8 — sophia maicki (@Sophiamaick) December 17, 2014
Today's lunch left me totally full and satisfied. #thanksmichelleobama pic.twitter.com/x9J2ujgxYT — Tone Jeff (@JeffGoodwin7) December 17, 2014
Wow The kids school lunch. Really? Hes 17 this is supposed to fill him? pic.twitter.com/wEDxPpjw2L — Pwannarka (@pwannarka) November 12, 2014
so we got a quarter of a cookie at lunch today, thanks Michelle Obama pic.twitter.com/zJt8vIOXjz — chan (@chanchilla_) November 7, 2014
Don't mind me, just eating my hollow-out salted turd #ThanksMichelleObama pic.twitter.com/oWDKwjDVzh — dalton paynter (@The_Rockaholic2) December 17, 2014
#ThanksMichelleObama so glad we get to eat the healthiest food at school pic.twitter.com/WPEskH6yxp — Kendal (@kendalblumey) December 9, 2014
Eww they served us catfish and mystery mashed potatoes #ThanksMichelleObama pic.twitter.com/FZj8ztFc05 — ✨BossUpLilBITCH✨ (@OnlyOne_Miaaa) December 9, 2014
there was literally mold on my cantaloupe #ThanksMichelleObama pic.twitter.com/aDtMoXM1fC — lauryn (@laurynxvela) December 15, 2014
This "healthy food" was served for breakfast today at school. #ThanksMichelleObama pic.twitter.com/AyP6Zd2O0G — Stephen Wheadon (@wheadon29) March 25, 2015
Not sure what I'm supposed to be eating today. #ThanksMichelleObama pic.twitter.com/WaMKegbX59 — T Fish (@TFishMN) March 27, 2015
First no white bread and now they don't even cut our produce #ThanksMichelleObama pic.twitter.com/2NixU7813D — Mark Peckich (@MarkPeckich) March 27, 2015
This is pitiful! And from my home town! #ThanksMichelleObama #schoollunch Dover Arkansas Wake up AMERICA! pic.twitter.com/2fT8XYqHtu — Connie Ragsdale (@connieragsdale) February 27, 2015
#ThanksMichelleObama this school lunch is disgusting and a poor excuse of a lunch! pic.twitter.com/SFkP0DiujU — garrett campbell (@jgcampbell97) February 26, 2015
@UCA__5 So as you can see, our school serves very healthy delicious high quality meals. #ThanksMichelleObama pic.twitter.com/7e3QL8ESNN — Max D'Agostino (@MaxD_Agostino) February 25, 2015
Is this the healthiest way to serve a french toast stick? #ThanksMichelleObama @FLOTUS pic.twitter.com/zI8rbMC2tk — Zachary Sauro (@zachsauro) February 25, 2015
Mm 1% white milk and finely aged pizza #ThanksMichelleObama pic.twitter.com/REGLiHa7V7 — Lu (@immortal_caya) February 26, 2015
This is disgusting. What happened to last year's food. It used to be so good. #ThanksMichelleObama @MichelleObama pic.twitter.com/d4nGDl1NaH — Taylor (; (@GilinskySideC) February 26, 2015I Woke Up Today/Flickr Happy 2013! It's a brand new year, but for some of us it might be a bit of a rough start. Between the champagne toasts and parties lasting until the wee hours of the morning, a hangover the day after New Year's Eve is pretty standard.
To see which cities have it the worst, we looked at the Center for Disease Control's most recent statistics on binge drinking and Trulia's list of cities with the most bars per capita. We then gave each city a Business Insider Hangover Score based on those two numbers.
The Midwest represented well on the list, proving that when its dark and cold outside, people love to drink. Also making the cut were major destinations such as Boston, Chicago, and New Orleans.Dear Auburn School Board,
I'm too afraid to talk to my children about drugs. Can't y'all just have my kids go to school, take their pants down, and |
is now complete in terms of prop work and we are just waiting on the stock to come in from our clothing manufacturers! It was an interesting environment to dress, taking on the role of shop fitters and adhering to a brand guidelines to really sell that retail experience.
The gold standard components are 95% there. They just need a final pass on the materials and then our first two will be ready. Work has also begun on the next set this week so we should have four by the end of the month. We are working closely with the tech designers and they are in the process of defining the sub-component list which is the final part of the puzzle from our point of view.
The rest of the team are now focusing on our core low-tech prop set in preparation for all the new environments coming in 2016.
I have been concentrating on getting a solid backlog / tracking of everything we currently have in game, the sheer number of assets is getting impressive and I needed a fast way of being able to track exactly where each asset is up to and also be able to quickly filter and search the assets so that when new requests come in we can prioritize them against what we have already in game. Once complete we should be in a really good place to start pumping out everything we need to bring the environments to life. This is really important from a game performance perspective, because the sheer number of assets, models, animations, and geometry in the game means that if you don’t do this intelligently, bad things can happen to your load times and FPS. It may not sound like exciting work, but when you want to maintain the pace of your gaming experience, it’s as critical as a lot of other things!
Finally we have a new hire here in the UK studio, the props team here is now up to three! We are still looking and have some strong candidates so hopefully will bolster our numbers again soon!
Ships
The ship art team led by Nathan were fighting hard in December to get you some new shiny ships to play with over the festive break, so we hope it was worth it!
Neil, Peter, Robin, Jose, and Jan managed to get the new and revised Freelancer exterior and interior art flight ready our 2.1 PTU release, and Paul and Ian also supported Nathan in completing the final art for the Sabre and the Vanguard (including damage states for the latter).
Many of you will be pleased to know that the Starfarer exterior and interior are well underway with Matt, Colin, Joe, Phil and Jay making good progress so we’ll be looking forward to releasing that to you later this year and also looking forward to releasing many more cool and wonderful Star Citizen spaceships in 2016.
Concepts
Paul and the concept team has been hard at work, the Javelin has had a bit of a nip-and-tuck with some remodeling to bring it into line with the Aegis brand.
Sarah has been valiantly battling her way through the many props needed, working on both high tech and low tech prop design styles, and on solidifying the design language should we need to outsource some of the work later on.
Jort has been working his Christmas magic on various space station interiors, dressing passes and additional concept work to help define what we need to make these areas come alive.
Stu has worked up additional pods for the ARGO RUV which we need for SQ42 and Gary finished up the Xian Scout and has really gone to town helping define further interiors for the Shubin Mining Facility.
Characters
Our two man team has been getting to grips with the new and improved pipeline where work has been done on Squadron 42 character Randall Graves by Jon (which you may have seen in the Livestream), both high and low poly models, along with some work to the Female officers uniform. As a good test for Michal our junior character artist, we set him the task of sculpting a stone statue needed for one of our future levels, and I must say the results were great!
In-Game Animation
Uisdean Ross and the UK animation team are continuing our push on the FPS AI and player mechanics. Player cover animation implementation is on-going by Colin and Dan and being refined and reviewed, this is an ongoing process working closely with the programming team.
The AI cover behaviors are currently going through a first pass by Spencer, and we are providing a base set for the AI programming team which will then be iterated on. Improvements are also being made to the no weapon (unarmed) locomotion set, as well as stops and starts.
Design
The Christmas break over and we are back in action for 2016. We have so much to do this year in the UK we need to make every day count!
The UI Director Zane and Lead Systems designer Karl are working on a simplified HUD UI to level out the learning curve when it comes to interacting with your ships systems. All the advanced bells and whistles will still be there for the more hard core players. They are also working with the engineering UI team to implement a functional EVA HUD for players to get all the information they need while experiencing zero-g movement.
The Live team of Luke, Danny and Matt are listening to your feedback and fixing up issues with the current Live build to make it more stable and fun. They are also looking at further iterations to some of the more basic design implementations that need further work, such as EMP. Syncing up with the ship release schedule in becoming a strong focus for this team going forward to make sure we cover the design functionality that is required for the various ships, such as cargo movers.
The Tech Design team led by John has scaled up over the last few months ands is now big enough to really get moving on the new ships as the Art team hands them over to us. We have also been looking into ways of addressing ship balance in a less reactive, more forward-looking way that is looking promising over the next month or so.
Mike and the Squadron 42 designers are transitioning the levels into the large world system rather than lots of separate CryFiles. We still need to get better at excluding SQ42 files from the current build process as you guys seem to find anything that leaks through and they sometimes appear as spoilers! This will be getting a more robust system in the future and will have the side effect of getting some of these intermediate patch sizes more under control.
All in all, we are geared up for a very busy year on Star Citizen here in the UK and with your continued solid support we know we can make this something very special! Thanks again.
Graphics
Over the last month the graphics director Ali and his team have made various performance improvements to the game.
The lighting shaders have had significant work and are now faster than the base CryEngine shaders despite having more features thanks to Ben. Geoff put in some hard work so that we can now cull rooms that you can’t see on ships and space stations much more accurately thanks to improvements to the culling system. The LOD system has been overhauled by Muhammed which should result in us rendering fewer polygons in the distance where you can’t really see them, and we’ve also made some significant improvements to the performance of our internal tools when generating LODs which could take several minutes on our largest levels and now takes just a few seconds. Okka and the rest of the team also spent a large amount of December bug fixing for the PTU and Live Releases.
Our focus now is on planning our work for 2016, and focusing on the features that Squadron 42 requires. The first features we’re working on will be improved HDR effects such as bloom, lens flares and eye adaption to give a better impression of the stark lighting you get in space and sci-fi scenes in general. We’ll be revamping some shaders such as the glass shader so we can improve the quality of the cockpits and helmets as well as increase their performance. We’ll also be getting back onto our volumetric gas cloud work which had been paused during the work on 2.0 but is crucial for both Squadron 42 and the Persistent Universe.
Environments
Ian and the environment team hope you’re all enjoying playing Crusader, our team is having a great time watching you play!
Jake and part of the team has been doing final bug fixes and lighting improvements for the 2.1 release of Crusader, so it should look and perform better than in 2.0. Eddie and rest of the team has been focusing down on one of our Squadron 42 levels, not too much we can reveal at this stage but it will be our test bed for creating sandbox locations with terrain and multiple landing points.
Engineering
For obvious reasons this has been a shorter month for us here in the UK and people have been taking some well-deserved time off. That’s not to say we’ve been taking it easy whilst we’ve been in though!
The highlight for Derek and the engineering team in December was getting Alpha 2.0 finally out to everybody after a huge effort from anybody concerned. We’re really proud of what we’ve managed to achieve, especially as it has gone down so well with the community. We keep an eye on all the forums and Twitch streams and people do seem to be having a blast which makes all the hard work feel worthwhile. But of course as soon as one milestone has been hit we’re onto the next. We’re now in the final stages of getting Alpha 2.1 hitting the streets so we’re in the general stabilization phase, with many engineers including Rob, Clive, George, and Craig getting those horrid random crash bugs which have crept in fixed and some performance optimizations.
More general ongoing work. One of the big things Jens and the FPS code team have helping working on is the new physicalized EVA which is a big departure from the current implementation. Rather than “faking” the fidelity of the player movement as we have been doing currently we’re going down the route of using a proper physical simulation, in much the same way as we do with the ships. As part of that the character is also put into a ragdoll state which gives the whole movement a much more fluid and natural feel to it. The effects of this should include a slight opposite impulse to you to help make it feel like you’re firing a real weapon.
It does bring up a whole host of new problems to solve, many of which are nasty edge cases. For example, as you EVA around and then hit a gravity area you need to come out of rag doll and transition into the normal locomotion again with it feeling natural and fluid. Also when you’re in EVA you generally can’t see where your legs are and it’s really easy to clip a piece of geometry with them, which will send you into a nasty spin, which gets really annoying really quickly. We’ve got a number of ideas from getting your character to automatically tuck in their legs, to have an IFCS to counter any unwanted spin. There’s going to be a new EVA HUD mode as well to give you some more feedback. When you’re in the middle of space away from any nearby geometry you have very little point of reference to give an indication of what speed and direction you’re moving in, which isn’t much fun.
But mainly we’ve been working on our eating, drinking and chilling. :)
QA
After November’s hopeful anticipation of 2.0.0 going LIVE to all backers, Andy and the QA team were very proud (and a little relieved!) that it finally launched this month. We’ve been working on it internally for a while!
Hopefully you’re all appreciating the hard work we put in to get it ready for release – there was a great feeling of satisfaction felt in the department, and like I mentioned last time, we’re really getting to grips with the nature of the testing for Star Citizen’s future development.
Some of the UK QA team have had a busier end to the month of December than others… ahem! While some were off enjoying the festive season (me, Andy), the rest of our dedicated team were on hand to make sure that the first 2.1.0 patch made it live to PTU on Christmas Eve. “Merry Christmas”, is probably what they were thinking at the time!
While some might have considered a lack of a full LIVE release of 2.1.0 disappointing, there were a few good reasons why this release was unfortunately not possible. Without going into too much detail, the performance and stability of the build had regressed, meaning we were not comfortable with a release for you guys. This is not unusual any time you add new content or new gameplay, and particularly not when one of the additions is a completely new class of flyable ship. Post-Christmas, this is going to form the majority of our testing in the department – helping to reproduce all the issues and ensure the quality of the experience is back where we want it to be.
2.1.0 has meant that the lucky PTU players were able to experience and help test the Freelancer for the first time – a ship that has prompted plenty of “Starbug roleplay” within the QA team. Hopefully before too long everyone will be able to play the “Rimmer role” once 2.1.0 goes LIVE…
In other news, the UK QA Secret Santa was a great success – highlights include: Pokemon trainer badges, a genuinely horrifying 1980’s E.T., a Transformers lunchbox with flask and a Corinthian Kevin Keegan figurine.
Audio
For Lee Banyard and CIG Audio, December was mostly taken up with ensuring things were as solid as they could be with sound for SC Alpha 2.0. With a game such as ours, testing every possible thing where audio is concerned can be difficult, so we spent a lot of time trying to cover all the bases, going through PTU feedback and issues that came up via QA as well as stuff we found ourselves.
What was everyone up to? Luke, Darren and Stefan were immersed in supporting ships such as the Freelancer and Vanguard. Matteo and Stefan (again, he gets around!) looking more at EVA and FPS elements, while Ross was running the rule over the environments in 2.0 again and again to ensure that all worked as it should, testing out the music logic system, planning battle-chatter system and just general testing. Phil continued with UI audio and with PU environments, especially the Million Mile High Club. Bob was engaged in hammering out anything to do with dialogue, and the larger dialogue system, and last (but not least) Jason continued his stellar work in supporting everyone from a technical standpoint and ensuring the audio build system continued to do its thing.
We continued to plan the orchestral sessions which should be happening in the next month or so, which should align nicely with the progress Ross and Sam Hall are making with the dynamic music system assuming all goes ahead as planned.
And Lee tried to help everyone with everything as much as he could!
Also the team received CIG Audio winter hats as seasonal gifts. I think photos were posted to the Ask A Developer audio thread in case you’re interested. Hope you all had a great winter break!Please enable Javascript to watch this video
MADISON (WITI) -- It has been one year since Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana, and this year, half of the states will consider similar legislation. A Democratic Wisconsin representative has introduced a bill into the state Assembly to legalize marijuana.
The bill has attracted six Democratic co-sponsors.
LRB 3671 would legalize marijuana for recreational and medicinal purposes in Wisconsin.
Rep. Melissa Sargent says the bill is a good start to bringing a policy we’ve seen implemented in Colorado and Washington State to Wisconsin.
“After researching this issue extensively, I believe that this bill will benefit Wisconsin and its citizens in many ways, including: addressing racial disparities in arrests, providing medical benefits, time and cost savings to law enforcement, and additional revenue for the state,” Rep. Sargent stated in a press release posted on her website.
"It just makes sense," Gary Storck told FOX6 News.
Storck is one of Wisconsin's leading advocates for decriminalizing marijuana. As a glaucoma patient, he learned in the 1970s that smoking cannabis reduced his inter-ocular eye pressure and helped to save his vision.
"It has helped me. I've been using cannabis every day since then, that I've been able to access it," Storck said.
Storck founded the group "Is My Medicine Legal Yet?" or IMMLY.
Medical marijuana is already legal in 20 states, and 14 others are considering medical marijuana laws this year.
As for Wisconsin...
"I don't think you're going to see anything serious anytime soon here, but if other states did, maybe in the next Legislative session there'd be more talk about it," Gov. Walker said.
Gov. Walker spoke with Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper at last week's National Governor's Assocation meeting, where Hickenlooper said his state would see $134 million in sales tax revenue for the year -- much higher than expected.
"He talked about the upsides of the revenue. He also talked about how they weren't rushing to spend that on other things because, he said, it's early and they're still concerned about the side effects," Gov. Walker said.
Despite the fact that Rep. Sargent has introduced LRB 3671, the consensus among state law enforcement officials seems to be that marijuana is a "gateway drug," and should remain illegal.
Gov. Walker agrees, but says he isn't completely shutting the door on this issue.
"It may be something that resonates in the future, but I just don't see any movement for it right now," Gov. Walker said.
That means for now, folks like Gary Storck must weigh criminal penalties against crippling pain.
"I have to buy it on the black market, like so many patients, and it's really sad because people want this medicine, they want legal access, but because our lawmakers haven't yet caught up with public opinion, they still have to break the law," Storck said.
What do you think? Is Wisconsin ready for the legalization of marijuana?Gavin McInnes, a Canadian writer, actor and comedian who has appeared on Fox News and The Blaze, and his posse of Proud Boys faced protestors at NYU last week during what was supposed to be a speaking engagement and Q&A by the conservative comedian and podcaster.
A student group, NYU Anti-Fascists, posted an invitation to protest the speech, which said McInnes "has a long track record of using incendiary language to attract media attention and frenzy," language that includes calling Jada Pinkett-Smith a “monkey actress.”
"I'm dumbfounded that NYU would invite somebody who is a hate speaker. He is a fascist," student Tamara Fine said.
RELATED: Gavin McInnes speaking at NYU, protests underway
Invited by NYU College Republicans, McInnes was expected to give a two hour speech on Feb. 2, but a scuffle broke out between protestors, Proud Boys and police resulting in 11 arrests.
The following day, McInnes, who calls feminists "sh--ty men," spoke to Metro about his group of “western chauvinist” pals, the Proud Boys.
"McInnes is the founder of a group called the 'Proud Boys,'" Emmy-winning reporter Ray Villeda wrote for NBC. "He dubs himself a 'western chauvinist,' uses racial epithets in his essays and has argued that women make less money because they are less ambitious than men."
The word “chauvinist,” McInnes said, has nothing to do with keeping women down like the term “male chauvinist” might. He said the word just means arrogant pride. “West is best,” according to the group’s Twitter account.
The Proud Boys is a men’s club, much like the Shriner’s Club or the Elk Club, McInnes explained. The group meets once a month and its 2,000 members worldwide, according to McInnes, aren't all anti-abortion rights (like McInnes) and are from all religions and ethnic backgrounds. Women, however, are not invited.
Many of the Proud Boys were raised by single moms and needed a male figure in their lives, according to the co-founder of Vice Media (McInnes and Vice severed ties in 2008).
“There is a real war on masculinity,” the father of two boys and a girl said. McInnes told Metro that in a world where a student gets suspended for chewing a Pop Tart into the shape of the gun, he teaches his sons: “Yes, you can be a boy. You can shoot people with water pistols.
“People say if someone’s fighting, go get a teacher. No, if someone’s f---ing up your sister, put them in the hospital.”
But don't ask about how his daughter will fare in a Proud Boys future. McInnes calls that a "liberal question."
"My daughter will have all the opportunities that she needs. My daughter is no one’s business."
McInnes said he teaches his Proud Boys to start a new chapter, the “dad chapter,” and put a ring on it. The Proud Boys are big on proposing, McInnes said.
But not before sowing some wild oats.
The aftermath of me helping a guy after being jumped by thugs. The police and 100's of civilians stood and watched. pic.twitter.com/7hN2iJ4kkf— Jake Shields (@jakeshieldsajj) February 2, 2017
The “pope” of the group, Dante Nero, has some rules on masturbation, including one rule that says a man should not ejaculate unless he is within one yard of a woman, particularly his wife.
"Wanking" alone into a tissue is just sad and wrong, McInnes said, and he puts much of the blame on video games and porn for men’s failures with women.
“With your brain on porn, you think you can f--k all these 10s, like you’re Attila the Hun,” but when the real-world hits, McInnes said, these guys get hit with a stark depression when they realize they “are not going to do better” than a real-life woman.
The initiation process for the Proud Boys, according to McInnes, goes something like this:
First degree - Declare you're a Proud Boy.
Second degree - The other Proud Boys "beat the crap out of you" until you can name five breakfast cereals. You also have to stop "beating off."
Third degree - Added to the above, you get a tattoo.
Fourth degree - The final step involves "a major fight for the cause," McInnes said. "You get beat up, kick the crap out of an antifa" and possibly get arrested.
McInnes said the Proud Boys believe in advocating free speech and he was encouraging last week’s protestors to take the microphone and engage in a debate.
McInnes was pepper sprayed during the melee, but tweeted that "being called a Nazi burned way more."
Still had pepper spray on my clothes when I got home. My non-white kid broke out in hives after hugging me. Antifa are going to die. pic.twitter.com/BnKAPE7xzv— Gavin McInnes (@Gavin_McInnes) February 3, 2017
McInnes said he is about ready to give up on debate after the way he and the 10 Proud Boys who came to support him were treated and he is willing to speak “the only language these people understand.”
“Not only would I love to speak, but I will get violent and beat the f--k out of everybody.”Changes In 2015 Include The Usual New Paint Colors And Trim Packages, As Well As A New Standard Eight-speaker Audio System, A New Nine-speaker System That Includes A Subwoofer, A Package That Bundles Steel Wheels With 31-inch Tires For Sport Models, And A Torx Tool Set That's Standard On All Models, Allowing Owners To Remove The Windshield Or Doors Wherever They Are.the Lineup Includes Base Sport, Fancier Sahara, And Super-off-road-focused Rubicon. Across The Upper Trims There's A Wide Range Of Choices In Top Configurations--including A Body-color Hardtop Now Offered In Sahara And Rubicon Form--as Well As A Bunch Of Appearance Packages That Go By Names Like Freedom, Willys Wheeler, And Hard Rock. Wrangler Models Can Be Equipped With Air Conditioning, Navigation, Automatic Climate Control, And Streetwise Alloy Wheels, Even Alpine Speakers. Its Utter Flexibility, Along With Those Options And Others Like Bluetooth Connectivity, Mygig Music Storage, Sirius Satellite Radio, Heated Seats, Automatic Climate Control, D A Hard-core Off-road Package Have Us Still Quite Amazed At All That's Offered�more Than Any Other Off-roader.�call Scarsview Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram For Details About This Fine Vehicle: 1-888-260-2944 Or 1-800-557-4069.A pivotal scene in The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s classic film adaptation of the Stephen King novel, occurs when Wendy, the wife of the protagonist Jack Torrance, enters the enormous reception hall in the isolated mountain hotel where her husband has been obsessively typing away on his “novel.” Previously barred from the space by the increasingly unstable Jack, Wendy nervously goes to his typewriter and finds on its roller a sheet of paper on which the message “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” has been typed over and over again. Frantic, she turns to the thick stack of pages neatly piled nearby, where she finds the exact same phrase on the top dozen or so pages she rifles through before being interrupted by Jack. The manuscript, which she had imagined would be a sign of her husband’s artistic achievement, is revealed instead as an undeniable symbol of his descent into madness.
Never one to stint on artistic integrity and veracity, Kubrick used no shortcuts for the relatively simple scene. As artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin discovered during recent research in the Kubrick archives in London, instead of having the sentence typed on only the few sheets seen by viewers, the director asked his secretary Margaret Warrington to type it on each one of the 500-odd sheets in the stack. What’s more, he also had Warrington type up an equivalent number of manuscript pages in four languages—French, German, Italian, Spanish—for foreign releases of the film. For these, he used idiomatic phrases with vaguely similar meanings:
Un “Tiens” vaut mieux que deux “Tu l’auras.”
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen.
Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today.
Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca.
The early bird gets the worm.
No por mucho madrugar amanece mas temprano.
Even if you rise early, dawn will not come any sooner.Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The average age women become mothers is just over 30 in England and Wales
The number of foreign-born mothers having babies in England and Wales in 2016 reached 28% - the highest level on record, official statistics show.
This figure has increased every year since 1990.
Data from the Office for National Statistics also shows more women in their 40s are giving birth than women aged under 20.
This is the second year in a row this has happened - a pattern last recorded in 1947.
Fertile 40s
The fertility rate for women aged 40 and over has now trebled since 1990, to 15.9 babies born per 1,000 women in that age group.
The rate at which women in their 30s are having babies has been on the rise since the 1980s.
In contrast, among women under 20 and aged 20-24, fertility rates are now at their lowest level since 1938.
The proportion of all live births to mothers born outside the UK stood at 11.6% at the start of the 1990s.
The ONS says one of the reasons for the increase since then is that fertility levels are generally higher among foreign-born women.
The overall number of live births in England and Wales decreased slightly last year, to just under 700,000.
The average age of mothers in 2016 increased to 30.4 years, compared with 30.3 years in 2015.
Teenage pregnancy
Natika Halil, chief executive of the sexual health charity FPA, said the figures were a reminder that fertility does not stop at 40.
"Although it can take longer and be more difficult to get pregnant if you are over 35, many women over 35 have healthy pregnancies and babies.
"However, this also highlights the importance for women who are not planning to have children, or have completed their family, to continue to use contraception until menopause."
She said cuts to public health budgets could have a future impact on teenage pregnancy rates, which had been falling steadily.
"It's worth noting that the UK still has one of the highest teenage birth rates in Western Europe: three times the rate in Italy, and more than four times the rate in Sweden," Ms Halil added.
Baby boom
There was a small decrease in the number of deaths - 525,048 - registered in England and Wales last year, following a large increase in 2015.
But the number of deaths among people aged 65 to 74 increased, possibly due to those born in the baby boom immediately after World War Two moving into old age.
The figures for children dying from asthma were lower than last year, though Asthma UK says the level of boys dying from the condition is the highest since 2004.
In 2016, the stillbirth rate decreased to 4.4 per 1,000 total births, the lowest rate since 1992.An Apology to Donald Trump
Almost a year ago, I published an article on American Thinker arguing that neither Hilary Clinton nor Donald Trump was acceptable as president and suggesting that the Electoral College could save us from them both. I was wrong in that judgment. It is true that Trump is often uncouth and his behavior is not “presidential,” but the first 100 days of his administration have been a revelation. I am now more optimistic about restoring the last best hope of earth than I have been since Ronald Reagan was president. An actor and now a business tycoon seem much more effective than any professional politician.
It will take decades to reverse the ratchet to the Left that weak Republicans have permitted for so long. As one of the most important examples, the systematic brainwashing of students from kindergarten to college is a problem whose roots run all the way back to the Wilson administration, a century ago. A nationwide school voucher program would help but is insufficient because many if not most parents are themselves victims of the pervasive ideological indoctrination and therefore do not realize how the schools are injuring their children. Even if we could eliminate the entirely unprofessional teachers’ unions and privatize all schools, it would still take many years to staff them with unbiased teachers. Breaking the politically-correct socialist stranglehold on college faculties will take even longer. We can, however, hope that Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos will at least start the reform process, and that is more than any previous Republican administration has done. It appears that Congressional Republicans have now become a principal obstacle to progress. Both houses need major reforms so that the Congress can fulfill its dual role as a partner to Trump and a check on possible excesses by his administration. It is outrageous that House Republicans are still debating how or even if to repeal and replace ObamaCare, since they have had six years to come up with a viable plan. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell must eliminate the “virtual filibuster,” which allows a simple announcement by a single senator, without an actual filibuster, to prevent passage of almost any bill unless there are 60 votes in favor. Absent these and many other necessary changes, the obvious task for the mid-term elections will be to replace those timid Republicans who want to go along to get along with the destructive Democrats, so that we can indeed get started on making America great again. Phil Chapman is a retired geophysicist and concerned Republican who lives in Scottsdale, AZ. He was once a NASA astronaut and is still involved in space-related research.The new Kirkersville Police Chief and two nursing home employees were killed during a shooting in the small Licking County community Friday morning.
The Licking County Sheriff says the suspected shooter,, was also found dead.
Sheriff Randy Thorp said was shot and killed while responding to a 911 call at the Pine Kirk Care Center, a nursing home on East Main Street. The last report from DiSario was that he'd spotted the suspect.
as Cindy Krantz, a nurse's aide from Pataskala, and Marlina Medrano, a nurse from of Newark. Investigators and the nursing home owner said.
DiSario was transported for an autopsy on Friday evening. Medrano and Krantz will have their performed on Saturday. Hartless' autopsy is scheduled for Sunday.
Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said the accused shooter took two hostages in an alley behind Pine Kirk Care Center and that Disario was shot near that location. Neither hostage was harmed.
Investigators were also executing a search warrant on a car found at the Flying J Travel Plaza at Interstate 70 and Ohio 158, a mile from the scene of the shooting.
The Sheriff said other authorities responding to the reports of a shooting later found three people dead inside the nursing home.
The remaining patients at the facility were taken to nearby hospitals as authorities conducted their investigation.
DiSario had only been on the job as Kirkersville Police Chief for three weeks, according to the Sheriff. DiSario was married and a father of six, with a seventh child on the way. Before his most recent job, he'd worked as part of the police departments in Millersport and Lithopolis. and
The first reports of the shooting came in shortly before 8:00 a.m. Friday.
A Kirkersville resident said that he heard multiple gunshots just a block off of East Main Street, while he was dropping his kids off at the babysitter's house nearby. A friend rushed the children inside the house while the neighbors tried to figure out what was happening.
As reports of an officer down came across scanner, other law enforcement departments from across the county responded to the scene.
Kirkersville Elementary, about two blocks away from the scene, was placed on lockdown, then the school was closed for the day. The kids were bused to the middle school where parents were able to pick them up early.
The Licking County sheriff said a motive behind the shooting is still unknown. That makes it tougher to deal with the tragedy.
"Obviously this is a very sad day for out town and the county and the community," said Thorp. "But I think we can reflect a little more deeply once we find a motive and find what set this off."
The Licking County Sheriff's Office and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation are investigating the shooting. Part of State Route 40, which is East Main Street in Kirkersville, is blocked for the remainder of the day while authorities work at the scenes.
ABC 6/FOX 28 will continue to update this breaking news story.Controller Gear by Marketing Instincts Revolutionary Controller Stands
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The provisions, which critics call warrantless online spying, were included in three lawful access technical surveillance bills from the last parliamentary session, but are expected to be rolled into the omnibus crime bill the Conservatives plan to table this fall. The Conservative election platform promised to reintroduce the electronic surveillance provisions as part of the omnibus crime bill.
The provisions would give law enforcement agencies more power to take information from internet service providers and other private companies without a warrant, according to Open Media, a consumer watchdog group.
Open Media is asking that the provisions be properly examined by MPs and senators in committee before the bill gets passed. The Conservatives have promised to pass the omnibus bill within 100 days of Parliament's post-election return, which was June 2.
Open Media worries that won't be enough time when combined with all the other bills expected to be rolled together.
Tamir Israel, a staff lawyer at the University of Ottawa's Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, says the potential for surveillance online is much greater than it was in a pre-internet era. CIPPIC is one of several groups and individuals who signed an open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which was distributed Tuesday along with a news release by Open Media.
Smartphones, for example, come with GPS devices that can be used to track a user's movements. Social networking sites make it easier to see who's connected.
"Everywhere we go, everything we do is recorded," Israel said. "It's becoming more the case with smartphones and facial recognition. We want to make sure that we're justifying that expansion [of law enforcement powers]."
"The overarching concern is its an erosion of civil liberties and online privacy with no real justification for it," he added.
The legislation proposed in the last session would allow police to get some information without a warrant and other information with something like a court order, but with a lower standard of proof, Israel said.
The group is also worried about a lack of oversight for the new powers.
Privacy safeguards
A spokesman for Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said while the law has to keep up with technology, there will be privacy safeguards in the bill.
"While technology has advanced rapidly in the past two decades, law enforcement and national security agencies have faced increased difficulty in protecting the safety and security of Canadians," Michael Aubie wrote in an email.
"Existing privacy safeguards in the Criminal Code will be maintained or enhanced under this legislation, including requirements for police to obtain prior authorization in the form of a judicial order or warrant. No information could be obtained by police without prior judicial authorization."
More details about the omn |
“Your rod and your staff comfort me,” they miss what the metaphorical “rod” really refers to. In biblical terms, the rod was used when corralling sheep to keep them on the desired path—not to prod, poke or flog.
There are many who disagree with that interpretation but we need only look to the vicious legacy of slavery. As a rule, people of African descent did not rip limbs from trees to beat their children. We learned that from slave owners who waved the Bible around to justify their violence on our bodies.
Children aren’t property and you have no more right (or moral authority) to punch your child than you do a stranger on the street.
I know something about bad, immature choices that can sometimes open unfortunate pathways to the criminal justice system or worse. I remember hanging with the “wrong crowd” myself as I came of age and being snatched off a corner by the nape of my neck. My brother Donnie was once attacked with a broomstick for hanging out with boys my mother did not approve of. She was desperate and would have done anything to save our lives.
The rigors of raising daughters and sons is not lost on me. I know what that desperation feels like. I know firsthand about the diminishing options when the only thing standing between your child and the streets is you. But, as the mother of now grown children and now grandchildren, I question a culture that encourages beating children into submission. My kids got by on extra chores, early curfews and fewer extracurricular activities with their friends. In the rare cases that I actually raised my hand, I remember the fear in their eyes.
And I regret every moment.
My children are thoughtful and engaged people—an Ivy League educated schoolteacher who is expecting her first son, a budding architect, and a political science major (and mother of a 3-year-old daughter) who wants to be a lawyer someday. They are law-abiding, socially conscious and out meeting the world on their own terms.
I was swift with discipline and sometimes, I admit, too much. I made at least my share of mistakes but did just enough of the right things, too, and they came through. I count myself lucky among the lucky.
“This hurts me more than it hurts you,” my late Uncle Ross would say as he pulled off his leather belt and wrapped the buckle around his meaty fist.
My mother once shot a man for abusing me. Her then-fiancé put me in a bath of scalding hot water, leaving scars I can still see and feel some 40 years later. Like I said, she would do anything for us.
But I wonder now, with jail cells and graveyards packed with people who faced similar discipline—my brothers among them—if it had the societal payoff we intended. The data tells another story. Children who are subjected to corporal punishment are no more likely to refrain from bad behavior than those who are not. In fact, it more often has the opposite impact as they seek out ever craftier ways to cloak unwanted conduct.
No matter what you believe about corporal punishment, the mother in that video went too far. In fact, she simply increased the likelihood that her daughter will be more secretive the next time around and, as was the case with me, that she won’t find safe harbor in her mother’s arms. I grew distrustful of authority, no matter what form it took and, in time, I built a family outside of my own.
I have to wonder what the response might have been if that mother in the video had been kicking a dog rather than punching her daughter on a live stream. I wonder if it would have turned, snarling, and bitten her or tucked that anger inside until it bit someone else.
When we replace love and encouragement with physical violence, we are teaching our children to do the same. Those lessons are best left outside, under the streetlights.The Chicago Sun-Times made a splash last week when they became the first major newspaper in the United States to accept bitcoin for subscription purchases.
The move followed a purely voluntary paywall trial in February which allowed website visitors to donate bitcoin to the Taproot Foundation. In total, there were about 715 bitcoin donors, 63 percent of whom donated around 25 cents. With 78,000 visitors that day, there was about a one percent conversion rate, better than any credit card conversion rate the Sun-Times has ever gotten.
And with last week’s news, newsBTC has been provided with some figures on subscriptions paid for in bitcoin.
About 11.3 percent of news orders this week were paid for in bitcoin, I’m told, amounting to 7 purchases. Two of the purchases were made from Chicago, the other 5 from other parts in the United States.
Two orders came in from New York City, one from Fairbanks, Alaska, one from Berkeley, California, and another from Clemson, South Carolina. These are markets not ordinarily reached by the Sun-Times.
Compared to traditional sales, the Sun-Times saw 55 orders this week via what was described to me as “regular channels” — online and by telephone.
Of those 55 orders, 23 were placed by using a credit card online, and 32 from the Sun-Times call center. The call center makes outbound sales calls, too, so it’s unclear just what the percentage of inbound vs. outbound sales were.
I should note that I received this information earlier this week, and as such, these figures may have increased.
“I’m actually blown away by the orders,” said Josh Metnick, CTO at Wrapports, LLC, the publisher of the Sun-Times. “The key metric will be measuring this over time — we got a really nice initial PR boost with this, now the question is how will this affect sales over the next 3, 6, 12 months?”
“How will we repurpose, modify our marketing locally as Bitcoin adoption grows, so that more and more every-day people understand the advantages of paying with Bitcoin, etc?” he continued.
Those advantages are broad. And more and more companies are discovering the benefits of going bitcoin.
The adoption of bitcoin by the Sun-Times may also set a precedent in the newspaper publishing industry — an industry that’s had its share of experience adapting to these digital times we live in.
Could other major newspapers in the United States (and around the world, for that matter) follow suit and begin accepting a digital currency for digital subscription purchases? The answer, of course, will come with time.July 15th, 2008 by D.Billy
Continuing our love-fest for extraordinarily costumed people in ordinary settings, we bring you the Land of the Free series from UK-based portrait and documentary photographer Steve Schofield:
Excerpted from Schofield’s statement on his website:
My practice is concerned with exploring the fascination that the British public has with American popular culture and the sub-cultural world of fandom. In the images, I have shown people in their own homes and environments wearing costumes that they would be dressed in to attend events with other like-minded individuals. It seeks to offer a glimpse into seemingly ordinary lives of my subjects and allows the private to become public. The work hints at the depth of people’s fantasies and the methods they employ to adopt this culture as part of their own lifestyle as a means of escapism.
What I want to know is… how the hell do you baby-proof your bat’leth?Ryan Callahan has signed a six-year deal with the Tampa Bay Lightning, the club announced on Wednesday.
“We are pleased to announce that we’ve reached an agreement on a six-year contract extension with Ryan,” vice president and general manager Steve Yzerman said in a press release. “He’s proven to be a fierce competitor and outstanding leader who fits very well with our team.”
“I couldn’t be happier to be part of the Tampa Bay Lightning organization for the next six years and I am excited for this new chapter of my career,” Callahan said. “Tampa Bay has been a great place to live and play from the day I got there. As soon as the season ended I knew it was a place I wanted to be.”
Callahan earned $4.825-million last season. The former New York Rangers captain was dealt to Tampa at the trade deadline after failing to negotiate an extension that would have kept him in Manhattan.
He put up 11 points in 20 regular-season for the Lightning, bringing his total to 36 points in 65 games on the year.
Tampa will send a second-round draft pick to the Rangers to finalize the trade. The Lightning also received two first-round picks in the deal and sent former captain Marty St. Louis the other way.
In 470 career games for Tampa and New York, Callahan has 138 goals and 265 points.
–With files from Sportsnet staff(Reuters) - Electric car company Tesla Motors is working to produce a car capable of running on “auto-pilot” within the next three years, CEO Elon Musk said, joining tech giant Google and rival carmakers in the race to roll a driverless car into the market.
Tesla Motors Inc CEO Elon Musk talks about Tesla's new battery swapping program in Hawthorne, California June 20, 2013. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
The California-based company’s autonomous car would allow the driver to hand 90 percent of the control of the car over to the vehicle’s computer system, Musk said in an interview with the Financial Times newspaper.
Fully autonomous cars would take longer to develop, he said.
The self-driving car would be developed in-house using Tesla’s own technology, not that of another company, Musk said in comments confirmed by a Tesla spokesperson.
Tesla’s online job board currently has a post for an Advanced Driver Assistance Systems Controls Engineer, who will be responsible for helping “Tesla’s effort to pioneer fully automated driving.”
On top of the technical obstacles, legal and safety issues must be overcome before driverless cars are allowed on the road.
European Union laws currently call for drivers to control their cars at all times.
And it is unclear whether the multi-billion dollar car insurance industry has any appetite to back the cars until the technology is proven, although driverless cars would be free from human error and programmed to obey traffic laws, features that could appeal to insurers.
Buyers may also be skittish about purchasing a car that drives itself until its safety has been proved through real world experience.
Musk’s three-year timeline is more ambitious than timelines set out by other carmakers, as well as analysts that say it will take 10 to 15 years before self-driving cars become a reality.
Germany’s Daimler AG and Japan’s Nissan have both said they hope to begin selling self-driving cars by the end of the decade.
Daimler already offers technology that allows for partly automated driving such as traffic jam assistance in its top-line S-Class Mercedes, which can maintain distance to other cars in stop-and-go situations.
Google has fitted out several cars with radar-like equipment that lets them navigate roads in California and Nevada. Google did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the status of its driverless car program.
California Governor Jerry Brown signed a law last year allowing the Mountain View-based internet giant to test its self-driving cars on the road.Tom Price John Yarmuth
Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., chairman of the House Budget Committee and a physician, appears before the Rules Committee, joined at right by Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., a member of the House Budget Committee, as he sponsors legislation that would repeal President Barack Obama's signature health care law, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2016. The legislation will be the first order of business as the House returns for the holiday break and will mark the first time a bill repealing the health law makes it all the way to the White House. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
WASHINGTON -- After dozens of failed attempts to undo President Barack Obama's health care law, the GOP-led Congress will finally put a bill on the president's desk striking at the heart of his signature legislative achievement.
Obama will veto the bill, and so the ultimate outcome will be the same as the many previous GOP attempts to repeal "Obamacare." But Wednesday's vote in the House will mark the first time such a bill makes it all the way to the White House.
Unlike past efforts that were blocked by Senate Democrats, this time the legislation was written under special rules protecting it from a Democratic filibuster. It passed the Senate late last year, and so Wednesday's House vote will send it straight to Obama.
House GOP leaders, opening their 2016 legislative session, said Wednesday's vote and Obama's subsequent veto will lay bare a stark choice between the parties in a presidential election year. The legislation also cuts federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton has decried the legislation while leading GOP candidates applaud it.
"It's up to the president to decide if he wants to side with the people whose health care costs have skyrocketed out of control, or the abortion industrial complex whose profits have skyrocketed out of control," said Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. "Congress is holding President Obama accountable."
Democrats denounced the vote as a waste of time aimed at placating GOP base voters riled up by Donald Trump and the unruly Republican presidential race.
"It's the 62nd vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act. It has as much chance as the previous ones did," said House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland. He said that Republicans "don't have an alternative, and the reaction of the American public if they lost the benefits and protections of the Affordable Care Act would be very upset."
Indeed despite numerous promises to "repeal and replace" the health care law since its enactment nearly six years ago, Republicans have never coalesced around an alternative. Ryan has promised that will change this year.
The bill being voted on Wednesday would dismantle the health law's key pillars, including requirements that most people obtain coverage and larger employers offer it to workers.
It would eliminate the expansion of Medicaid coverage to additional lower-income people and the government's subsidies for many who buy policies on newly created insurance marketplaces. And it would end taxes the law imposed to cover its costs.
The bill would also terminate the roughly $450 million yearly in federal dollars that go to Planned Parenthood, about a third of its budget. A perennial target of conservatives, the group came under intensified GOP pressure last year over providing fetal tissue for research.
"It is appalling that in their first week back in session the top priority for Republican leaders in the House is rolling back women's access to preventive health care," said Dawn Laguens, vice president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
GOP leaders hope to schedule a veto override vote to coincide with the Jan. 22 March for Life in Washington, the annual gathering of anti-abortion activists on the anniversary of the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. However Republicans do not command enough votes to override the president's veto.In a concerted effort to stomp out the "you suck asshole" goal kick chant and other "foul language" that plagues pockets of Major League Soccer stadiums and, indeed, Rio Tinto Stadium, Real Salt Lake's front office has issued a letter to supporters groups describing league-issued consequences if changes are not forthcoming.
Improvements, a letter from the front office to supporters groups says, must be palpable by Aug. 11, with the four matches between then and now set to be evaluated.
Should what the letter terms "significant improvements" not be made by Aug. 11, certain sanctions could be applied. Those include:
-No smoke devices, flag poles, banners, or other displays permitted at home or away matches -Retract parking passes, stadium credentials, and field passes at Rio Tinto Stadium -Prohibit drums, megaphones, and Capo Stand
The chant somewhat affectionately known as "YSA" has been an issue in the past in other stadiums, with Seattle Sounders fans the subject of one such campaign earlier this year. In 2011, New England Revolution supporters were at the center of controversy for the chant as well.
It should be noted that the letter specifies that other vulgar chants are in question, and not just the YSA chant.Detroit to host Roma-PSG
By Football Italia staff
It is now confirmed that Roma and Paris Saint-Germain will meet in Detroit’s Comerica Park for the International Champions Cup on July 19.
The fixture had been announced last month, but the venue was yet to be locked down.
Both clubs have now named the home of the Detroit Tigers as the place to be on July 19 for the opening International Champions Cup match.
This will be the first ever professional football match played at Comerica Park.
Roma will then play Tottenham Hotspur on July 25 at Red Bull Arena and Juventus at the Gillette Stadium on July 30.
“We are excited to bring two of the best in international soccer to Comerica Park and The District Detroit as part of the ICC,” said Charlie Stillitano, chairman of Relevent Sports.
“Both Roma and PSG have achieved continued success in Italian and French football respectively and will be looking to add to their trophy case this summer. Showcasing the best that international soccer has to offer in a city so rich in sports history is a dream come true for our organisation.
“We look forward to hosting these clubs at Comerica Park to kick off the 2017 tournament and providing an atmosphere that the people of Detroit will absolutely want to be a part of.”Al-Qaeda is plotting mass attacks on civilians in Britain and other Western countries, the head of the UK secret service MI5 warned. The announcement follows Wednesday’s terror attack at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, which killed 12 people.
Andrew Parker, director general of MI5, told a select group, mostly from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), that while the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) has been encouraging lone wolf attacks on British soil, Al-Qaeda are planning a massacre that will target large numbers of civilians.
“We know that terrorists based in Syria harbor... ambitions towards the UK – trying to direct attacks against our country, and exhorting extremists here to act independently,” he said.
“We still face more complex and ambitious plots that follow the now sadly well-established approach of Al-Qaeda and its imitators: attempts to cause large scale loss of life, often by attacking transport systems or iconic targets.
“We know, for example, that a group of core Al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria is planning mass casualty attacks against the West.”
It is believed the gunmen are affiliated to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The brothersCherif and Said Kouachi, the main suspects in the Charlie Hebdo shootings, have been killed after French police stormed a printworks warehouse in Dammartin-en-Goele, where the two suspects were holding at least one hostage.
French media are reporting that the two brothers have been killed in the operation and the hostage has been freed.
The UK's COBRA emergency committee agreed to increase security measures on Thursday. Border controls have been tightened as a result. Extra police have been deployed at British ports and train stations serving the Eurostar.
Home Secretary Theresa May said on Thursday: “Following the attacks [in Paris] we took the precautionary step yesterday of increasing security at the French-UK border.
“The UK threat level, which is set by the independent Joint Terrorism Advisory Centre, remains at severe; that means a terrorist attack is highly likely and the public should remain vigilant.
“This morning I chaired COBRA to consider Britain's response to the attacks and our own preparedness to a similar attack.”
READ MORE:Charlie Hebdo attack 'a grave reminder of terror threat to West' – MI5 chief
Sky News reports that Al-Qaeda recruits British volunteers in Syria, led by Muhsin al Fadhli, an “expert bomb maker,” whose mission it is to plot attacks against the West.
Al-Fadhli is the leader of the militant Khorasan Group in Syria, an Al-Qaeda cell. The 33-year-old, a senior Al-Qaeda operative, was so close to Osama Bin Laden that he was among a small group who knew about the September 11, 2001, attacks before they were launched.
He was reportedly killed in airstrikes in September 2014, but these reports have never been fully confirmed. At the time of his alleged death, Fadhli was an Al-Qaeda adviser with a $7 million bounty on his head from the US State Department.The 'Merica burger at Slater's 50/50 is showing that beef has no place in the perfect meal.
Slater's 50/50 (via Facebook)
Where’s the beef? Not in the ‘Merica burger. If you don’t believe there’s such a thing as too much bacon, you’ve got kindred spirits among the creative minds at Slater’s 50/50, a small, pork product-obsessed California burger chain.
(MORE: The Bacon Sundae is Coming)
Slater’s 50/50 is a trio of restaurants in Southern California that has been making a name for itself with its only-in-America blend of 50% beef and 50% bacon in its burgers. While that might be enough bacon for many people, Slater’s has now introduced The ‘Merica burger, featuring a patty made of 100% ground bacon topped with a slice of thick cut bacon, a sunny side up egg, a slab of bacon cheddar cheese, and, of course, “bacon island” dressing.
Oh, ‘Merica.
This all-bacon burger is only available for the month for July, though, after which time Slater’s 50/50 is likely to introduce an even more outlandish burger. The chain is known for going over the top with its burger concoctions. They’ve featured pulled pork burgers, chorizo burgers, and even a chili cheese frito burger in the past. But how can the chain follow an all-bacon burger? Perhaps they should offer one filled with cholesterol-lowering medication. Or maybe even giving away a free bacon coffin to its most loyal customers.
MORE: Bacon-Scented Perfume? Sure, Why Not?
MORE: Gluttony Alert: Racetrack Touts New Bacon-Topped Funnel CakeMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Clive Bone: "Religious freedom is an absolute right, and so is freedom from religion"
A Devon town council acted unlawfully by allowing prayers to be said at meetings, the High Court has ruled.
Action was brought against Bideford Town Council by the National Secular Society (NSS) after atheist councillor Clive Bone complained.
Mr Justice Ouseley ruled the prayers were not lawful under section 111 of the Local Government Act 1972.
However, he said prayers could be said as long as councillors were not formally summoned to attend.
The judgement was being seen as a test case which could affect local councils across England and Wales.
Mr Justice Ouseley ruled the prayers as practised by Bideford Town Council had been unlawful because there was no statutory power permitting them to continue.
The NSS, which said prayers had no place in "a secular environment concerned with civic business", argued the "inappropriate" ritual breached articles 9 and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protect an individual's right to freedom of conscience and not to face discrimination.
'Bizarre ruling'
However, the case was not won on human rights grounds but on a point of statutory construction of local government legislation.
Analysis By and large, judges have been unsympathetic to the Christian case when people have argued that they don't want to do things like advising homosexual couples. The tide has been flowing pretty firmly against Christianity in public life and it's caused huge concerns for the churches. They say it's being driven out of public life. There is a lot of concern that this is not just about pure religion but this is about some of the values that underpin the British way of life. Of course, from the other side, people like the National Secular Society say the Church and Christianity should not have undue privileges in having their values and their way of doing things upheld. So there's an argument on both sides but certainly it's been very noticeable in the last few years that the tide's been turning against Christian practices which we've just taken for granted for centuries.
Mr Justice Ouseley said: "A local authority has no power under section 111 of the Local Government Act 1972, or otherwise, to hold prayers as part of a formal local authority meeting, or to summon councillors to such a meeting at which prayers are on the agenda."
He told the court: "There is no specific power to say prayers or to have any period of quiet reflection as part of the business of the council."
Referring to Bideford, he said: "The council has on two occasions by a majority voted to retain public prayers at its full meetings.
"But that does not give it power to do what it has no power to do."
The judge acknowledged the case raised issues of general public importance and gave the council permission to appeal.
Speaking after Friday's outcome, Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, said the ruling was "surprising and disappointing".
He said: "Public authorities - be it Parliament or a parish council - should have the right to say prayers before meetings if they wish."
Anthony Inch, a Bideford town councillor and Torridge district councillor, said he hoped there would be an appeal leading to the ruling being overturned.
"I'm disgusted, surprised and saddened by the decision," he said.
Simon Calvert, of the Christian Institute, said: "We are pleased that the court has said the saying of prayers at meetings does not breach human rights laws.
"But it is bizarre that they should be declared unlawful because of the 1972 Local Government Act."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Simon Calvert: "We feel rather sad the court has given the National Secular Society some encouragement in their campaign"
He added: "The judge's finding that the Local Government Act doesn't give local authorities power to include prayers as part of their formal meetings - we think that's extraordinary.
"I mean we're talking about a practice that goes back to the Elizabethan era.
"And the logic of the judge's ruling may be that it could also be unlawful for a council to start its meeting with the beginning of the national anthem. It may even throw local authorities' Diamond Jubilee celebrations up in the air."
Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society said: "This judgment is an important victory for everyone who wants a secular society, one that neither advantages nor disadvantages people because of their religion or lack of it."
He added: "Acts of worship in council meetings are key to the separation of religion from politics, so we're very pleased with the judgment, and the clear secular message it sends - particularly the statement made about the 1972 Act."
'Great pity'
The Bishop of Exeter, the Right Reverend Michael Langrish, said he would encourage councils in his area to continue holding prayers before the start of their statutory business.
He added: "I think it's a great pity that a tiny minority are seeking to ban the majority, many of whom find prayers very, very helpful, from continuing with a process in which no-one actually has to participate."
The legal challenge was launched in 2010 after the NSS was contacted by Mr Bone, who was a Bideford town councillor at the time.
Mr Bone, who ended up leaving the council because of its "refusal to adjust" its prayers policy, said on Friday: "Quite frankly delighted. I'm not surprised, I expected to win.
"The law is the law and local authorities have to obey the law."
He added: "Local government is for everybody, it should be equally welcoming to everybody, whatever they believe.
"This has got nothing to do with intolerance towards religion.
"Religious freedom is an absolute right and so is freedom from religion an absolute right, in my view."Getty Images
Recent NFL head coaching searches have seen a great number of names get bandied about as potential hires and many of them change from year to year.
There are some perennial names, however, and former Raiders and Buccaneers coach Jon Gruden is high on the list of them. Gruden, who is now the color commentator for Monday Night Football on ESPN, is often mentioned as a possible target, but has not taken a job since parting ways with the Buccaneers after the 2008 season.
During an appearance on ESPN’s Mike and Mike on Wednesday, Gruden said he doesn’t intend to end that streak that this offseason either.
“I’m very happy doing what I’m doing,” Gruden said. “My full attention and focus is on Cowboys-Lions, I cannot wait for our final Monday night game. There’s a lot of chips on the table. Right now, I have no intentions of coaching. I really enjoy what I’m doing and feel like I’m really close to the fire. I’m getting plenty of satisfaction out of doing what I’m doing.”
Charles Robinson of Yahoo Sports reported this week that Gruden is a “focal point” in the Rams’ coaching search and that Gruden would want full personnel authority to be part of the plan to consider returning to the sideline. Getting that could change Gruden’s intentions, but, for now, he’s set to remain in the broadcasting booth.Jacoba Francisca Maria Smulders[1] (born April 3, 1982)[2][3] is a Canadian actress and model. She is known for her role as Robin Scherbatsky in the sitcom How I Met Your Mother (2005–2014) and S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films The Avengers (2012), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Avengers: Endgame (2019) and Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019). She currently stars as Lisa Turner in the Netflix series Friends from College (2017–2019).
Early life [ edit ]
Smulders was born in Vancouver, British Columbia to a Dutch father and a British mother. She was named after her great-aunt, from whom she gained the nickname "Cobie".[4] Smulders describes herself as "a fluent listener" of French.[5] She has four sisters: Melissa, Amy, Fiona, and Julie. [6]
Smulders worked in modeling, which she later said she "kind of hated", adding that the experience made her hesitant about pursuing acting as a career: "You know you go into these rooms, and I've had the experience of people judging you physically for so long and I was over that. But then it was like, 'Oh no, I have to actually perform. I have to do well, and I have to have a voice, and I have to have thoughts now.'"[7]
In her youth, Smulders aspired to be a marine biologist.[5] Describing her transition to her eventual professions, she said,
I studied acting throughout high school, then modeling took over because it brought more opportunity. When I quit modeling, coming back to Vancouver, I registered at the University of Victoria. At the same time, that summer, I was taking acting classes and decided to give that a year or two instead of going back to school. I always wanted to go back to school. I was looking into taking some classes part-time, but marine biology involves a lot of lab time.[5]
Acting career [ edit ]
Smulders at the CBS Comedies Premiere Party in September 2008
Smulders' first acting role was as a guest in the Showtime science fiction series Jeremiah, and she has appeared in several television series since, including a recurring role on The L Word. Her first permanent series role was in the short-lived ABC series Veritas: The Quest, which ran for one season. After the cancellation of Veritas, Smulders was cast as television reporter Robin Scherbatsky on the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother in 2005, remaining on the show for its entire nine-season run.
In June 2010, Smulders made her Off-Broadway debut in Love, Loss, and What I Wore at The Westside Theatre.[8]
Smulders played Maria Hill in the 2012 film The Avengers. She received training from a Los Angeles SWAT team trainer to handle guns in order to portray the character.[9] Smulders reprised the role in two episodes of the television series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,[10] and in the films Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), and Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019).[11][12] Joss Whedon has suggested he had considered her for the role of Wonder Woman in his draft of the eponymous film, which did not go into production.[13] Smulders did voice a Lego version of Wonder Woman in the 2014 animated film The Lego Movie. It was the first time the Wonder Woman character had a theatrical film appearance.[14]
In 2013, Smulders had a supporting role in the romance film Safe Haven. She also starred in the comedy-drama Delivery Man and They Came Together.[15] In July 2015, it was reported that Smulders had exited the made-for-TV film Confirmation because she had broken her leg; Zoe Lister-Jones was then confirmed to replace her in the role of Harriet Grant.[16]
In 2016, she appeared in the comedy-drama The Intervention, and with Tom Cruise in the action-adventure film Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. In 2017, she played the recurring character "Mother" in the Netflix series A Series of Unfortunate Events.[17]
Since 2017, she has appeared in the Netflix original series, Friends from College, in the main role of Lisa Turner.
Charitable endeavors [ edit ]
Smulders filmed a PSA with Oceana, an international ocean conservation organization, in 2014.[18][19]
Personal life [ edit ]
Smulders became engaged to Taran Killam in January 2009.[20] They married on September 8, 2012, in Solvang, California.[21] The couple reside in New York City, New York.[22] They have two daughters; their first, Shaelyn, was born in May 2009, [23] and their second, Joelle, was born in January 2015.[24][25]
In 2015, Smulders revealed she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer at age 25, while shooting season three of How I Met Your Mother in 2007. She had surgery to remove two tumors from her ovaries, but the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes, resulting in the need for multiple operations over the course of two years.[26][27]
Filmography [ edit ]
Film [ edit ]
Television [ edit ]
Theater [ edit ]
Awards and nominations [ edit ]What’s truly amazing about the issues involved in the fiscal cliff is, at the end of the day, just how easy a compromise should be.
This isn’t a decision about war and peace, or abortion, or gay and lesbian rights – issues on which compromise is exceedingly hard to find because of the nature of the issue. A nation can’t be halfway at war; abortion either is or isn’t murder. Budget disputes – overall spending totals, and especially tax questions – are by nature just not like that. A few billion more for the Pentagon or a few billion less? That’s exactly the kind of question normally solved by striking a deal.
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Now, granted, even in cases where the two sides eventually compromise, it might not seem as if they will, even right up to the last minute. And it’s always more difficult than just picking a number halfway between what both sides want. After all, bargaining power may not be equal; right now, Democrats control both the White House and one chamber of Congress, so they might be able to get a bit closer to their ideal point than will the Republicans, who have only the House. Meanwhile, both sides may inflate their original bids; it takes quite a bit of bargaining to get to where negotiators’ true positions are revealed, thus allowing for the difference to be split (or for the side better at bluffing to do a bit better than it should).
But, yes, if it’s just money, it should be very possible to split the difference.
So why is this one so hard? Because Republicans aren’t treating it as a difference over dollars; they’re treating it as if a principle is at stake, even if they seem to be struggling to find the principle:
1.) Is it about never raising taxes, no matter what? Even putting aside what a silly principle this would be, it’s clearly not what they’re fighting for since they don’t seem to care at all about the tax increase involved in the expiration of the payroll tax cut, not to mention that their failure to compromise on the Bush-era tax rates will produce an even larger tax increase. So the principle appears to be not about what happens to taxes, but about never voting to raise taxes, even if that means taxes go up more. A strange principle indeed.
2.) Or perhaps the principle is on the spending side. Some Republicans appear to believe that they were elected to return government to the size it was before the New Deal, and that anything else is an unconstitutional and probably ungodly perversion of the Republic. Granted, that principle doesn’t (for almost all of them) seem to extend to the size of the military or restrictions on the government’s ability to do who-knows-what in the name of fighting terrorism, not to mention intrusions into bedrooms. But putting that aside, it’s a way of elevating relatively small differences into a matter of first principles – just not one that Republicans have any chance of winning.
3.) Or perhaps it just comes down, for many Tea Partiers, to a principled opposition to compromise at all.
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If it’s the first of these, then a deal may be surprisingly easy – as soon we go over the cliff and they can vote for “tax cuts” instead of “raising taxes,” even if the end result is identical or even results in higher taxes.
If it’s the second one, then it’s just a case of convincing the holdouts (at least if there are enough to torpedo any deal) that, yes, Mitt Romney lost the election and the New Deal isn’t going to be repealed for at least the next four years.
If it’s the third … well, those who believe in that “principle” just have to be left behind, and the remainder of the Republican conference needs to accept that there’s nothing that can be done about it.
What the second and third stories depend on, however, is if there’s some competing incentive for most mainstream Republicans to abandon that “principle” -- whether it’s concern for the economy, or concern for the image of the party, or something else. If not, and if one of these is the big principle they settle on, then we could be in for a long ride.
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Either way, the idea that any of these are really “principles” is pretty much a joke. The reality is exactly what it always is in these cases, which is that the two sides will eventually settle |
the application." What that means, according to the article, is Carrier IQ software knows when a button is pressed, just as your e-mail application knows when you hit reply, but it doesn't record each keystroke or send a record of it to anyone.
Ultimately, how much information is collected on Android phones and what is done with it seems to be up to the carriers. We asked AT&T exactly what information is logged on its phones, where it is sent and how it is used. While we didn't receive a detailed response, AT&T did tell us "In line with our privacy policy, we solely use CIQ software data to improve wireless network and service performance."
We haven't heard back from Sprint, but the company told Computerworld that "We collect enough information to understand the customer experience with devices on our network and how to address any connection problems, but we do not and cannot look at the contents of messages, photos, videos, etc., using this tool."
Ars spoke with Apple yesterday, and we heard much the same thing. While Apple is in the process of phasing Carrier IQ out of iOS, it said "data was sent anonymously, and in encrypted fashion. We did not record keystrokes, messages or any personal information for the diagnostic data, and we have no plans to in the future."
Carrier IQ boasts that its software is deployed on more than 141 million handsets, and has operated for several years without any major level of controversy. Clearly, smartphones would be capable of tracking much of our activity even if Carrier IQ never existed. But the lawsuits filed against Carrier IQ and its customers, and forthcoming responses to Franken's letters, should shed more light on exactly what information is collected and how it is used.
UPDATE: We've just received a statement from Sprint, which says that while it "cannot look at the content of customer messages, e-mails, photos, videos, etc., using the diagnostic tools offered by Carrier IQ," it uses the tool to analyze device and network performance to identify problems and resolve them. Sprint says the data it collects is anonymized and "not sold or provided to anyone outside of Sprint."Exercising self-control is contagious: Within a person's brain, that is. The study hasn't made it out yet, so we're stuck with a press release on this one, but it's too good to pass up. The finding itself isn't a huge shock: if people are asked to avoid using the toilet, their exercise in self-control makes them less likely to make other impulsive decisions, and take a larger reward that requires a bit of waiting. So, if you want to avoid acting impulsively, hold it in. That's a bit odd on its own, but the motivation for the study is superb. One of the authors of the study, Mirjam Tuk, felt like she was going to doze off at an upcoming seminar, and chugged some coffee to avoid this fate. That may have kept her awake, but the urge to eliminate that coffee apparently distracted her enough to come up with the idea for the new work.
Maybe they're just sad because they know they throw like a girl: The second half of this title sounds like standard behavioral science: "Emotion affects sex-decoding of biological motion displays." It's the first bit—"He throws like a girl (but only when he’s sad)"—that sends this paper into Weird Science territory. The authors indicate that gender stereotypes seem to be inferred from a person's emotional state, but it's difficult to display a person's emotional state without revealing gender information. So, they chose a "biological motion display," namely how a person threw a ball. Male and female actors were filmed throwing baseballs in anger and sadness, and then had their gender hidden by video editing. Test subjects rated the videos, and generally felt that angry throwing motions were masculine.
Who's in charge, here?: Given the resources they devote to producing eggs, evolution selects for females that have some control over the males they choose to mate with. But scientists have found a species where the female has complete control. They can tell, because a pair of the now-extinct mites were caught in the act and preserved in amber. The female of this species "specialized structures assisting male-female attachment" and a structure that allowed it to hang on to males. Current males of related species have appendages that let them grab onto females, but these are absent in the sample trapped in amber. Still, the female mites may have a substantial say in who they mate with. "Some lineages have developed female copulatory tubes that function like a penis," said one of the mite experts involved in the work.
Education makes you mellow: I think it's safe to say that many of us with PhDs find the post-graduate life rather stressful, and the same probably applies to MDs, JDs, and MBAs, who tend to find themselves working long hours in high-stress positions. But it seems that something about graduate education is protective, since those with over 17 years of education had lower blood pressure readings than people who hadn't gone past high school. The effect is a bit larger in women.
Next up for the nanoparitcle revolution? Hair dye: Although it represents a multibillion dollar industry with international reach, according to an overview in Chemical Reviews, hair coloring remains trapped in the '50s. The 1850s, that is, when the chemical that serves as the basis of the process was first identified. The review is comprehensive, covering everything from the structure of the hair to the physical chemistry of the dying process, reaching over 20,000 words in the process. If you ever thought hair coloring was all about vanity, you might be shocked to see how much science is involved.
Something's not right with the males of Finland: There were two things I hadn't realized prior to looking into this paper: 1) rates of testicular cancer and quality of semen tend to trend in opposite directions; 2) Finland has generally been considered a nation with high semen quality. Alas, the country's glory days might be behind it. Sperm quality is dropping and the rates of testicular cancer are going up. In this, the Finns are joining most of Western Europe and the Americas. We're not sure why this is happening, but the rapid rate of change suggests it's an environmental or lifestyle issue.
There may be a fungus out there just waiting to turn you into a zombie (provided you're an ant): A little while back, a bit of fossilized plant matter indicated that zombie-generating fungi have been around for millions of years. Now, we find that they've used that time to diversify. Researchers checked four species of Brazilian ants, and found a fungus for each of them. Once infected, the fungus takes over the ant's brain and forces them to crawl to the underside of leaves and latch on, so that the fungus' spores can spread far and wide. (The fossil plant leaves showed bitemarks caused by ants grabbing hold.) Thankfully, so far, this seems limited to ants.
This paper scores a lot of Weird Science bonus points for it's title (which starts with "Hidden Diversity Behind the Zombie-Ant Fungus"). Extra points for the authors calling the paper "a test case for the electronic publication of new names in mycology," and for making me aware of the fact that fungus species have their own registry, called Index Fungorum.
Good news for the night owls: A study population of nearly 70,000 nurses shows that working the night shift reduces the chance of getting melanoma. The bad news? Working the night shift has previously been associated with increased risk of other types of cancer.In the late 1970s, Gilliam was having an understandably tough time acquiring funding for a film about time-traveling robbers starring a child and a troupe of little people. Gilliam was a fledgling director yet to earn Hollywood cred, despite being almost a household name back in England. Luckily fellow Brit George Harrison had his own film production company. It was created to fund the Monty Python flick, Life of Brian. Still, Harrison didn't exactly have the $5 million required sitting in his pocket. So the ex-Beatle took a big risk: Mortgaging the film company's offices, in order to have the scrill to make Time Bandits.
Such a great gesture requires a symbolic Thank You, and being polite Brits it was only natural that Harrison expected Gilliam to use some of his songs in the movie. In fact, Harrison went so far to write some new compositions, which his co-producer championed as the perfect soundtrack for the film. Gilliam disagreed, prompting a miffed Harrison to jab, "you remind me of John Lennon, you're so difficult, so bolshie." Gilliam agreed to run exactly one Harrison tune, but instead of being featured in a major dramatic scene, it would just be run over the end credits. In response, Harrison picked up a pen and wrote a biting series of lyrics about his true feelings on the situation:
I've got my mind set on you
I've got my mind set on you
I've got my mind set on you
I've got my mind set on you
Or wait, that wasn't about Gilliam. It was this song:
Greedy feeling wheeling dealing
Losing what you won
See the dream come undone
Stumble you may with the elementary
Lucky you got so far
All you owe is apologies
It's no "Something" but in terms of "songs that George Harrison wrote about people who eventually hurt him," it is definitely in the Top 20.Social media is changing the ground-level reality of the places we travel to, and the people who live there
We went on the five day Ciudad Perdida trek that's helping the "guardians of the heart of the world" to reclaim their ancestral home
If you liked episode one of the Mpora Pod, you're going to love episode two
With the help of some big name climbers, we’ve fixed your local wall’s biggest problem: its sucky music.
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Read our full Privacy Policy as well as Terms & Conditions.READER COMMENTS ON
"9/12 Tea Bag 'Unity' Sign/Terror Threat of the Moment: 'By Ballot or Bullet'..."
(28 Responses so far...)
COMMENT #1 [Permalink]
... Shortbus said on 9/12/2010 @ 4:20 pm PT...
We had a rally in Saint Louis also, on the Arch Grounds. I did not work it, but my brothers and sisters that did were tweeting some interesting observations. Hopefully pictures will follow.
COMMENT #2 [Permalink]
... Lora said on 9/12/2010 @ 5:29 pm PT...
"By ballot or bullet," eh? Real nice. Any respected leader out there gonna comment on that? Or are they just gonna let it pass, and by default give any obsessed wingnut out there the green light? The tea partiers seem to have co-opted that phrase for quite some time, per Google search, though this is the first time I've been aware of its use. Not to mention, if the elections don't go the way they want, will there be violence, as is implied? How about a counter slogan? "We're not at your Beck and call." I dunno. What Would Hercules Do?
COMMENT #3 [Permalink]
... Soul Rebel said on 9/12/2010 @ 9:34 pm PT...
Oh, this is rich isn't it? Love the photos from TPM. Especially the ones quoting Jefferson (Less Marx, More Jefferson) as if they would know. Case in point, with the Revolutionary-garbed crew and the sign that attributes "Democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not." I'd never heard that before, and I've always considered myself fairly well-versed in TJ lore (WWTJD). Not surprising to have found myself at this expose of that quote. And I wonder if some of them this (OMG!) that Obama will be voted out of office this November. Could someone please call Dick Armey and clarify this matter? Then there's the guy with the "Go Green, Recycle Congress" shirt. Doesn't he realize that's pretty much what we have been doing for the last 30 years (Democrats included, I'm an equal opportunity proponent of a reasonable stay in office.) Of course, it's K street that has been in charge of the recycling. Love the call to arms. I'm locking my door, wake me when it's over.
COMMENT #4 [Permalink]
... Soul Rebel said on 9/12/2010 @ 9:37 pm PT...
However, I do want to give credit where credit is due. The woman holding the sign in the last TPM picture: She used an apostrophe correctly. That's a rare feat for this group. Good on ya, mate!
COMMENT #5 [Permalink]
... Gray said on 9/13/2010 @ 3:19 am PT...
Sry, a bit OT - A US watchdog agency sees problems with the lists of registered voters, the vetting of candidates, biased election officials, but also improvements regarding ballot tracking and polling stations:
http://www.guardian.co.u...hanistan-election-report In AFGHANISTAN! Uh, excuse me pls, but don't you think, too, that this is a bit hypocritical? I mean, from the news about elections in the last years, it seems to me, that the US suffers from the very same problems, too! Despite 200 years more experience with democracy. What's the point in applying standards to another nation that you won't even meet yourself? Won't this unavoidably only result in disappointment and loss of motivation?
COMMENT #6 [Permalink]
... Gray said on 9/13/2010 @ 3:30 am PT...
Uh, English isn't my native language, but isn't it spelled "restAUration"? And "by ballot or bullet" seems to be a strange name for a restaurant. Or is it a tea room, maybe? However, all the best for the grand opening!
COMMENT #7 [Permalink]
... bubba said on 9/13/2010 @ 9:21 am PT...
Where is any violence taking place? People are assembling peacefully and protesting a thuggish government which uses racialism, bigotry, coercion and many other dirty tricks against them and you worry about a couple of signs of warning. Our government is enacting policies that are more fitting of the old Soviet Union or East Germany and using the tactics of governments like Cuba or Venezuela to stifle dissent. Our people have a history of protesting idiotic policies and Obama is not going to be immune from this. The political violence of the past has been from the left so if I was on your side I would be looking in the mirror more closely. Many on the left think we should submit to our governmental overlords because they know best. We the people have only loaned power to our elected officials and only for as long as they perform their duties as we determine they should. It is obvious that the current administration and congress have not listened to us for too long. We have never given up our freedoms and rights enumerated in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States and we are now prepared to use those rights and power to remove from office most of the offending politicians during the next election.
COMMENT #8 [Permalink]
... Brad Friedman said on 9/13/2010 @ 10:54 am PT...
Bubba @ 7 said: Our government is enacting policies that are more fitting of the old Soviet Union or East Germany and using the tactics of governments like Cuba or Venezuela to stifle dissent. What policies? And what tactics? Please be specific. Thanks in advance. (I'll put your comments about "political violence of the past has been from the left" aside, since they are so ridiculous and as JFK, RFK, MLK, the Muslims whose mosque in TN was burned down a few ago, the Muslim cab driver in NYC and members of the Tides Foundation, and thousands of victims of the KKK, just to name a very few, may feel differently than you do.)
COMMENT #9 [Permalink]
... bubba said on 9/13/2010 @ 12:32 pm PT...
If you look back over the last one hundred and fifty years you will notice a trend in political violence and it hasn’t been a flattering one for your side. I find the KKK repugnant and they did many evil deeds in their time but it was started and supported mainly by racists in the democrat party, they also haven’t been a force in politics for longer than your and my lifetime added together. Segregation and Jim Crow laws were not written by republicans, they weren’t in power then, and they were enforced by democrats. JFK was assassinated by a communist sympathizer who was mad at the president for the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. This same wacko tried to immigrate to the Soviet Union. Sirhan Sirhan (who killed RFK) was a pro-Palestinian lefty. I’m not going to go on with more of your examples, you certainly should know all this, but where is the violence that you say the Tea Party people are fomenting? Are there still jerks in the US? The answer is positively yes. I remember the sixties as if it was yesterday and many of these same people are now in power; it is they who find today’s protesters distasteful. Are you telling me you don’t remember all the things that occurred during the sixties? The protest marches, the bombings, the murders of policemen, the arsons, the riots, the bank robberies, the Black Panthers, the acronym groups like the SDS, SLA, RFA, and juvenile wannabe terrorists like Bill Ayers et al. I also remember all the hate spewed from the lefties since 2001 during a republican presidency. Are the Tea Party people frightening to you because they are boisterous and fired up against the democrat’s policies? You really do need to man up, cupcake, if the tone of voice or a stupid sign at a protest bothers you. This is how our system works, people either support policies or they protest them. Governing without the consent of the people is the antithesis of our republic and to continue with policies loathed by a majority of the population is in keeping with a tyrannical government. You may support these same despised policies but come November you will see an overwhelming majority of the population rejecting the congress’ and the president’s policies in one of the ways we have available to correct them. The government must take note of the wishes of the governed and change direction, if they don’t the governed will use more and other means to effect change.
COMMENT #10 [Permalink]
... Soul Rebel said on 9/13/2010 @ 1:52 pm PT...
Hmm. By the ballot seems reasonable. Vote the bums out. Constitutional, even (unverifiable elections notwithstanding.) But...by the bullet? As I have said previously, I'm-a lockin' mah door,let me know when the looney express has left the station.
COMMENT #11 [Permalink]
... Ernest A. Canning said on 9/13/2010 @ 2:02 pm PT...
I hate to burst your bubble, Bubba @9 but 21st Century Republicans have no ideological connection to the first Republican President Abraham Lincoln, who said: Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much higher consideration. There is likewise little relationship between today's Democratic Party and the Jim Crow "Dixiecrats" of the 19th and 20th Centuries. In fact, in 1948, Strom Thurmond ran for President as a Dixiecrat. Both Thurmond and the Republican candidate lost to Harry S. Truman. After JFK and then LBJ committed what Thurmond deemed a betrayal by passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, Thurmond became a Republican --- the party of Reagan (as opposed to Lincoln) having actively courted disaffected, Southern white bigots.
COMMENT #12 [Permalink]
... Ernest A. Canning said on 9/13/2010 @ 2:13 pm PT...
Bubba @9 wrote: JFK was assassinated by a communist sympathizer who was mad at the president for the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Doubtful! If you read serious studies of the JFK assassination, such as Plausible Denial by Mark Lane, you would retract your statement that "JFK was assassinated by a communist sympathizer..." Lane not only made a convincing case that the CIA killed JFK in a book but in a federal court, where a jury found as much. That case included the sworn testimony of Marita Lorenz, Fidel Castro's former girlfriend who was recruited into the CIA by Frank Sturgis. Lorenz testified she, along with Sturgis, Jack Patrick Hemming, Orlando Bosch and Alexander Rorke, Jr. traveled by way of a two-car caravan from Miami to Dallas in November 1963. One of the two cars was loaded with weapons, M-16s, M-1’s, handguns, shotguns and machine guns. Shortly after Lorenz and Sturgis arrived at a Dallas motel on November 21, 1963, E. Howard Hunt, who during the course of his involvement in the Bay of Pigs fiasco was also known as “Eduardo,” showed up and handed an envelope filled with cash to Sturgis. Hunt remained for about forty-five minutes. Within an hour of Hunt’s departure another individual arrived at their motel room, Jack Ruby! Lorenz, who had not been provided with the identity of the target of their operation, only knew that the operation was “big” and that she was to act as a decoy. Having second thoughts, she persuaded Sturgis to take her to the airport. She flew back to Miami. Hunt’s lawyer, Edward Dunne, concerned with the impact this testimony would have upon his client’s contention that he was not in Dallas on November 22, 1963, did not know when to leave well enough alone. He asked Lorenz whether she later spoke with Sturgis about the assassination. Sturgis had, telling her that she missed "the really big one." "We killed the president that day. You could have been a part of it—you know, part of history. You should have stayed. It was safe. Everything was covered in advance. No arrests, no real newspaper investigation. It was all covered, very professional." This account was later substantiated by Hunt in a deathbed confession. Lane argues the Bay of Pigs played a role, but for the opposite reasons you've suggested; that JFK fired CIA Director Allen Dulles in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion and that the Kennedy brothers intended to disband the CIA after the 1964 election. Lane and others also link George H.W. Bush to the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans and the Bay of Pigs invasion. Allen Dulles was appointed by LBJ to serve on the Warren Commission.
COMMENT #13 [Permalink]
... Ernest A. Canning said on 9/13/2010 @ 2:23 pm PT...
Finally, Bubba, whether you engage in a serious study of the 20th Century Democratic Party or today's Democratic Party, I think it important that you focus on the major factions within that party. In the 20th Century there was a major gap between progressive Dems who made up most of FDR's administration, and the reactionary Southern Democrats. Today, the principle distinction is between corporate Democrats (who are not all that different economically from Republicans in their willingness to sell out to the billionaire class) and progressive Democrats, who, like Greens, Democratic Socialists, etc., truly represent the interest of the vast majority of the electorate who make up the working class. I suspect that you, Bubba, fall within that working class. You would do well to move past the billionaire-funded lies which would have you believing that your subjugation to capitalist inequality is the essence of "liberty" and "freedom" to a realization that the billionaires who are funding the "Tea Party" movement are not really looking out for your interests.
COMMENT #14 [Permalink]
... Brad Friedman said on 9/13/2010 @ 2:35 pm PT...
Bubba said @ 9: If you look back over the last one hundred and fifty years you will notice a trend in political violence and it hasn’t been a flattering one for your side. First off, "cupcake", I don't know which "side" you are talking about. My "side" is the side of democracy and non-violence. My "side" includes Republicans, Democrats, Greens, Libertarians, independents and anybody who participates in their democracy. My "side" America's "side", at least when America and her government is living up to the guarantees in our Constitution. So yes, when you Republicans get screwed by voting machines this November, I will be on your "side" to make sure every legal voter who wishes to vote gets to vote, and that ever damn vote is counted and counted accurately and transparently to the best of our ability. "I find the KKK repugnant and they did many evil deeds in their time but it was started and supported mainly by racists in the democrat party" The party you refer to is the Democratic Party. I'd hope you'd have enough respect for all participants in our democratic (small "d") process that you'd accurately represent them. Thanks in advance. Beyond that, I believe you're confusing the Democratic Party with the Left throughout your response. If you believe that the KKK was on the the Left throughout their years of violence, you're more clueless than your general kneejerk response would indicate. That you've also failed to recognize the decades of (continuing) violence by the Right against pro-choice women and doctors and the murders committed against them, as encouraged by folks on the Right across the public airwaves is appalling as well. The rest of your attempts at revisionist history, however, are beside the point. You failed to answer the very direct questions I posed to you: Bubba @ 7 said: Our government is enacting policies that are more fitting of the old Soviet Union or East Germany and using the tactics of governments like Cuba or Venezuela to stifle dissent. What policies? And what tactics? Please be specific. Thanks in advance. Care to take another shot? Are the Tea Party people frightening to you because they are boisterous and fired up against the democrat’s policies? You really do need to man up, cupcake, if the tone of voice or a stupid sign at a protest bothers you. The Tea Party peple don't "frighten" me at all, sweetheart. Their cluelessness, much as yours, saddens me, though I rather enjoy expose them for who they are in hopes that they can be held accountable, and so that some of them --- you even --- might actually be educated where you have been so horrifically and cynically disinformed to fight against your very own best interest by liars and scam artists who have played you for chumps. This is how our system works, people either support policies or they protest them. Great. I've asked you "what policies" and you didn't bother to answer. Wanna try again, dear? Governing without the consent of the people is the antithesis of our republic and to continue with policies loathed by a majority of the population is in keeping with a tyrannical government. You seem to have a misunderstanding of how our Constitution and representative democracy works, as well as what the phrase "governing without the consent of the people" means. Are you suggesting that those in elected office were not put there by legal means? You do understand that liking your representativies in Government and "governing without the consent of the people" are two entirely different concepts? Or am I misoverestimating you, sexy? After all, you do realize how unpopular many of the Bush/GOP policies were for the last 8 years or so, but they were carried out anyway, right? Or is the case that they "govern without the consent of the people" only when your party is out of power and the folks opposed to those policies are largely in the party you don't belong to? You may support these same despised policies but come November you will see an overwhelming majority of the population rejecting the congress’ and the president’s policies in one of the ways we have available to correct them. Fabulous. That is your right. And I will be right there fighting to help you do so. Whether I "support these same despised policies" is besides the point. If you bothered to read this blog --- ever --- you'd likely learn that in the majority of cases, I do not. That said, it's a pity that you and the Tea Baggers are so incredibly disinformed and uneducated about what those policies actually are. When you answer you my original question, perhaps we'll know what you're talking about (and learn how clueless you are in the bargain, but that's just a guess based on the rest of your ill-informed ramblings here to date.) The government must take note of the wishes of the governed and change direction, if they don’t the governed will use more and other means to effect change. Wow. What kind of "other means"? Bullets instead of ballots? And your suggesting it is "the left" and "Democratic Party" who uses violence to get their way when the Constitution isn't enough to appease sore losers like yourself?
COMMENT #15 [Permalink]
... Dennis said on 9/13/2010 @ 2:41 pm PT...
Americans need to wake up the fact that Beck is simply another opinion pushing charlatan who is a product of mormon cult theology and he mixes this with his personal make up as a dry alcoholic. And for the record, he is a Mormon and not a Christian. As someone with a graduate degree in religion, I can say with all qualifications that Mormonism fits all parameters of a cult and has none of the parameters of a religion. A cult is any group (regardless of its size) that interprets the doctrines of a religion in an unorthodox fashion. The problem here is the fact the most Christians do not understand the difference and they easily fall for the lies of Mormon missionaries when they come to one's door. On Beck's radio show and Fox Network program he consistent demonstrates all the unstable behaviors of a dry alcoholic which include grandiosity, judgmentalism, intolerance, impulsivity, ADD and indecisiveness. Alongside that reality, Glenn Beck does not possess a single ounce of journalistic integrity, has no college degree, has no qualifications and he is definitely not a true conservative. But then, what can anyone expect from someone who can't find anything filthier than their own personal reflection. Since people like Beck cannot survive on the basis of any personal merits, they survive by putting others down with lies and half truths in order to feel good about themselves. The truth about Beck is that he a dry mormon alcoholic who never got the counseling required for alcoholics. To further complicate things and confuse people, Beck flippantly throws around Christian terms like "God", "Jesus","Holy Spirit" as well as voices of other so called "Spirit Powers" on his radio talk show. Beck is a mormon in active standing with the mormon church and is not a Christian. Mormonism teaches many gods, that the god of the earth was once a man who attained godhood status, there is no trinity, the cross of Christ means nothing and that Jesus Christ and Satan were brothers. Because Beck does not possess a single ounce of journalistic integrity, he is the perfect abortion poster child for Fox Network. The people who love what Beck says are no different than the impressionable sheep who loved every speech made by Adolph Hitler in his early years when he brought Germany into an era of economic prosperity These same sheep also blindly followed Hitler into one of the darkest chapters of world history. Beck and the Fox Network both cater to the same lowest common denominator of demagoguery. Beck would not know the first thing about God as he is a mormon. Someone should ask him which of the many mormon gods he kept talking about during his argument with himself on Saturday on the square in DC. Like a typical dry alcoholic, Beck even lied on national television when he spoke about holding a document signed by George Washington. That event never took Place. Unfortunately, people who love being led around by the nose do not realize that Beck is talking about a different god than that of Christianity, Judaism or Islam and that he has been a product of mormonism cultism from the day he started doing a radio talk show as an opinion pusher. You don't have to have a degree in psychology to see that he exhibits all the signs of a dry alcoholic. The only reason this unstable impressionable idiot fell into mormonism was because the woman he wanted to have sex with would not do so unless they got first got married and from that point, they joined the mormon cult. Glenn Beck is as big a charlatan as Josephs Smith or that 5th grade graduate (Charles T Russell) who started the Jehovah's Witness cult. This is Glenn Beck in a very accurate and concise nutshell. Considering the fact that Becks personal views are extreme Marxist Libertarian, his form of patriotism is false and he is a person who has no real substance or depth. It will not surprise many of us when Beck’s next big thing is to come out of the closet and announce his homosexuality to the nation. Simply put…he is just another predatory neocon who is pushing the buttons of very ignorant & impressionable people who love being told what to think and believe. We live in a period of history where it has become socially acceptable to be stupid and follow extremist idiots like Glenn Beck, Adolph Hitler, Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh. Chicanery and lies are their middle names.
COMMENT #16 [Permalink]
... Soul Rebel said on 9/13/2010 @ 4:03 pm PT...
Dennis...point taken, but Ouch! that was hard to read. Punctuation much?
COMMENT #17 [Permalink]
... bubba said on 9/13/2010 @ 4:19 pm PT...
I appreciate your responses, you all seem passionate and at least you're all mostly entertaining. You can hear and see it coming. There isn't much time left and still you won't do anything to get out of the way. There were many times you could have done things differently, in the last two years, to prevent what is going to happen to you but you didn’t. You haven’t been gracious, I didn’t expect you to be, and you only listen to the partisan players on your own team. You live in a liberal Ghetto and you only look in the mirror for advice. We’ve seen what your ideas are and how unsuccessful they have been. Our congress and president lack wisdom and they are floundering. Wisdom comes from experience not just an education. Most of you here have been educated but you certainly haven’t been schooled. That is going to change on November 2nd.
COMMENT #18 [Permalink]
... gavbrown said on 9/13/2010 @ 4:50 pm PT...
We were there and posted pics. My big takeaway was that the movement is basically about sore-loserism. They can't stand it that conservatives lost the last two elections. http://unsoliciteddrivel...emember-in-november.html
COMMENT #19 [Permalink]
... Jeannie Dean said on 9/13/2010 @ 5:38 pm PT...
@ GAVBROWN: That write-up is hilarious. Thanks for the link.
COMMENT #20 [Permalink]
... gavbrown said on 9/13/2010 @ 6:12 pm PT...
@ JD: Glad you liked!
COMMENT #21 [Permalink]
... Shortbus said on 9/13/2010 @ 6:42 pm PT...
Bubba@17: Most of you here have been educated but you certainly haven’t been schooled. That is going to change on November 2nd. Bubba, You have been "Schooled" on 9/13/10
COMMENT #22 [Permalink]
... Soul Rebel said on 9/13/2010 @ 7:00 pm PT...
Bubba, actually you haven't seen much of what "our ideas", leastways not if you are talking about the frequent authors and commenters on this here blog. Most of our ideas concern how best to have a civic-minded and tolerant populace grounded in constitutional freedom, with fair and verifiable elections, unfettered by the fascist constraints of a legally purchased government (this applies regardless of political party.) I don't know where you got the idea that we have been pleased with Obama, given that he has only halfheartedly fulfilled a few of his campaign promises and has mostly continued on the corporate path of Reagan and Bush.
COMMENT #23 [Permalink]
... Ernest A. Canning said on 9/13/2010 @ 7:50 pm PT...
Soul Rebel, nice of you to mention Reagan, Bush, Bush, Obama, but don't leave Bill and Hillary Clinton off that "corporate path" of yours. After all it was Bill Clinton who rammed NAFTA through on the fast track. Recall that Hillary served on the Board of Directors at Wal*Mart, which did not have a single store outside the U.S. before 1991. Wal*Mart was one of the principle beneficiaries of trade agreements, starting with NAFTA. By 2003, with its 4,400 stores, Wal*Mart had become the world’s largest corporation and the world's largest beneficiary of sweatshop labor. By 2005, as Wal*Mart was opening its 39th Super Center in China, it had also become the largest retailer in both Mexico and Canada. With a combined personal worth in excess of $100 billion, the five members of the Walton family are amongst the world's ten richest people. This is what the policies of all five of the above-enumerated Presidents have wrought. Yet, uninformed 'Tea Baggers' like Bubba actually think that Obama and Clinton are socialists.
COMMENT #24 [Permalink]
... Brad Friedman said on 9/13/2010 @ 10:52 pm PT |
! managed to unseat Iggy Azalea's "Fancy" as the #1 song in the United States. While most songs of the summer have a honeymoon period before they face mass eye-rolling, "Rude" seems to have skipped right to divorce court. Slatescolded the entire country: "America, we need to talk about our taste in reggae music." But no criticism has been quite as cutting as Jia Tolentino's. In a screed titled "Why I Have to Be So Rude" on The Hairpin, she wrote:
Rude is a reggae song the way a gas station taquito is a formal expression of Mexican cuisine. It's a pop object with no content and only as much form as is necessary to deliver brief chemical gratification.
The song's plotline isn't doing it any favors: the singer begs his girlfriend's father for her hand in marriage without ever asking the bride herself. But Tolentino's biggest problem with "Rude" is its lack of irony. "The great thing about pop music is that it's not self-serious. It's conscious of itself as a performance, and it's fun," she says. "'Rude' violates all three of those tenets." Case in point: the band's lazy and clich-ridden music video plucked straight out of the late 90s. In a bad way.
Yet even Tolentino has to admit that "Rude" has a highly infectious melody. Magic!'s frontman,Nasri, has been a one-man, one-name hit factory, writing hugely successful songs for Pitbull, Justin Bieber, Shakira, and others. Tolentino sees that as part of the problem. She suggests that Nasri's ability to adapt to different pop stars' styles has left his own songwriting soul hollow. "If the thing that makes you famous isn't the thing you care about most deeply, there's nothing behind it."Foreign visits by heads of state are important for their symbolism and the signals they send. Hence, speeches are carefully worded and the sites to visit are chosen tactically, keeping the PR value of such symbolism and signalling in mind.
India’s prime minister kicked off his three-day US tour on Monday with a visit to the Arlington National Cemetery, a United States military cemetery in Arlington county, Virginia and laid a wreath at Tomb of the Unknowns. This was no ordinary decision.
The Tomb of the Unknowns is dedicated to, among other US military personnel, those part of the invasion of Vietnam whose remains are yet unidentified.
The government of India had staunchly opposed the US invasion of Vietnam, widely regarded as one of the most brutal and technologically superior imperialist campaigns against the Vietnamese forces of national liberation. The war (known in Vietnam as the Resistance War against America) saw the US being politically and morally isolated at home and abroad. By the end of the war, any reputation that the US might have had as a force of intervention on the side of good lay in tatters.
In fact, its later campaigns in Iraq were considered, within the US military-political establishment, as a sign of recovery from the Vietnam shock.
Former diplomat and astute external-affairs observer KC Singh pointed out the significance of Modi’s wreath-laying in a series of tweets.
#Arlington Is Modi wreath-laying a strategic inflexion point in Ind-#US relations? Nehru did in 1949 but during Cold War Indian PMs didn't. — K. C. Singh (@ambkcsingh) June 7, 2016
#Arlington IndiraGandhi's JFK grave wreath laying/1966 was a political/emotional act. Modi's at tomb of unknown soldier is a strategic one. — K. C. Singh (@ambkcsingh) June 7, 2016
Though Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had also visited the Arlington cemetery during her 1966 US visit, when the US invasion of Vietnam was underway, she had laid a wreath at former US President John F Kennedy’s memorial and crucially, not at the Tomb of the Unknowns.
In fact, prior to Modi, no prime minister of the Indian Union has ever acted publicly in a manner that pays respect – in any way, directly or indirectly – to US military personnel involved in the invasion of Vietnam.
A departure
This week in Virginia, Modi crossed a sacred line.
Among the other sharp criticisms it invited, the Vietnam War had also brought forth scores of charges of heinous war crimes against US military personnel.
Right from the My Lai massacre, the Vietnam War saw the US military and its allies allegedly carry out the mass murder of civilians, organised gang-rapes at a mass scale, aerial bombing of large, densely populated civilian population centres, burning and destruction of whole villages, mass torture, murder of prisoners of war, loot, forced labour and so on.
Thousands of US military combatants who allegedly perpetrated such crimes or were witness to it suffered post-traumatic stress disorder. Internal investigation by the Pentagon showed that there was a factual basis to at least 320 such “alleged” incidents of war crimes.
The war crimes perpetrated on non-white people typically becomes a statistic, but it is important to list the nature of some such events in which the US military was specifically involved. The present-day US Secretary of State, John Kerry, (akin to the Home Minister in sub-continental parlance) testified before the US senate in 1971 as follows:
The “country” in question was the US. Using its vastly superior aerial power, its military, during the multi-decade South-East Asian campaign, dropped more than three times the amount of explosives as during the Second World War. I mention the Second World War for a reason. Few foreign heads of state, if any, would publicly pay respect at any memorial that included the German war criminals of the Second World War. To this day, China protests every time Japan’s Prime Minister pays homage to a shrine for fallen Japanese soldiers during that War, because Japan’s military had committed a series of war crimes during its invasion of China.
Why it's a problem
Those engaging in war crimes are war criminals. Paying respects at a tomb that may potentially include many such individuals is an act that may be justified by the emergent US-India strategic alliance optics of the occasion, but not by any stretch of human ethics.
Later, in his address to a joint session of the US House of Representatives, Modi proudly declared: “Our relationship has overcome the hesitations of history.”
It is important to examine what those “hesitations” were about and what the stance of the Indian Union’s citizens was towards them.
There was huge opposition to the Vietnam War among the citizens of the Indian Union. Robert McNamara, the US secretary of defence under whom America’s invasion and involvement in Vietnam was deepened and escalated, wasn’t allowed to enter the city of Kolkata on November 20, 1968. He was blocked by a huge crowd of protesters surrounding the DumDum airport when McNamara came visiting as the President of the World Bank.
Slogans rang aloud in Bengal’s streets – tomar naam, amar naam, Vietnam, Vietnam (your name, my name, Vietnam, Vietnam). The anger went beyond Calcutta and its students and extended even to the fishermen of rural Murshidabad.
Elsewhere in the Indian Union too, there were many Vietnam-solidarity committees.
It is in the shadow of the Vietnam War and Cold War politics that the US strategy towards arming Pakistan was devised during the Bangladesh liberation struggle, resulting in another genocide. It is not accidental that no prime minister post the Vietnam War, including Atal Bihari Vajpayee, did what Modi has done. There was a domestic constituency to think of.
A different optics mattered – not the optics of big-table camaraderie of realpolitik without morals but that of how a brown republic’s prime minister would be perceived if seen showing respect to the perpetrators of war crimes on other coloured people resisting a largely white foreign invading army.
At some level, that this hesitation has been overcome is a sad commentary on the sacrifice of the moral compass at the altar of the hunger for global supremacy by a nation-state home to the largest number of hungry people in the world.
Poor reflection
Days before Modi's visit, Mohammad Ali died. At the peak of the Vietnam War, the boxing legend and activist showed the courage of refusing to be enlisted in the US Army, summarising the war as one in which “the white man sent the black man to kill the yellow man”.
While his stance has come to be adulated in the wake of his death, those in South Asia might do well to remember some facts.
Many of the regiments of the Indian Army, have historically done exactly this. Before Partition, brown men enlisted in the then British Indian Army gained valour and gallantry by suppressing rebellious anti-British brown people or assisting British imperial expeditions abroad – in other words, the white (British) man sent the brown (British Indian Army) man to kill brown (in the subcontinent and in West Asia), yellow (in China and elsewhere) and black (in Africa) men.
While the Pentagon at least engaged with the war crimes committed by its forces in Vietnam, the British Indian Army or its successor, the Indian Army, has not done so for its colonial-era crimes. One may argue that the present Indian Army was formed on August 15, 1947 (strangely, with all ranks being maintained and those swearing allegiance to British crown a day before suddenly becoming loyal to the government of India overnight) and is not accountable for actions done before that.
However, the fact that so many of its regiments and formations to this day proudly celebrate their pre-transfer-of-power Raising Day and boast of the number of Victoria Cross awardees and retain pre-1947 mottos and war cries underlines the structural continuity.
The lack of hesitation on the part of Modi while laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns is a sad commentary on the state of human values in the Indian Union.A Fair Trade notebook? - image by Damien Van Achter
The suicides at Foxconn have highlighted the issue of highly stressful working conditions in the global electronics industry. Foxconn has responded with psychologists, punch bags, swimming pools, and asking employees to promise not to kill themselves.
But these moves do nothing to change the actual working conditions. Suicide numbers are a big red herring because even if they go down, huge numbers of workers will still suffer from low wages, long hours, and many other tough and unhealthy working conditions.
A recent BBC documentary series, "Blood, Sweat and Luxuries" took six young British consumers and placed them exotic locations working in the same jobs as locals, and having to survive on the same wages.
It's an eye opening series because it showed the horrible work conditions that billions of people face daily, every week, for years, and decades. These were strong, healthy, young British adults, yet they would pass out from the back breaking work, suffer panic attacks, and many other maladies, after just a few hours on the job.
They carried huge amounts of dirt in Ghana's gold fields; they processed leather in stinking abattoirs in Ethiopia; they dug deep holes in coffee plantations; and they had to work in an electronics factory in the Philippines where workers prepared tiny components for disk drives, processing one component every 3 seconds.
If they even took a moment to glance up from their tasks, or be distracted, they would fall behind in their quota and have their wages docked. It was incredible how much work had to be done for so little money by so many people. And the reason they were paid so little is that the electronics factory had to accept tiny profit margins in order to win its contracts.
All the large tech companies such as Apple, Nokia, Dell, etc have agreements with their suppliers that they do not employ children, and that they will abide by certain standards to protect workers. But it's not clear how these are monitored, enforced, or how much in common they share across the electronics industry.
What is common across the electronics industry is a relentless focus on reducing manufacturing costs, and the largest manufacturing cost is labor; which is why employees are pushed to work faster, while maintaining high quality work, and at the lowest wages acceptable.
We reap the benefits in the form of cheap digital gadgets, gizmos, and computers. We have absolutely no idea about all the blood, sweat, and human suffering that went into creating our digital devices.
For the six young Brits that took part in that five week program, the experience was life changing. On their return they made big changes in their life styles, some changed their diets, and they all changed their buying habits. Some raised money and collected clothes and books for the families they met during their stay. And they found a new respect for Fair Trade goods.
One of them said that she used to dismiss Fair Trade coffee as some kind of marketing ploy, a trendy fashion. Now she doesn't, and is happy to pay extra because she knows it does make a difference in the lives of many people.
Would you buy a Fair Trade iPhone or Android smartphone? Would you buy a Fair Trade Dell or HP PC if there were such choices? And how much extra would you be willing to pay?
And more importantly, what would it take for you to be assured that the Fair Trade premium was making a difference in the lives of electronics workers?
It wasn't that long ago when PCs typically cost $5,000 and lots of people paid it willingly. These days you can pick up powerful notebooks for under $1000, and netbooks for under $400. And a $100 smartphone is more powerful than PCs from just a few years ago.
Surely, we should be able to afford to pay a Fair Trade premium on electronics without too much suffering on our part.
And hopefully, the global media attention on the Foxconn suicides will result in improved working conditions for millions of electronics workers, and Fair Trade electronics goods will become commonplace.The Trump administration recently imposed sanctions on trade concerning humanitarian aid and negotiations with debts on Venezuela to put pressure on its current government.
The U.S. stopped before sanctioning against imports of crude oil from Venezuela, a move that would also raise American gas prices and negatively impact domestic jobs.
A formerly prosperous country centered on oil exports, Venezuela has become a close trading partner with the U.S. and other foreign nations in the past few decades. With the election of president Nicolás Maduro in 2013, external tensions between the right-wing U.S. capitalists and the new left-wing political party and internal tensions between competing parties have increased rapidly.
In the past two months, tensions have heightened even more as the U.S. is speculated to react to a stockpile of Russian Man-portable air-defense missiles held by the Maduro regime.
The U.S. and Venezuela have always shared mixed relations with one another, which started to polarize more after the 1999 election of socialist president Hugo Chávez.
“The only reason there’s tension between Venezuela and the U.S. is because they blamed us for supporting a rebellion in 2002,” said Early College student David Moore.
The U.S. is still trying to influence the Venezuelan government by supporting right-wing opposition, believing that conflicts will weaken their government, allowing the U.S. to establish favorable political systems. Internal conflicts between competing parties in Venezuela are blocking the U.S. from achieving this predicted political goal.
“I feel like conflict in South America always creates negative tensions between them and the U.S.,” said student Abbey Road. “Also, it makes them seem like the ugly duckling left behind, almost to the level of North Korea. I wish it stopped, there are other important things that we need to worry about at home, like hurricane damage.”
Within Venezuela, there are two major competing socialist parties, one following the ideas of former president Hugo Chávez, the other supporting the new president Nicolás Maduro.
BBC News stated that the Chavistas, or supporters of Chávez, blame the opposition of being elitists and exploiting the poor to increase their own riches. The opposition argued that the Chavistas have eroded Venezuela’s democratic institutions and mismanaged the economy. The Chavistas also accuse the opposition of being supported by the United States, further reducing the relationship between the two countries.
Although the current president is from the same party as Chávez, Chavez’s supporters do not fully support him. Maduro lacks in the charisma that his predecessor possessed, which some believe allowed Chávez to draw foreign countries in for investment and have strong control over resources.
This internal conflict over political ideologies hit an international level when the Supreme Tribunal of Justice, the Judicial branch of the Venezuelan government, took over the National Assembly, the legislative branch of the government.
Because Maduro supporters compose the TSJ and the opposition make up the National Assembly, the tension between the two parties reached a new level, invoking riots and protests throughout Venezuela. Although the TSJ relinquished control over the National Assembly shortly after, Maduro still faces accusations of transforming his power to an authoritarian state.
George Guo, professor of comparative politics, said, “Maduro now plans to revise the constitution of Venezuela and abolish opposition in the parliament with newfound power.”
In response to this, the U.S. has threatened to send military troops to Venezuela, but are reluctant to do so.
“I think this is because the other countries near Venezuela agree with some of the ideas like socialism that Maduro has,” said Early College student Eric Zhang. “Trump won’t have many friends if he decides to go down there, it’s just not a good idea.”
The U.S. idealistically holds a free-market right-wing philosophy where business and the interests of the upper class are priorities.
“Though America aims to support the right-wing opposition in Venezuela, Maduro continues to flex his (military) muscle as a show of force against any intervention,” said Guo. “No significant efforts are being taken by the National Assembly to oppose Maduro because his support from the military allows the Venezuelan leader not only to control the government, but the media and national resources.”
The Guilford community at home has had differed opinions about the subject matter, though the one consistency is that the Venezuela crisis has become a test to world democracy.
“The conflict in Venezuela just proves how the world is far from peace, and how neighboring countries have a significant task of helping and aiding situations like that of Venezuela,” said student Trevor Hyatt.WASHINGTON-- Our Revolution on Thursday announced South Carolina State Representative Justin Bamberg will join the organization’s Board of Directors.
“Our board is excited to welcome Justin Bamberg. He has a great record as a movement builder in South Carolina and beyond,” said Our Revolution Board Chair, Larry Cohen. “Justin has a strong record on progressive issues, including economic and racial justice. His history of community organizing, party building, and a proven commitment to building Our Revolution South Carolina will strengthen our board and our engagement in communities across the country.”
Justin Bamberg is a personal injury trial lawyer and has been a Member of the South Carolina House of Representatives for District 90 since 2014. During the 2017 presidential primaries he was an outspoken surrogate for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign. Bamberg is most well-known for his role in representing the family of Walter Scott, an unarmed man who was shot in broad daylight in North Charleston, South Carolina.
“I’m proud to be joining Our Revolution Board of Directors,” Bamberg added. “As we saw from Tuesday’s elections, local elections and local groups have the power to change our country for the better. We are building an organization that will lead the charge to bring policies that ensure social, economic, and racial justice to every community. I look forward to working with the board, our local groups, and supporters to make this vision a reality."
Our Revolution’s Board of Directors are leaders in all aspects of the progressive movement including workers’ rights, LGBTQ liberation, climate change, immigration, social justice, and civil rights.
Our Revolution’s Board of Directors:
Nina Turner -Former Ohio State Senator and current Our Revolution President
Jim Hightower - Political Leader, National Radio Commentator & Writer
Jim Zogby - Arab American Human Rights Leader
Huck Gutman - Former Chief of Staff for Senator Bernie Sanders
Lucy Flores - Former Nevada Assemblymember
Shailene Woodley - Actress and Environmental Leader
Justin Bamberg-South Carolina State Representative
Larry Cohen, Chair - Labor Leader
Deborah Parker, Vice-Chair - Native American Leader
Catalina Velasquez, Vice-Chair - Immigration, Reproductive Justice and Trans-Queer Liberation Leader
Jane Kleeb, Treasurer - Environmental and Rural LeaderRadeon Profile Tool, or RadeonPro for short, is a free, user friendly utility designed to unleash the power of AMD™ Radeon™ video graphics cards. RadeonPro applies user defined profiles upon game start, just define once the desired 3D settings for each game and have all those settings applied every time you play, automatically!
Featuring basic 3D controls found on Catalyst Control Center plus exclusive controls like advanced V-Sync control and post-processing based anti-aliasing like SMAA, RadeonPro can help on fine tuning of your games making them look better and also feel better and smoother through the use of Dynamic V-sync Control (DVC) and Dynamic Frame rate Control (DFC). RadeonPro can also help Crossfire users to force multi-GPU utilization in games not supported by the driver, improving your games performance with a few clicks.
Other exclusive RadeonPro Features include support for OSD functions making possible to monitor your system with GPU information displayed right on your screen while you’re gaming. You can also take screenshots or record Movies of your games with the press of a key to register your gaming moments, benchmark your games, apply post processing effects like SMAA, FXAA, Ambient Occlusion and SweetFX with full support for 64-bit games. All in one free tool!
Sounds good? Download RadeonPro now and take your games to the next level!Spoiler warning: Do not read on unless you’ve seen “The Flash” episode “Legends of Today,” part one of The CW’s “Flash” and “Arrow” crossover event.
After the first hour of this year’s “Flash” and “Arrow” crossover, Barry (Grant Gustin) and Oliver (Stephen Amell) have faced Vandal Savage (Casper Crump), discovered Kendra Saunders’ (Ciara Renee) hidden past as Hawkgirl, and met her reincarnated soulmate, Carter Hall (Falk Hentschel).
And somehow, the episode still found time to see Patty (Shantel VanSanten) shoot Harrison Wells (Tom Cavanagh), prompting Caitlin (Danielle Panabaker) to use an experimental speed-enhancing drug on Jay Garrick (Teddy Sears) to save Wells’ life, and managed to leave us with the cliffhanger of Oliver seeming to realize that the young boy he spots with his ex-girlfriend Samantha (Anna Hopkins) at Jitters is around the right age to potentially be his son, despite her previously telling him that she miscarried their baby.
While that particular plot point is explored in the “Arrow” installment of the crossover, the executive producers of “The Flash,” “Arrow” and the upcoming midseason spinoff “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow” (along with stars Teddy Sears and Falk Hentschel) spoke to reporters about the events of “The Flash” installment.
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Animosity of two Earths
Jay may have grudgingly saved Wells’ life by taking the Velocity 6 serum, but that doesn’t mean he and the scientist are about to become BFFs.
“Jay is still very dubious of Wells, and the carnage he’s created on Earth-2; just him being behind the particle accelerator explosion,” Sears noted. “There is a growing understanding, respect. There is a nice — I don’t want to call it a shift, but these two will begin to work side-by-side, as members of Team STAR Labs, going forward and fighting metahumans. They’re not going to be buddies or great friends, but something does happen for the good after that.”
A new kind of speed
Sears also admitted that although Jay won’t be “jonesing for a fix” of the new speed-enhancing drug, “he’s aware of the potential Velocity 6 has on his life. But I also think he’s clear that, ‘I don’t want to go down that path.’ But I think like anyone who has seen the other side, there are haunting memories of what could be, and what could have been.” The inability to be useful is particularly challenging for Jay, Sears notes. “This guy who was able to do a lot of good when he had the Speed Force. He’s wrestling with his identity in a way, and his life without it.”
As for whether Barry will eventually take the serum, executive producer Andrew Kreisberg hinted, “If you’re a fan of the comics, you know that a big part of the comics is Velocity 9. And today you guys met Velocity 6. So it’s safe to say that there’ll be a few more iterations of that formula … How it plays out and how it works and who uses it and the effects that that have — that’s something that you’ll have to watch.”
Close encounters of the Earth-2 kind
Patty has already had a few brushes with Barry’s secret identity and the many secrets the STAR Labs team is keeping, but this week certainly put her in an untenable situation after she shot Earth-2 Wells. It seems like she’s long overdue for someone, either Barry or Joe (Jesse L. Martin) to clue her in, which Kreisberg says is an ongoing part of Barry’s storyline this year, especially given the secrets they kept from Iris (Candice Patton) last year.
“Can he actually have a relationship with somebody, and what does having a relationship with somebody mean?” Kreisberg mused. “You see it moving forward, especially with Barry’s interactions with Iris where Iris is telling him, ‘I’m telling you as your friend that the way you handled things last year were terrible, and you caused a lot of unnecessary hurt and you caused people to be in danger, and you have to do things differently if you really care about this girl.’ Then on the other hand, he has this new version of Wells ironically telling him, ‘if you really care about this person, you keep her as far away from all of this as possible, because if Zoom finds out, he’ll kill her.’ So Barry is really wrestling with those two things moving forward.”
Savage plans
While we know that Savage is fixated on Hawkman and Hawkgirl for reasons that will become clearer in the “Arrow” episode of the crossover, exec producer Marc Guggenheim admitted that there’s a lot about the character that they’re saving for “Legends of Tomorrow.”
“He has a very clear plan and trajectory. The thing about Vandal is that for him a lifetime is an eye blink. He thinks in thousand-year-old terms. He’s a very much a master of the long con,” he noted. “Yes, he does have his own personal agenda vis-a-vis the Hawks. But he’s got much bigger plans for the world, which you’ll have to watch ‘Legends’ to find out. “
Building a ‘Legend’
The crossover was always intended to set up “Legends of Tomorrow,” according to executive producer Greg Berlanti: “The studio and the network were asking us from the very beginning of the year, which characters from ‘Legends’ are going to be in the two-hour, and were encouraging us. We wanted to have some — a couple, but not all in it, so it also felt right that we would use the characters that we hadn’t introduced on the individual series yet, with the exception of Rip Hunter [Arthur Darvill], who we saved for the pilot of ‘Legends.’”
But that set-up also required a lot of logistical maneuvering from all three shows, since “Legends of Tomorrow” had already started filming before the crossover episodes were shot.
“We had known what we had already written into the introductions of ‘Legends,’ so there were several times — and there are characters that I want to wait until people start to watch ‘Legends’ [to talk about] — that you’ll see that there was stuff that we set up in ‘Legends’ and then went back and put into this that then will pay off again in ‘Legends.’ So they really speak to each other in that way,” Berlanti said.
That process was particularly challenging for the actors, especially Hentschel, Renee and Crump. “You had actors who were not only working on different things, but you had Falk and Ciara and Casper who had already been filming episodes of ‘Legends’ … They’d already established them on ‘Legends,’ and then had to go back and introduce them,” Kreisberg added.
Hentschel described the process as “an acting marathon,” before amending, “No, it was great fun. Being carted from one set to another, it was a whirlwind, but it was really amazing to see it come together. When [the producers] all told me about this at first, I was like, ‘how’s this going to happen?'” he laughed. “But it was a blast and I have to say that it was very admirable to see it come together and everybody pulling it together. It was very creative.”
Starcrossed lovers
While Carter had a somewhat aggressive introduction (pushing his supposed soulmate off a roof was certainly an ice-breaker), Hentschel noted that Carter and Kendra “come as a team,” adding, “in my mind they’re like a bickering old couple. And he’s gone through 4000 years of loving her and having her love him back … she doesn’t know about it yet, though, so there’s always this fun dynamic of him being like, ‘You’ll love me! It’ll be good! I’ve seen it.’ And I think underneath it, terrified, always, of losing her because imagine you’ve seen everyone that you know die. It’s pretty lonely and here’s that one person that is always constant. So I just think that couple dynamic between the two of them… I hope everybody will enjoy it as much as I did.”
Kreisberg said that as well as the fun side of Hawkman and Hawkgirl’s banter, there’s also a bittersweetness that will be explored through these episodes and into “Legends.”
“What’s interesting about Carter’s character is he remembers loving Kendra and he remembers all the adventures they had. Not just the bickering, but he remembers all the fun they had. And now he’s staring at this woman who’s looking at him like he’s crazy,” he noted. “There’s a sadness about the whole thing, because he knows how great it can be and how sad it is for him to look at her looking at him like he’s a stranger.”
Click here to find out what the producers had to say about part two of the crossover, which took place during this week’s “Arrow.”"If we don’t get that gear off of that animal, or the animal can’t shake it off on their own, it’s going to die," Viezbicke said.
This whale in Crescent City videotaped by Ben Lester with Oregon State University became entangled in a fishing line in late July.
Viezbicke says engaging with local fishermen and communities has led to more calls when a whale is in danger. Officials are currently working with crab fishermen to develop better practices that result in less lost fishing gear that could potentially ensnare whales and other sea creatures.
But advocacy groups like the Center for Biological Diversity says more needs to be done.
"We’ve worked with regulators and crabbers to address this problem over the past couple of years, and we’ve heard their statements of concern as the problem has gotten worse and worse," said staff attorney Kristen Monsell in an op-ed for the Sacramento Bee. "But words aren’t enough anymore. It’s time for action now, before the start of the next crab season in November."
The environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity plans to sue the California Department of Fish and Wildlife over the issue at the end of the month.
Catherine Kilduff, senior attorney at the Center, told KPCC that the state has made some progress. A law passed the Legislature last year aims to help fishermen retrieve lost crab lines and gear. And this year, a bill was introduced that would give more money to teams like Viezbicke's that go out and disentangle whales and other marine mammals.
But Kilduff says last year's law still hasn't been implemented. In the meantime, state recommendations on best fishing practices to prevent excess fishing lines that the Center has advocated for have not been followed.
A voluntary advisory attempting to reduce the number of crab traps in whale entanglement hotspots like the Monterey Bay also "didn't have an effect," Kilduff said.
"All of this meant that we needed to file a lawsuit in order to get regulations to protect endangered marine wildlife," she said.
Kilduff said since the time of notifying the state of their intentions to sue in late June, a long-time whale rescuer in Canada was killed as he attempted to free an entangled whale.For your brewing station Tap that (beer... with your pickaxe).
Sturdy metal pickaxe looks like the one in game
Snazzy conversation piece for your home bar
It seems like everyone who is anyone is doing home brewing lately. So we thought we'd set up a home brewing station. We've got our brewing stand, our cauldron, glass bottles, water bottles, nether wart, glowstone dust, redstone dust, fermented spider eye, magma cream, sugar, glistering melon... wait, what? We can't make beer from those ingredients? What the heck? We were really looking forward to Golden Carrot Beer granting us night vision. Dangit.
Your home brewing station is of course, making delicious beer and cider (and maybe a side of regeneration potion). Hang this trusty pickaxe on the wall and you'll always have the right tool for cracking open a brew and tasting your handiwork. This officially licensed Minecraft Pickaxe Bottle Opener is as hefty as it is handy!
Product SpecificationsHacker Daeken of Team reswitched announced last week that Pegaswitch, the exploit tool for the Nintendo Switch, now supports usermode code execution.
Specifically, the Pegaswitch github was updated last week to support usermode execution on 3.0.0: in other words, homebrew on Switch 3.0.0 is now possible for you, the reader.
Currently, everything the reswitched team has released is focused on firmware 3.0.0. People on firmwares below that one will need to update to 3.0.0, which for now is only possible by grabbing a copy of Pokken Tournament DX, and updating from the cartridge.
People on firmware 3.0.1 and above, of course, will have to wait until future exploits are discovered. That might take a while.
For those on firmwares below 3.0.0 though, the current question is whether it’s worth buying Pokken DX simply to update to 3.0.0: given how recent the Pegaswitch update is, there is literally no homebrew available for the Nintendo Switch yet. Allegedly, Daeken was able to compile and load Doom (the 1993 game) on the Switch, although running the binary did not render anything. (source). In parallel, Plutoo announced a few weeks ago that he has full kernel access on firmware 3.0.0, and is actively working on the Switch firmware. But there is no word if or when he would release the results of that work.
Which brings the question: how big will the momentum be on Switch 3.0.0 homebrew? And once someone is on 3.0.0, how big is the incentive not to update instead of getting some good Mario Odyssey?
This will vastly depend on which developers (and how many) try to get homebrew up and running on 3.0.0. The folks behind Retroarch have announced they will attempt to support Switch homebrew on 3.0.0, but with the implicit assumption that SDKs and homebrew tools are available. A release of the meta-emulator could definitely bring motivation for more people to onboard the scene.
Personally, as an owner of 1.0.0, I’m strongly wondering if I should get Pokken DX, a game I have no intention to play, just for the sake of upgrading to 3.0.0. Then again, people who wait until “something big” happens for 3.0.0 might have to face the typical “skyrocketing price” effect on Pokken DX, once the game becomes in high demand.
Thanks to Hector A. for the tip!President Obama is reported to be considering an important brake on the torrent of “dark money” already flooding the 2016 presidential campaign — an executive order requiring federal contractors to disclose their donations to political candidates. Mr. Obama should immediately sign such an order. In doing so he would expose some of the bigger players in today’s big money politics, while offering a healthy counterpoint to Republican efforts to squelch disclosure.
In votes earlier this month, the House Appropriations Committee’s Republican majority quietly inserted an amendment in a spending bill that would block the Securities and Exchange Commission from crafting a rule requiring public companies to open up to their stockholders and voters about their political spending.
Another amendment would stop the Internal Revenue Service from issuing an overdue rule reining in “social welfare” organizations that do not have to disclose donors under current I.R.S. rules and are increasingly misused as big-money conduits for partisan political activity. A third would protect government contractors from disclosing who they’re showering with money.
When it blessed unlimited corporate, union and special interest spending in its fatally misguided Citizens United decision five years ago, the Supreme Court expressed hope that public disclosure would deter corruption. Sunlight, said Justice Anthony Kennedy, would let citizens “see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.”SHILOH AND THE BRICK (Copyright held by Faith Hunter)
Part Five
The blood-servant knelt at Shiloh’s side, whispering tender words and comfort. My eyes swept across the others gathered in the doorway. The man appeared to be the oldest, and certainly the most in control. But approaching a frightened, young vamp was dangerous under any circumstances. Approaching a frightened young witch-vamp was downright suicidal.
My cell rang, blaring into the sudden silence of the room. Shiloh hissed at me and her witch energies tightened around her like a purple-green shroud. Normally, at a time like this, I’d ignore it, but it was Leo’s ring tone, set into my cell by my partner in Yellowrock Securities, Alex Younger, as a joke. Marilyn Manson was screaming, ‘If I Was Your Vampire’. Not funny.
I answered, “Now is not a good time.”
“You will place me |
're on top of our game and we're ready to go out and play our best, because that's what it's going to take to win a game like this."
When it was posed to coach Mike McCarthy on Monday that the Packers (8-3) would need to be sharp against Brady and Co., he replied: "So you're saying we're not sharp?"
Then how about extra sharp?
"OK, well extra sharp will be the focus," McCarthy said. "You gave me my theme for the week, I guess, there."
And then his tone turned more serious.
"New England is a great football team," McCarthy said. "Just the way they're hitting their stride right now, just watching the video this morning, very impressive. We'll stay in tune with that. We're not going to make a bunch of changes. We like the football team that we are, and we look forward to the competition."“We can see a very ancient flame dying out before our eyes,” Ms. Himukai said in a separate interview. “But traditions have to change with the times.”
Junichi Tonosaki, a historian in the prefectural museum in Aomori, where Mount Osore is located, said the number of itako had fallen from about 20 a decade ago. He said they began gathering at Mount Osore in the last century as their numbers began to dwindle, to make it easier for customers to find them. The volcano’s 1,200-year-old temple is believed by many here to be a gathering point for souls of the dead before Buddhist reincarnation.
Mr. Tonosaki and other historians say itako and other shamanistic mediums were common across Japan in medieval times, when this was often the only occupation available for the blind. But they were suppressed in the late 19th century, as Japan built a modern nation. In recent times, they have survived only on the geographic margins, in rural northern Japan and on the southern island of Okinawa.
Shojiro Kurokawa, 82, can remember as a child in the 1930s when residents of his and other nearby villages would trek to the temple to hold weeklong festivals of all-night dancing, singing and séances. In those days, he said, there were more than 100 itako.
“This is an era when children ignore their parents and forget about the dead,” said Mr. Kurokawa, who runs an inn near the temple that caters to visitors of the spiritual mediums.
Photo
Now, there are so few itako that visitors routinely wait in line for several hours to see one. Itako charge 3,000 yen, or about $30, for each spirit called in a roughly 10-minute ceremony.
One family of three came from Tokyo, a day’s drive away. Masako Toyama, 68, said she came to speak with her husband, who died suddenly last summer of cancer. She, her son and his wife said it was their first visit to Mount Osore. She said she knew of the itako from growing up in northern Japan.
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“They were a scary but also soothing presence,” Ms. Toyama said. “Japanese still need this sort of emotional support.”
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“I wanted to give the itako a try, to see if this is real,” said the son, Shinji Toyama, a 41-year-old salaryman at a medical testing firm.
When the Toyamas’ turn finally came after six and a half hours of waiting, they seemed almost taken aback by the itako’s modern appearance, in pink-tinted glasses and a flower-patterned shirt.
The itako, Setsu Aoyama, began by lifting a long strand of dark beads and began a short chant: “I call the spirit who died on July 11,” the date Ms. Toyama’s husband, Shigeto, died.
In the same rhythmic cadence, swaying her head with eyes shut, she assumed the voice of Shigeto. “I didn’t go to a doctor soon enough,” she intoned. “Men don’t listen to things like that.”
Ms. Himukai, the 40-year-old itako, says she enters a trance in which she feels the presence of the spirit and its mood, which she expresses in her own words. She said she decided to begin the three-year period of study to become a spiritual medium as a teenager, after an itako near her rural village cured her of an ailment that doctors could not fix.
She said she felt guilty about not going to Mount Osore. However, she said she may no longer be able to attend because of health problems, including a chronic stomach ailment. Instead, she said she wanted to write a book or make a movie about the itako.
“The end can also be the beginning of something new,” said Ms. Himukai, who wore a plain gray suit with pants and spoke in a whisper.
After the ceremony, the Toyamas had mixed reactions. The widow said her heart had been put at ease. But the younger generation was less convinced.
“I didn’t feel like it was really my father in front of me,” said Shinji, the son. But he said he wanted to come again next year, to try a different itako. “Maybe we just had beginner’s bad luck by choosing the wrong one.”Biographical Sketch of Venerable Master Hsuan Hua
The Venerable Master, a native of Shuangcheng County of Jilin Province, was born on the sixteenth day of the third lunar month in the year of Wu Wu at the beginning of the century. His family surname was Bai and his name was Yushu. He was also called Yuxi. His father, Bai Fuhai, was diligent and thrifty in managing the household.
His mother, whose maiden name was Hu, ate only vegetarian food and recited the Buddha's name every day throughout her life. When she was pregnant with the Master, she prayed to the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The night before his birth, in a dream she saw Amitabha Buddha emitting brilliant light. Following that the Master was born.
As a child, the Master followed his mother's example and ate only vegetarian food and recited the Buddha's name. The Master was quiet and untalkative by nature, but he had a righteous and heroic spirit. At the age of eleven, upon seeing a neighbor's infant who had died, he became aware of the great matter of birth and death and the brevity of life and resolved to leave the home-life. At the age of twelve, he heard of how Filial Son Wang of Shuangcheng County (later known as Great Master Chang Ren) had practiced filial piety and attained the Way, and he vowed to follow the Filial Son's example.
Repenting for being unfilial to his parents in the past, the Master decided to bow to his parents every morning and evening as a way of acknowledging his faults and repaying his parents' kindness. He gradually became renowned for his filial conduct, and people called him Filial Son Bai. At fifteen, he took refuge under the Venerable Master Chang Zhi. That same year he began to attend school and mastered the Four Books, the Five Classics, the texts of various Chinese schools of thought, and the fields of medicine, divination, astrology, and physiognomy.
During his student years, he also participated in the Moral Society and other charitable societies. He explained the Sixth Patriarch's Sutra, the Vajra Sutra, and other Sutras for those who were illiterate, and started a free school for those who were poor and needy. When he was nineteen, his mother passed away, and he requested Venerable Master Chang Zhi of Sanyuan (Three Conditions) Monastery to shave his head. He was given the Dharma name An Tse and style name To Lun.
Dressed in the left-home robes, he built a simple hut by his mother's grave and observed the practice of filial piety. During that period, he made eighteen great vows, bowed to the Avatamsaka (Flower Adornment) Sutra, performed worship and pure repentance, practiced Chan meditation, studied the teachings, ate only one meal a day, and did not lie down to sleep at night. As his skill grew ever more pure, he won the admiration and respect of the villagers.
His intensely sincere efforts to purify and cultivate himself moved the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas as well as the Dharma-protecting gods and dragons. The miraculous responses were too many to be counted. As news of these supernatural events spread far and wide, the Master came to be regarded as an extraordinary monk.
One day as he was sitting in meditation, he saw the Great Master, the Sixth Patriarch, come to his hut and tell him, "In the future you will go to the West, where you will meet limitless and boundless numbers of people. The living beings you teach and transform will be as countless as the sands of the Ganges River. That will mark the beginning of the Buddhadharma in the West." After the Sixth Patriarch finished speaking, he suddenly vanished.
When his observance of filial piety was completed, the Master went to Changbai Mountain and dwelled in seclusion in the Amitabha Cave, where he practiced austerities. Later he returned to Sanyuan Monastery, where he was chosen to be the head of the assembly. During the period that he lived in Manchuria, the Master contemplated people's potentials and bestowed appropriate teachings. He awakened those who were confused and saved many people's lives. Countless dragons, snakes, foxes, ghosts, and spirits requested to take refuge and receive the precepts from him, changing their evil and cultivating goodness.
In 1946, because he esteemed the Elder Master Hsu Yun as a great hero of Buddhism, the Master quickly packed his belongings and set out on his way to pay homage to him. During his arduous journey, he stayed at many of the renowned monasteries of mainland China. In 1947 he went to Potola Mountain to receive the complete ordination. In 1948 he reached Nanhua Monastery at Caoxi of Guangzhou, where he paid homage to Elder Master Hsu Yun and was assigned to be an instructor in the Nanhua Monastery Vinaya Academy.
Later he was appointed as Dean of Academic Affairs. The Elder Master Hsu Yun saw that the Master was an outstanding individual in Buddhism and transmitted the Dharma-lineage to him, giving him the Dharma name Hsuan Hua and making him the Ninth Patriarch of the Wei Yang Sect, the forty-fifth generation since the First Patriarch Mahakashyapa.
In 1949, the Master bid farewell to the Venerable Master Hsu Yun and went to Hong Kong to propagate the Dharma. He gave equal importance to the five schools Chan, Doctrine, Vinaya, Esoteric, and Pure Land thus putting an end to sectarianism.
The Master also renovated old temples, printed Sutras and constructed images. He established Western Bliss Gardens Monastery, Cixing Chan Monastery, and the Buddhist Lecture Hall. He lived in Hong Kong for more than ten years, and at the earnest request of living beings, he created extensive affinities in the Dharma.
He delivered a succession of lectures on the Earth Store Sutra, the Vajra Sutra, the Amitabha Sutra, the Shurangama Sutra, the Universal Door Chapter, and others. In addition, he held various Dharma assemblies such as the Great Compassion Repentance, the Medicine Master Repentance, recitation sessions, and meditation sessions. He also published the magazine Hsin Fa (Mind Dharma).
Every day he worked and travelled zealously for the sake of propagating the great Dharma, and as a result the Buddhadharma flourished in Hong Kong. During that time he also made several visits to Thailand, Burma, and other countries to investigate the southern (Theravada) tradition of Buddhism. He wished to establish communication between the Mahayana and Theravada traditions and unite the strength of Buddhism.
In 1959, the Master saw that conditions were ripe in the West, and he instructed his disciples to establish the Sino-American Buddhist Association (later renamed the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association) in the United States. He travelled to Australia in 1961 and propagated the Dharma there for one year. Since the conditions were not yet ripe there, he returned to Hong Kong in 1962.
That same year, at the invitation of Buddhists in America, the Master traveled alone to the United States. He raised the banner of proper Dharma at the Buddhist Lecture Hall in San Francisco. Because the Master started out living in a damp and windowless basement that resembled a grave, he called himself "The Monk in the Grave." At that time the Cuban missile crisis occurred between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the Master embarked on a total fast for thirty-five days to pray for an end to the hostilities and for world peace. By the end of his fast, the threat of war had dissolved.
In 1968, the Shurangama Study and Practice Summer Session was held, and over thirty students from the University of Washington in Seattle came to study the Buddhadharma. After the session was concluded, five young Americans requested permission to shave their heads and leave the home-life, marking the beginning of the Sangha in the history of American Buddhism.
Since that time, the Venerable Master devoted his utmost efforts to such tasks as propagating the Dharma, supervising the translation of the Buddhist Canon, and developing education. He accepted vast numbers of disciples, established monasteries, and set forth principles. He focused the earnest sincerity of all disciples on the work of glorifying the Proper Dharma of the Thus Come One to the ends of time and throughout empty space and the Dharma Realm.
In terms of propagating the Dharma, the Master lectured on the Sutras and expounded the Dharma virtually every single day for several decades, always giving simple explanations that made profound principles easy to understand. He also worked actively to train both his left-home and lay disciples to become skilled in propagating the Dharma. He led many delegations to propagate the Dharma at various universities and in many countries of the world, with the goal of guiding living beings to reform and to discover their innate wisdom.
As for the translation of the Buddhist Canon, to date over a hundred volumes of the Master's explanations of the scriptures have been translated into English. No one else has overseen the translation of so many Sutras into English. Translations into Spanish, Vietnamese, and other languages have also been produced. His plans were to translate the entire Buddhist Canon into the languages of every country, so that the Buddhadharma could spread throughout the world.
As for education, at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas he established such educational institutions as Instilling Goodness Elementary School, Developing Virtue Secondary School, Dharma Realm Buddhist University, and the Sangha and Laity Training Programs. Many of the affiliated monasteries also have weekend and weekday classes based on the eight fundamental human virtues of filiality, fraternal respect, loyalty, trustworthiness, propriety, righteousness, incorruptibility, and a sense of shame.
Taking the public-spirited, unselfish spirit of kindness, compassion, joy, and giving as their goal, boys and girls study separately and the volunteer teachers regard education as their personal responsibility. In this way, students develop into capable individuals of incorruptible integrity who will be able to save the world.
The Master taught his disciples that every day they should sit in meditation, recite the Buddha's name, bow in repentance, investigate the Sutras, rigorously uphold the precepts, eat only one meal a day, and only before noon, and always wear the precept sash. He instructed them to dwell in harmony and offer encouragement to each other. In this way he established a Sangha that genuinely practices the Buddhadharma in the West, in the hope of uplifting the orthodox teaching and causing the Proper Dharma to long abide.
The Venerable Master also opened up the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas as an international religious center promoting the unity of all world religions by giving everyone a chance to learn, communicate, cooperate, pursue the truth, and work for world peace.
Throughout his life the Venerable Master was totally selfless. He vowed to take the suffering and hardships of all living beings upon himself, and to dedicate all his own blessings and joy to the living beings of the Dharma Realm. He practiced what was difficult to practice and endured what was difficult to endure, persevering in his heroic and pure resolve. He was a candle that refused to be blown out by the gale, an irreducible lump of pure gold in the hot fire. The Venerable Master composed a verse expressing his principles:
F reezing to death, we do not scheme.
Starving to death, we do not beg.
Dying of poverty, we ask for nothing.
According with conditions, we do not change.
Not changing, we accord with conditions.
We adhere firmly to our three great principles.
We renounce our lives to do the Buddha's work.
We take the responsibility to mold our own destinies.
We rectify our lives as the Sangha's work.
Encountering specific matters, we understand the principles.
Understanding the principles, we apply them in specific matters.
We carry on the single pulse of the patriarchs' mind-transmission.
From the time he left the home-life, the Venerable Master firmly maintained the six great principles do not fight, do not be greedy, do not seek, do not be selfish, do not pursue personal advantage, and do not liebringing benefit to the multitudes. Teaching with wisdom and compassion, dedicating himself to serving others, and acting as a model for others, he influenced countless people to sincerely change their faults and head towards the pure and exalted Bodhi Way.
Living beings of the present have deep obstructions and scarce blessings indeed, for a Sage of the era has abruptly manifested passing into stillness. The living beings of the Saha world have suddenly lost their harbor of refuge. Yet the life of the Venerable Master is actually an enactment of the great Flower Adornment Sutra of the Dharma Realm.
Although he has manifested entry into Nirvana, he constantly turns the infinite wheel not leaving any traces, he came from empty space, and to empty space he returned. His disciples can only carefully follow their teacher's instructions, hold fast to their principles, honor the Buddha's regulations, and be ever more vigorous in advancing upon the path to Bodhi so that they can repay the Venerable Master's boundless and profound grace.
return to top"One of the urgent task before everything else is that, we are used to consider, at least in our European society, that power is in the hand of the government and is exerted by some particular institution such as local governments, the police, the Army. These institutions transmit the orders, apply them and punish people who don't obey. But, I think that the political power is also exerted by few other institutions which seem to have nothing in common with the political power, which seem to be independent but which actually aren't. We all know that university and the whole educational system that is supposed to distribute knowledge, we know that the educational system maintains the power in the hands of a certain social class and exclude the other social class from this power. Psychiatry for instance is also apparently meant to improve mankind and the knowledge of the psychiatrists. Psychiatry is also a way to implement a political power to a particular social group. Justice also. It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that political violence has always exercise itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them."
- Foucault, from the transcripts of a debate with Chomsky
The Ugly Celebration Of The Modernity
The popularity and the prestige that are held by the Nobel Prize has created an illusion that each year there are at most three deserving candidates for each category among the six categories of all human endeavours worthy of the honour as inflated stature as the Nobel Prize. It's really disturbing to hear someone describing the Field Medal as the Nobel Prize of the mathematics, or the Turing Award as the Nobel Prize of the computer science. The ego of the Nobel Prize has infiltrated the discourse that are not even considered by The Nobel Prize Awarding Institutions. The Nobel Laureates are the sage of the modern world. Many of such sages with their nobel power to hypnotise the masses have endorsed racism, gender discrimination and wars. William Shockley and James Watson both have used their reputation to promote racist ideas. Mother Teresa in her Nobel Lecture after receiving Nobel Peace Prize said - "but I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion". Among the Nobel Laureate warmongers we definitely cannot forget Henry Kissinger. Although there are many controversial individuals who have beed awarded the Nobel Prize, on each controversial decision of the Nobel Committee, the masses seem to focus on the merit of the recipient without questioning the merit of the prize itself. In the wake of the postmodern society, to walk on the line of Foucault, it is now essential that we criticise the Nobel Prize for all the political violences that has exercised itself obscurely through the Awarding Institutions under the disguise of being apolitical and impartial.
Merchant Of Death
One man's guilt is another man's honour.
It's not shocking that the establishment of the Nobel Prize is originated from the guilt that upset Alfred Nobel after reading his own obituary on a french newspaper with a belligerent heading -"Le marchand de la mort est mort," (The merchant of death is dead). The obituary, continued it's soul-crushing humiliation to the extent to describe Alfred Nobel as - "who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before."
As much as Alfred Nobel represented the epitome of the Imperial, Patriarchal violence, so does the Nobel Prize. Even though it seems that in his last days, guilt-ridden Alfred Nobel tried to reverse his reputation by his will of the Nobel Prize, but he only reaffirmed all the evil that he himself represented in his will. Rather displaying his excellent enterprising skills to pass on his business of political violence from an elite individual to few elite institutions under the impression of the enabler of the human brilliance. As patriarchal as it can get the Nobel Prize Awarding Institutions noticeably failed to acknowledge the achievement of the women for a whole century of human excellence. As imperial as it can get the Nobel Peace Prize Awarding Institution time after time have bestowed the Peace Prize upon the mass murderers. The Nobel Peace Prize failed to enable Obama to close down the GITMO as well successfully enabled him to murder women and children through drone attacks. The Nobel Peace Prize enabled Henry Kissinger to continue the Vietnam War!
All the Nobel Laureate scientists who have contributed to the 'Manhattan Project' certainly have found their hand in blood after Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing! The prestige of being a Nobel Laureate allowed Milton Friedman to win over public opinion on neoliberalism and globalisation in half an hour TV debates. Today the consequences are naked infront of our eyes, dismantling of the welfare state, rising income inequality, war and environmental damages. Winston Churchill with his nobel oratory skills and a Nobel Prize in literature could conveniently and effectively implement a man made famine in Bengal, starving millions of lives to slow and painful death.
There are certainly deserving candidates with fair contribution to the collective human progress honoured by the Nobel Committee. Martin Luther King Jr. definitely deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, but it could also be that the award made it inevitable that he must be assassinated for the sake of the status quo.
Jean-Paul Sartre
On October 22, 1964 in a statement made to the swedish press, Sartre elaborated on his refusal of Nobel Prize in Literature. Below is a quote from his statement.
"This attitude is based on my conception of the writer’s enterprise. A writer who adopts political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his own—that is, the written word. All the honors he may receive expose his readers to a pressure I do not consider desirable. If I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre it is not the same thing as if I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prizewinner. The writer who accepts an honor of this kind involves as well as himself the association or institution which has honored him. My sympathies for the Venezuelan revolutionists commit only myself, while if Jean-Paul Sartre the Nobel laureate champions the Venezuelan resistance, he also commits the entire Nobel Prize as an institution. The writer must therefore refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honorable circumstances, as in the present case. This attitude is of course entirely my own, and contains no criticism of those who have already been awarded the prize. I have a great deal of respect and admiration for several of the laureates whom I have the honor to know."
- Sartre in his Nobel refusal letter
When the institutions are the destroyer of peace, an institutional peace prize with utmost honor is either an irony of the modern world or the most cruel practical joke of the millennium. Howbeit, we cheer or boo each year on the decision of the Nobel Prize Awarding Institutions, like the inundated audience of a reality TV show. Fragile humanity! We tend to imitate as imitating is easier than being creative. The educational institutions are hell bent on killing individual creativity. Our knowledge was manufactured via an assembly line, categorised into industrial necessities, putting to use for the growth of the state's GDP. Nobel Prize is the most prestigious, popular celebration of the best product manufactured via an assembly line. Thus inspiring us to shutdown our creativity and stay focused to be the best of the categorised lot, with the thin hope that we could be the best product ourselves.Bill Gross, co-founder and co-chief investment officer of Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO), wears sunglasses as he arrives to speak at the Morningstar Investment Conference in Chicago Thomson Reuters NEW YORK (Reuters) - It was one of the most extraordinary meetings in the history of the bond market. Two of the biggest-ever names in fixed-income investing, Bill Gross and Jeffrey Gundlach, fierce rivals who had never previously talked, held a secret meeting over glasses of lemonade, water, and plates of crudites about whether to join forces.
In the week of Sept. 15, just before Gross shocked the investment world on Sept. 26 by storming out of Pimco, he approached Gundlach and dropped a bombshell. According to Gundlach, Gross said he was about to be fired by the firm he had helped launch more than four decades ago and had built into a $2 trillion investment powerhouse.
Gross disclosed he had been toying with quitting for some time after Pimco erupted in turmoil earlier this year when Gross' heir apparent, Mohamed El-Erian, left the firm, sparking a public falling out between the two long-time colleagues. And Gross also told Gundlach he had been in talks with another firm some six months ago. He did not say which firm it was, Gundlach said.
Reuters first reported the meeting between Gross and Gundlach, who runs DoubleLine Capital, the day of Gross' departure from Pimco for Janus Capital Group. Gundlach has now provided Reuters with a much fuller picture of how the meeting came to pass and what they discussed over three hours on the north loggia of Gundlach's Los Angeles home.
Gross declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this story or to confirm Gundlach's account of their meeting. Representatives for Pimco, a unit of German insurer Allianz SE, and Janus, which is a much smaller player in the asset management business, declined to comment. DoubleLine has been among the firms to benefit as investors have ditched Pimco following Gross's departure.
PRANKSTER FEAR
Jeffrey Gundlach, chief executive and chief investment officer of DoubleLine Capital, speaks at the Sohn Investment Conference in New York, May 5, 2014. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz Gundlach said that Gross called him out of the blue.
"Bill called through the DoubleLine switchboard," said Gundlach.
Skeptical that it was really Gross, Gundlach said he "told the receptionist to take a number and then call it to verify it was not some prankster. A couple of hours later I called Bill from home."
In that initial phone conversation, Gundlach said: "Bill came out and told me: 'Pimco doesn't want me anymore.' And I said, 'That is an unbelievably stupid decision.'"
"Then he told me, 'They are going to push the button and fire me.' To which I said, "This is really distressing."
"They" were the members of Pimco's executive committee, chaired by Pimco Chief Executive Doug Hodge.
Hodge and Pimco President Jay Jacobs, through a Pimco spokesman, declined to comment for this story.
Gross' position at Pimco had grown precarious in the months since El-Erian left. The firm's flagship fund, the Pimco Total Return Fund, run by Gross personally, was underperforming and bleeding assets through redemptions. Sources have told Reuters that Gross had clashed repeatedly with Hodge and the executive committee, threatening to quit on several occasions. He finally did quit for Janus, hours before the committee was planning to dismiss him.
Gundlach said he told Gross he sympathized with him as Gundlach himself had been fired in 2009 by TCW Group, at the time owned by French bank Societe Generale SA, in a dispute over management and control of the firm's fixed-income business.
Gross, who is 70, told Gundlach he didn't want to retire, according to Gundlach. He wanted to keep managing money, albeit less of it.
At the conclusion of their phone call, Gundlach, 54, invited Gross, who lives south of Los Angeles in Newport Beach near Pimco's headquarters, to Gundlach's home about an hour-and-a-half away.
"I did think there could be some kind of 'Dream Team' concept," Gundlach said.
Kobe Bryant (L) of the U.S. 2012 Olympic men's basketball team walks past his teammate LeBron James during their exhibition game against the Dominican Republic at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, Nevada July 12, 2012. REUTERS/Steve Marcus
'TOO MUCH MONEY'
Gross arrived in a chaffeur-driven car the next afternoon around 4 p.m. The two perched in Gundlach's open-air loggia with mountainside views of the Pacific Ocean and for three hours talked about their careers, Gross' travails at Pimco and the possibility of the two men - both at various times nicknamed "bond king" by the financial press - combining forces.
Gross came well-informed about Gundlach, saying that his wife, Sue Gross, had probed extensively into the younger man's history.
The results of her research were very complimentary of Gundlach's career achievements, Gundlach said.
Gundlach told his rival that Gross had set the bar too high through years of out-performance that had allowed Gross to build the Total Return Fund into the world's largest bond fund, which at its peak in April 2013 had nearly $293 billion in assets. The fund was now too large to manage, and unfairly even a few years of average performance was now considered a failure, Gundlach said.
"I said to Bill: 'You are running too much money.' Bill agreed, saying 'absolutely, smaller is better.'"
"It was clear that Bill had reconciled himself to the weaker performance being because of the fact that he was running too much money," Gundlach said. "There was no disagreement at all. This change he is making is a good thing for his ability to perform."
In fact, Gross had proposed to Pimco's executive committee that he manage considerably less money - roughly $40 billion to $50 billion - and that he no longer wanted to run the flagship fund, Gundlach said that Gross told him.
Instead, Hodge and Jacobs told Gross the executive committee had reached a different decision. Gross told Gundlach the committee said: "We want you to leave soon."
YouTube/PIMCO
'I HAVE FIVE RINGS, YOU HAVE TWO'
Word of the face-to-face meeting between Gundlach and Gross surprised the bond world. For two decades, the two had no relationship or interaction at all, even though their personas were intertwined, compared and contrasted often in the financial media and by other bond market players.
Morningstar named Gross "Fixed Income Manager of the Decade" in 2010, an award for which Gundlach was a finalist. Then in 2011, Barron's magazine anointed Gundlach as the new King of Bonds.
Gundlach, for his part, said he never considered that he and Gross had been "adversaries" though he admits the two clearly competed "to log better returns than each other."
In their meeting, Gross "mentioned the 'Bond King' thing and seemed surprised when I said I never encouraged the media on that one, which is true," Gundlach said.
Discussing their potential legacies, Gundlach said Gross spun an analogy to National Basketball Association star players Kobe Bryant and the younger LeBron James.
"I am Kobe. You are LeBron James," Gross told Gundlach. "I have five rings, you have two rings - probably going to five," a reference to the number of NBA championships the two players have each won.
The meeting ended with no decision made about a partnership, but they agreed to stay in touch. Gundlach has made it clear that he wants to remain fully in charge at DoubleLine.
Then, a week later, Gross called Gundlach on the night before his Janus announcement. He left a voicemail message saying he was leaving Pimco for another firm.
(Reporting By Jennifer Ablan; Editing by Dan Burns and Martin Howell)Three Amazing PHP/MySQL/Perl Developers Now Available [broken link removed] – Posting on Craigslist. The url will expire so I included everything but the contact info below (follow the link for contact info).
Yesterday I had to do one of the more difficult things — lay off three of my good friends, all of whom are talented and professional developers.
I’m posting here today in hopes that someone out in the world is looking for some seasoned talent, people who can get things done for you. I will personally recommend all three of these guys, and I’ll detail below each of them. If you are interested, I’m including my phone number. I’ll take your contact information and give it to the person(s) you are interested in, and you can take it from there.
Here goes.
Developer #1
I’ve worked with Developer #1 since 2005. He’s worked for Fortune 500 companies and small startups. His strengths are conceptualizing and implementing complex systems using PHP and MySQL. These systems are not limited to the web, however the web is where most of his work has been for the last few years. During his employment with me, he:
* Designed a complex billing system, complete with audit trails
* Developed a site-wide internationalization system, allowing us to easily translate any phrase on the system to a different language
* Designed and successfully implemented several difficult projects based on half-way decent specifications documents (my fault)
Related: People are Our Most Important Asset – Bad Management Results in Layoffs – Hiring the Right People – Severance Plans to Respect People – Curious Cat Management Improvement Jobs
Developer #1 is the guy you want to lead your development team. He will take a project and run with it, and it will come out better than you had hoped. He’ll find the fatal flaws in your specifications, either propose a change or work around them as appropriate, and do it in an extensible way that will save you time in the future. He really is the cream of the crop.
Most of his work has been PHP and MySQL, though he has done a lot with Perl. He is strongly drawn to big challenges and tough assignments, and attacks them with tenacity. Don’t ask him to build you a 5 page website. He’ll fall asleep. Hire him to build you a gigantic web application that supports tens of thousands of customers.
Developer #2
Don’t let his shy persona fool you. He’s a geek, the kind of geek you’d expect to see waiting in line for Star Wars tickets or an Xbox 360 at Target. And behind his quiet demeanor the guy can code. You would put him in a basement and slide pizza and mountain dew (or Tilt, depending on office policy) under the door, and he’d keep cranking out code you never thought was possible. Sure, you’ll want to give him specific details on what he’s building, what it should look like, how you want it to work. But once you do that and hand it off, you get something better than you expected. I’ve always been pleased with the functionality and quality of the work he has done for me.
Developer #2 is the guy you need if you already have a lead developer and he needs a code monkey who can get code out that works the first time. PHP and MySQL are his strengths, but I’ve been impressed with his JavaScript and AJAX/Web 2.0 abilities as well. Cross-browser code is tested and working without need to mention it. He’s a joy to have on your team.
Developer #3
It’s tough to describe him. He’s the guy you want running your development team, managing a bunch of coders. He’s the guy who will listen to what you need and write up the specs. He’s the guy that, if you don’t have a team of coders, will write you code that will read like poetry and run like the wind. He’s obsessed with performance, code reuse, contributing the the Open Source community, and always exploring different ways to improve his own coding abilities in different languages and methodologies. He’s got more O’Reilly books than you, and has read and comprehended them better than you. No offense.
He’s not one to blast out messy code that barely works. If you need a huge project done in a day, he’ll tell you if it can be done, or how it can be done with some changes, and |
memorial to Cruyff, opened inside the Camp Nou stadium, to pay tribute. Cruyff's greatness was even reCLOSE Pope Francis has revealed that he once worked as a bouncer at a nightclub in Buenos Aires, and it’s starting a big conversation on social media, calling Francis the coolest pope ever. (USA TODAY, USA NOW)
Pope Francis greets the crowd at St Peter's Square on Nov. 27. (Photo11: Vincenzo Pinto, AFP/Getty Images)
Pope Francis revealed that he once worked as a bouncer at a nightclub in Buenos Aires — and it's starting a big conversation on social media, calling Francis the coolest pope ever.
Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) tweeted a suggestion for an off-beat dramedy about the pope as a bouncer: "Heaven can wait, and So Can You."
Charles Blow (@CharlesMBlow) tweeted "The Pope comes out with something cooler every week… If he releases a mix tape it will be all over."
So just how cool is Pope Francis? A quick scan of headlines shows a lot about how he relates to the faithful: He drives himself in a used car instead of riding with a chauffeur in the papal limousine. Rumors are swirling that he sneaks out of the Vatican at night dressed as a priest to give alms to the homeless.
In his effortlessly cool way, he recently chastised priests about giving more upbeat homilies to keep people from falling asleep in church. He added that "confession shouldn't be torture," and urged priests to get their shoes muddy, and get involved in the lives of their flock — and not to be, quote, "sourpusses."
Since succeeding Benedict XVI in March, he has really taken to Twitter. His nine @pontifex Twitter handles tripled the number of followers.
What do you think of Pope Francis? Tweet using #USANOW; I'll retweet from @shannonraegreen.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1bdmLXsCLOSE We took our drone out to look at fall colors in Seneca Park. Tina MacIntyre-Yee/Max Schulte
A view of the Au Sable River Valley painted in fall colors in October 2004 from the Highbanks Trail. (Photo: Photo by MichiganTrailMaps.com)
A glimpse of this year's fall colors from orbit showed a wave of changing leaves spanning from the Upper Peninsula across New York in an image NASA posted Friday on Instagram.
The satellite image, captured Oct. 20, shows the forests' fall foliage at or just past its peak in those areas, with areas of dull-yellow to red and orange, with some bands of darker green.
The Instagram post by Monday morning was approaching 360,000 likes. A higher-resolution image is available for download on NASA's Earth Observatory website.
Read more:
Here are some 2017 Michigan fall-colors shots captured at a lower altitude
In autumn a vibrant shade of tangerine colors @CrystalMountain. Have you visited this all-season resort in fall? #PureMichigan#NikonFallMIpic.twitter.com/Dt9VPbQpdQ — Pure Michigan (@PureMichigan) October 24, 2017
Turquoise waters and ruby red trees, we're loving this color combination at Sleeping Bear Dunes! 📸: @TraverseCity#PureMichigan#NikonFallMIpic.twitter.com/JRMhPvVDgm — Pure Michigan (@PureMichigan) October 27, 2017
MDOT Pic of the Day: The fall colors looks great from up here, too. #PureMichiganpic.twitter.com/GLtfjmBUeU — Michigan DOT (@MichiganDOT) October 23, 2017
MDOT Pic of the Day: More fall colors! US-131 at Indian Lakes Road in Kent County yesterday. pic.twitter.com/hTueJ6oI4H — Michigan DOT (@MichiganDOT) October 26, 2017
Enjoy Michigan’s bounty of beautiful fall colors with a color tour! See our blog for scenic routes you can take: https://t.co/NupV3JQTpVpic.twitter.com/r1xIlrokxZ — Graff Mt. Pleasant (@GraffMtPleasant) October 21, 2017
Contact Robert Allen on Twitter @rallenMI or rallen@freepress.com.
Read or Share this story: http://on.freep.com/2hpcssRThere’s been a baby explosion at Zoo Boise. Eight different species given birth in the last eight months, leading to one of the most prolific procreation years ever at the zoo.
It all started in March when this Serval kitten made her debut. She was born March 27, 2013. Servals have tan fur with black spots. They have long legs and very big, expressive ears. They eat rodents, small reptiles, and birds. They're native to Africa. Two other Serval kittens, Scout and Mzuri, were born in September 2012.
This baby North American porcupine was born April 8 to parents Zeus and Athena. This little boy is called a “porcupette.” The baby weighed 468 grams when it was born. Porcupettes are born with soft quills, to give mom a break during the birthing process. Those quills harden just 30 minutes after birth. Athena is a first time mom and took good care of her little porcupette.
This Black-crested mangabey monkey was born June 12 to parents Murphy and Betty. He’s the first mangabey monkey born at the zoo. Betty came from the San Antonio Zoo where she previously had one baby. She carries the baby upside down when she moves around. When the baby strays too far away, Betty latches on to his tail and pulls him back to her. Their name comes from the black hairs that form a crest on top of their heads.
Two snow leopard cubs, one male and one female, were born on May 23 to parents Kabita and Tashi. These are the first snow leopards to be born at the zoo. Kabita and Tashi were paired as part of the Species Survival Plan (SSP). The conservation program of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums helps breed endangered or threatened species. Kabita is a first-time mom and she’s been doing a great job. She likes to play with her babies, tumbling and pouncing on each other. The babies are on display now at Zoo Boise, but once they get a bit older, they’ll be transferred to other zoos who need snow leopards.
This red panda cub was born June 15 to first-time parents Dolly and Winston. It’s the third red panda born at Zoo Boise. The parents were matched as part of the Species Survival Program, which works to breed endangered or threatened animals at zoos around the country.
A Blue-poison dart frog emerged from the water in its tank earlier this year. The frog-watchers at the zoo say there have been blue-poison dart tadpoles before, but this is only the second baby to emerge on land and sprout legs. He’s about half the size of his parents. He was a little camera shy when we came by, so this is what he'll look like in a few months.
Six striped skunk babies were born on April 30, four girls and two boys. They have been de-scented, to keep the skunk smell down (although the pungent fragrance was lingering in their room). These babies were quickly snapped up by other zoos seeking skunks. This was the only baby skunk still at Zoo Boise, and he did not want to hold still for his picture!
Two Ruwenzori long-haired fruit bats were born in April. They are almost full-grown and are already about the same size as their parents. The bats spend their days at the zoo under a special blue light. It’s designed to mimic nighttime, so the bats think it is night and are more active so zoo-goers can watch them. During the night, the bats have a different light, so they think it’s daytime, and they go to sleep. Here's what they'll look like when they grow up.
Zoo Boise Executive Director Steve Burns says the animals played their part. But the zoo staff also gets some credit. Last winter, they drew up a list of 33 species to breed, then they went to work. Burns said they had to learn “how to introduce animals that hadn’t been together in a while." He adds they also had to work with animals who'd been together for years. "Sometimes instead of looking at each other like Romeo and Juliet, they start looking at each other like brother and sister,” said Burns.
Burns said breeding is crucial to keeping zoo populations healthy, and to help keep wild populations diverse. That will become more important, he says, as some animal populations in the wild decline.
The baby explosion isn’t over at Zoo Boise. There’s a baby-watch for the binturongs, also known as bearcats. And the anteaters may produce offspring before the year is out.
Copyright 2013 Boise State Public RadioBIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Democrats are looking to revive a little Todd Akin magic in 2018.
With Republican Senate primaries from West Virginia to Montana promising to pit Trump-inspired insurgents against more mainstream candidates, Democrats are considering ways to step in and wreak some havoc. The idea: Elevate the GOP’s most extreme option in each race, easing Democrats’ path to victory in a range of states tilted against them.
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At its most aggressive, the tactic could be a sequel to Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill’s 2012 campaign against then-GOP Rep. Akin in Missouri. She actively intervened in the Republican primary with ads designed to boost the conservative Akin to the front of the pack. Once he became the nominee, a series of gaffes — led by his “legitimate rape” comment — and hard-line positions unraveled his campaign.
Possibilities abound to revive the strategy next year, Democrats say. They’re exploring states, including Arizona, where Kelli Ward, a challenger to Sen. Jeff Flake, said Sen. John McCain should vacate his seat “as quickly as possible” after his brain cancer diagnosis. They’re looking at Nevada, where frequent candidate Danny Tarkanian — who once mused about “pretend[ing] we’re black,” referring to his African-American opponent — is running against Sen. Dean Heller.
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And they’re eyeing Ohio, where Josh Mandel — the state treasurer and two-time challenger to Sen. Sherrod Brown — this summer called the Anti-Defamation League “a partisan witch-hunt group,” while affirming his support for alt-right bloggers and conspiracy theorists Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec.
Though they did not intervene in Alabama's recent GOP Senate primary, national Democrats are now monitoring the Republican nominee in the state's general election. Twice-ousted former state Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore has called Native Americans and Asian Americans “reds and yellows,” while repeatedly claiming parts of the United States are under Shariah law. Those are just a few of his many controversial statements and actions.
Despite the heavy conservative tilt of Alabama, Democrats are looking to the state for, at least, hints for how to further divide Republicans next year — or, at best, a shocking upset.
“What happened [with Akin] has been multiplied [in Alabama], by both the character of this candidate and the positions he’s taken, but also by the fractures in the Republican Party — which are being fought much more publicly — and the extraordinary unpopularity of Mitch McConnell,” said Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, referring to the Senate majority leader who became a central punching bag in Moore’s primary bid.
At the Democrats' Senate campaign headquarters in Washington and their local offices in the states, operatives have started compiling files of the GOP hopefuls' more outrageous statements and positions, while combing through the daily news clips for hints of further themes to pursue against them. Many of the primary contests are still shaping up, so for now, the preparation is preliminary. There's also the challenge for Democrats of figuring out whether traditional controversies still spark outrage in the age of Donald Trump.
There are other long-shot states besides Alabama on the Democrats' target list. Among them are Mississippi and Tennessee, where former Trump chief strategist and Breitbart executive Steve Bannon is threatening to run insurgent candidates against the GOP establishment’s picks.
They're also considering how to be effective in races in which incumbent Democrats are already facing a phalanx of Republicans. They include Indiana, Montana, Ohio and Wisconsin, as well as West Virginia, where Attorney General Patrick Morrisey projected his move toward Trump-style anti-establishment politics by going so far as to distribute a news release when Bannon praised him late last month.
While it's not unusual for a party to monitor opposition primaries, rarely do so many prominent contests pop up simultaneously, and rarely do parties or candidates consider meddling across the aisle. It can be a risky endeavor: Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign team was eager to run against Trump, believing him to be a historically weak candidate, so it tried elevating his status during the presidential primary by speaking out against him vocally and frequently for months during his messy primary.
But in 2012, McCaskill’s team provided a blueprint by committing early to a strategy to promote Akin, who ended up being an easy general election opponent. Identifying a clear path to primary victory for him, the senator’s campaign staff polled the Republican primary and paid for ads calling their hoped-for opponent too conservative, which they correctly calculated would be useful for him in his primary. At one point, they even back-channeled with the Akin campaign to encourage it to re-up a specific television ad that they believed had been helping him.
Now, Democrats involved in the Senate campaigns are searching for ways to nudge their opponents into a race to the right during their primaries that could make the eventual GOP nominee toxic to independent voters.
That task may prove simpler than in 2012. Republicans are in an increasingly public, multi-front civil war, and Trump's base is openly fed up with its own party’s congressional leadership. With support for McConnell as Republicans’ Senate leader emerging as a primary issue, Greenberg called his unpopularity figures among Republican voters “way beyond anything I’ve ever seen.”
While Moore is still favored in deeply conservative Alabama, his run-off victory over Sen. Luther Strange activated national Democratic operatives’ plans to use the race as a testing ground for strategies in 2018’s tougher races.
Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., waves to the crowd as she walks on stage to declare victory over challenger Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., in the Missouri Senate race Nov. 6, 2012, in St. Louis. | Jeff Roberson/AP
Both the Democrats’ Senate campaign wing and the Democratic National Committee have recently sent staffers to the state, where two separate polls within the past week have now described the race as a single-digit-margin contest between Moore and former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones. And other national Democratic figures have started paying more attention. California Sen. Kamala Harris, for example, recently cut a $5,000 campaign check for Jones, a Democrat familiar with the transaction told POLITICO.
Democrats are framing the race as a chance for Alabamians to avoid being embarrassed by their representation. It's a theme Jones began emphasizing the night that Moore — who was twice ousted from his post as Alabama's chief justice — beat Strange.
“We are on the right side of justice, we are on the right side of respect and justice, and I can tell you, Roy Moore is not,” Jones said at a campaign rally here Tuesday with former vice president and possible 2020 presidential hopeful Joe Biden.
Democrats’ experience in Alabama has demonstrated that sometimes they can simply sit back and let the insurgent elevate him or herself without any help. Jones hardly piped up at all during the Moore-Strange fight, since it turned divisive quickly and received so much national attention.
But in the early days of the 2018 election cycle, the Democrats’ initial planning has moved forward slowly, and warily, given the unpredictability of a Republican Party that nominated, then elected, Trump. After all, while Akin became a pariah within the Republican ranks after his well-publicized “legitimate rape” comments in 2012, Moore is now backed by McConnell and his aligned super PAC, which spent millions of dollars against the candidate last month.
“You always have to watch closely what’s going on on the other side. But you cannot force a fumble in these situations,” warned party strategist Matt Canter, a senior staffer at the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm in 2012, when McCaskill defeated Akin. “Unfortunately, the goal posts have moved on what’s considered sane and reasonable now.”Knicks forward Carmelo Anthony (7) gestures after a three-pointer during the fourth quarter against the Atlanta Hawks at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. (Photo: Anthony Gruppuso-USA TODAY Sports)
NEW YORK – The results were visible on the court Sunday afternoon, but to find the roots that led to the Knicks 104-94 win over the Atlanta Hawks, you have to go back 24 hours to the team’s long day behind closed doors at their practice facility.
They watched film and scrimmaged as usual, but they gathered together – players, coaches and even Phil Jackson – and just talked for a long time, discussing what had gone wrong so far this season and how to make it better.
“It was everybody,” Carmelo Anthony said. “Players, coaches, everybody was in there and I thought the players did a great job of just kind of voicing their opinion on kind of where we want to be, what type of team we want to be, where we want to go and things that we want to see change.”
Did Jackson, the team president and holder of 11 championship rings as a coach, hold court?
“Nah, he just listened this time,” Anthony said. “Which was good.”
You can take whatever you’d like out of that – Anthony wasn’t saying, other than a sly smile. But the frustrations of the players has hardly been hidden with the efforts of Jackson to continue to push them into the triangle offense. Even coach Jeff Hornacek, who has complied with Jackson’s plans, praised the play of Anthony and the simple use of pick and roll to spring him time after time.
“I don’t know what year this is for me but I’ve had plenty of these kind-of player meetings and discussions and I think every team has that,” Anthony said. “There comes a point and time throughout the season where you have to re-evaluate things and step out of the situation, look into the situation, see what you can do better, look in the mirror at each other at yourself and see the things you can improve.
“I thought we did that yesterday and today, I don’t want to say we won today because of the meeting, but you clear the air like that and guys speak out and talk and they don’t have to hold it in. They don’t feel pressured in the open forum. Guys spoke and everybody responded.”
Anthony did perhaps more than anyone else. The last player left from the days before Jackson took over as Knicks president and some days, like Sunday afternoon, it seems as if he’s the only player around. Playing without Joakim Noah, who was a last-minute scratch with an illness, Anthony matched his season high with 31 points.
For one day Anthony took charge and it was enough. With 2:23 remaining in the game, Anthony drove to the rim and put up a shot that missed off the rim. He grabbed the rebound in traffic, tried again and then pulled down another rebound. This time, he was fouled and he let out a scream, raising his head and pouring it out – celebration, exhaustion, effort.
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“I don’t know where that came from,” Anthony said. “Yeah, it was fun. I try to bring the fun back into the game. And when you stop having fun the game gets boring. It gets monotonous. You do the same thing over and over again. I try to bring the fun back in the game and enjoy the game and today was one of those games, where yeah, it was fun to be out there.”
With Noah announced as out shortly before game time Kyle O’Quinn got his first start of the season and just second since joining the Knicks. He responded with six points and seven rebounds in the first quarter, helping the Knicks to an early lead. But he was hit with three fouls in the quarter and didn’t play again until the second half. The Knicks build leads of as many as 10 points in the second quarter, but settled for a five-point halftime advantage.
It was in the third quarter that Anthony, along with a mix-and-match assortment of role players, took over. Leading 53-51 the Knicks ran off 12 straight points, Anthony scoring five of them and 10 in the period. Porzingis sat much of the quarter after being hit with his fourth foul and Hornacek began to toss players on the floor to try to find help for Anthony.
Willy Hernangomez delivered and the team milked a few moments out of Marshall Plumlee. Courntey Lee chipped in with 14 points and Porzingis had 19 points and 11 rebounds.
“We talked a lot about what we want to do, how we want to be better,” Porzingis said. “We had a good meeting. We talked a lot of stuff through. We came out today playing the way we need to be playing.”
Email: popper@northjersey.comThe chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Wednesday they have "hit a wall" in trying to probe the origin of a salacious anti-Trump dossier, as the committee forges ahead with its investigation into Russia’s interference and possible collusion with Trump campaign associates in the 2016 election.
“As it relates to the Steele dossier, unfortunately, the committee has hit a wall,” North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr, the chairman of the committee, said during a press conference at the Capitol.
The dossier, authored by former British spy Christopher Steele, includes unverified allegations about Trump's connections with Russia and surfaced online in January. Trump has called the report false.
Burr said the committee has made a number of unsuccessful attempts to contact Steele and hopes he will cooperate.
“Those offers have gone unaccepted,” Burr said. “The committee cannot really decide the credibility of the dossier without understanding things like who paid for it, who are your sources and sub-sources.”
Burr – along with Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, the intelligence committee’s vice chairman – held the press conference Wednesday to discuss the progress the committee has made in its Russia meddling investigation.
The committee has conducted 100 interviews, held 11 open hearings on the matter and reviewed 100,000 documents, including highly classified intelligence, emails and campaign documents, Burr said.
The chairman acknowledged the committee is still probing any possible collusion between Trump associates and the Russians, but wouldn’t discuss anything learned so far.
“The committee continues to look into all evidence to see if there was any hint of collusion,” Burr said. “I’m not going to even discuss initial findings, because we haven’t any. We’ve got a tremendous amount of documents still to go through.”
Burr did say that the committee accepts the finding of January’s intelligence community assessment, or ICA, that the Russians did indeed try to influence the election.
“Given that we have interviewed everybody that had a hand in the ICA, I think there is general consensus among members and staff that we trust the conclusions of the ICA,” he said.
Burr said the committee plans to release its findings to the public when its investigation is complete, though said he couldn’t say when that would be.
“We will share with you when we have exhausted every thread of intelligence, every potential witness that can contribute anything to this,” he said.McConnell vows to slow judicial nominees
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is stepping up his parliamentary warfare with Minority Leader Harry Reid, vowing to slow confirmation of new judges to a trickle during the last months of President Barack Obama’s time in office.
After Democrats changed the Senate rules in late 2013 and subsequently pushed through 96 nominations in just over a year, McConnell has essentially put an end to new judicial confirmations on the Senate floor. Republicans confirmed just four new federal judges in five months controlling the Senate and McConnell said on Thursday evening that he’s unlikely to speed things up.
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“So far, the only judges we’ve confirmed have been federal district judges that have been signed off on by Republican senators,” McConnell told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, adding that it was “highly likely” it would remain that way for the rest of the 114th Congress.
That means at this rate the Senate could see as few as 20 total judicial confirmations by the end of 2016, or about 15 percent of the 132 confirmed in the last two years of the Democratic majority, which Reid made a focus of his final months as majority leader.
McConnell’s aggressive stance comes as Reid is set to lead Democrats into hardline stances on several major bills: Democrats are weighing block the National Defense Authorization Act, rejecting spending bills that they believe shortchange the federal government and block the GOP’s attempts to do short-term highway bills.
The threatened Democratic blockade has raised the specter of a government shutdown or construction workers leaving highway sites in the middle of the summer, setting the stage for a new round of brinkmanship that may also keep key judicial slots from being filled.
On the most immediate matter at hand, the defense bill, McConnell made clear that he doubts that Democrats will go through with filibustering a critical national security bill.
“We’ll see whether they really want to do this. Sometimes, they talk bigger in the locker room than they do out on the court,” McConnell said of Reid’s threat.
But Reid’s office said by leaning in so hard on filling gaps in the nation’s courts, including 26 judicial emergencies that date back as many as 3,400 days, it is McConnell who is obstructing the Senate’s business, even in the majority.
“Senator McConnell cannot quit his old, obstructionist ways. Days after letting critical national security tools expire on his watch, he is issuing a blanket blockade against all judges regardless of their merits,” said Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Reid.Sectarian tensions have escalated in Iraq, where the death toll from a wave of violence has passed 200, officials and reports have said.
On Saturday, the fifth day of protests, gunmen killed five army intelligence soldiers in two attacks west of Baghdad.
"Five soldiers in civilians clothes have been killed near a protest site in Ramadi," Al Jazeera's Omar Al Saleh, reporting from Baghdad.
"The men were stopped by gunmen protecting the protest. It's not clear how things developed and what led to the killing. Some say they were intelligence agents, others say they were soldiers on leave and were stopped," he said.
Thousands of protesters have gathered in cities across the country this week to voice their anger at the government of Nouri al-Maliki, calling on the prime minister to step down and an end to the discrimination against Sunnis.
Martin Kobler, a UN envoy, warned on Friday that Iraq was at "crossroads" and called for restraint as violence continues.
The comments came as bombings at four Sunni mosques in and around Baghdad killed four people and wounded 50 on Friday, according to an interior ministry official and medics.
The violence was the latest in a wave of violence that erupted on Tuesday when security forces moved in against anti-government protesters near the Sunni northern town of Hawijah. The ensuing clashes left 53 people dead.
Sunni gunmen were also battling government forces on Friday after they took over Suleiman Beg, a town in Salahuddin province north of Baghdad, in response to a deadly raid in the town of Hawija on Wednesday.
Conflicting reports
Our correspondent said on Friday that there were conflicting reports as to whether the armed groups or government were in control of the town.
Ahmed Aziz, the town's municipal council deputy chief, said the armed men had pulled out of Suleiman Beg under a deal worked out by tribal leaders and government officials.
The men had swarmed into the predominantly Sunni Turkmen town on Wednesday after deadly clashes with security forces, who pulled back as residents fled.
Abdul Baban, a local official, said helicopter fire wounded six people on the roof of a house in Suleiman Beg early on Friday.
The seizure of the town by the armed men came amid a surge of violence which began on Tuesday when security forces moved in against anti-government protesters near Hawijah.
"The situation is really escalating," our correspondent said.
He said that community leaders had called on Sunni soldiers in the Iraq army to leave their posts if the government ordered them to attack Sunni areas.
"I've been covering this story for more than four months; this is the first time I've seen armed men protecting the protests," our correspondent said.
"I saw people with rocket-propelled grenades.I saw people carrying sniper rifles and, very interestingly, the speaker who was addressing the crowd asked them if they were willing to die, and everybody rose in anger and they were shouting 'Allah Akbar [God is great]'."
'Willing to die'
The protest-related violence is the deadliest so far linked to demonstrations that broke out in Sunni areas of the Shia-majority country more than four months ago.
Thousands of protesters have called for the resignation of Maliki, a Shia, and railed against authorities for allegedly targeting their community.
Abdulghafur al-Samarraie and Saleh al-Haidari, leading clerics who respectively head the Sunni and Shia religious endowments, held a joint news conference on Wednesday in which they warned against sectarian strife and called for top politicians to meet at a Baghdad mosque.
Maliki himself warned of a return to "sectarian civil war" in remarks broadcast on state television on Thursday.Cinderella Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale
type 510A and related stories
of persecuted heroines
translated and/or edited by
D. L. Ashliman
©1998-2015
folktexts
folktexts
Europe (Joseph Jacobs)
Now there was among the nobles of the king's court one who had married twice, and by the first marriage he had but one daughter, and as she was growing up her father thought that she ought to have someone to look after her. So he married again, a lady with two daughters, and his new wife, instead of caring for his daughter, thought only of her own and favored them in every way. She would give them beautiful dresses but none to her stepdaughter who had only to wear the castoff clothes of the other two. The noble's daughter was set to do all the drudgery of the house, to attend the kitchen fire, and had naught to sleep on but the heap of cinder raked out in the scullery; and that is why they called her Cinder Maid. And no one took pity on her and she would go and weep at her mother's grave where she had planted a hazel tree, under which she sat.
You can imagine how excited they all were when they heard the king's proclamation called out by the herald. "What shall we wear, mother; what shall we wear?" cried out the two daughters, and they all began talking about which dress should suit the one and what dress should suit the other, but when the father suggested that Cinder Maid should also have a dress they all cried out, "What, Cinder Maid going to the king's ball? Why, look at her, she would only disgrace us all." And so her father held his peace.
Now when the night came for the royal ball Cinder Maid had to help the two sisters to dress in their fine dresses and saw them drive off in the carriage with her father and their mother. But she went to her own mother's grave and sat beneath the hazel tree and wept and cried out:
Tree o' mine, O tree o' me,
With my tears I've watered thee;
Make me a lady fair to see,
Dress me as splendid as can be.
And with that the little bird on the tree called out to her:
Cinder Maid, Cinder Maid, shake the tree,
Open the first nut that you see.
So Cinder Maid shook the tree and the first nut that fell she took up and opened, and what do you think she saw? -- a beautiful silk dress blue as the heavens, all embroidered with stars, and two little lovely shoon [shoes] made of shining copper. And when she had dressed herself the hazel tree opened and from it came a coach all made of copper with four milk-white horses, with coachman and footmen all complete. And as she drove away the little bird called out to her:
Be home, be home ere mid-o'-night
Or else again you'll be a fright.
When Cinder Maid entered the ballroom she was the loveliest of all the ladies, and the prince, who had been dancing with her stepsisters, would only dance with her. But as it came towards midnight Cinder Maid remembered what the little bird had told her and slipped away to her carriage. And when the prince missed her he went to the guards at the palace door and told them to follow the carriage. But Cinder Maid when she saw this, called out:
Mist behind and light before,
Guide me to my father's door.
And when the prince's soldiers tried to follow her there came such a mist that they couldn't see their hands before their faces. So they couldn't find which way Cinder Maid went.
When her father and stepmother and two sisters came home after the ball they could talk of nothing but the lovely lady: "Ah, would not you have like to have been there?" said the sisters to Cinder Maid as she helped them to take off their fine dresses. "The was a most lovely lady with a dress like the heavens and shoes of bright copper, and the prince would dance with none but her; and when midnight came she disappeared and the prince could not find her. He is going to give a second ball in the hope that she will come again. Perhaps she will not, and then we will have our chance."
When the time of the second royal ball came round the same thing happened as before; the sisters teased Cinder Maid, saying "Wouldn't you like to come with us?" and drove off again as before.
And Cinder Maid went again to the hazel tree over her mother's grave and cried:
Tree o' mine, O tree o' me,
Shiver and shake, dear little tree;
Make me a lady fair to see,
Dress me as splendid as can be.
And then the little bird on the tree called out:
Cinder Maid, Cinder Maid, shake the tree,
Open the first nut that you see.
But this time she found a dress all golden brown like the earth embroidered with flowers, and her shoon were made of silver; and when the carriage came from the tree, lo and behold, that was made of silver too, drawn by black horses with trappings all of silver, and the lace on the coachman's and footmen's liveries was also of silver; and when Cinder Maid went to the ball the prince would dance with none but her; and when midnight cam round she fled as before. But the prince, hoping to prevent her running away, had ordered the soldiers at the foot of the staircase to pour out honey on the stairs so that her shoes would stick in it. But Cinder Maid leaped from stair to stair and got away just in time, calling out as the soldiers tried to follow her:
Mist behind and light before,
Guide me to my father's door.
And when her sisters got home they told her once more of the beautiful lady that had come in a silver coach and silver shoon and in a dress all embroidered with flowers: "Ah, wouldn't you have like to have been there?" said they.
Once again the prince gave a great ball in the hope that his unknown be3auty would come to it. All happened as before; as soon as the sisters had gone Cinder Maid went to the hazel tree over her mother's grave and called out:
Tree o' mine, O tree o' me,
Shiver and shake, dear little tree;
Make me a lady fair to see,
Dress me as splendid as can be.
And then the little bird appeared and said:
Cinder Maid, Cinder Maid, shake the tree,
Open the first nut that you see.
And when she opened the nut in it was a dress of silk green as the sea with waves upon it, and her shoes this time were made of gold; and when the coach came out of the tree it was also made of gold, with gold trappings for the horses and for the retainers. And as she drove off the little bird from the tree called out:
Be home, be home ere mid-o'-night
Or else again you'll be a fright.
Now this time, when Cinder Maid came to the ball, she was a desirous to dance only with the prince as he with her, and so, when midnight came round, she had forgotten to leave till the clock began to strike, one -- two -- three -- four -- five -- six, -- and then she began to run away down the stairs as the clock struck eight -- nine -- ten. But the prince had told his soldier to put tar upon the lower steps of the stairs; and as the clock struck eleven her shoes stuck in the tar, and when she jumped to the foot of the stairs one of her golden shoes was left behind, and just then the clock struck TWELVE, and the golden coach with its horses and footmen, disappeared, and the beautiful dress of Cinder Maid changed again into her ragged clothes and she had to run home with only one golden shoe.
You can imagine how excited the sister were when they came home and told Cinder Maid all about it, how that the beautiful lady had come in a golden coach in a dress like the sea, with golden shoes, and how all had disappeared at midnight except the golden shoe. "Ah, wouldn't you have liked to have been there?" said they.
Now when the prince found out that he could not keep his lady-love nor trace where she had gone he spoke to his father and showed him the golden shoe, and told him that he would never marry anyone but the maiden who could wear that shoe. So the king, his father, ordered the herald to take round the golden shoe upon a velvet cushion and to go to every four corners |
million.
My favorite memory of Mike Brown: He was in my hospital room before my last season. I’d just had an appendectomy, and the week before I had my left knee operated on for a meniscus tear, and it was three weeks before the opening game. Mike is sitting there with Sam Wyche, and they were going to put me on the injured list to start the year. It would have ended for me a string of [seasons] starting at linebacker for the Bengals. And I asked Mike to give me one more chance: On that Thursday before the first game, if I can practice, let me start on Sunday. And he gave me that one last chance, even though I’m lying in the hospital bed with one leg up and a fresh set of sutures in my stomach, and I had an allergic reaction to the penicillin and had hives all over my body. Somehow he believed and trusted me enough to give me one chance to practice on Thursday and prove that I was capable of starting my last year in the NFL—which I successfully did. That one moment of trust will outweigh any periodic spat I’ve ever had with Mike Brown. —Reggie Williams
To hear some people tell it, the Mike Brown we don’t know is the Mike Brown we wish we did. Those who do know him, who have worked for him, who have interacted with him over the years, consistently paint him as a smart, funny, friendly, and generous person. Not without faults or mistakes, but also not the villain he’s perceived to be by the general public.
“Mike is very publicly private, but very privately engaging,” says Williams. “I’ve seen Mike laugh uproariously, turning red, falling over in enjoyment.”
It’s the “publicly private” trait that overshadows the other attributes—funny, smart, generous—words a lot of fans would never associate with Mike Brown or other members of the family. This is largely a fate they have chosen. The Browns politely declined any on-the-record interviews for this story, as they do with just about every media request, stating through a Bengals spokesperson that they “preferred to have attention directed to the accomplishments of the team’s players and coaches.” Which just paints them all the more gray. In good times or bad, the family prefers isolation to acceptance, obscurity to understanding.
The legend of Mike Brown’s deep frugality goes beyond the stingy contract negotiations and flying free agents in on coach. He and the franchise as a whole have long been chastised for their lack of charitable giving, community outreach, and civic responsibility. The team participates in a handful of NFL-friendly organizations—the United Way, Boys & Girls Clubs, Toys for Tots—and has always had a steady stream of players and coaches who are very active in their own personal foundations. But the Bengals don’t operate on the same level as the Reds, a franchise with its own outreach division (Reds Community Fund) and among the best in all of professional sports in terms of giving back to its city and fans. The public feud with the county over the stadium lease hasn’t helped this perception, either. Yet among people close to the team and familiar with the family, the Browns are consistently described as benevolent, though mostly on a personal scale and usually on the QT.
“The Bengals suffer in that the Reds under [owner Bob] Castellini have been great, publicly charitable citizens,” says Trumpy. “P&G is, and Cintas is, and Western & Southern has been, and the Lindner family has been. There are an awful lot of charitable givers in this town, and the Bengals don’t make that list publicly. But privately, with the people they know, they’ve been very generous.”
The family is widely praised for the loyalty and respect they show the organization’s non-football employees in terms of compensation and benefits. They funnel personal financial support to foundations led by Bengals players and coaches (Marvin Lewis, Andy Dalton, Anthony Muñoz, among others), as well as local high school programs. There’s even a rumor that Mike Brown once gave $1 million to the Miami University football program, with the understanding that if they publicized where it came from, they’d never see another dime. And this past January, when the team was struggling to sell out its home playoff matchup against the San Diego Chargers—putting the game in danger of not being aired on local television—Brown walked into the ticket office at Paul Brown Stadium and bought 1,000 tickets to distribute to fans, but demanded it be kept discreet.
“Mike quietly puts money where his heart is on a number of causes,” says Williams, who saw this first-hand through the recent establishment of the Reggie Williams Award for Dartmouth football. “He quietly made a very significant contribution to Dartmouth College in the name of the [award].”
The Bengals owner has a noticeable soft spot for reclamation projects as well, but because of his hermetic ways, the public usually only sees these as second chances for troubled athletes with questionable backgrounds and/or criminal records who may pay dividends for the team on the field. But Brown has consistently made efforts to help those players and their families off the field, too. He paid for treatment for Greg Cook’s substance abuse during the quarterback’s tenure with the Bengals in the early ’70s. After star-crossed receiver Chris Henry died from injuries sustained in a car crash in 2009 following a domestic dispute, Brown paid for flights and hotels for the family during the funeral arrangements, and may have even paid for the entire funeral service. And this season, after defensive tackle Devon Still’s 4-year-old daughter Leah was diagnosed with stage-four pediatric cancer, the organization stepped up in a number of ways, including raising more than $1 million for pediatric cancer research at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center through sales of his team jersey.
“I talked to [the family] when I first got back with the team after finding out that my daughter had cancer,” says Still. “Mike Brown basically told me that they were going to stick by me through this whole process and make sure I have everything I need out here to deal with everything that is going on back home. They’ve just been beyond helpful.”
Despite Brown’s well-publicized faults, a number of people who have worked for and gone up against him describe a man whose true colors aren’t accurately reflected in his public persona. Granted, being the president of a billion-dollar corporation carries with it the weight of public scrutiny, and the public can only judge what they see. But there’s also something to be said for a person whose most admirable qualities are displayed behind closed doors, expecting little in return.
Oh, you can tell I’m getting old. I’m a grandfather, and my granddaughters are in college. When you get old, your children get impatient with you. That’s just the way it works in life. I have been blessed to work with my two kids and my father. That’s something that is unusual in America these days. And I realize that roles change. My role changed with my father, just as Katie’s role with me changes. One time I went up, now I’m going down and that’s just the way it is. —Mike Brown, at the Bengals media luncheon in July
Here’s the shocking news: Mike Brown has changed. It’s been subtle, and it’s taken time, but it’s true.
The most obvious impetus is Marvin Lewis, who was hired as head coach of the club in 2003. After a decade of futility, the Bengals rebuilt under Lewis, reaching the playoffs five times since 2005, including each of the last three seasons. Katie Blackburn, Mike’s oldest child, is a big reason for that as well. Petite and wiry, with her grandfather’s slender, pointed nose and her father’s hesitant smile, Katie spent most of her childhood in Cincinnati, playing tennis for Cincinnati Country Day and graduating at age 16. After earning degrees in math and economics at Dartmouth—not to mention a varsity letter playing goalie for the women’s hockey team—she returned to the University of Cincinnati and earned a law degree in 1989 before joining the Bengals front office in 1991, a few months after her grandfather’s passing. Along with her husband, Troy, she has taken on more of a decision-making role with the team the last few years, overseeing all aspects of the business side, including team marketing, financing, ticket sales, player contract negotiations, and salary cap management. It’s something that has been in the works for a while—there were stories of her role as Mike’s successor as early as 2000, when the new stadium was unveiled—but as Mike has stepped back in recent seasons, conceding on-the-field issues to Lewis and off-the-field decisions to his daughter, the team has steadily improved in both areas.
“The people they’ve hired have been good, competent people, and [Mike] has kept his hands out of the cookie jar, so to speak,” says Daugherty, who has covered the team since 1988 and been extremely critical of Mike Brown’s management in the past. “I think [Katie] has had a big influence. She’s a very shrewd negotiator, very smart. I think she’s added a bit of a human element.”
That’s not to say she’s a media darling; in fact, she’s often described as more private than her father and is painfully shy when dealing with the media. But she is warmer, friendlier, and more patient when interacting with people in a business context—traits Mike Brown has credited to his own mother, whom Katie is named after. Over time, that warmth has rubbed off on him. When the Blackburns’ two daughters were younger, kids at school would tease them about their grandfather and how awful the team was. Katie was understandably hurt and troubled by it, and it almost certainly affected Mike.
“I think Mike’s softened,” says Trumpy. “I think he can see that he’s no longer as important to the franchise as he used to be. He’s leaving the football part of it to somebody else, which is something he should have done a long time ago.”
The changes have permeated the organization. Lengthy and substantial contract extensions for key players have muffled the old cries of frugality. Fan relations have improved through simple PR wins—things like instituting “family days” during training camp and the Devon Still story. And perhaps the biggest eye-opener of all happened in April when the team agreed to pay $2.5 million toward the cost of a new scoreboard (which the lease states the county is 100 percent responsible for funding) and waived air rights that paved the way for the forthcoming GE Building at The Banks. Ultimately, the Bengals agreed to pay $4 million toward projects that the stadium lease requires the county to fund—not a huge concession in the big picture by any means, but a concession nonetheless.
“I really am genuinely happy that the posture the team adopted in all of this was reasonable,” says county commissioner Todd Portune, a long-time adversary of the team. “It was big for the region, and we all had to come together, and we did. We both expressed a desire to work together and put the fighting behind us.”
More important for the fans, the team is no longer the laughingstock cellar-dweller of professional sports. It’s what the Brown family has always wanted, even if it took far too long for them to foster that positive transformation.
“You have to adapt with change, and maybe we didn’t adapt as fast as we should have,” says Jim Anderson, the Bengals running backs coach from 1984 to 2012, tiptoeing around the obvious. “I think [the family’s] main objective, contrary to what other people may say, is to bring a world championship to the people of Cincinnati. I know one thing: that would give Mike the greatest joy.”
As PB would say, ‘All of us are useful, but none of us are necessary.’ As you go through life, you have to hand that baton on to someone else. —Jim Anderson
Mike Brown is a simple guy. He enjoys bird watching and despises air conditioning, turning it on as sparingly as possible at home. He sips his morning coffee from a Styrofoam cup. He wears New Balance sneakers and old crewneck Bengals sweatshirts from the ’80s. He eats at the Frisch’s Mainliner on Wooster Pike once a week with his wife, Nancy. It’s an old-school sensibility that should by any rational measure endear him to a city like Cincinnati, which extols the genuine and bristles at ostentation. Yet after five decades of owning the franchise, he’s still viewed as an outsider by most folks in town. His reclusive nature amplifies this, but it’s also due in part to the distinctiveness of the team’s origin. The Browns weren’t local businessmen like Powel Crosley or Carl Lindner or Bob Castellini, men who used their fortune to augment their influence in the community. In fact, they weren’t businessmen at all. In a sports-industrial complex full of multi-millionaires who became owners, the Browns are a football family who became multi-millionaires.
“I don’t think you could find another team who came into ownership like this,” says O’Toole. “Art Rooney made money on the race tracks. Tim Mara was a bookmaker. Art Modell had money in ad agencies. And they all bought their own team. Paul Brown was just a football coach. And it’s amazing what that team is worth now.”
To the family, simply having a team was always more important than the city that housed it. Yet over time, they’ve developed ties. Katie and her brother Paul Jr. grew up here. The Blackburns’ girls are Cincinnatians, born and bred. Mike Brown is immensely proud of the rebirth of the city’s riverfront and the role the Bengals have played in that—including his daughter’s recent appointment to The Joint Banks Steering Committee, a collaboration between the city and county that oversees all development at The Banks. And as the state of the team continues to improve, the more that curtain separating the family from the city lifts.
“I think once they left Cleveland, there was a void in their life,” says Anderson. “The people of Cincinnati gave the Brown family the opportunity to get back into football and do something they really love and cherish. That’s a big thing. They appreciate that opportunity.”
Public opinion toward the family notwithstanding, that last part is undeniably true. Football is their livelihood, a truth Mike Brown has ensured for the foreseeable future. And regardless how much of the decision-making he surrenders, he’ll remain a part of that livelihood for as long as time allows—watching practice from the sidelines, sitting in his sun-soaked corner office high above Paul Brown Stadium, smiling and tapping his feet in the owner’s box as his wife sings along to the Bengals fight song after touchdowns—always seen but rarely heard, fending off the day when he’s no longer necessary.Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
A teenage boy was battered unconscious and three young men were also assaulted during an anti-Semitic attack at a tram stop, police say.
The four victims were injured by three thugs at Bowker Vale Metrolink station in north Manchester at around 11.30pm on Saturday night, September 5.
Officers are treating the incident as a hate crime.
The worst affected was a 17-year-old, who lost consciousness during the attack and remains in hospital suffering from a suspected bleed to the brain.
More on this
Police are treating the serious assault as grievous bodily harm with intent. Three others, aged 18, 18, and 20, were also attacked during the incident.
Forensics teams remained at Bowker Vale stop on Monday morning and tram services travelling towards Bury were unable to call at the station. The stop was reopened shortly after 11am.
Police believe that three men were responsible for the attack. They approached the four victims then verbally and physically assaulted them.
Anyone with information should contact police on 101 or Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555111.Holiday Solar Gift Ideas for Under $100
‘Tis the season to be racking your brain looking for the perfect gift for the ones you love. How about the gift of solar? Here’s a few gift ideas that won’t break the bank. Everything listed can ship by UPS and is available while supplies last.
Solar Gifts under $60
The altE Store’s ALT10-12P is a small 10 watt 12 volt solar panel that can be used to trickle charge a battery that is sitting unused for a while, like in a tractor or RV, keeping the battery ready to go when needed. It can also be used for keeping your cell phone charged when you are outside. Here’s a fun video of us keeping our phone alive while we played Pokemon GO. For only $39, it’s a great gift for just about everyone.
PROMOALT10/SG4 includes both an altE Store 10 watt solar panel and a Morningstar SunGuard solar charge controller for under $50, helping to keep your battery healthy and happy.
The Kill-a-watt P4400 meter isn’t necessarily a solar present, but is a fantastic tool to determine how much power your appliances are using. It’s great for planning your solar system, and for finding phantom loads that are costing you money. The advanced Kill-a-watt P4482 meter plus timer also calculates how much money the appliances costs to run, and automatically turns it off for you, saving you money.
A sealed deep cycle battery like the 12V 8Ah Universal Battery UNVUB1280 lets you store your solar power to use later. It costs less than $15 to have a battery that can be used to charge up your cell phone and tablet, among other uses. Just connect a cigarette outlet and plug your phone’s charger in. It is a maintenance free sealed AGM battery, just keep it charged and it will store your power for years. Combine it with the previously mentioned PROMOALT/SG4, and you’ve got a solar panel, charge controller, and battery, all for under $100.
Solar Gifts under $100
An altE Store 30 watt solar panel, plus a free charge controller can be a great introduction into solar. PROMOALT30/SG4 has a 30W panel plus a free charge controller for under $70. 30 Watts can be enough power to run your laptop for a couple of hours, provide light, or keep your tablet going all day and night.
A deep cycle battery like the 32Ah 12V MK Battery MKB8AU1 can give you quite a bit of storage for under $80. It’s a great pairing with the 30W solar panel.
The Shurflo 2088-443-144 solar water pump can pump water from a stream or tank, providing water to remote locations. It can be run directly from a solar panel, pumping while the sun shines, or from a 12V battery, providing household pressure to your cabin.
The Samlex SSW-350-12A 12V 350W inverter converts 12V DC from a battery to 120V 60Hz AC power for your AC loads. It has two 3-prong outlets to plug in up to 350 watts of appliances, as well as a handy USB port to charge your cell phone or tablet. It’s pure sine wave output is safe for your delicate electronics. It comes with battery cables to easily clamp onto a 12V deep cycle battery, providing an easy to use remote power source.
Willing to Spend a Little More to Empower Your Loved One with Solar?
Keep Reading..
Solar Gifts under $300
The Efergy energy monitors, EFEELITE and EFEE2 can be used with or without a solar system to monitor the power made by your solar and energy used by your whole house. You can see the effect of turning off lights and appliances, and track your solar energy production. Check the display before leaving the house or going to bed to see if anything was accidentally left on. By being more aware of energy use, the whole family can pitch in with saving electricity and money. Both models are just over $100 each. Adding the HH-1.0NA hub gateway allows you to connect the meter to the internet, giving you remote access to your energy meter.
The LEDTronics LED10W12VLEDKIT light kit for $225 includes everything you need for a complete remote solar powered lighting kit. It includes the solar panel, battery, and three LED lights, giving you light during an emergency or in a remote shed or cabin. It even includes a cigarette outlet to allow you to plug in your car charger for your phone or tablet.
The Kyocera KD150GX and KD145SX 12V 145 watt solar panels are world reknown for their durability and versatility. Their resistance to salt spray and sturdy frame makes them the perfect solar panel to add to your boat or RV, providing clean quiet power to the sailor or traveller in your life. Check out our video comparing the two different versions of the Kyocera panels:
Midnite Solar’s Kid MPPT 30A solar charge controller MPPT 30A solar charge controller is such a great product, I had to include it on the list. It works with 12V, 24V, and 48V battery banks, and includes lighting control to turn lights on and off automatically, auto generator start, and the ability to connect it to a second Kid for true paralleling to become a 60A charge controller.
The Xantrex PROwatt SW1000 Inverter gives you up to 1000W of pure sinewave AC electricity from a 12V deep cycle battery. Safely power their TV, computer, even most coffee makers in their remote location.
Solar Gifts under $500
The KITEMERGPREP1 Emergency Preparedness Kit that we featured in a recent blog includes everything you need to install a small backup solar system. It includes a 30W solar panel, a solar charge controller, a sealed 12V 18AH deep cycle battery, breaker box, and 350W inverter. Be prepared for bad weather with an emergency backup, or provide some power for your remote getaway.
They’ll get a real charge out of receiving an Outback FlexMax60-150VDC MPPT solar charge controller. This powerful charge controller can manage battery banks from 12V to 60VDC, and can handle up to 3600 watts of solar panels on a 48V battery bank. With its five stage charging, and on-board display, the Outback FlexMax has been a favorite in the the solar world for years.
Let Us Make Your Holidays Merry (and Sunny)!
If none of these ideas ring your bell, give us a call at 877-878-4060 and we’d be happy to help you find just the right gift for your loved ones. Or go to our website at altestore.com and browse through our thousands of products. While you are online, check out our YouTube videos that help you learn about how solar works, how to size your own solar power systems, install and maintain them.
Did you find this blog handy? Please like us on Facebook, Google+ and Tweet your friends about where they can come to for learning more about empowering themselves with solar.
[subscribe2]Etude House Happy Teatime Milk Tea Cleansing Cream review 3:46 PM Moi Sanom 0 Comments
Etude House Happy Teatime Milk Tea Cleansing Cream (180ml)
Comes in a plastic box as shown in the promotional photos, writing came off since I have been using this for 8 months
Contents of the jar about 3 months into usage, no spatula included
Missha perfect cover BB cream, Stila waterproof liquid eye liner, Essence black eye pencil, Maybelline Waterproof mascara, Tonymoly Lover kiss lip tint, Mac eyeshadow
My hand after being wiped off with a cotton pad after the second cleansing, and a cotton pad with toner to check how well the cream cleansed
Creamy cream
1.Blegh 2. Pff 3. Meh 4. Oohh 5. Awwyeah 6. Wooha
Since I have super dry skin and a slight water phobia, I very much like the idea of cleansing creams.When I did my online research on cleansing creams I couldn't really find a contender that convinced me 100% since they don't seem to be too popular.So why did I buy this one?I confess, the name is cute and so is the jar!Well, honestly this cleansing cream isn't the bees knees but it isn't bad either.It cleanses my face without any magical side effects.Positive or negative.But I guess if I’m trying to find a cleanser that also makes my hair turn different colors each time I use it, I would search forever.I hardly ever wear make up so I didn't buy it for the removing powers, but I think it definitely removes it well when I wear some.It doesn't sting my eyes when I use it to remove my mascara and manages to take it off easily even though it is waterproof.Unlike Bioderma which simply looks at my mascara and decides that it won’t even bother removing it from my lashes at all.You can't tell by the photo alone but I applied a super duper thick layer of mascara by accident.It would probably be about 5 or 6 layers on my lashes.I never use more then 2 so this cream cleanses my mascara well.I only use one layer of cleansing cream on my face but since that is how I swatched it I added another layer of cream in the photos to see if it would clean the left over mascara.Which it indeed did.It also doesn't aggravate my eczema and when I don't have any it doesn't make it come back either.The Texture is smooth and creamy which makes the massaging easy, but when I wipe it off the cleanser does not leave my skin specifically soft.But in my case neither do most moisturizers.I take it off with a cotton pad and then use a cleansing water afterwards.So it is not necessary to wash this cream off with water.It neither provides nor strips my skin of moisture, so that is definitely a plus.But if your skin isn't as dry as mine, this might be a nice and hydrating cleansing process.It doesn't smell like Milk Tea to me, more like a Powdery vintagey scent.I am quite sensitive to scents (ha!) and this one isn't super strong and doesn't linger at all.I have been using it once a day for 8 months now and still have a quarter of the jar left.It is definitely cheap and lasts for a long time!It is a solid product, but I believe there is probably nicer cleansing creams waiting to be tried in the world.Ph: 5Ingredients: Here Rating:Purchased on Ebay Available at KoreadepartOn its release in 1984, Elite was the pinnacle of bedroom-programmed games. It was a title that had a vision beyond the limitations of mere hardware, executed by a pair of undergraduates who had barely escaped their teens. Now Elite: Dangerous brings the story full circle - although it's a bigger game with bigger costs, its Kickstarter funding and independent distribution give it a homespun feel.
David Braben and co-designer Ian Bell began work on Elite while they were studying natural sciences and mathematics respectively. Braben had an Acorn Atom computer, Bell had a BBC Micro and both had tried programming space simulations with varying degrees of success. Elite initially took shape as
a space combat title, but it felt empty and unfocused. The pair then added the trading system - arguably Elite's greatest asset.
In 1984, Elite was released on the BBC Micro and its budget brother the Acorn Electron. At the time there was nothing else like it, and it was the game's sense of freedom and exploration that captured the public's attention. Here, in a mere 22 kilobytes of memory, was a game in which players were able to set their own path through the universe and make decisions about how they played.
We hope Elite: Dangerous includes a planet called Arse in tribute to the first game
Of course, a game of such vast scale inhabiting such a small amount of memory meant some ingenious cutbacks had to be made, including the development of a procedural generation system for creating and naming the game's 2,000 systems and planets. It even caused one of the galaxies to contain a planet amusingly called "Arse", but fortunately Braben and Bell noticed before the game was published with the bum word.
Custom coding
After its initial success, the game was ported to all the platforms that mattered: the Amiga, Atari ST, Apple II, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 and even the then-upcoming IBM PC. Each game acted a little differently to the original. For example, the Amstrad version had fewer ships and the Commodore 64 version included a reference to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The fervent following that the game gathered led to fans taking it apart and reassembling it. For example, Angus Duggan's Elite A included more ship types and cargo delivery missions. In 1993, Frontier: Elite II was published. The successor included full-colour graphics, curved polygons and texture mapping, and Braben had managed to get the entire thing to fit on a 3.5-inch floppy.
It also included some ridiculously cool sci-fi mechanics, such as the ability to slingshot around stars and land on planets. Ultimately, though, the game divided players between those who found it too boring, and those who appreciated its dogged adherence to Newtonian physics.
Games have come in the last 30 years, but Elite's core ideas remain the same
Bolstered by Elite's success, Braben set up his own development studio - Frontier Developments - in 1994. The company created Elite's second sequel, Frontier: First Encounters, in 1995. However, due to disagreements between the studio and publisher GameTek, the version was full of bugs and it received
a lukewarm reception due to being half-finished. Braben went on to sue GameTek, and settled out-of-court four years after the game's release.
As well as developing Elite: Dangerous, Frontier Developments has also created some big games, including Rollercoaster Tycoon, acclaimed WiiWare launch title LostWinds, and cute Xbox animal simulator Kinectimals. We're still waiting for The Outsider, though. This techno-thriller game relocates Elite's freedom into a real world scenario. It's currently "on hold", but we hope Braben turns his attention to it once he's completed Elite: Dangerous. We spoke to him about the return of Elite, pushing the bounds of game development, and why space is back in style.
Why is Elite able to make a return now when we've had so many false starts before?
David Braben Elite is in our DNA, and we have always had skunkworks development of relevant technologies that we have been building upon over the years. More recently, various things have come together to help catalyse it: the technology has finally caught up to our ambition, but Kickstarter has also offered an excellent opportunity.
Has anything completely unexpected happened during Elite: Dangerous' alpha?
DB Yes - already in the alpha 2x multiplayer builds we have seen interesting player behaviours emerging. A good example is the Ethics and Credits scenario, which is really the first glimpse of the flexible second-by-second roles and choices that the game will offer.
Some players were patrolling in Sidewinders together. They were waiting for others to kill miners and would then collect the bounty on their heads. It's a great example of the value of having our backers getting involved during development. We're able to drill down into the balancing to maximise the opportunity for such emerging behaviours.
Are we going to have the same sort of epically accurate star map that we had in Frontier?
DB Of course! In Elite: Dangerous we are going a lot further. We have some 150,000 star systems visible from Earth in real life; in the game this will be backed up with some 100 billion more that will be scientifically accurate in terms of how they formed etc. They will be generated procedurally to fit the observational data as best we can, as most of these systems are not individually visible from Earth, even with Hubble.
Each of these will include stellar systems with different types of planets, gas giants, rocky moons, asteroid fields and so on. One great side effect of this is the night sky is "correct" when viewed from Earth and changes gradually as you travel to nearby systems. The constellations gradually become unrecognisable as you move further from Earth.
Why do you think that space games have been unfashionable for so long?
DB I think games set in space became quite niche. They lost sight of what was the key element of Elite and Frontier - freedom. The true successors to Elite and Frontier were the Grand Theft Auto games. For me, the setting is secondary to the feeling of freedom.
The success of the Elite series has always been based on the freedom that players are given. It's all about individual choice in an open world - you don't select "pirate" or "bounty hunter" or "trader" from a list, you simply do what you want and events will unfold accordingly.
Traditional publishers have always regimented games into strict categories for forecasting and planning reasons, and somehow "space" became a category in itself - including games like Dead Space, Mass Effect and Halo, which are all quite different.
This screenshot weighs in at 535 kilobytes - the equivalent of 24 Elites
How much friendly competition is there between you and Chris Roberts - especially now you've got the Elite: Dangerous alpha out before Star Citizen's dogfighting module?
DB I'd place the emphasis on "friendly" as we are both alpha backers of each other's games, and both want the other to succeed. The games we are making are very different - Star Citizen is a handcrafted story-based game - but there are common elements, the most obvious being that they are both set in space.
Many of you will have seen the discussion Chris and I had during the Elite Kickstarter campaign, where we discussed the return of the space game at length with Gary Whitta. If you haven't seen it, you can still check it out through our website or the Elite: Dangerous Kickstarter site. It's also not just Elite: Dangerous and Star Citizen, there are others, too. I think shows there is strong interest in this area, which is a very good thing.
What are your plans for player created content, such as companies or galactic organisations?
DB To start with, players are just another commander, trying to make their way in what is quite a hostile galaxy. However, participants can form alliances with other players, and we do have plans down the line for building space stations and so on.
Is it generally easier or harder to program a game now compared to the 1980s?
DB There are several dimensions to it, I think. Put in today's language, Ian and I were a micro-studio, and when you're in that environment, communication is so much easier. The largest game that Frontier Developments has made to date involved almost 400 people! While the Elite: Dangerous team isn't quite that huge, between 70-100 people are closely involved. It's still a different world when it comes to communication and getting a shared vision for all the different aspects of the game. In modern game development, team communication is probably the biggest challenge, and this didn't really exist in the 1980s.
Looking at just the programming, I think today it is a lot simpler to do the same sort of thing. Debuggers and the fancy programming aids we have nowadays make it much easier, but the expectations are also very much higher. The scope of what happens in a ship in Elite: Dangerous, and hence the complexity of the programming task, is far greater. This more than makes up for all the fancy tools we have available now. With the original Elite we literally used every byte of memory the BBC Micro could offer. We are trying to make sure we similarly push the boundaries of what's possible in Elite: Dangerous using modern computer hardware.
Braben feels that sticking to his guns over Elite let to more creativity in games
When you were developing the original, was there a point when you realised you were completely changing what games could do?
DB With the original Elite, I think the realisation came for me when we presented the game to Thorn-EMI in London. They wanted us to completely change the game - have three lives, a score, a typical playtime of 10 minutes, and no saves. They really didn't understand what we were trying to do. I started to think that we had a real hill to climb, to sell the idea to a publisher.
The fact that it was so different to any of the competition at the time meant that after Elite came out, publishers were much more prepared to experiment with different types of computer games. They were willing to look at ones that weren't derived from the arcades.
And have there been any similar moments while you have been designing Elite: Dangerous?
DB With Elite: Dangerous, it was the realisation that we didn't have to follow publisher constraints in what we could do. It has allowed us to have a galaxy that continually changes based on player actions. I think this will prove to be very significant.There is an old anecdote about the different types of intelligence agencies. It says that a mediocre intelligence agency is protecting the government from the coup, a good intelligence agency is participating in the coup, while the best intelligence agency is organizing it. Mind you, the government in question is not the foreign government, but one's own. However, if we examine the intelligence agencies of the Balkan states, set up after the break-up of the Yugoslav Socialist Federation, we will quickly see that we cannot even talk about mediocre intelligence agencies. These agencies have thoroughly been made into the puppets of foreign intelligence networks. For all practical intents and purposes, they do not exist as sovereign entities, but as mere transmission belts of what their foreign mentors want them to do. The foreign mentors in question are the intelligence agencies of NATO countries, especially the CIA and the MI-6, even though the French, German, and Turkish intelligence agencies have also been active. Since the end of the Cold War, the Russian intelligence agencies, the SVR (the CIA equivalent), the FSB (the FBI equivalent), and the GRU (the DIA equivalent) have only recently begun to have their influence felt. Of course, this is far from saying that their operatives were not present before. However, it is only since Putin's consolidation of the Russian state that these intelligence agencies have started to demonstrate their independence from the West. In the early to mid-1990s, the Russian intelligence community was forced by then-president Boris Yeltsin to play an inferior role within the CIA-led team, especially regarding the developments in the Balkans. This led to the massive wave of resignations and retirements among KGB officers, many of whom Putin later re-instated. There are indications that in this period the GRU was less infiltrated by the NATO agents |
They continue to grow even when we're adults. (Well, at least, we hope they do.) Thus, both body parts need a continual supply of factory-like cells to make the hard, tough structures – nails or strands of hair.
For curly locks, each follicle contains a bunch of stem cells that serve as hair machines. The cells produce all the components of your coiffure — the silky strands, its lustrous color and the little shaft that attaches to your head.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of Ito Lab/New York University Courtesy of Ito Lab/New York University
Now Ito and her team have found analogous cell factories in mice fingernails. She calls them "nail stem cells." They sit right near the cuticle. And they do more than give the mouse its scratch.
When a rodent's "fingertip," as Ito calls it, is amputated, the nail stem cells start to regrow the claw. But they also make a signal that brings the bones and nerves to the wound. Healing is a whole new ball game once you get the nerves involved.
"In amphibians, the nerve is sufficient to trigger the whole regeneration process," Ito says. "We don't know yet if that's the case for mammals, but the nerve is essential to produce the bone of the mouse digit."
The signal made by the nail stem cells — called Wnt, for all you bio buffs — can orchestrate growth all over the body. It even coordinates the formation of limbs and some organs during fetal development.
"We think that nail stem cells may a have a special function to induce the whole regeneration process, including nerve attraction and growth of the bone," Ito say.
So could these nail stem cells one day help with more serious amputations? "We'd like to test this hypothesis in mice," Ito says. But she first wants to find these cells in people.
Who knows, perhaps the ability to regenerate limbs is already at our fingertips.With E3 only a little more than a week away, Destructoid has once again received this year’s insert for the yearly E3 badge and they are teasing its design. It is provided by Atlus.
Atlus USA have been the sponsors for the recent years when it came to the E3 badge inserts, and that’s continuing in 2015. Last year, they also teased the E3 2014 badge holder through a contest, which turned out to be designed after Persona 4: Dancing All Night. This time as well, Destructoid is inviting fans to try and guess what the design for the mysterious game is through image manipulation.
Obviously, there’s a good chance that this is Persona 5, considering previous years for Atlus USA sponsored E3 badge inserts, and how they featured upcoming Atlus games.
The full reveal for the E3 2015 badge insert will be next week, before E3 2015 officially starts on June 16.
E3 2014
E3 2014’s badge insert was themed after Persona 4: Dancing All Night and Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth.
E3 2013
E3 2013’s badge insert was themed after Dragon’s Crown and Shin Megami Tensei IV.
E3 2012
E3 2012’s badge insert was themed after Persona 4 Golden and Persona 4 Arena.
E3 2011
E3 2011’s badge insert was themed after Catherine.
— DestructoidHere's a headline that the White House wouldn't like.
Donald Trump helped build a hotel in Azerbaijan that appears to be a corrupt operation linked to Iran's Revolutionary Guard.
Business and economics reporter Adam Davidson investigated the story for the New Yorker magazine.
He traveled to the former Soviet republic for a close-up view of the Trump International Hotel and Tower Baku. While Trump has been associated with some controversial hotel and golf course projects worldwide, some that failed, some that are even hated by the locals, but Adamson calls the "ultra luxury property" in Baku Trump's worst deal ever.
Related: What happened to all the South American Trump Tower plans?
As Davidson wrote:
"Heydar Aliyev Prospekti, a broad avenue in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, connects the airport to the city. The road is meant to highlight Baku’s recent modernization, and it is lined with sleek new buildings. The Heydar Aliyev Center, an undulating wave of concrete and glass, was designed by Zaha Hadid. The state oil company is housed in a twisting glass tower, and the headquarters of the state water company looks like a giant water droplet. “It’s like Potemkin,” my translator told me. “It’s only the buildings right next to the road.” Behind the gleaming structures stand decaying Soviet-era apartment blocks, with clothes hanging out of windows and wallboards exposed by fallen brickwork.
As you approach the city center, a tower at the end of the avenue looms in front of you. Thirty-three stories high and curved to resemble a sail, the building was clearly inspired by the Burj Al Arab Hotel, in Dubai, but it is boxier and less elegant. When I visited Baku, in December, five enormous white letters glowed at the top of the tower: T-R-U-M-P."
Continue reading: Donald Trump's Worst DealToday’s chefs are stretching the gastronomic envelope further than it’s ever gone. From space-aged toques of the molecular ilk to those taking traditional dishes to flavorful new places, there’s never been a more exciting time in America’s culinary history. Much of that has to do with the wealth of resources, informational and ingredient-wise, that exist. Nearly anything a chef needs to create stellar dishes is at their fingertips, whether those digits are tracing over produce at a farmer’s market or manipulating a computer keyboard. It’s commonplace to come across foreign-sounding edibles and spices on a menu these days as chefs at all levels find new ingredients and the inspiration that comes with them. Given all of this, this food-and-beer journalist feels inclined to wonder in print: With all this nth degree embracement of every ingredient under the sun, why has such a small percentage of this country’s chefs thoroughly explored the wide-ranging and flavorful world of craft beer?
This isn’t a criticism. Surely, some craft brewing enthusiast somewhere has authored some snarky, accusatory piece scolding chefs for ignoring one of their favorite things, but it’s my belief that if chefs were aware of what craft beer really is, they would be inclined by their innate curiosity about all things edible and quaffable, and their desire to produce the best food and drink experience possible, to dive glass first into this medium. So, the intention of this piece is simply to raise the topic for both discussion and discovery in the hopes that this country’s culinary class will take note and interest in brews that have come to be regarded as the world’s best.
It’s easy to understand chefs’ grasp of wine as a cooking staple and adaptable go-with for their cuisine. Wine is at the core of many classic European recipes and base techniques and, hence, its use has been communicated to generations upon generations of aspiring culinary professionals. As anyone familiar with the depth and delicious character wine lends to so many recipes can attest, this is a good thing. And when it comes to pairing, the ideal white, red, rosé, or sparkler can take dishes to new heights. As such, a significant percentage of chefs devote time to learning about wine’s history, varietals, flavor profiles, and kitchen uses. This is a very good thing.
So, one would think it natural that, especially with the rise in popularity and availability of craft beer in this country (particularly over the past decade), that chefs would feel inclined to replicate that educational process with this libation category. As someone who has spent a great deal of time in the company of chefs, the majority are certainly no strangers to beer. Sometimes consumed before (or even during) a dinner service, and most definitely after, it’s a part of daily life in the restaurant industry. Unfortunately, consumption is typically limited to pale, bland American macro-lagers—and craft beer, that is not. Still, one would think even that baser interest in beer would spark an interest in learning about better beers. Sticking strictly to cheaply made, uninteresting, mostly flavorless beer when thousands of superior options are readily available would be like only drinking Two Buck Chuck.
Even spirits seem to be more on the average chef’s radar. In fact, restaurants have played a significant role in fueling this country’s burgeoning craft spirit renaissance. Again, this is a good thing, but if one is going to devote time and energy to picking apart subtle nuances of vanilla, oak, caramel, spice, etc. from a beverage that is undeniably alcohol-forward and more tipple than flavor enhancer, again, why not dig deeper with craft beer, a beverage that’s lower in alcohol than wine or spirits, broader in its number of styles and achievable taste elements, and more about providing flavor than either of the aforementioned beverages?
Again, this isn’t accusatory. The string of whys and why nots I’m presenting are so that the chefs reading this can ask the same questions. Simply put, ignoring a viable and delicious ingredient, much less an entire family of quality ingredients, is near sacrilegious in the cheffing culture. To put it in a purely culinary context, it would be like a chef coming across an assortment of mushrooms—chanterelles, morels, porcini, shiitakes, lobster, oyster, hen of the woods—and opting instead for near-flavorless white buttons. Or, instead of working with a variety of proteins, feeling content to work solely with ground beef. Any toque worth their salt knows how important it is to constantly evolve, remain curious, and use any tool at their disposal to make the best food they possibly can. I want to say definitively, as a passionate and professional journalist covering both food and beer, that craft beer can absolutely enhance the dining experience.
Whether accompanying a dish or serving as a flavor-adding component in a recipe, craft beer can and does make a difference. No article could ever explain all the countless enhancing qualities craft beer brings to the table—and the kitchen—but plenty of texts and online resources exist.† But for the beery beginner, the best reference points are those who produce craft beer. There are over 2,500 breweries, brewpubs, brewery-restaurants, and assorted craft beer tasting venues in this country, and no better place to learn about the variety and history of the world’s 100-plus identifiable styles—flowery Belgian ales, acidic sour beers, piney India pale ales, roasty porters, malty Scottish ales, cloven wheat beers, chocolaty stouts, and so many more. And there’s not a brewer around who would not be happy to welcome a chef into their establishments and afford them as much time as they can to explain the details of the beverage they have, like culinary professionals have with their craft, devoted their lives to.
Add me to that contingent. My reasons for writing this piece are two-fold. As stated, I am hoping to inspire chefs to take a closer look at craft beer and begin their journey down the ale and lager trail. But, to help facilitate that, I would like to offer my personal assistance to any chefs interested in starting that journey, whether it be by answering questions, advising on breweries and other beer-centric venues to visit and begin their immersion, or simply speaking further on the subject of craft beer (perhaps over a beer).
Craft beer is something I was intensely inspired by at first taste, and have since devoted my life and my livelihood to. It would be my sincere honor to help any interested individuals find that same joy and inspiration. Hit me up or simply hit up your local brewery, but whatever you do, don’t miss out on something this artisanally valid and variedly delectable. Cheers and thank you for your time.
† - Reputable written and web resources for the beer-and-food beginner include The Brewmaster’s Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food by Garrett Oliver, The American Craft Beer Cookbook by John Holl, The Best of American Beer and Food: Pairing & Cooking with Craft Beer by Lucy Saunders, Beer, Food, and Flavor: A Guide to Tasting, Pairing, and the Culture of Craft Beer by Schuyler Schultz, Tasting Beer: An Insider's Guide to the World's Greatest Drink by Randy Mosher, and the Brewers Association’s online pairing chart.Bjorn Andersson said he had been 'offered money on many occasions.'
Former Bayern Munich scout Bjorn Andersson has said "mafia methods" in the transfer process meant young players were "touted" to him on a regular basis.
Andersson, who worked for Bayern in Scandinavia for more than two decades, told the Lundh podcast in Sweden: "I've been offered money myself if I could bring this or that player to Bayern.
"I could own a few houses these days along the Croatian coast.
"Agents come and say: 'Make sure this player comes to Munich and then you'll get this much in return.'
"But I got paid by Bayern and fortunately I've never crossed over to that side. Everyone involved knows this is not always a clean business."
He stressed he had not accepted any such offers, saying: "I would never enter into that, then you're stuck. They are mafia methods."
The 65-year-old, twice a European Cup winner with Bayern in the 1970s, said Luka Modric, Vedran Corluka and Eduardo were among the players to have been touted to him.
All three came to prominence at Croatian club Dinamo Zagreb.
Last month, former Dinamo chairman Zdravko Mamic pleaded not guilty to multi-million euro corruption charges.
In 2016, he was charged with abuse of power and bribery along with his brother, former Dinamo Zagreb coach Zoran Mamic, and ex-director Damir Vrbanovic.
Mamic said the charges were "a hideous lie" after it was alleged that millions of euros had been embezzled.
Information from ESPN FC correspondent Mattias Karen was used in this report.
Mark Lovell covers Bayern Munich for ESPN FC. Follow him on Twitter: @LovellLowdown.MOSCOW, Russia — Opposition leaders hope to revive their anti-Kremlin movement after a summer lull by bringing tens of thousands of protesters onto the streets on Saturday in defiance of what they say is a coordinated crackdown on their activities.
The authorities have made overt moves to eject an outspoken lawmaker from parliament; they have charged a key opposition leader with financial crimes; passed laws to restrict protests and summoned opposition lawyers for questioning.
Turnout at the rally will help gauge whether the moves are dampening or reinvigorating discontent centered in large cities that erupted last December and led to clashes with police on the eve of President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration in May.
More from GlobalPost: Putin interferes with Gazprom investigation
“Tightening the screws has the opposite of its intended effect for many and spurs them to attend because it makes them indignant,” said Sergei Mitrokhin, chairman of the opposition Yabloko party.
“It doesn’t necessarily lead to a downward turn,” he added. “Some people probably won’t come, but it’s hard to forecast.”
The mayor’s office on Tuesday granted the opposition permission to hold its protest — which organizers have wishfully dubbed the “March of the Millions” — after ruling out a march down Moscow’s main Tverskaya Street that would have ended with a demonstration by the Kremlin walls.
The rally will mix liberals, nationalists, leftists, anarchists and gay activists. The Communist Party, which has a large electoral base but has so far shied away from joining street protests, will officially attend for the first time.
The Communists also vehemently denounced a move by the ruling United Russia Party to eject lawmaker Gennady Gudkov of the left-leaning Just Russia Party from parliament and strip him of his immunity.
United Russia accuses Gudkov, a former KGB officer who’s a prominent protest supporter, of engaging in business activities forbidden by his parliamentary post. He denies the charge, saying it’s a political reprisal for his outspoken stance.
He and his son Dmitry, also a legislator from Just Russia, have responded by publishing what they say is evidence United Russia is illegally engaged in business.
Gudkov’s fate is set to be decided by a vote on Friday in the 450-seat State Duma, where United Russia holds a slim majority.
Commentator Oleg Kashin of the influential Kommersant daily speculated Gudkov’s two allies from A Just Russia and another outcast from the Communist Party could also soon be expelled from parliament, criticizing the possibility by saying, “Now United Russia itself is the court.”
The two Gudkovs and colleague Ilya Ponomaryov were the main instigators of an unprecedented parliamentary filibuster that failed to derail a bill seen as part of the legislative crackdown on the opposition. Passed in June, it increased fines for protesters deemed to have caused injury to people or damage to property by a factor of more than 120.
The State Duma has since recriminalized slander, required NGOs receiving foreign funding to brand themselves “foreign agents” and passed a bill regulating the internet that prompted criticism from Google and other online giants.
Putin defended the internet law as necessary to protect Russian children in an interview with the Kremlin-funded English-language television channel RT last week.
"So is it true that other countries don’t have laws that ban child pornography, including on the internet?" he asked. “If we talk about what some call a clampdown... we should clarify what we’re talking about. If we understand it as a simple requirement for everyone, including the opposition, to comply with Russian law, then this requirement will be consistently enforced.”
More from GlobalPost: Vanity in Vladivostok
The authorities’ crackdown has included charges against Alexei Navalny, a leading opposition figure and anti-corruption campaigner, of embezzling half a million dollars from state coffers. He could face up to 10 years behind bars.
More than 10 activists charged with taking part in mass disturbances during the May protest against Putin’s inauguration remain in jail. Some also reportedly face up to 10 years in prison.
One of them — whose lawyer says he was arrested half an hour before the crime he allegedly committed is said to have taken place — has appealed to the European Court of Human Rights.
Investigators have summoned for questioning at least three other opposition lawyers who defended the Pussy Riot activists sentenced to two years in prison last month about their involvement in the May protest.
A state television report by a journalist well known for scathing attacks against Kremlin critics claimed this week that the exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky backed the female punk rock group to destabilize society. The program, titled "Provocateurs," said Berezovsky doled out large funds to international celebrities to support the band.
On Wednesday, however, Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev said the three female group members should be released, in what some believe to be a first move to end a case that has reverberated more than the Kremlin expected.On Thursday, as the Dallas Stars were getting ready to head into a possibly season-defining, or at least season-preserving, back-to-back set, Rich Peverley returned to the ice.
It wasn't a hard skate by any means - Peverley described it as "leisurely" - but it was a key step toward normalcy in a month that has turned his entire world upside down.
"I just put my skates on, and I wanted to shoot on our goalies," Peverley said at a press conference before Friday's game. "It was (a little hesitant) initially, but I think that all got wiped away real quick. Initially coming in (the American Airlines Center) too, that was tough because my last memories were of the ceiling pretty much. So I think I was really glad to overcome those really quick."
Thursday's skate was the first time Peverley had been on the ice since his terrifying collapse from sudden cardiac arrest at the AAC on March 10. He had a cardiac ablation last Monday with the goal of permanently correcting the cranky electrical pathway that caused his atrial fibrillation issues, the underlying heart condition that doctors theorize played a key role in the episode of ventricular fibrillation that caused the arrest.
As team physician Dr. Robert Dimeff described it, the ablation was designed to essentially short-circuit the bad electrical pathway and keep it from throwing the rest of the heart's electrical system out of balance. The procedure has a success rate of about 85 percent in otherwise young, healthy people, and it could be performed again if it is not successful this time around. Doctors won't know for a few months if Peverley is among that 85 percent.
For the moment, Peverley isn't ready to answer the question of if he'll ever play again, though it certainly sounds like that's his long-term plan if everything goes right.
"It's a question that I think I initially really wanted to know the answer to, and it's going to be a process of coming back," Peverley said. "The recovery process is going to take time. As cliche as it sounds, I've really learned in the past way that it really is day by day. I went on the ice yesterday, and ultimately my goal would be to come back if it was the right time."
As for the short-term recovery, it's going as smoothly as could be hoped. Peverley returned to Dallas two days after his procedure at the Cleveland Clinic and is slowing increasing his physical activity while recovering.
"He's still being monitored on a regular basis," Dimeff said.
"He's on medication to keep the heart rate slow. He's on medication for blood thinning, which is required after the procedure. At this point in time, we're really just ramping up his exercise intensity slowly and monitoring him closely."
Peverley said he remembered basically everything about the night of his collapse, though he needed a little memory jog to recall the final shift. When he came back to the bench, he said he felt like he was "seizing up" before he blacked out, and the next thing he knew, he was waking up on the floor in the hallway behind the benches.
Since that incident, he's heard from people around the hockey world, from former teammates to those who have been in similar situations. Jiri Fischer reached out to Jim Nill and eventually was able to chat with Peverley, and Stephane Robidas helped connect Peverley with a player who went through a similar event in Europe.
And like anyone involved in a near-death situation, it has made Peverley think about things a little bit differently.
"I think you appreciate life." Peverley said. "I have a beautiful family and two kids and a wife. Initially, you do think about if you weren't here for them, and that's kind of tough. I'm lucky to be here, and there's not a day that goes by that I'm not thankful for that."
His teammates were a huge help to his family in the days after the incident, including trading off the job of bringing meals over to the Peverley family. In turn, he's been back at the rink almost every day he can since being released from the hospital, trying to be there for his teammates in any way he can while not on the ice.
In fact, Friday's press conference was a way of getting the focus back on his teammates as well.
"If I say I hate it, then people are going to say, 'Great, he hates it,'" Peverley said with a chuckle when asked if he was uncomfortable with the fact that the incident placed him in such individual focus. "But I don't want the spotlight. I've never been that type... It's not something I'm searching for. I feel horrible for the team. I don't want this to be a sideshow. I know they're going for the playoffs. They're only a few points out. The focus should be on them and them trying to make the playoffs for the city, and I'm hoping that this can be put to rest and everyone can move on after this.
"I'm doing well now. I'm under great care, and I wish the team the best. And that's why I'm hoping to be there to support them. They've supported me."Study: Pittsburghers Wake Up Late & Grouchy
According to a new study by the makers of a bio-alarm clock app, people in Pittsburgh often wake up later than most and begin the day in a foul mood.
by richard cook
Photo: Antonio Mantero/Flickr Creative commons
How do you feel when you wake up? A new study suggests 'Burghers aren't at their best when their feet first hit the floor.
Sleep Cycle, which has a vested interest in such matters, studied data from more than 2-million people during the month of November and report that Pittsburgh led the nation with the latest wake-up time and in the worst wake-up mood.
Latest wake-up time:
Pittsburgh: 7:45 a.m. New York: 7:44 a.m. Raleigh: 7:42 a.m. Boston: 7:36 a.m. Philadelphia: 7:34 a.m.
Worst wake-up mood:
Pittsburgh Saint Paul Seattle Raleigh Albuquerque
The Sleep Cycle app uses a 30-minute alarm window that wakes you in your lightest sleep phase when, presumably, we are the least grouchy.According to Doody, doctors who offer INVOcell can cut the number of office visits for one round of treatment from eight (for traditional IVF) to two or three, which is a big deal for patients in underserved areas, especially in the southeastern and southwestern United States, who often must drive several hours to reach fertility clinics. That means there’s less work for staff who administer blood draws and ultrasounds and play phone tag with patients with updates after each visit. “Patients take less medication, and we’ve gotten better at dosing and predicting how they will respond so we can do less monitoring,” says Doody, who is also the president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, the organization that reports fertility clinics’ data to the government. “We’re not trying to get 10 to 15 eggs like with regular IVF. We just need six to eight eggs to get one or two good embryos to transfer.” His rationale: More eggs aren’t always better, and doctors should aim for a handful of quality eggs, rather than the larger quantity typically generated during regular IVF.
And because the embryos are grown in the mother’s body, there’s no need for lab staff to run costly incubators with extensive security systems around the clock, which also brings down the price.
The fact that INVOcell preserves some of the mystery of baby-making was a big selling point for Brittney Koch-Dowell, since she and her wife are depending on help from science to conceive. (They each plan to take a turn carrying a baby.) “We’re already using donor sperm, so this helped it feel more real and natural,” says Koch-Dowell, 37, a restaurant manager from Elsberry, Missouri, who’s scheduled to undergo the procedure this month. “I get to be the incubator. My body and my heat are producing the child.”
* * *
In some ways, the rationale behind INVOcell sounds so obvious. (“It’s like what’s old is new again,” quipped John Couvaras, a fertility doctor in Phoenix who’s helped four women conceive with the device.) Yet it took French embryologist Claude Ranoux nearly 30 years to fine-tune his invention, which has been available in Europe since 2008. Since the birth of the first “test-tube baby” in 1978, Ranoux had been fascinated by the idea of growing embryos inside the human body rather than in a petri dish. And he wasn’t impressed with the unreliable incubator at his workplace, the Cochin Hospital at Paris Descartes University. “I was forced to be an innovator because I had a bad machine,” says Ranoux.
So Ranoux rigged up a little portable incubator from plastic tubing. At first, he considered sewing it under the abdominal skin, but that would require two surgeries to implant and extract the device and risked causing an infection. Taping it under an armpit would provide a nice warm place, but he thought it would feel too uncomfortable over several days. He also considered securing it in the back of a patient’s mouth, but he didn’t want to risk shocking the embryos if she drank cold water or hot coffee. Besides, there was the chance she could accidentally swallow it.In the fourth quarter of Sunday night's Atlanta loss, Green Bay Packers linebacker A.J. Hawk was flagged for a 15-yard unnecessary roughness penalty after shoving Atlanta Falcons offensive lineman Joe Hawley to the ground. Or, for shoving him in retaliation. Hawley handled the "to the ground" stuff for himself, deploying a flop worthy of various other sports with which we're not familiar around these parts.
Hawk was furious, screaming at Atlanta's huddle after making a fierce tackle on the next play. After the game, he was still perturbed:
The guy went to the ground... I'm not that strong. I wish I was strong enough to do that.
via gif.mocksession.com
He's right. The bigger guy was off balance, but watch his feet.
Call it a heady play, if you like. It's not much different than, say, barking out a hard count in an attempt to get the defense to jump offsides. It's a move with no other goal but drawing a penalty. But it's nothing to be proud of, especially with the way Atlanta's beginning to be perceived around the league.
The Falcons have had a reputation as a -- shall we say -- aggressive team for a while now. Harvey Dahl was regularly listed among the league's dirtiest players, a scrum at the 2005 Falcons-Eagles game got multiple players ejected before kickoff and coach Mike Smith once popped former Bird DeAngelo Hall in the chest.
(The last one was justifiable, glorious and worth several contract extensions.)
But Dunta Robinson has been fined for helmet-to-helmet hits twice in the past two seasons and could've been dinged with another Sunday night, if refs had been so inclined. Roddy White sustained a personal foul after Matt Ryan was bumped while sliding. Multiple Packers players called out the way the Falcons play before, during and after the whistle, alleging cheapness and dirtiness and other conditions:
"Great teams don't indulge in the kind of cheap stuff the Falcons do," Raji said. "We're the champions and we play that way. We walk away from the stuff they pull.
Is it just frustration? Smith's Falcons have made their mark by playing careful, mistake-free football, but they do make a point of brawling through the whistle's last echo. When wins are racking up, that just looks like resolve and follow-through. But in tougher times, that same mindset too often translates into crap like this.After its initial announcement back in January, Sony is right on target with its intended “spring 2015” launch of PlayStation Music – its Spotify integration with PS3 and PS4 consoles. The update is now live for users across 41 major markets.
With PlayStation Music, you can stream music from Spotify and leave it playing in the background in the middle in of a game, creating a personal soundtrack of sorts. You can opt to play music from your Spotify account’s playlists, search for your favorite artists and albums, or browse through curated playlists from the Spotify team.
In our quick demo at the Spotify office in New York City, we could see that the transition between the game screen and PlayStation Music app was smooth. Just one click of a button brings up a settings menu to change the volume of music coming from Spotify so you can balance the perfect music-to-video-game sound ratio.
You can use the same button to skip or pause songs without ever leaving the game.
If you want to stay focused on the gaming experience before you, you can also pair your iOS or Android device with your PlayStation console and control music via Spotify Connect. This allows you or a friend to pair up a device with the console to easily adjust music in social settings, although it does require a Premium Spotify account.
PlayStation Music is now live in 41 markets, though Sony didn’t specify which markets were missing out on initial launch. The company said complications with bringing the technology to select countries limited the roll out, but it will continue to work on expanding this feature to all 58 markets Spotify services. Sony will provide the update to Xperia phones and tablets as well.
Read next: India wants to use more open-source software to build e-governance appsThe Earthiest planets in the universe (that we know of)
Last week, Rob told you how scientists announced that they'd found two Earth-like planets orbiting the star Kepler-62. One of those, Kepler-62e, now ranks as the most Earth-like exoplanet we've ever found. Of course, all of this is relative.
What I like about this chart is that it kind of shows you how "Earth-like" doesn't really mean, "Man, that is totally exactly like Earth." Instead, you should translate it more as, "Welp, this is about the closest to Earth that we've found so far." Even Kepler-62e, as you can see, is much larger than the Earth and Mars. And size matters when it comes to actual habitability. As does density — and we don't know what Kepler-62e is made of yet. It's also worth noting that #2 on this list, the infamous Gleise 581g, is really a planet candidate, rather than a planet. We aren't actually certain it exists, just yet.
Popular Science has a neat little breakdown explaining what life might be like on Kepler-62e, if we could go there. But it's worth keeping the context in mind on these Earth-like planets. Don't pack your bags just yet.1 of 6 View Caption
Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune John Evans (left) talks to Matt Owen after a meeting of the Phi chapter of the LDS fraternit Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune John Evans (left) talks to Matt Owen after a meeting of the Phi chapter of the LDS fraternit Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune John Evans, left, talks to Matt Owen after a meeting of the Phi chapter of the LDS fraternit Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune Members of the Phi chapter of the LDS fraternity, Sigma Gamma Chi, do a cheer at the end of Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune John Evans holds the gavel as he speaks during a meeting of the Phi chapter of the LDS frate Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune John Evans holds the gavel as he speaks during a meeting of the Phi chapter of the LDS frateFor 11 days, the giant white rabbit peacefully lolled on the grassy roof of a hangar at a former air base in northern Taiwan. But after the Taoyuan Land Art Festival ended on Sunday, the 82-foot-tall work by the Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman met a calamitous end.
As the bunny was being disassembled on Monday, it accidentally caught fire. The rabbit’s head and legs were destroyed, leaving only a charred torso, an ear and an arm behind. The authorities said a spark from a hoist or from chain saws probably started the fire, according to the local news media. No injuries were reported.
Photo
Mr. Hofman’s works have been widely popular in Taiwan. The Taoyuan festival saw nearly 2.5 million visitors, and in 2013 his yellow “Rubber Duck” attracted huge crowds while on display in three Taiwanese cities. That installation also had technical problems. While in Taoyuan for the 2013 festival, the duck burst as it was being inflated.
The rabbit was officially titled “Moon Rabbit” after a creature from Chinese mythology, a companion of the moon goddess Chang’e. “Hofman’s ‘Moon Rabbit’ has burned,” said the Apple Daily newspaper of Taiwan. “It’s gone back to find Chang’e for a chat.”Aaron Driver, who authorities fear might get involved in terrorist activity, says he had no choice but to agree to a peace bond.
"If I fought it, they would have added even more conditions than I'm already under," Driver told CBC News Tuesday at the Winnipeg courthouse, as he waited to sign paperwork at the clerk's office.
Driver will not go to trial. He is not facing criminal charges, but his lawyer and the Crown agreed to a peace bond to limit his activities.
During a court hearing Tuesday morning, the Crown said by agreeing to enter into the peace bond, Driver is "consenting or acknowledging that there are reasonable grounds to fear that he may participate, contribute — directly or indirectly — in the activity of a terrorist group."
Michelle Falk, executive director of Manitoba Association for Rights and Liberties, said consent in Driver's case is debatable because Driver would have faced additional restrictions on his freedom had he not agreed to the bond.
"We don't really think he had a choice in the matter," Falk said.
The peace bond does not require Driver to wear a GPS monitoring bracelet or undergo religious counselling — two conditions that Driver faced when he was released on bail in June.
Aaron Driver arrives at court in Winnipeg on July 7, 2015. (CBC) He will, however, have to continue living in Ontario, where he has been staying with his brother in recent months, and seek written permission to own any cellphones, computers or mobile devices. As well, he must stay off social media websites until the end of August.
The judge presiding over the case asked Driver in court if he understood and was prepared to abide by the conditions.
"Yes," he replied.
Driver's lawyer, Len Tailleur, said he worked out a deal with the Crown to eliminate some of the conditions.
"It's a compromise, but it's a fair compromise," Tailleur said.
"I got several conditions off — one, namely, [the] GPS device, an ankle bracelet around him."
Tailleur said GPS tracking bracelets are for high-risk convicted offenders, not for individuals like Driver who aren't facing criminal charges.
Falk worries Driver's case sets a "scary" precedent in Canada.
"Without having been charged with a crime Aaron Driver has been unjustly subjected to some pretty significant restrictions on his freedom and human rights and we don't think this is something that should be allowed in Canada. You need to be proven guilty of a crime before you are being held accountable in this way," Falk said.
Tweeted support for ISIS
Driver caught the attention of CSIS, Canada's spy agency, in October 2014 when he was tweeting support for the militant group ISIS under the alias Harun Abdurahman.
He has also said the attack in October 2014 on Parliament Hill by Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was justified. However, Driver has said he doesn't think Canadians should fear him.
"I wouldn't |
aic of America” / e pluribus unum moment in the speech.] We all enjoy the same glorious freedoms. And we all salute the same great American flag.
And whether a child is born in the urban sprawl of Detroit or the windswept plains of Nebraska, they look at the same night sky. They fill their heart with the same dreams, and they are infused with the breath of life by the same almighty creator. [If you’re a speech person, you’ll be thinking of Richard Nixon’s 1971 “lift of a driving dream” State of the Union speech about now.]
So to all Americans, in every city near and far, small and large, from mountain to mountain, from ocean to ocean, hear these words: You will never be ignored again.
Your voice, your hopes, and your dreams will define our American destiny. And your courage, goodness, and love will forever guide us along the way.
Together, we will make America strong again. We will make America wealthy again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again.
And yes, together, we will make America great again. [This is of course the way Trump’s standard campaign speeches always ended. I’m not aware of any precedent of using campaign rally slogans as the closing for the speech.]
Thank you. God bless you. And God bless America. [Before Ronald Reagan, presidential speeches virtually never ended with these words. Since Reagan, they virtually always end this way. You can look it up. Maybe after Trump, all speeches will have to end MAGA. And I can’t end without noting that a book I wrote during the U.S.-Japan trade-war era was called “More Like Us: Making America Great Again.” Sigh.]Kari Barnett Bollig has Stage 4 breast cancer, which has spread throughout Kari’s bones and into her lungs. She isn’t sure how long she has to live. Her story, told by her friend Dana Hunsinger Benbow of the Indianapolis Star, details a letter she sent to Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning and his heartfelt gesture:
“I have followed Peyton Manning forever, especially being an Indiana girl,” Bollig said. “I just thought, ‘Well shoot. I’m going to write him a letter and tell him how much he inspires me, not just because he’s a football player, but for what he does off the field.” “It was very personal. It was very heartfelt and I never thought anything of it other than I wrote it and sent it. I didn’t even know he would get it.”
Manning did get it, and he responded by flying Bollig to Denver for the Broncos’ season opener against the Baltimore Ravens.
He gave Bollig and her husband tickets to the game, on-field passes, and spent time with her after a team photo shoot. Bollig recounts in the story how Manning chose to introduce himself to her.
“It was so sweet because he shakes my hand and says, ‘I’m Peyton Manning.’ It was cute. It was kind of like, ‘I know who you are Peyton.’ ”
Manning left her with by saying “Keep fighting, Kari. I’ll be praying for you.”Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The edible mauve stinger, Pelagia noctiluca, is found in all the world's warm and temperate oceans
Jellyfish numbers have been increasing rapidly in the Mediterranean and one species that has long been a hazard for bathers there - the mauve stinger - is increasingly being seen around the British Isles. Now one marine biologist says if we can't beat them we should eat them.
I'm hovering in a makeshift kitchen, watching one of Italy's most eminent marine biologists gleefully playing chef. Prof Silvio Greco is focused on the bubbling contents of a large pot.
Dressed up for the part in chef's whites, traditional hat and red apron, the sustainable conservation expert is perfect for the role.
"In this water I have put lemon juice and vinegar. After boiling for a few minutes I will plunge it into this ice," he gestures, explaining how the hot water both sterilises, getting rid of bacteria, and destroys the stinging poison.
What for some might be food hell has got my tastebuds jumping with curious excitement: we're about to eat jellyfish. For Greco, it's not the first time.
"I love seafood," he beams. "Jellyfish remind me of oysters. When you eat them you experience an explosion of the sea on your tongue. They are, after all, 90% seawater."
Image copyright Alessandro Vargiu / Archivio Slow Food Image caption Professor Greco swaps his laboratory for the kitchen as he cooks jellyfish
Today he's enlisted the professional help of restaurant chef Marco Visciola, who confesses he's never cooked jellyfish before. He's going to fry it in a tempura batter made of potato, wheat and rice flours, mixed with sparkling water. "No salt?" I ask. "Zero," he tells me. "The jellyfish already has the salty flavour of the sea, so to bring out its flavour I've left the batter neutral."
Now man must be the new predator of jellyfish Silvio Greco, Marine biologist
This isn't some perverse chef's challenge, but part of a campaign that Greco is promoting at the Slow Fish festival. Held every two years at Genoa's porto antico the event encourages sustainable fishing and responsible consumption. There are at least four times as many jellyfish in the Mediterranean now as there were in 2004, with global climate change, pollution, and overfishing mostly to blame. And the message this cooking demo is sending out is: if you can't defeat them, eat them.
"The sea is full of them and it's a big problem for biodiversity," says Silvio Greco, describing jellyfish as rampant, opportunistic species that immediately take over any empty space in the water. He explains how their spread is devastating marine food chains and ecosystems, and how illegal fishing of natural jellyfish predators like tuna and turtles has left the coast clear for them to multiply. "Now man," he concludes, "must be the new predator of jellyfish."
It's an idea the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization is encouraging too. For years, fishermen have been finding their nets increasingly burdened with unwanted jellyfish that they simply throw back into the sea. Silvio Greco hopes this will change and says that sustainability aside, jellyfish is actually good for you: rich in protein and collagen, low in calories, and fat-free.
Image copyright Alessandro Vargiu / Archivio Slow Food Image caption Jellyfish is rich in protein and collagen
At Slow Fish I discover the "eat it to beat it" approach isn't limited to the Mediterranean. There's a Caribbean delegation of fishers, researchers and marine biologists here to pool ideas on how to fight their worst invasive species: the lionfish. They are trying to get it on to menus from Mexico to Honduras, Costa Rica to Barbados. Its tender meat, which apparently tastes like snapper, certainly sounds more appetising than jellyfish.
But the jellyfish cooking demo is, without a doubt, the biggest crowd-puller of the entire festival. As the tray of fresh medusa fritta is passed around, eager fingers grab the piping hot morsels. I select my piece. The tempura is exquisite, cracking seductively between my teeth. I'd expected the jellyfish to be chewy like calamari, but it's squidgier. It might just be because I'm hungry but I really like it.
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A young woman exclaims it's "surprisingly nice" while a Taiwanese lady tells me jellyfish is a common antipasto back home and she was curious to see what the Italians would do with it. The man beside me is unimpressed. "The batter's nice but the jellyfish tastes of nothing and it's slippery," he grumbles. I ask a three-year-old what she thinks. "Yummy or yucky?" "Yummy!" she grins at me, chewing happily. She was probably hungry too.
Image copyright Alessandro Vargiu / Archivio Slow Food Image caption A curious crowd tries the jellyfish tempura (medusa fritta, in Italian)
Marco Visciola has also made a boiled jellyfish salad with rice vinegar, sesame oil, carrot and cucumber - a traditional recipe a Japanese colleague gave him. Again I'm impressed, although I think jellyfish's neutral taste - or lack of taste - could lend itself to any decisive flavours.
Image copyright Alessandro Vargiu / Archivio Slow Food
But Marco's sold. "For me, it was a new experience and there were a lot of curious people," he enthuses, adding that he now plans to put locally caught jellyfish on his restaurant's summer menu. "It's a novelty a chef can offers diners. I think it will become popular."
I'm not entirely convinced. But if you never want another seaside holiday to be ruined by a coastal jellyfish invasion, perhaps it really is time to stop fretting and start frying.
Join the conversation - find us on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.Insanity! A Muslim Imam in Virginia claims girls have to have their genitals mutilated so they won’t be “hypersexual”…Shaker Elsayed, Imam of Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque in Fairfax County, VA, Endorses FGM: It Prevents Girls from Becoming Hypersexually Active
THE LANDMARK FGM CASE IN DETROIT HAS GAINED NATIONAL ATTENTION:
Female Genital Mutilation is horrendous and literally scars a young girl forever. It’s a tradition in the Muslim world to keep the girl from becoming sexually promiscuous…Idiotic reasoning! The young girl’s outer genitalia is removed in the severest practice where only a small hole is left so the girl can urinate. We’d like to know where the so-called feminists are and why they don’t cry out in protest for these poor young girls. Where is the National Organization for Women aka NOW? Shame on them for not speaking out against this!
Two Detroit doctors are in hot water for participating in this terrible practice…You won’t believe it but the prison sentence for this is just 5 years maximum! Can you believe that?
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Trending: OSCARS 2019: A Hot Mess Of Leftist Politics and Activism On Display [Video]
Here’s an update on the facts in the case:
The Detroit Free Press reported Thursday that documents obtained by the paper show much more serious mutilation of Dr. Jumana Nagarwala’s alleged victims’ genitals than the doctor admitted to.
The arrests of Dr. Nagarwala and two others last week represents the first federal female genital mutilation(FGM) investigation in United States history. FGM is common in the Islamic world, particularly in Africa. According to UNICEF, 98% of Somali girls and 87% of Egyptians have endured the procedure. FGM involves removing varying amounts of the victim’s — usually a pre-pubescent girl — clitoris, labia majoria, and labia minora. In its most extreme form, the victim is “infibulated,” having virtually all her external genitalia removed and being sown up, leaving her with only a tiny hole from which to urinate and menstruate.
Nagarwala’s attorney, Shannon Smith, claimed in her initial court hearing that no cutting of the seven-year-old alleged victims took place and that excess skin was simply scrapped off to be buried in a religious ceremony. The Free Press, however, reports that documents they reviewed show the injuries to the two Minnesota girls’ genitals were “much more severe” than Nagarwala is claiming.
Previously unheard of in the United States, the criminal complaints against the three suspects in this Michigan-based conspiracy to commit FGM — Nagarwala, Dr. Fakhruddin Attar, and his wife, Farida Attar — describe them as members of a “particular religious and cultural community.” That community has since been revealed as the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim sect, a branch of Shi’ite Islam popular in India, Pakistan, and East Africa. The worldwide leader of that sect, Syedna Mufaddal Saifuddin, has repeatedly called for the tradition of FGM to continue, describing it, according to a State Department report, as an “act of religious purity” and “a religious obligation for all women and girls.”
According to the complaints, the alleged victims in this case were brought by their parents, in what was described to them as a “special girls trip,” all the way from Minnesota to Dr. Attar’s Burhani Medical Center in Livonia, Michigan. The girls, who are not related, were allegedly told the cutting was needed to “get the germs out” and that they were not to tell anyone about what happened to them.
One of the victims told the FBI she screamed in pain as she Dr. Nargawala operated between her legs and that she was barely able to walk as she left the clinic. According to the complaint, Doctors working with the FBI found that both seven-year-olds’ genitals were “abnormal looking” with “scar tissue” and “small healing lacerations.”
Authorities believe many more than these two girls have been mutilated by this suburban Detroit FGM operation. Evidence suggests girls have been being brought to Michigan from around the midwest to undergo the gruesome operation since at least 2005. According to the complaint, several Michigan girls have complained to authorities that they were mutilated by Dr. Nargawala in Dr. Attar’s clinic.
Authorities believe Nargawala came on weekends to the Burhani clinic to perform FGM separately from her weekday job as an emergency room doctor at Detriot’s Henry Ford hospital. In her interview with the FBI, Farida Attar, the clinic owner’s wife, claimed Nargawala came to their clinic to see six to nine girls a year.
The defendants will face up to five years in federal prison for each count of FGM in this first case, in a wider push to eradicate the barbaric Islamic practice from America.
Via: Pam GellarWelcome back to our Unity 4.3 2D Tutorial series!
In the first part of the series, you started making a fun game called Zombie Conga. You learned how to add sprites, work with sprite sheets, configure the game view, and animate and move sprites using scripts.
In this second part of the series, you will re-animate the zombie (he is undead, after all), this time using Unity’s built-in animation system. You’ll also add several animations to the cat sprite.
By the time you’re done, you’ll have a great understanding of Unity’s powerful animation system, and Zombie Conga will get its groove on!
Getting Started
First download this starter project, which contains everything from the first installment in this tutorial series, Unity 4.3 2D Tutorial: Getting Started. If you really want to, you can continue with your old project, but it’s better to use this starter project so you’re sure to be in the right place.
Unzip the file and open your scene by double-clicking ZombieConga/Assets/Scenes/CongaScene.unity:
While these assets are the same as the ones you made in Unity 4.3 2D Tutorial: Getting Started, this version of the project has been organized into several folders: Animations, Scenes, Scripts and Sprites. This will help keep things tidy as you add assets to the project.
You’ll store the animations you create in this tutorial in the Animations folder; the other folders have names that clearly describe their contents.
Note: If your folders show up as icons rather than small folders, you can drag the slider in the bottom right of the window to change to the view you see here. I will switch back and forth between the icon view and compressed view in this tutorial, as is convenient.
[spoiler title=”Want to learn how to create folders yourself?”]The folders in your Unity project are nothing more than directories on your computer’s disk.
You can create folders from within Unity in one of three ways:
Choose Assets\Create\Folder from Unity’s menu. This will make a new folder in whatever folder you have selected in the Project browser, or in the top-level Assets folder if nothing is selected. Click Create in the Project browser and choose Folder from the popup menu, shown in the following image: This will make a new folder in whatever folder you have selected in the Project browser, or in the top-level Assets folder if nothing is selected. Right-click in the Project browser and choose Create\Folder from the popup menu to create a new folder in whatever folder you right-clicked.
Keep in mind that when you have multiple folders, Unity adds any new assets you create to whatever folder you have selected in the Project browser, or to the top-level Assets folder if nothing is selected. However, you can always drag assets between folders if you want to rearrange them.
[/spoiler]
If it has been a while since you completed the first part of this tutorial series, then you may not remember the state of the project. Run the scene now to refresh your memory.
Does the zombie walk toward where you click? Yep.
Does the zombie wander off the screen? Annoying, but yep. You’ll fix that later in this series.
Does the cat sit on the beach, more lifeless than even a zombie? Completely unacceptable! Time for some animation.
Sprite Animations
In the first part of this series, you animated the zombie’s walk cycle using a script named ZombieAnimator.cs. That was meant to demonstrate how to access the SpriteRenderer from within your scripts, which you’ll find can be useful at times. However, here you’ll replace that script to use Unity’s great built-in support for animations.
Select zombie in the Hierarchy and remove the ZombieAnimator (Script) component in the Inspector. To do so, click the gear icon in the upper right of the component and then choose Remove Component from the menu that appears, as shown below:
Note: When testing, sometimes it’s useful to try different things. Rather than remove a component and then replace it later, you can temporarily disable it by unchecking the box to the left of its name, as shown below: Of course, disabling components is not just for testing purposes. There will be times when you want to enable or disable components at runtime, which you can do from within your scripts by setting the component’s enabled flag. You won’t be using ZombieAnimator.cs anymore in this tutorial, so removing it from zombie is the cleaner option.
Run your scene just to make sure rigor mortis has set in. That is, make sure your zombie isn’t moving those limbs!
To start creating animations, open the Animation view by choosing Window\Animation. As you can see in the following image, you can also add this view to your layout by choosing Animation from the Add Tab menu connected to any other tab:
Arrange your interface so that you can see the contents of the Animation view and the Project browser at the same time. For example, it might look something like this:
Inside the Project browser, expand zombie to reveal its Sprites, then select zombie in the Hierarchy.
Your interface should look something like this:
Because you selected zombie in the Hierarchy, the Animation view allows you to edit the zombie’s animations. Currently, it has none.
currently selected GameObject, you might be surprised to find out that it usually continues to operate on the most recently selected GameObject. Note: While you would probably expect the Animation view to work with theselected GameObject, you might be surprised to find out that itcontinues to operate on theselected GameObject. That means that later, when you select a Sprite asset in the Project browser and Unity clears the Hierarchy’s selection, the Animation view will still operate on the zombie’s animations. This will continue to be the case until you select something else in the Hierarchy. The term “usually” was used earlier because if you select certain types of assets in the Project browser, such as Prefabs, the controls in the Animation view all disable themselves rather than allow you to continue working on your animations.
Introducing the Animation View
Before creating any animations, it will help if you understand the following three terms:
Animation Clip: A Unity asset that defines a specific piece of animation. Animation Clips can define simple animations, like a blinking light, or complex ones, such as an attack animation for a seven-headed hydra. Later you’ll learn how you can combine Animation Clips to produce even more complex animations.
Curve: Changing the values of one or more properties over time is what produces an animation, and Unity refers to each of these animated properties as a curve. Unity uses this term because you can graph the property’s values over time, and lines on a graph are referred to as curves, even if they’re straight. Mathematicians, am I right?
Keyframe: Rather than define values for every frame of an animation, you will set values at certain points in time and let Unity fill in the gaps by interpolating the values between those points. The points along a curve that you define explicitly are called keyframes, because they are the “frames” in the animation that are “key” to calculating the final result.
With those terms defined, it will now be easier to discuss the Animation view. You use this window to create Animation Clips associated with a specific GameObject. Each clip will consist of one or more curves, and each curve will consist of one or more keyframes.
The following image highlights the different parts of the Animation view, and the list after it provides the names used in this tutorial to refer to these areas, along with a brief description of each:
Control bar: This area contains various controls you’ll use when working on Animation Clips. These will be described as needed. Curves List: The list of curves affected by the current Animation Clip, as well as a button for adding a new property curve. Timeline: A view of the animation curves, showing their values over time. The contents of this area will be different depending on the current view mode (see item #4). In Dope Sheet mode, it will contain each curve’s keyframes, laid out horizontally over time. This functions similarly to what traditional animators use in that it is mainly useful for judging the timing of important moments in your animation. However, in Curves mode, the timeline graphs the actual value of the property over the duration of the animation, providing a visual indication of the curve’s values at any point in time. View mode buttons: These two buttons allow you to switch the timeline’s view mode between Dope Sheet and Curves modes. This tutorial utilizes Dope Sheet mode exclusively, but each mode can be useful. Generally, you will set up your keyframes in Dope Sheet mode and then use Curves mode if you need to fine tune how the values are interpolated between your keyframes.
Don’t worry if any of the above descriptions don’t seem clear – the Animation view’s various components will be described in detail throughout this tutorial.
Inside the Project browser, click zombie_0 and then shift+click zombie_3, resulting in a selection containing all four zombie Sprites, as shown below:
Now drag the selected Sprites over the Animation view. A green icon with a plus sign in it will appear, as shown below:
When you see the + icon, release the mouse button, which will display a dialog titled Create New Animation. This dialog simply allows you to name and choose a location in which to save your new Animation Clip.
Enter ZombieWalk in the field labeled Save As, choose the Animations directory, and click Save. The following image shows the completed dialog:
Note: One important point is that the dialog included this text: “Create a new animation for the game object ‘zombie'”. You can only create Animation Clips for GameObjects in your scene. That is, you cannot select a Prefab in the Project browser and create animations for it, but you can create animations for an instance of a Prefab that you’ve added to the Hierarchy and then apply those changes back to the Prefab.
When the dialog closes, Unity has done several things for you behind the scenes:
Added a new Animator component to zombie. Unity plays Animation Clips on a GameObject through this Animator component. You’ll learn more about it in the next part of this tutorial.
Created a new Animation Clip called ZombieWalk and set up the Animation view to edit it. As you can see below, the Animation view’s clip drop-down menu, in the view’s control bar, now indicates that ZombieWalk is the current Animation Clip:
Created a new Animator Controller, saved it in the same Animations folder into which you saved ZombieWalk, and assigned it to zombie‘s Animator. You can see it in the Controller field in the zombie’s Animator component here:
The Animator Controller is what decides which Animation Clip the Animator should play at any given time and will be covered in the next part of the tutorial.
Colored some interface elements red. For example, the scene controls shown below: The other red components are covered in more detail later, but for now, just know that whenever you see a red field or UI component in Unity, you’re currently recording an Animation Clip.
You can only work on one clip at a time in the Animation view. Clicking the clip drop-down allows you to select which Animation Clip to edit from all of the clips associated with a specific GameObject. As you can see in the following image, the zombie currently only has one clip – ZombieWalk.
In the above image, the check mark next to ZombieWalk indicates that this is the current clip selection, which becomes more useful when you have multiple clips in the list. The above image also shows that the menu includes an option labeled [Create New Clip], which allows you to create a new clip associated with the same GameObject. You’ll use this later when animating the cat.
The screenshot below shows how dragging the Sprites into the Animation view automatically added a curve labeled zombie : Sprite:
This means that this animation affects the sprite field of the zombie’s SpriteRenderer component. Sometimes, if the property name is not obvious based on the components attached to the object, the property name will include the name of the component as well. For example, if you wanted to animate the enabled state of the SpriteRenderer, it would be labeled zombie : SpriteRenderer.enabled.
Select zombie in the Hierarchy (or select zombie : Sprite in the Animation view’s curves list, which automatically selects zombie in the Hierarchy), and then look at the Sprite Renderer component in the Inspector. As the following image shows, the Sprite field is tinted red. This not only indicates that you are recording an Animation Clip, but that the clip you are recording specifically affects this field.
In the Animation view’s timeline, you can see that Unity added four keyframes to the Sprite curve. If you can’t see the frames as clearly as you can in the following image, try zooming in on the timeline by scrolling with your mouse wheel or by performing whatever scroll operation your input device supports.
Along the top of the timeline you’ll see labels that consist of a number of seconds followed by a colon and then a frame number.
Values start counting at zero, so 0:02 indicates the third frame of the first second of animation. I wanted to use 1:02 as the example, but I was afraid the phrase “third frame of the second second” might be confusing. ;]
As you can see, Unity placed the four sprites at 0:00, 0:01, 0:02 and 0:03.
Before doing anything else, try running the clip by clicking the Play button in the Animation view’s control bar.
Be sure that the Animation view is visible along with either the Scene view or the Game view so you can see the zombie strutting his stuff. Or, to put it more accurately, watch as he apparently gets electrocuted.
If that were Unity’s idea of good animation, you’d have to resurrect that script you removed earlier. Fortunately, this isn’t a problem with Unity; it’s just a problem with ZombieWalk‘s configuration.
Click the Animation view’s Play button again to stop the preview.
Note: While previewing an Animation Clip, the Animation view must be visible. If you have it open as part of a tabbed layout and you switch away from it to another tab, the animation will immediately pause.
You may recall from the first installment of this series that the zombie’s walk cycle ran at ten frames per second. However, if you look at the field labeled Samples in the Animation view’s control bar, you’ll see it is set to 60:
The Samples field defines an Animation Clip’s frame rate and it defaults to 60 frames per second. Change this value to ten, and notice how the timeline’s labels now go from 0:00 to 0:09 before moving to 1:00:
Preview your animation again by clicking the Animation view’s Play button. You should see the zombie moving at a much more reasonable pace:
The zombie is looking better already, but he’s not quite his old self yet. That’s because the animation you defined only includes the first four frames of the walk cycle, so when it loops it jumps from zombie_3 back to zombie_0. You need to add some more frames to smooth this transition.
Select only zombie_2 in the Project browser and drag it over the Animation view. Position your cursor inside the zombie : Sprite row in the timeline, just to the right of the last keyframe, and release your mouse button, as shown below:
You should now have keyframes at 0:00 through 0:04. However, depending on your zoom level, it’s pretty easy to accidentally place the new keyframe too far to the right. For example:
If this occurs, simply drag the keyframe to the left using the small diamond above the curve, as shown below:
Now repeat the previous process to add zombie_1 to the end of the animation, which is frame 0:05. Your Animation view now looks like this:
Test your animation again by pressing the Play button in the Animation view. Your zombie is finally strutting his stuff.
With your Animation Clip complete, run your scene and make sure the zombie still moves around properly while animating.
You’ve successfully replaced the zombie’s script-based animation with an Animation Clip. That may have seemed like a lot of effort, but it was really just a lot of words describing the UI. If you break down what you actually did, you basically dragged some sprites into the Animation view and set a frame rate. Darn, now I’m kicking myself for not just writing that in the first place.
easier way to create and animate the zombie. Note: If you didn’t already have a zombie GameObject in your Scene, you could have tried an evenway to create and animate the zombie. If you simply select a group of Sprites in the Project browser and drag them directly into the Scene or Hierarchy views, Unity does everything you saw earlier, like creating an Animation Clip, an Animator and an Animator Controller. However, it also creates a GameObject in the Scene and connects everything to it! I’m guessing that by Unity 5.0, you’ll just have to drag your Sprites into the Scene and Unity will automatically create the correct gameplay based on the art style. You heard it here first!
Ok, you’ve gotten your feet wet with animations in Unity, but there is still plenty left to learn. Fortunately, you’ve got a perfectly good cat to experiment on just sitting there.
Animating Other Properties
Unity can animate things other than Sprites. Specifically, Unity can animate values for any of the following types:
Bool
Float
Color
Vector2
Vector3
Vector4
Quaternion
Object Reference
Note: The above list was copied verbatim from Unity’s documentation here
For the zombie, you won’t modify anything other than the Sprite, but over the lifetime of a cat, it will move through the following sequence of animations:
There are actually five different Animation Clips at work here:
Rather than have cats just appear on the beach, you’ll animate them in from nothingness.
The cats will wiggle back and forth to attract the zombie’s attention.
When the zombie touches a cat, the cat will turn into a zombie itself. You’ll transition it from white to green to give it a nice, undead look.
By combining this simple scaling animation with forward motion, it will give the impression that the cats are happily hopping along in their conga line…of dooooooooom!
When the old lady hits your player’s zombie, you’ll remove some cats from the scene. Rather than just make them disappear, you’ll spin them into nothingness, signifying their mad descent into wherever kitties go after they die after having already died once. Poor little twice-dead kitties.
You’ll produce each of those animations without any additional artwork. Instead, you’ll animate the cat’s scale, rotation and color properties.
Create the Cat’s Animation Clips
Select cat in the Hierarchy. Remember, Unity decides where to attach new Animation Clips based on the most recent Hierarchy selection.
In the Animation view, choose [Create New Clip] from the clip drop-down menu in the control bar, shown below:
In the dialog that appears, name the new clip CatSpawn, select the Animations directory, and click Save.
Unity automatically adds an Animator component to the cat when you create the first Animation Clip. As you make each of the following clips, Unity will automatically associate them with this Animator.
Repeat the above process to create four more clips, one for each of the other animations you’re going to make. Name them CatWiggle, CatZombify, CatConga and CatDisappear.
The Animation view’s clip drop-down menu now contains all five clips, as shown below:
before you create the clips. Note: When creating a new Animation Clip, the dialog Unity displays defaults to showing whatever folder you are currently viewing in the Project browser. You can save yourself from having to repeatedly choose the Animations folder in this dialog by navigating to the Animations folder in the Project browseryou create the clips. Of course, if you created the clips before you read this note for some silly reason, like because those instructions came before this note, well then one of us made a serious mistake in our order of operations, didn’t one of us?
Adding Curves Automatically
This tutorial will show a few different techniques for setting up Animation Clips. For the zombie’s walk cycle, you dragged Sprites into the Animation view and Unity created all the necessary components automatically. This time, you’ll start with an empty clip to edit and let Unity add the curves for you.
Select cat in the Hierarchy, then select CatSpawn from the Animation view’s clip drop-down menu to begin working on this clip, as shown below:
To enter recording mode, press the Record button in the Animation view, shown below:
Once again, Unity indicates that you are now in recording mode by tinting red the Animation view’s Record button, the scene controls, and the checkbox next to the cat’s Animator component. The Record button while recording is shown below:
For the cat’s spawning animation, you simply want to scale the cat from zero to one. In the Inspector, set the Scale values for X and Y to 0. A 2D object’s scale along its z-axis has no effect, so you can ignore the Scale’s Z value.
Your Transform component in the Inspector now looks like this:
As soon as you adjusted one of the Scale fields, they all turned red in the Inspector to indicate that you are currently recording an animation for the cat that contains a Scale curve. Unity automatically added a curve to your Animation Clip named cat : Scale, shown below:
Look in either your Scene or Game views and you will see that your cat just disappeared!
Technically, the cat is still located right where it was, but without a width and height, you can’t see it. That’s because while recording an animation, your Scene and Game views display the GameObject as it appears in the frame currently selected in the Animation view. But what frame is selected in the Animation view?
Take a look at the Animation view’s timeline, which now includes a single keyframe at 0:00 on the cat : Scale curve, as shown below:
The vertical red line you see in the above image is the scrubber. Its position indicates your current frame in the animation. Any changes you make will be recorded at this frame, creating a new keyframe there if necessary. Also, as was previously mentioned, the Scene and Game views will display your GameObject as it will appear during this frame of animation.
The scrubber appears whenever you are in recording mode, as well as while previewing your animation with the Animation view’s Play button.
The Animation view’s control bar includes a current frame field that indicates the frame at which the scrubber is located. As you can see below, it is currently at frame zero:
Type 15 in the frame field to move the scrubber to frame 15. Because this clip is set to run at 60 frames per second, the scrubber is now at 0:15, as the following image shows:
Note: You can move the scrubber by setting its position in the control bar’s frame field like you just did, or by positioning it directly in the timeline view. To position the scrubber directly, simply click and/or drag in the upper area of the timeline, where the frame labels are displayed.
In the Inspector, set the cat’s X and Y values for Scale to 1, as shown below:
Press the Play button in the Animation view to preview your animation. Inside the Game or Scene views, watch your cat scale up to full size and then disappear, over and over again.
Click the Record button in the Animation view to exit recording mode.
Note: Besides using the Animation view’s Record button, Unity will also exit recording mode if you save or play the current scene.
Play your scene and notice that the cat still flashes continuously in and out of existence. Hmm, that wasn’t just a feature of the Animation view’s Preview mode?
Everyone loves a pulsating cat, but that’s not really what you were going for. The problem is that Animation Clips in Unity loop by default, but this should really be a one shot deal.
Select CatSpawn in the Project browser to view the Animation Clip’s properties in the Inspector. Uncheck the box labeled Loop Time to disable looping |
example.txt git commit -m 'example commit' git push origin mob
Note that it’s not strictly necessary to fetch with the git protocol, the ssh protocol can also be used for fetching.
Pushing to the global mob branch with https
In order to push with https, several things will be needed first:
The mob user certificate This can be fetched from here and will be assumed to be saved to /tmp/rorcz_mob_user.pem in the push example. cd /tmp && curl -O https://repo.or.cz/rorcz_mob_user.pem The mob user private key This can be fetched from here and will be assumed to be saved to /tmp/rorcz_mob_key.pem in the push example. Normally, of course, private keys are never shared, but as described above, since everyone is allowed to push to the mob branch the private key for the mob user must be shared with everyone. cd /tmp && curl -O https://repo.or.cz/rorcz_mob_key.pem
With the prerequisites out of the way, here’s the mob ssh example redone to use the smart http protocol:
cd /tmp git clone -b mob https://repo.or.cz/mobexample.git cd mobexample git config http.sslCert /tmp/rorcz_mob_user.pem git config http.sslKey /tmp/rorcz_mob_key.pem git remote set-url --push origin https://repo.or.cz/mobexample.git echo 'It worked!' >> example.txt git add example.txt git commit -m 'example commit' git push origin mob If using git version 1.8.5 or later, the http.sslCert and http.sslKey values can be set just once in the Git global configuration file so they apply only to a specific URL (such as https://repo.or.cz ).
Note that it’s not strictly necessary to fetch with the http protocol, the https protocol can also be used for fetching. However, if using a version of Git older than version 1.8.5, it can be a bother to get the two certificates and the key set properly without a project-specific place to configure them yet (this is not a problem with Git version 1.8.5 or later). See the output of git config help for more information about configuring certificates and keys.
Pushing to the personal mob area
Pushing should be configured as though your user had push permission to the project.
Any supported push URL may be used.
Here’s a mob.$user example using the ssh protocol:
# assume that $HOME/.ssh/config has been set up to automatically provide # the ssh key for user alice when pushing to example.com git clone ssh://example.com/someproject.git cd someproject # this is the single personal mob ref technique git checkout -b mob.alice git push -u origin mob.alice
It’s just that simple.
Here’s a mob_$user/... ref example using the https protocol:
# assume that git config http.sslCert and http.sslKey have been properly # set up to provide the user authentication certificate for user bob # when pushing to example.com git clone https://example.com/someproject.git cd someproject # this is the multiple personal mob ref technique git checkout -b mob_bob/master git push -u origin mob_bob/master # additional refs may be pushed to mob_bob/...
Of course the ssh protocol can be used with the multiple ref technique and the https protocol can be used with the single ref technique.
Cloning the personal mob area
Since the personal mob area is intentionally sequestered under refs/mob/ a little extra work is needed to clone from a personal mob ref to start with.
This example will clone both user alice and user bob’s personal mob areas, merge them and then push them to user eve’s personal mob area.
# assume that $HOME/.ssh/config has been set up to automatically provide # the ssh key for user eve when pushing to example.com git clone -n ssh://example.com/someproject.git cd someproject # optionally we may first check which personal mob refs are available git ls-remote origin | grep'refs/mob/' # we can see from the output that alice has a mob.alice branch and # and bob has a mob_bob/master branch. # since nothing under refs/mob is normally fetched we must add instructions # to fetch the personal mob area of both alice and bob being careful to # match the refs we need git config --add remote.origin.fetch '+refs/mob/mob.alice:refs/remotes/origin/mob.alice' git config --add remote.origin.fetch '+refs/mob/mob_bob/*:refs/remotes/origin/mob_bob/*' # alternatively, this mapping will just get every personal mob ref # but this is not really recommended #git config --add remote.origin.fetch '+refs/mob/*:refs/remotes/origin/*' # now fetch the new refs git fetch # merge mob.alice and mob_bob/master and push to mob.eve git checkout mob.alice git checkout mob_bob/master git checkout -b mob.eve git merge mob.alice git push -u origin mob.eve
Not so difficult, but a little bit of extra work to clone from a personal mob area.Release Date: March 20, 2012
Each Premium Collection tin contains:
1 Secret Rare card: Elemental HERO The Shining
1 Secret Rare card: Number 34: Terror-Byte (alternate art)
4 additional Secret Rare cards
8 Super Rare cards
1 Beginner’s Guide
Premium Collection set has 9 Secret Rare cards and 14 Super Rare cards, plus the Elemental HERO The Shining and Number 34: Terror-Byte variant cards (these last 2 cards come in every Premium Collection tin).
The 2 Variant Cards (You will get one of these randomly)-
Card List / Spoiler:
Meteor B. Dragon
Dragon
“Red-Eyes B. Dragon” + “Meteor Dragon”
3500/2000/ LV 8
Photon Sanctuary
If you activate this card, this turn you cannot Summon a monster, except a LIGHT monster. Special Summon 2 “Photon Tokens” (LIGHT/Thunder-Type/Level 4/ATK 2000/DEF 0) in face-upDefense Position. These Tokens cannot attack or be used as Synchro Material Monsters.
Kagemusha Knight
Warrior/Effect
0/0/LV 3
When you Normal Summon a Level 3 monster: You can Special Summon this card from your hand. This card cannot be used as a Synchro Material Monster.
Quick-Span Knight
If this card is used for a Synchro Summon and sent to the Graveyard, 1 face-up monster your opponent controls loses 500ATK.
Void Ogre Dragon
1 DARK Tuner + 1 or more non-Tuner monsters
Once per turn, when your opponent activates a Spell or Trap Cardwhile you have no cards in your hand: You can negate theactivation of that card and destroy it.
Masked HERO Acid
Must be Special Summoned with “Mask Change”, and cannot be Special Summoned by other ways. When this card is Special Summoned: Destroy all Spell & Trap Cards your opponent controls, and all face-up monsters your opponent currently controls lose 300ATK.
Ma’at
Cannot be Normal Summoned or Set. Must be Special Summoned(from your hand) by sending 1 face-up LIGHT Dragon-Type and 1 face-up LIGHT Fairy-Type monster you control to the Graveyard, and cannot be Special Summoned by other ways. Once per turn: You can declare 3 card names; reveal the top 3 cards of your Deck, add the declared card(s) to your hand, and send the other cards revealed by this effect to the Graveyard, and this card’s ATK andDEF becomes the number of cards you added to your hand by this effect x 1000.
Please tell us what you think the cards will be in this tin in the comments!!!Sexually suggestive Twitch streamers better take note: cover up your body or face having your account suspended.
Twitch's updated Rules of Conduct aim to ensure streams are more about the games and not the lack or clothes on show by the presenters.
"Dress...appropriately," states a section in the new guidelines.
"Nerds are sexy, and you're all magnificent, beautiful creatures, but let's try and keep this about the games, shall we?
"Wearing no clothing or sexually suggestive clothing - including lingerie, swimsuits, pasties, and undergarments - is prohibited, as well as any full nude torsos*, which applies to both male and female broadcasters. You may have a great six-pack, but that's better shared on the beach during a 2-on-2 volleyball game blasting "Playing with the Boys."
If it's really hot and you absolutely must wear little in the way of clothing, Twitch says to "crop the webcam to your face".
VideoGamer has had to cancel a new livestream series in which Dave sits topless whilst playing Skylanders and shows off his traps.
Source: TwitchFirst U.S. scientist to die of plague in 50 years worked in labs with 'harmless' bacteria
A scientist died after becoming the first American researcher to contract the plague in 50 years, it has been revealed.
Malcolm Casadaban, 60, was working with a weakened form of the plague's bacteria thought to be harmless to humans when he died in September 2009, a report said.
The University of Chicago genetics and cell biology professor's work with the live bacteria was not even noted when he fell ill and he followed proper safety protocols.
Dead: Chicago genetics and cell biology professor Malcolm Casadaban, 60, is the first U.S. scientist to die after contracting the plague in 50 years
Dr Casadaban was researching the chain of events that happens when a person is made sick by the bacteria Yersinia Pestis, which are behind the plague.
The bubonic plague, which killed at least a third of the population of medieval Europe in the 14th century, still infects more than 2,000 people annually worldwide today.
But the weakened bacteria have never previously been linked to human illness and are not covered by strict safety measures that regulate studying other deadly germs.
‘The severe outcome experienced by the patient was unexpected,' the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report said.
Tests: Infectious disease specialist Ken Alexander said lab results were positive for the plague after Dr Casadaban died
‘Researchers always should adhere to recommended use of personal protective equipment.’
Dr Casadaban had the hereditary condition ‘hemochromatosis’, causing an excessive build-up of iron and potentially making people more vulnerable to the plague, an autopsy said.
This is based on evidence that injecting mice with iron while they are exposed to the plague makes them more likely to become ill.
Ken Alexander, University of Chicago infectious disease specialist, said lab results were positive for the plague and their ‘biosafety fire alarm’ was raised.
He told Bloomberg: ‘The first question was: “Do we think this is real?”
‘The answer was “yes”. So the onus was upon us to do two things - to notify the health infrastructure and act as if this were a worst-case scenario.'
Hemochromatosis affects one in 400 people and goes unnoticed in half of patients, but the problems arose because Yersinia Pestis needs iron to survive.
Yersinia Pestis: The bacteria causes pneumonic, bubonic and septicemic plague, which killed millions of people in medieval Europe and still affects others today
‘It’s like having a lion, where we took out all its teeth and all its claws,’ Dr Alexander said.
‘But in the case of Dr Casadaban, the lion didn’t even need to have teeth. There was so much iron that it was freely available and easy to get.’
YERSINIA PESTIS: Meet the bacteria that causes the plague Yersinia Pestis causes pneumonic, bubonic and septicemic plague
The bacteria needs iron to survive, but the weakened lab form has never been seen as dangerous to humans
It affected Dr Casadaban as he had ‘hemochromatosis’, which causes an excessive build-up of iron in the body
Yersinia Pestis causes pneumonic, bubonic and septicaemic plague, but scientists found the version Dr Casadaban was working with had not evolved to become more infectious.
Only 10 per cent of reported cases of the plague result in death, thanks to earlier diagnosis and treatment, the World Health Organisation said.
It is spread by rodents and fleas feeding on them and there are usually under ten cases in America each year. The last scientist it affected was in 1959.
Dr Alexander said he believed Dr Casadaban would have had one comment for the university officials and scientists meeting after the tragic event.
'Listen guys, I’m trying to teach you something - and you better damn well learn it.'Image caption Sarbi was officially declared Missing In Action (MIA)
An Australian special forces sniffer dog that went missing for almost 14 months after a battle in Afghanistan has finally returned home to Australia.
Sarbi arrived in Sydney on a flight from Dubai, where she had been in quarantine for the past six months.
She has now been moved to a quarantine facility, where she will undergo further veterinary examinations.
The 10-year-old bitch went missing in September 2008 after her patrol was ambushed in Uruzgan province.
Nine Australian soldiers, including Sarbi's trainer, were wounded.
After the attack, there was no sign of the dog, and months of searching failed to find her. Sarbi was officially declared Missing In Action (MIA).
Return to service
But in late October 2009, the dog was found by a US soldier in the care of a local Afghan man. She appeared to have been well cared for.
She later returned to the Australian Special Operations Task Group base to a celebrity welcome from then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the former US military commander, Gen Stanley McChrystal.
The Australian Defence Force (ADF) said Sarbi would now spend another 30 days at the Eastern Creek isolation facility near Sydney.
"When released from quarantine early next year, Sarbi will return to the incident response regiment where she will continue her assessment and training to return her to service as an explosives detection dog," it added.
Last month, it was reported that Sarbi's original owner, Wendy Upjohn, had written to the defence minister seeking the return of the dog when her military service is over, saying the army had promised to give her back in 2004.
The army has denied any such undertaking was given and says the dog will remain with her handler and his family when she retires.Even though Advanced Micro Devices will allow its partners to build their own versions of AMD Radeon R9 Nano graphics cards, it will not let them significantly alter specifications of such graphics adapters. As a result, the difference between the original Radeon R9 Nano and custom versions from AMD’s partners will be minimal.
In about three months from now Advanced Micro Devices will allow its partners to build custom versions of Radeon R9 Nano graphics adapters. The only thing that AMD’s partners will be allowed to modify is the cooling system of the product. Producers of graphics adapters will not be able to increase clock-rates of their Radeon R9 Nano or significantly adjust printed-circuit boards, reports Expreview web-site.
Custom versions of AMD Radeon R9 Nano will have to preserve form-factor of the graphics card and should be compliant with mini-ITX standards. Thermal design power of partner’s Radeon R9 Nano graphics cards will have to be the same as TDP of AMD’s version.
AMD Radeon R9 Nano-based graphics boards from AMD’s allies will use fully-fledged “Fiji” graphics processing units with 4096 stream processors, 256 texture mapping units, 64 raster operations pipelines and 4096-bit HBM memory bus.
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KitGuru Says: It looks like custom versions of AMD Radeon R9 Nano will not be significantly different compared to AMD’s own graphics adapter. What we can expect are graphics adapters with hybrid or liquid cooling systems, which will have higher overclocking potential than AMD’s own Radeon R9 Nano. Keeping in mind that “Nano” graphics cards have different voltage regulator module compared to AMD Radeon R9 Fury X, even modified “R9 Nano” graphics adapters with advanced cooling systems will not have overclocking potential on par with the top-of-the-range product.Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Any urge to snap a selfie while at work must be suppressed
Police in the Philippines have been warned not to take selfies or pick their noses while on duty, it's reported.
A memorandum issued by the National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO) reminds officers not to do anything that might create a negative impression among members of the public, the Philippine Star reports. As well as leaving their noses alone, officers in the capital, Manila, have been told not to play online games, smoke or chew gum during their shifts. The list also specifies that any bodily itches must remain unscratched, and officers should avoid "unseemly posture" such as standing on one leg, the paper says.
The instructions are a response to police officers posting photos of themselves on social media while on duty in the city, GMA News Online reports. Police leaders have repeatedly issued no-selfie orders, including after Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, when some officers reportedly posted pictures from the disaster zone.
Manila's residents will have seen an increase in police activity of late - the NCRPO says 85% of its force is now on patrol. President Rodrigo Duterte recently announced a major increase in government funding for the national police, as part of his controversial war on drugs. He's committed to boosting its budget by 24.6% next year, in order to hire more officers and buy more vehicles and guns.
Next story: Project connects Moscow pensioners to students abroad
Use #NewsfromElsewhere to stay up-to-date with our reports via Twitter.ROCHESTER – A year ago, Buffalo Sabres prospect Alexander Nylander wowed as a 17-year-old at the World Junior Championship, showcasing his dynamic skills while leading Team Sweden with four goals and nine points in seven games.
So naturally, the expectations this year for Nylander, a youngster many believe was the most talented player in the 2016 NHL Draft, are extremely high.
Not only is Nylander a year older, the eighth overall pick has spent the first three months this season competing against men in the AHL.
“The expectations on him would be to be one of Sweden’s better players,” said coach Dan Lambert, whose Rochester Americans loaned the winger to Sweden last week. “I think last year he had a phenomenal tournament. Certainly, we expect him to do the same this season.”
Barely 10 minutes into Monday’s opener in Montreal, Nylander grabbed a loose puck in the left circle, cut to the slot and scored the tournament’s first goal. In the final minute of Sweden’s 6-1 demolishing of Denmark, Nylander got knocked down behind the net, quickly got up and redirected a shot in near the crease seconds later.
Nylander’s penchant for scoring highlight-reel goals is well-known around Buffalo and Rochester. Shortly after the Sabres drafted him June 24, he wowed a development camp crowd inside HarborCenter with a few nifty shootout scores.
His hands are among the quickest and softest in the world. But slick skill, of course, doesn’t always translate into success at the next level.
The AHL’s youngest player – Nylander doesn’t turn 19 until March 2 – has “been good for us at times,” Lambert said. The 6-foot-1, 185-pound Nylander has five goals and 17 points in 29 AHL games. The rookie hasn’t gone more than two contests without a point.
“He’s been very good for us on the power play,” Lambert said inside the Blue Cross War Memorial. “He’s a growing man, and it is a process for him as far development. We believe it’s going in the right direction.”
Nylander’s biggest adjustment has been learning how to compete against grown men, Lambert said.
“When you’re 18 years old, it’s not an easy thing to do,” Lambert said. “You’re playing against defensemen that are 27, 28. They have man strength and he’s not there yet.”
In a hallway outside the Rochester dressing room before he left for the world junior championship Dec. 19 – “It’s always really an honor to put on that jersey,” Nylander said – he reflected on his adjustments to pro hockey.
“You got to be a little bit quicker in your decisions,” said Nylander, who spent last season in the junior Ontario Hockey League. “They are smarter players. The guys are a little bit bigger. But other than that, it’s similar.”
Nylander said his family has helped him acclimate to the AHL. His brother, William, a rookie with the Toronto Maple Leafs, was arguably the league’s best player last season, scoring 18 goals and 45 points in 38 games. Their father, Michael, who compiled 679 points in 920 NHL games, briefly played in the AHL in 2010-11, ironically, for Rochester.
“It’s crazy,” he said of his father playing for the same team only six years earlier.
Their recent experiences have been valuable to Nylander.
“I had a lot of help from my brother and my dad to get going and getting adjusted to this game,” he said. “So it’s not been too big of a problem.”
He added: “It’s looking more normal out there.”
–
The reeling Sabres, losers of four straight games (0-2-2), resume their season tonight in Detroit against the Red Wings following a three-day Christmas break.Good afternoon everypony!
Novel Idea here again just to do a quick status update. We’re all hard at work right now recording lines, designing levels, writing scripts and all sorts of fun game design stuff.
I do want to mention a couple cool things in development. While we’re not quite ready to reveal screenshots yet, I’m happy to announce that the “Rarity-Designed Armored Dress” will be available in-game as a special upgrade for Velvet Remedy along with an alternative for female players! Not only that, but we have a completely redesigned “Velvet’s Lab Coat” complete with Ministry of Peace saddleboxes! There will be the Velvet Remedy version along with a version for both male and female players. (A special thanks for Wolfie for his undying hard work on both of these projects!)
Both of these are custom-made items which will be transferred into “Racing Apotheosis” for Fallout 4! (Barring any technical difficulties by using a different version of the GECK.)
We’ve also crossed several internal milestones in regards to the brand-new handcrafted (Literally. Every object in here was placed by hand, including most of the landscaping) worldspace, Appleloosa Valley, a verdant remnant of the Pre-War past dominated by the massive Rock Farm R&D lab. While it’s not quite ready for reveal yet, we’re getting very close to the point where we can finally show off this area to you, perhaps in a new exploration trailer! (No ETA on that though. ^^)
We’ve all had our nose to the grindstones lately, so we haven’t had time to do any big special features to show you. Please note that we have fixed the Manehattan Recruitment Center form, so you should be able to apply again without getting lost in the system. If you applied for a position and have not heard back from us, please apply again soon!
But just like every week, we’re releasing the next three chapters of the Fallout: Equestria (The Manehattan Edition) audiobook on YouTube. You can check it right here!
Until next week, stay safe out there!
-Novel IdeaTottenham had initially placed a £50 million price-tag on their midfielder and had turned down a deal that could have risen to more than £35million because they were unhappy with the guaranteed proportion of the payment.
Real, however, have indicated that they are willing to restructure the deal to guarantee Tottenham closer to £35 million and Modric is now finally expected in Madrid in the next 48 hours for a medical and to agree personal terms.
The money from the Modric deal will also allow Andre Villas-Boas, the Tottenham manager, to pursue his own midfield transfer targets, notably Porto’s Joao Moutinho but also Rennes midfielder Yann M’Vila.
He has also already signed Gylfi Sigurdsson this summer from Hoffenheim. Moutinho was Villas-Boas’ preferred replacement for Modric but, with Porto wanting £24 million, there is a sense that M’Vila, who would cost closer to £15 million, might represent better value.
Modric, who has four years remaining on his contract, has been training with the reserves since refusing to go on Tottenham’s pre-season tour but the club’s handling of the situation was still criticised yesterday by Igor Stimac, the Croatia coach.
“Daniel Levy promised a year ago that if an offer from Madrid arrived he would let him go. And when the offer arrived he changed his opinion,” said Stimac.
“I think that this guy tries to make himself famous in the world of football, but this isn’t the way to do it. When you promise something you always need to fulfil it. It was the same with [Dimitar] Berbatov before he signed for Manchester United. He went there on Aug 31.
“He [Modric] has already made his decision and he’s very clear about what he’s going to do. It’s the only thing he wants, to go to Madrid.
"Luka is a very sincere person, very sensitive, but very tough as well. He is very keen to play at Real Madrid and, as well as that, he has the promise of Levy. I only hope that this promise ends up being fulfilled.”
Stimac is also confident that Modric will thrive under Jose Mourinho at Real Madrid. “His tactics and how he prepares for a game are incredible,” said Stimac. “He lives and sleeps football. ’There is no doubt because he has done it magnificently for the last five or six years.
"In any position which his new coach, Mourinho, chooses, Luka is going to perform perfectly. He has a great first touch. He is very creative, but he has a lot of discipline too. He defends well and does what is asked of him."
Tottenham declined to comment on Stimac’s claims.
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<PLAY NOW >Artificial consciousness[1] (AC), also known as machine consciousness (MC) or synthetic consciousness (Gamez 2008; Reggia 2013), is a field related to artificial intelligence and cognitive robotics. The aim of the theory of artificial consciousness is to "Define that which would have to be synthesized were consciousness to be found in an engineered artifact" (Aleksander 1995).
Neuroscience hypothesizes that consciousness is generated by the interoperation of various parts of the brain, called the neural correlates of consciousness or NCC, though there are challenges to that perspective. Proponents of AC believe it is possible to construct systems (e.g., computer systems) that can emulate this NCC interoperation.[2]
Artificial consciousness concepts are also pondered in the philosophy of artificial intelligence through questions about mind, consciousness, and mental states.[3]
Philosophical views [ edit ]
As there are many hypothesized types of consciousness, there are many potential implementations of artificial consciousness. In the philosophical literature, perhaps the most common taxonomy of consciousness is into "access" and "phenomenal" variants. Access consciousness concerns those aspects of experience that can be apprehended, while phenomenal consciousness concerns those aspects of experience that seemingly cannot be apprehended, instead being characterized qualitatively in terms of “raw feels”, “what it is like” or qualia (Block 1997).
Plausibility debate [ edit ]
Type-identity theorists and other skeptics hold the view that consciousness can only be realized in particular physical systems because consciousness has properties that necessarily depend on physical constitution (Block 1978; Bickle 2003).[4][5]
In his article "Artificial Consciousness: Utopia or Real Possibility" Giorgio Buttazzo says that despite our current technology's ability to simulate autonomy, "Working in a fully automated mode, they [the computers] cannot exhibit creativity, emotions, or free will. A computer, like a washing machine, is a slave operated by its components."[6]
For other theorists (e.g., functionalists), who define mental states in terms of causal roles, any system that can instantiate the same pattern of causal roles, regardless of physical constitution, will instantiate the same mental states, including consciousness (Putnam 1967).
Computational Foundation argument [ edit ]
One of the most explicit arguments for the plausibility of AC comes from David Chalmers. His proposal, found within his article Chalmers 2011, is roughly that the right kinds of computations are sufficient for the possession of a conscious mind. In the outline, he defends his claim thus: Computers perform computations. Computations can capture other systems' abstract causal organization.
The most controversial part of Chalmers' proposal is that mental properties are "organizationally invariant". Mental properties are of two kinds, psychological and phenomenological. Psychological properties, such as belief and perception, are those that are "characterized by their causal role". He adverts to the work of Armstrong 1968 and Lewis 1972 in claiming that "[s]ystems with the same causal topology…will share their psychological properties".
Phenomenological properties are not prima facie definable in terms of their causal roles. Establishing that phenomenological properties are amenable to individuation by causal role therefore requires argument. Chalmers provides his Dancing Qualia Argument for this purpose.[7]
Chalmers begins by assuming that agents with identical causal organizations could have different experiences. He then asks us to conceive of changing one agent into the other by the replacement of parts (neural parts replaced by silicon, say) while preserving its causal organization. Ex hypothesi, the experience of the agent under transformation would change (as the parts were replaced), but there would be no change in causal topology and therefore no means whereby the agent could "notice" the shift in experience.
Critics of AC object that Chalmers begs the question in assuming that all mental properties and external connections are sufficiently captured by abstract causal organization.
Ethics [ edit ]
If it were suspected that a particular machine was conscious, its rights would be an ethical issue that would need to be assessed (e.g. what rights it would have under law). For example, a conscious computer that was owned and used as a tool or central computer of a building of larger machine is a particular ambiguity. Should laws be made for such a case? Consciousness would also require a legal definition in this particular case. Because artificial consciousness is still largely a theoretical subject, such ethics have not been discussed or developed to a great extent, though it has often been a theme in fiction (see below).
The rules for the 2003 Loebner Prize competition explicitly addressed the question of robot rights:
61. If, in any given year, a publicly available open source Entry entered by the University of Surrey or the Cambridge Center wins the Silver Medal or the Gold Medal, then the Medal and the Cash Award will be awarded to the body responsible for the development of that Entry. If no such body can be identified, or if there is disagreement among two or more claimants, the Medal and the Cash Award will be held in trust until such time as the Entry may legally possess, either in the United States of America or in the venue of the contest, the Cash Award and Gold Medal in its own right.[8]
Research and implementation proposals [ edit ]
Aspects of consciousness [ edit ]
There are various aspects of consciousness generally deemed necessary for a machine to be artificially conscious. A variety of functions in which consciousness plays a role were suggested by Bernard Baars (Baars 1988) and others. The functions of consciousness suggested by Bernard Baars are Definition and Context Setting, Adaptation and Learning, Editing, Flagging and Debugging, Recruiting and Control, Prioritizing and Access-Control, Decision-making or Executive Function, Analogy-forming Function, Metacognitive and Self-monitoring Function, and Autoprogramming and Self-maintenance Function. Igor Aleksander suggested 12 principles for artificial consciousness (Aleksander 1995) and these are: The Brain is a State Machine, Inner Neuron Partitioning, Conscious and Unconscious States, Perceptual Learning and Memory, Prediction, The Awareness of Self, Representation of Meaning, Learning Utterances, Learning Language, Will, Instinct, and Emotion. The aim of AC is to define whether and how these and other aspects of consciousness can be synthesized in an engineered artifact such as a digital computer. This list is not exhaustive; there are many others not covered.
Awareness [ edit ]
Awareness could be one required aspect, but there are many problems with the exact definition of awareness. The results of the experiments of neuroscanning on monkeys suggest that a process, not only a state or object, activates neurons. Awareness includes creating and testing alternative models of each process based on the information received through the senses or imagined, and is also useful for making predictions. Such modeling needs a lot of flexibility. Creating such a model includes modeling of the physical world, modeling of one's own internal states and processes, and modeling of other conscious entities.
There are at least three types of awareness:[9] agency awareness, goal awareness, and sensorimotor awareness, which may also be conscious or not. For example, in agency awareness you may be aware that you performed a certain action yesterday, but are not now conscious of it. In goal awareness you may be aware that you must search for a lost object, but are not now conscious of it. In sensorimotor awareness, you may be aware that your hand is resting on an object, but are not now conscious of it.
Because objects of awareness are often conscious, the distinction between awareness and consciousness is frequently blurred or they are used as synonyms.[10]
Memory [ edit ]
Conscious events interact with memory systems in learning, rehearsal, and retrieval.[11] The IDA model[12] elucidates the role of consciousness in the updating of perceptual memory,[13] transient episodic memory, and procedural memory. Transient episodic and declarative memories have distributed representations in IDA, there is evidence that this is also the case in the nervous system.[14] In IDA, these two memories are implemented computationally using a modified version of Kanerva’s Sparse distributed memory architecture.[15]
Learning [ edit ]
Learning is also considered necessary for AC. By Bernard Baars, conscious experience is needed to represent and adapt to novel and significant events (Baars 1988). By Axel Cleeremans and Luis Jiménez, learning is defined as "a set of philogenetically [sic] advanced adaptation processes that critically depend on an evolved sensitivity to subjective experience so as to enable agents to afford flexible control over their actions in complex, unpredictable environments" (Cleeremans 2001).
Anticipation [ edit ]
The ability to predict (or anticipate) foreseeable events is considered important for AC by Igor Aleksander.[16] The emergentist multiple drafts principle proposed by Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained may be useful for prediction: it involves the evaluation and selection of the most appropriate "draft" to fit the current environment. Anticipation includes prediction of consequences of one's own proposed actions and prediction of consequences of probable actions by other entities.
Relationships between real world states are mirrored in the state structure of a conscious organism enabling the organism to predict events.[16] An artificially conscious machine should be able to anticipate events correctly in order to be ready to respond to them when they occur or to take preemptive action to avert anticipated events. The implication here is that the machine needs flexible, real-time components that build spatial, dynamic, statistical, functional, and cause-effect models of the real world and predicted worlds, making it possible to demonstrate that it possesses artificial consciousness in the present and future and not only in the past. In order to do this, a conscious machine should make coherent predictions and contingency plans, not only in worlds with fixed rules like a chess board, but also for novel environments that may change, to be executed only when appropriate to simulate and control the real world.
Subjective experience [ edit ]
Subjective experiences or qualia are widely considered to be the hard problem of consciousness. Indeed, it is held to pose a challenge to physicalism, let alone computationalism. On the other hand, there are problems in other fields of science which limit that which we can observe, such as the uncertainty principle in physics, which have not made the research in these fields of science impossible.
Role of cognitive architectures [ edit ]
The term "cognitive architecture" may refer to a theory about the structure of the human mind, or any portion or function thereof, including consciousness. In another context, a cognitive architecture implements the theory on computers. An example is QuBIC: Quantum and Bio-inspired Cognitive Architecture for Machine Consciousness. One of the main goals of a cognitive architecture is to summarize the various results of cognitive psychology in a comprehensive computer model. However, the results need to be in a formalized form so they can be the basis of a computer program. Also, the role of cognitive architecture is for the A.I. to clearly structure, build, and implement it's thought process.
Symbolic or hybrid proposals [ edit ]
Franklin's Intelligent Distribution Agent [ edit ]
Stan Franklin (1995, 2003) defines an autonomous agent as possessing functional consciousness when it is capable of several of the functions of consciousness as identified by Bernard Baars' Global Workspace Theory (Baars 1988, 1997). His brain child IDA (Intelligent Distribution Agent) is a software implementation of GWT, which makes it functionally conscious by definition. IDA's task is to negotiate new assignments for sailors in the US Navy after they end a tour of duty, by matching each individual's skills and preferences with the Navy's needs. IDA interacts with Navy databases and communicates with the sailors via natural language e-mail dialog while obeying a large set of Navy policies. The IDA computational model was developed during 1996–2001 at Stan Franklin's "Conscious" Software Research Group at the University of Memphis. It "consists of approximately a quarter-million lines of Java code, and almost completely consumes the resources of a 2001 high-end workstation." It relies heavily on codelets, which are "special purpose, relatively independent, mini-agent[s] typically implemented as a small piece of code running as a separate thread." In IDA's top-down architecture, high-level cognitive functions are explicitly modeled (see Franklin 1995 and Franklin 2003 for details). While IDA is functionally conscious by definition, Franklin does "not attribute phenomenal consciousness to his own 'conscious' software agent, IDA, in spite of her many human-like behaviours. This in spite of watching several US Navy detailers repeatedly nodding their heads saying ' |
of doing politics over the issue.
"Congress is trying to derive political mileage out of it," the minister said.
Its clear cut political vendetta, its most unfortunate how this Govt has acted-Sharad Pawar on Kamla Beniwal pic.twitter.com/GBGgFQ4gSQ — ANI (@ANI_news) August 7, 2014
The sacking order brought to an end the gubernatorial tenure of the 87-year-old Congress leader from Rajasthan who battled with the Modi government over the appointment of Lokayukta and some legislations during her tenure in Gujarat.
During her confrontation with Modi, Beniwal appointed retired Justice RA Mehta as Lokayukta in Gujarat against which the state went in appeal to the high court and later the Supreme Court which upheld it last year. However, Justice Mehta did not take up the post and Modi's government named a new nominee.
Beniwal is the second governor to be sacked after the removal of Puducherry Lt Governor Virendra Kataria. Soon after the Modi government assumed office, some governors were forced to resign while a few a resisted and are still in office.
Interestingly, another Congress leader Margaret Alva appointed by the UPA government was allowed to conclude her tenure in Rajasthan.
First Published: Aug 07, 2014 12:01 ISTIt has been an eventful month for the producers of NBC's Timeless — after the show's cancellation and subsequent un-cancellation, it appears they've quietly settled a lawsuit from a man who claims the series is a rip-off of his Spanish-language show.
Onza Partners sued NBC, Sony and co-creators Eric Kripke and Shawn Ryan in September, claiming its principal, Gonzalo Sagardia, was in talks to create an American version of El Ministero de Tiempo, the story of a three-person government team who travels in time to change the past. Onza claims negotiations stopped abruptly and the network announced Timeless shortly thereafter.
The suit survived a motion to dismiss in February and had been set for trial early next year, but that future was averted this week. The parties filed a joint stipulation for dismissal with prejudice on Wednesday, which means the legal fight is over — unless someone really does travel back in time to change events.
Onza is represented by Devin McRae and Michael Smarinsky of Early Sullivan. Sony and NBC are represented by Louis Petrich and Edward Ruttenberg of Leopold, Petrich. None of the attorneys commented on the dismissal Thursday.A lone grave, its dirt mound shaded under the drooping branches of a mulberry tree and kept adorned with flowers, has become a daily stop for seminary students and staff members near Togh-Bairdi, in northern Afghanistan.
It is the burial site of Mawlawi Shah Agha Hanafi, a revered religious scholar who founded the seminary about two decades ago and helped it grow into a thriving school for 1,300 students, including 160 girls. This month, the Taliban planted a bomb that killed him as he conducted a discussion about the Prophet Muhammad’s traditions, and his grave, at a corner of the seminary grounds, has become a gathering place for prayer and grief.
“When I come to work, the first thing I do is recite a verse of the Koran at his grave,” said Jan Agha, headmaster of the seminary, in Parwan province. “Then I weep, and then I go to my office.”
Hanafi joined a rapidly growing list of Islamic religious scholars who have become casualties of the Afghan war. The scholars have long been targets, of one kind or another, in Afghanistan. Their words carry weight across many parts of society, and they are assiduously courted for their support – and frequently killed for their criticism.
Hundreds are believed to have been killed during the past 16 years of war, and not always by the Taliban. But there has been a definite uptick in the targeted killing of scholars – widely known as ulema – as the Taliban have intensified their offensives in the past two years, officials say.
It is being taken as a clear reminder of the weight the insurgents give not just to military victories but also to religious influence in their campaign to disrupt the government and seize territory. “The reason the Taliban resort to such acts is that they want to make sure their legitimacy is not questioned by the sermons of these ulema,” said Mohammad Moheq, a noted Afghan scholar of religion who also serves as an adviser to President Ashraf Ghani.
“The only thing that undermines their legitimacy is the ability and power of these ulema if they preach and argue against them,” Moheq continued. “Only they can challenge the Taliban’s ideology, not the liberal scholars or others, and the Taliban understand that.”
Sowing fear
The exact toll of victims among the scholars who preach Islam, but not the kind the Taliban prefer, is hard to gauge. If rough numbers from multiple provinces are any indication, it is enormous, and it has sown fear among preachers who know that their words at the pulpit could cost them their lives.
Religious students attend class in a tent outside the madrasa in Charikar, Afghanistan. Photograph: Jim Huylebroek/New York Times
In Kandahar province alone, the Taliban movement’s original power base, about 300 preachers have been killed since 2004, according to Mawlawi Obaidullah Faizani, head of the provincial Ulema Council there. In Badakhshan, 20 were killed in just the past year, out of a 16-year total of 110, said Abdul Wali Arshad, director of the province’s department of religious affairs.
In Logar province last week, the deputy head of the province’s Ulema Council was gunned down on his way home from dawn prayer, one of the bullets striking his upper lip.
“The reason these ulema are getting targeted is because they tell the truth – and the truth is that the ongoing fighting is just for power,” said Mawlawi Khudai Nazar Mohammedi, head of the Ulema Council of Helmand.
One member of the Taliban’s leadership council suggested that part of the reason for the intensified targeting of religious scholars was the influence of the insurgency’s new leader, Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada. He is an ulema and madrasa leader and is considered more of a religious ideologue than his predecessor, who was killed by a US drone in 2015.
The senior Taliban figure, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid angering other members of the leadership, said that under Haibatullah’s orders, sermons were more closely watched than ever – and that straying from Taliban interpretations of Sharia law was punished “as harshly as possible”.
Being watched
The Taliban’s statement this month after they gunned down Abdul Ghafoor Pairoz (32), a prominent scholar in Kandahar who had written or translated more than 50 books, made the stakes clear. They said he had been killed for considering “the current holy war in Afghanistan as illegitimate”. The Taliban said that “removing such a vicious element” was a signal to others that they were being watched, and that “insolence toward religious orders” would not be tolerated.
Waseel Pairoz, the younger brother of Abdul Ghafoor Pairoz, a prominent scholar who was killed by the Taliban, in Kabul, Afghanistan. Photograph: Jim Huylebroek/New York Times
During the Taliban’s rule in the 1990s, Pairoz was a young student in Taliban madrasas in Kabul. When their government fell, he stuck to the path and moved to Quetta, Pakistan, where he completed seven years of higher education in religion to earn the title of mawlana. He remained active in Taliban circles in Quetta, where the Taliban’s leadership council operates from in exile.
But, as Pairoz read more and the war dragged on, he started questioning the religious foundation upon which the Taliban were fighting. He decided the only way to fight back was through an active religious discourse. His last book, a collection of essays titled The Calling, dealt with themes like religious pluralism and the need for tolerance.
“He would translate orally from the text in front of him, and I would type,” said his younger brother Waseel Pairoz, who also pursued religious education. After the Taliban killed his brother and released their statement, the younger Pairoz left Kandahar and now lives in Kabul.
“Pairoz always said that he loved this country, and that if he died for it, it would not be a regret,” another of his brothers, Mohammed Rasoul Pairoz, said. “The message he often delivered to the Taliban was that this world is meant for living – so live in it, and let others live.”
Just like Pairoz, Hanafi, the seminary founder in Parwan, was critical of the Taliban’s path, and often spoke of politics passionately in his sermons. In one of his final speeches, he called on the Taliban to “join hands with the people of Afghanistan, instead of joining hands with Pakistan and Russia”, a country increasingly accused of establishing ties to the Afghan insurgency.
Hanafi’s killing
After multiple attempts on his life, with roadside bombs planted on his path, Hanafi had been forced out of Togh-Bairdi, his home village, and the seminary he had built here. He had taken up another job in the provincial capital, leading a bigger seminary.
On the morning of May 9th, as he sat down with about three dozen students, a bomb that had been planted under his cushion went off. His brother, Mawlawi Jawed Hanafi, succeeded him as head of the seminary at Togh-Bairdi. He said the young man who had planted the bomb – and who was arrested – was a student from the class, and that he had been seen peeking through the window to make sure his instructor had taken his seat. He then walked away and detonated the bomb.
The book in front of Hanafi was ripped and covered in blood. The scholar did not make it to a hospital. “I saw the Mawlawi lying on his back – when he saw me, he moved his lips to say something, but he couldn’t,” said Aziz Agha, his bodyguard, who rushed into the room after the explosion. “His turban wasn’t on his head. His clothes were torn. I held him to help him stand up, but I saw pieces of flesh dropping from his back.”
The ripped and blood-stained book that was in front of Mawlawi Shah Agha Hanafi, a revered religious scholar, when he was killed by the Taliban, in Togh-Bairdi, Afghanistan. Photograph: Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times
The room where the bombing happened remains sealed. Hanafi’s fellow scholars say they find peace in the fact that this is nothing new – that their leader was among the latest killed in the long history of the fight over whose beliefs are true. That fight dates back to the early days of Islam.
“These are not new enemies,” said Mawlawi Abdul Hafiz Mowahed, one of Hanafi’s former students and an instructor now. “Who killed Caliph Osman? Who killed Caliph Ali? Who killed Caliph Omar? The killers were people in the garb of Islam.” He noted that Caliph Osman had also been assassinated after dawn prayer, hunched over as he was reading from the Koran.
“The Prophet Muhammad predicted that once the sword bleeds innocent blood, this blood will run until the Day of Judgment,” he said.
New York TimesLOS ANGELES — For more than a century, California has been the state where people flocked for a better life — 164,000 square miles of mountains, farmland and coastline, shimmering with ambition and dreams, money and beauty. It was the cutting-edge symbol of possibility: Hollywood, Silicon Valley, aerospace, agriculture and vineyards.
But now a punishing drought — and the unprecedented measures the state announced last week to compel people to reduce water consumption — is forcing a reconsideration of whether the aspiration of untrammeled growth that has for so long been this state’s driving engine has run against the limits of nature.
The 25 percent cut in water consumption ordered by Gov. Jerry Brown raises fundamental questions about what life in California will be like in the years ahead, and even whether this state faces the prospect of people leaving for wetter climates — assuming, as Mr. Brown and other state leaders do, that this marks a permanent change in the climate, rather than a particularly severe cyclical drought.
This state has survived many a catastrophe before — and defied the doomsayers who have regularly proclaimed the death of the California dream — as it emerged, often stronger, from the challenges of earthquakes, an energy crisis and, most recently, a budgetary collapse that forced years of devastating cuts in spending. These days, the economy is thriving, the population is growing, the state budget is in surplus, and development is exploding from Silicon Valley to San Diego; the evidence of it can be seen in the construction cranes dotting the skylines of Los Angeles and San Francisco.All the parts necessary for a working gun were printed except for the spring and magazine — and bullets, obviously.
A handgun created via 3-D printing has set off a storm of discussion on the Internet, but perhaps the most important piece of the story has been left out of the headlines: the gun was made with highly advanced and extremely expensive industrial-level machinery. It's a proof of concept — not a new mode of production.
3-D printing techniques — even pricey ones that use metal instead of the increasingly affordable ones that spit out plastic shapes — have been known for their speed and convenience, but not necessarily their accuracy. If you want to make a spoon, sure, but a firing assembly for a handgun?
"There's a common misconception that laser sintering isn't capable of making things like this, that it's not strong enough or exact enough," said Scott McGowan, VP of marketing at Solid Concepts, the company that made the gun, in a phone interview with NBC News. "We knew different, so we wanted to make a working example."
So they did — and it appears to work as well (or even better, some who have tested it suggest) than a store-bought version of the gun, a Model 1911.45 caliber handgun. The gun was chosen because of its relative simplicity and the fact that its design is now, after 102 years, in the public domain. The spring and magazine, and of course the bullets had to be bought. You can't print gunpowder (yet), but everything else was machine-made in house.
As attention getters go, this worked like a charm, but don't be worried that your next door neighbor is going to start printing out guns left and right. For one thing, "the equipment we have is about $750,000 for purchase," explained McGowan. "They can go for a million."
Even if you had the money, you'd need an industrial warehouse capable of powering the machine, which uses a high-precision laser to solidify powdered metals in a pattern determined by a 3-D computer model.
These rapid prototyping setups are often used by companies that want to perfect a design before manufacturing it overseas. They're very different from the sub-$2,000 desktop 3-D printers you can buy today, which lay down melted plastic in layers instead and were used to create the Liberator, the world's first working printed handgun.
You'd also need some special inert gases to fill the production chamber with, a skilled metalworker and gunsmith to finish the parts ("you haven't seen the pieces when they come out of the machine," said McGowan), and of course a federal firearm production license.
The gun survived firing 500 shots in a row with no damage or problems except a little discoloration from heat.
That last bit may be optional if you don't care about the law — but Solid Concepts is proud to say that what it created is not only the first printed-metal handgun, but one that's OK in the eyes of the law.
Even so, the company is not about to enter the gun business.
"We have some customers who are gun producers, but it's less than one percent of what we do," explained McGowan. "We just wanted to show that this technology is viable. This gun cost us many times more than it would cost to go out and buy one."
What it does do, however, is prove that the company's laser sintering process produces parts strong enough and precise enough to include not just in guns, but in satellites, medical implements, robots and so on.
Funnily enough, though printing the gun was something of a milestone, it's not a recent technical advancement that made it possible.
"The equipment we're using was available a few years ago," said McGowan. "I believe someone with a high level of expertise could have done it — but no one tried it."
Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. His personal website is coldewey.cc.Founded by Paul Snow and Peter Kirby, Factom is a 2.0 solution built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. By distilling data to single hash and inserting it into the blockchain via a transaction, Factom allows the verification of any kind of record or information. NewsBTC’s Andrew Wagner managed to get a hold of Peter Kirby to ask him a few questions about what’s going on with their new technology, and its likely future.
Andrew Wagner: first, tell us a bit about your background. How did you come to be doing Factom?
Peter Kirby: I’m a long time entrepreneur and have been in sales/marketing for 20+ years. My last company was in Bitcoin Hardware, but I was more interested in Blockchain Technology. I met Paul in 2014 and loved the technology he was working on. We came together to form Factom in fall of 2014.
Andrew: so, the idea is that Factom works together with Bitcoin (or any blockchain), right? Does Gavin Andresen know what you’re doing, and how closely do you work with the Bitcoin developers?
Peter: yes. Factom piggybacks on the incredible security of the Bitcoin to create a data layer for the Blockchain. We drop anchors every 10 minutes into the Bitcoin Blockchain, but we can just as easily drop anchors into Ripple, Ethereum, NXT, or internal customer blockchains and increase the security even further from there. Bitcoin doesn’t need to succeed for Factom to stay secure. We sent the whitepaper to the entire development community, including the core dev’s for review before we published. Gavin told us it was a great use of Op Return, and other dev’s like Luke Jr. and Peter Todd have given us great technical feedback and guidance.”
Andrew: Factom seems to have a really wide variety of use cases. Do you think you’re going to be proving the existence of pretty much everything in the digital world?
Peter: “hahaha. Wouldn’t that be good for the world. Factom creates immutable ledgers for data. Turns out that’s a really powerful tool for record keeping and business systems. Also, because Factom prevents users from ever touching a cryptocurrency, it’s much easier for a big institution to adopt Factom’s blockchain technology then trying to write directly to Bitcoin or Ripple. We’re working on a lot of exciting real-world projects that we’ll be able to announce later this year. It’s an exciting time for the blockchain technology.”
Andrew: I saw that there’s going to be a Factom Foundation. The Bitcoin Foundation had a lot of critics until it refocused on core development; what exactly will be the goals of the Foundation, and how transparent and democratic is it going to be?
Peter: the Factom Foundation will be very different from the Bitcoin Foundation – probably closer in scope to the Mozilla Foundation. The core goal of the Foundation is to make better and better open source Factom software and to help facilitate uses of the protocol. It’s board is David Johnston, Paul Snow, and myself. Everything will be transparent (duh) and eventually documented on Factom. The protocol is extremely democratic by design. So I don’t think we’ll have the same challenges as the Bitcoin Foundation.
Andrew: how long do you think it’s going to be before corporations, banks and countries start integrating Factom? How long before the transition is complete?
Peter: I suspect you’ll see the first countries and corporations announcing preliminary projects this year. Once institutions use the protocol and get comfortable with the idea of distributed global ledgers and immutable record keeping, they’ll move systems to Factom very quickly. However, we’re realistic about the timelines and politics involved, so it’ll be a while before the total transition is complete. I expect the world will look very different in 10 years.
Andrew: anything else you’d like to add, or misconceptions to clear up?Tribal Huk president Jamie Pink said he has lost sight in his right eye after a gun shoot out on the country roads of Ngaruawahia.
A bullet through Tribal Huk president Jamie Pink's windscreen during a showdown with P dealers claimed the sight in one eye, the gang boss says.
Pink said his eye was grazed by a bullet shot through his windscreen in a country road altercation over the weekend. He said part of the eyeball was damaged beyond repair.
"Those bullets that came through the windscreen, one of them came a bit close and burnt it, that part on the top of the eye - it's all burnt out. The doctor said the rest will have to come out in about two weeks so I'm wearing a patch so I don't scare the kids."
CHRISTEL YARDLEY/FAIRFAX NZ Tribal Huk president Jamie Pink said he has lost sight in his right eye.
Pink said he did not seek hospital help but instead he was treated by a "trusted doctor".
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The Tribal Huk president said his SUV was shot up by P dealers on the back roads of the small Waikato town of Ngaruawahia.
On Monday he left his bullet riddled vehicle in the Waikato Times car park. Inside the armoured black Ford Explorer were two loaded shotguns, blood, bags of cement, and other devices presumably to absorb bullets.
Pink told a reporter that he had lost his right eye and warned them to be careful of touching the vehicle with the loaded weapons inside.
The police are investigating the incident and are examining the vehicle.
Pink's war on P began on October 13 at a Ngaruawahia town meeting, where he gave P dealers 24 hours to leave the town.
Pink has not revealed where and who he has run out of town, however sources in the township have said a number of houses had been visited.
"No one will ever nark out the Huks because most of us support the kaupapa. Better the devil you know," a source said.
Police ESR scientists have begun a sweep on the vehicle for any substances or matter, including blood on the passenger seat, at midday on Tuesday.
It would likely take most of the day and then those results would be sent for testing
Detective Senior Sergeant Darryl Smith, of Waikato CIB said: "We have isolated the vehicle and its contents and they will be examined by forensic specialists."
Police did confirm two guns were inside the vehicle when it was dumped.
Smith said police were following up on those inquiries.The U.S.-Mexico border has been a topic of much debate this election season. But should our national attention be more focused toward our neighbors to the north?
The Canadian border, just 300 miles from New York City, presents its own challenges, the scope of which CBS2’s Maurice DuBois saw firsthand during an exclusive tour earlier this week.
All that separates the two countries for miles at a time is a split rail fence that you’d find in any ordinary backyard. During DuBois’ tour, Border Control Division Chief Bradley Curtis spotted a horse that can cross the border with no trouble.
But the four-legged border jumper is the least of our concerns, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said.
“We see alien smuggling. We see narcotic smuggling. We see currency smuggling,” Border Patrol Operations Officer Brad Brandt said.
Agents said much of that activity is heading directly to New York City and our suburbs where the product is sold on our streets.
“There is a significant amount of violence that is associated with these drugs,” Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Michael Laravia said.
Large quantities of high potency marijuana can be particularly problematic. Drug runners sneak across the border in the secret compartments of vehicles.
But drugs, as dangerous as they are. are just a part of the story.
“Our primary mission of course, is to stop a terrorist,” Brandt said.
And some spots could be easy points of entry.
“There are radicalized groups that are in Canada — that is a tremendous concern to us,” Curtis said regarding terrorism threats.
They said Canada’s more open-door policy toward Syrian refugees is also of concern.
“Up here we’re encountering people from every single country,” Curtis said. “They’re coming across on snowmobiles. They’re coming across on ATVs. Of course, we have 95 miles of water boundaries, so people come across on boat, canoes, anything you can think of.”
And although technology is pretty widespread throughout the border, border patrol agents said they use everything at their disposal to mind the front lines.
“I’ve arrested people here, there,” Curtis said as he walked through wooded terrain with DuBois.
Everything from foot patrols to ground sensors to hidden cameras in the woods are monitored at a command center in Swanton, Vermont.
The command center is manned “24 hours, seven days a week, 365,” Curtis said.
Agents say they win daily battles. In the last year, agents seized more than 10,000 pounds of marijuana and millions of dollars in illegal currency coming into the U.S.
Going out of the country, they stop shipments of a wide variety of illegal guns.
To win the larger war, agents say, they need more troops.
“We’ve actually asked to double the man power. There’s only so many border patrol agents in the country allowed. We’re competing with the southwest border,” Curtis said.
The sector currently only has about 300 agents covering about 300 miles, including a large Indian reservation that’s an attractive route for smugglers. With so much ground to cover, the agents said they rely heavily on the people who live along the border to alert them to any suspicious activity.Financial relief could soon be on the way for struggling local television newsrooms, but that help will come at a cost to community programming.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission announced Wednesday that it will change the rules around the funding of local content, which could see nearly $67-million redirected into private local newsrooms, from community channels.
The broadcast regulator is also changing local news programming requirements in some regions.
English-language TV stations in metropolitan markets, such as Toronto and Vancouver, must air at least 14 hours of locally relevant programming each week.
In smaller non-metropolitan markets, the requirement will be seven hours per week.
French-language stations will be required to broadcast five hours of local programming weekly, but that could be increased based on individual community needs.
Changing funding models
In its decision, the CRTC said it will allow satellite and cable providers "flexibility" by rebalancing resources within the broadcasting system.
Right now, cable and satellite providers must put five per cent of their revenues into the creation of Canadian programming. While that number won't change, how the money is allocated will be adjusted.
Starting Sept. 1, 2017, the CRTC will allow cable and satellite providers that already own television stations, such as Rogers, Bell and Quebecor, to shift a portion of their community programming funding into local news funding instead.
CRTC Chair Jean-Pierre Blais says the decision was based on feedback from Canadians. "Their number 1 priority was local news," Blais said, adding, "instead of putting more money, year after year, into community channels... that money should be allowed to be flexed into local news."
The policy change comes with conditions. If a company chooses to shift more of its Canadian program funding into local news, the company must keep all of its local TV stations on the air.
Today's decision only applies to private broadcasters and has no impact on CBC funding.
Gap widening
The CRTC says Canadians told the commission they sense a "weakening of the ecosystem for local news," adding they have noticed some broadcasters "shortening the length of newscasts, downsizing newsrooms and centralizing production."
In its decision, the CRTC acknowledged that local news operations are facing a "difficult financial situation," adding: "The gap between the costs associated with producing local news and the revenues derived from this programming is increasing."
(Graham Hughes/Canadian Press)
Data released by the CRTC shows local news revenues have been falling steadily since 2012. Industry revenues from 2012-13 reached $297-million, but dropped in 2013-14 to $271-million. Revenues fell again in 2014-15 to $266-million.
At the same time, expenditures for local news have grown. In 2012-13 they reached $340-million, jumping to $345-million in 2013-14. In 2014-15, they increased again to $348-million.
Several news organizations, including the CBC, had asked the CRTC to come up with new ways to help struggling local TV newsrooms.
During CRTC hearings in January, the CBC proposed the creation of a new fund to encourage broadcasters to produce more than basic local news coverage.
Industry-wide concerns were raised in 2012, when the CRTC announced it would be ending the Local Programming Improvement Fund.
The $100-million fund was created in 2008 to help local TV newsrooms struggling with declining advertising revenues during the global economic downturn.
The LPIF was considered controversial at the time, as the CRTC ordered cable and satellite providers to pay into the fund. Some providers passed that fee onto customers.
Boost for independent news
A new independent local news fund is also being established to give independent stations access to roughly $23 million for local news programming.
The fund will be earmarked for TV stations in 18 communities across the country.
That cash could mean the difference between producing local newscasts or going off the air completely for struggling stations like Global-affiliated CKPR and CHFD in Thunder Bay, Ont.
An executive from the stations told the CRTC in January they would shut their doors by Sept. 1 unless they received help to pay for local programming.
The stations have been staying afloat using money from life insurance policies taken out on a station owner and a general manager who passed away, Don Caron, vice president and general manager of Thunder Bay Electronics told a CRTC panel.
The regulator heard similar financial woes from numerous stations that are part of the Small Market Independent Television Stations Coalition.
Last March, the CRTC turned down a request from the coalition for emergency interim funding.
New technology has given Canadians greater access to both local and international news. But advertising revenue streams have been flowing into digital news outlets and away from traditional TV stations, forcing them to cut hundreds of jobs to remain profitable.By Sarah Holt
BBC Sport at Monza
Sebastian Vettel fought back to win Red Bull's first Italian Grand Prix and move closer to a second world title. Fernando Alonso took the lead with a brilliant start but Vettel re-passed him to take his eighth win of the year. Jenson Button's fast-finishing McLaren passed Alonso later and team-mate Lewis Hamilton was fourth after losing time in a fight with Michael Schumacher. Red Bull's Australian Mark Webber crashed out, and was one of eight cars to retire from an exhilarating race. Vettel now leads the championship from Alonso by 112 points which means his first chance to seal a consecutive world title will come in Singapore in a fortnight's time. "It's no big surprise that this man is the winner again," said BBC F1 co-commentator David Coulthard. "Are we witnessing one of the true legends of the sport? He's proven today he's fighting for victories even when he does not have to take a risk." Vettel's victory completed a happy return to Monza, where the German first started making history when he became the youngest ever grand prix winner when he won his maiden race at the historic circuit for Toro Rosso three years ago. Vettel had lost the lead off the line as Alonso bravely squeezed his Ferrari down the inside from fourth on the grid. But the world champion displayed his own dash of daring to re-pass Alonso with a high-speed move around the outside of Curva Grande and into the second chicane on lap five. From there, Vettel steadily built his lead and when he pitted for soft tyres 15 laps later he comfortably returned way out in front and was never challenged on his way to the flag. ANDREW BENSON'S BLOG It was obvious in Italy that Schumacher is as willing as ever to push the boundaries of acceptable behaviour up to and beyond their limits
Vettel said: "This was a circuit that has been tough for us to be competitive in the last couple of years and we have come back this year. "The start wasn't good, I don't know where Fernando came from and it took me a while to realise we were three across the track." His team-mate Webber lost second place in the standings and conceded his championship was over as he retired following a crash with Felipe Massa. Alonso moved up to second on 172 points, with Button and Webber level in third on 167. Hamilton is nine points further back in fifth. Button played a waiting game in the opening stages of the race but seized the advantage when Hamilton ran wide as he chased down Michael Schumacher's Mercedes. Are we witnessing one of the true legends of the sport? He's proven he's fighting for victories even when he does not have to take a risk
BBC's Formula 1 co-commentator David Coulthard As his English team-mate edged his wheels on the grass, Button moved beyond Schumacher for fourth and stayed ahead of him at the first pit stop. When Alonso and Button switched to the harder medium tyres at the second stop, Button found himself up to speed much more quickly than the Ferrari. Button swept past Alonso for second on lap 36 and was untroubled as he held on to second - just where he finished in Monza last season. Alonso said: "We've been doing some good starts in recent weeks and we knew there was enough space to overtake so we maximised our potential in our start but we were not competitive enough to fight for victory." A crash on the opening lap, which was caused when Tonio Liuzzi's HRT slammed into the train of cars, was to have an impact on Hamilton's race. The McLaren driver was caught napping as the race restarted once the safety car, which had been called out for the opening-lap crash, retreated and he was jumped by Schumacher. The pair spent almost half the race locked in an entertaining battle for position as Hamilton even found himself behind the Mercedes after his first stop. Hamilton finally found his way past Schumacher as the German yielded position on the approach to Ascari only to find himself once again staring at the back of the Mercedes after his second pit stop. Hamilton finally passed the seven-time world champion with 15 laps to go and crossed the line in fourth. Schumacher collected fifth ahead of Massa, Toro Rosso's Jaime Alguersuari - who had started from 19th on the grid. Scot Paul di Resta got back in the points with eighth for Force India and Bruno Senna collected his first F1 points with ninth in the Renault. Sebastien Buemi was 10th for Toro Rosso. Webber was one of eight retirements which also included Nico Rosberg of Mercedes and Renault's Vitaly Petrov, who were tangled up in the first corner crash. Liuzzi was penalised for his part in the accident and received a reprimand and a five-place grid penalty, which will take effect in Singapore, for causing the collision.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionA pioneer of modern Korean sculpture, Kwon Jin Kyu (1922-73) is well known for terracotta pieces of the female figure. [Kwon Jin Kyu Commemoration Foundation]
Top: “Scene with a Horse and a Figure” (1956-57) Below: A terracotta piece titled “Woman with a Scarf” made circa 1969. [Courtesy of Kwon Jin Kyu Commemoration Foundation & PKM Gallery]
Is a sculpture made posthumously considered authentic? That is debatable.“The Gates of Hell” by Auguste Rodin was cast in bronze in 1926, nine years after he died. Not only his pieces but many others throughout history have been reproduced based on the mold that the artist left behind. These pieces, produced under strict quality control, are often treated as well as the originals.The case of Kwon Jin Kyu, a pioneer of modern Korean sculpture (1922-73) is a bit more complicated. The tragic sculptor killed himself at the age of 51. Before he committed suicide, he eliminated most of the molds of his works.But, additional editions of his works have been made by casting directly from sculptures that were made while he was still alive. This act of producing posthumous castings have been at the root of controversy in the Korean art community.Kwon Jin Kyu Commemoration Foundation held a press conference on Aug. 23 at PKM Gallery in central Seoul and stated that they distinguish posthumous editions from originals, while expressing the view that the trade of posthumous editions is undesirable. It also shared the plan for publishing a catalogue raisonne of Kwon’s pieces. A catalogue raisonne is an annotated listing of all the known works of an artist.“Posthumous casting depends on what the artist wanted,” said Park Hyoung-gook, a professor of History of Art and Design at Musashino Art University of Japan.He added, “In contrast to what Rodin did, not only did Kwon remove the molds and [notes about] his techniques, but also had published criticism against posthumous casting before he died.”The professor added that if an edition is made by casting from a finished work, not from a mold, regardless of how well it is produced, the piece becomes slimmer than the original piece by its horizontal contraction. “Finger prints of |
the United States make up 18 percent, which represents about a one-third drop over the past 25 years.
If Conservative Judaism becomes one with Reform in both theory and practice, how can it survive as an independent movement?
A
lthough Solomon Schechter (1847–1915) became the president of the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1902 and is considered the founder of Conservative Judaism, he did not think he was establishing a distinct movement per se. Instead, Schechter’s intellectual and organizational project sought to “conserve” Jewish tradition by establishing a cross-denominational movement for all traditional synagogues united in opposing the Reform movement’s rejection of traditional practice.
The norms of practice Schechter advocated were traditional, which is why, aspirationally, the classic Conservative synagogue service is almost identical to an Orthodox service and why the classic Conservative home life revolves around keeping kosher, keeping the holidays, and maintaining a strict division between the Sabbath and the rest of the week. Schechter spoke of a “Catholic Israel,” made up of “the committed people.” Where he differed from Orthodoxy was in the realm of belief. Schechter’s traditionalist approach grew from a historical perspective, one that situated the study of both biblical text and halacha in the overall cultural context in which they developed. This approach was highly problematic for those who viewed Judaism as God-centered and the Torah not as a historical document but as literally a gift to the world from the Lord to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Still, as the historian Jonathan Sarna has observed, Schechter’s original vision of two branches of Judaism—Reform and traditional—was reflected in the actual daily practice of Judaism in much of the United States until the 1930s, at which point the traditionalist camp openly fractured. The most open area of conflict became mixed seating in synagogues, which had been the common practice of Reform temples since the late 19th century. Increasingly, Conservative Jews wanted synagogues that allowed families to sit together, and the debates grew so heated that the matter was actually litigated in American courts in the 1950s in a series of cases. This situation provided Orthodox authorities with the opportunity to denounce publicly mixed seating as incompatible with halacha and established the differentiation between the norms of Orthodox and Conservative Judaism.
As all this was happening, Conservative Judaism’s middle-of-the-road message proved to be a good fit for many American Jews wanting to live a modern but still traditional life, and the movement was the dominant force in the community from the end of World War II through the 1960s. But as the second half of the 20th century progressed, Orthodox Judaism began to carve out a more distinct identity defined by much stronger norms of traditional practice. This phenomenon, documented by Samuel Heilman in his book Sliding to the Right, explains how the religious and cultural standards of Orthodox and Conservative Judaism began to diverge even more substantially. For Conservative Jews who were interested in living a Torah-centered life, Orthodoxy became more attractive. Aggressive outreach by pockets of Orthodoxy, notably Chabad-Lubavitch, contributed to the appeal of a Judaism perceived as more authentic than the normative practices characteristic of Conservative Judaism.
In the latter decades of the last century, Reform Judaism took a turn toward the more traditional. Some of its adherents began embracing once-discarded practices such as Hebrew prayers, the celebration of life-cycle events, and the wearing of yarmulkes, tallitot and even tefillin. To some Jews who had been raised Conservative, Reform no longer felt “churchy.” Even more important for its growth, the Reform movement began to attract a portion of the growing number of intermarried couples—in part because Reform clergy were open to performing such marriages. The Reform movement also changed the halachic standards for “who is a Jew” by adopting the Patrilineal Resolution in 1983, allowing the determination of Jewish status to be based on either parent. In practice, this new resolution created the presumption that children of mixed marriages are to be considered Jewish as long as they publicly manifest a positive and exclusive Jewish identity. Taken together, these reasons may help explain why the Pew Report found that 30 percent of Jews who had been raised Conservative had migrated to Reform over the previous four decades.
Unlike Reform Judaism, the Conservative movement is composed of discrete institutional arms with parallel authority. The United Synagogue governs synagogue-related matters, and the affiliated educational institutions train the clergy and other professional leaders. Regarding matters of halacha, however, the movement’s Rabbinical Assembly—the international association of Conservative rabbis—has the final say. The RA has established a lawmaking body known today as the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, which governs the movement outside of Israel. This committee is charged with the responsibility for adopting legal positions that are considered halachically acceptable as well as promulgating Standards of Rabbinic Practice. Individual congregational rabbis may look to the committee’s decisions for guidance, but they have considerable latitude in making their own halachic decisions for their respective communities. But they are strictly bound to a set of official rules called the Standards of Rabbinic Practice.
Two of the three Standards of Rabbinic Practice relate to intermarriage. One prohibits a Conservative rabbi from performing an intermarriage. Another defines Jewish membership according to the mother’s religion or a halachic conversion. (The third requires a get, a Jewish writ of divorce, before remarriage.) The new United Synagogue standard allowing non-Jewish members was designed to avoid conflict with the Rabbinic Standards of Practice, since it does not change the current legal definition of Jewish status. In other words, the United Synagogue draws a theoretical distinction between membership in a shul and the traditional halachic standards for defining who is a Jew.
That said, the real issue is not whether the United Synagogue Standard can be aligned in theory with the movement’s Rabbinic Standards but what impact this, and other initiatives concerning intermarriage, will have on how Conservative Judaism is practiced on the ground.
Simply put, a wide embrace of certain types of outreach measures to intermarried couples by Conservative synagogues has the potential to dissolve the movement down the road. Clergy, staff, and lay leaders need to weigh carefully just what will be gained—and lost—before they move forward on initiatives directed toward the intermarried.
As intermarriage escalates, it will be difficult enough for the Conservative movement to maintain its 73 percent in-marriage rate.
First, one must ask why an intermarried couple would choose a Conservative synagogue over a Reform temple. Aside from the fact that Conservative rabbis are still barred from performing intermarriage ceremonies, most traditional Conservative services are less accessible to non-Jews than Reform services, given their length and the amount of Hebrew. These demanding services prompt many in-married couples with one Conservative and one Reform partner to opt for the Reform affiliation. How can we realistically expect otherwise of an intermarried couple, even if one of the partners grew up in a Conservative synagogue?
Thus, while it is highly questionable whether Conservative synagogues will gain members by greater outreach to intermarried couples, it is almost certain that there will be losses of both a qualitative and quantitative nature from doing so. It is already the case that some Conservative rabbis allow an interfaith couple to have an aufruf—a pre-wedding honor—in their synagogues and allow public congratulations to interfaith couples on their engagements and weddings. Has this helped the movement gain adherents? There is no sign this is the case.
Parents who feel strongly about their children marrying Jews will lose the support of a synagogue community that reinforces their views on this matter. These parents will have to work twice as hard to buck the growing trends. As intermarriage escalates, it will be difficult enough for the Conservative movement to maintain its 73 percent in-marriage rate without synagogues acting in ways that seem to suggest there is no greater virtue in two Jews marrying each other than in a Jew marrying a non-Jew.
In areas with large Jewish communities, parents seeking to pass on some form of traditional Judaism to their children and grandchildren may simply go elsewhere if their synagogues go too far down the intermarriage outreach path. We can assume that these parents will be among the most dedicated and serious members in a Conservative synagogue, those who often form the core of Shabbat attendees and exert an influence on the religious norms of the community. Their departure will alter the spirit of Conservative synagogues considerably.
Finally, assuming these outreach efforts become common in Conservative synagogues, rabbis who stand their ground and refuse to go along will have a more difficult time getting hired and retaining their jobs. The same phenomenon occurred in the Reform movement when it decided to give rabbis the choice of performing intermarriages.
Realistically, as long as Conservative Judaism retains its existing halachic positions prohibiting intermarriage and retaining matrilineal descent, most intermarried couples wanting to seek out Judaism still will gravitate to Reform. Moreover, given the escalating rates of intermarriage and the documented lack of interest among Jewish millennials across the board in joining synagogues, Conservative affiliation will likely continue to decline despite these outreach efforts. If the movement’s next steps to counter this decline will be eventual permission for its clergy to perform intermarriages and the adoption of a version of the Patrilineal Resolution, Conservative Judaism will then be indistinguishable from Reform except for the makeup of the prayer book and the length of the Torah services.
The Reform movement already provides a much-needed space for intermarried couples to grow together regarding Judaism and raise Jewish families. “Under the Chuppah,” a recent study by the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, shows that intermarried couples wed solely by a Jewish clergy officiant are more highly engaged than other intermarried couples, more likely to join a synagogue, and based on early data concerning childrearing, significantly more likely to raise their children as Jewish.
Still, the Brandeis study also provides evidence suggesting that observance on the part of intermarried couples is not the same as that of mainstream Conservative Jews. Compared to in-married couples, intermarried couples married by a sole Jewish officiant are less likely to raise children as Jewish by religion, select a Jewish preschool, have a special meal on Shabbat, attribute importance to keeping kosher, discuss Israel and Judaism with friends and family, and donate to Jewish or Israeli causes.
These findings by the Brandeis study can be profitably compared with a study just released about levels of Jewish engagement among alumni of Camp Ramah, the Conservative movement’s network of summer camps. This study, based on over 5,000 Ramah alumni, provides ample evidence that institutional efforts to develop traditional norms of Conservative Jewish observance can be highly successful. The study found that Ramah alumni reported significantly high levels of Jewish identity, ritual observance, and connection to Israel, as well as extremely low rates of intermarriage. Significantly, nine out of 10 respondents stated that it is very important or essential for their children to marry Jews.
This survey may contain some “upward” bias based on the reality that the most Jewishly connected Ramah alumni are also the most likely to have participated in the study. Still, it cannot be denied that the Ramah culture has proven effective in keeping former campers strongly attached to Conservative Jewish practice. It is telling that about 70 percent of Ramah alumni belong to Conservative, Masorti (the name used for Conservative Judaism outside North America), or so-called traditional egalitarian congregations.
Through its camps, day schools, youth groups, synagogues, and part-time Hebrew schools, Conservative Judaism has sustained a core community of American Jews whose daily lives substantially revolve around Jewish tradition, even if not in a way that conforms completely with strict halachic observance. There are indeed standards of observance among rigorous Conservative Jews. These include Shabbat dinners and attending services, especially on Shabbat morning. Such Jews celebrate all the festivals, even if synagogue attendance is lighter on the second days of Pesach, Succot, and Shavuot. They attend services on the evening of Tisha B’av, the commemoration of the destruction of the Temple, even if most Conservative Jews do not fast the entire day. Traditional Conservative Jews still hold a seven-day shiva for a deceased parent, and many go to a minyan once a day for 11 months to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish, even if fewer observe all the mourning customs such as refraining from listening to live music and buying new clothing during the year of mourning.
Traditional Conservative Jews may not daven three times, or even once, a day, but by and large they do keep kosher homes with two sets of dishes and they refrain from eating nonkosher meat when outside their homes. Of course, not all self-identified committed Conservative Jews maintain these norms, but anyone who spends time in Conservative Jewish communities in this country will see these general patterns of observance common among the core. And many Conservative Jews who do not follow these patterns will readily acknowledge that they probably should.
Significantly, most Conservative Jews also insist on, or at least prefer, an egalitarian worship community and feel strongly about gay rights from a ritual perspective. The Conservative movement essentially represents the only realistic alternative for this group, a reality reaffirmed by recent rulings by the Orthodox Union and the Rabbinical Council of America proscribing roles for female clergy. The ability to offer traditional, egalitarian services provides the Conservative movement with a ready-made niche.
The Pew Report showed that Conservative Jews in general have higher measures of engagement with the tradition than do Reform Jews.
In retrospect, the Conservative movement has made some major blunders when it comes to encouraging the conservation of Jewish tradition. Consider theissued in 1950 by the movement’s law committee. This opinion, which was part of an overall plan to revitalize Shabbat observance among Conservative Jews, allowed driving on Shabbat (but only to attend services) and permitted the use of electricity to enhance the day’s enjoyment. The goal was to reintroduce Shabbat in a way that authors of thebelieved was possible for mid-20th-century American Conservative Jews.
The Responsum justified its leniency on these matters of Jewish law by applying halachic precedents to the science governing the production of electricity and the operation of automobiles. In practice, however, embracing such leniencies only provided a reason for further criticism of the movement by the Orthodox—and made no practical difference to the majority of Conservative Jews who were going to drive on Shabbat regardless of whether they received permission.
Committed Conservative Jews, regardless of whether they drive or use electricity on Shabbat, have always appreciated the benefits of keeping its 25 hours holy. Such benefits were emphasized by Rabbi Ben Zion Bokser, who wrote a strong minority opinion to the Responsum emphasizing the importance of a Shabbat experience grounded in home and quality family time. In language that is still remarkably relevant today, Bokser spoke of the importance of Shabbat as freedom from machines and modern life’s complexities. His opinion did not parse the halacha but rather presented a sociological and psychological argument for why a normative, traditional Shabbat experience matters.
Conservative Rabbinic leaders should follow Bokser’s lead. They should focus on developing, communicating, and selling to their membership a set of ritual norms of observance currently being practiced by the movement’s most dedicated Jews. An emphasis on thicker forms of traditional practice will provide the best path not only for retaining the core but also for reclaiming other traditional Jews who feel that Conservative Judaism has lost its footing.
It is not too late for the Conservative movement to right its direction. The Pew Report showed that Conservative Jews in general have higher measures of engagement with the tradition than do Reform Jews. Rates of intermarriage among Reform Jews are almost double those of Conservative Jews. Conservative Judaism needs to build upon and strengthen these distinctions rather than competing with Reform in areas in which it is bound to lose ground.
In short, the Conservative movement needs a return to Schechter’s mission of conserving Jewish tradition by focusing its educational and spiritual energies on enlarging and strengthening a root group of Conservative Jews who are drawn to tradition. The movement should refrain from attempting to widen a tent that is already losing its shape and structure. Instead, it should commit itself to a collective effort to develop a stronger, distinct, religious identity based on what it can legitimately claim as its unique legacy. Such a path may not result in an explosion of new adherents, but it will maintain Conservative Judaism’s distinct definition—and chart a course away from its self-destruction.Vancouver Island is home to some of the last remaining old-growth forests on the continent. The enormous trees that exist within these ecosystems used to cover most of North America before being cut down for industrial and agricultural purposes. Unfortunately, some of these forests now confront similar threats today from numerous logging companies in the area.
These are the trees they want to cut down.
This is what they want to turn them into.
73% of Vancouver Island's old-growth forests have already been lost.
Only 6% of Vancouver Island's productive forest lands are protected in their parks system.
Two Documentaries
From left to right (Rebecca Billings, Adam Monzella, Jacob Wise)
Our names are Jacob, Rebecca and Adam, and we're Environmental and Documentary students from Ithaca College in Ithaca, NY. In order to protect the final 27%, we will fly out to Vancouver Island in British Columbia to make two documentaries about its unique and imperiled ecosystems.
The first film will be a traditional investigative documentary detailing the ecological community's current circumstances. For this film we're hoping to interview a variety of individuals including representatives from logging companies, local environmentalists and citizens, and experts in relevant fields. By gathering a variety of opinions we hope to paint a clear picture of the current situation facing these forests, as well as present a wide range of views on the subject and its potential impact on global sustainability.
The second film will be a non-verbal piece showing these ecosystems and their enormous trees in their natural beauty, as well as the precarious nature of their existence. By non-verbal, we mean that the film will be made up entirely of images and soundscapes, rather than interviews and narration. These images will be used to bring the viewer through a variety of themes and vibrations that resonate throughout the forests in order to bring forth understanding and connection, as well as give weight to the current events.
Thus, the films act as companion pieces to each other.
There's just one catch, though. We need to get there first.
That's where you come in.
With your help, we will be able to afford:
Round-trip plane tickets
Lodging
Rental costs for production equipment such as lenses and camera rigs.
Everything else, including cameras, equipment, supplies, sustenance and determination, is already accounted for. If we manage to exceed our goal, the extra funds will be put to use in either increasing the quality of the film or a donation towards the protection of these lands.
As a way of showing our gratitude, we've put together a plethora of incentives which you can see on the right side of this page.
If you can't afford to donate, we would be grateful if you would share this project on your Facebook, Twitter, and with friends and family. We have a limited time to raise funds and appreciate all the help we can get!
These films are not being made for personal gain. We are making them in the hopes of reconnecting people with the planet that they are a living part of - the same planet that is currently on the brink of widespread environmental degradation, destruction and contamination. For us, this film isn't a choice or a career move. It's what all of us feel we need to be doing with our lives at this point in time.
By donating to this project, you are funding more than just a couple of films. You are helping to raise awareness and support for an ever-expanding environmental movement made up of people that want to keep our planet healthy and beautiful. The fact that old-growth forests are being logged, and will potentially continue to be logged until they are extinct speaks for the need of a societal reconsideration of the health and workings of our biosphere. Through the films that you help to complete, we hope to instill this sentiment in others.
“To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.” - Aldo LeopoldOver the past decade, everyone seems to have heard of the so-called 10,000-hour rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers: The Story of Success. It asserted that people who were performing at a world-class level, such as musicians, artists, or sportspeople, had practiced for approximately 10,000 hours up to that point.
And so, if you wanted to become one of the best in the world, all you had to do was also practice for 10,000 hours.
However, the authors behind the original study on which Gladwell based his figures now claim that his interpretation wasn't actually very accurate.
This has wide implications for anyone trying to develop a skill and expertise, whether in the arts, business, sports, or any other field.
What the original study actually found
In 1993, Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer published the results of a study on a group of violin students in a music academy in Berlin. It stated that the most accomplished students had put in an average of 10,000 hours of practice by their 20th birthday. That paper would go on to become a major part of the scientific literature on expert performers, but only attracted mainstream attention after Outliers was published
Recently, Ericsson and co-author Robert Pool wanted to clarify what the science actually says, highlighted in their new book Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise. They laid out some of its main points in an excerpt, where they mentioned the fundamental flaws with the 10,000-hour rule:
The rule is irresistibly appealing. It's easy to remember, for one thing. It would've been far less effective if those violinists had put in, say, eleven thousand hours of practice by the time they were twenty. And it satisfies the human desire to discover a simple cause-and-effect relationship: just put in ten thousand hours of practice at anything, and you will become a master.
They then go into detail about the first of its specific flaws:
Problem 1: The number 10,000 was chosen arbitrarily
First, there is nothing special or magical about ten thousand hours. Gladwell could just as easily have mentioned the average amount of time the best violin students had practiced by the time they were eighteen (approximately seventy-four hundred hours) but he chose to refer to the total practice time they had accumulated by the time they were twenty, because it was a nice round number. And, either way, at eighteen or twenty, these students were nowhere near masters of the violin. They were very good, promising students who were likely headed to the top of their field, but they still had a long way to go at the time of the study. Pianists who win international piano competitions tend to do so when they're around thirty years old, and thus they've probably put in about 20,000 to 25,000 hours of practice by then; ten thousand hours is only halfway down that path.
It is very important to differentiate between the amount of time required to become extremely good at something, to become a master at something, and to become the world's best at something.
Problem 2: 10,000 hours was only the average
Second, the number of ten thousand hours at age twenty for the best violinists was only an average. Half of the ten violinists in that group hadn't actually accumulated ten thousand hours at that age. Gladwell misunderstood this fact and incorrectly claimed that all the violinists in that group had accumulated over ten thousand hours.
Fundamentally, 10,000 hours of practice will actually only keep you level on average with everyone else working toward your same goal. At most stages in your life, if you're committed to practice and improvement, that figure means you'll be ahead of about half of your competition, but still be behind the other half.
So you're actually further away from mastery than most people would think. Other studies have shown that most artists don't begin to produce their best work until they have been working on their craft for at least 10 years.
Finally, here is the piece of information that may have the biggest impact for the majority of people in pursuit of developing their skills:
Problem 3: Practice itself isn't enough
Third, Gladwell didn't distinguish between the type of practice that the musicians in our study did--a very specific sort of practice referred to as "deliberate practice" which involves constantly pushing oneself beyond one's comfort zone, following training activities designed by an expert to develop specific abilities, and using feedback to identify weaknesses and work on them--and any sort of activity that might be labeled "practice."
This is where we get to the crux of what makes some people improve faster than others. Deliberate practice is about being completely honest with yourself about what you want to improve, finding the best ways to actually achieve that improvement, and then actually executing that practice even if it is challenging and uncomfortable.
It is all about pushing yourself beyond your comfort barriers for a specific purpose because that is where you see the greatest gains.
If you just "spend time practicing," by spending time doing a task, you will not improve as quickly as you would if you focused on what you want to achieve in that time practicing. One of Kobe Bryant's trainers recalled a fascinating story of him spending several hours before team training with the U.S. Olympic basketball team, focusing solely on making 800 jump shots.
This is why there is such a fundamental difference between practice and deliberate practice. In fact, if your definition of practice is to repeat what you have previously done, over and over again without pushing yourself further, it will only make your brain more fixed in using those neural pathways and make it less flexible and able to generate ideas to handle new challenges. To illustrate, this optical illusion can show you the exact moment that your brain stops processing your sensory input and instead switches to processing based on memory and experiences.
This will make it harder for you to be creative in the long term. Fortunately, there are simple regular activities you can do that act as deliberate practice specifically for your creativity. I teach them in my seminars and workshops, but you can get the same tool here for free.
So what is the lesson? You will improve significantly faster at whatever you are trying to practice if you practice deliberately.
What does this all mean for you and me?
If this all seems a bit depressing, then it shouldn't be.
While this evidence suggests that it might be hard to become one of the world's best performers, most of us are not dedicated to becoming world-beaters. For most of us, we want to know whether we can improve enough to see ourselves become better and feel like we are achieving something.
Here, Ericsson and Pool give their view on what their research actually suggests.
In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way. If you practice something for a few hundred hours, you will almost certainly see great improvement... but you have only scratched the surface. You can keep going and going and going, getting better and better and better. How much you improve is up to you.
Additionally, it is important to remember that you don't need to be a world-class performer to be creative and have ideas.
Too many people believe that they aren't creative because they're not a skilled artist. They might say, "I can't draw to save my life" or "I'm a terrible singer and can't play the guitar."
In reality, you don't need to be "arty" to be creative and have ideas. You can have ideas in whatever domain you work in. And as long as they add value to the end goal, that is the definition of creativity.ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkish authorities defied court orders and reaffirmed a ban on YouTube imposed after the posting of illicit recordings of top secret security talks that was cited by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan as part of a “dirty campaign” to topple him.
YouTube logos displayed on a laptop screen partially covered with Turkey's national flag in this photo illustration taken in Ankara March 27, 2014. REUTERS/Umit Bektas
Authorities imposed the ban on Google’s (GOOG.O) video-sharing site on March 27 in the build-up to local elections, after weeks of leaked wiretaps which had emerged online, allegedly uncovering corruption in Erdogan’s inner circle. Erdogan emerged from the polls with his popularity largely intact.
Turkey’s telecoms regulator said on Thursday it would not end a block on YouTube, despite court rulings lifting the ban.
“The measure blocking access to the youtube.com internet site remains in place,” the Information and Communications Technologies Authority (BTK) said in a statement on its website.
Access to Twitter (TWTR.N) had also been barred until the Constitutional Court ruled last week that this violated the law.
Erdogan accuses a U.S.-based Islamic cleric of using a network of supporters to orchestrate an internet campaign and a police corruption investigation to undermine him. The cleric, Fethullah Gulen, denies any involvement and criticises Erdogan over a purge of his followers from state bodies.
Last Friday a lower court in Ankara ruled that the YouTube ban violated human rights and ordered most of the restrictions be lifted, citing the constitutional court ruling, and instead specifically blocked access to 15 videos.
Despite a prosecutor’s challenge to lifting the ban, imposed on grounds of state security, a higher Ankara court also ruled on Wednesday in favour of removing the general block on YouTube.
However, the BTK said that while some of the offending links had been removed, access to others had only been blocked in Turkey and they could be viewed abroad.
It said the ban would remain place “because some of the said content continues to be available on the internet site.”
The posting that triggered the ban was an illicit audio recording of a meeting of top security officials at the Foreign Ministry over possible military intervention in Syria. Erdogan condemned the recording as an act of treason.
Erdogan, who has been battling the graft scandal swirling around his government since a police investigation emerged in December, has said the constitutional court decision on Twitter was wrong and should be overturned.The United States will remain in an armed conflict in Afghanistan — essentially at war — after the end of this year under rules for combat operations the Pentagon requested, and President Obama approved, early this month.
Senior administration officials said that Obama agreed that U.S. military leaders in Afghanistan are authorized to approve combat operations, using ground forces, manned aircraft and drones, under three sets of circumstances.
They include counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda and other “transnational” terrorist groups, protection of U.S. forces engaged in training or other activities, and assistance to Afghan forces. Under those circumstances, U.S. forces probably will be engaged in direct combat with the Taliban and other groups that pose a threat to them or other members of the remaining international military coalition.
“Our expectation is that the Taliban and al-Qaeda will continue to directly threaten U.S. and other forces in Afghanistan,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The new authorizations appeared to be a shift away from Obama’s statement, made in May, that “America’s combat mission will be over by the end of this year. Starting next year, Afghans will be fully responsible for securing their country.”
In this image provided by NATO Training Mission - Afghanistan, a convoy of Afghan National Army HMMWVs line up in formation at the Kabul Military Training Center in Kabul in January 2011. (Ernesto Hernandez Fonte/AP)
Obama ordered a reduction in the number of U.S. troops to 9,800 by Jan. 1 and said their mission would be limited to training and advising Afghan forces and to counterterrorism against al-Qaeda. By the end of 2016, that number is to be reduced to about 1,000 U.S. military personnel attached to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
In explaining the newly approved rules, which have been sent to the Pentagon to be turned into formal orders, the senior official drew a distinction between America’s “combat mission” in Afghanistan, and necessary guidelines for “combat operations” that will continue in specific situations.
Several months of discussions about the authorities, which were first reported by the New York Times, culminated with a meeting in late October in which Obama and his senior national security team listened to and questioned Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel; Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. John F. Campbell, who commands U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan.
While some civilian officials objected to the scope of the Pentagon requests, Obama’s decision, made less than a week later, “essentially allows for an expanded set of counterterrorism authorities than what had previously envisioned — essentially giving the military status quo,” said another U.S. official.
A senior military official said the authorities were “not a license for offensive combat operations against the Taliban just because we still have U.S. capabilities in the country.” Officials said that a combat-capability was already built into planning for the 9,800 troops, and that the new authorities would not require additional resources.
International law uses the term “armed conflict” to refer to war. A determination that the war was over would require a different legal justification for combat operations than the one the administration has used since 2009 (as did its predecessor under former president George W. Bush).
With the new authorities, the senior administration official said, “as a matter of international law, we will remain in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.” He said the same circumstances for authorizing combat — force protection, counterterrorism and assistance to Afghan forces — would also to apply to U.S. combat operations against Taliban subgroups, such as the Haqqani network, which are designated terrorists or pose a specific threat.
The official described debates within the administration as “a process in a legal way of defining the criteria and the thresholds for the use of those combat capabilities that would remain in theater, should they be needed. Going from combat to a non-combat mission doesn’t mean you go from full aperture to zero,” the official said.
“It was about a legal set of defining authorities, not about changing the mission, not about broadening the scope,” he said.
The official said the administration would also continue to use the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed by Congress in 2001 to provide domestic legal justification for combat operations next year in Afghanistan. Obama said last year he wanted to “narrow” or repeal that authorization, since “the Afghan war is coming to an end.”
The definition of a threat justifying the use of U.S. combat forces is not spelled out in the new authorities, and is left largely to the discretion of commanders on the ground. “These authorities would reside at a fairly senior level of the military leadership,” the official said.
“I can’t give you an exact threshold” for use of the new rules, the official said. “That’s not how the authority is defined. It is limited; it’s not any circumstance.”
The official said that authorization for combat in counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda remnants and associated groups that remain in Afghanistan was not news, and “has always been integrated into our plan.”
While Afghan forces hold primary responsibility for protecting themselves and coalition forces, a combat capability was deemed necessary to protect U.S. and coalition troops that came under attack or were threatened, again at the discretion of commanders. Military officials had asked to have those authorities specified to ensure that available resources were not withheld when needed.
“One of the things we’ve made clear in these authorities,” the senior administration official said, was that “we will do what we need to do using what we consider combat capabilities as a force protection matter as the need requires.”
The military also asked the president to determine “in cases where the Afghans were truly on their own and needed some assistance, what would be the authority to use our combat role to assist them?” the official said.
“It’s limited, there has to be a threshold.... It’s not a single checkpoint getting fired at,” and would depend on a commander’s determination of the availability of U.S. resources.
Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan said that “it would have been intolerable for the American commander... to keep his aircraft on the ground while an Afghan unit was overrun because he was not authorized to use it.”
Karen DeYoung reported from Istanbul; Missy Ryan reported from Washington.New doctor in town offers alternative to traditional fee-for-service model Monthly subscriptions plan touted for providing access for patients, low overhead for doctors
As individuals and businesses grapple with how they will meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act that kick in next year, Dr. Samir Qamar wants MedLion to be one of the options.
An estimated 55 million people in the United States are uninsured, and starting in 2014 many of them will be required to carry health insurance. Larger employers will start facing penalties if they do not offer coverage to their employees.
Exhibiting a good sense for timing, Qamar opened the first Las Vegas branch of his direct primary care service in March. The doctor, who originally started the company in California, is hoping the system gives patients better access to a physician and serves as an affordable alternative to traditional insurance.
At MedLion there is no insurance. Patients pay a monthly subscription and each visit costs $10. Qamar has negotiated discounted prices with labs, clinics, pharmacies and others that offer services that his patients will have to pay for out-of-pocket.
“The traditional medical practice model, which is a fee-for-service model, is flawed,” Qamar said sitting in his Summerlin office, which doubles as his exam room. “It’s flawed because you have to charge the patients 'x' amount several times over the course of the day to break even with your office overhead, which can be very high, and to make a profit. That number is about 30 patients a day.”
Qamar moved from Monterey, Calif. where he had a concierge medical service, providing primary care to people who could afford to pay a premium for house calls, 24/7 access and other amenities. His wife, Dr. Hisana Qamar, worked at a traditional practice. At the end of 2008, his wife’s practice lost a quarter of its patients as the recession took hold and rising unemployment meant more people without health care benefits.
So Qamar used his existing office to experiment with a low-cost alternative to his VIP service. He stripped out amenities, which could raise the subscription price to as much as $1,000 a month, and focused on providing basic care to the uninsured and underinsured. Qamar decided to move to Las Vegas because he saw a fertile market in the valley with a low ratio of primary care physicians to residents, and because of the low taxes in Nevada.
“Between 60 and 70 percent of medical care is primary care. My thinking was if I could make that 60 or 70 percent of medical care very affordable, you wouldn’t need insurance for it,” Qamar said.
The concept is relatively new to Las Vegas, according to Chris Cochran, a UNLV professor of health care administration |
the nearby Barclay Farm community.
The researchers couldn't pinpoint the source, however. They found that Ebola virus genomes from two Barclay Farm patients differed from Ebola genomes from the Needowein outbreak by only one nucleotide, suggesting direct transmission, but the Barclay Farm patients had died in August 2014.
Another possible link was a woman from Barclay Farm who had a presumed Ebola infection and who moved to Needowein, but her case was never confirmed, the report says. The authors speculate that the source of the virus might have been an unidentified Ebola survivor with ties to the Barclay Farm cluster.
The report notes that Liberia was again declared free of Ebola in September 2015, but three more linked cases were confirmed in November. And just over a month ago, on Apr 1, the WHO reported yet another new case in Liberia. The WHO warned in March that sporadic cases are likely to occur because of lingering infections in survivors.
Previous reports have shown that the virus can linger in immune-protected parts of the body, such as the eyes and testes, and sexual transmission has been suspected as the source of some recent illness clusters (see item above).
Apr 29 Science Advances report
Apr 1 CIDRAP News story on most recent Ebola case in LiberiaHe is facing a further month on the sidelines at least with a hamstring injury and Broncos half Ben Hunt has revealed that the real battle is not the physical rehabilitation but the mental anguish of being unable to contribute on the field.
The Broncos have recorded narrow come-from-behind wins over the Titans and Rabbitohs in the fortnight since Hunt suffered his injury and face another danger game on Thursday night against a Panthers team that is destined to click into gear sooner rather than later.
In his column for Big League this week Hunt says that while he will be at Suncorp Stadium to watch his teammates attempt to secure another two competition points that to him it is a more torturous experience than the work he is having to do in the gym at Broncos HQ at Red Hill.
"Injured players generally don't travel to away games," Hunt says in Big League.
"I watched our game against the Rabbitohs at home last week with Jordan Kahu and Jharal Yow Yeh.
"I really struggle to watch games when I'm injured. I get more nervous watching than actually playing in the game.
"Sitting on the sidelines really gets to me, especially when things start going wrong, because there's nothing you can do. I really don't enjoy it.
"For home games, injured players are asked to go around to some corporate boxes and meet the members. It's about helping the club out. After that I head down to the sheds and talk to the boys and try to help wherever I can."
Destined for St George Illawarra from next season, Hunt's injury has allowed Broncos coach Wayne Bennett to ponder how his halves will look in 2018 including the high-profile acquisition of Sharks utility Jack Bird.
Initially the diagnosis of Hunt's hamstring strain were that it would require only two or three weeks out of the game but the discovery of a large tear in the tendon meant that the Broncos' No.7 would instead be facing a longer and lonely stint away from the main group.
"Aside from a couple of bad ones when I was younger, I've been pretty lucky throughout my career," Hunt says.
"Since I've been at the Broncos I've had to get a pin in my finger and missed five weeks for that, plus the hamstring injury that's keeping me on the sideline at the moment.
"Injured players still go into training as they normally would, but when the boys go out to train on the field, I go to strength and conditioning or physio and do my stuff with the injured blokes.
"I've had a couple of younger guys with me in the rehab group, along with Benji Marshall. It's been good having Benji there because he's always up for a chat – it can get pretty lonely sometimes.
"After the video sessions are done, the group goes to training and you have to go to one side of the field by yourself.
"Even when you're in the gym, your program is different to everyone else and you feel a bit left out at times."
The Round 9 issue of Big League featuring stories on Nathan Peats, Coen Hess and the spirit within the Wests Tigers is on sale now at newsagents, supermarkets, at the ground and via www.magsonline.com.au/big-league.This list details Australian people working in the film industry who have been nominated for, or won, Academy Awards (also known as Oscars). These awards honour outstanding achievements in theatrically released motion pictures and were first presented by the United States Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in 1929. As of 2016, a total of 43 awards from 154 nominations have been won by Australians. Additionally, awards for Scientific and Engineering achievements have been given to Australians four times.
Art director and costume designer Catherine Martin has received more awards than any other Australian with four wins from six nominations in the Best Costume Design and Best Production Design categories. Cate Blanchett is the most nominated individual in this list with seven nominations, which resulted in a win for Best Leading Actress and Best Supporting Actress. Peter Weir has received five nominations in the Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay categories without a win.
May Robson was the first Australian-born person to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in 1933 for Lady for a Day. In 1942, Ken G. Hall became the first Australian to win an Academy Award for his documentary Kokoda Front Line! in the Best Documentary category. Suzanne Baker was the first Australian woman to win an Oscar, which was given to her in 1977 for Best Animated Short for Leisure. Cate Blanchett was the first Australian actor to win more than one award in the acting categories. Peter Finch was the first actor to be awarded an Oscar posthumously, winning the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Network in 1976. The only other acting Oscar awarded posthumously was to fellow Australian Heath Ledger 32 years later when his performance in The Dark Knight earned him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2008.
Australians have been nominated at least once in all categories. The Oscar for Best Costume Design has been the most successful category for Australians with seven wins from 17 nominations. The Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, Best Original Score, and the Best Documentary (Short Subject) are the only categories in this list where Australians have been nominated without winning.
Nominees and winners [ edit ]
In the following tables, the years correspond to the year in which the films were released; the Academy Award ceremony is held the following year.
Production [ edit ]
Best Picture [ edit ]
Best Foreign Language Film [ edit ]
Best Documentary Feature [ edit ]
Best Documentary (Short Subject) [ edit ]
Best Animated Film [ edit ]
Best Animated Short Film [ edit ]
Best Live Action Short Film [ edit ]
Performance [ edit ]
Shine (1996). Geoffrey Rush has been nominated twice in both acting categories, winning once for Best Actor for(1996).
Best Actress [ edit ]
Best Supporting Actress [ edit ]
Best Actor [ edit ]
Best Supporting Actor [ edit ]
Craft [ edit ]
Best Cinematography [ edit ]
Best Costume Design [ edit ]
Best Director [ edit ]
Best Editing [ edit ]
Best Makeup and Hairstyling [ edit ]
Best Music, Original Score [ edit ]
Best Music, Original Song [ edit ]
Best Production Design [ edit ]
Note: Before 2012, the category was called Best Art Direction-Set Decoration.
Best Sound Mixing [ edit ]
Best Sound Editing [ edit ]
Best Visual Effects [ edit ]
Best Adapted Screenplay [ edit ]
Best Original Screenplay [ edit ]
Scientific and Engineering [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]What Parents Need to Know About School Directory Information
Most parents are unaware that schools can compromise their children’s privacy and possibly their safety by sharing private information like their child’s phone number, home address, date of birth, email, and photos with anyone without consent. The good news is that parents already have the right to opt out of data sharing.
Below are a few key facts about what parents can do to protect their children:
Your School Can Share Detailed Information: Under the federal law called the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), any public school that receives federal funding (most public schools) can share “Directory Information” about students with any third party upon request. Any third party means anyone.
Under the federal law called the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), any public school that receives federal funding (most public schools) can share “Directory Information” about students with any third party upon request. Any third party means anyone. Private & Personal Information is Included: “Directory Information” under the law is extensive and includes personal details such as place and date of birth, home address, phone number, email address, activities, photos, height, weight, and other information.
“Directory Information” under the law is extensive and includes personal details such as place and date of birth, home address, phone number, email address, activities, photos, height, weight, and other information. No Consent is Required: Schools do not need consent from parents or students before releasing a student’s personal information to anyone who requests it. Schools can’t release the information ifan opt out is on file for a student for that school year.
Schools do not need consent from parents or students before releasing a student’s personal information to anyone who requests it. Schools can’t release the information ifan opt out is on file for a student for that school year. Your Ability to Opt-Out is Limited to Certain Times of the Year: Most schools allow opt out for a period of time at the beginning of the school year, The opt out period varies widely and can be as short as a week
Most schools allow opt out for a period of time at the beginning of the school year, The opt out period varies widely and can be as short as a week Parents Need to Act Now: This is why World Privacy Forum launched #OptOutKids now as parents are focused on getting their children ready to return to school. According to WPF Executive Director Pam Dixon, “The beginning of the school year is the key time when the school information opt-out period opens up. Parents need to stop schools from sending detailed information about their kids from going to unknown third parties. It can be a risk for identity theft and worse, ” she says.
This is why World Privacy Forum launched now as parents are focused on getting their children ready to return to school. According to WPF Executive Director Pam Dixon, “The beginning of the school year is the key time when the school information opt-out period opens up. Parents need to stop schools from sending detailed information about their kids from going to unknown third parties. It can be a risk for identity theft and worse, ” she says. How to Opt Out : Parents can opt out by calling their school and requesting a directory information (or FERPA, pronounced “fer-puh”) opt out form from their child’s school. Some schools put opt out forms on the school web site. Parents should act as soon as possible to make sure they do not miss their opportunit y.
: Parents can opt out by calling their school and requesting a directory information (or FERPA, pronounced “fer-puh”) opt out form from their child’s school. Some schools put opt out forms on the school web site. Parents should act as soon as possible to make sure they do not miss their opportunit. Protect Others: Spread the word : Educating parents is critical. We are asking everyone to share our opt out video with friends, family, co-workers, teachers, and on social media. For social media, please share along with the hashtag #optoutkids.
: Educating parents is critical. We are asking everyone to share our opt out video with friends, family, co-workers, teachers, and on social media. For social media, please share along with the hashtag. For More Information : If you would like more details about FERPA opt outs, and how-to instructions, visit our Student Privacy 101 Page.
: If you would like more details about FERPA opt outs, and how-to instructions, visit our Student Privacy 101 Page. Sample Opt Out Form: You can print our opt out form and take it in to your child’s school. Use our form if you can’t locate your school’s form. Sample FERPA opt out form.
For more information, see our Student Privacy 101 Series.Black Friday Bundle Blowout
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Purchase shells here!This week the Swedish Pirate Party came under attack from a movie and music industry-backed anti-piracy group. Rights Alliance informed the party that if they continue to work with The Pirate Bay, legal action will follow. With a demonstration and protest set to take place in Stockholm tomorrow, Pirate Party leader Anna Troberg is promising her adversaries a fight, whether that be inside or outside court.
This week Swedish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance stepped up their battle against The Pirate Bay by attacking parts of the site’s infrastructure operated by third parties.
The first and most remote casualty was the bandwidth supply coming from Swedish ISP Portlane. They provided Internet connectivity to a company called Serious Tubes, who in turn supplied the Pirate Party. In order to keep their supplier out of the upcoming battle, mid-week Serious Tubes routed their traffic around Portlane.
With Portlane out of the equation and bandwidth clearly coming from elsewhere, Serious Tubes continue to supply the Pirate Party who in turn continue to supply The Pirate Bay. The site remains up and tomorrow the Pirate Party are hosting a demonstration for citizens to show their support for the effort.
“Given that Rights Alliance threatens to drag the Pirate Party and individual representatives of the party to court for giving Pirate Bay Internet access, a demonstration has been organized for this Saturday to support the party and free society,” says party leader Anna Troberg.
The demo will take place in the Citizen Square (Medborgarplatsen) in Stockholm at 14:00 with Anna Troberg and Member of the European Parliament Christian Engström as speakers.
“This is primarily a democracy and freedom of speech issue, not a file sharing issue,” Troberg explains.
“It’s not fair for private companies on their own authority to dictate how and where we communicate with each other based on their own economic interests. It is in fact a threat to the open society. It is not fair for these companies to indulge in an organized extortion racket without ever meeting resistance.”
Despite recognizing a clear threat to the free and open Internet, Troberg says it’s quite remarkable that the entities with a real interest in this battle’s outcome (and the financial clout to influence it) are remaining so passive.
“Where are the major ISPs? Those with real financial muscle to take on a lawsuit? Why do the poor individual file sharers stand alone against the copyright industry’s Henchmen? Why do they have no interest in helping the only political party that stands up for their right to deliver Internet without being exposed to threats? Why do they do nothing?” Troberg questions.
Last year when the BPI threatened the UK Pirate Party over its Pirate Bay proxy, it quickly became clear that industry group was not only threatening the party, but the individuals involved with its operations.
The BPI bristled at the notion that they were being personally vindictive and insisted that since the UK Pirate Party is not a “legal personality” they had no choice but to target its members.
Whatever the motivations behind the tactics, the Swedish Pirate Party now face similar issues.
“Since [the threats] arrived I and several members of the Pirate Party have had to talk to our families about how we will be able to handle our lives if it turns out that our political commitment might potentially cost us both months apart and our economic security for the foreseeable future. How does one have such a conversation? I do not know. I just know that NO ONE should have to have such conversations in Sweden 2013,” Troberg says.
So what will the outcome be next Tuesday? Will the party choose to fight the world’s largest entertainment companies in court, even with the almost inevitable outcome of the side with the largest bank balance coming out the victor?
This morning TorrentFreak was informed that nothing has yet been decided and that the announcement will go to the wire next week. Whatever the outcome a fight is promised, whether that’s inside or outside court.
“On February 26, I will tell the Rights Alliance that the Pirate Party is picking up their thrown glove. If we choose to fight in the courts or outside the courts remains to be seen,” Troberg says.
“Regardless, we are not going to let them win by walkover.”RICHMOND, Va. -- U.S. Rep. Randy Forbes became the first political casualty of a newly redrawn Virginia congressional map Tuesday, as the senior member of the House Armed Services Committee lost a sharp-elbowed primary against a young challenger who painted Forbes as a "cowardly" political opportunist.
Forbes was defeated by Scott Taylor, a 36-year-old state House delegate and former Navy SEAL, in the newly redrawn 2nd Congressional District. The district includes much of the defense-heavy Hampton Roads area, including the Norfolk Naval Base, the largest naval base in the world.
Forbes was set for an easy re-election bid in his home district, the 4th Congressional District, which he represented for 15 years until a panel of federal judges ordered the state's congressional boundaries redrawn in a way that made the district far friendlier to Democrats.
Rather than seek re-election in his home district, Forbes opted to run in the neighboring 2nd District after incumbent Rep. Scott Rigell announced his retirement.
But the move opened Forbes up to fierce criticism from Taylor, who called Forbes a political opportunist who was acting "cowardly" by running in a supposedly easier district.
Taylor cast himself as a Washington outsider and said Tuesday that his most effective campaign message was that he would who would help fix a "broken" political system if elected.
"Washington is broken and we need a fresh start," Taylor said.
By contrast, Forbes played up his seniority on House budget matters, particularly on defense spending. He also enjoyed a large advantage in campaign spending.
Quentin Kidd, a political science professor at Christopher Newport University, said Forbes picked the wrong year to run as a Washington insider in a district where presumptive GOP president nominee Donald Trump had a strong performance during a March primary. Add in the fact that Forbes doesn't live in the district, and it was a recipe for a loss, Kidd said.
"Randy Forbes is the ultimate outsider running as the ultimate insider in a year when the insiders are out," Kidd said.
Taylor is set to face Democrat Shaun Brown, who said she's hoping to be the first female African-American from Virginia to serve in the House.
Though Virginia is a swing state where Democrats do well in statewide elections, Republicans outnumber Democrats in the House eight to three. Democrats challenged the congressional boundaries, and federal judges ruled that lawmakers in 2012 illegally packed black voters into the 3rd Congressional District, represented by Democrat Bobby Scott, to make surrounding districts safer for GOP incumbents. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the new map in May.
The most noteworthy outcome of the new Virginia map was to make the 4th Congressional District, which stretches from Richmond to the Hampton Road area and is currently held by Forbes, much more friendly to Democrats by significantly increasing the number of African-American voters.
"The injury is so severe that it forced him out of his district," Forbes' lawyer, Michael Carvin, argued unsuccessfully before the Supreme Court.The animation can be controlled with the arrow keys (It may be necessary to click on it first)The model was made in Zbrush.I really can not say how long exactly it took. I created the first Zbrush file on 2. may and uploaded the second pose turntable on 22. may. Let's say i worked on it for about 2 to 4 hours a day.So that would make about 60 hours.That seems a lot to me, but if i consider that it also includes doing the research on the specific dragon anatomy, doing sketches, all the secondary 3d stuff like uv's and texture tweaks - and creating all the required zbrush materials, of course. Then there was the "how to do the sparkles" research...YAY a DDThank you----I used Zbrush for the modeling, aftereffects to put the different passes together (see them here: [link] ) and flash to make the controls.----The first problem was that it is not possible to have animated textures in zbrush. So i had to come up with a way to create a fluctuating glittering effect in postproduction that is still happening on the skin and not on a flat overlaying layer. That is what the noise passes are used for.The second point was to find out what amount of sparkling would look good, the distribution, speed and color of it - and how to do all that in aftereffects...I make no secret of my hatred for the White Sox, but you have to respect the hell out of GM Ken Williams. On top of trading for an injured Jake Peavy in the 11th hour of this year’s trade deadline he has now added the hefty salary of the extremely talented, yet underachieving, Alex Rios for absolutely nothing other than having to pay the remainder of his 7 year $69.835 million contract.
Over on Big League Stew the headline of the Rios related post was Oops?! White Sox make $60-million waiver claim on Alex Rios. There was no “oops” involved in this waiver claim. Kenny W. knew exactly what he was getting into and may have just put the White Sox over the top in the AL Central with this move. One thing is certain, Williams is not afraid to take chances, and big chances at that, to improve his team. There is no doubt in my mind that this move was calculated, thought out, and intentional.
There is also no doubt in my mind who Rios will be replacing. Scott Podsednik has had a moderately successful season but has a limited set of skills and limited value to a MLB organization. Scotty Po has turned in an OPS+ north of 100 only one time in his career and that was back in 2003 with a mark of 116. This season despite the perceived success, Pods has an OPS+ of just 92. He’s not league average and in 9 ML seasons has a career mark of just 86.
Alex Rios, on the other hand, has a career OPS+ of 104 and in his 3 seasons prior to 2009 turned in marks of 120, 122, and 111 respectively. This year has been viewed as a disappointment by a lot of people as big things were expected of Rios. Fairness in conversation, I did spend my 1st round draft pick on Alex Rios in my 14 team keeper league to add him to my protected core of Morneau, Longoria, Hanley Ramirez, Greinke, and Lester. His BA, OBP, and SLG are all down, but he does have 14 HR and 19 SB on the season so he hasn’t been a complete bust.
It is impossible to predict how Rios will deal with the managerial stylings of Ozzie Guillen, but in addition to risk-taking moves, Ken Williams is clearly able to identify players that will fit into the experience of Oz. My prediction is that Rios will rachet up his production for the Sox thanks to a hitter-friendly ballpark, fiery manager, and his own sense of pride. Since the Blue Jays just let him go, the latter of those reasons may be the most important. If Rios ever needed a chip on his shoulder, he has one now.
Despite the thoughts of others online, I don’t see Rios battling for playing time. Ozzie may be crazy, but he knows baseball. He knows that Rios is a more valuable player than Podsednik, he knows Thome is old and slow, and he knows that Quentin is prone to injury. Alex Rios will play everyday mostly at the expense of Podsednik, but Scotty Po as a 4th OF will get plenty of ABs with his ability to play all 3 OF positions effectively.
You might be asking yourself what this has to do with the Royals, or why I am piling up the word count discussing a move that my second least favorite team just pulled off. If you are pondering this thought, a pat on the back for you. Aside from the obvious fact that the Royals season has been in the tank for some time, I thought it would be nice to write about a GM taking a high profile, potentially high reward risk.
I sure hope Dayton Moore is paying attention to what Ken Williams has done this season and in past seasons. Maybe as Royals fans we could take up a collection to send Dayton to a “How to Be a GM” seminar with Ken Williams as the keynote speaker. The White Sox took a huge risk on an unknown managerial candidate and ended up with Ozzie Guillen. The Royals took a risk on an unknown managerial candidate and ended up with Trey Hillman. One of them is a walking sound byte who speaks from the heart and doesn’t give a damn about political correctness. The other one is a monotone bore afraid to stray from the company line or show any of his personality. There is no evidence that Trey has a personality, but I am betting there is one in there somewhere.
It is an interesting contrast when you think about it. Ken Williams is a shrewd risk taker who comes up on the winning side of the deal more often than not. He is coupled with a borderline insane manager who leads a team willing to run through a wall for him. Williams and Guillen don’t always see eye to eye, a fact that has gone public a number of times, but they use all the resources at their disposal to improve the White Sox organization.
Dayton Moore by contrast is clearly delusional. He expects fans and players to trust the process even though there is no real definition of that process. Sure he has discussed it from time to time, but he also frequently sends mixed messages. On one hand he discusses the importance of guys who get on base and then goes out and adds guys like Olivo and Jacobs to a roster largely devoid of OBP guys. On one hand he talks about pitching being the currency of baseball, then trades off Howell, Nunez, Ram-Ram, Cortes, Saito, etc. to acquire marginal players. He has attached himself to a manager who is unable to command respect in his own clubhouse and is afraid to rock the organizational boat. Together Moore and Hillman both share the same aversion to sabermetrics and basic statistical analysis.
Ken Williams has a manager willing to speak his mind, voice his opinion, and stand up for what he believes in. Moore has a manager that is little more than a “vanilla” yes man. Setting aside the descrepancy in payrolls, is there any doubt why the White Sox have been successful and the Royals have not? Money surely helps, but there is little doubt in my mind that a Williams/Guillen combo could run rings around Moore/Hillman if the payrolls were reversed.
The final tally: Royals acquire Yuniesky Betancourt and Josh Anderson, White Sox acquire Jake Peavy and Alex Rios.
Damn, now I am depressed.A lot of fans agree that Suikoden II is the best game in the entire series. But what about the rest? Inspired by this article by Jason Schreier of kotaku.com on why one should play Suikoden II, fellow Revivalist Riley Crane wrote this article on why one should play its successor, Suikoden III.
Some of you bought it when it came out, and some of you have only recently had the opportunity to buy it on PSN. If you’re a Suikoden fan and you’ve never played it before I hope to convince you to do so. If you tried it and quit because you didn’t care for it, I urge you to continue. If you’ve played it all the way through and still didn’t enjoy yourself, maybe you’ll give it another try with fresh eyes. You can enjoy S3 all by itself, but its narrative will have more profound effect on you if you have played the preceding two. Much of my argument is based on the assumption that you have, and is structured around some commonly held contentions for not playing Suikoden III.
IT’S HORRIBLE. IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN 2D.
There is a need among some fans to rank Suikoden titles, and to rank games in general. The person that asks, “Is Suikoden [numeral] the worst of the series?”, is already coming from a negative space. There are strengths and weaknesses in every video game. Ask yourself if you think it’s horrible on its own merit, or do you think it’s horrible compared to your expectations of a 2nd Suikoden II? You don’t need to degrade something just to pay a compliment to another. It’s unrealistic to expect titles that cross consoles to be the same.
Just for fun let’s rank our top ten favorite 2D RPGs for PS2… Our list isn’t very long is it?
On PSX we slowly see pixel-based graphics in RPGs like S1 & S2 begin to fade from existence giving way to polygon characters against pre-rendered backgrounds. As we shift to PS2 we see those lovely pre-rendered paintings disappear as well, replaced by fully 3D environments. Comparing Suikoden III to its 3D counterparts from 2002 like Kingdom Hearts, Wild Arms 3, Front Mission 4, and SMT3: Nocturne is fair enough, but blaming it for being developed in a different era is not. History doesn’t flow, it moves in leaps and fits. We can cut Suikoden I some slack because it broke the ground for Suikoden II which had the advantage of being able to improve on its predecessor’s graphical aspects in every way, but Suikoden III did not. Accept it for what it is, the first 3D Suikoden, and try to judge it by those standards.
BUT I STILL LIKE SUIKODEN II THE BEST
I won’t argue with that. If you thought there wasn’t anything that could make you enjoy Suikoden II more, well Suikoden III can. I’ll use an example from the first game to illustrate my point. The City-State of Jowstone is introduced in the first 5 minutes of Suikoden I, an unseen nation beyond the badlands that serves an important role in advancing the plot. We are allowed to explore this nation and the complexities of its political structure in the next game which can add to our enjoyment of S1 when we return to it. The unseen nations of Grassland and Holy Harmonia serve a similar role in Suikoden II, and we get to explore them later in Suikoden III. When you return to Suikoden II after completing III it adds to your understanding of many details that may have seemed arbitrary or superfluous at the time. Playing Suikoden III can enhance your replay of Suikoden II just as much as playing II enhances the gameplay of III. It doesn’t have to be your favorite game ever to be entirely worth your time.
IT’S BEEN SPOILED FOR ME, I ALREADY KNOW EVERYTHING WITHOUT PLAYING
Just like comic book experts that get all their information from cartoon and film adaptations, you cannot substitute online videos, plot summaries, and forum discussions for firsthand experience. The order you choose to play the chapters of the trinity sight system in Suikoden III as well as the critical choices you make change the story you see. You may have watched Yuichi stream the entire game, but you only witnessed the choices that he made. Your own choices can produce a different Suikoden III. The trinity system allows some unique aspects of replay value. If you’ve only played it once you can get a lot of enjoyment out of playing it a few more times. The precise way the player experiences the setup and the critical mid-point in Act II is up to you.
Virtually every narrative that has ever been written can be broken into three acts encompassing a Setup, Conflict, and a Resolution. Every Suikoden title follows this structure. When Suikoden III came out it completed a trilogy, and narrative trilogies tend to follow a similar framework. There is a lot more setup in Suikoden I to establish the world of the 27 True Runes, Suikoden II expands that world at the same time establishing an even greater conflict of the True Runes, and Suikoden III has more resolution and payoff as the final act. It is only by the time of S3 that the story expanded enough for fans to fully comprehend the true nature of reality in the world they had come to love. If Yoshitaka Murayama is the J. R. R. Tolkien of Japan, or the George Lucas of JRPGs, then we should experience his Return of the King, his Return of the Jedi that is Suikoden III., The Arizona Rkpubuc A I 111 M UY. ArKII. 20. 2(H) I NATION Trash-hauling employee charged with 12 murders An employee at a Kansas City, Mo., trash-hauling company has been charged with strangling 12 women or teens in an arrest authorities said was made possible by new DNA technology. Authorities said Lorenzo J. Gilyard. 53, who was arrested Friday, preyed on prostitutes and teenage girls (rom 1977 to 1993, sexually assaulting all but one of the victims and strangling them, The bodies turned up in various places around Kansas City over the years. Eleven of the victims were prostitutes; the other was a mentally ill woman. They ranged trom ages 15 to 36. Brain scans gauge campaign ads. A6 Kronos to announce hormone-study centers A6 Presidential polls at odds. A7 i 1 Secrei S enice's log 4 i J w cites mvstery video Timothy'I y i 1 "iv Tape figures in Nichols case 1 V v. - N McVeigh was executed in 2001 for his lead role in the Oklahoma City bombing. v vfvvl 'r my t". - A u Sue Ogrocki Associated Press Bella Kok (left), sister of bombing victim Baylee Almon, joins in singing the National Anthem. 9th anniversary of bombing in Oklahoma City is marked "Security videotapes from the area show the truck detonation three minutes and six seconds after the suspects exited the truck," the Secret Service reported six days after the attack on a log of ; agents' activities and evidence in the Oklahoma investigation. The government has insisted McVeigh drove the truck himself and that it never had any video of the bombing or the scene of the Alfred P. Murrah building in the minutes before the April 19, 1995, explosion. Several investigators and prosecutors who worked the case told the Associated Press they had never seen video footage like that described in the Secret Service log. The document, if accurate, is either significant evidence, kept secret for nine years or a misconstrued recounting of investigative leads that were often passed by word of mouth during the hectic early days of the case, they said. "I did not see it," said Danny Defenbaugh, the retired FBI agent who ran the Oklahoma City probe. "If it shows what it says, then it would be significant." Other documents obtained By John Solomon Associated Press WASHINGTON A Secret Service document written shortly after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing described security video footage of the attack and witness testimony that suggested Timothy McVeigh may have had accomplices at the scene. A Secret Service agent testified Monday that the log does, in fact, exist but that the government knows of no videotape. The log that the information was pulled from contained reports that were never verified. Stacy A. Bauerschmidt, assistant to the special agent in charge of the agency's intelligence division, said the timeline was an internal log developed to help locate personnel lost in the bombing and determine if the agency was a specific target of the attack. Reports may have been based on mere speculation and the agency does not vouch for it reliability, she said. "It's for us. It's a crisis document," Bauerschmidt said during testimony at bombing conspirator Terry Nichols' murder trial in McAlester, Okla. by AP show the Secret Service in late 1995 gave prosecutors several computer disks of enhanced digital photographs of the Murrah building, intelligence files on several subjects in the investigation and a file detailing an internal-affairs inquiry concerning an agent who reconstructed key phone evidence against McVeigh. "These abstract sheets are sensitive documents which we have protected from disclosure in the past," said a Secret Service letter that recounted discussions in late 1995 with federal prosecutors on what evidence would be turned over to defense lawyers. Lawyers for Nichols say they have never been given the security video, photo disks or internal investigative file referenced in the documents. The trial judge has threatened to dismiss the death-penalty case if evidence was withheld.. Nichols was sentenced to life in prison on federal charges before being tried by the state this year. 5 m Associated Press OKLAHOMA CITY Hundreds gathered Monday at the site where the Alfred P. Mur-rah Federal Building once stood, staying silent for 168 seconds, marking one second for each person killed in the bombing nine years ago. Children of the victims then recited the names of the dead. "These children, like all of you and our city, are portraits of our survival," Frank Hill, chairman of the foundation that supports the Oklahoma City National Memorial, told the crowd. The commemoration began at 9:02 a.m., the minute the Murrah building was destroyed by a fuel oil and fertilizer bomb on April 19, 1995. Jason Smith, 31, read names including that of his mother, Linda McKinney, who had |
It's time to look at social mobility not as something that just happens, but as something we can create.
DEFINING TERMS What does'social mobility' really mean? Doug Saunders looks at the bigger picture. Click to read below.
We have known for a long time that some countries have more mobility than others. If you're born to a low-income family in Canada, your odds of having an income, in adulthood, in the middle class or better are twice what they would be if your family were in the United States or Britain, but not as good as they'd be in Northern Europe.
But some countries don't just have perpetually high social mobility – they have improved it. Finland, for example, was a middle-ranking country, closer to France, a generation ago, but has soared up the ranks as a result of a major intervention in education and early-childhood policy.
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Why should this be of concern to Canada, which already ranks in the social-mobility Top 10? Because there are signs that the "Canadian dream" is beginning to flag. They don't show up in the raw national figures yet – it takes at least 20 years to register a change in intergenerational mobility – but the signs are there.
A much more expensive housing market has limited access to one traditional tool for escaping poverty. A more precarious postindustrial economy is making it harder to find income security. And Canada's social safety net – which many studies have credited for its high rate of social mobility – is not as robust, in some provinces, as it once was.
There are also strong signs that some Canadian regions, provinces and cities are suffering much lower social mobility than is the country as a whole, and that these poverty traps may be getting worse. In the United States, economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues have used big-data studies to show that specific cities, regions and neighbourhoods differ dramatically.
"Cities such as Salt Lake City and San Jose have rates of mobility comparable to Denmark," he concluded in a 2014 paper that transformed the study of the subject. "Other cities – such as Charlotte and Milwaukee – offer children very limited prospects of escaping poverty," because their rates are lower than that of "any developed country for which data are currently available."
And many of these regional differences have to do with schools. Areas with higher test scores, lower dropout rates and smaller class sizes, Dr. Chetty's analysis has shown, had much more mobility; so did those with comparatively higher property taxes (which, in the United States, are the main source of school finance).
That kind of regional microanalysis has not yet been published in Canada. But Miles Corak, the University of Ottawa economist (now based at Harvard) whose work has shaped Canada's understanding of the subject, says he believes that Canada is also highly varied by region and neighbourhood, with the North and rural areas among the places experiencing far lower levels of mobility.
Other recent studies suggest that once-rapid social mobility experienced by newcomers may be slowing down. Shibao Guo, a professor of education at the University of Calgary, found that recent immigrants from China are facing tougher barriers to social and economic progress than did previous generations, some even experiencing "downward social mobility." Much of this, he discovered, has to do with education and skills-training obstacles.
It is therefore worth taking a close look at policy interventions that have made poverty less hereditary, as they offer potentially huge savings in social-security costs, and the potential economic benefits – higher productivity, higher tax revenues – of a more prosperous population.
Lara Osman, right, talks with a classmate during recess.
FROM THE CLASSROOM TO THE MIDDLE CLASS
Lara falls into stride with her fellow students as they file into their classroom; they talk about their Instagram posts and make plans to go to the mall after school. They greet a new girl in her class, from East Asia, who is still grappling with Finnish. She won't be kept out of the class, though: She'll get an extra hour of instruction in the morning, but otherwise she, along with half the school's students who don't speak Finnish as a native language, will learn along with everyone else. Still, there will be special one-on-one attention: By the time they are 16, almost half of all Finnish students will have received some intensive form of personalized help or individually tailored guidance.
Finnish schools have been obsessively and singularly re-engineered, in three decades of radical reforms, to ensure that kids like Lara are at the centre of everything, that they receive as much intensive education as the wealthiest and most fluent students, and that they all have the chance to make it through to higher education. Other countries have made education changes, but only Finland has altered its entire system to improve the odds of poor kids entering the middle class.
Equally important is what you don't see: teachers in Meri-Rastila or any other Finnish school delivering lessons from the front of the room, and their students taking notes – the core of the "German system" that the Finns abandoned.
Rami Salminen teaches class 6A.
Remedial or gifted classes, special classes for learning-disability or second-language kids, are all but absent. Standardized testing doesn't happen. There is no "ability grouping" at all – not by schools or classes or streams – until age 16. Everyone gets the same lessons in the same classes, whether they're a troubled student in a poor rural area or a university-bound kid from a professional family; differences in ability are handled by individual attention, not by separation.
Even the lunchroom is organized around a notion of empowerment: A buffet of hot food is laid out; all kids, down to the youngest, grab a plate and serve themselves as they wish, but are careful to follow a promise to take no more than they can eat.
Lara Osman joins her fellow pupils on lunch break.
Slightly more than half the 222 students at Meri-Rastila, who range in age from 7 to 13, are immigrants: Somalis, Ukrainians, Russians, Estonians and Arabs (from various Mideast countries) are the most numerous, with kids like Lara, the Finnish children of immigrants, also a sizable group. A lot of them have learning disabilities, or troubles at home. A significant proportion arrive each morning not having had breakfast: Malnutrition is a concern.
"We don't have easy days – there are real challenges here," says principal Tarja Tapper, a hands-on, relentlessly upbeat school manager who sometimes wears a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey, in honour of all the Finns who have been on the team's roster. "But we are really determined to make sure that everybody stays in school, and everybody gets the maximum amount of educational attention, no matter what it takes."
‘We don’t have easy days – there are real challenges here,’ says Meri-Rastila’s principal, Tarja Tapper.
The school receives special "positive discrimination" grants to provide extra teaching assistants and iPads for the many newcomers. There is a teacher or educational assistant for every 6.3 students (versus for about every 11 in Ontario) – but Meri-Rastila is otherwise identical to other Finnish schools, both in its design and its educational outcomes. Other than the two hours of intensive Finnish lessons taken daily in their first year, these "difficult" students study math, physics, history, biology and chemistry with the other kids.
Students are strictly kept together by age, not by ability, through the whole education process, regardless of their grades; by using multiple teachers and teaching assistants in each class, multiple learning levels are taught at the same time. This is a familiar practice in Canada and other English-speaking countries, but completely alien to most of continental Europe, where lessons are taught at one level and kids who fail are held back.
Finland has gone radically in the opposite direction because officials realized that less well-off children, and later those of immigrants, were in danger of becoming disenchanted and dropping out.
Tiina Kahara, the Grade 4 teacher, and her assistant present each lesson or unit three ways, to suit varying levels of language facility and education. (Half of her 27 students can't speak Finnish fluently.) This, she says, is better – not just for the immigrant students but for the native-born Finns: "It means that everyone gets more resources and a form of teaching tailored to their style. It's a better form of education for everyone."
What seems unfamiliar to educators from other countries with high-achieving systems is the lack of emphasis on what most places would call "education." School does not begin until age 7 (there are two years of preschool, but they don't include reading, writing or arithmetic). Only a third of the school day is devoted to "core" subjects such as science, math and Finnish; another third is for music, art and gym; and the final third is for second languages (Swedish and English are compulsory). There is a lot of time for recreation and socializing. It's not an intensive or competitive pedagogical experience.
"We want the children to have a lot of time to make friends, play sports and know their families – it shouldn't be stressful for them," says Ms. Kahara, sitting at a lunchroom table and eating chicken curry with some of her students.
"Stress does not create the best results. A good education plus free time builds them up as people. We think that school is for your life, not that your life is for school."
This strong focus on reducing stress is distinctly Finnish but is also a direct consequence of the focus on social mobility: It keeps people in school longer, and they are, therefore, more likely to earn more as adults.
In the school playground, the diverse circles of pupils most often use English, not Finnish, as their lingua franca.
OBSESSED WITH OPPORTUNITY
Educators from around the world visit Finland to study its famously successful school system, but often come away slightly baffled. From a purely pedagogical standpoint, the reforms offer a strange combination of the touchy-feely and the strict, the professional (all teachers must have advanced degrees) and the experiential (no testing; teachers who aren't publicly assessed and can't easily be fired; large amounts of social and play time).
It all makes much more sense when you realize that the reforms were not undertaken to improve educational outcomes at all, but to solve a social problem. In the 1970s, Finland was much less equal than it is now, with a poor rural population, dependent on fishing and agriculture, and a well-off urban elite, and very little chance of moving between the two. This became a genuine national obsession.
"It was becoming obvious in the seventies that our system was in crisis – people's outcomes were dependent on their social background, and their educational outcome depended on where they came from," says Jouni Valijarvi, a professor at the University of Jyvaskyla in central Finland who was a key figure behind the most recent round of education reforms. "Then, in the 1990s, we realized that we needed even greater educational equality to promote economic growth, which depends on social mobility."
For the next three decades, right into the 2000s, the Finns undertook a series of dramatic reforms designed to "provide equal educational opportunities to all students, irrespective of place of residence or social background," as officials said at the time.
Only a third of the Finnish school day is devoted to ‘core’ like math, science and Finnish-language classes. Another third is for music, art and gym; another is for second languages.
AN ELITE PROFESSION
"What has made Finland special," Prof. Valijarvi says, "is that education, its universality, has been accepted as something that's good for everyone – it is seen as a way to strengthen the national identity."
A big part of that, he adds, "has been to trust our schools and teachers, and allow them to work their own way."
Over several rounds of cross-country reforms, the Finns changed almost everything: All forms of testing were abolished (except for analytical purposes). Selection of students into academic or vocational tracks was raised from age 12 to 16 (and even then was easily reversible). Private schools were ordered to become, in effect, fee-charging public schools, using the national curriculum. And the teacher-education system was redesigned around inclusion – keeping kids in school came to count above all else.
A big part of the new system is the exceptional prestige accorded to teachers. New teaching universities were built to create a highly professional cadre of educators. Teaching is considered an elite profession, and requires a master's degree in education, half of it dedicated to a specialty subject (even preschool teachers must have a degree).
And, although teacher salaries are no higher than in most other Western countries, education degrees are highly sought after: This year, Helsinki University's undergraduate education-degree program accepted only 5 per cent of applicants. A big part of that is due to the promise of lifetime job security, but there's also the autonomy: Teachers set their own methods and goals, which are assessed twice a year in meetings with their principals.
The results of the changes, after a generation had elapsed, were startling. In 2006, a team led by Finnish economist Tuomas Pekkarinen, then based at Oxford, conducted a detailed analysis of the population – looking at the same counties before and after the reforms kicked in – and found that the average chance of Finns' being stuck with their parent's income had declined by seven percentage points, a huge increase in social mobility.
At the same time, Finns' "intergenerational income elasticity" – the share that family background plays in a person's future income – fell from 30 per cent to 18 per cent.
And, in an interesting and not really intentional side effect, the reforms also gave Finland the West's (and often the world's) consistently highest scores in the PISA exams, the international ranking of student success compiled by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The Finns intended to make their system more equal, and accidentally also gave it the best educational outcomes in the world.
While other countries have high scores in social mobility (Denmark consistently beats everyone), Finland is almost unique in having changed, in three decades, from a mid-ranking country to one that now sits near the top: Using a single state intervention, it all but eliminated family background as the main determinant of financial fate.
Just over half of Meri-Rastila’s 222 students are immigrants.
FINNISH-ING OUR SCHOOLS
If Canada's envied record on social mobility is slipping – as the increased inequality, regional stagnation and declining immigrant success rates suggest – what can we learn from Finland?
It's a pressing question not least because low mobility comes with a hefty price tag: Finnish officials estimate that, over a lifetime, each child who doesn't complete high school costs the state $1.8-million in social expenditures and lost taxation.
In the past few years, Canadian scholars have begun to take social mobility, as a specific policy goal, more seriously. A research paper that the U of O's Dr. Corak produced for a 2013 social-mobility conference, organized by the non-partisan think tank Canada 2020, proposed that three groups have a significantly higher tendency to fall out of the education system and become trapped at the bottom of the economy: boys, especially those with blue-collar or immigrant parents; children from some indigenous communities; and children born in countries where English and French aren't spoken – if members of that non-fluent group are over age 14 when they arrive, almost one in five drop out of high school, extremely high by Canadian standards.
Early-years programs are also important: They prepare children for success in school; they provide language and social-skills education to kids from different cultures; they often allow parents to remain employed and thus able to support their children's further education. Likewise, an emphasis on making postsecondary education, and especially university, more accessible to deprived students – which generally involves lowering the financial risk of a four-year degree commitment – can ease the path to mobility.
SECOND-GENERATION TENSIONS
Finland's emphasis on social mobility over narrowly defined educational success becomes more visible with immigrant students because they do not perform as well in international assessments as do students from immigrant backgrounds in other (mainly Northern European) countries. Finnish officials insist that this is deliberate: They see keeping all kids in school as more important than straight grades.
"Academically, immigrants here lag behind the Netherlands and Denmark, but in social inclusion, they are registering much higher than in those countries," says Jari Lavonen, head of teacher education at the University of Helsinki. "It's not just the teaching methods, but the social interaction that surrounds our activities" that spurs integration, he says.
And because students are not sorted into university-bound or vocational paths until age 16, there is a radical determination to treat even recent arrivals and those with learning disabilities as potential university graduates – including those from "troubled" schools such as Meri-Rastila.
"All the students here can go as high as they want," says English teacher Sari Jaatela. "It's not easy for all of them, but everyone has the same possibility. Going to this school will not burn any bridges."
That said, there are some uneven patches beginning to mar the smooth surface of Finland's educational-equality model. For starters, a system designed to elevate poor rural students is now mainly concerned with poor students who are immigrants or the children of immigrants – who are 10 times more numerous than they were in the 1980s. After the government gave special attention and funding to multilinguistic urban schools, rural areas now say they are suffering from a comparative lack of resources.
The proportion of students who drop out at 16 – and are therefore much more likely to become a big expense to society – remains stubbornly stuck at around 6 per cent. (By comparison, 12 per cent of Canadians and 21 per cent of Americans don't make it through Grade 12.)
In tiny Finland, whose population of 4.5 million is about the size of Toronto's, that 6 per cent amounts to only 4,000 students a year, but Pasi Sahlberg, an official responsible for the 1990s reforms, says it "has become a social and political problem." In 2011, the government launched a special program to guarantee apprenticeship or extended-study places to all students who leave school before 18.
And Finland is beginning to see a pattern that happens in many Western countries in which school choice – an idea that was introduced here, to a limited extent, in the 1990s, and allows parents to apply to send their children to schools in other parts of a city – allows aspirational Finnish and immigrant parents to shift their kids into more middle-class neighbourhoods, leaving the poor immigrant-district schools with a more troubled population. This isn't happening to the huge degree that it is in Western Europe or the United States, but a recent study found that such choices are eroding equality and potentially harming social mobility.
"Today the worry is that we're starting to lose the equality," says Prof. Valijarvi. "But the numbers aren't strongly showing it yet." There is another set of reforms, currently under way, intended to address this by connecting the more vulnerable urban schools to the information economy and the city's institutions. That, combined with the "positive discrimination" funds that schools receive, means that some are now different: Unblemished sameness is no longer the sine qua non of Finnish education.
When the reforms began, Finland was moving from a rural to an industrial economy; now, life is dominated by the sharp decline of Nokia, the nation-defining cellphone company whose loss of market dominance leaves many Finns afraid for a new generation entering a more challenging postindustrial economy. They, like Canadians, face a set of challenges that didn't exist 20 years ago: a stagnant world economy; nations missing some of their old motors of surefire growth; housing markets that no longer provide an easy path to prosperity, especially for newcomers; and a more diverse population often needing extra help to get a foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.
What if these obstacles end up leaving part of a generation – or certain regions, cities or ethnic groups – stuck at the bottom, unable to repeat the climb into security experienced by previous generations?
In both Finland and Canada, the cost of such a setback would be huge – economically (in damaged productivity and entrepreneurship) and fiscally (in lost tax revenues and increased social-assistance costs). There could also be a political cost in the creation of an embittered, disappointed citizenry that does not feel included in the Canadian dream and is vulnerable to extreme messages, as we've seen in Europe and the United States.
Canada's robust social-security, provincial-equalization and health-care systems have so far helped to smooth out the uneven patches on the road to a comfortable and secure life: In the five decades since sociologist John Porter denounced Canada's rigid class hierarchies in The Vertical Mosaic, public policy has dramatically improved the odds of rising above your family's station.
Likewise, Finland's profoundly inclusive education system has so far protected its list-topping equality and mobility rankings, in spite of a decade of challenges. But both countries face major threats to the functioning of their economic escalators, and can offer lessons to each other: Finland can learn from Canada's decades of experience in moving newcomers to the centre of economic life within two generations. And Canada can learn from Finland's even more comprehensive approach to ensuring that the most deprived children get the same education as the most privileged; it's not perfect, but it represents a different, and potentially valuable, approach.
As Lara Osman says, her school is far from utopian. "It's tough enough for me," she says, "and I know a lot of kids who are having a harder time, who don't understand much." But the amount of attention they all get is high by any standard. She dreams of studying languages – she's already fluent in three, is working on her Swedish, and hopes to learn Japanese.
Her success owes a lot to her own considerable ambition, to her parents' determination to have high-achieving, very European kids, and to some good teachers – but also to a system designed, above all else, to make sure nothing gets in her way.
Doug Saunders is The Globe's international affairs columnist.
Lara Osman on her experience in school: ‘You have to stay strong here.’
IN DEPTH
What does'social mobility' really mean? The schools of thought
By Doug Saunders
How much does your success in life depend on how much your parents make? That is the essential question behind the field of social-mobility research, which has experienced a dramatic renaissance in recent years, as scholars have used big-data techniques to measure the precise odds of escaping your economic background.
Social mobility is often mentioned in the same breath as economic inequality, another hot topic today. But the relationship between the two concepts is ambiguous.
A big rise in social mobility – as when billions of people in Asia and South America escaped poverty in the two decades after 1990 – usually produces an increase in a nation's inequality (because the economic forces that end poverty are even more beneficial to the country's property-owning and shareholding classes). On the other hand, the countries with the consistently highest rates of social mobility are also the countries with the highest measures of economic equality.
Social mobility is measured in a number of ways, but the most often-used approaches are intergenerational – are you in an income group different from that of your parents at the same age?
In Canada, OECD figures show that your parents' income plays only 20 per cent of the role in predicting your own future income. Denmark, Norway, Finland and a few other countries tend to do better, but in lower-mobility Britain, Italy and United States, the figure is closer to 50 per cent.
Some scholars see those percentages as fixed facts of life. In 2014, U.S. economist Gregory Clark shook up the field with a massive historical study, published as the book The Son Also Rises, in which he analyzed the appearance of tens of thousands of surnames in the property, tax and education registries of many countries, from the 1300s to the present, and determined that the social status of families is extremely stable over centuries and across continents – that a country's social-mobility rates are almost changeless. The consensus among other economists, however, is that his conclusion is not as universal as he suggests: It applies only to the elite, higher-income families his study examined – that is, once families have reached an income level above the middle, they tend to stay there for a long time.
Other studies of property and tax records have found a distinct relationship between government policies and social-mobility rates, going back centuries. Historian Andrew Miles, in a famous analysis of British data, found that your chances of escaping the class of your birth rose from one in three during the first half of the 19th century, to nearly 50-50 in the second half, after the first social, housing and free-schooling policies were introduced.
Major new studies of data in Britain by Oxford University professors Erzsebet Bukodi and John Goldthorpe show that social mobility there has increased in the last few decades, but that in recent years downward mobility has been increasing faster than has upward, although there's still more of the latter. And, they found, the huge public-education investments Britain has made since the mid-1990s have done little to help social mobility – largely because of the tendency of British employers to hire private-school gradutes, regardless of their quality.
Schools and education systems keep appearing in studies of social mobility. An influential paper by University of Toronto economist Philip Oreopoulos, for example, found that compulsory-schooling laws have a huge effect: With each extra year of required schooling, the lifetime wealth of individuals increases by about 15 per cent.
(Return to top of story)
MORE FROM THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Which is the best country in the world to be a woman? Scandinavian countries like Finland have Canada beat on issues like wage parity and female participation in government. Erin Anderssen looks at revealing statistics – from hours spent on housework to lengths of maternity leave – to gauge today's degree of gender parity.
Explained: What does it mean to be ‘middle class’ in Canada? 2:57Dr. Christopher Essex, professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario, told Breitbart Executive Chairman, Stephen K. Bannon, that political activists, who undermine scientists for not embracing climate change theology, have crossed a line by making direct political attacks on regular scientists, like Willie Soon.
Appearing on Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM, Patriot radio, channel 125, Essex explained that on Sunday he and a group of scientists published a paper which methodically critiqued the Royal Society’s position on climate change, emphasizing areas that were “weak, limited, and flimsy.”
Essex said that there seems to be a cultural shift and that scientific arguments have deteriorated. Individuals in society have moved away from “civilized dialogues in which people have a collegial attitude and work together to try to find the truth.” Essex characterized the pro-climate change philosophy as a form of sophistry, catering to popular opinion rather than being concerned with the truth.
The climate change proponents, according to Dr. Essex, are using an old form of Eristic argument–Eris was ancient goddess of chaos. “They are using this very old, but high profile tactic, in the modern world, under the heading or rediscovered by Saul Alinsky’s work,” he contends.
What drew Essex to science was that “it is the ultimate expression of democracy. It gives you the freedom to think as an individual person,” he explained. The Royal Society “has now taken kind of an authoritarian approach, rather than a authoritative approach… and are now taking an official position on climate change,” the mathematician states. Essex doesn’t believe that they are considering the science.
“In previous generations the scientific organizations knew that they should not do that. The rough and tumble of scientific debate and dialogue should not be suppressed or overcome by some official position on the part of these organizations,” he insisted.
“When they started to write letters from congress to employers telling them that they should expose the people that they don’ like, I think that they crossed a line. Now it’s necessary for us to respond in a way that we as scientists know how to respond, that is scientifically. And that is what we did,” Essex said.
Bannon asked the mathematician how does he respond when he hears so called experts say that the climate change science is settled. “The science is not only not settled, the science is pretty bad. In many respects climatology was an infant science when I was a graduate student in the mid-seventies…. All of it is premature,” Essex replied. “The science is weak. The political energy pouring into this subject has completely destroyed any kind of collegial scientific atmosphere. The claims that the science is settled is pure nonsense. It’s a completely empty statement. It doesn’t mean anything at all.”
Overall, Essex believes that climate change arguments have evolved to the point where we don’t talk about any science, but end up talking about people. “It’s wrong, it’s inappropriate and utter political nonsense,” he stated. There is “no merit” to the climate change arguments. He sais that, “it is time to leave the scientists alone.” Essex explained that the climate change advocates are going to have to “get over the fact that they lost the scientific argument.”The European Union is making a radical shift in economic policy by adopting the circular economy model. The re-industrialisation renaissance of the economy will involve consuming less energy and the rational management of natural resources. However, despite these tendencies on the European level, Croatia is going in the opposite direction.
A thermal power plant powered by imported coal would become ecologically unacceptable in the EU in less than five years. The Plomin C power plant has been declared as a strategic project this summer by the Croatian government. It is being presented as a reconstruction of the Plomin 1 unit, having more than four times the capacity and being located on the Croatian coast in Istria.
"There is a serious need to turn to the use of renewable energy sources, while turning our back on projects that endanger our existence"
The argument of the Croatian ministry of economy and Croatia's national electricity company, Hrvatska elektroprivreda (HEP), is that this project intends to decrease Croatia's dependence on imported electricity and increase the share of renewable energy sources.
However, it will increase Croatia's dependence on imported coal, while the EU is moving towards modernisation of energy sectors and reducing its usage of solid fuels. Furthermore, technology proposed for the thermal power plant is not suitable for supporting intermittent production from renewable energy sources.
The problems that will arise from this project are countless, the most obvious one being pollution. The citizens of Labin are extremely concerned by the pollution from the existing Plomin I and II power plants. The European commission and other bodies of the EU cannot take measures to impede the construction of the Plomin C. Nevertheless, the realisation of the project would prevent Croatia from meeting EU long-term climate goals for CO2 reductions.
It is significant to note that Croatia's entire emissions output will be limited between 1.566 million and 6.264 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent annually, while emissions of Plomin C would be around 2.644 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
Furthermore, the problem also resides with the foreign investor. The Japanese Marubeni corporation was elected as the preferred bidder for the construction and management of the thermal power plant Plomin C, and HEP expects the negotiations with Marubeni to be completed by the end of the year.
This is a great cause for concern because the Marubeni corporation has been sentenced for foreign bribery violations in the US (more on which can be read on the FBI website). The project is economically inefficient without state aid that will guarantee the price of energy, and this is contrary to the rules of the internal electricity market.
The Plomin C project has to be stopped before irretrievable economic and ecological damage is done in Croatia. There is a serious need to turn to the use of renewable energy sources, while turning our back on projects that endanger our existence.
Croatia's Sustainable Development party (ORaH) – as recently presented in its policy of sustainable energy – intends to achieve economic growth and reduce unemployment in Croatia through the transformation of the energy sector into a low-carbon one.
This will be achieved by increasing the share of renewable energy sources in electric and thermal consumption, implementing energy efficiency and investing in innovations and new technologies, especially in modern gas-fired power plants and smart grids.The FIA is currently looking at the various dossiers of the teams that want to become the 13th Formula 1 franchise-holder. Some of those in the running seem to be making a lot of noise in the hope that this will add to their credibility. The team that is leaking out the most information at the moment is Durango Corse, which has some kind of alliance – as yet unclear – with Jacques Villeneuve.
The latest rumours suggest that money could be coming for the Italian team from one of the sons of Colonel Gaddafi, the eccentric 68-year-old ruler of Libya. Al Saadi Gaddafi was recently ordered to pay $507,000, plus legal costs, to the Grand Hotel Excelsior in Rapallo, Italy, where he stayed in 2008 while hoping to be signed by the Sampdoria soccer club. Gaddafi Jr and his retinue – consisting of a personal secretary, waiters, bodyguards, a personal trainer, a driver, and a dog handler – used a luxury suite and a number of bedrooms in the hotel. He also hosted a number of parties and receptions at the hotel. He departed for Cannes leaving the Libyan Embassy in Rome to pay the bill. The diplomats declined to do so because they had received no such instruction.
There is no doubt that a member of the Gaddafi family could probably find the money to invest in an F1 team. The Libyan economy depends primarily upon revenues from the oil sector.Fort Vaux, November 22, 1916
French and British soldiers standing around a German A7V tank captured at Villers-Brettoneux, May 1918
French cantonment with canteen near Verdun, March 1917
Chasseurs posing with guns
French lines on the right bank, Lorraine, 1918
French prisoners guarded by a Uhlan, Verdun, March 1917
French soldier in the 291st Infantry Regiment
French soldiers at the village of Souilly
Soldiers leaving the village to join Verdun, Nubécourt, August 23, 1916
French stretcher bearers loading a wounded soldier into an American ambulance, Westouter, West Flanders, May 1918
French Zouaves marching in 1914
Horse corpse on the Bouvancourt road, near Jonchery sur Vesle, April 22, 1917
Near Rethondes, November 10, 1918
Portrait of a French soldier taken in a studio in Mailly, 1915
Senegalese French troops getting acquainted with their new gask masks
Soldier trying a German mask found on the ground, Wood of the Caillette, 1916
Soldiers in Saint Folquin, September 3, 1917
Two men playing chess, Verdun, May 30, 1917
Soldiers posing for the camera in their Turco uniforms
Some French and American officers who took part in the reconquest of cantigny before a tank Schneider French, May 1918.
The 'Kolossal' German prisoner was captured in the eastern trenches, 8 January 1916
The soup in the lines of the 204th Infantry Regiment, Bois des Buttes, September 17, 1917
These men return from fighting the Battle of the Argonne, July 17, 1915
Troops returning from Fort de Vaux, around Nixéville (department of Meuse, France ), April 8, 1916
A French soldier killed while he was eating, October 27, 1915
After the fighting, soldiers surrounded the bodies of their comrades, Region of Verdun, 1916
Canadian officers interested in a large French gun mounted on railroad, October 1917
Chilly in the Somme, the 28th regiment soldiers in a trench
Cooperative canteen of Portes de Fer, October-November 1916
Artist Frederic Duirez has redefined World War One as we know it by Photoshopping colourless photos. Each snap has had different tones layered on top of the original photographs to bring new depth. They offer an alternative look at the conflict that ravaged the world between 1914 and 1918. The majority of Duirez’s photos focus on what life was like for the French soldiers on the front line.Canada’s aboriginal “First Nations” have unexpectedly emerged as a potential force threatening to derail the plans of Canadian Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s plans to turn western Canada into an energy powerhouse underwriting eastern Asia’s various demands for energy.
Who are these obstructionists?
The First Nations are the various Canadian aboriginal peoples who are neither Inuit nor Métis, with Ottawa currently recognizing over 630 First Nations governments or bands spread across Canada, roughly half of which are in the provinces of Ontario and British Columbia.
For decades Canada has belatedly dealt with issues as Pacific coastal natives sought treaties to spell out their relationship with the rest of the country. Accordingly, successive Canadian courts have ruled that in the absence of settled claims, the First Nations actually have rights and title to all aspects of traditional lands.
Related article: Is a final Decision on Keystone XL Close at Hand?
Not surprisingly the First Nations are somewhat skeptical of Ottawa’s blandishments about the benefits accruing from developing the nation’s hydrocarbon resources.
Imperiled projects? They include TransCanada Corp.’s Energy East’s proposed 3,000-mile pipeline in across First Nation lands, which would traverse the traditional territory of 180 different aboriginal communities, each of whom must be consulted and have their concerns accommodated as part of the company’s effort at winning project approval.
The First Nations have major potential abilities to disrupt such initiatives. According to a new report by the Fraser Institute, there are more than 600 major resource projects worth a total of $650 billion planned for western Canada imperiled by Ottawa’s relations with the First Nations.
The report notes, “There is not a single oil or gas project under proposal in Western Canada that does not affect at least one First Nations community, and the willingness of these communities to participate in energy development can be the factor that determines the success of a project.”
The pressures are largely economic - according to the Fraser Institute’s Ravina Bains, “If you look at the actual geographic location of where these communities are located, in many cases there aren’t any other economic development opportunities around them.”
Bains added that the “obstacles” included education, as currently fewer than half of First Nations’ youth successfully complete high school, compared to approximately 80 percent of non-native youth.
Related article: |
play test. This time we worked on how deck advancement will function as well as testing out some new mechanics for skill test resolution.
Yes I know my cards are full of typos but cut me some slack. I’m making hundreds of these cards and this is still an alpha.
So Each character starts out with a 30 card deck. The idea is that as you adventure you can modify your deck by adding cards to it or replacing the ones you have.The max size of a deck is 60 cards but you don’t have to build it out that much if you don’t want to. In my game enemies deal wound cards that get shuffled into your deck. As you draw into them they go into your hand and since you can’t discard them they begin to build up. Each character has a number of wound cards they can have in their hand before they die. So adding cards to your deck has the advantage of making you less susceptible to wounds. The downside obviously is that with more cards in your deck you might not always draw into exactly what you want.
The idea is that someone like a warrior might choose to add cards to his deck giving him a wide selection of attacks and powers while also essentially increasing his “HP”. On the other hand a wizard might choose to keep his deck around 30 or 40 cards and simply focus on the spells he likes. He will be more likely to draw what he wants but also more vulnerable to wounds.
Last night was the first time we tried modifying the base decks and it seemed to work really well. There was a lot of discussion at the table about how and when exactly cards should be added and at the end of the night I think we came up with some pretty good ideas. I love the play tests because I get to work on the game in real time. When I see a power that’s not working like I wanted it to or a player tells me how they think an attack should work, we just change it up right there and try it. It feels great to look at a mechanic that’s not quite clicking, debate (or argue) it at the table, try it a new way and have it work perfectly.
I’ve had a lot of people ask me how I’m prototyping the game. Specifically they want to know how I’m making the cards. It’s actually really simple. Between Pokemon,MTG and the WOW TCG I have roughly one kabillion cards laying around my house. What I do is make my cards in Photoshop, print them out on normal copy paper, slice them up on the paper cutter and then fit them into a card sleeve with a real card behind them. This gives them the weight and support of a real card and you can play and shuffle them just like you normally would.
This process has worked really well and allows me to get cards out on the table quick. I spend a lot of time working on this game and tweaking it but the biggest improvements come from the play tests. If you’re trying to do something similar I can’t stress how important it is to get your game in front of people and just play it.
The other question I’m getting a lot is just how far along I am. It’s hard for me to say exactly but I can tell you that the core mechanics of the game are solid. It’s fun to play and it works. I still need to build out the card library to give players more options for customizing their deck but the foundation of that system is in place. There are still a few things that are just notes in my sketchbook and have yet to be implemented at the table. The big ones would be character creation and gear. I have a vague idea of how I want these systems to work but they are still very raw.
Again I want to stress that I’m not looking for ideas or suggestions. I’m just sharing my progress with you guys. At some point I’d like to try doing some public beta testing and then I’ll be hitting you guys up for feedback. Thanks for all the emails and tweets of support I think this is actually something I can do and might even be good at. It’s incredibly exciting.
-Gabe outPosted in Real Estate, Statistics |
WD-40
Our government has fiddled and the Vancouver Real Estate Market is burning. Regardless of where you sit at the Tax argument table what is certain is that the 15% Foreign National Tax attributed to property purchases has clearly disrupted the Vancouver real estate market. Absolute is that WD-40 will not kill the fire nor stop the squeak in this government authored intervention.
Average Price 1977 – 2016
Vancouver Real Estate Average Numbers
Detached Attached Apartment August 16 – $1,470,265 0% August 16 – $730,189 +18% August 16 – $528,808 + 1% August 15 – $1,474,475 August 15 – $615,557 August 15 – $521,666
Vancouver Real Estate Inventory – Active Listings
Detached Attached Apartment August 16 – 4,963 +10% August 16 – 1,062 -26% August 16 – 2,481 -50% August 15 – 4,478 August 15 – 1,383 August 15 – 5,036
Vancouver Real Estate – Units Sold
Detached Attached Apartment August 16 – 722 -44% August 16 – 431 -25% August 16 – 1,343 -10% August 15 – 1,301 August 15 – 578 August 15 – 1,494
Yattermatters – Average Price August 2016
*Percentage = YOY
Chaos
In July 2016 the average price for a Vancouver detached was recorded at $1,764,682. In less than a month (post Tax proclamation), the average price gain over the year of approximately $300,000 has been wiped out. August 2016`s average price for a detached home flat lined at $1,470,265 to settle below August 2015`s average price of $1,474,475.
While that price drop is worrisome more critical is that the number of sales has tanked to 44% below August 2015. Price is one thing but when there are no sales you don’t have a market. A certainty rests in this dramatic lack of sales. Should it continue future market predictions become more tenuous than ever. More curious will be the evolution that is about to take place. What will be the result from the multiplier effect of this drop in price and sales?
The chaos created by our government fiddle playing will I suspect, continue for the next months ahead. At some point it may become clear that elements beyond the currently perceived influence of foreign buyers could have played a greater part in determining the market place.
The outfall of this new tax is yet to be fully realized. Real Estate in Vancouver directly and indirectly generates cash flow to many ancillary businesses. This government intervention which supposedly was designed to “clean and protect” may well start a impenetrable rust in the economy – a reaction neither envisioned or hoped for that could render the ability to purchase a Vancouver home more difficult.The US Congress is planning a dramatic expansion of surveillance measures along the border with Mexico including round-the-clock use of unmanned aerial drones and radar systems developed by the military in Afghanistan as part of the package of comprehensive immigration reform.
The immigration reform bill currently being debated in the US Senate sets aside up to $6bn over five years to pay for a massive injection of surveillance technology along the south-western border. That includes $1bn to develop a new fool-proof social security card and other proposals to expand federal access to databases storing biometric and photographic records on American citizens and undocumented immigrants alike.
A new amendment by Republican senators John Hoeven of North Dakota and Bob Corker of Tennessee, that cleared a test vote in the Senate on Monday, calls for the US government to aim for a state of "persistent surveillance" along the border through an injection of surveillance technology that civil liberties groups fear could turn the border into a virtual military zone. The amendment, that is up for final senate approval on Wednesday, provides for the deployment of six "Vader" radar systems that were pioneered in Afghanistan as a way of tracking the planting of roadside bombs by the Taliban.
Vader, or Vehicle Dismount and Exploitation Radar, is a sophisticated airborne radar system that has already been tested along Arizona's border with Mexico mounted on Predator surveillance drones of the sort used by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Hoeven amendment is the first time that their use has been formally suggested for full deployment along the border.
Among the other innovations proposed by the amendment are handheld thermal imaging systems for detecting the movement of human bodies at night, seismic and infrared ground sensors and devices for detecting radioactive materials. The amendment calls for federal agencies to have the ability to conduct "continuous and integrated manned or unmanned, monitoring, sensing or surveillance of 100% of southern border mileage or the immediate vicinity of the southern border".
With the Senate debate focused around the issue of border security, supporters of the bill say the investments will provide a long-term solution to America's broken immigration system. The 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the country would be shown a pathway to citizenship, but only after the flow of new undocumented immigrants into the country has been staunched though a package of investments, including a proposal in the Hoeven amendment for a doubling of the number of US border patrol agents to almost 40,000.
But civil liberties groups and experts on biometric data fear that the focus on the border could have unintended consequences by spawning centralised databases storing details not just on undocumented individuals but on almost all US citizens. The American Civil Liberties Union points out that two-thirds of the US population lives within 100 miles of the country's land and coastal borders – within the remit of US border patrol.
"When we see such a large influx of federal money at the border, that's going to lead to a large influx of new surveillance techniques," said Chris Calabrese, the ACLU's legislative counsel on privacy-related issues. "There's a logic to all this – to find the people who are undocumented, you have to surveil the general population."
Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee has proposed the 'persistent surveillance' amendment. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
The senate bill, S 744, allocates $1bn in the 2014 budget to develop "fraud-resistant, tamper-resistant, wear-resistant, and identity theft-resistant social security cards". The bill does not specify how those criteria will be met, but experts in identity technology point out that in previous debates Congress has focused on the use of biometric data such as digital photos, fingerprints and iris scans.
Margaret Hu, a specialist in biometric digital surveillance at Duke university, said that the bill's ambition to create a fool-proof social security card posed dangers for the general public. "If it is used to create a universal and digitalised biometric database through the collection of digital photos, fingerprint or iris scans, this could be used as a cyber-surveillance tool that could significantly impact the lives of all Americans."
The bill uses the word "biometric" some 12 times. Section 3103, on "increasing security and integrity of immigration documents", instructs the homeland security secretary to report to Congress within a year of the bill passing on "the feasibility, advantages, and disadvantages of including, in addition to a photograph, other biometric information on each employment authorisation document issued by the department".
The bill also envisages a rapid expansion of E-Verify, a computerised data network that allows employers to check whether job applicants are permitted to live and work in the country. At present, E-Verify operates as a pilot scheme with just 7% of employers volunteering to use it.
But the bill requires the system to be rolled out to all US employers within four years of the bill's enactment. As part of that growth, the Homeland Security Department is instructed to develop a new digital apparatus called a "photo tool" that allows employers to "match the photo on a covered identity document provided to the employer to a photo maintained by a US citizenship and immigration services database".
Margaret Hu believes that such a verification device could only work if the government were to create a digitalised biometric database. "It would need a universal photo database of all citizens and non-citizens present in the US. That would be historically unprecedented, and the cyber-surveillance consequences could be enormous."
US customs and border protection has already laid down plans to boost its surveillance technology in the attempt to erect a "virtual fence" capable of satisfying Republican concerns about the porous crossing. The agency currently operates 339 remote video surveillance systems – day and night cameras that are used to detect incursions and are controlled from border patrol stations miles away.
It also has more than 15,000 sensors on the ground and 851 thermal imaging devices to detect the movement of people in the border region. That will be beefed up by the end of the year by fixed towers positioned at the crossing to integrate the various forms of surveillance equipment.
Michael Friel, spokesperson for US customs and border protection, said the agency was deploying "proven, effective surveillance technology tailored to the operational requirements along the highest trafficked areas of the south-west border."
Most controversially, that includes a fleet of unmanned aircraft, or drones, that numbers just 10 at present but is likely to increase exponentially with the injection of federal funds. The bill envisions a fleet of drones sufficient in number to allow them to be deployed "for 24 hours per day and for seven days per week".
The importation of military technology developed in the war zone is no coincidence: as the Obama administration continues to reduce troop numbers in Afghanistan, military contractors and arms manufacturers are increasingly looking for a new market to exploit, and the large sums Congress is considering pumping into border security provides an obvious alternative.
"We are at the tip of the iceberg here," said Mary Cummings, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "They don't have total coverage of the southern border with unmanned vehicles, but they could and I suspect they will. It's going to change the way that customs operates, though I don't think they realise that yet."
Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU's Washington legislative office, said: "This is so expansive. We are really talking about a militarisation of the border on a scale that we have never seen before."When I first met the NASA climate researcher Gavin Schmidt a few years ago, we discussed the proliferation of material on the Internet attacking mainstream climate science. I asked him whether he thought climate contrarians were flirting with conspiracy theory in their views.
Photo
“Flirting?” he said. “No. They’ve already had conspiracy theory out on a hot date, and now it’s the morning after and they’re sitting up in bed, having coffee.”
I happened to recall that conversation the other day as I read the latest chapter of a remarkable back-and-forth between mainstream researchers and climate contrarians.
It all started last year, when a social scientist named Stephan Lewandowsky, of the University of Western Australia, and two colleagues published a rather provocative paper. It was based on an anonymous Internet survey of the readers of climate blogs.
The title alone will give you a sense of the findings: “NASA Faked the Moon Landings – Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax.” The subtitle was “An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science.”
The strongest finding in the survey was that ideological belief in an unregulated free market tended to be a predictor of someone’s willingness to reject the findings of mainstream climate research. No great surprise there. It was the secondary findings that set off a brouhaha.
Dr. Lewandowsky’s survey results suggested that people who rejected climate science were more likely than other respondents to reject other scientific or official findings and buy into assorted fringe theories: that NASA faked the moon landing, that the Central Intelligence Agency killed Martin Luther King Jr., that the AIDS virus was unleashed by the government, and so forth.
This piece of research appeared in a specialized journal in psychological science, but it did not take long to find its way onto climate skeptics’ blogs, setting off howls of derision.
A theory quickly emerged: that believers in climate science had been the main people taking Dr. Lewandowsky’s survey, but instead of answering honestly, had decided en masse to impersonate climate contrarians, giving the craziest possible answers so as to make the contrarians look like whack jobs.
So, a paper about a tendency among this group to believe in conspiracy theories was met by … a conspiracy theory.
Dr. Lewandowsky and his collaborators were taken aback, but not for long. As far-fetched ideas about the survey ricocheted around the Internet, they realized that manna was falling on them from heaven.
They started collecting the relevant blog posts, attempting to trace ideas to their origin, and observing how readily new conspiracy theories were embraced by the contrarians.
The result is yet another paper, just out recently. Again, the title tells the tale: “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation.”
Now, I will confess to being a bit of a skeptic myself about the value of Internet surveys, which tend to draw a self-selected population of respondents. And the only science I follow closely these days is physical research into the climate system, so I will let others with more expertise in the social sciences judge the merits of these papers.
But for sheer entertainment, they are both great reads – especially the second one, with its long passages about how the minds of conspiracy theorists work to seal off doubt and contrary evidence.
The heart of the second paper is a narrative of the eruption of various theories regarding the first paper, with elements of conspiratorial thinking explicitly identified in each case. Before the fever died down, one blogger was comparing Australian climate research to Soviet political repression, spinning a web of treachery that involved the Australian government, the University of Western Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and other groups.
(Judging from some of the e-mail I get, The New York Times is also seen in some quarters as part of a global plot to foist a scientific hoax on the public.)
Parts of this second paper remind me of the timeless Richard Hofstadter essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which is, by the way, essential reading for anyone trying to understand the influence of climate denialism on modern American or Australian or British politics. It was written in the early 1960s and contains not a word about climate change, but anyone who has followed the climate wars closely will recognize a lot of the themes in the essay.
When I recently reminded Dr. Schmidt of our conversation from a few years back, he replied that it was “worth pointing out that just because an argument is used by a conspiracy theorist doesn’t make it wrong, and that just because someone agrees with a conspiracy theorist on something, it doesn’t make them a crank.”
Indeed, some of the strongest online reaction to Dr. Lewandowsky’s original paper came from intelligent climate contrarians who were offended at being labeled part of the tinfoil hat brigade. Whatever you think of their position on global warming, some of them have remarkable statistical skills and have made contributions, generally modest, to the scientific literature.
And yet, in other corners of the climate contrarian movement, words like “conspiracy” and “hoax” keep cropping up. Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who is the standard-bearer for the climate contrarians in Congress, scored a double last year in the title of a book he published: “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.”To the invaders the Awá tribe was nothing more than an obstacle to their territory's natural treasure trove; a primitive nuisance that they needed to fell together with the trees.
So they started killing them.
Some were inventive in their killings: several Awá died after eating flour laced with ant poison; a "gift" from a local farmer. Others, like Karapiru, were shot where they stood -- at home, in front of their families.
Karapiru believed that he was the only member of his family to survive one such massacre. The killers murdered his wife, son, daughter, mother, brothers and sisters. Another son was wounded and captured.
Severely traumatized, Karapiru escaped into the forest, lead shot embedded in his lower back. "There was no way of healing the wound. I couldn't put any medicine on my back, and I suffered a great deal," he told Fiona Watson, director of field and research at tribal rights organization Survival International. "The lead was hot in my back, bleeding. I don't know how it didn't become full of insects. But I managed to escape from the whites."
For the next 10 years, Karapiru was on the run. He walked for nearly 400 miles across the forested hills and plains of Maranhão state, crossing the sand dunes of the restingas and the broad rivers that flow into the Atlantic.
He was terrified, hungry and alone. "It was very hard," he told Survival International. "I had no family to help me, and no one to talk to."
He survived by eating honey and small Amazonian birds: parakeet, dove and the red-bellied thrush. At night, when howler monkeys called from the canopy, he slept high in the boughs of vast copaiba trees, among the orchids and rattan vines. When the grief and loneliness became too much, he would talk quietly to himself or hum as he walked.
More than a decade after he had witnessed the murder of his family, Karapiru was spotted by a farmer on the outskirts of a town in the neighboring state of Bahia. He was walking through a burned section of forest, carrying a machete, a few arrows, some water containers, and a chunk of smoked wild pig.
They greeted each other. The farmer gave him shelter in exchange for chores, and provided him with food he had never eaten before -- manioc, rice, flour and coffee -- for which Karapiru developed a taste. He discovered a little about the ways of the karai, the white man, learning that his hosts kept cattle and slept in a bed, which he found extremely uncomfortable.
He was a man who had spent ten years "fleeing from everything."
"It was very sad," he says. But just as Hawk could not have envisaged his long years of suffering, neither could he have predicted the joy that was soon to come.
Once news spread that a solitary, unknown Indian had emerged from the forest, an anthropologist visited him. Karapiru tried to recount his story, telling the anthropologist that he had seen his family brutally cut down; that he had spent a decade in silence and that he was now the only one left.Previous Next
Separate police raids in Toronto early today have led to arrests, with one bust involving a large-scale human trafficking probe, and the second focusing on the apparent gang-related killing of a 22-year-old last month.
In the human trafficking case, hundreds of police in tactical gear and carrying automatic weapons jumped out of a series of rental trucks just after 5 a.m. ET Thursday, and entered three separate apartment buildings on Chalkfarm Drive, in the Jane and Wilson area. Police were seen arresting three young people.
Police deployed flash-bang grenades and were seen leading suspects away in handcuffs.
The sex crimes unit is handling the investigation.
2nd police operation linked to Marfo death
In what appears to be a separate investigation related to a murder in March, police also made multiple arrests in the Dixon Road and Kipling area early Thursday.
Police provided an update about the arrests at a Thursday morning news conference.
Police told CBC News those arrests are related to the murder of Malcom Marfo. They'll hold an 11 a.m. news conference to give more details.
The 22-year-old died in hospital after he was shot on March 17. The building where he was shot is close to the building where Thursday's arrests were made.
Last month, police said the shooting that killed Marfo was gang-related, and may have been retaliation for another shooting that hours earlier at the same location.David Barton is coming under fire from the Southern Baptist Convention, with a spokesman for the conservative denomination’s political arm condemning the pseudo-historian’s recent remarks on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The right-wing activist recently spoke to televangelist Kenneth Copeland about PTSD, suggesting that soldiers are warriors for God and therefore should never suffer from such a condition. They advised against psychological help and said that simply reading the Bible will “get rid of PTSD.”
Joe Carter of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission said their remarks demonstrate how Barton and Copeland are “profoundly ignorant about theology and history,” arguing that by “downplaying the pain of PTSD” they have “denigrate[d] the suffering of men and women traumatized by war.”
Carter, who also writes for The Gospel Coalition and The Acton Institute, added: “[F]or them to denigrate the suffering of men and women traumatized by war — and to claim Biblical support for their callow and doltish views — is both shocking and unconscionable.”
Grove City College professor Warren Throckmorton, whose book Getting Jefferson Right helped convince Thomas Nelson to pull Barton’s book on Jefferson from publication, noted that Barton and Copeland’s “naïve and potentially offensive” comments show “they do not have knowledge of the condition.”A SECRET consortium of multi-millionaires will meet with the NRL to discuss buying Gold Coast’s licence after devising a blueprint to make the Titans a rugby league powerhouse.
In a huge boost for the embattled Titans, a group of Queensland-based corporate white knights are ready to launch a fresh bid after the NRL’s takeover on Tuesday provided greater certainty.
The team of bankers and finance experts are described as “seriously wealthy”.
The consortium first approached the NRL in 2012 during the Titans’ debt crisis and made it clear providing start-up capital of $15 million would not be problematic.
media_camera Former Gold Coast Titans co-owner Darryl Kelly. Picture: David Clark
At the time, the NRL opted for a restructure, but the ostensible collapse of the Titans has convinced the governing body to seek external investment once they stabilise the club.
Now the consortium are back on the radar. While co-owner Darryl Kelly will reinvest in the Titans, the 64-year-old does not want to own the club outright after losing at least $5.3 million trying to salvage the wreckage.
That opens the door for the new team of investors, whose interest was legitimate enough for a representative to contact Titans boss Graham Annesley three weeks ago.
The consortium were set to walk away following the cocaine crisis that hit the club, but the NRL’s decision to step in has given the business tycoons confidence in the Titans brand.
The potential investors have spent recent months performing due diligence, even drawing up an ownership model that includes the Titans having a leagues-club style facility to provide additional revenue streams.
A consortium spokesman confirmed the group is ready to ramp-up negotiations with the NRL, who are also helping Newcastle recover from Nathan Tinkler’s ownership saga.
“These people are seriously wealthy, start-up capital is not an issue,” the spokesman told The Courier-Mail.
“When we initially met (in 2012), we looked at around $12 million to $15m (to rebuild the club) and that wasn’t a problem.
“It’s hard to say what they would pay for a NRL licence now the Titans have been taken over, but $3m to $5m would be small fry for these investors.
“Committing funds would not be a problem, but it’s whether the Titans are a viable investment and where and how the funds would be allocated.”
A key plank of the investors’ plan is for the Titans to have diverse income streams. The NRL-controlled club is set to move to Parkwood International golf course in coming weeks as part a $100m redevelopment plan that would cater for a community club.
“The Titans model moving forward has to have more diverse revenue streams than just football,” the spokesman said.
“The NRL are aware of our consortium. Once we can put forward our model and the desire to drive a proper leagues club, hopefully the NRL are interested and then can move forward with some talks.”
The NRL is taking a cautious approach but will consider a buyout package at the right time.
“Our first priority is to stabilise the Titans and rebuild the club so it has a secure financial future,” an NRL spokesman said.
“At an appropriate time, the NRL will welcome approaches from private investors interested in taking over the running of the club.
“However, we have a duty to the players and fans to secure the club’s future first and that is what we will do.”
Kelly, who owned 47.2 per cent of the Titans, welcomed financial aid from the powerful group of businessmen.
“I hope there are some other investors out there but we still have some work to do,” he said.
“Hopefully someone will come on board eventually.”The BIG secret is out of the bag as mainstream media trumpets the historic news that the NATIONAL ENQUIRER has been accepted into the Pulitzer Prize competition for its exhaustive investigation of the John Edwards Conspiracy and Cover-Up.
The scoop was broken by Emily Miller at Huffington Post as rumors of our acceptance into the competition by the prestigious journalism committee ignited the blogosphere.
"The Pulitzer Prize Board has officially accepted The National Enquirer’s submissions for breaking the John Edwards scandal, according to sources close to the Board. In a historic move, the Pulitzer Board conceded that the self-proclaimed tabloid is qualified to compete with mainstream news outlets for journalism’s most prestigious prize.
"The Enquirer is in the running for the Pulitzer in two categories: "Investigative Reporting" and "National News Reporting" for The National Enquirer staff," Ms. Miller announced exclusively at HuffPo.
Quickly The New York Times – for many THE Paper of record – made it even more official with their elegant headline: "Enquirer Is Eligible for Pulitzer". Writer Richard Perez-Pena analyzed the Pulitzer committee’s turn-around in accepting the ENQUIRER entry after initially dismissing the very notion.
The Times reported: Sig Gissler, administrator of the prizes, says he and his colleagues never publicly discuss the eligibility of any specific publication. "We apply our criteria, and if publications meet them, we allow them to participate."
But with a grassroots effort steamrolling the viral landscape, Gawker.com analyzed the situation point by point in their historic article: "There’s NO Good Reason the National Enquirer Shouldn’t Win a Pulitzer Prize"
And MediaBistro even has a poll (yes, you can vote in it) on whether or not the Pulitzer Committee should award The ENQUIRER investigation into John Edwards’ alleged abuse of campaign funds to fund a conspiracy of silence:
Ms. Miller concluded in her Huffington Post exclusive: "The massive grassroots campaign by the public to push the Pulitzer Board to recognize the national importance of The Enquirer’s reporting of John Edwards shows the best of Americans’ core values – hard work, fairness and equality for all – even for tabloids."OK, although it proves I’m a nerd (as if any of you had any doubts) I will come right out and admit it: ever since I was a child and first learned about the longest word in the dictionary I have been eagerly awaiting an opportunity to use it in a sentence. I suppose that is the silver lining I can find in the religious right – they have given me the opportunity to use the word.
Establishment, as those who know the first amendment are aware, refers to having an established church or religion that is state sponsored and state approved. Disestablishment thus represents the removal of such a status, the separation of church and state (as Thomas Jefferson famously put it). Antidisestablishmentarianism is thus the point of view that is opposed to the separation of church and state, and thus the American religious right is very clearly (if I may be so bold as to try to outdo the dictionary in length of words) antidisestablishmentarianistically-oriented! 🙂
Back in 2006, I read Randall Balmer’s Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical’s Lament (New York: Basic Books, 2006), a book that eloquently takes the religious right to task for denying the historic values of American Christianity, undermining the foundations of both American democracy and the Baptist tradition to which many among the religious right claim to belong. Yet the Baptists historically were the key proponents of the separation of church and state, because they saw both the persecution and the empty formalism that resulted from state-sponsored religion, and realized that both were detrimental to the health of true Christianity. Indeed, it is hard for many who have experienced the Southern Baptist Convention in its modern form to believe that the words of George Washington Truett, spoken in 1920 from the steps of the Capitol, could once have been true: “Baptists have one consistent record concerning liberty throughout their long and eventful history. They have never been a party to opression of conscience” (quoted in Balmer, p.69).
Thomas Helwys famously wrote the following words to King James I of England in 1612:
For we do freely profess that our lord the king has no more power over their
consciences than over ours, and that is none at all. For our lord the king is
but an earthly king, and he has no authority as a king but in earthly causes.
And if the king’s people be obedient and true subjects, obeying all human laws
made by the king, our lord the king can require no more. For men’s religion to
God is between God and themselves. The king shall not answer for it. Neither may
the king be judge between God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or
whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least
measure. This is made evident to our lord the king by the scriptures (The Mystery of Iniquity 53).
This is the same King James under whose auspices the famous translation of the Bible was made. He imprisoned Helwys for speaking out in this way about the king’s persecution in particular of Roman Catholics. Helwys, like the American Founding Fathers, realized that in order for one’s own freedoms to be guaranteed, the freedoms of all viewpoints had to be guaranteed. It is distressing to see not only how many Americans and how many Christians, but how many even among Baptists have abandoned their confidence in the power of the Gospel in exchange for attempts to instead manipulate, harass, legislate and in other ways impose their views on others in a way that flies in the face of the spirit of both American democracy and the Christian message.
Balmer’s book’s strongest point, however, is in highlighting the irony of the religious right’s claims to be concerned about the Gospel, about Biblical values, and so on. In a famous instance from a few years ago, when asked where they stood on the issue of TORTURE, right-wing religious groups either said they had no particular view or statement, or parroted the rhetoric of the current administration. Appalling! How can you possibly claim to be a Christian and yet focus all your attention on matters about which the Bible says relatively little (e.g. abortion and homosexuality) and miss the overarching themes of social justice (one of the things that Amos decries Israel’s neighbors for is torture), of the evils of persecution, of loving one’s enemies and doing to others what we would have them do to us? I thank God that more and more voices are being raised by courageous individuals against the evil of the religious right. That is correct, you heard me correctly: it is not simply the case any more that the religious right in America is simply out of touch with the teaching of the Bible. They have become the very thing they claim to oppose. They have become what the Bible defines as evil. How did this happen? I would attribute it to one simple factor that the Bible warns us against. The religious right has become hypocritical, able to see sins in others while seemingly unable to spot the telephone pole lodged in their own eye. Self-righteousness is, as the New Testament warns, quite possibly the hardest sin to root out, and it has infected the whole movement of the religious right in this country.
Christianity Today decades ago warned of precisely where things might lead, but their warning was apparently unheeded. This quote is just another wonderful tidbit quoted in Balmer’s book (p.xvii): “Too narrow a front in battling for a moral crusade, or for a truly biblical involvement in politics, could be disastrous. It could lead to the election of a moron who holds the right view on abortion” (“Getting God’s Kingdom Into Politics”, Christianity Today September 19, 1980, p.10).
Antidisestablishmentarianism. The word you never thought you’d get to use. Today, it is a word we need to bring into our discussions more frequently, even though it is long and unwieldy, since it nicely summarizes the danger the religious right poses to our nation and our world.Hello everyone!! Kahotan here! (@gsc_kahotan)
Today I’m going to be taking a look at…
Nendoroid Yuri Katsuki!
From the popular anime series ‘YURI!!! on ICE’ comes a Nendoroid the figure skater with the most sensitive glass heart – Yuri Katsuki! He comes with three expressions including a smiling expression, the ‘eros’ expression he had during his short program as well as an embarrassed expression. You can easily pose him skating as if in a skating competition, but he also comes with alternate hair parts, glasses and a smartphone to recreate his standard appearance as well! His favorite food ‘katsudon’ is also included allowing for even more everyday scenes from the series! Be sure to add the skater that become stronger through love to your collection with Nendoroid Yuri Katsuki!
“I’ll make it up to you with my skating!”
From the figure skating anime ‘YURI!!! on ICE‘ comes a Nendoroid of the main character, Yuri Katsuki! The anime series captured the hearts of anime fans all over the world as well as figure skaters impressed with the realistic skating animation!! The series has finally come to join the Nendoroid series!!
Yuri’s lovely smile as he slides along the ice with his hair back all looks so perfect!! The sculpt and flow of his hair is so nicely done and the fact that it’s not all perfect captures that his personality nicely!
▲ The little ice-skates are so cute in Nendoroid size! ☆
The Nendoroid has been sculpted wearing Viktor’s World Juniors outfit!
The sculpt and paintwork not only capture the appearance of the outfit but also the textures of the material! The stylish design is filled with so many lovely details to enjoy! ε=(｡・д・｡)
▲ Note the inside of the material is faithfully painted a deep red! ♥
Even though the outfit doesn’t show off any skin, the way it sticks so closely to Yuri’s body-line provides a very sexy appearance!! And to match the the sexy appearance he also comes with the perfect face plate!
His ‘Eros‘ Expression!
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like me, had a traditional Catholic upbringing. My Christian Brother teachers were big on the real and imminent danger of Hell. But the enduring appeal of Satan spreads beyond my generation and my particular denomination. Politicians and public alike, when faced by a monstrous crime, are still quick to characterise its perpetrator as the Devil incarnate. Think of the descriptions routinely used of the Moors Murderess, Myra Hindley. "May She Rot in Hell," ran one headline on the day she died. Indeed, if there was ever a modern image of the Devil it was that Medusa-like picture of her taken in 1966, all blond hair, defiance, and cold, cold eyes.
Confronted with something unthinkably cruel and inhumane, we reach not for the language of psychiatry but for medieval demonology and scapegoating. As does the Church. Benedict XVI, generally as reluctant as his predecessor to mention the Devil in public, did nevertheless last June talk about the orchestrating role of "the enemy" in the paedophile priest scandal that has so damaged the Church's moral standing.
The Devil can still be a convenient get-out clause, whether it be from culpability for unspeakable crimes against children, or more mundane problems. I remember once attending a prayer group where young Evangelical Anglicans had gathered to share the trials and tribulations of their week, and how Jesus would shape their lives if they let him. "I've had a terrible few days," one twentysomething confided, "the Devil has made me spend all my money." She said it without a hint of irony or self-knowledge. She was taking no responsibility herself.
That same reaction can be glimpsed in remarks made by Father Gary Thomas, in interviews he has given to mark the release of The Rite in the United States. Since he successfully completed his training as an exorcist in Rome, he has dealt with five cases he describes as genuine possession by the Devil. His work with those individuals, he confides, has left him vulnerable himself to Satan. "My celibacy gets attacked a lot," he remarks. Rather than locate any problems he may have with the Catholic rule that priests must be celibate within, either himself or the church, Father Gary evidently prefers to externalise them and project them onto the Devil.
The connection between sex and Devil is almost as old as Christianity. Familiar figures in the medieval church iconography were incubus and succubus, copulating demons who would seduce both women and men and impregnate females with children of the Devil.
So is Satan in the 21st century being relegated to the extreme fringes of Christianity that still prefer a literal interpretation of the Bible? Apparently not. He's still right there in the mainstream churches. Indeed, in the opening titles for The Rite, the film-makers draw attention to a New York Times report on a conference of US Catholic bishops that took place in November 2010 to debate growing demand from their congregations for exorcism, and the absence of sufficient suitably-qualified priests to service them.
Unlike Father Gabriele, most of this secret army of priest-exorcists prefer to operate away from the spotlight, but for all that there is no question that the Devil is real. If they ever break cover and are confronted about their work, they have a standard response, best summed up by the 19th century French poet, Baudelaire – "the Devil's deepest wile is to persuade us that he does exist".
It is a pretty circular argument. When you counter, as Father Michael does in the early sections of The Rite, that the absence of proof of the Devil cannot be taken as proof itself, they just smile knowingly. While Father Gabriele didn't even manage a smile when I met him, I am sure the same justification was going through his head.
Peter Stanford's "Biography of the Devil" is published in paperback and e-book by Arrow
Source Independent
Belfast TelegraphPhoto: Getty
Yesterday, Playboy published a long interview with Gary Oldman that has made the rounds today because of his comments on Mel Gibson and celebrities’ relationship with the public eye. Oldman isn’t the first celeb to get heat for being too candid in the magazine’s pages. Here are ten other stars who ruffled some feathers after sitting down with Playboy.
1965: Sean Connery
Connery was in the middle of his James Bond moment when Playboy interviewed him. The actor went off script about halfway through, interjecting opinions about how to discipline women. “I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman,” he said. “An openhanded slap is justified — if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning. If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I’d do it.” Sean Connery: a total charmer.
1971: John Wayne
The most popular Western film actor of all time, Wayne had plenty to say about the decline of the movie industry in his late-in-life, career-spanning Playboy cover story. In his words, Hollywood had gone perverted: “Wouldn’t you say that the wonderful love of those two men in Midnight Cowboy, a story about two fags, qualifies?”
He also went on to share his views on skin color. “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility,” he said. “I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.” Yeesh, pilgrim.
1976: Jimmy Carter
Voters complained en masse after Carter’s widely circulated comments about infidelity: “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times,” he told the magazine as a nation winced.
1995: Snoop Dogg
In the middle of a conversation about drive-by shootings, Playboy writer Dave Sheff asked Snoop Dogg the question, “So innocent bystanders are fair game[?]” Snoop responded accordingly: “Shit, yes. If you’re trying to get somebody and this might be the only time you’re going to catch him, but he is holding his baby and with his mama, you ain’t gonna let that chance go by. That’s the mentality of the streets. If you let that chance go by, he might catch your ass.” Later in the piece, Snoop called the situation hell, but still, it’s hard to blunt the impact of his initial statement.
2004: Colin Farrell
Fresh off the heels of Daredevil and Alexander, Farrell dove deep into his widely publicized affinity for drugs. “Heroin is fine in moderation,” he said in an aside. He later called the comment one of his biggest regrets.
2010: John Mayer
The singer famously commented on masturbation and some of his most-talked-about relationships in this widely circulated Playboy interview. After noting that he’d rather, erm, spend time alone with himself than be with a woman, Mayer told the writer that Jessica Simpson — an ex — was like “sexual napalm.” Of his sexual proclivities, he said, “My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock. I’m going to start dating separately from my dick.” John Mayer said that. He also described a New Years Eve kiss with blogger Perez Hilton, claiming, “All of a sudden I thought, I can outgay this guy right now. I grabbed him and gave him the dirtiest, tongue-iest kiss I have ever put on anybody — almost as if I hated fags.” Someone please invent the Men in Black memory eraser quickly so we can flush this interview out.
2014: Ben Affleck
The actor has certainly had a roller-coaster relationship with the press, but in an interview earlier this year — soon after the news broke that he’d been tapped to play Batman in Zack Snyder’s upcoming movie — he revisited his “Bennifer” years with disdain. “At the nadir of that [relationship] I felt I was being treated worse than Scott Peterson, who at least got the benefit of the word alleged when they talked about him.”
When the interviewer responded, “he’s the guy who—,” Affleck came back with the following: “murdered his wife and tossed her over the side of a boat. The point is I felt like I was at the bottom. I became the guy people could kick around, even if they hadn’t seen the movie, because they saw other people taking shots. I thought it was unfair. But some of those people later wrote nice things about my work. I’ve learned not to take it personally.” Yes, Ben, it definitely feels like you haven’t taken the scrutiny personally.
2014: Gary Oldman
At last, we’ve reached the man who sparked this entire list. You’ve almost certainly seen the headlines today touching upon some of Oldman’s fieriest comments, but here’s a selection of them for your perusal.
On Philip Seymour Hoffman: “I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but maybe he looked in the mirror and always saw that very pale sort of fat kid.”
On Mel Gibson: “He got drunk and said a few things, but we’ve all said those things. We’re all fucking hypocrites. That’s what I think about it. The policeman who arrested him has never used the word nigger or that fucking Jew? I’m being brutally honest here. It’s the hypocrisy of it that drives me crazy. Or maybe I should strike that and say ‘the N word’ and ‘the F word,’ though there are two F words now.”
On Alec Baldwin: “Alec calling someone an F-A-G in the street while he’s pissed off coming out of his building because they won’t leave him alone. I don’t blame him. So they persecute.”
On political correctness and double standards: “It’s our culture now, absolutely. At the Oscars, if you didn’t vote for 12 Years a Slave you were a racist.”
On the Golden Globes: “They’re fucking ridiculous. There’s nothing going on at all. It’s 90 nobodies having a wank. Everybody’s getting drunk, and everybody’s sucking up to everybody. Boycott the fucking thing. Just say we’re not going to play this silly game with you anymore.”
On Nancy Pelosi: “Well, if I called Nancy Pelosi a cunt — and I’ll go one better, a fucking useless cunt — I can’t really say that. But Bill Maher and Jon Stewart can, and nobody’s going to stop them from working because of it. Bill Maher could call someone a fag and get away with it.”In an attempt to exploit Labour's divisions over Trident, the SNP today tabled a motion opposing its renewal. Labour whips instructed MPs to abstain on the grounds that the vote was "a stunt", as John McDonnell told reporters outside last night's PLP meeting.
But in defiance of the leadership, 14 backed the renewal of the nuclear deterrent. Their justification was clear: it remains official party policy to support Trident after annual conference voted not to debate the issue (a point made at the PLP by Ben Bradshaw, Chris Leslie, Jamie Reed and John Woodcock). For them, Labour's credibility depends on it maintaining its backing for the programme. By contrast, six MPs voted against renewal, the cost of which was revealed by yesterday's Defence Review to have risen from £25bn to £31bn.
The SNP is, unsurprisingly, delighted at having divided Labour. Defence spokesman Brendan O'Hara said: "For Labour, today was a sign of their moral bankruptcy in the Trident debate. Astonishingly for a party that say they want to govern, some of their members abstained, some voted with the SNP and some even voted to support the Tory nuclear folly. Labour’s solitary Scottish MP Ian Murray abstained – despite voicing his opposition to Trident renewal. His leader Jeremy Corbyn also abstained – although he previously supported an identical SNP motion in January this year. This is just the latest evidence that Jeremy Corbyn isn’t changing Labour – Labour is changing him."
A potentially far greater division lies ahead when parliament votes on renewal. Many Trident supporters abstained today but would not do so on the official decision. With the majority of the shadow cabinet in favour of renewal (unlike their leader), most frontbenchers expect Corbyn to offer a free vote. Andy Burnham, the shadow home secretary, has pledged to resign if the party opposes Trident renewal and others would likely follow. Among the most committed supporters of the deterrent are the deputy leader, Tom Watson, the shadow culture secretary, Michael Dugher, and the shadow Northern Ireland secretary, Vernon Coaker. But with Corbyn and his supporters arguing that he has a mandate to oppose renewal, and floating the idea of an online ballot of party members, today's split is but a hint of the divisions to come.
The 14 Labour MPs who voted in favour of Trident
Kevin Barron (Rother Valley)
Ben Bradshaw (Exeter)
Mary Creagh (Wakefield)
Chris Evans (Islwyn)
Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse)
Liz Kendall (Leicester West)
Chris Leslie (Nottingham East)
Madeleine Moon (Bridgend)
Albert Owen (Ynys Mon)
Jamie Reed (Copeland)
Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East)
Angela Smith (Sheffield Hillsborough)
Gisela Stuart (Birmingham Edgbaston)
John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness)
The six Labour MPs who voted against Trident
Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley)
Roger Godsiff (Birmingham Sparkbrook)
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North)
Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West)
Dennis Skinner (Bolsover)
Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton)After you are done reading this, you might want to head over to Darren Cauthon's blog to read his rebuttal
I want to share something that'll challenge a pretty fundamental belief you have on unit testing. Knowing this, I ask that you hear me out, because your first thought will be that I'm an idiot. Mocks make for poor tests.
I SAID HEAR ME OUT! Please notice that I said mocks, which is very different than stubs. Part of the problem is that people don't really understand the different between mocks and stubs. Part of the reason for that is that the implementation of a mock and a stub is virtually the same. What differs is how you use them.
I consider this a serious problem, almost a plague, facing the.NET community. This is something I didn't get until fairly recently, so I played my part is spreading the poison. The fact though is that if you aren't testing properly, you might as well not test at all. So let's fix the problem.
Let's look at a method that we want to test:
//i don't want to hear how this isn't a repository public class UserRepository { private readonly IDataStore _store; private readonly IEncryption _encryption; public UserRepository(IDataStore store, IEncryption encryption) { _store = store; _encryption = encryption; } public User FindByCredentials(string username, string password) { var user = _store.FindOneByNamedQuery("FindUserByUserName", username); if (user == null) { return null; } return _encryption.CheckPassword(user.Password, password)? user : null; } }
Our method relies on two dependencies: _store and _encryption. These are injected, as interfaces, into our constructor.
When I look at this method, I see 5 distinct things that I want to test:
Null is returned when the user doesn't exist Null is returned when the password don't match The user is returned when the passwords do match The user gets loaded from the data store The passwords are compared by the encryption code
A cardinal sin of unit testing is doing too much. If you are tempted to verify more than one of these within the same test, don't. You see, there are two things that you care about when writing unit test. First, and most obviously, that you are testing something worthwhile/correctly. Secondly, and equally as important, is that you are creating a robust test. Between having no tests, and tests that fail when you make unrelated changes to your code, I'd rather have no tests.
I want to reiterate the last point. If we swap the order of the parameters of _store.FindOneByNamedQuery, only 1 test should fail. None of the other tests have any reason to care about that change. If that isn't the case, then your tests are not focused, they are doing too much, and they are brittle. They'll be harder to read, harder to maintain and harder to change.
I want to show you the wrong way to test our 2nd expectation, which is that null should be returned when the passwords don't match:
[Test] public void ReturnsNullIfThePasswordsDontMatch() { var store = A.Fake<IDataStore>(); var encryption = A.Fake<IEncryption>(); A.CallTo(() => store.FindOneByNamedQuery("FindUserByUserName", "leto")).Returns(new User{Password = "Ghanima"}); A.CallTo(() => encryption.CheckPassword("Ghanima", "Duncan")).Returns(false); var user = new UserRepository(store, encryption).FindByCredentials("leto", "Duncan"); Assert.IsNull(user) }
This is how I'd expect most developers to write their test. If you really think about it, this test is doing much more than it's advertising. Want proof? Change the name of our named query, or of the data store method, or the order the parameters are passed to either dependencies, and this test will break. But, I ask you, what do any of those have to do with returning null if the supplied password doesn't match the password of the returned user?
Let's write this same test using stubs. Before though, I should point out that I'm using FakeItEasy as my mock/stub library (free/oss). While a lot of.NET mocking libraries support both mocks and stubs, FakeItEasy has the best stubbing implementation and the most intuitive api. With FakeItEasy, there's only 1 type of object (a fake) and what determines whether it's a stub or a mock is how you use it.
So, the proper way to test this:
[Test] public void ReturnsNullIfThePasswordsDontMatch() { var store = A.Fake<IDataStore>(); var encryption = A.Fake<IEncryption>(); A.CallTo(() => encryption.CheckPassword(null, null)).WithAnyArguments().Returns(false); var user = new UserRepository(store, encryption).FindByCredentials(null, null); Assert.IsNull(user) }
Suddenly you can change a lot about of the non-relevant details in FindByCredentials before breaking this test. Change the method name, parameters, add more parameters, remove some, none of it matter. This test doesn't even care about the input parameters. Another test will, but that'll be the focus on that other test. Again, it isn't that failing tests are bad, its that failing tests that break because of some irrelevant change are bad.
You might be wondering about a seemingly missing setup to for FindOneByNamedQuery. FakeItEasy automatically provides canned (or stubbed) responses (in this case, a dynamically created user) to any query we make against the interface. We really don't need anymore. By leaving out the call, our code is as decoupled as it can be
Remember that this is only 1 of our 5 tests we plan on writing. On its own, it doesn't give us the coverage that we need. That should be true of almost any unit test though. Let's look at a complementary test, which is that the passwords are compared by the encryption code:
[Test] public void VerifiesTheSubmittedPasswordAgainstTheStoredOne() { var store = A.Fake<IDataStore>(); var encryption = A.Fake<IEncryption>(); var user = new User{Password = "Ghanima"}; Any.CallTo(store).WithReturnType<User>().Returns(user); new UserRepository(store, encryption).FindByCredentials(null, "Duncan"); A.CallTo(() => encryption.CheckPassword("Ghanima", "Duncan"))).MustHaveHappened(); }
When you combine these two tests, you have focused and robust code. Here we specify a setup to return a specific user (with a controllable password) - but do so by being as generic in our specification as our framework lets us. Let's look at all 5 tests now (2 of these we've already seen):
[Test] public void ReturnsNullWhenTheUserDoesntExist() { var store = A.Fake<IDataStore>(); A.CallTo(() => store.FindOneByNamedQuery(null, null)).WithAnyArguments().Returns(null); var user = new UserRepository(store, null).FindByCredentials(null, null); Assert.IsNull(user) } [Test] public void ReturnsNullIfThePasswordsDontMatch() { var store = A.Fake<IDataStore>(); var encryption = A.Fake<IEncryption>(); A.CallTo(() => encryption.CheckPassword(null, null)).WithAnyArguments().Returns(false); var user = new UserRepository(store, encryption).FindByCredentials(null, null); Assert.IsNull(user) } [Test] public void ReturnTheValidUser() { var store = A.Fake<IDataStore>(); var encryption = A.Fake<IEncryption>(); var expected = new User(); Any.CallTo(store).WithReturnType<User>().Returns(expected); Any.CallTo(encryption).WithReturnType<bool>().Returns(true); var user = new UserRepository(store, encryption).FindByCredentials(null, null); Assert.AreSame(expected, user); } [Test] public void LoadsTheUserFromTheDataStore() { var store = A.Fake<IDataStore>(); new UserRepository(store, A.Fake<IEncryption>()).FindByCredentials("Leto", null); A.CallTo(() => store.FindOneByNamedQuery("FindUserByUserName", "Leto")).MustHaveHappened(); } [Test] public void VerifiesTheSubmittedPasswordAgainstTheStoredOne() { var store = A.Fake<IDataStore>(); var encryption = A.Fake<IEncryption>(); var user = new User{Password = "Ghanima"}; Any.CallTo(store).WithReturnType<User>().Returns(user); new UserRepository(store, encryption).FindByCredentials(null, "Duncan"); A.CallTo(() => encryption.CheckPassword("Ghanima", "Duncan"))).MustHaveHappened(); }
Ultimately, this comes down to numbers. If we mixed the last two interaction tests with the first three behavioral tests you might think it would be less maintenance because we have less tests. However, if you do that, changing how your code interacts (which is irrelevant to most of the behavior of your code) would break 3 tests rather than 1.
In conclusion, by their very nature, mocks are all about testing interactions. This doesn't decrease coupling like most think. There's actually no way to create greater coupling than to us a mock - because you have to specify every possible detail of each interaction. When you want to test interactions, which you should test, use a mock. But I guarantee you that the ratio of behavioral tests to interaction tests will be in the neighborhood of 5 to 1. Which means mocks should be in the minority. When you can, you should always favor either stubs or the real implementation. I haven't talked about using the real implementation (again, something the.NET community avoids like a plague), but hopefully you can see how even that isn't as crazy an idea as you've been told.In its report released in February 2014, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry accused North Korean leader Kim Jong Un of committing crimes against humanity and called for the case to be referred to the International Criminal Court. For its report the COI, having been denied access to North Korea, instead carried out 240 confidential interviews with North Korean refugees living in South Korea, Japan, the UK and the U.S., including Shin Dong-hyuk.
In January 2015, however, the DPRK government released a video of Shin’s father, claiming Shin’s stories were fake. When questioned Shin confessed that parts of the stories in his book were not correct, including sections on his time in Camp 14 and the age he was tortured.
There are numerous other stories told by North Koreans that have later been found to be unreliable, even by North Korean standards. Lee Soon-ok offered testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2004 about torture and burning Christians to death in hot iron liquid in a North Korean political prison. Lee was, however, later found not to be a political prisoner but a petty economic criminal.
Similarly, Kwon Hyuk gave accounts to the U.S. Congress that he was an intelligence officer at the DPRK Embassy in Beijing and witnessed human experiments in political prisons, which became a critical factor for passing the U.S. North Korea Human Rights Act in 2004. Kwon’s identity, however, was questioned by South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency, which argued that he never had access to such information. Kwon has since disappeared from public eyes.
While there is no doubt the North Korean regime has violated serious human rights, there is also a fundamental question about heavily relying on defectors’ testimonies as credible evidence. The evidence used in the U.S. North Korea Human Rights Act and the UN COI is based mostly on former North Koreans’ oral accounts, which are also the sources of information in North Korean studies and policy analyses elsewhere. The most representational non-academic work entirely depending on defectors’ accounts is Barbara Demick’s international best-seller Nothing to Envy.
I have interviewed North Koreans as a North Korea watcher and human rights researcher since 1999. What I’ve found suggests there are issues with the current methodologies used in investigating North Korean human rights and serious ethical dilemmas many researchers have to deal with.
QUESTIONABLE CREDIBILITY
One such issue is cash payments for interviewing North Korean refugees, which has been standard practice in the field. Initially, the cost was to cover the meals and local transport for interviewees, which was approximately $30 in the late 1990s when I first began interviewing North Korean refugees in China and South Korea. However, the fees were up to $200 per hour by the time I attempted to interview former North Koreans in May 2014 for another project I was involved with.
What is the impact of payment on interviewees’ stories?
A government official from the South Korean Ministry of Unification told me that the range of fees for interviewing former North Koreans in the South was $50-500 per hour, depending on the quality of information s/he had.
This practice raises serious questions about the payment as ethical research. What is the monetary value of a researcher’s evidence in the process of discovering the truth? What is the impact of payment on interviewees’ stories? How does the payment change the relation between a researcher and an interviewee? The more exclusive stories they have, the higher fees are. When a significant amount of fees and expenses are paid for exposure to the media, Western parliaments and the UN, participants tend to produce more ‘saleable’ stories. Defectors’ testimonies are not just unverifiable but also occasionally imagined, false or mythical as we find in Lee Soon-ok’s burning Christians and Kim Hye-sook’s killing babies to sell in the market.
Another issue is that one-on-one interviews often generate exaggerated stories and inaccurate information. Although there are ways to rectify false information through double and triple cross-examinations and through multiple sources, these methods are highly time-consuming and some information with single sources is never verifiable.
As the number of North Korean defectors reached 20,000 in 2010, earlier issues with oral accounts being not first-person eyewitness accounts but collections of secondary sources have been mitigated. First-person testimonies have become the norm but, at the same time, the stories involve younger victims with more tragic, dramatic, visual and emotional contents.
Both Kang Chol-hwan (a grandson of political prisoners who spent 10 years in Yoduk prison) and Shin Dong-hyuk (a son of a political prisoner who claims he was born in the Camp 14 in Kaechon) had dire camp experiences. Kang Chol Hwan, the co-author of The Aquariums of Pyongyang, was one of the very few political prisoners to appear before Shin Dong-hyuk, the real character of Escape from Camp 14. Both met the former U.S. President George W. Bush. Kang became a journalist at the South Korean conservative newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, and founded several advocacy groups. Shin’s story became an international bestseller and was made into a documentary film.
The DPRK dismissing evidence is perhaps unsurprising, but it was not just the DPRK government that claimed Shin’s accounts were fake. Many prominent North Koreans, including Kang Myong-do, whose uncle used to be the head of Camp 14, and others, all said that Shin’s stories were lies. In 2015 Shin confessed that some of the stories in his book were not true, raising serious questions about the veracity of his testimony.
INHERENT DIFFICULTIES
A further complication is that changing names, using false identities or even identity laundering are common among North Koreans who escaped their home country. Lee Hyeon-seo, the author of The Girl with Seven Names, talks about her experiences in China and South Korea, using different names or pretending to be Chinese to survive in harsh new environments. To what extent a responsible researcher has to believe the stories of those who keep changing their identities and what to make of it depends on the researcher’s exposure to the North Korean community.
On top of that a researcher’s national, gender and age identities affect the dynamics with North Korean interviewees. An older white male interviewer who is not a Korean speaker would hear different stories from what North Koreans tell a younger South Korean female researcher, for example. The native Korean language helps detect the nuance and sensitive information that cannot be identified when the communications are in English.
The UN COI and U.S. Congress hearings rely on interpreters, meaning that many important details are lost, misinterpreted or misrepresented. But it’s not just about things that get lost in translation, as the Korean language can also create hierarchical relations between younger researchers and older North Korean refugees as the former have to use honorific endings and the latter often do not.
When interviewing North Koreans, the researcher’s gender is another factor. Comments on the researcher’s body, characteristics, marital status, education, class or parents are common, which may not happen to a non-Korean male investigator who has to rely on interpreters, for example. Researchers studying North Koreans have to bear in mind these different dynamics generated by their own nationality, language, gender, ethnicity and age identities.
North Korean refugees are well-aware of what the interviewer wants to hear. Whether it is the UN COI, the U.S. Congress or the Western media, the question has been consistent: why did you leave North Korea and how terrible is it? The more terrible their stories are, the more attention they receive. The more international invitations they receive, the more cash comes in. It is how the capitalist system works: competition for more tragic and shocking stories. This is probably better than collecting trash or cleaning toilets in South Korea.
LOSING THE TRUTH
False testimonies are detrimental to many activists and researchers who have worked on North Korean human rights
In my 16 years of studying North Korean refugees, I have experienced numerous inconsistent stories, intentional omission and lies. I have also witnessed some involved in fraud and other illicit activities. In one case the breach of trust was so significant that I could not continue research. It affected my professional capacity to analyze and deliver credible stories in an ethical manner but also had a deep impact on personal trust I invested in the human subjects I sincerely cared about.
False testimonies are detrimental to many activists and researchers who have worked on North Korean human rights. Many former North Koreans identify the source of this phenomenon as the market pressure on defector-activists. Ahn Myung-chol, former prison guard at Camp 22, said people like shocking stories and defector-activists are merely responding to them. Chong Kwang-il, former prisoner at Camp 15, says that the fame that books and media exposure has brought to defector-activists also traps them.
Choi Sung-chol, the head of the UK One Korea Association, emphasizes that “Most North Koreans do not worry about small factual mistakes as long as the big picture that North Korea violates human rights is right. We, North Koreans, know what is true and what is fake, but, at the same time, we do not want to ruin the bigger political moves like the UN COI or the U.S. human rights act.”
One thing as of yet unclear is the role of the South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS), given the nature of the institution’s mandates. How much agency the defector-activists have depends on the power and control exerted on them by the NIS. There are, however, occasional hints that the NIS has been involved in the defector-activists’ North Korean human rights movements. Kang Chol-hwan, for example, said in one of his media interviews that the “NIS knew details of the political prisons and prisoners there. They even had the photo of our house.” After graduating from Hanyang University with a management degree, Kang worked for the Korea Electric Power Corporation for some time. In 1998 he started providing testimonies for the U.S. Congress, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. How this was arranged is unclear but I assume that it was done through the NIS. After a series of international testimonies and book publication, Kang established himself as a direct witness and victim of political prisons.
Shin Dong-hyuk left North Korea in January 2005 and arrived in Seoul in August 2006. Less than a year later in June 2007, Shin already had started talking to the UK government and parliamentarians. He published a memoir in Korean in 2007. It is hard to imagine how a 25-yeard old North Korean man rose this quickly within less than a year of arrival in Seoul, alone without any help. It is likely that the NIS has facilitated his career as an activist from the very beginning.
As the number of North Korean arrivals increases, the NIS sometimes makes false judgments about so-called North Korean “spies.” One NIS director was sentenced to five years imprisonment for framing a defector as a spy in May 2015.
To what extent the NIS is involved in the making of North Korean defector testimonies will remain unknown. It will continuously dampen the quality of reports on North Korean human rights.
Versions of this piece originally appeared on Asia & the Pacific Policy Society’s Policy Forum and on Song Jiyoung’s blog.
Main image: Rohan RadheyaBagan - Myanmar
The days were hot when we explored the Temples of Bagan in Myanmar. We hired a horse cart for one day and a bicycle for the next.
One thing we remember was that our horse cart driver was expecting a child any day now.
It was a happy time. Located in Myanmar (Burma) we took a ferry from Mandalay on the Irrawaddy River to the ruins. This Buddhist complex was built in 1057 and covers 16 square miles.
Time stands still in most of Burma and this feeling is even heightened in Bagan. Farmers ride by on their ox carts, very few many locals pray at the temples and monks walk the street in the morning searching for alms.
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Like most other ruins, the highlight is walking to the top of the highest temple; Thatbyinnyu Pahto to overlook the complex.
But one of the most extraordinary temples is Ananda Pahto.
Inside stands 4 giant Buddhas and two sacred Buddha footprints.
Visiting Bagan made a believer out of me! It is a spiritual sight that gives off a feeling of calm and peace.
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Hampi - India
We didn't even know Hampi existed before going to India.
But we were told about it while studying Yoga in Goa. We hopped on a train to see this city in the boulders where people still live among the ruins.
Even today people sell their wares in the bazaar and worship at the temples.
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Angkor Wat - Cambodia
It's the mother of all the ruins of the world. Angkor Wat was introduced to the masses in Lora Croft's Tomb Raider.
This ancient Khmer Temple is being overrun with tourists these days.
When we were there, one could still outrun tour buses by taking a tuk-tuk to remote corners of the complex.
Located in Cambodia this majestic complex consists of hundreds of temples covering 500 acres of land.
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The Main Temple of Angkor Wat is well preserved and a breathtaking sight. I
ts five main towers jut into the air as high as 66 meters (215 ft) from its 1.6 km (1 mile) long base.
At sunset on Bakheng Hill, you can overlook the entire land and complex.
But it wasn't quite as special when you were jockeying for a position and trying to see over the other hundreds of tourists heads. Never the less it is well worth a visit.
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Sigiriya - Sri Lanka
It took us four visits to Sri Lanka before visiting its most famous site.
Sigiriya is an impressive site with ruins leading up to and standing upon a giant rock in the middle of the jungle.
This ancient rock fortress dates back to 475 BC. That's impressive enough, but it is the 600 metre (660 ft) high natural stone column that it stands upon that is truly impressive.
We climbed it, took a scenic flight over it and then hiked up Pidurangala to view it at sunset.
It may have taken us years to see it, but when we finally did, we saw it all!
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Polonnaruwa - Sri Lanka
The ancient city of Polonnaruwa is Sri Lanka's second oldest kingdom dating back to 1070.
It is a World Heritage Site and people still inhabit the land all around it.
It's in great shape with many monuments still standing. It's not as large as many of the other ruins we visited around Asia, but it is a fascinating walk through time.
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Anuradhapura Sri Lanka
What I love about visiting Sri Lanka is how modern civilization lives in harmony with its ancient past.
Anuradhapura is the capital fo the North Central Province, but also the capital of the ancient cities of Sri Lanka.
Its ruins are well- preserved and a good way to learn about ancient Sri Lanka civilization.
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Great Wall of China
We didn't expect to be impressed by the Great Wall, we even went to the site expecting to be disappointed. I'm glad that we allowed ourselves to change our minds.
The Great Wall was one of the best ruins of the world we have ever visited.
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The MuTianYu Great Wall section is practically deserted and you can walk along the 2.5 km section enjoying the countryside and imagining the great battles that
took place between the Chinese Empire and |
ilan was recalled again on Aug. 23, then optioned on Aug. 25, earning 2 more days of service time.
Avilan was called up for 1 day as the 26th man on Aug. 31, earning 1 day of service time.
Avilan was recalled on Sept. 5, with 28 days remaining in the regular season.
****
2015: $530,000
Avilan was acquired from the Braves in a three-team, 13-player deal on July 30, 2015, with 67 days left in the regular season.
$530,000 x 67/183 = $194,044.
Pedro Baez
2016: $520,000
He signed a one-year deal on March 10, 2015.
Baez was optioned to Double-A on Aug. 30, earning 149 days of service time.
$520,000 x 149/183 = $423,388
Baez was recalled on Sept. 6, with 27 days left in the regular season.
$520,000 x 27/183 = $76,721
2015: $512,500
The third baseman turned pitcher was added to the 40-man roster on Nov. 20, 2013.
2014: $500,000
Baez was recalled to the Dodgers on May 5, and was optioned to Double-A on May 6, earning one day of service time.
$500,000 x 1/183 = $2,732
Baez was recalled to the Dodgers on July 8, and was optioned to Triple-A after the game on July 13, earning six days of service time.
$500,000 x 6/183 = $16,393
Baez was recalled to the Dodgers on Aug. 5, then was optioned to Triple-A on Aug. 11. He was recalled back on Aug. 15 replacing an injured Hyun-jin Ryu, canceling the option; from Aug. 5 there are 55 days left in the regular season.
$500,000 x 55/183 = $150, 273
Scott Baker
Baker signed a minor league contract on April 3, 2015. I don't have his major league salary for 2015, but I will assume $1 million.
Baker was called up to the Dodgers on April 26, and designated for assignment on May 3. He cleared waivers and accepted an assignment to Triple-A, so he'll still be paid. Starting with April 26, there are 162 days left in the season.
$1 million x 162/183 = $885,246
Austin Barnes
2016: $512,500
Barnes was optioned to Triple-A Oklahoma City on Apr. 15, earning 12 days of major league service time.
$512,500 x 12/183 = $33,607
Barnes was recalled from Triple-A on June 5, then optioned on June 14, earning 9 days of service time.
$512,500 x 9/183 = $25,205
Barnes was recalled from Triple-A on July 22, then optioned on July 31, earning 9 days of service time.
$512,500 x 9/183 = $25,205
Barnes was recalled from Triple-A on Sept. 2, with 31 days left in the regular season.
$512,500 x 31/183 = $86,817
***
The catcher/infielder came to Los Angeles as part of an eight-player, three-team trade between the Marlins and Angels on Dec. 10, 2014.
2015: $507,500
Barnes was recalled on May 23, then optioned on June 2 in between games of a doubleheader, earning 11 days of service time.
$507,500 x 11/183 = $30,505
Barnes was recalled on July 20, then optioned on Aug. 4, earning 15 days of major league service time.
$507,500 x 15/183 = $41,598
Barnes was recalled on Aug. 31, with 35 days left in the season.
$507,500 x 35/183 = $97,063
Darwin Barney
The Dodgers designated Barney for assignment on June 12, and sent him outright to the minors few days later. He was traded to Toronto for a player to be named later or cash on Sept. 13, 2015, with 22 days left in the regular season.
$2,525,000 x 22/183 = $303,552
The infielder signed a one-year contract on Dec. 2, 2014, avoiding salary arbitration for 2015.
2015: $2.525 million
Barney can also earn up to $175,000 in performance bonuses:
$25,000 for 250 plate appearances
$25,000 for 275 plate appearances
$25,000 for 300 plate appearances
$25,000 for 325 plate appearances
$25,000 for 350 plate appearances
$25,000 for 375 plate appearances
$25,000 for 400 plate appearances
***
The infielder was acquired with cash from the Cubs on July 28 for a player to be named later. On July 30, the Dodgers sent minor league pitcher Jonathan Martinez to Chicago to complete the trade.
2014: $2.3 million
With 62 days left in the season at the time of the trade and with the Cubs sending $500,000 as part of the trade, the Dodgers are responsible for just under $280,000 for the remainder of the season for Barney.
$2.3 million x 62/183 = $779,235 - $500,000 = $279,235
Barney was optioned to Triple-A Albuquerque on July 30, then recalled on Aug. 10, with 49 days left in the season.
Mike Baxter
The Dodgers claimed Baxter off waivers from the Mets on Oct. 17, 2013.
The outfielder signed a one-year contract on Nov. 29, 2013, avoiding salary arbitration. His 2014 salary is not guaranteed.
2014: $700,000
Baxter was optioned to Triple-A on April 4, earning a total of seven days of service time.
Baxter was designated for assignment on April 6, then cleared waivers and was outrighted to Triple-A on April 9.
Brandon Beachy
Beachy returned to the Dodgers on a one-year deal on Jan. 6, 2016.
2016: $1.5 million
The base salary is not guaranteed.
Beachy can also earn $250,000 for making the opening day roster, plus up to $2.75 million based on games started, plus another $750,000 for games pitched.
$250,000 for 10 starts
$500,000 for 15 starts
$500,000 for 20 starts
$750,000 for 25 starts
$750,000 for 30 starts
$100,000 for 30 games pitched
$100,000 for 40 games pitched
$100,000 for 45 games pitched
$150,000 for 50 games pitched
$150,000 for 55 games pitched
$150,000 for 60 games pitched
Beachy was sent outright to Triple-A Oklahoma City on Jan. 27, 2016, and extended a non-roster invitation to big league camp in spring training.
***
The right-hander signed a one-year deal with a club option for 2016 on Feb. 21, 2015.
2015: $2.75 million
2016: $3 million club option
The 2016 option carries a buyout of $250,000 if Beachy pitches at least 10 innings in 2015.
In addition, the base salary in 2016 can increase by up to $3 million based on games started in 2015:
$500,000 for one start (achieved on July 11, 2015)
$500,000 for five starts
$500,000 for 10 starts
$500,000 for 15 starts
$500,000 for 18 starts
$500,000 for 21 starts
If the 2016 option is exercised, Beachy can earn up to $2 million in bonuses:
$500,000 for 20 games pitched
$500,000 for 25 games pitched
$1 million for 30 games pitched
Beachy was designated for assignment on July 31, 2015, then sent outright to Triple-A on Aug. 3. He elected free agency on Oct. 13.
Josh Beckett
Beckett was acquired in a blockbuster nine-player trade with Boston on August 25, 2012.
Beckett signed a four-year, $68 million extension with Boston in 2010 that takes him through the 2014 season.
2012: $15.75 million
2013: $15.75 million
2014: $15.75 million
In 2012 Beckett was acquired with 40 days left in the season.
$15,750,000 x 40/183 = $3,442,623
Roger Bernadina
2014: $500,000
Bernardina signed a minor-league deal on July 7 after getting released by the Reds.
He had his contract purchased from Triple-A on Sep. 6, with 23 days left in the regular season.
$500,000 x 23/183 = $62,842
Chad Billingsley
Billingsley signed a one-year deal with the Phillies on Jan. 29, 2015.
***
He signed a three-year deal on March 29, 2011 worth $35 million, plus an option for a fourth year.
2012: $9 million
2013: $11 million
2014: $12 million
2015: $14 million club option ($3 million buyout)
Billingsley has a limited no-trade clause, as he can block trades to a list of 10 teams.
The Dodgers declined Billingsley's 2015 option on Oct. 31, 2014.
2011: He signed a one-year deal on January 18, 2011 for $6.275 million, avoiding arbitration.
2010: He signed a one-year deal on January 15, 2010 for $3.85 million, avoiding arbitration
Joe Blanton
The right-hander was signed to a one-year deal on Jan. 19, 2016.
2016: $4 million
Blanton can also earn up to $1 million in performance bonuses in 2016:
$250,000 for 50 innings (earned on July 22)
$250,000 for 60 innings (earned on Aug. 17)
$500,000 for 70 innings (earned on Sept. 3)
Mike Bolsinger
2016: $515,000
Bolsinger opened the 2016 season on the disabled list, but was optioned to Triple-A on May 19, after 46 days of the regular season. He was recalled on May 23, replacing an injured Chin-hui Tsao, which effectively cancels his option. He gets credit for service time and pay as if the May 19 option never happened.
Bolsinger was optioned to Triple-A on June 19, after 77 days of the regular season.
$515,000 x 77/183 = $216,694
Bolsinger was traded to Toronto on Aug. 1, 2016.
***
The right-hander was acquired from the Diamondbacks for cash considerations Nov. 22, 2014.
I don't have Bolsinger's 2015 salary, but I am estimating it at $517,500.
Bolsinger was recalled on April 23, then optioned back to Triple-A one day later.
$517,500 x 1/183 = $2,828
Bolsinger was recalled on May 12, then optioned back to Triple-A on July 31, earning 81 days of service time.
$517,500 x 81/183 = $229,057
Bolsinger was recalled on Sept. 1, with 34 days left in the season.
$517,500 x 34/183 = $96,148
Lisalverto Bonilla
Bonilla was claimed off waivers from Texas on Oct. 21, 2015.
He was not tendered a 2016 contract on Dec. 2, 2015, making him a free agent.
Bonilla was resigned to a minor league contract on Dec. 9, 2015, with a non-roster invitation to spring training.
Brooks Brown
Brown was claimed off waivers from Colorado on Oct. 14, 2015.
He was sent outright to Triple-A Oklahoma City, removing him from the 40-man roster on Dec. 4, 2015.
Brown was released on Feb. 26, 2016.
Drew Butera
Butera was designated for assignment on Dec. 5, 2014, then traded to the Angels on Dec. 9, 2014.
***
The catcher signed a one-year contract on Nov. 29, 2013, avoiding salary arbitration. His 2014 salary is not guaranteed.
2014: $700,000
Butera can also earn performance bonuses.
***
The Dodgers acquired Butera from the Twins on July 31, 2013 for a player to be named later, who became minor league pitcher Miguel Sulbaran.
2013: Butera made $700,000 in 2013, and the Dodgers acquired him with 60 days left in the season.
$700,000 x 60/183 = $229,508
Alberto Callaspo
The Dodgers acquired Callaspo in a six-player trade with the Braves on May 27, 2015.
2015: $3 million
Callaspo joined the Dodgers with 131 days left in the season
$3,000,000 x 131/183 = $2,147,541
Callaspo was designated for assignment on Aug. 19, and released on Aug. 27.
Chris Capuano
Capuano signed a two-year deal on December 2, 2011 worth a guaranteed $10 million, which includes a mutual option for 2014. The payout schedule:
2012: $3 million
2013: $6 million
2014: $8 million mutual option ($1 million buyout)
Additionally, Capuano can earn up to $1 million in incentives:
Annually in 2012-2013
$75,000 for 160 innings
$75,000 for 170 innings
$75,000 for 180 innings
$75,000 for 187 innings
$75,000 for 195 innings
Capuano can also earn $250,000 if he pitches 360 total innings in 2012-2013.
Capuano pitched in 198⅓ innings in 2012, earning $375,000 in bonuses. He earned no bonuses in 2013.
The Dodgers declined Capuano's 2014 option on Oct. 31, 2013, instead paying him a $1 million buyout.
Jesse Chavez
Chavez was acquired from the Blue Jays on Aug. 1, 2016.
2016: $4,000,000
Chavez was acquired with 62 days remaining in the regular season.
$4,000,000 x 62/183 = $1,355,191
Toronto is paying $1.15 million to offset part of his salary, leaving $205,191 for the Dodgers.
Louis Coleman
The Dodgers non-tendered Coleman on Dec. 2, 2016, making him a free agent.
***
Coleman signed a one-year deal on Feb. 18, 2016.
2016: $725,000
Kevin Correia
The pitcher was acquired from the Twins on Aug. 9 for a player to be named later or cash considerations. Correia was in the final season of a two-year contract.
2014: $5.5 million
With 50 days left in the season at the time of the trade, the Dodgers are responsible for just over $1.5 million for the remainder of the season for Correia.
$5.5 million x 50/183 = $1,502,732
Jharel Cotton
Cotton was added to the 40-man roster on Nov. 20, 2015, protecting him from the Rule 5 draft.
He was traded to Oakland on Aug. 1, 2016.
Daniel Coulombe
Coulombe was designated for assignment on Sept. 6, 2015. He was traded to Oakland for cash on Sept. 10, 2015.
I don't have Coulombe's salary for 2015, but I estimate it at $510,000
Coulombe was recalled on May 4, and optioned back to Triple-A two days later. He was then recalled on May 14 when Kenley Jansen was placed on the DL; since it was within 10 days, the earlier option doesn't count. He was optioned to Triple-A on May 15, so he gets 11 days of service time.
$510,000 x 11/183 = $30,656
Coulombe was recalled on June 2, then optioned on June 5, earning three days of major league service time.
$507,500 x 3/183 = $8,320
Coulombe was recalled on June 18, then optioned on June 20, earning two days of major league service time.
$507,500 x 2/183 = $5,546
Coulombe was recalled on July 5, then optioned on July 6, earning one day of major league service time.
$507,500 x 3/183 = $2,773
2014: $500,000
Coulombe had his contract purchased from Triple-A on Sep. 16, with 13 days left in the regular season.
$500,000 x 13/183 = $35,519
Carl Crawford
The Dodgers designated Crawford for assignment on June 5, 2016. He was released on June 13.
***
Crawford was acquired from the Red Sox in the nine-player Punto Trade on Aug. 25, 2012, in the second year of a seven-year, $142 million contract.
2012: $19.5 million
2013: $20 million
2014: $20.25 million
2015: $20.5 million
2016: $20.75 million
2017: $21 million
In 2012, Crawford was acquired with 40 days left in the season.
$19,500,000 x 40/183 = $4,262,295
Crawford can earn up to $625,000 annually in performance bonuses:
$50,000 for being named an All-Star
$75,000 for League Championship Series MVP
$100,000 for Gold Glove
$100,000 for Silver Slugger
$100,000 for World Series MVP
$200,000 for MVP award
$125,000 for second place in MVP vote
$100,000 for third place in MVP vote
$75,000 for fourth place in MVP vote
$50,000 for fifth place in MVP vote
Crawford earned no bonuses in 2012 or 2013.
Charlie Culberson
Culberson signed a one-year contract on Dec. 1, 2016.
2017: $550,000
He was sent outright to Triple-A on Dec. 9, 2016.
***
The utility infielder signed a minor league contract with a non-roster invitation to spring training on Nov. 19, 2015.
2016: $535,000
Culberson made the opening day roster. He was optioned to Triple-A on May 18, after 45 days on the major league roster.
$535,000 x 45/183 = $131,557
Culberson was recalled from Triple-A on July 20, then optioned back on July 21, earning one more day.
$535,000 x 1/183 = $2,923
Culberson was recalled from Triple-A on Aug. 23, with 41 days remaining in the regular season.
$535,000 x 41/183 = $119,863
Grant Dayton
Dayton was acquired from the Marlins for Chris Reed on July 15, 2015.
2016: $507,500
The Dodgers purchased Dayton's contract from Triple-A on July 21, 2016, then optioned him to Triple-A on July 23, earning 2 days of service time.
$507,500 x 2/183 = $5,546
Dayton was called up to the majors on Aug. 4, with 60 days left in the regular season.
$507,500 x 60/183 = $166,393
Chase De Jong
He was added to the 40-man roster on Nov. 18, 2016.
De Jong was traded to thhe Mariners for minor leaguers Drew Jackson and Aneurys Zabala on March 1, 2017.
Jose De Leon
De Leon was called up to the majors and added to the 40-man roster on Sept. 4, 2016.
2016: $507,500
De Leon was called up with 29 days remaining in the season.
$507,500 x 29/183 = $80,423
Jose Dominguez
Dominguez signed a one-year deal on March 2, 2014.
2014: $501,000
Dominguez was optioned to Triple-A on March 30, but earned two days of service time for the trip to Australia. He was recalled on April 2 to replace an injured Brian Wilson, canceling the option. Dominguez was then optioned on April 9, earning a total of 12 days of service time (counting the two days in Australia and the first 10 days of the season.
$501,000 x 12/183 = $32,852
Dominguez was recalled to the Dodgers on April 21, and was optioned to Triple-A on April 27, earning six days of service time.
$501,000 x 6/183 = $16,426
Dominguez was recalled to the Dodgers on May 2, and was optioned to Triple-A on May 4, earning two days of service time.
$501,000 x 2/183 = $5,475
The Dodgers traded Dominguez along with minor league pitcher Greg Harris in a four-player trade with the Rays on Nov. 20, 2014 that brought pitchers Joel Peralta and Adam Liberatore to Los Angeles.
Brett Eibner
Eibner was acquired from Oakland for minor leaguer Jordan Tarsovich on Jan. 25, 2017
Scott Elbert
The pitcher signed a one-year contract on Nov. 29, 2013, avoiding salary arbitration. His 2014 salary is not guaranteed.
2014: $575,000
Elbert can also earn up to $100,000 in performance bonuses:
$25,000 for 15 games
$25,000 for 20 games
$25,000 for 25 games
$25,000 for 30 games
Elbert was designated for assignment on July 29, then after he cleared waivers was outrighted to Triple-A on July 31. From the beginning of the season through July 28, Elbert earned 121 days of service time.
Elbert had his contract purchased from Triple-A Albuquerque on Sep. 12, with 17 days remaining in the season.
Elbert elected free agency on Nov. 3, 2014 after getting outrighted from the 40-man roster.
2013: $505,000
2012: $488,500
2011: $415,000
He was recalled on May 11, with 141 days left in the regular season.
$415,000 x 141/183 = $319,754
A.J. Ellis
2016: Ellis avoided salary arbitration with a one-year, $4.5 million contract on Dec. 2, 2015.
Ellis was traded to the Phillies on Aug. 25, 2016, with the Dodgers responsible for 145 days and the Phillies on the hook for the final 38 days of the regular season.
$4.5 million x 145/183 = $3,565,574
2015: Ellis avoided salary arbitration with a one-year, $4.25 million contract on Jan. 13, 2015.
2014: Ellis signed a one-year, $3.55 million contract on Feb. 1, 2014, avoiding salary arbitration. He can also earn up to $150,000 in performance bonuses:
$50,000 for 110 starts
$50,000 for 115 starts
$50,000 for 450 plate appearances
The catcher filed for salary arbitration on January 14, 2014, and three days later exchanged salary figures with the club. Ellis filed at $4.6 million, while the Dodgers filed at $3 million.
2013: Ellis signed a one-year, $2 million contract on January 18, 2013, avoiding salary arbitration.
2012: $490,000
2011: $421,000
Ellis was on the opening day roster, then optioned to Albuquerque on April 25, meaning he was with the club for 26 days.
$421,000 x 26/183 = $59,814
Ellis was recalled on June 19, then optioned on July 14, so he was with the club for 25 days.
$421,000 x 25/183 = $57,514
Ellis was recalled on August 23, with 37 days left in the regular season.
$421,000 x 37/183 = $85,120
2010: His salary is estimated to be $400,000, and he was recalled on April 10, and was optioned on July 21, meaning he was on the roster for 102 days.
$400,000 x 102/183 = $222,951
Ellis was recalled on August 4, then optioned after the game on August 22, so he was with the club for 19 days.
$400,000 x 19/183 = $41,530
Ellis was recalled on September 3, with 31 days left in the regular season.
$400,000 x 31/183 = $67,760
2009: His salary is $400,000, and he was on the major league roster from May 29 through May 31, for a total of 3 days.
$400,000 x 3/183 = $6,557
Ellis was recalled on June 15, and was optioned to AAA on July 2, so he was on the MLB roster for 17 days.
$400,000 x 17/183 = $37,158
Ellis was recalled on September 1, with 34 days left in the regular season.
$400,000 x 34/183 = $74,317
Mark Ellis
Ellis signed a two-year deal worth $8.75 million on Nov. 15, 2011, which includes a club option for 2014.
2012: $2.5 million
2013: $5.25 million
2014: $5.75 million club option ($1 million buyout)
In addition, Ellis can earn up to $125,000 per year in incentives based on plate appearances:
$25,000 for 500 plate appearances
$25,000 for 525 plate appearances
$25,000 for 550 plate appearances
$25,000 for 575 plate appearances
$25,000 for 600 plate appearances
Ellis did not reach any of the incentives in either 2012 or 2013.
The Dodgers declined Ellis' 2014 option on Oct. 31, 2013, instead paying him a $1 million buyout.
Andre Ethier
Ethier signed a five-year extension on June 12, 2012 worth a guaranteed $85 million. The deal also has a vesting option for a sixth season, based on plate appearances in 2017 or 2016-2017, that could bring the total value of the deal to $100 million. The payout:
2013: $13.5 million
2014: $15.5 million
2015: $18 million
2016: $18 million
2017: $17.5 million
2018: $17.5 million club option (or $2.5 million buyout)
The 2018 option vests if Ethier has 550 plate appearances in 2017, or 1,100 plate appearances in 2016-17.
2012: signed a one-year deal worth $10.95 million on January 17, 2012, plus incentives, avoiding salary arbitration. Ethier can earn up to $50,000 in performance bonuses based on plate appearances:
$25,000 for 600 PA - earned October 1
$25,000 for 625 PA
Ethier signed a two-year deal on January 19, 2010, avoiding salary arbitration. The deal was worth a total of $15.25 million:
$500,000 signing bonus
2010: $5.5 million
2011: $9.25 million
In addition, Ethier can earn up to $375,000 in incentives in 2010-2011:
Annually (2010-2011)
$25,000 for 600 PA
$50,000 for 650 PA
$50,000 for 675 PA
Achieving those incentives in 2010 (he didn't) would have also added those amounts to Ethier's 2011 base salary. Ethier didn't earn any bonuses in 2010 or 2011.
2009: Avoided arbitration with a one-year deal on Feb. 17, 2009 worth $3.1 million, plus potential for $100,000 in incentives:
$25,000 for 596 plate appearances -- achieved September 8
$25,000 for 625 PA -- achieved September 15 (PA #625 was his sixth walk-off!)
$50,000 for 650 PA -- achieved September 23
Kyle Farmer
He was added to the 40-man roster on Nov. 18, 2016.
Tim Federowicz
The catcher was traded to the Padres as part of a five-player deal on Dec. 18, 2014.
***
2014: I don't have the exact salary for Federowicz, but am estimating $513,000.
Federowicz was recalled to the Dodgers on April 8, and was optioned to Triple-A on April 30, earning 22 days of service time.
$513,000 x 22/183 = $61,672
Federowicz was recalled to the Dodgers on May 26, and was optioned to Triple-A on June 13, earning 17 days of service time.
$513,000 x 17/183 = $47,656
Federowicz was recalled on Sep. 1, with 28 days left in the regular season.
$513,000 x 28/183 = $78,492
Pablo Fernandez
The Dodgers signed the 25-year-old Cuban RHP to a minor league contract on May 19, 2015, with an $8 million signing bonus that doesn't count toward the competitive balance tax.
Daniel Fields
The outfielder was claimed off waivers from the Brewers on Dec. 7, 2015.
He was designated for assignment by the Dodgers on Dec. 30, 2015, then claimed off waivers by the White Sox on Jan. 7, 2016.
Josh Fields
Fields agreed to a 1-year deal, avoiding salary arbitration on Jan. 13, 2017.
2017: $1.05 million
Fields was optioned to Triple-A on March 28.
He was recalled from Triple-A on April 7, then optioned back to Triple-A on April 14, earning seven days of service time.
***
Fields was acquired from the Astros on Aug. 1, 2016.
2016: $900,000
Fields was acquired with 62 days remaining in the regular season.
$900,000 x 62/183 = $304,918
Fields was recalled on Aug. 3, then was optioned on Aug. 23, earning 20 days of service time.
Fields was recalled on Sept. 2, with 31 days left in the regular season.
Casey Fien
The reliever was claimed off waivers from the Twins on May 7, 2016, with 149 days left in the season.
2016: $2.275 million
$2,275,000 x 149/183 = $1,852,322
Fien was sent outright to Triple-A on May 12.
He was called up to the majors on May 28, then optioned to Triple-A on Aug. 19.
Fien was designated for assignment on Sept. 10.
Stephen Fife
2014: I don't have the exact salary for Fife, but am estimating $508,000.
Fife was recalled to the Dodgers for a spot start on May 4, and was optioned to Triple-A on May 5, earning one day of service time.
$508,000 x 1/183 = $2,776
Fife, out for the season after Tommy John surgery, was recalled from Triple-A Albuquerque on Sep. 16 and simultaneously placed on the 60-day disabled list, opening up a spot on the 40-man roster for Daniel Coulombe, meaning Fife gets major league service time and pay for the final 13 days of the regular season.
$508,000 x 13/183 = $36,087
Fife was outrighted to Triple-A Oklahoma City on Oct. 13, 2014, and became a minor league free agent on Nov. 3, 2014.
Chone Figgins
Figgins signed a minor league contract with a non-roster invitation to spring training on Jan. 22, 2014. He made the team out of spring training, and had his contract purchased on March 16.
2014: $900,000
Figgins' salary if in the minors is $120,000.
Figgins was optioned to Triple-A on April 21, and returned to the Dodgers on May 2. For those 11 days Figgins earned his minor league rate rather than the major league rate.
[$900,000 - $120,000] x 11/183 = $46,885
In addition, he can earn up to $475,000 in performance bonuses based on plate appearances:
$25,000 for 200 PA
$25,000 for 275 PA
$50,000 for 300 PA
$50,000 for 325 PA
$50,000 for 350 PA
$50,000 for 375 PA
$75,000 for 400 PA
$75,000 for 425 PA
$75,000 for 450 PA
Figgins achieved none of those bonuses in 2014.
Cole Figueroa
The infielder was claimed off waivers from the Pirates on June 28, 2016, and optioned to Triple-A.
He was designated for assignment on July 8, 2016. Figueroa cleared waivers and was sent outright to Triple-A on July 11, but declined the assignment and became a free agent.
Logan Forsythe
The Dodgers acquired Forsythe from the Rays on Jan. 23, 2017.
2017: $5.75 million
2018: $9 million club option ($1 million buyout)
Forsythe's option for 2018 was originally worth $8.5 million, part of his two-year deal signed with Tampa Bay in January 2016. The option value increased by $500,000 with at least 550 plate appearances in 2016 (he had 567), and can increase by up to $1.5 million more based on Forsythe's 2017 plate appearances:
$500,000 for 533 PA (1,100 combined in 2016-2017)
$500,000 for 550 PA
$500,000 for 600 PA
Carlos Frias
Frias was designated for assignment on Jan. 25, 2017, then traded to Cleveland five days later.
***
2016: $517,500
Frias was recalled from Triple-A on June 19, then optioned him back to the minors on June 21, earning 2 days of service time.
$517,500 x 2/183 = $5,656
He was recalled on July 7, then optioned on July 8, earning 1 more day of service time.
$517,500 x 1/183 = $2,828
Frias was recalled and placed on the 60-day DL on Sept. 9, with 24 days remaining in the regular season.
$517,500 x 24/183 = $67,869
***
I don't have Frias' 2015 salary, but I am estimating it at $512,500.
Frias was recalled on April 15, then optioned back to Triple-A one day later.
$512,500 x 1/183 = $2,801
Frias was recalled on April 26, with 162 days left in the season.
$512,500 x 162/183 = $453,689
2014: $500,000
Frias had his contract purchased on Aug. 4, then was optioned to Triple-A on Aug. 31, earning 27 days of service time.
$500,000 x 27/183 = $73,770
Frias was recalled on Sept. 2, with 27 days left in the regular season.
$500,000 x 27/183 = $73,770
Onelki Garcia
Garcia signed a one-year deal on March 2, 201 |
EJB ItemDAO itemDAO; @EJB UserDAO userDAO; @TransactionAttribute(TransactionAttributeType.REQUIRED) // This is even the default public void execute() { Bid currentMaxBid = itemDAO.getMaxBid(itemId); Bid currentMinBid = itemDAO.getMinBid(itemId); Item item = itemDAO.findById(itemId, true); newBid = item.placeBid(userDAO.findById(userId, false), bidAmount, currentMaxBid, currentMinBid); } }
P.S. Credit has to be given to Eric Burke, who first posted the basics for this pattern on his blog. Unfortunately, not even the Google cache is available anymore.
A Better typed Generic DAO? You decide!
We are missing something on <T> end, since T allows you to "domain-ify" everything! and the Identifier type should ideally match the identifier type of T, but there's no way to do that on the code above. You decide which approach is better.
// Our common Model interface that an abstract Domain model will implement and all domain // models will extend. public interface IModel<ID extends Serializable> { public abstract ID getId(); public abstract void setId(final ID pId); } // Our generic DAO, NOTE: MODEL's ID type is the same as ID now, which makes sense. // Also model type is more restrictive, dis-allowing all kinds of funky stuff to go in. public abstract class GenericHibernateDAO<MODEL extends IModel<ID>, ID extends Serializable> implements GenericDAO<T, ID> { private Class<MODEL> persistentClass; private Session session; public GenericHibernateDAO() { // FIXME : I don't like magic number in the code, is there any way to fix 0 to something dynamic? this.persistentClass = (Class<MODEL>) ((ParameterizedType) getClass().getGenericSuperclass()).getActualTypeArguments()[0]; } public final void setSession(final Session pSession) { this.session = session; } protected void getSession() { if (session == null) session = HibernateUtil.getSessionFactory().getCurrentSession(); return session; }...
In addition, we could add things like:
public final String getRootAlias(){ this.getPersistentClass().getSimpleName() + String.valueOf('_'); }
Alhough this is not necessary or part of the enhanced version, but when criteria API is in use, this comes in handy.Fares
Taxi aggregators have often faced criticism for excessive charging of fares during peak hours in the name of surge pricing.
Suggesting a stricter regulatory regime for app-based taxi aggregators like Ola and Uber, a high-level government-appointed panel on Monday recommended capping of their fares.
"Liberalise city taxi permit scheme. They (aggregators) should follow the rules relating to fares, fuel and safety as mandated by transport department. Upper cap for the fares be fixed by transport department," the panel of state transport ministers, set up by the Centre to frame stricter traffic and road safety rules, recommended today.
After the two-day meeting at Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh, the group of ministers also said that such taxis may be permitted but they have to aggregate only those taxis which have legally valid permits.
Taxi aggregators have often faced criticism for excessive charging of fares during peak hours in the name of surge pricing.
The ministers' panel also recommended steps like reserving "at least 20 per cent space in public parking lots for taxis" for improving parking facilities and other public transport vehicles in the cities besides promoting low-cost last mile connectivity solutions that include allowing e-rickshaws and two wheeler taxis "as they are safe and low cost solutions" for the passengers.
The panel, headed by Rajasthan Transport Minister Yunoos Khan, also suggested allowing "seat sharing in taxis & auto rickshaws" besides strengthening rural transportation that include launch of scheme by the Centre for rural transport vehicles and permits to them.
The Centre has formed the panel for framing stricter traffic and road safety rules under the new road safety bill with a view to check road accidents which claim over 1 lakh lives every year in the country.
The panel has unanimously agreed to framing steeper penalties that include imprisonment for offences like driving by minors, crossing speed limits, drunk driving, talking over phone while driving and jumping traffic lights.
The final recommendations of the panel are expected to be in place later this month.Really? Is House Speaker John Boehner just like Fredo, the Corleone family’s weak-minded, spineless yet wildly ambitious black-sheep brother in The Godfather movies?
That was the argument advanced by former Disney chairman Michael Eisner, a generous donor to Democratic candidates, during Wednesday morning’sSquawk Box on CNBC.
“You have a character like Fredo in The Godfather who’s too weak to go against his own minority, let’s say, and do the right thing,” said Eisner, chairman of Tornante, a media and entertainment investment company, assessing the government shutdown and debt ceiling battle. “I don’t think the president has a great bunch of opportunities because he doesn’t want to be the first president that actually, in advance, knowingly puts the country in default. At the same time, if he folds to this kind of threat, he is a weak man.”
Referring to the Republican speaker, Eisner added: “And [Obama is] dealing with a weak man who does not have the moral fiber to stand up to a minority in his party and say, ‘Hey, guys…We have to negotiate later. Let’s leave the threats off the table.”
Eisner, who acknowledged that “I’m not saying that the Democrats have handled everything perfectly,” likened the drama in Washington to a gangster movie—an incredible one at that. “If somebody came to me with a script, i.e. The Godfather and there was a sequel to it about what’s going on in Washington, I would say, ‘This is just fiction. It can’t happen in this country. You can’t put a gun to somebody’s head and say, ‘Now or never.’”
He added: “I have never dealt ever, in 40 years of negotiations in America, with someone coming to me and putting a gun to my head and saying, ‘Do it my way, or you’re dead and your whole family is dead.’…We make movies about it and they’re very popular. It’s just not the way to deal. It’s just absurd, and frankly, shame on Congress.”
The good news, arguably, is that if Eisner’s unusual analogy holds, Boehner will ultimately betray his rabid relatives and collude with the enemy. However, the speaker should probably avoid fishing trips in the future.
After Eisner departed, Squawk Box co-host Joe Kernan, offered this sarcastic riposte: “We definitely had the Hollywood view of politics.”“Don’t even bother getting a lawyer. The money always stays here.”
That’s what the Tenaha Police Department told 27-year-old Arkansan James Morrow after they confiscated $3,900 from his car for “driving too close to the white line.” The police reported the “odor of burned marijuana,” though no drugs were found in the car. Morrow was carted off to jail, while the car was impounded.
Eventually Morrow was released with no money, vehicle, or phone. “I had to go to Wal-Mart and borrow someone’s phone to call my mama,” he told The New Yorker. “She had to take out a rental car to come pick me up.”
Law-enforcement agencies at all levels of government provide a valuable and often thankless public service in their communities. There are, however, systemic problems that must be addressed. Perhaps one of the most egregious examples is the abuse of civil asset forfeiture laws.
The Fifth Amendment makes it abundantly clear that “[n]o person shall… be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” But for far too long, some law-enforcement agencies have used the law for their own benefit, seizing property suspected of use in a crime often without ever charging or convicting the owner of any wrongdoing.
The burden of proof, unfortunately, falls on the owner, ostensibly rendering his or her property guilty until proven innocent in the eyes of the law, with little concern for the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process. And since most people don’t have the financial means to fight a lengthy legal battle, the confiscated property often remains in the possession of the law-enforcement agencies that seized it.
What was originally intended to be an effort to combat organized crime has sadly morphed into an unconstitutional cash cow for local law enforcement and the federal government.
The New York Times recently reported that there are seminars that law-enforcement officers can attend that provide “useful tips on seizing property from suspected criminals.” A video shown in one seminar quotes the city attorney of Las Cruces, New Mexico, who called items that could be seized “little goodies.”
“A guy drives up in a 2008 Mercedes, brand new,” Harry S. Connelly Jr. says in the video, according to the Times. “Just so beautiful, I mean, the cops were undercover and they were just like ‘Ahhhh.’ And he gets out and he’s just reeking of alcohol. And it’s like, ‘Oh, my goodness, we can hardly wait.’
While law-enforcement agencies may have their wish lists of “little goodies” they covet, essentially “policing for profit,” civil asset forfeiture has serious ramifications for those whose property is taken from them.
As the co-founder of MoveOn.org and president and CEO of FreedomWorks, we don’t agree on many things, but this issue is one that should move progressives, conservatives, libertarians, and frankly any citizen who is offended by abuse of power to take action. Thanks to Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), there is an opportunity before us to put our ideological differences aside to stop this blatant abuse of police power that erodes our civil liberties and our trust in police.
Earlier this year, Paul started a national conversation about civil asset forfeiture when he introduced the Fifth Amendment Restoration Act, or FAIR Act. This proposal would require federal law enforcement agencies to present “clear and convincing evidence” connecting seized property to a crime.
Though many states have reformed their civil asset forfeiture laws, some state and local law enforcement agencies still use federal statutes to seize property. The FAIR Act puts a stop to this loophole by requiring these agencies to abide by laws of the states in which they’re based.
The FAIR Act also removes the incentive that law-enforcement agencies have to police for profit by redirecting seized assets from the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Fund, the value of which has swelled from some $500 million in fiscal year 2001 to nearly $4.3 billion in fiscal year 2012 (PDF).
While some may attempt to spin efforts to reform civil asset forfeiture laws as a “soft on crime” position, law-enforcement agencies don’t exist for the purpose of enriching themselves by taking property of the very people they are charged with serving.
When our elected representatives assume their respective offices, they take an oath to “protect and defend the Constitution.” This isn’t some feel-good suggestion; it’s an obligation, one that has been ignored by too many on Capitol Hill for far too long.
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle must show the American people that their civil liberties matter, and they can send a crystal clear, bipartisan message by ending this pernicious practice of law-enforcement agencies through the restoration the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process.
Joan Blades is a co-founder of MoveOn.org and LivingRoomConversations.org
Matt Kibbe is the president of FreedomWorks for America and author of the New York Times bestseller, Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff. Follow Matt on Twitter @MKibbeDigital cryptographic currency Bitcoin suffered a huge drop in value today, allegedly due to a denial of service attack against the largest Bitcoin trading exchange.
At the largest Bitcoin exchange, Mt Gox, Bitcoin rose sharply to US$147 before dropping to US$126 in just over an hour of trading. It then recovered to over US$140 before starting to trend downwards, hitting as low as US$113. Bitcoin against the Aussie dollar is showing a similar trading pattern.
Currently, Bitcoin is trading at US$123 at Mt Gox.
On its support site, the Mt Gox exhange told users that there would be delays with deposits and withdrawals. "Due to a DDos attack, Dwolla deposits and withdrawals are currently not being processed and we are expecting some delays. This is expected to be resolved in 12 hours. Our apologies for the delay and inconvenience caused. Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this." As of writing, representatives from Mt Gox said the issue has been resolved.
There is speculation that the swings in value are connected to a Bitcoin deposit service, Instawallet, being hacked and suspended its operations indefinitely.
Instawallet has not revealed how many Bitcoins were stolen in the raid on its database, but says it will start processing claims for users with wallets containing less than 50 BTC.
Those with more deposited may not be refunded, however, as Instawallet says "claims for wallets that hold a balance greater than 50 BTC will be processed on a case by case and best efforts basis."
Despite having little use in the real world, Bitcoin has experienced a massive appreciation in value in a short period of time this year, with the total monetary base now thought to be around A$1.3 billion.Different NBA Draft Models, and Their Top-14 Prospects. Full Ranking Displayed At Bottom
Composite Ranking Comparison to DraftExpress Rankings
In our last article, we featured a number of different analytic models to project the NBA draft. While each model presented is independently strong, they all suffer from some level of noise. By looking at seven different models collectively in the form of a composite ranking, we are able to widen our perspective and see where the models find consensus. To make this ranking even more robust, we have created what is known as a truncated mean' (which is how figure skating judging works) by taking out the highest and lowest ranking for each player to better establish where the models agree on players and avoid outliers.Once we have our truncated mean composite ranking, we then want to take one more step and add a subjective component to our model. This is necessary as statistic-based models can only tell us so much. Issues such as if a player has a good attitude, is likely to continue growing, has injury problems, is a defensive star etc. play a huge role in determining where a player should be drafted and are not adequately measured by statistics. As a proxy for subjective scouting, we have taken the DraftExpress ranking for each prospect and blended that without composite ranking (we are choosing to use a 75% analytic 25% mock blend).Now that we have our ranking, it is important to understand why these rankings matter.Simply put, many NBA teams are bad at drafting. Most of this has to do with how difficult it is to project future NBA performance, but there are still plenty of stubborn general managers fantasizing about 14 foot wingspans, international wonders, and high scorers from big college programs. Analytic models help teams see through some of the aforementioned red herrings.l selected an NBA draft (2009 draft) at random, and compared the actual order of the draft to a ranking of how advanced stats rates each player's career. I found a.28 correlation between the actual 2009 NBA first round draft order and career success (what statistics defines as being a weak correlation). For comparison, the 2009 DraftExpress mock draft was 11% better with a.33 correlation (moderate). I chose a random analytics model to compare it to and it had a.63 correlation (strong). A model-mock blend had a correlation of.66. In every back-test I have performed, analytic models have consistently outperformed NBA teams in projecting career performance.It is worth noting that the rankings provided in this article are likely more advanced than what many NBA teams are using. While the statistics used inside NBA organizations are far more advanced than those in the public sphere, this is a unique situation as there is no proprietary college data that only NBA teams have access to. Further, only a handful of teams actually create their own analytic models, and for those that do, they will not have as many different perspectives as represented here.When an NBA team makes their draft selection, they are not just selecting a player, but an asset. Positions are not created equally in the NBA. A serviceable center is much more difficult to find, and consequently much more valuable than a good guard. If a team thinks that they might be trading their draft choice in the near future, they might prefer a player with a better trade value than actual basketball value. Conversely, teams may prioritize potentially great players who lack traditional box score stats, as they are likely going to be cheaper to re-sign in the future.Although these rankings are objective, they are not universal. Each organization has to determine what they are looking for in the NBA draft. While teams should never draft an inferior player due to a positional need, there are many team specific factors that should be accounted for in a draft pick. For example, each team has their own cultural and stylistic fit, which makes certain players more or less desirable.Alex Rucker, stat guru for the Toronto Raptors, has stated that teams in the second round should be looking for players with niche skills, so they can have a better chance of impacting an NBA roster. Very few second rounders play in the NBA, and for those that do, most only do so after leaving the team that drafted them. If a player has a niche skill, such as spot up three point shooting, they will likely be able to contribute to an NBA team from day one.Another team-specific issue is potential and how a team balances risk versus reward. The more seasons a player has played in the NCAA, the more accurate their forecasts will be. Each additional season provides more data, painting a more detailed picture of a player's ability, while removing a year of potential growth. This forces teams to question what point in time they want their NBA draft selection to have an impact on their team. Younger players and big men take longer to develop their game, which might be good for a rebuilding team. Older players can more easily make an impact in their rookie year, which is good for competitive teams. This does not mean younger players are any better, just that their projection is more hazy and distant.One thing many people have commented on about our rankings is how seniors such as T.J. McConnell Seth Tuttle and Wesley Saunders appear underrated in comparison to mock drafts. While most amateur scouts have dismissed these college stars, they are an undervalued asset. None of these players will likely ever be elite NBA players, in fact, they will likely will never be a whole lot better than they are right now. However, they are all likely good enough to play some role in the NBA as a rookie. As these players can be signed to a league minimum contract, they are a great bargain for competitive teams near the salary cap.Despite the obvious benefits that statistics provide, they also lie. These models are based on an amalgam of college statistical data, and if a player's college setting deviates from the norm, it skews. The more atypical one's college experience is, the less clarity you should expect from their ranking. Playing at Kentucky and sharing the ball with five or more NBA caliber players can impact a player's rating. Same with playing in a unique system, playing incredibly weak competition, being the only serviceable player on a team etc.NBA teams have proven to overvalue youth, handsize, vertical jump, speed and wingspan while undervaluing steals and assists in making their draft selections (http://www.tothemean.com/2014/07/06/predicting-future-market-inefficiencies-in-the-nba.html). Stats such as steals, rebounding and low foul rates are important for projecting NBA success, while scoring and high usage shooting percentage seem to be less important. These rankings place Delon Wright Seth Tuttle as the most underrated, and Jonathan Holmes Devin Booker and Anthony Brown as some of the most overrated in comparison to the DraftExpress rankings. While these tools provide guidance, they are incomplete without further investigation. Do the models underrate Cauley-Stein because they fail to capture his defensive abilities? Or do scouts overvalue his defense due to his athletic ability or his pairing with Karl Towns, by far the best defender in college basketball?To summarize, these rankings are not perfect and will have a lot of misses. However, they are likely the best public tool available to assess the NBA draft, and a great starting point in making an analysis. If a player fares poorly in this ranking, it does not mean that they will be bad, but that you should be asking more questions about their game. These rankings should be used in supplement to all of the other information available about these prospects, and as one feature, in an open debate.We have added two new models to our rankings, updated several and brought back four of our original analysts to expand on their models as displayed below:I produce college ratings/rankings for all D1 players, adjusted for team, strength of schedule, pace, etc. Here's some past complete rankings. To project players, I first take the adjusted ratings, and break them down into every possible statistical subset. These adjusted ratings are then each multiplied by their respective college to NBA weight, garnered from the rating changes of every college to NBA player the last 20 seasons. I use the last two weighted college seasons (if not one and done), and meld a projection for the player's first NBA season. From there, I use weights from the last 35 NBA seasons at every age grouping to project every season in a player's potential future, as seen here.Using 28 different rating breakdowns/combos for each player's projected future, I found the max possible playing time for each player based on the last four NBA seasons, with the lowest of the grouping being the projected minutes. For example, if the highest percentage team minutes for someone with a -13.24 foul rating or worse in the NBA during the last 4 years was 31.2%, then the best possible projected minutes for a guy with a projected -13.24 foul rating is 31.2%.Players with obvious statistical flaws might see low projected minutes (for example, Towns this year because of his high foul rate or McDermott last year due to his of low steal+block rate) despite positive overall per minute projections.The idea isn't that a guy with a bad statistical outlier won't play because of that stat per se, but what that stat may "say" about him as a prospect. High foul rate traditionally means poor future NBA minutes. This rating might mean that the player is a poor defender, has poor movement, poor instincts, is out of shape, etc. For Towns, it might just mean that he knew he only would only be playing 21 minutes per game due to his team situation.I then create a Wins Above Replacement rating for each player, by combining the production (HN/48, 100 is NBA average, 80 is "replacement level" player) and projected minutes (%Min, 50% would have played exactly half of the available seasonal minutes). Players who never project above zero are ranked by projected peak minutes up through their "best" production season (almost always around age 25 or 26).There is a high likelihood that if I have a guy ranked quite low, he probably shouldn't be drafted in the lottery, as historically speaking, he is a risk. Conversely, the majority of past NBA 2nd round "sleepers" (Boozer, Arenas, Blair, etc.) all had top-10 (or better) level projections in their draft years. I only include actual basketball production in my model. The idea is that all things considered, a highly productive player at one level has a much better chance of being a highly productive player at the next level.To see the entirety of my projections and a more detailed write up, please go to: http://hoopsnerd.com/?page_id=823 My P-AWS draft model is built using box score statistics, age, competition level, and high school rankings. Of the outliers between P-AWS and the consensus rankings, Kevon Looney, a freshman who was highly recruited entering college, may be the one I would point any organization to re-evaluate. Looney scored above average compared to the rest of the draft prospects in every statistical category except for scoring, which just happens to be the least predictable measure going from college to the pros.In a sense I would say that statistical analysis is the worst way to select draft picks, except all of the others. In reality though, best practices are to combine scouting information and analytic analysis. For example, character is a tremendous variable in a young player's development. Some of that shows up through the stat sheet, poor decision makers will have worse shot selection and more turnovers, and stats like rebounds and steals show hustle.But, many aspects of ability and willingness to learn or put in gym time or deal with adversity are less easy to infer. Defense also tends to be obscured in draft models, players like Willie Cauley-Stein and Rondae Hollis Jefferson may be undervalued because their contributions on the court are less likely to end up in the box score.It is well known that player stats are less stable when they change teams, with different teammates around them they get different opportunities and fill different roles. Taking situation into account can help adjust the numbers players put up, at least at the margins. However, it is dangerous to over imagine how a player would blossom in a different environment, and the grounding that an objective model brings is one of the more important contributions analytic draft models can bring to a team's drafting process.In comparing out-of-sample retrodictions to actual draft order, EWP does about as well as NBA decision-makers, while my "HUMBLE" model (which integrates scouting consensus) actually does a bit better than either. This is good support for the use of draft models, but I would advise a scientific approach to prospect evaluation. For example, none of the models account for progression across the season that might benefit players with late-season surges such as Justise Winslow. Most models account for net strength-of-schedule, but they don't give special weight to individual performances against the stiffest competition. If they did, it might hurt D'Angello Russell's rating.If Coach K's system historically depresses defensive rebounding for big men (it does) it should probably be taken into account when evaluating Okafor. Speaking of Okafor, he and Towns offer contrasting Old school vs New school styles. Identifying whether and how much this matters might be helped through an analytic approach, but it definitely demands the subjective counsel of scouts who understand the complexity of NBA game-planning.CPR ratings are not a draft in this order list. Simplicity in a model greatly enhances interpretation, which is why CPR is simple. It measures how excellent a player's best performances were in regards to box score metrics. The only caveat is that CPR adjusts based on the player's year in school. Otherwise, there are no adjustments for the player's height, his rating out of high school, or the perceived quality of his competition. There aren't even weights on the statistics themselves. A great performance in rebounds is the same as a great performance in steals. All of this allows for an easy interpretation of the results. CPR simply measures excellence.While inconsistent play means season average statistics blur the value of a player, focusing only on the player's best performances has provided a clear view of the player's potential. CPR ratings have accurately identified high picks that should have been drafted in the second round, mid-first round picks that should have gone in the top five, and second round picks that should have been drafted in the first.At the very least, teams should use CPR as a call for more evidence in support of a team's selection. If a team plans to draft a player that rates particularly low (say below 2.5) in CPR over a player that rates particularly high (say above 7.5), that team should have a good explanation for why the prospect they are choosing never put up the kind of excellent box score production that is consistent with the prospects that turn into excellent NBA players.This leads nicely to this year's best example of a player who rates higher by the eye test than CPR. Noticeably missing from CPR's top 14 is Willie Cauley-Stein. In an NBA where rim protection is far more important than post scoring ability, Cauley-Stein appears to be a gem. His low CPR rating does not preclude that possibility. CPR relies on box score data and much of what Cauley-Stein brings to the game is not recorded in the box score. The real value of CPR in the case of Cauley-Stein is that it raises an interesting question. If Cauley-Stein is going to be a successful pro in the mold of a Tyson Chandler or Joakim Noah, why didn't this junior put up spectacular numbers at least on occasion in offensive rebounds or blocked shots? There could be very good explanations for this that justify Cauley-Stein's value and his selection in the top five of the NBA draft. CPR doesn't say don't draft Cauley-Stein in the lottery. Instead, it calls for an explanation of why he's worth that pick when his numbers in the college box score were not consistent with the numbers that we have seen for players that have had a high success rate in the NBA.Since my models include high school ranking while several other models do not, those players with strong high school rankings will rate significantly better, and those with weaker or more importantly, no rankings at all, will rate significantly worse. Myles Turner Cliff Alexander, and Frank Kaminsky are all examples of this phenomenon.In addition, my model covers data that only goes back to 2002, so the weights and importance of each feature will only be reflective of those players that have been drafted since 2002. Karl Towns, for example, may suffer from my model only being trained on data going back to 2002 and missing all-star big men such as Tim Duncan or Shaq. Further, stars have a high amount of leverage in my draft models (as they should), and the recent draft history of stars is somewhat guard heavy, ( Chris Paul James Harden, Dwayne Wade, etc.). As I do not model my players by position, my system may favor guards.My model's final output heavily leans on neural networks, and thus overfitting is a fair criticism. Overfitting is a statistical phenomenon that occurs when models are greedy and essentially memorize the training data in the pursuit of accuracy, rather than discover actual trends. To alleviate some of these overfitting concerns, I also take input from more stable regression based models, as well as perform a technique known as bootstrap aggregating on some of my neural networks. Bootstrap aggregating, or bagging, is a technique this is designed to alleviate overfitting and increase predictive stability by sampling (with replacement) from the original data set and training several neural networks on several different samples, and then averaging the outputs together. Despite the flaws, I utilize neural networks in my draft model because neural networks can be powerfully accurate.Like most other models, the "Longevity" model favors athletic players who have shown a high steal rate in college ( D'Angelo Russell Justise Winslow, and Stanley Johnson ). Two players where the "Longevity" model diverges from the other analytic models are Frank Kaminsky and Delon Wright. While most analytics standouts (i.e. D'Angelo Russell and Justise Winslow ) are well agreed upon, Kaminsky and Wright are not. Other models rank them lower likely because they were not highly recruited out of high school, nor did they blossom until the very end of their college careers. In "Longevity," college stats from more recent years are weighted higher and recruiting rankings aren't factored in, both of which may explain differences when compared to other models.Many of the models in the public domain are generated using linear techniques. On the other hand, the "Longevity" model is more complex and also uses some non-linear based modeling techniques. For example, height (which highly correlates with success in the NBA) doesn't necessarily scale linearly with NBA success. Models (and even non-analytics based rankings) have typically failed when outliers don't follow this linear trend, such as Isaiah Thomas (5'9" - 3.1 Max VORP) and Darko Milicic (7' - 1.1 Max VORP). By incorporating techniques that are not strictly linear, the "Longevity" model is less prone to overvaluing nonlinear relationships between attributes. Kevon Looney is a player who is ranked highly by most models (good pace adjusted stats and combine numbers), but "Longevity" ranks him slightly less. One explanation might be that his analytics edge is inflated by his strong 7'1" wingspan.The "Longevity" model is built from a blend of 60+ different models. One of the advantages of the model is its complexity, however this does have drawbacks. One of which is that it is difficult to understand "why" the model favors certain players. That being said, one can gain insight by looking at the results of the smaller sub-models. Cameron Payne is one example of a player who is interesting to analyze because his rankings are inconsistent, but is highly ranked in "Longevity." In the sub-models, which don't account for age, he stands out even more. This is likely because he is an "old" sophomore which could also explain his lower ranking in other linearly based models. Another player who might benefit from this is Jahlil Okafor, who is "young" for his age and has exceptional size/length (7'5" wingspan). While other models rank him highly, in the "Longevity" model out of sample results, he would have the lowest "Longevity" expectation of all top 3 draft picks ever (just surpassing Raef LaFrentz and Adam Morrison ).If you are interested in learning more about NBA draft models or analytics in general, we encourage you to visit us at the APBRmetrics community.To play around with these models, check out our full spreadsheet here, or this tool provided by our friends at tothemean.comComposite table also available in Google Spreadsheet format for sorting purposes and further analysis.Simple composite ranking including all 5 models.Layne VashroSteve SheaNick RestifoJesse FischerMasseffectlenkDan DickeyAndrew JohnsonDaniel MyersDraftExpress Top-100 RankingComposite Analytics Top-100 RankingCombined DraftExpress and Composite Analytics Top-100Difference between composite ranking and DraftExpress Top-100 Ranking (+ = DX-100 is higher on prospect, - = CAR-100 )We hope you will be back for round three for our feature on analytics and international prospects.With the football season right around the corner we re-visit Mike Aglialoro’s ranking of the top 10 running backs in Fantasy Football
1. Jamaal Charles, KC: 2013 stats: 1287 rushing yards, 12 TDs, 70 receptions, 693 receiving yards, 7 TDs– Honestly, you can’t go wrong with any of the top three choices, I choose JC for his versatility and the fact that Kansas City didn’t upgrade its receiver options at all, meaning Charles will still be Alex Smith’s security blanket.
2. Adrian Peterson, Min: 2013 stats: 1266 rushing yards, 10 TDs, 29 receptions, 171 receiving yards, 1 TD– AP isn’t the receiving threat that you’d get from Charles or Shady, but I like the upgrade at quarterback with Teddy Bridgewater, and I look for Cordelle Patterson to have a big year, opening things up for the fantasy stalwart.
3. LeSean McCoy, Phi: 1607 rushing yards, 9 TDs, 52 receptions, 539 receiving yards, 2 TDs– I only rank Shady #3 due to Darren Sproles presence, but ultimately I expect the dual threat to work in McCoy’s favor from a health standpoint, meaning he’s going to be a lot fresher towards the end of the season than in years’ past.
4. Matt Forte, Chi: 2013 stats: 1339 rushing yards, 9 TDs, 74 receptions, 594 receiving yards, 3 TDs— The versatility is huge if you’re in a PPR league. Expect Forte’s biggest year yet as he continues to thrive in Marc Trestman’s offense.
5. Marshawn Lynch, Sea: 2013 stats: 1257 rushing yards, 12 TDs, 36 receptions, 316 receiving yards, 2 TDs– The holdout is over and to be honest, I didn’t think that would affect Beast-mode much anyway. All the talk about getting Christine Michael involved doesn’t mean much to me either, as they said the same thing last year. If Lynch is healthy, his spot at the top will continue to go unquestioned.
6. Eddie Lacy, GB: 2013 stats: 1178 rushing yards, 11 TDs, 35 receptions, 257 receiving yards– If you’re in a keeper or dynasty league you are well within rights to rank him higher, as he gives Green Bay the running threat they haven’t had in years, and his rookie year just scratched the surface; look or his involvement in the passing game to only continue, and he’s a lock to pass his rookie numbers across the board.
7. DeMarco Murray, Dal: 2013 stats: 1121 rushing yards, 9 TDs, 53 receptions, 350 receiving yards, 1 TDs– Again, I’ll always feel Murray is undervalued by ESPN and Yahoo. He is an injury risk but he did stay healthy to play the most games of his young career last year, and honestly, any running back on this list can be considered an injury risk in some way. When he’s on the field, his role is unquestioned, and he is less of a question mark than the rest on this list due to what he has proven capable of during his career.
8. Le’Veon Bell, Pit: 2013 stats: 860 rushing yards, 8 TDs, 45 receptions, 399 receiving yards– Despite LaGarrette Blount’s presence, Bell’s another guy whose only going to continue to get better as he goes. Expect a 1000 yard rushing season, and he will continue to be involved in the passing game.
9. Doug Martin, TB: 2013 stats: 456 rushing yards, 1 TD, 12 receptions, 66 receiving yards– Hurt and ineffective last year, most have soured on Martin as a result, but it’s only a matter of time before Martin re-establishes himself in Tampa’s offense. Great buy-low candidate this season.
10. Alfred Morris, Was: 2013 stats: 1275 rushing yards, 7 TDs, 9 receptions, 78 receiving yards– No more Mike Shanahan means the sky is the limit for one of the few backs to have over 1000 yards in two seasons |
/For The Washington Post
As the U.S. military winds down its occupation, subtle changes are evident in the social fabric of Kabul and other urban areas.
As the U.S. military winds down its occupation, subtle changes are evident in the social fabric of Kabul and other urban areas.
As the U.S. military winds down its occupation, subtle changes are evident in the social fabric of Kabul and other urban areas.
In a private room inside the Wiana Cafe, Mahmood Rezai snapped his hands to an imaginary beat, mimicking the actions of his favorite rap stars: Eminem, 50 Cent and Tupac. Under the Taliban, Rezai’s own lyrics — blistering critiques of social woes — would have earned him a beating, or worse. Today, he is a testament to the subtler influences of the nearly 14-year-long American presence in Afghanistan.
“I love gangsta rap,” said Rezai, wavy-haired and clean-shaven and wearing a big silver watch. “It’s like being in a desert, so very free.”
How history will remember America’s longest war will be shaped by public debates over the United States’ failures and successes and visible consequences such as the collapse of the Taliban regime and the death of Osama bin Laden. But the U.S. engagement has also affected urban Afghan society in indirect ways, seeping into its culture, language and attitudes.
It can be seen in the graffiti art that covers blast walls in some neighborhoods and the Tom Cruise-style haircuts sported by hip Afghan youth. It can be heard in the vernacular of Afghan security guards after they frisk visitors — “You’re good to go, buddy” — and the alternative American rock music that fills Kabul’s illegal underground bars.
The U.S. influence can also be seen in the threads of handmade carpets emblazoned with drones and F-16 jets. Or in the indifference of Afghan elites, grown wealthy on American military contracts, calmly losing thousands of dollars in Texas hold ’em poker games.
Men socialize outside their stores with goods ranging from hair and beauty products to military and tactical apparel at Kabul's Bush Bazaar, named after former President George W. Bush. (Andrew Quilty/for The Washington Post)
“I have personal freedom. I can wear what I want,” said Samira Ahmadi, an employee at a consulting firm. “Now we can have mixed parties with boys and girls, and we are going to picnics. This was all unimaginable under the Taliban.”
[The unlikely life of Afghanistan’s first female taxi driver]
Yet what was once forbidden is unfolding under a cloud of history. Afghans remember the liberal 1970s, when women in Kabul wore miniskirts and jazz clubs were the rage. But those freedoms had evaporated by the 1990s. The society is still mostly conservative and tribal, many women remain subjugated, and centuries-old traditions rule. Even as they enjoy the new liberties, a question lingers among many Afghans: How long will they last?
Outside influences
Over the past 5,000 years, Afghanistan’s myriad invaders, from Genghis Khan to Tamerlane to the Mughal dynasties, have left indelible marks. The nation’s population is among the world’s most ethnically diverse.
In Zabul province are remnants of a fortress built by Alexander the Great, and in Herat and Ghowr, ancient minarets erected by Persian kings grace the landscape. In Kabul, the British cemetery, which houses the graves of soldiers killed in the two Anglo-Afghan wars of the 19th century, is a reminder of Britain’s ill-fated colonial experience. By the time Soviet forces pulled out in 1989, they had built apartment complexes, factories, universities and even a theater house that are still in use today.
[As U.S. wars ends, Russia returns to Afghanistan with investment projects
America’s contribution may prove to be more psychological than anything else — the silent reshaping of the psyche of a society and its people, even as they view their occupiers at once with great expectations, suspicion and animosity.
Sunni Mohseny, 21, left, and Mohammad Samim run the Tonight Store at Bush Bazaar. (Andrew Quilty/for The Washington Post)
Steps away from a stadium where the Taliban once stoned people to death, teenage skateboarders twist and fly off curved ramps in a cavernous gym. Seventeen-year-old Farid Wahidi rattled off the names of his heroes: “Rodney Mullen, Chris Cole and Tony Hawk” — all American professional skateboarders.
And he wants to be just like them, from the knee pads and brown Vans shoes he is wearing to his outsize ambitions.
“My dream is to go to the United States and win a skateboarding tournament, just like the ones sponsored by Red Bull,” Wahidi said with a confident smile. “I want to be as famous as Tony Hawk.”
In video stores around Kabul, bootleg DVDs of Hollywood films such as “ Furious 7” and “Taken 3” are hot sellers. So are Walt Disney cartoons, which parents use to teach their children English.
The American military and aid lexicon has infiltrated Dari and Pashto, the languages spoken by most Afghans. Words such as “funding,” “ID card” and “contractares” are now widely used.
At Bush Bazaar, named after President George W., shops sell Chinese-made knockoffs of U.S. military uniforms, khaki trousers with thigh pockets, gray U.S. Army T-shirts and Bushnell binoculars.
“When the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, people liked to look like the Russians,” said shopkeeper Mohammad Idris, 25, who regularly sells out of black Oakley wraparound sunglasses.
“Now, they want to look like American Special Forces.”
New freedoms
After nearly a quarter-century of communist rule, the Soviet occupation, civil war and the repressive order of the Taliban, billions of American aid dollars have ushered in a new class of capitalists, bold attitudes and a collective outspokenness.
That outspokenness is most visible in Afghanistan’s free-wheeling independent media, largely created by American funding. Under the Taliban, the press was shackled. Now, it’s among the most liberated in the region, often unafraid to criticize government policies and expose wrongdoing.
“If these freedoms stop once again after the Americans leave, people will remember this period as a golden era for the freedom of speech and freedom of media,” said Najibullah Amiri, chief editor of Salam Watandar, a U.S.-funded network of radio stations across the country.
Rezai, the rapper, practices another form of outspokenness. American rap and hip-hop lyrics inspire him, he said, because “Afghan society faces many of the same problems as in America.” His own lyrics, in Dari, are about drug abuse, high unemployment, child labor and violence against women. “Through rap, we are protesting against the inequalities in Afghanistan,” he added.
Conservative Afghans, however, chafe at the new freedoms. Racy Turkish soap operas and the country’s version of “American Idol” are seen as Western imports that dilute Afghanistan’s centuries-old ethos. Fashionably dressed women, their uncovered faces glowing with makeup, are often derided as un-Afghan or prostitutes.
[Photo of Afghan woman with legs bared goes viral, draws scorn and outrage]
“The Americans are leaving behind a mess,” said Idris, the shopkeeper at Bush Bazaar. “They brought Afghans living in the West here, and together they are spreading foreign culture among Afghans. The television shows are spreading immoral values. Our culture has been changed.”
Nowhere is this more apparent to Afghans than with the rise of the ultra-rich, created largely by U.S. military and aid contracts, and the rampant corruption it has fueled. Around Kabul, the signposts of the wealthy are everywhere: million-dollar mansions, opulent weddings and luxury cars. Hummers are popular. The rich spend money at will in a country where the average income is about $425 a year.
On a recent night, several Afghans and Westerners huddled inside a house transformed into a dim underground bar called the Venue. The song “Getaway Car” by the Los Angeles band Audioslave filtered through the room, followed later by a dose of Frank Sinatra. Conversation, over $5 cans of beer, turned to Kabul’s high-stakes, secret — and illegal — poker scene. In one cash game there was said to have been at least $30,000 on the table.
“I know all those guys who play at that game,” said an Afghan who spoke with a laid-back California accent after years of working with Americans as a consultant and interpreter. He won $6,000 the last time he played, he boasted.
In a recent game, whose participants asked not to be identified, an Afghan restaurant owner declared “All in!” He shoved about $2,000 into the pot and quickly lost, bringing his total losses for the evening to around $8,000.
“I don’t care about losing money,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’m here because I love playing poker.”
He pulled out a wad of $100 bills and bought in for another $1,000.
Facing the future
At the Wiana Cafe, six young women and seven men huddled on cushions, smoking from hookahs and chatting. Couples held hands while others clapped to loud American pop tunes, acts that were both banned under the Taliban.
Underneath their Western patina, though, they had existential questions about what the United States will be remembered for. With most U.S. forces departed, the country remains politically dysfunctional and mired in conflict, with the Taliban revitalized and the Islamic State emerging. And in the minds of most Afghans, there’s little evidence of the billions the United States has spent on development projects.
“If Americans continue to support Afghans after their withdrawal, democracy and civil freedoms will be their legacy,” said Ahmadi, the consulting firm employee.
And if they don’t, the “legacy that Americans are going to leave behind is war and mayhem,” said Hadi, an amateur actor who uses one name. “They are not leaving anything like what the Soviets left.”
With most U.S. military outposts closed and fewer American soldiers and contractors around, fewer stalls at Bush Bazaar are selling American products. They have been replaced by goods from China, India and Dubai.
Haji Tor Muhseini sighs when he looks at his racks of unsold American goods: Pop-Tarts, Quaker oats, Heinz barbecue sauce, Arizona iced tea, Texas Pete hot sauce and Uncle Ben’s long grain rice.
He senses the curtain drawing on an era, much like what happened more than two decades ago. Back then, there was a Brezhnev Market, named after the Soviet leader, in downtown Kabul, he said. It closed soon after the Soviets left.
“Perhaps all this will disappear, too,” he said.
Mohammad Sharif contributed to this report.
Read more:
After years of tension, anti-American sentiment ebbs in PakistanBoston Police Commissioner Wants Cameras Further Away From Cops, Criminal Charges For Not Assisting Officers
from the Accountability-Free-Zones dept
Earlier this year, Texas legislator Jason Villalba attempted to shortchange the First Amendment in the name of "officer safety" by making it illegal to film police officers from within a 25-foot, constantly-moving radius. His proposed law was greeted with criticism (and death threats, according to Villalba) and was consequently discarded because it was a terrible, arbitrary law that had only the briefest of flirtations with reality and logic.
For one thing, the law would have prompted officers to split their attention between the job at hand (whatever crime they were responding to/investigating) and Villalba's directive. Of course, officers could easily choose not to enforce this bad law, but far too many officers have been filmed leaving crime scenes just to hassle citizens with cameras. And the instant the officer started closing the gap between him and the photographer, a law would have been violated in letter, if not in spirit. Villalba is a staunch supporter of law enforcement agencies and his proposal was just an attempt to give officers a little less accountability.
So, despite this bill being ridiculed out of existence, hopes springs eternal in those who feel the public is the worst of their problems. Boston's police commissioner is now asking for the same accountability halo for his officers.
Boston police Commissioner William B. Evans is calling for laws to regulate the proliferation of cellphone-toting citizens and so-called cop watchers dedicated to recording potential police misconduct — a trend that has given rise to new challenges and risks for officers at crime scenes.
“If we can get legislation that protects both sides, I’m all for it,” Evans told the Herald late last week. “Should you be up in a police officer’s face and agitating them? Absolutely not. Because we’ve seen it through all these demonstrations. It interferes sometimes with us (being) able to look at the crowd and focus on what our mission is.”
“But when you’re just out there for the very reason of, you know, trying to get a gotcha moment, that’s irritating to us,” Evans said, pointing to instances on July 4 and following the March shooting of officer John T. Moynihan, when police were met by a group of vocal video-takers at the edge of the scene.
“During the altercation, as officers struggled to subdue the suspect, they noted that they were being videotaped by the large crowd that had gathered,” officers wrote in their report. “In need of help, officers asked members of the crowd and a security guard for help. No help was offered.”
Evans said that should never happen. “I’d also like to see some legislation that if a cop is on the ground struggling with someone, like he was the other night and everybody is videotaping, someone should be held accountable for not stepping up and helping them,” he said.
Evans is wholly disingenuous throughout the course of this article. He first tries to spin this as a problemby citizens. His claim that people are "agitating" officers by getting "up in their faces" may be minimally true, but it's far more common to see police officers walking up to people filming them and getting in their faces. Generally, citizens filming police activities don't approach cops. It's almost always the other way around. So, if there's an issue here, it should be addressed with officers, who seem far too willing to abandon the "mission" just to shut down recordings.This sort of argument has been raised before to defend actions taken against photographers. It's the law enforcement equivalent of the childhood go-to complaint, "He started it!" If officers would simply focus on theirrather than citizens and their cameras, there would be fewer "gotcha moments." Nothing about enforcing the law translates to "taking the bait." Every officer that shows restraint in the face of someone hoping for a "gotcha moment" will come out of the incident victorious. It will be the photographer who looks ridiculous, rather than the other way around. If Evans is using this as justification for a protective, camera-free space around cops, he's basically admitting his officers have self-control issues and cannot handle being "irritated."Evans goes even further than Villalba, however, when he starts advocating for arresting citizens who don't leap in the moment they sense an officer might have lost the upper hand in an altercation.It would seem that paying out settlements for police misconduct isn't financially damaging enough. Now, Evans wants to open his department and the city of Boston up to additional lawsuits for injuries sustained by citizens providing mandatory assistance to struggling cops. And what happens if the responding member of the public takes it too far and provides some additional excessive force of their own? The subdued suspect may look at police officers and their immunity and decide it's much easier to sue a citizen who isn't protected by this legal shield.While I understand his frustration that the public seems more interested in watching than helping, the public is usually similarly unhelpful when other citizens are receiving a beatdown. And the larger the crowd, the less likely it is that anyone's going to put their own lives/health on the line for someone else. Evans says "someone" should be held responsible in situations like this, while discussing a "crowd." But who? Any random person? All of them? The security guard? If people are going to have their preference to remain uninvolved in altercations criminalized, so should officers who refuse to show the same deference to the public -- either by responding to every perceived threat with acts of violence or by pointing out that "protect and serve" isn't actually part of any police department's policies or credo.Evans' low-key pitch for legislation on these issues shows he truly believes police officers deserve more rights than citizens. He believes cops should work in an irritant-free environment with the knowledge that the general public will put itself in harm's way to save a public
Filed Under: assisting officers, boston, filming police, photographs, photography, policeBartender poses as Mayweather security to sneak to ringside seats, gets pictures with celebrities
To most events, a $2,500 ticket gets a person pretty incredibly seats, but the Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor fight was an entirely different ball game. When British bartender Oliver Regis found out his expensive tickets had him up in the nosebleeds, he knew he had to do something to see the fight up close and personal.
The McGregor superfan, which has a tattoo of the UFC superstar on his leg to prove his fandom, apparently posed as a member of Mayweather’s security team to get past T-Mobile Arena security, who failed to check his ticket.
See the excerpt from The Sun article by James Beal detailing how Regis made it down to ringside:
If a person were to question Regis on his story, well, the man has a plethora of pictures with celebrities at ringside to prove he was there. And when we say “a plethora of pictures,” we mean he essentially took pictures with every celebrity in attendance.
Well played, Oliver the bartender… well played.
Here’s Regis’ tattoo of McGregor, who were sure he was pleased to see put up an incredible fight up close and personal against Mayweather.
(H/T FTW)Ecosystems of terminus lakes around the world could benefit from a new system being developed at the University of Nevada, Reno to desalinate water using a specialized low-cost solar pond and patented membrane distillation system powered by renewable energy.
"These lakes -- hundreds worldwide -- such as the Great Salt Lake, the Salton Sea, the Aral Sea and Walker Lake here in Nevada, see a decline in water levels and an increase in salinity from both human and natural processes," Francisco Suarez, a doctoral student in hydrological sciences at the University, said. "The high levels of salinity are dangerous and unsustainable for aquatic life."
He presented a portion of his solar pond research at the annual Fall AGU (American Geophysical Union) Conference in San Francisco that was attended by 16,000 geophysicists from around the world. A paper on his project will be published in the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer in early 2010.
Suarez is developing an artificial salt-gradient stratification process that traps solar heat at the bottom of the solar pond and uses the collected energy to power the membrane distillation system recently patented by the University. The system is designed to help sustain the ecosystems of these closed-basin regions where there is no outflow for the water and a high evaporation rate, leaving a high concentration of minerals and salts.
The hot brine in the lower storage zone of the pond, which can reach temperatures greater than 195 degrees Fahrenheit, may then be used directly for heating, thermal desalination, or for other low-temperature thermal applications.
"Our model results show that in a two-week period, the temperature in the bottom of the solar pond increased from 68 to 126 degrees Fahrenheit and, even though the insulating layer is being eroded by double-diffusive convection, the solar pond remained stable," Suarez explained.
The process has been highly successful in the lab in a small-scale experiment using a 400-gallon tank, where dissolved solids and precise fiber-optic temperature sensing are being used to track the process as it desalinates the water. The next step for Suarez and the research group is to build a pilot-project, demonstration-scale, low-temperature desalination system in an open environment.
Suarez is working on this novel approach for sustainable production of freshwater with Civil and Environmental Engineering Department Professor and Chair Amy Childress and Professor Scott Tyler of the Department of Geological Sciences and Engineering. Childress and colleagues developed the patented membrane distillation system and Tyler developed the distributed temperature sensing system that uses a laser and fiber-optic cable to record temperatures in the solar pond.
"We're working on funding and permissions to build a system at Walker Lake where dissolved solids have increased by a factor of five to an unhealthy level for aquatic life, and water levels have dropped 140 feet in the past 100 years," Tyler said.
The cost to run the system is negligible because it uses the renewable energy of the sun, trapped as heat in the bottom, to power most of the system.
"This can operate 24 hours a day using the stored energy. Very little electricity would be used," Suarez said. "For every surface acre of solar pond we can make three acre-feet of freshwater in about one year.
"The major advantages of this system are that renewable energy is used, the system is low maintenance and the stratification process that helps drive the process uses the salts from the lake itself."
Hydrologist Tyler said the process could serve as one component of a salinity management program and, coupled with other remediation efforts, could desalinate Walker Lake enough to make it a safe aquatic habitat. The new technology he and his colleagues have developed could be applied to declining water systems anywhere, with preference to areas with good solar capabilities and adequate freshwater flows.Bitcoin Guarantees Strong, not Eventual, Consistency
It has somehow become a common adage that Bitcoin is eventually consistent. We now have both academics and developers claiming that Bitcoin provides a laughably weak consistency level that is reserved solely for first-generation NoSQL datastores.
All of these people are wrong.
In this post, I want to dispel the myth of Bitcoin's eventual consistency once and for all: Bitcoin provides an incredibly strong consistency guarantee, far stronger than eventual consistency. Specifically, it guarantees serializability, with a probability that is exponentially decreasing with latency. Let's see what this means, and discuss why so many people get it wrong.
The Fallacious Eventual Consistency Claim The error in thinking that Bitcoin is eventually consistent stems from looking at the operation of the blockchain and observing that the last few blocks of a blockchain are subject to rearrangement. Indeed, in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies based on Nakamoto consensus, the last few blocks of the blockchain may be replaced by competing forks. It's tempting to look at the way the blockchain operates and say "a-ha, because the contents of the blockchain are subject to change, it's clearly eventually consistent." This narrative might sound sensible to valley developers who have been indoctrinated by data-store companies who are packaging software that would not pass muster as failed masters theses. The same companies have been pushing bad science to justify the fact that they cannot implement a consistency guarantee in their data stores. Not surprisingly, this argument is flat out wrong.
The Eventual Consistency Claim is Flawed First of all, if one were to buy the premise of this argument, that we should look at the entirety of the blockchain to evaluate Bitcoin's consistency, then the conclusion we must draw would be that Bitcoin is inconsistent. There is absolutely no guarantee that a transaction that has been observed in an orphaned block will be there after a reorganization, and therefore there is no eventual consistency guarantee. This argument, that Bitcoin is as worthless a database as MongoDB, is more accurate than the argument that Bitcoin is eventually consistent, but is still completely wrong. The root cause of the wrong conclusion here is that the people making these arguments about Bitcoin's weak consistency have a messed up analysis framework.
The Right Way to Evaluate Databases Here's the correct way to evaluate the consistency of distributed databases, including Bitcoin. Every database-like system on earth comes with a write protocol and a corresponding read protocol. When evaluating the properties of a system, we examine the behavior of that system when we go through these protocols. We do not peek behind the covers into the internal state of the system; we do not dissect it apart; and most of all, we do not examine the values of internal variables, find a variable that changes, and scream "hah! eventually consistent!" The suffix of the Bitcoin blockchain acts, in essence, as the scratch space of the consensus algorithm. For example, in Paxos (an algorithm that makes the strongest possible guarantee and yields a serializable timeline), a leader can seemingly flip-flop -- it starts out proposing value v1, but can end up learning some other value v2, and having the whole system accept v2. It'd be a folly to look at this and say "Paxos is eventually consistent: look, the leader flip-flopped." We need to look at the output of the protocol, not its transient states or internal variables. In general, we cannot take a God's eye view into distributed systems and judge them by what we see from that privileged vantage point. What matters, what systems are judged by, is what they expose to their clients through their aforementioned read and write protocols.
Bitcoin Provides a Strong Consistency Guarantee And a completely different picture emerges when we go through Bitcoin's read protocol. To wit, the read protocol for Bitcoin is to discard the last Ω blocks of the blockchain. Satoshi goes into a detailed analysis of what the value of Ω ought to be, and derives the equation as a function of the probability of observing an anomaly. The nice thing about Bitcoin's read protocol is that it is parameterizable. Merchants can make this probability arbitrarily small. Because the probability drops exponentially with Ω, it's easy to pick an Ω such that the chance of observing a blockchain reorganization is less likely than having the processor miscompute values due to strikes by alpha particles. If that's not sufficient for pedants, one can pick a slightly higher Ω such that the chances of observing a reorganization are lower than the likelihood that all the oxygen molecules in the room, via random Brownian motion, will pile up into one corner of the room and leave one to suffocate in the other corner. Satoshi suggests an Ω value of 6, in use by most merchants today. The read protocol simply discards the last 6 blocks, so reorganizations in the suffix of length 6 are not visible at all to clients. Sure, someone with a God's eye view could observe orphan chains of length 5 all day long, but it would not matter -- the Bitcoin read protocol will mask such reorganizations, and any inconsistency they might have led to, from clients. A similar argument exists for the write protocol that I won't go through. You get the point: if you discard the last Ω blocks like Satoshi told you to, and you confirm using the appropriately trimmed blockchain, your chances of observing an anomaly are exponentially small.
What if Someone Uses A Low Ω? Some people may actively choose to configure a system to provide weaker guarantees than it could give, for reasons of convenience or performance. In the same way I can configure an Oracle installation to violate its ACID guarantees, someone can use Bitcoin in a manner than does not take advantage of Bitcoin's strong guarantees. For instance, the merchants who accept 0-confirmations have chosen to forego the strong guarantees of Bitcoin for convenience. They are using a read protocol that doesn't even involve the blockchain -- there is no guarantee that the transactions they see on the peer-to-peer network will ever be mined. This is not what Satoshi advised, but it may be a sensible choice for a non-risk-averse merchant. Of course, we now know how to build much faster, much higher throughput blockchains that provide better guarantees than Bitcoin's 0-conf transactions, but that's a different issue.
Why Is This So Hard? There is a lot of confusion among software developers when it comes to consistency in databases. The muddled thinking that pervades the valley when it comes to issues of consistency probably stems from two sources: (1) academics' failure to provide a simple, accessible framework for reasoning about consistency, coupled with the misleading framework embodied in CAP, and (2) certain companies' deliberate, decade-long effort to muddy up the consistency landscape by falsely claiming that strong consistency is an impossible property to achieve under any circumstance. Surely, Google's Spanner is globally distributed and consistent, so are a slew of distributed databases that are part of a recent research wave that HyperDex started. Just because the developers of certain cheap NoSQL data stores cannot guarantee consistency doesn't mean that eventual consistency is the best anyone can do. And Bitcoin's $6B+ value is most definitely not predicated on something as hokey as eventual consistency. Hope this is useful for establishing a better foundation for evaluating systems, especially open source systems such as Bitcoin whose internal state is visible. It's tempting to look at that state, but consistency properties need to be evaluated solely by the outputs of the read and write protocols.
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DisqusSince its founding by Elon Musk and others nearly two years ago, nonprofit research lab OpenAI has published dozens of research papers. One posted online Thursday is different: Its lead author is still in high school.
The wunderkind is Kevin Frans, a senior currently working on his college applications. He trained his first neural net—the kind of system that tech giants use to recognize your voice or face—two years ago, at the age of 15. Inspired by reports of software mastering Atari games and the board game Go, he has since been reading research papers and building pieces of what they described. “I like how you can get computers to do things that previously you would think were impossible,” Frans says, flashing his ready smile. One of his creations is an interactive webpage that automatically colors in line drawings, in the style of manga comics.
Frans landed at OpenAI after taking on one of the lab’s list of problems in need of new ideas. He made progress, but got stuck and emailed OpenAI researcher John Schulman for advice. After some back and forth on the matter of trust region policy optimization, Schulman checked out Frans’s blog and got a surprise. “I didn’t expect from those emails that he was in high school,” he says.
Ryan Young for Wired
Frans later met Schulman when he interviewed for an internship at OpenAI. When he turned up for work in San Francisco’s Mission District this summer, Frans was the only intern without a degree or studying in grad school. He started working on a tricky problem that holds back robots and other AI systems—how can machines tap what they’ve previously learned to solve new problems?
Humans do this without a second thought. Even if you’re making a recipe for the first time, you don’t have to re-learn how to caramelize onions or sift flour. By contrast, machine-learning software generally has to repeat its lengthy training process for every new problem—even when they have common elements.
Frans’s new paper, with Schulman and three others affiliated with the University of California Berkeley, reports new progress on this problem. “If it could get solved it could be a really big deal for robotics but also other elements of AI,” Frans says. He developed an algorithm that helped virtual legged robots learn which limb movements could be applied to multiple tasks, such as walking and crawling. In tests, it helped virtual robots with two and four legs adapt to new tasks, including navigating mazes, more quickly. A video released by OpenAI shows an ant-like robot in those tests. The work has been submitted to ICLR, one of the top conferences in machine learning. "Kevin's paper provides a fresh approach to the problem, and some results that go beyond anything demonstrated previously," Schulman says.
Frans grapples with challenging motion problems away from computers, too, as a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Some of his enthusiasm for AI may come just from inhaling the air on his way to Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. Frans says he works on his AI projects without help from his parents, but he isn’t the only computer whiz in the house. His father works on silicon-chip design at publicly listed semiconductor company Xilinx.
As you may have guessed, Frans is an outlier. Olga Russakovsky, a professor at Princeton who works on machine vision, says making research contributions in machine learning so young is unusual. In general, it’s harder for school kids to try machine learning and AI than subjects such as math or science with a long tradition of extra-curricular competitions and mentoring, she says. Access to computing power can be a hurdle as well. When Frans’s desktop computer wasn’t powerful enough to test one of his ideas, he pulled out his debit card and opened an account with Google's cloud-computing service to put his code through its paces. He advises other kids interested in machine learning to give it a shot. “The best thing to do is to go out and try it, make it yourself from your own hands,” he says.
Russakovsky is part of a movement among AI researchers trying to get more high schoolers tinkering with AI systems. One motivation is a belief that the field is currently too male, well-off, and white. “AI is a field that’s going to revolutionize everything in our society, and we can’t have it be built by people from a homogenous group that doesn’t represent society as a whole,” Russakovsky says. She cofounded AI4ALL, a foundation that organizes camps that give high-school students from diverse backgrounds a chance to work with and learn from AI researchers.
Back in Palo Alto, Frans has been thinking about helping the next generation of AI experts, too. He has a seven-year-old younger brother. “He’s interested in coding I think,” Frans says. “Maybe when he’s older I can help him.”Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
These two battling Komodo dragons seem to recreate an epic battle scene from Jurassic World on a mini scale.
The bare-toothed beasts were snapped in the wild sharpening up their fighting skills as they tussled each other in a tear-up.
Pictures taken from a distance of only 10 yards away show the planet’s largest living lizards - which can grow up to 10ft long and have long, forked tongues and a venomous bite - going head-to-head in two marathon rounds.
First pictured in a clinch, one then overpowers the other to take victory.
Despite looking like a Hollywood film set these pictures were in fact taken on the island of Komodo, Indonesia.TouchArcade Rating:
Good news! KINGDOM HEARTS Unchained χ (Free) just popped up on the App Store, so this week is suddenly shaping up to be a pretty good one in terms of releases. If you don’t know much about the game, Tetsuya Nomura described the game as taking place during the beginning of the KINGDOM HEARTS series. It takes place in the world of the fairy tales talked about throughout the series and before the Keyblade War. You’ll play as one of the many keyblade wielders. In the game you’ll fight the Heartless as you explore Disney’s worlds (more Disney themes on the App Store today after Disney Crossy Road (Free)). You can collect and evolve hundreds of character medals containing the power of popular Disney and FINAL FANTASY heroes and villains, which was a blend I always found fascinating in the KINGDOM HEARTS games.
You can, of course, team up with friends to take down the various bosses, and you’ll be able to customize your hero by putting on outfits based on Disney, FINAL FANTASY, and KINGDOM HEARTS characters. Square Enix feels that the sense of playing live with other people will be what will really hook players since the sensation of playing at the same time as others and competing with them occasionally is a very unique aspect of this KINGDOM HEARTS game. We’ll see how well this social version of the famous franchise will do.Navigation-and-emergency-services company OnStar is notifying its six million account holders that it will keep a complete accounting of the speed and location of OnStar-equipped vehicles, even for drivers who discontinue monthly service.
OnStar began e-mailing customers Monday about its update to the privacy policy, which grants OnStar the right to sell that GPS-derived data in an anonymized format.
Adam Denison, a spokesman for the General Motors subsidiary, said OnStar does not currently sell customer data, but it reserves that right. He said both the new and old privacy policies allow OnStar to chronicle a vehicle's every movement and its speed, though it's not clear where that's stated in the old policy.
"What's changed [is that if] you want to cancel your OnStar service, we are going to maintain a two-way connection to your vehicle unless the customer says otherwise," Denison said in a telephone interview.
The connection will continue, he said, to make it "easier to re-enroll" in the program, which charges plans from $19 to $29 monthly for help with navigation and emergencies. Canceling customers must opt out of the continued surveillance monitoring program, according to the privacy policy.
The privacy changes take effect in December, Denison said, adding that the policy reinforces the company's right to sell anonymized data.
"We hear from organizations periodically requesting our information," he said.
He said an example of how the data might be used would be for the Michigan Department of Transportation "to get a feel for traffic usage on a specific section of freeway." The policy also allows the data to be used for marketing purposes by OnStar and vehicle manufacturers.
Collecting location and speed data via GPS might also create a treasure trove of data that could be used in criminal and civil cases. One could also imagine an eager police chief acquiring the data to issue speeding tickets en masse.
Jonathan Zdziarski, an Ohio forensics scientist, blogged about the new terms Tuesday. In a telephone interview, he said he was canceling his service and making sure he was being disconnected from OnStar's network.
He said the new privacy policy goes too far.
"They added a bullet point allowing them to collect any data for any purpose," he said.
Photo: OnStar Command Center in Detroit, Michigan. Associated Press/Gary Malerba
See Also:- General Motors Boosts OnStar to Challenge SyncWhen the only review that I saw on this mouse was a poor one, I decided I should give this mouse a chance with an actual well written review. First off, when I first saw this mouse online, I |
Well, Justin Trudeau is playing chess, too—and he just stuck a bishop up his nose. Your move, Canada.
Follow Scott Feschuk on Twitter @scottfeschukTo learn more about this new undergraduate program offered at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Ottawa,
Translational & Molecular Medicine (TMM)
You are invited to attend an Open House:
Network with professors
Visit the TMM laboratory and core research facilities
Attend a Q&A panel (with current TMM student)
Learn more about the admission requirements, the scholarships and how to apply.
And more (and yes, there will be food available!)
Please Register to attend!
Pour en apprendre davantage à propos de ce nouveau programme d'études de premier cycle offert à la Faculté de Médecine de l'Universite d`Ottawa,
Médecine Moléculaire & Translationnelle (MMT)
Vous êtes invités à notre Porte Ouverte:
Réseauter avec des professeurs avec lesquels vous pourriez faire de la recherche.
Visiter le laboratoire de MMT et les plateformes technologiques de recherche.
Assister à un panel de Questions et Réponses (avec les étudiants actuels de MMT).En apprendre plus les exigences d’admissions, les bourses disponibles et comment déposer une demande d’admission.
Et plus encore (un goûter sera offert!)
SVP, pour assister, enregistrez-vous!There’s a critical distinction to be made between having access to player projections of some sort versus having a systematic decision-making process. Andrew Friedman, and his former mates with the Rays, are by far the best exponents of the systematic decision-making approach in baseball today.
So what exactly is that distinction?
Many teams have developed their own player projection systems. Many have done some form of piggy-backing off of public systems. Naturally, these systems all range in quality quite broadly—so that’s one potential difference.
Bill Shaikin, however, correctly identified the true distinction in the LA Times last winter:
“What makes all of this so compelling is that trades of this magnitude do not happen with one phone call. Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers’ president of baseball operations, and Farhan Zaidi, the general manager, have juggled so many balls over not so many days. There is no Plan A or bust with this new front office. There is Plan A, Plan B and Plan C for every trade on the table, and there is Strategy A, Strategy B and Strategy C depending on how each trade plays out. With the three trades on Wednesday — the Dodgers had not yet made the moves official — Friedman has made 10 trades in 25 days.”
Speed is the distinction.
This has been the ethos of automated trading in finance. It’s not necessarily about creating much higher cognitive power, which is remarkably superior to what any group of analysts could muster (though such gains are certainly possible). The advantage comes from automating that judgement, so that it can be applied to a trillion cases and permutations in the time that the group of analysts would otherwise be able to apply it to a handful, with at least equal competence.
Andrew Friedman made the Dodgers organization $71.9m of profit last offseason.
We’re talking about net present value added.
No single player in baseball had such a gap between the value of their production and their cost in 2015.
If the market were more rational—and it may indeed become so—Friedman would have earned far, far more than he presently does. A far greater commoditization of Friedmans is on the horizon.
Except… it’s not really Andrew Friedman which created that $72m worth of NPV-added. It wasn’t created because he’s the very best baseball evaluator in the game; the single best analyst, scout, nor negotiator.
(Dodgers’ 2014 offseason, via NEIFI’s valuations.)
Similarly, the Rays did not wait for the offseason kickoff party in Boca Raton. They have fewer options than any other team. Their entire existence depends on the residual between perceived and actual player values. Waiting is not an option. Within the Rays’ means, there was probably not a better target in baseball in terms of the perceived and actual value gaps than Brad Miller. The Rays’ survival depends entirely upon beating competitors to such meals:
(NEIFI valuations of Rays-Mariners swap on 11/5)
(Note; in short, we don’t find Karns to be more than a fringe MLB rotation member, despite his seemingly nice 2015 ERA, and we find Brad Miller to be every bit of a 2.9 win player, controllable for years. It would appear NEIFI and the Rays agree.)
What’s the Difference?
The narrative becomes that Friedman/Silverman are “analytics-GM’s” or something similar.
But that’s not true, either. Ostensibly, so was Ben Cherington. So is Billy Beane. Jeff Bridich was a Harvard guy, which is supposed to imply the same thing. That description would be wholly incomplete.
The distinguishing characteristic isn’t “looking at the numbers.” It’s the antithesis of “looking at” them. It’s about having access to a systematic, comprehensive view of talent and value. And as a result, all players can be judged at the same time, apples-to-apples, in a completely comprehensive manner that results in a single value-based answer. The Rays and Friedman’s Dodgers operate in this manner.
And how can one be sure?
Some of the most observable evidence is Friedman’s behavior last offseason. He explicitly did not make the easy/lazy/obvious/defensible moves to build last offseason’s value. The highly defensible moves which he definitely had the budget to undertake comfortably.
That would have been signing Russell Martin and Max Scherzer (or even Jason Hammel and Pat Neshek)… Bona fides to fill obvious needs, none of whom wound up being overpays (in fact, all landed well under rational market value). But when you have the entire playbook, there’s no need for one to pay merely 85 cents on the dollar for talent (whether those 85 cents come in cash or treasure); with a comprehensive system, you’ll be able to find it for less than 50. This revolution was built on Yasmani Grandals and Michael Bolsingers and Juan Nicasios and Brett Andersons and Kike Hernandezes.
(We still don’t, and never will, understand the Hector Olivera signing. At the time of the signing, NEIFI had him as a barely-interesting bench player, based on a fairly unambiguous performance record in Cuba. In years of observing Andrew Friedman, the Olivera signing was, to an outrageous degree, the largest divergence we’ve had from a Friedman-led club. But that’s a digression for another time.)
Subjective, Objective, Systematic, Fragmentary
Again, and this can’t be emphasized enough; “systematic” is not simply “uses a projection system.” And it’s certainly not the false dichotomy of objective-versus-subjective that’s been fed to many of us for so long. Subjective information, e.g. scouting reports, can most certainly be systematized (whether MLB front offices are doing this effectively is a separate issue). And what’s termed ‘objective’ information is often, in truth, not. The value of a systematic approach is that it ensures methodological consistency: all players are evaluated in the same framework, by the same standards, allowing for easy and equitable comparisons. The opposite of “systematic” in this sense is “fragmentary” or “anecdotal”, i.e. doing piecemeal analysis and evaluating different players by different criteria. Manually assembling a view of each individual player, case-by-case.
The Athletics, for example, certainly have a player projection system. The success that they have enjoyed over the years is no accident; they are unquestionably one of the most analytically savvy organizations in the game. However, their process also led them to a Billy Butler signing and apparently, an extremely generous opinion of Sean Nolin and Kendall Graveman. And those are not cheap shots—those were predictably lukewarm-at-best players for whom red-hot prices were paid.
Or, for a clear illustration of the difference between merely having a “player projection system” (of some unknown quality) in your office and having a “systematic decision-making process”, consider the July 2014 trade of Addison Russell for Jeff Samardzija. At some level, they actually considered Samardzija more valuable than Russell.
The relative values placed on Graveman, Butler, Samardzija, Russell, Nolin… some portion of these miscues were undoubtedly evaluative issues—the question of “should we expect Nolin to be a 4th starter or 6th starter this year?” But undoubtedly, a large (if not dominant) aspect of the misfires in these decisions came not from discrepancies in evaluation, but in valuation; within the entire spectrum of talent, what is the relative rarity of Nolin, and on that basis, what would be the appropriate costs? The Russell-Samardzija decision is a clear as a manifestation of this as there could be—find anyone who thought Russell was anything less than a top-10 prospect at the time; he was overwhelmingly considered to be within the top 5. This was a distinction in valuation, not evaluation.
Valuation and evaluation are of course married.
And this is precisely why having just some projection system is no guarantee of any sort; the evaluative portion of the system has to be comprehensive and able to handle all the challenges thrown its way. Regardless of the type of player under discussion, whether what’s desired is a valuation of a slap-hitting Korean shortstop, a 5’10” “crafty lefty” pitching prospect, or an established big league slugger, the system has to be able to produce universally good answers, no matter the case. And that’s no easy task. If one wants a value on Sean Nolin, that simultaneously depends on the evaluation of a thousand other pitchers (and truly, many more), which must be executed without fail and without occasionally absurd/errant results and without corrupted fundaments of judgement. A staple of systemization is applying values to all players, and the relative ability of the evaluations to achieve that with efficacy is what determines the strength of the system.
When that’s accomplished, a truly valid system can fully/thoroughly evaluate 1000 opportunities in an afternoon, with perfect consistency. A comprehensive system is as comfortable being reactive as proactive. Flexible, opportunistic, and unbounded. That’s what Andrew Friedman utilizes—as he did with the Rays—and that’s what the Dodgers used to beat the market by $72m of present-value profit last winter.Improvements to conventional bulbs reached a limit 50 years ago
A European Union report has recommended banning conventional incandescent light bulbs by 2012 to save energy and cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.
Most light bulbs sold in the EU are of the type developed by Thomas Edison in 1879.
But the report says the EU could save up to $12bn (£8bn) a year in energy bills by switching to low-energy bulbs.
The report needs the backing of the European parliament and all 27 member states to become law.
"It's very clear that this is a measure that will change the way that we consume energy," EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs told journalists.
Phase out
Once approved, the EU would phase out conventional bulbs between September 2009 and September 2012.
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
Consumers will choose between long-life fluorescent bulbs or halogen lamps.
The EU says the measure will save households up to 50 euros ($64, £43) a year and pump up to 10bn euros ($13bn) into the economy.
The new-style lamps carry energy savings of 25% to 75% compared to traditional incandescent bulbs, which are little changed since they were invented almost 130 years ago.
The report also says the switch will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 12 million tonnes a year, and save energy equivalent to the consumption of 11 million European households.
Mr Piebalgs said that the phasing out had to be gradual so that "production facilities could adapt to the new lighting" and the quality of illumination could be ensured.
"European homes will keep the same quality of lighting, while saving energy, CO2 and money," he said.
Several nations including Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the Philippines have already announced they will phase out or restrict sales of traditional bulbs.Sprint chief operating officer says VoLTE is “on our roadmap”
Günther Ottendorfer, Sprint COO of Technology and former COO of T-Mobile Austria, took to the Sprint sub-Reddit this week to participate in an “ask me anything” with brand devotees.
Questions ranged from consumer-facing to network-related and even personal – for instance, Ottendorfer says he’s “the highest ranked Austrian badminton player in Overland Park, maybe even in all of Kansas.”
On the network side, Reddit user u/sherifhanna, who works in technical marketing for Qualcomm, asked: “Given that your carrier aggregation deployments are heavily based on small cells and the fact that higher order modulation (256-QAM in the downlink) was designed for small cells, any chance you will turn on 256-QAM to provide an additional speed boost on top of 3xCA [three-channel carrier aggregation]? Lots of devices can support this now.”
Without giving too much away, Ottendorfer replied: “There’s a very high chance for that!” Sprint has been testing three-channel carrier aggregation in Chicago and it’s home market of Kansas City.
User u/UPDguy, who says he is a mobile retail rep for Best Buy, asked: “Can you give us an idea on VoLTE release? Will it be nationwide? You’d be surprised how many customers I have leave without an upgrade or to a different carrier because they can not talk and surf …”
Ottendorfer answered: “VoLTE is on our roadmap and we’ll make the move as soon as we can ensure that our customers have an even superior voice experience than today. It is tied to our densification and optimization strategy.”
Check out the full AMA here. And our own Editor-in-Chief Dan Meyer had the opportunity recently to discuss Sprint’s 5G plans with Ottendorfer on this episode of RCRtv’s Carrier Wrap.Franklin guard Luke Kennard is a McDonald's All American, Ohio Mr. Basketball and Duke signee. But, he represents so much more to the Franklin community.
Buy Photo Luke Kennard, McDonald's All-American, Duke University signee and reigning Ohio Mr. Basketball. (Photo: The Enquirer/Kareem Elgazzar, The Cincinnati Enquirer)Buy Photo
Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski believes Luke Kennard may one day be an American favorite.
But, before Kennard fully experiences the Cameron Crazies, he is the Franklin favorite first and foremost.
The most recognized person in this Warren County city halfway between Cincinnati and Dayton is a high school basketball player born in 1996. Kennard's impact transcends all ages in this community.
"You see him out and he waves at you," says Franklin City Manager Sonny Lewis, a 1970 Franklin High School graduate.
"He's personable. He's not a fictional character. He's a real person – his family is real. It's meant so much to us just to have him. His impact will linger way past when he graduates this spring."
Franklin (population 11,770) has multiple reminders of Kennard, a senior shooting guard who averages 39.1 points.
Signs proudly noting his Ohio Mr. Basketball award last season as a junior can be clearly seen upon driving into the area.
CLOSE For Luke Kennard, it's about family and Franklin. The Enquirer/Kareem Elgazzar
Those signs will likely need updated this spring as Kennard has a great opportunity to become only the sixth player to win Ohio Mr. Basketball at least twice since the Associated Press award started in 1988. (The award will be announced in March).
"He's quite the hero in town," says Steve Caskey, President of Triple 'C' Glass Shop on Main Street.
At 6-foot-6, Kennard, a Duke signee, is difficult to miss on or off the court. Watching him play gives you the sense he could likely score at will if he wanted each time down the court.
Kennard excelled at high school football as a standout quarterback before he turned his full focus to hoops this fall. He had several scholarship offers in both sports.
The multi-talented athlete likes playing pickup games in other sports. He's an incredible cornhole player. He taught himself how to juggle a few years ago.
A 4.3 grade-point average student, Kennard's basketball statistics and national recognition paired with team success would be enough to earn the rave reviews of Franklin residents. But, what's striking is that his affable personality and maturity raises his stature to another level.
"He's always going to be our kid," Lewis explained. "He's always going to be us. No matter what he does at Duke. If he doesn't get hurt – whatever he does in the NBA – it's like he's going to be our Jerry Lucas from Middletown."
An hour before a game last week which saw him pass LeBron James on the state high school scoring list and earn accolades on ESPN's SportsCenter Feb. 6, Kennard wears his pinstripe Michael Jordan jersey and is sitting on the stage watching the junior varsity compete.
The entire gymnasium (1,200 capacity) is packed by the start of the undercard in anticipation of Kennard's milestone that night. A few minutes later he gets up and mingles with the student section several rows up.
"'Hey Luke,'" a student in the front row yells back to him. The small whiteboard is a sign in marker saying "39 Luke to pass LeBron." Kennard smiles.
Kennard enjoys the attention around his hoops career and says his parents, Mark and Jennifer, take a lot of pressure off of him.
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"They let me just be me as a kid," Kennard said.
Kennard, a McDonald's All American, understands what he's experienced is unique to most high school athletes. But even on Twitter, he offers perspective.
"I just want to focus on God, ball and school, nothing else," Kennard tweeted a few hours after the video of James discussing him to the media was published.
Even though he has 17,300 Twitter followers and fans are quick to praise his accomplishments, Kennard looks to his tight circle which includes his parents and Franklin coach Brian Bales for guidance.
"Having some of that spotlight you got to enjoy while you can," Kennard said. "I've experienced a lot of things that a lot of kids haven't so far. I am enjoying a lot of it. At the same time I am staying completely grounded. I am staying as humble as I possibly can."
Kennard had other opportunities earlier in his career to consider other places to take his game. He attended an open house at Moeller. But, Franklin is where he wants to be.
Kennard looks forward to returning to Franklin during college breaks and he wants to help the community; he's cherished every moment this winter.
"Oh man, I love this place," Kennard. "…Franklin is such a family built place. That's what is special about it."
That humility includes crediting his teammates every chance he gets.
Kennard sits with teammates in the locker room; he greets those in attendance at a packed A&G Pizza the night he is selected to the McDonald's Game. He packs his lunch and often sits with underclassmen in the lunch room at school.
Franklin's season has some already thinking a trip to Columbus in March, but the Wildcats aren't dwelling on that.
Bales – who is also the school athletic director – said there was some talk about possibly moving the games this season but the seniors voted prior to the season to keep them at home.
The athletic department would've likely benefitted financially from a different venue, but you can't put a price on the memories the Wildcats have in their intimate home gymnasium.
Kennard entered Tuesday's game at Carlisle just 29 points from passing Geno Ford for the No. 3 spot on the Ohio High School Athletic Association career points list. He scored 38 to up his career point total to 2,690. He moved into third place on the state scoring list with a free throw.
James, the Cleveland Cavaliers' superstar, is now No. 5 on the list with 2,646 points.
A line formed at 4 p.m. to get into the school prior to the Feb. 6 game. By 5:30 p.m., the game was sold out and some fans had to be turned away. There were reports of tickets scalped. The morning after the game, one of the coveted tickets was on Ebay.
Those in attendance said the gym had a different vibe hours before tipoff. Kennard said he felt his eardrums were about to burst when he made the 3-pointer to pass James late in the third quarter.
As he and his teammates sat in the locker room a few minutes before the game, a couple of the seniors took turns to speak on what they knew could be a special night. Bales reminded them of the line that formed some three-plus hours earlier.
Senior Evan Crowe spoke up first – saying it was crazy to think of just a few regular-season games left. Kennard said the team has come too far to jeopardize its success.
Maybe that's why Bales gets choked up at the thought of the final home game on Senior Night Friday when the Wildcats host Eaton.
Franklin (19-1) is ranked No. 26 nationally by USA Today and No. 2 in the Associated Press Division II state poll. Bales doesn't want Friday to arrive.
"Besides getting married, having my three children – this journey here being the coach at Franklin, the coach of Luke Kennard and these seniors – has been one of the highlights of my life," Bales said Feb. 5. "That's as genuine as I can be."
Just minutes before tipoff Feb. 6, Bales gathered the players into the middle of the locker room before the team ran onto the court to loud cheers. An assistant coach just explained how much of a hunger he has to suit up for the community.
Take of advantage of the special moment, he said. Nothing else professionally can compare to playing for family, friends and the community. Kennard looked on intently.
"'Everybody get in here," Bales said. 'We are going to say what we have said for four years now in the huddle. One, two, three…family,'" the players said in unison.An Ohio middle school is being criticized after it decided to remove the word 'feminist' from a T-shirt an eighth grade girl wore in her class photo.
Sophie Thomas wore the black shirt in March when she was having her picture taken at Clermont Northeastern Middle School in Batavia.
When the students got their class photos this week, she saw the word had been removed from her shirt with Photoshop.
Sophie Thomas (center) wore a shirt with the word 'feminist' on it for class photo day at her middle school
Administrators at Clermont Northeastern Middle School in Batavia, Ohio, had word removed from her shirt
Thomas had worn the shirt to school in the past without any problems, FOX19 NOW reported.
School principal Kendra Young said the word was removed to 'prevent any unintended controversies'.
Thomas, an eighth grader at the school, had worn the shirt in the past without having any problems
The school claimed it told Thomas the word was going to be removed from her shirt, but she said that is not the case, as does her mother, according to TODAY.com.
Christine Thomas said her daughter only met with school officials after the doctored photo was released.
Thomas said: 'I was upset.
'I went to the principal's office and she told me she blacked it out because it's offensive to some people.'
Ralph Shell, the superintendent of the Clermont Northeastern School District, said the situation was 'blown out of proportion', BuzzFeed News reported.
He added: 'We took the photo and she was in the front row with the T-shirt on, and it was just not a flattering picture.'
On April 17, Thomas asked people to post photos using the #IDESERVEFREEDOMOFEXPRESSION hashtag
On Friday, April 17, Thomas asked people who found the school's decision distasteful to wear a shirt showing their support for feminism or freedom of expression and post photos with the hashtag #IDESERVEFREEDOMOFEXPRESSION.
The photos were collected on Instagram.
She said: 'People around here misconstrue the word [feminism].'
'Like, 'Oh, you're a feminist so you hate men.'
'I just want to spread equality, and a lot of people here don't agree with me.'Initial reaction:
Stripping everything back to its core.
Demeulemeester without the master:
This was the first season without Ann Demeulemeester at the helm, and felt very much like a cleansing ritual that honoured her philosophies and the codes of the brand.
A lesson in draping:
It was all about fluidity, asymmetric cuts, and light fabrics draped impeccably around the body. The familiar became the new, as soft trench coats were bunched and twisted around the waist, dresses came wrapped with capes, and sleeves fell long over the hands. For men, looks were accentuated with a burnished gold, on boots, shirts and jackets.
How they wore it:
With a subtle redness under the eyes, and eyebrows combed through with red pigment. Hair was wet and swept into a ‘ponytail’, sprayed tightly into place rather than tied. Like running your fingers through wet hair. Silver bangles were piled up arms, and bunched leather leggings underpinned every look.
Act I & Act II:
The collection came in two parts – a study in black, and then off white. It really felt like we were stripping back to the essence of the brand, honouring Demeulemeester's incredible ability to electrify a monochrome palette with cut and fabric choice.UPDATE: The Amash amendment to the annual defense appropriations bill narrowly has failed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 205 in favor versus 217 against, reports the Guardian. The legislation, which would have curtailed the National Security Agency’s ability to operate secret “dragnet” surveillance, had been proposed by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), and reportedly was defeated by a vote that saw both parties highly split.
Less than two months after the disclosure of secret National Security Agency surveillance programs, a new fight on the issue is taking shape in the U.S. House. At issue is a controversial amendment — introduced by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), supported by a bipartisan coalition, and set for a vote of the full House — that would require the NSA to place limits on the information it collects in its surveillance operations.
Amash’s proposal would force the NSA to attest, when seeking a warrant from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, that it would gather information only on individuals that are under investigation. “Blanket” surveillance would not be allowed. The amendment would be added to an annual defense spending bill.
“It’s not a partisan issue. It’s something that cuts across the entire political spectrum,” Amash told the Rules Committee, according to Politico.
“In order for funds to be used by the NSA, the court order would have to have a statement limiting the collection of records to those records that pertain to a person under investigation,” he said. “If the court order doesn’t have that statement, the NSA doesn’t receive the funding to collect those records.”
Amash threatened to block the defense spending bill if his amendment was not given an “up or down” vote. Earlier this month, Amash introduced a similar proposal that won wide bipartisan support and was co-sponsored by 18 Democrats. It was killed in committee.
“This is the best chance we are going to get to keep the NSA from collecting the mass volume of phone records,” said Sina Khanifar, founder of Taskforce, which runs DefundTheNSA.com and has supported Amash’s efforts. “Support in Congress up until now has been pretty mixed and just getting a bill on the floor has been pretty difficult. In the short term, this is the best we are going to get and people will either have to vote for or against it, and people will have to make a statement of where they stand on this issue and make it clear to voters.”
Opposition to changing the status quo
The NSA is adamantly against the Amash amendment. On Tuesday, Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, scheduled a members-only briefing in response to the amendment.
“In advance of anticipated action on amendments to the DoD Appropriations bill, Ranking Member C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of the House Intelligence Committee invites your Member to attend a question and answer session with General Keith B. Alexander of the National Security Agency,” read the invitation. The brief was held at “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level” clearance, meaning that members cannot disclose what was learned in the briefing.
Amash’s amendment would affect the first section of the Patriot Act, which allows the government to request a warrant to receive “metadata” on a person’s phone calls. A court ruling changed the interpretation of the law so that a warrant authorizes the government to surveil all calls it feels is relevant. Many feel that this ruling went against the nature and spirit of the act.
Support for the amendment is likely to be low in Congress. As reported by The Atlantic Wire, only 11.3 percent of all members of Congress support the declassification of the secret court’s decisions. Less than 9 percent favor a reform or rewriting of the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
No members of Congress favor a repeal of the laws.
Rep. Richard Nugent (R-Fla.) has offered a competing amendment that, on the surface, also seeks to restrict NSA’s funding for surveillance activities. However, the amendment’s main provision, which prohibits spending for the purpose of targeting a “U.S. person,” is already prohibited, according to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Since the NSA insists that it surveils only metadata left from electronic transactions and not actual people, the Nugent amendment amounts to a red herring — something to distract from the Amash amendment.
Standing apart
Amash, who was elected to the House in the 2010 Republican sweep, has differentiated himself from other members of the class of 2010 as an anti-establishment, anti-spying, pro-controlled-military-spending libertarian. While many joke of a future Senate run for the Washington novice, the reality is that the junior representative forced House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to negotiate with him. Amash’s coalition controls 20 Republican votes, more than Boehner’s estimated margin for passage.
This has created friction among Republicans.
“The leaders have been clear with members whose amendments are being made in order that they are expected to vote for the bill on final passage if their amendments are adopted,” a leadership aide said to BuzzFeed.
The spending bill ignores a call to reduce the Defense Department’s budget by $50 billion next year as part of sequestration. Due to this, it is unlikely that the bill will pass the Senate.
“The majority ignores sequestration when it suits their purposes — for veterans, homeland security, and today, for defense,” House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) said. “I wonder if my friends on the other side of the aisle will have the courage of their convictions to explain why it is acceptable to ask working families to dig deeper than they already have. Why would we slash research for Alzheimer’s and autism, kick children off the rolls of Head Start, and evict low-income families?”
The bill is $3.4 billion smaller than the Pentagon’s 2014 base budget request, with a war-funding section $1.5 billion larger than what the Pentagon requested.
More controversy on Syria
Amash’s amendment was not the only controversial addition to the defense spending bill. Another amendment was introduced to prohibit the use of funds “with respect to military action in Syria to the extent such actions would be inconsistent” with the War Powers Act. The proposal was introduced out of fear by Republicans that the United States may get tied up in another country’s civil war.
Previously, Republicans criticized the president for being slow to intercede in Syria.
The Pentagon recently offered Congress a detailed list of military options to help remove Syrian President Bashar Assad, as well as the cost of those options. The list was released after the White House acknowledged that there is no known way to remove Assad from power quickly or painlessly.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, in a letter to Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.), pointed out that the options available — training the opposition, conducting limited stand-off strikes, establishing a “no-fly” zone, setting up buffer zones and searching for and destroying chemical weapons stockpiles — would require a massive build-up of military capital and billions of dollars a month.
“All of these options would likely further the narrow military objective of helping the opposition and placing more pressure on the regime,” Dempsey wrote. “We have learned from the past 10 years; however, that it is not enough to simply alter the balance of military power without careful consideration of what is necessary in order to preserve a functioning state. We must anticipate and be prepared for the unintended consequences of our action.”Looking for news you can trust?
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Like Tim Pawlenty and Newt Gingrich before him, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum announced this morning on ABC’s Good Morning America that later today he’ll officially announce his presidential candidacy in the rural Pennsylvania town where his immigrant grandfather once worked.
Santorum is arguably the most hard-line, far-right social conservative in the GOP presidential field, neck and neck with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who’s expected to jump into the race later this month. (That right-wing intransigence has earned Santorum a serious Google problem.) But on GMA, Santorum sought to burnish his right-wing fiscal credibility, too, saying Rep. Paul Ryan’s unpopular budget plan doesn’t cut deep enough. “Not even Paul Ryan and his budget now has the temerity to go after Social Security,” Santorum said.
Ryan’s plan, which claims to slash $4 trillion over the next decade, has become a political lightning rod. In the recent special election in New York’s 26th district, Democrats used the Ryan plan as a political bludgeon, bashing the Republican candidate Jane Corwin for calling it “a terrific first step.” An early favorite, Corwin went on to lose to Democrat Kathy Hochul. According to a June poll from CNN, just 35 percent of respondents said they backed Ryan’s plan, while 58 percent opposed it. Even among conservatives, 53 percent of respondents said they disagreed with Ryan’s plan. In a matter of months, the plan has become too politically toxic to touch—a dilemma that pollsters had warned of in early discussions with GOP lawmakers.
As it stands, Santorum’s presidential bid is a long-shot, Hail Mary pass for a politician once described by a former aide as a “a Catholic missionary who happens to be in the Senate.” By embracing both far-right social and economic policies, Santorum is only steering his campaign farther into the margin—and away from any chance, however slim, of succeeding in the presidential race.“It should be legalized and taxed. Taxed. Yeah, ‘Gimme a pack of marijuana!’ But this other stuff is poison; acid’s poison, speed is poison, STP is poison, it’s all poison. But grass is nothing.” ~ Jack Kerouac > A record-high percentage of Americans — 61 percent — say they support marijuana legalization (washingtonpost.com)
Whenever I read a blog about cannabis, I feel like I am watching a presidential debate with only one candidate.
The blog will either demand to legalize the plant due to its magical properties, or will list the horrific impact it will have on society.
As always, the truth is neither here nor there. I never smoked weed in my youth; in fact, I judged those who did, which made them hide it from me. I got high for the first time when I was 35, and was immediately intrigued with the effect it had on my mind. So, I documented it in my journal.
Here is a simple breakdown of what I learned from a few years of occasional use of pot. I hope it will help demystify the ambiguity around the plant, especially amidst the increasing legalization we are experiencing (it is now recreationally legal in Colorado and Washington states).
1. It dries us up
Pot is a foreign substance; our bodies knows it and are trying to flush it down. The result, other than unbelievably long peeing, is dryness of the mouth, eyes and body. If you smoke—drinks tons of water. It will help to feel better the next day (like alcohol and hangover).
2. It impacts short term memory
Marijuana causes chemical lapses within the mind. This lack of synaptic continuity impacts short term memory. What this means is that when we go get something to eat we might wander around the kitchen for 10 minutes without knowing why we are there. We will also most likely have a hard time following a complicated movie or conversation… you get the point. Don’t worry—the effect is short lived. Short term memory will go back to normal once the effect subsides.
3. It can impact the ability to operate machinery
‘nuff said. And even if you disagree, ask yourself if it is worth the risk.
4. It can give us anxiety
On occasion, especially while consuming low-quality cannabis, we might freak out about something—it could be anything from a knock on the door, a scary scene in a movie or that the cat is about to attack. Just breathe deeply, remember that the feeling is exaggerated by being high, and focus of pleasant thoughts. Don’t smoke when already feeling anxious—it will make it worse.
5. It can be addictive
Like any substance which makes us feel good, some people may find Marijuana to be addictive. But then again, the same can be said of alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine, medications and yes, processed sugar. They can be addictive because they are altering substances—they help us forget about something which pains us. For example, I started smoking because I hated my job. People who smoke, or smoked in the past, find pot easier to quit than cigarettes or even sugar.
My |
Australia over the past decade. Sydney is now rated the "world's eighth-most important city" for people in that wealth bracket. Knight Frank estimates there are now 842 people in Sydney with net assets of $US30 million or more and another 588 in Melbourne. There's been similar growth in the number of Australian billionaires. A record 53 were included on last month's BRW rich list this year compared with 22 a decade ago. A study by Caroline Freund and Sarah Oliver from the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics has examined key characteristics of the world's billionaires, including Australia's growing band. It draws on two decades of data from Forbes' annual world's billionaires list.
Illustration: Simon Letch The Peterson Institute study says extreme wealth is increasing rapidly, despite slow global income growth. The latest global rich list includes a record 1826 US-dollar billionaires. One striking trend has been the surge of extreme wealth in emerging countries, especially China where the number of billionaires rose from 64 to 213 between 2010 and 2015. The ultra-rich in developing nations are no longer concentrated in the "resource and politically connected sectors of the past". Instead, a large and growing share of billionaires, especially in east Asia, have made their fortunes creating new and innovative products. The demography of billionaires is also starting to change. The latest list has more under-40s and more females than ever.
But perhaps the biggest shift over the past two decades has been the rise of self-made billionaires. Self-made wealth accounted for nearly 70 per cent of billionaire wealth in 2014, up from 45 per cent in 1996. The finance sector and tech companies have contributed to the growth in self-made billionaire wealth, especially in the US. The Peterson Institute study estimates 28 per cent of Australian billionaires inherited their wealth, which means Australian billionaires are more likely to be self-made than their European counterparts where 36 per cent inherited their fortunes. But Australian billionaires are much less likely to be self-made than in China where only 2 per cent of billionaire wealth is inherited. There are other marked differences across regions and countries. In emerging markets robust economic growth rates mean the average wealth of the five richest citizens is not growing as quickly as GDP. But in many advanced economies, especially a grouping of "Anglo countries" investigated by the researchers (consisting of US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), extreme wealth has been growing faster than GDP. This helps explain why economic inequality is being so hotly debated in those nations. It turns out Australia has a disproportionate share of the world's billionaires. We have about 0.33 per cent of the global population but account for 1.8 per cent of all billionaires, the research shows. And its finance and property - not mining - that has created more Australian billionaires than any other industry. The Peterson Institute paper says 31 per cent of all Australian US dollar billionaires in 2014 made their fortunes primarily in the finance and property sectors. That's more than three times the proportion in Europe (10 per cent) and well above the US (27 per cent). The advanced country average for the proportion of billionaires who made their fortuned in finance and property was 20 per cent.
Some economists think the world's billionaires will become increasingly clustered in large markets over time. Such a pattern is evident in Australia where the BRW rich list shows 33 of our 53 billionaires are based in either Sydney (17) or Melbourne (16). There's another distinctive trait of Australia's ultra-wealthy: they seem to really like living here. Knight Frank's wealth report says only 6 per cent of ultra-high net worth individuals in Australasia want to change their country of residence over the next decade – the equal lowest proportion of any global region. Australasia also had the lowest proportion of super-rich families sending, or planning to send, their children overseas for either secondary or tertiary education. So much for a class war. Ross Gittins is on leave.Hudly's Projector
Hudly's Glass Optical Combiner
Hudly OBD2 View
Hudly grabs vehicle information from your car’s diagnostic (OBD2) port. Your speed, remaining fuel, fuel efficiency (MPG), outside temperature, etc are displayed as large, clear visuals.
Use All of Your Favorite Mobile Apps on Hudly
Waze running on Hudly
Here we have Waze running on night mode, which clearly highlights the information you need. Route instructions are displayed within your field of view, reducing distractions. We love how Waze looks on Hudly.
Sygic Navigation on Hudly
Applications like Sygic have a HUD mode and work great with Hudly. The simple and elegant design displays your route, speed, speed limit, and direction arrows. The arrows look like they're glowing on the road, guiding you to your destination.
Torque on Hudly
Car buffs will love the use of Torque's gauges on Hudly. Instead of large physical gauges, you'll have a seamless heads-up display of all your car performance stats like HP & Torque, 0-60mph timing, and more.
Google Maps and Native Notifications
Google Maps is a powerful navigational tool that works well on Hudly. Your texts or notifications will also show up as they do natively on your phone.
Speedometer Apps Look Great!
We have partnered with DigiHUD, Ulysse Speedometer, Speedview and other applications to help improve the heads-up experience. You'll never need to look away from the road for your speed and even have visual notification of speed limits! These apps already look amazing on Hudly and we will continue to develop great heads-up tools with them.
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In-Car Video Demo
Hudly is Visible Even in Bright Light
Hudly works great under bright sunlight. A light sensitivity sensor automatically adjusts the projection brightness. The special optical glass helps improve reflection and reduce glare.
Hudly Works With All Cars & Phone Apps
Hudly works in any car with an OBD2 port or cigarette lighter adapter. It connects to the port to retrieve vehicle information like speed, RPMs, fuel, etc. All cars manufactured after 1996 have an OBD2 port. If your car does not have a compatible port, you can use a cigarette lighter adapter to connect.
Hudly uses an HDMI input to connect to the iPhone 4 and newer or Android devices with MHL compatibility. MHL compatibility can be checked here. iPhone users will need a lightning digital AV adapter. Hudly is an open platform so it will project any app on your phone.
Your phone will also be charged while connected to Hudly. Just as you would normally charge your phone in the car, connected to Hudly you will now also be able to project your phone.
Set Up Hudly in 3 Easy Steps
#1) Plug Hudly into your car’s diagnostic OBD2 port or cigarette lighter adapter. This powers Hudly and connects the device into your car.
#2) Use the included paper guide to align the projector and plug in the USB and HDMI cables.
#3) Use the included paper guide to align the glass optical combiner. This places Hudly in the optimal projection range and in your line of sight for proper heads-up use. For phone mirroring, connect to an MHL capable Android phone or AV out adapter for iPhone.
Product Specs Review
Works with iPhone 4 and later models, Android devices with MHL compatibility.
Includes OBD2 wire or cigarette lighter adapter
Micro USB port
Mini HDMI port
Built-in speaker
Light sensitivity sensor
HDMI + USB input means Miracast + Chromecast Capable
Please note that the iPhone lightning digital AV adapter is not included.
Manufacturing Timeline
Upon completion of our campaign on September 18, we will begin our manufacturing of Hudly. This should take about 1-2 months and shipping will take about 1 month. This puts us around a December delivery time frame. If we are all good, Santa will be able to deliver our presents before Christmas!This video still shows the video image captured by a Detroit Police officer's body camera during a recent arrest. The suspect's face has been intentionally blurred to protect his identity. (Photo: Detroit Police Department)
Detroit — City and police officials announced plans Tuesday to launch the nation’s first law enforcement video system that would integrate body cameras and in-car dashboard cameras.
The announcement makes Detroit the latest in a growing number of Michigan police departments to use body cameras, which experts say can exonerate officers falsely accused of wrongdoing or uphold citizen complaints about police misconduct. With controversies brewing across the country regarding the use of force by police officers, more departments are equipping officers with body cameras.
“Our goal is to build a police department where all interactions between officers and citizens are recorded,” Mayor Mike Duggan said. “Full transparency is the best way to build trust.”
Thirty-nine police departments in Michigan use body cameras or are looking into using them, according to the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police. Among those using them are Bay City, which approved them this week, as well as New Baltimore, Roseville, Canton Township and the Macomb Sheriff’s Office.
“There are definitely issues with body cameras,” said Canton Township Police Lt. Scott Hughesdon, whose agency began using cameras in June. “A lot of people will think Big Brother is being intrusive. But the whole point is to capture anything controversial. It will protect both citizens and officers.”
Ron Scott of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality said cameras are important but not foolproof. He urged Duggan to restore full authority to the Detroit Police Commission to “guarantee... certainty of punishment when police misbehave.”
“The police have been told that in many cases body cams will exonerate them,” Scott said in a statement. “But if the camera indeed shows instead that the officer is indeed acting in a way that is unlawful or contrary to police procedure, what will be the consequence to the officer?”
Detroit police officials will select a vendor and recommend a video system to the City Council and Detroit Board of Police Commissioners next month, Duggan said.
Only about half of the department’s 409 marked police cars have working dash cameras, but Duggan said during a press conference at police headquarters that the plan is to equip all cars with working cameras in the next 12 months. Also, beginning in early 2016, police officers will be issued body cameras, with full deployment within three years.
“I’m extremely excited... to bring in technology that enhances transparency and improves our relationship with the community,” said Police Chief James Craig, who has advocated the use of body cameras since he came to Detroit in 2013. “It’s no secret when you look across the country that many communities are struggling with their relationship with the police. This will give us an opportunity to foster goodwill with the public, and exonerate officers accused of misconduct.”
Tuesday’s announcement follows a 90-day test of three camera systems that began in March and involved 20 officers from the 11th Precinct. Officers spent 30 days testing each system, donated by Tase Co., Innovative Solutions, and Data 911.
“The officers have concluded that the technology works, and the city of Detroit is establishing as its goal to build a police department where every officer interaction is recorded,” Duggan said. “This fall, our officers will be testing an integrated dash cam product.
“We started out thinking there would be one dash cam system and one body cam system... but with the officers’ input, we think it may be possible to store it all on a single system,” Duggan said. “I believe we’ll be the first in the country to roll out an integrated system. I’m always nervous when you think about being the first in technology, but if it’s successful, you’ll see the rest of the country coming to Detroit to find out how to implement an integrated camera system.”
Buy Photo Detroit Police Officer John Siejutt, one of the officers who tested the body cam, talked about the new body cams and video in the squad cars for police officers during a press conference Tuesday at Detroit Police headquarters. (Photo: Charles V. Tines / The Detroit News)
Duggan said the dash cameras will cost about $350,000, which is already in the department’s budget. Fully equipping officers with body cameras and purchasing storage equipment will cost about $3 million, which would be paid for from the police budget and federal grants, Duggan said.
During the test at the 11th Precinct, a body camera caught a suspect throwing a gun out of a car window, said Officer John Siejutt, a Special Operations officer who participated in the pilot program.
“The video captured the perp throwing the gun to the ground, when he claimed he didn’t have a gun,” Siejutt said.
“It opened my eyes to a lot of things,” he said of wearing the device. “Everyone is out there with a cellphone... but now we can say we also have video, and we can tell the true story of what happened, and not just a snippet.”
The American Civil Liberties Union supports police body cameras, said Dan Korobkin, deputy legal director for the agency’s Detroit office.
“The ACLU is supportive of police departments using body cameras provided there are appropriate policies in place to make it clear when they should be used and to protect everyone’s privacy,” he said. “The overall results show that they’re helpful for both citizens and police officers.”
Assistant Police Chief James White said officials worked on policy changes to address issues such as privacy.
“We looked at some agencies that had body cams, looked at the best practices and then developed our own policies,” White said. “There’ll be considerations for different types of crimes. Complainants can ask officers in some cases to turn them off, but we don’t want officers to be able to shut off their cameras without following proper protocol.”
Duggan said Freedom of Information Act requests for body camera footage will be handled the same as requests for dashboard camera video. “FOIA law allows us to hold back on releasing personally sensitive stuff,” he said.
Robert Stevenson, former Livonia police chief and director of the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police, agreed there are still many questions about body cameras.
“Do we record 24/7? Or should we only record when there’s an incident? Things can happen pretty fast, and if an officer doesn’t get a chance to turn on the camera, some people will say we’re trying to hide something.
“But in a situation where an officer should be reaching for his gun, we don’t want him reaching to turn on his body camera.”
ghunter@detroitnews.com
(313) 222-2134
Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/1LiFiVRStarting from Barman 1.6.1, PostgreSQL standby servers can rely on an “infinite” basin of WAL files and finally pre-fetch batches of WAL files in parallel from Barman, speeding up the restoration process as well as making the disaster recovery solution more resilient as a whole.
The master, the backup and the standby
Before we start, let’s define our playground. We have our PostgreSQL primary server, called angus. A server with Barman, called barman and a third server with a reliable PostgreSQL standby, called chris – for different reasons, I had to rule out the following names bon, brian, malcolm, phil, cliff and obviously axl. ;)
angus is a high workload server and is continuously backed up on barman, while chris is a hot standby server with streaming replication from angus enabled. This is a very simple, robust and cheap business continuity cluster that you can easily create with pure open source PostgreSQL, yet capable of reaching over 99.99% uptime in a year (according to our experience with several customers at 2ndQuadrant).
What we are going to do is to instruct chris (the standby) to fetch WAL files from barman whenever streaming replication with angus is not working, as a fallback method, making the entire system more resilient and robust. Most typical examples of these problems are:
temporary network failure between chris and angus ; prolonged downtime for chris which causes the standby to go out of sync with angus.
For further information, please refer to the Getting WAL files from Barman with ‘get-wal’ blog article that I wrote some time ago.
Technically, we will be configuring the standby server chris to remotely fetch WAL files from barman as part of the restore_command option in the recovery.conf file. Since the release of Barman 1.6.1 we can take advantage of parallel pre-fetching of WAL files, which exploits network bandwidth and reduces recovery time of the standby.
Requirements
This scenario has been tested on Linux systems only, and requires:
Barman >= 1.6.1 on the barman server
server Python with argparse module installed (available as a package for most Linux distributions) on chris
module installed (available as a package for most Linux distributions) on Public Ssh key of the postgres @ chris user in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file of the barman @ barman user (procedure known as exchange of Ssh public key)
Installation
As postgres user on chris download the script from our Github repository in your favourite directory (e.g. ~postgres/bin, or /var/lib/pgsql/bin directly) with:
cd ~postgres/bin wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/2ndquadrant-it/barman/master/scripts/barman-wal-restore chmod +700 barman-wal-restore
Then verify it is working:
./barman-wal-restore -h
You will get this output message:
usage: barman-wal-restore [-h] [-V] [-U USER] [-s SECONDS] [-p JOBS] [-z] [-j] BARMAN_HOST SERVER_NAME WAL_NAME WAL_DEST This script will be used as a'restore_command' based on the get-wal feature of Barman. A ssh connection will be opened to the Barman host. positional arguments: BARMAN_HOST The host of the Barman server. SERVER_NAME The server name configured in Barman from which WALs are taken. WAL_NAME this parameter has to be the value of the '%f' keyword (according to'restore_command'). WAL_DEST this parameter has to be the value of the '%p' keyword (according to'restore_command'). optional arguments: -h, --help show this help message and exit -V, --version show program's version number and exit -U USER, --user USER The user used for the ssh connection to the Barman server. Defaults to 'barman'. -s SECONDS, --sleep SECONDS sleep for SECONDS after a failure of get-wal request. Defaults to 0 (nowait). -p JOBS, --parallel JOBS Specifies the number of files to peek and transfer in parallel. Defaults to 0 (disabled). -z, --gzip Transfer the WAL files compressed with gzip -j, --bzip2 Transfer the WAL files compressed with bzip2
If you get this output, the script has been installed correctly. Otherwise, you are most likely missing the argparse module in your system.
Configuration and setup
Locate the recovery.conf in chris and properly set the restore_command option:
restore_command = "/var/lib/pgsql/bin/barman-wal-restore -p 8 -s 10 barman angus %f %p"
The above example will connect to barman as barman user via Ssh and execute the get-wal command on the angus PostgreSQL server backed up in Barman. The script will pre-fetch up to 8 WAL files at a time and, by default, store them in a temporary folder (currently fixed: /var/tmp/barman-wal-restore ).
In case of error, it will sleep for 10 seconds. Using the help page you can learn more about the available options and tune them in order to best fit in your environment.
Verification
All you have to do now is restart the standby server on chris and check from the PostgreSQL log that WALs are being fetched from Barman and restored:
Jul 15 15:57:21 chris postgres[30058]: [23-1] LOG: restored log file "00000001000019EA0000008A" from archive
You can also peek in the /var/tmp/barman-wal-restore directory and verify that the script has been executed.
Even Barman logs contain traces of this activity.
Conclusions
This very simple Python script that we have written and is available under GNU GPL 3 makes the PostgreSQL cluster more resilient, thanks to the tight cooperation with Barman.
It not only provides a stable fallback method for WAL fetching, but it also protects PostgreSQL standby servers from the infamous 255 error returned by Ssh in the case of network problems – which is different than SIGTERM and therefore is treated as an exception by PostgreSQL, causing the recovery process to abort (see the “Archive Recovery Settings” section in the PostgreSQL documentation).
Stay tuned with us and with Barman’s development as we continue to improve disaster recovery solutions for PostgreSQL. We would like to thank our friends at Subito.it, Navionics and Jobrapido for helping us with the development of this important feature, as well as many others 2ndQuadrant customers who we cannot mention due to non disclosure agreements but still continue to support our work.
Side note: hopefully I won’t have to change the way I name servers due to AC/DC continuously changing their formation. ;)Climate change isn't just a problem for future generations — it's already affecting broad swaths of the United States.
That's the upshot of the National Climate Assessment, a massive new US government report detailing the current and future impacts of global warming around the country. The report is particularly useful in detailing how specific regions and sectors will be affected — and outlining some possible ways we could adapt.
There's a lot of information in the report, but here are nine highlights:
1) Most of the country is getting hotter
This map is the simplest way to see global warming in action. Since the 19th century, average US temperatures have risen by 1.3°F to 1.9°F. (Note, though, there have been some fluctuations here and there: in the 1960s and 1970s, temperatures dipped, partly due to the cooling effect of sulfate pollution that was eventually cleaned up.)
Recent decades have been even hotter: since 1991, virtually every part of the country has been warming, with the biggest temperature increases occurring in the winter and spring.
2) The heaviest storms are getting wetter
As the atmosphere heats up, it can hold more water vapor. That, in turn, can lead to heavier precipitation — although this varies region by region.
A warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor
Since the 1950s, the amount of rain or snow falling in heavy storms has increased in the Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, Great Plains, and Alaska — more than can be explained by natural variation. (It's less clear that there's a significant trend in the Southwest, Northwest, or Hawaii.)
By the way, this is just heavy precipitation — the report doesn't find any trend in the United States for a few other severe weather events, including tornadoes or hurricanes or even floods.
3) Sea levels are rising particularly fast along the East Coast
Sea levels have risen, on average, about 8 inches around the world in the past century. But in some places, the ocean is rising even faster.
Sea levels are rising even faster than the global average
In the Northeast, for instance, sea levels have already risen about a foot over the past century. Levels are rising faster partly due to "land subsidence" — coastal land is actually sinking due to development or groundwater pumping. There's also a theory that changes in ocean circulation are also playing a role here.
Either way, more sea-level rise means more coastal flooding — particularly when storms strike. The report notes that two feet of sea-level rise would triple the rate of dangerous flooding throughout the Northeast.
4) The Southeast is getting more 95°F days
In the Southeast, the number of days above 95°F has been increasing since 1970. (The number of nights above 75°F has also increased.)
Expect even more sweltering days if the planet keeps warming. As the map above shows, if greenhouse-gas emissions keep rising unchecked, the number of days above 95°F in the DC region could triple by mid-century. Florida would see an especially sharp rise in extremely hot days.
5) Snowpack is dwindling in the Southwest — putting water supplies at risk
The Southwest's water supply relies on snow melting slowly from the mountains during the spring and summer. Over the last 50 years, however, a combination of climate change and increased dust and soot have been disrupting this system — there's less snow falling in the mountains, and melting is happening more quickly.
As the map above shows, that snowpack is expected to keep dwindling — posing risks to the water supplies needed to maintain the Southwest's cities, farms, and ecosystems. Many states will have to figure out better ways to conserve water if they want to adapt.
6) Farming in the Midwest has gotten a boost — for now
Climate change hasn't been all bad so far. The report notes that warmer temperatures have lengthened the growing season in the Midwest by almost two weeks since 1950. What's more, higher concentrations of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere have helped boost plant growth.
Those benefits are expected to last another few decades. But climate change will also have negative impacts that will start to hurt agriculture. An increased number of extremely hot days could damage crops. And heat waves during pollination could reduce corn and soy yields.
As such, the report recommends that farmers in the Midwest start preparing for projected climate impacts now — before the negative impacts start dominating.
7) Rivers in the Northwest are shifting in strength
The report notes that the flow in many of the Northwest's rivers has shifted over time — thanks to increased rain on the coasts and decreased snowmelt in the mountains.
The region will have to adapt. Some regions will see increased flood risk in the spring as a result of climate change. Other regions, by contrast, will have to deal with decreased river flow — that could hamper the effectiveness of hydroelectric dams or put a strain on farms in the region. Reduced river flow could also threaten key freshwater species like salmon and trout.
8) Summer sea ice in the Arctic is vanishing
The map above shows the reduction in summer sea ice in the Arctic as the planet has been warming.
With less sea ice, coastal towns in the Arctic are more exposed to erosion
That has all sorts of surprising effects: The Arctic is now becoming more accessible for shipping and oil and gas exploration. Companies are more likely to try to drill for oil and natural gas in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas (which, in turn, raises the risk of oil spills).
Less sea ice also exposes coastal communities to heavier waves from storms — increasing the risk of erosion.
The disappearance of sea ice also has consequences for certain species. Declining sea ice is associated with smaller polar bears, who have less ice to hunt seals. Walruses also depend on sea ice as a platform for giving birth and nursing — forcing them onto land.
9) Alaska's permafrost is thawing out
Alaska is thawing out. Permafrost along the state's coast has already warmed 6°F to 8°F at 3.3 foot depth since the mid-1980s.
About 70% of Alaska's permafrost is vulnerable to thawing
That's a big deal if it continues: About 80 percent of Alaska currently sits on frozen permafrost. And about 70 percent of that land is vulnerable to sinking as the state thaws out.
That sinking ground could cost Alaska an extra $3.6 billion to $6.1 billion just to maintain its buildings, pipelines, roads, and airports over the next 20 years. Thawing will also disrupt Alaska's water supplies and sewage systems — particularly in rural areas. Oil and gas exploration could also be hindered.
There's one other crucial aspect of this to watch. Permafrost soils throughout the Arctic (not just in Alaska) contain about twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere. As those soils thaw, more carbon-dioxide and methane will escape into the air — further warming the planet. While the report doesn't give any hard estimates here, it warns that this effect is likely to increase in the decades ahead.in the kitchen
IN THE KITCHEN WITH MICHAEL CHERNOW
Co-owner of The Meatball Shop shares one of his favorite recipes - prepared in his Brooklyn apartment, and made from vegetables grown in his upstate backyard.
TARIQ DIXON March 11, 2015 | BY
It's been five years since Michael Chernow founded The Meatball Shop with his lifelong buddy Dan Holzman. Inspired by meals he improvised while working at an Italian restaurant, the clever concept immediately evoked a rare fanaticism, especially uncommon for first-time restaurateurs. From day one, the original LES location had a perpetual line out the door (I personally remember skipping out of work and venturing halfway across town to avoid the long dinner waits). Six locations later, it's safe to say that the concept is no fleeting novelty.
The restaurant's success sounds almost like a fairy tale, especially after hearing the owners' endearing backstory. Having started in the food business together at age 13, the friends daringly poured their lives' savings into a shared dream - one 20+ years in the making.
Fast-forward half a decade, business is still flourishing, and life outside of work seems to be going equally well.
Just a few days ago, Michael, along with wife Donna, welcomed a new addition to their family - son Finnley Hudson Chernow. And last summer, in advance of the expanding family, Mike and Donna purchased a second home Upstate, where they pass quiet weekends together, and tend to acres of farmland. Since launching The Meatball Shop, Michael has caught a bit of an entrepreneurial bug, working on a series of new projects, including a restaurant concept called Seamore, opening soon in Little Italy.
We recently caught up with Mike in his Williamsburg apartment, as he prepared a farm fresh salad of Tuscan Kale, Delicata Squash and Wine Sap apples, all grown in his own backyard. While we dine, the native New Yorker reflects on five years at The Meatball Shop and his newfound life as a part-time country boy.
Read more to learn the one of the restaurateur's favorite recipes, and catch a peek of his Brooklyn apartment.The left-wing newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur has published details of secret planning the French elite had done in case Marine Le Pen won the presidency.It first of all assumed that there would be massive civil disorder."Far-left movements, more or less well-established, will no doubt seek to organise demonstrations some of which may result in serious disorder."Two days before the first round of the election, all police chiefs were asked for information about their anti-riot equipment and its readiness for use.As the election went on, private warnings were given about leftists stockpiling fireworks, mortars and weapons that could have inflicted serious casualties.The most extraordinary element of the plan was the intention to force Marine Le Pen to keep the then current Socialist prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve until the next legislative elections. He would simply have refused to leave. The state would therefore be effectively paralysed with one sole priority: maintaining public order.This LED shootout compares 28 lights, ranging in price from $599 to $10K. It also introduces the science of LEDs.
[Editor's Note: No Film School asked Timur Civan to conduct an exhaustive LED shootout.]
Last year, I compared 11 LEDs on this site, merely out of curiosity. I was looking to buy LEDs, but, having used some of the older classic LED panels, I was concerned about the quality of color; LEDs at the time were not known for color accuracy. There were tons of reviews online, but very few direct comparisons between the brands, and not much actual data about the color quality available. So I borrowed a C700 from my friends at Sekonic and went to B&H—the only place with a showroom full of LEDs—and I started metering the lights. I purchased the brand I thought performed the best and shared my findings here.
LED lights for filmmaking are trying to achieve a few things: match Tungsten, match daylight, or create RGB blends to for pure colors.
This year, as a follow-up, I wanted to go a bit more in-depth to seek accurate results with a wider variety of lights. Not everything on my wishlist made it to the set, but we got a wide range of lights from all price points, covering the major manufacturers—both legacy and newcomers.
What to Expect
In this post, you'll watch videos of the tests and then have the chance to read some of my thoughts on each light. The videos are self-explanatory, for the most part, but here is a quick breakdown:
The Main Test
The first video starts with the control light for each group, daylight and Tungsten. Then, it cycles through the different lights, one after another, full screen with the C700 readings displayed on the right side, so you can see what is happening with regards to the spectrograph and magenta/green readings.
Direct Comparison
The second video is a direct, side-by-side comparison of each light versus the control. For example, the daylight or Tungsten control shot will be on the left side of the screen, and the LEDs will cycle through as they did with the first video, but this way you can directly compare the color quality versus the control group. This is where you really see the differences.
Color Correction
The third video is similar to the second, but this time, halfway through each LED clip, the LED images will be manually white balanced with the dropper tool using the gray card to neutralize the color. This third video is intended to show you the possibilities of what the light can look like when simply corrected to neutral in post. At the top of the "data" section, you can download R3D stills of each light as well as the Waveforms and RGB data sheet if you want to examine anything more closely. Your eyes will be the best judge overall. Do your best to watch on a calibrated monitor.
The Lights
Here are the lights we tested (in ascending price order). More specs for each are listed at the bottom of the post:
The Sun - Free ARRI: 1k Tungsten - $599 Aputure: Light Storm LS-1 - $695 Ikan: Lyra LB10 Bi-Color - $799 Westcott: Flex X-bracket Bi-Color - $899 Hive: Wasp 100-C Omni - $999 Westcott: SkyLux - $999.90 Dracast: LED1000 PRO Bi Color - $1220.63 Rayzr: 7 - $1,269 Litepanels: Astra BiColor - $1,350 Quasar Science: QLED - $1400 ($250 per bulb, we had an array of 4 with Housing) F&V: Ultra Color K8000 2x1 BiColor - $1,679 Light and Motion: Stella 10,000 LED - $1970.80 Fiilex: Q500-AC 5" Fresenel - $1,995 BB&S Lighting: PipeLine Remote Phosphor 4' LED Bank - $1,997.45 Cineo: Maverick (Tungsten & Daylight units): $2,150,50 Zylight: F8 LED Fresnel : $2,250 BB&S Lighting: Area 48 - $2,269.95 ARRI: L5-DT Daylight - $2,338 Kino Flo: Select 30 DMX - $2,386.88 Mole Richardson: Junior LED 200W Tungsten DMX - $2,409.95 Fiilex: Matrix Bi Color Panel Light - $2,495 Hive: Wasp Plasma Par - $3,279 Outsight Creamsource: Doppio+ Bender Bi Color 2x1 LED - $3,695 Cineo: HSX Color Tunable Fixture - $3,735.33 Kino Flo: Celeb 401 DMX - $4,628.95 ARRI: Skypanel S60-C LED Softlight - $5,625 ARRI: M18 HMI - $10,515
The Meter (and how to read it)
The top row, CCT, is your measured color temperature. The CCi reading below that is the magenta or green correction level. It's telling you though an internal lookup table what gels or camera filter to add to correct it, not what is there. For example, if it reads.7M, it is essentially saying the image has a bit of green, and will tell you what filter you need to correct it on the filter page (the closer to "0" the better). None of the lights tested went beyond 1M/G on the meter. That means very small corrections—less than an 1/8th +- G. Just keep in mind: the smaller the number, the better.
Next up: the Spectrograph, a graph plotted on two axes. The horizontal is the wavelength ranging from 380nm (nanometers) to 780nm. The vertical height is the saturation of that specific wavelength. Theoretically, a perfect light source would be a full rectangular block of color, fading slowly through the rainbow from blue on the left, to red on the right. Real life doesn't quite work that way, so you will see waves, spikes, and bumps in the curve indicating that certain wavelengths are being represented differently. The atmosphere, pollution, and water vapor all affect the sun's rays, hence the slight warbling of the graph. I suspect that if you took the C700 into the vacuum of space, the whole graph would be a rectangular block of solid spectrum.
We are interested in the quality of "white light" color being output by an LED system, and how closely it can mimic Tungsten or daylight sources.
The last thing to look at is the CRI, which is not critically important here. I go into why a bit later, but essentially, the very nature of the way CRI registers color is that it averages the illumination on the 15 color chips you on the bottom bar graph. It doesn't really measure the way LEDs work. All LEDs have a discontinuous spectrum that can fool a CRI meter. That said, it's not altogether useless—just not refined.
The Videos
The Method
LED lights for filmmaking are trying to achieve a few things: match Tungsten, match daylight, or create RGB blends to for pure colors. In this examination, we are interested in the quality of "white light" color being output by an LED system, and how closely it can mimic Tungsten or daylight sources.
I set out to achieve this by shooting two control groups: daylight and Tungsten. In the frame is a standard color checker chart, gray card, white card, and three live models. |
that embraced him, Iverson is gone doing... whatever it is he's doing, and franchise big man Drummond just keeps giving us more reasons to love him.
The season can't get here fast enough.
H/T to stevenyc and freywagg who had it first in comments.An OECD report released on Monday shows that for the first time in over a decade, the EU has fallen behind the US as a destination for immigrants. The study finds that the prolonged economic downturn has tarnished the EU's allure among those looking to improve their lives.
“Countries would benefit more from immigration if they consider migrants as a resource rather than a problem, and integration policies as an investment,” said OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria, launching the International Migration Outlook 2014 report in Paris.
Just over 52,000 migrants settled in Denmark last year, a 20 percent increase over 2012 and an increase of 73 percent since 2007.
The largest group of immigrants in Denmark continues to be persons of Turkish origin, who make up 9.8 percent of all immigrants and their descendants. The next largest groups are Poles (5.8%), Germans (5.1%) and Iraqis (4.9%), while the fasting growing groups are Romanians and Poles.
The number of resident permits granted by Denmark was up in 2013, ending five years of steady decline. Of the 64,600 residence permits granted in 2013, 50 percent went to EU/EEA citizens
According to the OECD, nearly 30 percent of Denmark’s foreign-born residents in 2013 are highly-educated, which the organisation says is in line with global trends. The OECD says that the number of highly-educated immigrants has increased by 70 percent since 2000 and that today just over 30 percent of all immigrants to OECD countries are university-educated.
In many cases however those educations are not being put to use in the migrants’ new countries, with the OECD reporting that immigrants are more than 50 percent more likely than natives to be over qualified for their jobs. That gap is even more pronounced in Denmark, where 28 percent of the foreign-born population is overqualified for their jobs, compared to just 11 percent of the native-born population.
In absolute terms, Germany is the biggest magnet in Europe for immigrants. During 2013, migration to Germany recorded a double-digit increase to over 450,000 people, its fourth consecutive annual rise. Three-quarters of all immigrants received by Germany are from other EU countries, making the country the second destination in the OECD, after the United States.
Overall the largest source country for immigrants was China, with nearly ten percent of all immigrants, followed by Romania (5.6 percent) and Poland (5.4 percent).
The number of asylum seekers in the OECD area rose by 20 percent, with most coming from Syria. Per capita, the largest host country for refugees was Sweden.
“Migration policies should be a priority for OECD countries, and integration policies should be seen as the best possible investment in terms of growth, social cohesion and well-being,” said Gurria.
“The short and long-term costs of standing still in the face of rapidly changing needs are high. Policy makers need to lead an open and informed debate to build confidence and ensure everyone benefits,” he added.An injured firefighter grimaces as he is examined in a hospital following explosions in northeastern China's Tianjin municipality, Thursday, Aug. 13, 2015. Chinese state media reported huge explosions at the Tianjin port late Wednesday. (Chinatopix Via AP) CHINA OUT http://eapcontent.ap.org/jpg/2015/20150813/11/c07d6306383afb247e0f6a7067007b2a.jpg?contentid=c07d6306383afb247e0f6a7067007b2a/fmt=jpg/role=Preview/reldt=2015-08-13T11:43:16/media=Photo/recordid=bf49d67126684ff099919de6f2a2c6a0/itemid=4a0552282f074c89a9f4effff25e3990/objfilename=preview.jpg/authToken=eNotikEKAyEMAF%2bkRBOTXoR%2bRV0XPHRddKU95PHdQi8zDIzWT2QMEtALkQCAJ2EtLRaQjRHY4AOT2bMnIxV2w0mA71GyT7pmLP24Rsvr6mM%2b85rtqPPGbFsdtvSXnu%2f4TxdA2xmZrAO27mcXvs%2fRKBQ%3d&token=1439730647_013C2F210F51FC30CB8F5F74CB86460D TIANJIN, China (AP) — The latest on the explosions in China's port city of Tianjin (all times local):
7:30 p.m.
The Tianjin government says the death toll has risen to 50 after the huge, fiery blasts at a port warehouse for hazardous chemicals.
Twelve of the dead were firefighters from among the more than 1,000 sent to fight the blaze.
The municipal government said 701 people were injured, including 71 in serious condition. It gave no figure for the missing.
___
2:30 p.m.
The fire is mostly under control, and the Tianjin local government says further efforts to put out flames have been suspended on orders of the central government so that a team of chemical experts can assess hazardous materials on site, dangers to the environment and how best to proceed.
___
1:45 p.m.
The 12 firefighters who are among the 44 dead came from more than 1,000 who were sent to fight the blaze set off by the explosions shortly before midnight, according to the official Xinhua News agency.
It says 520 people are being treated in hospitals, 66 of them seriously injured.
___
1:35 p.m.
The official Xinhua News agency says the death toll has risen to 44, 12 of them firefighters.
___
11 a.m.
As is customary during disasters, Chinese authorities are trying to keep a tight control over information.
Police are keeping journalists and bystanders away with a cordon as many as a few kilometers (miles) from the site. On China's popular microblogging platform of Weibo, some users complain that their posts about the blasts have been deleted, and the number of searchable posts on the disaster fluctuated, in a sign that authorities are manipulating or placing limits on the number of posts.
Photos taken by bystanders and circulating on microblogs show a gigantic fireball high in the sky, with a mushroom-cloud. Other photos on state media outlets showed a sea of fire that painted the night sky bright orange, with tall plumes of smoke.
___
6 a.m.
There were scenes of devastation as dawn broke over the northeastern Chinese city of Tianjin after huge explosions rocked the port city later Wednesday night. Windows were blown out of high rise apartments and office buildings were destroyed. A fireball appears to have swept through a parking lot of 1,000 new Renault cars, with the paint burned off and the cars left charred.
__
5 a.m.
Government officials and state media say that the massive explosions at a warehouse for dangerous materials in the northeastern Chinese port of Tianjin killed at least 17 people and injured hundreds, including 32 in serious condition. The explosions late Wednesday knocked doors off buildings in the area and shattered windows up to several kilometers (miles) away.
__
2:45 a.m.
Police in the Chinese port city of Tianjin say at least seven people have been killed in explosions sparked at a warehouse for dangerous materials.
The state-run Beijing News said on its website that that between 300 and 400 people had been admitted to hospitals in the city, east of Beijing. It says the explosions shattered windows and knocked off doors of buildings in the area.
Police in Tianjin said an initial blast took place late Wednesday night in shipping containers at a warehouse for hazardous materials owned by a logistics company.Reduction would save £28 per year to standard household bill but critics call for deeper cuts branding it another move in ‘a phoney price war’
SSE has become the latest of the large energy suppliers to cut its prices by reducing the cost of household gas by 4.1%.
It said the cut would save £28 a year on the typical gas bill. SSE has also pledged not to increase prices for 7m customers, until July 2016 at the earliest by extending the freeze it introduced last year by six months.
SSE is the fifth of the big six energy companies to reduce gas prices, following cuts from E.ON, British Gas, Scottish Power and npower.
Its reduction is smaller than all those announced so far, apart from E.ON’s 3.5% reduction, which took effect earlier than others on 13 January.
SSE will lower prices on 30 April, whereas cuts at other companies take effect by the end of February at the latest. On Friday, npower announced it would reduce household gas prices by 5.1% from 16 February.
SSE said the way it buys gas in wholesale markets lets it give customers greater long-term certainty than other suppliers.
“Although this can mean reductions to wholesale prices may take slightly longer to have an impact, customers know that they will benefit from price reductions without having to worry about prices going back up before July 2016,” the company said.
EDF is the only power company not to have announced household price reductions after the halving of the oil price cut the cost of gas that companies buy in the market.
Consumer groups have called on energy suppliers to pass on more of the reduction in wholesale prices to consumers while Citizens Advice has branded the announcements as a “phoney price war”. The companies have said the wholesale price only makes up about half the standard gas bill.
Ann Robinson, director of consumer policy at price comparison site uSwitch.com, said: “It looked as though the gas bill reductions were slowly becoming more generous, but it’s disappointing that SSE has not reduced its prices further or sooner. Energy companies need to take greater steps forward to help ease the pressure on homes trying to make ends meet.”Washington (CNN) Russian airstrikes in Syria could happen at any time, a U.S. official with knowledge of the latest intelligence told CNN.
"They could start at any moment," the official said. "They are ready."
After several days of Russian familiarization flights, there is no reason they could not begin, the official added. And Russian drones have been collecting potential targeting information in their flights. But the U.S. doesn't know what the Russians have in mind and when they will make a decision on airstrikes.
Four Russian SU-34 Fullback fighters are now at the Latakia air base, and more than 600 Russian troops are in place.
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook told reporters Tuesday that Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter directed his staff to "open lines of communication with Russia on de-confliction."
The timing of these discussions is to be worked out in the coming days. The purpose of the discussions is "to ensure the safety of coalition air crews," he said.
Cook added that the two nations have common ground when it comes to fighting ISIS, also known as ISIL, with Carter making clear that "the goal should be to take the fight to ISIL and not to defend the Assad regime."
Russia continues to position itself to potentially launch airstrikes in Syria -- but their movements suggest that their targets are something other than ISIS, according to U.S. officials.
"We see some very sophisticated air defenses going into those airfields. We see some very sophisticated air-to-air aircraft going into these airfields. I have not seen ISIL flying any airplanes that require SA15s or SA22s. I have not seen ISIL flying any airplanes that require sophisticated air-to-air capabilities," Gen. Phillip Breedlove, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, said on Monday.
"I'm looking at the capabilities and the capacities that are being created and I determine from that what might be their intent. These very sophisticated air defense capabilities are not about ISIL. They're about something else," he concluded.
Separately, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work confirmed to the Senate Tuesday that Russia has violated a missile treaty with the United States but indicated that the administration didn't plan to take any action at present.
New Hampshire Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte asked Work at a hearing whether he thought the Russians had breached the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty governing the elimination of medium-range missiles.
"We believe very strongly that they did," he responded. But he also said, "This is still in discussions and we have not decided on any particular action at this point," noting that the U.S. has been in contact with the Russians over the issue.
JUST WATCHED Iraq agrees to deal with Russia, Iran and Syria Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Iraq agrees to deal with Russia, Iran and Syria 01:14
Meanwhile, America's own efforts to turn the tide in Syria have faltered once again.
The Pentagon has stopped moving new recruits from Syria to its training centers in Jordan and Turkey to train and equip moderate rebels to fight ISIS, a U.S. defense official told CNN Tuesday. The deeply troubled program has several dozen fighters in training right now, but new fighters will not be brought in until the White House makes a decision on how it wants to change the effort.
Several options are being considered, including having the rebels train to provide assistance in calling in airstrikes and conducting communications.
The official described the action as a "pause" in the effort until a way ahead is decided. Also paused for now is vetting of Syrians who say they want to join the effort.
Russian President Vladimir Putin mocked the stumbling train-and-equip program in his address to the United Nations Monday.
Putin and Obama, who were each confrontational toward the other in their morning speeches, then met to discuss Syria and Ukraine later in the day.
"We have clarity on their objectives," one senior administration official said after the meeting. "Their objectives are to go after ISIL and to support the government."
Defense officials have previously told CNN that the U.S. believes Moscow may fear that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad may not be able to retain power in the war-torn country and wants to be in position to be able to support a proxy should the situation collapse.
Russia is also a close ally of Assad and may want to bolster him, while the U.S. has repeatedly called for him to go in order to resolve the five-year civil war.
U.S. intelligence has observed the possible staging of multiple rocket launch systems at Russian ports, which could be loaded onto ships bound for Syria. It has also observed a small number of Russian long-range bombers being moved into airfields in the southern part of Russia, which could give them a long-range heavy bomber capability in Syria, according to the officials.
Syria and Russia have also established a coordination center in the Hamah province, though its purpose remains unclear, officials said.
Moscow is also sending drones in the southwest Idlib, Hamah and Latakia areas to gather reconnaissance and intelligence -- though none of those regions are near ISIS positions.
The new developments continue a pattern of strategic buildup for Russia in and near Syria. In recent weeks, Russia has moved aircraft, tanks, artillery and armored vehicles into Syria, though its objective in the region remains murky.
The intelligence on Russia's actions make clear that the U.S. is dedicating a substantial amount of satellite and eavesdropping capabilities to monitoring the developments around the clock.Tools’ action will cause an opposite reaction in Rosetta’s Philae lander, perhaps nudging it into a more sunlit position
Scientists have begun activating a drill and hammer on board the robotic comet probe Philae in an attempt to move it into sunlight so that its solar panels can be charged.
Time is running out for the European Space Agency’s lander. Since its bumpy triple touchdown on Wednesday, the spacecraft has been resting on its side, lodged in the shadows of a cliff or large boulder.
Philae has been receiving just 1.5 hours of sunlight instead of the expected 6-7 hours. This is not enough to charge the secondary batteries. With an initial battery life of about 60 hours, Philae’s mission could be over in less than 20 hours.
The primary mission objective of analysing the composition of the comet was designed to be achievable within this timeframe but landing on its side has made things difficult. On Thursday, the lander sent back historic first images taken from the surface of a comet.
A communications window opened on Friday morning and contact was re-established with the lander. More science data has been collected and sent to Earth, as well as telemetry data detailing the lander’s health.
A second communications window will open tonight, but Paolo Ferri, Esa’s Head of mission operations, European Space Operations Centre, said this morning that there was no guarantee that Philae’s primary battery would still be charged by then.
Scientists have begun to activate the lander’s drill. Designed to extract sub-surface samples for analysis, it will be a risky manoeuvre. Philae is not anchored to the surface, and the rotation of the drill will cause an equal and opposite reaction on the lander. It could make Philae do a cartwheel.
Then, as the drill presses into the surface, it could push the lander away. Either of these consequences could move Philae into a better position for receiving sunlight, or they could topple the craft and end the mission.
Another instrument deployed by the lander overnight is MUPUS (Multi-Purpose Sensors for Surface and Subsurface Science) which hammers into the ground to measure the strength of the surface.
If Philae is still alive after the drilling, then more radical action could be taken to try to move it. “We have four systems that could move the lander,” said Jean-Pierre Bibring, lead lander scientist at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, Université Paris Sud, France.
One possibility is to move the landing legs. According to Stephan Ulamec, Philae lander manager, DLR, these could be used to try to hop the lander into the sunlight. But one leg is sticking up into space rather than in contact with the surface, so there might not be enough spring in Philae’s step to achieve this.
Finally, in desperation, Bibring says they could even try re-firing the harpoons and thruster system that malfunctioned on landing day to jolt Philae into a new position.
Fred Jansen, Rosetta mission manager, European Space Agency, European Space Research and Technology Centre, struck a philosophical note, saying: “It has been absolutely fantastic. Of course you want the mission to last forever but there is a limited amount of sunlight.”
Meanwhile, Esa is still trying to establish Philae’s exact final landing spot. This is being done with the radar system on Rosetta and the OSIRIS camera.
The radar system, called CONSERT, can be used like a GPS satellite on Earth but because Rosetta is just one satellite, it takes longer to extract a precise location. On Earth, satnav systems usually coordinate three or more GPS signals.
Regardless of what happens to Philae, the main Rosetta mission, which analyses the comet from orbit continues for the next 20 months.Imagine this: You’re an elderly man driving along a quiet suburban road with your wife. You change lanes in front of another driver. The other driver immediately begins tailing you closely and, over the course of a ten minute drive, you can’t shake him off, even when you tap your brakes and slow down. As the road narrows from four lanes to two, you keep driving and he keeps tailing you. You don’t call the police, because there’s nothing yet to report.
Eventually, you turn onto your street and, to your unpleasant surprise, that other car keeps following you. You get to your house, open the garage door using your automatic door opening, and drive into the garage as quickly as possible — only to that other driver follow you there too. When you try to close the garage door, it actually bounces off that other car’s hood before closing.
As soon as you’re in the house, you grab your legal gun (one of 50 that you own) because you can see the other car’s driver advancing on your front porch. You tell him to go away, but he doesn’t. You fire a warning shot into a bush, and he keeps coming. Finally, you shoot at him. It takes two shots, one hitting the other fellow in the abdomen, to finally make him stop.
That’s what happened to 72-year-old James Simon, a physician, who ended shooting 70-year-old William Osenton. It was then left to a Marin County Superior Court judge to determine whether to charge Simon with manslaughter for the shooting. Osenton had little to say in the matter, since he claims to remember only the fact that, earlier in the day, he’d been in the hospital for a routine stress test.
This being Marin County, the District Attorney is very gung ho to press charges. Surprisingly, though, after a two-day preliminary hearing, Superior Court Judge Kelly Simmons declines to press charges:
Simmons ruled against the prosecution, ruling that Simon’s actions were not unreasonable under the circumstances.
The case is a really stunning victory for gun rights, because the judge rejected completely the DA’s claim that a homeowner cannot use guns to protect himself and his family until he has exhausted all other options:
During closing arguments Tuesday afternoon, [District Attorney Edward] Berberian said Simon could have locked himself in the home and called police rather than seek a confrontation. Berberian said Simon’s weapons supply — which included more than 50 guns throughout the house — suggested he was “hypersensitive” and had a victimization complex that led him to take unreasonably deadly action. “It was a bad judgment call, it was the wrong judgment call, and there has to be a standard,” Berberian said. But defense attorney Charles Dresow said it was Osenton who made the bad choices. He said Simon had a constitutionally guaranteed right to protect himself, his family and his property. “This is a clear case of self-defense,” Dresow said. The charges of attempted voluntary manslaughter and assault with a firearm carry a potential prison sentence of about 20 years. Osenton was not charged with any crimes.
Simon made a short statement to the press: “I’m proud to live in America.” Since Berberian is thinking about re-filing charges, let’s hope that Simon has reason to continue being proud.
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TwitterSophia Floersch has switched to Mucke Motorsport ahead of her second season in ADAC Formula 4.
The 16-year-old finished 19th overall in her rookie campaign in 2016 with the Motopark team, having won races in the British Ginetta Junior series the previous year.
Her best result was a fifth place on the opening weekend, with 21 of the 25 points she scored across the year coming inside the first two events.
“Peter Mucke’s team convinced me with its persistence and professionalism,” Floersch said.
“I feel great here and look forward to a fast and hopefully very successful season.”
Team boss Mucke added: “Sophia has grit, fighting spirit and is ambitious.
“We want to not only accompany her on the track, but also provide her with a sound education to use in higher classes.”
Ortmann moves to GTs, but F3 still in Mucke’s plans
Floersch’s car will run in a pink livery in deference to team sponsor and Austrian water technology firm BWT, which has previously backed the team’s DTM entry driven by Lucas Auer.
With Mercedes now handing the running of its reduced six-car DTM effort entirely to works operation HWA, Mucke will expand into ADAC GT Masters.
Its first driver for that programme is Mike Ortmann, its top F4 driver from 2016 who placed third in the standings behind Joey Mawson and Mick Schumacher.
Ortmann will therefore not step up to F3 with the team, but Mucke still intends to take part in European F3, with a Dallara in the pink BWT livery featuring in its season launch earlier this week (below).Soldiers National Cemetery
© Abraham Lincoln Online The Gettysburg Address Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
November 19, 1863 On June 1, 1865, Senator Charles Sumner referred to the most famous speech ever given by President Abraham Lincoln. In his eulogy on the slain president, he called the Gettysburg Address a "monumental act." He said Lincoln was mistaken that "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." Rather, the Bostonian remarked, "The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech." There are five known copies of the speech in Lincoln's handwriting, each with a slightly different text, and named for the people who first received them: Nicolay, Hay, Everett, Bancroft and Bliss. Two copies apparently were written before delivering the speech, one of which probably was the reading copy. The remaining ones were produced months later for soldier benefit events. Despite widely-circulated stories to the contrary, the president did not dash off a copy aboard a train to Gettysburg. Lincoln carefully prepared his major speeches in advance; his steady, even script in every manuscript is consistent with a firm writing surface, not the notoriously bumpy Civil War-era trains. Additional versions of the speech appeared in newspapers of the era, feeding modern-day confusion about the authoritative text.
Bliss Copy
Ever since Lincoln wrote it in 1864, this version has been the most often reproduced, notably on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. It is named after Colonel Alexander Bliss, stepson of historian George Bancroft. Bancroft asked President Lincoln for a copy to use as a fundraiser for soldiers (see "Bancroft Copy" below). However, because Lincoln wrote on both sides of the paper, the speech could not be reprinted, so Lincoln made another copy at Bliss's request. It is the last known copy written by Lincoln and the only one signed and dated by him. Today it is on display at the Lincoln Room of the White House.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863
Named for John G. Nicolay, President Lincoln's personal secretary, this is considered the "first draft" of the speech, begun in Washington on White house stationery. The second page is writen on different paper stock, indicating it was finished in Gettysburg before the cemetery dedication began. Lincoln gave this draft to Nicolay, who went to Gettysburg with Lincoln and witnessed the speech. The Library of Congress owns this manuscript.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war. We come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate we can not consecrate we can not hallow, this ground The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.
It is rather for us, the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Believed to be the second draft of the speech, President Lincoln gave this copy to John Hay, a White House assistant. Hay accompanied Lincoln to Gettysburg and briefly referred to the speech in his diary: "the President, in a fine, free way, with more grace than is his wont, said his half dozen words of consecration." The Hay copy, which includes Lincoln's handwritten changes, also is owned by the Library of Congress.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense, we can not dedicate we can not consecrate we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.
It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Edward Everett, the chief speaker at the Gettysburg cemetery dedication, clearly admired Lincoln's remarks and wrote to him the next day saying, "I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes." In 1864 Everett asked Lincoln for a copy of the speech to benefit Union soldiers, making it the third manuscript copy. Eventually the state of Illinois acquired it, where it's preserved at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here, have, thus far, so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
As noted above, historian George Bancroft asked President Lincoln for a copy to use as a fundraiser for soldiers. When Lincoln sent his copy on February 29, 1864, he used both sides of the paper, rendering the manuscript useless for lithographic engraving. So Bancroft kept this copy and Lincoln had to produce an additional one (Bliss Copy). The Bancroft copy is now owned by Cornell University.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Source for all versions: Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler and others.
Related Links
A Teacher's Tour of the Battle of Gettysburg (Matthew Pinsker/Gilder Lehrman Institute)
Battlefield Maps (Library of Congress)
Civil War Institute (Gettysburg College)
Edward Everett's Gettysburg Speech (University of Maryland)
Gettysburg Address Exhibit (Library of Congress)
Gettysburg Address Eyewitness (National Public Radio)
Gettysburg Address News Article (New York Times)
Gettysburg Address Teacher Resource (C-SPAN)
Gettysburg Address Text
Gettysburg Civil War Photographs (Library of Congress)
Gettysburg Discussion Group (Bob & Dennis Lawrence)
Gettysburg Foundation
Gettysburg National Military Park (NPS)
How Some Few "Remarks" Became the Gettysburg Address (LAP/ALI)
David Wills's Letter of Invitation to Lincoln (Library of Congress)
Lincoln and the Gettysburg Awakening (JALA)
Lincoln and Gettysburg Timeline
Lincoln Fellowship of Pennsylvania
Lincoln's Invitation to Stay Overnight (Library of Congress)
Edward Everett's Letter to Lincoln (Library of Congress)
Photograph of Lincoln at Gettysburg (Library of Congress)
Reading of the Gettysburg Address (NPR)
Recollections of Lincoln at Gettysburg (Bob Cooke)
Response to a Serenade
Robert Todd Lincoln's "Gettysburg Story" (JALA)
Seminary Ridge Museum
Solving the Mysteries of the Gettysburg Address (LAP/ALI)
The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation (Peter Norvig)
Who Stole the Gettysburg Address? (JALA)
Wills House
Related Books
Boritt, Gabor. The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows. Simon & Schuster, 2006.
Graham, Kent. November: Lincoln's Elegy at Gettysburg. Indiana University Press, 2001.
Hoch, Bradley R. and Boritt, Gabor S. The Lincoln Trail in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.
Johnson, Martin P. Writing the Gettysburg Address. University Press of Kansas, 2013.
Kunhardt, Philip B., Jr. A New Birth of Freedom - Lincoln at Gettysburg. Boston: Little, Brown, 1983.
Mearns, David C., Dunlap, Lloyd A., Wilson, Douglas L., and Sellers, John R., contributors. Long Remembered: Lincoln and His Five Versions of the Gettysburg Address. Levenger Press, 2011.
Wills, Garry. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. Touchstone Books, 1993.Image: bbernard/Shutterstock
A website that streams movies for marijuana enthusiasts and offers a platform for stoners to chat while watching videos left over 10 million messages of more than 44,000 users exposed online for anyone to see.
"Its [sic] just shit having to buy off sketchy people in the street etc," one user wrote in a message, according to Chris Vickery, the security researcher who fund the database.
"Because she buys weed from me," another one said.
The data was left exposed in a misconfigured MongoDB database by The Trees Network, a site that streams time-synchronized movies 24/7, offering "cannabis enthusiasts" a chance to chat while they enjoy a spliff. On |
to perpetuate itself sequentially within reasonably short sections is a key weakness affecting the entire modern eclectic theory and method. The problem is not that the entire text of a NT book nor even of a chapter might be unattested by any single MS; most MSS (including those of the Byzantine Textform) have unique or divergent readings within any extended portion of text; no two MSS agree completely in all particulars. However, the problem with the resultant sequential aspect of modern eclectic theory is that its preferred text repeatedly can be shown to have no known MS support over even short stretches of text--and at times even within a single verse. The problem increases geometrically as a sequence of variants extends over two, three, five, or more verses. This raises serious questions about the supposed transmissional history required by eclectic choice. As with Hort's genealogical appeal to a possible but not probable transmission, it is transmissionally unlikely that a short sequence of variants would leave no supporting witness within the manuscript tradition; the probability that such would occur repeatedly is virtually nil.
8. Modern eclecticism creates a text which, within repeated short sequences, rapidly degenerates into one possessing no support among manuscript, versional, or patristic witnesses. The problem deteriorates further as the scope of sequential variation increases. One of the complaints against the Byzantine Textform has been that such could not have existed at an early date due to the lack of a single pre-fourth century MS reflecting the specific pattern of agreement characteristic of that Textform, even though the Byzantine Textform can demonstrate its specific pattern within the vast majority of witnesses from at least the fourth century onward. Yet those who use the modern eclectic texts are expected to accept a proffered "original" which similarly lacks any pattern of agreement over even a short stretch of text that would link it with what is found in any MS, group of MSS, version, or patristic witness in the entire manuscript tradition. Such remains a perpetual crux for the "original" text of modern eclecticism. If a legitimate critique can be made against the Byzantine Textform because early witnesses fail to reflect its specific pattern of readings, the current eclectic models (regardless of edition) can be criticized more severely, since their resultant texts demonstrate a pattern of readings even less attested among the extant witnesses. The principle of Ockham's Razor applies, and the cautious scholar seriously must ask which theory possesses the fewest speculative or questionable points when considered from all angles.
9. Modern eclectic proponents fail to see their resultant text as falling under a greater condemnation, even though such a text is not only barely possible to imagine having occurred under any reasonable historical process of transmission, but whatever transmissional history would be required to explain their resultant text is not even remotely probable to have occurred under any normal circumstances. Yet modern eclectics continue to reject a lesser argument ex silentio regarding the likelihood of Byzantine propagation in areas outside of Egypt during the early centuries (where archaeological data happen not to be forthcoming), while their own reconstructed text requires a hypothetical transmissional history which transcends the status of the text in all centuries. The parallels do not compare well.
10. It seems extremely difficult to maintain archetype or autograph authenticity for any artificially-constructed eclectic text when such a text taken in sequence fails to leave its pattern or reconstructable traces within even one extant witness to the text of the NT; this is especially so when other supposedly "secondary" texttypes and Textforms are preserved in a reasonable body of extant witnesses with an acceptable level of reconstructability.
The essence of a Byzantine-priority method
11. Any method which would restore the original text of the NT must follow certain guidelines and procedures within normative NT text-critical scholarship. It will not suffice merely to declare one form of the text superior in the absence of evidence, nor to support any theory with only selected and partial evidence which favors the case in question. The lack of balance in such matters plagues much of modern reasoned eclecticism, since preferred readings are all too often defended as primary simply because they are non-Byzantine. Principles of internal evidence are similarly manipulated, as witnessed by the repeated statements as to what "most scribes" (i. e., those responsible for the Byzantine Textform) would do in a given situation, when in fact "most scribes" did nothing of the kind on any regular basis.
12. The real issue facing NT textual criticism is the need to offer a transmissional explanation of the history of the text which includes an accurate view of scribal habits and normal transmissional considerations. Such must accord with the facts and must not prejudge the case against the Byzantine Textform. That this is not a new procedure or a departure from a previous consensus can be seen by the expression of an essential Byzantine-priority hypothesis in the theory of Westcott and Hort (quite differently applied, of course). The resultant methodology of the Byzantine-priority school is in fact more closely aligned with that of Westcott and Hort than any other. Despite his myriad of qualifying remarks, Hort stated quite clearly in his Introduction the principles which, if applied directly, would legitimately support the Byzantine-priority position:
As soon as the numbers of a minority exceed what can be explained by accidental coincidence,... their agreement... can only be explained on genealogical grounds[. W]e have thereby passed beyond purely numerical relations, and the necessity of examining the genealogy of both minority and majority has become apparent. A theoretical presumption indeed remains that a majority of extant documents is more likely to represent a majority of ancestral documents at each stage of transmission than vice versa.
13. There is nothing inherently wrong with Hort's "theoretical presumption." Apart from the various anti-Byzantine qualifications made throughout the entire Introduction, the Westcott-Hort theory would revert to an implicit acceptance and following of this initial principle in accord with other good and solid principles which they elsewhere state. Thus, a "proper" Westcott-Hort theory which did not initially exclude the Byzantine Textform would reflect what might be expected to occur under "normal" textual transmission. Indeed, Hort's initial "theoretical presumption" finds clear acceptance in the non-biblical realm. Fredson Bowers assumes a basic "normality" of transmission as the controlling factor in the promulgation of all handwritten documents; he also holds that a text reflected in an overwhelming majority of MSS is more likely to have a chronological origin preceding that of any text which might be found in a small minority:
[Stemmatic textual analysis] joins with science in requiring the assumption of normality as the basis for any working hypothesis... If one collates 20 copies of a book and finds... that only 1 copy shows the uncorrected state..., "normality" makes it highly probable that the correction... was made at an earlier point in time... than [a form]... that shows 19 with uncorrected type and only 1 with corrected... The mathematical odds are excellent that this sampling of 20 copies can be extrapolated in accord with normality.
14. Such a claim differs but little from that made by Scrivener 150 years ago, and suggests that perhaps it is modern scholarship which has moved beyond "normality"--a scientific view of transmissional development in light of probability--in favor of a subjectively-based approach to the data. To complete the comparison in the non-biblical realm, modern eclectics should also consider the recent comments of D. C. Greetham:
Reliance upon individual critical perceptions (often masquerading as "scientific" methodology)... can result in extreme eclecticism, subjectivism, and normalization according to the esthetic dictates of the critic... The opposite extreme... maintains that... the only honest recourse is to select that specific... extant document which... seems best to represent authorial intention, and once having made that selection, to follow the readings of the document as closely as possible."
15. When considering the above possibilities, Hort's initial "theoretical presumption" is found to be that representing the scientifically-based middle ground, positioned as a corrective to both of Greetham's extremes. As Colwell stated,
We need Hort Redivivus. We need him as a counter-influence to the two errors I have discussed: (1) the ignoring of the history of the manuscript tradition, and (2) overemphasis upon the internal evidence of readings. In Hort's work two principles (and only two) are regarded as so important that they are printed in capital letters in the text and in italics in the table of contents. One is "All trustworthy restoration of corrupted texts is founded on the study of their history," and the other, "Knowledge of documents should precede final judgment upon readings."
16. Beyond an antipathy for the Byzantine Textform and a historical reconstruction which attempted to define that Textform as the secondary result of a formal revision of the fourth century, Westcott and Hort made no idle claim regarding the importance of transmissional history and its related elements as the key to determining the original text of the NT. Had all things been equal, the more likely scenario which favored a predominantly Byzantine text would have been played out. In that sense, the present Byzantine-priority theory reflects a return to Hort, with the intent to explore the matter of textual transmission when a presumed formal Byzantine recension is no longer a factor.
17. A transmissional approach to textual criticism is not unparalleled. The criticism of the Homeric epics proceeds on much the same line. Not only do Homer's works have more manuscript evidence available than any other piece of classical literature (though far less than that available for the NT), but Homer also is represented by MSS from a wide chronological and geographical range, from the early papyri through the uncials and Byzantine-era minuscules. The parallels to the NT transmissional situation are remarkably similar, since the Homeric texts exist in three forms: one shorter, one longer, and one in-between.
18. The shorter form in Homer is considered to reflect Alexandrian critical know-how and scholarly revision applied to the text; the Alexandrian text of the NT is clearly shorter, has apparent Alexandrian connections, and may well reflect recensional activity. 19. The longer form of the Homeric text is characterized by popular expansion and scribal "improvement"; the NT Western text generally is considered the "uncontrolled popular text" of the second century with similar characteristics. 20. Between these extremes, a "medium" or "vulgate" text exists, which resisted both the popular expansions and the critical revisions; this text continued in much the same form from the early period into the minuscule era. The NT Byzantine Textform reflects a similar continuance from at least the fourth century onward.
21. Yet the conclusions of Homeric scholarship based on a transmissional-historical approach stand in sharp contrast to those of NT eclecticism:
We have to assume that the original... was a medium [= vulgate] text... The longer texts... were gradually shaken out: if there had been... free trade in long, medium, and short copies at all periods, it is hard to see how this process could have commenced. Accordingly the need of accounting for the eventual predominance of the medium text, when the critics are shown to have been incapable of producing it, leads us to assume a medium text or vulgate in existence during the whole time of the hand-transmission of Homer. This consideration... revives the view... that the Homeric vulgate was in existence before the Alexandrian period... [Such] compels us to assume a central, average, or vulgate text.
22. Not only is the parallel between NT transmissional history and that of Homer striking, but the same situation exists regarding the works of Hippocrates. Allen notes that "the actual text of Hippocrates in Galen's day was essentially the same as that of the mediaeval MSS... [just as] the text of [Homer in] the first century B.C.... is the same as that of the tenth-century minuscules.
23. In both classical and NT traditions there thus seems to be a "scribal continuity" of a basic "standard text" which remained relatively stable, preserved by the unforced action of copyists through the centuries who merely copied faithfully the text which lay before them. Further, such a text appears to prevail in the larger quantity of copies in Homer, Hippocrates, and the NT tradition. Apart from a clear indication that such consensus texts were produced by formal recension, it would appear that normal scribal activity and transmissional continuity would preserve in most manuscripts "not only a very ancient text, but a very pure line of very ancient text."
Principles to be Applied toward Restoration of the Text
24. The Byzantine-priority position (or especially the so-called "majority text" position) is often caricatured as only interested in the weight of numbers and simple "nose-counting" of MSS when attempting to restore the original form of the NT text. Aside from the fact that such a mechanical and simplistic method would offer no solution in the many places where the Byzantine Textform is divided among its mass of witnesses, such a caricature leads one to infer that no serious application of principles of NT textual criticism exist within such a theory. This of course is not correct. There are external and internal criteria which characterize a Byzantine-priority praxis, and many of these closely resemble or are identical to the principles espoused within other schools of textual restoration. Of course, the principles of Byzantine-priority necessarily differ in application from those found elsewhere.
25. The Byzantine-priority principles reflect a "reasoned transmissionalism" which evaluates internal and external evidence in the light of transmissional probabilities. This approach emphasizes the effect of scribal habits in preserving, altering, or otherwise corrupting the text, the recognition of transmissional development leading to family and texttype groupings, and the ongoing maintenance of the text in its general integrity as demonstrated within our critical apparatuses. The overriding principle is that textual criticism without a history of transmission is impossible. To achieve this end, all readings in sequence need to be accounted for within a transmissional history, and no reading can be considered in isolation as a "variant unit" unrelated to the rest of the text.
26. In this system, final judgment on readings requires the strong application of internal evidence after an initial evaluation of the external data has been made. Being primarily transmissionally-based, the Byzantine-priority theory continually links its internal criteria to external considerations. This methodology always asks the prior question: does the reading which may appear "best" on internal grounds (no matter how plausible such might appear) really accord with known transmissional factors regarding the perpetuation and preservation of texts? Such an approach parallels Westcott and Hort, but with the added caveat against dismissing the Byzantine Textform as a significant transmissional factor. Indeed, the present theory in many respects remains quite close to that of Westcott and Hort; the primary variance is reflected in certain key assumptions and a few less obvious principles. Because of these initial considerations, the conclusions regarding the original form of the NT text will necessarily differ significantly from those of Westcott and Hort.
Principles of Internal Evidence
27. The basic principles of internal and external evidence utilized by Byzantine-priority advocates are quite familiar to those who practice either rigorous or reasoned eclecticism. At least one popular principle (that of favoring the shorter reading) is omitted; other principles are cautiously applied within a transmissionally-based framework in which external evidence retains significant weight. The primary principles of internal evidence include the following:
28. Prefer the reading that is most likely to have given rise to all others within a variant unit. This principle fits perfectly within a primarily transmissional process; it is utilized by both rigorous and reasoned eclectics, and is the guiding principle of the Nestle-Aland "local-genealogical" method. For Byzantine-priority this principle has great weight: it is extremely important to attempt to explain the rise of all readings within a variant unit. The eclectic model continually evaluates variant units in isolation, attempting to determine in each individual case that reading which seems most likely to have produced all others within that variant unit. The Byzantine-priority principle, on the other hand, insists on not taking a variant unit in isolation from the remainder of the text, but always to ask how the reading which appears to be superior in any variant unit fits in with a full transmissional overview. Such a procedure involves the readings of all the units in near proximity: how they developed, were perpetuated, and grew into their relative proportions among the extant data. This procedure elevates the overall value of this principle and serves as a check against excess in application. 29. The principle is not negated, but modified. The textual researcher always must ask whether the reading that initially appears to support the rise of all others in a given variant unit is equally that which by its transmissional history remains most likely to have given rise to all other readings in the surrounding text as a whole. If one initially assumes a reading with extremely weak transmissional support to be original, a sufficient explanation must be provided as to how other competing readings could have derived from the first, and also how such readings could have ended up in transmissional relation to neighboring variant units. When such explanations become problematic, this in itself becomes presumptive that another reading in a given unit may in fact have been the source of all competitors, and that the researcher should reexamine the case instead of accepting what at first appeared most plausible when viewed in isolation. Only thus can a final candidate be established within each variant unit--"reasoned transmissionalism" at work. 30. The reading which would be more difficult as a scribal creation is to be preferred. This internal canon is predicated upon the assumption that a scribe would not deliberately produce nonsense, nor make a passage more difficult to understand. If a more common word stood in an exemplar, a scribe would not normally substitute a rare word. Yet scribes do produce nonsense accidentally, and at times may even obfuscate a plain and simple reading for unknown reasons. There needs to be a transmissional corollary of qualification: difficult readings created by individual scribes do not tend to perpetuate in any significant degree within transmissional history. This principle can be demonstrated in any relatively complete apparatus by examining the many singular or quasi-singular readings which were never or rarely perpetuated. The same can be said for readings in small groups of MSS, whether due to family or sub-texttype ties, or by coincidence. Transferring the corollary to the primary principle, the more difficult reading is to be preferred when such is found in the transmissional majority of witnesses rather than when such is limited to a single witness or an interrelated minority group. The reasoning behind this assumption is obvious: while a minority of scribes might adopt any difficult reading for at least a time, the chances are slim that the vast majority of scribes would adopt such a reading were a simpler one originally dominant from the autograph. The researcher still must demonstrate on internal grounds that the "more difficult" reading is in fact such, as well as the transmissional likelihood of that reading having been original within that variant unit. 31. Readings which conform to the known style, vocabulary, and syntax of the original author are to be preferred. While this principle is valid, its application in modern eclectic praxis is fraught with difficulties. Other factors, including transmissional history, need to be considered before a final stylistic determination can be made in regard to a given passage. Merely because kai or euquj are "characteristic" in Mark or oun in John does not mean that one automatically should prefer such a reading over the alternatives. Stylistic criteria taken in isolation can easily lead to wrong decisions if the degree and quality of transmissional support are not equally considered. A basic assumption is that scribes in general would be unlikely to alter the style and vocabulary of a given author when copying that which lay before them. Further, in any given instance, a minority of scribes might create an intentional or accidental variation which either conforms the text to a writer's style, or which moves the text away from an author's normal style. Transmissional criteria serve as a check and balance against mere stylistic, syntactical, content, and vocabulary considerations, allowing one to arrive at a more certain result. Attention to transmissional considerations prevents a naive acceptance of a variant solely due to stylistic conformity, especially when such is dependent upon favored MSS which fluctuate stylistically within a given book. 32. For example, what does one do with oun in John? Certainly this word is distinctive of Johannine style, and on thoroughgoing eclectic principles perhaps should always be preferred (although structural considerations might alter such a decision). Modern reasoned eclecticism seems to prefer oun only when supported by favored MSS, even if such support is limited. On a transmissional-historical basis, oun when found in limited perpetuation among a small minority of witnesses would be ruled out due to lack of a reasonable amount of transmissional support. Modern eclectic methodology cannot satisfactorily distinguish a Johannine from a non-Johannine oun on the basis of either internal criteria or a small group of favored MSS. There needs to be a transmissional criterion for authenticity, since cases such as this cannot be resolved by an appeal to style, to limited external evidence, or to the reading that may have given rise to the others. Transmissional considerations offer a better solution in such cases than do eclectic methodologies. Similarly, how would one handle variation between de and oun in John? That gospel actually uses de more frequently than oun ( de Byz 231x, NA27 212x; oun Byz 201x, NA27 200x), even though oun is "stylistically Johannine." De thus cannot be ruled out when opposed by oun. The optimal (and only) solution is a reliance upon all external evidence, coupled with a solid view of historical-transmissional considerations. 33. Readings which clearly harmonize or assimilate the wording of one passage to another are to be rejected. That scribes engaged in some harmonization or assimilation to parallel passages or contexts can be demonstrated repeatedly within the pages of a critical apparatus. Colwell noted that harmonization to parallels in the immediate context occurs more frequently than to remote parallels. Yet, one must carefully guard against the assumption that verbal identity where parallels exist is presumptive evidence against authenticity. Merely because harmonization or assimilation could occur at a given location, one must not assume that scribes would harmonize whenever possible. Nor is scribal harmonization when it does occur more characteristic of the Byzantine-era scribes than any other. Once more, transmissional aspects remain the primary basis for decision. The apparatuses demonstrate that most of the numerous cases of harmonization or assimilation did not perpetuate in any great quantity. While scribes did harmonize at various places, and that frequently enough, the vast majority of scribes did not accept or perpetuate such alterations to any significant degree. Even if parallel locations were known from personal familiarity with scripture, most scribes would not adopt or add to the text that which was not in the exemplar before them. Harmonization simply did not occur on the grand scale. It would be a transmissional absurdity to assume numerous "harmonization-prone" scribes adopting a few dozen harmonizations into their Byzantine MSS while failing to continue the process in hundreds of other places where scribes had produced more plausible and attractive harmonizations--none of which were incorporated into the main stream of transmission. 34. The question can be framed precisely: were scribes more likely in any given instance deliberately to revise the text in the direction of harmonization, or would they generally tend simply to copy and preserve what lay before them? The answer is provided only by examining the data in the apparatuses which evidences transmissional reality. One will find that most of the time scribes would maintain and preserve the text of their exemplar. When harmonization or assimilation did occur, it was sporadic. The MSS which systematically harmonized to parallel passages were few (the scribes of Codex Bezae and various Caesarean witnesses are more typically harmonistic than what is alleged against Byzantine scribes). While certain Byzantine readings may appear to harmonize at various points, it would be a fallacy to charge the Byzantine scribes with a harmonistic tendency for the following reasons: (a) the Byzantine MSS fail to harmonize in most situations; (b) the alleged harmonizations within the Byzantine Textform are relatively infrequent; (c) alleged Byzantine harmonization often fails to conform precisely to the parallel passage; and (d) the Byzantine scribes fail to harmonize in hundreds of places where a minority of supposedly earlier MSS had created highly persuasive and attractive harmonizations. 35. Readings reflecting common scribal piety or religiously-motivated expansion and alteration are secondary. From a transmissional-historical aspect, this principle is viewed somewhat differently from that which is commonly held. Pious expansions or substitutions made by a single scribe or a small number of scribes are unlikely to gain acceptance within the manuscript tradition. Were this not the case, one would see a continual expansion of divine names and titles: "Jesus" becomes "Jesus Christ," then "the Lord Jesus Christ," then "the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." "Lord" would become "Lord Jesus" or "Lord God"; "Spirit" would become "Holy Spirit," and so forth. While such alterations and expansions can be demonstrated to have occurred frequently within the manuscript tradition, such cases remain sporadic, localized, and shared among only a small minority of scribes. Most NT scribes did not engage in wholesale pious expansion. Conversely, when a minority of witnesses might lack one or more appellatives, this does not indicate pious expansion by all other witnesses. The shorter reading may be due to accidental omission triggered by common endings (homoioteleuta) among the various nomina sacra within a phrase. One cannot presume that the majority of scribes would adopt piously-expanded readings on a merely coincidental but not systematic basis under normal transmissional conditions. A minority of scribes, however, might easily expand deliberately or omit unintentionally. Were pious expansion indeed typical and dominant, one would wonder why most such cases were not adopted by the transmissional majority. One cannot have it both ways--scribes either conform to certain patterns en masse, or they practice certain habits on a primarily individual and sporadic basis. Since most vagaries produced by individual scribes remained unadopted within the transmissional tradition, there should be no doubt regarding the actual situation. An example of "limited perpetuation" is provided in 1Cor 5:5 (nomina sacra in caps):
th hmera tou KU NA27 P46 B 630 1739 pc Tert Epiph
th hmera tou KU IU P61 vid Y vgst
th hmera tou KU IU XU D pc b Ambst
th hmera tou KU hmwn IU XU A F G P 33 104 365 1241s 1881 al a vgcl syp, h** cop Lcf 36. While modern eclectic advocates might argue that all readings beyond the shortest (that preferred by NA27) are "pious expansions," such an approach is too simplistic and ignores the transmissional and transcriptional probabilities that point clearly to the Byzantine Textform as the reading from which all the others derived. 37. The MSS comprising the Byzantine Textform (basically in NA27) did not adopt the remaining "natural" expansions found in other witnesses ( KU IU XU or KU hmwn IU XU ). Yet, had NA27 been original, it would be peculiar if nearly all the Byzantine-era scribes were to stop at KU IU without further embellishment, especially when such was found in supposedly "earlier" MSS from the Western and Alexandrian traditions. This argues strongly that the vast majority of Byzantine-era scribes did not create or perpetuate pious expansions, but simply preserved the text which lay before them in their exemplars. 38. It is transcriptionally more likely that the small minority of Alexandrian and Caesarean MSS (P46 B 630 1739 pc) reflect simple homoioteleuton from the Byzantine reading, skipping from - U to - U. A minority reading created by transcriptional error is far easier to accept than to rationalize such a shorter reading as the source from which only a partial expansion was made by the Byzantine majority. 39. The primary evaluation of readings should be based upon transcriptional probability. This principle goes back to Westcott and Hort, and has no inherent weaknesses. Scribes did make errors and deliberate alterations, and readings need to be categorized and assessed according to their conformity to such scribal tendencies. Other methods apply this principle inconsistently, more or less commensurate with the preferences of the critic; the application of this principle thus becomes unfairly biased. 40. A transmissional aspect needs to be recognized: an error or deliberate alteration made in a single MS or a few MSS is unlikely to be perpetuated in quantity. The many singular and quasi-singular readings which exist demonstrate the unlikelihood of a transcriptionally-based scribal creation extending much beyond any MS or MSS which first produced it. The chances that any sensible alteration subsequent to the autograph would extend beyond a small group of localized witnesses would be slim. Indeed, such readings as characterize minority texttype witnesses generally remain small and localized. That any deliberate alteration or transcriptional error would gain the cooperation of scribes so as to dominate the entire stream of transmission is a null proposition: scribes demonstrably did not engage in such a practice on the grand scale. Earlier exemplars would serve to nullify the growth and widespread dissemination of most scribal alterations, thus holding in check the unbridled mass of minority variants. An important corollary follows: 41. Transcriptional error is more likely to be the ultimate source of many sensible variants rather than deliberate alteration. Many variant readings have their root in transcriptional causes. While this principle includes all cases which produce pure "nonsense," it also includes many in which the end result in some way "makes sense." Sensible readings may arise from the simple omission of a letter, syllable, or word; so too readings produced by haplography, dittography, homoioteleuton or other forms of transcriptional error. Even an error that produced a nonsense reading may result later in other sensible variants, created in an attempt to correct the earlier error. 42. When examining any variant unit, one first should consider whether transcriptional factors could have caused one or more of its readings. A more plausible solution will arise from this approach than from an assumption of the less frequent deliberate alteration. While many readings can only be explained as due to intentional alteration, the primary principle remains of seeking first a transcriptional cause for variant readings. Many readings could be due to either accidental transcriptional error or intentional alteration; one always must weigh the evidence before settling on one cause over another. 43. Neither the shorter nor longer reading is to be preferred. The reasoned eclectic principle here omitted is the familiar lectio brevior potior, or giving preference to the shorter reading, assuming all other matters to be equal --a principle which has come under fire even from modern eclectics. Not only can its legitimacy be called into question, but its rejection as a working principle can readily be justified. The net effect of such a principle is to produce an a priori bias on insufficient internal grounds which favors the shorter Alexandrian text. The underlying premise is faulty: it assumes that scribes have a constant tendency to expand the text, whether in regard to sacred names, or by a conflationary combination of disparate narratives, lest anything original be lost. Yet scribal habits as exemplified in the extant data simply do not support such a hypothesis. Had the later scribes done according to all that has been claimed for them, the resultant Byzantine Textform would be far longer than that currently found: divine titles would be extensively expanded, parallel passages would be in greater harmony, and a universally-conflated text would dominate. Such simply is not the case. 44. The problem as usual is a text-critical leap to a conclusion refuted by a careful examination of the extant data. While scribes did engage in various practices which would produce a "longer" text, such occurred only on an independent, haphazard, and sporadic basis. Such minority scribal expansions can readily be discerned in any critical apparatus (even among Byzantine-era witnesses) and rejected on the basis of their minority support. Scribes simply did not expand or harmonize the text en masse, and any principle of internal evidence which suggests and is dependent upon the contrary becomes self-refuted by transmissional evidence. 45. The converse principle--that the longer reading should be preferred--is equally rejected. A few may argue thus, such as A. C. Clark and C.-B. Amphoux, who favor the Western type of text, but such no more can be applied mechanically to the text than can the "shorter reading," despite any apparent logic or plausibility which may be adduced. Such a principle simply will not work within a transmissional framework. Further, it has a similar bias favoring the Western text, just as the "shorter reading" favors the Alexandrian text. Elements which reflect "normal" transmissional considerations should not be overthrown or negated on the basis of a built-in bias within a text-critical principle.
Principles of External Evidence
46. The Byzantine-priority method looks at external evidence as a primary consideration within a transmissional-historical framework. The key issue in any unit of variation is not mere number, but how each reading may have arisen and developed in the course of transmission to reflect whatever quantitative alignments and textual groupings might exist. To this end a careful consideration and application of various external principles must be applied to each reading within a variant unit. Certain of these criteria are shared among various eclectic methodologies, but none demonstrate a clear linkage to transmissional-historical factors.
47. The quantity of preserved evidence for the text of the NT precludes conjectural emendation. The NT text has been preserved to an extent far exceeding that of any other hand-transmitted literature of antiquity. Thus, the likelihood that conjectural emendation might restore the original form of the text is virtually nil. While other critics do not exclude conjectural emendation as a possibility, conjecture does not gain a serious foothold in contemporary praxis, nor is there any pressing need for such. Conjecture argues a historical model requiring an unparalleled transmissional catastrophe in which all known witnesses--manuscript, versional, and patristic--failed to preserve the original text at a given point. Given the quantity of NT evidence, such becomes doubtful in the extreme, and if otherwise valid would call into question every word found in any extant witness. 48. Readings which appear sporadically within transmissional history are suspect. Assuming the general normality of manuscript transmission, the original text should leave a significant imprint over the range of transmissional history. Optimally, an original reading should demonstrate a continuity of perpetuation from the autograph to the invention of printing. Readings which fit this criterion have an initial presumptive authenticity that cannot easily be overturned. Certain corollaries follow: 49. A reading preserved in only a single MS, version or father is suspect. As with conjecture, it remains transmissionally unlikely that all MSS, versions, and fathers save one should have strayed from the original reading. Even if some witnesses are considered "best" within a given portion of text, it remains unlikely that any such witness standing alone would have preserved the original text against all other witnesses. So too the next corollary: 50. Readings preserved in a small group of witnesses are suspect. Just as with single testimony, readings preserved in but two witnesses are unlikely to have preserved the original reading against all remaining testimony. This principle can be extended to other small groups, whether three or four MSS, or even more, so long as such groups remain smaller than a larger texttype (which is treated under other principles). Such cases reflect only sporadic or limited transmission. 51. Variety of testimony is highly regarded. This principle addresses two areas, neither sufficient to establish the text, but either of which lends support to a given reading. 52. A reading supported by various versions and fathers demonstrates a wider variety of support than a reading lacking such. The greater the variety of support, the more weight is lent to a reading. However, if a reading possesses only versional or patristic support without being evidenced in the Greek manuscript tradition, such a reading is secondary. Isolated patristic or versional testimony is not sufficient to overturn the reading most strongly supported among the Greek MS base. 53. Among Greek MSS, a reading shared among differing texttypes is more strongly supported than that which is localized to a single texttype or family group. Diversity of support for a reading is far stronger than the testimony of any single manuscript or small group of MSS. Overlooked by many is the fact that the Byzantine Textform is the most frequent beneficiary of such diverse support: there are far more instances wherein an Alexandrian-Byzantine or Western-Byzantine alignment exists than an Alexandrian-Western alignment wherein the Byzantine stands wholly apart. Indeed, were all Alexandrian-Byzantine or Western-Byzantine readings in the MSS, fathers, and versions considered as primarily representing the Byzantine Textform (in accord with the present hypothesis), all witnesses would appear far more "Byzantine" than by methods which exclude such co-alignments from consideration as Byzantine. Specific texttype alignments in either case naturally remain distinct on the basis of quantitative analysis. 54. Wherever possible, the raw number of MSS should be intelligently reduced. "Genealogical method" is accepted whenever such can be firmly established. "Family" groups such as f1 and f13 have long been cited under one siglum, and a few MSS are known copies of earlier extant witnesses. In many other cases a close genealogical connection can be established and thus mere numbers can be reduced in a proper manner. At times a group of MSS can be shown to stem from a single scribe with one exemplar (e.g., the eight MSS copied by George Hermonymus or the seven copied by Theodore Hagiopetrites); other MSS stem from a single recension (e.g., the ca. 124 MSS of Theophylact's commentary on John, which differ so little from one another that Theophylact's Johannine archetype readily can be reconstructed). Such numerical reductions restore the source text of the descendants and prevent a multiplication of totals for the sake of mere number. Such also includes grouping the various Byzantine subtypes (K1 Ka Ki Kr etc.) according to their hypothetical archetypes; these then become single secondary-level sources within the Byzantine Textform. The Kr subtype in particular is known to be late and secondary, having been produced out of the Kx type with lectionary and liturgical interests in mind. The MSS of that subtype resemble each other far more than they do the dominant Kx type. When recognizable genealogical ties can be established, MSS can be grouped under their reconstructed archetype and reduced to a common |
Scouting Summary
Beede’s coffer of four average-or-better pitches, led by a resurgent fastball, should allow him to attain mid-rotation starter status even if he doesn’t improve upon his fringey command.
Drafted: 18th Round, 2013 from West Laurens HS (GA) Age 22 Height 6’0 Weight 185 Bat/Throw L/L Tool Grades (Present/Future) Hit Raw Power Game Power Run Fielding Throw 50/60 50/50 35/40 60/60 50/55 45/45
Scouting Summary
Fowler runs well enough to play a good defensive center field and has the bat speed and hand-eye to generate a lot of strong contact. Despite an aggressive approach that limits his ability to reach base a bit, I think he’s a likely average everyday player.
Drafted: 10th Round, 2012 from San Jacinto Age 23 Height 6’3 Weight 175 Bat/Throw L/L Tool Grades (Present/Future) Fastball Curveball Changeup Command 55/55 55/55 45/50 40/50
Scouting Summary
Banda has been up to 96 this spring and has two viable offspeed weapons in his curveball and changeup. The changeup’s projection receives mixed reviews depending on the scout with whom you talk. Some (who are smitten with Banda’s arm speed) think it might one day miss bats, while others (who don’t like the length of his arm action) do not.
Drafted: 4th Round, 2015 from Yavapai JC (AZ) Age 22 Height 5’9 Weight 177 Bat/Throw L/R Tool Grades (Present/Future) Hit Raw Power Game Power Run Fielding Throw 40/55 60/60 40/50 30/30 40/45 45/45
Scouting Summary
A man without a position, Calhoun’s blend of hit and power is still enough for him to profile as a DH but obviously his overall value takes a significant hit because hitting is all he can do. The Dodgers are hoping he’s passable at second base, but I can’t find a scout who thinks he will be. Those who saw him play all over the place as an amateur don’t think it works in the outfield, either.
Signed: July 2nd Period, 2010 from Dominican Republic Age 23 Height 6’2 Weight 160 Bat/Throw L/L Tool Grades (Present/Future) Hit Raw Power Game Power Run Fielding Throw 50/60 45/50 30/40 60/60 40/50 55/55
Scouting Summary
Scouts are enamored with but conflicted by Tapia’s eccentric mannerisms, which are highly entertaining to watch but not necessarily effective — and arguably detrimental to what is otherwise an excellent feel for contact. I think he’s going to hit and provide value on the bases.
Signed: July 2nd Period, 2011 from Dominican Republic Age 22 Height 6’0 Weight 188 Bat/Throw R/R Tool Grades (Present/Future) Hit Raw Power Game Power Run Fielding Throw 35/50 45/50 30/40 80/80 40/50 55/55
Scouting Summary
Though somewhat polarizing, Mateo is undeniably gifted. He’s an 80 runner with the physical tools to stick at shortstop, and he has more power than has shown up in games because his strideless approach to hitting doesn’t allow for it. If he stays at shortstop or moves to center field, the bat will play. At second base, I’m not so sure.
92. Jahmai Jones, CF, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim Video
Drafted: 2nd Round, 2015 from Wesleyan School (GA) Age 19 Height 5’11 Weight 210 Bat/Throw R/R Tool Grades (Present/Future) Hit Raw Power Game Power Run Fielding Throw 40/60 40/50 30/45 60/60 45/55 45/45
Scouting Summary
Jones is short back to the baseball and rockets head-hunting contact back up the middle at opposing pitchers. He’s a plus runner and great athlete with high-end makeup who should stay in center field and hustle his way to 20 annual doubles while hitting.280 or so.
Drafted: 1st Round, 2015 from Bishop Carroll HS (Calgary, AB) Age 19 Height 6’4 Weight 195 Bat/Throw R/R Tool Grades (Present/Future) Fastball Slider Changeup Command 55/55 50/55 40/45 40/55
Scouting Summary
Though he doesn’t project to miss as many bats as most of the other arms on this list, Soroka is a big-bodied sinker/slider horse with high-end makeup and advanced pitchability for a Canadian prep product with just one full pros season under his belt.
Drafted: 1st Round, 2016 from Miami Age 22 Height 6’3 Weight 220 Bat/Throw L/R Tool Grades (Present/Future) Hit Raw Power Game Power Run Fielding Throw 30/40 60/60 40/60 30/20 40/45 50/50
Scouting Summary
I’m not sold Collins sticks behind the plate. If he does, though, this ranking will be too low. He has big raw power and grandfatherly patience but also some swing-and-miss issues that might undo his profile if forced to move to first base or DH. I’m betting the power and OBP will still be enough for everyday duty if he does have to move and, should a transition occur, it would probably get Collins to the big leagues more quickly.
Signed: July 2nd Period, 2015 from Dominican Republic Age 18 Height 6’1 Weight 185 Bat/Throw L/L Tool Grades (Present/Future) Hit Raw Power Game Power Run Fielding Throw 35/55 55/60 40/55 45/40 40/50 50/50
Scouting Summary
Plate discipline is difficult to scout in Latin America, where showcase environments and workouts are far more common than game reps. It turns out Soto has an advanced idea at the plate and enough raw power to make opposing pitchers pay when they make a mistake. He’s on the low end of the defensive spectrum as a likely right fielder, but there’s enough bat here to make that work.
Drafted: 2nd Round, 2014 from Sandalwood HS (FL) Age 21 Height 6’3 Weight 215 Bat/Throw R/R Tool Grades (Present/Future) Fastball Slider Curveball Changeup Command 60/60 50/50 50/55 40/45 45/50
Scouting Summary
Foley has improved his arm action to the point where scouts who had seem him earlier and considered him a reliever are more receptive to the idea of him starting. It appears as though his command improvements are more than a small-sample mirage. He mixes in two solid breaking balls that play up due to his consistent ability to locate them down and to his arm side. The changeup needs to develop. With a new and improved arm action, it’s more likely to.
Drafted: 1st Round, 2014 from Tullahoma HS (TN) Age 21 Height 5’10 Weight 196 Bat/Throw L/L Tool Grades (Present/Future) Fastball Slider Changeup Command 55/55 50/55 45/50 40/50
Scouting Summary
Sheffield’s command backed up on him last year as he began working with a slider instead of a curveball during games. The slide piece is promising but raw, which can pretty much be said for his entire repertoire including a low-90s fastball that needs to be kept down in the zone to be effective.
Drafted: 1st Round, 2015 from Vanderbilt Age 23 Height 6’0 Weight 195 Bat/Throw R/R Tool Grades (Present/Future) Fastball Curveball Changeup Cutter Command 55/60 50/55 55/60 50/55 35/45
Scouting Summary
We’re now almost two years removed from Carson Fulmer’s junior year at Vanderbilt — when he was one of the more polarizing draft prospects of the decade — and nothing has been solved. His velo backed up a bit in 2016, sitting more around 93 than up at 96, but he began working with a promising cutter, and his curveball and changeup were still effective. Unless we see a grade’s worth of progression on the control, Fulmer likely winds up in the bullpen where he’d likely be dominant.
Drafted: 1st Round, 2015 from Concordia Lutheran (TX) Age 20 Height 6’1 Weight 210 Bat/Throw R/R Tool Grades (Present/Future) Hit Raw Power Game Power Run Fielding Throw 30/55 45/50 30/45 50/40 45/60 60/60
Scouting Summary
Terrific defense and feel for contact lead the way for Hayes, who’s unlikely to ever develop impact game power.
Drafted: 1st Round, 2012 from Olympia HS (FL) Age 23 Height 6’3 Weight 200 Bat/Throw L/L Tool Grades (Present/Future) Hit Raw Power Game Power Run Fielding Throw 55/70 40/40 30/40 40/30 40/45 45/45
Scouting Summary
A future plus-plus hitter, Winker has always lacked the power typical of big league left fielders, but the issue was especially alarming in 2016, likely because of a nagging wrist issue. He lacks an impact tool aside from the bat but I think he’ll hit enough to play every day, even in left field.
Other Prospects in Consideration
RHPs
Jacob Nix, RHP, San Diego Padres
Zack Burdi, RHP, Chicago White Sox
Oscar de la Cruz, RHP, Chicago Cubs
Marcos Diplan, RHP, Milwaukee Brewers
Luke Weaver, RHP, St. Louis Cardinals
Jack Flaherty, RHP, St. Louis Cardinals
Dakota Hudson, RHP, St. Louis Cardinals
Erick Fedde, RHP, Washington Nationals
Forrest Whitley, RHP, Houston Astros
David Paulino, RHP, Houston Astros
Franklin Perez, RHP, Houston Astros (Perez was my last cut among pitchers)
Ariel Jurado, RHP, Texas Rangers
Grant Holmes, RHP, Oakland Athletics
LHPs
Kyle Freeland, LHP, Colorado Rockies
Stephen Gonsalves, LHP, Minnesota Twins
Tyler Jay, LHP, Minnesota Twins
Joey Wentz, LHP, Atlanta Braves
Sean Newcomb, LHP, Atlanta Braves
Cole Ragans, LHP, Texas Rangers
INF
Hunter Dozier, 3B, Kansas City Royals
Shed Long, 2B, Cincinnati Reds
Jeimer Candelario, 3B, Chicago Cubs
Matt Chapman, 3B, Oakland Athletics
OF
Bryan Reynolds, OF, San Francisco Giants
Greg Allen, OF, Cleveland Indians
Alex Kirilloff, OF, Minnesota Twins
Christin Stewart, OF, Detroit Tigers
Aristides Aquino, OF, Cincinnati Reds
Christian Pache, OF, Atlanta Braves (Pache was my last cut among bats)
Tyler O’Neill, OF, Seattle Mariners
Ramon Laureano, OF, Houston Astros
Jesus Sanchez, OF, Tampa Bay Rays
The Full Top 100Published on
I think we can all agree that content marketing is both practical and potent.
It’s the ultimate form of inbound marketing and makes total sense when you need to reach 21st century consumers.
I could even spout off a laundry list of stats that prove just how big of an impact content marketing can have.
There’s the insane volume of leads, minimal financial investment, increased audience engagement, high ROI, and so on.
But if there’s any area where content marketers run into trouble, it’s the inherently time-consuming nature of the process.
Creating epic content takes time and energy. And not everyone has the time to devote to this marketing strategy.
And this doesn’t even include the additional effort needed to manage a campaign.
In many cases, it can take so much time that it hinders your ability to oversee other areas of business. Not good.
Here are some stats that put some perspective on just how time-consuming content marketing can be.
“72 percent of marketers are producing more content than they did the previous year.”
If these trends continue, the time investment required for content marketing will keep growing and growing.
And of course you have to consider that competition levels will continue to rise as well.
With more brands catching wind of the potential of this technique, it will become increasingly difficult to make your campaign stand out from the masses, requiring even more of your time.
What’s the solution?
As a person who’s incredibly busy myself, I’ve figured out some effective ways to run a content marketing campaign that requires the least amount of time but still achieves maximum results.
The content quality remains stellar, but I don’t have to perpetually “stoke the fire” to keep things running smoothly.
In other words, my campaign requires less time (and stress), but everything still operates at a high level.
Here’s how to create a content marketing system that runs on autopilot.
Campaign structuring and organization
In my opinion, a well built campaign starts at the top and trickles down.
You need to keep chaos at bay by having a clear game plan and making sure that all of your team members are on the same page at all times.
How do you do this?
I recommend using an online collaborative content calendar.
Although your basic spreadsheet can be helpful, I’ve found it’s seldom sufficient to meet my needs.
However, an online collaborative content calendar allows you and your team to:
Systematically plan and coordinate your content
Make edits that can be viewed in real time
Keep track of deadlines
Monitor progress each step of the way from conception to completion
I also prefer this to a spreadsheet because of the visual element. I just find it easier to keep my ducks in a row when I can visually see what’s happening and what needs to get done.
By staying organized, you can streamline collaboration, spend a lot less time scrambling to find information, and reduce your mistakes.
Some tools I recommend include CoSchedule, Buffer, and HubSpot.
Brainstorming
I’ve found that half of the battle of content marketing is simply coming up with new ideas for blog posts, white papers, videos, etc.
There never seems to be enough new ideas to “feed the hungry content monster.”
One way you can expedite the brainstorming process is to have a handful of idea-generating resources at your disposal.
I personally love BuzzSumo because it’s perfect for pointing me to articles on practically any topic under the sun.
Take content marketing for example.
By entering “content marketing” into the search bar, I instantly get access to a long list of articles written on this subject.
As you can see, BuzzSumo also shows you how well each article has performed based on social shares so you can see which topics are clicking the most with readers.
Some other content aggregators and helpful resources I recommend include:
Feedly
Alltop
Quora
You may also want to create a spreadsheet of all relevant industry blogs that you can quickly reference when you need to brainstorm.
I actually wrote an article about how to never run out of ideas, which offers further insight on this topic. Check it out for more details.
Content creation
This is without a doubt the more laborious part of the content marketing process.
You’ve got to actually sit down and consistently pound out quality content. Or do you?
While I definitely write a lot of the content myself, there’s just no way to keep up with the demand while juggling everything else that’s involved with running a business.
That’s why I recommend outsourcing at least part of it to freelance writers.
In fact, “64 percent of B2B marketers outsource writing.”
Some may only outsource a small fraction of it, while others outsource nearly everything.
It really just depends on your budget and content needs.
If content marketing is your go-to marketing strategy (or writing just isn’t your forte), you’ll probably want to outsource a significant portion of your content creation.
I’ve found outsourcing to freelance writers to be a positive thing, and many other brands feel the same way.
In fact, a big reason for the success of KISSmetrics was skilled writers we hired.
I even wrote an article on how KISSmetrics grew to 793,858 visitors a month by using this formula.
However, you don’t want to leave your content and brand reputation to just anyone.
You need to be sure you hire writers who are highly skilled, understand your brand/style/tone, and create quality content that resonates with your audience.
That’s why you need to make sure a writer has these six skills before you hire them.
Content curation
This term is defined as “the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging and publishing information.”
As you can tell, this sounds incredibly arduous. And it often is.
But it’s a staple of most content marketing campaigns.
Studies have even found that 95 percent of marketers share other organization’s content in some capacity.
The problem is it’s like panning for gold. You have to sift through all the dirt and debris just to find something of value that you can share with your audience.
If you’re just blindly curating content without some type of a game plan, it’s going to be a massive time-drain.
But the way I look at it, there are two main options to streamline this process:
Hire someone else to do it Utilize a tool to make it quicker
The first choice is good because it can save time, but you lose a bit of control.
The second choice gives you maximum control and still saves time.
No matter what approach you choose, it’s still going to be much more efficient than manually sifting through piles of content just to find the diamond in the rough.
If you’re looking for a tool that works well for content curation, check out DrumUp.
It “analyzes tens of thousands of stories every day from across industries, interests and niches,” so you can quickly find great content to share.
Even if you’re in an extremely small niche, this will help you find suitable content for your audience without having to painstakingly search for a needle in a haystack.
Automating posting
The final piece of the puzzle is posting.
If you’ve only got one or two accounts, this is no big deal. You simply post your content manually and boom!—you’re done.
But what if you’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and more?
Posting the same piece of content across multiple channels can quickly eat away at your time.
This is especially true if you’re posting nearly every day.
Fortunately, you can automate much of your content distribution by using a tool such as Zapier.
This easy-to-use platform connects your apps and allows you to post content across multiple channels with only a couple of clicks.
In turn, it can eliminate a lot of tedious busy work (while saving your sanity).
Conclusion
Creating an effective content marketing system involves addressing five key areas:
Organizing and structuring your campaign Expediting the brainstorming process to come up with new ideas Creating the actual content Efficiently curating content Automating your posting
By taking measures to simplify and streamline these areas, you can create a system that essentially runs on autopilot.
This isn’t to say that it requires no effort or maintenance on your end whatsoever. But you can definitely eliminate a lot of the tasks and dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend on the tasks you still perform.
The outcome should be a content marketing system that produces equal or even greater results than the ones you’ve been achieving so far—while spending only a fraction of the time managing your campaign.
Are there any content marketing “hacks” that have worked for you?Even dead financial institutions, it appears, are eligible for tax refunds from the federal stimulus.
Everett Collection
Today’s Wall Street Journal lead with a report that J.P. Morgan Chase was nearing a deal for a tax refund of nearly $1.4 billion, the latest example of a company taking advantage of a little-known part of President Obama’s economic stimulus program.
The stimulus law allows companies to apply losses from 2008 or 2009 to taxes paid five years ago, instead of the current two-year look back.
Another entity that may qualified for the stimulus refund is the estate of defunct Lehman Brothers. The firm said in a December 2009 securities filing said that it “was currently evaluating the potential impact of the five-year net operating loss carry-back provision recently enacted into federal law.”
Already, Lehman collected a $350 million refund in 2009 by carrying back losses to previously paid taxes.
Since the financial crisis has heightened the political calculations on everything at the intersection of Wall Street and the Washington beltway, it is natural to wonder which is worse in terms of the public perception on this: A refund going to J.P. Morgan or Lehman Brothers?…The vote in the House of Representatives to dismantle Obamacare was not the only attempt to undo key legislation from the Obama years that occurred last Thursday. Though it mostly went unnoticed, the House Financial Services Committee voted in favor of the Financial Choice Act. This legislation would substantially weaken the Dodd-Frank financial reforms.
If the Republicans are successful, and that is not assured at this point for either piece of legislation, it will increase economic insecurity for most households. For example, Obamacare has significantly reduced medical bankruptcy, a worry for families who do not have health insurance. If Obamacare is repealed, those worries will return for tens of millions of households and become a reality for many of them.
Related: Why Trump’s Attack on Dodd-Frank Is Dangerous
As for repealing Dodd-Frank, consider this statement by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Speaking at the Milken Global Conference last week, which is attended by key people in the financial industry, he boasted, “You should all thank me for your bank stocks doing better.”
What he is saying is that increasing the risk of another financial meltdown and a large recession, which would once again be paid for mainly by all the people who lose their jobs, homes, retirement savings, and so on rather than the wealthy interests benefitting from the change in policy, is worth making bank stocks do better. If the Financial Choice Act is passed, the risk of a deep and prolonged recession, which would once again hurt millions and millions of households, will go up.
Even if Republicans are unsuccessful in their attempts to get rid of Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, these policies are representative of a broader agenda that will make life harder for the poor and the working class. For example, the large tax cuts that are part of the Republican health care plan are likely to be enacted one way or another, and the resulting increase in government debt will give Republicans the excuse they need to weaken social insurance programs that protect people from large economic risks.
In 2006, Jacob Hacker published The Great Risk Shift. In this book, he argued persuasively that there had been a substantial decline in economic security over the previous three decades. The reasons for this were numerous, including declining retirement security due to the shift from defined benefit to defined contribution plans, the erosion of employer provided health care and other job benefits, the threat of jobs moving offshore, the commodification of labor, and more income variability for working class households.
Related: Democrats Dig in, Delay Against Dodd-Frank Overhaul
During the Obama years, this shift abated somewhat and was even reversed in areas such as the risks associated with not having health insurance. But The Great Risk Shift is back if full force.
Essentially, Republicans believe that the wealthy, who face few if any of the financial risks faced by those who aren’t so fortunate, should not have to contribute to the social insurance funds that the less fortunate rely upon. People should take care of themselves.
But there are some risks that people face – risks they have no control over – that are too large for individuals to cover on their own. And even if they could somehow save enough for a very rainy day, it’s a waste of resources for everyone to save enough to fully offset the risks they face. Fire insurance provides a good example. Every household could try to save enough to cover the cost of rebuilding after a fire, and perhaps some could manage to do so. But that would require everyone to save a substantial portion of his or her income. It’s much better for everyone to pool small contributions into an insurance fund, and then allow the unlucky few that have a fire to draw from it.
Social insurance is the same. Households face all kinds of risks that they have no control over such as sudden and unexpected job loss due to offshoring, technological change, changes in the public’s taste for goods, a sudden and costly health crisis, or outliving savings in retirement. As a society, we can pool our resources together into social insurance funds such as unemployment compensation, food stamps, health insurance, and Social Security, and then allow those in need to use the pooled savings.
Related: Will Democrats Stand Up to Trump? Here’s Their First Test
But why should the wealthy have to contribute to these funds? They have more than enough to cover health and retirement costs, or can at least purchase the best possible insurance, and they have no worries about job loss.
Setting aside the few that will lose their fortunes and perhaps be grateful for the social safety net, I think it’s important to remember the contribution of all the workers who design, manufacture, and distribute the goods and services that allowed the wealthy to accumulate such large fortunes. The wealthy didn’t do it alone. It depended critically on the hard work that so many people do each day, and the schools, roads, bridges, airports, sewage systems, water systems, electrical grids, and so on that society created.
No matter how much the wealthy forget this once they reach the top, we all did it together. When the people who have worked so hard each day to make such large fortunes possible face economic hardship, the wealthy have an obligation to help instead of scapegoating immigrants, environmental and financial regulation, high corporate tax rates, and unions to avoid having fingers pointed at them.
The decisions the wealthy make to move factories offshore, replace people with machines, or discontinue a product line are responsible for much of the insecurity and hardship workers face. Those decisions help the economy function more efficiently and grow more rapidly, but they also throw lives into turmoil. It’s not too much to ask that wealthy – who have reaped most of the benefits of economic growth in recent decades – help to alleviate the difficulties these decisions cause for the unlucky workers who are hurt by these decisions.NRA video declares war on liberals, critics say
National Rifle Association members attend the 146th NRA Annual Meetings & Exhibits on April 29, 2017 in Atlanta, Ga. (Photo11: Scott Olson, Getty Images)
Many progressives are decrying a recruiting video from the National Rifle Association they say comes dangerously close to promoting violence against liberals.
In the video, conservative commentator Dana Loesch runs down a list of alleged atrocities committed by an unspecified "they."
"They use the media, schools and celebrities to indoctrinate people with "their narrative, Loesch says. They "smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law abiding."
The only way to stop them and save the country "is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth," she says.
The ad, which was first posted to YouTube in April, drew condemnation on Twitter Thursday:
I think the @NRA is telling people to shoot us.
Now might be the right time to cancel your membership. pic.twitter.com/PWhHAvRcI3 — Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) June 29, 2017
If you're a responsible gun owner who doesn't regard fellow Americans as the enemy, this would be a good day to cancel your @NRA membership. — Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) June 29, 2017
This NRA ad is an open call to violence to protect white supremacy. If I made a video like this, I'd be in jail. pic.twitter.com/LD65yMUMVn — deray mckesson (@deray) June 29, 2017
The NRA just released an ad that is part authoritarian, part incitement to violence, part call for a civil war. This cannot be our politics. pic.twitter.com/1mzZf8fNku — Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) June 29, 2017
Hey, @NRA! I am a gun owner and I am appalled by that hate propaganda video you released. You are failing your members & the country. — Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) June 30, 2017
"It’s a paranoid vision of American life that encourages the NRA’s fans to see liberals not as political opponents, but as monsters," wrote Zack Beauchamp for Vox.
"How many of those Republican Congressmen who were calling for a reduction in rhetoric following the ballfield shooting, will step forward to condemn this video that uses that incident to call for civil war on Americans?" asked the Daily Kos' Mark Sumner.
Sumner said the NRA is trying to boost gun sales by "convincing half of America to declare war on the other half."
Loesch defended the ad on social media, saying the ad was about denouncing recent incidents of violent protest.
"And some of these people that are completely hyper-overreacting, get a grip," she said. "My gosh, how much energy do you use every damn day being so over-outraged about everything?"
On my NRA ad. https://t.co/2iZnNrBWGP — Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) June 28, 2017
"The reaction to this is insane," Loesch told Tucker Carlson on his Fox News show Thursday night. "Apparently me condemning violence is what's inciting and dividing America."
.@DLoesch accused of "white supremacy" and inciting violence and "civil war" for her latest NRA ad. pic.twitter.com/OUqSBeN5MT — Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 30, 2017
Here is the full transcript of the video:
They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that the president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars, and singers, and comedy shows, and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance. All to make them march. Make them protest. Make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia. To smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law abiding. Until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness. And when that happens, they’ll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we stop this. The only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2u555v5It speaks volumes about Pete Carroll that he listened. It says even more about Steven Hauschka that he spoke up.
With Seattle trailing 17-13 early in the fourth quarter of the NFC Championship Game and facing a fourth-and-7 from the 49ers' 35-yard line, the Seahawks coach was about to send Hauschka out to try a 53-yard field goal. The kicker would've been game under normal circumstances, but he saw from the flags on the uprights at Seattle's CenturyLink Field that the wind was now in his face. So he grabbed Carroll before going out onto the field and told him, "I don't think we want to kick this."
In a sport fueled by machismo and ruled by "my-way-or-the-highway" coaches, it's unusual for a player to ask a head coach to think twice during a game, much less a game that means a trip to the Super Bowl. Besides, what kind of kicker would have the audacity to question a man whose coaching career began in 1973?
Hauschka went 3-for-3 on field goals to help the Seahawks beat San Francisco in the NFC Championship Game. Christian Petersen/Getty Images
Fortunately, Carroll is not just any coach. And Hauschka, 28, is not just any kicker. For one thing, he was an honors student in neuroscience at Division III Middlebury College ('07). For another, he had earned the trust of Carroll, who had already nicknamed him "Hausch Money." At the time, he was 38-of-40 on field goals through the regular season and playoffs, including two overtime game-winners, and 3-of-3 from beyond the 50.
The coach called a timeout, pulled the field goal unit off the field and sent quarterback Russell Wilson back out. On fourth-and-7, Wilson pulled the 49ers offside with a deceptive snap count, thereby freeing receiver Jermaine Kearse to go deep for a 35-yard touchdown pass that gave the Seahawks a 20-17 lead that they would turn into a 23-17 victory after Hauschka tacked on a 47-yard field goal through those same uprights.
The rest is history. In part because a coach took the advice of his kicker, the Seahawks went on to beat the Broncos 43-8 in Super Bowl XLVIII. Hauschka outscored Peyton Manning and Co. all by himself -- 11-8.
There's one trouble with history, though. Where do you start? Where does the chain of events that led to Seattle's first Lombardi Trophy really begin?
One story began in a dorm room on the first floor of Battell Hall on the Middlebury campus in the spring of 2004.
That's where and when Hauschka's freshman roommate, Scott Secor, talked him into trying out for the football team. Hauschka, from Needham, Massachusetts, was playing on the JV soccer team at the time and coming to grips with the fact he might never make the varsity. Secor was a starting safety from Lake Odessa, Michigan, who knew that the Panthers would be in need of a kicker the next season.
Middlebury, a liberal arts college of 2,500 students founded in 1800 in the Champlain Valley of Vermont, is known for many things: scenic beauty and scintillating brains, constant frost and plenteous deer, one-time residents Robert Frost and John Deere.
Hauschka holds the career and season records for field goals at Div. III Middlebury in Vermont. Middlebury College Athletics
The college also has a strong Division III athletics program, but until Hauschka decided to try his right instep in the NFL, the only pro football player Middlebury had ever produced was running back Stone Hallquist... of the 1926 Milwaukee Badgers.
Now it has another claim to fame. Hauschka and his wife, Lindsey, who ran track at Middlebury as Lindsey Jones, recently returned to the schoool for a mini-homecoming at the invitation of the athletic department. They stayed at the Middlebury Inn, ate "Thumbs and Toes" at Mister Up's, met the local media and sat in on professor Paul Sommers' class on the economics of professional team sports.
The main purpose of Hauschka's visit, though, was to speak at various area schools and to the college community. Taking the stage at the McCullough Social Space before a thoughtful conversation with Sports Illlustrated writer Alex Wolff, who lives nearby, Hauschka told the audience, "Wow, this is crazy. I mean, this is the same place where I first saw Dispatch perform."
His tale is a mixture of dumb luck and intelligent analysis, of nature and nurture, of a willingness to take a chance and a refusal to give up. That's how a guy who was accepted by four dental schools and cut by five NFL teams ended up under a shower of confetti at MetLife Stadium on Feb. 2, 2014.
"It really seems like a dream sometimes," Hauschka said during a quiet moment at his homecoming. He was sitting in a lounge at the Kenyon Arena, and he still seemed a little surprised at his celebrity, especially when a woman asked him to sign the back of her shirt.
Once a Midd Kid, always a Midd Kid. "He's always been kind of a thoughtful person," said Middlebury football coach Bob Ritter, an alum himself ('82) who took over the football program in 2000. "He hasn't changed a bit."
(Actually, he has. When Hauschka decided to use an extra year of eligibility to kick at the Division I level for NC State, his first name was erroneously changed from Stephen to Steven. He didn't think it was a big enough deal to correct it, and the misspelling stuck.)
Hauschka (right) returned to Middlebury College as an unlikely celebrity: a Super Bowl champ and the first NFL player the school had produced since 1926. Middlebury College Athletics
As it happened, a kicking coach named Steve Wolf lived 45 minutes away in Rutland, where he managed an ice skating rink, and Ritter would bring him in to work with his kickers. Said Wolf, "The first time I saw the ball come off Steve's foot, I thought, 'Wow!' Oh, he needed a lot of work on his technique. But he had the "it" factor. Plus, kicking is a lot like golfing, and Steve is a very good golfer."
If the talent was there, so was the inexperience -- Hauschka had never played football on any level. He missed three of his first four field goals as a sophomore and once punted a ball into assistant coach Bill Mandigo's face during practice. "Ouch," Hauschka said when reminded of that during his return.
By the time Hauschka was a senior, though, he became a real weapon for Middlebury, and the the Panthers improved from 3-5 to 6-2, thanks in part to his punting and kicking. He also came to realize (at one of Wolf's kicking camps) that he could hold his own with Div. I kickers.
While Hauschka credits Wolf with turning him into a real kicker -- "I didn't know what I was doing" -- he also freely admits he owes a lot to his genes. "My father was a kicker too," he |
, a non-profit organization working on environment issues in Gujarat, who was fighting the case on behalf of farmers, called the NGT decision a landmark judgment that would set a precedent for other nuclear power plants in India and elsewhere.
Another activist, Rohit Prajapti, who was also fighting the case on behalf of the farmers, said that Westinghouse Electric Co. decided to shift the project to Andhra Pradesh after it saw farmers protesting in the region for so many years.
Asia’s largest ship recycling yards at Alang, hardly 10km from the nuclear site, was also likely to get affected if the nuclear project came up.Trump Admin Rescinds DAPA Amnesty Program
Peter Hasson
Associate Editor
The Trump administration has fulfilled another one of Donald Trump’s campaign promises by rescinding the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program implemented under Barack Obama that could have allowed as many as five million illegal aliens with children who are citizens or lawful permanent residents to remain in the country if they met certain criteria.
DAPA was blocked by the courts from implementation, which the Department of Homeland Security cited as a reason for rescinding the program. A DHS press released said Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly signed a memorandum rescinding DAPA on Thursday because “there is no credible path forward to litigate the currently enjoined policy.” (RELATED: Texas AG Says Trump Has Done More To Stop Illegal Immigration Than Anyone In World History)
The program had been challenged by 26 states after Obama issued it in November 2014. The Supreme Court deadlocked when ruling on the constitutionality of the program in June 2016, splitting the vote 4-4 due to the empty seat at the time left by late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
One of Trump’s signature campaign promises was that he would rescind both DAPA and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program if elected president.
The DHS press release added, however, that the June 2012 Obama memorandum creating DACA will remain in effect. That program applies to certain illegal aliens in the U.S. who arrived as children and met specific criteria.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2017/06/15/promise-kept-trump-admin-rescinds-dapa-amnesty-program/
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
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commentsGood evening everyone! I hope you are all having a fabulous Friday! Tonight I have my candy corn mani to share with you guys. If you follow me on Instagram, then you saw a little sneak peek of this mani earlier in the week. Well after wearing for a full week, I must say this is one of my favorite Halloween inspired looks. I received TONS of compliments from both male and females, even made a waitress break a smile on what was clearly a bad night for her. My candy corn manicure is super easy to create with the right colors.
For the candy corn nails I started with two coats of Alpine Snow by OPI and a coat of Clearly On Top by KBShimmer. Next up I used a makeup sponge with a stripe of Alpine Snow, Juice Bar Hopping, and Live Gave Me Lemons by OPI to do the perfect candy corn gradient. I used the same sponge for five nails and a fresh stripe of each color for each nail. I also found doing one coat on all five nails and then going back a second time to really smooth things out and give the colors a more vibrant finish. Lastly I used Polish Matte’rs by Girly Bits to give the perfect matte finish.
So what do you guys think of my Candy Corn nail art? I love it!!!!! I am beyond trilled with how well the colors blended to create the perfect candy corn look. Thank you so much for stopping by tonight and I will see you all again this weekend.Somali Rapper K'Naan Schools American MCs
Download a Song Somalia
Hear More Songs ABC's Dreamer
toggle caption James Minchin
News from Somalia usually involves violent warlords, or pirates hijacking ships off the coast. Other than that, average Somalis don't have much of a voice. But a rapper from Somalia named K'Naan is trying to change that, and in the world of hip-hop, he's become an artist to watch.
K'Naan grew up in Mogadishu, on what he calls "the meanest streets in the universe." In one song on his new album, he calls his hometown the "risky zone," full of pistols and Russian revolvers.
"The song's called 'ABCs,' " K'Naan says. "And it's about how being born in a certain place changes everything, your destiny. I got the kids choir singing, 'They don't teach us the ABCs / We play on the hard concrete,' and for us, that is very true."
Somalia is one of the poorest and most violent countries in the world. Malnutrition and clan warfare are rampant. According to Amnesty International, some 6,000 civilians were killed in fighting in 2007 alone. K'Naan says he wants to use his music to raise consciousness about what's happening there.
"The people of Somalia just do not have a voice," he says. "They are to me the most forgotten people in the world."
The rapper left Somalia as a teenager in 1991 with his mother and older brother. The country was in a civil war involving multiple fighting factions.
"Mogadishu was burning. The government is falling," he says. "And all the embassies are packing out, and my mother is able to get visas to the U.S."
New Life In North America
His family eventually settled in Toronto. Eighteen years later, K'Naan is establishing his name in Canadian and American hip-hop. His first album, 2006's The Dusty Foot Philosopher, was a hit with critics here and abroad. His latest, Troubadour, features Mos Def and Damian Marley. The L.A. Times recently listed K'Naan as an artist to watch in 2009, while The Guardian called him "powerfully low-key, theatrical [and] witty."
K'Naan writes in a variety of music styles. But before he moved to North America — before he spoke any English — his first love was American rap.
"I came to the door / I said it before / I never let the mic magnetize me no more," K'Naan raps, before saying, "That was Eric B and Rakim [from] Paid in Full. I used to say it just like that. But, of course, I didn't know what 'door' meant."
K'Naan could not be mistaken for an American rapper: For one thing, he has a kind of vintage Bohemian look. He says he doesn't think that American rap has much credibility, because even the toughest American neighborhoods aren't nearly as dangerous as Mogadishu.
"Where rocket-propelled grenades are fired around you on a daily... a guy bragging on TV talking about how gangster he is?" K'Naan says. "For us, it's more a source of entertainment. It's more like a comedy or something we watch. Say, 'Oh wow, that's kind of cute of American gangsters.' But it isn't hardcore, it isn't that bad. Let's get things in perspective, you know?"
Lately, K'Naan has been talking about the Somali pirates who've been hijacking ships from Western countries off the Somali coast. Because, he says, there's more to that story, too.Brazil recruited Pelé for the national soccer team in 1957. During the 1958 FIFA World Cup in Sweden, Pelé earned a starting position in a match against the Soviet Union. Later, in the quarterfinals, he scored the team’s only goal against Wales, which established him as the youngest scorer in World Cup history. He followed that performance with a hat trick, scoring three goals in 23 minutes against France, and to the world’s astonishment, scored two goals against Sweden in the Finals, earning his team their first-ever World Cup.His freshman performance garnered him the Cup’s second-highest honor, the Silver Ball, and he was carried off the field by his exuberant teammates. “I felt like I was living in a dream,” recalled Pelé of that moment.Although he returned to Santos, his home club team, Pelé had become an international star. He lived up to the buzz surrounding his abilities. In the year after his first World Cup, he scored 127 goals, 58 of which occurred during the state championship; this established him as the top scorer, a title he would hold for nine years straight.During the next two years, Pelé led Santos to numerous successes; he scored 110 goals in 1961 and led the team to countrywide and South American victory. 1962 brought another World Cup and, naturally, Pelé played for the Brazil team. During their second game against Czechoslovakia, Pelé injured his groin, leaving him benched for the rest of the series. The team won their second Cup, and Pelé spent the next three years scoring against his local rivals and preparing for his next World Cup.In England in 1966, Pelé was prepared to put up a fight. But so were his opponents, who focused their violence on Brazil’s star player. Pelé was carried out on a stretcher after players from Bulgaria and Portugal directed the majority of their tackles in his direction. Brazil failed to win the Cup in those games, but in 1970, the team rebounded in the first televised World Cup. Pelé scored one of the team’s winning goals over Italy and Brazil walked away with its third Cup, the only team at that point to hold that honor.Programmers make mistakes. Some of them are just annoying (for others to read) and some are really dangerous. Here is my selection of 10 mistakes done by Ruby / Ruby on Rails developers. These tips are easy to follow and can save you much time of later debugging.
1. Double negative and complex conditionals
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 if! user. nil? #... end unless user. blank? #... end unless user. active? || address. confirmed? #... end
Double negative is hard to read. Every time I encounter it, I spend a couple of seconds on parsing the condition. Use the API which Rails gives you – user.present? instead of!user.blank?.
I also rarely see any usage for unless, especially with complex conditionals connected by && and ||. How fast can you decide when unless user.active? || address.confirmed? will fire?
2. Using save instead of save! and not checking return value
1 2 3 user = User. new user. name = "John" user. save
What is wrong with this piece of code? It will fail silently when user cannot be saved. There will be no single trace of this failure in your logs and you will spend time wondering: “why there are no users in the database”. If you expect that data is valid and model should be always saved successfully, then use bang versions – save!, create! and so on. Use save only when you handle the return value:
1 2 3 4 5 if user. save #... else #... end
3. self when it’s not needed
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 class User attr_accessor :first_name attr_accessor :last_name def display_name " #{ self. first_name } #{ self. last_name } " end end
In this case writing self.first_name is completely unnecessary, because first_name will do. This is of course just matter of style and has no other negative consequences than overly verbose code. Please mind that you need self in assignments: self.first_name = "John".
4. N + 1 queries
This is a vast topic, but I will try to give the simplest example. You want to display a list of posts with names of authors. Post model belongs_to :user. If you just do Post.limit(10) and then call post.user.name in your views, you will make a separate database query for each user. That’s because Rails has no single chance to guess that you need users when you make the first query in the controller.
It’s easy to spot N + 1 queries problem just by looking at server’s logs:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Template Load ( 0. 4 ms ) SELECT "templates". * FROM "templates" ORDER BY "templates". "id" desc LIMIT 30 OFFSET 0 Collection Load ( 0. 2 ms ) SELECT "collections". * FROM "collections" WHERE "collections". "id" =? LIMIT 1 [[ "id", 1 ]] Collection Load ( 0. 1 ms ) SELECT "collections". * FROM "collections" WHERE "collections". "id" =? LIMIT 1 [[ "id", 6 ]] CACHE ( 0. 0 ms ) SELECT "collections". * FROM "collections" WHERE "collections". "id" =? LIMIT 1 [[ "id", 6 ]] CACHE ( 0. 0 ms ) SELECT "collections". * FROM "collections" WHERE "collections". "id" =? LIMIT 1 [[ "id", 6 ]] Collection Load ( 0. 1 ms ) SELECT "collections". * FROM "collections" WHERE "collections". "id" =? LIMIT 1 [[ "id", 3 ]] CACHE ( 0. 0 ms ) SELECT "collections". * FROM "collections" WHERE "collections". "id" =? LIMIT 1 [[ "id", 3 ]] Collection Load ( 0. 1 ms ) SELECT "collections". * FROM "collections" WHERE "collections". "id" =? LIMIT 1 [[ "id", 2 ]] CACHE ( 0. 0 ms ) SELECT "collections". * FROM "collections" WHERE "collections". "id" =? LIMIT 1 [[ "id", 2 ]] CACHE ( 0. 0 ms ) SELECT "collections". * FROM "collections" WHERE "collections". "id" =? LIMIT 1 [[ "id", 2 ]] CACHE ( 0. 0 ms ) SELECT "collections". * FROM "collections" WHERE "collections". "id" =? LIMIT 1 [[ "id", 1 ]] CACHE ( 0. 1 ms ) SELECT "collections". * FROM "collections" WHERE "collections". "id" =? LIMIT 1 [[ "id", 1 ]] Collection Load ( 0. 1 ms ) SELECT "collections". * FROM "collections" WHERE "collections". "id" =? LIMIT 1 [[ "id", 4 ]]
You have to be explicit at telling what you need from the database. In the easy cases Rails includes method will do. You can read more about it in Rails guides – http://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_querying.html#eager-loading-associations
5. Boolean field with three possible values
Boolean is supposed to have two possible values – true and false, right? And how about nil? If you do not specify default value and null: false in your migrations, you end up with boolean field with three possible values – true, false and nil. This leads to nasty code like:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 # post is new, not published, not rejected if post. published. nil? #... end # post is published if post. published #... end # post is new or rejected unless post. published #... end
If you need three possible states – use string field with three well-defined values.
6. Orphaned records after destroy
When you destroy a model and it is required by associated records, you should handle it. It’s easy to find such cases:
1 2 3 4 class Post < ActiveRecord : :Base belongs_to :user validates_presence_of :user end
User is required for post. Hence, we have to write:
1 2 3 class User < ActiveRecord : :Base has_many :posts, dependent : :destroy end
7. Using code from app/ in migrations
Let’s say you have the following model:
1 2 3 class User < ActiveRecord : :Base ACTIVE = "after_registration" end
and you want to add points field to it. So you create a migration. But you would also like to handle existing users: 10 points for active and 0 for the rest. You add to your migration:
1 User. where ( status : User : :ACTIVE ). update_all ( points : 10 )
It works and you are happy. Time passes by and you decide to remove User::ACTIVE constant. Your migrations are now broken, you cannot run them from scratch, because User::ACTIVE is undefined.
Never use code from app/ directory in migrations. If you need to update existing data and do it in a few environments (development, staging, production) create a Rake task and delete it once it’s executed in every environment.
8. Leaving puts
Leaving puts in the code after some debugging session pollutes server logs and output of tests. Use Rails.logger.debug so it’s later possible to adjust the desired log level.
9. Not using map
I’ve seen such code many times:
1 2 3 4 users = [] posts. each do | post | users << post. user end
This is exactly the case for using map, which is shorter and more idiomatic:
1 2 3 users = posts. map do | post | post. user end
10. Not using Hash#fetch
1 name = params [ :user ][ :name ]
What’s wrong with this code? It will throw NoMethodError: undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass if there is no user key in the hash. If you expect the key to always be present, use Hash#fetch :
1 name = params. fetch ( :user ) [ :name ]
This will give you a meaningful exception – KeyError: key not found: :user.
And you?
This is my selection of Ruby / Ruby on Rails mistakes. And what are your “favorite mistakes”? Share them in the comments!On Monday, H2k-Gaming top laner Andrei "Odoamne" Pascu took to Facebook to offer his analysis of the team's disappointing playoff performance.
H2K finished the 2016 EU Spring Split in second place with a record of 14-4, but would go on to lose to both Origen and Fnatic, to finish the Spring Playoffs in fourth.
Odoamne said that in practice matches, H2K's performance started to dip as much as a week before their Semifinal, and they were "barely keeping a positive win record."
"Things went downhill but we managed to barely bring it together a day before our series and bring our morale higher for the OG series," he wrote. "[B]ut our gameplay was on a whole different level than what we showed in the regular season."
Summing up H2K's series against OG as "really poor," he identified a number of mistakes that they made throughout the series, including two failed tower dives and a poor wave bounce in Game 4 of the series.
"They pretty much did a better job than us at punishing mistakes since we kept missing every opportunity to make good plays and took the impossible ones at starting fights," he concluded.
Following their loss to OG, H2K had to regroup to face Fnatic in the third place match the following week. They forced a Game 5 and were poised to reverse-sweep Fnatic, but they lost the final game due to "a ridiculously bad teamfight due to miscommunication and lack of patience."
"Our split just collapsed at the end," Odoamne said. "Two 3-2 series and two weeks of worst form we ever been in ruined 3 months of hard work."
Despite a sad end to the Spring Split, Odoamne is looking forward to returning to the LCS stronger than before.
"We ended up failing in this split, but not without realizing what held us back from winning the whole thing," he said. "I’m confident that this split will be better than our previous one."
Preston Dozsa is a news editor for theScore esports. You can follow him on Twitter.Search Gallery Gem Dragon Remake DragonsAndBeasties 903 Christmas Sale Dec.10th DragonsAndBeasties 1,075 Advertisement Advertisement Dragon Pets Sale August 14 DragonsAndBeasties 1,524 Dragon with Ball Python DragonsAndBeasties 2,732 Ebay/ Etsy Sale July 17th DragonsAndBeasties 1,386 Etsy/Ebay Sale June 19th DragonsAndBeasties 1,282 Oversized Dice Dragon DragonsAndBeasties 2,260 Beasties Sale May 29th DragonsAndBeasties 1,939 Rainbow Zebra DragonsAndBeasties 3,346 Art vs Artist DragonsAndBeasties 1,447 Mother's Day Sale 2016 DragonsAndBeasties 1,391 Nommin on Mom DragonsAndBeasties 1,487 Mama and Baby Rainbow Unicorns DragonsAndBeasties 1,335 Copic Rainbow Dragon DragonsAndBeasties 3,147 Dice Dragon Sale April 10th DragonsAndBeasties 999 Charity Auction for World Rat Day DragonsAndBeasties 1,088 Dice Dragon Sale March 27th DragonsAndBeasties 1,434 Home Tour in Dragons DragonsAndBeasties 1,210 Taco Dragons DragonsAndBeasties 1,787 Christmas Sale 2015 DragonsAndBeasties 1,259 Angel Dragons DragonsAndBeasties 2,466 Scarf Critters Sale DragonsAndBeasties 1,177 Etsy Sale Oct. 18th - Halloween! DragonsAndBeasties 1,792 Wispy Ghost Dragon DragonsAndBeasties 3,031International attention moved on, but the killings have continued, with a second wave even larger than the first. Even as overall violence here declines, new clusters of slain women are continually being discovered.
Roughly 60 women and girls have been killed here so far this year; at least 100 have been reported missing over the past two years. And though the death toll for women so far this year is on track to fall below the high of 304 in 2010, state officials say there have already been more women killed in 2012 than in any year of the earlier so-called femicide era.
This time, though, the response has been underwhelming. “People haven’t reacted with the same force as before,” said Gustavo de la Rosa, a human rights investigator for Chihuahua State. “They think it’s natural.”
Mexican authorities have made promises to prioritize cases like these for years, and in the wake of international pressure, prosecutors now argue that more of the killings are being solved. But arrests and convictions are exceedingly rare. For the victims found in the mass grave in the Juárez Valley, even the most basic details were still a mystery months later: forensic teams said they were not even sure how many women were buried there.
To many, these women are now part of what looks like a slaughter with peaks and valleys, but no end. In the state office opened a few years ago to investigate violence against women, desks are perpetually covered with stomach-turning case files.
“It’s a more vulnerable group,” said Hector Hawley, the forensics investigator charged with documenting the crime scenes of most of the women killed in Ciudad Juárez. “These are not people we expect to see killed.”
Mr. Hawley has been working murder cases since 2003. He started specializing in women in recent years, and in his view, the stunning tally of women killed is mostly caused by the increased local involvement in gangs and drugs; and jealous men. Often, both gangs and jealousy come together in a single case.
Photo
He opened a file on his computer showing one of the 18 women killed in April. Photographs showed that she had been dumped in a public street, and found around 8 a.m. “She was stabbed 63 times,” Mr. Hawley said. Her pink shirt, featuring an image of a heart, was stained with blood. Based on the number of stab wounds, he said, “The killer had to be on drugs.”
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He opened another file, showing a woman, shot dead, at the bottom of a garbage pile. “She was pregnant,” he said. “We think she owed her bosses money for something, drugs maybe.”
He clicked through several other cases showing women young and old, mostly shot and killed at close range. He and two investigators in his office said they did not have any specific information about the women found in the mass grave, but they warned against seeing their deaths as the product of a single cause. “In Juárez, there’s everything,” Mr. Hawley said. “There are jealous husbands, jealous fathers-in-law, there are women killing women.”
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A government committee found a similar array of causes for the earlier wave of killings. After surveying 155 killings out of 340 documented between 1993 and 2003, the committee found that roughly half were prompted by motives like domestic violence, robbery and gang wars, while a little more than a third involved sexual assault.
Victims’ advocates, however, argue that the killings of the women found in the valley fall on the more bizarre end of the spectrum. Francisca Galván, a lawyer who has been working with the parents of missing girls, said that Ms. González’s daughter, Perla, 15, was last seen downtown talking to a middle-aged man around lunchtime. Several other girls from the grave, along with some still missing, have also disappeared from locations nearby, Ms. Galván said.
All were around the same age and several looked very similar: posters hanging all over the city show that they had long, straight dark hair and skinny frames. “The authorities, they don’t want to see the truth,” Ms. Galván said. “Life here just has so little value.”
Her own theories run the gamut: maybe the girls were targeted for organ theft, maybe the killers arrived as part of the surge in deportations that has sent thousands of immigrant criminals to Ciudad Juárez from the United States. Though it is unclear if the victims had been raped, she added, maybe the killings started as sexual assaults.
American officials in El Paso said they were shaking their heads, too; when drug gangs are involved in high-profile killings, paid informers usually call with tips. But not in the case of the Juárez Valley grave.
For the parents, grief has been compounded by the authorities, who, in the parents’ view, have done far too little explaining. Several mothers of missing girls said that prosecutors had refused to let them visit the morgue, even as officials offered up conflicting tallies for how many female bodies were held there. “They’re liars,” said Norma Laguna Cabra, Idalí’s mother.
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Ms. González said that one state investigator even claimed to speak to the spirit of her missing daughter. She said he came to her house after the grave was found but before the identifications were announced. After lingering in Perla’s room, he told her she wanted to give her a message: “I’m on my way.”
“Tell me where you are — where should we look for you?” Ms. González said she shouted. But it was no use: “I can’t say,” came the reply from the investigator.
Two weeks later, the authorities told Ms. González that Perla was dead. A deeply religious woman, she said she had concluded that the message — whether real or fake — could only have come from the devil because it increased her pain.
“Here, the only one who gives us justice and obedience to the law is God,” she said. “And there’s no escaping.”A woman in Arizona was arrested this week after she used Facebook to make herself appear nearly 20 years younger so that she could have sex with two teenagers.
Jennifer Dempsey, 35, used her false identity—a doctored photo little more doctored photo with heavy makeup and a silly, teenaged smile—to corral the two boys, ages 14 and 16, over to her house, which she’d explain was her aunt’s.
Police say that Dempsey also told the two boys—who didn’t know each other—that she had recently gotten pregnant, even going so far as to meet with one of the boys’ parents about it.
It was that meeting that got Dempsey into trouble. After taking note that the 35-year-old woman didn’t exactly look like a teenager, the parents alerted police to the situation and then checked their son’s cell phone. There, they found nude photos Dempsey had sent and a number of other incriminating text messages that eventually led to her arrest.
Officials working on the case believe that Dempsey had been using Facebook to trick boys into thinking they were sleeping with a 16-year-old for some time now.
Dempsey’s online saga is strange enough to raise eyebrows, but it may not be as strange as the story she’s told just about everybody she’s known for the past five years.
That particular tale involves a longstanding fight with cancer chemotherapy port attached to her chest, both of which were fake as foil, detectives learned during the aforementioned arrest.
Additionally, Phoenix police spokesman Sgt. Trent Crump told Phoenix’s KPHO that Crump would shave her head and purchase wigs and carry out this cancerous hoax in an effort to stay out of trouble.
“She said this is the reason why she didn’t engage in the sexual conduct,” Crump said. “Because she was constantly ill from chemotherapy, all of which we learned in the following days, was not true.”
Photo via FacebookLYNN, Mass.—A Massachusetts State Police trooper is suspended without pay after his arrest for allegedly picking up a suspected prostitute and fleeing when police tried to stop him.
A state police spokesman says 50-year-old Efrain Montanez of Salem was off duty at the time of Friday morning's arrest in Lynn, but was driving an unmarked state pickup. Montanez worked in the gang unit.
He pleaded not guilty to charges including engaging in unnatural acts, failure to stop for police, and assault with a dangerous weapon, the truck. He was released on personal recognizance.
The woman also was charged with prostitution and unnatural acts.
Another off-duty state police veteran is suspended after his arrest last month. He allegedly was driving an unmarked state car erratically and refused to stop for Saugus police. He's due in court next week.
© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.What happens when a monkey gets loose in a Walmart parking lot and jumps a store employee? Someone catches the whole thing on video, that’s what happens, and the Internet goes crazy.
The rumble far from the jungle happened in Lancaster, OH on Sunday night, and was filmed by a shopper who was arriving at Walmart, reports NBC-4. She noticed something a bit odd — a monkey standing on a bunch of carts, apparently in a showdown with an employee trying to help its owner catch it. It had escaped from a woman’s nearby camper.
In the video, the monkey’s owner can be seen running towards the worker yelling, “Let her go, let her go! Did she bite you?”
“All of a sudden the monkey jumps on him and she pushes him out the way,” the eyewitness told the news station.
A Walmart spokesperson told NBC4 the monkey didn’t bite the worker. After it escaped from its camper, the employee took its leash and returned the monkey to its owner, who was “grateful,” Walmart says.
The Department of Agriculture is now interested in speaking with the woman out of concern that the monkey might not be registered.
Monkey gets loose in Lancaster Walmart parking lot [NBC-4]America's Best Holiday Light Displays by the Numbers
Christmas Light Displays Based on Number of Lights, Energy Output, and Number of Days Up
For many Americans, the holiday season means taking part in the exciting tradition of waiting until the sun sets and admiring neighborhood Christmas decorations.
While this is a fun family tradition on a small scale, at Treetopia, we wanted to find the best holiday light displays across the country to see which towns had the most holiday spirit! We put together a handful of charts illustrating where the most extravagant light displays were located, how many lights they used in their setup, and the total duration of the holiday light display event. With all of this in mind, we then looked at the total amount of energy that goes into powering each of these phenomenal holiday displays.
Check out our breakdown below!
Find the top holiday light displays by state
Out of these top 10 displays, where can you find the display with the greatest number of lights?
Which holiday light display is up the longest?
Which light display uses the most energy?
Which light display is the most expensive to power throughout the season?
As you travel around the country to visit family and friends over the holidays, dont forget about these brightly lit attractions: There are pre-lit trees, giant santas, glowing reindeer, and more. They are not to be missed!Barnhart, a small community in West Texas, has run out of water.
John Nanny, an Irion County commissioner and an official with Barnhart’s water supply corporation, said on Thursday that the situation was serious. When reached by telephone, he was working on pumping operations and hoped to have a backup well in service Friday morning. A load of bottled water was on its way to the community center, he said.
The town has one main well that serves 112 customers, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. But the well stopped pumping quickly enough Tuesday evening, and while there is still some water in it, Nanny said, "We don’t want to get down to the mud."
Nanny said he had checked for a leak but had not found one. The Barnhart area has been hard-hit by drought, he said, just as surging oil and gas drilling activities have increased local water demands. Barnhart was recently featured in The Wall Street Journal owing to the increase in oil boom-related railroad traffic through the town. (Incidentally, Barnhart's backup water well was drilled by the railroad in the early 1900s, Nanny said.)
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Barnhart’s dire water situation was first reported by the San Angelo Standard-Times.
The main municipal water well could come back "with a significant rainfall event," Nanny said.
At Barnhart's volunteer fire department, fire chief Jimmy Baker said there wasn't any water from the tap. But he said the fire station had a full tank for fighting fires and firefighters are drinking bottled water.
The residents of Barnhart are “pretty P.O.'d” about the water situation, Baker said.
Nanny said that the town was considering the possibility of getting a tank of freshwater from San Angelo, which is 50 miles away. Private wells were still supplying some water, he said.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality released a statement saying it had learned of the problem on Wednesday.
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"The water system indicated that the water level in their only active well has dropped to the point the pumps are pulling air, the well recovery is very slow, and the system’s distribution pressure has decreased significantly," the TCEQ statement said. "On June 6, 2013, the water system issued a boil water notice as a precautionary measure due to the low water pressure. The water system is in the process of receiving approval from the Water Supply Division for a previously used well."
Barnhart is not the first Texas community to run short of water. Early last year, wells failed for the community of Spicewood Beach, near Austin, which then began trucking in water.
About 30 communities statewide could run out of water by the end of the year, according to a list compiled by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
Texas Tribune donors or members may be quoted or mentioned in our stories, or may be the subject of them. For a complete list of contributors, click here.A new book examining prog albums between 1990-2016 is set to be released this winter.
Essential Modern Progressive Rock Albums: Images And Words Behind Prog’s Most Celebrated Albums 1990-2016 has been written by Prog Report editor Roie Avin and will feature more than 50 albums that made an impact over the last quarter of a century.
Artists featured in the book include Marillion, Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree, Opeth, Spock’s Beard, The Flower Kings, Big Big Train, Haken, Karnivool, Riverside and Between The Buried And Me.
A statement on the book reads: “Drawing on original interviews with band members such as Mike Portnoy, Neal Morse, Steven Wilson, John Petrucci, Mikael Akerfeldt, Roine Stolt, Pete Trewavas and dozens more, the book offers an in-depth look at the stories behind the albums that shaped the next wave of progressive rock.
“This book focuses solely on bands that carried the mantle of the genre’s initial 70s explosion, artists that expanded the genre further, incorporating new sounds and elements to reach new audiences worldwide.”
To mark the announcement, the publishers have released a short teaser showcasing the 250-page book. Watch it below.
A release date will be issued in due course.
Prog Quiz: General Knowledge IIBy F. William Engdahl
BlacklistedNews.com
Birds and bees are something most of us take for granted as part of nature. The expression “teaching about the birds and the bees” to explain the process of |
first amendment. One of these made-up permit requirements, which are not transparent or accountable, is the megaphone restriction.
So I informed the group on Hudson Street that they had a first amendment right to use a megaphone and that the National Lawyers' Guild should appeal the issue if they got arrested. And I repeated the words of the first amendment, which the crowd repeated.
Then my partner suggested that I ask the group for their list of demands. Since we would be inside, we thought it would be helpful to take their list into the event and if I had a chance to talk with the governor I could pass the list on. That is how a democracy works, right? The people have the right to address their representatives.
We went inside, chatted with our friends, but needed to leave before the governor had arrived. I decided I would present their list to his office in the morning and write about the response. On our exit, I saw that the protesters had been cordoned off by a now-massive phalanx of NYPD cops and pinned against the far side of the street – far away from the event they sought to address.
I went up and asked them why. They replied that they had been informed that the Huffington Post event had a permit that forbade them to use the sidewalk. I knew from my investigative reporting on NYC permits that this was impossible: a private entity cannot lease the public sidewalks; even film crews must allow pedestrian traffic. I asked the police for clarification – no response.
I went over to the sidewalk at issue and identified myself as a NYC citizen and a reporter, and asked to see the permit in question or to locate the source on the police or event side that claimed it forbade citizen access to a public sidewalk. Finally a tall man, who seemed to be with the event, confessed that while it did have a permit, the permit did allow for protest so long as we did not block pedestrian passage.
I thanked him, returned to the protesters, and said: "The permit allows us to walk on the other side of the street if we don't block access. I am now going to walk on the public sidewalk and not block it. It is legal to do so. Please join me if you wish." My partner and I then returned to the event-side sidewalk and began to walk peacefully arm in arm, while about 30 or 40 people walked with us in single file, not blocking access.
Then a phalanx of perhaps 40 white-shirted senior officers descended out of seemingly nowhere and, with a megaphone (which was supposedly illegal for citizens to use), one said: "You are unlawfully creating a disruption. You are ordered to disperse." I approached him peacefully, slowly, gently and respectfully and said: "I am confused. I was told that the permit in question allows us to walk if we don't block pedestrian access and as you see we are complying with the permit."
He gave me a look of pure hate. "Are you going to back down?" he shouted. I stood, immobilised, for a moment. "Are you getting out of my way?" I did not even make a conscious decision not to "fall back" – I simply couldn't even will myself to do so, because I knew that he was not giving a lawful order and that if I stepped aside it would be not because of the law, which I was following, but as a capitulation to sheer force. In that moment's hesitation, he said, "OK," gestured, and my partner and I were surrounded by about 20 officers who pulled our hands behind our backs and cuffed us with plastic handcuffs.
We were taken in a van to the seventh precinct – the scary part about that is that the protesters and lawyers marched to the first precinct, which handles Hudson Street, but in the van the police got the message to avoid them by rerouting me. I understood later that the protesters were lied to about our whereabouts, which seemed to me to be a trickle-down of the Bush-era detention practice of unaccountable detentions.
The officers who had us in custody were very courteous, and several expressed sympathy for the movements' aims. Nonetheless, my partner and I had our possessions taken from us, our ID copied, and we were placed in separate cells for about half an hour. It was clear that by then the police knew there was scrutiny of this arrest so they handled us with great courtesy, but my phone was taken and for half an hour I was in a faeces- or blood-smeared cell, thinking at that moment the only thing that separates civil societies from barbaric states is the rule of law – that finds the prisoner, and holds the arresting officers and courts accountable.
Another scary outcome I discovered is that, when the protesters marched to the first precinct, the whole of Erickson Street was cordoned off – "frozen" they were told, "by Homeland Security". Obviously if DHS now has powers to simply take over a New York City street because of an arrest for peaceable conduct by a middle-aged writer in an evening gown, we have entered a stage of the closing of America, which is a serious departure from our days as a free republic in which municipalities are governed by police forces.
The police are now telling my supporters that the permit in question gave the event managers "control of the sidewalks". I have asked to see the permit but still haven't been provided with it – if such a category now exists, I have never heard of it; that, too, is a serious blow to an open civil society. What did I take away? Just that, unfortunately, my partner and I became exhibit A in a process that I have been warning Americans about since 2007: first they come for the "other" – the "terrorist", the brown person, the Muslim, the outsider; then they come for you – while you are standing on a sidewalk in evening dress, obeying the law.San Diego got a big boost in its fight against homelessness on Wednesday with a $6 million state grant that will help get many more low-level criminals with drug problems off the street.
The city and county have been recommended to jointly receive the grant after state officials judged their proposal superior to 57 other jurisdictions seeking long-promised money from a 2014 state ballot measure that reduced many felony crimes to misdemeanors.
The city will use its $3 million to sharply expand a program launched in December that allows chronic, non-violent criminals with drug problems to avoid jail time if they agree to move into government-funded housing including drug treatment.
The money, $1 million per year over three years, will allow the city to offer the opportunity to eight times as many people by providing funds to expand the number of available beds from 10 to 80.
RELATED: New San Diego program targets chronic drug offenders
The program has been called innovative because rather than cracking down on repeat offenders who clog the justice system, it gives them a chance to turn their lives around and get off the streets permanently.
City Attorney Mara Elliott, who oversees the program launched by her predecessor Jan Goldsmith, said the new money will bolster one of many creative solutions San Diego is exploring to reduce its homeless population.
"It's a pilot program that's proving to be worthy of funding, a great deal of funding," she said. "We're hoping this is the beginning of new ideas and new approaches to tackling homelessness."
The county will use its $3 million to launch a new program targeting people who face criminal charges and have other problems such as drug addiction or mental illness.
It will provide counseling, treatment and job training to all participants and “rapid re-housing” for 60 people at a time.
The city will also benefit from the county program because that’s one of two specific geographic areas the county program will target. The other is the North County cities of Oceanside, Vista, San Marcos and Escondido.
Of the 58 applicants for $104 million in funding from the 2014 state ballot measure, 23 were awarded grants. The only other local agency to get money is the Oceanside Unified School District, which will receive just under $1 million.
The ballot measure, Proposition 47, forced local agencies to deal with more misdemeanor offenders and released criminals needing treatment and counseling.
But it promised to provide local agencies with some of the savings yielded by the measure reducing the number of people in California prisons.
The grants awarded on Wednesday are the first under Proposition 47.
Other jurisdictions getting funding include the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, which got $20 million, and several other health agencies that got $6 million each in Orange County, Alameda County, San Bernardino County, Solano County, Monterey County and San Joaquin County.
While state officials rated San Diego’s proposal as the most worthy of all applicants, that doesn’t entitle them to additional money.
The city of San Diego has been lobbying for Proposition 47 money for more than a year to boost the criminal diversion program, officially called San Diego Misdemeanant At-Risk Track – or SMART.
It’s an expansion of a program launched by Goldsmith, the former city attorney, in late 2014 called the Community Justice Initiative. That program allows people charged with most misdemeanors to avoid jail time and a criminal record if they complete two days of community service and pay a $120 fine.
That program has had 1,920 participants who have completed 30,720 hours of community service.
But there was a group of chronic offenders that needed something else, said Lara Easton, chief deputy city attorney in the Neighborhood Justice & Collaborative Courts Unit.
"We noticed there was a subset of the population that wasn't taking a CJI offer," she said. "When we got to the root of the problem it was because they were chronically homeless, chronically drug addicted and weren't really incentivized by having two days of public work service. What they needed was treatment and housing."
So the city created SMART, but could only come up with money for 10 beds — a small fraction of the number needed to allow everyone who could benefit from the program to participate.
"There are plenty of customers out there, but we don't have any beds to offer them," said John Hemmerling, an assistant city attorney for the Community Justice and Criminal Justice divisions.
With the grant money, which will be available June 16, the city will seek out additional social service agencies that can provide beds and treatment.
"We do intend to ramp up on this and we are looking at some other options that are out there," Hemmerling said. "We're very optimistic."
Mayor Kevin Faulconer, the San Diego Police Department, District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis and many county officials helped prepare the successful grant application.
“The fact that San Diego ranked among the highest in the state for this grant funding proves that we have a winning formula for addressing homelessness through the SMART program,” Faulconer said Wednesday. “Now we’ll be able to expand SMART and provide meaningful incentives to help hundreds more of our homeless neighbors turn their lives around.”
david.garrick@sduniontribune.com (619) 269-8906 Twitter:@UTDavidGarrickTool have confirmed the first eight dates for their upcoming US tour. The January jaunt, which the band promises to be an “unparalleled sonic and visual experience,” kicks off in San Diego on the 9th. In the ensuing days, they’ll play shows in Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina.
Each show will see Tool “dwarfed by dramatic video projections,” according to the band’s Facebook page. Additionally, the opening acts “will in all likeliness be exciting to many Tool enthusiasts.” Update: Primus have been confirmed as one of the opening acts.
Update – November 30th: Tool have announced four new shows for Houston, Kansas City, St. Louis, and New Orleans to take place in January.
Update – December 1st: Tool have added a pair of dates in Florida.
See the current itinerary below.
Tool 2016 Tour Dates:
01/06 – San Francisco, CA @ Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
01/07 – San Francisco, CA @ Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
01/09 – San Diego, CA @ Viejas Arena *
01/10 – San Diego, CA @ Viejas Arena *
01/13 – San Antonio, TX @ AT&T Center *
01/14 – Houston, TX @ Toyota Center *
01/16 – Tulsa, OK @ BOK Center *
01/17 – Grand Prairie, TX @ Verizon Theatre *
01/19 – Southaven, MS @ Landers Center *
01/20 – Kansas City, MO @ Sprint Center *
01/22 – St. Louis, MO @ Chaifetz Center *
01/23 – Nashville, TN @ Bridgestone Arena *
01/25 – Atlanta, GA @ Infinite Energy Center *
01/26 – Charlotte, NC @ Bojangles Coliseum *
01/27 – Charlotte, NC @ Bojangles Coliseum *
01/28 – Orlando, FL @ CFE Arena *
01/30 – Pensacola, FL @ Pensacola Bay Center *
01/31 – New Orleans, LA @ Smoothie King Center *
* = w/ PrimusTory leadership contender comes under fire after appearing to suggest being a mother gave her an edge over Theresa May
Andrea Leadsom has been urged to sign a “clean campaign pledge” after appearing to suggest she had an edge over Theresa May in the race to become prime minister because she had children and May did not.
Leadsom came under fire on Saturday for claiming she was misquoted in a newspaper report that said her children gave her “a real stake” in the future of the country, moments after raising the fact that May was not a mother.
An audio recording of the interview and a written transcript that verified the story was released by the Times newspaper after Leadsom and her supporters claimed she had been misquoted in a deliberate attempt to smear her.
The Times ran the front page story with the headline “Being a mother gives me an edge on May – Leadsom” on Saturday, quoting the pro-Brexit MP as saying being a mother and having a large family was an advantage in the contest.
Leadsom, an energy minister who has only emerged within the last week as a serious contender to replace David Cameron, said that she did not want to capitalise on May’s childlessness because to do so would be “really horrible”. But in the same interview she stressed that having children was one factor that gave her a personal interest in the future of the country.
“I am sure Theresa will be really sad she doesn’t have children so I don’t want this to be, ‘Andrea has children, Theresa hasn’t’ because I think that would be really horrible,” she said. But she added: “Genuinely I feel that being a mum means you have a real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake.”
Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, has since called for Leadsom to sign the “clean campaign pledge”, saying Conservative members “do not want to witness a slanging match or see any backstabbing”.
He also opened up a new front in the battle between the two Tory candidates by suggesting May had the advantage on the world stage because many senior foreign politicians “have never heard of Andrea Leadsom”.
Hammond, who is supporting May’s bid to be the new prime minister, made the comments on the fringes of a Nato summit in Poland. “I’m not making it up or scoring a point,” he said.
“Self-evidently, most of my colleagues do not know Andrea Leadsom, have never heard of Andrea Leadsom. Many of them do know Theresa May because she has appeared at joint meetings of interior ministers and foreign ministers that we’ve had in response to dealing with CT [counter-terrorism] issues. She’s a known commodity to them and her reputation goes before her.”
He also said he did not think having children made someone more qualified to be prime minister.
“What makes you qualified to be prime minister is having long experience of the issues facing this country, a proven track record of being robust in the face of the many pressures people have at the very frontline of politics. That is why I am backing Theresa May to be the Conservative party leader and prime minister,” Hammond said.
He added: “Theresa May has been clear she wants this to be a clean campaign on the issues, not around personalities, but around capabilities and policies.
“She signed the clean campaign pledge. I would urge Leadsom to sign up to the clean campaign pledge and let’s make sure the rest of this campaign is clean and openly fought on the issues. That would be for the good of British politics, for the good of the Conservative party and both candidates.”
Dismissing the idea that Leadsom should withdraw, he said: “We need to have this competition and we need to see the membership of the Conservative party hearing the arguments and deciding.
“I am clear from the members I have spoken to they have got to hear the arguments and they do not want to witness a slanging match or see any backstabbing. They want to see a clear and clean debate.”
Leadsom and her supporters hit back at the Times report, claiming she had been misquoted, labelling the story “gutter journalism” and asking the author on Twitter: “How could you do this?”
According to reports, Leadsom also said: “I am beyond anger and disgust. The reporting of what I said is beneath contempt. In front of the Times reporter and cameraman I repeatedly made clear that nothing I said should be used in any way to suggest that May not having children had any bearing whatever on the leadership election. I expect the Times to retract the article and accompanying headline.”
But the Times released a recording of the relevant section of the interview, which was later played on BBC’s Radio 4, and a written transcript of the comments. Both appear to verify the paper’s report.
Confronted with the evidence by presenter John Humphrys, armed forces minister Penny Mordaunt said the report was an attempt to smear Leadsom.
The Leadsom supporter said: “Andrea’s first thoughts will be with Theresa in this matter; it’s a horrible thing to have happened to both candidates. But we have got to now raise our game and actually give a proper contest to the country.”
“I’m afraid this is an attempt, I think, by a paper that has declared for the other candidate to smear Andrea,” she added. ”We have had a pretty unedifying contest so far, including people trying to prevent Andrea getting on the ballot paper.”
Mordaunt added: “From my understanding of the interview, you could not have come away from that interview with the impression that the Times have clearly decided to write a headline on, which is something that she did not say.”
Speaking outside her home in Northamptonshire, Leadsom added: “I want to be crystal clear that everyone has an equal stake in the future of our country, that is what I believe.”
The comments drew criticism from politicians across the political divide. Ruth Davidson tweeted: “I am childless. I have nieces and nephews. I believe I – like everyone else – have a very real stake in our country.”
Tom Watson, the Labour deputy leader, also attacked the leadership hopeful. “No matter what trouble my party is in, this is disgusting. Leadsom should not be our prime minister,” he said.Question: whom does today’s Left-Liberal hate the most? The answer is easy- anyone with a position contrary to one held by them. After all, “disagreement from opposition as a proof of moral deficiency “is Left-Lib’s go-to defence in all arguments.
Next Question- Among all those disagree with them whom does today’s’ liberal hate most? The answer once again is easy- all things being equal, the Left-Lib is likely to take criticism from a woman far less kindly than from a man. That is one of the reason, why, for all their talk of gender equality, Left-Libs are some of the biggest misogynists on the planet. In India women leaders from HRD Minister Smriti Irani to state CMs like Anandiben Patel, Vasundhara Raje Scindia or EAM Sushma Swaraj,have all been at the receiving end of the left vitriol otherwise aimed only at the PM.
Then how about a liberal woman who disagrees with a Left-Liberal? A woman disagreeing and claiming to be one of their own. The Traitor!! Must! Not! Be! Tolerated!!
In this light the hit job on Hawaii Rep (D) Tulsi Gabbard by alternet.org hack Zaid Jilani should come as no surprise to anyone. What surprised me mostly was how uninspired and shoddy the hit job was. The assertions made by the writer are so ludicrous and self-contradictory that exposing them gives me no pleasure.
The subject of this anti-Gabbard rant is nominally her appearance on Fox News where she questioned the wisdom behind White House holding an extremism summit with Muslim Americans. Rep Gabbard termed this outreach by the Obama administration as diversion from what our real focus needs to be. And that focus is on Islamic extremist threat. Needless to say Jillani got riled. He took exception to Rep Gabbard’s claim that the Islamic extremism is essentially theological and not fuelled by materialistic motivation. The writer quotes “To Gabbard, the fact that Syria and Iraq have been through years of brutal civil war, wrecked economies and massive displacement is irrelevant; the only reason they have an extremism problem is because of Islamic theology.”
Fact check- If Jilani actually saw the whole 5.52 minute interview clip he posted, he would be forced to admit that of the two countries mentioned above, Rep Gabbard makes a specific reference to Iraq war (3.11 onwards in the clip) “we were diverted from that and ended up in a nation building mission in Iraq, deposing Saddam, pushing forward this Western ideal of democracy in Iraq, costing trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives and to what end?”
Doesn’t sound like someone who finds the brutal war and wrecked economy irrelevant, does it?
And of course she is 100% right on the Islamic extremism not being fuelled by materialistic motivations. As the Fox News journalist points out at 1.47 in the clip 13 out of the 19 Saudi hijackers of the 9/11 belonged to wealthy Saudi families. Nor is Rep Gabbard the only politician to point this out. British PM David Cameron in a speech in July 2015 stated “The root cause of the threat we face is the extremist ideology itself.” This opinion is also supported by studies like the one done by RAND Corporation in 2009 that showed Terrorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated, or afflicted by mental disease,” and “Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds.” Osama Bin Laden anyone?
Of course Jilani knows all this and reveals his real agenda in the next para itself where he claims “the case of Rep Gabbard becomes less curious and more expected once you look at her links to a different set of ethnic and religious hardliners- the Hindu nationalist Indian Bhartiya Janta Party ( BJP)”
Aha!!
The writer introduces us to the “Islamophobic” BJP. The writer mentions ( as you would ) PM Modi’s past i.e. Gujarat 2002 riots and says “Although Modi was never indicted, many including a senior police officer who testified before India’s Supreme Court said Modi believed his region’s Hindus should be allowed to “vent their anger,” and deliberately allowed the rioting to happen for some time before intervening.
The senior officer? Disgraced IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt. The meeting Bhatt talks about never took place as confirmed by the other senior officers Bhatt claimed to have attended the meeting with. Bhatt’s own boss R. B. Sreekumar denies Bhatt ever speaking to him about this meeting prior to him filing an affidavit (9 years after the riots). His own driver claims Bhatt took him to the local Indian National Congress leader’s house and threatened to corroborate Bhatt’s version.
Yes, and the officer you have cited at this moment stands terminated from his service. His plea to constitute Special Investigative Team for cases filed against him by Gujarat government is quashed by the Supreme Court with the following observation “petitioner (Bhatt) was in active touch with leaders of rival political party, NGOs, their lawyers tried to play media card, was being tutored by NGOs. He had probably forgotten that he was a senior IPS officer. In case he was fairly stating a fact after nine years, he ought not to have entered into the aforesaid exercise and kept away from all politics and activism of creating pressure, even upon 3-judge bench of this court, amicus and many others…”
A tip about citing past news for you Zaid- if you are quoting an article from 2011, just make sure none of the claims made there are refuted later on. You can google this stuff, you know.
His question “why did the state government not intervene sooner?” sounds hollow in face of the facts that –
Narendra Modi issued orders of curfew and shoot-at-sight at the town of Godhra in less than 2 hours after Muslim mob murdered 59 Hindus without provocation. After his visit to the station that evening more than 800 people, mostly Hindus were taken in preventive custody to stop them from retaliating this gruesome mass killing of Hindus. 70,000 strong police force was deployed, Rapid Action Force was used on the day after riots and the first Army unit was called for and landed in Ahemdabad in less than 48 hours from the Hindus were massacred at Godhra. Almost all people killed in police firing in first week were Hindus.
Interestingly, Modi had requested 3 neighbouring states, namely Madhya Pradesh, Maharahstra and Rajasthan (all ruled by BJP’s opponent Indian National Congress ) to send in their state police / state reserved police since the Gujarat police was hopelessly outnumbered and barring Maharashtra who sent 2 companies of the state reserved police, the other two states did not help. A true investigative journalist will present these facts since they are easily accessible and verifiable. A hit job artist will sweep them under the rug and hope for the best.
The writer also uses the clichéd lie, namely mostly Muslims were killed in the riots in 2002. Facts do not bear this out. The riots started when a mob of Muslim extremists burned 59 Hindus including 15 children alive at the train station of Godhra. In the subsequent riots too, there was a cycle of violence where each attack by Hindu mob was answered with similar attack by Muslims in the hope of cowering Hindus into giving up. Dalits were targeted and killed by Muslims. Muslims formed cordons and cut off their power supplies to make it impossible for law enforcement personnel to search for Islamic miscreants and allowed them to escape so they could continue to perpetrate violence. These are facts and they are undisputed.
Moving on, our intrepid truth seeker claims Modi was unapologetic about the riots and again hilariously (if it was not so tragic) quotes this NY times story published in 2002.
Another tip for you- never use a story as reference material when nearly every claim made in that story has been refuted later on.
Like where the story claims (in the riots) “A pregnant woman’s belly was slit open, her foetus raised skyward on the tip of a sword and then tossed onto one of the fires that blazed across the city.”
We all know now that the doctor who performed post mortem on the woman in question has clarified that the foetus was intact and in fact he had stated the same in his original post mortem report. A report any conscientious journalist would have cross checked with if his objective was reporting truth instead of doing his political master’s bidding.
The same NYT story also portrays the victims of Godhra train massacre as religious zealots who insulted the Muslims on the platform and thus their gruesome murder was kind of a spontaneous reaction. Guess the NYT reporter assumed the mob just kept the large amount of quantities of petrol needed to burn a train coach with them, you know just in case.
I feel the perpetrators of both attack need to be punished and you cannot explain one case of violence with another. At the same time there is no denying that if the 59 peaceful Hindus were not butchered in a cold blooded attack by Islamic extremists, then the subsequent riots would not have taken place. Jilani ;whose mission is to explain away beheadings and planes flying into buildings with socio economic deprivation should see my viewpoint. Except he doesn’t.
The falsehood continues as Jilani makes the ridiculous assertion that “several BJP figures who were accused of spurring on the violence, and noted they had yet to be arrested.”
Are you even real? For the record a grand total of 443 people were convicted for the riots in 2002. Almost 75 % of them were Hindus. Maya Kodnani, the sitting minister for women and child development of the state government was convicted and sentenced to 28 years of imprisonment in 2009. Compared to that, United States has convicted 319 people (as per the Bush administration) on terrorism related charges arising out of investigations primarily after 9/11.
The writer then states “Modi escaped repercussions at home”, on the contrary he faced every inquiry by various law enforcement agencies, provided them with all the co-operation that was expected out of him as the CM of the state and as a person of interest in the case and won an acquittal.But Jilani the crusader makes it sound like Modi fled India in the middle of the night.
The string of disasters continue in the article as Jilani gets the freaking surname of RSS leader Mohan Bhagwat wrong (referred to as Bhagway). The author lives up to every cliché of the ugly American who can neither pronounce nor spell a foreigner’s name and does not care. Once again- google this stuff.
Next on his peeve list is Gabbard’s opposition to HR 417 where she cited the timing (the resolution urged the US government to continue its policy to not grant Visa to Narendra Modi and largely held Hindus responsible for communal violence in India) of the resolution since it was introduced on the floor of the house the same time India was preparing for elections. Jilani says “her concern was that Modi’s electoral chances would be hurt by an honest look at religious persecution in India.”
Except she was not the only one.Republican house representative of the Congressional 39th district Ed Royce who was the chairman of the House Foreign Relations committee said of the resolution “H Res 417 weakens, rather than strengthens, the friendship between the US and India. The resolution runs counter to all the hard work that the American people, particularly those in the Indian American community, have done to improve the relationship,” Rep Gabbard was not even the only Democrat to oppose the offensive resolution. Eni Faleomavaega Jr. (note to Jilani- I spelled this one correctly, you can get Bhagwat right bud), American Samoan delegate to the House of Representatives who was a ranking member of the Subcommittee on Asia and Pacific- which has broad jurisdiction for US foreign policy for the Asian region said he would not support the resolution and described it as “flawed”.
But then Royce is a Republican and Faleomavaega Jr is a man. And most of all none of them are Hindus. So Jilani will pretend they do not exist for the purpose of this discussion. Sounds to me that Jilani’s concern about Rep Gabbard is that she did not allow Modi’s electoral chances to be unfairly hurt by a “flawed” piece of resolution.
And that brings me to the origin of Jilani’s hatred of Gabbard. Rep Gabbard, is an American Samoan who converted to Hinduism as Teenager. In Jilani’s world where terrorists who fly planes in buildings are nothing but expression of extreme poverty, Hindus and Jews (he makes a reference to Zionist government) are the root source of evil. At the beginning of this article I talked about the anger liberals feel towards liberal women who do not buy their brand of liberalism. This anger ought to multiply many times when the woman in question chooses a religion that you have neatly pigeon holed as evil.
And how does he get away with it? Why, by using the magic word- Islamophobia, of course. In the new cowardly politically correct world exploited best by radical extremists, the baseless attack on a Hindu woman by a Muslim journalist cannot be called out for communalism because you would be immediately termed an islamophobe by him and other radical lefties like him.
The article in itself merits no rebuttal because of the lack of research and unfair representation. It makes no case of representing Rep Gabbard as a communal thug that it tries to make her. It even descends into ultimate cheap tactic- threatening Rep Gabbard in the last line of the article. But the trend it shows, the trend of Islamic terror apologists feeling confident of taking pot-shots at their ideological opponents and then hiding behind Islamophobia ought to worry you and me.
As Edward R Murrow mulled about Senator Joseph McCarthy in his iconic speech on free speech “The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully.”
Journalists like Jilani did not create this situation where attributing violence committed in the name of a religion will be referred to as Islamophobia. He is merely exploiting the situation (rather ineptly I may add, but still ) and if a young, idealistic legislator, one who chose to put herself in the harm’s way for her country becomes the casualty of this venomous brand of communal politics, why the liberals fully expect us to stand and do nothing. Or termed as Islamophobe.
Old ED was right, the fault indeed Brutus is not in our stars but in ourselves.The doldrums of the NFL lockout cannot stifle the lingering bitterness from New York Jets LB Bart Scott toward the archrival New England Patriots.
Scott -- who gleefully mocked the Patriots after the Jets' upset playoff win in Foxborough three months ago -- continued to bash the team last week.
In an interview with the New York Metro, Scott said the normally-stoic Patriots are coming loose in an attempt to mimic the Jets' bold-talking ways.
He told the paper that bold words from Patriots QB Tom Brady (who hasn't backed down from comments last summer that he hates the Jets) and WR Wes Welker (who appeared to mock Jets coach Rex Ryan in a news conference days before the playoff game) illustrate that the Jets have gotten into the Patriots' head.
Said Scott:
"That's doesn't sound right, that kind of talk. That's when you know they're buying into us, when they start sounding like we talk. Wes Welker start trying to be us, sounding like we do. That's how you know they want to be us."
The Jets have reached the playoffs as a wild card in Ryan's first two seasons as head coach and advanced to the AFC title game each year. The Patriots have won the AFC East both of those years but have been bounced from the playoffs in their first game each time.
Ryan has consistently said he considers Patriots coach Bill Belichick -- a three-time Super Bowl winner -- a better coach whom he only wants to be better than on game day.WASHINGTON (JTA) – Hundreds of pro-Israel activists from across the country will descend on Capitol Hill next week to press members of Congress to reject the nuclear deal with Iran.
The July 28-29 fly-in, which will bring to this city some of the most dedicated of the 100,000-strong membership of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is part of a multi-pronged effort by the pro-Israel lobby aimed at killing the agreement reached July 14 between Iran and the world powers. The campaign, according to top pro-Israel officials who briefed reporters on Wednesday, will also include TV ads by a new AIPAC-backed nonprofit dedicated to killing the deal, calls and emails by activists to their congressional representatives, and attendance at town hall meetings lawmakers are expected to convene during the August congressional recess.
Congress has two months to consider the deal, and the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives and Senate has indicated there will be a vote. If the lawmakers vote to disapprove, President Barack Obama has said he will veto their action. If congressional opponents can manage to muster the two-thirds majority in both chambers necessary to override a veto, it will kill the deal.
READ: The campaign for (and against) the Iran deal gets personal
Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran, the AIPAC-backed nonprofit, has raised nearly $30 million to run ads in 40 states, said one of the pro-Israel officials who had been briefed on the group.
Deal opponents as well as supporters will focus on Jewish communities. Five Jewish federations – Boston, Phoenix, Los Angeles and two in South Florida – have come out against the deal.
J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East policy group that supports the deal, has raised more than $2 million to run TV ads on news networks and is bringing in prominent Israelis who back the agreement, including a former consul general in New York, Alon Pinkas, and former Knesset member Amram Mitzna. On Thursday, J Street ran a full-page ad in The New York Times backing the deal.
Top administration officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, briefed lawmakers on Wednesday in classified sessions and on Thursday are slated to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The equivalent House committee will hear from the trio on Tuesday, the first day of the AIPAC fly-in.
READ: AIPAC to fight White House head to head in battle over Iran deal
The New York Times reported that Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to Washington, also briefed conservative Republicans on Wednesday, urging them to kill the deal. Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, the House speaker, has pledged to do whatever he can do stop the deal.
In the sights of AIPAC lobbyists will be Democrats who have yet to commit to supporting or opposing the deal, particularly those in states with large concentrations of Jewish voters, among them Florida and New York.
The pro-Israel officials who briefed reporters outlined a three-pronged presentation that lobbyists and activists will be making when meeting with lawmakers and their staffs: Asking the lawmaker whether he or she believes the deal is a good one; explaining that disapproval will not have the dire consequences as predicted by Obama; and outlining why AIPAC opposes the deal.
Among the major AIPAC objections are the freeing up of $100 billion to $150 billion in sanctions relief after Iran complies with the provisions in the deal rolling back and shutting down its nuclear activities. While the pro-Israel officials agreed with assessments by the administration that a large chunk of the money will go to reviving Iran’s stagnant economy, even a relatively small percentage diverted to Iranian mischief-making, they said, could destabilize the region.
READ: Timeline to a deal: Iran’s nuclear push has been decades in the making
Another objection is to the agreed-upon protocols for inspections of nuclear sites. The inspections regimen |
done with his movements that portray him as reacting and emoting and relating to people in very human ways. Ways that were not really carried forward into Halo 2 and 3, and were largely forgotten as part of the character’s DNA because it was Halo 2 and 3 that consolidated the popularity and cultural ubiquity of the series – and, as a result, popularised the notion that Chief is just this stoic, inanimate “vessel” because that’s how I’ll be arguing those games handled his characterisation.
For me, Halo 1 has the Master Chief at his most interesting and emotionally complex in the original trilogy. For that (and many other wonderful things in this series), credit really has to go to the writing from Trautmann, Boren, and Soell, the additional depth of context provided by Nylund’s The Fall of Reach novel, as well as Joe Staten’s fantastic cinematic directing style and the way in which the character was animated.
And, of course, to Steve Downes, for establishing the voice of this iconic character. It wouldn’t be the same without him.
Sadly, for the rest of the original trilogy, it’s all downhill from here…A 50′ x 50′ lawn uses 3,115 gallons of water every time you turn on the sprinklers. In the prolonged drought California is experiencing, this isn’t sustainable. Landscape irrigation uses 54 percent of all residential water. Even turf advertised as drought tolerant is only relatively drought tolerant. To make matters worse, the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) estimates the population of California will grow to 45 million by the year 2020.
California Assembly Bill 1881 requires that the DWR report to the Legislature on the status of water-efficient landscape ordinances to be adopted by local agencies. On February 4, 2014, the Tuolumne County Board of Supervisors declared a state of emergency and required a 20% reduction in water usage. The Tuolumne Utilities District declared a further state of emergency and instituted a 50% reduction in residential water use.
AB 1881 also mandates that local agencies set up programs to encourage the capture and storage of rain water, proper implementation of irrigation systems and strongly advises planting drought-tolerant plants.
Part of the bill is geared toward professional landscapers and commercial landscapes. Local agencies must create a plan to require an assessment of how much water a landscape design will use before allowing its implementation.
What does this mean for the home gardener? This water shortage is real and, even if we get a good winter with plenty of rain and snow, there won’t be enough water to go around. While the population of California keeps growing, our water resources are dwindling. We all need to ensure that our own water will be wisely used. We can only do this by changing the way we choose plants.
For an extensive list of water-efficient plant ideas, visit the California Native Plant Society’s website. Our Tuolumne County Library has two first-rate books by Bornstein, Foss and O’Brien titled, “Re-imagining the California Lawn,” and “California Native Plants for the Garden.”
The “California Master Gardener Handbook,” published by the University of California, also at the Tuolumne County Library, provides essential advice encouraging early-season watering, “Most established drought-resistant plants on soil at least 4 feet deep should be able to survive in fairly good condition with no irrigation if they start the growing season with a soil reservoir full of water.”
In addition to early watering, mulch is excellent for conserving landscape water. A 3 to 4 inch layer around plants will cut down on evaporation and reduce weed problems as well as buffer soil temperatures. Mulch, such as decorative bark and gravel are readily available at local nurseries. Backyard compost used as mulch also prevents water evaporation, and is a great organic fertilizer.
The more severe our drought becomes, the more legislation will be passed to curb our thirsty English-style gardens and force us to recycle water. AB 1881 is only one of many future directives to the California Department of Water Resources to implement stringent ordinances to address our ongoing water problems. Instead of waiting until this happens, we can begin by replacing water-thirsty plants with natives and drought-tolerant ones.
Francie McGowan is a UCCE Master Gardener of Tuolumne County who has replaced her lawn with paver stones and drought-tolerant plants.The Internet exploded after Zayn Malik announced his departure from One Direction, but no one was more caught of guard than Billy Zane.
In a hilarious Funny or Die video, Zane recorded a message for his "curiously heartbroken" fans, in which he reassured them that he is OK, even though he had no clue that his'shippers were "hysterical 14-year-old girls."
The tweets from his followers seem to have a common misspelling, so he tried to make them aware of their faux pas. "I don't want to be nitpicky," he said. "It's Z-A-N-E not Z-A-Y-N."
But when the tweets became overwhelmingly emotional with messages such as "I can't stop crying" and "#AlwaysInOurHeartsZayn," the Titanic actor started to respond with quotes from other famous musicians in order to console his worriers.
"As Sara Bareilles says, 'Say what you want to say / Let the words fall out / Honestly, I want to see you be brave,'" he recited.Melbourne could be the NRL frontrunners this season and they have no shortage of Fantasy prospects in their ranks, led by the best in the business in Cameron Smith.
Pre-register for the NRL Fantasy 2017 season now
Fantasy guns
Cameron Smith (HOK, $631,000): The best of the best. When picking your starting squad, there's nothing wrong with making the Storm skipper your first man picked (and then making him your team captain). Smith scored more than 66 points per game last season, scoring better than 50 points 22 times in 24 games during the regular season – more than any other player. He scores points in just about every Fantasy category and is as durable and reliable as they get.
[2016] Player Stats: Telstra Premiership: Cameron Smith
Jesse Bromwich (FRF, $482,000): He may have trailed behind the likes of Andrew Fifita and Ryan James last season but Bromwich remained one of just a handful of front-rowers to score more than 50 Fantasy points a game. The New Zealand skipper didn't miss a match either. He's a little cheaper than the top-priced props and could be worth a shot as a cut-price keeper.
Tohu Harris (2RF, $496,000): Melbourne's Mr Fix-It played at centre and five-eighth at times last year (and wore the No.6 for New Zealand in the Four Nations final) but his specialty is playing the full 80 in the second row, where he has a knack for running the right lines off Cooper Cronk. Harris scored an impressive eight tries last season and ran for at least 200 metres three times, finishing with 52 Fantasy points a game. With fellow second-rower Kevin Proctor now at the Titans, Harris could be sent the ball more often in 2017.
Wildcard
Cameron Munster (WFB, $481,000): Munster was the second-best fullback in Fantasy last season behind Tigers star James Tedesco, in what was a sensational individual campaign. Asked to step into Billy Slater's role from Round 2, Munster ensured the minor premiers didn't miss a beat. A tackle-breaking ball runner who can score and set up tries, Munster is likely to shift to five-eighth if Slater returns as expected in 2017 – but how that affects his scores is anyone's guess. His tackle counts will go up, but his run metres and tackle breaks could drop significantly.
Cash cow
Billy Slater (WFB, $212,000): A modern great of the game, Slater is traditionally a strong Fantasy scorer for a fullback but he starts this season at a cheap $212,000 price after playing just the one game last year before having his season ended by injury. If he can remain fit he's definitely good value with a break even of around 22 – but the veteran remains a big injury concern.
2017 NRL Fantasy prices
Cameron Smith (HOK, $631,000)
Tohu Harris (2RF, $496,000)
Jesse Bromwich (FRF, $482,000)
Cameron Munster (WFB, $481,000)
Dale Finucane (2RF, $445,000)
Cooper Cronk (HLF, $441,000)
Jahrome Hughes (WFB, HLF, $359,000)
Cheyse Blair (CTR, $325,000)
Kenneath Bromwich (2RF, $321,000)
Josh Addo-Carr (WFB, $305,000)
Tim Glasby (FRF, $304,000)
Suliasi Vunivalu (WFB, $300,000)
Jordan McLean (FRF, $296,000)
Nelson Asofa-Solomona (2RF, $294,000)
Will Chambers (CTR, $288,000)
Brodie Croft (HLF, $236,000)
Young Tonumaipea (WFB, $228,000)
Billy Slater (WFB, $212,000)
Felise Kaufusi (FRF, $203,000)
Slade Griffin (CTR, $201,000)
Christian Welch (FRF, $189,000)
Jeremy Hawkins (CTR, WFB, $143,000)
Vincent Leuluai (2RF, $143,000)
Mark Nicholls (2RF, $143,000)
Curtis Scott (CTR, $143,000)
Ryley Jacks (HLF, $138,000)
Joe Stimpson (2RF, $134,000)
More NRL Fantasy guides for 2017
Pre-register for the NRL Fantasy 2017 season nowThe new Greek government has found a novel way to secure concessions form hard-nosed German negotiators in their discussions over the debt crisis talks, by threatening them with refugees if they don’t play ball.
Panos Kammenos, the Greek defence minister said his nation would “dump” refugees on Germany, saying some of them could even be terrorist members of the Islamic State. Speaking on Sunday, Kammenos said: “If they deal a blow to Greece, then they should know the the migrants will get papers to go to Berlin”.
He is not the first member of the Greek government to make such a threat, though he is the most direct. Last week the foreign minister made a veiled threat at a meeting of EU leaders, remarking that if the Greek government were to fail because of heavy-handed German efforts to rebalance the nations enormous debt, it would become an express route into Europe for “millions of immigrants and thousands of jihadists”.
Germany has recently seen waves of large-scale protests aimed at perceived injustices stemming from the high number of refugees settling there in comparison to other European nations, which the protesters claim are shirking their responsibilities. Germany is now the largest importer of humans in Europe and one of the largest in the world, a point of contention for the PEGIDA movement, who campaign against the Islamification of Europe, war with Russia, and unlimited welcome to migrants.
Italy has become a major place of ingress for migrants and refugees, both legal and illegal, to Europe as the Italian Navy has created a safety net for those attempting to cross the Mediterranean by rescuing migrant boats. The emergence of a failed state in South East Europe could exacerbate the problem and create a new headache for FRONTEX – the European Union’s own borders agency.
Reacting to the threat by Greece, the German police union has already suggested Greece should be kicked out of the Schengen border-less area, which allows people already inside the EU to travel freely without a passport.Today’s post is a guest contribution from a Canadian pharmacist who is writing under the pseudonym Sara Russell:
For several years after graduating from pharmacy school, when I’d answer the question “What do you do for a living?”, it would be met with responses like “Good for you!”, “You must be so smart!” or simply “Wow!”. After a decade-long absence from a role in direct patient-care, I returned to pharmacy. I noticed that my response to that same question was met with much less enthusiasm, with some people even having trouble hiding their disappointment. How did this happen? When did being a pharmacist have less caché than saying you worked in a health-food store?
When I began my pharmacy career, so-called natural therapies were very much in the background. I worked in a hospital oncology setting, and observed patients in the waiting room passing around the name of the latest herbal cancer cure. This was before the internet age, so information was passed word-of-mouth, and evidence to support or refute these claims not easy to find. If the oncologist found out, he would usually suggest they discontinue the remedy due to possible interference with their treatment protocol. I don’t think very many complied with this request, and a few admitted to me that they simply would stop telling us. Looking back, this was the genesis of my skepticism. Not wanting them to keep this information from us, I made it my mission to investigate the claims of the various teas and capsules and report the findings back to them. As a relatively new graduate, I embraced the possibility that there was a miracle cure out there and I hoped to be able to find information to confirm their hopes. As I searched, time and time again I came up empty. Strangely, some of the herbs had not even been associated with cancer treatment. I came to realize that the message between patients became like the telephone game I had played so many times as a child.
Fast forward through a decade-long education in drug information, sales & marketing in the pharmaceutical industry, and I now embraced evidence-based medicine as a mantra of sorts. One may think that the term “evidence-based medicine” and pharmaceutical industry don’t belong in the same sentence, but it was there that I learned the art of dissecting research and how to interpret results – a skill that I later realized was used more often to combat competitor’s claims than to support those my own company was boasting of. I became the sales manager’s worst nightmare during training sessions, but my devotion to evidence actually served me well in my sales role as the physicians with whom I developed relationships trusted me. Ultimately, I realized that I was not the right “fit” for a sales role, and my career in retail pharmacy was born.
After 15 years in other settings, I was ill-prepared for what I found on the shelves at my first retail job. What was homeopathy again? Didn’t we learn about that in History of Pharmacy 101? Why is it back again? What was Cold-fX, and why were so many people asking me for it? If I were to be effective in my job I had to find these answers, so I took my drug information skills, and set to work. I signed up for a basic homeopathy course offered by Boiron. I laughed all the way to earning my certificate, which I decided not to print off for display in the pharmacy, as was recommended. Searching less biased sources of information on homeopathy only deepened my feelings of incredulity. The rep for Cold-fX had conveniently dropped off some published studies for me to read. After reading them, I was not only underwhelmed, but wondered how so many other pharmacists could embrace it so enthusiastically. Clearly, they must not have read the studies? Mark Messier and Don Cherry knew better than I did though, so I quickly found out that few patients cared for my opinion. The pharmacy owner encouraged me to adopt the mantra “What’s the harm?” and allow customers to try whatever they wanted as long as there were no obvious risks. Still, I had this nagging feeling that to do so would be unethical, given that there was no real evidence to support their choices.
Then came the great flu pandemic. Patients descended on us suffering obvious symptoms before the vaccine program rolled out and were looking to us for guidance and leadership. Stories about vaccine dangers and conspiracies were swirling among family and friends and spread like another plague on Facebook. Suddenly oscillococcinum was the most in-demand product in the pharmacy, and learning about it ultimately forced me to finally choose evidence over health freedom. Indeed, I now saw its sale in pharmacies as not only unethical, but fraudulent. A skeptic was born.
By pure luck, a pharmacist friend linked to this article on Facebook, which I shared with friends who had irrational fears about the vaccine. Sadly, some responded with their own links to whale.to, Mercola and NaturalNews. My fate was sealed, however, and I decided to make it my mission to educate the misinformed. Daily visits to Science-Based Medicine soon lead me to the blog you’re reading, Respectful Insolence, and Skeptic North. Understanding the difference between evidence-based medicine and science-based medicine completed my evolution. Some friends began to poke fun at how closed-minded I had become. They began embracing “all-natural” lifestyles, embracing acupuncture, and ridding their bodies of toxins with cleanses. I began to realize that I was running up against a mountain when it came to debunking widely-held opinions, and decided to retreat into the valley to regroup. I am not waving the white flag, however, as I am hoping that other health care professionals become more vocal:
Pharmacists, in particular, I call on you to scrutinize new products, dig into outrageous claims, and teach patients the difference between herbal and homeopathic products. Don’t be afraid to comment on articles in our pharmacy publications that are lacking in evidence. Nominate pharmacists for awards that thrive in business with practices such as Schill’s Remedy’s Rx as opposed to those that profit from the Suzanne Somers method of health. Pharmacy students – form skeptical student groups and question evidence presented to you as facts in lectures. Send people to this website to read the many excellent posts written by Scott.
As many people aren’t equipped to interpret science-y information, sometimes I adopt the “fight propaganda with propaganda” routine, and send people to the CBC website to watch a few excellent episodes of Marketplace debunking homeopathy, Cold FX and food labels that appeal to the naturalistic fallacy. While I don’t chase people down who put Stodal into their carts, for those customers that ask for my help, I do provide a quick lesson in homeopathy or in the case of a product like Cold-fX, show them the bottom line on the evidence. In the majority of cases, people feel misled by the hype and walk away $10-$20 richer. Plus, given that many hold the impression that pharmacists only want to sell products, they realize that I can be trusted for honest advice. One customer, a highly-educated well-to-do prominent local woman to whom I’d just explained homeopathy declared “That is something I’d be totally into!”
So I realize I can’t win everyone over, but I can try – one customer at a time.
Next up …. Skepticism in a small town, and why I retreated into the valley – again.
Photo via Flickr user ell brown under a CC licence.What do 3,000 or so Ubuntu server and cloud users have to say about the cloud that you might care about? A lot. Besides having its own cloud offering, Ubuntu OpenStack, Ubuntu is the most popular operating system by more than two to one on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). In other words, Ubuntu cloud users know what they're talking about when they talk cloud.
In Canonical's sixth annual Ubuntu Server and Cloud Survey, the company found -- no surprise -- that the enterprise is rapidly adopting the cloud. Further, the cloud is moving from "mostly development and testing to more production-grade workloads".
What kind of cloud? It's still heavily weighted to private clouds, which has 35 percent of users. The most popular platform for private cloud is OpenStack, which is used by 53 percent of users. At the same time, hybrid clouds are on the rise, at 20 percent, up from 15 percent last year. Indeed, the survey found that hybrid clouds are now almost as popular as public cloud, which is at 23 percent.
Interestingly, public cloud usage, which scored 27 percent in 2013, is declining, despite all the many recent price cuts by major public cloud providers. This leads to the conclusion that saving money alone is not the reason why companies are adopting clouds.
Canonical speculated, "Hybrid is clearly an appealing strategy for enterprises, because it offers the balance of economic and technical benefits of the public cloud with the control and security of a private cloud."
As GigaOm Research analyst David Linthicum recently observed, "Most enterprises are moving toward hybrid and multi-cloud computing. In some cases, there is a clear business case. At other times, it just seems like hybrid is the approach that gives an enterprise the most options and the most control."
It may also be because enterprises don't fully trust public clouds. The Ubuntu Cloud Survey found that security and privacy remained, with 34 percent, the top barrier to cloud adoption.
Whatever kind of cloud an organization adopts, Canonical discovered that there is a continued shift to running more mission-critical programs on the cloud. More than 75 percent of users are deploying workloads like big data, analytics, CRM, scientific apps, and virtualization on clouds. Last year, it was only 64 percent.
In other words, companies are not simply replacing datacenter servers with clouds; they're moving the new applications to the cloud. For instance, two thirds of the surveyed "OpenStack users are deploying mission-critical functions to it, while nearly half are deploying infrastructure and virtualized environments".
Indeed, the survey also revealed the three major trends driving cloud adoption: Connected devices/Internet of Things (33 percent), growing data volumes, and the software-defined datacenter (26 percent each). The first two are intimately connected, as the increase in connected devices is generating more data than ever, necessitating the use of increasingly scalable and flexible storage and compute platforms -- the cloud -- to store and process this data.
At the same time, while developers love Docker, the container technology, it's still a "new kid on the block" when it comes to adoption. Most Ubuntu Docker users are still just trying it out for development and testing rather than rushing it into production.
Finally, Ubuntu users are also very interested in becoming OpenStack users. They may run Ubuntu on Amazon or the Google Compute Engine, but 64 percent think OpenStack is already ready for mission-critical workloads.
Related stories:Do you know Chetan Chauhan? He is a former Indian cricketer, who played 40 Test matches for India. Chauhan was once a long-time opening partner of Sunil Gavaskar.
What is the perfect job for a former sportsperson with experience in cricket?
Well, according to the Union government, the answer to that question is chairman of the National Institute of Fashion Technology.
That's right.
Chauhan, who thanked PM Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah for his appointment, adds to the list of other BJP leaders who have been appointed as heads of various crucial institutional bodies, including Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Children's Film Society of India (CFSI) and Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). From the looks of it, the only credential Chauhan needed to head NIFT was to be a BJP MP.
In fact, even Chauhan acknowledged that he was appointed partly because he was a BJP leader. "This is a Government of India appointment. The names (for the post of chairman) are sent by the Ministry of Textiles...preference is given to people in the party (BJP)," The Indian Express quoted him as saying after his appointment.
He also said that he had been chosen as NIFT chairman because he was "an international sportsman" and has "experience in banking". However, the NIFT Act 2006 clearly states that the chairperson of the Board of Governors (BoG) is expected to be "an eminent academician, scientist or technologist or professional, to be nominated by the Visitor" of the institute, which is the President.
According to reports, Chauhan is already the vice-president of the Delhi and District Cricket Association (DDCA) and is a senior BCCI official. In addition to this, Chauhan also runs a cricket academy and has a printing press. Already However, Chauhan said him juggling "all these profiles" is not a problem. "I will have time for all my roles."
When asked how does he plan to balance the multiple roles, Chauhan said, "I will spend 60 percent of the time in DDCA, 30 percent at NIFT and 30 percent in my business," he said.
Chauhan will be the head of the Board of Governors at NIFT, the supreme body which takes administrative and financial decisions of the institute. As if matters were not ridiculous enough, Chauhan also said that he will spend only "30 percent" of his time at NIFT and had this to say about his fashion sense:
"My fashion sense is not being flamboyant but well dressed. I am not dashing fashion-oriented because I have to go with what suits my age. But I like to dress up smartly and well."
Appointing a former cricketer, whose view on fashion sense is something as vague as 'dressing smartly', the chairman of an institute devoted to fashion technology is something that confounds not just us but also a lot of people on Twitter.
Here is how many people reacted on Twitter:
Modi ji ne bhi chun chun ke chamchon ki fauj jama ki h- Gajendra Chauhan, chetan chauhan, pahlaj nihalani, arnab goswami, smriti irani — Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) June 18, 2016
This is how Fashion shows will be done in future after Chetan Chauhan is appointed as chief of NIFT pic.twitter.com/EH6YhNE1a9 — Billoo (@MohitParmarr) June 18, 2016
So Chetan Chauhan has 23 years of experience in banking... Good...They did not make him RBI governor...Got him only to NIFT. — Vivek (@kaul_vivek) June 18, 2016
Chetan Chauhan picks out his own shirts. What higher qualification do you need? — Veena Venugopal (@veenavenugopal) June 18, 2016
Former cricketer Chetan Chauhan is now chairman, National Institute of Fashion Technology. Reports suggest Salman Khan will soon head ISRO. — lindsay pereira (@lindsaypereira) June 18, 2016
@NayakRagini @pranavINC so chetan chauhan as NIFT head...next my be shaina NC as sports minister...square pegs in round hole! — With GOP of India (@vi_vibhavjoshi) June 18, 2016
Chetan Chauhan appointed NIFT chief. Someone in BJP matching Pappu's logic — GappuRaja (@GappuRaja1) June 18, 2016
Chetan Chauhan is the new NIFT chief... Now, what next? Shakti Kapoor as the new ISRO chief?#YogaWithNaMo — Nimit (@nimitarora1991) June 18, 2016
Biodata of Chetan Chauhan pic.twitter.com/qWTydTBN0B — Garvit Bhartiya (@MODIfyIndia) June 18, 2016
Appointment of Chetan Chauhan to NIFT has surged hopes for Swamy to be the next RBI Gov. — Neeraj (@neerajn) June 18, 2016
Chetan Chauhan as NIFT chief? good enough...how about Sunny Leone as our Cricket Coach??? she is an expert in playing games too!!! — Lambodar Mishra (@lamboomishra) June 18, 2016
I do know in India we consider some of our Cricketers very stylish but that doesn't mean we appoint Chetan Chauhan chief of #NIFT! Bizzare. — Rashi Kakkar (@rashi_kakkar) June 18, 2016
So Chetan Chauhan is the new Gajendra Chauhan and NIFT students might soon be the new anti nationals. Remember the joke is on us. — Sanjukta Basu (@sanjukta) June 18, 2016
Chetan Chauhan is NIFT chairman. He's going to bring the nineties back in fashion. He never scored a hundred. #ChetanChauhan #NIFT — Ajay Gahlaut (@meajay) June 18, 2016
Always was a hard-working guy, Chetan Chauhan. https://t.co/43ZZZ2EHJr — Prem Panicker (@prempanicker) June 18, 2016
Ex-Cricketer Chetan Chauhan is Chief of NIFT.
Love his fashion.
Here he is in Shikari Shambhu's new Fall collection. pic.twitter.com/PLzBo0i9n2 — Sorabh Pant (@hankypanty) June 18, 2016
Chetan Chauhan to head National Institute of Fashion Technology. Now really! What next? — Cricketwallah (@cricketwallah) June 18, 2016
After Gajendra chauhan for FTII, Chetan Chauhan for NIFT, abt time we made Annu Kapoor the head of ISRO. #IssLaunchPeKuchNahiBolneKa — Gabbbar (@GabbbarSingh) June 18, 2016
Who makes decisions like appointing Chetan Chauhan chief of NIFT? What's in their mind while taking such a decision? Unfair to Chetan too. — Rahul Kanwal (@rahulkanwal) June 18, 2016
Why didn't govt just pick a smart BJP leaning fashion designer to head NIFT. What's the point of making Chetan Chauhan in-charge. Absurd. — Rahul Kanwal (@rahulkanwal) June 18, 2016
Chetan Chauhan's appointment comes after similar appointments have landed the Narendra Modi-led government at the Centre in controversy. Starting from Gajendra Chauhan, who was appointed as the chairman for FTII which led to massive protests by students, to appointing actor Mukesh Khanna as the chairperson of CFSI. Critics believe that the BJP government is rewarding those who campaigned for the party prior to the elections. Khanna too had campaigned for the BJP, and was caught on camera calling Modi, "the Shaktimaan in Gujarat."
Current CBFC chairman Pahlaj Nihalani's appointment was criticised heavily as well. During his appointment, Pahlaj Nihalani had said that he considers PM Modi an 'action hero' and took some very controversial decisions as the censor board chief, Udta Punjab controversy being the latest one.
(With inputs from IANS)
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.Gateway to Lincoln Square; Oct. 4, 2012. View Full Caption dnainfo/Patty Wetli
LINCOLN SQUARE — A man was robbed at gunpoint Tuesday afternoon in the heart of Lincoln Square, near Lincoln and Leland avenues.
The 35-year-old victim, who requested anonymity, told DNAinfo that he was walking on Leland Avenue, near businesses including Lincoln Quality Meats and Yogurt Square (closed for the season), heading toward the Lincoln Square Athletic Club at approximately 1:30 p.m.
He was approached by a man with a gun and told to lay on the sidewalk and empty his pockets. The robber made off with the victim's phone, wallet and car keys before fleeing through a nearby alley.
Police confirmed the details and provided a description of the suspect: African American, 21 to 25 years old, approximately 5-feet-7 to 5-feet-9 inches tall, weighing 140-150 pounds and wearing a black coat.
Before the victim could cancel his credit card, he said charges were made including a purchase at a KFC on the South Side.
The victim said he was shaken by the timing and location of the attack and cautioned neighbors to be aware of their surroundings even in broad daylight in well trafficked areas.
It's the second robbery at gunpoint in the general area since Christmas.
On Dec. 26 at approximately 6 p.m., a 39-year-old man was walking away from his parked car when he was approached by two men in the 4100 block of North Mozart Avenue. One of the men pulled a gun and the robbers took the victim's keys, wallet and phone before fleeing.
Police provided descriptions of the suspects, both believed to be 16 to 18 years old: one suspect is 5-feet-7 to 5-feet-8 inches tall, weighing 150-160 pounds; the other suspect is 5-feet-10 to 5-feet-11 inches tall, weighing 160-170 pounds.
No one is in custody in either incident.
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here.Welcome to my new series on the OGN Champions circuit. If you want information on matches, standings and trends in OGN then we'll be going over each of these. If you want to watch OGN yourself and don't want any spoilers then I recommend hitting the back button. This will be a weekly series so if you enjoy the article keep an eye on our website, Facebook page, or Reddit for week 2.
Day 1
SK Telecom T1 K vs Team NB
Match 1
NB Picks: Vladimir, Lee Sin, Gragas, Caitlyn, Annie
NB Bans: Riven, Vi, Syndra
SKTK Picks: Singed, Elise, Leblanc, Ezreal, Lulu
SKTK Bans: Lucian, Nidalee, Olaf
Longpanda face-checks a bush at level 1 and gives first blood to Faker. With some added pressure by Bengi, Impact is already proxy farming at 4 minutes. By 7 minutes Bengi has ganked and scored each of SKTK's lanes a kill. NB is put on the defensive the whole game. NB's first line of towers are all down by 16 minutes with only 2 deaths on SKTK. It is 24 minutes before SKTK takes the first inhibitor with 7 deaths. Although NB do a great job of drawing the game out considering SKTK’s early lead, they ultimately lose top and bottom during a split push as Impact catches the NB champions crossing their base with Twin Shadows.
Match 2
SKTK Picks: Rumble, Olaf, Zed, Corki, Lulu
SKTK Bans: Kassadin, Sona, Lucian
NB Picks: Kennen, Nasus, Jayce, Vayne, Thresh
NB Bans: Nidalee, Annie, Elise
Despite NB scoring first blood on their Vayne during a level 1 fight, SKTK dominated the laning phase, evening the gold with a CS lead, returning a kill, taking a tower and securing the first dragon to create a 2k gold lead before 7 minutes. From here the game remains relatively passive. SKTK take NB's other front turrets but neither side secures any kills until dragon spawns. A botched engage by NB results in a 4/0 team fight for SKTK and NB's 2nd bottom turret. Despite NB rushing from their base to secure the dragon, SKTK had a 7k gold lead and used it to push mid and turret dive for a 3/0 fight and the mid inhibitor. Another 4/0 teamfight at top for SKTK cements their lead. They secure baron and then push in for the win.
NaJin Black Sword vs Incredible Miracle #2
Match 1
IM#2 Picks: Renekton, Nunu, Lucian, Caitlyn, Sona
IM#2 Bans: Annie, Gragas, Lee Sin
Sword Picks: Shyvana, Elise, Orianna, Vayne, Thresh
Sword Bans: Syndra, Olaf, Nidalee
The first 7 minutes of the game were relatively passive, the first turret going to IM#2, until Sword takes first blood and one of IM#2’s turrets. At 9 minutes the teams contest dragon, resulting in a 2/0 fight and secured dragon for IM#2. A huge engagement by Sword during a mid siege by IM#2 resulted in a 3/0 fight for Sword and the 2nd dragon. Having taken the lead, Sword keeps the lanes pushes and builds armor against IM#2's attack damage centric team. It isn't until IM#2 attempts a blue steal off of momentum they gained from a pick on Pray that the stalemate breaks. Sword aces IM#2 with no deaths, then takes Baron and Dragon. IM#2 attempts to sneak a dragon while Pray is bottom, forcing Sword to engage 4v5. Despite IM#2 taking the baron, Sword takes the fight 3/0 and an inhibitor. A final 5/3 fight by Sword on bottom closes out the game.
Match 2
Sword Picks: Shyvana, Lee Sin, Zed, Lucian, Lulu
Sword Bans: Syndra, Kassadin, Olaf
IM#2 Picks: Renekton, Elise, Riven, Vayne, Annie
IM#2 Bans: Gragas, Nidalee, Orianna
IM#2 takes the first turret of the game with Sword trading. A pick on Cain in the jungle leads to a turret dive by IM#2 mid and a 3/2 fight. IM#2 responds to a three man gank ending in a 1/1 trade on Kuro in bot lane by taking Baron. Swords contest forces IM#2 to back and allows Sword to take IM#2’s remaining two forward turrets. IM#2 uses the Baron buff to create a huge push bottom that draws Sword bottom and allows PLL to take the 2nd mid turret. After a subsequent dive they secure a 3/0 teamfight and the bottom inhibitor and |
are from Min County of Gansu Province, according to Beijing Youth Daily.
They come to Beijing with their parents and relatives during the winter holiday, and make considerable earnings.
The 'child beggars' can earn more than 200 yuan (about 29 USD) a day in the summer, and it is estimated that some children may make more than 10,000 yuan (about 1,453 USD) during their summer holidays (generally in July and August), a law enforcement officer told Beijing Youth Daily.
Photo shows a group of 'child beggars' on a subway train in Beijing. [Photo: news.china.com]
Their behaviors cause trouble for subway riders.
They ask the children to kneel on the ground and cry for mercy, or even clasp their arms around the passengers' legs or rummage in their bags to ask for money.
In order to avoid punishment, the adults sometimes ask the children to form their own 'working groups' and discretely give them working instructions.
Ma Xiang, from the Beijing Traffic Law Enforcement Team, told the Beijing Youth Daily that these people come to Beijing regularly every year during summer and winter school holidays and they share a strong sense of group identity.
"More than ten of them live together (when they are in Beijing), they go to work together every day and then scatter to different subway lines," Ma said.
"To prove that the children were not abducted as some citizens have suspected, they [adults] carry around their household registers and [the children's] birth certificates with them."
Law enforcement officers speak to a group of adults and 'child beggars'. [Photo: news.china.com]
Ma said it is not easy to solve the problem, as they cannot impose punishment on the children and they reappear on the subway trains time and again for the attractive profit.
Thus, different measures are being taken to tackle the problem at its source.
The Beijing Traffic Law Enforcement Team is going to corporate with the Min County government to solve the problem.
Ma said they are also hoping to contact these children's schools to ask them to educate their students, and they are considering going to Min County to investigate.
"We have been to Minquan County in Henan Province before to tackle this type of problem and formed a cooperating mechanism with the local government, it worked well," Ma said.The security cabinet on Sunday approved an outline for a plan to grant work permits to 30,000 Palestinian laborers from the West Bank, a move that would allow them to work in Israel.
According to a report in the Haaretz newspaper on Monday, the laborers are expected to work mostly in such professions as construction, infrastructure, services, and agriculture.
An advance version of the plan was presented to the security cabinet by the commander of the Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, Major General Yoav Mordechai, on Sunday. A more detailed plan will be delivered to the full cabinet in the coming weeks, the report said.
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The Palestinian candidates for work permits will first have to receive Shin Bet clearance.
Currently, 58,000 Palestinians possess Israeli work permits, though experts assess that about 120,000 Palestinians from the West Bank are actually employed — both legally and illegally– by residents of the Jewish state.
Several high-ranking government and security officials, including Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, have recommended increasing the number of Palestinians allowed to work in Israel, in hope that the economic boost to residents of the West Bank would assist in curbing attacks against Israeli civilians and security personnel. A security official quoted by Haaretz Monday stated that the policy of preserving jobs for Palestinians in Israel has proved itself in the past as an effective means of “restraining terrorism.”
Education Minister Naftali Bennett, the leader of the right-wing Jewish Home party, has also expressed support for granting more work permits to Palestinians, suggesting that the number of legal West Bank laborers allowed in Israel be increased by 100,000, the business daily The Marker reported.
Since the outbreak of the current round of violence in the region last October, two terrorist attacks have been carried out by Palestinians possessing Israeli work permits.
Overnight Sunday, IDF and Border Police forces arrested 18 Palestinians in the West Bank, among them three suspected members of Hamas and eight activists who allegedly took part in violent protests.DayZ Standalone Closed Alpha Underway, Pricing Details Discussed By William Usher Random Article Blend
In an interview with
So what we're doing at the moment is, we gave free keys as a gift to the forum moderators, the Reddit moderators, people who helped out with DayZ development, and stuff like that. I guess there's about 30-100 people involved with that.
From here, once we've finished our server/client architecture -- because we're moving it an MMO model -- we're reviewing the situation of that in June, and then we do an alpha, just like Minecraft. People pay X amount of dollars and they get early, cheap access to it, and then once it's beta, price goes up, maybe, say, $10, and once it goes retail, the price goes up $10.
That sounds very reasonable. If you can get into the alpha for about $5 through $10 I would rock that. Bugs, glitches and clipping issues galore, I think I would just want to see how the basic structure of the standalone is setup and run around the new and improved, post-apocalyptic Cherno, especially based on all the
“Rocket” has also already confirmed that the closed alpha testing is already underway and selected gamers are already playing it up on the single server they have running, and that Valve has accommodated them with a brand new method of updating the game so that fixes and patches come in fast, furious and clean like an F22 landing briskly at the Luke Field Air Base in Arizona...
We are doing content updates all the time. The Steam model is really working well for us. Valve approached us and they said, "What do you guys want, to make things easier?" and we said, "Well, we want delta patching." Luckily they were just about to bring that out. That's where, instead of downloading the whole file when it updates, it just downloads the part [that has changed.]
And it's already built into our build process. So the artists, they download the game via Steam, and our internal development process uses Steam to patch their stuff.
Sweet, sweet Mary that's good news.
This means that gamers will be able to jump into the alpha about sometime in early to mid June going by Rocket's comments. I guess a lot of it still depends on the server/client architecture finalization.
If you're excited about the Dean “Rocket” Hall has been trudging away in the trenches of development war, working hard to bring the standalone version of the zombie apocalypse survival game, DayZ, to the masses this year. Well, recently Hall laid out a few more details on what gamers can expect from the alpha test.In an interview with Gamasutra, Hall stated that...That sounds very reasonable. If you can get into the alpha for about $5 through $10 I would rock that. Bugs, glitches and clipping issues galore, I think I would just want to see how the basic structure of the standalone is setup and run around the new and improved, post-apocalyptic Cherno, especially based on all the cool screenshots “Rocket” has also already confirmed that the closed alpha testing is already underway and selected gamers are already playing it up on the single server they have running, and that Valve has accommodated them with a brand new method of updating the game so that fixes and patches come in fast, furious and clean like an F22 landing briskly at the Luke Field Air Base in Arizona...Sweet, sweet Mary that's good news.This means that gamers will be able to jump into the alpha about sometime in early to mid June going by Rocket's comments. I guess a lot of it still depends on the server/client architecture finalization.If you're excited about the DayZ standalone but can't wait any longer, you can still check out the free mod, which is available on Steam right now. For more information feel free to visit the official DayZ Tumblr Blended From Around The Web Facebook
Back to topWASHINGTON — In a feisty statement to be delivered to the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Roger Stone, President Trump’s longtime political adviser, denies any collusion with Russia during last year’s presidential election and accuses panel members of “cowardice” for insisting that he testify behind closed doors rather than in a public session.
While acknowledging that he is “no stranger to the slash and burn aspect of American politics today” and that “some may label me a dirty trickster, … there is one ‘trick’ that is not in my bag and that is treason,” Stone says in a lengthy, 47-page statement, complete with accompanying exhibits and copies of his tweets, that he provided in advance to Yahoo News.
“Multiple members of this Committee have made false allegations against me in public session in order to ensure that these bogus charges received maximum media coverage,” Stone says about accusations that he had insider knowledge of WikiLeaks’ dumps of emails that U.S. intelligence officials say were hacked by Russian intelligence services. “Now however, you deny me the opportunity to respond to these charges in the same open forum. This is cowardice.”
Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to President Trump, will appear before the House Intelligence Committee Sept. 26, 2017. (Photo: Seth Wenig/AP)
“What is it you fear? Why do you oppose transparency? What is it you don’t want the public to know?” Stone asks. “I can assure each of you, I will not let myself be a punching bag for people with ill intentions or political motives.”
Stone’s long-awaited appearance before the committee is shaping up to be a combative confrontation with Democratic committee members who have publicly accused him of being a key player in Russian efforts to meddle in last year’s presidential election.
In particular, Stone is expected to be closely questioned about multiple tweets during last year’s campaign suggesting that, at critical moments, he was tipped off to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s plan to release damaging emails about Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta — material that U.S. intelligence officials say came from Russian state-sponsored hacks.
Among those tweets was one on Aug. 21 in which Stone wrote, “Trust me, it will soon the [sic] Podesta’s time in the barrel.”
Then, just days before the WikiLeaks release of Podesta’s emails on Oct. 7, Stone tweeted on Oct. 2: “Wednesday, @HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks.” That was followed on Oct. 3 by another one: “I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon.” Then on Oct. 5, Stone tweeted: “Libs thinking Assange will stand down are wishful thinking. Payload coming.”
Stone says in his statement he first learned that WikiLeaks had emails about Hillary Clinton last summer, from Assange’s own Twitter account. He then reached out to “a journalist who I knew had interviewed Assange to independently confirm this report” and the unnamed journalist — whom he alternatively characterizes in his statement as an “an intermediary” and “go between” — then assured him that damaging material about Clinton would be released in October.
But, despite once vowing to “answer every question” the committee asks him, Stone told Yahoo News last Friday that he will refuse to identify the intermediary to the committee — a stance that is likely to lead to charges that he is stonewalling the panel’s inquiry.
”I’m not gonna say,” Stone said of the journalist’s identity. Asked on what grounds he will refuse to answer the panel’s questions, he replied: “On the grounds that I’m not there under a subpoena. And when something is off the record with a reporter, it’s off the record. He told me this off the record. It’s a two-way street. I don’t burn reporters with whom I’ve made an agreement.”
Stone arrives for a closed House Intelligence Committee meeting on Russian interference in the 2016 election, Sept. 26, 2017. (Photo: Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters)
In his statement, Stone also insists that he had no direct communications with Assange himself. “I have never said or written that I had any direct communication with Julian Assange and have always clarified in numerous interviews and speeches that my communication with WikiLeaks was through the aforementioned journalist,” he said.
Yet in his Yahoo News interview last Friday, Stone acknowledged that he had in fact communicated directly with Assange, although after the election.
“We’ve had some exchanges — via email,” Stone said during the interview. “But again, they’re innocuous. … I wrote a piece for the Daily Caller that he liked and he complimented it. That kinda thing.”
Stone’s statement takes a combative approach to the House Intelligence Committee. He disputes that the Russians were responsible for hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee and questions why the unanimous conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies that they did should be accepted uncritically.
“The mantra-like repetition of the claim by our vaunted 17 intelligence agencies that the ‘Russians’ colluded with the Trump campaign to affect the 2016 election, does not make it so,” Stone said. “These are, after all, the same entities who insisted the North Koreans would not be able to launch a viable rocket for 3-5 years, that insisted Saddam Hussein was in possession of WMD, that there was no torture at Abu Ghraib prison, and that the government had no bulk data collection program, until Edward Snowden revealed otherwise.”
Read more from Yahoo News:Around 11 am Pacific on January 20th, while newly-inaugurated President Trump finished a celebratory lunch in the Capitol Rotunda, Magdalena Cerdá noticed something different about the White House's website: All of its references to climate change had disappeared. Cerdá is an epidemiologist at UC Davis' Violence Prevention Research Program, which focuses on another politicized region of science—gun violence. So she knew what that meant.
"It was a real call to action," Cerdá says. With links to climate data vanishing, she worried the same thing could happen to gun violence data on websites belonging to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "I was on Amtrak between Berkeley and Sacramento," she says. "So I sent an email to Garen Wintemute saying we needed to start downloading our data immediately."
Wintemute, epidemiologist and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program, was prepared. After seeing that climate scientists were systematically downloading crucial information from federal databases, he had drawn up a spreadsheet of the gun-related datasets he uses every day: lists of gun licensees, retailers, and manufacturers; gun tracing data; firearm-related death and injury numbers sorted by categories like race, location, or age. "I basically walked around the building saying, 'Get it done now,'" Wintemute says. So on inauguration day, as Cerdá says, the Violence Prevention Research Program was less of a lab and more of a "little downloading bootcamp."
This wasn't just alarmism. "I’ve been through it before," says Wintemute. During the Clinton years and early in George W. Bush's presidency, he worked with a group of academics who partnered with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to study the inner working of criminal gun markets. "We had the reports ready for 2001 and 2002, but their publication was suppressed," says Wintemute. "We were ordered to destroy our copies of the documents."
Wintemute wasn't hankering to repeat that experience, so he instructed his team—barely 10 people, which isn't surprising in this notoriously under-funded field—to create a compendium of gun-related data as a failsafe. "Everyone stopped what they were doing and gathered around a big table in the center of the office," says Aaron Shev, the team's senior statistician. "We had Dr. Wintemute's list, and wrote things up on a whiteboard, assigning jobs. Then we sat there for a day, through lunch, in this frenzy of downloading."
It's not as if they were hacking, or even using some secret scientists-only login. "Everything we downloaded by definition is public information," says Wintemute. "We didn’t go behind any firewalls." So the fact that scientists are worried they'll lose access should probably give you pause.
In many cases, federal information is vital to research in these fields. "I was scared," says Veronica Pear, a data analyst at the Violence Prevention Research Center. She's using federal data for a paper on firearm mortality—tracking hotspots in California between 1999 and 2015—and her work is almost complete. Since the federal query system makes it easy to search the data but cumbersome to download, Pear had never bothered to save the information to her computer. To catch up, "I had to enter around 50 different queries," she says. "I felt frantic."
After about five hours spent in a flurry of activity, the team had downloaded everything they could think of. Now, it's stored on a secure server at UC Davis, ready if gun violence researchers ever do lose access to federal data on firearm licenses, sales, use in criminal activity, and deaths. It's not as large of an effort as the climate data scraping executed in recent weeks—the datasets numbered in the tens rather than thousands—but that doesn't mean the UC Davis team's work was insignificant. Thanks to funding issues and opposition from the National Rifle Association, very little gun-related data exists. Every scrap counts. "There aren’t a lot of different kinds of data, but they are foundational," says Wintemute. "Every research study on firearm violence begins with a statement on the size of the problem. That's what these data provide."
Should the information disappear from the web, the UC Davis team will have no qualms sharing it. "I think of it is as a public service for the scientific community," says Pear. "And for me, it feels more important now than ever to be vocally on the side of truth."
But for now, they're just watching and waiting. "Every day I go onto the sites, I hold my breath," says Pear. "'Is it going to be there?'" When science becomes politicized, the only thing for researchers to do is let the data speak for itself. The UC Davis team wants to make sure the data is still around to do the talking.A dispute in New York could have far-reaching implications for how Uber treats its on-demand workforce — namely, whether the company is legally responsible for people injured on the job.
If the case being heard by the New York state Workers’ Compensation board goes against Uber, and classifies the worker as an Uber employee, the company could be on the hook for years' worth of compensation claims. Since its founding, Uber has insisted that the drivers and couriers that work through its app are independent contractors, and it simply runs a software platform that connects them with customers. But efforts are underway nationwide to challenge that assertion, with test cases being filed to state and federal authorities.
The case in New York has been filed by Jorge Washington, a courier for Uber's Rush and Eats delivery services and a founding member of the New York Messengers Alliance, a group representing gig-economy delivery people pushing for better pay and conditions. The organization is backed by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which successfully successfully organized drivers in the city to receive more labor protections and benefits.
"Ordinarily, this would be a garden variety workers' compensation case," said Robert Grey, the attorney representing Washington, who has worked with the NYTWA in the past. "But Uber is very motivated to avoid a second hearing because the compensation board will decide on his employment status."
In an attempt to end the case before it reaches a second hearing, slated for late February, Uber offered to settle with Washington, floating the possibility of a cash payment on the condition that he accept a rejection of his claim and terminate his contract with Uber. Such a settlement would avoid setting precedent, and leave his independent contractor status untested.
Washington and Grey declined, and say they have no plans to accept a settlement of any dollar amount. Grey also believes Uber engaged in unfair retaliation against his client, based on its proposal for termination as part of a settlement deal.
An Uber spokesperson said the company rejects the allegation that it is retaliating against Washington — partly on the grounds that, because Washington is an independent contractor, rather than an employee, he is not covered by state labor laws that prohibit retaliation by employers against staff. That Washington is not an employee is, of course, the very point that remains up in the air, and which the state board will decide next month.
The company also insists it merely floated the possibility of a settlement, and made no formal offer.
"This claim — instigated by a taxi medallion-backed organization chasing headlines — is without merit on its face," the Uber spokesperson told BuzzFeed News in an email. "It fundamentally misunderstands how Uber works and ignores the fact that under the National Labor Relations Act, Mr. Washington can't engage in union activity."
Should the board rule Uber's messengers are independent contractors, they would not be entitled to the organizing protections and workers' compensation coverage enshrined in labor law. (The reference to'medallion-backed' is to taxi-cab driver and medallion-owner Victor Salazar, who is married to the NYTWA executive director Bhairavi Desai and a paid staffer at the organization.)Canadian Digs – Adventures in the North Part 1: Edmonton, Alberta
As a digger and collector, I’m always excited to check out record communities in cities across the globe. Canada was no exception. This spring, I set out to see what our northern neighbors had to offer. Without a doubt I was 110% blown away by the record community. The people and selection of vinyl was second to none! My tour began in Edmonton Alberta and I was not sure what to expect. When I rolled into town I had nine shops on my visit list. What I found was priceless!
EDMONTON, ALBERTA
Day 1
Listen Records– Vinylhub | Website
Address: 10443a – 124 Street, Edmonton, AB T5N 1R7
Phone: 780-732-1132
Email: listenrecords@shaw.ca
Listen Records in Edmonton has been touted as the spot to hit since 2001. If they don’t have the hard-to-find items on your wantlist, they’ll do their best to get it for you! The shop was jam-packed with new releases, a decent used selection and assortment of legit gear. The staff was preparing for RSD but still took the time to chat me up. Selections range from Funk & Soul to Experimental & Avantgarde. My only regret was not snagging the For the People 7 set while I was there…. (this will be a recurring theme throughout my journey).
Great shop with a cool vibe and knowledgeable staff!
Record Collectors Paradise– Vinylhub | Website
Address: 11004 150 St NW, Edmonton, AB T5P 1S1
Phone: 780-757-3414
Email: recordcollectorsparadise@ gmail.com
RCP features one of the largest selections of Jazz, Classical and Country (although I came up on some funk, soul and Disco) in this region. At first glance, I was taken back by the wall of 45’s and vintage items on display. This shop organizes their selection in a way that makes digging very easy. After spending 2 hours talking with the staff and sharing our mutual love for modern funk I left with a few gems in hand.
*Whenever I buy Sade 45’s I always chuckle to myself about the shop owner in San Fran that argued with me about the fact that Sade did not have any releases on 45’s :).
Day 2- RECORD STORE DAY
Let me preface by saying that RSD for me personally is about supporting the local shops so I’m not the lady on the prowl for those “limited” releases BUT I am someone that will always show my support for those that are slingin’ records 365/247.
Blackbyrd– Vinylhub | Website
Address: 10442-82 Ave, Edmonton, Alberta T6E 2A2
Phone: 780.439.1273
Email: info@blackbyrd.ca
First view of Blackbyrd….. In the full swing of RSD. I’ll be back!
Upon my return the line had lessened slightly. Crossing the threshold meant free donuts and coffee if you so desired (Tim Hortons of course). This shop had a modern feel with bins full of new releases. Nevertheless there was a selection of used records near the back. I scoured the bins and was rewarded with a something that I’ve had my eye on for while. I was not going to leave without it.
Towards the front of the store you could find a pretty decent selection of gear (TT, Cartridges, sleeves etc..). It’s important to note that the staff were super cool and engaging. I had the opportunity to speak with a few people in the community about the local shops and it was apparent that BB is a strong supporter of the local music scene and is very well respected. Kudos to the team! You can also check out their Calgary location.
Freecloud Records– Vinylhub | Website
Address: 10764 101 St NW, Edmonton, AB T5H 2S3
Phone: 780-429-1476
Email: glotex@moderndigital.net
This was the shop I had heard rumblings about prior to my trip so I was definitely interested in seeing what was up. What I encountered was a small line of vinyl enthusiasts out front. I chatted up some cool dudes that were there to pick up some of those limited releases. When I made it inside, my first impression was – this shop specializes in rock. I was quickly proven wrong. They have an amazing funk & soul section, their punk game is on 10. They also have jazz, hip hop, classical, pop– you name it. If cassettes, CDs or music mags are your thing they have you covered. I have to say I was really impressed by the sheer volume of records they had in stock, In addition, their grading and pricing was spot on. Super happy to leave Freecloud with a copy of “Soul Sister” in my hand.
The Gramophone Inc– Vinylhub | Website
Address: 7913 104 St NW, Edmonton, AB T6E 4E1
Phone: 780-428-2356 | 800-231-7594
Email: info@gramophone.ca
Okay, so not the traditional stop on my list, but I had heard so much about the audio systems and turntables at Gramophone that I had to stop in. I am SO glad I did! I had the privilege of chatting with Bryan about their shop and he gave me the full tour and showed me some of the most artistic looking turntables I have ever seen.
This spot would make any audiophile salivate. If you’re in the market for new gear or want to check out the largest selection of classical and jazz recordings in Alberta, this is the spot!
EROC- Vinylhub
Address: Super Flea Market Booth 118 12011- 111 Avenue Edmonton AB
Phone: 780- 459-9112
This gem in the wild is a must see. I always try to stop by flea markets or antiques shops when I’m traveling because you never know what might turn up and this was no exception. I consulted google and found the Super Flea Market and since they toted themselves as “Super” I thought I would give it a go. I walked all the aisles and saw no sign of any of those wax beauties and then I rounded the last corner and in an almost lighted glow I saw the sign EROC Records. YES!!! I proceeded to spend the next 2 hours talking with the owner Terry and his wife about their shop and his lengthy history in the industry (formal interview to follow so stay Tuned!). About halfway through our visit he casually mentioned that he had a backroom… when one hears those words… the pulse starts to race in hopes that you will gain entry and come upon some secret stash of goodness. I spent the last portion of this stop in a narrow backroom combing through his shelves of 80’s & 90’s dance music.
I left EROC thinking this is what it is all about… individuals like Terry that give their life to the love of music and sharing that passion and knowledge with others. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with me. If you find yourself in Alberta DEFINITELY hit this spot up!
Edmonton Music Collectors Show – Vinylhub | Website
Address: Central Lions Seniors Recreation Centre 11113 113 St NW Edmonton, AB, Canada
Phone: 780-423-0120
Email: info@yegmusicshow.com
To borrow a line from the folks at the Swap “The Edmonton Music Collectors Show is definitely a place to add to your record collection, but it is also a place to network with other collectors, gain insight into the value of your own collection, and celebrate music culture.” I could not have said it better myself. I attend fairs and swaps year round and I can honestly say that this event was one that will remain in my mind forever. This particular group of dealers and attendees truly celebrate the community aspect of collecting. I was amazed by the perfectly curated selections, the knowledge of the dealers and the true passion that shined through in all my interactions.
George Gawlak and Dave Chorley, two of Edmonton’s leading independent record collectors came together in 2011 to create the EMCS. Due to the hype and popularity around this event they have switched to a twice a year format in order to bring more opportunity to the vendors and collectors in the region. Not only do these gentleman support their local community but they also support other organizers and events across Western Canada. These guys are the real deal and it was an honor to witness them in action!
Next up… Vancouver BC. Stay Tuned!Hillary Clinton's hopes of shutting Bernie Sanders down by beating him in Indiana were dashed Tuesday night.
With most of the vote tallied, the U.S. senator was six per cent ahead of the former secretary of state and was awarded the coveted checkmark that designates the winner of a given state.
Sanders was in the lead with 53 percent to Clinton's 47 percent after a running start from Clinton quickly turned into a sputter.
'I sense a great deal of momentum. I sense some great victories coming,' he said during a hastily convened news conference in New Albany, Indiana.
Acknowledging the state of the race, Sanders said: 'I think that while the path is narrow, and I do not deny that for a moment.'
But he said: 'I think we can pull off one of the great political upsets in the history of the United States and in fact become the nominee for the Democratic Party. And then once we secure that position, I have absolute confidence that we are going to defeat Donald Trump.'
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Back from the brink: Bernie Sanders spoke at a rally in Kentucky tonight before the Hoosier State was called for him. He later said: 'I sense a great deal of momentum. I sense some great victories coming'
Hillary Clinton's hopes of shutting Sanders down by beating him in Indiana were dashed tonight when he won by six percent - giving him the juice to keep going even though the numbers indicate he can't win
Sanders rallied his supporters tonight in Louisville, Kentucky as the state votes two weeks ahead on Tuesday. He dashed back over the state line to hold a press conference in Indiana once he won the primary
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Trump became the presumptive Republican presidential nominee tonight after Ted Cruz dropped his bid following a spectacular loss in the Hoosier State that eliminated what he saw as viable path to the Cleveland convention.
Hillary Clinton did not comment on the results of the Indiana Democratic primary, however campaign staff sent out a tweet on her behalf asking for the funds she needs to keep him from winning the White House.
The Clinton campaign also sent out a statement from chairman John Podesta disparaging Trump.
Podesta said the ex-reality TV star will neither 'keep our nation safe in a dangerous world' nor 'help working families get ahead here at home.'
'Throughout this campaign, Donald Trump has demonstrated that he’s too divisive and lacks the temperament to lead our nation and the free world,' said Podesta, a former adviser to both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
'With so much at stake, Donald Trump is simply too big of a risk. Hillary Clinton has proven that she has the strength to keep us safe in an uncertain world and a lifelong record of fighting to break down the barriers--economic and social--that hold working families back.'
He added, 'While Donald Trump seeks to bully and divide Americans, Hillary Clinton will unite us to create an economy that works for everyone.'
Sanders resisted a reporter's attempt tonight to get him to assassinate Trump's character by calling him a racist.
He instead pointed out that the Republican businessman has insulted Mexicans, Muslims, women and other demographic groups and spearheaded the birther movement.
'I'll let...the American people decide the appropriate label,' Sanders said at his press conference.
Unsolicited, he proceeded to denounce the probable GOP nominee on related grounds as 'a man that does have the demeanor, does not have the policy background or the ideas to become President of the United States.'
'I would love to run against him, and I'm absolutely confident that not only would we beat him, but we'd beat him by a pretty large number,' Sanders said, drawing on polling that generally support assessment of the general election.
Acknowledging the state of the race, Sanders said: 'I think we can pull off one of the great political upsets in the history of the United States and in fact become the nominee for the Democratic Party'
If the victory was bitter sweet for Sanders as he defeated Clinton but with far fewer votes than he'd deemed necessary to keep his campaign on track, he did not show it tonight as he disparaged the media for saying it cannot be done
Sanders greets supporters outside the New Albany-Floyd County Public Library tonight after winning Indiana
His sights on the newly anointed Republican tonight, Sanders has the difficult task over the next week of convincing prospective voters he still has the ability to become the Democratic nominee.
Hoosier State delegates will be distributed proportionally to the two Democrats and Sanders needed a tidal wave of support tonight to fulfill his own highly-publicized explanation of how he will overtake Clinton.
If the victory was bitter sweet for Sanders as he defeated Clinton but with far fewer votes than he'd deemed necessary to keep his campaign on track, he did not show it as he spoke to reporters.
Shortly afterward his campaign sent out a statement reaffirming his remarks and predicting'more victories in the weeks to come.'
'The Clinton campaign thinks this campaign is over. They’re wrong. Maybe it’s over for the insiders and the party establishment, but the voters in Indiana had a different idea,' Sanders said.
'The campaign wasn’t over for them. It isn’t over for the voters in West Virginia. It isn’t over for Democrats in Oregon, New Jersey and Kentucky. It isn’t over for voters in California and all the other states with contests still to come.'
The senator again said, as he did in the days leading up to Indiana, that he has an 'uphill climb to victory.' However, he argued, he and his supporters 'have been fighting uphill from the first day of this campaign.'
'We are in this campaign to win and we’re going to fight until the last vote is cast,' he stated. 'There is nothing I would like more than to take on and defeat Donald Trump, someone who must never become president of this country.'
Sanders needed to win Indiana with a floor of 65 percent to have a plausible path forward in the race by his own admission, and he did not do that. He's seen here tonight with his wife Jane in Kentucky looking glum before he found out he was the winner of Indiana
The self-proclaimed democratic socialist intended to stay in the race regardless of tonight's results in order to promote his political revolution and force his party leftward. But the victory in Indiana was most certainly music to the ears of his campaign, which raised $20 million less last month than the month prior
The self-proclaimed democratic socialist intended to stay in the race regardless of tonight's results in order to promote his political revolution and force his party leftward.
But the victory in Indiana was most certainly music to the ears of his campaign, which raised $20 million less last month than the month prior and had to lay off much of its staff.
'Every victory we earn is extraordinarily important for our political revolution,' Sanders told his backers tonight in a fundraising email. 'Not just because of the delegates we earn, but because each win and all the work that goes into that effort sends an unmistakable message to the establishment of this country that we will never stop fighting for the values we share.'
He concluded the note by saying, 'I am in this fight through the Democratic convention. Thank you for standing with me.'
Sanders needed to win Indiana with a floor of 65 percent to have a plausible path forward by his own admission and he fell more than 10 percent short of meeting it.
Sunday on Face the Nation he proclaimed, 'We think we have a chance to win the majority of pledged delegates. It’s an uphill fight, I admit it. We need to win 65 percent of those votes but the states coming up our favorable to us.'
As a result of tonight's shortfall, he must add to his balance in upcoming contests, of which there are just 13 after this, including Oregon, where he's expected to trounce Clinton.
'Every victory we earn is extraordinarily important for our political revolution,' Sanders told his backers tonight in a fundraising email. 'Because each win and all the work that goes into that effort sends an unmistakable message to the establishment of this country that we will never stop fighting for the values we share'
His campaign at least avoided egg on its face by exceeding Clinton's vote total in the Hoosier State after it predicted wins in every May contest on a less favorable election night two weeks ago as it attempted to justify his continued participation in Democratic race for the White House.
Sanders and his aides have insisted the progressive senator could overtake Clinton in pledged delegates by dominating the rest of the map.
That strategy just hasn't panned out they way they thought it would, however, and Sanders is now on the verge of being completely boxed out.
Clinton led him by nearly 330 pledged delegates before Indiana's results were finalized.
When pledged delegates are factored in her advantage balloons to more than 800 delegates overall, putting her slightly more than 200 shy of locking in the nomination.
Sanders' stated plan is to pull even |
ignant Personal Story:
Brodies 2015: Most Poignant Personal Story
Best Mormon Parenting Piece:
Brodies 2015: Best Mormon Parenting Piece
Best Real-Life Act or Activism:
Brodies 2015: Best Real-Life Act or Activism
Most Interesting Interfaith Interaction:
Brodies 2015: Most Interesting Interfaith Interaction
Best from-the-pulpit speech/sermon:
Brodies 2015: Best from-the-pulpit speech/sermon
Most fantastic r/mormon AMA:
Brodies 2015: Most fantastic r/mormon AMA
Best Poem:
Brodies 2015: Best Poem
Thanks for all the nominations, and good luck to all participants!!I grew up in a wonderfully diverse, increasingly Latino neighborhood, where me and bunch of other young goofballs played as much soccer as baseball or fooball. I liked all the other sports – but I loved soccer.
After graduating from the University of Texas in 1990, I was lucky enough to land at The Dallas Morning News and its blue chip sports section. I rehearsed the good tenets of solid journalism while covering high schools first, then colleges, and then while populating a gossipy, snarky Page 2 column on local sports personalities. (It looked and read a little like a first-gen sports blog.) All the time, I kept watch over the soccer scene, too.
So I covered World Cups in 1994, 1998, 2002 and 2006 for the News. I was also stationed along the Major League Soccer watchtower the entire time, from first kick of that old school Mitre ball in 1996. Along the way, I introduced one of the paper’s first blogs, doing my part to drag the stubborn industry past its old ways.
I was on a train between Hamburg and Berlin smack in the middle of World Cup 2006 when I made the final decision to get out of newspapers (while the gettin’ was still good). I wanted to try life as a fulltime freelance journalist, specializing in soccer. Economically, it was a ridiculous plan. But you want what you want. And somehow, along with some other non-soccer writing assignments here and there, I’ve made it work.
I wrote for ESPN Soccernet through 2009 and then moved to SI.com. All along, I wrote regularly for MLSSoccer.com and daily for my own blog, Daily Soccer Fix (R.I.P.).
Now, I’ll be pouring all the prose, praise, appraisal and critique into one site. I’m thrilled to be heading up NBC Sports Digital’s new platform ProSoccerTalk (see previous post), and what a hoot this thing is going to be.
Just so you know, when I’m not writing about soccer or running with my dogs, I coach a good bunch of young men (under-13s) in a select league in Dallas. And I still play – although at a decreasingly competitive level! None of us are getting any younger, ya know.The situation in Ukraine has only played into those fears.
Ukraine makes up only about 0.2 percent of global gross domestic product, according to Société Générale, and in itself has little bearing on the world economy. Rather, economists said the biggest danger to global growth, outside of outright war, was the possibility that sanctions or political theater could bring a disruption to the flow of natural gas to Western Europe, creating an external shock that could push the fragile euro zone back into recession.
The crisis has energy markets worried because a large portion of Russian natural gas for Europe moves through Ukraine. Natural gas prices rose about 6 percent on the British market, and shares of Gazprom, the Russian gas monopoly that counts Ukraine as a major customer, fell more than 10 percent. Oil prices also rose, with Brent crude futures traded in London adding 1.9 percent. What may be keeping prices from going higher for now is that in recent years Russia has chipped away at the amount of gas that goes through Ukraine by opening the Nord Stream pipeline, which bypasses the country. In addition, European countries have been able to build up substantial stores of gas, given that the winter has been warm.
Stocks with direct exposure to Russia and Ukraine also took a hit.
Several of the biggest western oil companies like ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell have major investments in Russia. BP, the British oil company, has significant interests with a 20 percent stake in Rosneft, the state-controlled oil company. Robert W. Dudley, BP’s chief executive, serves on Rosneft’s board, and BP has been in talks to send teams of technical experts to help the Russian company. On Monday, BP shares fell 2 percent in London.
Russia is also a big player in industrial metals, and most of the world’s major brands are significantly invested in the country. “That means Russia is very important for a range of European and American companies,” said Chris Weafer, co-founder of Moscow-based Macro Advisory. For instance, Russia is the No. 1 market for the French dairy giant Danone and the second-biggest market for Pepsi. Shares of the French automaker Renault, which also has major operations and sales there, fell 5.4 percent.
European banking shares were broadly off, led by a 9.6 percent decline in Raiffeisen Bank International, the Austrian lender that ranks as one of the Western lenders most exposed to Ukraine. UniCredit, the Italian lender, fell 6 percent, while BNP Paribas of France and Piraeus Bank of Greece each declined more than 3 percent.
But the fallout to the banking sector may be somewhat limited. During the financial crisis in 2009, many Western banks pulled back from Ukraine, and Russian lenders, particularly Sberbank and VEB, stepped in to take up the slack. Raiffeisen is one of the few European Union lenders with major Ukraine business, and it said in November that it was seeking to sell the local unit, known as Raiffeisen Bank Aval.
Ms. Marcussen of Société Générale said that investors would be closely watching the progress this week of an expected International Monetary Fund mission to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. The interim Ukrainian government is negotiating with the European Union, the United States and the International Monetary Fund for a bailout of as much as $35 billion to get it through the next two years. And a team from the fund was expected to arrive in Kiev for discussions this week.Michelle A. Rhee, the schools chancellor in Washington, fired about 25 teachers this summer after they rated poorly in evaluations based in part on a value-added analysis of scores.
And 6,000 elementary school teachers in Los Angeles have found themselves under scrutiny this summer after The Los Angeles Times published a series of articles about their performance, including a searchable database on its Web site that rates them from least effective to most effective. The teachers’ union has protested, urging a boycott of the paper.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan weighed in to support the newspaper’s work, calling it an exercise in healthy transparency. In a speech last week, though, he qualified that support, noting that he had never released to news media similar information on teachers when he was the Chicago schools superintendent.
“There are real issues and competing priorities and values that we must work through together — balancing transparency, privacy, fairness and respect for teachers,” Mr. Duncan said. On The Los Angeles Times’s publication of the teacher data, he added, “I don’t advocate that approach for other districts.”
A report released this month by several education researchers warned that the value-added methodology can be unreliable.
“If these teachers were measured in a different year, or a different model were used, the rankings might bounce around quite a bit,” said Edward Haertel, a Stanford professor who was a co-author of the report. “People are going to treat these scores as if they were reflections on the effectiveness of the teachers without any appreciation of how unstable they are.”
Other experts disagree.
William L. Sanders, a senior research manager for a North Carolina company, SAS, that does value-added estimates for districts in North Carolina, Tennessee and other states, said that “if you use rigorous, robust methods and surround them with safeguards, you can reliably distinguish highly effective teachers from average teachers and from ineffective teachers.”
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Dr. Sanders helped develop value-added methods to evaluate teachers in Tennessee in the 1990s. Their use spread after the 2002 No Child Left Behind law required states to test in third to eighth grades every year, giving school districts mountains of test data that are the raw material for value-added analysis.
In value-added modeling, researchers use students’ scores on state tests administered at the end of third grade, for instance, to predict how they are likely to score on state tests at the end of fourth grade.
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A student whose third-grade scores were higher than 60 percent of peers statewide is predicted to score higher than 60 percent of fourth graders a year later.
If, when actually taking the state tests at the end of fourth grade, the student scores higher than 70 percent of fourth graders, the leap in achievement represents the value the fourth-grade teacher added.
Even critics acknowledge that the method can be more accurate for rating schools than the system now required by federal law, which compares test scores of succeeding classes, for instance this year’s fifth graders with last year’s fifth graders.
But when the method is used to evaluate individual teachers, many factors can lead to inaccuracies. Different people crunching the numbers can get different results, said Douglas N. Harris, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. For example, two analysts might rank teachers in a district differently if one analyst took into account certain student characteristics, like which students were eligible for free lunch, and the other did not.
Millions of students change classes or schools each year, so teachers can be evaluated on the performance of students they have taught only briefly, after students’ records were linked to them in the fall.
In many schools, students receive instruction from multiple teachers, or from after-school tutors, making it difficult to attribute learning gains to a specific instructor. Another problem is known as the ceiling effect. Advanced students can score so highly one year that standardized state tests are not sensitive enough to measure their learning gains a year later.
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In Houston, a district that uses value-added methods to allocate teacher bonuses, Darilyn Krieger said she had seen the ceiling effect as a physics teacher at Carnegie Vanguard High School.
“My kids come in at a very high level of competence,” Ms. Krieger said.
After she teaches them for a year, most score highly on a state science test but show little gains, so her bonus is often small compared with those of other teachers, she said.
The Houston Chronicle reports teacher bonuses each year in a database, and readers view the size of the bonus as an indicator of teacher effectiveness, Ms. Krieger said.
“I have students in class ask me why I didn’t earn a higher bonus,” Ms. Krieger said. “I say: ‘Because the system decided I wasn’t doing a good enough job. But the system is flawed.’ ”
This year, the federal Department of Education ’s own research arm warned in a study that value-added estimates “are subject to a considerable degree of random error.”
And last October, the Board on Testing and Assessments of the National Academies, a panel of 13 researchers led by Dr. Haertel, wrote to Mr. Duncan warning of “significant concerns” that the Race to the Top grant competition was placing “too much emphasis on measures of growth in student achievement that have not yet been adequately studied for the purposes of evaluating teachers and principals.”
“Value-added methodologies should be used only after careful consideration of their appropriateness for the data that are available, and if used, should be subjected to rigorous evaluation,” the panel wrote. “At present, the best use of VAM techniques is in closely studied pilot projects.”
Despite those warnings, the Department of Education made states with laws prohibiting linkages between student data and teachers ineligible to compete in Race to the Top, and it designed its scoring system to reward states that use value-added calculations in teacher evaluations.
“I’m uncomfortable with how fast a number of states are moving to develop teacher-evaluation systems that will make important decisions about teachers based on value-added results,” said Robert L. Linn, a testing expert who is an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
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“They haven’t taken caution into account as much as they need to,” Professor Linn said.SR Schuyler Rossi "I'm more aware of what to do and what not to do. Thanks for the tips!"
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Others have pointed to the surprisingly poor performance of Mehdi Karroubi, another reform candidate, and particularly in his home province of Lorestan, where conservative candidates fared poorly in 2005, but where Ahmadinejad allegedly captured 71 percent of the vote. Eyebrows have been raised further by the relative consistency in Ahmadinejad's vote share across Iran's provinces, in spite of wide provincial variation in past elections.
These pieces of the story point in the direction of fraud, to be sure. They have led experts to speculate that the election results released by Iran's Ministry of the Interior had been altered behind closed doors. But we don't have to rely on suggestive evidence alone. We can use statistics more systematically to show that this is likely what happened. Here's how.
We'll concentrate on vote counts -- the number of votes received by different candidates in different provinces -- and in particular the last and second-to-last digits of these numbers. For example, if a candidate received 14,579 votes in a province (Mr. Karroubi's actual vote count in Isfahan), we'll focus on digits 7 and 9.
This may seem strange, because these digits usually don't change who wins. In fact, last digits in a fair election don't tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election. They are random noise in the sense that a fair vote count is as likely to end in 1 as it is to end in 2, 3, 4, or any other numeral. But that's exactly why they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud. For example, an election in which a majority of provincial vote counts ended in 5 would surely raise red flags.
Why would fraudulent numbers look any different? The reason is that humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others.
So what can we make of Iran's election results? We used the results released by the Ministry of the Interior and published on the web site of Press TV, a news channel funded by Iran's government. The ministry provided data for 29 provinces, and we examined the number of votes each of the four main candidates -- Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai -- is reported to have received in each of the provinces -- a total of 116 numbers.
The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average -- a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another -- are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.
As a point of comparison, we can analyze the state-by-state vote counts for John McCain and Barack Obama in last year's U.S. presidential election. The frequencies of last digits in these election returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections.
But that's not all. Psychologists have also found that humans have trouble generating non-adjacent digits (such as 64 or 17, as opposed to 23) as frequently as one would expect in a sequence of random numbers. To check for deviations of this type, we examined the pairs of last and second-to-last digits in Iran's vote counts. On average, if the results had not been manipulated, 70 percent of these pairs should consist of distinct, non-adjacent digits.
Not so in the data from Iran: Only 62 percent of the pairs contain non-adjacent digits. This may not sound so different from 70 percent, but the probability that a fair election would produce a difference this large is less than 4.2 percent. And while our first test -- variation in last-digit frequencies -- suggests that Rezai's vote counts are the most irregular, the lack of non-adjacent digits is most striking in the results reported for Ahmadinejad.
Each of these two tests provides strong evidence that the numbers released by Iran's Ministry of the Interior were manipulated. But taken together, they leave very little room for reasonable doubt. The probability that a fair election would produce both too few non-adjacent digits and the suspicious deviations in last-digit frequencies described earlier is less than.005. In other words, a bet that the numbers are clean is a one in two-hundred long shot.
Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, Ph.D. candidates in political science at Columbia University, will be assistant professors in New York University's Wilf Family Department of Politics this fall.“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” And just like that one woman’s callousness and casual racism became the Internet’s evening entertainment.
Public relations professional Justine Sacco probably didn’t think much of the tweet as she sent it from London’s Heathrow Airport shortly before boarding a 9-hour flight to South Africa. But as the director of communications for a billion-dollar media company, one Sacco listed in her Twitter bio, she probably should have. It’s pretty indefensible.
Like many people watching the spectacle unfold online, I was disgusted and angry at first. Then I imagined Sacco’s phone coming out of airplane mode and giggled my a** off.
The tweet set off a firestorm. According to Twitter analytic tool Topsy, Justine Sacco’s now deleted account garnered more than 45,000 tweets in the past 24 hours. Twitter user @shortstack81wondered #HasJustineLandedYet just 30 minutes into her flight. In the time it took to fly from London to South Africa, the hashtag was nearly 56,000 tweets strong and Sacco’s employer had scrubbed their site clean of any trace she’d ever been on payroll.
As with #PaulasBestDishes, #RacismEndedWhen and #USATodayBreakingNews, Black Twitter had struck a resounding blow with usual biting humor.
“Sometimes you land with more baggage than you took off with,” mused @monteiro. @twice_sifted tweeted, “If she is traveling with the company credit card, that first attempt at swiping is going to be a rude awakening.” It was all brilliantly capped with the purchase of JustineSacco.com, which was redirected to Aid for Africa’s donation page. Not everyone was amused.
“It was hard to ignore a disturbing feeling in the mob’s response, and something creepy in the trial by social media that was going on in her absence,” wrote Chris Taylor, Mashable’s deputy editor. “There’s a fine line between slamming Sacco for her blatant what-guys-I-was-just-kidding buffoonery, and taking an unconscionable delight in the misfortune of others while playing Big Brother on their lives.”
Unconscionable? Misfortune?
It has been estimated that more than 75 million people worldwide have contracted HIV/AIDS since the illness was first identified, and over 36 million have died from an HIV-related cause. And it’s a sad truth that many of the dead were poor people of color on the continent of Africa.
In fact, 75 percent of the HIV/AIDS-related deaths in 2012 were of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa. That Sacco’s career in PR was likely ended with the same ease she could work this tragedy into a “joke” is more than schadenfreude, as Taylor suggests.
Waiting for Justine Sacco’s flight to land was like watching Wile E. Coyote chase The Road Runner off a cliff only to realize too late that that he’d run out of ground. Seeing her delete the tweet then her entire Twitter account was like watching gravity work. It felt something like justice.
Now, of course, flooding Sacco’s Twitter mentions didn’t end racism, xenophobia and general nastiness. But what it did do — more than likely — was end her career in corporate communications and that means something in a society where people of color put up with racism on a scale from micro-aggression to full-out slur everyday.
Hopefully, Sacco’s shaming will serve as an example to other casual racists that people of color are tired of being the butt of their “jokes,” that there are limitations to privilege, words matter and that those of us with good sense are willing to teach them those lesson one Sacco, USA Today and Paula Deen at a time.
Donovan X. Ramsey is a multimedia journalist who writes about all things social, political, cultural, financial and whimsical. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter @iDXR, or DonovanXRamsey.com.Story highlights "She has fought for social justice, equality and policies that expand civil rights and economic opportunity out there," Harvey said
"It really is very much an honor to have your support and your endorsement," Clinton said
Washington (CNN) Talk show and radio host Steve Harvey endorsed Hillary Clinton on Tuesday during her appearance on his radio show, saying she is the best candidate to build on President Barack Obama's legacy.
"She has fought for social justice, equality and policies that expand civil rights and economic opportunity out there," he said on the "Steve Harvey Morning Show," his nationally syndicated radio show.
"As President, you really plan on building on the progress that President Obama has made to deliver some real results for a lot of Americans, including African-Americans," Harvey said. "And I'm endorsing you as my candidate for President of the United States and I just think that you're going to just do the right thing for the majority of the people in this country."
Clinton and her rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders have been competing for the African-American vote, one of the Democratic Party's largest voting blocs.
Read MoreAs I’m writing this, there are members of the Rihanna Navy lined up on the sidewalk outside the Macy’s in downtown Brooklyn. They’re waiting for Rihanna to appear and perform at the unveiling of her seventh perfume, RiRi, on Monday. That’s in three days. They’ve been there since 6 a.m. Plenty of time to wonder what she’ll wear. What she’ll say.
I get it. I’ve waited for Rihanna too. In fact, I’m waiting for her right now. The whole deal with this cover story was that she wouldn’t grant us any facetime, or phone time, but agreed to answer five questions over email.
Thing is, I knew she could go ghost. Not just because she can, which she can. Not just because of Beyoncé’s recent Vogue September issue cover story, where Pulitzer-prize winner Margo Jefferson wrote a killer writearound with zero involvement or comment from Bey’s camp. But because I’ve been in exactly this position before—seven times, actually, if you count each leg of Rihanna’s 777 Tour in 2012.
From Mexico City to Berlin and Toronto to Stockholm, I’ve waited for Rihanna. Once, I waited on the tarmac at Charles de Gaulle airport for three hours because she wasn’t quite finished shopping for lingerie at Chantal Thomas. After which she stopped at La Perla, another very nice underwear store. This was documented on Rihanna’s Instagram, and Just Jared’s. I think she ran into Puffy at La Perla.
At the time I—along with 140 other journalists, a handful of fans, and a caravan of international contest winners—was sleep-deprived, hungry, and utterly fucked sideways from back-to-back redeye flights. The tour was the brainchild of Rihanna and her manager Jay Brown. A Boeing 777 furnished by Delta would squire a roving enclave of carefully selected individuals to visit 7 countries in 7 days for 7 Rihanna concerts and parties to commemorate her 7th studio album in as many years.
There’s a special kind of confusion and circadian loopiness that accompanies landing in different countries one after the other without ever seeing daylight. It makes you feel insane. A documentary was shot to capture the trip for posterity, and in it Brown states that the whole point was so other people would know what it feels like to live like Rihanna.
I can’t say what it’s like to be Rihanna, but judging by that week, I’d guess it feels like being a jetlagged basketcase in a hostage situation. I do know that the very special circumstances surrounding that tour conditioned me to become more obsessed with her, and that three years later, she comes up a lot. I have discussed, at length, over drinks, whether or not she works out. How many phones she has. If she ever gets sick. If there exists a man who could date her and, more importantly, who we’d want that man to be, because surely we deserve a vote, because stars are just like us, and of all stars, Rihanna feels the most real. I believe this is a sentiment shared by many of her fans, even ones who were never trapped on a plane with her. Still, I can’t picture Rihanna jogging. Or going to the dentist. I usually envision Rihanna in the sun, languidly smoking. In short, I can only imagine things that she’s already shown us.Happy New Year, hunters! Here are 4 new monsters you'll get to fight in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate this year!
Throughout 2014, we talked about a variety of brand new monsters introduced in the fourth generation of the Monster Hunter series; but did you know even new monsters get their own subspecies? Most of them will be waiting for you at G-Rank, but here's what they look like.
And I should note that I won't be talking too much about them right now, since most of us haven't even hunted the regular species yet.
Berserk Tetsucabra
A Tetsucabra so fierce it can bite into explosive rocks!
Ash Kecha Wacha
Imagine the regular Kecha Wacha... but with the ability to spit fire!
Tigerstripe Zamtrios
This one you may remember from our event demos; we even live streamed it before. Essentially a Zamtrios that can go between its various forms at any time and can paralyze you!
Ruby Basarios
While not a subspecies of a new monster, this is the first time the Basarios gets a subcpecies. Watch out for those ruby crystals... they look like they can break off. ;)
That's all for now. Keep your eyes open for more Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate news in the coming weeks and be sure to pre-order your copy today!Django internals: authentication
Django’s session and authentication frameworks are designed to Just Work™, and can seem pretty magical. Like the rest of Django, though, these parts aren’t magic — just Python. So let’s take a look at the internals of sessions and authentication and see how the whole thing works.
Our journey begins with the session middleware. You’ll see that the process_request method is pretty simple: it looks up the session engine setting, looks for a session key in the request’s cookies, and then sets request.session to a SessionStore instance.
I’ll skip over the details of SessionStore (see the implementations if you want to get more details) other than to note that SessionStore` just behaves like a dict, and that the data you store there is automatically persisted for you. All that the user receives is a session cookie, an opaque key identifying the session. You can read more about the technical details of the session framework in Chapter 14 of The Django Book.
I’ll assume from here on out that you’re using the database session backend since that’s the easiest to poke at.
So now we hop over to the auth middleware. The auth middleware is similarly simple: it sets request.user to a LazyUser. Like request.session, request.user is lazy: the user won’t be loaded until request.user is accessed.
When request.user is accessed — often by something like the @login_required decorator — LazyUser calls django.contrib.auth.get_user(), passing in the request; get_user() pulls info out of the session and, if the user is authenticated, returns the appropriate User instance.
So what’s the data that’s stored in the session? Let’s take a look:
>>> from django.contrib.sessions.models import Session >>> s = Session.objects.get(pk='d638d3e640d2133c8cc0b73d0e88c6b3') >>> s.get_decoded() {'_auth_user_backend': 'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend', '_auth_user_id': 1}
So you can see that a properly authenticated user gets two pieces of information stored in the session: (a) which backend was used to authenticate that user and (b) what the user’s ID is.
So how does that information get there?
Most of the time, a user is going to get logged in from some view. Django ships with such a view; it’s django.contrib.auth.views.login. There’s a fair bit going on there that’s related to processing the view and request itself; the important details are the steps you need to take to log in a user:
Given a dict of credentials, call django.contrib.auth.authenticate(**credentials) (i.e. authenticate(username='jacob', password='mypass') ). authenticate() returns the User object, if successful, or None if the credentials are incorrect. Given a properly authenticated user, call django.contrib.auth.login(request, user). This is what stores the backend and user ID info in the session.BEIJING (Reuters) - China has further revised up its solar power development target for 2015 by 50 percent from its previous plan, state media reported on Thursday.
The government has set a target for installed solar power generating capacity to reach 15 gigawatts by 2015 and wind power capacity to hit 100 GW, China National Radio reported, citing an announcement from the National Energy Administration.
The ambitious move may have been encouraged by a rapid increase in solar power installation in recent months after the government unified grid feed-in tariffs for solar projects for the first time in July, and offered a higher price for projects that would be put into operation before the year end.
China had doubled its 2015 solar power goal to 10 GW after the Japanese nuclear power crisis.
Installed solar power capacity at the end of 2010 was less than 1 GW in China, the world's largest exporter of photovoltaic products and home to some of the industry's top players, such as Trina Solar, JA Solar, Suntech Power and LDK Solar.
Annual solar power output will reach 20 billion kilowatt hours by 2015 and wind power output 190 billion kWh, China National Radio said in a text report posted on its website (www.cnr.cn).
Of the planned 100 GW wind power capacity in 2015, 5 GW will be built in the ocean, it said.
The overall wind power capacity goal was the same as that in the previous plan.
Non-fossil energy production including wind, solar, biomass, geothermal and nuclear power will amount to 480 million tons of standard coal in 2015, the report added.
(Reporting by Jim Bai and Chen Aizhu; Editing by Jonathan Hopfner)It's obvious now that you have all the beautifully Photoshopped facts in front of you, isn't it?
Have you ever played that road-trip friendly game where you try and decide which actor would play a famous person in their hypothetical Hollywood biopic? For example, if some wacky producer were to make a movie about Amy Winehouse’s tortured life—who would you play the late soul singer? My first choice would be Lady Gaga: her nose is crooked, she sorta has a good voice, and her outrageous personality could potentially match up with Amy’s. But, what if we were to take this incredibly fun challenge to the next level by pretending that Amy and Gaga are actually the same person, IRL. Are you still with me?
Well, according to my new favourite website, WellAware1, this kind of bodysnatching celebrity insanity is only the tip of the iceberg, or the beginning of the rabbithole, depending on which conspiratorial metaphor you prefer. WellAware1 exposes one the most unbelievable conspiracy theories I’ve ever heard—and if you follow my writing, you probably already know how much time I spend talking about shadow governments and alien cover-ups.
The main premise of WellAware1 is that the “real” people you see interviewed in news stories—whether they’re small town mall employees who got robbed at gunpoint or famous musicians and politicians—are not who they say |
4 Share features – sharing photos and videos – but Atlus has opted for this option with Persona 5.
The editors of Polygon have contacted Atlus USA for more clarification, the publisher has confirmed that the Share button is currently inactive and will be once the game will reach the shelves of European shops. “This being a Japanese title with solely a single-playthrough story means Japan is very wary about it,” according to an Atlus representative. “Sharing is currently blocked through the native PS4 UI.”
It is a decision taken to limit the spoilers, as Persona 5 is a game based heavily on the plot and the narration and sharing of short clips or certain screenshots may ruin the experience for some players.
According to the information, the first elements of Persona 5 are unlocked, but after its animated sequence and main menu, Share is deactivated. This will not, however, prevent the game from being recorded by other means, such as an external capture.
Recall that Persona 5 will arrive in Europe on April 4.
What do you think of this choice? Do tell us your opinion in the comment section below.
SourceMSU student still missing, has social media posts hinting at suicide
Update: Monday — Police are still attempting to locate MSU student Patrick Kegan Cochrane, who has been missing since Saturday.
Since Cochrane was reported missing, posts attributed to his social media accounts detailed his reasoning behind wanting to kill himself. MSU spokesman Jason Cody said police are aware of these posts and have yet to find any information on Cochrane’s whereabouts.
MSU spokesperson Jason Cody said in a release he was last seen 3:15 p.m. April 8 at Snyder-Phillips Hall. He does not have a personal vehicle and is known to use public transportation.
The MSU student database lists Cochrane as a French senior.
Anyone with information on Cochrane's location is asked to immediately contact MSU police at 517-355-2222.
The Michigan State University Police Department is currently asking for the public's help in locating a missing MSU student named Patrick Kegan Cochrane, who was reported missing early Saturday morning.
According to an MSUPD alert, police believe Cochrane — who goes by Kegan — might harm himself. Police believe he likely has his head shaved.
Anyone with information on Cochrane's location is asked to immediately contact MSU police at 517-355-2222.When you’re a band with a back catalogue as overwhelmingly massive as the Melvins do, it’s kind of hard to pick your 10 favourite songs. In fact, according to frontman Buzz Osbourne, “it’s nearly impossible”.
Indeed, since forming in Montesano, Washington in 1984, the group – rounded off by drummer Dale Crover and a constantly revolving door of bassists – have released a staggering 25 studio albums, 14 EPs, 12 live albums and 10 compilation records and have never settled on one idea for too long.
So, when Team Rock set Osbourne the task of picking his 10 essential Melvins tracks, he originally offered to do something on his favourite John Huston films but we politely declined – a bit too niche. We want Melvins and Melvins we got.
Melvins in 2016: Dale Crover, Buzz Osborne, Steve McDonald
But where do you start when your back catalogue includes everything from live experimental noise sets to collaborations with Jello Biafra and Lustmord?
“I rarely know what people want but that doesn’t bother me too much”, says Osbourne. “The fact is, I would never have been happy doing the same thing over and over again. That wouldn’t have been me. Plenty of other bands could have gone down that line too, I just don’t think they had the guts to do it. But I’m not afraid.
“You just have to keep doing what you’re doing and not concern yourself with the fact that maybe not everybody is on board with what you’re doing right now”, he adds. “If I started worrying about what people were going to like, I think I’d miss the boat; I’d be completely off base with what I was doing and I think it would be a complete failure. I’ve always thought that’s a mistake, and I’m certainly not going to change now. I don’t think I’m wrong either.”
Fair enough. Here, then, are the essential Melvins releases, according to Buzz…
Eggnog (1991)
“Let’s start with this record. It’s an EP, but I like that record a lot. We did it really quickly and for very little money. I personally like EPs better LPs because my attention span is less challenged, but people don’t generally buy EPs the way they do LPs – I don’t know why. When I go to concerts I’d also much rather see a band play a good solid 40-minute set than an hour and 40 minutes. I’ve kind of always felt that way, except for maybe when I was 16 and it was just nice to be away from my parents for a long time. Nowadays, I’m good after 30 or 40 minutes. But people don’t prefer that either. Anyway, we probably spent about 500 bucks making that EP and it came out great. It was a precursor to the Lysol record [aka Melvins aka Untitled aka Lice-all, 1992], and it was me, Dale [Crover, drums] and Lori [Black, bass]. You can kind of hear where Lysol came from out of that record; people could see what was to come. A lot of people seemed to think the Lysol record came from Joe [Preston, bass] joining the band, but I always say, ‘No, listen to the record that came before it.’ I like the Eggnog record a lot.”
**Pigs of the Roman Empire (2004) **
“Next I’d have to say Pigs of the Roman Empire, which is the record we did with Lustmord. I like that one a great deal. We’d never done anything like that before and it’s a true collaboration, meaning that we never jammed with him. He would give us stuff and we would give him stuff, and some stuff on that record is just us and some stuff is just him. We’d also mess with some of his stuff and he’d mess with some of ours, but we were never actually in the same room together and we never made music directly together, so it’s a real collaborative effort in that sense. He’d never worked with guitars before either, which was cool, and I think he did a great job. I’d love to do a live show with him at some point; maybe one day that will happen. I will say that the record wasn’t met with a lot of enthusiasm when it came out, which was kind of a head scratcher for me, but to this day I can listen to it and I still think it’s a really great record.”
Hold It In (2014)
“This is another true collaboration that Dale and I did with the guys from the Butthole Surfers; Paul Leary [guitar] and Jeff Pinkus [bass]. We’d done a lot of live shows with Jeff before that, and we had the idea to record with Jeff whilst we were on tour; I was like, ‘Oh, and what about also playing with Paul?’ Paul is one of my favourite guitar players, and through Jeff we made that happen. For that one we did meet up and write songs together; it was me, Dale and Jeff more than it was me, Dale, Jeff and Paul, but Paul did contribute a lot to the songs and he also brought in his own songs that we all played on. He sang three songs on the record as well, which was really odd for a Melvins record but it was great. It was a really fun record to do, and I’d love to do another one with those guys. It was unlike anything we’ve ever done. We still play a bunch of those songs live too, and the Butthole Surfers, to me, are one of the best bands ever; they’ve never done things by the book and that’s exactly what I like about them.”
Nude With Boots (2009)
“Nude with Boots was one of the records that we did with the Big Business guys [bassist Jared Warren and drummer Coady Willis]. It was the second one that we did with them and I think we really hit our stride with that one. And it was another that was done relatively quickly; the guys had moved to LA and settled out there for a while and we did it in a studio in the middle of Hollywood that’s not there anymore. One of the songs is a cover of an old Gregorian chant [Dies Iraea], which we got the inspiration to cover from The Shining [the 1980 horror film by Stanley Kubrick]. It’s been in a bunch of movies, including The Bible by John Huston, and we did our own version of it on that record. I really love that record, and for the first time since the very early days I only used one guitar on the whole thing. There’s a song called Billy Fish that I really like on there as well. We should start playing that song again.”
Freak Puke (2012)
“We did the Freak Puke record with Melvins Lite, which is me, Dale and Trevor Dunn [Mr. Bungle] on stand-up bass, and that was a new thing for us at the time. The record came out in 2012, and that same year we did a tour of the United States where we played all 50 States plus Washington, D.C. in 51 days. That was a real challenge, but we did it and we made it through the whole thing. When we got down to the last few days we were like, ‘OK, we’ve gotta make this work’, because that’s not something that you want to do over, you know. But it was a great thing to do and the record was a cool one to make. Once again, it was a record that was unlike anything we’ve ever done, and the stand-up bass really shone through. We just let Trevor do his thing; he’s a great player and a really good friend. We got to be close playing in Fantomas together, and that’s kind of how that record got cemented. And there’s more of it to come. I’d also love to do a tour with him where we do half stand-up bass and half electric. That would be really cool.”
Stoner Witch (1994)
“The Stoner Witch record was the middle record of the three that we did with Atlantic. It wasn’t the best selling record from that time; Houdini was the best selling one but that was actually my least favourite of the three. I’m proud of all of those records though, and when you listen to them you can tell there’s not a lot of record company meddling going on. Stoner Witch in particular was a lot of fun to make, and we really learnt a lot in the studio on that one. I think it was the longest time we ever spent in the studio actually; 19 days, which for us is a long time. Bands like Tool obviously spend about six months on their albums, and they’ve spent about ten years putting together the new one. And they haven’t even started recording yet, but Adam [Jones, Tool guitarist] told me the shortest song they’ve been working on is twelve minutes long. Anyway, Stoner Witch was great.”
**Bullhead (1991) **
“I have to put the Bullhead record in my top 10. We intentionally made a record that was very different to the two that came before it with that one, and we made it for almost no money in four or five days, including mixing. I did my best to make everything single song was different as well; I really wanted each one to have an individual flavour. That was the idea and I think it worked. I really like the cover art for that one too, which was kind of how it worked for us from then on.”
Basses Loaded **(2016) **
“Our latest album Basses Loaded was really fun to make. We used six different bass players and all but Steven McDonald [Off!] we’d worked with before, except for Krist Novoselic of course, but we go way back to the early ‘80s with him. It was a lot of fun to do and we didn’t even realise what was going on until we were way into it; our intention wasn’t to have six bass players at the start, it just turned out that way and I think that aspect of the record gave it a really cool flavour. And now we’re touring with Steve and that’s a whole other new thing for us, so I couldn’t be happier.”
Colossus of Destiny (2001)
“Colossus of Destiny is one of my all time favourite albums that I’ve ever done. We did a trilogy of albums in 1999 – The Maggot, The Bootlicker and The Crybaby – and Colossus was supposed to be the third record in that trilogy, but then I got the idea of working with guest stars and so it sort of became like the unofficial fourth one. It’s a live album, and we played a show where we did like an hour of crazy noise type stuff, which was worked out down to the wire, into a regular set. So on the album you hear this noise thing and then Eye Fly, which was the first song in our set, and that’s the end of the album. I really think that record is great. It always amazes me when people go, ‘This is bullshit, it’s just noise’, because it’s not just noise; there’s a meter and a flow to it that makes a lot of sense. If you don’t get that then you really just don’t get what we’re doing. We’re big Throbbing Gristle fans and we’ve always loved that sort of thing. And I’m sorry if you feel that way, but I think that record is beautiful. I think it’s one of the best things that we’ve ever done, and if I had to pick just three albums to give someone to figure out what this band is about, Colossus would be one of them.”
Thinking Out Loud: Melvins' Buzz Osborne
A beginner's guide to The MelvinsTOPEKA, KS–The second law of thermodynamics, a fundamental scientific principle stating that entropy increases over time as organized forms decay into greater states of randomness, has come under fire from conservative Christian groups, who are demanding that the law be repealed.
"What do these scientists want us teaching our children? That the universe will continue to expand until it reaches eventual heat death?" asked Christian Coalition president Ralph Reed, speaking at a rally protesting a recent Kansas Board Of Education decision upholding the law. "That's hardly an optimistic view of a world the Lord created for mankind. The American people are sending a strong message here: We don't like the implications of this law, and we will not rest until it has been reversed in the courts."
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The controversial law of nature, which asserts that matter continually breaks down as disorder increases and heat is lost, has long been decried by Christian fundamentalists as running counter to their religion's doctrine of Divine grace and eternal salvation.
"Why can't disorder decrease over time instead of everything decaying?" asked Jim Muldoon of Emporia, KS. "Is that too much to ask? This is our children's future we're talking about."
"I wouldn't want my child growing up in a world headed for total heat death and dissolution into a vacuum," said Kansas state senator Will Blanchard (R-Hutchinson). "No decent parent would want that."
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Calling the second law of thermodynamics "a deeply disturbing scientific principle that threatens our children's understanding of God's universe as a benevolent and loving place," Blanchard is spearheading a nationwide grassroots campaign to have the law removed from high-school physics textbooks. The plan has already met with significant support in the state legislatures of Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi.
"My daughter's schoolbooks tell her that we live in a world ruled by disorder," said Knox Heflin, one of several dozen fundamentalists who spoke out against the teaching of the law at a Statesboro (GA) School Board hearing. "That's a direct contradiction of what it says in the Bible, about how everything is going to get better, and we'll all live happily up in heaven after the End Times."
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"The only 'heat death' Jesus ever mentioned is the one that sinners will suffer for all eternity in the Lake of Fire," said Indianola (MS) School Board president Bernice McCallum. "Now more than ever, we need to hear what the Bible has to say about our public schools' physical-science curricula."
Leading physicists contend that, as the foundation of much of our current scientific understanding, a reversal of the second law of thermodynamics would have massive ramifications on the future of both our nation and the universe itself.
"Were the second law to be repealed, random particles would collect and organize themselves instead of dissipating, which could affect such basic processes as combustion, digestion, evaporation, convection–that sort of thing," Columbia University superstring theorist Dr. Brian Greene said. "There wouldn't be much sunlight, either, because all stars, including our sun, would be collecting photons from surrounding space instead of emitting solar radiation. Oh, and the universe would begin to contract rather than expand, which could possibly turn back the flow of time itself, sending our cosmos spiraling inward toward a reverse Big Bang, a sort of 'Big Crunch,' if you will."
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"In light of all this," Greene continued, "I would sincerely hope that our nation's legislators think long and hard before making any decisions to amend or repeal this law."
Despite such warnings, the grassroots movement to eliminate the second law of thermodynamics appears to be gathering strength.
"This is America," said Duane Collins, a Gatlinburg, TN, distillery operator and father of five. "And in this country, we have the God-given right to change laws we don't think are Christian. We are united in our demands that the second law of thermodynamics be repealed, and our voice will be heard no matter what. That's just a plain fact, and nothing anybody says can ever change it."After objecting to the closing arguments made by Caldwell, Cassady & Curry attorneys representing VirnetX, Apple has now filed a motion for mistrial in the case that awarded a $625 million verdict after just a week of testimony and deliberation.
VirnetX headquarters: a Lake Tahoe home far from East Texas
Why East Texas?
According to a report by Texas Lawyer, Apple's motion for mistral argues that VirnetX lawyers' closing remarks to the jury included "arguments outside the evidence and blatantly misrepresented the testimony of Apple's witnesses."The East Texas trial made headlines this week after a jury returned a verdict finding Apple guilty of willfully infringing on four VirnetX patents in products including iMessage, FaceTime and VPN services.A previous trial held in 2012 had earlier awarded VirnetX $368.2 million, but that verdict was vacated on appeal last September. As part of its appellate ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit called for a damages retrial.VirnetX, disparagingly referred to as a patent troll, filed its case in the town of Tyler, Texas, within the state's Eastern District, despite the fact that the patent holding company is headquartered in the tiny Lake Tahoe village of Zephyr Cove, Nevada, next to Stateline casinos and the Heavenly ski resort at the resort town of South Lake Tahoe.Texas' Eastern District has emerged as the "patent litigation capital of America" over the past few decades. In 2014, Texas Monthly profiled why Tyler and its nearby neighboring town of Marshall have become plaintiffs' preferred location for the majority of patent cases, despite the fact that most U.S companies are incorporated in Delaware. (Apple is incorporated in California, just over three hours west of Lake Tahoe).It began with Texas Instruments in the mid-80s, which saved itself from bankruptcy by "turning its patent portfolio into a profit machine," the report noted, "aggressively suing other tech giants for infringing on its patents for the integrated circuit and microprocessor."Within a decade, TI was earning more from patent lawsuits than it was from operations. However, as Federal Court dockets in Dallas, Texas grew clogged with drug-related criminal cases, TI moved its litigation further east to the small town of Marshall, which lacked an FBI office or U.S. attorney, resulting in a light caseload of criminal complaints.The small towns of East Texas were also "ideal venue for intellectual property debates," the article noted, because the resident juror pool was largely uneducated ("only 20 percent of the towns adult population hold bachelor's degrees") while also having grown up "on the edge of one of the world's richest oil reservoirs, and royalty battles with oil companies have created a strong sense of property rights, whether they relate to patents or minerals."Former federal magistrate judge Judith Guthrie was cited as noting that the area was "always popular with plaintiff's lawyers. The perception was that juries weren't as sophisticated as in other parts of the district."Judges in the district have also set up rules for rapidly processing cases, resulting it being called "the rocket docket," another contributing factor to its attraction of companies seeking quick and easy verdicts on complex intellectual property claims.Companies that actually build products, such as Apple and Google, have been lobbying Congress to close the loopholes that allow "non practicing" patent trolls to drag firms into East Texas courts for easy, streamlined verdict awards that involve little significant argument and generate huge jury awards that embolden trolls to continue.President Obama has repeatedly addressed "costly, needless" patent litigation in his State of the Union addresses as an American problem that needs to be addressed, while at the opposite end of the political spectrum, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia has similarly referred to East Texas as being a "renegade jurisdiction."What are your biggest struggles while on the set of the show Game of Thrones?
Very long hours. Because I love to sleep. I like sleeping more than most of my siblings. So staying awake and working long, long hours is very difficult.
Have you had one of those “I can’t stop laughing” moments on the GOT set? If so, what was so funny?
The one time was in series 3, episode 8, when I was supposed to laugh anyway – when Arya cracked up laughing at the news of her dead aunt – and I was watching funny videos on my phone, so I giggled endlessly, and they liked it, and so did the audience.
At what point did you realize that Game of Thrones was becoming a huge deal?
Season 3. At the season 3 premiere, we went to the Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, and stepping out of the car, with hundreds of people screaming my name, is when I realized that this show completely changed my life. It was very, very daunting – I found it quite scary – but it happened gradually, so I had time to get used to it.
Hi Maisie, thanks for doing this AMA. What’s been the biggest change in your life since starting Game of Thrones? Also, which cast member is most like their character on the show?Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
Environmental Protection Ministry officials on Thursday urged Israeli gas companies to lower natural gas prices, saying it is critical to ensuring the resource’s attractiveness to Israeli industry.
Such steps are necessary, according to the ministry, because the low oil price worldwide is making natural gas a more expensive option, despite its environmental advantages.
Switching over to natural gas is the most effective way to reduce air pollution, which comes mainly from factories, heavy vehicles such as buses, and the use of coal to generate electricity, Environmental Protection Minister Avi Gabbay stressed at a press conference in Tel Aviv.“Lower the price – the market will flourish and that will be good for your sales, for your production, and for the cost of living,” he said, addressing the natural gas companies.As part of the country’s continual transition to natural gas use, ministry director-general Yisrael Dancziger said his office hopes to this year convert trucks, buses and taxis into hybrid vehicles that run on natural gas as well as gasoline. He warned, however, that such a process cannot occur if the price of natural gas does not come down.“Despite the desire of companies to switch over to natural gas, it has not proven worthwhile for them to do that because of the price,” he said.While other measures, such as installing filters on trucks, can reduce air pollution, the most effective course is to switch to natural gas.A massive glut in global oil, fueled by an internal crisis at the OPEC oil cartel; new technology to extract shale oil; and the expectation of more Iranian oil hitting the market following the removal of sanctions, has moved oil prices to their lowest levels in over a decade.Many analysts foresee prices staying low through 2016, but an eventual rise is expected, barring any massive economic shocks to dampen demand.A possible agreement among some oil producers to cut production brought prices up to $34 a barrel on Thursday.Eran Haimovich, CEO of the Upper Nazareth- based Phoenicia Ltd., was given a $250,000 government grant to switch his glass factory over to natural gas power in 2012.When his company connected to the fuel network, natural gas was a third of the price of petroleum, he told Thursday’s conference.“Nowadays, it is the more expensive option,” he said, adding that since connecting, the price of a barrel of oil plummeted from $120 to $30.Haimovich called offshore natural gas “the best thing to happen to Israel in the past 50 years,” but said that the high prices take away any incentive for other companies to convert their factories. All the money going into building natural gas infrastructure and pipelines will be for naught if there are not enough customers to actually use it, he added.For future gas contracts, a number of new pricing schemes were approved in the country’s natural gas outline – a deal between the government and natural gas firms activated in mid-December, following a year of disputes, negotiations and bureaucratic battles.The gas framework offers two new contract options. The first obliges the companies to offer prices according to the existing Oil Refineries Ltd. contract, which is currently the cheapest industrial contract in the sector.According to National Infrastructure, Energy and Water Ministry projections, this would lead to a price of $5.10 per mmBtu (million British thermal units) – linked to the global benchmark Brent oil price, he added.Meanwhile, electricity producers will pay a gas price based on an average of the three cheapest contracts of today – those of three independent power producers. That gas price will be equivalent to about $4.70 per mmBtu, with linkage to market changes.
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>The European Parliament’s largest political group, the centre-right EPP, wants to end an EU-US data exchange agreement known as Safe Harbour.
German centre-right MEP Manfred Weber, who is the group’s vice-president, told this website on Tuesday (29 October) in an email that the “EPP group wants to terminate the agreement as it stands now and negotiate new rules.”
Facebook's new custom-built Data Center based in Prineville, Oregon - the company has signed up to Safe Harbour (Photo: Tom Raftery)
He said American IT companies are not respecting the terms of the agreement, meant to protect the personal data of EU citizens.
“There have been doubts if the firms always fully comply with the rules, not just since the revelations about the NSA activities. This has to stop,” he said.
He added that clear ground rules are needed to protect the personal data of EU citizens from the US-based companies.
“That is why we are saying ‘yes’ to a strict EU data protection legislation but ‘no’ to the Safe Harbour Agreement in its present form,” he said.
Critics say the so-called Safe Harbour agreement is full of loopholes and rarely enforced by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Around 3,000 US companies have signed up to the self-certification scheme, which is only enforceable once the company makes a promise to adhere to a handful of privacy principles.
An annual compliance check by an independent body is not mandatory. Those which opt-out of the an independent review are required to review themselves.
The agreement, which excludes financial services, transport, and telecommunications sectors, was signed over a decade ago between the FTC and the European Commission.
A European Parliament civil liberties committee earlier this month revealed that one in seven companies lie about belonging to the agreement.
“At the time, they [EPP] wanted to uphold it [Safe Harbour],” said Dutch liberal Sophie in 't Veld.
The parliament last week passed a non-binding resolution to scrap a separate Swift agreement, which involves the transfer of bank data between the US and the EU.
“The German MEPs wanted to keep the Swift agreement, so it seems they’ve come to higher insights fairly rapidly,” she noted.
For her part, EU commissioner for justice Viviane Reding raised concerns over the agreement in a speech delivered at a trade conference in Washington DC.
She noted that “inter-operability and self-regulation is not enough” to restore the trust the American’s have lost in the EU since the on-going NSA revelations.
"The existing scheme has been criticised by European industry and questioned by European citizens: they say it is little more than a patch providing a veil of legitimacy for the US firms using it," said Reding.
Her department is set to issue an analysis of the Safe Harbour before the end of year.
Meanwhile, a handful of MEPs from the civil liberties committee are in Washington DC as part of the overall inquiry into the electronic mass surveillance of EU citizens by the NSA.
The nine-member delegation, led by British centre-left MEP Claude Moraes, are set to discuss the agreement with US federal trade commissioner on Wednesday.
A EU contact in Washington said the Americans will have to rebuild the confidence lost as a result of the on-going NSA-led snooping allegations on EU citizens and their leadership.
“It [Safe Harbour] is wider than the immediate wire-tapping because that has consequences or that has implications on trust on how we work together,” noted the contact.Two child migrants arrested in January after a 12-year-old girl was forced to perform sex acts with them are now thought to be adults at least 21 years of age.
The two men who have not been named but are reported to be Iranian citizens were officially 15 and 16-years-old at the time of their arrest four weeks ago. One of the men has now been proved to be “at least 21 years old” through dental examinations, while the second is also thought to be an adult but with no conclusive evidence having yet been brought forward, reports Bild.
The men were admitted to a children’s migrant aid centre when they arrived in Dusseldorf last year after they had managed to fool the German government over their true age. Once in the centre they were allowed into the classroom alongside other children from Dusseldorf, and they were able there to gain access to the much younger girl.
She was “compelled and forced into sexual acts” over the course of some days, said the prosecutor. Germany’s Express reports a six year old boy who discovered that the girl was being abused was threatened with having his throat cut for telling on the pair.
It was reported at the time of their arrest the abuse had been established after the girl had given testimony and she had undergone a gynaecological investigation, a doctor giving his professional opinion. The girl was moved for “protection” to another facility outside of the city.
The authority responsible for the accommodation and facility have blamed severe overcrowding for the events that allowed the men to attack the girl, with reports stating the city child protection centre is “bursting at the seams”. Chief officer for youth services John Horn said of the attack that children are normally segregated by age and sex, but are able to mingle in “common spaces”.
The two suspects had always “retreated into corners” and taken precautions to avoid being properly supervised, he said.
Reticence to be seen too much by staff at the centre may be linked just as much to their falsified ages, as to their sexual attacks. That these men were able to masquerade as children is being seen as a “serious blow” to the credibility of Germany’s Youth Office, which gave the men a “qualified inspection” and certified them to be “credibly under-age” at the time of their arrival.Top 10 must have supplies for a disaster
Self-sufficiency is a big part of living in the country. Small rural areas don’t get the same level of government services as urban areas. This means that you will often be among the last to get your power turned back on or your road plowed. In my area it’s not uncommon to have to go without power for several days during the winter. Below is a list of 10 items you might not have thought about for a grid down situation.
1. Gas Siphon: You may find yourself in a situation where you need to siphon gas or diesel from an automobile or piece of farm machinery to be used in your generator or other piece of machinery. You may also find yourself in a situation where you either need to siphon gas from someone else, or for someone else. You may not need a gas siphon often, but you will be happy that you have one when the need arises. And it certainly beats the hell out of trying to suck gas through a hose.(click here to check look/buy)
2. Rocket stove: A rocket stove is a small portable wood stove. I personally have a small gas stove that weighs less than a pound that I carry on backpacking trips and forays into the woods. However, one big drawback is that you need to carry one or several small gas canisters. The advantage to a rocket stove is that it runs off of wood: a fuel source that is widely available and easy to come by.(click here to look/buy)
3. Space blanket: A space blanket is a small, lightweight, metal coated sheet that is specially designed to retain heat. It’s also water resistant which is especially important for circumstances were you are wet and don’t have access to a heat source to dry off.(Click here to look/buy)
4. Water filter: You can go a month without food, but you can only last about 3 days without water. Being able to filter water is important in the event that you don’t have access to clean drinking water. Hurricane Katrina is a great example of a time when although people were literally waist deep in water, they didn’t have access to clean drinking water.(Click here to look/buy)
5. Food: Obviously it’s important to have access to food. There are many different options when it comes to preserved food. As someone who does a lot of camping and backpacking I have tried many (if not most) of the freeze dried meals that are available. The advantage to freeze dried food is that it’s lightweight. This makes it optimal for long trips where every ounce of weight maters. However, for short tips I much prefer to canned food (canned salmon chowder is my favorite). For the home canned food is preferred to freeze dried dinners. I have only had MRE’s once. It was from a military surplus store and is apparently the same thing our troops eat… It was god awful.
6. Rain jacket: Without power you may find yourself in a situation where you have trouble drying off. As a ranch hand I still have to work outside in the elements even when there isn’t any power. As an outdoorsman I can speak from experience that you can get hypothermia even in a warm rain when it’s 70 degrees out. I have tried a lot of name brand gear and even those cheap yellow rain suits you can pick up for a few dollars.
My best experiences with rainproof jackets come from both ends of the financial spectrum. On the ranch I wear a waterproof jacket made by a company called “trespass.” It has big pockets to carry wrenches, screws and whatever else I need. It’s not made from breathable material, but it does have vents that allows moisture to escape from your body. Their waterproof jackets sell for around $100-$150.
On the other end of the financial spectrum you have those cheap rain ponchos that you can pick up from the dollar store for 90 cents. They don’t last long, and they wear out easily. However, they will work for a day or so and they will keep the water off you. They are incredibly small when packed up and are lightweight. I keep a couple in my truck in case I am hit by an unexpected rainstorm.
7. Waterproof lighter: Obviously, being able to create fire is important. Especially if you don’t have power and need to cook and stay warm. I used to carry waterproof matches but learned the error of my ways on a rain soaked backpacking trip. Although you can submerge a waterproof match in water and still keep it burning, there is one major drawback. That is that you need something dry to strike it on and in a heavy rainstorm everything gets wet really fast. I have converted to using a waterproof lighter instead. I also highly recommend investing in fire starter: A highly flammable goop that you squeeze out of a toothpaste like receptacle.(click here to look/buy)
8. Hand crank flashlight: It’s always nice to have a reliable flashlight for obvious reasons. This last winter I found myself in a situation where I had to do a lot of work in the dark (we have long winter nights). Unfortunately, I never seem to have enough batteries. Because of this I had to keep commandeering them from tv remotes and other household items. Lesson learned. I not only bought enough batteries to last a lifetime, but I also invested in a hand cranked flashlight. It’s a flashlight that doesn’t need to constantly have its batteries replaced, rather it is charged by simply winding a crank as needed.(click here to look/buy)
9. Duct tape: You can never have enough duct tape. It has a wide variety of uses. I won’t go through a list of said uses for duct tape (I already did an article on it), but I’ll just say that NSA sends up duct tape with astronauts. If it’s important enough to send to the International Space Station, then it’s something worth keeping around the house/in your car.
10. Positive attitude: The most important thing you can have in a bad situation |
I think there was.”
Brian Mastre: “But investigators are saying it's worse now.”
Andy Williams: “Maybe they're patrolling it more now. Even if it is more now, is that because Nebraska residents are coming here and buying it and bringing it back? How are we to control Nebraska residents who are breaking the law? I have no power over them.”
The rules in Colorado work this way: it's legal for out-of-state residents to buy recreational marijuana in Colorado. You cannot smoke it in public, however.
One difference: Colorado residents can buy an ounce of pot.
Out-of-state residents are allowed to buy up to a quarter ounce a day, but nothing in the law keeps track of those going to other dispensaries and getting more.
Olivia Grider believes the war on drugs has been handled poorly for years. “It's ridiculous. You shouldn't go to jail for some pot.”
She came to Denver from Oklahoma for a concert. Oklahoma is also suing Colorado over marijuana. “I plan on moving here anywhere,” Ms Grider told WOWT 6 News, “So either way – it will be legal for me.”
The Medicine Man sees the trend of other states following Colorado's lead as a sign that his state is on to something.
What Colorado and Washington State are doing is regulating marijuana, and it's illegal under the Controlled Substances Act. But in 2013, the Justice Department backed off prosecution and cleared the way for the marijuana boon.
Brian Mastre: “Do you worry at all that the Department of Justice will change its mind and all this goes away?”
Andy Williams: “I've lived with this for so long – that it's just buzz in my head anymore. I don't even think about it. I don't think the DOJ is going to change its mind on that. The genie is out of the bottle.”
It won't be long and we'll hear a response from the Colorado Attorney General. The state is expected to file official paperwork by the end of the month in the lawsuit from Nebraska and Oklahoma. Even then, there's no guaranteed the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case.
Colorado's AG declined a WOWT 6 News interview request. A spokeswoman said, “Because this matter is one that is before the high court, we are not granting interview.”
“These guys are fighting this problem already,” said Nebraska Attorney General Peterson in an exclusive inteview with WOWT 6 News in Gering, Nebraska, with local law enforcement. “They're running into kids who are bringing it back – high school. We're talking 14, 15, 16 year-olds. And they're saying, 'What's the big deal? Colorado legalized it.' It's an impairment industry that stands to make a big profit. They need to expand the market and this is one of the closest markets to do it.”
Brian Mastre: “Do people ask if they can take this out of state when they come here?”
Andy Williams: “Yes.”
Brian Mastre: “What do you tell them?”
Williams: “We say you can't take this across state lines. You could go to jail for that.
Dispensary owners put it this way: no matter the regulation, there will always be some people who don't follow the rules.
Andy Williams: “Since we're the closest dispensary to the airport, we get people all the time that ask if they can take it on the airplane.”
Brian Mastre: “Are you surprised they're even asking?”
Andy Williams: “I am. I don't quite get that.”
So what does the data say?
An August report from the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Trafficking Area called “The Legalization of Marijuana in Colorado: The Impact” found, Colorado young people – between 12 and 17 – use marijuana at a 39% higher rate than the national average.
(read the full report in the link next to this story)
Brian Mastre: “There's still scientific evidence out there that marijuana use among young people can affect your memory.”
Andy Williams: “I agree. Young people shouldn't be using marijuana. This industry does a lot to educate the public on that.”
Brian Mastre: “Do you hear from people who say, 'Come on. We tried it when we were younger and we turned out fine. So what's wrong?”
Scotts Bluff County Sheriff Mark Overman: “What's wrong is look at the numbers – the emergency room admissions – look at the traffic fatalities – it's doubled. What are we willing to stand? I don't want to see Nebraska get like that. “
The same study shows traffic fatalities involving operators testing positive for marijuana in Colorado jumped 100% from 2007 to 2012.
From 2011 to 2013, emergency room visits related to marijuana increased 57%.
“Everyone today is comparing the marijuana of today to that of the 60's and 70's,” said Cheyenne County, Nebraska, Sheriff John Jenson. “You can't do that. They have nothing in common but the name. The THC level is so much higher in today's marijuana.”
The report also revealed the chemical compound in marijuana that causes the “high” has grown dramatically.
The average THC potency in marijuana stood at 4% in 1995. In 2013, it tripled to 12%.
“Marijuana is the gateway drug,” said Sheriff Jenson. “If you have marijuana coming in – you're going to start seeing meth. We saw huge numbers back to the days of when we had labs. We're seeing heroin for the first time in this end of the state.”
Andy Williams: “Just like anything, if people have a propensity for addiction or abuse – no matter what they do – is going to be a stepping stone for something else.”
Brian Mastre: “You think it's like alcohol?”
Andy Williams: “I do. I think it's better than alcohol. I know it is.”
In its first year, Colorado's pot industry racked up more than $700-million in revenue. A 10% sales tax and other fees added $76-million to Colorado's treasury.
Even so – lawmakers were forecasting much higher numbers.
Brian Mastre: “You yourself said you don't really partake in marijuana that often.”
Andy Williams, Medicine Man: “No, I don't.”
Brian Mastre: “I think some people would be surprised by that – you're the medicine man.”
Andy Williams: “I should be doing marijuana. It's like living in the Colorado and not skiing. I don't do either. I do marijuana recreationally a few times a year – but it's really a minimum.”
Brian Mastre: “You don't drink?”
Andy Williams: “I don't drink. I do cuss. Maybe that's one of my vices.”
Situated inside a Denver industrial park, Williams showed us his operation as a way to not only defend his industry, but educate the public. He's aware Nebraska is debating the merits of medical marijuana. Something Colorado started more than a decade ago.
Brian Mastre: “Nebraska doesn't have medical marijuana.”
Andy Williams: “It's a shame. I hear miracle stories all the time.”
The Bellevue, Nebraska, family of Will Gillen agrees.
“We call him God's Will – what we've nicknamed him,” said his father Dominic Gillen. “Will doesn't talk. He's never spoken a word. He wears diapers. He's at the cognitive level of a 18-month to 2-year-old. Over his 12-years, he has had thousands of seizures – probably 10's of thousands to be honest with you.“
Will's parents believe medical cannabis could help with his epileptic seizures. His seizures turn so violent, he must wear a helmet to keep from injuring himself.
The Gillen's are reluctant to leave Nebraska for Colorado or one of the other 23 states with medical marijuana laws. It's why they want to change policy here.
“We are Nebraskans,” said Dominic Gillen. “We live here. We don't believe we should become medical refugees to go to another state to get a treatment that's working.”
While acknowledging medical marijuana carries some health benefits to a small percent of the population, Nebraska's Attorney General believes the negatives outweigh the positives. Doug Peterson e calls it a “slippery slope” – where the potential for abuse is great. “The way you step into this industry is you don't go to the state right away and say let's go to recreational use. You do a medical marijuana statute, and you bring out some very sympathetic stories to get people to loosen their guard.”
“It makes me angry that we can' t look at the good things from the treatment,” said Dominic Gillen. “I think they hear the word marijuana and turn it off. They don't understand that there's a definite difference between medical marijuana and recreational marijuana. They have this idea of a slippery slope. It's an idea that I don't agree with. Every step of the way I think the legislature has the opportunity to say no. If medical got in and someone wanted recreational, they can say no if that's what the constituency of Nebraska wants.”
While this 7th grader will never understand the debate, Will Gillen heads off to school like any other day. “He didn't choose to have the epilepsy that he has,” said his father. “As advocates for him, my wife and I, we're trying to be his voice to give us the opportunity to do something with our son that will have positive benefits for him....and help his quality of life. That's all we're asking for.”
Law enforcement is poised to take on marijuana from every angle – from to medical marijuana to the border enforcement of Colorado.
Some lawmakers have gone at it another way – considering easing the penalty of pot possession as a way to lighten the load on an overtaxed system.
Right now – for first offense – possession of less than an ounce of marijuana in Nebraska is like a speeding ticket and a $300 fine.
“We're convinced that those in the unicameral want to utilize the overcrowding in the Nebraska correctional system – that we need an excuse to ease up on these things – marijuana isn't as big of an issue as some other violent crimes – so therefore quit pushing this, you're overstating it,” said Attorney General Peterson.
Short of getting Colorado to stop the sale of recreational marijuana altogether, what is Nebraska's end game?
For those patrolling the Nebraska border, cooperation with Colorado would be a start.
“What can we do together?” asked Sheriff Jenson. “You help us enforce our state laws. The voters of Colorado decided what would happen in Colorado. They did not decide what happens in Nebraska.”
For the state's lead investigator – it's patience. He's asking Nebraska decision-makers, at the very least, to slow down the change machine. “Please wait 3-5 years and study Colorado. If I'm wrong, I'll be the first to say this doesn't have great social costs. But the fact of the matter is you have to wait to see what Colorado is doing.”
Both sides believe they will be on the right side of history.
“I can name a number of other things when people thought the status quo was going to win out over time – and guess what – they were proved wrong too,” said Andy Williams.Ryan Zinke, in one of his first acts as the newly seated secretary of Interior, overturned a much-hated and twelfth-hour Barack Obama-era ban on lead ammunition in national parks and wildlife refuges.
Zinke signed Secretarial Order 3346, repealing a directive put in place by Obama to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that prohibited hunters from using lead ammo on the public lands. Obama’s directive was issued just one day before President Donald Trump took office.
Zinke also signed another order that expands the access of hunters and fishers on federal properties, and gives recreational users more freedoms.
“Outdoor recreation is about both our heritage and our economy,” Zinke said in a statement. “This package of secretarial orders will expand access for outdoor enthusiasts and also make sure the community’s voice is heard.”
Obama’s ban on lead ammunition came at the insistence of environmental and animal-rights groups’ members who said the lead was poisoning for land and beast alike.
The Center for Biological Diversity, for examples, said up to 20 million birds and other animals die of lead poisoning each year from the 100,000 tons of lead left on lands by hunters and fishers, as well as other sports enthusiasts.
All you ever needed to know about guns and gun rights – right from the WND Superstore
One major concern of environmentalists: the lead seeps into the ground and taints not just nearby plant life, but also water sources used by animals.
“There’s no good reason to be using toxic ammunition lead,” said Jonathan Evans, the environmental health legal director for CBD, to the Huffington Post.
The National Rifle Association, however, along with other Second Amendment rights groups, said lead-free ammunition is much more expensive and more difficult to obtain than lead ammo.
The NRA also refuted Obama’s reasons for the ban, saying there’s no factual evidence birds and other wildlife forms have been dying in mass numbers due to lead bullets.
“The fact is,” said Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, “that traditional ammunition does not pose a significant population-level risk for wildlife. On behalf of the five million members of the NRA and tens of millions of American sportsmen, we thank Secretary Zinke for eliminating this arbitrary attack on our hunting heritage.”
It’s not just the NRA that supported Zinke.
National Wildlife Federation president and CEO Collin O’Mara, whose group actually supports non-toxic options for hunting and fishing – from ammunition to weights used by fishermen to cast into deeper waters – nonetheless stood by Zinke and cheered his signing of the order.
“Having less lead in the water and soil is better for wildlife,” O’Mara said to the Huffington Post. “But the best way to do this is not through a policy in the last few days of an administration, but to have a science-based collaborative process with sportsmen and states that comes to a solution.”
O’Mara also acknowledged that “most sportsmen want the same outcome” as environmentalists, “which is healthier wildlife,” and then added, to the news outlet: “But the question is the best way to get there is to make sure that the outdoor experience isn’t harmful in the short term.”File this under “For Real?!”
Cleveland, Ohio Juvenile Court Judge Alison Floyd is forcing sexual assault survivors to take polygraph tests before their attackers are sentenced. To date, at least four teenage girls have been ordered to do so. All have refused.
According to reports from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, even prosecutors see the problem. Ordering sex crime survivors to undergo polygraph testing exceeds judicial authority over victims, says Assistant County Prosecutor Nicole Ellis.
Plain Dealer reporters Rachel Dissell and Leila Atassi write that Judge Floyd also “ordered the teenage boys who were accused of rape and other sex crimes in those cases to undergo polygraph examinations as part of an assessment done before the teens would be sentenced.” Although the defendants have not objected, this raises procedural concerns about due process for teens in the legal system.
But back to the sexual assault survivors. Still not sure what the problem is? Here’s the breakdown:
• The judge’s order may violate Ohio’s rape shield law, which is intended to prevent courts from effectively trying the victim instead of the defendant.
• Forcing victims to take a polygraph test violates the federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).
• Polygraph testing can be intimidating for rape survivors who already have difficulty in coming forward. Cleveland Rape Crisis Center president and CEO Megan O’Bryan tells Ms.:
We want to create a culture where survivors are supported in coming forward. Forced polygraph testing sends a message that survivors’ stories are not believed.
This sort of order contributes to the fact that sexual assault is a vastly underreported crime. The National Center for Victims of Crime (NCVC) indicates that a mere 39 percent of rapes or sexual assaults are reported to law enforcement agencies.
Of those assaults reported, even fewer lead to convictions, partly because of extreme delays in testing rape kits. Yet, according to a 2009 publication by researchers from The National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women, false reports of sexual assault are only between 2 to 8 percent. Ashleigh Klein, a Los Angeles-based sexual assault prevention educator, points out that polygraph testing adds to problem of discouraging reporting and encouraging misinformation. She tells Ms.:
In my work I repeatedly hear the myth that women lie about rape to get back at men or because they are embarrassed by what they have done. We know that this just isn’t true. Reporting a rape and having a rape kit exam done can be extremely devastating to someone who has just experienced trauma. A very small percentage of women would voluntarily go through this invasive process and not be telling the truth.
Clearly, when it comes to sexual assault, what’s needed is more streamlined criminal justice procedure, not further blockades to victim support. We hope Judge Floyd gets the message.
Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/chewie/ / CC BY-SA 2.0.Today at CES 2016, Fitbit has unveiled the latest generation of its smart fitness watch in the Fitbit Blaze.
With the Blaze, the company is looking to be competitive with products like the Apple Watch, which offer less by the way of fitness but far more when it comes to customization and style.
The Blaze include customizable accessory options for the bands and casing, a color touchscreen, and smart notifications from the user’s smartphone for text, calls, and calendar notifications. The folks at Fitbit even updated the music controls to allow for volume control and front/backwards skipping directly on the device.
You might notice that, out of the box, the $199 Blaze with a color touchscreen is actually less expensive than the Surge fitness watch, which goes for $249. That’s likely because Fitbit expects you to customize the Blaze with various bands, which tips the overall cost beyond that of the Surge. The Blaze also lacks the GPS built into the Surge though the watch can still track GPS data provided from a connected smartphone.
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The Blaze will also include three on-board workouts from FitStar, a company Fitbit acquired back in March, right out of the box, with the option to sync more workouts to the device via the Fitbit smartphone app.
Like the Surge fitness watch, the next-gen wearable is coming with standard features like five-day battery life, MultiSport Mode, and PurePulse, which constantly tracks your heart rate without taking a break, making sure that information around your sleep habits, workout habits, and more are as accurate as possible.
MultiSport Mode, on the other hand, lets you designate what type of exercise you’re participating in, from running to cycling to basketball, and the device will make sure that you get the right credit for all of your activity.
That said, the Blaze also comes with SmartTrack, which recognizes the type of exercise you’re doing and starts recording your activity accordingly. Still, Fitbit recommends using MultiSport mode for the most accurate tracking, but wants to have the user’s back in case they forget.
The new Fitbit Blaze also comes with Connected GPS, which is a fancy way of saying that it syncs up with the GPS from your smartphone via Bluetooth.
In other words, when on a run, users must have their phone with them to track pace and steps, and when the workout is completed, the watch will push the user’s route to the Blaze to be reviewed. That said, the user will be able to see information around their steps and pace directly on the Blaze, even though that info is technically coming from the smartphone in their pocket.
Because Fitbit is including its first-ever color touchscreen to the device, users will now be able to customize the clockface of the Blaze to fit their style or mood.
Of course, to make Fitbit’s new Blaze fitness watch compatible with the same 200+ devices as other Fitbit wearables, the company created their own OS for the device, meaning that you won’t be able to download third-party apps to the watch.
The Blaze will come with a number of customization options, starting with the casing itself, which pops in and out of various bands for ultimate customization control. However, the Blaze will only be available with stainless steel casing at launch, with more premium options coming at a later date.
As far as bands go, the company is offering its classic elastomer bands in black, blue and plum for $29.95, one of which is included in the box for free with the original purchase of the device. From there, Fitbit is offering Luxe leather bands in black, grey and camel ($99.95) and a stainless steel link band in silver ($129.95).
You can pre-order the Fitbit Blaze today for $199.95 on the Fitbit website.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
SHAMOKIN, Pa. -- A Dunkin' Donuts in a small Pennsylvania city closed its doors last week following a fire and some customers are taking the news hard -- especially those who use the coffee shop for their "legal work."
Police charged a 13-year-old girl with intentionally starting the fire inside the restaurant's women's bathroom, according to WNEP.
The restaurant is closed until further notice, which has obviously devastated some customers. Now, those customers are reluctantly considering other options in Shamokin -- a city of around 7,000 residents.
"Now I have to rely on myself to maybe go to a Turkey Hill or something where I don't like their doughnuts. I'd rather the doughnuts at Dunkin' Donuts. I'm kind of dealing with it, but I really miss Dunkin' Donuts," Alba Wehr said.
And seriously... where is a guy supposed to do legal work?
"I go there every day. I get a chicken bacon croissant. I get coffee or a Powerade if I'm dehydrated. I sit there all the time. If I have any legal work that I need to do I go there. I meet with my attorneys there," Dutch Smith said. "Cheap, classy place to meet up. It's a place you can meet up with your friends. It's the only thing this town has."
And what about the iced coffee?!
"I'm gonna miss that place if it don't open up. A lot of my friends go in there and get that cold coffee, iced coffee I guess it's called," Edna Faust said.
The good news? Local coffee shops have seen a business boom since the Dunkin' Donuts closed its doors -- so don't worry, Pennsylvania people are still getting their coffee fix.
Also good news? The Dunkin' Donuts is expected to reopen once repairs are completed -- and order will be restored to the universe (or at least Shamokin).According to the Japanese Association of Travel Agents (JATA), the Bulgarian town of Koprvishtitsa ranks among the thirty most beautiful towns in Europe.
The list of the Japanese association aims to promote tourism to attractive little places in Europe.
Koprvishtitsa is located near the Sredna Gora mountains, with the river Topolnitsa flowing through the town.
The town has an important place in Bulgarian history as it was the site of the outbreak of the 1876 April Uprising against the Ottoman Empire.
Although the revolt was unsuccessful and was suppressed by Ottoman authorities, it was succeeded by the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878 that led to the liberation of Bulgaria.
Nowadays Koprivshtitsa is known for its folklore music festivals and the fine examples of typical Bulgarian architecture featuring half-timbered buildings.ICS-CERT, the US body responsible for the security of industrial control systems, has warned of a tool that can be used to crack passwords for programmable logic controllers (PLCs). The Python script has been developed by security experts Alexander Timorin and Dmitry Sklyarov, both members of the SCADA StrangeLove research group.
The tool uses a brute force attack to crack passwords for Siemens SIMATIC S7 programmable logic controllers. It does not, however, try out the passwords on the controller itself; instead it does so offline using recorded network traffic containing authentication events.
On the S7 PLC, authentication is carried out using a challenge-response procedure. The first party sends a random number – the challenge. The other party then appends its password hash to it. The result is again hashed and then sent back to the first party as a response. The first party then does exactly the same with the expected password. It the result agrees with the response received, authentication is successful.
The script extracts the challenge and response from recorded network traffic. It then tries out password after password until hashing produces the recovered response. If a match is found, the attacker now has the password in plain text format. Because cracking a password requires a recording of network traffic, the attacker first has to obtain access to the network.
ICS-CERT states that the report describing the Python script was published without informing either it or the manufacturer of the affected industrial control systems. It also notes that the code could be adapted for systems from other manufacturers.
ICS-CERT gives the usual advice for reducing the risk of attack – control systems should not be accessible via the internet, they should be protected behind a firewall and should be isolated from company networks. Remote access should require a secure method such as VPN. In reality, however, the situation is often quite different.
(fab)It took longer than anyone expected but the Linux Foundation fix for Windows 8 PC's UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Secure Boot lockout of other operating systems has finally arrived.
James Bottomley -- Parallels' CTO of server virtualization, well-known Linux kernel maintainer, and the man behind the Linux Foundation's efforts to create an easy way to install and boot Linux on Windows 8 PCs -- announced on February 8 that the Linux Foundation UEFI secure boot system was finally out.
To finish this required security keys from Microsoft so that the Linux Foundation UEFI bootloader would work. These keys have now been included and these universal Linux bootloaders are ready to go. With these files you should be able to boot and install Linux on almost any Windows 8 PC.
I say "should" because this is the first release. As Bottomley himself wrote, "Let me know how this goes because I’m very interested to gather feedback about what works and what doesn’t work. In particular, there’s a worry that the security protocol override might not work on some platforms, so I particularly want to know if it doesn’t work for you."
You must also be an expert Linux user to even try to get this to work at this point. Today, all Bottomley has provided are the two key bootloading files: PreLoader.efi and HashTool.efi. These EFI files are Extensible Firmware Interface Firmware files. By themselves, they just set up a pre-boot environment that can then be used to boot Linux.
Bottomley has also "put together a mini-USB image that is bootable (just did it on to any USB key; the image is gpt partitioned, so use the whole disk device). It has an EFI shell where the kernel should be and uses gummiboot [a simple UEFI boot manger] to load" a Linux distribution.
If you couldn't follow those instructions, don't even try using this method yet. As Pēteris Krišjānis, an Ubuntu Linux tester, wrote on Bottomley's blog, "These instructions are for advanced users only. Users who want to install Linux distro on UEFI/Secure Boot computer will have to wait for distribution releases in April/May (Fedora/Ubuntu and related distros)." Krišjānis is right. Ordinary users should stay well away from this solution for now. It's really meant more for distribution developers. Their job will be to turn these esoteric instructions into something that requires little more than a user hitting an "OK" button.
In short, by May, it should be easy to boot and install the most popular Linux distributions on Windows 8 PCs. Today, we're still not there, but the developers now have the tools they need to get us there.
Others object to the Linux Foundation's attempt to work with Microsoft to get around Secure Boot's restrictions. One accused Bottomley of folding "to Microsoft UEFI and microsofts monopolistic decision to have OEMs use UEFI whether a consumer wants this or not under the guise of security when in fact its an effort to maintain control on MS part." Others used far harsher terms.
Unfortunately, these people are ignoring the simple fact that the vast majority of new PCs are being sold with Windows 8. This, in turn, means they're locked into that Windows 8 with UEFI Secure Boot Short of cracking UEFI security, something no one really wants to do in Linux development circles; the only viable choice has been to work within Secure Boot to get Linux to work. It's what Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE, and now the Linux Foundation, has chosen to do.
Is this ideal? No. As far as I'm concerned Secure Boot is far more about locking people into Windows than it is about security. For now though fixes like these are Linux's only viable options.
Related Stories:Four Midlands men found guilty of planning to use pipe bomb and meat cleaver against police or military target
Four men have been convicted of planning a “Lee Rigby-style” terrorist attack that aimed to murder members of the police or military using a pipe bomb and meat cleaver.
MI5 set up a fake delivery company employing two of the men as they investigated the plot. Three of the men, who are all from the Midlands, called themselves the “three musketeers” as they exchanged encrypted messages on the app Telegram as part of their conspiracy.
Counter-terrorism officials believe it is one of the most significant plots they have thwarted in the past year.
A jury of three men and eight women convicted Naweed Ali, 29, and Khobaib Hussain, 25, both from Birmingham, and Mohibur Rahman, 33, and Tahir Aziz, 38, from Stoke-on-Trent, of planning terrorist acts between May and August 2016. Ali, Hussain and Rahman have previous terrorism convictions, prompting calls after the verdict for a further crackdown on the spreading of jihadist ideology in prisons among those convicted of terrorism offences.
The defence had asked for the trial to be postponed after the 22 March terrorist attack on Westminster, arguing it could prejudice the jury. During the course of the trial the Manchester Arena was bombed and the London Bridge terrorist attack took place.
The men were arrested on 26 August 2016 after a bag of weapons, including a pipe bomb, an air pistol and a meat cleaver with the word kafir (unbeliever) scratched on it, were found under the driver’s seat of Ali’s car. In Aziz’s car they found a samurai sword bought from a sex shop in Stoke for £20.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A cleaver that was found in Naweed Ali’s car, with the word kafir scratched on the blade. Photograph: West Midlands police/PA
The court heard the bag was discovered in the course of a sting operation, in which West Midlands police and MI5 set up a fake courier company in Birmingham and hired Ali and Hussain. The bag was found as MI5 attempted to bug Ali’s car on his first day in the job.
The prosecution said the four defendants were likely to have been planning an imminent “Lee Rigby-style” attack on a police or military target, but the details were unclear as they had taken extreme care to avoid surveillance.
The defence claimed the weapons had been planted by rogue undercover officers to frame the suspects and accused them of falsifying their notes and lying in the witness box.
No fingerprints were found on the bag, but a partial DNA sample found on a roll of duct tape inside was established during the trial to belong to Hussain. The pipe bomb, which was not fully operational, was found to be made from a type of pipe Hussain had worked with when he trained as a gas fitter.
The jury sat through days of messages and online searches that indicated what the prosecution described as the defendants’ “hateful beliefs” – but the judge, Mr Justice Globe, told them they could not convict based on “mindset evidence” alone.
Gareth Patterson QC, for the prosecution, told the jury: “It is the prosecution case that the four defendants shared the same radical belief in violent jihad and had reached a stage where they were planning to take action.”
The trial faced multiple delays and at one point was halted so the police officers’ mobile phones could be seized and their private messages read out to the court in a complex case. The trial ran for twice the 10 weeks it had been expected to.
The jury went down to 11 members in the final week of the trial, after a juror was discharged when it emerged she had “jokingly” asked court staff three times whether a police witness was single. This came to light only after a Guardian reporter overheard police discussing it. The defence questioned why police had not raised it with the prosecutor.
As he was taken down to the cells, Rahman shouted: “I hope you’re happy with your lies. Lying scumbags.”
DCS Matt Ward, the head of West Midlands counter-terrorism unit, said more should be done in prisons to counter violent extremism. “This is the second time three of these individuals have been convicted of terrorism offences after planning an attack. Although much work is being done in prisons and following the release of individuals, it is clear that more needs to be done,” he said.
He said the claims of wrongdoing against police officers were “groundless”.
Rahman and Aziz are understood to have visited the extremist Anjem Choudary in May 2016, while he was on bail charged with urging support for Islamic State, for which he was later convicted.
The 11 jurors deliberated for more than 22 hours to reach their verdicts, which were all unanimous. Sentencing is scheduled for 10am on Thursday. The maximum sentence is life in prison.
The plot
Having become suspicious about the men, the domestic intelligence service MI5 and police from the West Midlands counter-terrorism unit launched a sting operation.
Ali, Hussain and Rahman were watched for months before their arrests. From May 2016 onwards, officers observed them meeting in Birmingham, Stoke and London. They were seen walking in a park and boating on a lake in what were believed to be attempts to evade monitoring.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest An imitation handgun with an empty magazine strapped to it that was found stashed in Naweed Ali’s car. Photograph: West Midlands police/PA
They took care to avoid surveillance, the jury heard. Rahman bought mobile phones from eBay and had them delivered to Ali and Hussain, which the prosecution said were for “covert discussions”. He kept notes on his phone about avoiding surveillance and texted Aziz that he had two phones: one “hot” and one “clean”.
Patterson told the jury: “These were men who were taking care to try to avoid detection of what they were doing and who wanted to pursue their plans secretly.”
The men’s electronic devices were “bursting” with extremist material, Patterson said, and the jury read thousands of messages between the defendants and their associates that he said proved they “shared an extremist belief in the duty to bring the fight to the kuffar [unbelievers]”.
Rahman, Hussain and Ali eventually set up a private Telegram group called “the three musketeers”, which the prosecution said was intended to serve for attack planning.
The defendants
Ali and Hussain were next-door neighbours living with their families in redbrick terraced houses in Sparkhill, Birmingham. When the investigation started, Hussain, who had completed a year of a law degree, was doing a gas-fitting course at college. Ali, who the court heard had a stutter and had performed badly in school, was working at a cash-and-carry.
They were known to the authorities. In 2011 they travelled to a militant training camp in Pakistan’s tribal regions. But, dismayed by the spartan conditions, they soon contacted their families, who were furious and arranged for their return.
Their trip became known to police during the Operation Pitsford investigation, which resulted in 11 men from Birmingham being jailed for planning attacks that detectives said would have been the biggest in a generation. Ali and Hussain pleaded guilty to preparing for acts of terrorism, and were sentenced to 40 months each in 2013.
In prison they met their co-defendant Rahman, one of nine men prosecuted in connection with a plan to attack the London stock exchange, who was serving five years for owning copies of an al-Qaida magazine. On the witness stand, Hussain said Rahman was “domineering, paranoid, weird and had a lot of contact with MI5”.
The final defendant was Aziz, a takeaway delivery driver and contact of Rahman’s from Stoke. The father of two had recently split up with his wife. Though he only started taking an interest in Islam after his breakup, the prosecution said he was a hardliner who took an “obsessive interest in extremist material”. He was brought in as a “fourth man” to help carry out the plot.
The operation
In summer 2016, West Midlands counter-terrorism command launched Operation Pesage to gather intelligence on Hussain. They set up a fake company, Hero Couriers, complete with a city-centre depot, logo, vehicles and branded T-shirts for the drivers to wear.
An undercover officer, “Vincent”, posed as the boss, while two other agents, “Andy” and “Hajji”, acted as employees.
The company hired Hussain as a driver in late July 2016, offering him £100 a day cash in hand to deliver packages to airports and storage lockups. Vincent said Hussain could park his car in the depot, leaving the keys with him. Vincent soon mentioned that he was looking for more drivers, and Hussain put him in touch with Ali.
On Ali’s first day, 26 August, he arrived shortly after 7am and handed his car keys to Vincent so he could park it in the depot. Soon afterwards, Andy arrived with a group of MI5 agents, who carried out what the prosecution euphemistically described as a “technical operation”, bugging Ali’s car.
Under the driver’s seat, they found a multicoloured JD Sports bag, which contained items of concern: what appeared to be a pipe bomb, a pistol with a magazine taped to the handle, and the meat cleaver with “kafir” scratched on it. There was also a live round of 9mm ammunition, shotgun shells, rubber gloves and duct tape. MI5 bosses ordered the men to leave the depot urgently because of the pipe bomb.
The discovery prompted a security alert: all businesses on Florence Street were evacuated, and nearby Bath Row, a major Birmingham artery, was closed off as the army’s bomb disposal squad was summoned.
All four defendants were arrested that day, and in Aziz’s car police found a machete tucked beside the driver’s seat. All the defendants refused to answer questions, although Ali submitted a statement |
appeal on behalf of another chimp in a related case.)Colorado Rapids Soccer Club announced today the signing of attacking midfielder Johan Blomberg from Sweden’s AIK Fotboll subject to receipt of the player's ITC. Blomberg becomes the Rapids’ first offseason signing and will occupy an international roster spot in 2018.
“We have had an eye on Johan for quite some time and he is someone who we believe will add an extra creative dimension to our team,” said Rapids Sporting Director and Interim General Manager, Pádraig Smith. “Johan fits into the way we want to play and we’re confident he will improve our team – especially on the attacking side. He is a versatile, forward-thinking player who possesses the creativity and game intelligence to make an impact in this league.”
Prior to signing with the Rapids, Blomberg had spent his entire professional career in his home country, tallying 28 goals and 39 assists for Ängelholms FF, Halmstads BK, and AIK. This past season, Blomberg had three goals and six assists in 28 league appearances for AIK in Sweden’s top flight division, while also appearing in five Europa League qualifiers.
“I chose the Colorado Rapids because I believe in the team’s vision for the future, the way they want to play the game, and because the move offers new challenges both on and off the pitch,” said Blomberg. “My family and I are very excited and we can’t wait to move to Denver and officially begin this new chapter of our lives.”
Born in Lund, Sweden, Blomberg made his debut for Ängelholms FF on May 17, 2009, playing the final eight minutes of a 3-1 loss against Qviding in Sweden’s second division. Blomberg would go on to make nine appearances in his rookie season.
Following the 2011 campaign, Blomberg signed for Halmstads BK, where he would notch two goals and five assists in 29 appearances, helping the club earn promotion to the nation’s top-tier division. He went on to appear in 100 matches for HBK, tallying 14 goals and 14 assists in three seasons.
In 2015, Blomberg moved to Swedish giants AIK Fotboll, guiding the club to consecutive runner-up finishes in 2016-17. During his three-year stint with the club, Blomberg made 108 appearances in all competitions, while scoring ten times and adding 22 assists.
TRANSACTION: Colorado Rapids – November 21, 2017 – Rapids acquire Swedish midfielder Johan Blomberg from AIK Fotboll.
Full Name: Johan Blomberg
Age: 30
Position: Midfielder
Height: 5’10”
Weight: 143
Birth Date: June 14, 1987
Birthplace: Lund, Sweden
Hometown: Lund, SwedenTSA agents insinuated 58-year-old Maggie Buckenmayer had a penis
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
November 12, 2012
Another day, another shocking TSA abuse story, this time directed against a woman who TSA agents insinuated had a penis as she was subjected to numerous invasive grope downs which included screeners touching her genitals.
58-year-old Maggie Buckenmayer was going through a TSA checkpoint in Birmingham, Alabama when her harrowing encounter began.
As expected given that she has implants in her knees, Buckenmayer set off the metal detector and was then subjected to an “extremely invasive” pat down which included a woman TSA screener groping Buckenmayer’s “female body parts”.
Buckenmayer was subsequently told that the first agent found “a protrusion, an abnormality” between her legs on the left side.
“I’m shocked, I’m humiliated, so I don’t know what to say, I blurt out ‘I don’t have a penis’ and she looks at me and says ‘well I’m going to have to perform a second pat down on you’.”
An even more invasive pat down was then performed on Buckenmayer which she described as “painful” and “akin to sexual assault”. The TSA screener said there was still an abnormality between Buckenmayer’s legs.
“I’m a normal female, a 58-year-old female, my husband, my OBGYN, my doctors have never ever told me that I was anything but normal, so I’m in total disbelief I think that this is a joke,” said Buckenmayer.
After a whole group of TSA agents gathered round to discuss Buckenmayer’s private parts, they took her to a private screening room.
Buckenmayer then angrily removed her pants, spread her legs, pointed at her crotch and said, “Do you see anything abnormal here, do you see a protrusion?”
After being told to put her pants back on, another TSA agent performed yet another pat down on Buckenmayer and found nothing abnormal. A wanding of her private parts was also negative.
Buckenmayer was finally released after an apology and handed a TSA evaluation form.
“I can’t believe you’ve just subjected me to this sexual assault, this emotional assault, there are bad guys out there….why are you picking on me?” Buckenmayer told TSA managers, calling on them to fire the two TSA screeners who performed the initial pat downs on her.
Buckenmayer pleaded with viewers in her video for people to acknowledge the “egregious abuse of power” the TSA is engaged in on a daily basis.
“Our country is a country of great civil liberties….why the TSA is allowed to emotionally and sexually abuse passengers – I don’t get it – if some stranger did this to me, what one of these TSA agents did, that stranger would be convicted of sexual assault and sent to prison – please please get my story out,” concluded Buckenmayer.
Infowars is launching the national Opt Out and Film Week during Thanksgiving, November 19-26. Click here for more details or click here for the campaign’s Facebook page.
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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.Hi Walter, Erm.....it looks complicated.
In common with a lot of people I find it difficult to read pages and tables of numbers.
A voting system has to have the confidence of the electorate so it needs to be expressible in words. That's why FPTP is popular; because it is the simplest of concepts, but it doesn't work where there is more than a binary choice. It doesn't even work then where there is a conflict between votes cast and seats won. Democrats in the US saw Trump triumph with a minority of the popular vote in what was essentially a binary choice. (Sorry. You know this.)
I don't see it as a priority that the system should be designed to produce a majority. (One of the stated aims of PR2) There is nothing inherently wrong with a hung parliament if it reflects the divided opinions of the electorate. If this leads to a more consensual politics so much the better. Thatcher and Blair both had landslide majorities in parliament with well below half of the votes cast. Both abused the power they won. (in my opinion)
The STV system in Scotland for Holyrood elections seems to work well. It is widely believed that this system was foisted on Scotland to prevent the SNP nationalists being able to gain a majority. In that respect it failed while FPTP was delivering hung parliaments in Westminster against its stated aims. The referendum on proposed change to the electoral system for Westminster was cynically manipulated by a campaign which was blatantly disingenuous to the point of outright deceit; which goes to show how easy it is to bamboozle the public.
My favourite example of the demonstrable fairness of STV is that despite gaining only around 7% support in her constituency, Ruth Davidson (whom I personally despise, but who represents a constituency of opinion which in a democracy has a right to be represented) was able to take a seat in Holyrood and indeed become leader of her party there. STV allows the voter to prioritise a local choice and state a party of government choice aswell. Both votes may be cast for the same party or different parties.
Scottish voter intentions in the recent general election for the Westminster parliament are impossible to discern because, being run on FPTP system, tactical voting was rife and targeting of campaign resources and collusion between parties allowed some perverse results in the usual manner of the three horse race. Retrospective application of any PR system to the results of that election would only serve to mislead because of the distortion caused by tactical of voting on the day.
Back testing of election results are not a reliable guide to how a system will work. Too many people cast votes against a candidate or party in a tactical way. STV allows voters to vote FOR what they want. Evidence for the effectiveness of PR2 would be more instructive if tested against STV than FPTP.
Whatever the system it must not only be fair it must be accepted to be fair which means it must be understood by those who are voting.I spent a week trying to implement higher-order pattern unification. I looked at couple of PhD dissertations, talked to lots of smart people, and failed because the substitutions were just getting in the way all the time. So today we are going to bite the bullet and implement de Bruijn indices and explicit substitutions.
The code is available on Github in the repository andrejbauer/tt (the blog-part-III branch).
People say that de Bruijn indices and explicit substitutions are difficult to implement. I agree, I spent far too long debugging my code. But because every bug crashed and burnt my program immediately, I at least knew I was not done. In contrast, “manual” substitutions hide their bugs really well, and so are even more difficult to get right. I am convinced that my implementation from part II is still buggy.
Blitz introduction to de Bruijn indices and explicit substitution
If you do not know about de Bruijn indices and explicit substitutions you should first read the relevant Wikipedia pages, and perhaps the original paper on explicit substitutions, written by a truly impressive group of authors. Here is an inadequate short explanation for those who cannot be bothered to click on links.
We keep looking up variables in a context by their names, which seems a bit inefficient. We might have the bright idea of referring to positions in the context directly. We can indeed do this, and because a context is like a stack there are two choices:
de Bruijn levels are positions as counted from the bottom of the stack,
de Bruijn indices are positions as counter from the top of the stack.
We will use the indices. Thus, when the context grows all the old indices have to be shifted by one, which sounds more horrible than it is, as levels bring their own problems (which?). For instance, the $\lambda$-term $\lambda x \,.\, \lambda y \,.\, x$ is written with de Bruijn indices as $\lambda \, (\lambda \, 1)$, whereas $\lambda x \,.\, \lambda y \,.\, y$ is written as $\lambda \, (\lambda \, 0)$. (Just go read the Wikipedia article on de Bruijn indices if you have not seen this before.)
The shifting and pushing of new things onto the context is expressed with explicit substitutions:
type substitution = | Shift of int | Dot of expr * substitution
Read Shift k as “add $k$ to all indices” and Dot(e,s) as “push $e$ and use $s$”. In mathematical notation we write $\uparrow^n$ instead of Shift n and $e \cdot \sigma$ instead of Dot(e,sigma). An explicit substitution $\sigma$ acts on an expression $e$ to give a new expression $[\sigma] e$. For example:
$[\uparrow^k] (\mathtt{Var}\, m) = \mathtt{Var} (k + m)$
$[e \cdot \sigma)] (\mathtt{Var}\, 0) = e$
$[e \cdot \sigma)] (\mathtt{Var}\, (k+1)) = [\sigma](\mathtt{Var}\, k).$
Below we will read off the other equations from the source code. Substitutions are performed on demand, which means that $[\sigma] e$ is an expression that needs to be accounted for in the syntax.
Splitting the syntax
The user is going to type in syntax with names, which we have to convert to an internal syntax that uses the indices. We should also keep the original names around for pretty-printing purposes. Therefore we need a datatype Input.exp for parsing,
(** Abstract syntax of expressions as given by the user. *) type expr = expr' * Common.position and expr' = | Var of Common.variable | Universe of int | Pi of abstraction | Lambda of abstraction | App of expr * expr (** An abstraction [(x,t,e)] indicates that [x] of type [t] is bound in [e]. *) and abstraction = Common.variable * expr * expr
and a datatype Syntax.expr for the internal syntax:
(** Abstract syntax of expressions, where de Bruijn indices are used to represent variables. *) type expr = expr' * Common.position and expr' = | Var of int (* de Briujn index *) | Subst of substitution * expr (* explicit substitution *) | Universe of universe | Pi of abstraction | Lambda of abstraction | App of expr * expr (** An abstraction [(x,t,e)] indicates that [x] of type [t] is bound in [e]. We also keep around the original name [x] of the bound variable for pretty-printing purposes. *) and abstraction = Common.variable * expr * expr (** Explicit substitutions. *) and substitution = | Shift of int | Dot of expr * substitution
Conversion from one to the other is done by Desugar.desugar. Notice that we do not throw away variable names, but rather keep them around in the internal syntax so that we can print them out later. Strangely enough, beautify.ml gets shorter with de Bruijn indices.
Explicit substitutions
The Syntax module contains a couple of functions for handling explicit substitutions. First we have Syntax.composition which tells us how substitutions are composed:
let rec compose s t = match s, t with | s, Shift 0 -> s | Dot (e, s), Shift m -> compose s (Shift (m - 1)) | Shift m, Shift n -> Shift (m + n) | s, Dot (e, t) -> Dot (mk_subst s e, compose s t)
In mathematical notation:
$\sigma \circ \uparrow^0 = \sigma$
$(e \cdot \sigma) \circ \uparrow^{m} = s \circ \uparrow^{m-1}$
$\uparrow^{m} \circ \uparrow^{n} = \uparrow^{m + n}$
$\sigma \circ (e \cdot \tau) = [\sigma] e \cdot (\sigma \circ \tau)$
Of course, composition $\circ$ is the operation characterized by the equation $[\sigma \circ \tau] e = [\sigma]([\tau] e)$. Next we have Syntax.subst which explains how substitutions are performed:
(** [subst s e] applies explicit substitution [s] in expression [e]. It does so lazily, i.e., it does just enough to expose the outermost constructor of [e]. *) let subst = let rec subst s ((e', loc) as e) = match s, e' with | Shift m, Var k -> Var (k + m), loc | Dot (e, s), Var 0 -> subst idsubst e | Dot (e, s), Var k -> subst s (Var (k - 1), loc) | s, Subst (t, e) -> subst s (subst t e) | _, Universe _ -> e | s, Pi a -> Pi (subst_abstraction s a), loc | s, Lambda a -> Lambda (subst_abstraction s a), loc | s, App (e1, e2) -> App (mk_subst s e1, mk_subst s e2), loc and subst_abstraction s (x, e1, e2) = let e1 = mk_subst s e1 in let e2 = mk_subst (Dot (mk_var 0, compose (Shift 1) s)) e2 in (x, e1, e2) in subst
The code is not very readable, but in mathematical notation the interesting bits say:
$[\uparrow^m](\mathtt{Var}\,k) = \mathtt{Var}\,(k + m)$
$[e \cdot \sigma] (\mathtt{Var}\,0) = e$
$[e \cdot \sigma] (\mathtt{Var}\,k) = [\sigma](\mathtt{Var}(k-1))$
$[\sigma](\lambda\, e) = \lambda \, ([\mathtt{Var}\,0 \cdot (\uparrow^1 \circ \sigma)] e)$
$[\sigma](e_1\,e_2) = ([\sigma]e_1)([\sigma]e_2)$
There is also Syntax.occurs which checks whether a given index appears freely in an expression. This is not entirely trivial because explicit substitutions and abstractions change the indices, so the function has to keep track of what is what.
You may wonder what happened to $\beta$-reduction. If you look at Norm.norm you will discover it burried in the code for normalization of applications:
$$(\lambda \, e_1)\, e_2 = [e_2 \cdot \uparrow^0] e_1.$$
Normalization
In the last part we demonstrated normalization by evaluation. We always normalized everything all the way, which is an overkill. For example, during equality checking the weak head normal form suffices to get the comparison started, and then we normalize on demand. So I replaced normalization by evaluation with direct normalization, as done in norm.ml. We still need normal forms when the user asks for them. Luckily, a single function can perform both kinds of normalization.
Optimization
The source contains no optimizations at all because its purpose is to be as clear as possible. The whole program is still pretty small, we are at 824 lines while the core is just 247 lines. The speed is comparable to the previous version, but with a bit of effort we should be able to speed it up considerably. Here are some opportunities:
we normalize a definition every time we look it up in the context,
explicit substitutions tend to cancel out, and it is a good idea to look for common special cases, like composition with the identity substitution,
there is a lot of shifting happening when we look things up in the context, perhaps some of those could be avoided
If anyone wants to work on these, I would be delighted to make a pull request.
I really have to do some serious math and stop playing around, so do not expect the next part anytime soon.Carbon dioxide may be public enemy number one in the fight against global warming. But taking aim at methane and soot has a better chance of keeping the planet cooler in the short run, a new study finds.
Cutting the amounts of these two pollutants that are poured into the sky would diminish warming by half a degree Celsius by 2050, researchers report in the Jan. 13 Science. That could buy a little time for the world — slowing sea level rise, glacial melting and other problems caused by rising temperatures. Targeting these agents of climate change would also improve air quality, potentially preventing up to 4.7 million premature deaths every year, the researchers calculate.
“These are really the low-hanging fruit both for mitigating climate change and improving air quality,” says study leader Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City.
Shindell and his colleagues put 400 knMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Video footage shows a group of young people gathered around a banner before the blast
Turkish PM Ahmet Davutoglu has promised to boost security along the country's border with Syria, after 30 people were killed by a bomb in the town of Suruc.
Investigators think the blast was caused by a female suicide bomber from the Islamic State group.
Correspondents say Turkey is cracking down on the militants, after previously being accused of ignoring them.
But the blast triggered violent protest in Istanbul, with police using water cannon, teargas and rubber bullets.
Monday's bomb hit a group of youth activists planning to cross into Syria to help rebuild the town of Kobane.
Are you in Turkey? Please email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk with your experiences.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Police fired tear gas and water cannon as Istanbul protests took a violent turn
A video shows the group holding a news conference to discuss their plans, when an explosion rips through the young people - mostly of university age - gathered in the grounds of a cultural centre.
They had been chanting slogans and were holding a large banner with the words "We defended it together, we are building it together."
Kobane is just across the border from Suruc and has been the site of fierce fighting between IS and Kurdish fighters.
It was retaken by the Kurds in January. Suruc houses many refugees who have fled the fighting in Kobane.
Kobane: Inside the town devastated by fight against IS
Image copyright AFP Image caption The coffins of some of the dead were carried through the town on Monday night
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Turkish media report that the attacker may have been a young woman
The attack took place just before noon local time (09:00 GMT). Around a hundred people were injured.
Mr Davutoglu said initial findings suggested it was the work of IS.
"Turkey has taken and will continue to take all necessary measures against Islamic State," Mr Davutoglu told a news conference in Ankara.
"We are face to face with a terrorism incident. We have the willpower to find and certainly punish those who are responsible."
"Measures on our border with Syria... will be increased," he added.
BBC Middle East correspondent Jim Muir says Turkey has been widely accused of turning a blind eye to IS activities, but recently it has been cracking down harder on the militants and this may be one reason for the attack.
Authorities are likely to target militants within Turkey itself in response to this attack, our correspondent says, and this could in turn lead to further retaliatory attacks.
Protests turn violent
There were large scale demonstrations in cities across the country.
Protests in Istanbul and Ankara turned violent as police clashed with protesters.
A witness told the Reuters news agency that hundreds of protesters in Istanbul chanted slogans accusing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of collaboration with IS.
Earlier in the day, the president condemned the attack.
"On behalf of my people, I curse and condemn the perpetrators of this brutality," he said while visiting Cyprus. "Terror must be condemned no matter where it comes from."
A spokesman for the White House condemned the attack and expressed "solidarity with the Turkish government and the Turkish people".
Image copyright EPA Image caption Protesters threw fireworks at police in Istanbul
Image copyright AFP Image caption This banner in Ankara proclaimed "ISIS will be defeated"
Are you affected by the issues raised in this story? Please email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.
Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also contact us in the following ways:As the Cabinet Office reviews Philip Green’s knighthood, we look at former honourables who have had titles revoked
How dishonourable do you have to be to be stripped of an honour?
With Sir Philip Green facing calls to have his knighthood taken from him after being accused of plundering his former company BHS at the expense of thousands of workers, the Cabinet Office disclosed it was reviewing the accolade.
From being a sex offender to bringing a bank to the brink of collapse, there are plenty of precedents for losing honours ranging from CBEs to knighthoods.
Here we take a look at ways in which you could become one of the growing number of black sheep in the honours system.
Nearly destroy a bank
James Crosby, the former HBOS chief executive, was stripped of his knighthood at his own request after a scathing parliamentary report into the bank’s collapse. Crosby was given a knighthood after leaving HBOS in 2006.
Similarly, Fred Goodwin lost the knighthood he received for services to banking under the Labour government after guiding the Royal Bank of Scotland to the brink of collapse in 2008.
While honours are usually only removed from those convicted or jailed, the Cabinet Office said the scale of the RBS disaster – necessitating a £45bn bailout from the taxpayer – made the case “exceptional”.
Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce each jailed for eight months Read more
Lie to protect your husband’s political career
Vicky Pryce was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath in 2009 in recognition of her contribution as head of the government economic service. But in March 2013 she and her ex-husband, Chris Huhne, the former Liberal Democrat minister, were both jailed for eight months for swapping speeding penalty points a decade earlier so he could avoid a driving ban, which only emerged when Pryce approached newspapers after Huhne left her for another woman.
She was released from prison after two months but after her conviction her name was removed from the Order of the Bath register.
Be guilty of nepotism and financial management
The “super-head” Jean Else was made a dame in 2001 in recognition of having transformed Whalley Range high school in Manchester. But in January 2009 she was banned from running a school after the General Teaching Council found her guilty of failing to observe minimum standards in recruiting and promoting staff. Her honour was revoked in 2011 after she was found guilty of misconduct.
Be an abusive dictator and tyrant
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, was stripped of his honorary knighthood in 2008 over his ‘abuse of human rights’. Photograph: Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP
The Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe was stripped of his honorary knighthood in 2008 over his “abuse of human rights” and “abject disregard” for democracy.
The Queen approved the annulment of Mugabe’s knighthood, awarded in 1994, on the recommendation of the then foreign secretary, David Miliband.
Mugabe was the first foreigner to be stripped of an honorary knighthood since the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989, the day before his execution by firing squad.
Drive dangerously
Naseem Hamed, the former WBA world featherweight champion known as Prince, was jailed in 2006 for 15 months and disqualified from driving for four years after a crash in May 2005 that left another man with fractures to “every major bone in his body”.
Hamed was driving at about 90mph on the wrong side of the carriageway as he approached a blind dip on a road on the edge of the Peak District, smashing into the Volkswagen Golf of a painter and decorator, Anthony Burgin. Burgin’s wife, Claire, was also seriously injured. Hamed was stripped of his MBE in January 2007.
Spy for the Russians
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anthony Blunt was stripped of his knighthood in 1979 for being a part of the infamous Cambridge spy ring. Photograph: PA News
The art historian Anthony Blunt was a professor of art history at the University of London and surveyor of the Queen’s pictures. What was not known was that in 1964 he had confessed to having been a member of the infamous Cambridge five Soviet spy ring, passing information to Moscow while they worked for MI5 during the second world war.
His secret was closely guarded for many years, but Margaret Thatcher publicly revealed his status in November 1979 and he was immediately stripped of his knighthood.
Be a predatory paedophile
Rolf Harris was stripped of his CBE by the Queen after being jailed for almost six years for a string of sex attacks on girls as young as seven.
Harris, 86, was made a CBE in 2006 by the Queen, a year after painting her portrait to mark her 80th birthday. He had previously been awarded an MBE and an OBE. But his honour was annulled – alongside those awarded in his native Australia – after he was unmasked as a predatory paedophile and found guilty of 12 indecent assaults.About the project
Charles Carroll Plaza and the supporting Genesee Crossroads Parking Garage underneath are located on a prime waterfront site on the west bank of the Genesee River between Main Street and Andrews Street in the city of Rochester’s Central Business District.
Charles Carroll Plaza is a public, riverfront, urban space that provides scenic views, park seating, a public promenade, public art, and green space. The plaza is tiered with multiple levels that directly reflect the shape of the multi-storied Genesee Crossroads Parking Garage below. The plaza is approximately 127,000 SF (3.4 acres) and provides essential connections to the surrounding downtown. The 50 year old site is in poor condition and requires renovation.
Download a site location map
Project Objectives
Remove pavers and other portions of the plaza to access supporting garage roof slab underneath
Perform concrete slab repairs
Replace the slab waterproofing system
Reconstruct a new plaza that meets the current needs of the City’s urban core
The Genesee Crossroads Parking Garage provides approximately 658 parking spaces and is vital to the city’s downtown parking needs. The garage roof waterproofing and structural repairs are of the highest priority in maintaining and extending the functional life of this valuable asset.
The plaza on top of the parking garage is an essential link in the Genesee Riverway Trail system, a designated National Recreation Trail that provides pedestrian access along the Genesee River. The plaza is the current home to a six-part, enameled steel, sculptural compilation by nationally renowned artist Richard Fleischner. The installation, known as the “Rochester Project,” was installed as part of the Rochester Sesquicentennial by the Sesquicentennial Arts & Culture Committee and dedicated in October 1986.
Plaza Reconstruction Objectives…functionality with artistic waterfront design:
Visibility and views: Maximize view sheds of the river
Maximize view sheds of the river Linkages: Improve all linkages through the plaza to create a dynamic pedestrian network
Improve all linkages through the plaza to create a dynamic pedestrian network Safety: Reduce vertical elements and add lighting to increase perception of safety
Reduce vertical elements and add lighting to increase perception of safety Accessibility: Create full accessibility wherever feasible
Create full accessibility wherever feasible Vitality: User attractions and activity generators such as vendors, interactive art, sculptures, game tables, kiosks, open green and recreation spaces
User attractions and activity generators such as vendors, interactive art, sculptures, game tables, kiosks, open green and recreation spaces Additional factors such as durability, maintenance, and spatial variety will play into the final design.
Project Team
The design consultant team of T.Y. Lin International Group, with OLIN landscape architecture, urban design & planning, Highland Planning, LLC and Bell & Spina Architects was selected through the City’s Request for Proposal (RFP) process to provide engineering, landscape architectural, public outreach, planning and design services for the project.
Public engagement and feedback for understanding the needs and visions of the community as they relate to the plaza will be implemented through a project advisory committee, public meetings, public surveys, and project updates on the City’s website.
Project Schedule
Winter / Spring 2015: Design Consultant Procurement through City RFP process
Design Consultant Procurement through City RFP process Summer / Fall 2015: Site Reconnaissance and Inspection
Site Reconnaissance and Inspection December 10, 2015: Project Advisory Committee (PAC) Meeting 1 at the Holiday Inn on State Street
Project Advisory Committee (PAC) Meeting 1 at the Holiday Inn on State Street February 24, 2016: Public Information Meeting 1 at the Holiday Inn on State Street
Public Information Meeting 1 at the Holiday Inn on State Street September 14, 2016: PAC Meeting 2 at the First Federal Plaza
PAC Meeting 2 at the First Federal Plaza November 10, 2016: Public Information Meeting 2 at the Holiday Inn on State Street
Public Information Meeting 2 at the Holiday Inn on State Street Spring – Fall 2016: Schematic planning and design
Schematic planning and design Fall 2016 – Fall 2017: Preliminary development of design
Preliminary development of design TBD: Finalize design and publicly bid
Finalize design and publicly bid TBD: Construction phase
Schedule is subject to change based on funding opportunities
Project Documents
Design and construction documents are prepared with funds provided by the New York State Department of State under Title 11 of the Environmental Protection Fund.
Project Advisory Committee Meeting 1
December 10, 2015
Download key slides from the presentation
Public Information Meeting 2
November 10, 2016
Download slides from the presentation
Download views of the Schematic Concepts
Questions?
If you have questions or comments about the project, please contact Jason VanDemark in the City’s Bureau of Architecture and Engineering at 428-7356, or by email.A Toronto manufacturer of lead-based pigments is coming under fire from critics who say it is contributing to the global spread of potentially-harmful toxins after the company sought an exemption to new rules that essentially bar the sale of its products in Europe.
Dominion Colour Corporation, the largest manufacturer of lead-based paint pigments in the world, attracted the attention of critics earlier this year when the company attempted to get an exemption to continue selling the products in the European Union.
Dominion also exports the pigments from its operations in The Netherlands to countries around the world.
"What Dominion and other paints companies have done is made profits at the expense of public health," said Bruce Lanphear, a public health expert at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.
There's no reason we should be using lead in anything other than car batteries and even then we should be looking for alternatives. Bruce Lanphear, Epidemiologist
Lanphear is just one of a number of critics who say when Dominion's pigments are exported globally, they become part of an unregulated, uncontrolled system that exposes people to a known toxin.
The company's plant in Ajax, Ont., produces two pigments — bright red and yellow — that contain lead chromate and are used to colour industrial paints and plastics.
While lead in paint is allowed for industrial use in Canada, the company hit a snag when Europe added lead chromate to a list of "substances of very high concern" for human and environmental health, greatly restricting its use, to the point that Dominion wouldn't be able to sell its products there — or export them -— as of May 2015. Dominion sells the pigments from its operations in The Netherlands.
Dominion was the only company to ask the European Chemicals Agency for permission to continue manufacturing with lead chromate, arguing there are no suitable alternatives. After a lengthy review process, EHCA granted it -- for 12 years -- concluding the benefits outweigh the risks.
The final decision rests with EU member states and is expected next year.
That worries Perry Gottesfeld, who is head of San Francisco-based Occupational Knowledge International, which works to reduce workers' exposure to industrial pollutants in the developing world.
"The situation with these pigments is that they get sold in bags and each bag can be used to make many small batches of lead paint. Given that Dominion sells this product to dozens of distributors who in turn sell it to hundreds of smaller distributors and end users, there is no way to determine where or even how these hazardous chemicals are ultimately used," said Gottesfeld.
'High number of safeguards'
However, Dominion insists it has strict controls on the supply chain, and knows how the paint is being used. "This is a very technical sale that's a minimum one year process. Someone doesn't just pick up the phone and ask for 20 tons of it," Mark Vincent, Dominion's Executive Vice President told CBC News.
"There are a high number of safeguards to ensure they're not being used in sensitive applications," Vincent said."
The paints are used on road markings, construction equipment, and agricultural machinery, among other things. The company says the lead-based formulation is necessary for durability and quality -- the bright red paint used on a construction fence or bright yellow of a traffic light, for example.
Lead chromate paints are used to create bright yellow markings like these for improving safety on roads and bikepaths. (CBC)
"These pigments are used to make products where vibrant, durable colours are important in ensuring public safety." said Mike Klein, President & CEO of Dominion Colour Corporation.
Thousands of deaths per year: WHO
Lead is a known cause of intellectual disabilities in children, and is linked to high blood pressure and kidney damage in adults.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates lead exposure leads to 143,000 deaths per year. Almost all are in the developing world.
The WHO and the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) want to eliminate lead in paint by 2020.
The UNEP says young children and pregnant mothers in the developing world "are still exposed to high levels of the dangerous toxin through unsafe paints."
Canada signed on to the effort last year and so did the industry organization that represents Canadian paint manufacturers, including Dominion.
The company says it supports eliminating lead in decorative paint used on homes, or toys, but stops short of agreeing to take it out of its red and yellow pigments.
Canadian Opposition
Earlier this year, a consortium of environmental and health organizations wrote Dominion asking the company to withdraw its application in Europe.
SFU epidemiologist Bruce Lanphear was a signatory.
"You're talking about an isolated company that's selling a toxic product where there are safer alternatives," he said.
Canada has regulated the amount of lead in consumer paint to almost zero. However it's still allowed for industrial use.
In 2008, the federal government also did a risk analysis of Dominion's pigments under Canada's Chemicals Management Plan, and concluded that, while they do pose a risk to human health, it is "controlled" and the "risk is negligible."
Dominion's Mark Vincent told CBC News, "We've been through two assessments now, in Canada and EU, and both are very tough."
But Lanphear believes the pigments should not be for sale in Canada, either.
"There's no reason we should be using lead in anything other than car batteries and even then we should be looking for alternatives."Thanks to you Dungeon World is going to print, but there is still |
to abolish — essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know." AFP/Getty Images 10/18 On Hilary Clinton's emails “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” AFP/Getty Images 11/18 On sexual assault In a statement regarding the release of a 2005 video in which he can be heard boasting about sexual assault: “This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course.” Getty Images 12/18 On tax loopholes "I absolutely used it, and so did Warren Buffett, and so did George Soros and so did many people who Hillary is getting money from." AFP/Getty Images 13/18 On his accuser “Believe me, she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you.” Getty Images 14/18 On Hillary Clinton “Such a nasty woman” Getty Images 15/18 On his pro-life stance “Based on what she's saying... you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month, on the final day, and that's unacceptable” Getty Images 16/18 On his accusers "Total fabrication. The events never happened. Never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over.” Getty Images 17/18 On the 'rigged' election system “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election — if I win.” Getty Images 18/18 On Hillary Clinton “I hate to say it but if I win I'm going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation. There has never been so many lies, so much deception. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Getty Images 1/18 On Mexicans “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re not sending you, they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bring crime. They’re rapists… And some, I assume, are good people.” AFP/Getty Images 2/18 On Senator McCain “He’s not a war hero... He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Getty Images 3/18 On Megyn Kelly “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.” AFP/Getty Images 4/18 On Vladimir Putin “He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country.” Getty Images 5/18 On his popularity “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” AFP/Getty Images 6/18 On torture "I would bring back waterboarding and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding." Getty Images 7/18 On his body “Look at those hands, are they small hands? And, [Republican rival Marco Rubio] referred to my hands: ‘If they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.” AFP/Getty Images 8/18 On president Obama “He is the founder of Isis.” Getty Images 9/18 On the Second Amendment "Hillary wants to abolish — essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know." AFP/Getty Images 10/18 On Hilary Clinton's emails “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” AFP/Getty Images 11/18 On sexual assault In a statement regarding the release of a 2005 video in which he can be heard boasting about sexual assault: “This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course.” Getty Images 12/18 On tax loopholes "I absolutely used it, and so did Warren Buffett, and so did George Soros and so did many people who Hillary is getting money from." AFP/Getty Images 13/18 On his accuser “Believe me, she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you.” Getty Images 14/18 On Hillary Clinton “Such a nasty woman” Getty Images 15/18 On his pro-life stance “Based on what she's saying... you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month, on the final day, and that's unacceptable” Getty Images 16/18 On his accusers "Total fabrication. The events never happened. Never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over.” Getty Images 17/18 On the 'rigged' election system “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election — if I win.” Getty Images 18/18 On Hillary Clinton “I hate to say it but if I win I'm going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation. There has never been so many lies, so much deception. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Getty Images
Meanwhile, for all the latest coverage on the election result, follow The Independent in-depth reporting here.Three small birds are being nursed back to health at the Wolf Hollow Wildlife Rehabilitation Center on San Juan Island. More than two dozen baby herons died in a May 2017 windstorm at March Point in the Anacortes area.
An effort is underway to save a handful of baby great blue herons that were knocked from their nests at March Point during an Anacortes-area windstorm last week.
Following the May 23 windstorm, Skagit Land Trust volunteer stewards Jim Scheltens and LaVerne “Levy” Scheltens, who care for the March Point heronry, noticed the wildlife camera that typically shows footage of nesting herons was not working.
When they visited the site May 25, they found a downed maple tree and about 25 dead baby herons that had been tossed from their nests when the tree fell.
“There was a large maple tree that had fallen over … just scattered around there was a lot of carnage actually, a lot of dead baby herons,” said Hannah Williams, an AmeriCorps volunteer with the land trust.
She said the Scheltenses reported the damage to the Skagit Land Trust, and staff joined them to document the damage and to recover six young birds that were still alive.
Those six were transported by volunteers to the Wolf Hollow Wildlife Rehabilitation Center on San Juan Island. Three have since died.
Wolf Hollow education coordinator Shona Aitken said the surviving birds were dehydrated and weak. Of the three that died, two had broken wings and the third was suspected of having internal injuries.
“We wish we could have helped all of them to recover, but they had fallen from the tops of tall trees so it is not surprising that some had serious injuries,” Aitken said.
She said the three still alive are feasting on fish and gaining weight, which is a good sign.
They are estimated to be about 5 weeks old.
“They couldn’t be left because they are unable to fly or even walk very far, so they would be very vulnerable to predators on the ground. They have no way of getting back up into the trees and their parents wouldn’t come down to the ground to feed them,” Aitken said.
Wolf Hollow cares for orphaned and injured wildlife from San Juan and Skagit counties, and from part of Island County. The center has often cared for bald eagles, harbor seals and a variety of other wildlife from throughout Skagit County.
This is the first time the wildlife center has received multiple young herons, as well as the first time the land trust has seen so many young herons lost at the March Point heronry, which the trust has managed since 1994.
“Sometimes if a windstorm blows through it might knock a nest or two out, but nothing like this,” Williams said. “Since it was a maple tree that fell down, it had many nests in it, probably about 15 … Having all of those nests come down at one time was pretty detrimental.”
Aitken said the birds in Wolf Hollow’s care will eventually be put in large outdoor cages where they can build up strength, learn to fly and learn to fish on their own. They will then be released.
In the meantime, the March Point heronry wildlife camera is again live and can be viewed online and at the Breazeale Interpretive Center at the Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.
“A positive note is that it looks like a breeding pair of herons is trying to rebuild their nest,” Williams said.PENRITH have reinstalled Matt Moylan as skipper for Sunday’s blockbuster against Cronulla, despite speculation he wants to throw in the captaincy.
There was confusion on Tuesday when the Panthers lodged their official team with the NRL without a captain for the must-win game against the Sharks.
The Daily Telegraph understands Moylan, who was one if three high-profile Panthers dumped to NSW Cup last week for a booze breach, is giving serious thought to stepping down from up the top job.
ROUND 7: Get the latest team news here
The club is poised to name Peter Wallace as the new permanent captain should Moylan pull the pin. He has struggled this year with the extra responsibility, which has affected his form and possibly jeopardised his hopes of playing for Australia in the Anzac Test.
Sources insist Moylan is looking forward to less responsibility on and off the field in hope of recapturing the form, which earned him an Origin call-up last year and Mal Meninga taking him on the Four Nations tour.
Penrith coach Anthony Griffin said he was happy to reinstate Moylan as skipper.
When asked about Moylan’s concerns about the captaincy affecting his own game, Griffin said: “You’ll have to speak with him. I won’t get into what might happen. He’s the captain of our club.’’
media_camera Moylan‘s indiscretion hasn’t affected his standing at Penrith. Photo: Gregg Porteous
Griffin was impressed with the way Moylan and teammates Waqa Blake and Peta Hiku responded to their axing after they had stayed out late in Melbourne a week earlier following the Storm loss.
“I was more concerned with what they did last week, they trained very well and applied themselves very well to the (NSW Cup) game on the weekend,’’ Griffin said.
“That was good to see. From my end, there was never any concern that wasn’t going to happen.’’
Daily Telegraph sports editor-at-large Phil Rothfield wrote a column saying Griffin had overreacted by standing down Moylan and his mates.
“Everyone is entitled to their opinion,’’ Griffin said.
“I didn’t make the decision based on how I thought it would be perceived in the media. But I understand everyone has an opinion on it. It’s football.’’
Griffin is prepared to make the tough calls, with his triple dumping publicly supported by the players.
Moylan, Hiku and Blake all looked in good spirits at training on Monday.
Tyrone Peachey (ribs) was named at centre, James Fisher-Harris (eye socket) in the backrow, while Bryce Cartwright (ankle) was listed in the No.21 jersey.
The Panthers remain favourites with the bookies, despite losing four of their opening six games and coming up against the premiers who beat Melbourne in their own backyard on Sunday.President-elect Donald Trump blasted General Motors Company for building some of its cars in Mexico, and said the largest US automaker should build the car at home or face a hefty tariff.
"General Motors is sending Mexican made model of Chevy Cruze to US car dealers – tax free across border,” Trump tweeted Tuesday. “Make in USA or pay big border tax!"
General Motors is sending Mexican made model of Chevy Cruze to U.S. car dealers-tax free across border. Make in U.S.A.or pay big border tax! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2017
Every Chevrolet Cruze sedan is built in Ohio and most of GM’s Mexican-made hatchbacks are “exported to global markets,” GM spokesman Tony Cervone told Bloomberg.
Cervone declined to comment on whether the company planned to talk to Trump, although GM CEO Mary Barra is among the panel of business leaders giving the president-elect strategic advice on the economy after he takes office.
The Detroit-based company had announced it planned to lay off 2,000 employees at two US auto plants, including one in Lordstown, Ohio, where it builds the compact Chevrolet Cruze, due to weak demand for small cars.
Ohio Democrats weighed in on the Trump tweet over the Cruze sedan.
.@realDonaldTrump The Republican Congress is merely following your lead on ethics. And BTW -- the Chevy Cruze is made in Lordstown, Ohio. pic.twitter.com/uD4Y99AvSW — Ohio Dems (@OHDems) January 3, 2017
A trend among Detroit’s automakers is to have smaller cars manufactured in Mexico to take advantage of lower labor costs and have higher-paid American workers build more profitable trucks, sport utility vehicles and luxury cars.
General Motors was one of the US corporations helped by government bailouts during the Obama administration following the financial crisis in 2008. The company was able to reorganize after filing for bankruptcy in 2009, with the US Treasury investing $49.5 billion in the company through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). GM has reported annual profits since 2010, and the Treasury recovered $39 billion when the company sold shares in December 2013.
Trump, Boeing and Lockheed Martin CEOs meet to negotiate US contractshttps://t.co/PjIUlAhfvRpic.twitter.com/z5Jajvv5Af — RT America (@RT_America) December 22, 2016
Trump’s tweet is the latest example of the president-elect intervening with US companies against moving jobs across the border. After striking a deal with Carrier to keep a plant in Indiana, Trump has taken aim at Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin Corp. and United Technologies.
During the presidential campaign, Trump criticized Ford Motor Company for moving production of some car brands to Mexico.
In November, Trump tweeted that he talked to Chairman Bill Ford and got the automaker to commit to keeping production of the Lincoln MKC sport utility vehicle in century instead of Mexico, and indicated he saved the plant.
As it turned out, the plant makes Ford Escape SUVs and was not scheduled to close.
#Ford small cars production moving out of US to Mexico https://t.co/hzg1QST7m2pic.twitter.com/VzUVI7mdun — RT America (@RT_America) November 16, 2016
On Tuesday, Ford announced it was canceling plans to build a new manufacturing plant in Mexico and would be investing $700 million in Michigan instead.
The move is a “vote of confidence” in Trump’s pledge to create a pro-business environment, Ford CEO Mark Fields told CNN, but added that it wasn’t the result of a special deal with the president-elect.
“We didn’t cut a deal with Trump,” said Fields. “We did it for our business.”
The deal won’t affect US jobs because the automaker will be putting new vehicles in the Michigan plants as part of a $700 million investment for more electric and self-driving cars. The automaker said it plans to build a self-driving car by 2021.
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder thanked Ford “for your continued confidence in our state.”PayPal’s (s ebay) plans to announce a solution for small businesses at an event this Thursday includes a mobile payment dongle that would compete against Square, Intuit (intu), Verifone (s pay) and others, according to sources we’ve talked to who are familiar with PayPal’s plans. The dongle, which might be shaped like a triangle, will allow small business owners to process credit card swipes from a smartphone, similar to Square, Intuit’s GoPayment and Verifone’s PAYware.
The potential move, part of a larger brand refresh, would fall in line with PayPal’s recent strategy to bring its payment services into physical stores. It’s working with a host of partners to bring its in-store system to bigger retailers including Home Depot (s hd), which is launching the service in more than 2,000 locations. That system relies on integrating PayPal software into existing point-of-sale terminals so users can pay either by swiping a PayPal pre-paid card or by entering in their phone number and PIN, which connects to their account.
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The in-store system works ideally for retailers with existing hardware. But a mobile payment acceptance tool like Square would allow PayPal to target much smaller businesses with one or two locations and give them a simple way to process card transactions. Square has shot to success with its dongle and is now processing $4 billion annually. PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar declined to confirm the news, saying: “We’re unveiling what we believe will be the future of commerce for small businesses.”
PayPal’s move into Square’s turf would sharpen the rivalry between the two companies. Square’s COO Keith Rabois, an early employee at PayPal, dismissed the threat from his old employer in an interview with GigaOM last year, saying its payment assets and fraud models were outdated. He predicted that Square would be more valuable than PayPal eventually.
“The brand has atrophied in the last decade and there are not a lot of users who wish they could use a PayPal account,” he said. “That may have been true a decade ago but not today.”
PayPal, however, has been ramping up its efforts to win the in-store battle and is increasingly confident about its chances. Don Kingsborough, who joined PayPal last year as its VP for retail and prepaid products, told me in an interview that in-store payments was PayPal’s to lose. Now, it seems like PayPal is making a play for the entire market, not just bigger retailers.
It’s going to be interesting to see how merchants respond, if PayPal follows through on this. PayPal has more than 100 million account holders and it’s a well known name for online payments. But its track record for in-store payments is thin. For small business owners, many may not naturally gravitate to PayPal for in-store payments. But a dongle solution, along with an app for merchants that allows them to take PayPal payments via a phone number, may be compelling for some merchants interested in tapping PayPal’s existing customer base.
PayPal hasn’t always been the favored choice of merchants but it seems to be working to improve its standing with them. It recently announced that it would refine its 21-day hold policy on PayPal accounts for eBay sellers, which allows PayPal to freeze funds in merchant accounts. It now says it moves held money into a non-interest bearing account.
We’ll know more about PayPal’s small business plans at its San Francisco event on Thursday, which is likely to touch on other areas as well. But the early signs suggest the mobile payment space is about to get even more competitive.TrackingPoint’s much lauded “smart scope” technology allows even an inexperienced shooter to hit targets a mile away, but is it vulnerable to hacking?
Hacking is not generally a concern for the vast majority of firearms. After all, most firearms don’t mount fancy electronic devices. Yet TrackingPoint firearms, with their state-of-the-art technology, may be “taken over” by a hacker working remotely.
Wired reported earlier this week that at least two hackers, husband-and-wife security researchers Michael Auger and Runa Sandvik, have successfully “taken control” of a $13,000 TrackingPoint rifle.
“You can make it lie constantly to the user so they’ll always miss their shot,” Sandvik told Wired. “If the scope is bricked, you have a six to seven thousand dollar computer you can’t use on top of a rifle that you still have to aim yourself.”
The researchers were able to compromise the gun’s software through one of the rifle’s features: a Wi-Fi connection that allowed shooters to see and record shots on another device. Sandvik and Auger quickly identified vulnerabilities in the software and were able to manipulate the scope into doing a variety of different things, such as showing false wind direction, temperatures, or even forcing the firearm to lock on to another target entirely.
“Unless you’re really familiar with the rifle and know what you’re doing, you probably won’t notice those variables are changing,” Sandvik told CNNMoney. “You’ll be too focused lining up your shot.”
You can watch a demonstration below:
TrackingPoint’s unique “Precision Guided Firearms” work by first “tagging” a target. The scope then adjusts the digital image presented to the shooter to indicate how they must physically adjust in order to hit their tagged target. To fire, the shooter holds down the trigger until the crosshairs cover the tagged target, at which point the firearm discharges.
This technology won over many firearm enthusiasts and even garnered interest from the US Army, but caused some debate among hunters who viewed the devices as unfair. Others, like TrackingPoint founder John McHale, argued that more accurate shots made for more ethical hunts.
Now the company has an additional concern, as all it takes is a Wi-Fi connection and a computer or smart phone to “hack” into one of these rifles. There is one thing, however, that the hackers are still unable to do. The firearms that Sandvick and Auger tested, two rifles chambered in.308, require someone to pull the trigger manually before it will fire. That means that as hard as the hackers try, the rifle will still not shoot on its own.
“The fundamentals of shooting don’t change even if the gun is hacked,” McHale said.
The TrackingPoint founder was notified of the security breach by Sandvik and Auger themselves. He noted that the likelihood of one of the rifles being hacked maliciously was very low, and there seems to be little motivation for a hacker to do so. According to some estimates, there are only about a thousand TrackingPoint rifles in the hands of consumers, and some do not have Wi-Fi. The feature can also be turned off. Sandvik and Auger said they are willing to help the company patch up any vulnerabilities in its software and prevent future problems as well, but the firm has not responded. This may be due to the company’s financial difficulties, as TrackingPoint announced in May that it will not be taking any more orders for their rifles.
In the end, the researchers say this proved to be a valuable lesson for innovators and they should always be aware of possible security issues.
Image screenshot of video by WIRED on YouTube
What's Your Reaction?Zachary Quinto answers questions on stage during an AOL BUILD Speaker Series held at AOL Studios on Thursday (February 19) in New York City.
The 37-year-old actor opened up about his new NBC show The Slap.
“The interesting thing is it’s not really about the slap, and all of these characters come to the table with a tremendous amount of internal conflict and struggle about different aspects of their lives and relationships,” Zachary recently said (via The Washington Post). “The Slap” is just this codifying incident that puts all of that into clear relief, and so I think all of us were more interested in the psychological dynamics that are going on outside of the incident of the actual slap.”
10+ pictures inside of Zachary Quinto at the AOL event in NYC…Public Transport and Roads Minister Terry Mulder has hosed down hopes that the speed limit on the Princes Highway would be raised to 110km/h after reports the government was secretly planning to do so.
Speaking to radio station 3AW on Monday, Mr Mulder said "at this point in time, I certainly have not approached the Assistant Commissioner or the Commissioner and asked them to support this".
"There's nothing wrong with discussing the issue... [but] if we were to do that today, the crash rate along that road would go up around 30 per cent, fatalities would go up, injuries would go up," Mr Mulder said.
The minister added that while he was not ruling out an increase in the future, the road in its current state could not support the change.
"There are potential major upgrades to the road that could bring the speed limit up... but to change the speed zone signs on that road [today] would result in a catastrophic impact in relation to road safety."A solid majority of Americans — 61 percent — say President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans are responsible for any future problems with Obamacare, according to a poll released Friday.
The poll also found strong distrust of Trump's health-care goals — and that half of Americans will blame the Trump administration's actions to weaken Obamacare if fewer people sign up for individual health insurance plans this enrollment season.
Just 37 percent said any fall-off in enrollment would be the fault of the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress, who created the Affordable Care Act, as Obamacare is formally known.
The Kaiser Family Foundation poll comes a day after the Senate Finance Committee approved a tax bill that would repeal Obamacare's requirement that most people have health insurance or pay a fine.
The findings also come three weeks into the first full Obamacare enrollment season under the Trump administration.
Trump and most congressional Republicans favor repeal of much of the ACA. Despite months of efforts this year, they have been unable to win approval of a replacement.
Since Trump took office in January, his administration has made a series of moves to undercut Obamacare. Those actions have been blamed for driving up prices for Obamacare plans in 2018 and for spurring some insurers to drop out of ACA marketplaces. They also have raised concerns among advocates for the law that enrollment in Obamacare plans will fall in 2018.
Trump and his health-care officials have repeatedly said that any problems with the program are the fault of Democrats who passed the ACA into law.
While Trump's health-care policy goals are popular with many Republican voters, the public as a whole does not tend to think highly of them.
Sixty percent of respondents "do not trust President Trump to do what's best when it comes to health care in this country," Kaiser said in a summary of the poll's results.
And majorities of people of all political affiliations say that because Trump and Republicans are in control of the federal government, "they are responsible for the health care law moving forward."
Just 27 percent said that Obama and Democrats are responsible for any future problems with the law.
Among all respondents, 50 percent have a favorable view of Obamacare and 46 percent hold an unfavorable view.
Most Republicans, 81 percent, hold an unfavorable view, while 80 percent of Democrats like the law.
Independents are split, with 50 percent seeing the law unfavorably and 43 percent holding a favorable view.
Kaiser's poll, which had a margin of error of 3 percentage points, questioned 1,201 adults via telephone from Nov. 8 to 13.“The man who created God? I never thought we would be friends.”
Like so many episodes before this, “Skip” deals with the ideas of humanity and compassion in the face of loss. It’s an entertaining and snappy piece of television that also finds a deeper and more poignant meaning behind its storylines, and while it’s far from a perfect episode, it’s certainly a step up from last week’s middling outing. “Skip” is able to find a better balance between the case of the week and the overarching Finch-Samaritan struggle, and as a result, both plots have excellent moments throughout the episode.
Let’s start with the case of the week, which is anchored by Katheryn Winnick’s firecracker performance as Frankie Wells, a bounty hunter who is out to take down her boss, Ray Pratt. Frankie has immediate chemistry with Reese–who seems to be a real ladies’ man in this episode–and whether they’re sitting down and talking or breaking out of handcuffs and kicking ass, they’re very enjoyable to watch.
Of course, it’s not all entertainment for Frankie, as her storyline takes a darker turn when she figures out that Ray was the one who killed her brother. What “Skip” wants to highlight, however is the fact that she eventually leaves behind her quest for revenge and saves Harper Rose. Even in this state of heightened tension and conflict, it doesn’t necessarily mean we descend to the level of the bad guys; even Harper, who stirred up a boatload of trouble earlier in the season, acts as a mediator here between Ray and others.
The whole storyline is not without problems, though. I’m not quite invested in Harper Rose enough to see her as a recurring character just yet, and I’m also not quite sure about where the show is heading with Iris and John. The Reese-Frankie dynamic eventually leads into Dr. Campbell expressing her feelings for John, and it’s an uncertain step for a show that has generally refrained from putting Reese into romantic relationships. That’s not to say the writers won’t handle this well; it’s just that with only four episodes left in the season, Iris’s role is still very unclear, and her character isn’t exactly the most fleshed-out character in the show.
So, that’s definitely the weaker aspect of the episode, but “Skip” shines whenever it focuses on Root and Finch, which is a pairing I will never get tired of. I do hope that the Trojan Horse plot point carries over into future episodes–it will be a waste of so much set up if it isn’t–but still, what we get in this hour are phenomenal character moments between two brilliant characters. We see just how far Root’s come: so far that she’s willing to listen to her own humanity over The Machine, so far that she values friendship over her “God”. Just like Finch and Reese, she’s been profoundly affected by the loss of people close to her, and she doesn’t want to lose anyone else.
The final scene she and Finch share is absolutely beautiful, and it’s a lovely moment that both acknowledges the connection they have and the distance that now exists between them. It takes care to note both past and present, and it doesn’t undervalue the significance of Root discrediting Beth Bridges or of Root saving Finch’s life. It’s a wonderful note to end the episode on, and it once again underscores just how fascinating these characters are. One thing is for sure: I will never get tired of seeing how they develop.
GRADE: B+
OTHER THOUGHTS:
– “You triggered it somehow. Ruh roh.” I love Amy Acker.
-I’ve been missing Bear recently.
-Next week, it’s the millionth time we break for a week following an episode. Anyway, the dates have been announced for the final four episodes: April 7, April 14, April 28, and May 5th.
Photo credits: CBS, Person of InterestIt’s just humanity and the physical environment:
A tinge of atheism:
Reasoning out through human experience:
The concept of equality:
Today we are living in a world that breaks all clichés and works with broad-minded humanism, unlike the yesteryears. There are a lot of factors that prove that humanism has been in existence for a longer period. Having said that, though the term seems a bit modern, humanism is not something that is new to the world. The concept of humanism has been in existence since the days of the renaissance period. A humanist is someone who breaks the religious boundaries and believes in life values and philosophical living. So here are some of the beliefs of a humanist.In the world of a humanist, there are only two concepts he would want to believe and adore. It is the humanity that saves the world from war and unethical behaviour and the physical or the tangible world that exists around us. There is nothing more to it than these factors especially religious belief. In religion there exists a lot of factors that are cannot be defined by science or normal human intelligence and that is what a humanist hates.If I have to define humanism rightly, the concept of atheism or theism has got nothing to do with it. However, when it comes to understanding humanism, there is a tinge of atheism mixed with the feelings of every humanist. The thing we have to understand is that you can be a believer and still be a humanist, but when you co-exist with others in the society a humanist gets rid of the concept of religion and focuses only on humanism. That is why we say that there is a bit of atheism inside every theist who is a humanist.The humanist believes in the factor of human experience over the concept of divine agency and magic. So humanist will reason out anything that happens around him only through human experience within the limits of human reasoning. There are no superstitious beliefs in the life of a humanist. Just to wish away the concept of superstition, a humanist relies on human experience and reasoning ability. Science answers it all: Though these humanists wouldn’t prefer to be called as the Illuminati of the world, they appreciate the theories of science. They choose to believe the answers of science rather than the answers that are given by the religious doctrines. They would rather believe the big bang theory and man evolving from an ape, than the theory that calls all of this as the creation of God. There isn’t something that science can’t define. This is where every humanist sounds a bit like an atheist. However there are humanists who believe that science and religion can co-exist.Every humanist wants to take his call when it comes to equality. It is this sense that determines if a person is a humanist. In a humanist world, there shall be no difference based on religion, gender, caste, creed, nationality or colour. All are equal in the eyes of the law, and it is a person’s deeds in this physical world that shall act as a judgement on him. Know MoreMINNEAPOLIS - If you drive I-94, you know the sometimes frustrating trip.
Which is why the Minnesota Department of Transportation recently started a long-term study on how to improve the portion of 94 that connects Minneapolis and St. Paul.
"So from Broadway in north Minneapolis to Highway 61 on the east side of St. Paul,” said Brian Isaacson, MnDOT’s I-94 project director. "It's an important piece of how the cities function together.”
13 miles in all.
"There's a few hundred thousand people who live along it. There's probably on average around 150,000 vehicles a day on it,” he said.
That’s why they’re asking for people’s input in a series of workshops. The next one is Wednesday, June 28, from 2-4 p.m. and 6-8 p.m. at the Brian Coyle Center in Minneapolis, which is at 420 15th Ave S., Minneapolis.
It includes the vexing Lowry Tunnel that often times is backed up, not just when it’s under construction, which is happening right now.
"It's a really tough issue,” he said.
If this sounds familiar, it is. KARE 11 profiled the tunnel and a study that talked about potential improvements to it 10 years ago.
Yet nothing really has changed. MnDOT says the 2007 study recommended conceptual fixes, nothing concrete.
But officials point to the lack of progress for the lack of resources, and the fact there is no easy solution for a tunnel built in the 1960s. 394 didn't even come along until 20 years later.
"I honestly don't know,” said Isaacson about the fix. “Whatever it is. It is likely not going to be a small cost."
It is one reason why MnDOT is asking people to share their experiences and concerns about the Lowry Tunnel and everything else drivers encounter on the I-94 stretch between Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Isaacson says improvements on the 13-mile I-94 stretch won't be competed for 20-plus years.
“That's the challenge that lays ahead of us," he said. "It's about that balance of resources but also impact."
For more information about the Rethinking I-94 project click here.Bush demo police branded 'blood hungry' by protesters
It began as a perfectly legal protest about the visit of the most hated president in American history.
But within hours - as George Bush dined with Prime Minister Gordon Brown several hundred yards away in Downing Street - the demonstration degenerated into a vicious melee in which numerous officers and protesters were injured, and 25 were arrested.
In the aftermath of yesterday's shameful scenes it was claimed that 'blood hungry' Metropolitan Police massively over-reacted to the protests to save face for Mr Brown, with a huge presence of officers all too ready to use their batons.
'Blood Hungry': Police and protesters clash in Parliament Square
The senior officer in charge of policing the event, meanwhile, controversially claimed that the protesters could have been 'used as cover for more sinister criminal activity'.
The demonstrators wanted to express their opposition to President Bush opposite Downing Street - but in an unusual move were forbidden from doing so, and the whole of Whitehall was sealed off well before the demonstration late on Sunday.
The Stop the War Coalition, which organised the demonstration, blamed the 2,500 police involved in the operation in total over the weekend for the fighting that broke out with the 2,500 protesters.
As the Met began an investigation into the fracas, Stop the War spokesman Andrew Burgin said: 'This was the first time in the history of Britain that they've sealed off the centre of London in the way they did.
'We were not allowed to make a protest opposite Downing Street to save the face of the Prime Minister, because he didn't want protest to be heard when he arrived for dinner.
'It was very much a political decision taken under the directions of the security service of America.
'People were understandably annoyed at being smashed over the head in their own country at the request of a foreign security service.'
'Heavy Handed': A protester is left bleeding after clashes with police
Veteran peace campaigner Walter Wolfgang, who was at the rally, said: ‘Not only did some of the police behave brutally, it looked as if they enjoyed it.’
Human rights activist Bianca Jagger, who was also among the demonstrators, said the police response was ‘the most heavy handed I have seen since the Grovesnor Square 1968 protest’.
In advance of the demonstration, which began in Parliament Square at 5pm with speeches from leading opponents of the war in terror including politicians Tony Benn and George Galloway, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Chris Allison had detailed the huge police operation planned.
Mr Allison said: 'We have not banned their march. They asked for a particular route. That route is just not open to them. Part of Whitehall has to be closed, and is being closed, on security grounds.'
Despite Mr Allison's confidence, the protest degenerated into violence - and waiting riot police were called in to help out when the two lines of police and two lines of police vans were deemed insufficient, although Mr Bush entered unhindered at the other end of Whitehall.
Protesters angry at the ongoing |
moved to disqualify a judge. The latter move was juxtaposed with a speedy trial and characterized as a “Hobson’s Choice”: the right to a speedy trial v. the right to a perceived fair trial.
We felt confident the law was on our side, which is to say, we felt naked. But thanks to the great work of APD Brian Ellison, ultimately, the Circuit Court granted the Writ and ordered that all charges be dismissed. (Shout out to APD Klara Stephens, as Ms. Martinez was her client and she vigorously argued the “Hobson’s Choice” issue before Judge Altfied–the aptly characterized quandary described by APD Robert Klassman).
The opinion provides a wonderful (defense friendly) analysis of one’s right to Speedy Trial. Solid precedent for the defense bar (especially in Miami).
11th Judicial Circuit_Writ of Prohibition_Speedy Trial
This article was authored by Jordan Redavid, Esq., a founding partner at Garza & Redavid LLP. Jordan Redavid is a Miami Criminal Defense Lawyer who represents people from DUI and Drug Crimes to Fraud, and many other criminal charges in both State and Federal court. Jordan Redavid is both a Miami Trial Lawyer and a Miami Appeals Lawyer.Following a recent spate of attacks, Germany’s leading coalition parties are readying a set of new security laws to fight extremism which will include measures accelerating deportations, abolishing dual citizenship, and loosening medical confidentiality.
German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière has put together proposals from several political parties to create an updated catalogue of counterterrorism measures and legislation aimed at curbing domestic extremism that will be presented on Thursday, Bild reports.
As Interior Minister De Maizière reportedly wants to deal with foreign troublemakers and offenders in an effective manner, deporting undesired migrants will become a quick and unhindered procedure, and asylum applications will be considered much more quickly as well.
The new laws will also change some long-standing policies, such as respecting doctor-patient confidentiality. In fact, under the new legislation, health professionals will be obliged to report on their patients if they suspect them of having committed a crime or think they might be planning one.
Terrorism wave in Germany forces #Berlin to plan broad range of civil defense measureshttps://t.co/69BJicxxnf — RT (@RT_com) August 4, 2016
The Interior Minister reportedly plans to make his EU colleagues sign a Berlin Declaration on security, that is believed to include a ban on financing of mosques by extremist organizations, the abolition of dual citizenship, and a ban on full-face veils that are widely worn in some Muslim countries.
A further ramping up of internal security is planned to be discussed at a ministerial meeting on August 18.
According to the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger media outlet quoting leading coalition parties, the package to be presented by de Maizière is likely to be adopted during this term, as it does not require the Bundesrat’s consent.
The Union (the coalition of Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union in Bavaria) wants to beef up internal security by adding 15,000 new police officers on both the local and federal levels from 2015 to 2020, who should be armed with rifles and wear body cameras. In addition, more CCTV cameras will be installed in public places and transport hubs, the Union said in a statement.
“Given the assassination of Würzburg, we need more presence of federal police in trains, train stations, and airports,” the statement reads, pointing out at the dangers presented by internet crimes and illicit activities in the Darknet.
It has been proposed that “non-German hate preachers” be expelled from the country immediately and that the German citizenship of citizens who have joined terrorist organizations to fight abroad be revoked if they have a passport from any other country.
In addition, the Union Home Secretary is demanding the creation of a Cyber Defense Centre at the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), justifying data retention by arguing that sometimes 14-year-old suspects need to be investigated.
According to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, ministers representing the Union in the German government also would like the law permitting dual citizenship to be rescinded, citing it as “a major obstacle to integration” for newcomers.
The debate surrounding dual citizenship flared up with renewed force following a mass rally in support of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Cologne, which prompted the Union to suggest that those who want to get involved in the politics of foreign governments should leave Germany.Articles about the proliferation of ornamental and decorative lettering are nothing new—I’m thinking specifically of Steven Heller’s “Cult of the Squiggly” in Eye in 2009 and Paul Shaw’s “Letter Centric: Thoughts on Spencerian Script” in Print in 2010. But in the past few years the use of hand-lettering and script fonts has experienced a downright explosion. It’s easy to see the attraction for designers: a hand-drawn quality can evoke the DIY/craft movement as well as, like Heller pointed out, a controlled yet organic reaction to the relative sterility of Modernism. I wanted to know more, so I asked three leading letterers, type designers, and all-around experts on the topic—Ken Barber, Martina Flor, and Ale Paul—to reflect on typography’s nouvelle vague (you can check out some of their work below).
To what do you attribute the growing popularity in hand-lettered typography, whether as illustration or as type design?
Ale Paul: Things have definitely changed over the past few years. Right after technology reached that certain point where pretty much everything from the past can be recreated and superimposed on any given environment, more and more people are doing it and in so many different ways. It’s become a particularly interesting phenomenon because it adds a strange spin to things. In the past, industry was concerned with transforming the handmade into something mechanical (movable type, film type), but now that the mechanical/digital is a given, because that’s where everyone works, we’re trying to tone things back to the original handmade, while at the same time looking for ways to make it fit within our own time. Though from what I see everywhere, this phenomenon is not unique to our discipline. There is an almost invasive DIY streak, with almost no evident rules, happening wherever craft and computers interact.
Ken Barber: Its popularity seems to have risen among graphic designers who don’t specialize in the practice. Social media outlets like portfolio sharing sites allow for instant exposure and viewer input, and seem to be instrumental in encouraging many to make a go of lettering professionally. But the number of typeface designers appears to be growing as well. While there are still relatively few schools offering postgraduate study in the field, that hasn’t stopped people from making their own fonts. As compared to lettering, however, typeface design requires a fair amount of technical know-how, not to mention a considerable time commitment. My guess is that the training, experience, and dedication usually required to produce high-quality fonts deters more from doing it full-time.
As anyone working in both fields can tell you, lettering and typeface design are quite different animals.
AP: We shouldn’t forget that lettering and typefaces are basically individual resources for visual communication. When we do forget that, we tend to sacrifice the content we need to communicate just so we can have some modern or catchy appearance. That level of specialty depth may be too much. We used to demand that designers know how to draw and now we want our illustrators to stay away from design.
Martina Flor: I’ve noticed a steady growth of interest in lettering along with new areas in which it’s used. While commissions used to come predominantly for logo or packaging design, they have spread strongly into advertising and media in the past years, so the use of lettering has broadened into other applications. This interest has also influenced type design and is motivated as well by technical tools (like OpenType features) that allow imitating some of the behavior of hand lettering into a font. OpenType features have been around for years, but nowadays they’re facilitated through forums, social networks, and are even default features in some software. Everyone doing fonts out there can have a grasp of them.
What’s the boundary between lettering and calligraphy? Would you say that every calligrapher is a letterer, but not every letterer is a calligrapher?
KB: Although there’s an undoubtable relationship between the two, I’d put calligraphy and hand-lettering in two different camps. Although both practices require skill and attention to detail, calligraphy is composed of written letterforms with a greater emphasis on muscle movement and the gestural forms that accompany it. Lettering, on the other hand, is drawing. And, while lettering often strives to capture the freedom of uninhibited motion, it’s the result of careful consideration and deliberate planning. Lettering is closer to drafting than to writing, which is the core of calligraphy.
MF: I often also say also that calligraphy embraces randomness and surprise, while lettering decides exactly the shape that a certain gesture or letter should have. Lettering is, in this sense, a discipline strictly related to design and decision making.
AP: I think calligraphy and lettering are different, but somewhat complementary skills. Lettering is a kind of “designed” or “drawn” calligraphy. Calligraphy itself is done with repetition and refinement with a given tool, while lettering is a more rational endeavor. Some people can do calligraphy, some can do lettering, some can do both, and some can’t do either. Seeking out some kind of philosophical exclusivity between background subtleties between calligraphy and lettering would probably be futile, as far as overall visual communication goes. It’s up to the graphic designer to know what’s needed for the project and, accordingly, seek out a calligrapher, a letterer, or both.
You all teach workshops on lettering. Have you seen an increase in enrollment? Do the attendees look to learn how to create (and possibly sell) their own fonts or just get better at one-off illustrations, or both?
KB: It’s reassuring to find that there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of folks who are interested in learning letter-making skills to implement in their design work. Personally, attempting to teach typeface design over the course of a day or two is too formidable a challenge. For that reason, I stick to leading hand-lettering workshops. Yet, while the two disciplines have their differences, it’s always great to hear from folks who have used lettering basics from my classes as a foray into creating fonts.
MF: I’ve mainly hosted workshops around Europe for the last five years and there continues to be interest in it. The reasons to attend a lettering workshop might be initially the aim of being able to create lettering commercially, but many get to realize that mastering the practice requires much more than a workshop. However, it does train their eye to work with typography in general and understand the principles in letter design, which is a great tool for the creative work of a graphic designer.
AP: I do quite a few lettering workshops all over the world, especially in Latin America, where typographic tradition is very recent. The internet and social media have triggered enormous interest in the region. Now it’s at the point where there are two postgraduate programs alongside the many undergraduate ones. The students’ objectives vary; some publish their own fonts, some go into analog directions, and some do both.
If a designer wanted to integrate hand drawn, or embellished type, or a script font into their work for the first time, but not create it themselves, where should they look? If they’re hiring a letterer, what criteria should they use to assess the quality of his or her portfolio? If they’re buying a script font, what criteria should they look for there?
KB: Lettering and typography are essential components of graphic design. Knowledge of these practices is indispensable, even for designers with no professional aspirations in either discipline. A typeface course or lettering workshop goes a surprisingly long way in helping to recognize well-made letters. In appreciating good lettering, it’s important that the artwork always fulfills its intended purpose. The letterforms should be suited to their environment and perform well in the ultimate application. While fashion may sometimes overshadow readability, the content must be legible while stylistically complementing the message. And the letters should be impeccably produced, even in cases where a deliberately naive appearance is desired.
Typographers should look for fonts that are both well-drawn and well-engineered. In other words, they should look good and work well.
From a practical standpoint, in most cases it’s crucial that the letters appear even in volume, with respect to both positive and negative form. Like lettering, typefaces should have a clear voice that supports what’s being communicated without detracting from it. Text faces work best when they go unnoticed, while display faces can have much more personality. Most importantly, a typeface needs to function according to its intended purpose.
MF: When judging a piece of lettering, focus should go primarily on the letter shapes and legibility. When I look at a lettering portfolio I set my eyes on well-drawn letters, good pieces of artwork, and a high level of detail. I’m also interested in the variety of work. When hiring a letterer you’d be most interested in someone who’s capable of solving a lettering piece that suits your project rather than applying the same lettering style across all projects.
For script typefaces, look for well-designed letter shapes connected nicely with a fair amount of alternates and automatic features. I appreciate typefaces that have a fair amount of glyphs, including diacritics and punctuation marks. That said, recognizing good letterforms is not a piece of cake on the first place. I agree with Ken in that courses on both type and lettering design are a great way to develop an eye for typography.
AP: I agree with Ken, too, and I’d add that graphic design is not for its own sake.
Design is a response to a need for communication. What works in Pinterest will likely not work for a butcher.
Design produces a communicative identity and anything that goes in it (calligraphy, lettering, etc.) should serve that particular goal. It’s important to know how the tools work and distinguish between them in order to achieve the result that’s ultimately needed. So even a simple thing like knowing the difference between a pen and a soft brush is quite essential for good design work.
More about the interviewees: Ken Barber is a letterer, type designer, and type director at design studio and type foundry House Industries, and a partner in Photo-Lettering, Inc. (And from April 25–26 he’ll be leading the Script Lettering workshop at Type@Cooper.) Martina Flor is a Berlin-based designer who focuses on type, lettering, and illustration, and teaches lettering internationally and online through Good Type. A few years ago, she also participated in a friendly competition called Lettering vs. Calligraphy with fellow Berlin designer Giuseppe Salerno. Finally, Ale Paul is the co-founder of the Argentinean type foundry Sudtipos, where he produces award-winning script typefaces like Hipster and Poem Script. He expertly revived the work of early 20th-century calligrapher Charles Percy Bluemlein, producing over 30 penmanship script typefaces with charming names like Mrs. Von Eckley. His latest typographic release is Auberge Script, an ode to quill pens that practically waltzes across the page. He also teaches in the postgraduate typography program at the University of Buenos Aires.The Islamist group Jaysh al-Islam admitted to using chemical weapons against Kurdish militias in Aleppo. It also uses human shields and publishes execution videos – yet it has a delegation at the UN-backed Syria peace talks in Geneva.
Jaysh al-Islam (Army of Islam), formerly known as Liwa al-Islam (Brigade of Islam), is a coalition of Salafist Islamist militant groups based in the Douma and Eastern Ghouta neighborhoods of the Syrian capital Damascus.
1 Who supports it
Jaysh al-Islam is one of the two major militant groups in Syria supported by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and is part of a larger coalition called the Islamic Front. The coalition seeks to make Syria a country ruled by sharia law, exactly what its rival Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) aims to achieve.
2 Who considers it terrorist
The group is considered a terrorist organization by Syria’s allies Russia and Iran, and also by Egypt. It describes as “brothers” fighters of the Al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, which is considered a terrorist group by the UN and many nations.
BREAKING: Syrian Islamist group Jaysh al-Islam admits using banned weapons against Kurds in Aleppo https://t.co/M8RieFnCnK — RT (@RT_com) April 7, 2016
3 ISIS-style executions
In June 2015 Jaysh al-Islam released a video of the execution of captured Islamic State fighters, which mimicked similar videos produced by the notorious terrorist group. Unlike IS, Jaysh al-Islam dressed the executioners in orange prison robes, rather than their victims.
GRAPHIC: Shocking images show victims of chemical attack on Aleppo neighborhood in Syria https://t.co/CAYbI5txWTpic.twitter.com/w7EMxs5CYs — RT (@RT_com) April 8, 2016
4 Allegations of using human shields
In November 2015 the group was exposed as using caged men and women as human shields in Eastern Ghouta. The people were reported to be Alawites, including military officers of the Syrian Army and their family members who had been taken captive.
5 Peace talks participant
In December 2015 Jaysh al-Islam sent a delegation to Riyadh, where Saudi Arabia was hosting a conference of Syrian armed groups. Mohammed Alloush, the brother of Jaysh al-Islam founder Zahran Alloush, was elected chief negotiator for UN-backed peace talks in Geneva. Zahran Alloush was reportedly killed by a Russian airstrike days later.A New York man was arrested Saturday after he allegedly bit the eye out of his family's Shih Tzu, officials announced Monday.
The Nassau County SPCA said in a news release 20-year-old Aaron Kluger of Port Washington, on Long Island, was arrested after an investigation by detectives.
Officials said the incident happened on Nov. 6, when the 3-year-old dog named Chloe was taken to an animal hospital with a "serious eye injury."
After Chloe was examined by a veterinarian, it was determined the dog's right eye was bitten out and the SPCA was notified.
The dog later received surgery to reattach her right eye.
"At this time, with proper care and treatment, the veterinarian is hopeful her eye will be saved," the SPCA said.
An SPCA spokesperson told Newsday the 20-year-old was arrested based on information given to the animal hospital by a family member who brought the dog in.
Kluger is due in court again on Dec. 27 to appear on a misdemeanor charge, according to the SPCA.ST. LOUIS — Police arrested 143 people after protesters blocked traffic on a busy highway near downtown St. Louis as part of the ongoing demonstrations against the acquittal of a white former police officer in the 2011 killing of a black man.
Protesters gathered Tuesday evening and marched to Interstate 64, where some walked onto the roadway and blocked traffic for several minutes. Police began arresting people after protesters left the highway.
Police haven't said what charges they will face. A spokeswoman for the Circuit Attorney's office said they likely will be charged in municipal court.
Authorities have made more than 300 arrests at demonstrations over the Sept. 15 acquittal of former Officer Jason Stockley in the shooting death of 24-year-old Anthony Lamar Smith following a high-speed chase.
Protesters and civil liberties groups have accused the authorities of using heavy-handed tactics against demonstrators.
In a lawsuit filed after about 120 people were arrested Sept. 17, the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri raised concerns about a police tactic known as "kettling," in which lines of officers move protesters into a limited area. The lawsuit also accused police of unnecessarily using of tear gas and pepper spray, arresting bystanders and journalist, and taunting some of those who were arrested.
Police have defended their actions, saying protesters threw rocks at officers, sprayed some with unknown substances and shattered shop windows.
The Rev. Darryl Gray, a protest organizer, was arrested Tuesday for the second time in five days. He was also arrested Friday during a protest near Busch Stadium.
"They kettled us again," Gray said in a phone interview shortly after being released from jail Wednesday. "No one resisted." He said two social media journalists and others not involved in the highway blockage were among those arrested.
By Wednesday afternoon, several of those arrested were still in jail while dozens of other protesters, some with tents, waited on the sidewalk outside for their release. Gray said virtually all of the people arrested were from the St. Louis area.
Protests have occurred in the suburbs, too, including a Sept. 23 demonstration at the St. Louis Galleria shopping mall in Richmond Heights that resulted in 22 arrests.
Earlier Tuesday, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner outlined to a city board a proposal that her office take over and lead all use-of-force investigations involving the police. She asked the Board of Aldermen for $1.3 million to launch an independent team that would include four prosecutors, five investigators and two support staff.
Currently, use-of-force cases are investigated internally by the police department's Force Investigation Unit.
"Both the community and police deserve an objective, fair and transparent investigation, and it is no longer acceptable for police to be essentially investigating themselves," Gardner said.
Lt. Roger Engelhardt, who heads the Force Investigation Unit, said Gardner is "naive" if she thinks her office's credibility also wouldn't be questioned. He stood by the investigations of his unit.
"Every investigation, you have to do the best job you can to be as fair and unbiased as you can," Engelhardt said.The math seems so simple. The Iraqi army has 250,000 troops; its enemies, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), somewhere around 7,000. The Iraqi army has tanks, planes, and American training. ISIS has never fielded a tank or a plane and its troops didn't get formal training from an advanced military. Yet ISIS is demolishing the Iraqi army on the battlefield, seizing a massive swath of the country's northwest. Why?
It comes down to two things: training and professionalism. ISIS learned how to fight, while the Iraqi army has long been a weak fighting force. All the weapons in the world won't matter if you don't know how to wield them. And ISIS's victories, not to mention the Iraqi army's repeated failures, tell you a lot about the country's larger crisis.
The Iraqi army has never been disciplined
In Mosul, Iraq's second most populous city, about 800 ISIS fighters invaded and sent 30,000 Iraqi army troops running. That's been portrayed as a sudden collapse of the Iraqi army, but that's not quite right. "The Iraqi army has been collapsing for months now," Yasser Abbas told me.
Abbas, originally from Baghdad, is an analyst at the private research and consulting firm Caerus Associates. Before that, he served as a linguist in for the military in Iraq from 2005 to 2009. "At the end of 2006, I was involved in training the Iraqi national police in Baghdad," he said. "The amount of corruption and under-training was [astounding]... insubordination became widespread."
So, for Abbas, the military's collapse "didn't happen at once. It's been happening for a very long time." For instance, the governor of Mosul ordered the military units in the area to go to a particular town, and "the battalion commander said no, it was too dangerous." It's the same insubordination problem the army has had for years.
And even when they do fight, many units aren't all that effective. "They'll stand up with a PKM [machine gun] and blast off 250 rounds" says Phillip Smyth, a researcher at the University of Maryland. "What is that doing?"
This isn't true of all Iraqi units, some of which, particularly around Baghdad, are quite well-trained. But many of the ones in the northern, Sunni-held regions of Iraq where ISIS made such large gains were some of the worst.
insubordination became widespread
How did the Iraqi army get this bad? One explanation is sectarianism: the Iraqi government is dominated by Shia Muslims, whereas ISIS and its allies are Sunnis. Perhaps Sunni soldiers in the mostly-Sunni northwest simply ran because they didn't want to fight for a Shia government.
There's some truth to this theory, but "it's been overblown," according to Abbas. Two other things stand out. First, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki significantly weakened the army. He replaced effective Sunni officers with Shia ones and well-trained generals with loyalists. As Slate's Joshua Keating explains quite well, this was an attempt to protect his own political position. A strong, independent army could launch a coup d'etat. An army filled with your cronies is safer.
But, as the decade-long history of Iraqi army failures suggest, it's not just about Maliki. Rather, it's that the modern Iraqi army simply has never been a particularly strong institution. From the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s to the Gulf War to the 2003 American-led invasion, Iraqi units have performed pretty poorly. When the US military tried to rebuild the Iraqi army essentially from scratch after disbanding it in 2003, it just didn't have a lot of raw material to work with.
ISIS advantages: training and experience
ISIS wasn't always strong enough to take real advantage of the Iraqi military's intrinsic weakness. "When the US fought ISIS in 2007, they were very weak," Abbas explained. "North of Baghdad, it took less than 24 hours for the whole organization to collapse in the face of a few soldiers and tribal militias."
But between 2007 and now, something changed. "When you like at the [ISIS] training videos from the mid 2000s, and compare them to ones from 2010, they're moving from terrorist tactics like how do you create an IED to things that include operations, strategy tactics," Nathaniel Rosenblatt, the head of Caerus' Middle East division, says.
Rosenblatt and Abbas say there's been an influx of skilled Saddam-era military leaders and soldiers into ISIS' ranks. "When you look at some of the reports about the leadership under [ISIS commander Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi," Rosenblatt said, "those second-in-command guys have very strong ties to Saddam's army." Acquiring lots of weapons, money, and experience over the course of the Syrian war allowed them to translate that new training into real military effectiveness.
It's hard to overstate how much of advantage this training and professionalism gives the Islamist group. "ISIS knows how to use smaller units" effectively against larger forces, says Smyth. They're "very efficient, and you have to deal with that."
This matters greatly. An undisciplined force, one whose movements aren't well coordinated or can't deploy proper tactics for taking city blocks, can be beaten by a much smaller opponent that knows what it's doing.
This puts the conflict into a weird sort of violent stasis
Superior training and motivation can also give defenders an extra edge. Smyth points to the World War II Battle of Wake Island as an example, where US troops held off a much larger Japanese force by digging in and creatively using their environment and dwindling resources. The Iraqi army has had a similarly tough time making progress in ISIS-held territory.
This leaves the conflict locked in a violent stasis. The Iraqi army will press ISIS-held territory, and possibly push them back on the margins, but it isn't strong enough to roll back ISIS all the way. "Bottom line: I think ISIS will be able to hold Mosul for some time," Rosenblatt says. "Unless Maliki is really pushed, I don't think he's going to be able to march all the way to Mosul with a Shia force. The political aspects are too sensitive."
Meanwhile, ISIS doesn't have the strength to challenge the more effective Iraqi army units defending Baghdad and the other largely Shia areas. "Technically, they do [want to take Baghdad]," Smyth says. "But I don't think they're stupid. They won't jump into the open jaws of the crocodile."
Three things could transform the conflict
There are three critical factors that could break this bloody status quo.
First, a collapse in ISIS' popular support. ISIS has a long history of brutal treatment of civilians, and every analyst I spoke to agreed that a loss in Sunni civilian support would be a back-breaker for ISIS. "Insurgencies can make do with passive support from the bulk of the population, but if an ideology is too radical, it risks sparking a backlash," said Jason Lyall, an expert on counterinsurgency at Yale University. "Given the size of the outflow of people from Mosul, it is apparent that ISIS' ideology may find little support among the civilian populace."
Second, either side's allies could alter the military balance dramatically. ISIS fights with a broad range of Islamist, tribal, and Saddam-loyalist groups; if those groups turn on ISIS, which they very well might, it could break the group's hold on the territory.
On the flip side, the Iraqi army is backed by Iran and several Shia militias. It's also recruited thousands of Shia volunteers — about 200,000, by All Iraq News Agency's count — for impromptu anti-ISIS militias. According to Abbas, this "massive Shia recruitment" could potentially shift the balance of power dramatically.
it's far, far too early to count ISIS out
Third, an unexpected military intervention by a third party. The semi-autonomous Kurdish area in northwest Iraq is adjacent to ISIS' stronghold. Their powerful military, which has already had small clashes with ISIS-aligned forces, could challenge ISIS. And who knows what effect large-scale a American air campaign against ISIS would have on the balance of power.
You may have noticed that all three of these scenarios trend badly for ISIS. That's true, and it's because ISIS has put itself in a precarious political position. It doesn't have any real reliable friends, and it's challenging a government that represents the Iraqi religious majority that also has backing from the United States and Iran.
But it's far, far too early to count ISIS out on the basis of hypothetical scenarios. Their military record in Iraq proves that they can outperform expectations.________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Remembering 1913
PLEASE NOTE: Next year marks the centenary of the 1913 Lockout. Workers from the Dock-side communities, North and South of the river, were very much to the forefront of the trade union militancy of the time. Members of the East Wall History Group are amongst those that are working together to ensure that the local aspects of this era are properly commemorated. We are anxious to talk to anybody who has any information on this period, most likely through stories passed on from parents or grandparents. If you have anything to contribute, no matter what it is, please get in touch, we would be delighted to talk to you.
eastwallhistory@gmail.com
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October 1915 – The revolutionary dockers in Dublin
In this month in 1915 the “revolutionary dockers in Dublin” were held up as an example by workers abroad. To find out the reason why, read the extract below, which first appeared in The History of the Irish Citizen Army by RM Fox, published in 1943.
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“The way to do peaceful picketing…”
During October of 1915, disputes occurred on the Dublin Docks, due to companies breaking their agreement with the dockers over rates of pay. Connolly wrote in the Workers’ Republic (October 16), that “in view of possible eventualities all the men on strike are undergoing a daily course of military drill.” On November 6, he wrote: “A large section has been formed for drill, and every day the men are instructed in military exercises. We are thus rapidly becoming the best drilled body of men in Ireland. For a time it was difficult to get our men trained, as dock work keeps men employed in the evenings, but the employers are kindly helping us to get over that difficulty. Company after company locks out its men, and then we bring them up to Liberty Hall and take advantage of the opportunity to drill and train them. When each dispute is settled, that squad of men goes back to work and some other squad gets locked out and we get a chance to train them.... And when it is over, the men will be back to work on the same rates of pay as their brothers have been conceded. And not a penny less.”
Eventually the docks dispute settled down to a long-drawn-out conflict with the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company. The strikers put on a picket at the North Wall, where clerks in the office were blacklegging on the dockers. The company had invoked the Munitions Act, which contained heavy penalties for strikers. A Nationalist M.P. visited Liberty Hall and threatened the Union with this Act. But the men were unimpressed. They were more perturbed at the way in which the way the police pushed the pickets around outside the shipping office. This seemed a reversion to the worst days of 1913.
Connolly received a report of this and decided that it must be stopped. So he ordered a squad of Citizen Army men to the number of eight or ten to march down the quays, fully equipped with rifles or bayonets, to act as armed pickets. The men obeyed with zest. Outside the offices they halted, formed in double line, and with shining bayonets, carried out their picket duty. Some of the clerks looked through the shed window and saw them marching up the quays. Seized with a guilty panic they bolted. The police then discovered that it was not their place to interfere with Union pickets. After this armed picketing, the dispute was quickly settled.
“It was the first time,” says a Citizen Army man who took part, “that armed workers carried out picket duty in a trade union dispute.”
The news of this event soon spread and John Maclean, the Glasgow revolutionary leader, recommended the Dublin method to workers in Glasgow. “The way to do peaceful picketing,” he cried exultantly at a meeting in the city, “is to march down with Lee Enfield rifles and not a scab on the horizon. Take a line from the revolutionary dockers in Dublin!”
From The History of the Irish Citizen Army RM Fox 1943
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Elsewhere in the same book, the importance of the Dock workers in the ranks of the Irish Citizen Army prior to the 1916 rising was referred to. The newspaper excerpt might be a clue to what the author is referring to.
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“They worked at awkward hours…”
It must, however, be emphasised here that the Citizen Army – a small force – turned out in practically full strength. Connolly’s own estimate of the numbers of the Citizen Army, given to John Hanratty in March, 1916, when they were both staying in Surrey House, was three hundred armed men. This included the “shot-gun men” – a reserve of dockers who did not parade or drill with the Army, partly because they worked at awkward hours and also because it was thought that they might be more useful at the docks it they were not identified with the general body.
From “The History of the Irish Citizen Army” RM Fox 1943
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Troops on duty on North Wall during earlier strike.
eastwallhistory@gmail.comboost.heap is an implementation of priority queues. Priority queues are queue data structures, that order their elements by a priority. The STL provides a single template class std::priority_queue, which only provides a limited functionality. To overcome these limitations, boost.heap implements data structures with more functionality and different performance characteristics. Especially, it deals with additional aspects:
Mutability : The priority of heap elements can be modified.
: The priority of heap elements can be modified. Iterators : Heaps provide iterators to iterate all elements.
: Heaps provide iterators to iterate all elements. Mergable : While all heaps can be merged, some can be merged efficiently.
: While all heaps can be merged, some can be merged efficiently. Stability : Heaps can be configured to be stable sorted.
: Heaps can be configured to be stable sorted. Comparison : Heaps can be compared for equivalence.Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) candidate from Lok Sabha constituency has declared a total assets of Rs 12,781. He does not have any immovable assets.
Agarwal declared Rs 1,871 in savings bank account and Rs 5,000 cash in hand and a mobile phone of Rs 6,000 value thereby totalling Rs 12,781.
He made the declaration while filing nomination papers from the constituency the other day.
Alok holds a bachelor degree from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur in Chemical engineering. He is associated with (NBA) for the last 25 years. Alok who is not married hails from Lucknow but has fought for cause of oustees of controversial Shree Maheshwar Hydel Power Project, Omkareshwar hydel power project and Indira Sagar Power project.
He makes his living through an honorarium of Rs 5,000 which he receives from NBA. The other contestants from the constituency are Nandkumar Chouhan of BJP and Arun Yadav of Congress who is state unit president of the Congress party.A fuel rod at the nuclear plant Ringhals located on the southwest coast of Sweden was damaged yesterday during an inspection with a robotic arm.
Krister Svahn, the press officer for the plant, told the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that the situation is under control.
The four metre fuel rod was damaged last year and has been in storage since then.
The rod broke in two while being checked for damage,” said Svahn. “One part slid back into its socket while the other remained in the tool that was being used to lift the rod.”
Still hot
Svahn said that wand was still radioactive, but about 90 percent less than it has been. He also said that it was too early to determine if the accident will present challenges when the damaged rod needs to be moved off site.
“All work is stopped for now and we are continuing to analyse the situation,” he said. “For now the rod is safe and secure where it is.”
READ MORE: More nuclear power flowing through Danish outlets
The nuclear power plant has been in contact with all relevant authorities, but the incident – which happened at about 5pm yesterday afternoon – does not appear to have caused elevated radioactivity.
Denmark does not operate any atomic plants, but about 14 percent of DONG’s energy supply comes |
on a barracks, officials say
The interior ministry says several members of the armed forces and civilians were also killed in clashes
(CNN) At least 43 militants have been killed in clashes following an attack on a military barracks near Tunisia's border with Libya, Tunisia's defense ministry said Wednesday.
Seven suspected terrorists were also arrested after the attack in the town of Ben Gardane, the ministry statement said.
Air patrols in the area around the border have intensified, and the main crossings with Libya -- Ras Ajdir and Dheiba -- were closed Tuesday.
Authorities asked residents in Ben Gardane to stay indoors and report any suspicious activity.
CNN Map
Human rights activist Mustapha Abdelkebir in Ben Gardane told CNN that a senior counter terror official -- his relative -- was among the dead.
Read MoreYEREVAN, JULY 18, ARMENPRESS. Director of the International Secretariat of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation Bureau Giro Manoyan says after the failed coup Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will continue his policy, and the relations with Armenia are not priority for Turkey. It is also not clear what policy the military officials would carry in case of succeeding, what impact it would have on Turkey and Armenia.
“The Turkish army has been famous for its much tougher policy on a number of foreign affairs, including also the Armenian question. We cannot say that their success will definitely have positive impact on Armenia. After the failure I can say Erdogan will continue his policy, this means that the relations with Armenia are not priority for Turkey, and especially after this incident. Turkey will continue its same policy. It has close cooperation with Azerbaijan and this will remain the same”, “Armenpress” reports, Giro Manoyan said.
As for Russia-Turkey-Azerbaijan relations, Giro Manoyan said the further close cooperation can create a concern among us. “Russia’s relations with Turkey and Azerbaijan are for economic reasons, it is to some extent not beneficial for us. Russia’s selling weapons to Azerbaijan causes concern, and if the Turkish-Russian relations normalize, it can be more concerning since the economic ties may merge into military ones”, Giro Manoyan stated. He said Armenia must be alert and attentive, follow all developments for correctly defending its interests.
Giro Manoyan said Turkey will conduct policy of diverting the attention from its internal issues not only over the Karabakh issue, but also on a number of foreign issues, but its internal issues are so deep that it will make the Turkish leadership face that issue. “We must expect intrigues in the regional policy, that’s why we must be alert and united”, Giro Manoyan concluded.
Nearly 290 people were killed in the failed military coup attempt in Turkey on July 15. According to official data, the number of wounded is 1440.The Productivity Commission’s recent report on Australia’s urban water sector sets out the economic case for reform. One reform they suggest: remove water conservation measures.
In Melbourne, most people would agree that water restrictions are a pain. However, restrictions account for only a fraction of the water savings generated by a range of water conservation programs.
It is conservation programs like these that the Commission recommends removing, and these programs that effectively stopped Melbourne from running out of water during the recent drought.
Water conservation programs have been extremely effective in reducing household demand for water in Melbourne. Demand dropped from an annual average of about 250 L per person per day in the 1990s to just below 155 L now.
More remarkable is that Melbourne’s total demand has dropped from 500 GL per year to below 370 GL (GL = gigalitre, or one billion litres) in conjunction with a population increase of more than half a million people.
Water conservation measures include low flow fittings, water saving shower heads, appliance efficiency standards, behaviour change campaigns (such as Target 155), and rebates on water saving products.
In its report, the Productivity Commission contends that “…demand side management and water conservation programs are imposing large costs on consumers per unit of water saved that far outweigh the cost of supplying them with water”.
True, the cost of supplying water is dirt cheap, so you would need to save a lot of water to pay off the cost of, say, a water saving shower head.
However, most people like their showers hot, and that uses energy and energy also costs money. So the real benefits arise from the reduced cost of the water and the reduced cost of gas and electricity.
In fact, the energy used to heat water in the average domestic hot water unit is about ten times the energy used to desalinate the same volume of water. Hot water is one of the largest energy uses at home.
A broader “systemic” look at the situation would include things like the energy saved by low flow shower heads, the ecological benefits to our rivers…even the good feelings generated by catching that first flush of shower water in a bucket.
The Productivity Commission should be commended for promoting “adaptive management” of water. Adaptive management is essentially learning by doing: implementing and monitoring plans and policies and then improving the process through learning.
Managing water based on historical averages is no longer viable. Flexibility and adaptability are crucial in a highly variable environment – economic efficiency alone is a poor measure of performance.
The Commission’s critique of one-size-fits-all approaches to water management opens the way for a greater diversity of water supply, disposal and re-use systems. For example, different customers could purchase different levels of service. The thinking espoused in the Living Melbourne, Living Victoria Roadmap provides a good model for this.
Finally, the Productivity Commission needs to think beyond its focus on water delivery. Water conservation measures, along with water sensitive urban design and local water solutions, provide benefits beyond just water supply. These include reduced energy use, protection of urban waterways and less pressure on water catchments.
In the meantime, whatever the economists say, we should continue to conserve water - Melbourne’s next drought is likely to be the rule rather than the exception."Did you say Natalie Ferno?"
Exa just took a mobile phone call while travelling through the Channel Tunnel. This is a completely normal thing that he can do. He was bound for the bomb site already, but the specific task of interrogating this one woman has only just arrived.
"Affirma--"
"Natalie Ferno?"
"Affirmative," Casaccia repeats. "Problem?"
"Check your files," Exa says.
"Hmm?"
"We have history with that woman. Four years ago. I don't blame you for trying to forget about it. Look her up, do it now. The relevant keyword is 'fiasco'."
Casaccia does so. Some seconds elapse as he reads. His eventual response is a long inhalation followed by a single, drawn-out swear word.
Exa sighs. He sometimes thinks he's the only competent person in the entire organisation.
*
Zeck's been called Zeck for so long that it even appears on official University documentation. Sometimes people who don't know him well try to call him by his birth name, but it always comes off as slightly insulting, not just because they inevitably mangle it, but because "Zeck" is, according to everybody including Zeck, the man's real name.
Zeck's wife calls him Zeck.
Their house is built wholly from flat surfaces: windowsills, mantlepieces, side tables, nooks. Every flat surface is covered with greying knick-knacks. The place would be a nightmare to dust if either of them dusted it. Zeck is old and immobile enough that he's one of the few theoretical magic tutors to host tutorial sessions at his own home. He and Natalie usually work at the kitchen table, which, while it is as cluttered with objects as any other flat surface in the house, is at least cluttered with objects which can be picked up and piled up elsewhere.
Zeck is a perfectly cordial human being, and a fine tutor. His house makes Nat's skin crawl. It's a cold place, too. It rattles in the wind.
It's the first term of Nat's first undergraduate year. Zeck tutors Phonic Algebra. Out of all of introductory theoretical magic, Phonic Algebra is the course which would be the least recognisable to students of, say, physics. Magic has a language: an alphabet, a vocabulary, a grammar and an accent. Everything a mage says means something. Every syllable does something to the preceding syllables and to the universe. The topic is "basic", in that it forms the basis for almost all magical theory, but it is also riddled with traps, one-time exceptions and maddeningly finely-distinguished vowel sounds.
It is extremely easy to write down spells which work perfectly on paper and which no human tongue can possibly pronounce.
Another fun fact: in 1978, a long but startlingly elegant theorem by Shilmani proved that the language of magic had a name. That is, that the language of magic contained within itself a name for the language of magic. The proof was not constructive; it was only in 1980 that Shilmani went on to prove that the name of the language of magic was, in fact, the empty string.
Point being, magic is so complicated as to be embarrassing, and protecting wannabe mages from that complexity is a great way to protect them from becoming mages. Phonic Algebra is the sharp end of the intro. It is the mandatory course which turns wannabe mages into either serious mages-in-training or equally serious electrical engineers.
"You did something interesting," Zeck says, beginning the session. He is reviewing Natalie's solutions to problems set the previous week. "Question ten. You solved it and then you overshot a little."
"What? Ah."
"Would you want to explain? You overflowed onto a whole back page of extra working. I'm not complaining, it's just that there aren't any extra marks back there."
"Does it make sense?"
"It does," Zeck says, nodding many times. "Where did it come from?"
Ultimately, it came from her mother. It was a curious and abstract result which, for Natalie, had existed in complete vacuum, memorable and yet pointless. It had never made sense to her until she saw question ten. And then it had been like applying voltage to a tangle of dull glass, and seeing the neon colours light up inside it.
But Natalie automatically withholds the whole truth.
"It just... worked."
Zeck says, "You got the question correct. That's fine, we don't need to belabour that. The 'extra credit' is correct as well. Except that this is a quite novel result. I haven't seen it before. Now--"
Zeck is old enough to predate magical science. Mages can be broadly broken down into two categories: those under forty, who essentially grew up inside magic, and those over forty, who retrained from some other discipline, and had to retrain hard to hold their own. Zeck was a respectable applied mathematician when upstart magic began muscling in on the research funding. He has seen magic unfold, live. He was one of the few people on Earth - other than the very earliest pioneers, the Vidyasagar enclave - to know, at one moment in time, all of the magic that was known by anyone at that time. That moment is a decade and a half in the past now, but the point still stands that if Zeck hasn't seen something before, there's a bankable probability that nobody has seen it before.
"--that's not to say it's going to shatter the Earth. It could be worth pursuing formally. Academically. Although it could equally be a little early for you, career-wise. Before we embark on that particular ship, I need to ask you again, are you sure this isn't derived from anywhere? Extracurricular reading?"
"No," Natalie lies.
"Then I think I might try it out," Zeck announces. Although specialising in theory, Natalie has been required to take a fixed quantity of practical courses. That means she's bound herself a True Name - once, with help - and can confidently get as far as eset, which is the magical equivalent of Chopsticks. Zeck is better-positioned to try a real spell out, although it would still be a break from habit. "It'll take some time to glom it together into a real spell, but I shall see whether I can find the time."
"That's, ah. Thank you. I didn't think it was important."
"It may not be! But, regardless, it's novel. We'll find out, if I can find the time," Zeck says. "Actually, what I shall do first is read around the subject a little and see whether I can't see whether it's been done. But, otherwise. If. Et cetera. So. No problems with questions one to nine. Ten is correct. Eleven is where you started to hit problems..."
This is Zeck and Natalie's second-to-last tutorial session of the academic term.
Their final session is a week later. Both of them have forgotten about the earlier discussion.
(Well, actually, Zeck has indeed tried the spell out, but the effects were forgettable. So, he decides not to mention it, unless Natalie raises the topic. Natalie correctly infers Zeck's line of reasoning, and does not mention it either. But it's the same thing in the end.)
After that, Phonic Algebra is over. Christmas is next, and in the spring, Natalie will move on to a whole new collection of courses and tutors.
Over Christmas, Natalie's near-identical twin sister is stabbed in the kidney by a man whom she (the sister) then kills in self-defence.
*
Exa's in lecturing mode.
"A refresher for anybody who's listening: the Natalie Ferno fiasco is what happens when someone other than Caz is on security duty. It's what happens when Scott fucking Parajsa decides to hit a person for no good damned reason and then delegates the hit to external third parties who'll screw it up at any cost. Instead of, for example, me.
"Where is he right now? Drunk? In Chile? Best place. It's a travesty that we left him his privileges.
"I am one hundred percent in favour of killing people who need to be killed. Natalie Ferno did not need to be killed. Wiktor Czekanowski, may he rest in peace, did not need to be killed.
"Who knows what Ferno would have done if she'd linked the attack back to us?"
*
It's months later, the following year. Over coffee, Laura has just given Natalie two gifts: a self-defence shield spell, and a warning. "Be safe."
Natalie spends the whole journey home checking over her shoulder and working out what she needs to do to be safe.
Suppose someone really tried to kill her. Not her sister, at random. Her. On purpose. They botched it, and lay low for months. Why didn't they come back? Will they? When? She knows nothing for certain. But the probabilities are high enough that she can't ignore them.
She has never felt like this. It's as if the whole outside world is flooded with ionising radiation. Being in public is dangerous exposure, and the longer she stays there, the more likely she is to die.
First of all, she tries the shield out. She can't make it work. She has just enough capability to understand that the gift, EPTRO, is far beyond that capability. Next, she rearranges her academic schedule to allow time for a self-directed crash course in applied magic and twenty hours of structured meditation per week. Knowing the exercises isn't enough. She needs to get her mind back into shape.
Once she can reliably cast the shield, and has tested its capabilities, Natalie's simmering fear begins to level off. The need to carry both the bangle and the driver dot is still a liability. She gets one ear pierced, and carries out a highly specialised optimisation computation that enables her to discard the bangle entirely.
Suppose someone tried to kill her. Why?
Natalie reviews every page of work she's produced since her education in magic began. She eliminates the obvious-- that is, the results that are known to the whole world. This leaves her with a relatively small pool of what are essentially magical doodles. She cross-references by time frame, reducing the pool further. But it's just paperwork. Theory.
What about practice?
Practical magic releases floods of chi particles. Chi particles are usually described as neutrinos with attached metadata. They are almost non-interacting unless deliberately intercepted.
Natalie imagines the Big Brother future. She imagines the magical equivalent of a directional microphone, trained directly on her head, recording every spell she ever casts. Natalie works with theory. She can enumerate almost every spell she ever cast, there are so few.
She imagines everybody in the world with an identical microphone pointed at them. Has anybody else ever cast a spell she wrote? Could that have been tracked back to her?
Oscillating crazily between conclusions, she calls Zeck's number.
The person she reaches is his widow.
The last winter, Natalie learns, had been too hard for Zeck. He became terribly ill, terribly quickly. Pneumonia.
*
"Caz, another thing. Did you say Nat Ferno witnessed the bombing of her sister's house?"
"Yeah," Casaccia tells Exa. "That's what the news is saying."
"From where?"
Casaccia pulls the relevant feed up again. Delving into the records like this is starting to bring on a headache, because he's not doing it the right way. Scin, the seer, would be able to do a better job, but is still hours away.
Shortly, Casaccia will remember that he is a Wheel Group member, and set his kara to chase the headache away. But he's going to suffer for another twenty or thirty minutes before that.
"She--" he begins.
Exa responds with patient silence.
Casaccia is now looking at a single frame with three labelled green pinpricks. "She was one of the two who were blown up."
"Natalie Ferno gave the police an eyewitness account of the bombing... from beyond the grave?"
"I'm watching in slow motion," Casaccia says. "They weren't killed. The bomber dies instantly. She and the other man... exit the house at high speed when the detonation takes place. Blown away. A few minutes pass and they get up. Perfectly healthy....Could they have been wearing medrings?"
"Or some kind of shield," Exa says. "We repossessed Rachel Ferno's medring, there's no way she passed anything similar down to her heirs. Without being stupid, could they have survived if they were wearing bomb-disposal gear?"
"Impossible," Casaccia says.
"A shield, then," Exa concludes. "They survived using magic."
Casaccia frowns, winding the feed back and forth. "Erm."
"'Erm'?"
"Give me one second."
There is no chi on the feed.
Maybe the bomber's akashic scrambler had a wide field effect. Wide enough to blot out everything out to Natalie Ferno's final resting place, on the other side of the street.
But the bomber dies. Less than a tenth of a second after detonation, he has ceased to exist.
And there's still no chi on the feed.
*
It's months later still and Natalie is flying home from Iceland with her mind racing. Frightening, inexplicable things have just happened. Ra isn't the half of it.
("This isn't you, Benj! So who is it?" she had shouted at him. "I told you," he had replied. "I've been telling you and telling you--")
Her mystery spell - well, subspell - is an odd piece of rough working. She can compute, to any number of decimal places, what it really does. What she can't predict is how reality will react to it, which means she has to try it and see. But if she tried the spell in reality, chi would flood out and give her away, just like it gave Zeck away. It would mark her as a confirmed threat. To whom, she doesn't know. She can't know that yet.
She could suppress the chi output. That much, she has (with difficulty, in secret) proven. But suppressing the output would require a whole different spell, and that would release its own chi, which could still be tracked. She'd need to suppress the chi output from that second spell using a third. And so on, recursing forever. In theory, it could be done very easily... using a spell which was infinitely long and infinitely complex, because no finite spell can completely describe its own structure.
Unless, that is, you know the first thing about quines.
Natalie Ferno thought quine spells couldn't exist. And then, on the mountain a few days ago, she saw a counterexample with her own eyes.
Natalie doesn't know that Benjamin "Ra" Clarke built his quine with mechanical assistance from an astra, an ungodly dangerous artifact from before the dawn of time; a machine which enables spells to cast spells. With that object in one's hands, building something like an akashic scrambler is made shockingly simple.
But Natalie also doesn't know that the artifact in question is just a shortcut, a labour-saving device. Like riding a helicopter to the peak of K2, it does nothing that a sufficiently determined human being couldn't do unaided.
Theoretically.
All Natalie knows is that it's possible.
*
"She's wearing a scrambler as well," Casaccia says.
"For how long," Exa asks carefully, "has she been wearing it?"
"I don't know," Casaccia admits, exasperated. "I don't know! I'm working on it. I haven't had five seconds in a row to think about this yet."
Exa says, "Scott Parajsa acted because of a worst-case scenario in which Natalie Ferno, or Wiktor Czekanowski, or both, had used that oracular spell and had seen the listening post, or the distributor, or both. Or worse, Ra. Nat Ferno found a loophole in magic through which she would be able to see us. But all the evidence suggested that she was dropping the thread. That it was a non-issue. We set tripwires just in case it became one.
"And now?"
*
It's months later, months later, months later again--
Natalie Ferno, thaumoastrophysicist, is looking for evidence of magic in space. The project is ongoing. It's too early to judge yet, but she already knows what she's going to find.
You can't prove a negative. It doesn't matter how much data you gather. It will always be possible to rationalise the gathering of additional data for the purposes of confirmation.
It will always be possible to justify withholding the truth. One more month. Two more months.
Laura Ferno is a bad scientist-- rash and far too reckless. And Natalie Ferno is a bad scientist too, in her own way.
*
Exa doesn't let Casaccia get a word in. "Parajsa's bad call made the worst-case scenario happen. We're so far beyond it that we need to recalibrate. Who knows how long she's been hiding from us? Who knows what she's actually seen?"
*
It's now.
In Chedbury Bridge reception, Natalie Ferno has assumed the "thinking king" pose: slouched to one side in an armchair, the fingers of one hand against her temple and cheek, staring directly forwards at something extremely important which nobody else can see. Beside her, her coffee is levelling off at room temperature.
She and Devi have been locked out. They're off the case now, too close to the source material to be allowed to pass judgement. Certainly, they've been kept separate from any and all instances of Ra. With a little effort, the police will be able to find other, independent mages to pick the pieces up.
This leaves Natalie with a very small pool of known facts.
There's a telescope pointed down into the Earth. I walked past it twice. Once on the way in. Once on the way out.
It had moved. I know it moved, because I was looking for it.
There is a way to make sense of all of this. Even without access to the evidence that the police are holding, there is a straight line through to the far side. But she can't find it.
"I'm sorry," Anil Devi says, sitting near her with his own drink.
Natalie carefully avoids reacting to him.
"I'm sorry about your sister," Devi continues. "I barely worked with her, but... she was a great engineer. Forceful. Uncompromising. She almost always had the right answer."
"She and I died once before," Natalie tells him, not moving. She speaks softly and lightly, as if reciting a fairy tale. "We were on a volcanic mountain in Iceland, called Krallafjöll. We were there with a friend named Benjamin Clarke. He had been possessed by Ra. He blew the mountain up below us, and we drowned in lava.
"We survived inside a shield, perhaps for ninety seconds, or two minutes. Then Laura and I ran out of mana, and the shield collapsed on us, and we were killed. Crushed to ashes and burnt to atoms."
Devi has no response to this.
Natalie says, "Before running out of air, we escaped into T-world together. And while inside the dream we watched ourselves die. And then all three of us, Laura and the real Benj and I, walked home from the dream. And I still..." Natalie doesn't finish the sentence.
"How did you walk home?" Devi asks, gently.
Natalie ignores the question. "We did it once. Laura can do it again. She's alive."
"No." Devi takes Natalie's hand. "Your sister's dead. So is her boyfriend. You saw the buckets. You identified what was left." Devi is having to steel himself to say this, because he, too, has seen the buckets, and Jesus Christ.
"This all began with a conservation violation, Anil," Natalie tells him. "Laura's still alive. She's still in trouble. And we still need to find her."Maltese police have effectively shelved an investigation into former European Commissioner John Dalli, who resigned last October, dialing up the political heat on Giovanni Kessler, Europe’s anti-fraud chief who directed the probe into what predictably came known as Dalligate.
Mr. Kessler’s report last October into allegations that a businessman friend of Mr. Dalli sought a €60 million bribe from tobacco firm Swedish Match was the biggest political scandal to hit the European Union’s executive in years, leading rapidly to Mr. Dalli’s ouster and a criminal probe in Malta.
The alleged bribe was supposed to deliver Mr. Dalli’s backing to ease a ban on the sale of snus, a smokeless tobacco manufactured by Swedish Match AB, according to the anti-fraud office report.
Over the weekend, Malta’s new police chief Paul Zammit said there was no evidence to incriminate Mr. Dalli, although he said the probe was not closed.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Monday, Mr. Dalli—who has always denied the allegations–said he considered the police chief’s weekend comments to have cleared his name.Chicago Whitney Young High School center Jahlil Okafor, ESPN's No. 1-ranked junior, announced Wednesday a list of eight schools he's still considering in his recruitment.
Jahlil Okafor may want to play collegiately with Chicago Curie junior power forward Cliff Alexander. Kelly Kline/Getty Images
Okafor tweeted that his final list of schools -- in alphabetical order -- consists of Arizona, Baylor, Duke, Illinois, Kentucky, Kansas, Michigan State and Ohio State.
The 6-foot-11, 270-pound Okafor averaged 21 points and nine rebounds during his junior season. He finished second to Simeon senior Jabari Parker, a Duke recruit, in the voting for Illinois' Mr. Basketball.
Illinois was a surprise to some to be included on Okafor's final list, but Mac Irvin Fire coach Mike Irvin, Okafor's club coach, said the Illini's status had improved in recent weeks.
"Jahlil went back to the drawing board, looked at his recruiting, talked to his dad and family," Irvin said. "After looking at everything, looking at the style of play, the great job coach [John] Groce has done at Illinois, he could see himself playing at Illinois.
"They definitely have a legitimate shot at getting him. Jahlil, he's really taking his recruiting seriously and has analyzed a few things in the past couple weeks. Every school on the list he's serious about going to."
Illinois is also recruiting Okafor's club teammate, Chicago Curie junior power forward Cliff Alexander, who is ranked No. 8 by ESPN. Irvin said Okafor and Alexander could end up together at Illinois.
"I could see that," Irvin said. "I could see them playing for the state school. I think they're the two best players in the country, period."
Okafor and Apple Valley (Minn.) point guard Tyus Jones, ESPN's No. 2-ranked senior, also have previously said they would like to play together in college. Jones' list of finalists includes Baylor, Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan State, Minnesota and Ohio State.Rooney (Kevin Dillon): [Standing in line for confession] Hey, Williams, you got your list? Williams (Stephen Geoffreys): Oh, yeah. Rooney: Let’s have a look. [Reading Williams’ list] Rooney: Jesus! You got here you jerked off 168 times? And it’s been one month since your last confession? That’s an average of… Williams: 5.6 times a day. Rooney: Oh, my God, you can’t tell him that. He’ll cut your balls off. – From the 1985 movie Heaven Help Us
For anyone who did time in Catholic school, speeches on the peril of wayward adolescent sexuality probably echo in the subconscious even as some of us move rapidly toward our late thirties. “There is a beast living in each and everyone of you,” Father Abrizi (Wallace Shawn) tells his youthful Brooklyn charges just prior to a local mixer between local Catholic schools St. Basil and Our Lady of the Virgin Martyr in the 1985 comedy Heaven Help Us. “A filthy beast name lust! Lust is the Beast within you!” Abrizi continues his admonishment warning the students that winged, sharp-toothed creatures from hell would one day rip their lust filled souls apart for indiscretions like those discussed by Kevin Dillon’s Rooney and Stephen Geoffrey’s Williams. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert reminisced about the kind of sexual cautions his own Catholic instructors threw his way: “I remember a priest once warning my class, ‘Never touch yourselves, boys’ – without telling us where.”
While Heaven Help Us depicted the lives of a handful of Brooklyn kids attending Catholic school in 1966, its release in 1985 points to Catholicism’s expanding place in the public sphere of a nation built on Protestantism. As Daniel T. Rodgers points out in his new work Age of Fracture, the 1980s witnessed the blossoming of the Church’s political voice, a voice that had been muted for much of the twentieth century. Bishop protests in 1983 over nuclear armament, the 1986 statement Economic Justice for All, and the Catholic Church’s central role in the Pro-Life movement, demonstrated a new cultural impulse, “the signs of a minority religious culture finding a new assertive voice,” notes Rodgers.[1]
For the past two weeks, ToM has been publishing responses to Rodgers work. Joel Suarez and Alex Cummings provide valuable overviews, with the latter wondering how exactly we parse out causation from Rodger’s examples. Andrew Edwards points out one of the book’s fundamental contributions: a veritable catalogue of “elite failure,” a point the aforementioned Suarez might concede, but with the caveat that throughout Fracture, intellectual debates and transformations at the heart of fragmentation rub up against the political asphalt of the period. Mark Sholdice highlights the surprising transnational aspects of Rodger’s work, notably the connection between Canadian cultural policy debates and America’s adoption and deployment of multiculturalism. Finally, Brian Ingrassia asserts that while undeniably valuable, Fracture’s basic premise might be better described not as disassemblage, but breakdown and reassembly. “I would borrow Rodgers’s own terminology to say that the 1970s-1990s might better be understood as an age of disaggregation and reaggregation,” suggests the Middle Tennessee State professor.
As one might surmise, all this insightful commentary leaves little meat on the proverbial bone. Yet, Rodger’s discussion of Catholicism and its move toward the public square in the last quarter of the 20th century in some ways demonstrates Suarez’s point about the book’s theoretical underpinnings colliding with real life. As a “big idea” book, Rodgers impressively synthesizes a vast array of seminal late twentieth century scholarship. His ability to place these diverse social, economic, and political movements in dialogue speaks to his formidable talents. However, “big idea” books are about sweeping conclusions and demand both depth and brevity. Rodgers bravely and successfully summarizes and connects works by Foucault, Geertz, Rawls, and dozens of others. Still, one doesn’t witness what this means for average people. Though as an invaluable “catalogue of elite failure,” Fracture tells us much, much less about how average people absorbed these ideas. By no means does this undermine the book’s worth; intellectual histories, more often than not, focus on elites, but when coupled with a careful curatorial attention to pop culture and current events, connecting Rodger’s abstractions with everyday life can brightly illuminate subjects and individuals. In this regard, the Catholic Church provides a fine example.
According to Rodgers, abortion sparked the new, more vigorous cultural presence that came to define the Church in the late twentieth century. As suggested by Heaven Help Us, sexuality has long provided leaders – both lay and clergy – in the Catholic Church with an evil worth combating. That abortion would serve as the initial means to enter into the burgeoning “culture wars” – the term that came to serve as lazy shorthand for the kind of social, economic, and political fracture of the century’s last twenty five years – should be unsurprising. Despite historic antipathy toward one another, evangelical Protestants and Catholics forged an anti-abortion alliance in the 1980s and 1990s that repeatedly challenged the provisions of Roe v. Wade and abortion access
The story of late twentieth century American Catholicism occupies a small, but significant place in Rodgers’s new work. Abortion may have been the driving force, but more progressive constituencies within the Church mobilized to raise public awareness about the broader concerns. For example, Chicago’s Cardinal Joseph Bernardin talked about a “’seamless garment of life’” that included protections for the unborn but also the poor. Bernardin’s “seamless garment” also laid out a “comprehensive program of human rights and social justice” that more progressive Catholics could embrace.[2]
While conservative sexuality may have been the dominant theme, other issues drew the attention of Catholic leaders and parishioners. In 1986, in their pastoral letter on economic inequality, Economic Justice for All, Catholic bishops broke with their evangelical allies in questioning the centrality of markets and advocated for the indigent. “’The poor have the single most urgent economic claim on the conscience of the nation,’” the bishops wrote.[3] Two years earlier, an internal feminist opposition within the Church arose to challenge the constant anti-abortion drumbeat. A full page add in the New York Times, signed by over 100 Catholic women, many of them nuns, dissented from leadership’s position on abortion.[4] Clearly, even the Catholic Church, argues Rodgers, struggled to unite its flock under one message as competing factions – conservative, progressive and moderate – vied for influence. “There is no coherent ‘Catholic vote’ that coalesces around distinct issues and cuts across ethnic lines,” the Economist argued in 2012. Catholic doctrine supports causes on the left and right so fealty to a political party depended more on other factors than religious belief, though as documented by Rodgers, more religious Catholics have increasingly joined forces with other equally devout Christians on issues like resisting provisions of Obamacare that required Catholic institutions to offer health plans that included birth control coverage. American Catholics, the newspaper argued, were “more polarized and diverse” than ever before.
Politically and culturally, Catholicism has become more visible, in part due to the community’s value as a voting bloc. Nearly 70 million strong, one in every four voters is Catholic, a ratio that has stayed roughly the same for decades, but population shifts in recent years, to the Sunbelt from the urban Northeast and Midwest have altered politics. Remember Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign? During her run, Clinton’s campaign sometimes described her as the “tough nun” you had in school, a tactic directed at white working class voters uncomfortable with the cooler, more reserved Barack Obama. In a notable SNL Weekend Update skit, Tina Fey satirized critics who argued Clinton was too much of a “bitch” to be President. “Bitches get stuff done,” asserted Fey. “That’s why Catholic schools use nuns to teach and not priests. Those nuns are mean, old clams and they sleep on cots and they’re allowed to hit you.” Sure, Fey admitted, at the end of the school year “you hated these bitches, but you knew the capital of Vermont.”
The 2008 Meryl Streep/Philip Seymour Hoffman film Doubt, based on the award winning play, serves as another example, but one that also demonstrates the problematic nature of “big idea” books to fully address the lives of average Americans. Were you to depend exclusively on Rodgers for information about late 20th century Catholicism, an individual might walk away thinking the Church an institution of internal debate and occasional controversy, but moral fortitude and force. In Doubt, Sister Aloysius Beauvier believes popular new priest, Father Brendan Flynn (Hoffman), to be guilty of child molestation. While the movie never proves Sister Beauvier’s suspicions, nor does it dismiss them; instead, the movie suggests ambiguity. In the end, even Beauvier is left to confess she has “doubt.”
Though taking place in the 1960s, Doubt refracted the trauma of the Church’s woeful record of child abuse that in America has crippled the institution over the past decade and a half. While officials denounced abortion, declared protection of the poor, and opposed nuclear proliferation, its leadership knowingly tolerated child abuse. Tragic, |
chief and his followers as they are accused of exploiting innocent female followers," says Vijay Bhardwaj.
Interestingly, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh - the controversial Dera Sacha Sauda Chief who added Ram and Rahim to his name saying that it would send out the message that the Dera is a confluence of all religions - is now accused of himself disturbing communal harmony between the two religions.
Also Watch : Dera's WhatsApp gang: How Honeypreet, Ram Rahim's aides are outsmarting Haryana cops“He’s a smart guy and works at it, so he’s much further ahead now than he was last week,” Shanahan said on Wednesday. “I expect that to be week-to-week to continue to get further ahead.”
Garoppolo also assessed his progress. The quarterback has been hard at work getting a grasp of Shanahan’s playbook and is eager to make his 49ers debut.
“I had a pretty good feel for what I knew and what I didn’t. I’m trying to learn the whole thing as fast as possible. The faster we get there, the better.”
Shanahan explained that should Beathard have gone down with an injury last week against the Arizona Cardinals, he had a separate call sheet strictly for Garoppolo. The list featured approximately 25 run plays and 20 pass plays, according to Shanahan.
He added that Garoppolo needed to know the verbiage for each one and know how to check out of each play if it wasn’t a good look. Garoppolo proved he was capable of the task towards the end of last week which is why the 49ers didn’t bring up Nick Mullens from the practice squad.
Even so, there still is no timetable for when Garoppolo might take over the starting job.
“Hopefully it’s sooner than later, but again I’m not setting a date on it,” Shanahan said. “I think I’m very eager too and excited to see him out there. That doesn’t always mean that’s the right decision, so that’s what I’m trying to balance out. If I just went off impulse and feeling, I would have done that the very first day, the very first second.A lot of the time romance books are referred to as perfect for easy summer reading: perfect for lying in the sun with nothing to do but read and dream. For me, though, the perfect time to chill out with a light-hearted, fun book that is full of hope, love and heartbreak is the autumn. The evenings draw in and the temperature drops and its time to curl up inside and pick up a book that will transport me away. That is the mood I’ve been in lately and, as a result, I’ve read through quite a few YA romances. I’d thought I’d share my thoughts on them with you.
I have included those books which I enjoyed the most and are purely romance based. It’s true some are generic and it’s true that this isn’t necessarily the type of reading that stretches brain cells and even makes you think big thoughts. They are fun and dreamy: that is the point. I don’t see the harm in reading books of this type – I do think it’s better if they are not the only type of book you read, though. I also think you have to be realistic. These romances are pure escapism, they are not necessarily real life. Or at least the whole stories are not like real life, even though certain incidents you read or certain characters or even the emotions described are real and you can identify with them.
Adorkable by Sarra Manning – Jeane is unusual. She is in senior school, lives on her own, dresses in her own special style and has loads of cyber friends. But not many real friends. Michael is the opposite of Jeane. So will they get together?
Amy and Roger’s Epic Detour by Morgan Matson – thrown together on a road journey across the States, Amy and Roger learn to face there demons and get to know each other. Gentle, slow romance with America as its backdrop. Interesting facts about the States and towns they visit pepper the book.
If I Stay by Gayle Forman – trapped in a coma, Mia has to decide whether to live or die and a large part of her decision is tied up in her first love, Adam. A real tearjerker. There is a follow-up book Where She Went. Gayle Forman’s new book, I Was Here will be published in the UK on 29th January 2015. It’s a fantastic book and a review will be available on the BT&M website nearer publication date.
If Only series – this is Bloomsbury series of clean, fun, love stories written by different authors. Good, light-hearted romantic fun.
Let It Snow by John Green, Maureen Johnson and Lauren Myracle – three short stories that interconnect about love and romance at Christmas time. Amusing and quirky.
My Life Next Door by Huntley Fitzpatrick – Samantha has spent many years looking over the fence at the large and chaotic Garrett family next door. Then the gorgeous Jace Garrett introduces himself and she falls for him. It’s not easy loving someone from the family your mother disapproves of and it’s harder still to cope when tragedy strikes. Full of interesting characters and sub-plots, this is an enjoyable read.
Since You’ve Been Gone by Morgan Matson – Emily’s best friend Sloane is gone leaving her a list of 13 tasks to complete – each task is something that will take Emily out of her comfort zone. As Emily tackles the tasks she discovers herself, new friends and that not everyone is as confident as they seem. Gentle, slow romance.
The Summer I turned Pretty by Jenny Han – Belly has spent all her summers at the summer house of her mother’s friend Susannah and her two sons, Conrad and Jeremiah. She loves the summers and she loves Conrad, but he is enigmatic and distant. Jeremiah is her best friend. Finally when she turns sixteen, Emily is sure that Conrad will now see her as more than a younger sister. However, reality has a way of intruding and whilst Jeremiah’s feeling seem to have changed, Conrad is more confused than ever. There are two more books in the series – It’s Not Summer Without You and We’ll always Have Summer. A very enjoyable read, occasionally told from the boys’ point of view.
The Worst Girlfriend in the World by Sarra Manning – a romance book that also explores the friendship between two girls who live in a town where life isn’t that exciting. Quirky, fun and full of fashion titbits.
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han – Lara Jean has never had a boyfriend but she has been in love five times. Each time it has been in her head and the boy has never known. Every time her crush is over she writes the boy concerned a letter and puts the letter away. Except one day the letters are sent out and Lara Jean finds herself having to deal with real feelings. A sequel is due in the summer. I liked this book because Lara Jean came across as fairly normal and I liked the way her relationships with the boys developed.
What Happened to Goodbye by Sarah Dessen – MacLean has moved schools so many times that she has learnt not to make lasting relationships. In fact when it’s time to go she just goes, not even saying goodbye. And then she starts again, creating a new persona in her new school. Then she meets Dave and she needs to decide if she is brave enough to be herself.
Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler – Min fell in love with Ed, the school sports god and amazingly he falls for her. However, as the title tells us, the relationship does not last and this book is the story of how Min takes out the box of momentous from their relationship and sends each one back to Ed with a letter saying what the item means. Even though you know things will end badly, you keep hoping they won’t. It was so good to read a book from a different perspective
I am just reading some Kate McGarry’s at the moment so I’ll add them to the website soon.
If you do enjoy lighthearted romance, you can branch out and try some excellent romance books which perhaps offer a little more than the usual and may even be classics. There are three books I fully recommend:
Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Little Women by Louisa May AlcottTWO weeks into its introduction, cracks have appeared in a new law that affords some benefits to fathers as part of paternity leave, with state officials defending the provisions of the law and social groups saying the new law does not go far enough, while single fathers are left out of the picture altogether.
A senior government official defended on Friday the provision of the law which stipulates that only married men or those who have a co-habitation agreement are eligible for the paternity leave benefit.
Following media reports of scores of complaints from unmarried fathers who found that they did not qualify for the paternity leave and of general confusion as to who is a beneficiary, the permanent secretary of the labour ministry, Andreas Assiotis, said that it is very clear on the application forms that the benefit allowance concerns only married fathers.
“It is an allowance paid by the social insurance fund. All such allowances concern married couples,” Assiotis told the Cyprus Mail.
He added that the labour ministry had not received any official complaints concerning the paternity leave so far. The new law, which was passed by parliament last month and kicked off on August 1, allows working fathers of newborns to file for 15 days of paid paternity leave.
The office of the Commissioner for Gender Equality, that contributed to drafting the bill, said that they would review the law, to see if it could include single fathers.
“Our focus was the best interest of the child. The bill is aimed at the best possible care of the child and that the father should be present in this procedure during the first days of the life of a newborn,” official of the commissioner’s office, Andri Savva said.
The 15 days’ leave allowance is a stepping stone toward that direction, she said.
“We will examine this, assess it and see how to include this category of fathers, given that all criteria should ensure the best interest of the child,” Savva said.
The paid paternity leave must be used during the 16 weeks that maternity leave is in effect. The two weeks fathers take as leave will be deducted from the 16 weeks of their spouses’ maternity leave, meaning that a mother of a newborn will take a 14-week maternity leave so that her husband can take his paternity leave.
Paternity leave is payable for two consecutive weeks and the social insurance fund will pay 72 per cent of the applicant’s weekly salary. Applicants must present, among others, the baby’s birth certificate, as well as certificates of marriage or of a co-habitation agreement. Eligible to apply are fathers who have paid up contributions to the social insurance fund.
For the Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies (Migs), the paternity leave is a positive step, but not a substantive one.
“It is inadequate, it covers a very small gap, and it is very short (15 days) compared to other countries,” policy coordinator at Migs, Josie Christodoulou told the Cyprus Mail. She added that in other countries, paternity leave is combined with other support measures.
“It does not cover real needs. What is it that the government wanted to cover? Which needs?” she asked. “It’s a start, but perhaps we should rethink which needs we want to address”.
Maria Angeli, also of Migs, said that the findings of a survey carried out by the institute indicated that there is lack of support for couples with newborns and for the elderly.
But the paternity leave is also dependent on the financial background of each family, Christodoulou said. She added that according to statistics, after child birth, the work hours of fathers are increased, while those of the mothers are decreased.
She added that there are a number of factors that need to be examined for a comprehensive policy to assist families with newborns.
According to new father Eftychios Savvides, what’s important is the ability of the couple to choose how many of the 16 weeks each could use.
“This decision gives me the right to switch two weeks of my wife’s maternity leave for me to use and look after our child,” he said. “I want the right to have more weeks; if she needs only two weeks after giving birth and then she feels ready to go back to work, why should she get the whole 14 weeks, and me just two?” he asked.
There are women, he said, who would rather get back to work sooner than those four months expire, so their husbands could take over the care of the baby during the remaining time.
“The decision as to how the leave would be shared ought to lie with the couple and their doctor and not the parliament and the government,” Savvides said.
The paternity leave proposal, which aimed at eliminating discrimination by offering fathers paid leave, had been tabled by socialist Edek.Because both Family Guy and The Simpsons share a mutual appreciation that Family Guy could only dream of sharing with South Park, creator Seth MacFarlane has signed on to guest star in an upcoming episode of Fox’s landmark show. Add this, then, to the ever-expanding list of upcoming things that Seth MacFarlane will do, a list which includes hosting the Oscars and putting together a Family Guy movie.
The episode, titled “Dangers on a Train,” is set to focus on Marge, who accidentally signs up to a website for people wishing to have affairs. There she meets Ben (MacFarlane), who sets his sights on her after they bond over a Downton Abbey-like TV series called Upton Rectory. These events will, of course, drive another fork between Homer and Marge – a fork that will be returned to the cutlery drawer after 22 minutes.
Al Jean, legendary Simpsons producer, said: “A lot of him trying to go after her is over the phone, so it’s a perfect part for someone with his voice.” He also revealed that MacFarlane croons “The Way You Look Tonight” in the episode, because Seth MacFarlane can sing and therefore must.
So, yes, Sunday night on Fox is now Seth MacFarlane night, though years since Family Guy earned a proper laugh, a decade after The Simpsons was funny, and the fact that The Cleveland Show was never something to be amused by, it’s hard to make that sound like a good thing.
Source: EWHeri Joensen: Vocals / Guitar
Gunnar Thomsen: Bass / Vocals
Terji Skibenæs: Guitar
Tadeusz Rieckmann: Drums
With Hel, the Faroe Islands' Týr provide even more irrefutable evidence that they stand at the vanguard of Scandinavian metal. Their eighth full-length is a collection of ruthlessly melodic and irresistibly compelling progressive folk metal that will immediately resonate with any who have followed the band at any point over the two decades of their storied career. "Being so close to the album, it's almost impossible for us in the band to have an objective opinion about it, but my impression is that it's a more diverse collection that's also more extreme in some ways. There are more instrumental passages than on 'Valkyrja' (2013), and there are a lot of guitar and bass details," states guitarist/vocalist Heri Joensen. "I really feel we've realized the vision we set out to create all those years ago, and as I listen through the album, I am satisfied with every aspect: the epicness, the intricacy, the melodies and harmonies, and the sheer heaviness of it. I love the whole atmosphere of it."
Known for their prolific nature - dropping their first five full-lengths in the space of just seven years - the six-year gap between Valkyrja and Hel is by far the longest between any two of their records. During that period the band toured hard, taking the album around the world, including a support run with Children Of Bodom in North America and an appearance on the 70,000 Tons Of Metal cruise. However, other factors played into this extended break between releases. "We approached this one differently because I learned that if I continue doing albums in the way we had up to now, I would die from a heart attack before I'm 50!" says Joensen. "That's one of the reasons we changed our method and took such a long time on this one." That this tactic - which also includes more songwriting contributions from bassist/vocalist Gunnar Thomsen and guitarist Terji Skibenæs than on previous releases - has been beneficial is borne out in the finished product, which is perhaps more immersive than those that came before. "Musically it leans a bit towards our album, 'Ragnarok' (2005)," states Thomsen. "It's a bit more epic and also much better worked through than any of our previous albums." It also marks the recording debut of drummer Tadeusz Rieckmann, who has manned the drum throne for Týr's live shows since 2016. "We had some problems finding the right guy some years back, but Tadeusz is the man for the job," says Joensen. "He's a very technically able drummer, but at the same time, he has a very natural old-school heaviness to his style, and he plays with deep emotion, which is just what we need."
Conceptually, the album is informed by a combination of mythology, personal experience and observations of current international events, making for a multifaceted experience that can be processed and understood on many levels. Starting not with a specific story to tell but with an atmosphere in mind, Joensen prefers not to disclose too much detail when it comes to lyrics, keen for listeners to have a chance to take what they want from the songs, though he provides a basic description of that which inspired him. "Hel is the realm of death in Norse mythology, the underworld where those who die a natural death, not in battle, go. A bit confusingly, it is also the name of the goddess who rules over the same realm. She's the daughter of Loki and a terrifying creature to look upon." Two of the songs - "Ragnars Kvæõi" and "Álvur Kongur" - are traditional Faroese ballads and are as such sung in Joensen's native tongue. Followers of Týr will be aware that they have on numerous occasions strayed from English, which Joensen acknowledges as the "language of metal", though this time out it is only the ballads that feature non-English lyrics. "If I have a good folky melody, I always have the thought that I should write the lyrics in Faroese, but I seldom have the time. The traditional songs come with lyrics, so it's just about picking out the verses I want to use." These tracks were in actuality selected even before the release of Valkyrja and have had a long gestation period, Joensen feeling that in adapting them they very much fit with the band's signature sound. "I am always trying out melodies and chose 'Ragnars Kvæði' first for the fascinating melody in the chorus, and secondly for the storyline. The other ballad I picked first because of the lyrics, which refer to Odin extensively, and secondly for the melody and chorus. I was very satisfied with the harmonies and epic feel of the arrangements I'd come up with, and to tell you the truth, I wish there were more songs of this kind on the album."
Hel was tracked entirely by Thomsen and Joensen, with sessions split between the latter's studio in Søldarfjørður, drums lain down at Jacob Hansen's studio in Denmark, Skibenæs working in his home studio, and some solos and bass details recorded while they were on the road in North America. "The sessions took us a long time because we did it all on our own. But we gathered a lot of knowhow while doing it, so it will be a good reference for the future," states Thomsen. Joensen concurs, adding, "It was a bit more relaxing than usual, which was good for me. It took some discipline, and creative people are not typically the most disciplined types. I am definitely not, so I guess it could have gone faster with someone else at the whip!" That the delay in getting the record out means it's emerging in the twentieth year of Týr's existence is quite poignant. It has definitely not been an easy road to this point, with several members having come and gone, and those that remain having had to endure some very difficult periods, but despite all of it, they have managed to make it through, and achieved a great deal in the process. "I did dream about becoming an internationally successful professional when I started. It's what I aimed at, but still it's a bit surreal that we've made it this far," Joensen admits. "I didn't in my wildest dreams think I could put survive such misery and abject poverty that this career has lead me through. Still, here I am." Thomsen "could not be prouder" when he looks back at the string of records they have released, also acknowledging the ups and downs experienced along the way, but making an important point: "We've done something nobody from where we're from has done before," he states plainly. "But there's a lot more to come!"Construction has begun on the Patua Geothermal Project, a large plant located in the desert near Fernley, Nev. Once completed in 2012, the first phase of the $300 million plant will generate up to 60 megawatts (MW) of renewable power – enough to provide electricity to around 36,000 homes.
The plant is being developed by Reno-based Gradient Resources. According to Gradient, up to 250 Nevada companies are expected to be involved in the construction of the plant during the next 16 months. About 170 people are expected to be employed on the construction project. Once the construction phased is complete, the plant will employ 32 people in operations and maintenance positions. The plant will have an annual payroll of around $2.5 million. This comes as good news for an area struggling with an unemployment rate of 17 percent.
Gradient already has a buyer for at least some of the the plant’s power; the company announced it had signed a 20-year deal with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. Gradient said it is also negotiating other purchase agreements for the site’s geothermal power.
The Patua Geothermal Project is scheduled to proceed in phases. The second phase of the project is scheduled to add another 60 MW of capacity. This is hardly the only geothermal project under way in Nevada; in June, we told you about a $350 conditional federal loan guarantee for Ormat Nevada’s plan that involves three different geothermal electricity generation plants – in Pershing, Lander and Elko counties, respectively – that are expected to produce a combined 121 megawatts of clean power.MW
Do mediów wyciekł projekt zmian w brytyjskiej polityce zatrudnienia. Po wyjściu Wielkiej Brytanii z UE obywatele wspólnoty chcący pracować na Wyspach będą potrzebować specjalnych pozwoleń. Najtrudniej będzie je uzyskać pracownikom słabo wykwalifikowanym, więc nowa ustawa może dotknąć wielu Polaków, którzy przybyli na Wyspy po 2004 roku.
Brexit i wynikające z niego ograniczenie swobodnego przepływu osób na pewno wpłyną na zmniejszenie liczby najsłabiej wykwalifikowanych pracowników pochodzących z krajów UE – donosi środowy „Guardian”, powołując się na zarys dokumentu, który wyciekł z brytyjskiego ministerstwa spraw wewnętrznych. 82-stronicowy projekt, datowany na sierpień 2017 roku, zakłada rewolucyjne zmiany w brytyjskiej polityce zatrudnienia.
Mają one polegać m.in na tym, że pierwszeństwo na rynku pracy będą mieli brytyjscy pracownicy, a kontrolowany napływ emigrantów ma wspomagać tylko te branże, w których faktycznie brakuje rąk do pracy. Służyć temu mają czasowe pozwolenia na pracę: w zawodach niewymagających wysokich kwalifikacji dokumenty mają być wydawane maksymalnie na okres dwóch lat, natomiast specjaliści będą mogli liczyć na trzy lub nawet pięcioletnie wizy pracownicze.
Zmiany czekają jenak nie tylko osoby chcące pracować w Wielkiej Brytanii. Dokument przewiduje, że każdy obywatel Unii Europejskiej przybywający na Wyspy będzie musiał legitymować się paszportem, a nie – jak dotychczas – jedynie dowodem osobistym. Dla tych, których pobyt ma trwać więcej niż pięć miesięcy, Londyn przewiduje wydanie tymczasowych biometrycznych dokumentów.
Proponowane rozwiązania będą także wiązać się z wprowadzeniem ograniczeń w sprowadzaniu do Wielkiej Brytanii członków rodziny. Nie będzie do tego uprawniać nawet pozwolenie na pracę – teraz przez urzędnikami będzie trzeba się także wykazać się zarobkami sięgającymi co najmniej 18,6 tys. funtów rocznie. Warto jednak zwrócić uwagę, że zarówno w tej kwestii, jak i innych, sytuacja obywateli krajów UE i tak będzie lepsza niż osób przyjeżdżających spoza UE.
Jak podkreśla „Guardian”, nie oznacza to jednak, że zawarte w dokumencie postanowienia wejdą w życie – będą one bowiem przedmiotem kolejnej rundy negocjacji pomiędzy rządem Theresy May i Brukselą. Według dziennika, szkic pokazuje jednak, w jakim kierunku zmierza Londyn: z jednej strony chce pogodzić opowiadające się za „twardym” Brexitem związki zawodowe domagające się ochrony brytyjskiego rynku pracy, a z drugiej udobruchać międzynarodowe korporacje funkcjonujące dzięki wolnemu przepływowi pracowników.
Zmiany mogą okazać się kluczowe dla naszych rodaków. Według brytyjskiego spisu powszechnego przeprowadzonego w 2015 roku na Wyspach mieszka obecnie 916 tys. Polaków. Jak zauważają dziennikarze „Guardiana”, to więcej niż samych Brytyjczyków przebywających na stałe we wszystkich krajach Unii Europejskiej.Use Hpack
Are you interested in a good ergonomic keyboard? Please help us make Moonrim II, the “liftless” keyboard with a trackball.
TL;DR
Use Hpack, and you don’t have to manually add/remove modules in the cabal file’s exposed-modules and other-modules section!
A little bit of background
Haskell has a very long history: Since 1987 which is long before the concept of “package managers.” When modern package management emerged, Haskellers had to invent something too. So they made “Cabal” which came to mean three things:
A standard way to organize your project repository and describe the project metadata like project name, repo URL, dependencies, etc. A new file format to contain the aforementioned metadata. (YAML did not exist at the time or was not popular, I think.) A Haskell library to parse 2 and therefore manage 1
(This is why you should be careful about what someone means when they say “Cabal.”)
And then there is cabal-install which is different from “Cabal.” cabal-install is a command line application that lets you manage Cabal-based projects.
Sandbox
So, we had commands like ghc, ghci, and cabal-install, and we were happier than before. Until the programming community realized the problem of dependency hell; which package depends to which version of which library, etc. Naturally, we needed some kind of sandboxing per project, so we added that to cabal. That’s called Cabal sandbox. The problem was, although Cabal sandbox did solve the problem of dependencies-per-project,
It still didn’t provide the compiler-per-project concept. If you are familiar with Python, consider how “virtualenv” and “pyenv” are different. The former is about isolating the version of dependency packages, while the latter is about the version of Python itself (CPython 3.6.1 or CPython 2.7 or PyPy 2, etc.) Sandbox alone could not solve the butterfly effect. It was quite slow because Cabal sandbox couldn’t share the pre-built binaries across different projects. Each project sandbox will begin from the zero base where most packages are not installed at all, and download/compile all libraries as they are added by the programmer. This means building “bytestring” five times if you have five projects. Note that you have a lot of packages that are used almost universally: bytestring, text, array, stm, unordered-containers, unix, directory, … All of them had to be built over and over again.
Stack
Stack solved these problems. Stack is actually a wrapper (plus some great deal of its own machinery) around the commands like ghc, ghci, and cabal-install. It does a brilliant job to isolate everything (both compilers and dependency packages) and sharing a binary if it can be shared.
For example, if you already have a bytestring-0.10 that was built using base-4.8, you don’t have to build it again when it’s needed because it’s cached. However, when you need base-4.9 and bytestring-0.10 in your project, you’ll have to build bytestring from scratch; this is exactly the behavior we want.
So what’s the problem?
One of the remaining problems is that the <projectname>.cabal file is in a custom format. Custom formats are generally not good because you can’t leverage the existing tools and free-ride other people’s work. Another pain point of the cabal files is that, whenever you add or remove some module (Haskell source code file) to/from your project, you have to edit the exposed-modules or other-modules section of the cabal file. Tedious, error-prone, and not so rewarding.
We understand that the concept of cabal file and its format came out before the popularization of YAML or TOML or anything, and we also understand that if Cabal decided to switch from <projectname>.cabal to package.yaml, it would be a breaking change. But maybe we can write some code to
Have a package.yaml file Automatically transpile it to a cabal file whenever a cabal file is needed In the process, automate the exposed-modules / other-modules problem.
Fortunately, someone already did this. It’s called Hpack.
Conclusion
Use Hpack.
How?
Hpack is built into Stack, so there is no additional setup required. This is so brilliant.
If you already have a Haskell project, use hpack-convert. It will automatically generate a package.yaml file from your <projectname.cabal> file.
If you are starting a new Haskell project, use Haskeleton. It’s simple:
stack new myprojectname haskeleton -p 'github-username:xtendo-org' -p 'author-name:XT'
Update
eacameron says:
Actually, my truly favorite thing about hpack is that you can specify a common set of dependencies that get shared across all the libraries/exes/tests/benchmarks in your setup. That part is truly annoying in cabal files. You can do the same thing with ghc-options, language extensions, etc.
I totally agree.No matter how spooky a spooky game’s rocks may be, it’s always comforting to know they can’t really hurt you. Unless, that is, they’re actually real rocks scanned into the game with fancy technology, and the original is still lurking out there somewhere in the mist, waiting to trip you. That’s the true terror of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, the non-combative horror walk ’em up from Bulletstorm veterans The Astronauts. The gang are showing off their mastery of the arcane science of photogrammetry, or smooshing loads of photos together to make a 3D model.
The big idea is that with a game world built of scanned real objects rather than the same handful of repeating and tiling hand-made art, they say, players will “stop seeing assets and start seeing the world.” Which is presumably helpful when trying to scare the kecks off visitors to it.The Vanishing of Ethan Carter’s photogrammetry uses dozens, or even hundreds, of photographs of places and items to make its 3D recreations, spaceman Andrzej Poznanski explained in a blog post yesterday. Their artists go in to clean up the models and trim a few squillion off the polycount, but they’ll end up with a unique hunk of rock, or statue, or valley, worn and stressed as if by Mother Nature’s own crippling hand.
Your brain does take notice when things are not normal. Like in video games. Even if on the unconscious level, your brain points out to you all those perfectly tiling textures, all those evenly worn-out surfaces, those stains placed in all the wrong places – and whispers in your ear: LOL!
In a spooky tale about a detective with supernatural powers roaming through woods in search of a kidnapped boy, you probably don’t want players LOLing and certainly not ROFLing.
Behold, an eerie boolder (click on it for the full 3D rotate-o-view):
And the wyrdest of waterfalls (the game will, of course, have proper moving water):
Poznanski’s post has a load more examples, including a few of when 3D scanning goes bad.No, it’s not a joke: Canadian Solar has started ground-breaking on a mega-solar project in Scotland that will – all going to plan – be the largest solar installation north of Hadrian’s Wall, and will dwarf the other (mainly) sub-5MW sites being built now by a bunch of other UK- based developers.
Of course, Canadian Solar is not a developer in the true sense. Rather, the company allocates overseas activities budgets to acquire site rights (mostly in a shovel-ready state) in typical bidding wars that are common for sought-after solar projects.
In fact, while the site in question will be greater than every ground-mounted solar farm in operation right now across the whole of Scotland, it is just one of a number of solar farms that are now under construction in Scotland for completion by 31 March 2016.
In true British fashion, don’t expect any particularly enthusiastic responses from the mainstream press however, come April 2016. When the Jewel & Esk site was built outside Dalkeith a few years back, the local papers sent out their reporting team on the wettest and darkest day possible and got someone to stand with an umbrella between the rows of panels. When the Mackies site was built earlier this year, the television interview by the BBC just happened to be on a sunny day, only for the reporting to suggest this type of thing - namely the sun - does not come out very much in Scotland.
Perhaps though there is a story here that is unlikely to get covered: it took a foreign site developer, a Chinese company like Canadian Solar to see it through. Component supply is probably from China and from mainland Europe, and more than likely built with southern Europe low-cost sub-contractors that will come in and out in a flash.
It is hardly a great advert for Scotland flying the flag for renewables, and simply another indication of the role that subsidies out of Westminster have played in solar deployment well away from the south of England. (In some respect, there is a whole novel that could be written about Wales and solar that may follow that same narrative.)
Indeed, by 31 March 2016, solar deployment figures in Scotland are expected to see a massive uptick compared to present levels, but once again coming from overseas efforts driven largely by short term gains from highly professional developers.About
What is the Polybius urban legend?
The urban legend takes place in 1981 in Portland, Oregon, where several arcades started to display a new game titled “Polybius.” These games were said to have strange effects, causing headaches, seizures, and often those who played it would suffer from amnesia. Mysterious men in black suits would come to collect information from the game, and to see the high scores.
What is the Polybius film about?
Eric, Jimmy, and Reed are best friends, and are attending high school together in Portland, Oregon in 1981. They decide one day to revisit one of their favorite middle school activities, which is playing at the local video arcade. Eric doesn’t seem to enjoy arcade games as much as he used to, despite being the best in the group at them.
When they finally convince Eric to go, he tries out a new arcade game that nobody else seems to enjoy much. It’s title is….Polybius.
Eric wakes up two days after playing Polybius with no memory of what happened the previous day. He returns to that arcade, finding the arcade machine is gone. The arcade owner has no memory of it, and neither do his friends. But Eric does, and he makes it his mission to find out the mystery behind this game, who created it, what their goals are, and what happened to him that would cause him to forget an entire day.
My film will be true to the Polybius legend, while adding it’s own unique personality. I have looked into stories of those who contributed to Polybius, including Blister, Steven Roach, the fan game, and many other stories people have made to add to this urban legend.
What made you decide to make a film based on Polybius?
The |
the capital are likely to be disappointed with the view
Image copyright AFP Image caption The elderly, children and people with asthma or heart problems have been advised to stay indoors
French authorities appealed to drivers to leave their cars at home.
"I am asking all residents in Paris and neighbouring areas to favour the use of public transport," said Jean-Paul Huchon, the head of the the capital's transport authority.
He also warned that current pollution levels represented "significant risks" to people's health.
The elderly, children, asthmatics and people with heart problems have been advised to stay indoors to avoid potential breathing problems.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Drivers have been urged to leave their cars at home and choose environmentally friendly transport modes
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Bike shares in Paris will also be free until Sunday
Environment minister Philippe Martin said air quality had now become "an emergency and priority for the government".
The country's northern and eastern regions have been particularly hit by toxic pollutants.
Several other French cities, including Reims, Rouen and Caen, announced they would follow Paris's example and make their public transport free over the weekend.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/19VjA
— An Apex high school student was struck by a vehicle on Tuesday morning while walking to school, authorities said.
Apex police said the 15-year-old Apex Friendship High School student was hit just before 7 a.m. while in a crosswalk on Humie Olive Road at Evans Road. He was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
The driver of the vehicle, Robert Brantley, of Apex, was cited for failing to yield to a pedestrian in the crosswalk, police said.
The crosswalk is less than half a mile from the high school.
There are no lights or signs to indicate the presence of a crosswalk, but there is one speed limit sign with flashing lights to alert drivers to a slower speed limit during school hours. Parents said they have worried about the safety of the crosswalk for years.
"They're definitely not prioritizing student safety. The school's been open for two years and here we are, there's no lights, no crossing guard," said parent Pauline Baggarly.
"When you kiss him goodbye in the morning, you just hope for the best," parent Edward Tomasi said.
Parent Dana Emberland said the school has been receptive to complaints about the crosswalk, but told him the matter was out of their hands. Emberland took his concerns to the town council in 2015, but was told any changes would be up to the North Carolina Department of Transportation.
"There's so much growth going on in our county, but a lot of times that growth isn't planned properly and things like pedestrian crosswalks for brand news schools should be part of the plan in the beginning, not as a reactionary means at the end," Tomasi said.
The Department of Transportation on Tuesday told WRAL News they were not aware of any complaints about the crosswalk.
The North Carolina Department of Transportation said it would send employees to the intersection to see if there is any way to make the crossing safer.
Officials with the Town of Apex said a traffic light is planned for the intersection as part of construction for a new nearby middle school, but did not say when it would be installed.
Emberland believes a pedestrian tunnel would be the best solution to make the area safer.
"That way a child is never going to get hit again. They'll go under the road. There is never a conflict with a child and the road again," Emberland said.
There have been two crashes at the intersection since 2012, according to Department of Transportation officials, but neither involved pedestrians or cyclists.The Extended Essay (IB DP)
The art of asking. Questions. 'Askers' vs. 'Guessers' - National. The Socratic Method. The Role of Questions in Teaching, Thinking and Le. One of the reasons that instructors tend to overemphasize "coverage" over "engaged thinking" is that they assume that answers can be taught separate from questions.
Indeed, so buried are questions in established instruction that the fact that all assertions — all statements that this or that is so — are implicit answers to questions is virtually never recognized. For example, the statement that water boils at 100 degrees centigrade is an answer to the question "At what temperature centigrade does water boil? " Hence every declarative statement in the textbook is an answer to a question. Resources « Sisyphean High: AP English Language & Composition. Questions no one knows the answers to (Full Version) - Chris Anderson. For Students, Why the Question is More Important Than the Answer.
Thinkstock In a traditional classroom, the teacher is the center of attention, the owner of knowledge and information.
Teachers often ask questions of their students to gauge comprehension, but it’s a passive model that relies on students to absorb information they need to reproduce on tests. How to think like Sherlock Holmes: See and observe to fight attention blindness; be happier. Illustration by Rob Donnelly.
I do not think like Sherlock Holmes. One route: Start with a few interesting/inspiring sources. Noam Chomsky "Public Education and The Common Good" Noam Chomsky. Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, author, and lecturer.
He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Linguistics[change | edit source] Chomsky created the theory of generative grammar. How Media Shapes Perception. Chomsky Is Citation Champ. Many are the authors who may wonder if anyone is paying attention to what they write.
Professor Noam Chomsky, MIT's preeminent linguistics authority, doesn't have that problem. Recent research on citations in three different citation indices show that Professor Chomsky is one of the most cited individuals in works published in the past 20 years. In fact, his 3,874 citations in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index between 1980 and 1992 make him the most cited living person in that period and the eighth most cited source overrall--just behind famed psychiatrist Sigmund Freud and just ahead of philosopher Georg Hegel. Indeed, Professor Chomsky is in illustrious company. Lectures: Brenzel. The Essential Value of a Classic Education.
JEFFREY BRENZEL, Philosopher, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, Yale University. New Research Tools Kick Up Dust in Archives. Seated recently in the special collections room at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology library, Anders Fernstedt raced through an imposing set of yellowing articles and correspondence.
Several years ago Mr. Fernstedt, an independent Swedish scholar who is studying the work of the 20th-century philosopher Karl Popper and several of his colleagues, would have scratched out notes and set aside documents for photocopying. Now, however, his tool of choice is the high-resolution camera on his iPhone. When he found a document of interest, he quickly snapped a photo and instantly shared his discovery with a colleague working hundreds of miles away.
Indeed, Mr. Interesting Research Approaches. Introducing “Freakonomics Experiments”: A New Marketplace Podcast. RYSSDAL: Time now for a little Freakonomics Radio.
It’s that moment every couple of weeks we talk to the coauthors of the book and the blog of the same name. It is the hidden side of everything, of course. And today it is the brains if you will of the operation, Steven Levitt, professor of economics at the University of Chicago. Great to talk to you again.
Freakonomics Experiments Preliminary Analysis.pdf. Read, I, Pencil. I, Pencil My Family Tree as told to Leonard E.
Read I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.. * Simon Rich: “Unprotected” I born in factory.
They put me in wrapper. They seal me in box. The Surprising History of the Pencil. By Maria Popova. Artisanal Pencil Sharpening. Microhistories of the Mundane: 10 Books About Everyday Stuff. This October, author Nicholas A. Technology Affordances. Lessness: Randomness, Consciousness and Meaning. Elizabeth Drew and Mads Haahr This paper was presented at the 4th International CAiiA-STAR Research Conference ‘Consciousness Reframed’ in Perth, Australia, 1-4 August 2002. A PDF version is also available. The tool described in the paper is still online but has been renamed Possible Lessnesses. Summary. How Brainless Slime Molds Redefine Intelligence [Video] Why the Brazil nuts are on top Phys. Rev. Lett. 58, 1038 (1987) Physicist uses math to avoid traffic penalty. Applied Ethics in Agriculture Socy/Econ course syllabus and readings. Toothpaste in hotels: Why do they provide shampoo, soap, and high-end toiletries but no toothpaste?
Dressing Constitutionally: Hierarchy, Sexuality, and Democracy from Our Hairstyles to Our Shoes: Introduction by Ruthann Robson. 3,000 Years of Human History, Described in One Set of Mathematical Equations. Does Expanding School Choice Increase Segregation? Architecture and Public Health: A NewPublicHealth Q&A with Brooks Rainwater. "THE REALITY OF FANTASY SPORTS: A METAPHYSICAL AND ETHICAL ANALYSIS" by Chad R. Carlson. Inspiration in Unlikely Places. Oscar-Winning Animated Short, The Dot and the Line, Celebrates Geometry and Hard Work (1965)
The animated short above, The Dot and the Line, directed by the great Chuck Jones and narrated by English actor Robert Morley, won an Oscar in 1965 for Best Animated Short Film. 102 Spectacular Nonfiction Stories from 2012. Gangnam Style Flip Book Animation. How the Harlem Shake went from viral sideshow to global phenomenon. The Jenna Marbles Paradox: Why Are YouTube Videos So Terrible?
Life in Five Seconds: Minimalist Pictogram Summaries of Pop Culture and Historical Events. The Myth of Pop Culture: Why "Highbrow" and "Lowbrow" Don't Work. Jay-Z's 99 problems close reading w 4th amendment for cops and perps. “New shit has come to light”: Information seeking behavior in The Big Lebowski.
Academic paper on The Big Lebowski. Did You Say that Voting is Ridiculous?: Using South Park to Teach Public Choice by Adam J. Hoffer, George R. Crowley. We Analyzed Keith Morris’s Dreadlock. Mozart had weird ears. Julian Rubinstein: The Hunt for Illegal Egg Collectors. Essay: Unexpected Insights into Terrorism and National Security Law Through Children's Literature: Reading the Butter Battle Book as Monstrosity by Nick J. Sciullo. Lol My Thesis. Why is Pizza Hut's roof like that? An Anthropological perspective on the Coca-Cola Company. Locating Zombies in the Sociology of Popular Culture.
The 1980's Power Suit: Anger Dressed As Beauty. Thinking and Learning TED Ed. Language and Literature TED Ed. Critical Thinking On The Web. Creativity/Problem Solving/Criti. Resilience. Citelighter - The fully automated bibliography, research, citation, and internet highlighting tool. Information Research. Research. S.O.S. for Information Literacy. Writing. Articles and essays. Extended Essay Guide. Example of EE. International Baccalaureate / Extended Essay Resources. IB Extended Essay Supports Success at U Va. Extended Essay Advice for Students in the IBO. Category:Research methods. Social Research Methods. Research Methods. Research Methods. Research Methods in Psychology: Evaluating a World of Information: W. W. Norton StudySpace.
Home - Research Guides at University of Miami. Content Analysis.Clive Lewis MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Defence, speaking at Labour Party Conference 2016, said:
Conference, as a lifelong party activist it’s a great honour not just to address you for the first time, but to do so as Shadow Defence Secretary.
I speak today not just as a politician, but as someone who has seen first-hand the consequences when political failure leads us to war.
I’ve found there are some who are surprised to find an Army veteran serving as a Labour MP, as if it was somehow against the values we collectively believe in.
But I see no contradiction between my service and my socialism.
I want to pay tribute to the extraordinary men and women of our armed forces, who work so hard to keep us safe every single day.
They have continued to do so at a time of unprecedented challenges. From operations against Da’esh in the Middle East, to peacekeeping missions in Somalia, South Sudan and elsewhere, our armed forces have been exceptionally busy and dedicated.
Conference, when I look at our key military alliance – NATO – I see an organisation that springs directly from our values: collectivism, internationalism and the strong defending the weak. Its founding charter – a progressive charter – includes standing up for democracy and defending human rights. These are values that I believe go to the core of our political identity.
So, of course, a Labour government would fulfil our international commitments, including those under Article 5. But let’s be clear: that means both our military and our diplomatic obligations. We cannot have one without the other, and nor should we.
Every Labour government since Attlee’s has met NATO’s spending target of at least 2 per cent of GDP, every single year. And I confirm today that the next Labour government will do the same, including our UN and peacekeeping obligations.
Of course, what really matters isn’t so much what you spend as how you spend it.
And when I look at the Tories’ record on defence, I do not see a proper recognition of the value of our people.
What I do see is a government that has cut the size of the armed forces by a fifth, imposed an effective pay cut year-on-year, and it’s an insult to their dedication that they are not adequately housed.
But Conference, let’s be honest. There are defence issues on which we are not united. This should not surprise us though. The security of our country – the first duty of any government – demands nothing less than the most rigorous of examination and debate.
Friends, we know that nuclear weapons are one of those issues.
As you know, I am sceptical about Trident renewal, as are many here.
But I am clear that our Party has a policy for Trident renewal.
But I also want to be clear that our Party’s policy is also that we all share the ambition of a nuclear-free world.
So we will take steps to make that ambition a reality.
So we will make our long-standing multilateralism reality, not rhetoric. We will be working with international organisations, including the United Nations General Assembly First Committee on Disarmament and International Security, within the spirit and the letter of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
That will stand in stark contrast to the Tories’ lip service on nuclear disarmament; they have not brought forward a single proposal as to how they intend to achieve it.
Because Conference, we know how Theresa May uses Trident. Not as a military weapon aimed at deterring enemies overseas – but as a political weapon aimed at her party’s opposition at home. Us.
The best possible chance for a better, safer world is a Labour government.
Conference, only we in the Labour Party have the ideological foundation on which a defence policy fit for the 21st Century can be built. We have to rethink what real security means.
Increasingly, what threatens us are complex, interlinked systemic forces: the collapse of states, asymmetric warfare, resource depletion and catastrophic climate change.
Each of these will make the lives of hundreds of millions unimaginably hard, starting with the poorest.
Every day we see through our media the pitiful pictures of ordinary men, women and children forced from their homes, families desperately seeking sanctuary from war and social collapse.
And this is just the beginning. If we want it to stop we must look beyond the symptoms and tackle the root causes. The Tories can never do this because their right-wing dogma is the cause.
Economic policies that foster rampant inequality, the shoring up of oppressive regimes, conniving in proxy wars, ruthless over-exploitation of natural resources, complacent denialism on climate change.
No Conference, it will be our values that solve these problems. Our internationalism, our passion for social justice, for economic justice and for environmental justice.
Our Labour Party recognises that a world without justice is a world that will never be at peace. By addressing injustice, we can help to deliver real security.
And if the Tories’ philosophy leaves them incapable of dealing with the challenges of the future, their practical choices are no better.
When I look at the Tories’ record on defence I can see that, as with so many of our public services, they simply don’t recognise the value of the most important asset we have in this country – our people.
The men and women – who have this Party’s deepest respect – that are the backbone of our nation’s defence. They are our sons, our daughters, cousins, nieces, nephews. They are all of us.
And yet this government has systematically undermined and demoralised far too many of them.
They have systematically undermined our industrial communities, ripping up Labour’s Defence Industrial Strategy and spent billions overseas, instead of investing in British jobs and British steel.
I want the money we spend on defence equipment to go not to the cheapest bidder but to those who pay fair taxes and fair wages, who provide decent jobs and support communities.Capital Tax Reform and the Real Economy: The Effects of the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut
NBER Working Paper No. 21003
Issued in March 2015, Revised in January 2018
NBER Program(s):Corporate Finance, Public Economics
This paper tests whether the 2003 dividend tax cut—one of the largest reforms ever to a U.S. capital tax rate—stimulated corporate investment and increased labor earnings, using a quasi-experimental design and U.S. corporate tax returns from years 1996-2008. I estimate that the tax cut caused zero change in corporate investment and employee compensation. Economically, the statistical precision challenges leading estimates of the cost-of-capital elasticity of investment, or undermines models in which dividend tax reforms affect the cost of capital. Either way, it may be difficult to implement an alternative dividend tax cut that has substantially larger near-term effects.
Acknowledgments
Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX
Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w21003
Published: Danny Yagan, 2015. "Capital Tax Reform and the Real Economy: The Effects of the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut," American Economic Review, vol 105(12), pages 3531-3563. citation courtesy of
Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded* these:Napolitano, 87, was sworn in on Monday following his re-election on Saturday, becoming the first Italian president to serve a second term. At the ceremony, Napolitano reportedly urged leading politicians to form a new government "without delay."
He scolded fellow politicians for failing to break a post-election deadlock.
"You cannot avoid facing up to the electoral results, like them or not," Napolitano said on Monday after taking his oath, according to the dpa news agency.
"I have a duty to be frank. If I find myself once again facing the kind of deafness I ran into in the past, I will not hesitate to draw the consequences," Napolitano said.
In the two months since Italy's election, politicians had failed to find a new presidential candidate who could win a majority and form a new government. Despite hoping to retire, Napolitano agreed to stay on for a second term in an effort to help broker a coalition government after being urged to do so by Italy's two main parties. He felt bound by duty to stay on and help Italy out of its political quagmire.
Since the election
Italy has been awaiting a new government since the February elections in which the center-left Democratic Party (PD) won the most votes. The PD not did win enough votes, however, to form a government on their own.
The PD had been unable to put forth a viable presidential candidate, and party leader Pier Luigi Bersani announced his resignation on Friday. The PD has refused to form a coalition with the second largest party, former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's Party of Freedom conservatives. A new party, M5S, refuses to form a coalition with either of the two main parties.
Presidential powers
With his mandate of seven years, Napolitano can call new elections, which he was unable to do in the final months of his first term. This power will enable him to pressure Italy's political parties into forming a viable coalition government.
Moreover, only the president can nominate a prime minister and approve his cabinet.
Calming fears
Investors were relieved by Napolitano's re-election, and the main stock index in Milan rose in kind, with a 1.8 percent increase, the strongest gain in Europe.
"We can now celebrate the unblocking of the situation," Edoardo Luini, a market analyst at Trading Room Roma told the Associated Press. "It is not the best solution, but it was the only possible one - or at least the most convenient."
tm/mz (AP, AFP, dpa, Reuters)OSLO (Reuters) - Rising foreign demand for beef and soybeans will tempt Brazil to clear more of the Amazon rainforest, in a reversal of recent success in slowing forest losses, a study said on Thursday.
An aerial photograph shows a tract of Amazon jungle recently cleared by loggers and farmers, near Altamira in Para State, November 15, 2012. REUTERS/Stian Bergeland/Rainforest Foundation Norway/Handout
About 30 percent of deforestation in Brazil in the decade to 2010 was due to farmers and ranchers seeking land to expand export production of beef and soybeans, against about 20 percent in the 1990s, the report said.
“Trade is emerging as a key driver of deforestation in Brazil,” according to experts at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, Oslo (Cicero).
“This may indirectly contribute to loss of the forests that industrialized countries are seeking to protect through international agreements,” they wrote in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
Exports of beef and soybeans accounted for 2.7 billion metric tons (1 metric ton = 1.102 tons) of carbon emissions caused by Brazil’s deforestation in the decade to 2010, the report said. That exceeds greenhouse gas emissions of a nation such as Egypt over the same period.
Deforestation of Brazil’s Amazon region fell 27 percent to 1,798 square miles between August 2011 and July 2012 from the same period a year earlier, the Brazilian Environment Ministry said in November.
That was the lowest since monitoring began in 1988. Brazil’s so-called Legal Amazon covers 5.2 million square kilometers.
But growing foreign demand and the Brazilian government’s eagerness for economic growth meant continued falls in the rate of forest loss were unlikely without new measures to safeguard forests, the report said.
Worldwide, deforestation accounts for up to a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions from human sources, according to U.N. estimates. Trees soak up carbon dioxide as they grow and release it when they burn or rot.
Under U.N. climate change rules, greenhouse gas emissions count as those within national boundaries. Suggestions of shifting responsibility to consumers, for instance foreign buyers of Brazil’s beef, are often dismissed as too complicated.
“It’s been a bugbear in the forest sector,” said Duncan Macqueen, a forest researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development in Edinburgh. “Consumers ask ‘why should we suffer the cost of reforming the system?’” he said.
Some schemes seek to certify forest production as coming from a source that does not involve illegal logging. But these have drawbacks since the costs of audits can be prohibitive for small producers, he said.
The Cicero study suggested better labeling or information about imports to guide consumers.
The study did not try to compare the environmental impact of Brazil’s beef or soybean production with that other nations to see where production was least damaging. “Similar analyses still have to be done,” lead author Jonas Karstensen told Reuters.Used Tesla Inc. Model S sedans sell faster than luxury-car competitors do, and faster than other top-selling used vehicles from Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co.
That’s according to a survey by the car-shopping platform Autolist.com, which compared the Model S, the first car to be entirely built and designed by Tesla TSLA, -0.30% with a peer group that included luxury sedans from car makers such as Volkswagen AG’s VW, -1.08% Audi, Toyota Motor Co.’s 7203, +0.31% Lexus, and Daimler AG’s DAI, -0.54% Mercedes-Benz, as well as popular vehicles from GM GM, -0.07% and Ford F, +1.37%.
Related: Tesla fans, Barclays has a ‘reality pill’ for you
Used Model S sedans had the briefest time on the market of all vehicles included in the survey, taking, on average, 87 days to sell. That was about 5% quicker than the average for vehicles in the model’s peer group, which included the Audi A7, the Porsche Panamera, the BMW 6 Series, the Mercedes-Benz CLS and the Lexus LS 460.
The listing prices of used Tesla Model S sedans were between 3% and 5% above their peer-group average for the past year, after controlling for price differences among the models, Autolist.com said.
“We would expect top-performing vehicles in a peer group to have prices [about] 2% above our adjusted expectations for the segment. But 3% to 5% above, and maintaining that level of performance over the past year? That’s surprising,” Alex Klein, Autolist.com’s vice president of data science, said in emailed comments.
See also: Why Tesla is getting rid of its cheapest model
Top-selling GM and Ford models, including the Ford F-150 pickup truck (the No. 1 vehicle sold in the U.S.), the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 pickup, the Chevrolet Malibu and the Ford Fusion, have seen prices hover between 1% below and 1% above their peers over the past year, Autolist.com said.
The GM and Ford models also cooled their heels on used-car lots and in owners’ garages for longer: 104 days for the F-150, 103 days for the Chevy Malibu and 88 days for the Ford Fusion.
Tesla shares closed at their highest ever price Monday, at $312.39, the latest on a string of records closes. Shares have gained about 40% so far this year, nearly 10 times as much as the S&P 500 index SPX, -0.08% The stock had dipped below the $300 mark by Thursday afternoon.
The upward march in Tesla shares started when the company reported first-quarter sales that were on the higher end of Wall Street expectations, which fueled hopes that Tesla would be freed up to focus on the launch of the Model 3, the $35,000 the car that the Silicon Valley company hopes to bring to market by the end of the year.
See: After leapfrogging Ford, Tesla is neck and neck with GM for must-valuable-car-manufacturer crownDISTRIBUIE
După companiile Tarom şi Wizz Air, o altă companie aeriană a anunţat zboruri între Cluj-Napoca şi Bucureşti.
Zborul pe această rută va fi operat din 3 iunie, de compania Blue Air, cu preţuri de la 89 lei / segment, informează site-ul aeronews.ro.
Cursa va pleca din Bucureşti în zilele de luni şi vineri la ora 07:30 şi va ateriza la ora 08:20 la Cluj-Napoca.
Întoarcerea din Cluj spre Bucureşti este programată la ora 17:15, cu aterizare pe aeroportul Otopeni 18:05, în zilele de luni şi vineri.
În zilele de marţi şi sâmbătă, aeronavele vor decola din Bucureşti la ora 07:00 şi vor ateriza la 07:50 pe aeroportul internaţional Cluj.Tot în zilele de marţi şi sâmbătă va exista o cursă care va pleca din Cluj-Napoca la ora 17:15 şi va ateriza la Otopeni la ora 18:00.When my son, Casey was first diagnosed with autism at age four, I thought our world had ended. I thought our family was doomed to defeat and misery and decades of frustrated, circular searches for meaning: "Why us? Why him? Why anyone?" I can tell you with certainty that I have never been so wrong about anything in my life.
You see the thing with Casey is that he has this gift, which he shares with all those who take the time to know him, for finding delight in the most mundane situations. It is the flip side of autism; something the books and the specialists and the media scare-mongering never tell you.
Kids with autism, and their families, struggle with many challenges: difficulty with verbal and social communication and interaction; fine and gross motor difficulties; uneven developmental trajectories; crippling anxiety and self-regulation dysfunction. These cannot be minimized and the burden is not an easy one.
But kids with autism are also often singular in their attention to the things they love and the things that give them pleasure; this sometimes makes them wholly present and pure receptacles of joy.
For Casey, his love has always been city buses. This is not uncommon in a young child, but he loved them so much that before the age of three he had most of the city's bus routes memorized, and while he couldn't answer in full sentences (something that wouldn't come until after age six), his first words along with "mama" and "papa" were words like "articulated bus," "transfer" and "bus pass." We didn't know he had autism at the time; in retrospect, this should've been a clue.
By age five, while other kids were sounding out the words to their favourite Sesame Street books, Casey was sounding out, and quickly memorizing, all the words found on the free transit maps and bus schedules found around town.
It's often said that kids with autism don't have an imagination or, in the more nuanced books on the topic, lack "imaginary play." I've never found this to be the case with any of the kids I've seen on the spectrum. In fact, I'd argue the reverse from my parenting perspective. I think kids on the spectrum often have such vivid powers of imagination that the "real world" has difficulty competing.
In Casey's case, of course, he dreamt of city buses. He talked about them incessantly and when he conversed with others, the dialogue often went something like this (in rare full sentences): "Where do you live? Do you ride the bus? Which bus number do you take? Do you have a bus pass?" -- and so on. Once Casey exhausted this script, he'd ask the same questions to the same person all over again (and again), not because he'd forgotten or misunderstood the answers, but because he'd delight in them.
So it was with his imaginary play. Throughout our house, he created a vast labyrinth of bus stops replete with cut out paper bus numbers. But the most important bus stop of all was right in front of our house. He insisted that the city bus stops at the foot of our driveway and he created his own bus stop in his mind. Every day he'd play "buses" in front of his imaginary bus stop on our front yard.
Casey would tell friends and neighbours who would drop by about the bus stop at the end of our yard. They would look in earnest, but of course, there was nothing there to see, so they'd figure out he was playing, and gamely, play along. This went on for years.
That's why one Sunday morning when Casey pointed out our front window and said, "The bus is here!" with great enthusiasm, I said something like, "that's nice, honey" and didn't bother to look up. None of us did. So he said it again, "Look! The city bus!" "Uh huh," I responded two and three or more times. Until finally I looked up to appease him.
And there it was. At the end of our yard, sitting directly in front of Casey's imaginary bus stop was a real live bus. An articulated city bus to be exact.
Let me tell you how improbable this was. We live on a tiny dead-end street in a quiet little neighbourhood where no city bus would or could ever venture. There's nowhere for them to go, and there's almost no one for them to pick up.
So when I saw a city bus parked at Casey's imaginary bus stop I had to take a sip or two more of my morning caffeine before I could take it all in. But there it was. Like it had jumped from his head to his crayoned pages to life in our yard. I immediately thought this had to be planned. This had to be a crazy gift from one of our lovely neighbours who had endured Casey's imaginary bus scenarios at that very spot for years. I looked over at my husband to make sure he was not in some way responsible. But he looked as incredulous as I did.
Casey ran outside to watch his city bus, still parked in the imaginary bus stop -- now, not so imaginary. Then the neighbours started to come out too, to their front porches and decks and stoops, to see what the heck was going on.
Not only was there a real bus in Casey's imaginary bus stop, there were real people on the bus. They looked as confused peering out from their windows as we did peering in at them.
That's when we finally noticed the panicked bus driver. You see, our dead end street is compact enough that it was easy pulling in but getting out would be a whole other matter. It would take a skilled driver with nerves of steel to manage backing out an articulated bus with tight corners dodging parked cars, houses and curious onlookers.
So here's what really happened. It turns out it was a new bus driver who had to take a last minute detour from a major road nearby because of a charity marathon. She thought our street was a throughway back to the major arteries of the city, and now she was trapped.
For a full thirty minutes, Casey's real live bus sat at his imaginary bus stop. We all waited to see what would happen next. Finally, a senior bus driver arrived in another vehicle, took over, and with pretty impressive skills backed the articulated bus out in a single, long, fluid motion. The bus was back in business.
When it was finally gone, Casey grinned and turned to all of us and said: "I told you it was a bus stop." He went on playing as if nothing huge and improbable had just happened. His real bus gave him joy, but so had his imaginary buses. He was delighted by our participation in his bus game when the real bus came along. But the thrill for the buses was always there, real or not.
We were the ones who needed the real bus.
Casey's older brother turned to me and said, "Casey can make things come out of his head and happen." I had to admit it kind of felt that way that day.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune.
ALSO ON HUFFPOST:Agent Obsession
Tony Winn Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 18, 2017
One of the most valuable learning experiences of 2016 for me was getting to attend James Edward Gray’s SimAlchemy training at the start of ElixirConf. It was very timely information for me as I was right in the middle of writing my first process heavy application in Elixir.
Towards the end of the talk he went though a number tips and common anti-patterns and one hit me hard: GenServer Envy. This is when your use of either a Task or Agent goes beyond their suggested use cases and you start treating them like GenServers.
I had a special case of GenServer Envy that I’m calling Agent Obsession. You might have it too if:
The responsibility for interacting with your Agent process is spread across your application.
process is spread across your application. You don’t actually know the api for GenServer (quick, how many arguments does handle_cast take?).
(quick, how many arguments does take?). You don’t know the use case described in the documents for Agent.
. You know that an Agent is best used for “a simple wrapper arounds state” but can’t articulate what a complicated wrapper around state would entail.
There’s a line of thinking among Elixir devs that if you aren’t sure if your process should be backed by an Agent or a GenServer just start with an Agent and refactor to a GenServer when it gets painful.There’s some interesting news coming out of Denver as the Democratic National Convention approaches.
Apparently, the Denver Police are being urged to look the other way and not enforce the city’s law against marijuana possesion while the convention is taking place:
DENVER – A city drug panel has voted to urge police to refrain from arresting adults for marijuana possession during next week’s Democratic National Convention, but the cops aren’t necessarily on board.
Lt. Ernie Martinez, the police department’s representative on the panel, said police, bracing for potentially tens of thousands of protesters during the Aug. 25-28 convention, would have more pressing duties than rounding up pot smokers.
At the same time, he said, authorities wouldn’t ignore blatant flouting of the law. “If something occurs in front of us, we’re going to act,” he said.
(…)
Mounted police patrol Civic Center Park in downtown Denver. Thousands of Democrats, protesters and media will attend the Democratic National Convention. (Associated Press)
A Democratic National Committee banner flies Thursday outside the Pepsi Center in Denver. Protesters will be fenced in at a designated protest area in the vicinity of the Pepsi Center. (Christian Fuchs/The Washington Times)
Mason Tvert, a panel member and pot-legalization activist, Thursday delivered a copy of the panel’s recommendation to Mr. Hickenlooper and police Chief Gerry Whitman, saying that “we expect police to abide by this very logical recommendation.”
“If police expect the taxpayers to cover their $1.2 million in overtime during the DNC, it is only fair that |
wear board.
Project Lead German Rivera Location Sunnyvale, USA(A) The original view elaborated a set of brain structures originally proposed by Leslie Brothers ().
(B) The current view ties subsets of these structures together into functional networks that subserve particular components of social cognition; both (A) and (B) are from.
(C) Hints of a future view in which brain networks are derived by mining large data sets (NeuroSynth; ). Left: Lateral (top) and medial (bottom) views of a reverse-inference map (generated using 293 studies) indicate the likelihood that the term “social” was used in a study given the presence of activation, i.e., p(term|activation) (brain activity displayed using NeuroLens; http://www.neurolens.org). We compared this map to that of 200 independently identified Topic maps (; http://neurosynth.org) and identified those that were based on more than 30 studies and that either covered more than 50% of the “social” term map (middle) or were more than 50% covered by the “social” term map (right). Topic 116 was primarily concerned with emotion; Topic 135 with social games and interactions; Topic 143 with mentalizing; Topic 20 with fear and arousal; and Topic 30 with consciousness and awareness. Although these data-mining results should be considered preliminary, they suggest several intriguing patterns: dorsomedial prefrontal cortex appears to subserve a general role, appearing ubiquitously across the networks, whereas regions of the precuneus may be involved more selectively, distinguishing between emotion and social games. It is also interesting to observe that the amygdala is identified in all maps with the exception of Topic 143 (mentalizing). Approaches such as the example we show here should be used in future studies that make an effort to combine and reconcile data-mining results with the results of particular experimental studies.Skwigly Animation Podcast #33 – Richard Williams 09 September 2015 // Skwigly Podcast iTunes Soundcloud RSS Feed
Presenting the 33rd episode of the Skwigly podcast!
If you wish to get involved or have any topic you’d like us to address in the next podcast then please get in touch with us on either Facebook, Twitter, by email to ben@skwigly.co.uk or leave a comment below.
Presented by Ben Mitchell and Steve Henderson featuring Kieran Argo
Special guest: Richard Williams, legendary animator (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Thief and The Cobbler) and author of The Animator’s Survival Kit on his latest film, the jaw-dropping Prologue. Having premiered at this year’s Annecy Festival, the film will screen in the UK as part of Bristol’s Encounters Festival on Friday September 18th.
Edited and produced by Ben Mitchell
Music by Ben Mitchell and Wez AllardRadio Sputnik discussed the burqa, women’s right and freedom of choice with London-based political analyst and author of the book “Arabia's Rising: Under the Banner of the First Imam," Catherine Shakdam.
“The issue has become a political one because it is very easy to bank on terrorism and hatred politically. This is what is seen across Europe right now,” Shakdam said.
She further said that she personally does not understand the argument for the burqa because the headscarf is a requirement in Islam but the burqa is not an obligation in Islam and it is up to women to decide whether they want to wear it or not.
She further spoke about how the whole burqa issue has more to do with cultural choice than a religious one. According to her, it has been misunderstood by a lot of Europeans who think that it is religious obligation.
“It has been assumed that the burqa is an expression of Islam which it is not. It is a cultural choice and this needs to be highlighted because then it becomes a cultural argument and not a religious one,” Shakdam said.
She further spoke about how different communities need to talk to each other and understand one another in order to clarify such cultural misunderstandings which lead to hatred and isolation of minorities.
According to a survey published August 31, a majority of people in the UK are in favor of a ban on wearing the burqa.
A YouGov poll revealed that some 57 percent of the 1,668 adults participating in the poll in "the most tolerant" country in Europe support "a law that bans people from wearing the burqa in the UK."
Thirty-six percent of respondents strongly support the law while 10 percent were strongly opposed.
© East News / Jon Enoch ‘Most Tolerant’: Poll Reveals Most Brits Support Banning the Burqa
Among demographic groups, only 18-24 year-olds were against the ban. There is no significant difference in opinions between regions: 51 percent of Londoners and 63 percent of northerners approved the initiative.
Talking about this ban the analyst said that when it comes to integration, “We need to be very careful about the word and we need to make sure where we all stand otherwise we can’t talk about pluralism and integration,” Shakdam said.
She further spoke about how respect and being understood works both ways.
“When it comes to burqa, it is linked to Wahhabism and to a notion that women are objects and commodity and should be completely denied their identity. As a woman I of course don’t feel comfortable about this exceptionalism.”
She further said, “Telling women that they need to take off their clothes to express their love of democracy, I don’t agree with that and when it comes to Wahhabis telling women to make them invisible so that men can feel better about themselves, I disagree completely.”
The analyst said that women need to be empowered and be able to choose for themselves how they want to dress.
Discussions on banning certain Islamic clothes have recently become a matter of contentious debate in many European countries.Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos.
Now that the new 2017 flagship smartphones from both Google and Apple are available and in the hands of consumers, we thought we'd compare Apple's iPhone X with the Google Pixel 2 XL to see how these two devices measure up.In the video below, we took a look at specific features of both phones, including design, hardware, camera and display, along with each device's unique features like Face ID and Active Edge. We also compared what it's like using each phone on a day to day basis to give an overall picture of the similarities and differences between each of the devices.Both the Google Pixel 2 XL and the iPhone X have high price points ($849 for the former and $999 for the latter), and similar display sizes at 5.8 inches for the iPhone X and 6 inches for the Pixel 2 XL.Inside, the iPhone X has a custom Apple-designed A11 processor, while the Pixel 2 XL features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chip. In raw benchmarks, the iPhone X outperforms the Pixel 2 XL, but the differences in processor and GPU speed aren't as noticeable in real world usage. When it comes to intensive tasks, though, the iPhone X will handily outperform the Pixel 2 XL.Both devices feature OLED displays, but the iPhone X's display is leagues better than the OLED display of the Pixel 2 XL. The Pixel 2 XL is plagued by serious display issues that have been making headlines for the last couple of weeks, including burn-in and bizarre color variations.iPhone X and Pixel 2 XL both have impressive cameras and produce some amazing photos, but the Pixel 2 XL does a lot of what the iPhone X can do with just a single camera. Apple's iPhone X is equipped with dual 12-megapixel rear cameras, one with an f/1.8 wide-angle lens and the second with an f/2.4 telephoto lens, while the Pixel 2 XL is sporting just a single f/1.8 12-megapixel camera.As for front-facing cameras, the Pixel 2 XL has an f/2.4 8-megapixel camera while the iPhone X is sporting an f/2.2 7-megapixel camera that also happens to be equipped with an additional infrared camera, sensor, and dot projector to enable Face ID, one of the flagship iPhone X features that gives the iPhone X an edge over the Pixel 2 XL.Face ID has proven to be largely fast and accurate, making it an improvement over fingerprint sensing technology. Pixel 2 XL continues to offer a fingerprint sensor, albeit a fast and accurate one. Active Edge, the Pixel 2 XL's distinguishing feature, lets users squeeze the sides of the device to quickly activate Google Assistant. Speaking of Google Assistant, that's another feature where the Pixel 2 XL has an edge over the iPhone X -- many believe Google Assistant is more useful than Siri.Pixel 2 XL has a larger battery than the iPhone X (though the iPhone X wins out in some battery life tests), but it doesn't offer the same Qi wireless charging functionality that's available in the iPhone X. It charges over USB-C, though, while the iPhone X continues to use a proprietary Lightning port for non-wireless charging purposes. Neither device has a headphone jack, as Google followed in Apple's footsteps and opted to rely solely on wireless technology.So which of these devices is better? It's impossible to say. Both the iPhone X and the Google Pixel 2 XL are entirely different platforms, and each one is the best in its respective category. There are some things the Google Pixel 2 XL does better than the iPhone X, and some things the iPhone X does better than the Google Pixel 2 XL. Choosing one really comes down to the ecosystem you prefer -- iOS or Android.Results: Overall, psychotropic medication was used in 77.9% of the participants; 52.0% received more than one medication. The most commonly prescribed medicines were atypical antipsychotics (49.4%) followed by attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) medications (48.0%). Usage patterns for specific diagnostic presentations were examined, and appeared consistent with current clinical practice. Persistent elevated psychopathology appeared frequently in students on medication.
Methods: The prevalence of psychotropic medication use was obtained at the beginning of a school year for a cohort of 77 students attending a self-contained middle school for special education students with emotional and/or behavioral problems, in the suburban New York City area. Demographics, intelligence quotient (IQ) and achievement testing, and objective measures of both psychopathology and school functioning were gathered.
Therefore, this study was undertaken to update our knowledge of which psychotropic medications are being prescribed for special education students with emotional and/or behavioral disorders. We anticipated that both psychotropic use and polypharmacy have increased since the last similar study in 1999, consistent with overall national trends. We also aimed to examine the relationships between the diagnostic presentations of the students and their medication regimens, to help assess their consistency with current clinical practice. We sought to ascertain any distinguishing student characteristics for polypharmacy, such as increased severity of psychopathology and/or dysfunction in school. Finally, by obtaining teacher ratings of psychopathology, we hoped to gain some insight into the clinical status of these difficult students.
Special educators better trained in psychotropic knowledge would become improved reporters to help prescribing physicians determine the beneficial and side effects of the psychotropic medications they are increasingly prescribing to youth. However, at this point, prescribing physicians do not appear to commonly obtain feedback about medication effects from teachers, except those for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and disruptive behavior disorders (Mattison et al. 2007 ). To stimulate collaboration, a new study of psychotropic usage would aid physicians in better appreciating which psychotropics they are currently prescribing to special education students with emotional and behavioral problems, whether their prescribing practices make clinical sense, and how effective these medicines might be in reducing psychopathology in school.
A new study of current psychotropic usage in special education students with emotional and behavioral disorders is especially timely for both special education teachers and prescribing physicians. Special educators have become increasingly informed of the accumulating evidence base for the use of psychotropics to treat specific psychiatric disorders in their students (Forness and Kavale 2001 ), which can complement their frontline behavioral and academic interventions (Forness et al. 1999 ). However, they continue to have minimal working knowledge about psychotropic medications (Ryan et al. 2012 ) despite improving resources (Konopasek 2012 ). They now need more real-time awareness of which psychotropics (alone and in combination) are currently being prescribed for their students, to better recognize those medications with which they must be especially familiar.
The only related interim information about psychotropic usage in such students has been provided for 137 students in a non-public school residential setting who were classified by the federal special education category as having emotional disturbance (Ryan et al. 2008 ). The large majority of the students (75.9%) were taking a psychotropic medicine, including 56.2% who were taking two or more medicines. These findings were double the findings in the earlier study of such students (Mattison 1999 ). One likely reason was that these special education students were in residential programs for seriously dysfunctional youth rather than in public school programs for those with less dysfunction at school and/or home. However, another probable reason is that the increased rates in the Ryan study are also consistent with recent national trends of significantly increased prescribing of psychotropic medications for youth by all physicians, not only singly, but also concomitantly. For the period from 1987 to 1996, the overall rate of psychotropic prescribing more than doubled (Olfson et al. 2002 ; Zito et al. 2003 ). Then, from 1996 to 2007, the overall rate rose by ∼75% (Comer et al. 2010 ).
Psychotropic medication characteristics have rarely been investigated in special education students with emotional and/or behavioral disorders. The most recent study (Mattison 1999 ) investigated psychotropic usage from 1993 to 1996 in 89 elementary school students classified as having serious emotional disturbance who were in either self-contained classes (52%) or a self-contained school (48%). At baseline, 38.2% of the participants were receiving a psychotropic medication, with 16.8% taking more than one medication. A similar study has not been repeated for special education students in a public school, such as a resource room, a self-contained class, or a self-contained school.
Second, DSM-IV diagnoses were determined at enrollment by the psychiatric consultant, using a diagnostic procedure that has been previously described (Mattison et al. 2003 ). To further augment this process, observations were also used from treatment team discussions that occurred during each student's first marking period after enrollment in the program. Diagnoses were determined independently from the CASI-PM-T. Acknowledging the diagnostic controversy of juvenile bipolar disorder, criteria for the narrow clinical phenotype of mania were used, which emphasizes the need for either elevated/expansive mood and/or grandiosity (Leibenluft at al. 2003 ).
Two methods were independently used to describe psychopathology. First, at the end of the first marking period teachers completed the Child and Adolescent Symptom Inventory Progress Monitor (CASI-PM-T) (Sprafkin et al. 2010 ), a 30 item behavioral checklist with American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (DSM-IV)-based symptom categories (developed from the original CASI-T [Gadow and Sprafkin 1998 ]) (American Psychiatric Association 1994 ). Psychometric properties have been established in different samples of students, including special education students with emotional and/or behavioral disorders (Sprafkin et al. 2011 ). T scores have been determined based on samples of general education students (Sprafkin et al. 2011 ).
The principal psychotropic categories used in this report were anxiolytics, atypical antipsychotics (no earlier first generation antipsychotics were found), mood stabilizers (anticonvulsants [non-seizure use] and lithium), selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) (no earlier generation antidepressants were found), and other medications. In addition, stimulants, atomoxetine, and α agonists were also combined into an ADHD medication category.
During the first marking period, the psychotropic medication(s) that students were taking at that time were recorded. The program's nurses and consulting psychiatrists routinely obtain such information from parents at the start of the school year for medical/psychiatric questions that might subsequently arise.
The information detailed here was obtained from student files at the beginning and end of the school year. These data are typically gathered by this SCS program. The study was approved by the special education agency that provides the SCS and by the institutional review board (IRB) of the affiliated institution.
Educationally, the mean intelligence quotient (IQ) scores at enrollment for the participants were as follows: Verbal IQ (n=76) 98.8±14.8, performance IQ (n=76) 97.0±15.7, and full scale IQ 96.1±15.0. Their mean standard scores (n=68) for the Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Achievement (Woodcock et al. 2001 ) during the school year were 93.4±17.3 for broad reading and 89.3±14.1 for broad math. The respective mean grade equivalencies were 6.6±3.2 and 5.7±2.0, compared with a mean chronological grade level of 7.4±0.8 at the time of testing.
The SCS program has been described extensively elsewhere (Mattison and Schneider 2009 ). To summarize, students were taught in preparation for state assessment in classrooms of eight or fewer pupils by a special education teacher and a paraprofessional, using both direct individual instruction and small group instruction. Behaviorally, a level system was used to systematically provide schoolwide positive reinforcement. The school-based therapeutic components included individual counselors, psychiatric consultation, and an imbedded day program for those students who required the most intensive intervention to prevent hospitalization.
Psychotropic medication usage was determined for a cohort of 77 special education students who began the 2008–2009 school year in a self-contained middle school (SCS) (grades 6–8) in the suburban New York City area. The large majority (62; 80.5%) also completed the year. This program was for special education students with emotional and/or behavioral disorders who had not responded sufficiently to special education services within their general education schools.
Functionally ( ), the no medication group showed the best overall school functioning on the four measures, but no significant differences were found. For intensive community treatment, the students in the two medication groups were found to have experienced significantly more psychiatric hospitalizations and/or day program participation than the no medication group.
The single medication group showed the highest mean T scores for the six symptom categories ( ), followed by the ≥2 medication group and then the no medication group. However, only one significant difference (ADHD [hyperactive-impulsive]) was found among the groups for the categories, as well as for the total score, mainly differentiating the two medication groups from the no medication groups but not distinguishing between the medication groups.
The students were divided into three medication groups ( ): No medication (Group 1; n=17), one medication (Group 2; n=20), and two or more medications (Group 3; n=40). Although statistical comparisons among the three groups are limited by the numbers within the groups as well as the numbers of variables examined, we have chosen to list the resultant p values.
Reflecting the above findings of common serious psychopathology, 24.3% of the students were hospitalized once, 5.4% twice, and 1.4% three times during the course of the school year (any psychiatric hospitalization=31.1% [ ]). Almost one third of all participants were in a day program, whereas 16.9% experienced both hospitalization and day programs. Furthermore, on average, all students (the total group) had one office DR per marking period, were infrequently suspended, and missed >4 weeks of school during the year.
Psychopathology was rated by the teachers for all participants with the CASI-PM-T. The severity of the six symptom categories was, in descending order ( ): ODD, global depression, and ADHD (hyperactive-impulsive), followed by ADHD (inattentive), social anxiety, and CD. Whereas no mean T score for the total group was ≥70 (98th percentile or 2 standard deviations [SD] above the mean), the mean T scores for the first three symptom categories were ≥65 (93rd percentile or 1.5 SD). Furthermore, three categories of the single medication group and one category of the multiple medication group had mean T scores >70.
More than one medication was most commonly used in half of the ADHD+ODD/CD group and in half of the PDD only group. On the other hand, 22.2–31.6% of the groups were on no psychotropic medication.
In the third group, consisting of two disorders (ADHD+ODD/CD), two medicines predominated: ADHD medicines (63.2%) followed by atypical antipsychotics (52.6%). The fourth group was diagnostically the most complex, with depression plus one or two additional diagnoses. Three medicines were used in at least 30% of these students, including SSRIs, which were the most frequently prescribed in this group (37.5%), among all four diagnostic groups.
The level of diagnostic comorbidity in this cohort of participants did not allow simple comparison of medication use within single DSM-IV diagnostic categories. Therefore, we decided to examine which medications were used in the most common actual clinical presentations of these students. presents the most common presentations of DSM-IV disorders found in the participants (four groups of 9–19 students [12 – 25%]), followed by the distribution of medication use for each of the presentations.
The distribution of medications used by at least 25% of the students was, in descending order: Atypical antipsychotics (49.4%), stimulants (33.8%), and 28.6% for both mood stabilizers and SSRIs ( ). If atomoxetine and α agonists are considered medications for ADHD along with stimulants, then 48.0% of the students were taking at least one ADHD medicine. When combinations of medications were examined, almost 25% of the participants were on an atypical antipsychotic plus a stimulant or on an atypical antipsychotic plus a mood stabilizer.
Discussion
Psychotropic medication was used in the large majority of the special education participants of this study (77.9%), frequently in combination (52.0%). Atypical antipsychotics were the most commonly used medicine (in almost half of the students, 49.4%), followed closely by ADHD medications in 48.0%, including stimulants in one third (33.8%). Specific use of medications in the actual diagnostic presentations of the students appeared mainly to show ADHD medications when ADHD was present, and atypical antipsychotics when PDD or ODD/CD were present. Few significant differences were found when comparing groups with different numbers of medicines, except that medicated students were significantly more likely to have experienced psychiatric hospitalization and/or day programming during the course of the study's school year. Finally, serious psychopathology still occurred in many students who were on psychotropic medication.
Comparison of our medication findings with previous studies is limited because psychotropic medication usage has rarely been investigated in special education students with emotional and/or behavioral disorders. However, presents three studies that allow some key comparisons with the current study: The last study of psychotropic usage in such students in a public school setting (Mattison 1999), the most recent study of such students, although in a residential setting (Ryan et al. 2008), and a recent study of usage in outpatient youth in the same state of New York (Staller et al. 2005). The most direct comparison is with an earlier sample of students in elementary school who were classified as having serious emotional disturbance, half of whom were in an SCS (Mattison 1999). The current finding for overall medication use of 77.9% is double what was found in this earlier study (38.2%), and, therefore, consistent with the national trend for increased usage (∼75%) over a similar time period (Comer et al. 2010). Stimulants and antipsychotics were the most commonly used medications in both studies, though in reverse order. In addition, whereas the use of stimulants increased by almost one third, the use of antipsychotics more than quadrupled (as did the use of mood stabilizers and antidepressants). Furthermore, aside from stimulants, few of the medications used in the past study appeared in the current study, and vice versa.
Table 4. Treatment settings Medication Current SCS(n=77) SCC+SCS1999a(n=89) Residential ED students2008b(n=137) NY outpatient clinics2005c(n=1292) Any medication 77.9 38.2 75.9 74 >1 medication 52.0 16.8 56.2 37 Medication groups: Antipsychotics 49.4 11.2 41.6 27 Stimulants 33.8 25.8 13.1 35 Mood stabilizers 28.6 4.5 28.5 8 Antidepressants 28.6 6.7 48.9 33 Open in a separate window
The medication usage in this report is consistent with the percentages of overall and combined use found for students classified as having emotional disturbance in three residential settings for students ( ; Ryan et al. 2008), that is, therapeutic settings more intensive than the SCS of this study. Although the percentages of antipsychotics and mood stabilizers were quite similar between the two studies, the current findings show double the use of stimulants and close to half the use of antidepressants compared with the residential study. This difference might partly be explained by the fact that one residential setting was for youth with histories of drug abuse (where stimulant usage was likely limited).
The present results were also compared with those of a study of psychotropic medication use in outpatient settings in the state of New York during 2002 ( ; Staller et al. 2005), that is, less intensive settings than an SCS but in the same state as the current study. The outpatient distribution showed similar overall usage, but less polypharmacy, and also much less use of antipsychotics and mood stabilizers. These differences could well be related to the increased severity of psychopathology (especially externalizing) that has been shown for students classified with emotional and/or behavioral disorders compared with outpatient youth (Mattison 2004a). Teachers rated the current SCS participants in the upper 5th percentile on the ODD and ADHD (hyperactive/impulsive) symptom categories, whereas the most common DSM-IV diagnoses were ADHD (57.1%) and ODD/CD (50.6%).
The distribution of specific medications according to the most common clinical presentations presented by the participants provided some real-time insight into how the medications were being prescribed according to their actual diagnoses, and whether this was consistent with clinical practice. This approach was chosen rather than inspection by single diagnosis, which has usually been the case in such psychotropic prevalence studies, because single diagnoses or even generally termed comorbidities produce limited or potentially misleading results for understanding what psychotropic medications are actually prescribed in complex clinical presentations. For the PDD only group, atypical antipsychotics were most commonly prescribed, and, indeed, have an indicated use in PDD (AACAP, in press). Within the ADHD only group, ADHD medicines predominated, whereas atypical antipsychotics appeared to often be added to ADHD medicines when ADHD occurred in combination with ODD or CD. In clinical practice, antipsychotics or mood stabilizers are commonly added to ADHD medications when ODD/CD symptoms are also present and unresponsive to initial ADHD medicines, although the evidence base for such polypharmacy is limited (Blader et al. 2010). Therefore, overall the preceding real-world groupings appear to indicate prescribing practices that are consistent with community standards.
The most dramatic difference between the 1999 and current studies is the increased use of antipsychotics and polypharmacy. However, the findings are not definitive, because of different possible explanations; for example, similar groups of special education students with emotional and/or behavioral problems were not followed over time. Nevertheless, the change for antipsychotics appears consistent with national trends for antipsychotics in youth (Olfson et al. 2012; Zito et al. 2013). This antipsychotic research also appears to reflect other findings of the current study. For example, Olfson and colleagues found that antipsychotics were most commonly prescribed by psychiatrists in the 2005–2009 time period for youth with the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 9th revision (ICD-9) diagnosis of disruptive behavior disorder (53.0%), as well as 51.2% when comorbid disorders were present. When Zito and colleagues compared antipsychotic usage between 1997 and 2006, the increased antipsychotic prescribing in 2006 was significantly distinguished by increased percentages of bipolar disorder and ADHD/disruptive behavior disorder.
Similarly, the change in polypharmacy also appears consistent with national trends. For example, polypharmacy with two or more psychotropic medications prescribed by physicians for youth with psychiatric disorders has increased by ∼50% between 1996 and 2007 (Comer at al. 2010). Such polypharmacy visits were most often associated with disruptive behavior disorder (53.7%) and two or more disorders (47.4%).
Few significant differences were discovered between groups with no medication, monopharmacy, and polypharmacy beyond what appeared to be severity of dysfunction as represented by experience in a more intensive mental setting such as a day program or inpatient setting during the school year. (Although the statistical findings for these intergroup comparisons are limited by the numbers within each group and by the numbers of variables used for comparison, we chose to include the results because such studies of psychotropic usage in emotionally and behaviorally disturbed [EBD] students are so rare.) These findings appear consistent with past work. Characteristics for polypharmacy were previously investigated among 392 youth 2–17 years of age treated by private psychiatrists in 1997 and 1999 (Duffy et al. 2005). The predictors (from demographic and clinical factors) of polypharmacy over monopharmacy were the increased presence of bipolar disorder, comorbidity, and inpatient setting. Griffith et al. (2010) compared monopharmacy versus polypharmacy in 180 youth (10–18 years old) on psychotropic medication as they entered residential treatment (i.e., the equivalent of an inpatient setting) in 2004–2005. No significant differences between the monopharmacy and polypharmacy groups were found for demographics, behavioral checklist scores, or psychiatric disorders.
Finally, the clinical effectiveness of the psychotropics prescribed for the participants in this study could be questioned for many students. That is, especially for teachers' ratings of the ODD, global depression, and ADHD (hyperactive/impulsive) symptom categories of the CASI-PM-T, elevated mean T scores (of at least 1.5 SD) persisted, especially for those students on at least one medication. “Why” could be answered by several explanations, which will not be expanded upon here. More importantly for this report is the question of whether or not the prescribing physicians were aware of this continuing serious psychopathology, which could aid their readjustments of both medication and non-medication treatments. This finding highlights the need for physicians to get feedback from teachers when they are prescribing psychotropics for youth with school psychopathology, even more so for special education students. In the authors' experience with special education students such as those in this study, this information is not commonly requested by community prescribers.Image copyright Reuters Image caption The USNS Invincible, pictured here in 2012, was forced to change course
A US Navy ship was forced to change course when fast-moving Iranian vessels approached it in the Strait of Hormuz, US officials say.
The USNS Invincible changed direction when the other vessels came within 600 yards (550m) before stopping.
Three British Royal Navy vessels, accompanying the American ship at the time, were also forced to move.
A US official told reporters the Iranian vessel had tried to position itself between them.
The Iranian ships are believed to belong to the Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a navy official told the Associated Press news agency that such incidents had been happening on a regular basis.
The navy considers them "unprofessional and dangerous", and had fired warning shots in previous incidents, he added.
The Invincible, a tracking ship, is fitted with considerable radar equipment and other scientific instruments.
Such ships are usually deployed to monitor missile launches and provide important data back to the command centre. For friendly launches, such data helps with accuracy and future weapon design.
But the system can also be used to track foreign missile launches and tests.
In February, Iran once again tested a medium-range ballistic missile, in apparent violation of a United Nations Security Council resolution.
That test led to sanctions from the United States and a strongly-worded warning from President Donald Trump.
"Iran is playing with fire - they don't appreciate how 'kind' President Obama was to them. Not me!" he tweeted.
The swift sanctions were widely seen as a warning to Iran that the new administration would not accept any further missile tests.Post)[Position notes from Day 1, video of QBs, OL]
[Watch: RBs at work during first spring practice]
CORAL GABLES — As the Hurricanes search for playmakers in the passing game behind Ahmmon Richards, a former All-American recruit turned heads on the first day of spring practice.
Mark Richt said sophomore wide receiver Dionte Mullins “caught my eye,” because he’s “much more sure of what he’s doing. He’s in good condition. He made some nice catches. He did a nice job.”
Tight end Chris Herndon, a senior who is taking over for David Njoku at that position, named Mullins and freshman early enrollee DeeJay Dallas as two playmakers from the team-drills portion of the day.
“They were pretty short catches, but they were contested,” he said, not specifying whether Dallas or Mullins made the grabs. “They were not easy and he made a play on the ball.”
Richt said Dallas “showed the ability to snatch the ball well,” thought he’s “still kind of lost and definitely not in condition” to fully compete in college practices. “But he had a few bright moments,” Richt said.
Mullins, listed at 5-foot-11 and 200 pounds, is apparently some 20 pounds heavier than last year and wears No. 84. Academic issues forced him to miss his senior year at Miami-Gulliver Prep. He enrolled midway through last fall camp, played sparingly, and recorded no catches.
Dallas (5-10, 200), who wears No. 13 and whose given name is Demetrius, was a four-star recruit in the most recent recruiting class (like Mullins was in 2016). He is from Brunswick, Georgia.
Richt noted the receiver group looks much like last year, when UM had a light group in the spring and four summer enrollees who will help. Redshirt sophomore Lawrence Cager (knee) is “not going right now,” Richt said, and UM won’t have freshmen Jeff Thomas, Mike Harley and Evidence Njoku until the fall.
***
SPRING FOOTBALL 2017
Position-by-position previews and projected depth charts:
QB | RB | WR | TE | OL | DL | LB | DB | ST | Scholarship count | Spring schedule | Five big?sSam Taylor
Nothing depresses me more than reading about happiness. Why? Because there’s entirely too much advice out there about how to achieve it. As Frédéric Lenoir points out in Happiness: A Philosopher’s Guide (recently translated from its original French), great thinkers have been discussing this topic for more than 2,000 years. But opinions on it still differ. Just scan the 14,700 titles listed in the “happiness” subgenre of self-help books on Amazon, or watch the 55 TED talks tagged in the same category. What makes us happy? Health, money, social connection, purpose, “flow,” generosity, gratitude, inner peace, positive thinking… Research shows that any (or all?) of the above answers are correct. Social scientists tell us that even the simplest of tricks—counting our blessings, meditating for 10 minutes a day, forcing smiles—can push us into a happier state of mind.
And yet for me and many others, happiness remains elusive. Of course, I sometimes feel joyful and content—reading a bedtime story to my kids, interviewing someone I greatly admire, finishing a tough piece of writing. But despite having good health, supportive family and friends, and a stimulating and flexible job, I’m often awash in negative emotions: worry, frustration, anger, disappointment, guilt, envy, regret. My default state is dissatisfied.
The huge and growing body of happiness literature promises to lift me out of these feelings. But the effect is more like kicking me when I’m down. I know I should be happy. I know I have every reason to be, and that I’m better off than most. I know that happier people are more successful. I know that just a few mental exercises might help me. Still, when I’m in a bad mood, it’s hard to break out of it. And—I’ll admit—a small part of me regards my nonbliss not as unproductive negativity but as highly productive realism. I can’t imagine being happy all the time; indeed, I’m highly suspicious of anyone who claims to be.
I agreed to write this essay because over the past several years I’ve sensed a swell of support for this point of view. Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2009 book Bright-sided, about the “relentless promotion” and undermining effects of positive thinking, was followed last year by Rethinking Positive Thinking, by the NYU psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen, and The Upside of Your Dark Side, by two experts in positive psychology, Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener. This year brought a terrific Psychology Today article by Matthew Hutson titled “Beyond Happiness: The Upside of Feeling Down”; The Upside of Stress, by Stanford’s Kelly McGonigal; Beyond Happiness, by the British historian and commentator Anthony Seldon; |
Pin It or Tumble it) YOU are claiming that YOU have a legal right to that picture. And if the owner of that photo comes after the company, you will be the responsible party. And Pinterest goes so far as to say if you REpin something, you're saying you have the right to that photo. Yes, if that's enforced, it would mean that 99% of people on Pinterest are doing something illegal. Will that ever come up? Maybe. Maybe not. But I'm leaning on the paranoid side now. I don't want to be the test case. And I don't want to pin something the owner of the photo wouldn't want pinned.
So pin your own photos, pin things from sites that have a Pin It button (though the Pin It button is not always a safe bet either because if the site owner doesn't own the pic but has the Pin It option automatically pop up, it's still not okay.) I pin book covers and movie posters because I figure that it's advertisement for said movies or books. But other stuff? All those pretty photos? I'm going to look but not touch.
ADDED: Also see discussion in comments about posting and sharing pics on Facebook. Same rules apply. (*comments were lost in site transfer)
5. Assume that something is copyrighted until proven otherwise.
That's your safest bet. If you're not 100% sure it's okay to use, don't. This includes things like celebrity photos. Someone owns those. There are enough free pics out there that you don't need to risk violating someone's copyright.
6. Spread the word to your fellow bloggers.
It was KILLING me not to be able to go tell everyone about all of this because I didn't want anyone else to get into this kind of mess. So if you know someone who is using photos in the wrong way, let them know. I wish someone had told me.
So I know many of you are probably thinking--she's being paranoid or that the likelihood of this ever happening to you is slim. Well, maybe. But it happened to me. And now that I know better, I'm going to do better (from the Maya Angelou quote Oprah always used.) And yes, it does kill me a little bit that I can't go on posting boyfriends of the week and mancandy, but instead I'll just post links to it so you can see it elsewhere. :)
So lesson learned: protect yourself and respect the rights of other artists.
*This post is not intended as legal advice. God knows I have no background in law. This is just my experience and what I learned working these past few weeks with people who are experts at copyright.Still looking for new ways to download content without breaking a sweat? Well, look no further as torrents are here to save the day!
It is a marvel that torrents cover any and all kinds of content out there, be it music, movies, TV shows, games, eBooks or even apps! However, determining the best torrent clients can be a hassle for those who are new to the scene.
To ease your pain, feel free to choose the best torrent clients for Windows from the following list:
uTorrent
BitTorrent
Frostwire
qBittorrent
Vuze
Before you download the best torrent clients for Windows, let us remind you that torrenting is not the best option for many people across the globe. In some countries, torrenting is frowned upon and can also lead to legal hassles and. But with the help of a torrent VPN, you can avoid legal ramifications by masking your IP address when using the best torrent clients.
Thus, do remember to use Ivacy on Windows before installing the best torrent clients. Here’s what you need to do:
Get Ivacy VPN. Download and install Ivacy for Windows. Once installed, open the app. Under the ‘Purpose‘ tab, and select ‘Torrenting‘. You are now ready to download as many torrents as you like.
Download uTorrent for Windows 7 and 10
uTorrent has more than 100 million users. The client is quite popular largely because it has been designed to use limited computer resources, all the while offering complete functionality of larger clients like BitComet and Vuze.
It’s really not that difficult to download uTorrent for Windows 7, neither is it difficult to download uTorrent for Windows 10. Once taken care of, you can use it to fetch all your favourite torrents with ease. Here’s what you need to do:
Open the browser of your choosing. Go to utorrent.com. On the site, click the ‘Download’ button. Select ‘Windows’ on the next screen. Click ‘Download Now’ in the screen that pops up next. Once the download is complete, execute the installer. Follow onscreen instructions, until installation is complete. Upon completion of installation, access uTorrent and start torrenting immediately.
Download BitTorrent Free for Windows 10 and Windows 7
BitTorrent is considered to be the best torrent clients for Windows and is estimated to have more than a quarter billion users. In 2013, the client accounted for 3.35% worldwide bandwidth, which is more than half of the total of 6% for file sharing.
To download Bit Torrent for Windows, here is what you need to do:
Open the browser of your choosing. Go to bittorrent.com. Click the ‘Download’ button. Execute the BitTorrent installer. Follow onscreen instructions until installation is complete. Access BitTorrent and torrent as much as you like without any hassles whatsoever.
Download Frostwire for Windows
Frostwire was released in 2004 and was quite similar to Limewire in terms of its functionality and appearance. However, numerous features have been added since then, including support for BitTorrent functionality.
To download Frostwire torrent client for Windows, here is what you need to do:
Open the browser of your choosing. Go to frostwire.com/downloads. Select ‘Windows’. Download the installer file. Execute the Frostwire installer. Follow onscreen instructions until installation is complete. You can now access Frostwire for any unforgettable torrenting experience.
Download qBittorrent for Windows
qBittorrent is different from the other clients on this list. It serves as an OS native application and was written using C++. The client is small but equally powerful and intuitive.
To download the qBittorrent client for Windows, here is what you need to do:
Open the browser of your choosing. Go to qbittorrent.org/download.php. Select ‘Windows’. Choose the appropriate installer, based on whether your OS is a 32-bit or 64-bit OS. Upon download completion, execute the installer. Follow onscreen instructions until installation is complete. Access qBittorrent to torrent movies, TV shows, music, games and so much more henceforth.
Download Vuze for Windows
Vuze, previously referred to as Azureus, utilizes the Azureus engine and is written in Java. The BitTorrent client was quite popular, that is until it required its users to abide by stricter license terms.
To download Vuze torrent client for Windows, here is what you need to do:
Open the browser of your choosing. Go to vuze.com. The installer will download automatically. Once the download is complete, execute the installer. Follow onscreen instructions until installation is complete. Access Vuze to start torrenting right away.
After going through our list, it should be easier for you to find the best torrent clients that meet and exceeds your expectations. So which one is your favourite client from the ones mentioned above? The truth is, no matter which client you end up downloading, you will be content with their user-friendly features.
And if you want to anonymize your torrenting activity to avoid DMCA notices and legal hassles, simply download the best VPN for torrenting, Ivacy! Our app also helps you bypass geo-restrictions, giving you unrestricted access to all your favourite content from around the world.Azizullah Royesh is a teacher at Marefat High School in Kabul, Afghanistan. He teaches courses on civic education, humanism, Quranic interpretation, Dari and English. He is currently one of 10 finalists for the Global Teacher Prize.
I left school when I was 10. Soviet troops invaded Kabul in 1979 and I fled to the highlands with my family. My father didn’t support the communist regime and, along with thousands of others, he was persecuted. In 1982 I fled again – this time to a refugee camp in Pakistan.
My family couldn’t come with me and life in exile was difficult. I went to camps in Quetta and Peshawar, but I couldn’t stay there for long. I had to go into the cities to find work and provisions. I mainly worked in sweatshops. At one factory I had to collect hot candy which used to burn my hands. The owner would insult me and the other children, but none of us had any choice but to work there. I also worked as a tailor and carpenter, and sometimes on construction sites. I was surviving, but my life was not much more than that.
During this time I began reading whenever I could. There was a kind man called Mukhtar who would lend me books from his shop. He took a real interest in me and we discussed history, politics and different ideologies.
When I returned to Kabul at 16 I was one of only a few people who could read and write. I began teaching the alphabet to small groups. After six months, the local authority, comprised of resistance fighters to the Soviet regime, asked me to help set up a school. People of all ages attended – even many adults didn’t have basic literacy skills. Families contributed small amounts of money or food if they could to help teachers with living costs.
The authority supported us and I went to Pakistan to get supplies from the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan. It was a very dangerous four-day trip. Attacks from Soviet fighter jets were likely and we travelled through rough terrain at night. Over the next three years we set up five more schools in the district of Jeghatoo with the support of the committee. We grew from three teachers to 45 and from 50 students to more than 2,000.
No girls were able to join. It was something that simply couldn’t be talked about at the time. I also had to include lots of religious activities. Some of the local clerics saw the school as being against religious seminaries and I had to maintain good relations with them as they were so influential.
Four years later, aged 20, I fled Kabul again. The Taliban had taken over. I was part of the Hazara ethnic community, which is strongly opposed to its beliefs, so it was unsafe for me to stay. I went back to Pakistan and helped set up a school for refugees with friends.
Families contributed to the expenses and we used textbooks written by Islamist parties during the time of resistance. Later, students studied from books that I and other teachers wrote. One of the subjects we designed was humanism. It’s aim was to provide hope. We talked to the children about the power of the human being: its power of thought, wisdom, will, determination creativity. We wanted them to realise that they had an active role to play in society.
After the collapse of the Taliban in 2001 I moved back to Kabul. Some of the teachers came with me and we set up Marefat High School in a bombed out building. The city was completely destroyed. Families were struggling to feed themselves and it was difficult persuading them to send their children to school. We visited each home and tried to help parents see education in the same regard as other basic needs, such as food and shelter. We explained that they couldn’t wait for the government or foreign donors to help them because they might not come. Initially, the fees were the equivalent of $1 a month and the poorest families didn’t pay. We started out with 37 students, and now have more than 3,500. Since we opened, 163 of our students have won scholarships to universities abroad – 17 of these have been in the US.
We wanted the school to be co-educational. One of the biggest challenges was persuading parents to allow their daughters to attend. A lot of families were trapped in traditional mindsets and it was difficult for them to accept the idea. When we visited homes we explained that the education of girls was not just about providing them with the skills to read and write, it was also about turning them into active family members. As well as bringing them pride, this would mean they’d be able to find better paid work.
Some of the parents took on board our arguments, sparking a cultural change in the community. By showing the impact school had on those first few students, we were gradually able to persuade others. In Afghanistan, there is a long history of gender segregation, but we wanted a mixed school to show that there’s no difference between boys and girls. And we hoped that by giving young people a place for natural interaction it would help them have a more realistic view of each other. Currently, 44% of our students are female.
In 2009, our female students protested against a controversial law which would allow marital rape. In response, around 30 traditional clerics came in a mob to attack the school. They said they were going to burn the building down and called for my execution. We decided not to react negatively. We didn’t go to the press or say anything against them. All we did was ask the government for protection. Police troops were sent to school and after two days we asked the students to come back. We were expecting around 15% to attend, but about 95% came. They walked into school holding their parents hands, who had brought in flowers. It was a wonderful moment. It showed the female pupils that they had the support of their families and fellow students.
The police officers stayed for five months, but no one in uniform stands guard now. This doesn’t mean that the traditional clerics aren’t trying their best to undo our work. But their actions have only made people more determined to attend.
Teaching has never been a profession. It’s a natural part of my life. I’ve always felt that I’ve had something to pass on to others. Sometimes it has simply been helping people read and write – other times it is about providing hope. Our experiences at the school have shown what can be achieved. When a community is poor and oppressed you need to mobilise it to instigate change. I hope that other areas will be supported to do the same.
Follow us on Twitter via @GuardianTeach. Join the Guardian Teacher Network for lesson resources, comment and job opportunities, direct to your inbox.Marvel and ABC have unveiled the official episode description for the upcoming season 2 premiere of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which reveals that Hayley Atwell’s Peggy Carter will be making a guest appearance ahead of headlining her own Captain America spin-off show Agent Carter later this year. Also set for guest appearances in ‘Shadows’ are the returning B.J. Britt (Agent Triplett), Adrian Pasdar (Glenn Talbot) and Patton Oswalt (Agent Koenig); check out the full synopsis here…
“Shadows” – Coulson and his team are now wanted fugitives with limited resources–but that’s not stopping them from keeping the world safe from powerful and unseen threats everywhere. However, with new members they hardly know, will S.H.I.E.L.D. ever be trusted again? Watch “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” on the ABC Television Network.
Guest starring are B.J. Britt as Agent Antoine Triplett, Nick Blood as Agent Lance Hunter, Adrian Pasdar as Brigadier General Glenn Talbot, Henry Simmons as Alphonso “Mack” Mackenzie, Patton Oswalt as Agent Billy Koenig, Lucy Lawless as Isabelle “Izzy” Hartley, Wilmer Calderon as Idaho, Reed Diamond as Daniel Whitehall, Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter, Brian Patrick Wade as Carl Creel, Matthew Glave as Roger Browning, Simon Kassianides as Sunil Bakshi, George Stephanopoulos as self, Raquel Gardner as Carla Talbot, Ben Turner Nixon as Hydra Officer, Franco Vega as Military Leader, Rich Ceraulo as Soldier #1, and JB Tadena as Private Tilden.
So, is this going to be a flashback to the early days of S.H.I.E.L.D., or might we see another appearance from Old Peggy?
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. returns on September 23rd with Clark Gregg (Phil Coulson), Ming-Na Wen (Melinda May), Chloe Bennet (Skye), Iain De Caestecker (Leo Fitz), Elizabeth Henstridge (Jemma Simmons) and Brett Dalton (Grant Ward) all returning as regulars.Political Leanings: Republican/Anti-Trump Super PAC
Spending Target: Unknown
Our Principles PAC was formed in January 2016 to thwart Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Its founder, Katie Packer, is a veteran Republican strategist who was the deputy campaign manager of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. She founded Burning Glass Consulting, a firm whose goal is to attract female voters, and is a founding partner of WWP Strategies, a political consulting and issue management firm based in Washington, D.C.
Our Principles PAC hired former Jeb Bush campaign spokesman Tim Miller as its communications adviser. Miller was previously executive director of America Rising, a Republican organization formed to conduct opposition research on Democrats. Jamie Jodoin, a political accounting specialist at Robert Watkins & Company, serves as the super PAC’s treasurer. Hewlett Packard Enterprise President and CEO Meg Whitman, who served as finance co-chair of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s presidential campaign, has helped the super PAC with fundraising.
On Feb. 22, Packer released a memo outlining the PAC’s strategy “to prevent Donald Trump from hijacking our great Party.” As of March 8, the PAC had spent $4.4 million on independent expenditures, including TV ads, voter guides and mailers targeting Trump, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
As of Jan. 31, Our Principles PAC raised more than $3 million from individual donors, according to its February report filed with the Federal Election Commission. Almost all of its funding came from Marlene Ricketts, co-owner of the Chicago Cubs baseball franchise, wife of billionaire T.D. Ameritrade founder J. Joe Ricketts, and mother of both Republican Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts and Todd Ricketts
Marlene Ricketts was a top contributor to Unintimidated PAC, a super PAC that supported Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s failed 2016 presidential bid. She also has been a major funder of the fiscally conservative Ending Spending Action Fund, which was founded by her husband, Joe, and is run by her son, Todd. And, in 2015, Ricketts also gave $10,000 each to super PACs backing the presidential campaigns of Bush and Christie, as well as former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.Here’s my fun fact for the day, provided courtesy of Robert Litan, who directs research at the Kauffman Foundation, which specializes in promoting innovation in America: “Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less,” said Litan. “That is about 40 million jobs. That means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period.”
Message: If we want to bring down unemployment in a sustainable way, neither rescuing General Motors nor funding more road construction will do it. We need to create a big bushel of new companies — fast. We’ve got to get more Americans working again for their own dignity — and to generate the rising incomes and wealth we need to pay for existing entitlements, as well as all the new investments we’ll need to make. It was just reported that Social Security this year will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes — a red line we were not expected to cross until at least 2016.
But you cannot say this often enough: Good-paying jobs don’t come from bailouts. They come from start-ups. And where do start-ups come from? They come from smart, creative, inspired risk-takers. How do we get more of those? There are only two ways: grow more by improving our schools or import more by recruiting talented immigrants. Surely, we need to do both, and we need to start by breaking the deadlock in Congress over immigration, so we can develop a much more strategic approach to attracting more of the world’s creative risk-takers. “Roughly 25 percent of successful high-tech start-ups over the last decade were founded or co-founded by immigrants,” said Litan. Think Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, or Vinod Khosla, the India-born co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
That is no surprise. After all, Craig Mundie, the chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft, asks: What made America this incredible engine of prosperity? It was immigration, plus free markets. Because we were so open to immigration — and immigrants are by definition high-aspiring risk-takers, ready to leave their native lands in search of greater opportunities — “we as a country accumulated a disproportionate share of the world’s high-I.Q. risk-takers.”
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In addition, because of our vibrant and meritocratic university system, the best foreign students who wanted the best education also came here, and many of them also stayed. In its heyday, our unique system also attracted a disproportionate share of high-I.Q. risk-takers to high government service. So when you put all this together, with our free markets and democracy, it made it easy here for creative, high-I.Q. risk-takers to raise capital for their ideas and commercialize them. In short, America had a very powerful, self-reinforcing engine for growing innovative new companies.
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“When you get this happy coincidence of high-I.Q. risk-takers in government and a society that is biased toward high-I.Q. risk-takers, you get these above-average returns as a country,” argued Mundie. “What is common to Singapore, Israel and America? They were all built by high-I.Q. risk-takers and all thrived — but only in the U.S. did it happen at a large scale and with global diversity, so you had this really rich cross-section.”A new poll shows that Donald Trump has vastly improved his support among voters since becoming the presumptive Republican nominee.
The Washington Post/ABC poll released Saturday night shows that Trump is now favored by 46 percent among registered voters, with Clinton at 44 percent.
That marks an eleven-point shift towards Trump since the same poll conducted in March. Clinton is down five points among registered voters while Trump is up six.
Forty-four percent of voters said they wanted a third-party candidate to run, but 51 percent said they were satisfied with the current field.
When asked to pick Clinton, Trump, or Romney, only 22 percent of voters chose the former failed Republican nominee, while 37 percent chose Clinton and 35 percent chose Trump.
The poll was conducted May 16-19 of 1,005 adults (829 registered voters) with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.President Trump has been trying to fast track tax reform since he’s entered the whitehouse, but it comes with backlash from boomerang effects. Democrats and Republicans on both sides claimed it would harm middle class citizens. But is is the middle class already being harmed by individual mandate laws that fine low income individuals tax returns, as a result for not being able to afford skyrocketing premiums through the ACA?
In a recent report from CBSnews, The House GOP revised the tax reform bill to tax income at higher rates overtime. The article has the normal banter on taxes from both sides, good for middle class, bad for middle class. One thing that stood out in the report was how the GOP finds a struggle to remove the Individual Mandate law that fines US citizens for not being enrolled in the ACA. Fines are issued when tax returns are filed, and can peak up to $700. For struggling young Americans just getting into the groove of life, that’s a first emergency fund setup, or two monthes of health insurance through the ACA paid ahead of time to make it easier to save for the upcoming monthes ahead, gone.
Rep. Tom Cole mentions that getting healthcare involved in tax reform isn’t the best idea right now. But if being fined from your tax return for not being able to afford the premiums the ACA requires you to pay to receive healthcare benefits, then healthcare and tax reform have already been blended together.
There seems to be a general disconnect between the average middle class American, and the representives that govern the economic laws they live with. A lot of messages have been sent and retracted on both sides of the isle, but the message from President Trump remains the same. He wants the biggest tax cut in decades for businesses and citizens nationwide.
During a meeting on Thursday including Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan, trump told Kevin Brady, chairmain of the Way and Means Committee, that he wants to see the Tax Reform plan signed by Christmas. A version of the bill is currently being rushed through lower chambers of congress, but there’s no direct word on the removal of the Individual Mandate.
House Republicans are aiming to move the bill through the lower chamber as quickly as possible so Trump has some version of a tax bill to sign by Christmas.
“We’re going to move promptly next week … to begin action on this tax cut.” – Kevin BradySpeaker of the House Paul Ryan says he plans to run for another term as speaker and he wants Republicans to support Donald Trump on Election Day.
Radio show host Jerry Bader interviewed Ryan on Green Bay, Wisconsin’s WTAQ-AM. Bader read a story in the The Hill that fed into the narrative that the Wisconsin congressman may step away after the election:
Chatter is growing louder on Capitol Hill that Paul Ryan’s days as Speaker are numbered. Four House Republicans, including a senior lawmaker close to leadership, told The Hill they expect Ryan to step down after Tuesday’s elections, arguing that he faces a daunting path to the 218 votes he needs to win a full two-year term leading the House GOP.
Bader then asked Ryan: “A simple question for you, can you say with 100 percent certainly you seek another term as speaker?”
Ryan, who was calling in from a bus tour of the Badger State, said to the host: “Yes, I can. This is the typical chatter you have every two years that they call ‘palace intrigue’ in the Hill rags. I am going to seek staying on as speaker.”
The speaker said he was proud of his Better Way agenda that he developed and now he was looking in the next session of Congress to executing the agenda. “There is a lot of unfinished work to do. I think I can do a lot to help our cause, our party.”
Ryan told Bader that for the next four days, he was going to be on a bus with Sen. Ron Johnson throughout the state and he is scheduled to rally Saturday with Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, the GOP nominee for vice president, in Mukwonago, Wisconsin.
Wisconsin is a battleground state.
“Just imagine the scandal baggage Hillary Clinton brings in–if she were to get elected-on top of the liberal-Obama agenda she wants to prosecute,” he said.
Ryan said it is too bad that young people do not remember what the Clinton’s put the country through in the 1990s.
“This is what life with the Clinton’s looks like–there is always a scandal around the corner–then, there is some kind of investigation–you never know what’s coming next,” he said
“They play the system to enrich themselves through what everyone calls: ‘Clinton Incorporated,'” he said.
“Let that be a case for voting for Trump-Pence-Johnson.”I am pleased to announce that as of the middle of April, my Elsevier publications had received 30,752 page views and 2,025 citations. I got these numbers in a promotional e-mail from Elsevier, and although I’m not sure what they mean, I presume that it would be even better to have even bigger numbers.
Indeed, the widespread availability of bibliometric data from sources such as Elsevier, Google Scholar and Thomson Reuters ISI makes it easy for scientists (with their employers looking over their shoulders) to obsess about their productivity and impact, and to compare their numbers with those of other scientists.
And if more is good, then the trends for science are favourable. The number of publications continues to grow exponentially; it was already approaching two million per year by 2012. More importantly, and contrary to common mythology, most papers do get cited. Indeed, more papers, from more journals, over longer periods of time, are being cited more often. One likely reason for rising citations is the incredible search capabilities that the web now affords. This would seem to be good news.
But what if more is bad? In 1963, the physicist and historian of science Derek de Solla Price looked at growth trends in the research enterprise and saw the threat of“scientific doomsday”. The number of scientists and publications had been growing exponentially for 250 years, and Price realized that the trend was unsustainable. Within a couple of generations, he said, it would lead to a world in which “we should have two scientists for every man, woman, child, and dog in the population”. Price was also an elitist who believed that quality could not be maintained amid such growth. He showed that scientific eminence was concentrated in a very small percentage of researchers, and that the number of leading scientists would therefore grow much more slowly than the number of merely good ones, and that would yield “an even greater preponderance of manpower able to write scientific papers, but not able to write distinguished ones”.
The quality problem has reared its head in ways that Price could not have anticipated. Mainstream scientific leaders increasingly accept that large bodies of published research are unreliable. But what seems to have escaped general notice is a destructive feedback between the production of poor-quality science, the responsibility to cite previous work and the compulsion to publish.
The quality problem has been widely recognized in cancer science, in which many cell lines used for research turn out to be contaminated. For example, a breast-cancer cell line used in more than 1,000 published studies actually turned out to have been a melanoma cell line. The average biomedical research paper gets cited between 10 and 20 times in 5 years, and as many as one-third of all cell lines used in research are thought to be contaminated, so the arithmetic is easy enough to do: by one estimate, 10,000 published papers a year cite work based on contaminated cancer cell lines. Metastasis has spread to the cancer literature.
“The enterprise of science is evolving towards something different and as yet only dimly seen.”
Similar negative feedbacks occur in other areas of research. Pervasive quality problems have been exposed for rodent studies of neurological diseases, biomarkers for cancer and other diseases, and experimental psychology, amid the publication of thousands of papers.
So yes, the web makes it much more efficient to identify relevant published studies, but it also makes it that much easier to troll for supporting papers, whether or not they are any good. No wonder citation rates are going up.
That problem is likely to be worse in policy-relevant fields such as nutrition, education, epidemiology and economics, in which the science is often uncertain and the societal stakes can be high. The never-ending debates about the health effects of dietary salt, or how to structure foreign aid, or measure ecosystem services, are typical of areas in which copious peer-reviewed support can be found for whatever position one wants to take — a condition that then justifies calls for still more research.
More than 50 years ago, Price predicted that the scientific enterprise would soon have to go through a transition from exponential growth to “something radically different”, unknown and potentially threatening. Today, the interrelated problems of scientific quantity and quality are a frightening manifestation of what he foresaw. It seems extraordinarily unlikely that these problems will be resolved through the home remedies of better statistics and lab practice, as important as they may be. Rather, they would seem — and this is what Price believed — to announce that the enterprise of science is evolving towards something different and as yet only dimly seen.
Current trajectories threaten science with drowning in the noise of its own rising productivity, a future that Price described as “senility”. Avoiding this destiny will, in part, require much more selective publication. Rising quality can thus emerge from declining scientific efficiency and productivity. We can start by publishing less, and less often, whatever the promotional e-mails promise us.Vladimir Putin and then-wife Lyudmila attend a service in Moscow to mark the start of his current term as president on May 7, 2012. (Pool photo by Aleksey Nikolskyi/RIA Novosti via Reuters)
Lyudmila Putin was the wife of Vladimir Putin for three decades. They met in Leningrad, married in 1983 and moved to East Germany, where her husband was a KGB spy. When the Iron Curtain crumbled, they returned to Russia, where Vladimir Putin began his remarkable journey to becoming the most powerful person in the country, if not on the planet.
But as Vladimir reigned in Moscow, Lyudmila was seen less and less in public. Wild rumors in the Russian press suggested that he had packed her off to a monastery. In June 2013, the couple attended a Kremlin production of the ballet “La Esmeralda.” In the intermission, they announced to reporters that they would be divorcing.
Since then, Russians have heard little about Lyudmila. Putin’s press secretary refused to answer questions about her life, while the Kremlin biography of Russia’s president deleted all mention of her. But many ordinary citizens remained fascinated by her, eager to know what happened to the woman who may have gotten closer to Putin than anyone else.
The Kremlin confirmed April 2 that Russian President Vladimir Putin's divorce from his wife Lyudmila has been finalized. (Reuters)
Now, almost four years later, details about Lyudmila’s new life are emerging. And rather than turning up at a remote monastery, she appears to be planning a lavish life at a European villa, with a new husband 20 years her junior.
[This is what it’s like to be the token American journalist on Russian state TV]
These new details offer not only a glimpse into the notoriously private world of Putin’s family, barely acknowledged in official accounts and the subject of tabloid gossip, but also a hint of the wealth that critics say the Russian president and those in his inner circle have acquired over recent years.
The Russian news website Sobesednik revealed Lyudmila’s new relationship last year, when it reported on documents that appeared to show that the 58-year-old divorcée had remarried and changed her last name to that of her new husband, businessman Artur Ocheretny, then 37. Photographs appearing to show the couple at London’s Heathrow Airport were published this weekend by the website Starhit.
The couple’s link to the European villa was revealed Wednesday when the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) published an article that suggested Ocheretny was the owner of a “mini-palace” in a village called Anglet, near Biarritz in the southwest of France, that is worth up to $7.46 million and is undergoing an extensive renovation. The villa was bought six months after the Putins announced their divorce, the OCCRP reported.
The “Souzanna” villa, near Biarritz, which was reported to have been purchased by Artur Ocheretny, husband of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ex-wife. (Wikimedia Commons)
One local resident told a reporter from the OCCRP that the art deco villa was a landmark. “The buyer is Putin’s ex-wife, we all know this here,” the resident was quoted as saying, apparently unaware that Artur Ocheretny was the legal owner.
It seems like a happy ending for Lyudmila. Accounts of the Putins’ long marriage weren’t always pretty, and the sensitive Lyudmila is said to have struggled with her harsher husband. As Nataliya Gevorkyan, a biographer of Putin, told The Washington Post shortly before the divorce was announced, “She was a woman who loved and was not loved.”
But the OCCRP’s discovery of the luxury villa in France also raised questions about how Lyudmila or her new husband could afford such a lavish property. Artur Ocheretny is the director of a nonprofit organization, the Center for the Development of Interpersonal Communications, which is best known for being closely linked to Lyudmila. Before that, he worked at an event agency that often worked with government clients. The OCCRP notes that Russian NGO directors do not generally receive high salaries, and none of Ocheretny’s business ventures appear to be a success.
Lyudmila is not officially wealthy, either. Until her divorce, she was required by law to declare her assets and income, and she never declared much. In fact, Vladimir Putin’s own wealth declarations are similarly sparse, with a $147,000 salary and limited assets, including a Moscow apartment, a plot of land and three cars, listed on his 2015 statement.
There has long been speculation, however, that Putin and those close to him are significantly wealthier than they let on. Some estimates for the Russian president’s personal wealth go as high as $200 billion, though they are backed by scant evidence. A 2016 leak of records from a law firm based in Panama did suggest that associates known to be close to Putin held as much as $2 billion through offshore accounts.
[Russia's mass protests were a win for Navalny. How will the Kremlin respond?]
The Russian president may well have reason to keep such details quiet. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny recently released a video that accused Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of accepting more than $1 billion in bribes. The allegations sparked major protests in Russian cities.
Reuters reported in 2015 that Katerina Tikhonova, widely said to be the younger of Putin’s two daughters, owned a seaside villa in Biarritz that was worth about $3.7 million at the time. She and her husband, Kirill Shamalov, the son of a friend of the Russian president, together were worth around $2 billion, the news agency reported.
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Just because Russians like Putin doesn’t mean they’re happy about the economyA painting depicting bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto sold for 35 BTC (roughly €10,000) at the most recent Inside Bitcoins Conference and Expo in Israel.
Called ‘The Eye of God’, the work was created by local artist Xania Dorfman and bought by Yoshi Goto, a mining expert employed by bitcoin ASIC developer Bitmain. Goto got his first glimpse of the |
representatives of the aristocracy are dragged from their homes to be killed, and the St. Evrémonde château is burned to the ground.
In 1792, Lorry decides to travel to Paris to collect important documents from the Tellson's branch in that city and bring them to London for safekeeping against the chaos of the French Revolution. Darnay intercepts a letter written by Gabelle, one of his uncle's servants who has been imprisoned by the revolutionaries, pleading for the Marquis to help secure his release. Without telling his family or revealing his position as the new Marquis, Darnay sets out for Paris.
Book the Third: The Track of a Storm [ edit ]
"The Sea Still Rises", an illustration for Book 2, Chapter 22 by " Phiz
Shortly after Darnay arrives in Paris, he is denounced for being an emigrated aristocrat from France and jailed in La Force Prison.[8] Dr. Manette, Lucie, little Lucie, Jerry, and Miss Pross travel to Paris and meet Lorry to try to free Darnay. A year and three months pass, and Darnay is finally tried.
Dr Manette, viewed as a hero for his imprisonment in the Bastille, testifies on Darnay's behalf at his trial. Darnay is released, only to be arrested again later that day. A new trial begins on the following day, under new charges brought by the Defarges and a third individual who is soon revealed as Dr Manette. He had written an account of his imprisonment at the hands of Darnay's father and hidden it in his cell; Defarge found it while searching the cell during the storming of the Bastille.
While running errands with Jerry, Miss Pross is amazed to see her long-lost brother Solomon, but he does not want to be recognized in public. Carton suddenly steps forward from the shadows and identifies Solomon as Barsad, one of the spies who tried to frame Darnay for treason at his trial in 1780. Jerry remembers that he has seen Solomon with Cly, the other key witness at the trial and that Cly had faked his death to escape England. By threatening to denounce Solomon to the revolutionary tribunal as a Briton, Carton blackmails him into helping with a plan.
At the tribunal, Defarge identifies Darnay as the nephew of the dead Marquis St. Evrémonde and reads Dr Manette's letter. Defarge had learned Darnay's lineage from Solomon during the latter's visit to the wine shop several years earlier. The letter describes Dr Manette's imprisonment at the hands of Darnay's father and uncle for trying to report their crimes against a peasant family. Darnay's uncle had become infatuated with a girl, whom he had kidnapped and raped; despite Dr. Manette's attempt to save her, she died. The uncle killed her husband by working him to death, and her father died from a heart attack on being informed of what had happened. Before he died defending the family honour, the brother of the raped peasant had hidden the last member of the family, his younger sister. The Evrémonde brothers imprisoned Dr. Manette after he refused their offer of a bribe to keep quiet. He concludes his letter by condemning the Evrémondes, "them and their descendants, to the last of their race."[9] Dr. Manette is horrified, but he is not allowed to retract his statement. Darnay is sent to the Conciergerie and sentenced to be guillotined the next day.
Carton wanders into the Defarge's wine shop, where he overhears Madame Defarge talking about her plans to have both Lucie and little Lucie condemned. Carton discovers that Madame Defarge was the surviving sister of the peasant family savaged by the Evrémondes.[10] At night, when Dr. Manette returns, shattered after spending the day in many failed attempts to save Darnay's life, he falls into an obsessive search for his shoemaking implements. Carton urges Lorry to flee Paris with Lucie, her father, and Little Lucie, asking them to leave as soon as he joins.
Shortly before the executions are to begin, Solomon sneaks Carton into the prison for a visit with Darnay. The two men trade clothes, and Carton drugs Darnay and has Solomon carry him out. Carton has decided to be executed in his place, which he is able to do because of their similar appearances, and has given his own identification papers to Lorry to present on Darnay's behalf. Following Carton's earlier instructions, the family and Lorry flee to England with the unconscious Darnay, who slowly comes to consciousness as they travel by stages to cross the waters to England.
Meanwhile, Madame Defarge, armed with a dagger and pistol, goes to the Manette residence, hoping to apprehend Lucie and little Lucie and bring them in for execution. However, the family is already gone and Miss Pross stays behind to confront and delay Madame Defarge. As the two women struggle, Madame Defarge's pistol discharges, killing her and causing Miss Pross to go permanently deaf from noise and shock.
The seamstress and Carton, an illustration for Book 3, Chapter 15 by John McLenan (1859)
The novel concludes with the guillotining of Carton. As he is waiting to board the tumbril, he is approached by a seamstress, also condemned to death, who mistakes him for Darnay (with whom she had been imprisoned earlier) but realises the truth once she sees him at close range. Awed by his unselfish courage and sacrifice, she asks to stay close to him and he agrees. Upon their arrival at the guillotine, Carton comforts her, telling her that their ends will be quick but that there is no Time or Trouble "in the better land where... [they] will be mercifully sheltered", and she is able to meet her death in peace. Carton's unspoken last thoughts are prophetic:[11]
I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance [a lieutenant of Madame Defarge], the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man [Lorry], so long their friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward. I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other's soul, than I was in the souls of both. I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, fore-most of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place—then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day's disfigurement—and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
After Carton tearfully hears the execution of the seamstress, his final thoughts flash in his mind as he is pushed towards the slot where the blade would fall.
Characters [ edit ]
In order of appearance:
Book the First (November 1775) [ edit ]
Chapter 2
Illustration from a serialized edition of the story, showing three tricoteuses knitting, with the Vengeance standing in the center.
Jerry Cruncher : Porter and messenger for Tellson's Bank and secret "Resurrection Man" (body-snatcher); though rough and abusive towards his wife, he provides courageous service to the Manettes in Book the Third. His first name is short for Jeremiah; the latter name shares a meaning with the name of Jarvis Lorry.
: Porter and messenger for Tellson's Bank and secret "Resurrection Man" (body-snatcher); though rough and abusive towards his wife, he provides courageous service to the Manettes in Book the Third. His first name is short for Jeremiah; the latter name shares a meaning with the name of Jarvis Lorry. Jarvis Lorry: A manager at Tellson's Bank: "...a gentleman of sixty... Very orderly and methodical he looked... He had a good leg, and was a little vain of it..." He is a dear friend of Dr. Manette and serves as a sort of trustee and guardian of the Manette family. The bank places him in charge of the Paris branch during the Revolution, putting him in position to provide life-saving service to the Manettes in Book the Third. The end of the book reveals that he lives to be eighty-eight.
Chapter 4
Lucie Manette: Daughter of Dr. Manette; an ideal pre-Victorian lady, perfect in every way. About seventeen when the novel begins, she is described as short and slight with a "pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, a pair of blue eyes..." Although Sydney Carton is in love with her, he declares himself an unsuitable candidate for her hand in marriage and instead she marries Charles Darnay, with whom she is very much in love, and bears him a daughter. However, Lucie genuinely cares about Carton's welfare and defends him when he is criticized by others. She is the "golden thread" after whom Book the Second is named, so called because she holds her father's and her family's lives together (and because of her blond hair like her mother's). She also ties nearly every character in the book together.[12]
Chapter 5
Monsieur Defarge : Given name Ernest, he is the owner of a Paris wine shop and leader of the Jacquerie. "A bull-necked, martial-looking man of thirty... He was a dark man altogether, with good eyes and a good bold breadth between them." He is devoted to Dr. Manette having been his servant as a youth. One of the key Revolutionary leaders, in which he is known as Jacques Four, he embraces the Revolution as a noble cause, unlike many other revolutionaries. Though he truly believes in the principles of the Revolution, Defarge is far more moderate than some of the other participants (notably his wife).
: Given name Ernest, he is the owner of a Paris wine shop and leader of the Jacquerie. "A bull-necked, martial-looking man of thirty... He was a dark man altogether, with good eyes and a good bold breadth between them." He is devoted to Dr. Manette having been his servant as a youth. One of the key Revolutionary leaders, in which he is known as Jacques Four, he embraces the Revolution as a noble cause, unlike many other revolutionaries. Though he truly believes in the principles of the Revolution, Defarge is far more moderate than some of the other participants (notably his wife). Madame Defarge : Given name Therese; a vengeful female Revolutionary, she is arguably the novel's antagonist and is presented as a more extreme and bloodthirsty personality than her husband Ernest. "There were many women at that time, upon whom the time laid a dreadfully disfiguring hand; but, there was not one among them more to be dreaded than this ruthless woman... Of a strong and fearless character, of shrewd sense and readiness, of great determination, of that kind of beauty which not only seems to impart to its possessor firmness and animosity, but to strike into others an instinctive recognition of those qualities." The source of her implacable hatred of the Evrémonde family is revealed late in the novel to be the rape and killing of her brother and sister when she was a child.
: Given name Therese; a vengeful female Revolutionary, she is arguably the novel's antagonist and is presented as a more extreme and bloodthirsty personality than her husband Ernest. "There were many women at that time, upon whom the time laid a dreadfully disfiguring hand; but, there was not one among them more to be dreaded than this ruthless woman... Of a strong and fearless character, of shrewd sense and readiness, of great determination, of that kind of beauty which not only seems to impart to its possessor firmness and animosity, but to strike into others an instinctive recognition of those qualities." The source of her implacable hatred of the Evrémonde family is revealed late in the novel to be the rape and killing of her brother and sister when she was a child. Jacques One, Two, and Three: Revolutionary compatriots of Ernest Defarge. Jacques Three is especially bloodthirsty and serves as a juryman on the Revolutionary Tribunals.
Chapter 6
Dr. Alexandre Manette: Lucie's father; when the book opens, he has just been released after a ghastly eighteen years as a prisoner in the Bastille. Weak, afraid of sudden noises, barely able to carry on a conversation, he is taken in by his faithful former servant Defarge who then turns him over to Jarvis Lorry and the daughter he has never met. He achieves recovery and contentment with her, her eventual husband Charles Darnay, and their little daughter. All his happiness is put at risk in Book the Third when Madame Defarge resolves to send Evrémonde/Darnay to the guillotine, regardless of his having renounced the Evrémondes' wealth and cruelty. At the same time, the reader learns the cause of Dr. Manette's imprisonment: he had rendered medical care to Madame Defarge's brother and sister following the injuries inflicted on them by the Evrémonde twins back in 1757; the Evrémondes decided he couldn't be allowed to expose them.
Book the Second (Five years later) [ edit ]
Chapter 1
Mrs. Cruncher : Wife of Jerry Cruncher. She is a very religious woman, but her husband, somewhat paranoid, claims she is praying (what he calls "flopping") against him, and that is why he does not often succeed at work. Jerry often verbally and, almost as often, physically abuses her, but at the end of the story, he appears to feel a bit guilty about this.
: Wife of Jerry Cruncher. She is a very religious woman, but her husband, somewhat paranoid, claims she is praying (what he calls "flopping") against him, and that is why he does not often succeed at work. Jerry often verbally and, almost as often, physically abuses her, but at the end of the story, he appears to feel a bit guilty about this. Young Jerry Cruncher: Son of Jerry and Mrs. Cruncher. Young Jerry often follows his father around to his father's odd jobs, and at one point in the story, follows his father at night and discovers that his father is a Resurrection Man. Young Jerry looks up to his father as a role model and aspires to become a Resurrection Man himself when he grows up.
Chapter 2
Charles Darnay: A Frenchman of the noble Evrémonde family; "...a young man of about five-and-twenty, well-grown and well-looking, with a sunburnt cheek and a dark eye." When introduced, he is on trial for his life at the Old Bailey on charges of spying on behalf of the French crown. In disgust at the cruelty of his family to the French peasantry, he took on the name "Darnay" (after his mother's maiden name, D'Aulnais) and left France for England.[13] He and Lucie Manette fall deeply in love, they marry, and she gives birth to a daughter. He exhibits an admirable honesty in his decision to reveal to Dr. Manette his true identity as a member of the infamous Evrémonde family. He puts his family's happiness at risk with his courageous decision to return to Paris to save the imprisoned Gabelle, who, unbeknownst to him, has been coerced into luring him there. Once in Paris, he is stunned to discover that, regardless of his rejection of his family's exploitative and abusive record, he is imprisoned incommunicado simply for being an aristocrat. Released after the testimony of Dr. Manette, he is rearrested and sentenced to be guillotined owing to Madame Defarge's undying hatred of all Evrémondes. This death sentence provides the pretext for the novel's climax.
Chapter 3
John Barsad (real name Solomon Pross) : An informer in London and later employed by the Marquis St. Evrémonde. When introduced at Charles Darnay's trial, he is giving damning evidence against the defendant but it becomes clear to the reader that he is an oily, untrustworthy character. Moving to Paris he takes service as a police spy in the Saint Antoine district, under the French monarchy. Following the Revolution, he becomes an agent for Revolutionary France (at which point he must hide his British identity). Although a man of low character, his position as a spy allows him to arrange for Sydney Carton's final heroic act (after Carton blackmails him with revealing his duplicity).
: An informer in London and later employed by the Marquis St. Evrémonde. When introduced at Charles Darnay's trial, he is giving damning evidence against the defendant but it becomes clear to the reader that he is an oily, untrustworthy character. Moving to Paris he takes service as a police spy in the Saint Antoine district, under the French monarchy. Following the Revolution, he becomes an agent for Revolutionary France (at which point he must hide his British identity). Although a man of low character, his position as a spy allows him to arrange for Sydney Carton's final heroic act (after Carton blackmails him with revealing his duplicity). Roger Cly : Barsad's collaborator in spying and giving questionable testimony. Following his chaotic funeral procession in Book the Second, Chapter 14, his coffin is dug up by Jerry Cruncher and his fellow Resurrection Men. In Book the Third, Jerry Cruncher reveals that in fact the casket contained only rocks and that Cly was clearly still alive and no doubt carrying on his spying activities.
: Barsad's collaborator in spying and giving questionable testimony. Following his chaotic funeral procession in Book the Second, Chapter 14, his coffin is dug up by Jerry Cruncher and his fellow Resurrection Men. In Book the Third, Jerry Cruncher reveals that in fact the casket contained only rocks and that Cly was clearly still alive and no doubt carrying on his spying activities. Mr. Stryver : An ambitious barrister, senior partner to Sydney Carton. [14] "... a man of little more than thirty, but looking twenty years older than he was, stout, loud, red, bluff, and free from any drawback of delicacy..."; he wants to marry Lucie Manette because he believes that she is attractive enough. However, he is not truly in love with her and in fact treats her condescendingly. Jarvis Lorry gets him to see how unwise this course of action is and talks him out of it. (Readers frequently misperceive that Stryver's full name is "C. J. Stryver", but this is very unlikely. The mistake comes from a line in Book the Second, Chapter 12: "After trying it, Stryver, C. J., was satisfied that no plainer case could be." [15] The initials C. J. almost certainly refer to a legal title, probably "chief justice" or "circuit judge.")
: An ambitious barrister, senior partner to Sydney Carton. "... a man of little more than thirty, but looking twenty years older than he was, stout, loud, red, bluff, and free from any drawback of delicacy..."; he wants to marry Lucie Manette because he believes that she is attractive enough. However, he is not truly in love with her and in fact treats her condescendingly. Jarvis Lorry gets him to see how unwise this course of action is and talks him out of it. (Readers frequently misperceive that Stryver's full name is "C. J. Stryver", but this is very unlikely. The mistake comes from a line in Book the Second, Chapter 12: "After trying it, Stryver, C. J., was satisfied that no plainer case could be." The initials C. J. almost certainly refer to a legal title, probably "chief justice" or "circuit judge.") Sydney Carton: A quick-minded but depressed English barrister, known as "The Jackal" in legal circles. When introduced, he is a hard-drinking cynic, having watched Stryver advance while never taking advantage of his own considerable gifts: Dickens writes that the sun rose "upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible to the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away." In love with Lucie Manette, she cares about him but more as a concerned mother figure than a potential mate. He ultimately becomes a selfless hero, redeeming everything by sacrificing his life for a worthy cause.
Chapter 6
Miss Pross: Lucie Manette's governess since Lucie was ten years old: "... one of those unselfish creatures—found only among women—who will, for pure love and admiration, bind themselves willing slaves, to youth when they have lost it, to beauty that they never had..." She is fiercely loyal to Lucie and to England. She believes her long-lost brother Solomon, now the spy and perjurer John Barsad, is "the one man worthy of Ladybird," ignoring the fact that he "was a heartless scoundrel who had stripped her of everything she possessed, as a stake to speculate with, and had abandoned her in her poverty for evermore..." She is not afraid to physically fight those she believes are endangering the people she loves. She permanently loses her hearing when the fatal pistol shot goes off during her climactic fight with Madame Defarge.
Chapter 7
It took four men, all four a-blaze with gorgeous decoration, and the Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur's lips.
It was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men; he must have died of two.
And who among the company at Monseigneur's reception in that seventeen hundred and eightieth year of our Lord, could possibly doubt, that a system rooted in a frizzled hangman, powdered, gold-laced, pumped, and white-silk stockinged, would see the very stars out!
"Monseigneur" : An unnamed generic aristocrat whose extraordinary decadence and self-absorption, described in detail, are used by Dickens to characterize the ancien régime in general. "The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance upon Monseigneur." His fellow nobles also luxuriate in vast wealth, but this does not inoculate them from feeling envy and resentment: as the Marquis St. Evrémonde leaves Monseigneur's house "with his hat under his arm and his snuff-box in his hand", he turns to the latter's bedroom and quietly says, "I devote you... to the Devil!" When the Revolution begins, Monseigneur puts on his cook's clothing and ignominiously flees, escaping with only his life.
: An unnamed generic aristocrat whose extraordinary decadence and self-absorption, described in detail, are used by Dickens to characterize the in general. "The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance upon Monseigneur." His fellow nobles also luxuriate in vast wealth, but this does not inoculate them from feeling envy and resentment: as the Marquis St. Evrémonde leaves Monseigneur's house "with his hat under his arm and his snuff-box in his hand", he turns to the latter's bedroom and quietly says, "I devote you... to the Devil!" When the Revolution begins, Monseigneur puts on his cook's clothing and ignominiously flees, escaping with only his life. Marquis St. Evrémonde : [16] Uncle of Charles Darnay: "...a man of about sixty, handsomely dressed, haughty in manner, and with a face like a fine mask." Determined to preserve the traditional prerogatives of the nobility until the end of his life, he is the twin brother of Charles Darnay's late father; both men were exceptionally arrogant and cruel to peasants. Lamenting reforms which have imposed some restraints on the abusive powers of his class, the Marquis is out of favor at the royal court at the time of his assassination. Murdered in his bed by the peasant Gaspard.
: Uncle of Charles Darnay: "...a man of about sixty, handsomely dressed, haughty in manner, and with a face like a fine mask." Determined to preserve the traditional prerogatives of the nobility until the end of his life, he is the twin brother of Charles Darnay's late father; both men were exceptionally arrogant and cruel to peasants. Lamenting reforms which have imposed some restraints on the abusive powers of his class, the Marquis is out of favor at the royal court at the time of his assassination. Murdered in his bed by the peasant Gaspard. Gaspard : A peasant whose son is run over and killed by the Marquis St. Evrémonde's carriage. He plunges a knife into Evrémonde's heart, pinning a note that reads, "Drive him fast to his tomb," a reference to the careless speed that caused his little boy's death. After being in hiding for a year, he is found, arrested, and executed.
: A peasant whose son is run over and killed by the Marquis St. Evrémonde's carriage. He plunges a knife into Evrémonde's heart, pinning a note that reads, "Drive him fast to his tomb," a reference to the careless speed that caused his little boy's death. After being in hiding for a year, he is found, arrested, and executed. The Mender of Roads: A peasant who later works as a woodsawyer; the Defarges bring him into a conspiracy against the aristocracy, where he is referred to as Jacques Five.
Chapter 8
Théophile Gabelle: Gabelle is "the Postmaster, and some other taxing functionary, united"[17] for the tenants of the Marquis St. Evrémonde. Gabelle is imprisoned by the revolutionaries, and his beseeching letter brings Darnay to France. Gabelle is "named after the hated salt tax".[18]
Book the Third (Autumn 1792) [ edit ]
Chapter 3
The Vengeance: A companion of Madame Defarge referred to as her "shadow" and lieutenant, a member of the sisterhood of women revolutionaries in Saint Antoine, and Revolutionary zealot. (Many Frenchmen and women did change their names to show their enthusiasm for the Revolution.[19]) Carton predicts that the Vengeance, Defarge, Cly, and Barsad will be consumed by the Revolution and end up on the guillotine.
Chapter 13
The Seamstress: "...a young woman, with a slight girlish form, a sweet spare face in which there was no vestige of colour, and large widely opened patient eyes..." Having been caught up in The Terror, she strikes up a conversation with the man she assumes is Evrémonde in the large room where the next day's guillotine victims are gathered. When she realizes that another man has taken Charles Darnay's place, she admires his sacrifice and asks if she can hold his hand during their tumbrel ride to the place of execution.
Sources [ edit ]
While performing in The Frozen Deep, Dickens was given a play to read called The Dead Heart by Watts Phillips which had the historical setting, the basic storyline, and the climax that Dickens used in A Tale of Two Cities.[20] The play was produced while A Tale of Two Cities was being serialized in All the Year Round and led to talk of plagiarism.[21]
Other sources are The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle (especially important for the novel's rhetoric and symbolism);[22] Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton; The Castle Spector by Matthew Lewis; Travels in France by Arthur Young; and Tableau de Paris by Louis-Sébastien Mercier. Dickens also used material from an account of imprisonment during the Terror by Beaumarchais, and records of the trial of a French spy published in The Annual Register.[23]
Publication history [ edit ]
The 45-chapter novel was published in 31 weekly instalments in Dickens' new literary periodical titled All the Year Round. From April 1859 to November 1859, Dickens also republished the chapters as eight monthly sections in green covers. All but three of Dickens' previous novels had appeared only as monthly instalments. The first weekly instalment of A Tale of Two Cities ran in the first issue of All the Year Round on 30 April 1859. The last ran thirty weeks later, on 26 November.[1]
A Tale of Two Cities has been cited as one of the best-selling novels of all time. It has been stated to have sold 200 million copies since its first publication, though this figure has been dismissed as "pure fiction" by Oxford University's Peter Thonemann, and appears to have been promulgated by poor reference checking on Wikipedia.[24] As with other contenders for the title, such as Don Quixote and Three Musketeers, available sales figures are not reliable,[25] or indeed, for such public domain works, not available.[26]
Literary significance [ edit ]
Many of Dickens' characters are "flat", not "round", in the novelist E. M. Forster's famous terms, meaning roughly that they have only one mood.[27] For example, the Marquis is unremittingly wicked and relishes being so; Lucie is perfectly loving and supportive. As a corollary, Dickens often gives these characters verbal tics or visual quirks such as the dints in the nose of the Marquis. Forster believed that Dickens never truly created rounded characters.
Analysis [ edit ]
A Tale of Two Cities is one of only two works of historical fiction by Charles Dickens (the other being Barnaby Rudge).[28] Dickens relies much on The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle as a historical source.[22] Dickens wrote in his Preface to Tale that "no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle's wonderful book".[29]
Dickens uses literal translations of French idioms for characters who cannot speak English, such as "What the devil do you do in that galley there?!!" and "Where is my wife? ---Here you see me."[30] The Penguin Classics edition of the novel notes that "Not all readers have regarded the experiment as a success."[30]
J. L. Borges quipped: "Dickens lived in London. In his book A Tale of Two Cities, based on the French Revolution, we see that he really could not write a tale of two cities. He was a resident of just one city: London."[31]
Themes [ edit ]
Resurrection [ edit ]
In Dickens' England, resurrection always sat firmly in a Christian context. Most broadly, Sydney Carton is resurrected in spirit at the novel's close (even as he, paradoxically, gives up his physical life to save Darnay's.) More concretely, "Book the First" deals with the rebirth of Dr. Manette from the living death of his incarceration.
Resurrection appears for the first time when Mr. Lorry replies to the message carried by Jerry Cruncher with the words "Recalled to Life". Resurrection also appears during Mr. Lorry's coach ride to Dover, as he constantly ponders a hypothetical conversation with Dr. Manette: ("Buried how long?" "Almost eighteen years."... "You know that you are recalled to life?" "They tell me so.") He believes he is helping with Dr. Manette's revival and imagines himself "digging" up Dr. Manette from his grave.
Resurrection is a major theme in the novel. In Jarvis Lorry's thoughts of Dr. Manette, resurrection is first spotted as a theme. It is also the last theme: Carton's sacrifice. Dickens originally wanted to call the entire novel Recalled to Life. (This instead became the title of the first of the novel's three "books".) Jerry is also part of the recurring theme: he himself is involved in death and resurrection in ways the reader does not yet know. The first piece of foreshadowing comes in his remark to himself: "You'd be in a blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jerry!" The black humour of this statement becomes obvious only much later on. Five years later, one cloudy and very dark night (in June 1780[32]), Mr. Lorry reawakens the reader's interest in the mystery by telling Jerry it is "Almost a night... to bring the dead out of their graves". Jerry responds firmly that he has never seen the night do that.[33]
It turns out that Jerry Cruncher's involvement with the theme of resurrection is that he is what the Victorians called a "Resurrection Man", one who (illegally) digs up dead bodies to sell to medical men (there was no legal way to procure cadavers for study at that time).[citation needed]
The opposite of resurrection is of course death. Death and resurrection appear often in the novel. Dickens is angered that in France and England, courts hand out death sentences for insignificant crimes. In France, peasants had formerly been put to death without any trial, at the whim of a noble.[34] The Marquis tells Darnay with pleasure that "[I]n the next room (my bedroom), one fellow... was poniarded on the spot for professing some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter—his daughter!"[35]
The demolition of Dr. Manette's shoe-making workbench by Miss Pross and Mr. Lorry is described as "the burning of the body".[36] It seems clear that this is a rare case where death or destruction (the opposite of resurrection) has a positive connotation since the "burning" helps liberate the doctor from the memory of his long imprisonment.[citation needed] But Dickens' description of this kind and healing act is strikingly odd:
"The Accomplices", an illustration for Book 2, Chapter 19 by " Phiz
So wicked do destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross, while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible crime.[37]
Sydney Carton's martyrdom atones for all his past wrongdoings. He even finds God during the last few days of his life, repeating Christ's soothing words, "I am the resurrection and the life".[38] Resurrection is the dominant theme of the last part of the novel.[citation needed] Darnay is rescued at the last moment and recalled to life; Carton chooses death and resurrection to a life better than that which he has ever known: "it was the peacefullest man's face ever beheld there... he looked sublime and prophetic".
In the broadest sense, at the end of the novel, Dickens foresees a resurrected social order in France, rising from the ashes of the old one.[11]
Water [ edit ]
Hans Biedermann writes that water "is the fundamental symbol of all the energy of the unconscious—an energy that can be dangerous when it overflows its proper limits (a frequent dream sequence)."[39] This symbolism suits Dickens' novel; in A Tale of Two Cities, the frequent images of water stand for the building anger of the peasant mob, an anger that Dickens sympathizes with to a point, but ultimately finds irrational and even animalistic.[citation needed]
Early in the book, Dickens suggests this when he writes, "[T]he sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction."[40] The sea here represents the coming mob of revolutionaries. After Gaspard murders the Marquis, he is "hanged there forty feet high—and is left hanging, poisoning the water."[41] The poisoning of the well represents the bitter impact of Gaspard's execution on the collective feeling of the peasants.
After Gaspard's death, the storming of the Bastille is led (from the St. Antoine neighbourhood, at least) by the Defarges; "As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging circled around Defarge's wine shop, and every human drop in the cauldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex..."[42] The crowd is envisioned as a sea. "With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped into a detested word [the word Bastille], the living sea rose, wave upon wave, depth upon depth, and overflowed the city..."[42]
Darnay's jailer is described as "unwholesomely bloated in both face |
Newsletter Sign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood. E-mail Address SubscribeMoviegoers agree with Oscar experts that this year’s Best Picture race is an exceptionally close one, with two films neck-and-neck and another not far behind. But they don’t agree on which two films those are – because while the pundits put “12 Years a Slave” and “Gravity” together at the top, an exclusive survey conducted for TheWrap by Survata said that movie fans are predicting that either “Slave” or “Wolf of Wall Street” will win the top prize on Sunday.
Those two films were each predicted to win by 23 percent of the 444 movie fans surveyed between Feb. 23 and 26, with “Gravity” in third place at 17 percent, “American Hustle” fourth at 15 percent and “Nebraska” perhaps surprisingly fifth at 10 percent, ahead of “Captain Phillips,” “Dallas Buyers Club,” “Her” and “Philomena.”
Also read: Oscar Predictions: ‘Gravity’ Will Be the Biggest Winner, But Will It Win the Big One?
The movie fans, all of whom had seen at least one film in the past six months, went for some high-profile actors over Oscar favorites in the acting categories, with Leonardo DiCaprio (“Wolf”) holding a substantial lead over Matthew McConaughey (“Dallas Buyers Club”) for Best Actor and Sandra Bullock (“Gravity”) dominating the Best Actress race with prohibitive frontrunner Cate Blanchett (“Blue Jasmine”) way down in fourth place.
In the supporting categories, a pair of “American Hustle” stars, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, are in front, with Lawrence getting 41 percent of the vote to 24 for Lupita Nyong’o (“12 Years a Slave”) and Cooper leading Jonah Hill (“The Wolf of Wall Street”) 29 to 23 percent.
Also read: 17 Greatest Hollywood Unknowns to Win Oscar Gold – From Anna Paquin to Hilary Swank (Photos)
The Best Picture chart is at the top of the page. Here are the other categories.
Best Actor: With more than double the votes of his nearest competitor, DiCaprio more than doubles the votes of his closest competitor – and poor Bruce Dern, who campaigned tirelessly, ekes out a paltry 3 percent of the vote.
Best Actress: The pros say it’s Cate Blanchett in a romp (with Amy Adams as the only potential spoiler), but movie fans see an equally easy victory for Sandra Bullock (with Adams again number two).
Best Supporting Actor: While experts give Jared Leto a huge lead, moviegoers see him in the middle of the pack, and put BAFTA winner Barkhad Abdi dead last.
Best Supporting Actress: Fans agree with pundits that Lawrence and Nyong’o are the top two – but where most experts see a tight race and give Nyong’o a narrow lead, fans are predicting an easy win for J-Law.Some of you might have already heard of Jamie Keiles. The 18-year-old high school senior from suburban Philadelphia has made a feminist splash with her blog The Seventeen Magazine Project. Keiles’s blog documents her 30-day experiment to follow at least one piece of advice from the teenage girls’ bible, Seventeen magazine. What’s remarkable about Keiles’s experiment is, well, Keiles herself. Instead of an A.J. Jacobsesque fumble through mindless observations, The Seventeen Magazine Project is a witty critique of teenage culture. Keiles tackles everything from nail polish to prom to race, providing pie-charts and photographs to document and dissect her journey. Along the way, Keiles points to the very problem of fashion magazines like Seventeen; their pages are filled with a carefully constructed fantasy which is presented to young women as reality.
Keiles recently told me that was one of the reasons she picked Seventeen for her project rather than trendier magazines aimed at young women. Keiles said,
I read Seventeen. My mom read Seventeen. The magazine has been around for as long as the notion of teenage culture has been around. I figured if I was going to choose a teen magazine to work with, it was best to go with the original.
Like Keiles, I too read Seventeen magazine and my subscription was a gift from my grandmother. It was in the pages of Seventeen that I learned about what I should look like, act like, and expect of my high school experience. And like Keiles, I too found reality to be far different than the magnificent hype of Seventeen’s glossy pages.
Keiles wrote two blog posts about the ultimate teenage rite of passage—the prom. In the first post, Keiles documents, “the most labor intensive and expensive beauty process of my life thus far,” getting ready. Running with the mantra, “make me look conventionally attractive,” Keiles put in the time and money to look like a prom princess straight from the pages of Seventeen. What did it take? A total of 4 hours and 45 minutes and $461.50. When I asked Keiles about the time and expense she said:
I think I definitely spent an average to low-average amount for my area. I live in an upper-middle class suburb of Philadelphia. There were definitely girls who spent upwards of $600 on their dresses, not even including hair and nails. People took limos. It’s a privileged area, I’m not going to make myself out to be representative of the average teenage girl. There is no such thing. We are a very diverse group, us teens, financial situations included.
But were the money and time worth it? I asked Keiles about her prom experience. Was it as magical as Seventeen promised it would be? Keiles responded, “Prom was fun, but I’m not sure anyone would say it was magical, unless you define magical as dry chicken cutlets and sweaty kids dry humping to oldies.” That sounds like a pretty accurate description of my own prom festivities which, I remember leaving early even though, like Keiles, I had spent the requisite amount of time prepping to make the event magical. But when have fashion magazines ever been about the reality of an experience rather than the ritualistic staging prior to an event? Reading The Seventeen Magazine Project surprises me at every turn, not only because of Keiles’s maturity, but also because the construction of teenage femininity hasn’t changed significantly in the thirteen years or so since I read Seventeen magazine. It still depicts a teenage ideal as a white, heterosexual, young woman who can “just look at my nails and feel peppy!” Keiles’s response? “This is bleak. I wish Seventeen would suggest a hobby [for this girl] so she didn’t have to look to idle nail-gazing as her only source of joy.”
So, while my surprise was the depressing stagnation of beauty magazines, Keiles, a decade-plus my junior said her biggest surprise was:
…how willing our society is to accept an image of teenagers as pretty, stupid, and shallow. Considering the fact that my generation is the future of the world, you’d think that the people controlling today’s media would want to set the bar a little higher.
Cross-posted from This Week in Lady News.
Photo courtesy of Jamie Keiles, The Seventeen Magazine Project.(CNN) -- Pittsfield, Vermont, population 427, reacted in its own special way to severe flooding from Hurricane Irene that has turned their community into an island.
They had a town barbecue.
"No one in this town was expecting the flooding to be what it was, and we've all gotta eat," said Jason Evans, the owner of the skiing enclave's popular Clear River Tavern.
"My house is high and dry, but there was water all around my restaurant," he said. "We just had everybody come to the park and we cooked up hamburgers and hotdogs.
"I would have lost everything anyway, so why not feed some folks?"
On Tuesday afternoon, more than a full day since Irene's effects were being felt along the northeast in New England and upstate New York, Pittsfield was the epitome of positivity. The fact that roads were impassable and homes were partly underwater didn't seem to send residents into a fury.
Everyone in the landlocked rural state is suffering, a few pointed out. No one had been reported injured or killed in the town. They could start pumping their fists and shouting but that wouldn't dry a darn thing, they said. They are confident officials are doing what they can.
Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin toured devastation from the air. He said the flooding he saw is probably the worst the state has ever experienced. Three people in Vermont have died. Many areas of the state were still under flood watches and warnings early Tuesday.
CNN.com reached Evans at Pittsfield's fire station. It's hot today in Pittsfield, and the station is a nice, air-conditioned break for people who are without electricity, a problem a reported 50,000 Vermonters are dealing with.
"We're not in dire straights yet," said Evans. "I think everybody here is smart enough to have some pasta and beans in their cupboards. But that isn't going to last forever."
The U.S. National Guard says it's preparing to air-drop supplies into flooded areas. Pittsfield residents told CNN.com they've seen what they think are military helicopters flying Tuesday.
"That's a good sign and so we'll be patient," said Peggy Schorle. She was chatting on her cell phone which she's charging at the general store. And that is the Pittsfield general store, the other place in town besides the fire station that has a big generator. The store, across the street from the fire station, has the town's only two gas pumps, she said.
It was about 1 p.m. ET when CNN.com spoke with Schorle.
"The people who run the general store said we could start pumping our gas around noon, but now they say 5 p.m.," she said.
"They're rationing it, a smart thing," she said. "I guess we could have bad attitude about the whole thing, but what good would that do?"
Most are refueling their personal ATVs so they can get around, Schorle said.
It's not a problem if you don't own an ATV, she said, because most people are loaning theirs.
A retired health care administrator, Schorle and her husband thought they were making a smart move by getting out of New Jersey to spend some time at their vacation home in Pittsfield.
See photos and video of the area around Schorle's home
Their house is on a mountain, and so wasn't seriously damaged by flooding.
George Deblon said he's had a little flooding at his home. The 48-year-old who grew up in Pittsfield has been the town's road commissioner for 20 years.
"I'm the road guy, so this is a big week," he said.
Deblon's been scooting around town on an ATV, making sure people know the latest. On Monday he said that there was a town meeting at city hall. But city hall wasn't big enough to accommodate all the people who showed up.
"So we had it at the big church," he said. "There's one church in town. We just let people know about the meetings word of mouth.
"We're going to keep things real calm around here," Deblon said. "We see the helicopters and we think we'll get some help soon. We're optimistic."Heather Bernie has never been homeless, but she knows how tough it is to sleep outside in the cold.
For five days last year, the business student slept outside Taro Hall to help raise awareness about youth homelessness in Niagara.
She’s doing it again March 7-11 along with a group of other Brock University students participating in the national 5 Days for the Homeless campaign.
Giving up these daily conveniences is just the tip of the iceberg that is homelessness.
“5 Days has shown me how we take our lifestyle for granted and that there are people in our local community who need our help,” Bernie says. “Giving up these daily conveniences is just the tip of the iceberg that is homelessness. There are many other struggles that the homeless may have to deal with on a daily basis, including abuse and negative perceptions from the public.”
Students participating in the campaign give up necessities and comforts such as shelter, proper sleeping arrangements, access to food (except what is donated to them), heat, lighting and showers.
With the exception of using technology for homework and sharing their experience on social media to promote the 5 Days for the Homeless campaign, students will give up their smartphones and laptops while continuing to attend class throughout the week.
Organized by the Goodman Business Students’ Association (BSA), the campaign supports Community Care of St. Catharines and Thorold.
BSA President Rudy Ambrosio says the purpose of the campaign is about starting the conversation about youth homelessness on campus.
“Students are not necessarily trying to replicate homelessness, but are trying to connect with their peers on a more personal level about the hardships and issues that homeless people face every day,” he says. “Every dollar raised can have a huge impact on homelessness in our local community. By working together, homelessness can be better understood.”
Betty-Lou Souter, CEO of Community Care of St. Catharines and Thorold, says this event has a lot of impact in Niagara.
“This campaign tells the story of homelessness through the eyes of university students to a completely different audience that we do not normally reach,” she says.
“It’s more impactful to hear the messaging from young people than from those of us who deliver the services.”
Students will be set up in front of Taro Hall and will be accepting non-perishable food and cash donations for Community Care of St. Catharines and Thorold from March 7-11. Online donations are also being accepted at 5days.ca/brock throughout the month of March.Story highlights President Barack Obama offered an update on the military mission against ISIS on Monday
"This will not be quick. This is a long-term campaign. (ISIS) is opportunistic and it is nimble," Obama said
Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama offered an update on the military mission against ISIS on Monday, emphasizing the long-term nature of the effort and the importance of local forces and stable governments as keys to stopping the terror group's rise.
Obama pointed to the more than 5,000 air strikes against ISIS in Iraq, Syria and new regions like North Africa, and the efforts of a "galvanized" Iraqi government in the wake of the fall of Ramadi, as signs of stepped-up efforts against the terrorist group.
"This will not be quick. This is a long-term campaign. (ISIS) is opportunistic and it is nimble," Obama said, delivering remarks from the Pentagon.
Obama said the coalition is going after the "heart" of ISIS when it comes to both monetary and human resources. And he took the opportunity to prod Congress to confirm Adam Szubin as Treasury Department under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, to aid the effort to stop money flowing to ISIS.Arizona State University researchers reporting this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have found that fragments of the Sutter’s Mill meteorite contain complex polyether- and ester-containing alkyl molecules not previously found in any meteorites.
The Sutter’s Mill meteorite is a rare carbonaceous chondrite which caused a sensation in April 2012 when its fireball was seen by many eyewitnesses in California.
“This is a meteorite whose organics had been found altered by heat and of little appeal for bio- or prebiotic chemistry, yet the very Solar System processes that lead to its alteration seem also to have brought about novel and complex molecules of definite prebiotic interest such as polyethers,” explained study lead author Prof Sandra Pizzarello from the Arizona State University’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
The scientists hydrothermally treated fragments of the Sutter’s Mill meteorite and then detected the compounds released by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.
The hydrothermal conditions of the experiments, which also mimic early Earth settings, released a complex mixture of oxygen-rich compounds, the probable result of oxidative processes that occurred in the parent body.
They include a variety of long chain linear and branched polyethers, whose number is quite bewildering.
This addition to the inventory of organic compounds produced in extraterrestrial environments furthers the discourse of whether their delivery to the early Earth by comets and meteorites might have aided the molecular evolution that preceded the origins of life.
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Bibliographic information: Sandra Pizzarello et al. Processing of meteoritic organic materials as a possible analog of early molecular evolution in planetary environments. PNAS, published online September 09, 2013; doi: 10.1073/pnas.1309113110The official LivePhish app for all phish concerts, music streaming, and webcasts on-demand.
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LIVE PHISH ON-DEMAND
LivePhish was created and is staffed by Phish fanatics. The app features the entire LivePhish catalog of professionally-recorded, licensed live concerts, mixed and mastered directly from the soundboard in real time. Stream every LivePhish concert on demand minutes after each show ends, and dive into the Phish Archives. In addition to listening to Phish watch every concert live via SD, HD or 4K webcasts.
The app features gapless playback, scrubbing forward and backwards within tracks, Twitter, Facebook and email sharing of your favorite songs and shows. LivePhish+ subscribers can save shows and playlists for offline playback, access the entire LivePhish catalog, including new shows during a tour and any newly added releases. Stream all of your previous downloads with the “My Stash” song library within the LivePhish app.
LIVEPHISH FEATURES
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See the LivePhish Terms of Use and Privacy Policy at http://www.livephish.com
DOWNLOAD THE LIVEPHISH APP TO BLAZE ON NOW.Saturday Night Live aired a special edition of Weekend Update tonight, opening with a spoof of the cable morning show Fox & Friends.
The segment started with the hosts wryly dismissing the impact of Mitt Romney‘s “47 percent” video, before cutting to Jason Sudeikis as Romney explaining his comment in full. Romney said that within that 47 percent, he’s not actually talking about senior citizens or veterans or southern white people. “When I say ‘these people,’ I mean ‘black people.'”
The Fox hosts laughed off the comments, with one saying that if he were black, he would consider Romney “king of the honkeys.” They played another tape of Romney enjoying a “hamburger sandwich” at “the McDonalds,” and grabbing someone else’s drink to wash away the awful burger taste out of his mouth.
But lo and behold, there was yet another Romney video to show off. This time, Romney got caught on Cash Cab. Romney laughs off 25 dollars as “a quarter” and laughingly refers to California as “New Mexico.” But the Fox hosts found absolutely nothing wrong with Romney’s comments, finding each of them to be equally delightful, including a surprise video at the end of Romney singing in the shower about how much poor people hate jobs.
The segment ended with a list of all the factual inaccuracies made on the show thus far. A long, seemingly unending list.
Watch the video below, courtesy of NBC:
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Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comNew Renderings Released for Ohio Veterans Memorial
All visuals provided by Allied Works Architecture.
Allied Works Architecture released updated renderings of the new Ohio Veterans Memorial project, which will replace the old Veterans Memorial Building on the bank of the Scioto River. Preliminary demolition work has already begun on the inside Vets Memorial, and the new building is slated for completion in December 2016.
The new 53,000 square foot Ohio Veterans Memorial will feature museum exhibition space honoring the 250 years of Ohio military service from over 900,000 Ohio veterans. The main floor includes a great hall, museum store, cafe space and other places for educational programming. The upper portion of the building will feature an exterior “civic room” for special events, ceremonies and other community uses.
Allied Works Architecture issued the following project statement to explain their process for the design:
The Ohio Veterans Memorial and Museum is conceived as an architecture of two acts. The first is an act of landscape, where the surrounding parkland is cut, carved and lifted into the sky, creating a processional path to the sanctuary, a place of ceremony, celebration and reflection – a civic room for the city of Columbus. The second is an act of structure, where a series of concentric arches rise from the earth to hold the sanctuary above. These bands of interwoven concrete hold and protect the museum and its occupants within, creating a labyrinthine journey of exhibitions that illuminate ideas of service, duty and remembrance.
Some of the renderings released by the firm include background buildings that may take shape in future phases of the larger Scioto Peninsula Plan that was announced in August 2013, which calls for private development infill on the rest of the 56 acres of open land currently adjacent to Vets Memorial and COSI.
According to Amy Taylor, COO at the Columbus Downtown Development Corporation and Capitol South, construction is slated to begin on the new building in the Spring of 2015.
All renderings provided by www.alliedworks.com.
For ongoing discussion on this project, CLICK HERE.
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About the Author Walker is the co-founder of ColumbusUnderground.com and TheMetropreneur.com along with his wife and business partner Anne Evans. Walker has turned local media into a full time career over the past decade and serves on multiple boards and committees throughout the community.
Tags:Jimmy the kangaroo (WISN)
A Wisconsin woman was kicked out of McDonald’s last week after another customer complained about her therapy pet – a kangaroo.
Diana Moyer brought the baby kangaroo about 11:40 a.m. Friday into the McDonald’s in Beaver Dam, reported The Daily Cardinal.
Another customer called police to report the animal, saying it was not appropriate or safe for the kangaroo to be in the fast food restaurant.
Moyer claimed the kangaroo was a service animal and showed police a note from her doctor to back her assertion.
But officers told her that other customers felt unsafe with the animal there and asked her to leave.
Moyer’s husband admitted Tuesday to WISN-TV that the kangaroo was not a service animal but was a therapy pet for his wife as she battles cancer.
Therapy pets aren’t protected under disability laws, which allows dogs or miniature horses that are specifically trained to help disabled people.
Moyer and her husband keep five kangaroos at their home outside of Beaver Dam, where they moved following complaints about their exotic pets.
He said they often took “Jimmy,” the youngest kangaroo, out in public.
No citations were issued in the incident.
Watch this video report posted online by WISN-TV:While I appreciate that BJP of late is trying to highlight the plight of Hindus under the mercy of Jihadi mobs in West Bengal, let me be blunt and say that the Bengal can not be won with Twitter friendly slogans like #SaveBengal, especially when you shout these slogans from the streets of Delhi or for that matter even in Kolkata.
Bengal can not be won with launch of online campaigns, which will be attacked by the cheerleaders of secular-liberal establishment and thus shifting the debate to a ‘representative image’ shared by a BJP guy from the riots that happened after an image was shared by a 17 years old boy, for which he is still in jail.
Bengal can not be won when you try to remain politically correct and do monkey-balancing to appear secular (we will get to this later in this article). It can not be won with Amit Shah visiting the state once in a while for inspection.
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To win Bengal you need to get your hands dirty.
To win Bengal, you need a fiery ‘khati’ (core) Bangali, who is a robust fighter, an unapologetic character, and one who is not afraid to speak his/her mind out. It needs a local saviour around which the campaign to save Bengal can be launched and mobilised, not in Delhi or just in Kolkata, but in entire Bengal.
“An appeaser is the one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” “No man survives when freedom fails, the best men rot in filthy jails. And those who cry ‘appease, appease’ are hanged by those they tried to please.”
The above two quotes describe the conditions of modern India due to systematic appeasement by the elite liberal and certain section of the political class. But it particularly applies to the Bengal under Mamata Banerjee’s jaamati rule.
But is she so ignorant? Does she not know that she is feeding the crocodiles that will only get more hungry and will bite her one day? She is playing with fire and already Bengal has seen peace go up in flames multiple times. When will she realise?
I think she knows it very well. She knows that her disastrous appeasement policies will have a serious national impact. But she doesn’t care a bit. She is too intoxicated by power she is enjoying and the questions that are never asked to her as she is seen someone who is a challenger to Modi. To keep this power and status intact, she seeks the blessings of that particular community, which is around 30% of Bengal population.
In my previous articles ‘Making of a ‘New Bengal’ by Mamata in Modi’s New India‘ and ‘Steps for De-Radicalising Bengal‘, I had tried to highlight the sinister designs of ruling TMC govt, and how it gets support of the media to keep the flawed and preposterous ‘secularism’ intact. I had also stated how the central govt needs to counter it and prevent the rise Islamic fundamentalism in Bengal. This can be achieved if the BJP grows strong in the state.
But coming to BJP’s chances in the electoral politics of Bengal, I am not optimistic about it. There are various reasons for it:
BJP appears to ride on the anti-incumbency factor as Mamata Banerjee is in her second term. That isn’t going to happen. Bengal is historically different. Bongs are patient and willing to give chance. They let the communists rule for 34 long years and they could have ruled for another 10 years, if not for Nandigram and Singur. Rest of the people might believe that Politicians are a lot like diapers, which should be changed frequently, and for the same reasons. But bhadraloks don’t appear to think that way.
Lack of rural base: BJP has virtually no rural base. Large parts of rural Bengal are not aware of the existence of BJP. Yes, that’s the harsh reality. RSS is trying get a foothold, but is finding it difficult due to government control over its activities as well as populist schemes of Mamata government, such as Kanyasree which is a massive hit in the rural belt.
Trying too hard to remain ‘secular’. Recently in one of the debates on an English news channel regarding Basirhat riots, Rajya Sabha MP and a prominent face of Bengal BJP Roopa Ganguly’s opening remarks were about how she was secular and had many friends from the minority community and blah blah. This is the condition of entire state unit of the party. They are not bold enough to say what must be said. The political correctness will not help.
Lack of enthusiasm to take the initiative. One classic example of the state unit’s failure was during Amit Shah’s visit in May. Shah started his Bengal campaign from the infamous Naxalbari. He held rallies, visited homes, and had lunch at house of Raju and Geeta Mahali, a Dalit couple who ‘were’ supporters of Modi. It was a part of the Dalit outreach, which forms a considerable chunk particularly in South 24 parganas. A few days after Amit Shah left, the Mahali couple joined TMC. Yes certainly there could have been pressure on the poor couple, but wasn’t it the duty of the state unit to look after them? Such a massive PR failure hints at lack of alertness and enthusiasm in taking an initiative forward.
And most important factor. Absence of a strong local Bengali leader. No, not even Amit Shah’s crafty organisational skills can fill that void. As I had said in the beginning it requires a local saviour. It requires a leader who makes the Bengalis rally celebrate their lost pride and forgotten heritage and rally them like a captain in a battle. Much like Bal Thackeray and Shiv Sena revived Marathi asmita. The character of Bengal is changing fast under Islamist and Jamaati politics, and this needs to be conveyed.
There is one person who is trying that. Mamata Banerjee went to the extent of threatening to ban his organisation. It is ex-RSS man Tapan Ghosh and his organisation Hindu Samhiti. His Twitter profile says “Uncompromising Hindu activist of Bengal. Determined to fight against Islamic aggression & expansion.”
As blunt as it gets.
It is his organisation that relentlessly talked about Malda and Dhulagarh riots, which were, as usual denied by the Mamata government and its news suppressed by the mainstream media. Tapan Ghosh was also the one to highlight the issues in Tehatta where Islamist mobs had laid siege over a school and Saraswati Puja was not allowed.
Few months ago, he organised a massive rally in Kolkata, which really shook the TMC cadre. They had thought that the rally will be a flop.
As mentioned earlier, in the same debate in which Roopa Ganguly took part and started with listing her secular credentials, Tapan Ghosh minced no words. He went on to say, and I am quoting him, “When thousands from the Muslim community take part in violent activities, entire community has to come forward. If they are quiet, it means they are supporter of violence.”
BJP needs to indulge in such plain speak. It needs that firebrand leader who doesn’t care about what tags the media uses about him or her. It needs someone who cares about what is happening on the ground.
The party needs to realise that talking about ‘Sarada’ & ‘Narada’ scam will not dent Mamata’s popularity nor it can uproot her from the throne of Bengal. To snatch Bengal from Didi, it needs an uncompromising fighter, much like she had been when communists ruled.
As said before: you need to get your hands dirty.
Instrumentation Engineer M.tech – NIT DGP. Business | Football fan | Arsenal Bhakt Communal bigoted Bengali Hindu.
Share This Post and Support:Spurred by a Chico man’s quest to become a lawyer, Gov. Jerry Brown this weekend made California the first state in the nation to allow illegal immigrants to get their law licenses if they’ve earned a law degree and passed the State Bar exam.
As part of a flurry of pro-immigrant legislation approved in recent weeks, the governor signed a bill that permits the California Supreme Court to give law licenses to immigrants who are not yet United States citizens.
But in a departure from actions widening immigrant rights, Brown also vetoed a bill sponsored by Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont, that would have allowed lawful permanent residents who are not citizens to serve on juries.
In a statement, Brown compared jury service to voting and said both responsibilities should be reserved exclusively for the country’s citizens.
Wieckowski said in a statement that he is “disappointed” by the governor’s veto of AB 1401 and disagrees with Brown’s rationale.
“It is fair and just that they be asked to share in the obligation to do jury duty, just as they serve in our courts, schools, police departments and armed forces,” Wieckowski said.
The legislation allowing illegal immigrants to become licensed lawyers was pushed in September as a result of a legal showdown over the issue that had reached the state Supreme Court.
Sergio Garcia, a law school graduate who has waited for his green card for nearly a decade, has been in limbo while the California Supreme Court determined whether it had the legal authority to give him a law license. The Obama administration has argued that federal immigration law prevents such licensing unless a state adopts a specific law allowing law licenses for illegal immigrants.
The Supreme Court heard arguments in Garcia’s case in early September, when a majority of the justices appeared likely to side with the federal government’s position. Several of the justices invited California legislators to resolve the problem, and a bill was quickly introduced to address Garcia’s predicament, backed heavily by the Latino caucus.
Garcia could not be reached for comment Monday, but in the past has told this newspaper he has dreamed of becoming a lawyer and hoped his case would open the door for immigrants in his position to gain the right to a law license.
The legislation would appear to resolve the Supreme Court case, but there has been no order released yet by the justices.
There are similar legal challenges unfolding in Florida and New York, where illegal immigrants with law degrees are also seeking law licenses.
Contact Howard Mintz at hmintz@mercurynews.com, or at 408-286-0238. Contact Jessica Calefati at jcalefati@bayareanewsgroup.com, or at 408-921-8690.A 16-year-old girl was stabbed to death inside a Connecticut high school Friday, and police took a teenage boy into custody and are investigating whether the attack stemmed from her turning down an invitation to be his prom date.
Emergency responders were called to Jonathan Law High School in Milford, about an hour's drive from New York City, around 7:15 a.m. Staff members and paramedics performed life-saving measures on the girl, but she was pronounced dead shortly before 8 a.m. at Bridgeport Hospital, police said.
A 16-year-old boy was taken into custody. His name wasn't released because of juvenile offender laws, said Police Chief Keith Mello. Investigators are looking into reports that the boy stabbed the girl after she declined to be his date for the junior prom, which had scheduled for Friday night but was postponed because of the stabbing.
Schools Superintendent Elizabeth Feser identified the victim as Maren Sanchez, a junior who was in the National Honor Society and engaged in school activities. Students were released from school early, and officials were offering counseling services.
Students described an emotional, somewhat chaotic scene with people crying as police and paramedics swarmed the school. Students flocked to social media sites to try to find out what was going on.
Sarah Golden, a 14-year-old freshman, said she was sitting in the main lobby with friends Friday morning when she was startled by several security guards running down the hall. Then she heard a voice on a walkie-talkie say that someone had been strangled. She was shocked when she learned about the stabbing.
"I was trying not to freak out because it was really scary," Sarah said. "I just don't believe that something like that happened at my school. It's something that seems so unreal."
Golden's sister, Rebecca, a 17-year-old senior at the school, said she saw the victim lying on the floor surrounded by teachers, some of whom were crying. She said she didn't know what was going on at the time, and teachers directed her away from the victim.
"We are obviously devastated by the loss of one of our students, Maren Sanchez," Feser, the superintendent, said at a news conference. "She was a 16-year-old junior — vibrant, very, very involved in Jonathan Law High School, an incredible contributor, someone who was loved and respected.... The Jonathan Law community mourns greatly the loss of Maren, and our thoughts and prayers go out to her family."
____
Associated Press writer Pat Eaton-Robb in Hartford, Conn., contributed to this report.Kotaku East East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.
As part of the Famicon's (Nintendo Entertainment System's) 30th anniversary in Japan, Nintendo has been releasing various retro titles on the Wii U for the insanely low price of 30 yen ($0.32).
The first title released this way was the NES classic Balloon Fighter. The following game was Fire Emblem: Monsho no Nazo, the first Fire Emblem game on the SNES. But starting last Wednesday Nintendo moved on to its third title, Mother 2, or as it's known in the West, Earthbound.
But this super low price for the virtual console title isn't the only Earthbound-related thing that's come out on the Japanese Wii U. There is now a Mother 2 MiiVerse community (which is accessible on Western systems as well as on Japanese ones) and a special 30-minute Earthbound-centric episode of GameCenter CX (Retro Game Master) that was released on the Japanese Nintendo eStore for free as well.
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And in addition to all this, last Friday night, Nintendo President and CEO Satoru Iwata sat down with Earthbound writer/director Shigesato Itoi to play through the first three and a half hours of the game on the Wii. And by far the highlight of this |
Buck is a Democratic strategist, President of the Buck Communications Group, a media relations and new media strategies consulting business based in Washington, DC, and Managing Director of the online ad firm Influence DSP. He has over twenty years of international and national communications experience. The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CBS Local.Michael Flynn's resignation as national security adviser — and the murky, widening scandal that it has provoked— has prompted another bout of shivering and shaking in the media about Russian interference in American politics.
Here's a quick recap, if you've been living in a cave: Flynn resigned Monday night after it emerged that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and other White House officials about the content of his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, Russia's ambassador to the U.S.
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The accusation is that Flynn — who was a private citizen at the time — discussed the sanctions placed on Russia by the outgoing Obama administration in response to the alleged hack of Democratic Party emails. Flynn may have urged the Kremlin to show restraint in responding to them.
According to The Washington Post, Flynn “signaled” that the incoming Trump administration would reassess the sanctions a few weeks later if the Kremlin held off on a harsh response. Indeed, the Kremlin did just that. In fact, the Russian government barely reacted at all. Vladimir Putin instead invited the children of U.S. diplomats in Moscow to a Christmas party at the Kremlin (for Orthodox Christians, the holiday falls on Jan. 7) — and Trump tweeted the next day that he “always knew” Putin was “very smart.”
Even if this series of events is true: Flynn urged a cautious response from Russia and suggested that a different approach would be forthcoming from the Trump administration, Putin took that advice and Trump happily tweeted about it the next day, none of that amounts to a scandal of severe proportions. The cover-up, as so often is the case with political scandals, is worse than the crime. If Flynn had not carelessly misled Pence about his conversations with Kislyak, he might not have been forced to resign.
Now talk of an obscure (and never enforced) federal law called the Logan Act is being bandied around by some as grounds for charges being raised against Flynn. The law prohibits U.S. citizens from conducting diplomacy with foreign nations without the consent of the government. Keith Olbermann even dramatically called for Flynn’s immediate arrest. Where were the Logan Act devotees a couple of weeks ago when Sen. John McCain called up the Australian ambassador of his own accord to smooth things over after Trump apparently hung up on the Aussie prime minister during a dispute over refugees?
Flynn’s resignation and the reason for it amount to a huge scandal only if you are willing to believe that Flynn or Trump are patsies for the Kremlin, and that Putin is, in fact, in the White House driver's seat.
If you’re not willing to believe that particular theory without sufficient evidence — first of all, good call. Second, it might be a good time to notice that behind all this there's a potentially much bigger scandal, which is going largely unnoticed in the midst of all the hand-wringing about the all-powerful Putin and his innumerable American puppets.
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It’s been clear for months that the U.S. intelligence community opposes even the most benign improvement in relations with Russia. Furthermore, the level of hysteria over Russian influence doesn’t even remotely correspond with the amount or quality of evidence presented to prove the various theories of Russian involvement in the American political system.
It is increasingly plausible that there are powerful forces inside the intelligence community attempting to engineer U.S. foreign policy in a way that would fully reignite the Cold War and thwart any attempt to cooperate with nuclear-armed Russia at even the most basic level.
The Kremlin's response to Flynn's departure was fairly muted. Putin's spokesperson Dmitry Peskov called it an internal U.S. matter and refrained from commenting further. Other officials were more colorful in their language. The general view in Moscow is that anti-Russia hysteria is simply so bad in the U.S. that the intelligence agencies will do anything in their power to prevent Washington from becoming friendlier with the Kremlin. Leonid Slutsky, chair of the foreign relations committee in the Russian State Duma, said the "target" in all this was U.S.-Russia relations. He later commented that recent statements from the White House on the status of Crimea were like a "cold shower" that cooled expectations of a better relationship.
If the "anti-Trump plot" theory sounds more than a bit dubious coming from Moscow, take a listen to former Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, who represented the Bernie Sanders left before Sanders did. He makes a reasonable case that Flynn’s departure was essentially the first shot fired in a "deep state" coup against Trump.
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"What's at the core of this is an effort by some in the intelligence community to upend any positive relationship between the U.S. and Russia,” Kucinich said on the Fox Business Network. “There are people trying to separate the U.S. and Russia so this military-industrial-intel axis can cash in.”
Trump, Kucinich argued, needs to “get ahold” of his intelligence apparatus — and fast. “This isn't a joke; this is serious. If he doesn't get control of where the information is coming from, he'll never know the truth. The American people will never know the truth and we could be set at war with almost any country,” he said.
Kucinich makes sense. The military industrial complex benefits from actual or potential conflict with Russia. Hyping the Russia threat is a moneymaker for defense contractors. The specter of war with Russia is used by defense officials in both the U.S. and U.K. as a means of arguing for more money to be thrown at the military. Never mind that the 2015 Pentagon budget, for example, was more than nine times higher than Russia’s defense budget in 2015 — and that Putin, while he does control an increasingly strong nuclear power, does not have a death wish for his country.
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Kucinich also reminded us of an all-but-forgotten incident in Syria a couple of months ago that conceivably is related to the current mess. During the last months of Obama’s presidency, the White House struck a deal with Russia for an attempted cease-fire in Syria. Lo and behold, a few days later a “mistaken” American strike killed 62 Syrian soldiers and put a prompt end to the deal. The former Ohio congressman summed it up this way:
What happened is, inside the intelligence and the Pentagon, there was a deliberate effort to sabotage an agreement the White House made. This is like deep state, this is like some kind of a spy novel, but it's real and the American people have to understand, a game is being played with the security of our country.
In the latest blow to Trump, a New York Times report on Wednesday included allegations that his presidential campaign had been in contact with “senior Russian intelligence officials” in the year before the election, which “alarmed” intelligence and law enforcement agencies. All officials claiming this spoke to the Times on the condition of anonymity. Reports like this, with no named sources or hard and fast evidence, only lend credence to the idea that the intelligence community has it in for Trump.
But this is not about whether you’re for or against Trump. It’s about whether there's a cloak-and-dagger effort to subvert American foreign policy and ignite a new Cold War under false pretenses and spend tens of billions of dollars — that most certainly could be better spent elsewhere — to thwart a threat that doesn’t truly exist.
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If this is the deep state fighting back against Trump, the efforts are working so far. The deep shroud of suspicion around Trump now makes it almost impossible for him to roll back sanctions on Russia, if that was ever his intention. While rumors swirl, Trump now appears to be on a mission to prove he is not indebted to Moscow. His tweet about Crimea on Wednesday was probably part of this effort.
As I have written before, none of this will particularly surprise the Kremlin. Despite popular belief, Russian officials have maintained low expectations for Trump from the outset, assuming that he would come up against powerful forces if he tried to get along with Moscow.
Last month Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned that Trump was “really dumb” to criticize the intelligence community because the spy agencies have “six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.” In retrospect, that statement reads as pretty ominous. Almost no one noticed it at the time.Returns and exchange details
Refunds/exchanges will be made if the item is not as described or faulty upon receipt*. Buyer has 5 business days from confirmed delivery date to contact me concerning any problems.
I will not make exchanges or issue refunds for items which have been improperly handled. Care cards are included with all items, but if you have any questions about the care of any item, please inquire before purchase if possible.
Refunds and exchanges for custom items** may vary, so you will need to contact me to discuss, but as with other items must contact me within 5 business days.
*ALL ITEMS ARE HAND-CRAFTED! Many of the listings will show a picture of an item made FROM THE SAME PATTERN as what you will receive, but may not be the item pictured. All care is taken to create all products as uniformly as possible, but some unique qualities are inevitable. This is what makes hand-made items so wonderful - Everything is one-of-a-kind!
**Custom refers to:
-A product that is not listed at all
-Listings that state they are CUSTOM (chainmaille jewelry where you choose the colors)
Custom does NOT refer to:
-A listed item wherein you choose a small detail (Ninja Turtle mask color, Minion height)
-Fully pre-made item that ships as provided in the picture
In most cases, refunds can only be issued on the product purchase and not shipping & handling.Getty Images
Giants cornerback Eli Apple won’t be the only rookie in his family this season.
Apple’s mother Annie has become a popular follow on Twitter since the first round of the draft because of her commentary on topics like refusing to let her son wear a Rolex to the draft, women who might want to chase Eli because he’s an NFL player and her complaints about the lack of dessert in the draft green room in Chicago. That last one got Mrs. Apple a batch of brownies from the NFL and she’ll have another platform to share her thoughts this fall.
ESPN announced on Monday that Annie Apple will be a contributor to Sunday NFL Countdown this season. Per the network’s release, she will do player profiles and other stories.
“Annie caught our attention during the NFL Draft and when we met with her in-person at ESPN we were blown away by her relatability, her sense of humor and just how unafraid she is to speak her mind,” ESPN senior coordinating producer Seth Markman said in a statement. “Annie brings a very unique perspective as the mother of a current NFL player and as a fan, and we look forward to exploring a variety of different story ideas with her on Sunday NFL Countdown.”
Apple says she looks forward to sharing a sports mom’s “perspectives, energy, contributions and fantastic awkwardness” during her appearances on the show. It’s certainly a departure from the kind of content we’re used to getting on the Sunday morning pregame shows and it’s one that could make Annie Apple a household name ahead of her son if it goes well.Hardness and crystal structure Edit
Toughness Edit
Diamonds in an angle grinder blade Unlike hardness, which denotes only resistance to scratching, diamond's toughness or tenacity is only fair to good. Toughness relates to the ability to resist breakage from falls or impacts. Because of diamond's perfect and easy cleavage, it is vulnerable to breakage. A diamond will shatter if hit with an ordinary hammer. The toughness of natural diamond has been measured as 2.0 MPa m1/2, which is good compared to other gemstones, but poor compared to most engineering materials. As with any material, the macroscopic geometry of a diamond contributes to its resistance to breakage. Diamond has a cleavage plane and is therefore more fragile in some orientations than others. Diamond cutters use this attribute to cleave some stones, prior to faceting.[10][11] Ballas and carbonado diamond are exceptional, as they are polycrystalline and therefore much tougher than single-crystal diamond; they are used for deep-drilling bits and other demanding industrial applications.[12] Particular faceting shapes of diamonds are more prone to breakage and thus may be uninsurable by reputable insurance companies. The brilliant cut of gemstones is designed specifically to reduce the likelihood of breakage or splintering.[6] Solid foreign crystals are commonly present in diamond. They are mostly minerals, such as olivine, garnets, ruby, and many others.[13] These and other inclusions, such as internal fractures or "feathers", can compromise the structural integrity of a diamond. Cut diamonds that have been enhanced to improve their clarity via glass infilling of fractures or cavities are especially fragile, as the glass will not stand up to ultrasonic cleaning or the rigors of the jeweler's torch. Fracture-filled diamonds may shatter if treated improperly.[14] Pressure resistance Edit Used in so-called diamond anvil experiments to create high-pressure environments, diamonds are able to withstand crushing pressures in excess of 600 gigapascals (6 million atmospheres).[15]
Optical properties Edit
Electrical properties Edit
Thermal conductivity Edit
Unlike most electrical insulators, diamond is a good conductor of heat because of the strong covalent bonding and low phonon scattering. Thermal conductivity of natural diamond was measured to be about 2200W/(m·K), which is five times more than silver, the most thermally conductive metal. Monocrystalline synthetic diamond enriched to 99.9% the isotope 12C has the highest thermal conductivity of any known solid at room temperature: 3320 W/(m·K).[38][39] Because diamond has such high thermal conductance it is already used in semiconductor manufacture to prevent silicon and other semiconducting materials from overheating. At lower temperatures conductivity becomes even better, and reaches 41000 W/(m·K) at 104 K (12C-enriched diamond).[39] Diamond's high thermal conductivity is used by jewelers and gemologists who may employ an electronic thermal probe to distinguish diamonds from their imitations. These probes consist of a pair of battery-powered thermistors mounted in a fine copper tip. One thermistor functions as a heating device while the other measures the temperature of the copper tip: if the stone being tested is a diamond, it will conduct the tip's thermal energy rapidly enough to produce a measurable temperature drop. This test takes about 2–3 seconds. However, older probes will be fooled by moissanite, a crystalline mineral form of silicon carbide introduced in 1998 as an alternative to diamonds, which has a similar thermal conductivity.[6][28]
Thermal stability Edit
Diamond and graphite are two allotropes of carbon: pure forms of the same element that differ in structure. Being a form of carbon, diamond oxidizes in air if heated over 700 °C.[40] In absence of oxygen, e.g. in a flow of high-purity argon gas, diamond can be heated up to about 1700 °C.[41][42] Its surface blackens, but can be recovered by re-polishing. At high pressure (~20 GPa) diamond can be heated up to 2500 °C,[43] and a report published in 2009 suggests that diamond can withstand temperatures of 3000 °C and above.[44] Diamonds are carbon crystals that form deep within the Earth under high temperatures and extreme pressures. At surface air pressure (one atmosphere), diamonds are not as stable as graphite, and so the decay of diamond is thermodynamically favorable (δH = −2 kJ / mol).[19] So, contrary to De Beers' ad campaign extending from 1948 to at least 2013 under the slogan "A diamond is forever",[45] diamonds are definitely not forever. However, owing to a very large kinetic energy barrier, diamonds are metastable; they will not decay into graphite under normal conditions.[19]
See also Edit
References Edit
Further reading EditStory highlights Winner says someone let her go ahead of them to buy ticket
Gloria Mackenzie, 84, claims second-biggest Powerball jackpot
She'll pocket $370.9 million in a one-time, pre-tax payout
Somewhere, someone is kicking themselves for being nice to a little old lady.
Gloria Mackenzie, 84, came forward to claim the second-largest U.S. lottery jackpot, more than two weeks after the $590.5 million Powerball drawing on May 18, Florida Lottery officials announced Wednesday. She passed up a payout spread over 30 years for a somewhat smaller one-time lump sum, pocketing $370.9 million before taxes, Lottery Secretary Cynthia O'Connell said.
Mackenzie bought her winning ticket at a supermarket in Zephyrhills, north of Tampa. She did not appear at Wednesday's announcement, but in a statement O'Connell read to reporters, she said it was the fifth ticket she'd purchased for that drawing.
"While in line at Publix, another lottery player was kind enough to let me go ahead of them in line to purchase the winning quick-pick ticket," Mackenzie said.
JUST WATCHED Powerball winner allowed to skip in line Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Powerball winner allowed to skip in line 02:42
"We are grateful for this blessing of winning the Florida Lottery Powerball jackpot and appreciate the interest of the public, the state of Florida and the lottery. We hope that everyone will give us the opportunity to maintain our privacy for our family's benefit."
The amount of the prize ballooned to $590 million as the drawing approached, with Florida lottery officials selling about $45,000 worth of tickets an hour at the peak. That total was surpassed only by a $656 million Mega Millions drawing in March 2012, split among winners in Illinois, Kansas and Maryland.
Mackenzie was accompanied by her son, a "trusted family friend and her legal and financial advisers" when she came in to the lottery's Tallahassee headquarters to get her winning ticket validated, O'Connell said. She said Mackenzie waited "to make sure they were ready to handle the types of responsibility that come with that kind of a jackpot win."Here's audio of Bill Clinton from Pennsylvania's WHYY, cursing and ranting about how Barack Obama's campaign "played the race card" on him.
I confess, I didn't really miss those January days when Bill Clinton kept springing out from behind the bushes to grab reporters by the collar and turn purple screaming about Obama. But this is sort of fun. Just count the whoppers!
- "We now know from memos from the campaign and everything that they planned to do it [play the race card] all along."
No, we don't.
- "I said that Jesse Jackson had run a good campaign with overwhelming African-American support and white supporters."
No, he didn't. He didn't say anything about white voters.
- "They thought his white support was better because Jesse Jackson had blue-collar working people and most of Senators Obama's supporters were upscale cultural liberals. It was like, beneath them to be compared to Jesse Jackson."
I don't think anyone believes this. Jackson peaked at around 15 percent of the white vote, and did far worse in the South. Obama got 25 percent of the white vote in South Carolina, which turned out to be one of his lowest totals. Clinton's disdain for the upscale cultural liberal is fun, and fitting with his policy of shunning private jets or fundraisers with rock stars, but, well... South Carolina's 1984 and 1988 contests were caucuses, which Clinton has argued are more elitist than primaries. He's just babbling like a crazy person.
- "You really got to go somewhere to play the race card with me. My office is in Harlem."
At this point I'm not even sure the Obama team will give Clinton a speaking slot at the convention.Today’s comic fan can quickly find themselves overwhelmed by the plethora of readily available comics content that is now available online. Obviously, there are plenty of comics that you may have seen in passing which are phenomenal, such as Cyanide and Happiness, xkcd, and Penny Arcade which are the source of countless memes and can be read and enjoyed out of order and out of context. But there are also plenty of independent, story driven comics out there, so to help, I’ve compiled a quick list of a few that you may have missed:
Honorable Mentions:
Minor Acts of Heroism, cute, quirky, and just a little super; a fun read if you’re looking for something to fill the time until Young Justice returns.
Go Get A Roomie, a sweet and sassy comic about love and sexuality and acceptance. WARNING!! RACY COMIC ALERT!! AKA lots of nekkidness in this one! Click at your own risk!
5 – BARBAROUS
Barbarous, written and drawn by Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota, throws its reader right into the story. Set in a modern world with a magical twist, Percy has what is known as “bad magic.” She’s unreliable, disagreeable, and short-tempered, but despite her flaws has a bad habit of trying to be a hero.
Currently in their second chapter, the story is fast-paced and exciting, set in a world where more questions have been presented so far than answers, so there’s plenty of room for the plot to grow and develop.
Hirsh and Ota have also worked on plenty of other awesome comics like Is This What You Wanted and more which can be found on their site as well. To support them, check out their Patreon.
**For a similar comic, read Strong Female Protagonist (SFP) which isn’t quite as pretty at first, but is set in a world that is just as magical with superheroes and villains and magical girls a plenty.
4 – NECROPOLIS
Necropolis by Jake Wyatt is a dark warning of the price of power. In this case, magic and steel in a feudal and damned world. A young girl strikes a bargain with a trickster, promising everything she has for a sword that will make her invulnerable to the blades of her enemies.
The story is only in the second chapter of what is obviously a long, complex narrative, which means that Wyatt is still fleshing out the world of Hyberia and the Hinterlands, which is medieval in fashion but dark and magical. His art style is elegant and does a good job cultivating the tone of the story, particularly his old-fashioned style of lettering.
While all the other comics in this list are hosted on their own dedicated websites, Wyatt updates his Necropolis on Tumblr, which turns out to be a surprisingly good format for comics. Wyatt is also the only creator who has worked on mainstream comics and cartoons for companies like Marvel and Nickelodeon. So this comic is his passion project, updated in his spare time, and because of this, his comic is also the shortest on the list and there are a few breaks in the story where Wyatt posted sketch art and character design or nothing at all for several months. The good news is that just this month, Wyatt has begun posting again so there’s plenty to look forward to.
3 – AVA’S DEMON
Ava’s Demon by Michelle Czajkowski is the type of digital comic that the internet was created for. Tying multimedia aspects (such as music and motion) into a comic in book form is something not yet achievable with our limited paper technologies, but through the wonder that is a webcomic, all things are possible.
Emily Carroll is particularly well known for her creative use of digital space and reader interactivity. CAUTION, that link is to a horror comic; not for the faint of heart!
Czajkowski’s comic is also a little intense at points, following the story of a girl–Ava–who is possessed by a demon–Wrathia Bellarmina–although the title of the comic might have given some of that away already. For most of her life, Ava believes that the “imaginary friend” who keeps manipulating her actions and telling her to kill herself is just an aspect of psychosis. Her family and classmates also think she’s crazy, leaving her isolated and adrift. When her life threatened and her planet destroyed, Ava decides that she’s not ready to die yet and makes a pact with Wrathia; to spend her life helping to avenge the demon’s homeworld and in exchange, Wrathia will share her power with Ava. Their mission becomes to find other demons, Wrathia’s most loyal supporters, who have been likewise reincarnated into human hosts.
A neat element of the story is that each demon represents a different deadly sin and their powers are elemental in nature (Wrathia being Wrath and her powers typically manifesting as fire/lava, etc). The characters are each incredibly unique and expressive, but it’s their coloring that really sets them apart from the world around them, since each human host takes on the color of their demon’s powers (Wrathia is red, so Ava eyes and skin become red when she’s channeling Wrathia’s power, etc). Visually, Ava’s Demon is absolutely stunning, with the gorgeous, rich colors being the–no pun intended–highlight.
The comic is nineteen chapters in, just over seventeen hundred pages long–and that isn’t counting the additional motion comic sequences set to music by Frank Haught–and the story isn’t even close to over. Check out Czajkowski’s Patreon to support the comic.
2 – ON A SUNBEAM
On A Sunbeam by Tillie Walden is a comic about friendship and finding yourself… in space. Although not a huge fan of sci-fi (by her own admission), Waldon brings something new and inventive to the genre. In fact, Space-Fantasy might be the more appropriate term for a story with spaceships that look and maneuver like fish and trees that grow in abandoned architecture scattered across the stars.
The comic follows Mia at two different points in her life, skipping back and forth between her time working as part of a construction crew restoring old buildings and her youth at boarding school. And don’t get too bogged down in trivial details like “gravity” or “fish aren’t spaceships,” and don’t ask questions like “how do they breathe in space?” or “where does the water come from?” Just go with it. After all, everyone in the comic does. Even the most fantastic elements of this universe just amount to another day for its occupants, making even the most beautiful or exotic setting feel familiar and safe.
Throughout it all, Mia is trying to discover who she wants to be. She’s looking for direction in life and acceptance for who she is. The people around her, who she slowly lets become her friends, each have their own stories to tell and, with their self-assured help, Mia starts down the path of self-acceptance… with a few twists and turns and bumps along the way.
Walden does a great job developing her characters and supplying representation. The main cast of characters is made up primarily of women. I would say all women, but one of the characters is agender, preferring the pronouns “they/them” which is really nice to see.
On A Sunbeam finished earlier this year, so you can binge the whole story all at once, rather than waiting for weekly updates. If you like Walden’s work, donate to the page or support her on Patreon. You can check out her other comics here.
1 – THE WORMWOOD SAGA
The Wormwood Saga by Daniel Lieske tops this list for many, many reasons. Not least of all because you can read it in over a dozen languages, including German–which is what it was initially published in–and–thankfully–English.
Once again, this is the kind of comic the internet was made for, panels flowing seamlessly from one to the next as you scroll down the page. This gives the story an incredible flow and sense of purpose, allowing you to keep reading constantly without having to stop and go to a new page. Which works incredibly well with the sense of adventure cultivated by the narrative.
Lieske captures the passion and invincibility of childhood amazingly well through the voice of Jonas, the narrator and protagonist of the story. At first, that’s all it seems to be, childhood fantasies that even Jonas can’t remember if they’re memories or dreams. As the world around Jonas becomes more and more magical, Jonas is forced to start on a journey that might be more than he bargained for. I’ll let you read the rest yourself. This is a story best experienced when you don’t know what to expect.
After nine chapters, The Wormwood Saga is still going strong, with a tenth chapter currently in production. You can always check out Patreon or buy the board game to support the series.SCRIBA, N.Y. - While 615 workers at the FitzPatrick nuclear plant wait for news about their future, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he hoped the plant would stay open but offered no reason to assume that it will.
"I know there have been a lot of rumors'' that FitzPatrick might close, Cuomo said today in DeWitt. "But we hope the rumors aren't true.''
Entergy Corp., the plant owner, has said it will announce by the end of this month whether it plans to buy more nuclear fuel to keep the money-losing plant running past late 2016. In the meantime, as recently as Wednesday night, the company said it was "focused on constructive discussions with the state'' about the possibility of keeping the plant in operation, spokeswoman Tammy Holden said.
The governor acknowledged that his office has held discussions with Entergy officials "for a long time,'' but he provided no specifics about the talks.
Asked whether the future of Entergy's downstate nuclear plant at Indian Point might factor in to the discussions about FitzPatrick, Cuomo indicated that they are separate issues. Cuomo has opposed Entergy's application to extend the license of Indian Point, arguing that the Westchester County nuke poses an unacceptable safety risk to nearby New York City and should be closed.
Some Oswego County observers have speculated that Entergy might seek a compromise to allow the profitable Indian Point facility to continue operating for some fixed term in return for keeping FitzPatrick online. Neither Cuomo nor Entergy has confirmed that such a deal has been discussed, but Cuomo today seemed to rule out any linkage.
"I want to close Indian Point. I want to see FitzPatrick stay open,'' Cuomo said. "These are very different situations, and we would handle them one at a time.''
Cuomo said he had "no news'' about FitzPatrick's fate. If Entergy plans to close FitzPatrick for economic reasons, the company is required to notify the state Public Service Commission at least six months in advance. No such notice has been filed, Cuomo said.
The notice gives the PSC time to evaluate whether shutting a major power plant would adversely affect the regional power grid. In the case of the Ginna nuclear plant in Wayne County, the PSC's review concluded that Rochester-area utility customers should subsidize the plant for 18 months to keep it running long enough to develop alternative power sources.
Central New York, however, is less dependent on FitzPatrick for electricity than Rochester is on Ginna. The central zone of the state power grid has enough power plants to generate more than 6,500 megawatts, of which FitzPatrick's 850 megawatts represents 13 percent, according to data from the New York Independent System Operator. Ginna, on the other hand, represents about 76 percent of total generating capacity in the zone around Rochester.
Cuomo said the state's only clear option to intervene in Entergy's decision about FitzPatrick would be to assess the impact on electric reliability if Entergy files a formal notice of closure.
"If they plan to do anything, they have to file a notice and then we will know if something's happening,'' Cuomo said. "We've had ongoing conversations with FitzPatrick for a long time. But let's see exactly what they plan first, and the only way you'll really know is if they file a notice of closure. And then we would take it from there.''
The Public Service Commssion did not require Ginna officials to file a formal notice of closure before investigating the need for subsidy payments in 2014. PSC Chair Audrey Zibelman said at the time that nuclear plants are unique and that requiring a formal notice of closure would magnify the likelihood that a nuclear plant would close before subsidies could be negotiated.
Oswego County officials dread the potential loss of FitzPatrick's $74 million annual payroll and its $17.3 million in yearly property tax payments. All told, FitzPatrick's operation is thought to support $500 million or more in local economic activity.
Contact Tim Knauss anytime | email | Twitter | 315-470-3023Ads support the website by covering server and domain costs. We're just a group of gamers here, like you, doing what we love to do: playing video games and bringing y'all niche goodness. So, if you like what we do and want to help us out, make an exception by turning off AdBlock for our website. In return, we promise to keep intrusive ads, such as pop-ups, off oprainfall. Thanks, everyone!
By Josh Speer / August 4th, 2017
Title Hey! Pikmin Developer Arzest Publisher Nintendo Release Date July 28th, 2017 Genre Action, Puzzle Platform Nintendo 3DS Age Rating E for Everyone – Mild Fantasy Violence Official Website
It might seem strange that someone who has never played a typical Pikmin game (despite picking up Pikmin 3 for my Wii U) would have been excited to try Hey! Pikmin, but that’s the case here. The reason being, this 2D outing reminded me strongly of another 3DS game, Chibi-Robo! Zip Lash, which I greatly enjoyed. There are two questions with Hey! Pikmin then. Is it more than a clone of Zip Lash and does it do a good job of translating the Pikmin appeal into a portable adventure?
Let’s get one thing out of the way, there is no grand story motivating Captain Olimar on his quest. He’s traveling home when he warps right into an asteroid field, damaging the Hocotate and sending it plummeting to a nearby planet. While Olimar and his talkative mechanical co-pilot the S.S. Dolphin II survive intact, the rest of his ship isn’t so lucky. It’s completely out of fuel, so Olimar sets out to find a substitute fuel source. Remarkably, the Dolphin II picks up a signal from an energy called Sparklium (depicted like a glowing yellow or orange acorn in game), and with 30,000 of it, the Hocotate will be shipshape once more. Best of all, the planet is rich with another peculiar resource, the plant like minions known as Pikmin! Blowing his whistle and mustering his troops (or slaves, depending on how dark you want to look at it) Olimar begins his journey to get back home.
The game itself is split into various sectors, each of which have several areas (including secret ones you unlock with alternate exits) as well as boss fights. Each of the early sectors introduces the special uses for different colored Pikmin (Red is fire proof, Blue can safely travel in water, Rock can shatter crystals etc.) and most sectors also have a theme. The first sector, Brilliant Garden, plays it safe with lots of plant life and few hazards, while Sector 4, Ravaged Rustworks, is composed of hulking mechanical devices. Each sector stands out from the rest, though some themes do get reused, such as cavernous underground labyrinths or underwater trials. The diversity of the stage design will keep you on your toes, but more strategically important are the Pikmin you find within.
For example, say that you’re in a fiery stage with scorching flames blocking your way. If you have Red Pikmin, they will safely stomp on the flames, smothering them so you have a path forward. But what if you have Blue Pikmin instead? Well, that likely means you’ll have to find an alternate path through water to progress. Some of the most clever areas turn your expectations on their head, such as one in Ravaged Rustworks where you are completely bereft of Pikmin until halfway through, and then once you find some, you have to work your way back to the beginning to reach the exit. Another creative ice area throws Olimar on a sled and arms him with Winged Pikmin, which he hurls at foes and massive snowballs trying to trample them both. But don’t worry too much if you lose Pikmin along the way, as you can usually find replacements hiding under rocks or shrubbery nearby, and a quick blow of your whistle will send them running your way (failing that, you can summon extra ones using your amiibo).
One thing the game does incredibly well is reinforce how much Olimar depends on the Pikmin. Without them, all he can do is walk and hover briefly with his jetpack. That’s it. You’re defenseless against foes without Pikmin to hurl at them, and you also can’t pull on leafy levers, push boulders out of the way or myriad other activities. So the game encourages you to keep your Pikmin safe and manage them carefully. They can get lost if you jetpack away from them, and they can also get destroyed by foes or level hazards. Olimar has to do his best to wrangle them with his whistle, as well as pick the right Pikmin for the job.
More Space Slavery on Page 2 ->
About Josh Speer Josh is a passionate gamer, finding time to clock in around 30-40 hours of gaming a week. He discovered Operation Rainfall while avidly following the localization of the Big 3 Wii RPGs. He enjoys SHMUPS, Platformers, RPGs, Roguelikes and the occasional Fighter. He’s also an unashamedly giant Mega Man fan, having played the series since he was eight. As Review Manager he spends far too much time editing reviews and random articles. In his spare time he counts the days until Mega Man 11, TWEWY Final Remix and Wargroove release.
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March 20, 2015, 10:07 PM GMT / Updated March 20, 2015, 9:18 PM GMT / Source: NBC News By Alan Boyle
Want to see Spock Crater on Pluto, or the Nimoy Mountains on its biggest moon |
at even strength. His 14 goals are the most by a Rangers defenseman since Brian Leetch scored 21 in 2000-01 and he led Rangers defensemen in every major statistical category, including goals, points, power-play points, shots and ice time.
Fortunately for the Rangers, McDonagh is day-to-day and expected to return from his shoulder injury soon.
---Frog Fractions (Twin Beard Studios) [browser, free]
A Top 10 Indie Games of 2012 list just couldn't fit all of our must-play titles of the year. Instead, we're booting the industry standard by adding two more, because we can and more importantly, because we must.If 2011 represented an "indie boom" for the scene, 2012 was an indie-vasion on all fronts. Free, paid, and free-to-play indie games revitalized aging Sony and Microsoft consoles, were often the highlight software of new gadgets such as the Wii U and PlayStation Vita, and even overwhelmed Steam to the point of Valve restructuring its entire submission process.Free and paid indie games continue to spawn from a variety of game jams and competitions. These games take up residence in more online stores, browser-based mega sites such as Kongregate and Newgrounds, mobile devices led by Android and Apple, and every other platform that has now warmed up to "indie." Social gaming, however, remains occupied by mostly indie tumbleweed.We needed to increase the residence of our own top 10 indie games of 2012 list to 12 because these developers deserve the recognition, and our readers deserve a chance to learn about the diversity and opportunity that presently exists. We are here to celebrate games that challenge our skills as much as they challenge our beliefs and expectations.These are our top games of 2012. It's the biggest game in the surreal and wonderful Lands of Dream, it sports one of the best soundtracks we've ever encountered and unique visuals that wouldn't feel out of place in a children's book, it tells a story that will make you proud of gaming, it features dozens of odd characters, it's huge, it's got impressive walls of text and it even features two of the smartest puzzles we've encountered, but these are not the reasons you should play. No. You should play this game because it can actually help you become a better person.Are-level visuals and sleek, responsive gameplay integral to the development of a game we won't forget?says no. Painted in neon-bright colors,is an autobiographical look at six months of its creators' life and the tribulations instigated by hormone replacement theory. Poignant and almost painful to behold, sometimeswas, and still is, a game that resonates with its brutal honesty.became the internet's worst-kept, highest-praised secret back in October. In case you haven't heard or more importantly played this secret game, do it now. It will teach you fractions!Jim Crawford'sends up teaching its players a whole lot more in what feels like equal parts reckless abandon and methodical story and gameplay stitching. It parodies a gamut of games and subverts players' expectations all the way to its XXX, insect-ual ending, all for free and ad-free.is not only an excellent, sci-fi, point-and-click adventure game. It's an important game showing off that innovation can be achieved in all genres and can actually be much more subtle than a new button that does a new thing. Innovation can, and in the case of Resonance does, affect everything from the plot to the way classic gameplay mechanics are re-implemented in novel ways.with its brilliant music, masterfully designed puzzles, multiple playable characters, charmingly pixelated graphics is an evolutionary glimpse at the future of adventure gaming. A first-person horror game that been viewed as both gimmicky and ground-breaking,has inspired a slew of clones and derivative material. Drawing from the Slender Man myth, the game has players scrambling to recover manuscripts before the inevitable approach of the Slender Man and the onset of terror-induced insanity. Why is it one of our top twelve? Because people are still coming up with Slender-games even today.Thatgamecompany's journey comes to the end of its three-game exclusivity with Sony in its largest project yet. Gamers and bloggers the world over shared their emotional experiences of playing the exploration platformeron PSN, learning how to communicate with others without headsets or text. Exploring the game fully required a commitment to help one another on a gorgeous, magic cloth ride.Worth noting,'s music, which dynamically responds to the player's actions, even received a Grammy nomination for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media. This is a first for a video game, let alone a downloadable indie title.Starting off as an overly ambitious NES homebrew project,took the better part of a decade and impressively evolved into the most nostalgic and detailed love letter to 80s gaming and pop-culture we could ever hope for. Thick with mentions, nods and little spoofs that even affect its gameplay, it's much more than a lovingly pixelated8-bit demake; it's a truly great game and an obvious work of love. A top-down mix of almost all the things that make a hardcore experience so worthwhile,-- or, if you'd rather call it by its full name -- is a space-faring simulation that has players dealings with the tribulations of space-travel in the micro. Intensely difficult, almost to the point of being insurmountable for some,is a deeply absorbing experience in an environment informed with way too manyclones.Klei Entertainment builds on the success of itsseries with an enthralling, original take on the stealth genre, and we couldn't be happier with the results.empowers players with a wealth of tactical options, and the result is some of the most fun we've had with a stealth-action game since the originalEven if you're not a fan of stealth games, you need to play this.deftly sidesteps many of the frustrations inherent in the genre, leaving only a brutally satisfying core experienceis fun even when you suck at it. It's rewarding even when it's played recklessly. Every long fall, every unnoticed trap, and every inevitable death teaches you something new about the game and how you can do better. And you'llto do better.Most of us haven't yet reached the end of, but that's largely because we're having so much fun running through the earlier levels and learning their intricacies (also, Danny always steal from shopkeepers, and they're always happy to murder him). In this case, the journey itself is so much fun and so full of randomly generated surprises that we don't really care if we ever reach the destination.We're suckers for good Metroidvania-styled games, but we've played enough of them to recognize their common faults. Happily,is well-built throughout, and we can't imagine anyone coming away from the experience disappointed.Creator Dean Dodrill reveals many of the issues that hampered Dust's production in a recent Gamasutra postmortem, and it's gratifying to see his years of difficult work reflected in a polished, charming, thoroughly enjoyable final product.Jonatan Soderstrom and Dennis Wedin earn this year's bloody, chicken-faced crown as the highest collectively ranked title in our must-play list.comes to life in a top-down pixelated perspective and requires players to come to grips with its kill-or-be-killed, danger-lurking-everywhere intensity. Players can't simply hide behind the masks they wear, they have to be aware of every corner or crevice while leaving the opposition unaware of the impending slaughter.Though not necessarily making it a must-play title, we also celebratefor its rather unbridled publisher-developer relationship with the rock stars of Devolver Digital, its commercial and critical success using the indie-friendly, Game Maker-based engine, and its freeware developers crossing the line and making money for their entertainment. This is how indie can be done in 2013 and how the industry and its tools can help it happen.Document Recovered From The Marianas Trench
I need to write this down, because I forget things sometimes, and I think what I heard today was important. Not to me, the time for me or almost anyone else alive on Earth today to make a difference has passed, but someone, somewhere might be able to make something of this, or at least find it helpful, or something. Once I'm done, I'm going to seal it up in a pipe, coat it in wax, and chuck it into the ravine. Maybe someday someone will read this, and try to put things together. If they're allowed to.
I'd love to start at the beginning, but I'm honestly not sure when the world started to end. Could have been years and years before the final bits, or it could have been all at once. Everything was so grim, what with warmer air, cooler seas, too little gas and too many people, things could have been unraveling for ages before things bubbled up to the public eye. What I and others remember most was when the Disney Magic sank. It was then, I think, that most people started to think that things might be worse than they seemed.
The Disney Magic was a big cruise ship, one of those liner jobs that tools around islands and stuff. One day, the news was all screaming about how it suddenly just went down when it was trying to put in to port. The weird thing about it was how there was no video of it for a long time. Some still pictures of it floating fine, but none of it actually going down. Then, somehow, a tape showed up, and the news started playing it. I have to imagine they didn't review it first.
The ship was puffing along, strong and fast, little boats bobbing around it, looking like every vacation lover's dream, when suddenly it stopped. I mean stopped, just a dead halt like it had just slammed into a mountain. You could see people go lurching forward all over the deck, a bunch of junk fall off the sides, a real mess. It's all still for a few seconds, then suddenly there's this foaming behind the ship. Most people assumed it was the engine trying to fire up again… then the arm came up.
I'm not sure if it actually was an arm, but it was some kind of limb, and it must have been a hundred feet long at least. It reached up along the side of the boat and… just ripped it open, I mean unzipped it like a coat, and you could see all the people inside screaming and running… it was awful. Then you saw something lurch up, a big, spiny shape pushing against that gap, shoving in… then there was an explosion on its back, and the camera whipped up to show a couple of jets whizzing by… then it ended.
I remember just sitting there, stunned, looking at the TV, barely noticing the president coming on to declare a state of emergency. I think it was two or three days later when the TV went under full government control, but it may have been a week, I'm not sure. Internet got clamped later, but soon all you could hear, read or see was “remain calm, everything is under control”. The oddest thing was that life really didn't change much for a while. Bills still came, still had to work, go to school, all that. Just a lot more scared faces, and a lot more weird talk.
Pretty soon we were getting told that whole towns were being evacuated, that there was a plague, or a riot, or a terrorist bomb, or some other nightmare. My brother down south said that they got moved because of a huge wildfire. The weird thing was, he said, that the fire moved oddly… seemed to shoot right for gas or brush, and didn't travel evenly. That after a while, he swore he saw what looked like a twenty foot tall man of fire walking and eating everything. The call got dropped right after he said that. I haven't talked to him since.
So things got worse, little by little. People kept being moved, and there was no real way to communicate with each other anymore that was really reliable, so it was hard to say just how bad things were. Still, word of mouth was still going strong, and it was creepy. Crazy shit, really, stuff about zombies in the north, killing frenzies in the east, a place near the ocean where the ground was alive and eating people, a cult screaming about the second coming and killing people to buy off god… I started pulling more and more away from people, just to get some ignorant peace of mind. Looking back, that probably saved my life.
Finally, one day, I woke up and there was blood on my window. It was outside, and I could hear some insane shit going down outside… screaming, clanking, gunshots, and a smell like burning wires. I hid. I'm not ashamed to admit it, I left my fellow man to rot, and hid inside for almost a full week, long after the noise stopped. After the fifth day, the electricity and gas gave out, along with the running water. When I finally got hard up for supplies, I poked my nose out, and saw that the whole west side of the world was gone.
Now, I don't know for sure if it actually is gone, but there is a cliff that starts thirty feet to the west of my house, and I cannot see the bottom of it. I also can't see the other side of this ravine, so for all intents and purposes, that part of the world is gone for me. The suburb I was in looked like a war zone, blood and broken stuff everywhere, houses carved up… no bodies though, which I still think was weird. I scrounged up some food and stuff from some of the houses, then went back home.
I've been doing that for a while now. I'm not sure how long, really. Might have been years and years, or just a few months, it's hard to say. Sometimes the sun just sticks in one spot for what feels like days… other times these clouds roll in, and you can't see two feet. There's… things around, too. I run at the first noise, but I think they're about man-sized, and they seem to like metal. Other, little things scramble around in the rubble sometimes, so I try and keep clear. One time, a thing that looked like a pill bug the size of a cat crawled out, looked at me, and screamed “STOP!” in perfect English. I hid inside for days.
There are also these big blimp-things that float around sometimes. They have little bug legs on their undersides, and they look kinda like maggots, but with eyes all over. They eat everything when they land, but most of the time they stay high up. One of these had just passed when I found the hurt guy. He was all ripped up, and looked like one of those S.W.A.T. Team guys you see on tv sometimes, but his combat suit thing was all ripped to hell. I dragged him back home, and then we talked.
He said that he had been hunting the blimp-thing, but had gotten attacked. He wouldn't say by what, but he looked like he was on his last legs. I fed him some canned beans and some water, and he seemed to come around a little. Asked me who I was, if I was alright and all that. He seemed kinda shocked when I said he was the first person I'd seen since the west of the world vanished. He told me it wasn't gone, just relocated, but wouldn't say what that meant. I helped heal him up, and kept asking who he was, but he wouldn't say. Finally, he said screw it, that his orders were probably no good anymore anyway, and told me.
He said he worked for a foundation or something, and that they were like a combination jail and research center. He said that he was one of the agents who went around trying to find strange stuff and keep it from hurting people. I said he was doing a hell of a job so far, and he laughed pretty hard. He said something had happened, and that a bunch of these things had gotten loose at the same time, and caused this foundation place to lose control. He said it became a “GH-0 'Dead Greenhouse' scenario”.
I asked him what that meant, and he looked at me for awhile before going on. He said that's what they call a situation where everybody on earth dies, but the earth itself is still ok and can support life. I asked what did that matter if everybody's dead, and he smiled strangely. I asked him if anyone else on earth was still alive, and he said yes, but carefully spread out and contained. After that, I just sorta sat and digested things for a bit, and the man started stretching and checking his cuts. He was starting to pull his boots on when I asked what happens now.
He said that they have to “reboot” things. Said they have the technology to recreate almost anything, and that making people is actually pretty easy. Said that they would clean out and contain things, rebuild the broken cities, and repopulate them. It would take a long, long time, but he said they would eventually get things back to the way they were before. Even said they could recreate memories and stuff. I just sat, kinda stunned, and watched him as he just kept going along, getting dressed like this was all no big deal. I told him he was nuts, that there was no way people could just forget, that this could all be just swept away. He stopped, looked at me, smiled, then said “Why not? It's been done before.”
I don't know if that man was crazy or not, but I think he was sane. As he was leaving, he said something about putting my house underwater. Please, don't let them brush me away. Don't let them hide us. Try and find more, I know there's got to be more people who tried to leave something behind. Don't let the world die in vain. Remember us.Lombardo says Las Vegas shooter had lost money, been depressed
Courtesy of Eric Paddock / AP
The man who killed 58 people at a country music festival in Las Vegas last month had been depressed after losing a significant amount of money in the past two years and that may have been a "determining factor" in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, the city's sheriff said.
Gunman Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old high-stakes gambler and real estate investor, had lost a "significant amount of wealth" since September 2015, which led to "bouts of depression," Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said in an interview this week with Las Vegas news station KLAS-TV.
"This individual was status-driven, based on how he liked to be recognized in the casino environment and how he liked to be recognized by his friends and family," Lombardo said. "So, obviously, that was starting to decline in the short period of time, and that may have had a determining effect on why he did what he did."
Investigators still have not determined exactly what led Paddock to unleash a barrage of gunfire at concertgoers from his high-rise suite at the Mandalay Bay hotel and casino on Oct. 1.
Paddock killed himself after the massacre that also wounded more than 500 people. Las Vegas police and the FBI have examined his politics, any possible radicalization and his social behavior but turned up little.
Investigators have found that Paddock planned his attack meticulously and was "purposeful in concealing his actions," the sheriff said.
The gunman requested an upper-floor room overlooking the Route 91 Harvest Festival; stockpiled 23 guns, a dozen of them modified to fire continuously like an automatic weapon; and set up cameras inside and outside his room to watch for approaching officers.
One of the laptops found in Paddock's hotel suite was missing a hard drive, and searches of his internet history turned up nothing unusual.
Investigators found no evidence that Paddock had help carrying out the attack but are continuing to question his girlfriend, who was visiting family members in the Philippines during the massacre.
Marilou Danley is still considered a "person of interest" in the investigation and was being questioned again this week, Lombardo said. The FBI previously questioned her about Paddock's gun purchases and what she may have noticed about his behavior.
Danley has repeatedly denied knowing anything about the attack and said Paddock never said or did anything that would have led her to believe he was going to carry out a massacre.
But the sheriff said he had doubts about her story, calling it "hard to believe."
"You would think Ms. Danley would have some information associated with that," Lombardo said. "Currently, we haven't been able to pull it out of her, if she has it in her."
The sheriff also described Paddock's younger brother, Eric, as "manic" in interviews with news reporters outside his Florida home following the shooting but didn't elaborate. Eric Paddock has called his brother a multimillionaire.
"You can see there's something associated with the family," Lombardo said without elaborating.
A second brother, Bruce Paddock, was arrested in Los Angeles on Oct. 25 on suspicion of possessing child pornography.
In the wide-ranging, two-part interview, the sheriff said he believed Stephen Paddock was able to carry the guns into the hotel unnoticed by bringing them in separate bags over several days. He said Paddock was known among casino staff and nothing appeared unusual.
Fire officials released three hours of radio dispatches Friday that shed more light on the chaotic scene that first responders faced as they arrived and then worked to triage, treat and transport victims.
In just 2½ minutes, a mass-casualty incident unit was requested as firefighters scrambled to figure out where the gunfire was coming from and help victims. A firefighter described hearing "full-auto fire," a reference to the rapid gunfire coming from the hotel, as dozens of shooting victims were being reported.
It comes as several news organizations, including The Associated Press, have sued to seek 911 calls, police camera video and search warrants related to the shooting.
Spokeswomen for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and the FBI declined to comment on Friday.
Associated Press writer Ken Ritter in Las Vegas contributed to this report.An employee works at strengthening the Mosul Dam on the Tigris River, north of the Iraqi city of Mosul, on February 1, 2016. (Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images)
If breached, it could unleash a 180-foot-high wave down the Tigris River Basin and drown more than half a million people, with floodwaters reaching as far as the Iraqi capital, about 280 miles to the south.
The collapse of the Mosul Dam would be catastrophic for Iraq.
The dam has been called the most dangerous in the world for the past decade. But recent assessments by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers say it is at a “significantly higher risk” of failing than previously thought.
The dam’s structural problems became evident as soon as the reservoir behind it was filled in 1985. It is built on layers of clay and gypsum, a soft mineral that dissolves when it comes into contact with water, and the dam immediately began seeping. Since then, about 100,000 tons of grout have been poured into the structure to prevent it from collapsing.
But even this stopgap measure has been disrupted by the Islamic State, which briefly seized the dam in the summer of 2014. The militants still hold the nearby city of Mosul, their de facto capital in Iraq. Political wrangling and a financial crisis in Iraq also are complicating repair work.
Employees at the Mosul dam in northern Iraq, February 3, 2016. The Islamic State briefly seized the dam in the summer of 2014. (Azad Lashkari/Reuters)
[Islamic State offensive in northern Iraq shows group’s resilience]
The hydroelectric dam almost certainly has an “unprecedented level of untreated voids” in its foundation, according to the Army Corps of Engineers’ report of Jan. 30, which was made public this week when it was submitted to the Iraqi parliament. The monitoring team has identified “significant signs of distress,” it added.
When the Islamic State took control of the dam, a rigid daily routine of pouring grout into the structure to keep it from collapsing was missed for six weeks, and logistical issues have plagued the process ever since.
Meanwhile, a government decision to deprive Islamic State-held Mosul of electricity by blocking the flow of water put additional pressure on the dam as water levels rose.
Top-level U.S. officials have voiced their growing concerns to the Iraqi government, an adviser to the prime minister’s office said. They have regularly invoked Hurricane Katrina but warned that the devastation could be “a thousand times worse,” the adviser said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is not an official spokesman.
If the dam fails when water levels are high, the flooding would be disastrous. Mosul, about 30 miles to the southeast, would be hit by a 65-foot wall of water and wiped out within four hours, studies have said. Farther downstream, Tikrit is expected to be deluged in 50 feet of water before the torrent bursts another dam at Samarra. Within 48 hours, floods 13-feet deep would reach Baghdad.
Concerns are becoming more acute as Iraqi security forces prepare for an offensive to recapture Mosul from the Islamic State, the adviser said. In recent days, units from the Iraqi army’s 16th Division have arrived in Makhmour, southeast of Mosul, to begin operations in the area, commanders have said.
[August 2014: Islamic State fighters take Mosul Dam]
The adviser said Iraqi security officials, worried that militants may try to sabotage the dam if they think they have lost the city, have drawn up emergency plans. Meanwhile, the use of heavy munitions could put additional pressure on the structure, he said.
“We had to give a warning to these operations to observe the dam, but there shouldn’t be anything nearby,” said Shirouk al-Abayachi, co-chair of the Iraqi parliament’s agriculture and water committee. The situation remains “very dangerous,” she said.
“We don’t have anything that tells us what’s going on under the dam,” she said. “There are sinkholes, but we don’t know how big they are now.”
Iraq’s Ministry of Water Resources has played down the threat but was persuaded to reopen the lower gates of the dam to relieve some pressure, even though it meant power was restored to the militant-held city farther south.
The Italian company Trevi recently won a bid to repair the dam and is expected to sign the contract soon. The cost is estimated to be more than $300 million, the adviser said, adding that the expense probably will be covered by the World Bank. But the repair bill comes as Iraq is desperately seeking financial assistance as oil prices hover around $30 a barrel.
Iraq’s water minister, Mohsin al-Shammari, who is politically aligned with the anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, has dismissed U.S. warnings. He said in an interview with an Iraqi television station that there is only a “one-in-a thousand” chance that the dam will fail.
He has also criticized the predictions as an excuse for sending more foreign troops to the country; Italy has said it would send 450 soldiers to provide security for the Italian firm.
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has stressed the need for the work to begin quickly. Melting snow and more rain are expected to increase pressure on the dam this spring.
Read more:
Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the worldI’m often asked about the time involved in creating this weekly blog.
The answer; it depends.
Sometimes I’ll write an article months or weeks before it’s posted. Other times, I receive some fresh perspective and inspiration that changes my direction, and presents a new idea, superseding what I’ve already written, started to write or plan to share.
This post is the source of recent inspiration that supersedes anything I planned to share today.
On last night’s radio show, I asked my listening audience the question, “Are you a winner?” and discussed the qualities of an individual with a winning mentality. Towards the end of the show, a gentleman called the radio station and revealed that the last ten years had been losing years for him. He shared his many losses related to relationships, finances, and career. He also expressed that drug abuse played a large role in this losing streak. During our conversation, he explained how the Inspirational Perspective radio show helped him resolve to turn his life around. While sharing some of the steps he took to get his life back on track, he captivated me with a truly inspiring statement.
He said, “I am working on the inner me, so that I do not become an enemy of me.”
While driving home from the studio, these words played repeatedly in my head. All too often, we focus our full attention on the exterior presence, while completely neglecting our INNER being!
We all give mental energy to identifying our external enemies, when the real focus should be on the inner enemy, our worst enemy. In a previous blog, I shared how I am the hardest person I’ve ever had to lead. I can be my own worst enemy.
What is it that causes such a lack of internal integrity that we become completely disconnected with our internal state of being?
How does one begin to measure the state of their internal being?
In my opinion, the measurement of a person’s internal state of being is reflected in their attitude towards life.
Thus, my questions for reflection this week are:
How do you see the world around you?
How would you rate the environment around you?
Take a moment to think on this…
Now, what if I told you that how you rate and see the world around you, is a merciless mirror that is reflecting the status of your attitude?
If you rated the environment around you as excellent, you probably have an excellent attitude.
If you rated the environment around you as good, you probably have a good attitude.
If you rated the environment around you as neither good or bad, you probably have an average attitude.
If you rated the environment around you poor, you probably have a poor attitude.
We create our space. We create our environment. We create the world in which we live.
We can’t control circumstance, but we can control the attitude in which we choose to approach that circumstance.
How have you been choosing to approach circumstance lately? We all have a choice.
My choice?
“I am working on the inner me, so that I do not become an enemy of me.”
I’m also choosing to stay inspired; it’s my lifestyle choice.
Hopefully you’ll be joining me.whatever the plan is, those leaks are damaging it. since people who'll watch the presentation also are paying attention to that. And at the end of the day does it matter since none of those even said something interesting. at least to me, I just can't care at all about the setting of yet another shooter
anyway, I fully expect the 3d mario to be just as great as all the previous mario. I'm not thinking at all it should solve the question about making a fully designed world more interesting and yet not sequential. Zelda and mario exchanging place would
be way better.
Other than that though, it's bad. since thanks to the leak we only have the name, it doesn't sound appealing. I'll be more than happy to bite again on those two online games (mk splatoon) but yeah like nothing new?
and who cares about "reboot" as if they could reboot a game existing solely for you know gameplay reason. So no new games?
in fact those leaks are the single worst way to present those information.
and as for 3rd parties, yeah it won't work. No there isn't going to be a reason to not take the online fees money (or comarketing bs) and in fact not putting the game on a nintendo platform is weirdly a way to prove the technical achievements of a game.
Not that I care that much since those games are just awful, and now due to the leak, I'm incline to think that once again nintendo let the launch window to the 3rd parties (3ds) and they just mess it up!
It's plausible to me, that zelda is delayed because oh look at that skyrim. And this is pretty bad
objectively the new mario, new zelda, a very needed sequel to splatoon, a mk8 (costly) dlc and pikmin, would a be a great ds wii 3ds wii u year, but thanks to this leak. It's the worst way to show itMonster Hunter is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a... guitar?
ESP Guitars has modeled an axe on a sword — the in-game Rathalos Firesword, to be precise. It is not cheap. Available in Japan for 2.3 million yen, that converts to more than $22,000 U.S. It does come with a case, however.
Capcom has partnered with others to create high-end collectibles commemorating the series, from shirts to charm necklaces to a... golf bag, completed with Monster Hunter-themed golf balls and ball markers. That has yet to be priced but, as they say, if you have to ask, you probably cannot afford it.
More images and details at the link. Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate will launch in the west in early 2015; Japan, meanwhile gets Monster Hunter 4G in the fall of this year.February 27, 1983
Williams Choked on a Bottle Cap
By SUZANNE DALEY
ennessee Williams choked to death on a plastic cap of the type used on bottles of nasal spray or eye solution, New York City's Chief Medical Examiner said yesterday.
The 71-year-old playwright, whose body was found Friday morning on the floor of his Manhattan hotel suite, was first thought to have died of natural causes. But an autopsy yesterday found the bottle cap blocking the larynx -''swallowed or inhaled or some combination,'' said the Medical Examiner, Dr. Elliot M. Gross.
Dr. Gross said that there was no suspicion of foul play and that ''deaths of this type are usually classified as accidental.'' He said, however, that he would not make that determination until the results of all the chemical tests were complete. He said they would take several weeks.
The Medical Examiner's initial findings left many questions unanswered about the death of the playwright, who had moved between illness and hypochondria, often relying on alcohol and drugs to keep going.
An empty bottle of wine and several types of medication were found in Mr. Williams's room, the police said. But Dr. Gross would not say whether they had been a factor in the death.
The Medical Examiner also would not speculate on how the bottle cap might have got into Mr. Williams's throat. He did say there were a number of medical dispensers in Mr. Williams's two-room suite at the Hotel Elysee at 60 East 54th Street. He would not say whether any was missing a cap like the one that caused the playwright's death.
Dr. Gross said he had discussed his findings with Mr. Williams's personal physician, whom he would not name. Alcohol and drugs, along with strong coffee and cigarettes, became a regular part of Mr. Williams's life in the mid-1950's after ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'' brought him a second Pulitzer Prize. As the playwright saw it, that great success was a turning point, and a long decline began.
Though Mr. Williams continued to write prolifically, he never again achieved the success or the greatness of his earlier works, ''The Glass Menagerie'' and his first Pulitzer Prize play, ''A Streetcar Named Desire.''
At his best, Mr. Williams was a master of dramatic moments who created lost, tortured characters struggling for dignity and hope in a world that often denied both. Suffered From Several Ailments
Obsessed with sickness, failure and death, he constantly thought his heart would stop beating. He had suffered from several ailments, including cataracts, arthritis and heart disease. ''I've had every disorder known to man,'' he once said.
Several weeks ago, when Mr. Williams returned to New York from his house in Key West, Fla., he told close friends that he was exhausted, overworked and suffering from a shoulder condition.
Mr. Williams's body was found Friday morning by his secretary, John Uecker, who shared the playwright's two-room suite. Mr. Uecker said he had heard a noise in Mr. Williams's room at about 11 P.M on Thursday, but did not investigate. At about 10:45 A.M. Friday, Mr. Uecker entered the room and found Mr. Williams lying next to his bed.
Dr. Gross said Mr. Williams had died sometime in the late evening on Thursday or the early morning of Friday. According to doctors, normal nerve reflexes at the back of the throat would ordinarily force a person to gag and therefore eject any object that was caught in the opening of the larynx, called the glottis. No Test for Alcohol
Yesterday, Dr. Gross said that, while ''a number of reasons'' could have impaired the gag reponse, ''it frequently happens when a person is under the influence of alcohol or drugs.''
He said that Mr. Williams's blood had not been tested for alcohol, a procedure that often takes less than an hour to complete, but that testing would start tomorrow.
Dr. Gross issued a brief statement yesterday at a 2:30 P.M. news conference in the lobby of the Medical Examiner's headquarters at 520 First Avenue. The statement, which refers to Mr. Williams by the name he was given at birth, said:
''An autopsy was performed this morning on the body of Thomas L. Williams. The cause of death is asphyxia due to obstruction of the glottis (the opening to the larynx or upper airway) by a plastic over-cap (of the type used to cover the opening of nasal spray or ophthalmic solution dispenser). Further studies, including chemical tests, will be performed.''
The police were unable to say what the bottle cap might have belonged to. ''All the medication was taken from the apartment by the Medical Examiner's office,'' said Captain Gene Burke of the Manhattan detective squad. ''We don't have any information on it.''
Plans for funeral services for Mr. Williams remained incomplete yesterday. A memorial service was scheduled for Wednesday at the Tennessee Williams Fine Arts Center in Key West and a viewing, open to the public, was set for Sunday through Tuesday from 10 A.M. to 8 P.M. at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home, 1076 Madison Avenue.WATCH ABOVE: The Calgary Stampeders are putting rookies to the test. As Quinn Phillips reports, Dexter Janke will be among the first-year players vying for some attention.
EDMONTON – Edmonton’s Dexter Janke has been playing football since he was seven-years-old. His dedication to the sport is now paying off, as the 22-year-old is in Calgary for his first CFL training camp.
“As everyone’s been saying to me hard work |
Line at the US PlayStation Store on June 27th for $12.99, but PS+ members can get it for 20% off during the week of release.HER famous rear is said to be insured for PS13million-plus and has helped boost her fortune to a buttock-clenching PS65million.
For the hundred-odd Apprentice wannabes who've sat trembling outside Lord Sugar's office, the challenging tasks and back-stabbing fellow contestants are nothing compared to the buttock-clenching terror of facing up to the man himself.
I admit it was buttock-clenching at that point but so exhilarating to be falling at 120mph".
Recurring guest star Bobby Ball, who plays Lee's errant father Frank, returns tonight for an episode crammed full of buttock-clenching humour.
Disgrace: Oldham's Tom Adeyemi was racially abused by Liverpool fans It's easy, of course, to dismiss racist and sexist remarks as mere banter - to complain that those who object are miserable, buttock-clenching puritans obsessed with political correctness.
You get buttock-clenching pace with the traction only a four-wheel drive vehicle can deliver.
Letters To Juliet is undone by Egan's grating performance, trying to convince Sophie and us that: "I'm not the buttoned-up, buttock-clenching killjoy you make me out to be.
Letters To Juliet is undone by Egan's grating performance, trying to convince Sophie and us that "I'm not the buttoned-up, buttock-clenching killjoy you make me out to be.
I woke the other day and she was doing buttock-clenching exercises.
Whether it be a jaw-dropping triumph or a buttock-clenching embarrassment, the fortunes of the national team consistently manage to polarise opinion.
There are plenty of rivers, especially in North Wales around Bala, where whitewater rafting has long been a popular, if buttock-clenching pastime.University of Colorado senior Paul Pustea puts a parking receipt on his dashboard on the top level of the Euclid Parking Garage before heading to class in 2016. ( File photo )
This week, University of Colorado students can clean out their pantry and collection of campus parking tickets all in one.
From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday at CU Boulder Parking Services, those with outstanding parking citations can pay their fines with non-perishable food items in lieu of cash, according to the university. The donated food will go to the Harvest of Hope Pantry.
Participants are asked to bring in a minimum of five items to waive one citation with an issuance date prior to April 1. For those with more than one outstanding citation, the university said to donate more food.
Donations won't be counted on fines already in collections, on Bursars bill, for relocated or booted vehicles, Americans with Disabilities Act or fire lane or undesignated space violations, or any single amount due more than $50. Food items that are damaged, opened, missing a label, expired or in glass jars or containers won't be accepted.
Parking is available for free in 15-minute increments in lot 440 south of Parking Services during the designated time on donation dates.
The university asks participants to have a photo ID and license plate number ready to quickly access their account.
Elizabeth Hernandez: 303-473-1106, hernandeze@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/ehernandezNEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices vaulted to a record $100 a barrel on Wednesday as violence in Nigeria, tight energy stockpiles and a weaker dollar triggered a surge of speculative buying, dealers said.
A drop of unleaded fuel falls from the end of a nozzle after a motorist filled his car's tank at a service station in Washington January 2, 2008. Oil vaulted to a record $100 a barrel on Wednesday as violence in Nigeria, tight energy stockpiles and a weaker dollar triggered a surge of speculative buying, dealers said. REUTERS/Jason Reed
Oil’s climb to the psychologically key triple-digit price helped send stocks tumbling on Wall Street and further darkened an already gloomy economic outlook in the United States, which has been battered by a housing crisis and credit crunch.
“Oil hitting $100 a barrel has sparked some concerns about the consumer and inflation,” said Todd Salamone, vice president of research at Schaeffer’s Investment Research.
U.S. crude traded once at $100 a barrel, up $4.02, before easing back to settle $3.64 higher at $99.62. It remains below the inflation-adjusted high of $101.70 hit in April 1980, a year after the Iranian revolution.
London Brent crude rose $3.99 to $97.84.
“Oil could rise further from here. It’s simple supply-and-demand fundamentals,” said Kris Voorspools, energy analyst at Fortis in Brussels.
The White House said it would not open up the nation’s emergency crude oil reserve to lower prices. Two members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said the cartel was powerless to bring the market down from its lofty height.
Crude prices jumped 58 percent in 2007, the biggest annual gain this decade. Oil prices have nearly tripled since 2000 — driven by rising demand in China and other developing countries, tight stockpiles and geopolitical turmoil.
Weakness in the dollar has added to gains across the commodity sector as investors supported the underlying value of products denominated in the softening currency.
Wednesday’s price surge of more than 4 percent came after suspected militant attacks in Nigeria’s main oil city, Port Harcourt, heightened concern over the potential for further disruptions in shipments from the world’s eighth largest oil exporter.
“With the military and the militant warlords engaged in a violent tit-for-tat, the risk for oil disruptions in Nigeria remains higher than in the past few months,” said Olivier Jakob of Petromatrix.
Frequent attacks by militant groups since February 2006 have driven thousands of foreign oil workers from the oil-rich Niger Delta and cut oil exports by about 20 percent.
Investors are also particularly sensitive to signs of further fund investment in commodities at the start of the year. The broad Reuters/Jefferies CRB Index of commodities rose nearly 17 percent in 2007 as the sector rebounded from a loss in 2006.
A further decline in U.S. crude stockpiles — already running at a three-year low — was also expected. Weekly government data will be released Thursday, a day later than usual due to the New Year holiday.
Stocks of crude in the United States were expected to have fallen 2.2 million barrels last week, the seventh straight week of decline, as refiners processed more crude, according to a Reuters poll.
Distillate stocks, which include heating oil and diesel, were forecast to have declined by 500,000 barrels.This evening, Thursday, September 14 from 5-6:30 p.m., Feeding Tampa Bay is delivering and distributing a truckload of Meals Ready to Eat (MRE), bananas and water to those in need due to Hurricane Irma at Tropicana Field this evening.
St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman, St. Petersburg Police Chief Anthony Holloway, officers from the St. Petersburg Police Department and front office staff from the Rays and Feeding Tampa Bay will be on hand to help distribute food to the public.
Central pick up will be located at Parking Lot 6 at Tropicana Field. The Lot 6 entry is off 1st Ave. S. or the main Tropicana Field entrance off 9th St. S.
For more on everything the Rays are doing to support the community after the devastating hurricane, which has left a third of Florida residents still without power, read more here.Even as the monsoon has made speedy progress to most parts of the country, except Northwest, overall rainfall has been 18 per cent below normal while 30 per cent of the country has recorded deficient rainfall, according to the India Meteorological Department (IMD). In meteorological parlance, the country is divided into 36 sub-divisions and of these 17 have received normal rainfall, 11 have received deficient rainfall, six recorded excess rain while two sub-divisions, in Gujarat, have recorded scanty rainfall. Sub-divisions in Central India; Jharkhand, Chhatisgarh, Vidarbha, Odisha, East Madhya Pradesh, have recorded rainfall 37 per cent below normal.
IMD officials, though, said that the rainfall is likely to pick up as June draws to a close and monsoon will advance into remaining parts of the country in Northwest by Tuesday. As on Friday, the northern limit of monsoon pass through Veraval, Surat, Ratlam, Jhansi, Lucknow, Dehradun, Una and Jammu. "The conditions are becoming favourable for further advance of southwest monsoon into some more parts of north Arabian sea and Gujarat state, remaining parts of West Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and most parts of Haryana, Chandigarh, Delhi, Punjab and East Rajasthan during next 3-4 days," IMD said.
Graphic: Dnyaneshwar Jadhav
Met officials said that the weather systems that formed over the Bay of Bengal moved westwards and gave more rainfall to central and western Maharashtra, resulting in below normal rainfall in Central India. "The normal rainfall, in regions that have recorded deficient rains, is high, but this year rains have not picked up yet. Regions on the west coast have seen more convective activity, and have thus recorded more rainfall that Central and eastern regions," said Sunitha Devi, director, weather section, IMD, Pune. She added, "Rainfall is likely to pick up as June ends. As per our forecast, rainfall will be 107 per cent of long period average, that will make up for the deficient June rainfall."While you may already be familiar with the many photos of legendary waterman, five-time Olympic gold medalist and father of surfing, Duke Kahanamoku, film clips of him are few and far between. That's what makes these black-and-white peeks into pivotal periods of his life so incredibly special.
1. See Duke break his own record in the 1920 Olympics.
Look at him go.
2. Here he is casually pioneering stand-up paddleboarding at the 12-second mark.
3. Duke meets the other Duke, John Wayne, in Hollywood film "Wake of the Red Witch."
Watch the whole thing or fast-forward it to 44:16.
4. See the legend describe surfing in this 1965 interview.
5. Watch Duke star in a TV episode of "This is Your Life."
He thought he was there to shoot a travelogue.Free Your Guitar, Free Your Mind
Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of the artist
The electric guitar has only existed since the 1930s, but it's spawned an amazing amount of innovation, in both construction and technique. The electric guitar already has some weighty history behind it: As with classical music and the violin, or jazz and the saxophone, rock music has claimed the six-stringer as its own. But while rock gives the electric guitar fire, avant-garde jazz musicians often re-think the instrument beyond its basic, melody- and rhythm-based functions.
Musicians such as Sonny Sharrock eschew standard conventions and instead approach the guitar as a device of pure sound. Here are five guitarists who turned the guitar inside out; if you have more to recommend, please do so in the comments below.
For more entries in NPR Music's weekly Take Five: A Weekly Jazz Sampler series, click here.IMAGE, MATT KREMKAU FOR EMPIRE OF SOCCER
by DAVE MARTINEZ
It’s safe to assume New York Red Bulls head coach Jesse Marsch will be getting an unwelcome phone call from the MLS Disciplinary Committee this week.
Angered by a series of controversial calls and plays, Marsch took aim at referee Mark Geiger and the New England Revolution following Friday’s encounter.
“It’s shameful to me,” Marsch told reporters. “The game is supposed to have an honor.”
That remark was aimed at the Revolution players who continued play several moments after defender Kemar Lawrence crumbled to the ground injured. Kept onside by the prone Jamaican, the Revolution attack found a way to beat Luis Robles for the deciding goal of the match.
“They can claim they didn’t see him, they can claim that they weren’t sure he was hurt,” Marsch said. “It was clear as day that he was down on the ground.
“Not just one player saw him but their whole team saw him. That part for me is shameful.”
Team captain Dax McCarty joined his coach in condemning the Revolution, explaining the ensuing goal by saying, “That’s what desperate teams do.”
“Clearly that was the play that decided the game,” McCarty began. “There are a few different ways you can look at it. Maybe we are a little naive and maybe we should do more to let the ref know we have a guy injured and put it in his hands. Then again, what are we doing? It’s 2016. I guess we are asking refs to be doctors on the moment in the field.
“You would hope the team would recognize [Lawrence’s injury] and knock the ball out of bounds, but in the game these days, sportsmanship is kind of a novel concept we love to talk and think about but I don’t think it exists anymore in the game these days.”
Sportsmanship was only part of the issue. Referee Mark Geiger played a major role in allowing the play to continue — and followed that up with a controversial red card call on Felipe.
“[Geiger] has such a huge impact on this game by having a bad performance,” Marsch stated. “He can blow the whistle when a guy is down like that.”
Felipe put his leg into the path of Kelyn Rowe, winning the ball at midfield. His follow through, however, just clipped Rowe’s ankle, prompting Geiger to pull out a surprising red card.
Barring a decision to overturn the call, Felipe will now miss the Red Bulls’ coming April 9th match against Sporting KC.Abstract
Background Endogenous opioid systems may be engaged in the control of arterial pressure (MAP), however, given the risk of addiction, opioid receptor agonists are not used in antihypertensive therapy. We examined cardiovascular effects of biphalin, a potentially non-addictive dimeric enkephalin analog, an agonist of opioid μ and δ receptors.
Methods Biphalin was infused iv at 150 μg/kg/h to anesthetized spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) and normotensive Wistar-Kyoto rats (WKY). Along with MAP and heart rate (HR), renal blood flow (RBF) and iliac blood flow (IBF, a measure of hind limb perfusion) were measured using Transonic probes on renal and iliac artery, respectively. The effects of biphalin were compared with those of intravenous morphine (1.5 mg/kg/h).
Results In two SHR groups biphalin decreased MAP from 143 ± 2 to 130 ± 2 and from 177 ± 4 to 167 ± 3 mmHg (p < 0.001) while HR did not change or modestly decreased. The renal blood flow (RBF) increased modestly and both renal and hind limb vascular resistances decreased significantly (p < 0.001). The responses were blocked by inhibition of peripheral opioid receptors with naloxone methiodide. Unlike in SHR, in WKY rats biphalin did not change MAP or vascular resistances. Morphine infusion decreased MAP in SHR from 169 ± 6 to 150 ± 6 mmHg (less decrease in WKY) and significantly decreased RBF and IBF.Abstract Snake venom use for recreational purposes has been documented earlier. Willfully subjecting oneself to repeated lethal snake bite as a source of getting relieved of stress and recreation observed in two healthy software engineers, without any underlying psychiatric ailments or comorbidities along with probable mechanisms, are reported. Emergency physicians and practitioners have to be aware of novel methods of exposure to snake venom so as to recognize such cases and treat them accordingly. Keywords: Behavior, mental relaxation, nonpsychiatric status, recreational purpose, snake venom, software engineer, willful snake bite
INTRODUCTION Globalization and technological innovations are bringing new challenges to the emergency physician. New technological innovations have contributed to profound changes in the quality of life of human beings and societal changes. Information technology (IT) is the most coveted field in modern India. While each job has its own stress, the fast and relentless pace of technology-enhanced work environment in IT has created new culture. Two healthy software engineers subjected themselves willfully for repeated snake bite and gained access to snake venom, so as to get relieved of their stress. This is reported in order to create awareness of such issues among emergency physicians and practitioners. There were three reported cases of snake venom use in psychoactive substance users to experience “high.”[1,2,3] There are few cases of such addiction to semipoisonous snakes like rat snake and green wine, reported in the local press. However, to our knowledge, this is the first report of willful exposure to snake venom from direct bite for the purpose of mental relaxation among nonusers of illicit drugs and without any underlying psychiatric disorders.
CASE REPORT A 25-year-old software engineer came to emergency department (ED), with a request to get himself tested for HIV infection, even though he did not have any previous episodes of unprotected sexual intercourse or any illicit drug use. However, he said that he has subjected himself willfully to repeated snake bite over a period of 6 months with an interval of 30-45 days between each exposure. Patient was questioned on the awareness of toxic effects of snake venom and he had optimal knowledge. Incidentally, he said that he was stressed very much and had insomnia, due to immense work pressure. As some of his colleagues exposed to snake bite willfully felt relieved of his stress and experienced euphoria, patient accepted for willful snake bite and felt relaxed and had good sleep also. With patient's consent, he was investigated for HIV and his serology was negative. After this episode another friend of primary case, who is also a software engineer of 23 years old, came to ED with same request, as he has subjected himself to willful snake bite. He experienced sound sleep for 20-24 h and had relaxed mind after snake bite without any hang over/head ache, tremor, and sense of crawling. He also felt that his sexual desire has increased. Both of them did not experience any withdrawal symptoms. General and systemic examination including psychological assessment did not reveal any abnormalities in both. Their basic hematological and biochemical profile were within acceptable levels. Interestingly, these two cases informed that there are different dens in different cities wherein people who want to have snake bite are allowed to sit in chairs. The person in charge of snakes holds the snake near the head end of snake just distal to lip margin. Initially, he makes the snake to inject minimal bite in little toe or index finger for minimal envenomation, and then, he makes the snake to bite in lip or tongue of individuals according to their wish. The most commonly used snakes were krait, cobra, and green snake. Persons who were bitten, showed jerky movement and left the room within few minutes. From the reports provided orally, six persons lost their life due to such procedure. Many people who use such dens were from high socioeconomic status and well educated. Some of them were youth and college students.
DISCUSSION Ancient cultures all over the world believe that repeated snake bites/snake venom inoculation renders a person immune to fatal snake envenomation.[4] Tribal regions even in India are known to give snake bites purposefully to their children in order to protect them from fatal complications of snake bite. Lack of symptoms in our reported cases and in these primitive practices may be due to injection of too little venom, precisely the quantity needed for recreational purpose/immunity which needs further exploration. Multiple factors like easy availability, adventure seeking, social/peer-pressure, novel sensation, pain relief, and cultural beliefs might have influenced the use of snake bite as a form of substance abuse.[3] Moreover, snakes form an important part of Hindu mythology and are worshipped even today,[5] thereby general population being unafraid of them. During middle age period, physicians used snake venom of various snakes as medicinal agents. Base on observations, we hypothesized the mechanism and uses of snake venom in clinical medicine.[6] Snake venoms have antinociceptive and analgesic activity, and certain isolated neurotoxins have demonstrated significant analgesia in animal models. The venom on entering human blood releases active metabolites such as serotonin, bradykinin, peptides, prostaglandins, and other slow reacting substances. Drowsiness was the most common symptom observed among cobra bite, which may be due to effect of toxin in brain. Literature review[7] showed that in individuals injected with cobra venom, had marked relief of pain in nearly 65% of the patients and a mild-to-moderate relief in more than 80%, and the site of analgesic action being peripheral and central nervous system.[8] Also, long-form alpha-neurotoxin from cobra venom produces a potent opioid-independent analgesic effect by acting on nicotinic acetyl choline receptors (nAChRs).[9] Cobra venom resembles to the action of morphine but differs from the opiate in that it does not produce addiction and other disagreeable or dangerous by effects. Moreover, nAChRs are involved in the mesolimbic dopaminergic reward system of the brain.[10] This pathway may be responsible for the experience of “high.” There is a debate in the fatality/immunity due to repeated snake bites in human beings either accidentally or incidentally. Haast and Winer[11] reported complete recovery of a patient without any specific therapy even after bitten by a deadly snake Bangarus Caeruleus[11] and the authors attributed it to cross protection of existing antibody between species of Bangarus and Indian, African and Egyptian cobras, as he had a history of bites from these snakes earlier. Immunity was also reported in a reptile handler bitten by king cobra “Ophiophagus Hannah.”[12] Repeated poisonous snakes bites, though believed to render the individuals immune and reduce fatality of subsequent bites, Parrish and Pollard[13] analyzed the effect of repeated bites in 14 patients and concluded that bites from pit viper did not produce any kind of immunity and can cause death due to anaphylaxis. Limitation of this report is that the nature of snakes involved for willful snake bite could not be verified. Also, recall bias of the individuals has to be considered while interpreting patient's statements.
CONCLUSION Physicians and practitioners have to be aware of novel methods and more research is warranted in this field both for prevention as abuse and exploration of newer therapeutic molecules from snake venom.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT We thank Dr. K. Arthanari, M.S., for his logistic support.
Footnotes Source of Support: Nil Conflict of Interest: None declared.Ha Ha!” ―Nelson's most popular catchphrase
Nelson Mandela Muntz[3] (born October 30, 1979) is the tertiary antagonist of the TV Series and a child citizen of Springfield. He is considered the leader of the school bullies at Springfield Elementary School (despite being the youngest and shortest), even though he is also the most independent of them. He is a fourth grader.[4]
Contents show]
Biography
Nelson was first shown as a bully and the arch rival of Bart.[5] Over the years, he has terrorized most male kids in Springfield, and was even seen bullying teenagers (also known as Jimbo Jones and the Squeaky-voiced Teen). Nelson has a manner of showing up in awkward situations of surprise or misfortune and regularly pinpoint it by laughing at the concerned people ("Haw-haw!" became his catchphrase). When cornered about the awkwardness of those situations, Nelson usually gives a very reasoned explanation as to why he acted the way he did, sometimes even pseudo-scientifically proving it ("See, epidermis means your hair, so technically it's true. That's what makes it so funny.")
Nelson currently studies in the fourth grade, but was already a student when Bart came to school, which suggests that he may have repeated a couple of years. As he said on one occasion "I can't count the number of times I've been held back. Probably why I'm being held back." As such, he mainly remains skeptical to Edna Krabappel's remarks and laughs at nerds present in his class as he well knows all the correct answers to teacher's every question.Nelson represented Japan at the Model UN cluband serves as a quarterback for the Pee-Wee school's football team (on one occasion he even catches his own pass and plows through the opposing team with extreme ease), which he almost single-handedly carried over the rivals at some point.He has a surprising facility for planning, as he tells Marge when she says she wants to take down Mixed Fighting that she will need parents, sympathetic school officials and clergymen, a place to meet, snacks, staplers and a phonetree; (which he considers to be invaluable in regards to organizing a protest) to even have a chance at taking down an entire sport. He turns out to be a fan of many unexpected things, such as Andy Williams and Snow White. He is also an expert in the proper preparation of Huckleberries and eats tadpoles for brunch and lunch.Another time he was apparently a master of disguise, fooling even Bart and Ned Flanders Finally he was also depicted as having master answer sheets to various tests and assignments at school. He has an "office" located in a toilet stall where he has the answer sheets hidden in the toilet cistern.In " Loan-a Lisa ", he starts his own business using the fifty dollars Lisa donated to him. In a video link, Nelson says that he used some of the money to treat his mother the way she deserves. In the same episode, he is very caring towards Lisa at the end as he makes up an excuse to hold her hand as they are rollerblading.
Nelson's choice of social ethics seems to sprout from edgy reasons and rules understood only to himself: when Bart (truthfully) claimed to have been Krusty the Clown's assistant, Nelson punched Bart in the stomach, saying: "That's for taking credit for other people's work!".[11] Nelson also hit Bart after the latter accidentally wrecked Adolf Hitler's vehicle at a carnival. ("You wrecked Hitler's car! What did he ever do to you?") Bart also got beaten for "Wasting teacher's valuable time!", after constantly raising his hand with the wrong answer to answer a question Mrs. Krabappel asked, and received pain for "Besmirching an innocent girl's name!" after trying to flaunt his relationship with Jessica Lovejoy to the other kids. Milhouse claims to care about the environment to impress Lisa. Nelson stands over him with a fist raised and demanded he "say global warming is a myth!" Milhouse does so, and Nelson punches him anyway, stating "That's for selling out your beliefs!" [12]
It is once revealed that Nelson is of German descent.[13] However, he picks on Üter Zörker for being German, during a time when the town was in an anti-illegal immigrant hysteria.[14]
Nelson's enigmatic personality had an impact on many individuals, notably some who try to find good traits in him, if any, and "convert" his demeaning character into whatever it is that they see in him. Mrs. Krabappel once tried to make a teacher's pet out of Nelson after he passed a test with A+. Bart was able to befriend him in order to gain popularity, notwithstanding their earlier conflict, which resulted in Nelson bullying Bart even harder at the end.Lisa went out with Nelson for the same reasons, only to be persuaded that he will never change.At some point Nelson teamed up with Martin and attempted to put him straight, therefore not all of his actions are mere intimidation.
After Season 10, Nelson became portrayed rather as an insecure teenager who is ashamed of his ways and beats kids out of fear that they will find out some piece of his biography he cherishes most, rather than out of fun and boredom. Since his father left the family at that time and Nelson remained with his mother, who is a drunken prostitute, he fears the judgment of others on this and dreams that one day his dad (whom he calls "papa") will come home. In several instances, Nelson has visions where he sees his dad and goes up to hug him, but he is actually hugging a tree. Nelson also was revealed to have worn diapers at some point in "Midnight Rx" since he says he was grateful to Homer and Abe's drug smuggling operation as it cured his diaper rash.
Family
Nelson's parents are Mr. Muntz and Mrs. Muntz. His grandfather was a judge.[17]
Nelson lives in a dilapidated house with his mother, from whom he learned his trademark laugh. The negligent Mrs. Muntz works either as a waitress at Hooters or in a topless bar. In "Brother From the Same Planet", Nelson's father appears. It is indicated many times that Nelson's father abandoned Nelson and Mrs. Muntz when he "went to pick up some cigarettes", and never returned. Mr. Muntz appears as the children's soccer coach and awards Nelson with a free trip to Pele's Soccer and Acting School.[18]
At one time, Nelson is adopted by Marge Simpson. To get rid of him, Bart finds Nelson's father and brings him to meet Nelson. It turned out that he did not leave Nelson deliberately; he bit into a chocolate bar, not knowing it had peanuts and had an allergic reaction. Looking like the Elephant Man, he ran out of the store and encountered a circus that made him a part of its freak show. At performances, audiences threw peanuts at him, which perpetuated his allergic reaction, never allowing him to return to normal. When the circus came through Springfield, Bart recognized him and brought him home to rid himself of the needy Nelson, who had been taken into the Simpson home by Marge, and wouldn't leave.[19]Nelson is the youngest of three siblings including half-brother Norman.
Relationships with others
Fellow Bullies
Nelson spends quite a lot of his time with other bullies Jimbo, Dolph and Kearney. While it was once clear that he was their 'leader', he's spent more time being independently developed as a more sympathetic character, and just as often as not Jimbo can be seen calling the shots now - although Nelson's almost always present when there's a chance to cause trouble for Principal Skinner. He also has two cronies whom he calls The Weasels (rarely seen alongside him after the earlier seasons). Nelson himself was subjected to a beating at the hands of Kearney and Jimbo at the racetrack when he used the word "guff" instead of swearing when noting that Furious D, Bart's horse, "took no guff from nobody" when exiting the race track to chase off a paparazzi in a violent manner.[20] However, Nelson is shown to be a lot tougher than the other bullies, when protecting Bart[21] and in "Dial "N" for Nerder" when the other bullies's punches don't hurt Nelson and he doesn't even notice them hitting him.
Bart Simpson
Although he does admire Bart and looks up to him like most children of their school, Nelson basically treats him the same as he would most people he bullies. Nelson once described Bart as having "spiky hair, soft kidneys, and always hitting himself".Nelson sometimes hangs out with Bart. Indeed, despite Nelson periodically bullying Bart, he is also a frequent participant in many of his schemes, often serving as his muscle man or (to a lesser extant than Milhouse) his right-hand man. It should also be noted that Bart has also beaten Nelson on occasion; such as when he deliberately allowed Martin to sing a girlish song while skipping and pummelled him for this. Bart also beat up Nelson when they were imitating mixed fighting on the playground. In "The Debarted",[22] Bart smashed his head with a trash can when Nelson replied "Yes" to a question (*the correct answer was "Yes, sir"). At one point, he also asked Bart if he wanted to play with him in a friendly manner, the implied reason being was that both he and Bart had mothers who were in jail.[23]
Nelson has many other moments where he displays his hidden good nature, such as his brief amorous relationship with Lisa. Although he cannot control his delinquent tendencies, he treats her with respect and even tries to change for her, although both of them realize that he is not being true to himself by doing so. Nelson kisses Lisa, only to be berated by Jimbo, Kearney, and Dolph, who believe that kissing girls is gay (despite the fact that Jimbo kissed Laura Powers). They stop dating when Lisa finds out that Nelson threw old coleslaw at Principal Skinner's house.[24] He also helps Lisa punish Sherri and Terri for tormenting Lisa about her butt. Their romantic relationship has been referred to several times throughout the series, most notably in the Season 22 episode, "Loan-a Lisa" in which Lisa invests in Nelson's business venture. The episode ends with Nelson taking Lisa rollerblading and the pair holding hands. Nelson has even told God "If you don't bring my Lisa back ants will burn tonight". He has actually said this twice, first in "Lisa's Date with Density" and again in "The Great Simpsina". He also admitted that she broke his heart and that he has a fake tattoo of himself on a cross captioned "Lisa".
Throughout Tapped Out, when Lisa notices other boys, Nelson shows some jealousy, outright calling them sissies and wimps, and they have plenty of shared tasks that could be classed as 'dates'. Many of these interactions are the result of Premium-based tasks.
Another curious example of his "good side" is with Martin Prince, the school genius, whom he cruelly bullies. However, there are occasional hints that Nelson does not harbor any hate towards Martin, and only bullies him to maintain his 'tough guy' reputation. Both Nelson and Martin attend Space Camp and it is implied that Martin had helped Nelson quite a bit and the two may have been very friendly.[25] When it is believed that Martin has died after accidentally falling over a cliff, Nelson seeks to learn the truth and find Martin's alleged killers, adopting an Inspector Columbo demeanor. When it is revealed that Martin is alive, Nelson mocks and punches him, but adds he is glad Martin is not dead.[26] While helping rescue the Springfield Lemon Tree, which is in the hands of some kids from Shelbyville, Nelson saves Martin from getting beaten up by a Shelbyville kid, even though he is clearly embarrassed by doing it, but did it so he could maintain Springfield pride.[27]
Physical appearance
Nelson has light brown hair and wears a short-sleeved light orange shirt with a dirty, torn light blue vest and blue shorts with matching Mary Jane loafers. Nelson's front teeth are false, and on a removable plate.[28]
Personality
Although physically tough, Nelson is not always emotionally tough, as shown in the episode "The Haw-Hawed Couple", where after learning Bart had been playing with Milhouse, Nelson finds tears in his eyes. He has a sensitive side as seen when he cried during Andy William's "Moon River" rendition in Las Vegas with Bart and the gang.
He is also very aware of his poverty and frequently has very little food, normally eating tadpoles and on one occasion drywall, this goes to an extreme where he has never even tasted hot dogs before, only "reading about them in catalogues". Nelson's home is extremely dilapidated and is not quick to invite people over. An example is in "Sleeping with the Enemy"; after spending a day with Marge Simpson, she brings him to a broken-down house which she believes is his home, the second she drives away, he gloomily goes next door to an even worse looking house.
The most likely cause of Nelson's poor behaviour is his low self-esteem, brought on by having a poor relationship with his mother, and a lack of a stable father figure in his life. On one occasion he developed an intimate relationship with Marge who gave him self-respect. At the climax he even tells to Marge "thanks lady, for making me feel good about myself".
Despite this, Nelson remains aggressive and bullying by nature. While he alienates some with his violent ways he forces others to be his friends with threats. An example is when he tells his fellow students "come to my party or die" for his birthday; however, when they are persuaded by Bart to not go, he is reduced to tears. The few friends he does have, Nelson is protective towards, such as Bart, who he protected from being bullied by Jimbo. He also saved him from drowning during a field trip. However this was only because they were field trip buddies, and Bart meant "barf to him".
Catchphrases
Nelson's catchphrases are "Ha-ha!" (also spelled as "Haw-haw!"), "Aw, crud!", "Smell you later!", and "Stop hitting yourself!" The last phrase can be modified to suit the current situation/method of beating, resulting in phrases such as "Stop endangering yourself!", "Stop zapping yourself!", etc.
Non canon appearance
The contents of this article or section are considered to be non-canon and therefore may not have actually happened/existed.
Split-Stories
In "Love, Springfieldian Style", the story of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen is told by Bart. It stars Nelson as Sid, and notably Lisa as Nancy. The two embark on a tragic and abusive love story fuelled by chocolate addiction. However the story ends with Nelson and Lisa kissing in a garbage-strewn alley before it can reach its real-life conclusion, in which the real Sid was charged with Nancy's murder, and went on to overdose on heroin barely a year later in what most considered a successful suicide attempt. While non-canon it shows that the writers have not yet put aside their previous relationships.
Future
The episode "Future-Drama" depicts Nelson to have dated and impregnated identical twin sisters Sherri and Terri, becoming the father to two sets of identical twins who share his signature laugh. He then claims to be going out to the store for a pack of cigarettes, and then flees, later explaining himself in a similar manner to his father.
In "Lisa's Wedding", Nelson attends Lisa |
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Frequently Asked QuestionsThe World Cup's coming to Russia next year, which is presumably why aliens have decided to set up shop there. Watch a video here, showing a mysterious object flying through the night sky:
Credit: UFO Today
The video, titled A TR-3B type UFO was filmed in Russia - Best evidence ever was posted on YouTube by UFO Today.
The group are a Belgium-based collective who regularly claim to sight extraterrestrials. Some might say 'a bunch of individuals with way too much time on their hands'. Not me, though. Not here. Just some people. Because aliens are real, and here's the proof.
Credit: UFO Today
In a tl;dr video description, the flying saucer spotters wrote: "Very recently a TR-3B type of UFO was filmed in Russia. This footage was making headlines in underground UFO groups after it was posted on the dark web. The object is moving at a very slow pace, too slow to be classic airplane.
"The speed at which this object was moving is physically impossible for any airplane build by mankind. At a certain point in time the aircraft loses propulsion in one of the three engines, but that does not stop it. It continues it's way through earth's skies.
Credit: UFO Today
"Black triangles as the TR-3B are a class of unidentified flying object (UFOs), with certain common features which have reportedly been observed during the 20th and 21st centuries. Media reports of black triangles originally came from the United States and United Kingdom.
"The objects may or may not be related to the rumored U.S. Air Force Aurora aircraft developmental program. Reports generally describe this class of UFOs as large, silent, black triangular objects hovering or slowly cruising at low altitudes over cities and highways.
"Sightings usually take place at night. These objects are often described as having pulsing colored lights that appear at each corner of the triangle."
How about that then?
Featured Image Credit: UFO TodayThe Pentagon says it opposes a bill to re-designate the Department of the Navy as the Department of the Navy and Marine Corps and deems the name change as "unnecessary," costly and a move that would do nothing to elevate the standing of the Marine Corps, which was the intention of the bill.
In a letter released today by Senate Armed Services Committee chair Sen. Carl Levin's office, Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson writes the dissenting opinion:
"The Navy and Marine Corps have been one team led by one Secretary since Benjamin Stoddert was named the first Secretary of the Navy by president Adams in 1798. The tremendous sense of unity and jointness that have been the hallmark of the Navy and Marine Corps team for well over 200 years is unique among the services... A re-designation could be viewed as more than symbolic, and could easily be misinterpreted as a step away from the heritage and tradition of a strong Navy and Marine Corps team."
Of course such a change would also fly in the face of Defense Secretary Robert Gates' new initiative to reduce redundant and unnecessary management at the Pentagon.
-- Greg GrantA year ago Paul Graham posted The Acceleration of Addictiveness, and I just re-read it thoroughly. It is a wonderful insightful post. I agree with the whole thing and if you haven't seen it yet go read it first.
There's only one thing wrong with the essay: it's framed in terms of a problem rather than a self-reinforcing solution.
We are living in a world of accelerating addictiveness and increasingly I think the only way (likely lonely, squirming, and eccentric as Paul alludes) we'll get things done is the continuous directed practice and improvement of willpower, productivity, flow, and exercising thereof.
In All Fairness
To be fair 1: Paul does suggest by example taking long hikes and running, both of which I concur with, though I tend to substitute long bouldering sessions for long hikes. I find bouldering much more whole mind-body engaging: simultaneous problem solving, physical challenge, and confrontation of fears.
To be fair 2: The essay is the sounding of an alarm bell, with good reason. The problems he describes and predicts are real, are affecting us greatly, getting worse (from passively Amusing Ourselves to Death to actively texting ourselves to death), and (he stops short of saying this) our industry (technology, internet, web) is making them worse: how many people do you know who are working on designing and building ever more addictive and absorbing interfaces of constant interruption, and see nothing wrong with doing so?
A Metacognitive Hypothesis
Wording and describing (framing) something in terms of a positive, in terms of what it is or what you should do, is far more empowering, effective, and self-sustaining than wording or describing something in terms of what it is not, or in terms of what you should avoid.
A few examples you might be familiar with:
Hypothesis: positive framing is more effective than negative framing because thinking and acting on negative framing unnecessarily burdens you with thoughts of the thing you're trying to avoid, and thus requires greater use of willpower (which is limited) to deliberately reject it.
In short: positive framing is cheaper to implement than negative framing for a more self-sustaining and scaling outcome.
Here are a few illustrative thought experiments relating to the essay topic:
The Stress of Denial
If I say, "Don't think of Twitter!", what are you thinking, and how much mental energy do you have to spend to not just go check Twitter right now? (How many of you did just that? Were you acting on your free will or an addictive impulse?)
If I say, "Don't think of Facebook!", are you able to avoid immediately checking it? Or did you spend the necessary executive control to resist doing so?
And if those didn't distract you, how about if I say:
Don't check your email, feed reader, IRC, Convore, iPhone, or Blackberry?
Either I just lost you (sorry to miss you!) or you just spent some executive control resisting the urge to check one or more of those, and that resistance probably stressed you out a bit. Take a note of that specific feeling of stress. As a shorthand, let's call this the stress of denial.
It's also the feeling of deliberately exercising free will over impulse.
The Stress of Focus
Now if I ask instead:
"What's the most important project, to you, that you're working on right now?" (related: Paul Graham touched on this in his essay: The Top Idea in Your Mind )
Or:
"What's the next action you can do to make progress on that project towards a successful outcome?"
How do those make you feel?
Both of those also induce some stress (unless you're already exceptionally organized, prioritized, focused, and/or your name is David Allen or Merlin Mann).
Notice how this specific feeling of stress is different.
Unlike the previous set of examples, you're not denying yourself something, you're instead making yourself figure out what matters the most to you, what matters now, and what can you do towards that. You're forcing yourself to focus. So as a shorthand, let's call this the stress of focus.
Aside from shifting from the stress of denial to the stress of focus, What else can we do?
Filtering Instead Of Denying
Paul concludes his essay with We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to. He's right, we will and are.
The problem is, "saying no" is expensive. It costs you willpower to do so. Explicitly saying no doesn't scale. We need automatic or default ways to "say no". The best word we have for that is "filters".
We need filters against two sources of things to say no to:
Environment People
We're far from figuring out how to do this (in fact the other side's techniques, commonly known as advertising, marketing, and sales, are way ahead of us). However, here are some things that I've found work for me, and they may work for you.
A few simple environmental filters:
Minimize your exposure to brands* and ads. Cancel your cable/satellite subscription.
Replace your TV with a monitor (or projector).
Listen to your iPod (#brandirony) not broadcast radio.
Disable Flash in your browser (use plugins like ClicktoFlash for Safari and Flashblock for Firefox). Choose paths through parks and neighborhoods, instead of malls and along storefronts.
*Brand Exceptions If a brand tends to produce tools or services that consistently empower and encourage creativity, then I tend to make an exception for them. E.g. Apple - their hardware and software best allow me to focus on creative acts, not administrative maintenance.
LEGO - creativity catalyst for engineers and artists; I have a bag.
People filters are much more difficult, as it's much harder to clearly determine who you want input from and about what.
I've been deliberately working on this for a few years and have seen what I feel like is only partial success. I've written up some of my specific techniques:
Perhaps we can better solve this collectively, I encourage each and every one of you to create your own personal wiki, write up your preferred communication protocols, how you do and don't want to be contacted, and about what. Share your ideas for how you filter your social activity streams.
Lonely Fate?
Second to last Paul mentions:... this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it [addictiveness] will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. (emphasis mine)
That's the thing about willpower, it's not a collective thing. It's a personal thing. No one is going to give it to you. You have to create it yourself. It's just you.
Willpower is a lonely thing. Exercising it can often mean deliberately deciding to do something different than everyone else.
Addictions are memetically viral (per Paul's example of how the use of cigarettes originally spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population ). Fighting and avoiding such addictions requires exercising willpower and thus at times choosing to be a lone eccentric. The person that didn't smoke. Or doesn't drink (more challenging: limits their drinking). It might also mean you have to look harder for similar peers, who are also deliberately choosing paths that minimize and avoid addictions.
Harmless Addictions and Opportunity Cost
Cigarrettes and alcohol have well documented physical harms, but what about supposedly physically harmless addictions (like various internet distractions and interruptions)?
Their harm is opportunity cost.
The time you spend giving into your urges and supporting your addictions is time you could have spent being creative and productive.
How you choose to spend your time defines you and your life.
Productivity beyond work Most people measure productivity in terms of work, what they're paid to do. I prefer a different measure. Productivity is the measure of how effectively you get done the things you rationally, explicitly want to do (including work when necessary). Productivity is the output of the exercise of free will. This isn't a new generalization, adherents of GTD and other productivity systems know that productivity is about your life, not just your work.
Consumer or Creator?
Are you primarily a consumer, driven by appetite (inevitably, addictions), or are you a creator, driven by directed willpower to be productive and prolific?
Do you identify yourself primarily by your tastes, where you eat or shop, what brands you wear or gadgets you own, what bands you listen to or shows you watch, what websites you browse or feeds you read, or which apps you download and select for your home screen?
Or do you identify yourself by your creative output, what you cook or build, what writing, photographs, music, videos, websites, art or apps you make and publish?
If you identify as the latter and want to continue to do so, due to accelerating addictiveness, you will have to deliberately fight the former, and you'll increasingly need more willpower to do so.
You are not defined by your tastes A couple of quotes on the subject of not being defined by your tastes: "You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis." — Tyler Durden, "Fight Club", 1999 "when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create." _why 2008-08-08, tweetquoted 2009-08-20
Improving Willpower and Productivity
Being productive and creative comes down to one core skill: willpower, the ability to direct your attention, your focus, deliberately at what matters the most to your conscious rational mind (also known as volition, in contrast to your appetite).
With willpower, you can create the necessary environment and probabilities for inspiration that creativity requires.
Willpower is depleted over time. It's possible to restore it.
More importantly, it's possible to strengthen and grow your willpower, have more of it to "spend", and thus spend a greater proportion of every day being productive.
I'm collecting the techniques I've learned so far on wiki pages:
To be clear, they're far from complete, and I would not by any measure consider myself a master of willpower or productivity.
I have found these works-in-progress techniques incrementally helpful and share them in the hopes that maybe some of you may find some of them helpful as well, and better yet, have suggestions for improvement.
Finding Flow
While increased willpower and focus can help avoid internet distractions, the closest to the opposite of being distracted is a state of flow:... in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.
I've only read part-way through the seminal book on the subject but enough to highly recommend it, and to recognize the state of flow when I've managed to experience it.
My personal experiences of flow have occurred during a few different types of activities, like writing code and standards specifications, or the aforementioned bouldering. In each case I observed a few things:
The absence of distraction by others. This is usually best achieved by signing off IRC/IM, closing email/Twitter, and putting away all communication devices (phone, iPod touch). Interestingly enough, the presence of others in the climbing gym isn't usually distracting. A dramatic drop in the energy required to maintain directed willpower, that is, at some point I get so absorbed in the task itself that the need to expend energy to concentrate disappears replaced by a self-sustaining state of focus. Feeling restored. Perhaps related to the previous item, after I've been in a state of flow for some time and complete whatever it was I was focused on, I often emerge not tired, but rejuvenated, as if I have more energy than when I started.
The point is, in addition to working on improving willpower and focus, there's even more to be gained if you can block out time to disconnect and direct those abilities to focus on a specific creative act and achieve a state of flow.
Focus on the Positive
If I could summarize the points of this article in a single statement, it would be:
Focus on the positive
It's good to be aware of problems we're dealing with now and expect more of in the future, however, it's even more important to stay focused on solutions.
Regarding accelerating addictiveness in particular, I don't have all the answers, but I've been documenting various techniques which may help address various aspects, all listed here together for your convenience:
Try them out and see what works for you. Have additional studies, data, or techniques to suggest? Write up your own respective wiki pages and perhaps both independently, and together, collectively, we can not only avoid addictions, but get more things done, and live more directed, focused, productive, and meaningful lives.
Have a good weekend.
Further reading
Wikipedia
Articles
Books
Thanks to Erin Jo Richey, Edward O'Connor, and Matthew Levine for reading drafts of this.Tension rises in eastern Turkish province amid reports of march on Alevi neighborhoods
MALATYA
Tension has been rising in the eastern province of Malatya, as a number of people from a larger group which had gathered to protest the failed coup attempt reportedly chanted pro-government slogans in largely Alevi-populated neighborhoods in the province.“The [ruling Justice and Development Party] AKP supporters are here. Where are the Alevis?” shouted the group in the Alevi-dominated Paşaköşkü and Çavuşoğlu neighborhoods, as they also parked their cars in the neighborhoods’ streets and played AKP election songs.Nearly 1,000 people gathered in the Paşaköşkü neighborhood and a fight erupted between the residents of the neighborhood and the group that was protesting the coup, Doğan News Agency reported on July 17.The police showed up in the neighborhood after a short while and fired their guns into the air in order to disperse the groups, as representatives of Alevi associations called Malatya Governor Mustafa Toprak to ask for help.The representatives told the governor that several provocative groups had arrived in the neighborhood in order to start fights and urgent prevention measures needed to be taken, to which Toprak replied by saying everyone should act “responsibly.” The governor also reportedly said that provocations wouldn’t be allowed and everybody should “calm down.”The situation calmed after police intervention.Meanwhile, main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) deputy head and Malatya lawmaker Veli Ağbaba warned against further rising provocations and tension in Alevi neighborhoods.“Everyone should calm down and shouldn’t fall for provocations. As the CHP, we are calling on the citizens to remains calm regarding this issue. However, several groups are continuing to provoke and the [Malatya] Governor’s Office should take very urgent precautions,” said Ağbaba, adding that the “common sense of the people prevented a saddening incident from happening.”“It’s a democratic right to celebrate peacefully against the coup attempt. But no one has the right to provoke or target anyone while using that right,” he also said.Android predicted to beat Apple in China because of its potential for 'oppression' More
We tend to think of an open source operating system as something that gives both smartphone vendors and end users more freedom to customize their experiences. But as Bronte Capital’s John Hempton points out, open source software can have a dark side as well if it is changed by authoritarian governments to limit the information that end users can access. Hempton says he bought a Samsung Desire HD off of eBay from a Middle Eastern country a couple of years ago and found that “it did not contain any access to the Google market place (Google’s equivalent of the App store),” that “it had limited apps and no possibility of adding more” and “it contained a non-standard web browser and a non-standard email client (leaving open the possibility of the State watching what I wrote and said).”
[More from BGR: iPhone sales projections are now so low it’s ridiculous]
All of this was possible, Hempton notes, because governments have access to Android’s source code and can thus “demand and implement any changes” they want as a precondition of selling devices on national wireless carriers. Hempton says that it’s significantly more challenging for repressive regimes to drastically overhaul Apple’s iOS for their own purposes since Apple does not hand out its source code to anyone who asks for it. Instead, the regime must negotiate with Apple over potential country-specific modifications to iOS, which means that the government is unlikely to get everything it wants.
[More from BGR: Was Samsung caught fighting dirty in war against Apple?]
Of course, there is a solution to this for Android users living under more repressive governments: They can simply root their phones and install stock Android or remove their device’s more oppressive features. But Hempton worries that knowledge about rooting Android phones will be severely limited in many countries and that rooted Android phones will be used only by a tiny elite who have education in coding.
All of this brings us to the looming battle between Android and Apple for consumers in China. Hempton speculates that Apple might have to make such severe changes to its operating system to gain broad access to the Chinese market that it could actually wind up degrading its devices’ overall user experience. This will only stand to benefit Android vendors, especially among elites who will know how to root their devices to open up access to more apps and content.
“I am assuming that if Apple goes mass-market in China it will sell systems with enough ‘apologies’ to the cultural differences of China,” he writes. “Those ‘apologies’ will make a rooted Android massively superior to a botched-up Apple. The elite will want their Samsungs… Some bulls on Apple and China may be just flat wrong…”
This article was originally published on BGR.comThe sale of UK gold reserves was a policy pursued by HM Treasury over the period between 1999 and 2002, when gold prices were at their lowest in 20 years, following an extended bear market. The period itself has been dubbed by some commentators as the Brown Bottom or Brown's Bottom.[1][2][3][4][5][6]
The period takes its name from Gordon Brown, the then UK Chancellor of the Exchequer (who later became Prime Minister), who decided to sell approximately half of the UK's gold reserves in a series of auctions. At the time, the UK's gold reserves were worth about US$6.5 billion, accounting for about half of the UK's US$13 billion foreign currency net reserves.[7]
Events [ edit ]
The UK government's intention to sell gold and reinvest the proceeds in foreign currency deposits, including euros, was announced on 7 May 1999, when the price of gold stood at US$282.40 per ounce[8] (cf. the price in 1980: $850/oz [9]) The official stated reason for this sale was to diversify the assets of the UK's reserves away from gold, which was deemed to be too volatile. The gold sales funded a like-for-like purchase of financial instruments in different currencies. Studies performed by HM Treasury had shown that the overall volatility of the UK's reserves could be reduced by 20% from the sale.
The advance notice of the substantial sales drove the price of gold down by 10% by the time of the first auction on 6 July 1999.[1] With many gold traders shorting, gold reached a low point of US$252.80 on 20 July.[8] The UK eventually sold about 395 tons of gold over 17 auctions from July 1999 to March 2002, at an average price of about US$275 per ounce, raising approximately US$3.5 billion.[8]
To deal with this and other prospective sales of gold reserves, a consortium of central banks - including the European Central Bank and the Bank of England - were pushed to sign the Washington Agreement on Gold in September 1999, limiting gold sales to 400 tonnes per year for 5 years.[7] This triggered a sharp rise in the price of gold, from around US$260 per ounce to around $330 per ounce in two weeks,[7] before the price fell away again into 2000 and early 2001. The Central Bank Gold Agreement was renewed in 2004 and 2009.
Cost [ edit ]
Gold prices remained relatively low until 2001, when the price began consistently rising in a protracted bull market. By 2007, the price of gold had reached US$675, and the loss to the UK taxpayer (contrasted to selling the gold later) was estimated at more than £2 billion, as the Euros bought with the proceeds had also risen in value.[1]
Analysis [ edit ]
Brown's actions have attracted considerable criticism, particularly concerning his timing, his decision to announce the move in advance, and the use of an auction. The decision to sell gold at the low point in the price cycle has been likened[who?] to the mistakes in 1992 that led to Black Wednesday, when the UK was forced to withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, which HM Treasury has estimated cost the UK taxpayer around £3.3 billion.[1]
It has also been argued that the sale of the gold reserves was a positive decision in that gold had been historically under performing and was paying no dividends to the Exchequer and the sale enabled the UK Government to pay off a substantial part of the national debt and keep repayment interest rates down on the remainder.[10][11]
As of December 2013, the UK retained a gold reserve of 310.3 metric tonnes.[12]
See also [ edit ]A new study in Science suggests that thrill-seeking is not limited to humans and other vertebrates. Some honey bees, too, are more likely than others to seek adventure. The brains of these novelty-seeking bees exhibit distinct patterns of gene activity in molecular pathways known to be associated with thrill-seeking in humans, researchers report.
The findings offer a new window on the inner life of the honey bee hive, which once was viewed as a highly regimented colony of seemingly interchangeable workers taking on a few specific roles (nurse or forager, for example) to serve their queen. Now it appears that individual honey bees actually differ in their desire or willingness to perform particular tasks, said University of Illinois entomology professor and Institute for Genomic Biology director
Gene Robinson, who led the study. These differences may be due, in part, to variability in the bees' personalities, he said.
"In humans, differences in novelty-seeking are a component of personality," he said. "Could insects also have personalities?"
Robinson and his colleagues studied two behaviors that looked like novelty-seeking in honey bees: scouting for nest sites and scouting for food.
When a colony of bees outgrows its living quarters, the hive divides and the swarm must find a suitable new home. At this moment of crisis, a few intrepid bees -- less than 5 percent of the swarm -- take off to hunt for a hive.
These bees, called nest scouts, are on average 3.4 times more likely than their peers to also become food scouts, the researchers found.
"There is a gold standard for personality research and that is if you show the same tendency in different contexts, then that can be called a personality trait," Robinson said. Not only do certain bees exhibit signs of novelty-seeking, he said, but their willingness or eagerness to "go the extra mile" can be vital to the life of the hive.
The researchers wanted to determine the molecular basis for these differences in honey bee behavior. They used whole-genome microarray analysis to look for differences in the activity of thousands of genes in the brains of scouts and non-scouts.
"People are trying to understand what is the basis of novelty-seeking behavior in humans and in animals," who Robinson, who also is affiliated with the Neuroscience Program at Illinois. "And a lot of the thinking has to do with the relationship between how the (brain's) reward system is engaged in response to some experience."
The researchers found thousands of distinct differences in gene activity in the brains of scouting and non-scouting bees.
"We expected to find some, but the magnitude of the differences was surprising given that both scouts and non-scouts are foragers," Robinson said.
Among the many differentially expressed genes were several related to catecholamine, glutamate and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) signaling, and the researchers zeroed in on these because they are involved in regulating novelty-seeking and responding to reward in vertebrates.
To test whether the changes in brain signaling caused the novelty-seeking, the researchers subjected groups of bees to treatments that would increase or inhibit these chemicals in the brain.
Two treatments (with glutamate and octopamine) increased scouting in bees that had not scouted before. Blocking dopamine signaling decreased scouting behavior, the researchers found.
"Our results say that novelty-seeking in humans and other vertebrates has parallels in an insect," Robinson said. "One can see the same sort of consistent behavioral differences and molecular underpinnings."
The findings also suggest that insects, humans and other animals made use of the same genetic "toolkit" in the evolution of behavior, Robinson said. The tools in the toolkit -- genes encoding certain molecular pathways -- may play a role in the same types of behaviors, but each species has adapted them in its own, distinctive way.
"It looks like the same molecular pathways have been engaged repeatedly in evolution to give rise to individual differences in novelty-seeking," he said.
The National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and Illinois Sociogenomics Initiative supported this research.
Collaborators on this study included researchers from Wellesley College and Cornell University.Eighty-three percent of Americans, according to last week’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, disapprove of Congress. That was the highest level in the history of the poll. The anger is so deep now that 57 percent want the entire Congress thrown out.
Why are people so mad at Congress? The poll produced a simple, concrete answer:
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“Offered a list of what makes them least happy about Washington, a plurality of Americans cited the capital’s partisanship and the inability of Congress to get things done,” according to the Journal’s story on the poll. And Republicans get most of the blame for the currently poisonous partisan politics.
“Americans pointed to Republicans far more than to [President] Obama as putting partisanship above efforts to unify the country … 67 percent said Republicans emphasize a partisan approach at the expense of unity, compared with 48 percent who said that of Obama,” the newspaper reported.
The key evidence of congressional partisanship is the GOP’s never-ending effort to repeal, damage or defund the Affordable Healthcare Act, also called ObamaCare.
A majority of Americans agreed, “Republicans in Congress should stop trying to prevent the law from going into effect,” according to the news story on the polling. The Journal noted that Republicans in the House have held nearly 40 votes in an effort to stop the law from taking effect.
But congressional Republicans are no dummies. They read polls, too.
They can see that 17 percent of Republicans in the Journal poll are part of the national majority asking them to quit their futile assault on ObamaCare. “By now they should just leave it alone — it is what it is,” one Republican mother from North Carolina told reporters.
But in Washington, congressional Republicans are not concerned with general public disapproval of their bad behavior. They see a path to winning the 2014 mid-term elections — holding the House and possibly winning a majority in the Senate — by bashing ObamaCare.
A June Kaiser poll found 76 percent of Republicans disapprove of Obama’s signature healthcare plan. Nothing unifies and excites the GOP’s activist base like cursing Obama and his No. 1 legislative accomplishment.
Reuters reported last week that House Republicans are being advised by their leadership to use August town-hall meetings in their home districts to stir anxiety and eventually rebellion against the healthcare law.
In addition, FreedomWorks, a Tea Party group, is organizing right-wingers to protest healthcare reform at August town-hall meetings put on by House Democrats. Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity, the conservative group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, is sponsoring a media effort to get young people, ages 20-40, to refuse to sign up for healthcare coverage.
And Crossroads GPS, co-founded by Republican strategist Karl Rove, is aiming its money at a campaign to stir rebellion among seniors with the message that ObamaCare is taking money from Medicare.
“There are folks out there who are actively working to make this law fail,” Obama said in a speech last week. He called the GOP’s planned attack a “politically motivated misinformation campaign.”
It is hard to argue with the president on this one.
The GOP is proudly without any interest in making the new national healthcare plan work. This is exactly what angers the Americans who told the Journal they are fed up with Congress.
That is why the Republican political strategy on ObamaCare is so wrong. First, it leaves them open to their greatest vulnerability: charges of being unproductive obstructionists and brazen partisans. Second, it is a serious misreading of the public.
Even with most polls showing a plurality of Americans opposed to ObamaCare, there is widespread public discontent with today’s high-cost healthcare system.
A June 2012 poll by The Washington Post found 56 percent of Americans have an unfavorable impression of the current healthcare system. A United Technologies/National Journal poll in September of last year found 50 percent of Americans believe the president’s health care reform act will “make things better for the country overall.”
The winning ticket for a Republican effort to use ObamaCare against the president is to come up with a better idea for improving America’s healthcare system.
Every poker player knows you cannot beat something with nothing. And at the moment, the GOP is offering no alternative fix for the nation’s ailing healthcare system.
With a GOP plan, the party would put the White House on the defensive and excite its base.
The Democrats are vulnerable to political damage as they roll out a big government mandated health program. If only the opposition was savvy enough to exploit it.
Juan Williams is an author and political analyst for Fox News Channel.Green Bean Casserole Breakfast Nachos » June 6th, 2014 Green Lasagna Rolls Makes 10 rolls
Total time: 1 hour 15 minutes
Active time: 45 minutes It’s basil season! And spinach season! And, well, let’s just say it’s lasagna roll season, too. These make a great appetizer if you’re doing a little summer entertaining, or a filling entree if you prefer. Tofu ricotta is elevated with the addition of some Pumpkin Seed Pesto. The mellow flavor of pumpkin seeds really lets the basil shine. The sautéed spinach is really really garlicky, as is the pesto, so this makes the perfect date night meal. What I really love, besides how flavorful these are, is the texture. Baking the rolls makes the noodles soft but still toothsome, with little crunchy bits on the edges. Smothered in cashew cream and pesto and finished off with a scattering of additional pumpkin seeds, these lasagna rolls will fulfill even the most wild fantasies: creamy, crunchy, velvety, chewy, and hearty all at once. Yes, there are a few components here, but none are too difficult to pull off and also LASAGNA ROLLS. Serve with Caesar Salad to round out the meal! PS This is my first blogpost using only iPhone photos, so take a deep breath with me. Sorry $2000 camera, this is just easier. Since I’m not an aspiring photographer, I’m not ashamed to admit that adjusting lighting and apertures and editing in Photoshop is just too labor intensive for me these days. A few adjustments in VSCO cam, a button to upload to Flickr, and my work is done here. You get the picture. Har har.
Notes ~You don’t need all of the lasagna noodles called for, but go ahead and boil the whole package to account for some breakage. Saute the leftovers and broken ones for dinner the next night. ~The amount of ricotta made is just enough to fill the rolls, so go easy with the taste testing and don’t overfill the rolls, or you might not get ten out of the deal. ~I put the pesto in a little plastic bag with a hole cut out of the corner to pipe it nicely over the rolls. Then just spread it a bit with a spoon and it’s real pretty like. ~I make the white sauce before the pesto to cut down on cleaning a little bit. You can pour the white sauce out and then just rinse the blender without having to do a major cleaning, since who cares if a little bit of cashew cream ends up in your pesto. Ingredients 12 oz lasagna noodles For the white sauce:
1 cup cashews, soaked for at least 2 hours
1/2 cup water
2 teaspoons cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon salt For the pesto:
2 cloves garlic
3 cups fresh basil, loosely packed
1/2 cup pepitas (shelled pumpkin seeds), plus extra for garnish
1/3 cup olive oil
2 tablespoons nutritional yeast flakes
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon salt
Several dashes fresh black pepper For the ricotta:
1 14 oz extra firm tofu, crumbled
1/4 cup pesto
2 tablespoons nutritional yeast
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon salt For the spinach:
2 tablespoons olive oil
6 cloves garlic, minced
10 oz baby spinach Directions Make the noodles:
Bring a big pot of salted water to boil and cook the noodles al dente, stirring occasionally to make sure they don’t stick together. If they seem to be, use metal tongs to gently peel them apart. Once cooked, drain them in a colander and run them under plenty of cold water to make sure they stop cooking and don’t stick together. Bring a big pot of salted water to boil and cook the noodles al dente, stirring occasionally to make sure they don’t stick together. If they seem to be, use metal tongs to gently peel them apart. Once cooked, drain them in a colander and run them under plenty of cold water to make sure they stop cooking and don’t stick together. Make the white sauce:
Drain cashews. In a blender, combine all ingredients and blend until completely smooth. This could take 1 to 5 minutes depending on your blender. Scrape down the sides of the blender with a rubber spatula every minute or so to make sure you get everything. Set aside. Make the pesto:
Place garlic cloves in a blender and pulse a bit to chop. Add basil, pumpkin seeds, olive oil, nutritional yeast, lemon juice salt and pepper and blend. It should still have some texure and not be completely smooth. Thin with a few tablespoons of water to get it into a spreadable consistency. Make the ricotta:
In a medium mixing bowl, mash tofu with your hands or an avocado masher, until it resembles ricotta cheese. Mix in pesto, nutritional yeast, olive oil, lemon juice and salt until well combined. Set aside. Make the spinach:
Preheat a large heavy bottomed skillet (preferably cast iron) over medium low heat. Add the olive oil and garlic and saute until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add spinach and cook, stirring often, until wilted, about 3 minutes. Set aside. Assemble and bake:
Preheat oven to 350 F. Lightly grease a 9×13 inch casserole dish with olive oil. Spread 3 tablespoons of ricotta mixture evenly over each lasagna noodle, leaving a little room around the side edges and 1/2 inch at each end.
Scatter about 3 tablespoons of spinach mixture over the ricotta. Starting at the bottom end, roll noodle up and place |
Comics Super Heroes Battle of Atlantis set. The underwater Atlantis scene features a grand arch to knock over with the Parademon’s Super Jumper. Also includes the Mother Box and 4 minifigures with assorted weapons to add to the role-play battle fun. Includes 4 minifigures: Aquaman™ (with new-for-August-2017 scale armor decoration), a Parademon™ and 2 Atlantean guards.
The Atlantis scene features a grand arch to knock over with the Parademon’s Super Jumper, 2 pillars with reed elements and seaweed elements.
Also includes the Mother Box on a base.
Weapons include Aquaman’s 2 Power Blasts and trident, the Parademon’s stud shooter and the Atlantis guards’ Atlantean PlasmaGuns.
Accessory elements include the Parademon’s Super Jumper and foil wings.
Atlantis scene measures over 5” (14cm) high, 6” (17cm) wide and 2” (7cm) deep.
Mother Box and base measures over 1” (4cm) high, 1” (3cm) wide and 1” (3cm) deep.
$19.99
Available August 1 in US
Granted, toys are toys, and they aren’t always indicative of the finished product in the film. Still, these are some pretty nice sets on their own (dig the details on the Parademon wings), and… I mean, come on guys. We’re living in a world where we can make a LEGO Mother Box. How much longer until we get a LEGO Mister Miracle, Big Barda, or even Granny Goodness? Too long, I say.
Justice League is a film directed by Zack Snyder, written by Chris Terrio, and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. The film stars Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Jason Momoa, Ezra Miller, Ray Fisher, Willem Defoe, Amy Adams, Ciarán Hinds, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, Connie Nielsen, and J.K. Simmons. The film releases on November 17, 2017. In the meantime, pick up some sweet LEGO sets on August 1st.WASHINGTON -- A Democratic state lawmaker in Maryland is seeking to become the nation's first openly gay person elected governor.
State Del. Heather Mizeur (D-Takoma Park) announced Wednesday that she will enter the 2014 Democratic primary to succeed term-limited Gov. Martin O'Malley (D). Mizeur's entry formalizes what is likely to be a very competitive three-way primary in the heavily Democratic state. If elected, Mizeur would also be the first woman Maryland governor.
“I’m running for governor because I love this state," Mizeur told The Huffington Post. "I see limitless possibilities on what we can accomplish together.”
Mizeur is challenging Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown and state Attorney General Doug Gansler for the Democratic nomination. Brown, who is close to O'Malley, announced his candidacy earlier this year, while Gansler will likely enter the race later. Brown's candidacy is also historic, with the two-term lieutenant governor seeking to be Maryland's first black governor.
Mizeur downplayed the historic aspect of her candidacy and said her sexual preference seldom comes up as she campaigns across the state. She described being openly gay as being "the least interesting about me to most people."
“It is a sign of how far we have come as a state that an LGBT person can be a serious candidate," Mizeur said. "But that we are still talking about it shows we have more to go.”
Having a strong shot at being the first openly LGBT candidate to win a governorship may boost Mizeur's candidacy. Paul Herrnson, a political science professor at the University of Maryland, said Mizeur will attract national donors from the LGBT community, and may swing undecided LGBT voters in Maryland to her campaign. Hernson noted that a similar dynamic could help Brown with the black community.
Former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey (D) was the nation's first openly gay governor, but McGreevey came out after he had been in office for more than two years and announced his resignation at the same press conference. McGreevey's resignation took effect three months after the press conference.
Mizeur is campaigning for governor at a time when Democratic women are pushing to lead states. New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan is the only Democratic woman governor, while four Republican women hold governorships. In addition to Mizeur, Pennsylvania U.S. Rep. Alyson Schwartz and New Mexico state Sen. Linda Lopez have announced gubernatorial campaigns in 2014, while other women, including Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis and Rhode Island Treasurer Gina Raimando, are considering gubernatorial campaigns. New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial nominee Barbara Buono is running this year.
In Maryland, former Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend was the unsuccessful Democratic gubernatorial nominee in 2002, while former state House Minority Leader Ellen Sauerbrey was the unsuccessful Republican nominee for governor in 1994 and 1998.
Mizeur intends to campaign for improving education in low-performing school districts, increasing access to health care and environmental protection. She also said she intends to stress community service during her campaign and if elected.
On the Republican side, Hanford County Executive David Craig, state Del. Ron George, businessman Brian Murphy, energy consultant Brian Vaeth and Frederick County Commissioner Blaine Young are seeking the party's gubernatorial nomination.
Herrnson said the Democratic primary is likely to determine the next governor. He noted that Gansler is a well-known attorney general, while Brown has had a high profile as lieutenant governor. Brown's recruitment of Howard County Executive Ken Ulman (D) as his running mate could help in the primary, Herrnson said. Mizeur has made inroads with party activists with her work as a national Democratic committeewoman and in working for other candidates.In a sign of the beginning of unionisation among India’s two million IT workforce, trade unions such as Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) have come out in support of TCS employees facing termination.
Leaders of both unions expressed solidarity and urged around 100 software engineers, who gathered in Bangalore on Saturday, to discuss ways to resist what appears to be a large-scale retrenchment drive at the 3,13,000-strong IT services firm.
Alarmed by a possible downsizing move across the IT industry, software professionals from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and other companies came for the meeting organised by the IT&ITES Employees Centre (ITEC) and decided to conduct protest demonstration in the city in coming weeks.
A TCS spokesperson did not respond to mails and SMSs by HT.
IT workforce, traditionally wary of organising demonstrations fearing the strict diktats that exist in the industry, is now taking tentative steps towards coming together, albeit in small numbers.
“The only solution is the Buddha mantra; ‘sangam sharanam gachami’ (I take refuge in organising),” said Prasannakumar, general secretary, Karnataka, CITU.
“The Indian IT industry is labour intensive in nature. Does it make any sense to argue for labour law exemptions in such an industry?” asked Satyanand Mukund, district secretary of AITUC, and a former TCS staff.
Meanwhile, a dozen TCS employees HT met at YWCA Koramangala, the venue of the meeting, confirmed there is a widespread retrenchment move within the company, which is creating panic and anger since it allegedly targets people above eight years of experience, who find it difficult to find alternative jobs within the industry.
“The situation is horrible. Two of my seniors got pink slips,” a TCS staff said. “It started three weeks ago and about 3,500 people across various centres have already lost their jobs. The numbers will swell in the coming weeks. This will continue on to the next quarter,” a middle-level manager said.
“The firing started with banking and finance unit, the largest segment within TCS and began in other units such as insurance,” another employee said, two of whose colleagues were asked to leave last week. Another manager who spent more than 10 years in the company said all account heads in the company were asked to give details of the staff above eight years of experience in their teams.
“The company currently has about 90,000 staff with more than eight years of experience. The plan is to bring it down to 30,000 and hire more juniors,” he said.
TCS has maintained that there is nothing out of the ordinary and involuntary attrition, which is mostly performance related, is just 1-2% of the total strength.
First Published: Jan 04, 2015 23:02 ISTPoznen is rightfully Polish.
Poland is rightfully Russian.
Therefore, Poznen is rightfully Russian.
The illiterate armies of the Czar march forth as we go to war with the Prussians once again, for their grave crime of violating the Treaty of Amsterdam.
Though some mock us for our traditionalist ways, we have shown the might of Russia, without surrendering our traditions to the West. We can crush anybody - so long as we are fighting on one front, that is.
Our armies swing into Ostpreussen, with several armies led by the famed Russian Field Marshall Shuvalov marching into Memel, where he meets the esteemed German commander Helmuth von Moltke
In the south, our forces cross into Brandenburg, preparing to rush Berlin. This war, like the last, should be quick and easy. Nobody can stop the Czar's armies! Beyond this, we have support from the French, Hanoverians and others. The Prussians cannot survive a war on two fronts!
BUT THE SCREEN SAID YOU'D HEL-
The French, already concerned by our intervention in Hungary, view the aggression against Prussia highly unfavorably. They dissolve the alliance and refuse to assist.
Meanwhile, the Austrians raise concerns over the invasion of German lands, and the balance of powers in the region. They, however, are willing to concede Poznen, given that its barely German.
We meet von Roon's army in Gorlitz
Shuvalov crushes von Moltke's armies, and now the way is open for all of Ostpreussen and Westpreussen to fall.
We are victorious in Gorlitz, but haemorrhage (now I'd know how to spell this word if the Czar every gave me public education, but such is not the way of Russia) a large number of troops.
Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia, himself leads an army to meet our advance towards Berlin.
We give the order to mobilize our serfs to support the diminishing infantry regiments.
The Czar had already been warned that the infantry units were both not reinforcing, and our army compositions had largely fallen apart since the losses of the first war with Prussia.
von Moltke's presence in the north is eliminated, though he himself manages to flee to the rest of Prussia.
We re-obtain our alliance with the Ottoman Empire that was lost following the end of the Oriental Crisis. The Black Sea Fleet stations itself in Constantinople, and the Ottomans agree to not tariff all Russian goods. They are now firmly in our sphere of influence.
Otrovsky leads the Guards Cavalry Corps into the Hungarian capital of Pest to put down the revolution.
Why do we even start with a pure cav army? Oh well, what could go wrong?
The Prussians have managed to stall our summer campaign (we had anticipated to be in Berlin by now), but the defeat of von Roon's army, the last major force this side of Hanover, will spell the end of the Prussian resistance.
von Roon's army is pushed back, but inflicted heavier losses on the poorly equipped Russian troops. We push forth nonetheless, and hunt his armies down.
von der Osten-Sacken, a general well-known for his efforts in the Caucasian wars, leads the march towards Berlin.
von Roon pulls back to Prezlau, but stages a last-ditch defence to prevent the Russian army from marching on Berlin.
von Moltke magically teleports to Poznen.
As the army in Gniezo crumbles to von Moltke's advance, Fyodor Shuvalov is called over from Ostpreussen. His arrival in the battle turns it around, though Russian losses once more outweigh Prussian ones.
Thank god we have so many serfs!
The Battle of Prezlau is seemingly up in the air, with von Roon's forces putting up a very credible fight against the larger, but poorly structured and commanded Russian armies.
Meanwhile, Surkov is ordered to lead a separate assault on Berlin, meeting von Moltke's army along the way. Winter will soon set in, and the situation will likely stall unless all their armies are eradicated.
The brave Prussian resistance in spite of the much larger Russian invasion force inspires nationalists and revolutionaries in Silesia, who rise up against Russian rule.
We dispatch Grishin to deal with the Silesian rebels.
Meanwhile, von Roon is forced to retreat, whilst Surkov's army arrives to besiege Berlin.
von Roon once again stages an extraordinary defense north of Berlin, though he was unable to stop Surkov's army. Shuvalov is forced to intervene, and the remainder of our armies withdraw from the battlefield upon his arrival.
Shuvalov's arrival sounds the death knell for von Roon's army.
Ostrovsky's army is annihilated in Hungary.
This is reportedly the first time in history anyone has lost an army to a Vic2 spawned rebel country.
Before the Spring of '49, the entirety of the eastern half of the Kingdom of Prussia is occupied.
Our campaigns in the Caucasus come to an end.
The British finally decide to do something about their ally being annihilated, and land forces in the Baltics in preparation for a Spring campaign.
That goddamn Chechen keeps escaping.
von Roon attacks our positions in Eastern Prussia through Saxony, which grants the Prussians access but not us.
Minor skirmishes aside, the war in the eastern half is over. We begin executing our Spring campaign to take Westfalen.
Also, yes, you can mobilize serfs.
Our mobilized serf armies are used to wipe out any Prussian resistance as our main armies leave for Westfalen.
Westfalen falls by May, and we now begin the invasion of the Rheinland. The Dutch armies arrive to stop our incursion into the Netherlands, but Shuvalov is there to face them.
Shuvalov annihilates the Dutch armies.
Meanwhile, the British expeditionary force poses a threat in Lithuania. The Czar, however, insists that the Prussians are defeated before a withdrawal to deal with the British.
By mid-summer, all of Prussia is occupied, and our forces head back east as we prepare for the final battle with the British expeditionary force.
We dispatch an army led by Gurko to attack the Netherlands to stop them from retaking the Rheinland, but a sudden liberal revolution against the monarchy means that our job has been done for us.
The serfs gather for the attack on the British armies.
With the Dutch now removed as a force of resistance, and the Russian armies heading back, the expeditionary force retreats to the coast.
The British surrender.
In the Second Treaty of Amsterdam, the Prussians and British agree to accept Russian annexation of Poznen and its incorporation into the Kingdom of Poland. A cut-down-to-size treaty, however, is not enforced, upon pressure from the Austrians and French and threats of intervention.
Greater Poland has almost been restored! With more Polish territories firmly under our grasp, we can eliminate the risk of a grand revolution.
We send the serfs back to their miserable lives.
The Czar enters a fit upon being informed that there are *craftsment* is Poznen. The factories are immediately shut down and blown up by the Russian Army. Russia will not let the scourge of industrialization touch us!
The broken remnants of the Russian army withdraw from Prussia.
Almost none of our armies are properly structured, with the occasional pure cav army mixed in with pure artillery armies (their infantry regiments were annihilated in battle).
Shuvalov obtains the Czar's approval to begin rebuilding the Russian Army.
A series of forts are constructed across our borders in Europe.
To the east we begin colonizing and establishing forts in areas that begin to concern the Japanese.
A picture of our territories in the east
Shuvalov begins the rebuilding of the Russian Army in the wake of the first two Russo-Prussian Wars.
Part of the rebuilding efforts involve conscripting Poles, which immediately trigger street protests throughout Poland. These rapidly devolve into violence, with the Russian Army briefly shelling major Polish cities in the winter of 1849. In 1850, the Russian officers are expelled from Warsaw and the Polish Congress declare their independence, triggering a revolution throughout Poland.
The Russian Army is already in place to retake parts of Poland, though local policemen and Russian bureaucrats are expelled from the major cities. Silesia and Poznen, though formally under the Kingdom of Poland, were not under the administration of the Congress and are prevented from rising up.
Several Polish regiments attempt a revolt in Greater Poland but are stopped and all conspirators are executed via firing squad.
Shuvalov leads the campaign against the Poles
Most of the Polish cities in Mazovia are back under Russian control by the end of January. Meanwhile, Nikolay Read leads an attack on Warsaw against the Polish Liberation Army.
The Polish forces are defeated and Warsaw is reconquered by March. By April all remaining Polish-controlled cities are under Russian siege.
The Poles offer to surrender in May, with no hope of foreign intervention.
Peace is restored.
Bavaria is a great power! The Czar welcomes this development and hopes that they can form an alliance with other Southern German states to serve as a bulwark against the Prussians.
The Austrians, however, now shift their entire foreign policy focus to dealing with Russian aggression against the German Confederation.
Under Shuvalov's orders, a series of mass executions occur in Poland, and all conspirators are rooted out and killed. Bodies pile up in the streets of Warsaw, with violent looting and pillaging conducted under the eyes of Nikolay Read.
Meanwhile the Czar makes a state visit to Greece, where we affirm our closer ties.
The Toucouleur decides that now is the time to strike, apparently.
The Serbs also fall under our influence as we complete our total dominance of the Balkans. The Austrians are now highly concerned that they're being encircled - the Czar assures them that we aren't in any way threatened by *Austrians* and have no reason for war.
The current state of the centralization reforms.
All hail the Czar!
The Russian Empire has established itself, beyond a doubt, as one of the most formidable forces in all of Europe. The victories of our grand armies inspire songs and poetry-REEE KEEP THAT LITERATE STUFF OUT OF MY COUNTRY
The % of reactionaries continue to make steady gains.
The Czar learns that our academia, or what remains of it, is apparently described as an "avantgarde intelligentsia". Upon hearing the word "intelligent" he orders that this immediately be rectified.
We shoot the damn cultured folk.
A new ideology has been developed in Russia in the wake of the movements of the last two decades. "Russian Agrarianism" is an extremist reactionary ideology that favors serfdom, the return to fields over cities, and most importantly the annihilation of machinery and factories. The movement takes hold throughout Russia, and in particular among the aristocracy, who begin demanding that Russia use its armies to stop the spread of industrialism and capitalism throughout the world. This is the birth of a national revolution!
The harsh response to the Polish uprising triggers reprisal attacks in both Polish and Lithuanian cities, and things begin to heat up once more with a violent jacobinite revolution calling for the creating of a democratic, federalized state.
The Uprising of 1852 is swiftly annihilated.
Now it's confusing why the Silesians, of all people, are becoming moralist, given that they aren't Orthodox, but this means they'll support the Orthodox reactionary party that wants to annihilate their religion.
This makes sense.
Russian Agrarianism is on the march!
2 years after the end of the Second Russo-Prussian War, the Prussians re-establish defenses in Ostpreussen.
The Czar, after much badgering from Shuvalov and the State Council, roughly halves the tariffs on foreign imports to Russia.
While this triggers opposition among hardliners that he has unintentionally managed to create, this move was necessary so as to encourage pop promotion to soldiers. Serfs are not valuable troops.
By the end of 1853, the Russian Army has been both replenished and entirely standardized, thanks to Shuvalov's reforms. We should be a much more potent fighting force.
Russian Agrarianists are in uproar after it is discovered that the Prussians are building several factories in an area very close to the Russian border. There are growing calls for the Czar to invade to annihilate the industrial threat. Various strands of Russian Agrarianism begin to pop up, with "Global Agragranists" proposing that Russia invade to spread the Agrarian Revolution to the rest of Europe, and "Agrarians in One Country" rising up in opposition. Still there are "Accelerationists" who believe that they should leave capitalist and industrial societies as they are, for the inherent contradictions of industrial societies (the tendency of the rate of employment to fall, and industrial machines steal our jobs!) will lead to the collapse of those states and their replacement with agrarian societies.
Read this sentence enough times and "agrarian" stops sound like it should be a word.
DEMOCRACY IS A THREAT TO ALL CIVILIZED SOCIETIES
THE PEOPLE CANNOT BE TRUSTED TO MAKE THEIR OWN DECISIONS
THE CZARS WILL IS GODS WILL
The struggles that Russia faces in recruiting troops are due to the fact that so many possible eligible soldiers are serfs, and it is not lawful for the state to take them from their masters.
Some, more liberal factions within the State Council propose that the Czar conduct a major serfdom reform and emancipate the serfs, bringing great prospe-
HAHAH FUCK OFF
Serfs should be grateful that they can be serfs! Would they prefer to starve without any land to work on? The life of a serf is physically laborious, sure, but the life of freemen is mentally taxing. The serfs would not live if they were free - they would grow lazy and fat*
*Actual argument that Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace.
The British invade the USA for control over Montana, which the British claim is part of their rightful territory in the west.
This means that the British are far too distracted to assist the Prussians.
In early 1855, the factories in Pomerania begin operation, prompting luddite outrage. The Czar must intervene! Agrarianism cannot be left to fall!
The Czar sides with the Global Agrarians and calls for war to annihilate industrial production in Pomerania, proposing a Russian occupation (though not annexation) of the region.
This creates the seeds of the Third Russo-Prussian War, or the Luddite War.
Europe is tired of Russia's shit.
Absolutely no one buys the Russian cause for war. The Austrians are furious - Pomerania is part of the German confederation. They pledge that Russia will not be allowed to occupy Pomerania.
The French call for the formation of a coalition to annihilate the dangerous new ideology taking root in Russia.
To which the Czar replies - hah, below the infamy limit.
Atheism is nonsensical. You already have living, visible proof of a god - the Czar! How could anything but intelligent design produce such a handsome man?
We sign an alliance with the Bavarians, who are approving of our proposed occupation in order to further their own interests in the German confederation.
The Czar is told of rising militancy in the country by his State Council. He is urged to act to prevent it from rising into uproar.
Now the Czar's fundamental belief has always been that reform is wrong, but he is informed that expanding State Council privileges to Ukrainian and Belorussian aristocrats could possibly placate them and also with homogenizing the local population.
Furthermore, admitting such accepted cultures is actually quite popular among the reactionary panslavic movement. So long as the poor are kept out, this reform doesn't compromise Russia!
Ok so I need to break any character to explain what's going on here.
Restricting rights for even accepted cultures comes with a consciousness penalty for non-accepted cultures.
This is absolutely terrible, because one of biggest modifiers for pops drifting reactionary requires that they have less than 6.0 consciousness, but above 6.0 militancy. So we need to eliminate *anything* that can raise consciousness, and then bump up militancy, and that will spur reactionary growth. I'll be going through that pop screen in detail in a later episode (thanks /u/mystery_tramp for informing me about the existence of the ideology drift modifiers and UI).
So basically, by passing this reform (which isn't too out of character given that it just extends State Council representation to Ukrainians and Belorussians, which is acceptable enough, especially to the panslavic movement), my pops will end up becoming more reactionary over time.
I need it if I want to repeal "appointed" and make it "ruling party only" without a reactionary revolution (which can only be triggered through accelerationism i.e. passing reforms, which would break character even harder).
Making "ruling party only" is necessary for rolling back all other reforms (including possibly this one),
The Czar, despite no international support, refuses to listen to foreign demands that he stand down. He demands one last time for the Prussians to peacefully let Russian troops occupy Pomerania and shut down the factories.
The Prussians are outraged, and prepare for war.
The Czar issues the declaration of war. As the snow melts, our troops cross the border into Prussia.
The Hanoverians and Bavarians both support Russia and declare war on Prussia.
With the newly reformed armed forces, nothing can stop us!
Shuvalov leads an army into Memel, where he engages with von Moltke. This is a clash of titans.
The Russians suffer a severe defeat in Memel, with von Moltke pulling a miracle and defending the area despite being outnumbers. He however makes a fatal mistake and launches an aggressive attack into Lithuania.
Meanwhile, some of our troops swing into Pomerania and cut off reinforcements to Ostpreussen.
Shuvalov, not one to accept humiliation, leads a second attack on von Moltke's army in Lithuania after brief reinforcements.
von Moltke is forced to abandon his position, though Russian casualties are far greater.
Shuvalov chases von Moltke's army back into Memel, encircling them before reinforcements can arrive.
The army is utterly destroyed, and ducal Prussia is open to siege. Meanwhile another army leads a push towards Berlin. With the Russians on the verge of a rapid victory, the Austrians cry foul and demand the Russians stand down. We call their bluff - the Russian army stops for no one!
The United Kingdom declares war on Russia to stop their blatant aggression.
With von Moltke eliminated by the glorious Shuvalov, Wilhem IV leads a brave last-stand defense of Berlin. The attempt is ultimately futile, as Brandenburg is overrun. Prussia will likely fall.
Despite next to no technology or reforms, the Russian Army has crushed everything that has stood in its path. There is nothing that can stop us, except, of course a two front war.
Ahahaha fuck.Venomous Proteas fast bowler Dale Steyn has cautioned his social media followers after a close run-in with a deadly snake in South Africa’s Kruger National Park.
Travelling by car with a friend in the National Park, located 400km north-east of Johannesburg, Steyn pulled over to help what he thought was an injured brown house snake.
But the 32-year-old got more than he bargained for when he discovered it was in fact a deadly Black Mamba snake he was dealing with.
Steyn posted a video of the encounter on Instagram and urged his followers to avoid getting in a similar situation to the one he found himself in.
"So this poor guy was hit by a car, we stopped to move him out the road thinking it was a brown house snake," Steyn wrote on his Instragram account.
"Got a little too close and then realized what we were actually dealing with! Mr Black Mamba!
"This post is not to show how brave we were, it's to show that if you don't know what you dealing with then best you leave it alone! Lesson learnt! #wildouthere #blackmamba."
Quick Single: England cruise past South Africa in ODI
Steyn is currently sitting out South Africa's ODI series against England with a shoulder problem and is hoping to be fit again for the World Twenty20 in India next month.
WATCH: Steyn battling shoulder problemAs critics question the militarization of police in light of ongoing unrest in St. Louis, some California residents are expressing similar concerns over a new measure that allows Compton school officers to carry AR-15 rifles.
As Compton students head back to school Monday, parents are expressing concern about a school board policy passed in July that allows campus police to carry semi-automatic rifles in their trunks while on duty, according to KPCC, a Southern California public radio station.
“This is our objective — save lives, bottom line,” Compton Unified Police Chief William Wu told the board, arguing that assault-style rifles are more deadly and more accurate.
“Handguns you’d be lucky to hit accurately at 25 yards,” Chief Wu said, the station reported. “With a rifle in the hands of a trained person, you can go 50, 100 yards, accurately.”
School officers would have pass an internal selection process to be able to carry the AR-15 rifles on campus. Chief Wu said the program will likely have select officers trained and carrying such guns in time for the new school year, KPCC reported.
But not everyone is thrilled about the measure. Francisco Orozco, a recent Dominguez High School graduate and founder of the Compton Democratic Club, said police would be of better use focusing on day-to-day security concerns, rather than arming themselves for a worst-case scenario. He cited recent allegations in which Compton school police officers were accused of racial profiling and excessive force.
“This escalation of weapons we feel is very unnecessary,” he told KPCC. “The school police has not even earned the right to carry handguns.”
Joe Grubbs, president of the California Association of School Resource Officers, argued that an assault rifle is a “tool.”
“If there’s an issue with Compton and how Unified School Police are engaging with the community, that should not affect their availability to tools that can save kids,” he said.
Chief Wu said he trusts his officers and that they do not engage in racial profiling. He also said his door is open to hear complaints from the community, KPCC reported.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Former Rep. Marjorie Margolies has lost the Democratic primary to represent Pennsylvania's 13th District, the Associated Press reports. State Rep. Brendan Boyle secured the party's nomination on Tuesday.
Boyle led Margolies, his next closest primary opponent, 41 percent to 27 percent, with 94 percent of precincts reporting
Margolies, who served one term in Congress, is Chelsea Clinton's mother-in-law. She had received a significant amount of campaign help from the family: former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attended a fundraiser for Margolies last week, while former President Bill Clinton starred in a television ad and attended a pair of fundraisers for her.
Margolies represented the more conservative 13th District from 1993 to 1995, which after redistricting became significantly more Democratic-leaning. She was defeated after voting for Clinton's tax-raising budget proposal.
State Sen. Daylin Leach and physician Val Arkoosh also contested the nomination to succeed Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-Pa.).
Margolies had struggled to raise money throughout the campaign, before Leach filed a Federal Election Commission complaint accusing her of violating campaign finance law by using funds raised for the general election during the primary.
A HuffPost investigation detailed how a charity run by Margolies spent an unusually large proportion of its revenue on her salary and benefits. Subsequent reports suggest that she was involved, as both chief executive and chairman of the Women's Campaign International, in a 2001 vote to more than double her own pay at the charity.Venezuela slammed President Trump's recently revised travel restrictions on Monday, calling them an act of "political and psychological terrorism" after the administration placed new rules on travelers coming to the U.S. from the South American country, as well as seven other nations.
"These types of lists, it is worth underlining, are incompatible with international law and constitute in themselves a form of psychological and political terrorism," Venezuela's foreign ministry said, according to a translation from CNN.
Venezuela along with Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria and Yemen make up the latest list of states to face travel restrictions after failing to meet the minimum information-sharing requirements that aim to make vetting processes stronger.
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“As president, I must act to protect the security and interests of the United States and its people,” Trump said in the proclamation that will go into effect next month.
The presidential declaration said that while Venezuelan government had met many of the minimum vetting standards, it has ultimately proved to be "uncooperative in verifying whether its citizens pose national security or public-safety threats."
"Venezuela's government fails to share public-safety and terrorism-related information adequately, fails to satisfy at least one key risk criterion, and has been assessed to be not fully cooperative with respect to receiving its nationals subject to final orders of removal from the United States," the proclamation states, while saying these restrictions are largely directed at "government officials of Venezuela who are responsible for the identified inadequacies."If you want to go back in time, visit Kiwi Music Bar and Cafe, says Hussein Moses.
Photo: Unknown
“You have the worst taste in everything.”
This is my friend Dave, talking to me on Friday night. Usually a war of words like this is reserved for the NBA (I’m an occasional James Harden apologist), but this time we're debating a crucial after-work decision: where to go for dinner.
My suggestion is Kiwi Music Bar and Cafe.
The name speaks for itself: It’s a New Zealand music-themed bar, a gimmick likely to be more of a turnoff than a selling point these days. Scaffolding dominates the ugly stretch of Auckland’s Queen Street it calls home (you'll find it opposite the Metro Centre entrance), and there are pretty much endless options for other places you could eat in the area; a flash new Nando’s just opened up down the road, and there’s a food court plus numerous fast food spots less than a minute away.
I had to do it, though. I had spent far too much time thinking and writing about NZ Music Month, and it was all finally coming to an end. I needed closure.
I also needed answers. It's been open for as long as I can remember but it had been five years since I had even stepped foot inside. Was it still the same? How had it not closed down yet?
But Dave was worried. It didn’t help that I'd mentioned the bar was once judged one of the dirtiest places to eat in Auckland city. It had got an 'E' grade some years back, the worst grade possible. I pretended like it wasn’t a big deal.
Anyway, I don’t know how, but I talked Dave into it.
And whaddaya know, things were already looking up:
Photo: Unknown
There’s a brutally steep staircase that leads up to the place. Inside it was totally empty apart from a woman who was standing behind the bar reading a Game of Thrones novel. We had got in just ahead of a private function which would see the place fully packed out for the night.
Within maybe 10 minutes, that’s exactly what happened. We sat at our table in the corner while someone from the arriving group yelled “I’M GONNA GET DRUNK WITH YOU” to everyone that entered the bar after him.
It was awesome. We wanted in.
Being there was weirdly comforting: Nothing had changed, like much of the music industry when you think about it. A dozen or so NZ Music Month posters line an entire wall, with the latest dating back to 2013. There’s another from 2010 stuck to the ceiling. On the way to the bathroom, you’ll find old gig posters layered over each other and framed records signed by Howard Morrison and John Rowles. It’s like Lorde was never born.
Before its rebrand, Kiwi Music Bar and Cafe was known as Pizza Pizza. And despite its small size, it was host to a bunch of shows, including a famed performance from The White Stripes in 2000.
Pizza is still their thing these days, but the menu - like the place itself - is indebted to another era. You can order a Goldenhorse (“a carnivore’s delight”), a Nesian Style (“a sweet blend of shaved ham and diced pineapple”), or even a Salmonella Dub (“an unfortunately named pizza”; their words, not mine).
The list goes on:
Photo: Unknown
Sadly, they got serious with the cocktail names in the intervening years. No longer can you get a Foamy Ed, Mint Chick, Hello Sailor or Pacifier.
At the front of the bar are some craft beer options: Kiwi Music Lager and Kiwi Music Draught. A friend who had a stint working at the bar once told me that if you ordered one, the staff had to pretend the keg needed changing; once out back they would pour a can of some cheap beer into a glass and send you on your way.
Photo: Unknown
Dave and I ordered, and I paid. It felt like I owed him. We were entirely out of place, but the rowdiness of the crowd was also kind of rubbing off on us. It had been the right decision to visit, although Dave said the Goldenhorse pizza was only a 6.1 out of 10: “And that’s being generous. But I’ve had 10 beers and there’s nothing I wouldn’t have eaten.”
The place is cheap as, though, so all good. It’s perfect for a work thing or whatever. You just have to get back down the staircase without breaking your neck when it’s time to go home.
In our opinion, it |
farm animals because their land is zoned residential. According to MLive.com, they have a horse, two donkeys, five ducks, a flock of chickens and 11 young turkeys. The letter said they could have only “only one horse and one donkey; or one horse and 3 fowl; or 13 fowls.”
In the end, they won the right to keep the animals under the Right to Farm Act. The proposed changes would give the Township the right to force the couple to get rid of their animals.
The Michigan Small Farm Council asked all of the state’s residents to contact the Agricultural Commission by Jan. 22 and complain. The Commission hasn’t approved the changes.
“A great deal is at stake here, and I hope each of you will appeal to the Michigan Commission of Agriculture for continued Right to Farm protection for small farmers in Michigan,” Council President Wendy Lockwood Bank wrote in the press release.
The battle in Michigan is only the latest example of efforts by local governments to restrict the growing of food on residential properties. For instance, cities in Florida have tried to force residents to remove vegetable gardens from their front yards.
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Experts say the Milky Way is dying or have actually already died, implying that we are already living in a zombie galaxy. There is a way to bring it back from the undead though, as a giant cloud of fiery gas is on its way to save the day.
Kevin Schawinski, a professor from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich collaborated with citizen scientists to help him classify galaxies, particularly its shape.
Schawinski gets a consensus about the shape of the galaxies and delve into how this classification influences the lifespan of galaxies.
As he goes through with his investigation, he realized that the Milky Way may be slowly shutting down or may have completely died many years ago.
"It's entirely possible that the Milky Way galaxy is a zombie, having died a billion years ago," he writes.
Food For Galaxies
Galaxies thrive through a supply of hydrogen gas so it can form new stars. When this food supply runs out and star formation stops, then it is a signal that the galaxy is about to reach its end.
Gas conversion continues just like in factories, but imagine the day when the supply of raw materials, or in the case of galaxies, fresh outside gas, runs out. What is there left to process? Such possibility leaves just the remaining gas and its reservoir.
Since the reservoir is massive and the gas formation is slow, just like in the Milky Way, it continues to look alive with new stars. The truth is, the rate of star formation plummets over several billion years.
Green Valley
There are two types of galaxies in terms of star formation. The first one is the blue star-forming galaxies and the red passively-evolving galaxies. There is another one and it is represented by the green color.
Galaxies living in the so-called "green valley" have star formations in the brink of turning off. Star formation still continues, indicating that the process has just stopped, probably a hundred million years ago. The Milky Way may possibly belong to this category.
Help On The Way
A new capture of the Hubble space telescope implies that help is on the way for our dear, dying galaxy. The telescope was able to detect a giant cloud of fiery gas that can help the galaxy continue its star formation and survive.
Called the "Smith Cloud," this giant gas is hurtling towards the Milky Way at 700,000 miles per hour. Experts say it may be a part of the Milky Way 70 million years ago and is now boomeranging home with a large bag of goodies: sufficient hydrogen and helium gas supply that is enough to form 2 million suns.
"The cloud is an example of how the galaxy is changing with time," says Andrew Fox from the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Whether there is truth to the Milky Way being at the edge of the green valley or not, people may find peace in the fact that the Hubble was able to detect the Smith Cloud, which will hit the galaxy about 30 million years from now.
ⓒ 2018 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.The Wild has agreed to terms with its winningest goalie in franchise history.
Niklas Backstrom has agreed to a three-year deal worth $10.25 million ($3.42 million).
Backstrom, the Wild's goalie of seven years, won 24 games last year before sustaining a sports hernia before the playoffs. He has won 184 games.
Backstrom, 35, wanted term -- at least 3 years -- and he got it. The Wild wanted to make certain it came in less than $4 million -- what he probably would have gotten on the open market -- and it got that.
Backstrom loves Minnesota and wanted badly to return. The Wild maintained its priority was to sign Backstrom. The only options for a No. 1 goaltender would have been the trade market.
With limited cap space, the only true potential No. 1 if he gets to free agency is Mike Smith, and he's looking for a big payday.T arus Lyons called students this week from a comfortable place.
Rick Owens prayed from a popular pulpit.
Good thing, too. It might have been different.
Lyons could, after all, have urged his students to bow before Muhammad, to open their hearts and minds to the words of the Buddha.
Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts.
Yeah, Owens might have told Bessemer's troubled boys to emulate Balrama, the brother of Krishna. He's a fine role model and husband, an all-around good guy and god.
That would have been educational.
As it was this week, Lyons led an apparently successful and obviously inspirational altar call during a required assembly in the Bessemer school system. Owens raised the bar, praying to the students that Jesus Christ is the only way.
Surprising? No. There will always be prayer in schools, as they say, as long as there are algebra tests.
And around these parts there will always be a call to freedom of faith in schools, city council meetings and school boards.
As long as you worship the right way.
It would have been different, I suppose, if Lyons had told students to attune themselves to the natural rhythm of life forces through the phases of the moon, as a Wiccan might.
It would have been different if Owens prayed to Hanuman the monkey god, or a sacred caterpillar known as Malacos the tent worm.
The only way to salvation, young pupae, is to follow the transformation of the tent worm. Mate, build your cocoons and emerge as moths. Follow the light until... ZAP!
I say teach your children well in whatever your faith may have. But don't teach mine.
We are arrogant and ignorant when we presume our beliefs are the only ones worth teaching. We might even be un-American.
Because freedom of religion is freedom from religion. Pray to my God. Pray to your moth. But not in public schools.
It's not just Bessemer's issue. The Birmingham City Council has been challenged for its prayer policy, too. No wonder why.
So far this year 15 prayers have opened council meetings, and 15 have been Christian prayers. There is barely even denominational diversity. Ten of those prayers came from Baptists, one from the chaplain at Miles College, and one each from A.M.E., Presbyterian and Full Gospel ministers. One came far out on a limb, from a Catholic priest.
Hoover School Board President Donna Frazier also wants to return to verbal prayers before meetings, backtracking on a year-long policy of silent prayers.
And why not? Just start with a prayer to Jesus and move on to Muhammad or Mother Earth. We'll get to Ram, 7th incarnation of Vishnu, before we reach Tom Cruise and Confucius.
Maybe we'll get back to Malacos the tent worm. Right before the next school board appointment.
Teach your children about the worm, if that's what you believe. Let me teach my own.
John Archibald's column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write him at
jarchibald@bhamnews.com.Preston North End have warned that the Premier League ‘do not give a damn about the Football League’ clubs.
In a strongly-worded letter to other League One clubs, North End expressed their fears over the future of football clubs outside of the Premier League as the top-flight prepares for another huge cash injection.
Clubs relegated from the Premier League at the end of the 2013/14 season will received a whopping £59m parachute payment.
That is a 42% increase from what this campaign’s bottom three will receive.
The £59m is spread over four years to supposedly help relegated clubs stay financially secure by being able to meet Premier League-sized contracts and wages.
Those making the drop will be paid £23m in the first season, £18m the next and then £9m in each the following two years.
Such payments mean that clubs dropping down from the top flight are awash with cash compared to the rest of their Football League counterparts.
Championship clubs receive a solidarity payment of about £4m a season – half from the Premier League and half from the Football League.
In League One the solidarity payment is currently £900,000 a season. That will go up slightly to £960,000 next term, but North End are among many clubs who think the rise should be higher, bearing in mind the big hike in parachute payments.
Their argument is that if the Premier League can increase payments to relegated clubs by such a big amount courtesy of a new television deal, more wealth should spread down to the Football League.
Last week, League One clubs met at Notts County’s Meadow Lane to discuss the current financial position.
PNE officials were around the table and they also put their views forward in writing.
That document was re-produced in a national newspaper who suggested PNE were ‘leading the revolt’ of Football League clubs against the Premier League. But a North End spokesman told the Evening Post: “We are not leading a revolt although we’re very unhappy about the imbalance of finance in football.
“When we attended the League One meeting, we put our thoughts in writing and circulated that among the other clubs.
“All 24 clubs in our division are unhappy with what is proposed.
“Parachute payments are going up 46% which is huge.
“Football League clubs receive an annual solidarity payment which comes partly from the Football League and Premier League.
“For a club in League One like ourselves, that adds up to £900,000. The proposal is that it goes up by 5% – the bit of that from the Premier League will amount to £30,000 per club.
“Compare that to the £59m which the clubs relegated from the Premier League at the end of next season will receive over four years in parachute payments.
“Some clubs are saying we should all reject the money as a protest, but many clubs just couldn’t survive without it.
“We just want a better deal, there’s got to be more balance than there is now.”
The written statement which PNE circulated at the League One meeting read: “Let no one doubt that the Premier League do not give a damn about the Football League.
“It is now one of those pivotal moments in the history of the game. Now is the time to stand up and be counted.
“To win the play-off final to the Premier League guarantees circa £120m and yet a Championship club who do not receive parachute payments receive circa £4m. This is financial suicide.
“League One and League Two clubs don’t stand a chance of surviving, let alone competing, without a benefactor.
“Owners/directors of Football League clubs are continually being reminded of their responsibilities to run their clubs in a financially responsible way.
“At a time when there is more money coming into football than ever before there appears to be less and less of the financial cake being distributed to the Football League.
“We are now faced with yet another devastating widening of the gap in terms of cash being given to relegated Premier League clubs - an increase of between 40.6 per cent and 47.5 per cent per season.
“A mixture of the Premier League and the Football League’s lack of ability to exploit the Football League brand is driving a wedge between the football haves and have nots that will see the disintegration of the Football League sooner rather than later.
“Our board representatives now need to rise to the occasion and use every method to get a better financial outcome for clubs.”Over the years, various pieces of possible evidence have been collected which most Bigfoot believers point to as proof the elusive cryptid exists.
Bigfoot evidence has been found in various forms, including tracks, video footage, sighting reports, Pictures, and more. Skeptics are quick to point out that none of this evidence of Bigfoot is rock solid proof that the creature does indeed exist. Supporters believe that the overall combination of these various pieces of evidence does, in fact, make a solid case for the existence of the creature. As Bigfoot supporters and believers, we have seen various pieces of possible evidence over the years, some more questionable than others and some of which has been proven to be unreliable.
Here is a cool Bigfoot video which focuses on what may possibly be the top 5 pieces of Bigfoot evidence to date. These pieces of evidence range from Bigfoot Pictures to Bigfoot videos, etc. and are considered to be some of the most compelling pieces of evidence collected over the years according to the video. We have all heard some very interesting and believable Bigfoot sightings and reports and some of the evidence in this video are without a doubt worthy of consideration as to whether or not Bigfoot really exist. I am sure we can think of some other pieces of Bigfoot proof which may also rank in the top 5 but this video of Bigfoot evidence seems to be pretty well put together. Check out the video and see for yourself!To say that Universal/Blumhouse’s Get Out is scaring up great midweek business is an understatement. Yesterday, the Jordan Peele-directed horror movie made $4.1M, which while not record-breaking according to February and March records, was very solid for a horror movie and on par with summer slasher releases: just $500K shy of The Purge: Election Year‘s July 4th take of $4.6M and $200K shy of Conjuring 2‘s first June Monday ($4.3M).
However, yesterday, rivals show Get Out shooting up an amazing 20% over Monday for an estimated $4.95M. That Tuesday take kills the first Tuesdays of The Purge: Election Year ($4.3M on July 5), Conjuring 2 ($4.8M) and is 32% higher than Split‘s first Tuesday ($3.76M) and 66% higher than Don’t Breathe‘s ($2.98M). Current cume to date for Get Out is an estimated $42.45M, and many say it’s a no brainer that the pic will hit $100M. Even more amazing, Get Out is posting these great numbers on days when there aren’t that many schools off (only 2% of all colleges are on break according to ComScore).
This weekend, industry estimates believe that Get Out will dip -35% to -40% for $20M-$21.6M against Logan‘s huge $70M opening. Why is this particular horror movie holding up? Aside from Certified Fresh Rotten Tomato reviews of 99% and an A- CinemaScore, many say that Get Out‘s plot of a young African American man who encounters the racism of his Caucasian girlfriend’s family strikes a nerve with moviegoers during these divided times.Predicted second day of thick fog could cause further flight cancellations and slow progress on roads after transport chaos on Sunday
Weather warnings have been issued across most of England as forecasters predicted a second day of thick fog on Monday. Travellers were told to prepare for further flight cancellations at two of Britain’s busiest airports after a day of disruption on Sunday saw dozens of flights cancelled and delays at Britain’s busiest hub, Heathrow.
According to the Met Office, dense fog was expected to become widespread across much of central and southern England overnight on Sunday, reducing visibility to less than 100 metres at times. Forecasters said that travel might be impacted by the poor visibility, and London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports both warned passengers to check with their airlines for news on disruptions to their flights, warning that they expected further problems throughout Monday morning.
The Met Office issued severe weather warnings across the southern regions of England, with the exception of the westernmost parts of Devon and all of Cornwall. The whole of the Midlands, East Anglia and the eastern areas of Wales, as well as large parts of Yorkshire and the Humber, the north-west of England and the southern tip of north-east England were also issued with yellow warnings, advising people to be aware.
The Met Office said it expected fog to “slowly lift and clear from many places through Monday”. There was no other disruption reported on the UK’s road or rail networks. There were no warnings for Scotland or Northern Ireland.
After disruption earlier in the day, Heathrow airport tweeted that flights would be operating past 11pm on Sunday. The airport is allowed to operate a limited number of nighttime flights each year.
The fog had been expected to clear by 3pm on Sunday, with no further cancellations or delays expected at Heathrow. But the airport later revised that.
Passenger Ed Drewett tweeted: “Stuck on the ground at Dublin due to fog at Heathrow. Gonna miss my flight to LA. Ooh I do love a drama.” Another passenger tweeted: “So fog at Heathrow means cancelled flight and 1 extra night in sunny Palma. Thank you britishairways and Iberia for looking after us.”
Sunday’s disruption at Heathrow came on the last day of the school half-term holidays for much of the country.Overcrowded conditions fuelled by new federal laws that impose longer, stricter sentences will lead to more mental and physical health problems in prisons, a new report published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal suggests.
The study by Queen’s University law professors Adelina Iftene and Allan Manson says already crowded institutions will become more cramped as a result of sweeping legislation that includes more mandatory minimum sentences and tougher provisions on parole and conditional sentences.
Bill C-10 will have a "dramatic impact" on the size of the inmate population and stability of the institutional environments, according to the report.
"We can expect an aggravation of the current state of overcrowding, an increase in correctional costs, more young people in custody and prisoners spending longer periods in prison and being more isolated," the report says.
Under Canadian and international law, prisoners have a right to "the highest attainable level of health care," but the authors raise concerns that stretched resources could hamper the ability of physicians to deliver proper care.
Many inmates have not led healthy lives before incarceration, and face a new variety of stressors related to imprisonment such as culture shock, depression, exposure to contagious diseases and susceptibility to drug use. Rates of HIV and Hepatitis C are already dramatically higher behind bars compared to the community, and more overcrowding will likely worsen the spread of infectious disease, the report suggests.
Potential restriction of family visits as a result of C-10 may also have "devastating effects" on the mental and emotional status of prisoners.
"An increased number of prisoners run the risk of overwhelming an already overburdened system unless more is invested in mental-health care," the report reads.
Citing projections from the Office of the Correctional Investigator, the report says penitentiaries will need to accommodate 3,400 more prisoners by 2013. Ontario expects it will need to accommodate 1,000 more prisoners at a cost of $900 million and Quebec is expecting $600 million for new cells, according to the report.
"In an era of governmental budgetary restraint, is it likely that these allocations will be made?" the authors ask. "Regardless of new capital expenditures, it is reasonable to assume that increasing demands on correctional systems will affect allocations for internal programs, including health care."
The report also pointed to the Correctional Investigator’s link between overcrowding and an increase in violence, and said physically and mentally ill prisoners will endure greater fear of victimization and decreased safety.
But Julie Carmichael, spokeswoman for Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, rejected any link between overcrowding and violence behind bars.
"Double bunking is a completely normal practice used in many western countries. Correctional Service of Canada recently completed an analysis of prisons in the Prairies which found that violent incidents are independent from the levels of double bunking," she said.
"In fact, last year the number of double-bunked prisoners involved in violent incidents represented only one per cent of the total number of prisoners in the Prairie region. Correctional Service of Canada has concluded that double bunking has a minimal impact on the rates of violence in prisons."
Growth in prison populations has been only one-quarter of what Correctional Service of Canada had predicted and is far below what critics are claiming, Carmichael said.Irish pro-choice protesters - AFP
Thousands of people marched in Dublin on Saturday calling for an overhaul of Ireland’s strict abortion laws, as a campaign for change gathers momentum ahead of the upcoming general election.
Ireland has some of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws. Termination is allowed only when there is risk to the life of the mother, rather than just her health.
Campaigners and politicians are calling for a referendum to be held to repeal the eighth amendment of the constitution, which grants equal rights to the foetus and the mother.
“We want to sell a really strong, confident message to the government that it’s not enough to kick the issue down the road anymore,” said organiser Cathleen Doherty of the Abortion Rights Campaign.
“We want to see a pledge to repeal the eighth in their manifestos for the election,” she told AFP.
Irish police declined to give an estimate on the crowd but organisers were expecting 8,000 to 10,000 people.
Demonstrators chanted: “What do we want? The right to choose. When do we want it? Now.”
Abortion is a deeply divisive issue in Ireland, a traditionally Roman Catholic country, and ignites fierce debate whenever it is raised in public.
May’s referendum on introducing same-sex marriage, passed by a resounding “Yes” vote, has added to the momentum for broader social change.The PBE has been updated!visual and gameplay updates are now up for testing, along with new lore and a complete set of updated skins! We also have texture rebalancing for, and, as well as several of their skins. Lastly, we have updates for, splash art for, inhibitor timers on SRU, a fix for's logo, and much more!Continue reading for more information!
(Warning: PBE Content is tentative and iterative - what you see may not reflect what eventually gets pushed to live servers! Manage your expectations accordingly. )
Sion Champion Update
[Note: Sion's VOICEOVER is NOT IN THIS UPDATE!]
Following his reveal earlier today, Sion's visual and gameplay updates are now on the PBE for testing! visual and gameplay updates are now on the PBE for testing!
Riot Scruffy Sion's PBE debut: Before we dig in too deep, here's with a few words aboutPBE debut:
"Hey all!
Sion Champion Update is finally here! Go check him out on the PBE (he is free to all PBE players and skins cost 1 IP).
We welcome any feedback on the gamplay, visuals, sounds or bugs you have.
A brief summary of his kit (numbers can be found on the PBE):
Passive: Glory In Death
-After death, Sion discards his weapon and can fight on with his fists for a limited time (auto attacks but no spells). He gains extreme attack speed, 100% lifesteal and deals a % of the enemy’s Max Health on every auto attack.
-In this state his health constantly decays, and when it reaches 0 he will be permanently dead.
Q: Decimating Smash
-Sion charges an extremely powerful swing in a cone for up to 2 seconds. When he releases the swing, he will deal damage based on the time charged. (physical damage, scales with AD)
-If he charges for greater than 1 second he will knock up all enemies hit by the cone. The knockup duration increases if he charges more.
W: Soul Furnace
-Passive: Sion gains permanent Max Health every time he kills an enemy
-Active: Sion gains a shield that scales with his maximum health for 6 seconds. He can reactivate it after 2 seconds to deal damage in an AOE around himself.
E: Roar of the Slayer
-Sion fires a short range shockwave in a line that deals damage, slows and reduces the armor of the first target hit.
-If the shockwave hits a minion or monster, they will be knocked back a large distance in the direction of the initial cast. All enemies that the minion passes through will take magic damage and be slowed.
R: Unstoppable Onslaught
-Sion charges in a direction gaining speed as he runs. This charge can go for extreme distances (about half of the map length) and is steered by the mouse cursor (like velkoz ult).
-When he collides with an enemy champion or wall he deals damage and knocks up all enemies in a small aoe around himself and slows enemies in a larger aoe around the point of impact.
-The damage and knockup duration increase the further he has charged (like ashe ult)
Go smash things!
-Scruffy
Sion, The Undead Juggernaut
585 RP or 1350 IP
[Pre update vs post update Sion!]
Stats & Abilities
HP: 420 (+60 per level)
HP Regen Per Second: 1.7 (+.2 per level)
Mana: 200 (+45 per level)
Mana Regen Per Second: 1.4 (+0.12 per level)
Attack Range: 150
Damage: 53 (+4 per level)
Armor: 18 (+3 per level)
Magic Resist: 30 (+1.25 per level)
Movement Speed: 345
[Passive, Q, W, E, R]
After being killed Sion will reanimate himself, but his Health rapidly decays while he is reanimated.
He can move and attack during this time. He gains 100% Lifesteal, attacks extremely fast and will deal an additional 10% of his target's maximum Health on hit. Max 75 bonus damage against monsters.
All of his abilities are replaced with Death Surge, which grants him a burst of Movement Speed.
50/55/60/65/70 Mana
10/9/8/7/6 Second CD
Sion charges up a heavy blow for up to 2 seconds. When released, he deals 20/40/60/80/100 (+.6 total AD) to 60/120/180/240/300 (+1.8 total AD) physical damage to enemies in the area (60% damage to minions). Enemies hit are briefly slowed.
If Sion charges for at least 1 second, enemies are knocked up and stunned for 1.25 to 2.25 seconds.
70/75/80/85/90 Mana
13 Second CD
Passive: Sion gains 2 maximum health whenever he kills a unit (8 for large monster and champion kill or assist).
Active: Sion shields himself for 30/55/80/95/110 (+.4 AP) (10% of maximum Health) for 6 seconds. After 2 seconds, while the shield holds Sion can reactivate to deal 40/65/90/105/120 (+.4 AP) plus 10/11/12/13/14/15% of the target's maximum health as magic damage to enemies around himself. Max 400 bonus damage against minions and monsters.
25 Mana
12/11/10/9/8 Second CD
Sion fires a short range shockwave, dealing 70/105/140/175/210 (+.4 AP) magic damage to the first target hit, slowing it by 40/45/50/55/60%, and reducing its armor by 20% for 2.5 seconds.
If the target is not a champion, they will be knocked back. All enemies that the knocked back unit passes through will take 50% bonus damage and be slowed by 40/45/50/55/60%.
100 Mana
140/100/60 Second CD
Sion charges in a direction for 8 seconds and can steer slowly towards the mouse cursor. While charging, Sion is immune to all Crowd Control. Reactivating will cancel Sion's charge early.
When Sion collides with an enemy champion or wall, he deals 150/300/450 (+.4 bonus AD) physical damage and knocks up and stuns enemies in a small area for 0.75 seconds. Enemies in a larger area take the same damage and have their Movement Speed slowed by 40/45/50% for 3 seconds.
The damage increases to 300/600/900 (+.8 bonus AD) and the stun duration increases to 1.75 seconds as Sion charges further.
[Ignore the blue]
Lore
"BLOOD.
SMELL IT.
WANT. ACHING. NEED!
CLOSE NOW. THEY COME.
NO CHAINS? FREE! KILL!
IN REACH. YES! DIE! DIE!
Gone. Too quick. No fight. More. I want... more.
A voice? Unfamiliar. I see him. The Grand General. My general.
He leads. I follow. Marching. To where? I should know. I can't remember.
It all bleeds together. Does it matter? Noxus conquers. The rest? Trivial. So long... since I've tasted victory.
The war wagon rocks. Rattles. A cramped cage. Pointless ceremony. The waiting. Maddening. Faster, dogs!
There. Banners. Demacians and their walls. Cowards. Their gates will shatter. Thoughts of the massacre come easily.
Who gave the order to halt? The underlings don't answer. No familiar faces. If I do not remember, neither will history.
The cage is opened. Finally! No more waiting. WE CHARGE!
Slings and arrows? The weapons of children! Their walls will not save them!
I can taste their fear. They shrink at every blow as their barricades splinter. SOON!
Noxian drums. Demacian screams. Glory isn't accolades; glory is hot blood on your hands! This is life!
A thousand shattered corpses lie at my feet, and Demacian homes burn all around me. It's over too quickly! Just one more...
The men stare. There's fear in their eyes. If they're afraid to look upon victory, I should pluck those craven eyes out. There is no fear in the Grand General's eyes, only approval. He is pleased with this conquest.
Walking the field with the Grand General, surveying the carnage, I ache for another foe. He is hobbled, a leg wound from the battle? If it pains him, he does not show it. A true Noxian. I do not like his pet, though; it picks over the dead, having earned nothing. His war hounds were more fitting company.
Demacia will be within our grasp soon. I can feel it. I am ready to march. The Grand General insists that I rest. How can I rest when my enemies still live?
Why do we mill about? The waiting eats at me. I'm left to my own devices. The bird watches. It's unsettling. Were it anyone else's, I would crush it.
Fatigue sets in. I've never felt so... tired.
Boram? Is that you? What are you whispering?
Where am I?
Captured? Kenneled like some dog. How?
There was... the battle, the razing of the fortress, the quiet of the aftermath. Were we ambushed? I can't remember.
I was wounded. I can feel the ragged gash... but no pain. They thought me dead. Now, I am their prize. Fate is laughing. I will not be caged! They will regret sparing me.
Demacian worms! They parrot kind words, but they are ruthless all the same. This place is a dank pit. They bring no food. There is no torture. They do not make a show of me. I am left to rot.
I remember my finest hour. I held a king by his throat and felt the final beat of his heart through my tightening grasp. I don't remember letting go. Is this your vengeance, Jarvan?
I hear the triumphal march. Boots on stone. Faint, through the dungeon walls. The cadence of Noxian drums. I shall be free. Demacian blood will run in the streets!
No one came. I heard no struggle. No retreat. Did I imagine it?
There is no aching in this stump. I barely noticed the iron boot. It's caked in rust.
When did I lose my leg?
I still smell the blood. Battle. It brings comfort.
The hunger gnaws. I have not slept. Time crawls. So tired.
How long?
So dark. This pit. I remember. Grand General. His whispering. What was it?
Not who I think.
Fading. Mustn't forget.
Message. Cut. Remember.
''SION – Beware ravens.''
FREE ME!
BLOOD."
Updated Skins:
Hextech Sion
520 RP
Barbarian Sion
750 RP
Lumberjack Sion
520 RP
Warmonger Sion
975 RP
2014 Championship Ward
2014 Championship Ward
Riot KateyKhaos
"It’s the time of year again – World Championships are quickly approaching! To celebrate, we're happy to announce the 2014 Championship Ward!
The 2014 Championship Ward has...
All new model and texture! (So shiny!)
New sound effects!
New animations! Bugs reports, as well as feedback are super helpful, so please take a look at the 2014 Championship Ward in game, and drop your feedback in the thread below! Likewise, if you've got any questions, post 'em here, and we'll do our best to answer them!
GLHF!"
New Splash Art
Dunkmaster Darius's splash art is now on the PBE! While we've already seen it previewed,
Underworld Wukong Updates
Texture Rebalance Round #2
Brand
Apocalyptic Brand
Vandal Brand
Cryocore Brand
Evelynn
Masquerade Evelynn
Shadow Evelynn
Tango Evelynn
Here's a video previewing all of Evelynn's texture rebalances:
Hired Gun Graves
(The other Graves skins are already updated in 4.17)
Nocturne
Frozen Nocturne
Void Nocturne
Ravager Nocturne
Haunting Nocturne
Olaf
Glacial Olaf
Forsaken Olaf
Brolaf
Here's a video previewing all of Olaf texture rebalances:
HEXAKILL: Twisted Treeline
L4T3NCY
"Heya everyone! ^o^/
We’re back with the next Featured Game Mode, Hexakill: Twisted Treeline! We listened to feedback from you guys after Hexakill’s first outing, and this time around, you can earn a Hexakill on the Twisted Treeline.
Some design notes:
-- It’s a tight squeeze for 12 players in there there, so be alert for ganks. Lots of ganks.
-- Gold & XP values have been tuned to sustain double the population of a normal TT game.
-- Controlling both Altars provides an additional HP & dmg buff for your team’s minions.
-- Scaling for minion health and damage has also been tuned for the higher population cap.
Known issues:
Play flow artwork and description text are still placeholders.
Hexakill: Twisted Treeline will be live on the PBE soon™. As always we want to hear any feedback from you guys! We also want to say “Thanks!” to all you guys on the PBE who are really quick to spot bugs and report them for us each time. It’s really helpful when we’re first testing these modes out.
So.. what lane setups is everyone running? 1-1-4? 2-2-2? 0-0-6? ^_^"
Other
[Old vs New]
Balance Changes * Remember *: The PBE is a testing grounds for new, tentative, and sometimes radical changes. The changes you see below may be lacking context or other accompanying changes that didn't make it in - don't freak out! These are not official notes.
* Remember *: The PBE is a testing grounds for new, tentative, and sometimes radical changes. The changes you see below may be lacking context or other accompanying changes that didn't make it in - don't freak out! These areofficial notes.
Champions Azir
Base mana regen per second increased 1.42 from 1.3.
Mana regen per second per level increased to.15 from.13.
Base damage increased to 47 from 43.
Base Armor increased to 16 from 14.
Items Ohmwrecker
Reverted back to live values.
Now let's take a better look:This update also includes a new ward skin to celebrate the 2014 World Championship!Here'swith a bugs and feedback thread for theYou can find in-game previews ofby checking out our earlier PBE coverage After first hitting the PBE in the 9/24 PBE update has been updated! His Q animation has been fixed, his staff now ghoulish visual effects, and he has a voiceover filter!Here's an updated look:... and here is his full VO with the new spooky filter:Today's update also features another round of texture rebalances, including, andThe TL;DR of texture rebalances is Riot is aiming to update nearly all champions and skins releases before 2013 to better fit with the current art style and the upcoming Summoner's Rift update.: OLD is on LEFT and NEW is on RIGHT ]Here's a video previewing all oftexture rebalances:Here's a video previewing all oftexture rebalances:Here'swith a chunk of info for our latest featured gameplay modeThe inhibs on the Summoner's Rift update now have a visual indicators to time their respawns, although their timing seems to be off in this build The SKT T1 logo on the back ofhas been fixed!Miss out on previous updates from this PBE cycle? Check outfor a comprehensive list of the new content in this PBE cycle or catch up with the links below! |
All three of Spain’s major newspapers ignored de Guindos’ finessing and put the word bailout on their home pages soon after the news broke on Saturday. Twitter has been awash today with links to the Prime Minister’s earlier disavowals of European aid; #rajoycobarde (“cowardrajoy”) was a trending topic. “This reversal is going to hurt him a lot,” says Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí, a public-image consultant. “He hasn’t told the truth because the truth would oblige him to act. And that has eroded Spaniards’ trust in him.”
Whatever it’s called, the intervention carries with it plenty of questions and risks. Peydro will be looking to see if the terms of the arrangement require the Spanish banking sector to pay back “super seniors” (that is, privileged heavyweight lenders like the IMF or, in this case, the E.U.’s rescue fund) first — a measure that in the past has discouraged private investors. And Hugh, who says this package will only cover the banks’ losses for 2012 and ’13, not “what is causing those losses,” believes today’s rescue is only a first step. “Housing prices are going to continue to fall, unemployment is going to continue to rise, and Spain is going to eventually need some kind of macroeconomic plan to solve that. But the government knows they can’t sell that to the Spanish public yet.”
And thus the insistence on a mere “loan.” As if to prove that nothing has changed, Rajoy, who has not yet made a public statement about the intervention, has maintained his plans to travel to Gdansk, Poland, on Sunday for the Spain-Italy match in the Euro 2012 championship. At least there, he knows, Spain has a good chance of coming out O.K.Mushroom Matar Masala. Mushrooms and Peas in creamy tomato sauce. Mushroom Masala Recipe with Easy Blender Masala Sauce. Vegan Indian Gluten-free Soy-free. Pin this post for later
Jump to Recipe
Masala means many things in Indian cuisine. It can be a dry spice blend, a wet spice blend or a sauce which can be used to make a dish. This simple Masala sauce works well with any veggies, or baked tofu, soy curls, chickpeas or lentils. Make the sauce creamier with more cashews, creamy + vegan butter to make makhani or butter sauce, tangier with more tomatoes, spicier or milder.
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The sauce with mushrooms and peas is a satisfying flavorful meal. I add some spinach or greens as well. In the pictured dish, i also added some chickpeas. Serve over rice or cooked grains, with flabread or over toast for snack or breakfast. Easy and 20 minute active time in the kitchen and then let everything simmer.
Matar mean peas. Use less or more peas. To make the sauce without nuts, use pumpkin seeds or silken tofu or plain unsweetened non dairy yogurt, or full fat coconut milk or coconut cream. Many many more options for sauces, curries, easy dishes on the blog and my book.
More curries from the blog
Video!Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Iran's main uranium enrichment site is at Natanz
The US has imposed new sanctions on companies and individuals in connection with Iran's nuclear programme.
The sanctions target at least 25 firms and people suspected of helping the programme, evading previous sanctions or supporting terrorism.
But Washington said its actions were still consistent with its commitment to provide sanctions relief in exchange for steps to halt the programme.
World powers suspect Iran seeks atomic weapons, a claim it strongly denies.
The country insists that it is enriching uranium for use in nuclear power stations and for medical purposes.
In a statement, US Under-Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen said that Washington's action in imposing these new sanctions "reflects our continuing determination to take action against anyone, anywhere, who violates our sanctions."
Senior administration officials said the latest round of sanctions included action against the Russia-based Asia Bank, which Washington says was involved in converting and delivering US dollar bank notes to the Iranian government.
They also targeted firms that have helped Iran support President Bashar Assad's government in Syria.
Iran and world powers have set themselves until 24 November to reach a permanent agreement resolving the nuclear dispute.
The next round of talks on the issue is expected in mid-September.Le Corbusier pioneered 20th-century modernism and the International Style, beginning with the Villa Savoye. Anthony Flint
The pioneer of modern architecture inspired hundreds of drab downtowns and suburban corporate office parks. But he had many good ideas that are relevant to citybuilding today
In talking about the book I recently had the privilege of seeing published, Modern Man: The Life of Le Corbusier, Architect of Tomorrow, my suspicions have been confirmed. Reactions to this extraordinary man fall into three categories: those who adore him, those who detest him, and those who have no idea who he was. There may be other figures through history where the response is divided up this way, and certainly the love-him-or-hate-him split is common for many architects. But for those in the world of citybuilding and urban planning, the strong opinions are intense. People are dug in like Red Sox and Yankees fans; talking about Le Corbusier is a bit like bringing up politics or religion at the Thanksgiving table. This makes the job of the biographer especially challenging; as I point out in the epilogue of the narrative, it is indeed possible to learn some useful things from Le Corbusier (1887-1965), in this very urban 21st century. Talking about Le Corbusier is a bit like bringing up politics or religion at the Thanksgiving table. The man who pioneered 20th-century modernism and the International Style, beginning with the Villa Savoye, above—the architectural equivalent of introducing the iPhone—was an original star architect, adept at public relations but comprehensive in his theoretical approach to design. As such, he dominated architectural training and assumed godlike status among generations of draftsmen. “For an architect of my generation, trained in the early 1980s, Corbusier was architecture—and nothing else mattered,” said Tim Love, principal at the Boston-based design firm Utile. “My entire architectural education consisted of learning ‘moves’ from six buildings—the La Roche/Jeanneret House, the Villa Stein at Garches, the Salvation Army building in Paris, the Swiss Pavilion at the International University campus in Paris, the Millowners building in India, and the Palace of Justice in Chandigarh.”
And then there is an extraordinary dark side, where Le Corbusier didn’t just move to Paris from the watchmaking capital of La Chaux-de-Fonds and change his name from Charles-Edouard Jeanneret—he became, in this widely shared view, a veritable force for evil, a destroyer of cities. He gave us blank walls, windswept plazas, and towers in the park; his wipe-the-slate-clean-and-start-over approach, seen in the 1925 Plan Voisin, a proposal for 60-story towers spaced well apart in the historic district of the Marais in Paris, helped inspire a dark era of urban renewal in this country.
He believed in autocratic, top-down planning, where today it is all about a participatory, citizen-oriented process. He embraced the separation of uses and sought to kill the street, when today it is all about the street, a mix of uses, and a human scale. Le Corbusier started revolutionizing architecture and urban design in earnest in the 1920s; by the end of the 20th century, the triumph of the principles espoused by Jane Jacobs was well established. The refutation came full circle. In many ways, master builder Robert Moses, the Goliath to Jane’s David, was channeling Le Corbusier in the account of their battles in my last book, Wrestling with Moses.
His use of concrete morphed into one of the least-liked styles in America—Brutalism (originally named not for what you might think, but the French beton brut). He inspired not only hundreds of drab downtowns and suburban corporate office parks, with their horizontal strip windows, but works such as Boston City Hall, which has “kick me” taped to it in the public mind. Bad copies of his urban design schemes sprouted up in public housing projects being routinely demolished, like Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis. The iconic photograph of the demolition of that superblock has come to represent the very opposite of good planning: in terms of anticipating how humans would inhabit space, it got everything exactly wrong. Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter. The best way to follow issues you care about. Subscribe Loading... On a personal level, he was larger than life, always sharply dressed, traveling the world, and ready for romance. He was a rock star who convinced many governments of the need to pay attention to housing and cities. But he was also a brazen opportunist who aligned himself with some of history’s most despicable characters, at one point trying to ingratiate himself with the collaborationist Vichy government in World War II. Always chasing the commission, he was accused of being a capitalist, fascist, and communist, all at the same time. He was paternalistic, chauvinistic, a serial philanderer—and he was French! (Though born in Switzerland, he became a French citizen in 1930). He believed in autocratic, top-down planning, where today it is all about a participatory, citizen-oriented process. Any biographer must adopt a policy of showing his subject warts and all, and I readily acknowledge Le Corbusier had some really bad ideas. But my plea is to refrain from throwing out the baby with the modernist bathwater. There are fundamental themes in Le Corbusier’s career that are quite relevant to the most pressing urban issues before us today. The first is his appreciation of scale in planning for the future growth of cities. More than two-thirds of the planet’s population of 9 billion will live in cities by 2050. India alone is going to add 400 million people, an entire new United States, but with virtually no one living in the equivalent of Nebraska. Rural migrants are streaming into burgeoning developing world cities in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, and if minimal preparations are not made, the human suffering will only increase in slums. The staggering project of urban expansion, on its face, requires long-range planning for housing, open space, and infrastructure. It’s whistling past the graveyard to think that a bunch of Greenwich Village-style neighborhoods will do the trick.
The second way today’s design professionals can learn from Le Corbusier is by looking at his pioneering thinking in efficient housing design. The all-inclusive Unite d’Habitation apartment building, an ocean liner on land, was designed to be mass-produced, compact, and affordable, density exceptionally well designed. Some 60 years later, the right-sized needs for living space are seen in the trend of micro-apartments, and in the work, among others, by Bjarke Ingels Group, with projects such as the 8 House.Canada's "apartheid system" of reserves shares some of the blame for a string of suicides that devastated an Innu community on Quebec's North Shore in 2015, a coroner's inquest has found.
Coroner Bernard Lefrançois was tasked last year by the Quebec government with looking into the deaths of four women and one man over a nine-month period in Uashat-Maliotenam, an Innu reserve near Sept-Îles, Que.
His report, released Saturday, is scathing in its description of the legal regime that governs Indigenous communities in Canada. The coroner said it contributes to the mental health and substance abuse problems that plague Uashat-Maliotenam.
"I believe and see evidence that the great fundamental problem lies with the 'apartheid' system into which Aboriginals have been thrust for 150 years or more," the report reads.
"The Indian Act is an ancient and outdated law that establishes two kinds of citizens, Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals. The Aboriginal is a ward of the State, someone considered incapable and unfit."
Suicides of five members of the Innu community of Uashat-Maliotenam in 2015 were preventable, a Quebec coroner has found 2:02
Lefrançois' report also blamed the series of suicides on a lack of mental health resources available to the community of 4,000 people.
The local suicide prevention centre only provides services in French, which is not widely spoken in Uashat-Maliotenam, Lefrançois noted. It does not provide services in Innu or Naskapi.
The shortage of Innu-languages resources extends to substance-abuse treatment. The Naskapi have to travel to Montreal, 900 kilometres away, to receive treatment for alcohol or drug issues in either Naskapi or English.
"Overall, I believe that these five suicides were avoidable," Lefrançois concluded.
"Besides the profound personal discontent of the five persons considered by this inquest, there is the backdrop of profound collective discontent experienced by the community as a whole or by a group of individuals belonging to the community."
'Naming the things that should be named'
The coroner's findings were welcomed by the Innu leaders, who said they felt Lefrançois listened closely to their testimony during a visit to the community last year.
"We knew before what was the problem, but today, Canadians and Quebecers know a little bit more about the situation and what is going on inside the community," said Jean-Claude Therrien Pinnet, a political adviser to the band council in Uashat-Maliotenam.
Jean-Claude Therrien Pinnet, a political adviser to the band council in Uashat-Maliotenam, said the coroner was right to refer to the reserve system as apartheid. (Marika Wheeler/CBC)
Pinnet added that Lefrançois was right to use the charged term apartheid — invoking the system of racial discrimination that existed in South Africa between 1948 and 1991 — to describe Canada's reserve system.
"We are naming the things that should be named," Pinnet said.
"I think that with the kind of situation that we are living and passing through, we should use the good words, and I think that is the best word I saw in the report today."
Recommendations for both Quebec and Ottawa
The report contains more than 40 recommendations, directed at all levels of government. They include:
Ottawa create an Aboriginal suicide prevention centre, with Indigenous staff, on Quebec's North Shore.
A regional task force to fight the drug trade on Quebec's North Shore, with the RCMP, the Sûreté du Québec and Aboriginal police forces as participants.
More programs in Uashat-Maliotenam offering family therapy and extended stays in nature.
Federal and provincial funding for an English addiction treatment facility that can be used by Aboriginal populations in the area.
Quebec's Minister for Public Health and Healthy Living, Lucie Charlebois, said her government will ask Ottawa for help implementing some of the proposals.
"What we find in the recommendations... is that sometimes people don't get services because they [fall between] provincial, federal or local governments," Charlebois told CBC News.
"We know they have difficulties and we've got to help them."
When pressed for concrete commitments, Charlebois said the coroner's report was likely to be discussed at an up-coming cabinet meeting.
She also pointed out her government recently committed to holding a multi-year inquiry into the treatment of Indigenous people in the province.If there is one unifying point between all members of my generation (let’s say folks born between ‘80-‘85) it’s the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES. No matter what the social situation, if I mention the word Nintendo, I’ve got an instant bond with people. Even my wife, who spent most of her childhood reading books (huh?) and playing outside (what?) enthusiastically shares tales of conquering Super Mario Bros. 3 by passing off the controller between siblings until the Koopalings were no more.It was more than a form of entertainment, it was a pop culture milestone that has been redefined with each passing decade. Being born in ’82 and the NES getting its North American release in 1985, it’s something that was always there for me and has so many childhood memories attached to it. I know you’ve got ‘em too, so let’s start playing with power!The day I got my Nintendo was 50-50 split between excitement and confusion. See my brother is 17 years older than me and had experienced the Atari 2600 in all its “glory” during his teenage years. So just imagine his excitement when this 8-bit gaming system with graphics that actually looked like the things they were supposed to represent appeared under the Christmas tree in 1988. It may have had my name on it, but my brother knew I couldn’t truly understand the sheer awesomeness that was about to be unleashed in our home. Frankly, all I cared about at the time was the fact that the system came with guns that clicked when you pulled the trigger. Little boys like guns.Like some kind of special forces operative assembling a sniper rifle, my brother and brother-in-law hooked up the NES to our ancient TV and popped in the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cartridge. I will say, there was something magical about getting 2 games in one, even if Duck Hunt was pretty much a tag along. In case you were wondering, yes, that's the back of young Hoju's head and the satisfied face of my older brother from Christmas morning '88.Soon I was watching Mario stomp flying turtles and dodge Bowser’s flaming belches in a castle where the Princess surely wasn’t. I remember asking the classic, “Is it my turn yet?” on the level where you jump from one “toadstooly” platform to another. After dooming Mario to what I always assumed was death by spikes that were waiting just below the screen, I passed the controller over to my brother-in-law. Then another cartridge found its way into the machine…GOLF?! Seriously, GOLF? I’m not even mad that some parent or relative bought this thinking a kindergartner would want to play it, I’m furious at Nintendo for letting this get past their brainstorming meeting. I mean how did that go, “Let’s see, kids like video games. What else do kids like? Dragons, Machine Guns, wait, I’ve got it, GOLF!” Look, a case could be made that Caddyshack was a big hit a few years prior and if it was themed after Happy Gilmore a few years later I would have let it pass, but this was literally just called Golf and featured what I always considered to be a “human-sized” Mario whacking away at balls (yep, totally went there). This wouldn’t be the first disappointment in a Nintendo game cartridge, but it was for sure the most quickly discarded.As Nintendo’s influence began to spread, the marketing and tie-in promotions were often more exciting to me than the games themselves. I remember Nintendo Game Pack trading/game cards showing up at the impulse buy counters of drug stores around this time. With their bright yellow packaging, who could resist picking up a few?Now theoretically you were buying a pack of these things to play the “game”, which consisted of a scratcher card where you couldn’t win anything but an empty victory. For real, you would scratch away the likely carcinogenic silver circles and if you got the right combination you won…NOTHING! Come on Nintendo, you couldn’t come up with a “Win A Date with Samus Aran” sweepstakes where each winning card counted as an entry? At least offer a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine for every 100 winning cards. Cheapskates.Pointless scratchers aside, the real draw of the Game Packs were the stickers of video game icons like Billy Lee from Double Dragon or King Hippo from Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out (Super Macho Man and Mr. Dream can kiss my grits, Iron Mike is the true king of the ring!). These things were awesome and made the perfect decals to adorn your Control Deck or Trapper Keeper. In fact, when I bought an NES control deck during my most recent nostalgia binge, I made sure to buy a couple Game Packs as well so that it could be properly decorated.One of the other items I always found cool were the Nintendo themed food stuffs. Just a year after I got my NES, those wizards at Nintendo had already moved into the world of handheld electronics with the Game Boy. The arrival of a game system you could fit in your fanny pack had to be announced somehow and one way they decided to spread the word was with Game Boy Gum.Borrowing a concept from the equally awesome Bubble Beeper and Ouch! Gum packs, these smaller plastic replicas were filled with less than fantastic gum, but made up for it with secret tip cards for beating your favorite games. I wonder how many grandparents bought these things for their whiny grandchildren thinking they had made their dreams come true, only to find out this was not the talk of the schoolyard the kid had been bugging them about.Also around this time, Nintendo themed fruit snacks started arriving on store shelves. I am an unabashed fan of fruit snacks and in my opinion they reached their peak with the fully 3-D sculpted Garfield themed treats. But that doesn't mean that Nintendo didn't give them a run for their money with Mario and Zelda crafted confections.The gold box for The Adventure of Link fruit snacks is the clear winner here. Much like the game box and cartridge, the shininess made the item seem that much more desirable and tantrum worthy to a kid back in the day. Also, the fact that you were eating giant bugs and slime creatures was a major plus. I remember opening a package of these at a friend's house and feeling like he had just shared his secret stash with me, they were that amazing.There's so much more I could talk about, but I think I can wrap it up here and leave room for a part 2 one of these days. You might notice, I've barely mentioned video games, you know, the "real" reason people liked Nintendo. The truth is, I was much more into the hype than the games, but it doesn't mean I didn't play my fair share of Contra, Bionic Commando and Marble Madness. You can check out some of my other articles for gaming memories. But how about the toys, clothes and marketing promotions, what do you guys remember?SSL/TLS Suffers 'Bar Mitzvah Attack'
Researcher at Black Hat Asia shows how attackers could abuse a known-weak crypto algorithm to steal credentials and other data from encrypted communications.
SSL/TLS encryption once again is being haunted by an outdated and weak feature long past its prime: a newly discovered attack exploits a weakness in the older, less secure RC4 encryption algorithm option in SSL/TLS that's still supported in many browsers and servers.
Itsik Mantin, director of security research with Imperva, at Black Hat Asia in Singapore today will detail how an attacker could sniff credentials and other information during an SSL session in an attack he named the "Bar Mitzvah Attack" after 13-year-old weaknesses in the algorithm it abuses. The attack is a glaring reminder that the RC4 algorithm, long known to be breakable, should be put to rest once and for all, according to Mantin.
Bar Mitzvah exploits the weak keys used by RC4 and allows an attacker to recover plain text from the encrypted information, potentially exposing account credentials, credit card data, or other sensitive information. And unlike previous SSL hacks, this one doesn't require an active man-in-the-middle session, just passive sniffing or eavesdropping on SSL/TLS-encrypted connections, Mantin says. But MITM could be used as well, though, for hijacking a session, he says.
Using a sniffer, the attacker can passively spy on the SSL sessions of a targeted organization, for instance, or an application. He then can ferret out the keys being used in the encrypted session of a user logging on to his Facebook account, or a ecommerce transaction. The attacker sees "parts of the encrypted message" that can be used to wage an attack, Mantin says. "He can recover part of the random key stored in plain text … and recover parts of the plain text" prior to its being encrypted, he says. "When a weak key is used, part of the plain text can be recovered from the cipher text."
It's basically an algorithm problem, according to Mantin, who notes that most browsers still include support for RC4 and more than half of servers support it. He says some 30% of TLS sessions still use RC4, which for more than a decade has been superseded by the stronger AES algorithm.
Client machines and servers running SSL/TLS negotiate which algorithm to use for encrypted sessions, he explains. "Today, many still have RC4 in this negotiation process," he says. RC4 in some cases gets selected for performance reasons, he says.
The result: if RC4 is an option and gets selected, an attacker can potentially wage the Bar Mitzvah Attack.
But don't panic: Mantin says it's not an imminent threat per se, and fixing it merely requires removing the RC4 algorithm from the mix.
[Everything you need to know about today’s IT security challenges – but were afraid to ask. Register with Discount Code DRBLOG to save $100 for this special one-day event, Dark Reading's Cyber Security Crash Course at Interop on Wednesday, April 29.]
This isn't the first attack demonstrating RC4's woes: in 2013, researchers Nadhem AlFardan, Dan Bernstein, Kenny Paterson, Bertram Poettering and Jacob Schuldt, showed how RC4 is basically broken. "RC4 has been known to be weak for quite many years," says Mantin, who notes that the main difference with his attack and previous RC4 research is that his focuses on the use of the class of weak keys used by RC4.
He says while there's been a gradual trend to phase out RC4 altogether, the process has dragged on.
RC4's troubles have long been in the spotlight, he says, which is frustrating. "This is very odd to me. These things were known in the crypto community for more than a decade, old vulnerabilities in RC4 and in some sense, (they) were ignored by the security industry," Mantin says.
Outdated Features Add Risk
The Bar Mitzvah Attack is yet another in a series of vulnerabilities in SSL/TLS encryption exposed over the past year due to old, outdated options in the encryption implementation. The POODLE (Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption) attack, for example, allowed an attacker to downgrade to the older, less secure SSL Version 3 encryption standard.
More recently, some SSL/TLS client and server implementations were found vulnerable to being forced to employ the weak, old-school 512-bit encryption option long abandoned as easily cracked. Some one-fourth of SSL-encrypted websites were found to be potentially vulnerable to the so-called Factoring RSA Export Keys (FREAK) attack, including FBI.gov and Whitehouse.gov. Microsoft Windows also was found vulnerable to FREAK, and since has been patched for the flaw.
Meanwhile, the Internet Engineering Task (IETF) is well aware of the problem of too many options in the crypto standards, so the new version of TLS currently under development, TLS 1.3, trims the fat in the specification, eliminating older encryption algorithms and other outdated features.
Mantin has now published a white paper with technical details of the attack, available here.
Kelly Jackson Higgins is Executive Editor at DarkReading.com. She is an award-winning veteran technology and business journalist with more than two decades of experience in reporting and editing for various publications, including Network Computing, Secure Enterprise... View Full BioThe following is a guest post from Kay, a member of Ontario group Gender Mosaic:
Bill C-279 is at the one year mark in the Canadian Senate and still hasn’t come to a vote. I know, it’s been so long since this Bill passed parliament that a little refresher will be handy. Below is an excerpt from Amnesty International’s backgrounder on the bill:
Bill C-279 is the fourth attempt to pass legislation on gender identity. NDP Member of Parliament Bill Siksay tried three times. The first two attempts didn’t get off the ground. His third attempt passed Third Reading in the House but died in the Senate. when an election was called. MP Randall Garrison introduced Bill C-279 as a Private Member’s Bill in September 2011. It passed First and Second Reading and was sent to the Justice Committee.
At this point, the Bill sought to include the phrase “gender expression” in addition to “gender identity,” neither of which was accompanied by a definition. Attempts were made in Committee to amend the Bill by removing “gender expression” and adding a definition of “gender identity.” These changes were necessary to maintain the Conservative support that would pass the Bill at Third Reading. Due to a Filibuster by three Conservative MPs at the Justice Committee, the amendments were not completed, and the Bill went back to Third Reading in its original form. MP Randall Garrison was able to convince the Speaker that the entire House should vote on the amendments since the Committee had run out of time. The Speaker agreed and the amendments were passed at Report Stage. The Bill then passed Third Reading in March 2013 with 18 Conservative votes in favour. When the Bill passed the entire opposition stood, faced activists in the Gallery, and gave a standing ovation.
The Bill moved to First Reading in the Senate in March 2013, moved on to Second Reading in May 2013, to the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights in June 2013, and to Third Reading in June 2013. During Third Reading, Senator Nancy Ruth moved an amendment to the Bill that would add “sex” to Sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code, arguing that both sex and gender should be included as criteria for hate propaganda to ensure specific protections for cisgender (ie, women born women). If passed with the amendment, the Bill would have gone back to the House of Commons to be voted on again before becoming law.
Prorogation of Parliament in mid-2013 sent the Bill back to First Reading in the Senate and removed Senator Ruth’s amendment.
The Bill was reinstated when Parliament reconvened in October. It passed First Reading in the Senate in October. Second Reading debate on the Bill began on February 4, 2014 when Senator Grant Mitchell, the Senate sponsor of the Bill, reintroduced it. The Bill is currently at Second Reading in the Senate.
Amnesty International Canada contacted Gender Mosaic earlier this year and asked if they could partner with us and others working on the Bill. As a result, they called a meeting of all interested parties in early February to see what could be done to help the process and to let the Senators know that a lot of people would like the Bill to be passed. The joint statement that was sent to all Senators on February 20th, World Social Justice Day, along with a list of the signatories may be found at:
” http://www.amnesty.ca/news/coalition-letters/equal-rights-for-all-statement-in-support-of-bill-c-279-an-act-to-amend-the “.
Egale Canada also has two related public service announcements which may be found at: ” http://trans.egalecanada.org/ “.
Why is your action needed and why now?
Bill C-279 is facing significant opposition in the Senate. We need to influence Senators now, while the Bill is in Second Reading, and then again at Committee. Broad support both from within and outside the LGBTI community is needed to show that this is a fundamental human rights issue that we, representing a broad cross-section of Canadian society, all support without reservation.
What can you do?
Send letters, emails, and make phone calls to the Senators asking them to support Bill C-279. Enlist your friends too.
This bill has spent too many years languishing in the house and now in the Senate. It has never been so close to becoming law, now is the time to push it through the last obstacles.
Thank you
Kay
VP Gender MosaicThe Turnbull government will not rule out trying again to implement its full company tax cut plan as the Senate was poised last night to either curtail the package or, due to a late standoff between One Nation and the Nick Xenophon Team, scuttle any deal at all.
Treasurer Scott Morrison seemed resigned to achieving a tax cut for business with a $10 million turnover only but said that would not be insignificant and would be "a very, very good result for those 2.2 million Australians" employed in these businesses.
The Senate was scheduled to sit until midnight and then resume on Friday to resolve the situation. This is the last sitting week before the May 9 budget and the government wants to draw a line under the company tax cuts which where the centrepiece of its 2016 election campaign.
Senator Nick Xenophon could support company tax cuts in exchange for an emissions intensity scheme. Andrew Meares
The situation was made more confusing by Nick Xenophon having to dash back to Canberra on Thursday night to resume negotiations after spending Wednesday and Thursday in Adelaide for the funeral of a relative and leaving the government unable to meaningfully negotiate.
Before boarding a plane to Canberra late Thursday, Senator Xenophon was adamant his party, whose three votes are critical, would not be budging from its long-held position to only allow the first phase of the 10-year plan – a cut from 30 per cent to 27.5 per cent rate for firms with turnovers up to $10 million.On behalf of the newspaper industry, I’d like to thank CP Rail and the City of Vancouver for their very public fight over the future of the Arbutus Corridor. At least somebody’s making money off of this thing. To wit:
CP, losing the public relations battle when it razed the gardens of horticultural squatters along its tracks, attempted to regain some public sympathy Monday when it took out a full-page ad in The Sun and the city’s other major newspapers. The ad was entitled “Clarity and Context: On CP’s Discussions with the City of Vancouver over the Arbutus Corridor,” and it was written by CP chief executive officer E. Hunter Harrison — at least, that’s his illegible scrawl at the bottom of the page.
Harrison’s main points can be summed up as:
• The City of Vancouver is being a real dillhole by offering a laughably small sum of money for the corridor.
And:
• No, I mean really laughable, like you’d pee yourself.
“At the heart of the issue,” Harrison writes, “is the value of the corridor. Based on independent third-party proposals using the value of the adjoining lands — the standard method for assessing this type of rail corridor — the Arbutus corridor has been valued at more than $400 million. As this was done a number of years ago, the value is significantly higher today.”
In the interests of the citizens of Vancouver, Harrison wrote, CP was prepared to accept “far less” — a reported $100 million — which, you know, is practically an act of philanthropy. The city offered $20 million. In CP’s book, that’s practically an act of thievery.
Alternative proposals suggested by CP were also rejected by the city, Harrison wrote — including “small portions of the corridor rezoned for development by CP with the remainder donated to the city,” or a straight land swap of city land of equal value being given over to CP.
Harrison wasn’t available for comment Monday, but CP vice-president of corporate affairs Mark Wallace spoke with me. He was handling the Arbutus file for CP, he said.
“We think we’ve been more than reasonable,” Wallace said. “We think the value of the corridor is well in excess of $400 million, and we’re only asking a fraction of that price, and we’re still not there.
“The city asked me to give it one last shot (after negotiations fell through), and asked me to stop work on the corridor pending that one last meeting. So we did. On Sept. 12, I flew to Vancouver and met with the city... Unfortunately, the city was not in a position to move significantly off the position where they were. They did not have any new creative ideas in terms of how to generate value for us.... So we walked away at the end of the day.”
Wallace refused to say which of its properties adjoining the corridor it had proposed to the city for rezoning, or how many properties it was asking for in a land swap. So much for clarity and context.
As for the future, Wallace said, CP would be returning its work crews to the corridor and have the line operational “by the end of the year.” Several ideas were being considered for its use, he said — railcar storage, a training ground for crews, a rail-welding facility for track upgrades. I’m sure westsiders will be thrilled with any of them.
“One thing we know is the rail line is going to earn its keep,” Wallace said. “It’s not going to sit there for the next decade.”
Bluster? Another negotiating ploy? Time will tell.
At City Hall, however, the ad seems only to have solidified council’s position. Coun. Heather Deal, speaking on behalf of the city, said:
“I’m very disappointed in (the ad). It’s going over territory we’ve already covered and we’d much rather be sitting at the table with CP. But we won’t be bullied into spending tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money for land that has value as a transportation corridor, not residential.”
But at that point in the interview, Deal allowed that there was the possibility, or at least the potential, that the corridor could see residential development along it some time in the future.
“If it were to happen in the future, then there would be some kind of a letter of understanding with CP around sharing that value change. We’re willing to have that conversation with them, but we are very steadfast that it is going to be retained as a transportation corridor, and that’s the value of the land at this time.”
The parameters of this deal, then, would seem to be mutable. Which is to say, the city would share the partial value of any change to residential use along the corridor with CP for land the railway previously owned and wanted to develop itself, but which it would have had to sell to the city at a devalued price on the basis that the city maintained the land would never be used for anything but transportation. Who’s railroading whom?
For the record, I think $20 million for 11 kilometres of real estate through the country’s most expensive neighbourhoods is ludicrously low, transportation corridor or not.
Unlike CP, though, I don’t have to take out a full-page ad to say so.
pmcmartin@vancouversun.com
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Displayed + Plus Sign. Dot o Circle * Star p Pentagon s Square x X Character D Diamond h Hexagon ^ Triangle
Linestyle Code Line style Displayed – Solid Line — Dashed Line : Dotted Line -. Dash-Dotted Line None No Connecting Lines
We should probably add a legend as well, to let the viewer know which curve is which. To do this, we can simply modify the two plot method calls by adding a label argument, and add a call to pyplot.legend() to draw the legend box. Once we do this, our plotting code will look like this:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt radius = [1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0] area = [3.14159, 12.56636, 28.27431, 50.26544, 78.53975, 113.09724] square = [1.0, 4.0, 9.0, 16.0, 25.0, 36.0] plt.plot(radius, area, label='Circle') plt.plot(radius, square, marker='o', linestyle='--', color='r', label='Square') plt.xlabel('Radius/Side') plt.ylabel('Area') plt.title('Area of Shapes') plt.legend() plt.show()
This will give us a nifty little plot like this:
Well, now you should be able to make some pretty looking plots of linear data! In the next installment, I will be showing you how to make another common type of plot: a histogram. Feel free to leave me comments on what topics I should cover in future posts.
Basic Data Plotting With Matplotlib
Part 1: Introduction
Part 3: Histograms
Part 4: Multiple Plots (Coming Soon)
Part 5:?World map of time zones, with the UTC-12 time zone highlighted.
Anywhere on Earth (AoE) is a calendar designation which indicates that a period expires when the date passes everywhere on Earth. The last place on Earth where any date exists is on Howland and Baker islands, in the IDLW time zone (the West side of the International Date Line), and so is the last spot on the globe for any day to exist. Therefore, the day ends AoE when it ends on Howland Island.[1]
The convention originated in IEEE 802.16 balloting procedures. At this point, many IEEE 802 ballot deadlines are established as the end of day using "AoE", for "Anywhere on Earth" as a designation. This means that the deadline has not passed if, anywhere on Earth, the deadline date has not yet passed.
The day's end AoE occurs at noon Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) of the following day,[1] Howland and Baker islands being halfway around the world from the prime meridian that is the base reference longitude for UTC. Thus, in standard notation this is:
UTC−12:00 hour[2] Daylight Saving Time: DST is not applied, nor applicableAhmad Sami Kheder, from south London, and Hisham Fadlallah, from Nottinghamshire, abandoned medical degrees in Sudan to join Isis in Syria
Two British students who abandoned medical degrees in Sudan a couple of years ago to work as doctors helping Isis in Syria have been killed in fighting, it has emerged.
Ahmad Sami Kheder, 25, originally from Carshalton in south London, is understood to have died last weekend when a convoy he was travelling with leaving Mosul, Iraq, was hit by gunfire.
Nine British medics enter Isis stronghold to work in hospitals Read more
Hisham Fadlallah, from Nottinghamshire, was also killed, although it is not known whether he was killed in the same incident. A source close to Fadlallah’s family confirmed the deaths and said the family is flying to Khartoum for the wake.
Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi-based writer on extremist groups, told the Guardian: “This information is correct. They were British-Sudanese medics killed near Mosul on Sunday.”
Mosul is currently the scene of fierce battles as Iraqi forces backed by US and coalition military attempt to wrest control of the city from Isis.
A Foreign Office spokeswoman said the government is aware of reports of their deaths and said: “We advise against all but essential travel to Iraq and against all travel to large parts. Anyone who does travel to these areas, for whatever reason, is putting themselves in considerable danger.”
Kheder and Fadlallah were among the medical students of British origin at the University of Medical Sciences and Technology in Sudan who travelled to Syria in successive waves from 2015 onwards. The Sunday Times estimated last month that 22 such people had attempted to join Isis, including several sets of siblings.
The pair left Khartoum, Sudan, for Syria in early 2015 as part of a group of nine students that also included Kheder’s sister Nada, 22.
In 2015 Kheder appeared in an Isis propaganda film that sought to portray the group in a softer light, including footage of babies in hospital, high-tech medical equipment and Kheder sitting at a desk with a stethoscope or teaching a class of students.
Raffaello Pantucci, director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute and author of a book on British foreign fighters, said Kheder and his cohort had been valuable to Isis’s propaganda efforts.
“They were interesting because they were showcasing a positive message for the group,” he told the Guardian. “This is a group that’s eager to show it’s not just a bunch of guys chopping off heads, it’s doctors, engineers, everyone. And having these well-spoken British kids showing up and saying these sorts of things was quite useful for that cause.”
The British medical students who left Khartoum to join Isis are believed to have been radicalised at the university’s Islamic Cultural Association, a low-key group founded in 2006 to help western students become closer to their religion. The organisation is accused of being the hub from which Isis recruited at least 24 medical students from Sudan.
The association became increasingly hardline after 2011, when Mohammed Fakhri al-Khabass, 26, from Middlesbrough, became its president. The university told the BBC he played a “major role” in recruiting and radicalising for Isis. His whereabouts remain unknown.
Kheder is understood to have been recruited by Mohammed Fakhri al-Khabass, a British man of Palestinian origin Photograph: Handout
It is believed Kheder and Fadlallah initially attended a medical faculty opposite Raqqa’s National Hospital after entering Syria to join Isis in March 2015. Isis opened the facility in January as part of its embryonic health ministry. Kheder later moved to work in a medical facility in Deir Ezzor province in the Islamic State, much of which remains territory occupied by Isis.“What if Assad didn’t order this? What if this wasn’t a Syrian troop chemical attack? What if this was perpetrated by al Qaeda affiliated oppositionists?”
Hillary Mann Leverett is a Senior Adjunct Professor at American University specializing in politics and international relations of the Muslim world. She joined a panel on MSNBC to discuss the ongoing Syrian crisis and its comparisons to the intervention in Iraq, detailing the lies in the run up to the war. She was in the Bush administration at the time and remembers the fabricated evidence that was used in order to sell the American people on the invasion. In this heated debate, she takes on four panelists over whether the US needs to intervene in the civil war and verbally bashes her colleagues naiveté drawing on her experiences in both the Bush and the Clinton administrations.
“The American people need a debate on this!”Child cry
A conservative legal advocacy group is threatening a lawsuit against a school that is accused of stopping a 5-year-old girl from praying.
Officials at Seminole County Schools issued an apology to the girl’s family last week, although they found “zero evidence an incident ever occurred.”
The girl’s father, Marco Perez, posted video of his kindergartener daughter making the claim earlier this month, and Fox News correspondent Todd Starnes wrote a column about the alleged incident.
Perez is vice president of sales for the Christian publisher Charisma House, which will release Starnes’ new book — “God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values” — next week.
Attorney Jeremy Dys, of the Liberty Institute, issued a statement Wednesday saying the family was “grateful” for the school district’s apology, along with assurances that students were permitted to “exercise their First Amendment freedoms” to pray at school.
But two days later, reported Right Wing Watch, Dys and the family rejected the apology and accused the school of never conducting an investigation into the girl’s claims.
Dys sent a letter Friday to the school district requesting video footage, emails to or about the Perez family, or phone logs related to the case.
The school’s investigation found no evidence that the employee accused of ordering the girl to stop praying had been anywhere near the lunchroom where kindergartners and first-graders eat.
“We apologized for the incident she believes occurred, but there was nothing warranted or found,” said school district spokesman Mike Lawrence.
Dys said Lawrence made “false and defamatory statements publicly and intentionally” about the girl and her family and requested he be disciplined.
“Mr. Lawrence went out and essentially called our client a liar,” Dys said.
The Liberty Institute threatened to take legal action against the school, claiming the family were the victims of “false and defamatory statements” because the school announced their public accusations had turned out to be groundless.
Starnes’ book, which is about alleged discrimination against Christians in American society, is due out May 6.CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — A sandwich shop in West Virginia’s capital plans to expand next week to add craft beer and ax throwing.
Chadrick Harper, owner of the Lucky Dill Deli, tells WSAZ-TV the addition will be called “Axes and Ales” and will allow customers to hurl real axes into a wooden target.
Starting Dec. 14, the Charleston business expects to have five ax-throwing courts open Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings.
There are rules.
You have to be 21 to play and get safety training. It costs $40 to reserve one court, separated from others by Plexiglas dividers, for one hour. Up to four can play.
A projector displays the target, tells people when to throw and when to pull an ax off the target to ensure that no one is in the line of fire.
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Information from: WSAZ-TV, http://www.wsaz.comDixon Machado
The Detroit Tigers added infielder Dixon Machado to their 40-man roster Thursday to protect him from the Rule 5 draft.
(AP File Photo)
The Detroit Tigers added two players to their 40-man roster prior to the deadline Thursday to protect them from next month's Rule 5 draft.
The Tigers announced this morning that they have purchased the contracts of infielder Dixon Machado and pitcher Angel Nesbitt from Double-A Erie.
The Tigers now have 40 players on their 40-man roster.
Machado, 22, hit.286 with 75 runs, 31 doubles, six home runs and 40 RBIs in 131 games in Single-A Lakeland and Double-A Erie in 2014. He hit.305 in 90 games for Erie and was named the Eastern League Player of the Month for August.
Machado, who plays extremely well defensively and has a strong arm, hadn't hit much at all during his time in the minors prior to breaking out after he joined Erie.
"I was encouraged with Dixon's improved hitting this year," Tigers assistant general manager Al Avila said. "The main reason for his improvement was that his body is finally showing signs of getting stronger. Dixon has a sound hitting approach and a good swing."
Nesbitt, 23, went 3-0 with a 1.49 ERA, 72 strikeouts and 20 saves in 48 games for Single-A Lakeland and Double-A Erie in 2014. Opponents batted just.183 against him.
The Rule 5 draft is scheduled for Dec. 11, the final day of the winter meetings in San Diego. Players are eligible for the draft if:
They were 19 or older when they signed and have played four years of professional ball or if they were 18 or older when they signed and have played five years.
They are not on their team's 40-man roster.
A player selected in the Rule 5 draft must remain on his new team's 25-man roster for the following season. If not, he has to be offered back to his original team.
The Tigers prospect most likely to be selected by another team in the Rule 5 draft is right-handed pitcher Edgar De La Rosa. Relief pitcher Joel Hanrahan, who recently signed a minor-league deal with the Tigers, is also eligible to be selected.
-- Download the Detroit Tigers on MLive app for iPhone and Android.
-- Like MLive's Detroit Tigers Facebook page.Some City of Winnipeg money, earmarked for repairing riverbank erosion, appears to have gone missing.
Councillors on the downtown development committee were told by city administrators Thursday morning that about $1 million is no longer there, that it may have been reallocated in the fall due to budget issues.
The news floored Coun. Brian Mayes, who has some serious riverbank erosion issues in his St. Vital ward.
He said there was no vote to move the money and he's determined to find out where it went and get it back.
"I want answers and this is very upsetting, like this is something I've, I had a big announcement on in my ward, about that particular project, Guay Park," said Mayes, who plans to bring the issue up at the city's executive policy committee meeting on Friday.
"Where's the money? We don't know where the money's gone. None of us voted to reallocate the money."
Mobile link
Mobile linkWhen the bullets started flying, people had nowhere to run.
"People were running into the tents. You know a tent cannot stop a bullet," said Boum Kaboung, a South Sudanese man living on Juba's west side in a United Nations camp for displaced people where gunfire killed eight and injured 59 others Monday.
Heavy fighting in South Sudan's capital city has killed at least 300 people and injured many more. The UN says at least 7,000 people have sought shelter at its compounds since the fighting began Friday.
South Sudan First Vice-President Riek Machar (L) and President Salva Kiir held a press conference at the presidential palace in Juba on Friday after the fighting broke out. (Associated Press) The violence broke out at the president's official residence between government forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and fighters loyal to First Vice-President Riek Machar.
South Sudan, the youngest country in the world, had been recovering from a two-year civil war that erupted in 2013 after the president, an ethnic Dinka, accused the vice-president, a Nuer, of planning a coup. The war killed tens of thousands of people and started with a similar clash between the rival political factions.
On Monday, two days after the country was meant to celebrate its five years of independence, streets were empty as loud explosions and gunfire were heard near the airport and the United Nations base on the city's west side.
Camp is chaotic
"We don't feel like we are now a country," said Kaboung, a former government worker who has lived in the UN camp since the civil war began.
Kaboung said the situation in the camp is chaotic. Chinese UN peacekeepers tend to a wounded colleague after an attack on an armoured personal carrier used by the Chinese peacekeepers in Jebel, South Sudan. (Associated Press)
The incessant noise of gunfire, RPGs, tanks and attack helicopters had the residents running for cover. Some UN staff, who live in the nearby base, lay on the floors of their apartments for hours to avoid stray bullets.
Although the fighting quieted around 3 p.m. Monday at the camp, Kaboung said the situation remains volatile. People are running out of food and water. They're afraid the fighting will start again.
In the city, the streets were quiet.
'A lot of destruction'
At the Juba Youth Training Centre, South Sudanese-Canadian Puro Okelo Obob was sheltering five families who fled fighting in Gudele, a neighbourhood in the city's northwest.
South Sudanese-Canadian Puro Okelo Obob is held up in the Juba Youth Training Centre. He said water supplies in some parts of the city are beginning to run out. (Carolyn Thompson/CBC News) He runs a kickboxing gym out of a technical training school located in the centre.
He said the streets were deserted and shops closed Monday morning. The only people outside other than military were those carrying small packs of belongings, seeking safety across the Nile River in a neighbourhood east of the city.
"There is a lot of destruction," he said. "A lot of displaced people. A lot of homeless. People have no place to go."
Obob said water supplies have dwindled in some areas, leaving people drinking from pools of rainwater.
Stephen Affear Ochalla said when fighting broke out near his Gudele home, he decided to walk to the centre, where he runs a cooking program.
When he heard shots getting closer, he ran.
He said his other family members are hiding out in relatives' homes.
'I am so scared'
EvelineLimuBuni went to pray for peace at church Sunday morning. Instead, she took cover there for hours, waiting for the gunfire outside to calm down so she could make her way home to Munuki, a neighbourhood in the city's north end.
She spoke to CBC News on Monday with the sound of gunfire in the background.
South Sudanese policemen and soldiers are seen along a street following renewed fighting in South Sudan's capital Juba. (Reuters) "I am so scared. People did not go to work. People are fearing to go out," she said.
President Salva Kiir declared a unilateral ceasefire Monday evening, set to start at 6 p.m. Shortly after, troops celebrated, peppering the city with a raucous chorus of gunfire.
But some of those displaced by the violence are worried it's not over yet.
Ochalla said he's disappointed South Sudan's independence day was marred by fighting and fears it could worsen. He called on the international community to act.
"If people want to react, they have to react now — or it will be too late for South Sudan."By Raymond Lesniak
Protecting our environment, growing our economy and creating jobs can grow hand in hand if we adopt my NJGROW Healthy plan to make New Jersey fossil fuel free by 2050, invest in mass transit, and require strong vehicle emissions standards.
I have sponsored the most important environmental protection laws in the nation. Here's what I would do as governor to continue to protect our environment, grow our economy and stand up to President Trump's assault on environmental protection:
Overturn ExxonMobil settlement
Oral argument will be heard May 23 on my appeal of Gov. Chris Christie's settlement of a $8.9 billion damage claim for $225 million against ExxonMobil. I've sued Exxon and the NJ petrochemical industry in federal district court in the past and won to make them pay to cleanup abandoned hazardous waste sites. That victory and my sponsorship of the Environmental Cleanup Responsibility Act have cleaned up tens of thousands of contaminated sites and saved New Jersey from an environmental disaster.
Stop the pipelines and make New Jersey fossil fuel free by 2050
Three proposed natural gas and oil pipelines, Penn East, South Jersey Gas and Pilgrim Oil present serious environmental hazards and conflict with my goal to make New Jersey fossil fuel free my 2050. If allowed to be built, New Jersey will be committed to fossil fuel for another century.
New Jersey has the 10th highest energy costs in the nation and is the 16th highest emitter of carbon. Our reliance on fossil fuels is 98.2 percent costing every homeowner an average of $3,000 a year which will continue to grow as fossil fuel plants age and require more investment.
Gubernatorial candidate Ray Lesniak talks to Tom Moran for a Star-Ledger editorial board meeting. Posted by NJ.com Opinion on Wednesday, May 3, 2017
New Jersey's cost of energy, health care costs from pollution, maintaining a distribution system often disrupted and needing increased expense from storm damage will continue to increase.
Here's my solution to make New Jersey fossil fuel free by 2050:
Stop The Pinelands, PennEast and Pilgrim Pipelines. Not only will they threaten to contaminate our water supply and disrupt pristine private and public lands, they will commit New Jersey to a future of reliance on fossil fuels and consume $billions of investment that should go to producing solar and wind energy and energy efficiency.
Create jobs: Engineers, technology developers, solar and wind construction jobs and maintenance and energy efficiency installers.
Air quality and health: Replacing aging fossil fuel plants with clean solar and wind and lowering demand with energy efficiency will enhance our quality of life and improve productivity with lower sick days and time off from work.
Revise the state's Energy Master Plan to promote renewable energy. (Christie revised it to promote natural gas usage.)
Eliminate threats to our drinking water
Christie has ignored 12 testing recommendations of hazardous contaminants by the Drinking Water Quality Institute established under my Safe Drinking Water Act. I will have my DEP commissioner adopt them as soon as I'm sworn in as governor.
Get the lead out
Priority funding must be appropriated to replace lead lined pipes in school districts and remove lead paint in public housing.
Get back into RGGI
Christie withdrew New Jersey from this 10 state compact to trap and reduce CO2 emissions hurting our air quality and costing more than $100 million of revenue from the sale of emission allowances which would have promoted clean energy initiatives.
Who is Raymond Lesniak and why is he running to succeed Christie as N.J. governor? Raymond Lesniak has been a name in New Jersey politics for decades. Now he is running a longshot bid for governor.
Clean cars and trucks and investing in mass transit
The No. 1 contributor to pollution in New Jersey comes from cars and trucks. A recent MIT study reported that 200,000 U.S.residents a year die from CO2 emissions from vehicles. NJ must adopt California's strict vehicle emissions standards and invest in a world class mass transit system.
Water and sewer infrastructure
A ticking time bomb that threatens the health, safety and quality of life of residents in communities throughout the state. A multi-billion dollar bond initiative must be passed before the threat of sewer overflow and contaminated water becomes a reality.
Germany, one of the world's most productive economies, has already achieved fossil fuel freedom. As governor, I will lead New Jersey in that direction and protect the safety of our drinking water and reduce air pollution.
Raymond Lesniak (D-Union) is a state senator and a candidate for governor of New Jersey.
Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.The 1988 Winter Olympics, officially known as the XV Olympic Winter Games (French: Les XVes Jeux olympiques d'hiver), was a Winter Olympics multi-sport event celebrated in and around Calgary, Alberta, Canada, between February 13 and 28, 1988 and were the first Winter Olympics to be held over a whole two week period. The host city was selected in 1981 over Falun, Sweden, and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy. Most events took place in Calgary while several skiing events were held in the mountain resorts of Nakiska and Canmore, west of the city.
A then-record 57 nations competed and 1,423 athletes participated. As it had in Montreal in 1976, Canada again failed to win a gold medal in an official medal event as the host nation. Finnish ski jumper Matti Nykänen and Dutch speed skater Yvonne van Gennip were individual medal leaders with each winning three gold medals. The games are also remembered for the "heroic failure" of British ski jumper Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards, and the Winter Olympic début of the Jamaica national bobsled team, both of which would be subjects of major feature films about their participation in the games.
The Calgary games were at the time one of the most expensive Olympics ever held, but the organizing committee turned record television and sponsorship revenue into a net surplus that was used to maintain the facilities built for the Olympics and develop the Calgary region into the heart of Canada's elite winter sports program. The five purpose-built venues continue to be used in their original functions, and have helped the country develop into one of the top nations in Winter Olympic competition; Canada more than quintupled the five medals it won in Calgary at the 2010 games, the next Winter Olympics hosted on Canadian soil in Vancouver. Calgary is the largest city to host the Winter Olympics; however, the census metropolitan area of Greater Vancouver could also be considered the largest metropolitan area to host the Winter Olympics. Nonetheless, this title will soon to be turned over to Beijing in 2022.
Host city selection [ edit ]
1988 Winter Olympics bidding results[1] City Country Round 1 Round 2 Calgary Canada 35 48 Falun Sweden 25 31 Cortina d'Ampezzo Italy 18 —
The bid for the 1988 Winter Olympics was Canada's seventh attempt at hosting a winter games and Calgary's fourth. Previous bids representing Montreal (1956) and Vancouver (1976 and 1980) bookended failed attempts by the Calgary Olympic Development Association (CODA) to host the 1964, 1968 and 1972 games.[2] The CODA became dormant in 1966 after losing its bid for the 1972 Olympics, but was revived in 1979 under the leadership of Frank King to bid for the 1988 games.[3] Calgary earned the right to bid on behalf of Canada by the Canadian Olympic Association (COA), defeating a rival challenge from a group representing Vancouver. The defeated organizing group lamented that they lost to Calgary's "big-ticket games"; the Calgary bid proposed to spend nearly three times what the Vancouver group expected to pay to host the Olympics.[4]
The CODA then spent two years building local support for the project, selling memberships to 80,000 of the city's 600,000 residents.[1] It secured C$270 million in funding from the federal and provincial governments while civic leaders, including Mayor Ralph Klein, crisscrossed the world attempting to woo International Olympic Committee (IOC) delegates.[3] Driven by the arrival of the National Hockey League's Calgary Flames, the city had already begun constructing an Olympic coliseum (later named the Olympic Saddledome) prior to the IOC vote, an action that demonstrated Calgary's determination to host the games and positively influenced delegates.[5] The city was one of three finalists, opposed by the Swedish community of Falun and Cortina d'Ampezzo, the Italian town that hosted the 1956 Winter Olympics.[3]
The vote was held September 30, 1981, at Baden-Baden, West Germany, during the 84th IOC Session and 11th Olympic Congress. After Cortina d'Ampezzo was eliminated in the first round of balloting, Calgary won the right to host the games over Falun by a 48–31 vote.[1] The announcement of the CODA's victory sent delegates in Baden-Baden and residents of Calgary into celebration.[6] It was the first Winter Olympics awarded to Canada, and the second games overall, following the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal.[7]
Venues [ edit ]
[8] The IIHF called the Olympic Saddledome "the finest international rink in the world". It is also the largest hockey arena ever used at the Olympics with a capacity of 20,016 in 1988.
It was Bill Pratt, the former contractor who took over as Calgary Organizing Committee president in 1983, and who supervised the enormous construction project. Says Donald Jacques, general manager of the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede: "Because of him, everything was built on time and on budget." But Pratt rubbed many colleagues the wrong way. As a former co-worker predicted in 1983: "He will get everything built. There may not be many left around to enjoy it, but he'll get it done." His relations with the media were also difficult at times. He had barely settled into his job when the Calgary press began criticizing the committee for excessive secrecy and for awarding Olympic contracts to the Calgary public relations firm of Francis Williams and Johnson, where Pratt had been a director, oco insisted there was no conflict of interest. Declares Pratt: "I have been nailed for a lot, but that does not bother me. The record stands."[9]
McMahon Stadium, Calgary's primary outdoor facility, was the site of both the opening and closing ceremonies, the first time in 28 years that the same venue hosted both events.[10] Three other existing venues served as secondary facilities: The Max Bell Centre hosted the demonstration events of curling and short track speed skating. The Father David Bauer Olympic Arena hosted some ice hockey matches, as did the Stampede Corral, which also played host to some figure skating events.[10] Though the Corral did not support the size of the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF)'s standard ice surface, the Calgary Organizing Committee (Olympiques Calgary Olympics '88 or OCO'88) was able to convince the IIHF to sanction the arena in exchange for a $1.2 million payment.[11]
The Games' five primary venues were all purpose-built however, at significant cost.[12] The Olympic Saddledome was the primary venue for ice hockey and figure skating. Located at Stampede Park, the facility was expected to cost $83 million but cost overruns pushed the facility to nearly $100 million.[10] The Olympic Oval was built on the campus of the University of Calgary. It was the first fully enclosed 400-metre speed skating venue in the world as it was necessary to protect against the possibility of either bitter cold temperatures or ice-melting chinook winds.[11] Seven world and three Olympic records were broken during the Games, resulting in the facility earning praise as "the fastest ice on Earth".[10] Canada Olympic Park was built on the western outskirts of Calgary and hosted bobsled, luge, ski jumping and freestyle skiing. It was the most expensive facility built for the games, costing $200 million.[10]
Two facilities were built west of Calgary, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The Canmore Nordic Centre was 90-percent funded by the Province of Alberta at a cost of $17.3 million. Located near the community of Canmore it was built with the intention that it would become a year-round recreation destination for Albertans. The facility hosted cross-country skiing, biathlon and Nordic combined events.[13] Nakiska (Cree for "to meet") was the most controversial facility built.[11] The province paid the $25 million construction cost for the alpine skiing facility on Mount Allen, about an hour west of Calgary.[14] It was initially criticized for the location's relative lack of snow, requiring artificial snow making machines to be installed, and for an initial lack of technical difficulty.[11] International Ski Federation officials proposed modifications to the courses that ultimately met with praise from competitors.[15]
Preparations [ edit ]
Television [ edit ]
The official poster of the 1988 Winter Olympics
The Calgary Winter Olympics were the first winter games to earn a significant television revenue base; where the 1980 Lake Placid Games generated only US$20.7 million worldwide, OCO'88 generated $324.9 million in broadcast rights.[16] The overwhelming majority of television revenues came from the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), which agreed in 1984 to pay $309 million for American television rights, over three times the $91.5 million it paid for the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo.[17] The deal, at the time the highest amount ever paid for a sporting event, allowed organizers to announce the Games would be debt-free.[18] The CTV Television Network paid C$4.5 million for Canadian rights and to act as the host broadcaster.[19] The games were also televised on CBC. While western European nations paid US$5.7 million combined.[20]
OCO'88 made several alterations to the Olympic program as part of efforts to ensure value for its broadcast partners. Premier events, including ice hockey and figure skating, were scheduled for prime time and the Games were lengthened to 16 days from the previous 12 to ensure three weekends of coverage.[21] However, a significant downturn in advertising revenue for sporting events resulted in ABC forecasting significant financial losses on the Games. Calgary organizers appreciated their fortunate timing in signing the deal. King described the timing of the contract with ABC as "the passing of the sun and the moon at the right time for Calgary."[20] ABC lost an estimated $60 million, and broadcast rights to the 1992 Winter Olympics were later sold to the CBS network for $243 million, a 20% reduction compared to Calgary.[22]
Ticketing controversies [ edit ]
A series of ticket-related scandals plagued the organizing committee as the Games approached, resulting in widespread public anger.[23] Demand for tickets was high, particularly for the premier events which had sold out a year in advance. Residents had been promised that only 10 percent of tickets would go to "Olympic insiders", IOC officials and sponsors, but OCO'88 was later forced to admit that up to 50 percent of seats to top events had gone to insiders.[11] The organizing committee, which was subsequently chastised by mayor Klein for running a "closed shop", admitted that it had failed to properly communicate the obligations it had to supply IOC officials and sponsors with priority tickets.[24] These events were preceded by OCO'88's ticketing manager being charged with theft and fraud after he sent modified ticket request forms to Americans that asked them to pay in United States funds rather than Canadian and to return them to his company's post office box rather than that of the organizing committee.[25]
Organizers attempted to respond to public concern by asking sponsors to consider reducing their orders and by paying $1.5 million to add 2,600 seats to the Saddledome. King also noted that the Calgary Games offered a then-record 1.7 million tickets for sale, three times the amount available at Sarajevo or Lake Placid, and that 82 percent of them were going to Calgarians.[24] By their start, a Winter Games' record of over 1.4 million tickets had been sold,[26] a figure that eclipsed the previous three Winter Games combined.[27]
Community [ edit ]
Hidy and Howdy were the mascots of the Calgary Games.
The city, which already had a strong volunteering tradition with the annual Calgary Stampede, also relied heavily on volunteers to run the Olympics. Over 22,000 people signed up to fill 9,400 positions, no matter how inglorious: doctors, lawyers and executives offered to clean manure dropped by horses at the opening ceremonies.[28] Many residents participated in a "Homestay" program, opening their homes to visitors from around the world and renting rooms to those who could not stay in a hotel.[11]
Klein was among those who felt it necessary that the event be community driven, a decision which allowed the city's welcoming spirit to manifest.[29] The Games' mascots, Hidy and Howdy, were designed to evoke images of "western hospitality".[30] The smiling, cowboy-themed polar bears were popular across Canada. Played by a team of students from Bishop Carroll High School, the sister-brother pair made up to 300 appearances per month in the lead up to the Games.[31] From their introduction at the closing ceremonies of the Sarajevo Games in 1984 until their retirement at the conclusion of the Calgary Games, the pair made about 50,000 appearances.[32] The iconic mascots graced signs welcoming travelers to Calgary for nearly two decades until they were replaced in 2007.[33]
Finances [ edit ]
Held at a price of C$829 million, the Calgary Olympics cost more to stage than any previous Games, summer or winter.[26] The high cost was anticipated, as organizers were aware at the outset of their bid that most facilities would have to be constructed.[4] The venues, constructed primarily with public money, were designed to have lasting use beyond the Games and were planned to become the home of several of Canada's national winter sports teams.[34]
The Games were a major economic boon for the city which had fallen into its worst recession in 40 years following the collapse of both oil and grain prices in the mid-1980s.[27][35] A report prepared for the city in January 1985 estimated the games would create 11,100 man-years of employment and generate C$450-million in salaries and wages.[36] In its post-Games report, OCO'88 estimated the Olympics created C$1.4 billion in economic benefits across Canada during the 1980s, 70 percent within Alberta, as a result of capital spending, increased tourism and new sporting opportunities created by the facilities.[37]
Torch relay [ edit ]
Event highlights [ edit ]
There were 46 events contested in 6 sports (10 disciplines).
The 1988 Winter Games began on February 13 with a $10 million opening ceremony that featured 5,500 performers,[38] an aerial flyover by the Royal Canadian Air Force's Snowbirds,[39] the parade of nations and the release of 1,000 homing pigeons.[38] Canadian composer David Foster performed the instrumental theme song ("Winter Games") and its vocal counterpart ("Can't You Feel It?"),[40] while internationally recognized Canadian folk/country musicians Gordon Lightfoot and Ian Tyson were among the featured performers.[41] Governor General Jeanne Sauvé opened the Games on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II as an estimated 1.5 billion people watched the ceremony.[42][43]
Katarina Witt won gold in women's figure skating
The weather was a dominant story throughout much of the Games, as strong chinook winds that brought daily temperatures as high as 17 °C (63 °F) wreaked havoc on the schedules for outdoor events. Events were delayed when winds were deemed unsafe for competitors and organizers used artificial snow making equipment to ensure skiing venues were properly prepared.[44] It was the first time in Olympic history that alpine events were held on artificial snow.[45] The Games were also marred by the death of the Austrian ski team's doctor, Joerg Oberhammer, on February 25 after a collision with another skier sent him crashing into a snow grooming machine at Nakiska, crushing and killing him instantly. The incident was ruled an accident.[46]
The top individual competitors |
go live Sunday night) and you can help out by donating to the efforts. He has an uphill battle in a very red district, but his very candidacy is one we should root for, not just because he doesn’t believe in God, but because he represents the values that so many of us cherish.
Politicians won’t take atheists seriously unless we can prove we’re a voting bloc that gets people elected — so if you find Woods worthy of support, even if you’re not from the district, let people know about it.
If you have questions for him, leave them below and I’ll pass them along to his staff! His team is calling today “Atheist Media Day,” making Woods easily available to atheist groups who may want to do interviews with him. (“Media days” for other groups will be coming soon.)The Scottish National party has questioned the legality of the so-called snooper’s charter bill – warning that it will not support the legislation in its current form, the Guardian can reveal.
Joanna Cherry, the party’s justice spokesperson, said she accepts the law needs a thorough overhaul, but claimed the plans could “set a dangerous precedent and a bad example internationally”.
She accused ministers of trying to rush the investigatory powers bill through parliament to avoid scrutiny, and said the SNP’s concerns were shared by three parliamentary committees and campaign groups. As such the SNP will vote against the government on a key vote on Tuesday.
The intervention comes after Liberal Democrats attacked Labour’s decision to abstain in that same vote, accusing them of “sitting on their hands while the government rams through a law that will erode our civil liberties”.
The shadow home secretary, Andy Burnham, has confirmed Labour will not vote against the bill at its second reading in the Commons on Tuesday. Instead, the party said it is prepared to delay parts of the legislation until next year if ministers fail to address concerns about privacy and state intrusion.
But the Lib Dem leader, Tim Farron, said Labour failed to provide serious opposition. “Previously, Labour were for the bill, then against the bill, and now are abstaining,” he said.
Technology firms' hopes dashed by 'cosmetic tweaks' to snooper's charter Read more
“We want a bill that keeps us all safe, and keeps the government in check. You can’t fight terrorism by just gathering information on everybody and making it available to anyone who asks – that’s like finding a needle in a haystack that grows every day. Every pound the government spends on storing the family photos you sent home from your holiday is a pound taken away from your local police.”
The SNP’s resistance to the bill could become a problem for the government at a later stage if Labour decides that its demands have not been met.
Cherry added: “The bill seeks to put on a statutory footing some powers which go well beyond those currently authorised by law in other western democracies. No convincing operational case for such powers was produced with the draft bill. It is for the government to make that case.
“The SNP looks forward to working with other parliamentarians to get this right but the government must afford sufficient time for consideration of the bill. Surveillance is a global concern, and this new legislation could be copied internationally.”
One senior Labour backbencher, David Winnick, who is a member of the Commons home affairs committee, says he will vote against the bill “due to the disproportionate amount of surveillance proposed and its substantial intrusion into privacy”. Some Conservatives may also rebel, with the longtime civil liberties campaigner David Davis among those who have voiced strong criticism.
But Burnham said there would be “no blank cheque” of Labour support for the bill, which gives the state powers to require communications firms to store individuals’ internet connection records – the addresses of websites visited – for 12 months.
“Britain needs a new legal framework in this crucial area that is fit for the digital age, balancing powers with proper safeguards. So Labour will put party politics aside and work constructively with the government to that end,” he said.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tim Farron has accused Labour of failing to put up proper opposition to the bill. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Burnham said the home secretary, Theresa May, needed to make substantial changes before the bill would be acceptable. He added: “While I share her wish to see a comprehensive bill on the statute book by the end of this year, we can’t let the timetable dictate the quality. On Tuesday, I will make clear to the home secretary that if she fails to listen to our concerns, Labour will be prepared to delay this legislation so that we get it right.
“We believe the bill must start with a presumption of privacy, as
recommended by the intelligence and security committee, include a clearer definition of the information that can be held in an internet connection record and set a higher threshold to justify access to them. There also needs to be a higher degree of protection for journalists and their sources.
“On the left of politics, there are deeply held concerns that, in our country’s past, investigatory powers have been misused against trades unionists and ordinary people who are campaigning for justice. This is why the government will have to work hard to earn our support.”
The surveillance bill is as big a threat to state security as to personal liberty | Simon Jenkins Read more
Privacy campaigners have demanded that the bill be split to allow proper scrutiny of the new surveillance law. This would allow the renewal of those parts needed to retain existing powers due to expire in December that require internet and phone companies to retain business records for 12 months. It would allow the rest of the bill, including its powers to track everyone’s web use and to license the security agencies to hack into phones and computers worldwide, to be examined further and avoid it being rushed on to the statute book.
The government argues the bill is needed to address a gap in police and intelligence powers that means some communication cannot be tracked.
It revives some of the aims of a previous surveillance bill, which became dubbed the snooper’s charter in the last parliament and was eventually blocked by the Lib Dems.
Over the weekend, the US president, Barack Obama, questioned the way tech companies were making smartphones so strongly encrypted that they could not be broken into by law enforcement agencies.
Obama told a technology festival in Texas: “The question we now have to ask is, if technologically it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system, where the encryption is so strong there’s no key, there’s no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?”
His remarks come after the FBI took Apple to court in an attempt to force it to break into a smartphone owned by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino massacre.On Nov. 13, 1907, French engineer and bicycle maker Paul Cornu made history by becoming the first man to fly in a rotary wing aircraft.
The primitive helicopter — a twin-rotor craft powered by a 24-horsepower engine — only lifted Cornu about 1.5 meters off the ground, holding him there for 20 seconds at Coquainvilliers, near Lisieux in France.
But that was enough for Cornu to take his place in the history books as the first man to successfully fly a rotary wing aircraft.
Cornu was born in 1881 in the French town of Lisieux, where the local high school is named after him to this day.
Once he reached working age, he joined his father in the family business, an automobile, cycles and motorcyles shop where his talent for engineering became clear.
Cornu died in 1944, when his home was destroyed during a World War II Allied bombardment.
Cornu’s “flying bicycle”
Like the Wright Brothers, Cornu was a bicycle maker who dreamed of flight.
His inventive skills first came to the fore when, at the age of 24, he designed and built a working, two-rotor model helicopter weighing 13kg.
The success of this invention, which he demonstrated at the annual agricultural fair in Lisieux on Oct. 4, 1906, encouraged him to build a large-scale version capable of carrying a passenger.
The helicopter he built had two rotors mounted one behind the other, a 24-horsepower Antoinette engine, and movable flat surfaces, or control vanes, mounted under the rotors for steering purposes.
It was with this machine, known as his “flying bicycle,” that he achieved the first manned helicopter flight.It’s bigger than Sweet Caroline, Dirty Water and Fenway Franks all put together. For Red Sox fans, there is no greater tradition than finding that elusive long-term first baseman. With Mike Napoli’s contract coming to an end at the season and David Ortiz’s career unfortunately coming close to its finish, there is at least one and possibly two spots in the lineup opening up very soon. This is becoming even more of a talking point amidst the many roster crunches that appear to be coming down the road. The crowded outfield has been discussed ad nauseam, and the two young catchers in the organization could provide a predicament in the next few years. After the recent signing of Yoan Moncada, the future infield has crowded up a bit, too. With all of this happening, Pablo Sandoval moving across the diamond from third in the next year or two has become a general consensus. That seems awfully presumptuous, especially with Hanley Ramirez on the roster.
Before I move on to why Ramirez would make more sense as a candidate to change positions, I think it’s important to mention how bold it is to be making these plans. The world where all of the young players like Xander Bogaerts and Moncada work out and cause this massive positional crunch is likely a fantasy one. So much can change between now and April 2016 that all of this could be moot. Maybe Allen Craig sticks around and performs well enough to grab the first base job next season. Maybe the Red Sox have another offensive acquisition up their sleeve. There’s a lot that can happen. With that being said, if things break the way we think (hope), Ramirez is more likely to move off his position than Sandoval.
Photo Credit: Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports
Defense
As much as it runs contrary to the weight narrative that is already surrounding him, Sandoval is at least an average defensive third baseman, and is most likely better than that. His quick reactions and strong arm make him a surprisingly adept third baseman. In fact, a good chunk of his value is tied to this ability. He’s a good offensive player, but that profile as a 115 OPS+ player looks a lot more attractive at third base rather than first base or designated hitter. Ramirez, on the other hand, has been a subpar defensive player for the entirety of his career. Yes, he’ll be moving from shortstop to left field in 2015, but there’s no way of knowing how he will adjust. There is a real and nonzero chance that he stays a below average defensive player. At the very least, it’s a better chance than Sandoval all of a sudden becoming bad with the glove.
Injury Risk
Although Shane Victorino and Clay Buchholz get the bulk of the injury concern, Ramirez has a bit of a checkered health past as well. He has missed an average of 38 games over the last three seasons, while Sandoval has missed 27. There was only one DL stint for him in 2014, but he also missed chunks of game throughout the season with various nagging injuries. In fact, over his career he’s had just about every kind of nagging injury you can think of. While Sandoval hasn’t exactly been Cal Ripken, his injury history is a lot more encouraging than Ramirez’s. It’s possible the move off shortstop can save Ramirez’s health, but the range required in left field may not be the answer we hope it is.
Age
This goes along nicely with the injury risk discussed above. One of the reasons Sandoval was such an intriguing target this winter was his relative youth compared to your typical free agent. As the Red Sox have made their weariness regarding signing aging players no secret, signing a third baseman who is entering his age-28 season makes a ton of sense. He still has a good four years left in his prime, at least. Ramirez, on the other hand, is a full three years older. There are still plenty of good years left in his bat, but it’s questionable how long his body will hold up. Moving to a less demanding position like first or DH could alleviate a problem that will hit him before than Sandoval.
As mentioned above, someone moving off their current position to first base or designated hitter is far from a certainty. There are so many other possible outcomes that Sandoval and Ramirez both staying at their current spots for the next few years may be the most probable. If someone does have to move, though, Ramirez seems to me to be the more likely candidate than Sandoval. It’s contrary to the presumed plan, but the factors suggest it’s the case. Not only does Sandoval have much more defensive certainty and value tied to that, he also has less injury risk and is likely to wear down later. If anyone is going to fill the voids possibly left by Napoli and/or Ortiz, Hanley Ramirez is the one to do so.54 Warning Signs That You Work In Social Media
by Jason Keath on Dec 08, 2011 Share: Buffer
I really hate when I have to deliver bad news to our readers, but the fact is, I know many of you are in danger of this illness. I personally have been battling against it fairly publicly, and yet I have noticed many of you might even have it worse.
Those of you at standing desks right now might want to sit down.
Some of you ARE in fact social media professionals.
I know, it sounds horrible. And there really is no known cure to date. The best remedy right now, is to become Amish. And even that seems to be slipping as a solution.
So you might be asking yourself “This is horrible, how can I tell if I have it?” Well, luckily, there are some clear signals that you might be afflicted.
These are a few of the warning signs…
You might work in social media if…
Your parents keep up with your life through your Twitter feed. You are actually using Google+. You have sent a DM to someone sitting within 5 feet of you. It’s been years since someone mentioned news to you that you hadn’t heard already. – Derek Shanahan You verbally hashtag real world conversations. You are the mayor of something other than your home. – John Hondroulis You judge anyone with a hotmail email address as not so hip. You own a t-shirt or jewelry with your Twitter handle on it. You look down on anyone that does not own an iPhone. You get distracted easi… – Dave Delaney You look down on anyone that does not own an android. You secretly judge blackberry owners. You run into people you have not seen for years and they know everything about your life through Facebook, Twitter and your blog. – Inspired by DJ Waldow You secretly judge QR codes that are on subway ads or in airplane magazines. – Inspired by Scott Stratten You sign up to social networks before there is any discernible value, just to be an early adopter. You have reached the friend limit on Facebook. You know that there is a friend limit on Facebook. Your mom just tells her friends that you work “on the internet” – Inspired by David Spinks You checkin to a restaurant before actually speaking to anyone there. You not so secretly judge anyone following more people than are following them on Twitter. Your phone is usually face up on the bar or restaurant table when you are out. Your couch has Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare or Angry Bird pillows. Your world feels like it’s coming to an end when you get a low battery alert on your smartphone – Elysa Rice You take photos thinking about how they will look on Facebook. You read whatever news you find on Facebook and Twitter. You are haunted by the Tweetdeck chirping sound. – Nicole D’Alonzo You secretly judge magazine and TV ads that promote their social profiles poorly. You secretly hate friends who have more Twitter followers than you. You have a backup plan for when Twitter goes down. When you have bad customer service, your first step is to find the company’s Twitter handle. You complain about how bad Klout is while still signing in to check your score everyday. Your smartphone is your best friend. You hate when people use the word “viral.” You think of @GaryVee every time you see an orange Crush soda. You read Mashable more than you read the USA Today. You know what a bookmarklet is. You have Google alerts setup for your own name. You are working on a ‘strategy’ for people to like you. – Ryan Boyles You love Twitter. You secretly hate Twitter. You respect Justin Beiber for his Twitter following and recently learned he plays music too. You assume someone is talking about social media instead of pending nuptials when they mention the word “engagement”. – Dave Cutler You get bored reading news that is longer than 140 characters. All of the parties and events you go to are from Facebook invites. Spike Jones has ever made fun of you. – Inspired by Jason Falls No one in your family is capable of explaining to their friends what exactly it is that you do. – Mandi Laine Your significant other asks, “Are you still working, or just tweeting?” – Ryan Boyles You never ask to redeem Foursquare specials because you hate explaining them to your server. You think that your friends that are not on Facebook don’t have birthdays. Your use Pinterest to write your letter to Santa. – Inspired by Nicole D’Alonzo You ask your coworkers and friends for a “big favor” — to help Retweet your latest client’s Twitter campaign. You are fully aware that Auto DMs are what is really wrong with America. When you completely lose your voice, you use Twitter to ask those sitting with you to “pass the butter, please” #truestory – Lea Marino As much as you say you hate the term you secretly hope that someone calls you a “guru” – Simon Salt
Thanks to our Google+ fans for the help.
If you have any additions, please add them below in the comments.
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Image source: Shutterstock.comThe owner of a waterfront property on Bowen Island will proceed with a new dock after winning at B.C.'s highest court, in a case that highlighted the clash between development and conservation along the province's coast.
Murray Skeels, the mayor of Bowen Island, a 20-minute ferry ride from West Vancouver, called the defeat disappointing and said it involves a "spectacular, wonderful, iconic point of land."
"This dock is going to be built right beside it, within rock-throwing distance and that's why we are very upset about that," he said.
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The case centred on a stretch of Bowen Island known as Cape Roger Curtis, which is popular among locals for its rocky shoreline, trails and views.
A lot at Cape Roger Curtis was acquired in 2011 by Zongshen (Canada) Environtech Ltd., which in 2013 sought to build a dock. But the company – led by Zuo Zongshen, a billionaire who made his fortune selling motorcycles in China – was repeatedly stymied by a municipal council that wanted to stop the construction of such structures.
The B.C. Court of Appeal ruled in Zongshen's favour in mid-July and Peter Kenward, the lawyer who represented the company in the case, in an interview on Wednesday said it has submitted its material to the municipality's lawyer and is awaiting the issuance of its permit.
Mr. Skeels said the municipality could theoretically appeal the judgment to the Supreme Court of Canada, but likely will not.
"I don't believe we're going to, because … it would have to be an issue of national significance. And I don't think one dock application is going to rise to that standard," he said in an interview.
Mr. Skeels said there are already four docks in the Cape Roger Curtis area and this will be the fifth.
He said the docks have caused disagreement among Bowen Island residents, with some of those who live on the waterfront saying the issue is one of class.
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"They don't see a big deal with docks at all," he said. "Whereas the people on the interior of the island that go to the waterfront but don't live there took much more issue with them. I don't think that people who live in the interior of the island thought of it that way, they didn't see it as a class thing at all. And I don't live on a waterfront lot and I didn't think of it that way."
Zongshen sought provincial approval for the dock in February, 2013, and notified the municipality of its plans a couple of months later, as required. But Bowen Island amended its municipal bylaws in November of that year and the permitted length of a dock structure became less than what Zongshen had planned, according to the appeal court ruling. Zongshen submitted a revised plan in August, 2014, in which the dock had been shortened.
But in March, 2015, Bowen Island council asked staff to prepare an amendment to the municipality's land use bylaw that prohibited all private docks at Cape Roger Curtis. The municipality then refused to accept a building permit application from Zongshen.
Bowen Island council adopted the amended bylaw in May, 2015. Another building permit application by Zongshen was rejected in September of that year.
The company then filed an application for judicial review, but a B.C. Supreme Court judge last year ruled in Bowen Island's favour, saying the proposed dock would be a private moorage facility and fell within the amended bylaw's prohibitions.
However, the three-judge Court of Appeal panel unanimously overturned the ruling. It said the dock should not have been classified as a private moorage facility but instead as a structure accessory that is permitted under the bylaw.
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The court ordered the municipality to issue the building permit for the dock to Zongshen once the company submitted a current title search and resubmitted the application fee.
Mr. Kenward said he does not anticipate any issues in having the building permit delivered.
He said the dock will be constructed once the permit is issued and a single-family home will be built on the property "in the fairly near future."CLEVELAND — It’s a Thursday night, five days out from Election Day, and Nina Turner is trying to find people to volunteer for Bernie Sanders in the city’s overwhelmingly black East Side.
It’s not easy. Working the phone banks never is. “You never get to too big to phone bank, that’s my opinion,” says Turner, a former state senator who has made a national name for herself after rising through the political ranks on the East Side. But it’s especially difficult when you’re running against Hillary Clinton, who has built a reputation for coalescing the black vote in every 2016 Democratic contest to date — that is, except for one.
In Tuesday’s primary in Michigan, Clinton won African-Americans by less overwhelming margins, beating Sanders among blacks 68 percent to 28 percent instead of the 80-20 or worse split seen in Southern states. That may sound like a minor change, but the 10-point dip in Clinton’s black support could have cost her Michigan and augurs trouble in states like Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri, which hold primaries on Tuesday.
RELATED: Sanders’ surprise win and Clinton’s defeat: What happened in Michigan?
Sanders strategists are hoping to do Michigan all over again, but this time in Ohio, a state whose rivalry with Michigan belies their similarities. They’re under no illusions they can win a majority of African-American voters, but even getting to 30 percent would be a coup that could deliver victories, given Sanders’ strength with white voters.
They’re counting on young people and Sanders’ anti-establishment message to get them there. And allies think Sanders can do better with black voters outside the South, where Clinton has a long history with the core Democratic voting bloc, and they think later contests have given Sanders more time to introduce himself to people who didn’t previously know him. view photo essay The presidential campaign: Bernie Sanders The self-described democratic socialist is known for pushing change on income inequality, college affordability and criminal justice reform.
Clinton is currently beating Sanders by wide margins in recent Ohio polls. While there’s no data on her strength with African-Americans specifically, a CNN poll found Ohio Democrats trusted her on race relations over Sanders 65 percent to 32 percent. But polls also painted a similar picture before Sanders won Michigan, and Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters this week that Ohio would be “competitive.”
If Sanders succeeds in the delegate-rich state, his office in a former daycare center on the corner of East 79th Street and Central Avenue could play a key role. On the walls, there’s a photo of the candidate fist bumping rapper Killer Mike and campaign t-shirts with the slogan “Black Lives Matter” under a cartoon silhouette of Sanders’ face.
The literature on display includes a double-sided flyer (produced by volunteers, not the campaign) that states, “Hillary Clinton and her husband have supported policies which have devastated the black community.” On the back, there are photos of Sanders marching with Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington and speaking at a meeting of the Congress of Racial Equality, with his face circled.
Nonetheless, many of the nearly dozen volunteers working the phones here white and have ventured to the office from other parts of the city, underscoring Sanders’ challenge with African-American voters.
But not all are. David Washington, a 26-year-old black East Sider, has been a political junkie since he was 12 years old, when teachers would pull The Cleveland Plain Dealer out of his hands to make him focus on schoolwork.
RELATED: Immigration turning point for Clinton and Sanders hits just before Florida primary
“We were strictly Hillary,” Washington says of his group of friends. “Mostly everyone of my friends has been saying the same thing. They were all Hillary in the beginning, but once they started seeing Bernie Sanders’ policies, and started seeing that he had a proven track record going back 40 years, it was just inevitable for them to switch sides.”
Free trade policies are at the top of many people’s minds in Washington, as they are for many in Ohio, along with Sanders’ larger message of economic equality and fighting corporate power — as is Sanders’ work in the civil rights movement, support for LGBT rights in the 1980s, and current policies on criminal justice reform.
Close video Diversity and the Democratic Party Democratic Pollster Cornell Belcher talks to Jose Diaz-Balart to discuss diversity among Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders as part of MSNBC’s and 92 Y’s 7 Days of Genius series. share tweet email save Embed
Nicole Bates, 24, said Sanders is well liked by people who have heard his message and will do well with young African-Americans. But she worried about friends who weren’t registered or seemed apathetic about voting.
“The East Side loves Bernie,” she said. “The question is whether they get out to vote.”
Ohio and Michigan have a lot in common when it comes to demographics. They have roughly identical education levels, workforce participation, unemployment rates, and median incomes. Ohio is slightly bigger and slightly whiter — 12 percent of Ohio is black, compared to 15 percent of Michigan.
But Clinton allies in the state feel confident about the African-American vote here. She has a lock on the endorsement of virtually every elected official, including Rep. Marcia Fudge, who represents the East Side and whose political operation has been out in force. The campaign has also activated longstanding church and other more informal networks.
To overcome Clinton’s deep ties to the state, Sanders will need young African-Americans. But he has two things working against him in Ohio: One, the Republican secretary of state recently ruled that 17-year-olds who will be of voting age by the general election can no longer vote in the primary. (Sanders sued to stop that change.) Secondly, many colleges in the state will be on spring break during on Election Day, raising concerns about turnout.
Clinton has also been leaning on the success of her husband, whose popularity with African-Americans earned him the appellation of America’s first black president, and President Obama, the country’s actual first black president. She even put her Cleveland campaign office on the same square Obama put his.
Turner also took issue with that. “Secretary Clinton is wrapping herself around the president in the hopes to charm, if you will, the African-American community into voting for her, and I just really find that quite disturbing.” she said.
Citing all the negative things Clinton said about Obama in the 2008 primary, Turner said it’s disingenuous for Clinton to claim close ties to him now. “Now all of a sudden, she’s got his back. Every other word is about President Obama, President Obama, President Obama,” she said. “In my mind, that is just a way for her to seduce the African-American community into voting for her. And I find that insulting, actually.”Two women who were part of a group of teens that attacked a man in Logan Square can be seen chasing him down Milwaukee Avenue in surveillance footage. View Full Caption Screen shot
HUMBOLDT PARK — A 13-year-old has been arrested in connection to a sucker-punch on The 606 last week, according to police.
Police arrested the 13-year-old girl Friday after the victim in the attack positively identified the girl in surveillance video posted on the news, according to the Chicago Police Department's news affairs division.
The girl was charged with one count of battery and was arrested in the 3300 block of W. Schubert Ave.
She is the only person that has been arrested and charged in connection to either of two attacks of "random violence," which include the beating of a gay man in Logan Square and the 606 sucker-punch, police said.
The 30-year-old victim of The 606 punch said she believed it was the same girl seen chasing after Levi Frerichs after a group of six teens attacked him while yelling homophobic slurs at him in late July.
RELATED:
Attackers Yelled Homophobic Slurs During Logan Square Beating, Man Says
606 Sucker-Puncher Same Person Who Attacked Gay Man In Logan, Victim Says
The victim of the 606 sucker-punch was punched by a girl on a bike while she was walking her dog on the trail last week at about 10:15 p.m.
The 606 punch occured on the trail just west of the entrance at Rockwell.
Jean Godfrey, the victim, said she was shocked when she saw the surveillance video from the Logan Square attack and recognized her puncher.
In both attacks, the suspects did not attempt to rob the victims, but threatened to steal the victims' dogs.
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:186 Shares
Reaching for the snooze button feels so good, but the truth is, it wrecks your sleep quality. Here are our tips to help you finally break your snooze habit.
In 1956, the General Electric Company unveiled the the Telechron 7H241. Billed as ‘the world’s most humane alarm clock’, it heralded the dawn of the snooze button. It promised a new, gentler way to wake up, guaranteeing a few extra minutes of precious sleep with just a simple click.
Six decades later however, that luxury has turned into an unhealthy addiction for millions of people round the world. But fear not, Sleep Junkies is here to help. So read on and find out exactly how you can quit your snoozy habits.
Why snoozing is bad for your health
In a perfect world we wouldn’t need alarm clocks. Every morning, we’d wake up at exactly the right time feeling refreshed and ready to leap out of bed. Sadly this is a fantasy for most people. We’re slaves to our alarm clocks and to a lesser extent, the snooze button.
Snoozing is a guilty pleasure and deep down we know it’s not good for us. At best it’s little more than a psychological crutch.
But did you know that the snooze button can have more serious consequences, messing with your biological clock and ultimately making you feel more tired?
Robbing you of REM sleep
There are two main types of sleep, REM (rapid eye movement) and NREM (non-REM). During NREM (also referred to as deep, or slow-wave sleep) your body and brain relax. REM, on the other hand is very much an active state.
During REM your muscles twitch constantly and your brain exhibits high levels of electrical activity.
At night we constantly move between these two states. Slow wave sleep occurs more frequently at the start of the night whilst REM sleep increases as morning approaches. In order to feel sleep’s full restorative benefits you need to get your full quota of both REM and NREM.
If you set your alarm much earlier than you intend to get up so that you can keep pressing snooze, you could be missing out on vital REM in the morning. Because once your alarm goes off, you’ve already disrupted your sleep cycle, and you’re unlikely to fall back into REM again.
The bottom line is, the snooze button can seriously affect your health. Disturbing your sleep in this way can impair your mental functioning throughout the day, affecting memory, reaction time and even your emotional state.
How to break the snooze habit
The most common cause for snooze addiction is a straightforward lack of sleep. Waking at an inappropriate time causes sleep inertia – the groggy, transitional state before you’re fully awake.
Sleep inertia normally lasts for just a few minutes but can sometimes go on for hours. It is worst if you wake up during slow-wave sleep, where studies have shown the effects can be worse than being legally drunk.
To minimize sleep inertia, first try to examine your own circadian rhythms ie your natural body clock. Are you a lark or an owl? Do you need 8 hours sleep or can you survive on 6.5 hours?
Next take a look at your current sleep habits. Are you practicing good sleep hygiene? Rather than trying to fight your natural instincts, try to establish a routine that works for you.
Professor Kevin Morgan a scientist from Loughborough University’s sleep research unit recommends focussing on setting a regular wake up time, rather than a fixed bedtime.
“If your sleep is vulnerable you would be much better advised to set your body clock to the same time every morning by always getting up at the same time. This tells your biological system when it needs to start and it works better than always going to bed at the same time in the evening.”
If you think there may have a deeper underlying issue to your sleep problems, you should consult your doctor or a sleep professional. However, if you just need a little extra to break your snooze habit, we’ve got a comprehensive list of tips, from quick solutions you can try in the short term to some serious behaviour modifying rituals guaranteed to get you to kick the snooze button habit.
1) A sunrise alarm clock
Humans are not designed to wake suddenly. We’ve evolved over millions of years to gradually rise in synchrony with the dawn, and the subsequent increase in natural daylight.
Human circadian clocks are programmed to respond to the early dawn light – triggering the release of cortisol, a wake up hormone, whilst stemming the flow of the ‘darkness hormone’ melatonin.
How Do Sunrise Alarm Clocks Work?
Watch this video on YouTube
Sleeping under the stars clearly isn’t an option, but fortunately, there’s an effective alternative – a sunrise alarm clock. Also known as a wake-up light, or dawn simulator, these devices mimic the dawn sunlight.
Instead of blaring out the traffic report at 9:30, a sunrise alarm clock will slowly produce a gradually increasing light which reaches full brightness at your desired wake up time. Most wake up lights also allow you to play an alarm tone as well just in case the light wasn’t enough to rouse you.
Research has show that sunrise alarms have are effective at waking you, and preventing the effects of sleep inertia.
2) Put your alarm clock out of reach
This is an old favourite, but works a treat. Put your alarm on the other side of the room so when it goes off you’re forced to get out of bed. There are lots of variations on this theme, some people use two different alarm clocks, although I think this is only slightly better than pressing snooze.
3) Give yourself a reward
Our brains respond incredibly well to incentives, so if you give yourself some kind of enjoyable mental activity in the morning, you’re less likely to want to drift off to sleep afterwards. Try to think of a reward that’s mentally stimulating and enjoyable.
Watching TV doesn’t count as it’s more of a passive activity. As soon as your alarm goes, switch on the lights and engage your brain for 5 or 10 minutes. When you’re done your mind should be sufficiently occupied to stop you falling asleep again. Here are a few suggested activities if you’re stuck for ideas:
read your favourite book
play a musical instrument
check your email/Twitter/Facebook
play a computer game
4) Wake up and smell the coffee
We all know how caffeine acts as a powerful stimulant to your brain and nervous system. But did you know the effect can be triggered just by smelling a cup of coffee? Scientists tested the theory on rats and found that a sniff of coffee activates several genes in the brain in ways that reduce the effect of sleep deprivation.
You can test the theory by getting a coffee machine with a timer; place it within sniffing distance and set it to start brewing 10 minutes before your alarm goes off. Not only will the aroma wake gently wake you up, you’ll have a steaming cup of your favourite brew ready as soon as you get out of bed.
5) Increase the temperature
In the hour before waking, your body starts to gear up for action. Sleep becomes lighter, ‘wake’ hormones are released and body temperature starts to rise. But if your alarm is out of sync with your body clock you might be attempting to wake up when your core body temperature isn’t quite up to the task.
Gradually increasing the temperature of your bed, or your bedroom can help to give you the subtle nudge to ease you out of bed. Smart temperature-based gadgets like Moona and Eight can do this for you, but equally, you can set the central heating to start warming the bedroom half an hour before your alarm, or get an electric heater with a simple timer.
6) Clocky, the alarm that forces you out of bed
The Clocky is a unique alarm clock that forces you to get out of bed whether you like it or not. Looking and sounding like a distant cousin of R2D2 on wheels, Clocky is an ideal gadget to help you quit your snooze habit.
Clocky struts his stuff
Watch this video on YouTube
When the alarm goes off, the little creature jumps off your bedside table and starts running around the room making cute but annoying noisesalong the way. Clocky runs on carpet and hard floors, and sets off in a random direction every time.
7 |
audiences would never buy it and assume everything was done with camera tricks. He won them over by suggesting a one-camera continual shot, and doing the show before a live theater audience. The show is still the longest running TV magic show in history.
Compare that to magic on TV and video today, like the young man in this video:A recent report from Europolitics, a Brussels-based European affairs daily publication, regarding an alleged European Parliament plan over a possible Grexit, which was later annulled by European Parliament President Martin Schulz, caused Greece’s firm reaction. SYRIZA MEP Dimitris Papadimoulis characterized the revelation as a “very significant” one, underlining that certain circles are playing games at Greece’s expense and the Eurozone’s stability. Moreover, regarding the report, Papadimoulis requested immediate briefing from Schulz.
In a written statement, the SYRIZA MEP said: “This revelation is very significant and shows the games that some circles attempt to play against the country and the stability of the Eurozone. The European Parliament administration and above all the Secretary General must keep strict political neutrality, away from political games, without the knowledge of competent institutions and relevant procedures. I ask with my letter, which will be sent tomorrow, from President Schultz, a reliable update. The matter is very serious and requires immediate and full investigation.”
The article cited European Parliament officials revealing that Secretary General Klaus Welle, in a meeting of Commission Director Generals in February, asked the completion of a report on a possible Grexit. On his behalf, Schulz, when informed on the issue, requested its immediate suspension, saying that this is not the European Parliament’s job.Dr. Robert Jeffress speaks to Fox News (screen grab)
A right-wing Texas megachurch pastor admits he’d vote for Donald Trump over Jesus — who he accused of being weak on terrorism.
Robert Jeffress, pastor at 12,000-member First Baptist Church in Dallas, has been a vocal supporter of the presumptive Republican nominee — who he believes is the only candidate who can defeat Hillary Clinton.
Some conservatives have criticized Jeffress, who bashed Christians who don’t support Trump out of “pride,” and the frequent Fox News guest defended himself Tuesday on talk radio host Mike Gallagher’s program, reported Right Wing Watch.
Jeffress, who urged Christian voters to impose a “religious litmus” test when he backed Ben Carson for president, took the exact opposite position after switching his allegiance to Trump.
The influential pastor admitted that Trump isn’t much like Jesus Christ — a difference he enthusiastically described as a feature of his presidential campaign.
“You know, I was debating an evangelical professor on NPR, and this professor said, ‘Pastor, don’t you want a candidate who embodies the teaching of Jesus and would govern this country according to the principles found in the Sermon on the Mount?’” Jeffress said. “I said, ‘Heck no.’ I would run from that candidate as far as possible, because the Sermon on the Mount was not given as a governing principle for this nation.”
Jeffress, who has said freedom from religion is a “perverted idea,” argued as a Trump supporter that the U.S. government should not be based on Christian principles.
“Nowhere is government told to forgive those who wrong it, nowhere is government told to turn the other cheek,” Jeffress said.
The conservative pastor said earlier this week that police officers are “ministers of God sent by God to punish evil doers” — which is what he said the Bible calls for in a president.
“Government is to be a strongman to protect its citizens against evildoers. When I’m looking for somebody who’s going to deal with ISIS and exterminate ISIS, I don’t care about that candidate’s tone or vocabulary, I want the meanest, toughest, son of a you-know-what I can find — and I believe that’s biblical.”"I'm not leaving... I can't... I've spent too long trying to find this place... There's not another collection of knowledge like this on Earth... I could spend an eternity in here."
— Professor Zei to Team Avatar.[1]
Professor Zei was the head of the Anthropology Department at Ba Sing Se University. An ambitious cultural anthropologist, he was well-traveled and highly educated in exotic cultures. His thirst for knowledge brought him to strange, remote, and often dangerous places. Zei was an eccentric man to whom knowledge was priceless. He got excited at the prospect of learning anything about history or the world around him. A map of his travels showed he had been everywhere in the world, except the Fire Nation. Even though he had discovered many lost civilizations over the years, he longed to find the "crown jewel" of ancient discoveries: Wan Shi Tong's Library.[1][2]
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History
Zei attempted to find Wan Shi Tong's Library several times, but failed in every attempt. Though he knew the library was somewhere in the uncrossable Si Wong Desert, he never managed to find it on his own.
However, in 100 AG, he met Avatar Aang and his friends at the Misty Palms Oasis while preparing another expedition into the desert. The professor quickly befriended the group, interested to meet a living Air Nomad. He asked questions about the Air Nomads, including their primary agricultural product, though the Avatar was overwhelmed by these questions. Sokka quickly turned the conversation toward maps, and though Zei was able to provide the group with a more up-to-date map, he was unable to provide them with one that included the Fire Nation. The team discovered that the professor had made several trips into the Si Wong Desert, and Zei informed them about his quest to find the missing library. Sokka became interested in assisting the professor in finding the library, believing that there might be information about the Fire Nation there, but Zei warned them of the difficulty in crossing the desert, noting that he had almost died in every attempt. The group decided to search the desert from the sky by riding on Appa, whom Zei was thrilled to meet, wishing that he could speak the language of the flying bison.
After a few hours of searching, they stopped to investigate what appeared to be a tall, slender tower, but upon further investigation and the observation of a Knowledge Seeker entering the structure, the tower was revealed to be the top of the library, which had been mostly buried in sand. Zei entered the library, marveling at its architecture, along with Aang, Sokka, and Katara. He easily passed Wan Shi Tong's test of knowledge by contributing a book to the library, which was found pleasing to the spirit being. The professor proceeded to peruse the library along with the rest of group, and later pointed out the Knowledge Seeker trying to help Sokka find information about the "The darkest day in Fire Nation history". Zei was greatly impressed by the mechanical marvel of the planetarium, which Sokka was using to find information that could be to the group's advantage against the Fire Nation.
When Wan Shi Tong discovered the group had betrayed his trust and were planning to use his information against the Fire Nation, he sank his library to prevent humans from accessing his knowledge ever again. As the members of Team Avatar made their escape, Zei tried desperately to grab as many books as he could. Eventually, he simply declared that he would rather "spend an eternity" in the library than lose all of his life's work.[1] Zei ended up dying in the library, inadvertently fulfilling his wish.[3]
Legacy
Despite his disappearance, Zei remained a known character among historians, as even Aang's granddaughter, Jinora, came to learn about Zei's story during her studies. Seventy years following the relocation of the library to the Spirit World, she arrived at Wan Shi Tong's Library, stating that she could spend her life reading in the building. Wan Shi Tong informed her that the last human who said that was still there, before motioning toward the skeletal remains of Professor Zei, which was slumped against a bookshelf and surrounded by books and scrolls.[3]
Appearances
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Book Two: Earth (土)
The Legend of Korra
Book Two: Spirits (神靈)
Trivia
Avatar Extras for "The Library" stated that Zei may have ended up in the Spirit World; this was later confirmed to be true in "A New Spiritual Age".
for "The Library" stated that Zei may have ended up in the Spirit World; this was later confirmed to be true in "A New Spiritual Age". A student in Ba Sing Se that Team Avatar interrogates mentions Professor Zei in "City of Walls and Secrets".
Zei appeared in the tenth episode of the second book of each Avatar series.
ReferencesJohnny Hedge
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November 14, 2010
[These events took place roughly between 5:30 and 6:30 AM, November 13th in Terminal 2 of the San Diego International Airport. I’m writing this approximately 2 1/2 hours after the events transpired, and they are correct to the best of my recollection. I will admit to being particularly fuzzy on the exact order of events when dealing with the agents after getting my ticket refunded; however, all of the events described did occur.
I had my phone recording audio and video of much of these events. It can be viewed below.
Please spread this story as far and wide as possible. I will make no claims to copyright or otherwise.]
This morning, I tried to fly out of San Diego International Airport but was refused by the TSA. I had been somewhat prepared for this eventuality. I have been reading about the millimeter wave and backscatter x-ray machines and the possible harm to health as well as the vivid pictures they create of people’s naked bodies. Not wanting to go through them, I had done my research on the TSA’s website prior to traveling to see if SAN had them. From all indications, they did not. When I arrived at the security line, I found that the TSA’s website was out of date. SAN does in fact utilize backscatter x-ray machines.
I made my way through the line toward the first line of “defense”: the TSA ID checker. This agent looked over my boarding pass, looked over my ID, looked at me and then back at my ID. After that, he waved me through. SAN is still operating metal detectors, so I walked over to one of the lines for them. After removing my shoes and making my way toward the metal detector, the person in front of me in line was pulled out to go through the backscatter machine. After asking what it was and being told, he opted out. This left the machine free, and before I could go through the metal detector, I was pulled out of line to go through the backscatter machine. When asked, I half-chuckled and said, “I don’t think so.” At this point, I was informed that I would be subject to a pat down, and I waited for another agent.
A male agent (it was a female who had directed me to the backscatter machine in the first place), came and waited for me to get my bags and then directed me over to the far corner of the area for screening. After setting my things on a table, he turned to me and began to explain that he was going to do a “standard” pat down. (I thought to myself, “great, not one of those gropings like I’ve been reading about”.) After he described, the pat down, I realized that he intended to touch my groin. After he finished his description but before he started the pat down, I looked him straight in the eye and said, “if you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested.” He, a bit taken aback, informed me that he would have to involve his supervisor because of my comment.
We both stood there for no more than probably two minutes before a female TSA agent (apparently, the supervisor) arrived. She described to me that because I had opted out of the backscatter screening, I would now be patted down, and that involved running hands up the inside of my legs until they felt my groin. I stated that I would not allow myself to be subject to a molestation as a condition of getting on my flight. The supervisor informed me that it was a standard administrative security check and that they were authorized to do it. I repeated that I felt what they were doing was a sexual assault, and that if they were anyone but the government, the act would be illegal. I believe that I was then informed that if I did not submit to the inspection, I would not be getting on my flight. I again stated that I thought the search was illegal. I told her that I would be willing to submit to a walk through the metal detector as over 80% of the rest of the people were doing, but I would not be groped. The supervisor, then offered to go get her supervisor.
I took a seat in a tiny metal chair next to the table with my belongings and waited. While waiting, I asked the original agent (who was supposed to do the pat down) if he had many people opt out to which he replied, none (or almost none, I don’t remember exactly). He said that I gave up a lot of rights when I bought my ticket. I replied that the government took them away after September 11th. There was silence until the next supervisor arrived. A few minutes later, the female agent/supervisor arrived with a man in a suit (not a uniform). He gave me a business card identifying him as David Silva, Transportation Security Manager, San Diego International Airport. At this point, more TSA agents as well as what I assume was a local police officer arrived on the scene and surrounded the area where I was being detained. The female supervisor explained the situation to Mr. Silva. After some quick back and forth (that I didn’t understand/hear), I could overhear Mr. Silva say something to the effect of, “then escort him from the airport.” I again offered to submit to the metal detector, and my father-in-law, who was near by also tried to plead for some reasonableness on the TSA’s part.
The female supervisor took my ID at this point and began taking some kind of report with which I cooperated. Once she had finished, I asked if I could put my shoes back on. I was allowed to put my shoes back on and gather my belongs. I asked, “are we done here” (it was clear at this point that I was going to be escorted out), and the local police officer said, “follow me”. I followed him around the side of the screening area and back out to the ticketing area. I said apologized to him for the hassle, to which he replied that it was not a problem.
I made my way over to the American Airlines counter, explained the situation, and asked if my ticket could be refunded. The woman behind the counter furiously typed away for about 30 seconds before letting me know that she would need a supervisor. She went to the other end of the counter. When she returned, she informed me that the ticket was non-refundable, but that she was still trying to find a supervisor. After a few more minutes, she was able to refund my ticket. I told her that I had previously had a bad experience with American Airlines and had sworn never to fly with them again (I rationalized this trip since my father-in-law had paid for the ticket), but that after her helpfulness, I would once again be willing to use their carrier again.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
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At this point, I thought it was all over. I began to make my way to the stairs to exit the airport, when I was approached by another man in slacks and a sport coat. He was accompanied by the officer that had escorted me to the ticketing area and Mr. Silva. He informed me that I could not leave the airport. He said that once I start the screening in the secure area, I could not leave until it was completed. Having left the area, he stated, I would be subject to a civil suit and a $10,000 fine. I asked him if he was also going to fine the 6 TSA agents and the local police officer who escorted me from the secure area. After all, I did exactly what I was told. He said that they didn’t know the rules, and that he would deal with them later. They would not be subject to civil penalties. I then pointed to Mr. Silva and asked if he would be subject to any penalties. He is the agents’ supervisor, and he directed them to escort me out. The man informed me that Mr. Silva was new and he would not be subject to penalties, either. He again asserted the necessity that I return to the screening area. When I asked why, he explained that I may have an incendiary device and whether or not that was true needed to be determined. I told him that I would submit to a walk through the metal detector, but that was it; I would not be groped. He told me that their procedures are on their website, and therefore, I was fully informed before I entered the airport; I had implicitly agreed to whatever screening they deemed appropriate. I told him that San Diego was not listed on the TSA’s website as an airport using Advanced Imaging Technology, and I believed that I would only be subject to the metal detector. He replied that he was not a webmaster, and I asked then why he was referring me to the TSA’s website if he didn’t know anything about it. I again refused to re-enter the screening area.
The man asked me to stay put while he walked off to confer with the officer and Mr. Silva. They went about 20 feet away and began talking amongst themselves while I waited. I couldn’t over hear anything, but I got the impression that the police officer was recounting his version of the events that had transpired in the screening area (my initial refusal to be patted down). After a few minutes, I asked loudly across the distance if I was free to leave. The man dismissively held up a finger and said, “hold on”. I waited. After another minute or so, he returned and asked for my name. I asked why he needed it, and reminded him that the female supervisor/agent had already taken a report. He said that he was trying to be friendly and help me out. I asked to what end. He reminded me that I could be sued civilly and face a $10,000 fine and that my cooperation could help mitigate the penalties I was facing. I replied that he already had my information in the report that was taken and I asked if I was free to leave. I reminded him that he was now illegally detaining me and that I would not be subject to screening as a condition of leaving the airport. He told me that he was only trying to help (I should note that his demeanor never suggested that he was trying to help. I was clearly being interrogated.), and that no one was forcing me to stay. I asked if tried to leave if he would have the officer arrest me. He again said that no one was forcing me to stay. I looked him in the eye, and said, “then I’m leaving”. He replied, “then we’ll bring a civil suit against you”, to which I said, “you bring that suit” and walked out of the airport.
This video starts with my bag and belongings going through the x-ray machine.They’re kind of long, and they don’t show much, but the audio is really good.
I was in the middle of telling someone that if I was going to be felt up, I wanted it done in public so that everyone could see what it is that the TSA does. Here is the rest of that video.
After I was escorted out to the ticketing area, I went to have my ticket refunded. I didn’t have the opportunity or the presence of mind to turn the camera back on until everyone walked away from me.
Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Ad)The Fukushima nuclear accident dealt a blow to the emerging "nuclear renaissance" just when the world was close to putting Chernobyl behind it.
In its aftermath, several countries, including Japan and Germany, put aside, under public pressure, plans to build nuclear power plants (NPPs).
Six years after Fukushima, 61 new nuclear plants are under construction, in Britain, China, India, Russia and even the United States, where lobbyists from the oil and gas industry ply the corridors of power. France, undeterred, continues to keep its economy humming, with 77 per cent of its energy needs coming from nuclear fission. Scandinavian countries opt for nuclear rather than dam up their stunning fjords. Vietnam pushes ahead with its plan to build the first NPP in Asean.
But Singapore continues to vacillate, despite its strategic vulnerability, with its 95 per cent dependence on natural gas flowing from Indonesia and Malaysia for as long as goodwill on the other side prevails.
Natural gas is expensive and pollutive. Regular replenishment is needed or the economy halts. Gas-fired power plants require additional land for unloading terminals, tanks, regasification units, flue gas treatment plants and kilometres of pipelines. Carbon sequestration looms in the future.
One of the biggest obstacles is what to do with a distressed nuclear power plant. If we can move it out of harm's way, there is no need for large exclusion zones. We can indeed do this, if our nuclear power plants are on floating platforms.
Each year, 25 million gigawatt hours of electricity are generated worldwide. Studies by the University of Wisconsin-Madison conclude that 944.4 tonnes of CO2 (if coal-fired) and 564.3 tonnes (if gas-fired) are released for each gigawatt hour.
Singapore, on a per capita basis, is a significant polluter.
This is not to deny the risks from NPPs. One commonly cited risk is radioactive particle leaks, which is possible. But radioactivity is not as deadly as naysayers proclaim.
Without radioactive emissions, we would all be dead. The human body is radioactive and much of our food is naturally radioactive. Many medical procedures are radiation-dependent.
Exposure to radiation becomes hazardous when the subject receives more than 100,000 microsieverts a year for multiple years. To put this in perspective, the radiation recorded in Tokyo 10 days after the Fukushima accident was 0.125 microsievert an hour or 1,096 microsieverts a year. This level is below the threshold and safe.
The accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, tragic though they were, provided engineers with valuable lessons. The last link in the events leading to the meltdown of the reactors was the loss of cooling water needed to remove the decay heat after the shutdown of the reactor.
The reactor shutdown was accomplished in seconds. However, after the reactor is shut down, the nuclear fuel continues to produce heat, called decay heat.
Cooling water needs to be circulated to keep the temperature of the fuel under control.
In these three accidents, meltdown occurred because of the failure of the cooling water pump. The circulation of the cooling water failed owing to a complete loss of backup power to operate the associated pumps.
To address this, engineers have introduced a passive cooling system, which works by natural convection and will work even when the NPP suffers a total blackout.
And the extensive discharge of radioactive particles in Fukushima was caused by the explosion of hydrogen that resulted from the reaction between the molten uranium and the zirconium cladding of the fuel tubes.
Measures to prevent this are being devised.
It is reassuring that, after previously opposing it, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has said that a nuclear plant is possible in his lifetime and that Singapore "cannot afford to dismiss it".
There are good reasons to seriously consider going nuclear. Natural gas supply can be threatened by political instability or blatant disregard by a party to an agreement to supply it. This would cause havoc to the economy.
With water, Singapore has developed fallbacks should its main supplier abrogate a deal. We should be as resilient with natural gas.
Five countries control 72 per cent of the world's proven reserves of 187,300 billion cubic m.
We must remind ourselves that in 1973, oil prices quadrupled, taking the world by surprise.
What about renewables? For Singapore, this can never meet our base load. And it is only a matter of time before fossil fuels run out.
The way I see it, there is only one option to future-proof our economy: Go nuclear.
This can be done with uranium fission for the immediate future, and possibly thorium or hydrogen fusion for our grandchildren's time.
With the economy trending towards more intensive digital number-crunching, our per capita electrical energy consumption of 8,500 kilowatt hours is likely to rise along with our population. We cannot resolve this conundrum without going nuclear.
NPPs have small footprints because nuclear fuel is 50 million times more energy-dense than gas.
A nuclear reactor does not require gas-fired plants' aforementioned paraphernalia to support it. Its capacity factor is, according to many studies, almost twice that of a gas-fired heat source. This means less downtime for maintenance.
Its lifespan is also longer. The higher capital cost of an NPP is more than offset by its longer life, low maintenance requirements, cheaper fuel and more productive use of land.
Studies have shown that the levelised cost of energy - a way of comparing energy options - is lower than that of fossil or renewable plants, if the cost of funds is less than 4 per cent.
Small modular reactors that can be replicated and scaled up can drive costs even lower.
As for spent fuel, a lifetime of spent fuel can be kept in a pool of a modest size. In fact, 78 per cent of the spent fuel accumulated over five decades from all the NPPs in the US remains in water-filled pools today.
While gas is transported in liquefied natural gas ships or sub-sea pipelines to our shore, uranium can be shipped in boxes at a fraction of the cost.
Hydrogen produced with NPPs could be used in hydrogen fuel cells to power cars cleanly and cheaply. Cheap energy lowers the cost of business and improves our global competitiveness.
One of the biggest obstacles is what to do with a distressed nuclear power plant. If we can move it out of harm's way, there is no need for large exclusion zones.
We can indeed do this, if our NPPs are on floating platforms. Former minister mentor Lee Kuan Yew stated in 2008, when contemplating the prospect of NPPs to serve Singapore's energy needs:"I was thinking at one time about a floating platform. Put a nuclear station there and, if it blows, then we move it a few kilometres away from us."
No one foresaw Singapore becoming a market leader in offshore oil and gas rigs when it delivered its first offshore oil rig. But that market is mature and competition from lower-cost economies is intense. Singapore shipyards are in dire need of innovating and reinventing.
I am convinced that floating assets unrelated to oil and gas are the new horizon and a new area to develop. In particular, floating nuclear power plants are a disruptive technology worthy of the challenge.
What Singapore needs next is the political will to say "Yes" to nuclear.
• The writer is managing director of Floating Solutions LLP.Note from dshort: One of my economic correspondents, James Ross, called my attention to the fact that the NYSE has released new data for margin debt, now available through April. I've updated the charts in this commentary to include the new numbers.
The New York Stock Exchange publishes end-of-month data for margin debt on the NYXdata website, where we can also find historical data back to 1959. Let's examine the numbers and study the relationship between margin debt and the market, using the S&P 500 as the surrogate for the latter.
The first chart shows the two series in real terms — adjusted for inflation to today's dollar using the Consumer Price Index as the deflator. I picked 1995 as an arbitrary start date. We were well into the Boomer Bull Market that began in 1982 and approaching the start of the Tech Bubble that shaped investor sentiment during the second half of the decade. The astonishing surge in leverage in late 1999 peaked in March 2000, the same month that the S&P 500 hit its real all-time high. A similar surge began in 2006, peaking in July, 2007, three months before the market peak.
The next chart shows the percentage growth of the two data series from the same 1995 starting date, again based on real (inflation-adjusted) data. Margin debt grew at a rate comparable to the market from 1995 to late summer of 2000 before soaring into the stratosphere. The two synchronized in their rate of contraction in early 2001. But with recovery after the Tech Crash, margin debt gradually returned to a growth rate closer to its former self in the second half of the 1990s rather than the more restrained real growth of the S&P 500. But by September of 2006, margin again went ballistic. It finally peaked in the summer of 2007, about three months before the market.
After the market low of 2009, margin debt again went on a tear until the contraction in late spring of 2010. The summer doldrums promptly ended when Chairman Bernanke hinted of more quantitative easing in his August, 2010 Jackson Hole speech. The appetite for margin instantly returned, and the Fed has periodically increased the easing.
Unfortunately, the NYSE margin debt data is a few weeks old when it is published. In nominal terms, margin debt at the end of April 2013, the latest available data, has sharply increased since the middle of last year and is now approaching levels associated with market peaks.
NYSE Investor Credit
Lance Roberts, General Partner & CEO of Streettalk Advisors, analyzes margin debt in the larger context that includes free cash accounts and credit balances in margin accounts. Essentially, he calculates the Credit Balance as the sum of Free Credit Cash Accounts and Credit Balances in Margin Accounts minus Margin Debt. The chart below illustrates the mathematics of Credit Balance with an overlay of the S&P 500. Note that the chart below is based on nominal data, not adjusted for inflation.
As I pointed out above, the NYSE margin debt data is a several weeks old when it is published. Thus, even though it may in theory be a leading indicator, a major shift in margin debt isn't be immediately evident. Nevertheless, we see that the troughs in the monthly net credit balance preceded peaks in the monthly S&P 500 closes by six months in 2000 and four months in 2007. The most recent S&P 500 correction greater than 10% was the 19.39% selloff in 2011 from April 29th to October 3rd. Investor Credit hit a negative extreme in March 2011.
There are too few peak/trough episodes in in this overlay series to take the latest credit-balance trough as a definitive warning for U.S. equities. But we'll want to keep an eye on this metric over the next few months.The current flag
The former flag, used from 1987 to 2000
The flag of Ottawa is highlighted by a stylized O design. This stylized O is meant to represent both a maple leaf (symbolizing Canada) and the Peace Tower and Centre Block of the parliament buildings (symbolizing Ottawa). It is meant to be simple, but look festive, and to create a feeling of vibrant motion when flying.
The design uses the blue and green colours chosen to represent the new City of Ottawa. The blue is symbolic of rivers and waterways that are part of the Ottawa region, such as the Ottawa River. The large green areas speak to the large green space and quality of life in the area, as well as the forests, trees, and parkland within the city. It was adopted January 1, 2000 following the creation of the Ottawa "megacity".
History [ edit ]
Previously the Ottawa flag had been a purple, red and blue tricolour. This flag was adopted by the city in 1901 and when it was replaced it was the oldest municipal flag in Canada. The three colours were intended to represent purple for the monarchy, red for the Liberals[citation needed], and blue for the Conservatives. The flag was not popular, however, with few liking its appearance. It also violated rules of heraldry by placing colour next to colour. In 1987, in an attempt to spruce it up, the city's coat of arms was added to the centre. There was little controversy when the transition board decided the new city should get a new flag.Last week, we shared photos of the views from The Shard, which boasts London's highest observation deck. This time, we travel halfway around the world to the tallest building in Hong Kong. The International Commerce Centre (ICC) is a 108-storey skyscraper standing at 484 metres in height. The Kohn Pedersen Fox-designed project is the most prominent component of the Union Square development, which is situated above Kowloon Station of Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway. The tenth tallest building in the world contains a large shopping mall, class A office space, a five-star Ritz Carlton hotel, and a 360-degree observation deck called Sky100.
The International Commerce Centre, image by Flickr user Kimon Berlin via Creative Commons
From here, the views of the Hong Kong skyline — undoubtedly one of the densest in the world — are extraordinary. Numerous advanced telescopes store pre-loaded'sunny day,' 'night view,' and 'fireworks' settings to give visitors a full experience, regardless of the weather. A number of interactive touch screens provide facts about the building and the city.
The Bank of China Tower, 2 IFC, and The Center, image by Flickr user ser_is_snarkish via Creative Commons
Sky100 offers aerial views 393 metres above sea level. Hong Kong Island, with its mountainous terrain and undulating skyline silhouette, can be appreciated in all its glory. This is where the majority of the city's most famous skyscrapers have risen. The Center, a 73-storey office building finished in 1998, was one of the first urban renewal projects undertaken by the modern day Urban Renewal Authority. The star-shaped tower is clad in reflective glass and features a unique night lighting scheme of horizontal colourful strips.
Panorama from the ICC, image by Flickr user Matthew Pintar via Creative Commons
Cesar Pelli's Two International Finance Centre (2 IFC) was the tallest building in Hong Kong from 2003 until the completion of the ICC in 2010, and it dominates the view from the ICC. The 412-metre tower culminates with a distinct sculptural crown that tapers inwards. To the east is I.M. Pei's Bank of China Tower, which was the tallest building outside the United States at the time of its completion in 1990. The glass curtain wall cladding envelops the triangular framework of the building, which is meant to resemble sprouting bamboo shoots. The structure's sharp edges attracted controversy from some feng shui practitioners, yet it has grown to become one of the most identifiable landmarks of Hong Kong.
Looking west at Victoria Harbour and Stonecutters Bridge, image by Flickr user johnlsl via Creative Commons
The pyramidal top of Central Plaza is visible further to the east, where its gold and silver glass shines in the daylight. The Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, identified by its curved roofline, is positioned a short walk northwards on the waterfront. Hong Kong's sweeping Victoria Harbour is home to various popular promenades and the site of annual fireworks displays. The image above shows boats scattered across the landscape, a common sight in the busy shipping corridor. Stonecutters Bridge can be seen in the far distance. Spanning the Rambler Channel, it was the second longest cable-stayed bridge in the world when it opened in 2009.
Kowloon's forest of highrises, image by Flickr user Matthew Pintar via Creative Commons
Like many buildings in the city, the ICC is located on reclaimed land. Lying opposite Hong Kong Island, the area of Kowloon is defined by a forest of tightly packed skinny residential highrises. The name Kowloon is derived from the term Nine Dragons, which denotes eight Hong Kong mountain peaks and Emperor Bing of Song. With the completion of the ICC, Kowloon now possesses a landmark in the same vein as Hong Kong Island's 2 IFC. Both supertall skyscrapers anchor their respective areas with gleaming office towers that have become internationally recognized assets for the city. The architectural prowess of Hong Kong's contemporary cityscape is highlighted by buildings that paved the way for Asia's ongoing skyscraper revolution. The expansive skyline is often considered to be among the best in the world and the ICC serves as the premier platform from which to admire Hong Kong's built legacy.
The International Commerce Centre, image by Flickr user Jaume Escofet via Creative Commons
Want to know about the latest developments shaping Hong Kong? Check out the designated Forum section and get involved in the discussion.Introduction
Genji is a highly versatile DPS and flanker that, unlike other flankers such as Tracer or Reaper, can utilize vertical and horizontal mobility with the help of his Double Jump, Wall Climb and Swift Strike. Because of this, Genji can use a variety of flank routes that very few other heroes can use, allowing Genji to sneak and disrupt an enemy's backline. This guide serves to display, per map, flank routes that many players may not know about as well as their viability depending on the situation and context of a game.
One final note is that while Genji is considered a flanker, he cannot solo a whole team on his own. The best piece of advice any Genji player should consider is communication with their teammates. A Genji must communicate with his team that he is flanking with the goal in mind of getting a pick or "peeling", pulling a defender(s) away from the main objective because when a Genji flanks, his team essentially must fight a 5v6 until the Genji makes a play. By getting a pick or peeling defenders away, Genji disorganizes a team's defenses as well as giving his team a man advantage in a push to almost guarantee the objective.
The Assault Maps
Hanamura
It would only be natural that this guide begins in the birthplace of Genji himself. The main problem that greets most players when they enter this map as an attacker is the initial chokepoint in the form of the main gate of Hanamura Castle. This chokepoint, if defended properly, can seem impenetrable and stagger most attacks before they even begin. There are two common flanks that Genji players will often use to try to bypass the choke shown below in the form of black crosses.
In my opinion these are poor flank choices as they leave the Genji player exposed, forcing Genji to burn abilities most of the time and can be counterplayed quite easily. The window flank on the left can easily |
6 SEA 31 0-0 Marshawn Lynch left end for 4 yards (tackle by Donte Whitner). Penalty on Russell Okung: Offensive Holding, 10 yards 4 0.740 -0.070 -0.81
2013-12-08 Seahawks 49ers 1 0:58 1 10 SEA 20 0-6 Marshawn Lynch left tackle for 4 yards (tackle by NaVorro Bowman) 4 0.280 0.270 -0.01
2013-12-15 Seahawks Giants 3 10:11 1 6 NYG 6 13-0 Marshawn Lynch left guard for 4 yards (tackle by Justin Tuck) 4 5.830 5.720 -0.11
2013-12-15 Seahawks Giants 3 1:07 2 2 SEA 49 16-0 Marshawn Lynch left end for 4 yards (tackle by Ryan Mundy) 4 2.200 2.460.26
2014-01-11 Seahawks Saints 2 13:06 1 10 SEA 7 13-0 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for 4 yards (tackle by Akiem Hicks) 4 -0.380 -0.490 -0.11
2014-01-11 Seahawks Saints 4 7:09 1 10 SEA 20 16-8 Marshawn Lynch left guard for 4 yards (tackle by Cameron Jordan) 4 0.280 0.270 -0.01
2013-09-22 Seahawks Jaguars 3 8:00 1 10 SEA 2 31-0 Marshawn Lynch left tackle for 3 yards (tackle by Tyson Alualu) 3 -0.380 -0.560 -0.18
2013-09-29 Seahawks Texans 4 7:48 1 3 HTX 3 12-20 Marshawn Lynch left end for 3 yards, touchdown 3 6.510 7.000.49
2013-10-06 Seahawks Colts 3 4:16 1 10 SEA 20 25-23 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for 3 yards (tackle by Cory Redding) 3 0.280 0.140 -0.14
2013-10-13 Seahawks Titans 1 3:56 2 6 SEA 36 0-3 Marshawn Lynch left end for 3 yards (tackle by Mike Martin) 3 1.070 0.760 -0.31
2013-10-13 Seahawks Titans 4 7:37 1 3 OTI 3 19-10 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for 3 yards, touchdown 3 6.510 7.000.49
2013-11-03 Seahawks Buccaneers 4 6:13 1 10 SEA 41 17-24 Marshawn Lynch left guard for 3 yards (tackle by Leonard Johnson) 3 1.660 1.530 -0.13
2013-11-03 Seahawks Buccaneers 4 2:35 3 2 TAM 18 17-24 Marshawn Lynch right end for 3 yards (tackle by William Gholston) 3 3.750 4.580.83
2013-11-03 Seahawks Buccaneers 5 12:43 1 10 50 24-24 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for 3 yards (tackle by Derek Landri) 3 2.260 2.120 -0.14
2013-11-10 Seahawks Falcons 3 14:15 1 10 SEA 31 23-3 Marshawn Lynch left tackle for 3 yards (tackle by Osi Umenyiora) 3 1.000 0.870 -0.13
2013-12-02 Seahawks Saints 3 9:13 1 10 NOR 28 27-7 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for 3 yards (tackle by Kenny Vaccaro) 3 3.710 3.570 -0.14
2013-12-08 Seahawks 49ers 2 14:23 1 10 SFO 45 0-6 Marshawn Lynch left tackle for 3 yards (tackle by NaVorro Bowman) 3 2.590 2.450 -0.14
2013-12-08 Seahawks 49ers 4 9:12 2 10 SFO 27 14-16 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for 3 yards (tackle by Glenn Dorsey) 3 3.230 2.940 -0.29
2014-01-11 Seahawks Saints 2 3:19 2 5 NOR 30 13-0 Marshawn Lynch left end for 3 yards (tackle by Ramon Humber). Penalty on Russell Okung: Offensive Holding, 10 yards (no play) 3 3.380 2.030 -1.35
2014-01-11 Seahawks Saints 3 15:00 1 10 SEA 20 16-0 Marshawn Lynch right tackle for 3 yards (tackle by Brodrick Bunkley) 3 0.280 0.140 -0.14
2014-01-11 Seahawks Saints 3 14:19 2 7 SEA 23 16-0 Marshawn Lynch left tackle for 3 yards (tackle by Roman Harper) 3 0.140 -0.160 -0.30
2014-01-11 Seahawks Saints 3 8:32 1 10 SEA 19 16-0 Marshawn Lynch left guard for 3 yards (tackle by Keyunta Dawson) 3 0.150 0.070 -0.08
2014-01-19 Seahawks 49ers 1 4:05 2 10 SEA 11 0-3 Marshawn Lynch right tackle for 3 yards (tackle by Justin Smith) 3 -0.780 -1.070 -0.29
2014-01-19 Seahawks 49ers 4 5:04 2 18 SFO 36 20-17 Marshawn Lynch right end for 3 yards (tackle by Ray McDonald) 3 2.090 1.820 -0.27
2013-09-08 Seahawks Panthers 1 0:14 1 10 SEA 40 0-0 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for 2 yards (tackle by Luke Kuechly) 2 1.600 1.320 -0.28
2013-09-15 Seahawks 49ers 4 4:26 1 2 SFO 2 28-3 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for 2 yards, touchdown 2 6.740 7.000.26
2013-10-06 Seahawks Colts 1 0:12 1 10 CLT 47 12-7 Marshawn Lynch right guard for 2 yards (tackle by Kavell Conner) 2 2.460 2.180 -0.28
2013-10-17 Seahawks Cardinals 2 14:16 1 15 CRD 17 7-0 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for 2 yards (tackle by John Abraham) 2 4.320 3.660 -0.66
2013-10-17 Seahawks Cardinals 3 3:57 2 2 CRD 2 30-13 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for 2 yards, touchdown 2 5.720 7.000 1.28
2013-10-17 Seahawks Cardinals 4 8:57 1 10 SEA 28 34-16 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for 2 yards (tackle by Calais Campbell) 2 0.810 0.530 -0.28
2013-10-28 Seahawks Rams 3 15:00 1 10 SEA 20 7-3 Marshawn Lynch right tackle for 2 yards (tackle by Jo-Lonn Dunbar) 2 0.280 0.000 -0.28
2013-11-03 Seahawks Buccaneers 3 7:42 1 10 SEA 46 7-24 Marshawn Lynch left tackle for 2 yards (tackle by Mark Barron). Penalty on Zach Miller: Offensive Holding, 10 yards 2 1.990 1.470 -0.52
2013-11-03 Seahawks Buccaneers 3 0:58 1 10 TAM 25 14-24 Marshawn Lynch left guard for 2 yards (tackle by Lavonte David) 2 3.910 3.630 -0.28
2013-11-10 Seahawks Falcons 2 3:00 1 10 ATL 29 13-3 Marshawn Lynch left end for 2 yards (tackle by Jonathan Babineaux) 2 3.640 3.370 -0.27
2013-11-10 Seahawks Falcons 3 12:30 2 7 SEA 45 23-3 Marshawn Lynch left end for 2 yards (tackle by Jonathan Babineaux) 2 1.590 1.160 -0.43
2013-11-10 Seahawks Falcons 3 0:22 2 8 SEA 22 26-10 Marshawn Lynch right end for 2 yards (tackle by Paul Worrilow) 2 0.000 -0.430 -0.43
2013-12-08 Seahawks 49ers 2 4:33 1 10 SFO 41 7-9 Marshawn Lynch left tackle for 2 yards (tackle by Dan Skuta) 2 2.850 2.580 -0.27
2013-12-08 Seahawks 49ers 4 7:55 1 10 SFO 15 14-16 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for 2 yards (tackle by Ahmad Brooks) 2 4.580 4.280 -0.30
2013-12-15 Seahawks Giants 2 5:39 2 2 NYG 2 9-0 Marshawn Lynch right tackle for 2 yards, touchdown 2 5.720 7.000 1.28
2013-12-22 Seahawks Cardinals 1 8:47 1 10 SEA 11 0-0 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for 2 yards (tackle by Karlos Dansby) 2 -0.370 -0.630 -0.26
2013-12-22 Seahawks Cardinals 1 3:17 1 10 SEA 47 0-0 Marshawn Lynch left end for 2 yards (tackle by Darnell Dockett) 2 2.060 1.790 -0.27
2013-12-22 Seahawks Cardinals 1 2:42 2 8 SEA 49 0-0 Marshawn Lynch left guard for 2 yards (tackle by Calais Campbell) 2 1.790 1.360 -0.43
2013-12-29 Seahawks Rams 2 7:44 1 8 RAM 8 7-0 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for 2 yards (tackle by Kendall Langford) 2 5.370 4.950 -0.42
2013-12-29 Seahawks Rams 3 2:25 2 2 RAM 2 19-3 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for 2 yards, touchdown 2 5.720 7.000 1.28
2013-09-15 Seahawks 49ers 2 10:31 1 10 SFO 49 2-0 Marshawn Lynch right tackle for 1 yard (tackle by Ahmad Brooks) 1 2.320 1.920 -0.40
2013-10-13 Seahawks Titans 2 2:46 4 1 OTI 1 6-3 Marshawn Lynch left guard for 1 yard, touchdown 1 3.550 7.000 3.45
2013-10-17 Seahawks Cardinals 2 15:00 1 10 CRD 26 7-0 Marshawn Lynch left tackle for 1 yard (tackle by Frostee Rucker) 1 3.840 3.430 -0.41
2013-10-17 Seahawks Cardinals 2 2:04 2 2 SEA 39 14-10 Marshawn Lynch left tackle for 1 yard (tackle by Calais Campbell) 1 1.540 0.960 -0.58
2013-10-17 Seahawks Cardinals 4 14:09 2 6 SEA 24 31-16 Marshawn Lynch left tackle for 1 yard (tackle by Calais Campbell) 1 0.270 -0.300 -0.57
2013-10-28 Seahawks Rams 2 2:57 2 4 SEA 43 7-3 Marshawn Lynch left tackle for 1 yard (tackle by Kendall Langford) 1 1.670 1.090 -0.58
2013-11-10 Seahawks Falcons 2 2:23 2 8 ATL 27 13-3 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for 1 yard (tackle by Akeem Dent) 1 3.370 2.810 -0.56
2013-11-10 Seahawks Falcons 4 8:54 3 1 ATL 1 32-10 Marshawn Lynch left end for 1 yard, touchdown 1 5.170 7.000 1.83
2013-11-17 Seahawks Vikings 2 6:31 3 1 MIN 1 16-10 Marshawn Lynch right tackle for 1 yard, touchdown 1 5.170 7.000 1.83
2013-12-29 Seahawks Rams 3 4:16 2 10 RAM 23 13-3 Marshawn Lynch right tackle for 1 yard (tackle by Trumaine Johnson). Penalty on Alec Ogletree: Unnecessary Roughness, 11 yards 1 3.500 4.840 1.34
2014-02-02 Seahawks Broncos 2 12:08 2 1 DEN 1 14-0 Marshawn Lynch left guard for 1 yard, touchdown 1 5.910 7.000 1.09
2013-09-08 Seahawks Panthers 2 13:11 2 3 CAR 36 0-0 Marshawn Lynch right tackle for no gain (tackle by Star Lotulelei) 0 3.120 2.410 -0.71
2013-09-08 Seahawks Panthers 3 6:02 1 10 50 3-7 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for no gain (tackle by Josh Thomas) 0 2.260 1.710 -0.55
2013-09-08 Seahawks Panthers 4 2:17 1 10 CAR 36 12-7 Marshawn Lynch right tackle for no gain (tackle by Luke Kuechly) 0 3.180 2.640 -0.54
2013-09-29 Seahawks Texans 3 5:50 3 1 SEA 39 3-20 Marshawn Lynch right tackle for no gain (tackle by J.J. Watt) 0 0.890 -0.780 -1.67
2013-10-13 Seahawks Titans 3 5:30 2 10 OTI 22 7-10 Marshawn Lynch left tackle for no gain (tackle by Karl Klug) 0 3.560 2.870 -0.69
2013-10-17 Seahawks Cardinals 2 10:39 3 1 CRD 43 14-0 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for no gain (tackle by Karlos Dansby) 0 2.080 0.400 -1.68
2013-11-03 Seahawks Buccaneers 5 10:54 2 6 TAM 33 24-24 Marshawn Lynch left tackle for no gain (tackle by Derek Landri) 0 3.110 2.410 -0.70
2013-11-17 Seahawks Vikings 1 12:09 3 22 MIN 32 0-0 Marshawn Lynch left tackle for no gain (tackle by Kevin Williams) 0 1.420 1.240 -0.18
2013-12-02 Seahawks Saints 3 14:55 1 10 SEA 18 27-7 Marshawn Lynch left guard for no gain (tackle by Curtis Lofton) 0 0.040 -0.490 -0.53
2013-12-08 Seahawks 49ers 2 5:50 2 2 SFO 45 7-9 Marshawn Lynch right guard for no gain (tackle by NaVorro Bowman) 0 2.600 1.880 -0.72
2014-01-11 Seahawks Saints 2 1:58 2 3 NOR 8 13-0 Marshawn Lynch left end for no gain (tackle by David Hawthorne) 0 5.220 4.450 -0.77
2014-02-02 Seahawks Broncos 3 10:00 1 10 SEA 26 29-0 Marshawn Lynch left tackle for no gain (tackle by Danny Trevathan) 0 0.670 0.130 -0.54
2013-10-06 Seahawks Colts 1 6:49 1 9 CLT 9 3-0 Marshawn Lynch right end for -1 yards (tackle by Antoine Bethea) -1 5.140 4.190 -0.95
2013-10-17 Seahawks Cardinals 3 4:43 1 1 CRD 1 24-13 Marshawn Lynch right end for -1 yards (tackle by Calais Campbell) -1 6.970 5.720 -1.25
2013-10-28 Seahawks Rams 4 7:53 1 10 RAM 48 14-9 Marshawn Lynch right tackle for -1 yards (tackle by Chris Long) -1 2.390 1.710 -0.68
2014-02-02 Seahawks Broncos 2 14:23 1 10 DEN 11 8-0 Marshawn Lynch right end for -1 yards (tackle by Danny Trevathan) -1 4.840 3.980 -0.86
2013-11-10 Seahawks Falcons 2 12:43 2 4 ATL 23 3-0 Marshawn Lynch right end for -2 yards (tackle by William Moore) -2 3.910 2.940 -0.97
2013-12-15 Seahawks Giants 1 13:52 1 10 SEA 47 0-0 Marshawn Lynch right guard for -2 yards (tackle by Ryan Mundy) -2 2.060 1.250 -0.81
2014-01-11 Seahawks Saints 3 7:10 3 6 SEA 23 16-0 Marshawn Lynch left end for -2 yards (tackle by Corey White) -2 -0.550 -1.960 -1.41
2013-09-08 Seahawks Panthers 2 11:49 1 10 CAR 11 0-0 Marshawn Lynch right tackle for -3 yards (tackle by Star Lotulelei) -3 4.840 3.690 -1.15
2013-09-15 Seahawks 49ers 3 1:41 1 20 SFO 34 12-3 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for -3 yards (tackle by Ahmad Brooks) -3 3.310 1.680 -1.63
2013-09-15 Seahawks 49ers 4 15:00 1 10 SFO 13 12-3 Marshawn Lynch left tackle for -3 yards (tackle by Aldon Smith) -3 4.710 3.620 -1.09
2013-10-17 Seahawks Cardinals 3 13:39 3 16 SEA 14 17-10 Marshawn Lynch up the middle for -3 yards (tackle by Daryl Washington) -3 -2.030 -2.490 -0.46
2013-10-28 Seahawks Rams 1 11:40 1 10 SEA 7 0-0 Marshawn Lynch left tackle for -3 yards (tackle by Robert Quinn) -3 -0.380 -1.000 -0.62
2013-09-15 Seahawks 49ers 3 13:00 2 8 SEA 33 5-0 Marshawn Lynch left end for -4 yards (tackle by Aldon Smith) -4 0.730 -0.490 -1.22
2014-01-11 Seahawks Saints 1 11:37 2 5 NOR 22 0-0 Marshawn Lynch right guard for -4 yards (tackle by Cameron Jordan) -4 3.910 2.680 -1.23The first thing Patient 53 saw as he walked in was a red football helmet. A groan rattled through his vending-machine-sized frame. "The last thing I want to see," he said, "is a football helmet."
It was the heavy plastic variant from his playing days, in the 1980s, as an offensive lineman in the National Football League, one of four helmets lined up on the front desk of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. Tucked into the seventh floor of the Boston University School of Medicine, the center had welcomed 52 retired football players like him over the past six months, each racked by a single question: Had their brains gone bad?
Two years before, when he entered his mid-50s, Patient 53 fell into a fog, and he hadn't come back since. He was dizzy and tired and frazzled. He'd visited more than a dozen doctors. None helped much. He'd seen the news, seen former teammates struggle. The suicides. He knew doctors had found a degenerative brain disease—chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, as it's known—in a number of deceased former football players. But none could say if he had it. There was no way to know; it could be diagnosed only by cutting the brain open, they told him.
So when Patient 53 heard that these Boston researchers, the same pioneers who had found the disease in those dead pros, were recruiting former players to help them diagnose CTE in the living, he signed up immediately. So did several hundred of his peers.
This is a problem you've heard about. Over the past decade, CTE, a disease once thought limited to a few boxers and labeled dismissively as "punch-drunk syndrome," has blown up as a medical and cultural phenomenon. 60 Minutes investigated it. Prime-time courtroom dramas have filmed scripts on it. Worry is widespread: Is it a threat only to the thousands of current and former NFL players? What about the more than 60,000 active players in college football? The 1.1 million children playing in high school? The two million veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Concerned parents flood the five-year-old BU center with questions; because the symptoms—anxiety, depression, confusion—are widespread, and far from exclusive, it's easy to jump to self-diagnosis. "Everybody wants to know if they have this disease," one researcher told me. "Then everyone wants a treatment." What they don't want to know is how little the scientists know.
"We don't have any clue about the rest of the disease—the hows, the whys. Anything really about it, except what it looks like," says Robert A. Stern, the BU neurology professor leading the detection study, which began last year and is the first such study financed by the National Institutes of Health. CTE is closely related to Alzheimer's disease. (Only in the past year have most scientists accepted it as a separate condition.) Do genetics play a role? Can lifestyle help cause it? "Is it specific to the type and frequencies of hits, or the amount of rest between hits?" Stern asks. "When they start, when they stop? The total duration? We don't know any of that."
To answer any of those questions—to figure out why some football players get CTE and some don't, or even how prevalent it is—they first need to be able to diagnose it.
"All we know is that one variable seems to make it happen in some people," Stern says.
It's a very simple variable: being hit, repeatedly.
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Patient 53 has had that variable. A lot of that variable. On the condition of anonymity, he agreed that I could shadow him through his tests. And now he was here, around 8 in the morning, greeted by Stern. Balding and bubbly, the professor, who also directs clinical research at BU's Alzheimer's Disease Center, is an exuberant football fan, and he warmed up Patient 53 with some talk about the former player's bad back. That's the type of injury 53 had known to expect when he played. But not the brain stuff. Is that what was wrong with him?
"Now I wish I had never played. Well, some I do, some I don't," 53 told Stern. "I'm hoping you can help."
"That's why we're so glad you're here," Stern said. "We're the people who know the most. And we're hopeful."
Dressed in loose, old blue jeans and a teal pullover zipped to the throat, Patient 53 loomed over Stern and Christine Baugh, the study's research coordinator, who would guide him through the next two days. They would make a fine study in contrasts: 53 was large, his beard patchy, nose thick, breathing heavy. Just a few years out of Harvard University, where she studied the history of neuroscience, Baugh was very much a former rower—tall, thin. Her father had played professional football for a couple of years, so she has a vested interest in the disease and an easy way of talking with former pros. She's sharp, too, which was good, because as they settled into a conference room across the hallway, 53 would show that he'd lost little wit to his mental fog.
Baugh was explaining the study's spinal tap. It's a normal point of anxiety, a reason they've had a hard time getting subjects for a control group. (They desperately need volunteers: former professional or college athletes in sports like baseball or rowing who haven't been hit in the head. When I visited, in March, only three such volunteers had gone through the study.) The same fluid in the spine also surrounds the brain, she explained. In CTE, a protein called tau congregates in fibrous tangles inside the brain's neurons. It's one of the mechanisms seen in other degenerative brain diseases, like Alzheimer's, for which spinal taps have recently proved promising in diagnosis. They might find similar spinal biomarkers for CTE, though that's far from certain.
But there are possible side effects, she noted. "The other thing that can happen is what's called a spinal headache," she said. "We do a couple things to try and minimize that. We use a special needle, and we also have you lay down afterward, both of which have actually been shown to help."
"What did you call it?" Patient 53 said. "The what headache?"
"Spinal headache."
"Oh, great."
"I know. We really try to minimize the headaches. We know you guys have all too many of those."
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They went through permissions—53 donning his steel-framed glasses to read the documents—and descriptions of the rest of the tests: physical, blood sample, neurological exam, EEG, psychiatric interview, medical history, cognitive test, and, on Day 2, a couple of hours in an MRI machine. A spiral of white-plastic brains hung on the wall, its pattern reminiscent of a meditation labyrinth. Don't worry, Baugh assured Patient 53, if anything health-related arises, they'd let him know right away. But much of this work won't yield any diagnostic results until the study is done, she said.
"When do you anticipate everything will be done?" he asked.
"Everybody should be fully through the study in about a year's time."
"From now?"
"From now."
Christine Baugh and Patient 53 eased their way up a flight of stairs—given his chronic back injuries, he doesn't walk so much as grind—to the center's clinical-research unit, a quiet floor mocked up like a standard hospital, nurse's station and all. Patient 53 would spend most of his day here in a drab beige room, paintings of white and blue potted flowers on the wall, attended by a cast of efficient caretakers.
First came a dark-haired, middle-aged nurse—a real pro in blue scrubs and white coat, with a Boston accent—to take blood and vitals. She needed three tablespoons of blood, some to see if the spinal tap could go forward, and the rest for genetic tests. The researchers theorize that the most common genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's could play a similar role in CTE. If it does, it wouldn't be the cause of CTE but another indication that genes play a role in why the results of brain injury vary so much.
Between tests, Patient 53 encompassed a gray padded chair, his arms dangling close to the floor. He delighted over the day's strange vocab, the "Johnny top" hospital gown, and a scale branded Detecto. Then the neurologist, Samuel Frank, an associate professor, swept in, young-featured and wearing olive pants and a blue-and-white-checked shirt.
Before the spinal tap, he ran 53 through physical tests: tracking Frank's fingers, clenching hands, tapping toes. "Do you get much sleep?" he asked at one point. "I don't sleep much," 53 said. "Not very well." Then there was the drunk-driving test, putting one foot in front of the other. "Can you take a few steps way up on your tiptoes?" Frank asked. 53 grimaced. "My calves don't work," he said. Long, quiet pauses punctuated the conversation as Frank tapped records into a black tablet. Eventually he started poking 53's feet with a safety pin, to little response. 53 had suffered bad frostbite during one game, he explained. His feet were gray for months.
The neurological tests ended with 53 standing on a four-inch-thick blue mat, balancing on one foot. Baugh timed him with an iPhone. He barely had his foot off the floor before he tipped forward. "This is depressing," 53 said.
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"This is hard for anybody," Baugh quickly protested.
"You did fine," Frank said.
"No, I didn't," 53 said with a sad laugh. "But that's OK."
Frank and the nurse readied him for the spinal tap. He was the tallest patient they had tested, though not the heaviest; he hadn't shrunk like some of his post-steroid peers—53 never took steroids, he said—and carried his gut well. Still, Frank said, they should start with the long needle. 53 sat on the side of a bed, leaning facedown on two pillows stacked on a rollaway food tray. "You should have the documentary Spinal Tap playing when you do this," he said, his voice muffled. He paused: "The mockumentary."
Frank streaked red-brown iodine on 53's spine and pressed the needle, thin, about a half-inch long, into 53's back, searching for a route between two vertebrae. In Alzheimer's patients, the researchers have seen a large increase of tau in the spinal fluid, possibly because of nerve destruction. They wanted to see if the same held for CTE—far from a given—and how it might be detected early on. The needle resembled a dipstick, its interior sliding out to show whether Frank had tapped the spinal fluid.
"You in there yet?" 53 asked, after some time had passed. Not yet. "We have a little bit more tissue to go through than normal," Frank said.
As Frank continued to explore, there was a knock on the door, and Robert Stern, the study's leader, appeared. "Perfect timing," Frank said.
"No matter what my schedule is, I walk in just as he's doing this!" Stern said. "How's it going?" he asked Patient 53.
"You always ask that just as we're doing this," Frank said. "What are they supposed to say? 'Oh, it's great'?"
"Are you coming out the other side or what?" 53 asked, in good humor. They had to try a different spot, it turned out; Frank couldn't get between the bones. Stern chatted with 53 about Lou Gehrig's disease; one variant of it seems related to CTE, caused by repetitive blows to the head.
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"It's nasty," 53 said.
"It's really nasty, really nasty," Stern said.
Frank started again. Soon enough he struck fluid.
"I've got maple syrup coming out of me," 53 said.
"This is much less viscous," Frank said. "It's quite literally like water. Water with a few extra proteins. That's what we're looking for."
The nurse walked around the bed to show 53 his fluid, now in vials.
"That's what your brain floats around in," Baugh said.
"I guess it's good it's clear, right?" 53 said.
Patient 53's day was far from over. After Frank, Stern, and the nurse left, Baugh had him lie down. She scrubbed his face, then stuck on circular white electrodes for the electroencephalogram, which would measure the electrical activity of his brain in a resting state. The room was still, though 53 fidgeted, drawn to chat with Baugh. She dimmed the lights. The clock ticked, ticked again.
He got no spinal headache, thankfully, and a late breakfast soon arrived: sausage, eggs, banana, apple. "I had never had a spinal tap, so I was a little nervous about that," 53 said. "But that wasn't bad." His back is such a problem, he continued. He was due for surgery soon, a three-tiered fusion. "I'm not necessarily in pain. But walking is very uncomfortable. It's like getting stabbed."
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Patient 53 started playing contact football when he was 14 years old. His dad didn't allow him to play tackle before then. "Smart man," he said. He was a tight end in high school, playing basketball (center, of course) and heaving a shot put. His size and smarts made him an offensive lineman by college, the burly yet agile players responsible for defending the quarterback and opening holes for the running back. It's an unheralded position—one that can record thousands of light blows to the head. And blows that are not so light.
We were still in the exam room. Patient 53 had spent a couple of hours speaking confidentially with a psychiatrist. Then Baugh returned to learn about his past: sports, injuries, medical history, drug use. He'd taken off his pullover and absently curled his left hand into a fist, wrapped under his beige T-shirt.
"Next I'm going to ask you some questions about concussions."
"What?" 53 said.
"Next I'm going to ask you some questions about—"
He laughed. "It's a bad joke."
53 believes he suffered 30 to 50 concussions during his playing career. A lot of dings. A lot of stars. "Man, that's a lot of football, isn't it?" he said. Only once did he black out. (It's a misconception that concussions require a loss of consciousness.) "I remember putting my pads on, and I remember a nurse waking me up," he said. "With a bad headache." That was in college, and would have been in practice, he said. He rarely left games after his other concussions; there were smelling salts, after all. More than once he approached the wrong huddle, only to have his teammates drag him back across the field.
He turned and looked at me. "Stupid (expletive) sport," he said.
Though Baugh was asking about concussions, chronic traumatic encephalopathy is not tied just to concussions. This is a point of wide and understandable confusion; until recently, Stern and his team thought it was all about concussions. Now they know that the disease is linked to the hundreds of "subconcussive" blows the brain suffers, the collective scrapes and bruises it takes from the skull. "It's somehow the total load of hitting your head," Stern told me earlier. "Something about that in some people puts into motion this cascade of events in the brain that eventually leads to this overall disease course."
The mechanisms aren't known. The researchers suspect that tau spreads in a way similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and related disorders, in which defective proteins, called prions, beget more defective proteins. There's also a neuroinflammation hypothesis, but nothing the researchers are ready to unveil. The center has found CTE in the brains of 34 of the 35 deceased players it's examined, but that's a highly selective sample, given that most of those donated brains came from players known to have had the disease's symptoms. Stern has also recently noted that CTE has two stages: one that causes changes in behavior and mood, and the other, later in life, that causes cognitive problems and leads to dementia. (That paper is not yet published.) Why does that happen? He doesn't know.
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Patient 53 had a lot of history to go over. He'd done |
-opted the direct-from-the-farmer brand established by CSAs, and unlike small farmers, they have the benefit of venture capital to capture market share.
These companies run ads -- often on public radio and podcasts -- offering discounts and freebies. Underhill said giving away free boxes or making steep discounts "would blow a giant hole in any farm’s budget."
Evan Wiig is founder of The Farmers Guild, an advocacy group for local farms. “The new produce box schemes, they really aren’t the death of the CSAs,” Wiig said. “They’re just the newest iteration in a long evolving trend.”
CSAs used to be one of the few ways for urbanites to get their fix of things like heirloom kohlrabi and purple carrots. Now there are more farmers markets, and organic produce is available at many grocery stores, even Costco. "The local food system, the local food models, have shifted so dramatically in just the past decade or two," Wiig said.
With all these choices, Wiig said customers are demanding more control over what they get and when. The buy-direct, support-the-farm ethos of CSAs is getting lost in the pursuit of convenience.
Lorraine Walker's Eatwell Farm near Davis relies on the CSA model. She is trying to retain customers by offering add-ons to her boxes: eggs, chicken stock and sodas made with herbs on the farm. She also invites members to the farm to do things like pick strawberries and make pasta sauce.
"That's the one thing no one else can offer," Walker said, "The true connection to the farm, to the soil, to the plants, and to where your food comes from."
To make up for the loss of CSA revenue, Underhill has gone back to growing more for restaurants and grocery stores. He said other nearby CSA farms have started selling to the new meal and produce delivery services.
“I’m trying to think of a word other than depressing,” Underhill said. “But that’s what it is.”WordPress Plugin Vulnerability leads to Panama Papers leak at Mossack Fonseca?
First Forbes and others reported that the Drupalgeddon security issue in an old version of the popular Drupal CMS was a cause for the Mossack Fonseca information leak causing the massive information leak on tax evation via offshore companies.
Now WordFence is reporting that they have also found WordPress has a vulnerable plugin which as been exploited in the largest leak of confidential information to date:
The Mossack Fonseca website runs WordPress and is currently running a version of Revolution Slider that is vulnerable to attack and will grant a remote attacker a shell on the web server.
It is now certainly been proven that maintaining your open source software is equally (in not even more so) important than that of closed source ones. An open door is an invitation.
Read the full article on WordFence website: Mossack Fonseca Breach – WordPress Revolution Slider Plugin Possible Cause
Written by Janita on Friday April 8, 2016
Permalink -The two films, opening Wednesday, are pacing to do less business than expected over the Fourth of July holiday and could lose the weekend to 'Inside Out' and 'Jurassic World.'
Thanks to female fans, Channing Tatum's raucous R-rated comedy Magic Mike XXL opened to $9.3 million at the Wednesday box office, enough to beat Terminator: Genisys and shimmy up the pole to top the North American box office.
But both films are pacing to do less business than expected over the long Fourth of July holiday, meaning that titans Inside Out and Jurassic World could win the three-day weekend unless the landscape changes and Magic Mike XXL or Genisys pops.
Magic Mike XXL has far less at stake that Terminator: Genisys, having cost Warner Bros. less than $15 million to make.
Genisys, with a production budget of $155 million and relying heavily on males, opened in the No. 2 spot Wednesday with $8.9 million for Paramount and David Ellison's Skydance, which are looking to relaunch the marquee franchise. (Ellison spearheaded acquiring the rights to the Terminator franchise.)
Heading into the long holiday stretch, Paramount counted on Genisys hitting $55 million for the five days in North America, but it may not get to $45 million (even $55 million wouldn't have been a spectacular number). That includes $27 million-$28 million for the three-day weekend. For the movie to work, it will have to do sizable business internationally, where it's launching in 60 percent of the marketplace this weekend.
Alan Taylor directed Genisys, with Arnold Schwarzenegger reprising his role as a Terminator. He stars opposite Emilia Clarke, who plays John Connor's mother, Sarah, and Jason Clarke, who plays John Connor. Jai Courtney and J.K. Simmons co-star. This time out, John Connor sends Kyle Reese (Courtney) back in time to protect his mother, but things soon go awry.
Critics have been none too kind to the tentpole, while audiences gave it a B+ CinemaScore.
Magic MIke XXL, the sequel to Steven Soderbergh's sleeper hit, has fared better with critics and moviegoers, who gave it an A- CinemaScore. Tracking had suggested the sequel would earn $45 million-$50 million for the five days, but it may come in around $35 million, including $18 million-$20 million for the three days. It's not a surprise that it won Wednesday, thanks to ardent fans.
The sequel was made this time without Matthew McConaughey, who played an undeniable role in turning Magic Mike into a sleeper hit in summer 2012 after the film opened to $39.1 million. But Tatum, himself a popular star and whose early career as a male stripper inspired the film series, did return, alongside Matt Bomer and Joe Manganiello. Gregory Jacobs directed.
July 2, 8:00 a.m. Updated with Wednesday numbers.Superhero Lessons in Analytics — Ep. XI
Memory & Storytelling— Lessons from Legion
Corsair's Publishing Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 19, 2017
It has been a few months since our last episode of Superhero Lessons. The X featured the X-men, but this article will focus on Marvel’s latest television offering. At the time of this writing, Legion just aired its 6th episode on FX. The show seems to be attracting a solid following and is getting great reviews on Google, IMDB, and Rotten Tomatoes.
Legion is the story of David Haller. I think. A guy, or possibly several, with some extraordinary powers, or perhaps delusions. The show features a cast of characters who may all be imaginary, possibly dead, or perhaps none of the above. Each episode has taken us deeper, set us back, and well really just confused the hell out of everybody. It is the perfect show for analysts!
Memories Are Never What They Seem
The human memory database is not exactly built for accuracy, but at least it has only one administrator. Recent science suggests that human memory is iteratively rewritten with every recall. In other words, we technically remember remembering. This is validated by the experience of crime scene investigators and others. Witness testimony is often wildly biased by minor events. Our memories just aren’t what they seem.
David Haller’s memories are another level entirely. They seem to have been purposely rewritten. There is a still a question of exactly by who? The show further takes advantage of memory by relying on Ptonomy Wallace, a character who can visit peoples memories. Ptonomy’s powers seem capable of overcoming another of science’s recent hypotheses — human’s only really see about 20% of what we think we see. The other 80% is basically brain modeled background.
David’s memories are dark and haunting. They are also dynamic and wildly inaccurate. They make for great drama but they also remind us that the human mind is not engineered for total recall. We focus on 20% and let the rest take care of itself. Our memories are malleable and changing. They are subject to alteration. Analysts should always be careful when relying on the memory of others, or even our own.
There Are Plenty of Ways To Deliver A Storytelling
As noted above, much of David’s story is unlocked through memory, some seems to be a walk through his mind, a bit seems to be projection to the astral plane, and a small amount may actually be reality (at least the TV version). Essentially, the show takes the boundaries of storytelling and ignores them completely.
Analysts today live in a world dominated by PowerPoint decks, Answer First thinking, and on occasion — classic story telling. There is merit in all of these views. They are straightforward and typically clear. But Legion reminds us that pushing the boundaries can be compelling as well — and also confusing as hell… or David’s dreams, if you prefer.
Paris fashion shows push boundaries. The fall collections that follow are much more moderated but clearly inspired models of what is set down the catwalks each year. Legion is a catwalk for storytelling. If you use it wisely, your stories may be far more compelling and provocative (good things in analytics). Go too far and you are just going to confuse your audience, which is potentially a great hook for TV (bad for analytics).
To remind us just how bad a story can be, Legion features one of the worst. Or at least the worst memory of one…
Legion is an inspiration. It is compelling. It is provocative. It breaks boundaries. It is also a warning about the limits of memory and how a stories go bad.
Thanks for reading. Episode XII will be here soon. If you would like to catch up on the rest of this series:Like many, I watched with horror as the recent violence at Manus Island unfolded. But not with surprise. Last year I worked on the island as the occupational health and safety manager for the security firm G4S.
It was clear to me then that the mixture of an overcrowded and insecure camp, inexperienced local guards and a tormented population of refugees was a lethal combination. I reported as much to my immediate superiors and the Department of Immigration.
'It was obvious... that violent altercations were imminent.' Credit:Kate Geraghty
I resigned from the detention centre when instances of sexual abuse and torture of vulnerable inmates at the hands of fellow detainees were uncovered. The design of the facility and the attitude of the department made it impossible for staff, many of them fine men and women, to protect the victims. The key problem wasn't G4S or other contractors. The key problem was the Department of Immigration, which refused to consider professional advice concerning the protection of the inmates.
With nowhere to turn within the system, I felt morally compelled to go outside of it and I told my story as a whistleblower to the media. The government announced an independent review, which I naively believed would rigorously inquire into the morass that the Manus Island centre had become.Leonard commits long-term future to Southend United after signing a new contract
Midfielder Ryan Leonard has committed his long-term future to Southend United, after agreeing a new three-and-a-half year deal with the club on Friday.
The 21-year-old, who joined the club three years ago in July 2011, has been instrumental in the middle of midfield for Blues this season.
The former Plymouth man originally joined the club as a right-back, but has been transformed by manager Phil Brown into a holding midfielder for Southend this season.
Leonard has agreed a new three-and-a-half year deal that will keep him at the club until the summer of 2017.
The news follows fellow midfielder Kevan Hurst agreeing a new two-year deal with the club last Friday.
Leonard has made 35 appearances so far this season, scoring six goals. He also captained the side while club skipper John White was out injured during January.
Speaking about his new deal with the club, Leonard said: “I’m delighted to have signed a new contract because I’ve really enjoyed my time with Southend.
“I’ve had the best season of my career so far and have managed to keep my place in the starting line-up in a position I only really moved to under the new manager in the summer.
“I want to continue my development and I feel that Southend United is the perfect place for me to do that.”
Manager Phil Brown was pleased to tie Leonard down, adding: “Ryan has been a big player for us this season and has gone from a right-back when he signed to an important figure in the middle of midfield.
“I’ve been pleased with his progress this season and has added goals to his game which has also been important for us.
“He’s got a big future in the game and I’m delighted that he’s going to be staying with us for the future.
“With both Kevan and Ryan both agreeing new contracts, it’s a clear sign that we’re trying to get some stability here at the club.”Ms Chapman's forthcoming book claims she learnt to catch birds and rabbits with her bare hands after being abandoned in the jungle by kidnappers.
The Tarzan-like episode was brought to an end when she was discovered by hunters, but by her ordeal continued when she was sold to a brothel in the city of Cucuta and groomed for prostitution.
She was eventually found living on the streets and was taken in by a family who adopted her.
Her cousin, Carlos Velasquez, described how she was believed to have survived amongst the animals for so long.
"Apparently she was very little and she saw the monkeys eating food in the middle of the jungle. In order to survive she would imitate, or eat what they ate," he said.
An expert at the state Environment Agency in Colombia explained how it might be possible for a human to survive in these conditions.
Antonio Ramirez said: "The social behaviour of the monkeys is such that they can embrace the human as long as it doesn't show any aggression."
Ms Chapman and her family have now decided to tell her story to help highlight the horrors of human trafficking in South America.A few years ago, I wrote about the horrible “witch children” craze in Nigeria. Like the witch hunts that once swept through America and Europe, this one is fed by sects of fanatic evangelical preachers, inflamed by Western missionaries, that believe in a miracle-drenched, demon-haunted world – and teach that people, including children, can be possessed by evil spirits, and that the only cure is to torture or kill them.
One of the worst of the lot is a Pentecostal preacher named Helen Ukpabio, who claims, among other things, that any child who screams, cries or gets sick is a “servant of Satan”. She’s visited the U.K. to preach to friendly congregations, promising help to those being attacked by witchcraft or, bizarrely, by “mermaid” spirits. Human-rights groups like the International Humanist and Ethical Union have called on the UK government to ban Ukpabio from returning to the country.
It was in the context of this controversy that a UK-based Christian radio station, Premier Radio, posted this horrifying question on their Twitter page last week:
Controversial Nigerian 'witch hunter' Helen Ukpabio has now come to the UK. Do you think children can be witches? #NewsHour — Premier Christian (@PremierRadio) April 15, 2014
This is the most hideous example of the “just-asking-questions” meme I’ve yet seen. It implies that they’re not taking sides on whether children can be demon-possessed witches, but that they consider this an issue where reasonable people can disagree, and that we should thoughtfully weigh both pro and con answers.
I reposted their tweet and added a sarcastic note:
#prt Can children be witches who should be killed? Hey, @PremierRadio is just asking questions! — Adam Lee (@DaylightAtheism) April 15, 2014
In the meantime, Premier Radio was being attacked by other rationalists on Twitter. Here’s what they posted in response:
That link goes to a page, “37 Bible Verses About Witches“, whose first line is the notorious Exodus 22:18: “You shall not permit a sorceress to live.”
Right after they posted that, they responded to me:
@DaylightAtheism Christian's believe evil can be at work in people, what some people define as 'witches'. We would never condone killing. April 15, 2014
Obviously, the question arises: if you don’t condone killing, why don’t you, considering that you believe witches are real and that you follow a Bible which tells you to kill them?
.@PremierRadio You just linked to a page of Bible verses about how witches should be killed. Do you reject those verses? — Adam Lee (@DaylightAtheism) April 15, 2014
@DaylightAtheism Yes – there is a difference in both language and interpretation of the Bible throughout the Christian faith. — Premier Christian (@PremierRadio) April 15, 2014
It’s not clear what alternative “interpretation” they had in mind here. If you believe that witches don’t exist and that demonic possession was a superstition of an earlier age, then you’d have good reason to ignore the Bible verses about killing them. But Premier Radio’s spokesperson, as they just stated, does believe in witches. So why the disconnect?
They offered one more justification, which was the most unbelievable of all:
.@PremierRadio Children are being tortured, abandoned and murdered because of "witch hunters" like Ukpabio. Do you know this? — Adam Lee (@DaylightAtheism) April 15, 2014
@DaylightAtheism We know witch doctors can cause harm, but they are also known to do spiritual healings — Premier Christian (@PremierRadio) April 15, 2014
This is saying that dead and tortured children are a price worth paying for “spiritual healing” – that the manifest harm these witch hunters do has to be balanced against the wholly unverifiable, unmeasurable “spiritual” help they offer, as if one could cancel out the other. We’d never tolerate a surgeon who performed life-saving operations, but killed a patient on the table every once in a while, just on a whim. And these missionaries don’t even have the thin excuse of doing some measurable good, as that hypothetical surgeon could claim in his defense.
This story sums up every reason why I, as an atheist, object to religion as a destructive force. These ancient witchcraft superstitions, which by all rights should have been banished to memory long ago, are being kept alive in the modern era by people who have no excuse for not knowing better. And the overriding need to preserve those superstitions warps their moral compass, persuading them to judge intangible goods as more important than all-too-tangible evils.It’s been more than a month since the last update on my work on Firefox Sync. Time for a quick update.
The Code
The application grew quite well and was splitted in four separate projects:
SyncCore : contains the authentication back-ends and various utilities like the CEF logger or various WSGI helpers.
: contains the authentication back-ends and various utilities like the CEF logger or various WSGI helpers. SyncReg : that’s the User application. Implements: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/User/1.0/API. Can be used as a standalone WSGI application
: that’s the User application. Implements: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/User/1.0/API. Can be used as a standalone WSGI application SyncStorage : Contains the storage back-ends and implements https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Sync/1.0/API (and the upcoming 1.1.) Can be used as a standalone WSGI application.
: Contains the storage back-ends and implements https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Sync/1.0/API (and the upcoming 1.1.) Can be used as a standalone WSGI application. SyncServer: This is just a glue application that can be used to run in the same server both Reg and Storage servers. By default this application will run sqlite back-ends for storage and authentication, which means it can be launched with a zero-config environment.
I moved the code to bitbucket, and will clone it back to hg.mozilla.org once we set dedicated repositories for the Python server there. If you want to run your own Sync server, it’s still very simple. Make sure you have the latest virtualenv installed, Mercurial and Make, then run:
$ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/tarek/sync-server Sync $ cd Sync $ make build
Then you can run your server on port 5000 by using the built-in web server:
$ bin/paster serve development.ini
Of course, a real setup should be done using SSL, a real web server like Apache/mod_wsgi and MySQL for the DB. But the default setup is useful and can replace the minimal-server Toby wrote.
Benching
One thing I want to make sure is that the Python server is as fast as possible, and faster than the PHP application. Since a Python web application can reuse the same interpreter in memory, there’s a lot of room for improvements like connection pooling and light memory caching. I also wanted to bench out various configurations for the DB, like using postgresql instead of mysql etc.
The team is currently working on stress testing our Sync infrastructure and the tool that we use is Grinder. Grinder is a Java tool that uses Jython for writing tests, and provides a simple console to drive it. The results Grinder return are raw results, and there’s quite some work left to do if you want to generate nice reports.
I used another tool to bench the server called Funkload. It’s a Python tool that uses unittest classes to run benches, and provides a functional test tool to query a web server and do some assertions like WebTest. It produces HTML reports that are containing a lot of metrics. Some I don’t use because they are specific to web sites. But it’s good enough to stress-test the Sync server and compare PHP and Python speed. One caveat is that it cannot be distributed. There’s a project called BenchMaster that adds this feature, that I need to try.
The stress test is the same than the Grinder one, and here are some reports using various configuration : http://sync.ziade.org/funkload/
While Python already appears to be slightly faster than PHP, those were done on my MacBook with 100 users loaded in the DB, 6000 objects each, so don’t mean a lot. Just that the Python application is not borked 😀.
I’ll probably run Funkload in the same environment we run Grinder at Mozilla, where we have a realistic setup. I also want to have this kind of reports generated every day, so I can keep an eye on how the Python server performs. Making sure the app does not slow down when it grows is one important part of continuous integration.
Caching: Redis vs Memcached
I used Redis to do a bit of caching in the Python app, instead of Memcached like the PHP app. See my previous post for the rational.
Redis was very stable during my benches, but I have heard from some other projects that they had quite a few problems with it in production [I might post more details here in another blog post]. I still think this is the tool we should use in Sync, and I also want to experiment writing a full back-end for Sync using it. But the first version of the Sync server we will deploy on our servers will probably use Memcached since it’s proven to work well right now and since I don’t really need all the extra features Redis offers if the usage is restricted to volatile caching.
Continuous integration
I am still working alone on the Python app, but a continuous integration server is something we really want to have. I am a big fan of buildbot but I wanted to give a try at Hudson. The management interface is brilliant and I could set up a Hudson server for Sync in an hour. I eventually moved it at https://hudson.mozilla.org/job/Sync with other Mozilla projects from the WebDev team. It contains Pylint reports, test coverage report, and of course Chuck Norris keeps the code safe.
What’s next?
The Python app is mostly done, besides a few things to clean up. The next big step will be to bench it alongside the PHP application on realistic data, fix any problem that will rise, then work on pushing it in production. The production switch will probably happen gradually since every node is standalone. And since the rest of the team is quite busy to make sure everything is ready for the upcoming Firefox 4 final release which includes Sync natively, switching to Python is not the #1 priority right now. I expect it to happen before the end of the year though.
In the meantime once the benches are done and the code is rock-solid. I’ll start to play with different back-ends. A full Redis back-end and maybe something based on Riak or Cassandra.
AdvertisementsLOS ANGELES – Paris prosecutors are reporting that as many as 120 people were killed on Friday night following multiple explosions and shootings. It’s the deadliest attack on France since WWII.
The coordinated assaults, which began after 9:15 p.m. local time, saw multiple explosions and shootings at six sites across the city at restaurants, soccer stadium and a concert hall.
At least 70 hostages were killed at the Bataclan theater, where the California-based Eagles of Death Metal band were performing a sold-out concert. Gunfire could be heard from inside the theater late Friday. The hostage situation ended around 1 a.m. with three terrorists getting shot down by special forces.
According to the police chief, attackers at all six locations are believed to be dead.
The assaults took place in some of Paris’s liveliest, hippest neighborhoods in the 10th and 11th districts on a warm and busy Friday evening. One of the main site of the assault, the Bataclan is located about two hundred meters from Charlie Hebdo’s newsroom which was attacked by terrorists on Jan. 7 and killed 12 people. In the 10th district, a man armed with a kalashnikov stormed a restaurant and shot randomly at clients, according to BFMTV.
French terror analysts have noted the singularity of the attack in terms of its massive scope, as well as the presence of Kamikazes in Paris and the fact that they targeted random French people.
Chilling moment that the explosion close to Stade de France could be heard mid-game between France & Germany https://t.co/VODxb8fLoy — Richard Buxton (@RichardBuxton_) November 13, 2015
France president Francois Hollande, appearing visibly shocked during a live press conference, called it an "unprecedented terrorist attack … a horror." He also launched a State of Emergency and urged that France’s borders be shut down. He said France would wage a "merciless battle against terrorists. (…) They will be punished."
Hollande had been evacuated earlier Friday night from Stade de France, the country’s national stadium, after three explosions rocked the football arena during a friendly match between France and Germany. The stadium reportedly has been put on lockdown and is being evacuated in sections.
Although the suspects have not yet been identified, witnesses inside the Bataclan reported that the shooters screamed "This is for Syria, this is for Syria" before gunning down patrons.
For mobile users, click here to watch the video
The locations of the November 13th Paris terrorists attacks with the Gare du Norde in the center for reference.
Local channel France 24 reports that at least six shootouts were perpetrated by gunmen across Paris.
President Barack Obama also condemned the attacks, which he called "heartbreaking," in a nationally television address from the White House.
"This isn’t just an attack on France. … It’s an attack on all of humanity," he said.
France’s Canal Plus reported that the attack outside of the Stade de France was executed by two suicide bombers and that the bombs were crudely built with nails.
Paris officials have told local citizens to stay indoors as the city remains on high alert.Trump, New York attorney general spar again over Trump U.
CLOSE Donald Trump isn't happy with the judge calling him "hostile" and saying he believes the judge is Mexican. Video provided by Newsy Newslook
ALBANY — Calling Trump University a "three-card monte game," New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman on Tuesday applauded a judge's decision last week to release more documents pertaining to a lawsuit against the now defunct real-estate school.
Donald Trump and Schneiderman have engaged in a bitter legal fight and war of words over the controversial Trump University since the Democratic attorney general filed a $40 million lawsuit in 2013, claiming students were bilked. The case, which is also being played out in California courts because of a separate lawsuit there, is headed for trial in New York as early as November.
"You’re not allowed to protect the trade secrets of a three-card monte game," Schneiderman said on CNN. "You’re not allowed to protect the trade secrets of conducting a fraud."
U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel last week ordered documents to be released in the case, including "playbooks" that show how sales employees were to engage with customers of Trump University.
The decision irked Trump, who on Friday ripped Curiel as a "hater of Donald Trump" and suggested the judge, who is Hispanic, is Mexican. He was born in Indiana.
"What happens is the judge, who happens to be — we believe — Mexican. Which is great. I think that's fine," Trump said in a speech in San Diego. "You know what? I think the Mexicans are going to end up loving Donald Trump when I give all these jobs."
He also knocked Schneiderman, saying the lawsuit is politically motivated against the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
"Obama meets with this dopey Eric Schneiderman, who hates our governor and wants to run for governor, but I don’t think it’s going to happen," Trump said Friday. "They go up to Syracuse, meets with Obama and he files a lawsuit."
On Tuesday, Trump again knocked the judge and repeated his contention that Trump University was a success, saying the majority of students were satisfied with the program.
"I will win the Trump University case. I already am, as far as I’m concerned," Trump said, adding, "I could settle that case. I could have settled that case. I just choose not to."
Schneiderman said Trump's legal team has sought to quash the release of documents and fought against having the case go to trial.
"This was a fraud from top to bottom," Schneiderman said. "He’s using every trick he can do to delay the release of documents, to delay the trials – attacking the judge for his ethnicity, attacking me and accusing me of conspiring with the president of the United States."
Schneiderman pointed to a playbook released last week in the California court case that showed how employees were encouraged to get customers to sign up for additional courses that cost $20,000 or more.
"So the playbook just shows it was a pitch up to just try to and dupe these people into spending more money," he said.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1WXdCuTIt is a name synonymous with perhaps Moscow’s greatest military triumph, an internecine six-month standoff that killed well over 1 million people. But in 1961, Stalingrad was quickly renamed Volgograd as part of incipient efforts to remove the cult of Stalin from the Soviet Union.
Locals, however, have long agitated for the city to revert to its Soviet-era name – and now senior Russian officials are proposing a referendum. At the weekend, the city re-adopted its old name for a day as it celebrated the 70th anniversary of the decisive second world war battle in which Soviet forces finally encircled and routed Nazi units. On Monday, the upper house speaker Valentina Matvienko suggested that a plebiscite might give citizens of the city a chance to decide its name once and for all.
“This battle is known all over the world as a turning point,” Matvienko said. “Everyone knows that in Paris they have a metro station called Stalingrad. But we need to ask the people of the city, we need a referendum, [to decide] on renaming. There are pros and cons to this issue.”
Other leaders in parliament have also spoken in favour of a vote. The communists have collected 100,000 signatures in support of turning the clocks back to Stalingrad. In a controversial move, Stalin’s image adorns five buses that are to run in the city until Victory Day on 9 May.
The top election official, Vladimir Churov, said he would be happy to set up a referendum.
If a change is agreed, it would be the third time the city has changed its name in the past 100 years. It was called Tsaritsyn until 1925.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
— —
[Image via German Federal Archive, Creative Commons licensed]Will Bill Gates’ Blockchain Payment Networks Really Help the Poor?
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has unveiled its ambitious new financial inclusion framework, the Level One Project, which leverages blockchain technology to bring financial services to the poor.
Also read: Taiwanese Banks May Be Causing Bitcoin Exchange Freezes
The Level One website is intended to be a foundational resource for rolling out modern digital financial services to the unbanked. It’s a well-meaning, if somewhat well-trodden, path. Nearly every young Bitcoin startup has at one point claimed to focus on the unbanked and underbanked, tugging on the heartstrings of first-world investors who have limited understanding of the situation on the ground.
Financial Inclusion Problem Has Many Faces
The Gates Foundation presumably has spent the time to understand the local context, and their decade-long presence in markets like Ethiopia and Nigeria certainly indicates that they have deeper familiarity than most.
The foundation is probably aware that mobile wallet and payments technology layers are often the easiest part of the financial inclusion problem. Indeed, the larger challenge lies in user education and adoption, as well as the fact that infrastructure (internet and telecommunications, bank and ATM networks) is inconsistently implemented throughout a given country.
The Level One Project is their attempt to shorten the time for governments and central banks to get started, by providing a free “recipe” for rolling out a nationwide mobile money platform. The “recipe” is not particularly detailed, and reads more like a brochure than a consultative guide, but discusses basic principles such as push payments, tiered KYC, and enhanced regulatory support.
Importantly, it advocates for building open-loop networks, which allows for interoperability even amongst competitors in a given market. It’s an approach that most bank-financed blockchain efforts have rejected in an effort to preserve their security protocols and, conceivably, market dominance.
The website further lists important network components such as operating rules and business requirements, which must be filled in by the country implementors with content pertaining to their own jurisdictions. It also demonstrates a rudimentary payments API that could be copied and re-implemented for free.
Blockchain May Not Be the Technology For This
Although the guide advocates for the use of blockchain technology, Level One Project leader Kosta Peric says he believes current public blockchains “will struggle to process transactions in real time and have trouble scaling up.” Additionally, the decentralized, global nature of most active blockchains are notoriously difficult for national governments to regulate.
The Level One team is reportedly collaborating with companies in Africa and South Asia to produce a blockchain-derived technology that would satisfy their criteria.
The unfolding narrative potentially echoes that of R3, a bank-financed initiative which notably set out to create a regulatory-friendly blockchain in 2015, and recently wrote that their new platform Corda would not involve a blockchain. Whether Level One will come to a similar conclusion in their own development efforts remains to be seen.
What do you think? Is the Gates Foundation offering anything truly groundbreaking? Let us know.
Images via Bill and Melinda Gates FoundationIn a small conference room with flickering lights, Andrew Schwartz fires up the overhead projector and points to two word clouds of various colours and sizes.
Hovering in one cloud, the words in the biggest fonts are "love you," "excited" and "shopping." Those, according to the University of Pennsylvania psychologist, are the words that appear most often on women's Facebook pages.
"I think we were a bit surprised by how much stereotypes did seem to come out," Schwartz says, smiling ruefully. "What came out was a lot of emotional language, also boyfriend-related topics. And then on the male side … we got very different types of words."
These were words most news outlets can't print. But to Schwartz, this is all valuable data. "We study social media, status updates and tweets in order to learn about people," he says.
And what he and others like him are learning is that social media can give a general understanding of the physical and mental well-being of certain communities, and may even be able to hone in on things like depression.
For a couple of years now scientists have been able to flag flu outbreaks by counting how many people are googling the flu.
University of Pennsylvania researcher Johannes Eichstaedt has taken this approach to the next level. He can predict your risk of suffering from heart disease or depression just by analyzing tweets.
What's more, the tweets he's studying aren't necessarily even written by those who are actually depressed or who have had heart attacks.
"What we learned is that the people on Twitter are the canaries of the communities," Eichstaedt says. "They sort of share the psychological states that are shared in the communities. Do they feel angry? Is there road rage? Do people feel safe outside?
Johannes Eichstaedt is a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded the World Well-Being Project in 2011and was elected an Emerging Leader in Science & Society by the American Association for Advancement of Science. (University of Pennsylvania)
"All these are things that affect the risk for heart disease, and to some extent you can measure [that] in the language patterns of the young generation."
Eichstaedt believes one day public health officials will be able look at these social media maps and come up with interventions designed specifically for each neighbourhood. It's health research on a scale never seen before.
"Even the biggest studies that the government sets up — the Centres for Disease Control, the Census Bureau — only get tens of thousands, perhaps a hundred thousand people," Eichstaedt says. "We can look at tens of millions of people with these new methods."
Creepy?
In 2012, Facebook published the results of a psychological experiment it conducted on close to 700,000 of its users. It was considered an unprecedented — and creepy — breach of privacy.
Facebook users were outraged, prompting the company to apologize and promise not to do it again.
But now computer scientists, psychologists and statisticians are hard at work shov |
picks to get Ragland. Concerned his team wouldn't get its inside linebacker, general manager Doug Whaley sent two fourth-round picks (one in 2017) to the Bears to move up eight spots in the second round and grab Ragland. You can understand why the Bills wanted Ragland, who some sources had projected as a first-round pick, but the Bills paid an exorbitant price.
That's a lot of draft capital to give away -- according to the Chase Stuart draft chart, the Bills essentially used the 13th overall pick on Ragland, given the amount they sent to Chicago. By that same chart, they paid $1.68 on the dollar for the trade. The issue isn't wanting Ragland; it's the cost of giving away the opportunity to acquire more cheap talent at below-market prices.
The Bills are both a capped-out team and an organization that's low on homegrown drafted talent after the Sammy Watkins trade, a 2014 deal that looks short-sighted (given the presence of arguably superior receivers Odell Beckham Jr. and Allen Robinson later in that same draft). Teams in this position should be trading down to acquire more draft picks, not trading up and getting rid of midround assets in the process.
Nobody is doubting Reggie Ragland's fit in the Bills' defense, but Buffalo gave up a lot of draft capital to move up to get the Alabama LB. Marvin Gentry/USA TODAY Sports
They paid an exorbitant sum to lock up Glenn. Glenn's five-year contract contains $36 million in guarantees. Unlike the deals for a vast majority of 2016 free agents, most of Glenn's base salary in 2018 is guaranteed. That's consistent with the Bills' reputation: They regularly hand out deals that are friendlier than those given to similar players by other teams.
What's next
Re-sign Stephon Gilmore. The latest product off of Buffalo's assembly line of star cornerbacks, Gilmore was the primary reason why the Bills posted the league's fifth-best DVOA against No. 1 receivers. He's not peak Darrelle Revis, but he's about as close as the Bills are going to get, and his presence gives Ryan a lot of freedom in his game plans. Gilmore is signed for one more season at $11.1 million as part of the option year of his rookie deal, but the Bills might need to go above that figure with a deal in the $12 million-per-year range to keep Gilmore in Western New York after 2016.
Grade: B
What went right
They drafted Laremy Tunsil. While teams that have invested in players with far more checkered histories blanched at the idea of drafting the Ole Miss tackle after his social media accounts were hacked moments before the draft, the Dolphins wisely snatched up Tunsil with the No. 13 pick. Miami didn't particularly need a tackle in the short term with Branden Albert and 2014 first-rounder Ja'Wuan James manning the edges, but Albert suffered a nasty knee injury in 2014 and could very well be a cap casualty next year.
Tunsil will slot in at guard for the time being and should end up as Miami's left tackle for years to come, long after anyone has pretended to care about whether he smoked weed in college.
Denver bailed them out of the C.J. Anderson offer sheet. Needing a running back, the Dolphins offered Anderson a four-year, $18 million deal with $6 million in guaranteed money for 2016. Anderson showed that he can be a useful player during Denver's run to the Super Bowl, but he was also an undrafted free agent who only got his shot in 2014 once everybody in front of him got injured, and then he spent most of 2015 benched behind Ronnie Hillman.
Chances are that you can find a back like Anderson in the later rounds of the draft or in unrestricted free agency, and those backs don't cost $6 million.
Dolphins CB Byron Maxwell got torched often last season in Philadelphia. AP Photo/Brynn Anderson
What went wrong
They mysteriously swapped picks with Philadelphia to acquire a terrible contract. To what must have been bemused delight in Philly, the Dolphins sent the eighth pick to the Eagles for the 13th selection and two veterans, Kiko Alonso and Byron Maxwell, who failed to launch during their lone season in Pennsylvania. Alonso is basically a low-cost flier, given that he's set to make just under $1 million in the final year of his rookie deal. He might very well respond better to playing middle linebacker in a 4-3, where he was impressive during his rookie year with the Bills.
Maxwell, though, is another story. He was a disastrous signing from Seattle; the Eagles must have been itching to give away one of former coach Chip Kelly's personnel mistakes and get out from under the $13.5 million in guaranteed money remaining on Maxwell's deal. The difference between the eighth and 13th picks by Stuart's chart is a fifth-round pick; by the traditional chart, it's a pick at the top of the third round.
The Dolphins were the league's worst team against No. 1 receivers last year as Brent Grimes struggled through a disappointing season, so they did need to upgrade at cornerback -- but Maxwell was a mess in that same role for the Eagles. At the $8.5 million price tag, they would have been better off signing somebody like former Dolphins cornerback Sean Smith for a little more money while holding on to their pick.
They renounced Olivier Vernon's transition tag to sign Mario Williams. After publicly trying to suggest they could pull a sign-and-trade with Vernon, the Dolphins let him into free agency to sign Williams. The Fins weren't necessarily wrong to pass on re-signing Vernon at the staggering sum he received from the Giants, but the mistakes made with prior moves and in previous seasons made it more difficult for Mike Tannenbaum to lock up Vernon before the offseason began. Vernon for Williams is a downgrade.
They traded up repeatedly in the draft. Even after giving up some of their draft capital as part of the Maxwell trade, the Dolphins stretched their spending even thinner with their draft-day moves. They sent a fourth-round pick to the Ravens to move up five spots in the second round and grab cornerback Xavien Howard before sending third- and fourth-rounders in next year's draft to Minnesota to select Leonte Carroo in the third round. Then they made one of the rare trade-down moves that got a negative return, sending the 147th pick to the Patriots for Nos. 196, 204 and 250. The Patriots then sent that selection and the 243th pick to the Seahawks for pick 225 and a 2017 fourth-rounder, a deal the Dolphins would have been better off taking themselves.
Olivier Vernon, who had 29 sacks in four seasons with the Dolphins, signed with the Giants in free agency after Miami removed the transition tag. Charles Trainor Jr./Getty Images
They re-signed Cameron Wake. At 34 and coming off of a torn Achilles, there's a legitimate chance that Wake won't regain his form as one of the better pass-rushers in all of football. The Dolphins had Wake signed for one more year with a cap hit of $9.8 million, but over the weekend, they re-signed him to a two-year extension with $10 million in new, fully guaranteed money.
Before agreeing to this deal, there was a chance that a monster season from Wake would have forced the Dolphins to spend the franchise tag on him in 2017. But the chances are greater that the Dolphins paid for the player they're hoping Wake still is instead of the guy who shows up this upcoming season.
What's next
Look into a low-cost veteran at running back. After striking out on Anderson, the Dolphins paid lip service to Jay Ajayi as a three-down back and drafted Alabama runner Kenyan Drake in the third round. That's a better option than paying Anderson under the terms of that offer sheet. Miami could still do well, though, to add a free agent making something close to the minimum for depth purposes. Even an option like oft-injured Ahmad Bradshaw would be useful to have in the mix as the Fins enter training camp.
Grade: D-plus
What went right
'Scar' is back. After two years of inconsistent-at-best play from their offensive line, the Patriots went back to the well and convinced legendary line coach Dante Scarnecchia to return to the fold. He should represent a comfortable upgrade over deposed coach Dave DeGuglielmo -- one much-needed given the question marks surrounding many of the pieces on New England's line.
They leveraged their success and culture into veterans at a fraction of their market value. All that's to say, basically, that people want to play for the Patriots because the Patriots win. New England managed to bring Martellus Bennett, Chris Long, Nate Washington and Terrance Knighton into the fold on short-term deals. The price? Less than $10 million combined and swapping a fourth-round pick for a sixth-rounder in the Bennett trade with the Bears. All of those players have various warts, but the risk is low and the upside -- especially for Bennett and Long -- is far higher than the cost.
They continued to make smart decisions on draft day. Even without a first-round pick as a result of the Deflategate scandal and a fourth-rounder from the Bennett trade, Bill Belichick continued to manufacture draft capital by trading down with overly confident organizations. In trading down three times during the draft, the Stuart chart suggests that the Patriots sent out 12.8 points of draft capital and acquired 18.7 points in the process. That's like trading the 30th pick in the draft for the 12th pick, or like generating the 90th pick in the draft out of thin air. Imagine what they could have done with a first-rounder.
The Patriots acquired TE Martellus Bennett from the Bears for a reasonable price. Joe Robbins/Getty Images
What went wrong
Brady's suspension was restored. It's obviously not a personnel move, and the Patriots will be able to survive his absence, but it would be impossible to talk about what went right or wrong for the Pats this offseason without considering the Brady news.
They traded Chandler Jones. The Jones deal might end up working out for the Patriots; given that they were unlikely to be able to afford Jones as he approached free agency, they weren't even necessarily wrong to make the trade. It still has to be disappointing for a team with a 38-year-old franchise quarterback to trade away its best pass-rusher for a disappointing guard (Jonathan Cooper) and third- and fourth-round picks.
The Pats are typically one of the best teams in the league in managing their salary cap, but they have nearly $10 million in dead money on the ledger this year, mostly due to releasing Jerod Mayo ($4.4 million) and 2014 first-rounder Dominique Easley ($2.9 million). Would that $7.3 million have been enough to lock up Jones? No. Would that extra cap space have helped? Absolutely.
They spent a lot to try and find a second wideout and might not have done so. In the interests of moving on from Brandon LaFell, the Patriots came into the market looking for a wide receiver during one of the worst markets in recent memory. After reportedly being outbid for Marvin Jones and Mohamed Sanu, the Patriots eventually settled on Bills third wideout Chris Hogan, who has averaged 39 catches for 438 yards and three touchdowns over the past two years in Buffalo. Hogan isn't without his merits, but the Patriots are giving him what amounts to a two-year, $8.5 million deal with $7.5 million guaranteed. As receiving prospects of the Belichick era go, he seems closer to LaFell or Donald Hayes than he does Wes Welker.
What's next
Lock up their star defenders. After trading Chandler Jones, the Patriots were left with three critical pieces of their defensive core entering the final years of their respective deals. Malcolm Butler will be a restricted free agent, which should make it relatively easy for the Patriots to retain him for the 2017 season. His low price tag in 2016 ($600,000) might also give the Patriots leverage in negotiating a long-term deal.
Malcolm Butler is set to be a free agent after the 2016 season. Derick E. Hingle/USA TODAY Sports
It'll be tougher to lock up linebackers Dont'a Hightower and Jamie Collins, who are the centerpieces of Belichick's current defense. Trading Jones was designed to free up future cap space to keep those players in town; with both linebackers set to hit unrestricted free agency next year, the Pats will want to lock them both up before the calendar reads 2017. And this all is without considering that Long, Knighton, Jabaal Sheard, Rob Ninkovich, Logan Ryan and Alan Branch will all be free agents this offseason.
Grade: B
What went right
They didn't acquiesce to Ryan Fitzpatrick's demands. As badly as the Jets need a quarterback (and we'll get to that in a minute), it was never going to be a good idea to give a journeyman like Fitzpatrick an eight-figure salary after a career year at 33.
The Jets need Fitzpatrick, but Fitzpatrick also needs Brandon Marshall, Eric Decker and (in particular) offensive coordinator Chan Gailey to reproduce those numbers. There's a middle ground where a deal makes sense for both sides, but despite Fitzpatrick's public posturing, it's closer to the Jets' number than the one he might be looking for.
What went wrong
They still don't have a quarterback. Well, that sure wasn't a long list of things that went right. As much as the Jets shouldn't give in to what Fitzpatrick wants, they haven't been able to convince him to lower his demands and come back to town. In the meantime, the Jets lost out on Brian Hoyer, a comparable quarterback to Fitzpatrick who just signed a one-year, $2 million deal with the Bears.
The move they did make seems ill-fated. Christian Hackenberg is the exact sort of quarterback who teams overrate: a passer with prototypical size and arm strength who struggled with accuracy in college. As much as teams will point to his freshman tape with Bill O'Brien and Allen Robinson in town and suggest that Hackenberg was on pace to be a possible No. 1 pick, we now have twice as much evidence from the ensuing two seasons that he isn't a great quarterback.
The Jets might be able to turn him around if they give him the reps and he gets the sort of coaching he needs, but it's hard to think of a quarterback this inaccurate who has succeeded as an NFL passer in recent years.
They didn't solve the Muhammad Wilkerson problem. Despite hopes that they might be able to finagle a discount after their star defensive end broke his leg at the end of the season, the Jets franchised Wilkerson and haven't locked him up on a long-term extension. Despite suggestions that they would look to trade Wilkerson, no deal ever materialized. Wilkerson's $15.7 million cap hold has prevented the Jets from doing more in free agency, and with an even more untenable $18.8 million franchise tag looming for Wilkerson in 2017, it's hard to see Wilkerson sticking around past this year.
The Jets are in a tricky situation with Ryan Fitzpatrick. They need a starting quarterback, but don't want to give in to Fitzpatrick's contract demands. Ronald Martinez/Getty Images
They used most of the money they had on... running backs? With Chris Ivory and Bilal Powell forming a productive one-two punch at running back last year, Jets general manager Mike Maccagnan could have looked at his dangerous duo and remembered how cheaply they were acquired. Granted, they both arrived in town before Maccagnan, but Powell was a fourth-round pick and Ivory was acquired for a pick in the same round. Even in 2015, their combined cap hit was less than $5 million. That's a smart way to put together a running back duo.
Maccagnan couldn't afford to bring back Ivory, but let's give him credit for being smart enough to stay out of the running when the Jaguars offered the bruising back a five-year, $32 million deal. Ivory is talented, but he's best in a two-down role and has the sort of running style and body type that tends to age poorly. Ivory was a risk the Jets are better off not taking, given their cap situation.
The choices they made, though, seem ill-advised. Matt Forte does have the sort of running style and skill set that age well, but that aging might have already happened. Forte is already on the wrong side of 30, has more than 2,000 carries on his body and the Bears let him leave in free agency when they had more than $50 million in cap room and easily could have chosen to retain their longtime starter.
Forte's rushing average has dropped to an even 4 yards per carry over the past two years, down from 4.6 yards per attempt over the previous four-year span, while his role as a receiver declined dramatically. His three-year, $12 million deal might work out, but there's chance the Jets just gave $5 million guaranteed to a running back who ends being replacement-level next year.
Forte would make sense as the veteran receiving end of a platoon, similar to the role that somebody like... well, Bilal Powell played for the Jets last year. The only problem is that the Jets re-signed Powell, too, giving him a three-year, $11.3 million deal. Maccagnan kept the deal cheap in 2016 out of their desperate financial straits, but the Jets will pay Forte and Powell nearly $10 million combined in cap hits the following year. They would probably be better off applying most of that money to a new deal for Wilkerson instead.
What's next
Sign Fitzpatrick. It's the obvious move for all parties involved.In this final video in the series we go over how to generate new inputs for a program once we detect a user-influenced conditional branch. At the end there is also an example of the type of condition/resulting formula that we get from working on a real file parser, in this case libwebp.
(You probably want to click the “Watch on YouTube” option on the bottom right of the video and set the quality to 720p)
Conclusion
This type of emulation, input generation and formula checking does not need to be limited to conditional jumps. As I discussed in a previous post you can use a similar approach to discover variable ranges, check for variable relationships and assist in figuring out complex algorithms. For example, one could generate a query to the solver every time an argument to malloc is found to be influenced by the user, or export a list of all functions that operate on user-influenced data to IDA for manual review. (In fact, a light-weight version of this approach in combination with fuzzing and an IDA importer is possibly more generally useful to an individual auditor than going down the route of full on whitebox fuzzing. More on that later =))
Anyway, I hope these videos provide some insight into how a whitebox fuzzer might work as well as one approach to building a symbolic emulator. To give an idea of the effort involved – the combined whitebox fuzzing, trace parsing and emulation code (along with supporting libraries) comes to around 10,000 lines of Python. Of this, the emulator itself is only 3000 lines or so. The PIN tracer is just under 1000 lines of C++.
Tracing is currently fairly unoptimised and parsing something like a video or image while tracing can result in a factor of 10-100 increase in running time. This usually means a wait of 30 seconds, which isn’t too bad for whitebox fuzzing as tracing is not performed too often but for other uses of a symbolic emulator (like tracing while fuzzing normally) this will require some work. The emulator itself is Python based and as such is not lightning fast. In the default run-mode it emulates ~5000 instructions per second. What this translates to is about 30-40 minutes per trace of an average file parser. This isn’t as bad as you might think however as the tests cases generated tend to be much more effective at hitting new code than what you would get from dumb fuzzing. Despite this we still need performance gains and I’m working on a few different solutions for that. Somewhere around 30,000+ instructions per second would be what I would consider approaching acceptable =)
To preempt the inevitable questions – for now JESTER is not publicly available but that may change in the future. It’s very much a research prototype at the moment where we’re testing out several approaches to improving performance and general usefulness. However, if you are interested in working on this type of research post a comment with a contact address (it won’t appear publicly) as I’m fairly sure we are currently hiring.Everton got nowhere near the credit they deserved for the 3-1 thumping of Chelsea at the weekend. Partly that is due to the fact that the defending champions making such a wretched start to the season will always be a bigger story, especially if it can be illustrated with pictures of a grumpy José Mourinho. But partly it is due to Everton’s own status as a nearly team, an up-and-down sort of side, a typical Roberto Martínez outfit.
In the wider scheme of things Everton are not expected to carry on like that all season, to terrorise all who come to Goodison Park and make a serious push for a Champions League place. It could happen, but most probably it won’t. Fortress Goodison got off to a limp start to the season when Watford came along and gave the home side a scare. A 2-2 draw was a reasonable result in the end but it still had supporters expressing doubts, once again, over Martínez’s style of management and suitability for the job. Those same supporters are happy again now, after a joyous afternoon against Chelsea when every single one of Martínez’s decisions came off – better not to ask what might have happened if Muhamed Besic had not picked up an early injury and Steven Naismith remained on the bench all afternoon – but every Everton fan is aware the Midas touch could disappear again just as quickly. Such as on Saturday afternoon, for instance, when Martínez returns to Swansea.
Everton to reward defender Brendan Galloway with new contract Read more
That is not to imply Everton will lose at a ground where they gained a respectable point last season, just to point out that their form and results can be wildly unpredictable. Everyone feared the worst when Everton had to go to Southampton after the disappointing display against Watford, a stylish 3-0 away win was a long way from what most people were expecting.
Similarly there was nothing in the next two games, a defeat by Manchester City and a scoreless draw at Spurs, to suggest that Chelsea could be overcome so emphatically when Premier League football resumed after the international break. Mourinho’s side had a lot to do with their own downfall – teams such as Swansea and West Bromwich are likely to allow Ross Barkley less time on the ball than Chelsea permitted him – but on the other hand Everton were not backward in coming forward.
They poured enthusiastically into the miles of space behind Chelsea’s high line, not always using it effectively if the truth be known, created enough chances to win the game by a distance and finished three of them crisply. Defensively they were just as good, with John Stones practically taunting Mourinho with his calmness and ability on the ball, Phil Jagielka putting in his usual shift and Brendan Galloway excelling at left-back as a replacement for the injured Leighton Baines. Martínez deserves praise for his handling of the whole Stones situation, his willingness to trust that his player would not be distracted was amply vindicated by the performance against Chelsea, and it should also be noted that when he sent on Ramiro Funes Mori to make his Everton debut when Seamus Coleman was injured late in the game the home side were still only one goal ahead and the points were not yet safe.
Martínez undoubtedly looks the real deal at times – he even found an amusing riposte to Mourinho’s foul-mouthed rant in the tunnel after the game, though how newspapers can deem the single use of just one swearword as a rant is beyond most people’s comprehension. It just shows how desperate the media has become to make Mourinho the entire story. If the Queen or the pope ever start effing and jeffing then fair enough, that might count as front page news, but a football manager uttering a single expletive in the aftermath of a defeat is hardly in the same league. By current standards of prudery practically every football manager (not to mention players and supporters) is guilty of a foul-mouthed rant every Saturday afternoon.
But back to Martínez. Is this the start of something big at Everton, or is he simply doing what he used to at Wigan, namely producing stellar performances one week then mistake-ridden calamities the next? Roller-coaster would be the cliche of choice for the Martínez years at Wigan, beating all the big names in the Premier League but leaking points to lesser opponents all the while, though helter skelter might be a more apt description of the final few weeks, FA Cup glory notwithstanding. Martínez and Wigan never got the credit they deserved for taking Manchester City apart at Wembley either. Once again most of the coverage focused on the opposing manager – it turned out to be Roberto Mancini’s last game and City were therefore excused a lacklustre display – when in reality Martínez should have been lauded for his tactical acumen and his ability to get the absolute utmost form a collection of mostly ordinary players.
Martínez has a much better selection of players at his disposal now. Perhaps not a Champions League standard squad – whatever that is, after the two Manchester sides’ results on Tuesday – but there is no way players such as Barkley, Stones and Romelu Lukaku can be described as ordinary. Ask the manager for his ambition for the season and he would say a top-four finish.
Get into the Champions League and beef up the squad with a few more better than average players. At the moment that seems a reasonable aim – Everton have made a better start to the season than Chelsea, Liverpool and Spurs – though it is an assessment that really needs to be made in the second half of the season, not the first couple of months.
Everton need to develop consistency, to become a team feared by opponents for picking up points as well as rave reviews. Everyone knows they can hit the heights, everyone also knows there are likely to be troughs as well. Right now with Everton the tendency is to wait for the next result to put the last one into perspective. If Martínez can break that spell he could take his side to the next level. Confidence is currently coursing through the club, though the same could be said of Crystal Palace, Leicester, Swansea and West Ham.
Everton need to show they can top that mini-group first, before they aim any higher. It is traditional at this point to observe that Everton, or someone like them, will have a good chance in the cups if they are not quite strong enough for the league but can raise their game when the occasion demands. That is both patronising and old-fashioned. The cups have had their day. Consistency is now the bigger prize.You walk into draft day with a giant grin on your face. You grab a drink, sit down on the couch, and pull out your cheat sheet. You are ready because you have the number one pick in the draft. You will get to pick out the best running back that will be the lead your team to victory. When you sit down you look at you cheat sheet and it says Adrian Peterson as number one overall. You look at your buddy’s cheat sheet and he has LeSean McCoy as number one overall and AP is only 4th. Then you look at another cheat sheet and you see that Jamaal Charles is number one overall. You flip though your book and there is a long article about how Matt Forte will have a break out year. Draft day is scary enough and it definitely does not help that there at 4 potential number one overall picks. In this article I will be able to help you make that decision. I will be comparing the top 4 running backs (Charles, McCoy, Peterson, Forte) based on touchdowns, yardage, receptions and strength in schedule. Keep in mind, I am not guaranteeing you anything, because in nothing is guaranteed in fantasy football.
Touchdowns
Half of the formula to an all-star running back is finding a way into the redzone. Leading 2013 in rushing touchdowns in our group is Charles with 12 followed by Peterson with 10, and McCoy and Forte with 9 each. For receiving touchdowns, Charles had a whopping 7, Forte with 3, McCoy with 2 and Peterson with 1. So as far as totals go we have Charles with 19, Forte with 12, Peterson with 11, and McCoy with 11. Just by looking at these numbers Charles put his fellow running backs to shame when it comes to scoring TDs. Keep in mind, touchdowns are hard to repeat year to year. Charles had 19 in 2013, but in 2012 he had 5 rushing and 1 receiving.
Yardage
The other half to the all-star running back formula has to be yardage. Touchdowns are great but if your running back has a 20 yard 1 TD game, thats only 7 points. However if you have a running back who loses a redzone touchdown, but gets over 100 yards a game he maybe the better RB. Leading 2013 in all rushing is LeSean McCoy with 1,607 total yards. After McCoy was Forte with 1,339, and then Charles with 1,287. Peterson was fifth overall with 1,266 yards, behind Washington’s running back, Alfred Morris with 1,275 yards. McCoy the clear leader with 1,607 yards not to mention he claims that he is the best running back in the NFL. 2013 was McCoy’s best season beating his 2011 season with 1,309 yards. McCoy definitely has more to go in him.
Receptions
If you are in a PPR (points per reception) this is the section for you. Having a running back that rushes 100 yards per game and catches 5 balls also in a PPR league, is like as having your cake and eating it too. Leading 2013 in receptions is Matt Forte with 74 receptions. Next is Charles with 70 receptions, McCoy with 52, and Peterson with 29. Forte had plenty of competition in getting his 74 receptions. The Bear’s wide receiver Brandon Marshall and Alshon Jeffery had 100 and 89 receptions respectively. However Forte was the third most with the next closest being Martellus Bennett with 65 receptions. Charles came in with 70 leading the Chiefs in receptions in front of Dwayne Bowe with 57 receptions. Charles has become Alex Smith’s favorite target and the focal point around the Chief’s offense. Some argue that McCoy could see a bump in receptions with DeSean Jackson leaving. Others see that McCoy may lose catches to Darren Sproles who the Eagles brought in during free agency. If I had to choose one for a PPR league its hard to decide between Forte and Charles. You can’t go wrong with either of them.
Strength of Schedule (SOS)
As far as Strength of Schedule, I will be focusing on how many top 10 rush defenses (ARI, CAR NYJ, SF, CIN, DET, DEN, SEA, STL, and PHI) and bottom 10 rush defense (CHI, ATL, NE, JAC, BUF, DAL, IND, GB, MIA, HOU). Chicago has 5 games against the top rush defenses and 7 against the bottom 10. Kansas City has 7 games against the top rush defenses and 3 against the bottom 10. Minnesota goes up against 5 of the top 10 rush defenses and 8 of the bottom 10. Philadelphia goes up against 5 of the 10 top rush defenses and 6 of the bottom 10. Based on SOS I would rank the running backs as Peterson, Forte, McCoy, and Charles.
Review
You can not go wrong. Charles lead in TDs, McCoy in yardages, Forte in receptions, and Peterson in SOS. If you are in a PPR aim for Charles or Forte. If you are in a Standard McCoy or Peterson maybe your best bet. Overall you can not go wrong barring an injury, and if that happens (knock on wood), make sure you handcuff your RBs.
Good Luck drafting,
Timmy Liebs
Advertisements“Then Baghdadi asked each commander to bring in some of his fighters. Abu al-Atheer, the MSM commander, invited Belgian, Dutch, and French fighters who were under his command to the occasion.” Foreign Policy — August 16 2016
Three Belgian citizens — all from the city of Vilvorde — attended the April 2013 meeting during which ISIS was created. According to Belgian Newspapers — quoting the mayor of Vilvorde — these individuals were known as radical elements since 2012. The mayor said that one is dead and a second is rumored to be dead. Follow us on Twitter: @INTEL_TODAY
UPDATE — Once again, Europeans are in shock. On Thursday 16:50 (14:50 GMT), a white Fiat van drives down Las Ramblas in central Barcelona, killing 13 people and injuring scores. A few hours later, a second vehicle attack took place in Cambrils.
“With IS coming under massive pressure in the Middle East, where its caliphate is shrinking by the day, its remaining leaders are more determined than ever to strike back at those countries they blame for the end of their brutal rule. So the onus will now be on governments to second guess where violent jihadists may be tempted to strike next and put measures in place to stop them.” [BBC]
INTEL TODAY understands that Belgium has officially opened an investigation into these attacks. Marc Trévidic — A former French anti-terrorism judge — has made a few cryptic comments about a possible link. He stated that the links between Islamic terrorists in Belgium and Spain have been documented since 1990. — END of UPDATE
Among the foreigners who personally met Baghdadi and pledged allegiance were Abu Sayyaf, known as “the slayer”; Abu Zubair, a Belgian jihadi; Abu Tameema al-Fransi, a French jihadi killed in July 2014; and Abu Shishan-al-Belgiki, a handsome blond jihadi with a Chechen background wanted in Belgium, his home country, for possible participation in beheadings.
Magomed Saralapov — alias Abu Shishan al-Belgiki
Nabil Azahaf — alias Abu Sayyaf
Zakaria Asbai — alias Abu Zubair
REFERENCES
Present at the Creation — The never-told-before story of the meeting that led to the creation of ISIS, as explained by an Islamic State insider — FP August 16 2016
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ISIS: 3 Belgian Citizens at the ‘Creation’ Meeting
One Year Ago — ISIS: 3 Belgian Citizens at the ‘Creation’ MeetingA political backlash has commenced within the Republican Party against tea party and libertarian groups that have limited interest in securing Republican victories and majorities. Elected leaders, party officials and business groups have begun pushing back against self-destructive legislative strategies and unelectable primary candidates.
But the GOP’s political reaction often concedes a great deal of ideological ground to anti-government populism — what its advocates describe as “constitutionalism.” Our national recovery, in this view, depends on returning to the severely constrained governing vision of the Founding Fathers, as embodied in the Constitution. Many Republicans now seem to be saying: Yes, this is the conservative ideal, but it is just not practical to implement at the moment.
This cedes too much. In a new essay in National Affairs, “A Conservative Vision of Government,” Pete Wehner and I argue that the identification of constitutionalism with an anti-government ideology is not only politically toxic; it is historically and philosophically mistaken.
It is not enough to praise America’s Founders; it is necessary to listen to them. The Federalist Founders did not view government as a necessary evil. They referred to the “imbecility” of a weak federal government (in the form of the Articles of Confederation) compared to a relatively strong central government, which is what the Constitution actually created. Though they feared the concentration of too much power in one branch of government, they believed that good government was essential to promote what they called the “public good.”
And they assumed that the content of the public good would shift over time. “Constitutions of civil government,” argued Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 34, “are not to be framed upon a calculation of existing exigencies, but upon a combination of these with the probable exigencies of ages.... Nothing, therefore, can be more fallacious than to infer the extent of any power, proper to be lodged in the national government, from an estimate of its immediate necessities. There ought to be a CAPACITY to provide for future contingencies as they may happen.”
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In the tradition of the Federalist Founders, Abraham Lincoln believed the federal government should be capable of adjusting to changing circumstances and active in pursuit of national purposes. In his “Fragment on Government,” Lincoln described a number of matters requiring the “combined action” of government, including “public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism” and “providing for the helpless young and afflicted.”
Conservatives naturally want to be seen as defenders of the Constitution. But “constitutional conservatives” need to recognize what both the Federalist Founders and Lincoln actually envisioned for the republic they respectively created and preserved. Far from being constrained by the political and economic arrangements of an 18th-century coastal, agrarian republic, the Founders fully expected the United States to spread across a continent, undergo economic and social change and emerge as a global actor. And they purposely designed a constitutional system that could accommodate such ambitions.
This is not to argue that the Founders would |
author of The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity.
"That's one of the things about illusions, they have this remarkable tendency to formulate in your mind, and it's very difficult to unthink them," he says.
Hearing voices in white noise Advocates of Electronic Voice Projection (EVP) claim they can use radio equipment to communicate with the dead. But are they just hearing what they want to hear? EVP is a standard tool of ghost hunters worldwide. Many well-educated people see it as proof positive that the dead are trying to talk to us. The simplest explanation is that EVP voices are just stray radio transmissions. Usually they are so faint and masked by static interference that it's hard to make out what they are saying, and the EVP investigator has to "interpret" them for you. But we are naturally well-adapted by evolution to imaginatively reconstruct speech against a noisy background. The people who think they hear dead voices
But simply spotting a face in a morsel of food or a fence doesn't explain why some people spend thousands of pounds to buy it or make a pilgrimage to see it.
Pareidolia can be extremely evocative - especially if a person believes in miracles, Scott says.
"It's an incredibly strong demonstration of how powerful these perceptual effects are. We really want to see things like faces, we really want to hear things like voices, and our perceptual system will set out to do that," she adds.
For some, pareidolia stands as evidence of the supernatural, Hood says. "People will seek out these sorts of things for some sort of intervention."
The object itself can also take on special significance, says French. People assume that if it has been divinely produced, then it has been "touched by God" and "will bring good fortune", he says.
But you don't have to be particularly religious to appreciate pareidolia.
"I don't for one minute think there's any kind of religious significance or anything else in them," French says. "But hey, they're pretty neat, aren't they?"
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Seen a face in the clouds, on toast or a tree trunk? Send us a photo you have taken for a picture gallery. Email yourpics@bbc.co.uk with the subject line Magazine faces, or upload your photos here with the same subject line. If you submit an image, you do so in accordance with the BBC's Terms and Conditions.North Korea held a live artillery drill close to its disputed border with South Korea, its official state news agency reported today.
The country's leader Kim Jong-un personally supervised the drill, in a move that is sure to inflame tensions further between the two countries, the KCNA agency said.
The North has stepped up military preparations in response to being sanctioned for its February nuclear test, with the border being seen as the most likely site of any clash.
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The country's latest move follows a series of inflammatory statements in which North Korea has threatened a nuclear war with the United States in response to new United Nations sanctions and to strike back at South Korea and the United States during military drills that the two allies are holding.
Kim praised the artillery units on two islands after watching them hit targets, in what KCNA described as the "biggest hotspots in the southwestern sector of the front", in practice for striking at two South Korean islands.
Pyongyang has kept up a steady stream of incendiary rhetoric since moves began to sanction it in the United Nations over its third nuclear test. It was also subject to sanctions for the launch of a long-range test rocket in December that critics say is aimed at proving its long-range missile technology.
The new UN sanctions aim to stifle funding for the North's nuclear and missile programmes and for the ruling Kim dynasty, although much will depend on whether China, the North's main ally, enforces them.
North Korea's claims to be able to stage a nuclear strike on the United States have not been taken seriously by most observers of its missile programme, but it shelled a South Korean island in 2010, causing civilian casualties.
So far, there are few signs beyond Pyongyang's rhetoric that it is preparing for a major conflict.
South Korean workers at the Kaesong joint industrial zone in the North reported seeing North Korean soldiers wearing camouflage webbing earlier this week but said work was proceeding as normal.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
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Subscribe nowThis week, our sea lion team went above and beyond for wildlife. For two years, this group of Houston Zoo keepers has made regular trips to the Surfside jetty, picking up trash and recyclables. The team also spends time speaking with fisherman and visitors on the jetty about the dangers that discarded monofilament fishing line poses to marine life like sea lions and sea turtles. This self-started program has included Houston Zoo staff from 14 departments and resulted in the collection of 729 pounds of trash, 529 pounds of recycling, and 114 pounds of discarded fishing line.
While working on the jetty this Wednesday, our sea lion team rescued a sea turtle that had been entangled in fishing line. Houston Zoo sea lion keeper, Heather Crane, was on the jetty and helped free the turtle. We asked Heather to share her experience and here’s what she had to say.
“On October 30th, a group of dedicated volunteers and I went to the Surfside Jetty for a scheduled sea lion monofilament team collection. As we made our way out to the end of the jetty to begin our work, we passed by a number of fishermen, surfers, and people enjoying taking in the sights. Our monofilament cart and team seemed to generate a lot of attention by the jetty-goers and we were able to share our story of why we were there to clean the jetty. Not long after, civilians jumped in and joined the efforts to collect trash and fishing line from the jetty sidewalks. It has been a few months since I have visited the jetty myself and I was so impressed by the difference in the vibe I received from the fishermen. After 2 years, I notice a definite difference in the attitudes and perspectives of the people who frequent the jetty the most. Originally, it seemed people were unsure of why we were there and what our intentions may be. But yesterday, I received an overwhelmingly wonderful and warm welcome and acts of gratitude from the jetty-goers. Several fishermen stopped to thank us as we emptied the monofilament bins placed on the jetty for recycling fishing line.
As we collected fishing line, trash, and recyclables, a civilian reported to one of our volunteers that there was a turtle that was possibly entangled. We immediately notified the sea turtle hotline (1-866-TURTLE-5). Soon, we received instruction to monitor the turtle and have someone stay with it and report any changes. From the shore, it appeared that the green sea turtle was entangled in fishing line and was struggling to free itself. As we awaited the arrival of NOAA scientists, the turtle appeared to becoming more stressed and more entangled. As it fought to get free, it only exacerbated the problem. After thoughtful deliberation and safety planning, it was decided that if this turtle was to survive, it would be absolutely necessary to enter the water and extract the turtle. NOAA never recommends or requests members of the public to enter the water to extract a turtle due to the in-water dangers that exist. When I reached the turtle, I found it to be anchored in two spots to the bottom. Fishing line wrapped around the hindflipper, the neck, and tightly around the front left flipper. We removed the loose line around the neck and hind-flippers, but awaited help from the NOAA scientists to remove the front flipper entanglement to prevent further damage of the flipper that probably resulted from an initial entanglement.
We waited for help to arrive and continued monitoring the turtle. During this time, we were able to educate onlookers about the importance of recycling fishing line and how to contact the turtle hotline to report injured turtles. It was a great teachable moment and seemed to captivate and inspire this audience the turtle invited. When NOAA scientist, Lyndsey arrived, the remaining fishing line was removed and he was taken to the sea turtle facility in Galveston for further evaluation and treatment. It was a special day and I could not be more proud of the team that collaborated to make the rescue successful. For me, this is a testament and reminder to the importance of the work we do to keep our waterways clean for animals in the wild, and it makes me proud to work for the Houston Zoo.”
Great work Heather and sea lion team! We want to take a quick moment to reiterate that if you see an injured sea turtle, please immediately dial NOAA at 1-866- TURTLE-5. NOAA’s expert biologists are on-call 24/7 to respond and advise to reports of hurt or nesting sea turtles. Thanks to our friends and conservation partners at NOAA for helping this turtle get ready for another chance in the wild.They're heeeeere.
No, its not a Poltergeist sequel. It's Pinterest business accounts! We knew this day was going to come. In fact, we wrote about it in this article about why social networks like Pinterest will never be marketing-free. It was just a matter of time.
Today on its blog, Pinterest announced that it's not only letting companies set up business accounts (as opposed to personal accounts), but it's also releasing a business-specific terms of service, totally separate from the TOS for regular ol' people like you and me.
Pinterest cited the contribution of quality content from the business community as a reason for launching these business-specific accounts:
"Thousands of businesses have become a part of our community, giving great ideas, content, and inspiration to people on Pinterest. Whether it's Anthropologie sharing awesome clothes, Whole Foods sharing tasty recipes, the Smithsonian sharing fascinating collections, or Amazon making products easy to pin, many of us have been inspired on Pinterest by businesses."
So... do you already have a Pinterest account you want to convert into a business account? Convinced today's the day to set up your Pinterest business account for the first time? Want to know what the new terms of service specifically for businesses say? Well have we got the blog post for you! Read on to learn all that and more, you pinning maniacs, you :-)
How to Convert Your Personal Pinterest Account Into a Business Account (Or Set Up a Pinterest Business Account From Scratch)
Before I get into the steps to setting up Pinterest business accounts, it's important to note that accounts won't look any different than personal pages, aesthetically. So doing this isn't signing yourself up for hours of extra work -- you can convert your account in seconds. If you're setting up your account for the first time, you'll obviously need to put time into setting up boards and pinning images, but the actual account setup will only take you a very short amount of time.
So... if business accounts don't look any different from personal accounts, why even bother?
A couple of reasons...
First, this announcement has also been coupled with a host of resources that Pinterest has created specifically to help businesses succeed on its network. If you want to continue receiving that kind of educational content from them, you're going to have to identify yourself as a business.
Second, this dedication to businesses -- releasing business accounts, creating educational tools and resources -- is a signal that Pinterest is going to continue making improvements to the way its platform works for businesses. That means a host of new feature releases coming down the road. Won't you want to be able to have access to things like, ohhhh I don't know, a 'Buy Now' button, should they choose to release it? Or targeted ads? Or business analytics? I sure would. But I wouldn't get 'em from my personal account, that's for sure!
Finally, I'll reiterate that establishing your personal account can be accomplished in less time than it takes to brew a cup of coffee. So go get your coffee machine going, come back and set up your business account, and you'll be done before the machine's finished brewing.
Alright, now let's get going with the conversion and setup!
How to Convert Your Personal Pinterest Account Into a Business Account
It's so easy, you guys. Here's all you need to do:
Step 1: Go to business.pinterest.com, and click the red 'Convert your existing account' button.
Step 2: Next, select your 'Business Type,' and update your 'Contact Name,' and 'Email Address,' if necessary.
Pinterest also guides you through the 'Business Type' choice that's most appropriate for you by providing parenthetical examples next to each type. Also note that the 'Contact Name' can be anyone -- it's not publicly shown. For your email address, you should use a company email address if you aren't already so it's not tied to any one employees' personal email address.
Step 3: Still on the same page, fill out the next section, 'Profile Info.'
None of this needs to change unless you didn't fill it out when you first set up your account, or you want to make edits. All of this is publicly displayed on your Pinterest profile right now, and it will not appear any differently on your new business account.
Step 4: Scroll down to the 'Agreement' section, and read the agreement. Then, agree to it. (Or don't, I suppose, but I can't help you from there.)
Once you've accepted Pinterest's terms by checking the check box, the 'Convert Account' button will turn red, and you can press it to change your heretofore personal Pinterest account into a business account!
Voila! That's it -- You're done. Told you it was easy.
How to Set Up Your First Pinterest Account as a Business Account
Now, what do you do if you don't already have a Pinterest account? How do you set up your first Pinterest account as a business account? Good news; it's just as easy as converting an existing account. Basically, you follow the exact same steps we just went over -- except instead of clicking the big red 'Convert your existing account' button in Step 1, you click the smaller red text below it, 'New to Pinterest? Join as a business.' As a reminder, this is found at business.pinterest.com.
Once you click this, the only difference is that the fields on the next screen -- e.g. your profile image and 'About' section -- will be blank, because your profile's brand new.
Once you're done, there are plenty of resources available to help you fill out and optimize your account. Pinterest itself will walk you through things like verifying your website and how to add buttons to your website -- you can also download our ebook about How to Use Pinterest for Business to get access to best practices and ideas to make your venture into Pinterest successful.
What the New Pinterest Business Terms of Service Say
Along with the new business accounts came business-specific terms of service. And I've gotta say, this entire business account rollout has proven that Pinterest, as an organization, totally gets the importance of educational content. Not only did they release a bevy of business resources to help marketers use their platform successfully (more on that next), but they also released a "translated" version of their business terms of service devoid of legal jargon. You can read them in full here, but here are the highlights:
You can only open an account on behalf of a company that you're, well, allowed to open an account on behalf of.
The content you post on Pinterest can be used by other Pinterest users. That means they can not only re-pin it, but they can also modify it, reproduce it, display it, distribute it, whatever, on Pinterest. If they start doing something weird with it outside of Pinterest that they're not supposed to do, Pinterest ain't havin' anything to do with it.
Pinterest expects that any content you post from third-party content creators and owners doesn't violate any laws or infringe the third party's rights.
The biggest TOS change, other than the fact that there are now two separate ones, is that the TOS for "people" is about half as long as it used to be. Which makes sense, because now Pinterest doesn't need to cram in legal terms that really only applied to businesses.
New Pinterest Resources and Tools for Businesses
Along with these rollouts, Pinterest has published some educational content -- worth checking out -- that will help businesses better use Pinterest. Here's what they've released that you can use to improve your Pinterest performance.
Pinterest Case Studies
My favorite new resource is its case studies, which feature businesses that are doing great work on Pinterest. You can find these when you visit business.pinterest.com and scroll down below the fold. As you can see, Pinterest features case studies from five different organizations:
When you click into the case study, it features the things they do best in the left navigation. Jetsetter, for example, talks about how to:
Engage an Audience
Encourage Site Exploration
Use Group Boards
I encourage you to check out all the case studies to learn as much as you can about using Pinterest as a business, and then do a deeper dive into the case study that has similar business goals -- which they are nice enough to spell out for you at the top of each case study.
Pinterest Best Practices
Pinterest created another section on business.pinterest.com called What Works, and it outlines... what works for businesses on Pinterest! It covers four sections:
Telling your brand's story
Building a community on Pinterest
How to send traffic to your site
How to analyze your Pinterest presence to improve
I highly recommend checking out the community-building section, as the Pinterest community is tight-knit and strong. If you can garner a following, you'll be glad you have them on your side. And, of course, the section on how to send traffic to your website is very useful -- there, you'll learn how to do some technical things, like adding a 'Pin It' button to your site so your content is easier to share.
Buttons and Widgets
Speaking of "technical things," the last major piece of documentation Pinterest released for businesses is its improved documentation on how to use sharing and follow buttons and widgets. You can find this under the Buttons and Widgets section on business.pinterest.com, and it will teach you how to add 'Pin It' and 'Pinterest follow' buttons to your website, as well as profile or board widgets.
As far as we can tell, the profile and board widgets are new features. The profile widget lets you embed code on your site that shows your 30 most recent pins, while the board widget lets you embed code on your site that shows 30 of your favorite board's latest pins.
Whether you're a new or seasoned pinner, I encourage you to spend some time looking at the educational resources and documentation on the new Pinterest business site. And of course, I encourage you to get that personal Pinterest account converted into a business account today!
Does Pinterest's dedication to supporting business' presence on its social network make you want to dedicate more resources to pinning? Is this the tipping point for your business to try Pinterest for business for the first time?
To learn more about how to take advantage of Pinterest's new business accounts, download our free new ebook, A Guide to Pinterest's New Business Accounts, here!Although Season 2 of History’s popular survival series Alone is only just premiering tomorrow, April 21, the network has gone ahead and renewed the show for Season 3, it was announced today. For the next season, the series will move from Vancouver to South America.
Not changing much are the basics of the competition: Ten hardcore survivalists are placed alone in the wilderness, and the contestants have one mission: to stay alive. There are no camera crews, no teams, and no gimmicks. At stake is a $500,000 cash prize awarded to the person who can last the longest.
RELATED: ALONE SEASON 3 PREMIERES IN DECEMBER 2016
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Equipped only with limited gear, their wilderness experience, and cameras to self-document their journeys, these brave men and women are completely separated from one another in harsh, unforgiving terrain. To survive, they must find food and water, build shelters and fend off predators. They will face extreme isolation, psychological distress, and treacherous environmental conditions as they descend into the unknown.
POLL: WHO WILL WIN ALONE SEASON 2?
“The success of Alone truly speaks to the fact that there is simply nothing else like it on television.” said Paul Cabana, Executive Vice President and Head of Programming of History. “Season 2 truly takes the series to the next level and gives us the confidence to trigger Season 3 immediately.”
Filming on Season 3 begins in Patagonia, South America, next month.
Alone Season 2 airs on History Thursdays at 9pm ET/PT beginning April 21.
______________________________
Photo: History/Brendan MeadowsAct 1: Let me tell you a story about an old man who lived in a small village somewhere that does not matter. It all began when the man’s sons came to him and told him that some people from the neighboring village had stolen a chicken from their farm. The old man told his sons to go after the thieves and recover the chicken.
The sons said, “Father, it’s only one chicken. We have hundreds of chicken. One won’t make a difference.” The old man said, “Do what you please.”
A few days later, the thieves stole a goat. Once again the old man told his sons to not let them get away with it. The sons said that they have dozens of goats and it’s not worth the trouble. The next week it was a horse. Once again the sons rationalized it away saying that they still had six horses that the farm needs.
Finally, the next week the sons came back to report to the old man and said, “Father, our sister has been abducted. What shall we do?” The old man said, “It’s too late. You should have recovered the chicken. Now there’s nothing you can do.”
* * *
Act 2:
I heard this story from an expat from New Zealand who runs a very successful school in Singapore. David told me that in the early years of Lee Kuan Yew’s government, a minister was suspected of having taken a bribe. People said that since the minister was a close associate of LKY, in all likelihood the man would get away with it.
But as it happened, LKY had a brief chat with the minister one afternoon. The next day the minister went out with a bang — he put a bullet in his head.
Singapore is one of the least corrupt nations in the world. LKY’s policy is simple: zero tolerance for corruption. That’s so because he himself is incorruptible and therefore does not tolerate corruption. The wages of public corruption is death. People know it and act accordingly.
* * *
Act 3:
India’s appointed prime minister is Dr Manmohan Singh. Under his watch, the most egregiously blatant instances of public corruption have taken place. His ministers and other office holders have been involved in acts of public malfeasance that are stunningly incredible — but for at least a significant segment of Indian voters, it is quite alright. They appear to take it as if it’s nothing out of the ordinary. The rulers are going about the rape of the land and the people just lay back and supinely accept it.
We are talking figuratively about rape but Dr Singh’s misgovernance has descended into literal rape. Not just rape, gang rape. Not just gang rape, it has finally hit (one hopes) the rock bottom into murderous gang rape.
The 23-year old woman who was gang raped in a New Delhi bus died in a hospital in Singapore.
* * *
Act 4:
They first stole a chicken.
The Congress government under Jawaharlal Nehru was involved in corruption. The news papers reported it. Nehru responded saying that the reporters were being silly since corruption is a global phenomenon and there’s nothing to get all excited about.
Then they stole a goat.
Nehru’s daughter nationalized many sectors of the economy, thus making public office attractive to the most criminally corrupt. The people of India did not disapprove. They in fact voted her back to power.
The stage was set for horse thieves.
* * *
Act 5:
Some people started waking up to the reality. They realized that somehow the system was not working. They heard the call from a chosen few and gathered to register their protest. The government followed the time-worn strategy of attack being the best form of defense. They sent in their baton-wielding cops and the crowds — leaders too — beat a hasty retreat.
The lesson the appointed prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh’s government learned was that it does not take a whole lot to put the people in their place — the place of course being that the people in the government are the rulers and the people are serfs.
For around a century, a few hundred million Indians were the serfs of a few thousand British. Now it is different. India is under self-rule.
An Italian, Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi, and her bunch of sycophants led by Digvijaya Singh are ruling about a thousand million Indians.
Well, perhaps it is not all that different. Though Maino’s father was a fascist. That could make the British Raj 2.0 a little more vicious than the British Raj of pre-1947.
* * *
Act 6:
It tickles me no end when I hear talk about India being a free country and a democracy with universal adult franchise. Every adult has the vote and therefore is in some sense responsible for the kind of government. In my opinion, India is a kakistocracy — government by the most corrupt and the least principled. Indians freely elect these people. And among the elected are criminals who have been charged (and many convicted) of rape and murder.
The guys who gang raped the unfortunate woman on the bus in New Delhi a few days ago share at least some of the characteristics of the law makers of India: their criminality. A significant numbers of Indians vote for these kinds of criminals.
* * *
Act 7:
I hear that the despicably dishonest appointed prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh’s government moved to shut down protests in New Delhi by closing down a few metro train stations. Perhaps the people will back down and go home.
If they don’t back down, I suppose the unfathomably dishonest cretin, the appointed prime minister Dr Singh will probably escalate the situation till we see tanks on the streets of New Delhi.
The sister has been abducted.
And if I were a betting man, I would place the bet that the people are not going to do anything about it. Come next elections they will vote for Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi and her henchmen.
* * *
Act 8:
Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi and her gang of vile henchmen are unprincipled criminals. But they are not stupid. Their moves are calculated to push the boundaries and they know precisely what they can get away with. They know precisely how much they can steal and yet be elected. They know precisely how many backs they can break with their police lathi-charge and still the people will not lynch them.
Indians have an amazing capacity for tolerating injustice.
It was an American, born a slave but who understood the dynamics of slavery, who put it best over a century ago. Frederick Douglass (1818 – 1895), the renowned American abolitionist wrote, “Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them... The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
The rulers are not unintelligent. They would not be where they are if they were not the most accomplished criminals. They make the laws, don’t you know. They dictate the terms.
They control the press. The press provides the cover for them and they in turn protect those in the press that do their bidding. The Ghoses, the Sardesais, the Dutts — these are not unimportant players in this sordid play. They are complicit in the figurative rape of India and are handsomely rewarded for their prostitution.
* * *
The Final Act
No doubt for a few days the twitterati will be screaming bloody murder. A few thousand will go on candlelight vigils. In a few weeks, another distraction will occupy the talking heads on TV. Cricket will take over the collective psyche. And of course the sordid stories of Bollywood shakers will move the public to other concerns.
Talking of journalists, I am reminded of what the legendary American radio broadcaster Edward R Murrow (1908 – 1965) said. “A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”
Yes, India does have a government of wolves because India is a nation of sheep. The tyrants like Dr Singh know well precisely how much oppression the Indian public is willing to endure.
The rape of the land and the people — literally and figuratively — will continue.A while back, rumour circulated that Elijah Wood was DJ-ing under the name “DJ Frodo”. “It's so funny,” he muses. “I don't know where that came from. I've never called myself 'DJ Frodo'. I don't think I would ever call myself 'DJ Frodo'.” Unwilling to exploit his most famous character – the Hobbit in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy – Wood simply had to sit back and take it. A sly joke, perhaps, at the expense of an actor who has failed to emerge from the shadow of Frodo Baggins.
With his curly brown hair and saucer-like blue eyes a constant reminder of the character, “I accepted a long time ago that Frodo would be a part of my life forever,” he says. Yet surely erasing Frodo from our minds has been difficult?
“It's been eight years since the last Lord of the Rings movie came out. Almost nine. To me, I've been working on characters that are completely different for a long time. But I guess in terms of popular reference… a lot of people consider me to be that character predominantly,” he says. Like Mark Hamill post-Star Wars, Wood has struggled in the wake of Rings. Aside from small roles in Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Robert Rodriguez's Sin City, there's been little of note on his CV. Plenty of voiceover work (video games, animated feature Happy Feet, the recent TRON: Uprising TV series) and lots of shorts, but for an actor who carried Jackson's first Tolkien trilogy so elegantly, it's somewhat surprising there have been few leads.
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Understandably, he revisited Middle Earth more than once, voicing Frodo in a rather X-rated episode of the stop-motion comedy Robot Chicken, and last December fans glimpsed him in a brief cameo in The Hobbit, the first of Peter Jackson's three films taking on JRR Tolkien's prequel to Rings.
“It was like stepping back into time,” he says, admitting “it was strange” to be without his fellow Hobbits Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan and Sean Astin, who he got so close to on the New Zealand set of Rings."
He claims that's it for Frodo, and that we won't see him again in Jackson's next two Hobbit films.
“I've actually done my piece, which is just the beginning of the first film. But anything can happen, I suppose. It's funny – we were doing press for The Hobbit, and I was told by Warner Brothers not to say it was the last time. I don't know what that means! But I genuinely don't think there's any more place for Frodo to exist within the framework of what they created. In all likelihood I won't be going back.”
His latest film, Maniac, feels like an attempt to shake the Shire from his soul once and for all. A remake of the 1980 William Lustig film, he plays Frank, a New York loner with a mother fixation who stalks women before killing and scalping them. Violent, gory and sick, genre-hounds will love it; most others will probably be repulsed. Did he choose the role to help distance himself from the sweet natured Frodo? He says not, that he doesn't operate in such a calculated way.
“To play something this extreme, that represents such a sharp turn, is just interesting in and of itself.”
It is co-produced/written by French horror maestro Alexandre Aja (who made Switchblade Romance). Wood notes, “I don't typically love horror film remakes – or remakes at all for that matter. There are exceptions, but I think what was so interesting about this was that I knew going into it that it was going to be done in a completely different way.” Unlike the original, which starred Joe Spinell in the title role, this is shot entirely from the killer's point of view – with Wood off-camera for the most part, bar his hands and, occasionally, his reflection glimpsed in mirrors.
Criticised for its extreme sexualised violence, Lustig's 1980 version was considered highly controversial for its time (the Los Angeles Times dubbed it “without any redemption whatsoever”). This latest effort, though undeniably shocking, has been met with a series of one-star reviews (including The Independent's Anthony Quinn, who noted that “Wood is possibly desperate to reposition himself as a serious actor, but his face still screams Hobbit”). It's not Wood's first twisted role of course; in Sin City, he was the cannibalistic serial killer Kevin – though his screen time was scant. This time, he's the lead. Although his baby face looks lend a creepy edge to the character, I wonder if his agents advised him against taking such a provocative part?
“Not really, no,” he answers, without hesitation. “I think the pedigree of those involved was quite high. It was an interesting opportunity for me as an actor. I think everyone saw it for the strange little art horror movie that it was. So there wasn't any advice against doing it.”
Born and raised in Iowa, Wood developed his love for horror from the age of six. “It all started with seeing movies that I wasn't supposed to, that my brother [Zach] would rent with his friends – ones that I would get to see unbeknownst to my parents!”
One of three children, Wood's folks ran a delicatessen; when his mother Debbie started putting her son up for commercials, the decision was made to sell the family business and move to Los Angeles, so Wood could start auditioning more regularly.
While his younger sister Hannah and father Warren remained behind initially, they eventually followed on – by which point Wood had been directed by David Fincher (in Paula Abdul video Forever Your Girl) and featured in a bit-part in Back to the Future II.
His parents would eventually divorce, in 1996, as Wood – still only 15 – became regarded as one of the industry's brightest prospects. His performance alongside Kevin Costner in 1994's The War had prompted critic Roger Ebert to declare: “Elijah Wood has emerged, I believe, as the most talented actor, in his age group, in Hollywood history.”
Now 32, that proclamation seems premature for Wood – particularly when he's put up against peers like Ryan Gosling and Tom Hardy. He recently admitted to one British tabloid that, after not working for two years in his late twenties, he went into a slump. “I've had things that I had to overcome, like everybody does,” he said. “I went to therapy for the first time. It was amazing. It made me learn to laugh a lot at myself, but I also learned a lot of groundbreaking things. It was like mental excavation.”
Still, you won't find him bemoaning his lot. “I've had a lot of moments worth celebrating,” he tells me, although he has yet to marry or have children. He previously dated Pamela Racine, the former member of the band Gogol Bordello (Wood starred with lead singer Eugene Hütz in Liev Schreiber's 2005 directorial debut Everything is Illuminated).
More recently, he has been spotted with American actress Kerry Bishé, with whom he's just made the Hitchock-ian thriller Grand Piano in Madrid (he plays a concert pianist terrorised by John Cusack's assassin).
Moreover, he has smartly diversified in a way few actors ever do. A mini music mogul, his indie label Simian Records signed bands like The Apples in Stereo and Heloise and the Savoir Faire. And, yes, he does DJ – just not as DJ Frodo – with a friend, Zach Cowie, under the moniker Wooden Wisdom. On the film side, his production company The Woodshed, which specialises in genre fare, has just wrapped an Iranian vampire Western shot in Farsi called A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. He's also heavily involved in the LA horror festival Nightmare City, which was founded last year. So why so many fingers in pies?
“I have a lot of interests,” he shrugs, “and I feel incredibly lucky and blessed to be in a place in my life where I'm able to do a lot of those things and express a lot of those interests.”
It all culminated in December 2012, he says, when he felt a wave of satisfaction wash over him. In addition to his DJing and film producing, he'd completed the second season of his TV comedy series Wilfred, in which he plays an attorney who, strangely, strikes up a relationship with his neighbour's dog (it is shown on BBC Three here, and Wood has just started shooting the third season).
Other achievements for 2012 included completing two forthcoming movies in Spain – the aforementioned Grand Piano and also Open Windows, a thriller in which the action plays out entirely on a PC, as his desk-bound techie tries to orchestrate the rescue of a kidnapped actress (ex-porn-star Sasha Grey).
“I had an incredible year doing a lot of the things I always hoped I would be doing,” he says. “And I had this moment of reflection – what an |
heard they are incarnations of the sea devil. Supposedly, if you eat one, you will gain devil powers... but the sea will hate you and take your ability to swim! ” — Shanks speaks to Buggy on Devil Fruits[2]
Devil Fruits are said to be the fruits of the Sea Devil and that the secret to their power is hidden in the Grand Line. Because encounters with them are rare (especially outside the Grand Line), a number of rumors about them have risen, making it difficult to tell whether some things are fact or fiction; Nami dismissed them as mere myths until she saw the Bara Bara no Mi in action. The average person knows nothing or very little about what they are or what they do; this especially applies to people in isolated countries, even within the Grand Line, such as those of Amazon Lily and Wano Country, and even Princess Shirahoshi of Fish-Man Island, as none of them know about Devil Fruits, instead believing the powers bestowed to be curses or sorcery. Because of their power, if sold they can expect to fetch well over 100,000,000[2], and Devil Fruit users themselves are sold at market prices as slaves.[3] Of course, individual Fruits each have their differences in price, dependent on the powers bestowed, as the Ope Ope no Mi is worth 5,000,000,000 in the black market.[4] There are more than 100 varieties of Devil Fruit.[5]
One running theme with Devil Fruits, however, is the fact that they taste unimaginably bad, to the point of making it seem like the user had taken poison. They also seem to stop the eater from gagging them up. The Devil Fruit, when consumed, gives the consumer a power or special trait, which they will soon become aware of; a person who has eaten a Devil Fruit and gained its powers is known as a Devil Fruit User (能力者, Nōryoku-sha?, literally meaning "Ability User" or "Esper"). The Fruits come in all different shapes and colors, and all Devil Fruits presumably have swirl marks or patterns on them of some kind.[6] The only known exception is the Artificial Devil Fruit made by Vegapunk, which had ring patterns on it.[7] There can be only one of each type of Fruit at a time.[1] Only one bite is needed for the user to gain the power of the Devil Fruit, after which the Devil Fruit becomes a simple, useless, disgusting fruit. Despite this, the majority of those who have consumed a Devil Fruit have eaten the entire Fruit, as they are apparently unaware of this fact.[8] Swallowing the Fruit whole, as Buggy did, has the same effect.[9] Peeling off the skin and eating it piece by piece, such as Kaku and Kalifa did, also works. After ingesting the Fruit, the powers within affect the eater's Lineage Factor.[10]
Devil Fruits are the origins of the powers of some of the strongest people in the current generation of the world, including rookie pirate crews, Marine admirals, Shichibukai, and at least three Yonko, Marshall D. Teach, Charlotte Linlin and Kaido. They are common in the Grand Line compared to the other four blues. A typical Grand Line Pirate crew will often center around a captain with a Devil Fruit ability (such as the Bellamy Pirates, the Wapol Pirates, or the Foxy Pirates), while stronger crews and organizations will often contain many Devil Fruit users (such as the Whitebeard Pirates, the Donquixote Pirates, Baroque Works, or the Marines). Two of the Yonko (Blackbeard and Kaido) even take this so far as to go out of their way to gather as many Devil Fruits as possible using their own unique methods. In fact, since entering the Grand Line, nearly every single major opponent that Luffy has faced had a Devil Fruit ability, while in the East Blue he only faced two (not including Alvida, who ate her Devil Fruit later after their encounter).
Like many series, One Piece follows the trope that a Devil Fruit power also generally affects the clothes that the user is wearing. Paramecia Fruit users alter their clothes along with themselves automatically (for example, Luffy's shirt will never burst a button when his chest is swollen in Gear Third, Mr. 1's pants become blades along with his legs, etc.), Zoan Fruit users' clothes will fit in the same proportions after their transformation (Chopper's hat grew big when he was in Monster Point, Jabra's shoes are considerably stretched when in the hybrid form), and Logia Fruit users transform their clothes (and subsequent accessories) to their element along with themselves. Oda explained in a SBS once that if he had done it realistically, the manga would have too much unnecessary nudity.[11] However, some users do not seem to adhere to this, such as Jewelry Bonney and Honey Queen, whose clothes do not change proportionally to their powers.
It is implied that this common trait can also be extended drastically, after Devil Fruit powers have been "awakened," where the powers would not only affect a user's clothes but also their surroundings, as demonstrated first by Doflamingo when the Ito Ito no Mi affected everything around him.[12]
Some Devil Fruits may also lead to the user being considered a "freak". This is due to some of the abilities considered far too strange or frightening for normal people to accept.[13] In many cases, Devil Fruit users are considered a different race altogether, and with good reason. Since each Devil Fruit user possess a unique ability, they each require different countermeasures to deal with them, outside of their standard weakness to submersion, seastones and Haki. As such, once an unfamiliar Devil Fruit user is identified on the battlefield, the standard approach is to take a step back and experiment different means of attacks on the opponent.
Devil Fruit powers are so varied and mysterious, that the powers gained from eating one can serve purposes that may transcend normal limits. Such surprising effects that Donquixote Doflamingo believes he may find one to save Trafalgar Law from the reputably incurable Amber Lead Syndrome, showing that he places more faith in a Devil Fruit of such power than in medical science that failed to find a cure.[14]
Identification
“ We can figure out the name of a Fruit by the power it gives, but the kind of power we get is completely up to chance. ” — Kaku on his and Kalifa's unidentified Devil Fruits
According to Oda in a SBS, the same power of a Devil Fruit can exist more than once, though no two Devil Fruits of the same kind may exist at the same time.[1] Several Devil Fruits have seen their consumers either die or meet unknown fates within the storyline. Whitebeard's Gura Gura no Mi is still in use despite his death because Blackbeard somehow assimilated the power into himself, while Sabo has eaten Ace's reborn Mera Mera no Mi.
There exists a Devil Fruit Encyclopedia (悪魔の実図鑑, Akuma no Mi Zukan?) that lists the names and abilities of all the Devil Fruits. However, only a few of them have illustrations, meaning that most Devil Fruits cannot be identified by their shape.[15] For example, the Gomu Gomu no Mi and the Yami Yami no Mi had pictures and could be recognized prior to consumption,[15][16] whereas the Awa Awa no Mi and the Ushi Ushi no Mi, Model: Giraffe did not, and could only be determined by the abilities they granted.[17]
One individual known to utilize this book is Blackbeard, who, in his search for the Yami Yami no Mi, memorized its shape from the illustration provided.[16] The Vinsmoke Family also has a copy of the encyclopedia,[18] which Sanji read and became interested in the Suke Suke no Mi.[19]
Natural Devil Fruits
Artificial Devil Fruits
Growth
Natural Devil Fruits
When a Devil Fruit user dies, their ability is reborn into another similar fruit. Instead of growing from a plant, the ability simply regenerates inside another similar fruit as seen when Smiley "died" and the Sara Sara no Mi, Model: Axolotl transplanted itself into a nearby apple. Some Devil Fruits retain some form of the transformed fruit: The Bara Bara no Mi resemble a pineapple, the Ushi Ushi no Mi, Model: Giraffe resembles a cluster of bananas, the Yami Yami no Mi resembles a bunch of grapes, and the Ito Ito no Mi resembles a pear.
Another characteristic of a Devil Fruit's growth is that the stem becomes noticeably curlier than it was when the Fruit was not endowed with the ability. In the anime, and Digitally Colored Manga, it was also shown to change its color.[20]
Artificial Devil Fruit
SMILE Devil Fruits have been shown to grown on trees, groomed by the Dwarves of the Tontatta Kingdom under the Donquixote Pirates coerce. Unlike regular Devil fruits, the SMILE are seem to be fruits that are transformed over time.[21]
Gallery
Devil Fruit Powers That Returned Into Circulation
* Note: While the Mini Mini no Mi and Gutsu Gutsu no Mi were used by two different users (Blyue and Lily Enstomach ate the Mini Mini no Mi and Lambor Bukini and Bill ate the Gutsu Gutsu no Mi), it is not to be assumed that either had died and that the fruit respawned, as all users and both fruits are non canon.
Awakening
Devil Fruit powers can, in rare occasions, be "awakened" (覚醒, kakusei?), increasing the abilities of the user. The details of how a Devil Fruit can be awakened are so far unknown, but the increased abilities have been seen to allow significantly more power, as well as new abilities. The effects of the awakening depend on the type of the Devil Fruit.
For Zoan-type powers, awakening grants the users much larger transformations than other Zoan, while also gaining even more physical strength and durability, the latter contributing to a higher recovery rate. The Jailer Beasts of Impel Down are all awakened Zoan users.[22]
“ Listen up, hatchling. Devil Fruit abilities have a whole other stage to them. It’s called "Awakening"! Very rarely, an ability will "awaken", and begin to affect things other than the user's own body! ” — Donquixote Doflamingo to Monkey D. Luffy on the new power he is displaying.[12]
For Paramecia-type powers, it allows the user to change the landscape around them to match the properties of their Devil-Fruit, and to manipulate and deform the landscape through force of will. Donquixote Doflamingo, with the Ito Ito no Mi, is confirmed to have awakened, and has used it to create massive amounts of string to either serve as a shield, pierce opponents with masses of string with highly compressed tips, or to simply trip-up opponents by making the ground unstable, with all but his most powerful attacks not requiring him to move his body unlike his non-awakened attacks; Luffy commented that such a feat makes it appear that it is no longer a mere Paramecia.[12] Similarly, Charlotte Katakuri, with the Mochi Mochi no Mi, has been shown transforming the floor of the Mirror World into mochi, and producing tendrils of mochi in order to catch and restrain a dodging Luffy.[23] The main difference between the effects of awakening and Devil Fruits that have been used to affect surroundings like the Hira Hira no Mi or Suke Suke no Mi is that it does not require direct physical contact to transform the landscape and the user can seemingly manipulate the landscape with their thoughts alone. Non-canonically, Gild Tesoro awakened his Goru Goru no Mi, which instead allows him to create a complex sensory network with the gold he has touched, allowing him to detect any movement within his city of gold.[24] This (non-canonically) shows that each awakened Paramecia may have a different effect on their respective elements, based on how their ability works.
Proficiency
After consuming a fruit, the user must train themselves to use their new powers and understand their capabilities. For example, Luffy spent years learning how to use his Gomu Gomu no Mi while Califa and Kaku only took hours to get used to their new abilities after consuming their Devil Fruits. Sabo also trains with his Mera Mera no Mi ability at Baltigo days after Doflamingo's downfall, indicating that Sabo is still trying to understand its power. Brook himself takes around 50 years to finally understand the power of his Yomi Yomi no Mi, earning his title of Soul King.
The more the users understand their capabilities, the more varieties of techniques the users can utilize, which eventually lead to the awakening itself. Those who cannot harness their Devil Fruit's power well will not be able to utilize their abilities to the fullest.
Proficiency also relates to the user's stamina. When exhausted, one cannot used their abilities properly and must rest to regain their strength. After using his monster point, Chopper must rest for at least three hours after the Rumble Ball effect subsided. Luffy's Gear Fourth is also an example as he was exhausted after using it and must rest for at least ten minutes before using it again. Within that time, he cannot use his powers properly.
Types of Devil Fruit
All Devil Fruit are categorized into three types/classes. Currently of all named fruits, only Tamago's Tama Tama no Mi, which makes him living Chicken-and-Egg dilemma, and also two non-canon Devil Fruits have an undetermined class.
Devil Fruit Count
Canon Non-Canon SBS Total Paramecia 81* 30 2 113 Zoan 34** 7 0 41 Logia 11 3 0 14 Undetermined 4 2 1 7 Total Devil Fruits 130 42 3 175
* Note: These numbers include the Fuwa Fuwa no Mi, which was not named or detailed in the manga. It is deemed to be a canon Fruit because Shiki's escape from Impel Down (which involved the Fruit) was mentioned in the manga.[27][28][29] ** Note: This number excludes Artificial Devil Fruits.
Unnamed Devil Fruits
Several characters have been shown to either possess unique abilities and/or have been been confirmed to have a Devil Fruit power, but without it being directly named.
Paramecia
Eustass Kid's unnamed Devil Fruit, which allows him to manipulate magnetic forces.
Jewelry Bonney's unnamed Devil Fruit, which allows her to manipulate the age of any person, including herself.
Scratchmen Apoo's unnamed Devil Fruit which allows him to morph body parts into instruments and use music as a weapon.
Urouge's unnamed Devil Fruit, which allows him to convert damage taken into strength, resulting in expanding muscles. [30]
Blamenco's unnamed Devil Fruit which creates pockets in his body that can store things such as a giant hammer.
Sanjuan Wolf's unnamed Devil Fruit that makes him bigger than regular giants.
Issho's unnamed Devil Fruit that gives him the ability to manipulate gravity.
Kanjuro's unnamed Devil Fruit that allows him to bring whatever he draws to life. Like Kin'emon, he refers to it as sorcery.
Tama's unnamed Devil Fruit that allows the user to manifest edible dango from their cheeks that make any animal that eats them tame and subservient to the user.
Zoan
Minotaurus' unnamed Devil Fruit, an Awakened Zoan which allows him to take the form of a cow.
Minokoala's unnamed Devil Fruit, an Awakened Zoan which allows him to take the form of a koala.
Minozebra's unnamed Devil Fruit, an Awakened Zoan which allows him to take the form of a zebra.
Minorhinoceros's unnamed Devil Fruit, an Awakened Zoan which allows him to take the form of a rhinoceros.
Onigumo's unnamed Devil Fruit that lets him sprout spider-like arms from his back as well as grow a spider's abdomen.
Dalmatian's unnamed Devil Fruit which allows him to turn into a dalmatian.
Epoida's unnamed type Devil Fruit, which allows him to turn into a caterpillar.
Minochihuahua's unnamed Devil Fruit, an Awakened Zoan which allows him to take the form of a chihuahua.
Kaido's unnamed Devil Fruit, a Mythical Zoan which allows him to transform into an eastern dragon.
Undetermined Class
Laffitte's unnamed Devil Fruit, that allows him to sprout wings and fly.
Vinsmoke Reiju's unnamed Devil Fruit. Reiju was confirmed to have eaten a Devil Fruit in the One Piece Magazine Vol.1, and while she had been shown to have some unique abilities, it is unknown which of those are Devil Fruit powered and which are scientific enhancements.
Karasu's unnamed Devil Fruit that allows him to turn his body and clothes into a murder of crows.
Artificial
Momonosuke's unnamed artificial Devil Fruit, which allows him to transform into an eastern dragon. It was artificially created by Vegapunk, and was said to be a failure. [7]
Sheepshead's unnamed sheep SMILE Devil Fruit that allows him to transform his hands into the horns of a sheep.
Ginrummy's unnamed and unseen SMILE Devil Fruit.
Non-Canon
Chiqicheetah's unnamed Devil Fruit that allows him to turn into a cheetah.
Alpacacino's unnamed Devil Fruit which gave him life and the ability to transform into an alpaca.
All-Hunt Grount's unnamed Devil Fruit that turns his left arm into a monstrously large Gorilla like arm, that has red fur and claws.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Consequences of Consumption
“ Regardless of the type of power, it all depends on how you use it. The chances of you weakening from it are very low. Besides, being a hammer isn't much of an inconvenience. ” — Rob Lucci on Devil Fruit power.
The main attraction of eating a Devil Fruit is the power bestowed upon the user, with many spending their entire lives seeking out just one specific Devil Fruit. More often than not, the benefits and uses bestowed by power far outweight the loss of the ability to swim. However, due to lack of information known by most, and with Devil Fruits that are still unknown, the average consumer plays Russian Roulette when consuming one, without knowing what Devil Fruit it may be. With no way of removing the curse, all Devil Fruits users are labeled as "freaks", "Devils", and "monsters" for the remainder of their lives. All Devil Fruit users have to be trained to a certain degree, from simple activation control to full combat techniques.
“ You could sell 'em for hundreds of millions. But one bite might leave you with a lifetime of problems, you know!? ” — Jabra's warning to Kalifa and Kaku.
Another problem with the Devil Fruits is that a few of them offer "weird" or "useless" powers. While many citizens can be fascinated by their powers,[31] others may leave a consumer leading a miserable life full of discrimination from those around them.[13] However, due to the lack of information within some societies and cultures, misconceptions on how this power was achieved can lead to manipulation of individuals for that user's own purposes.[32][33]
Side Effects of Devil Fruits
With this new power comes a weakness: the sea rejects the new Devil Fruit user and they become helpless while submerged in water (or "become a hammer," in Japanese parlance).[2] Though the terminology is usually referring to the inability to swim a more accurate definition is that the sea water itself is the weakness as opposed to the actual motion of the body to move in the sea which simply becomes impossible once one has consumed a Devil Fruit. Not touching the water itself however will allow the user to go unaffected even if submerged, shown when the Monster Trio used diving gear to reach the sunken St. Briss,[34] and again when the Monster Trio coated themselves in smaller bubbles of Yarukiman Tree Resin bubbles to battle the Kraken. Oda stated in an SBS that Devil Fruit users are susceptible to all types of water, not just seawater.[35] This includes the white sea surrounding Skypiea. He elaborated on this, saying that "moving" water, like rain or waves, does not weaken Devil Fruit users, while standing water does. This was also shown first when Monkey D. Luffy was in the Dance-Powder induced rain and did not feel his power slipping away, and again when on Zou, the sea water that Zunisha used to shower did not affect him despite being sea water as it was "moving" water.[36] However, it should be noted that when Luffy used Mizu Luffy he was not affected in any way by the water he was holding.[37] Furthermore a Devil Fruit user will not be restricted in the water if he or she is not physically touching the water. Sometimes the power of a Devil Fruit involves water, or at least some state of water, like the bubble power of Kalifa or the ice power of Kuzan. In that case the user will not be weakened by its own state of water but will still be weak against others states of water.
Oda also said in an SBS that it is not until a Devil Fruit user has half their body in water that they become immobilized. This is seen with the Gorgon sisters and Luffy in Boa Hancock's bath. Brook was also seen slowly losing his strength as the water levels increased in the floods in Ryugu Palace, demonstrating that being in contact with the sea does not instantly rob their strength unless it reaches a certain level.[38]
Even if a part of the user is submerged, they cannot use their Devil Fruit powers, no matter how much or how little is submerged. However, if the user's body has been permanently altered by the Fruit, then the user's ability can be manipulated by outside sources; e.g., when Luffy was knocked into and sunk to the bottom of the pool at Arlong Park, Genzo and Nojiko dove underwater and stretched his neck so his head would be above water, allowing him to respirate. It should also be noted that although all Devil Fruit users are weak against water, the power itself may still work underwater (for example, Galdino can survive underwater by creating a bowl of wax surrounding him, and the keys he creates can be used to open Seastone handcuffs). Luffy was also shown after the timeskip to be able to use Gear Third underwater but it did greatly reduce the strength of his attacks. Being weak against the sea proves deadly to many Devil Fruit users who are pirates and Marines sailing the Grand Line. Additionally, the use of a Devil Fruit puts users at odds with races like the fish-men, and some with greater weakness to the sea than normal (such as the Kage Kage no Mi whose zombies are purified with salt) are almost useless against these races. However, the Devil Fruit power will also render a Fish-Man or Merman just as weak in water as it would anyone else, so this advantage is only applied to one that has not consumed a Devil Fruit themselves.
One of the greatest dangers created by a Devil Fruit user's weakness to water is the risk of drowning, which opponents can take advantage of this to kill even strong devil fruit users, like Hody Jones tried to do while fighting Luffy underwater by popping the bubbles that protected Luffy both from the surrounding sea and his only source of air. However it should be noted that the risk of dying from drowning only applies to a devil fruit user if cannot breath underwater, as fish-man and merfolk devil fruit users are capable of breathing underwater. Recently, Jack demonstrated an unexplained ability to survive underwater without drowning. However even if a Devil Fruit user can survive underwater without drowning, they will still be rendered unable to move due to their weakness, as shown by Jack who though able to remain alive and conscious underwater was rendered unable to move while submerged. Presumably this would remain true for Fish-Man and Merfolk, as Vander Decken IX required a bubble to move about underwater, even though there was no risk of him drowning due to him being a fish-man. This immobility would also make such users vulnerable underwater dangers such as ocean predators as they would be incapable of defending themselves.
Aside from the common weakness of becoming paralyzed in still water that all Devil Fruit users share, there are many powers that also have a further weakness to water, having their abilities dampened[39][40][41] or even outright washed away upon contact.[42][43][44]
Seastone, a special substance that emits the same energies of the sea, can also cancel out Devil Fruit powers through physical contact with the user. How weakened the user's movements become depends on how much physical contact the user has with the Seastone. The Marines use this to their advantage when imprisoning pirates in Impel Down. In addition, all other Devil Fruit users will have their powers nullified when they are grabbed by the user of the Yami Yami no Mi.
One rumor, as recounted by Jabra, is that Devil Fruits house actual devils that will fight when placed in proximity of one another. The resulting battle would destroy the users' bodies. Nevertheless, Blueno contradicted this claim, stating that Grand Line scientists have noted that the phenomenon of one's body destroying itself only occurs when one consumes two Devil Fruits.[45] However, Marshall D Teach was able to obtain and control two different Devil Fruit powers at the same time through an unknown method.
Superiority and Unpredictability
“ Depending on how you use and train the ability of the Devil Fruit... It can become a strong weapon in battle. ” — Crocodile's statement on his powers[46]
As Crocodile and Lucci stated, the power and potential of the Devil Fruits is mostly dependent on the skill and creativity of the users. Luffy was able to ingeniously devise a wide versatility of rubber enhanced physical attacks and Doflamingo was able to use his string based powers for a variety of devastating offense and sturdy defense. Charlotte Linlin has extended her soul manipulation powers, which is a Paramecia ability, to develop two different forms of elemental manipulation to create a sun and thundercloud, creating fire and lightning similar to two different Logia Devil Fruits, the Mera Mera no Mi and Goro Goro no Mi respectively.
List of Confirmed Superiorities
Some Devil Fruits of similar powers have been confirmed to be superior over another, though this in no way means that the superior ability user is stronger than that of the inferior's.[47]
List of Seen Unpredictability
As noted by Crocodile, there is no way to tell how Devil Fruit powers will fare when pitted against one other.[48] A Devil Fruit user who normally dominates all other powers can sometimes be brought down by a power considered "weak" in comparison.
Research
Artificial Devil Fruits
Dr. Vegapunk, a Marine scientist, is heavily responsible for the research into the effects of Devil Fruits' and Seastone. His research has also led him to devise a method that allows an inanimate object (such as a gun or a sword) to gain the effects of a Devil Fruit (it has not yet been shown how this is done and this has been only done with Zoan types that transform the weapon into an animal). He also managed to replicate the effects of one Fruit to a certain degree, and has even created a synthesized Devil Fruit, though it was said to be flawed.[7]
Caesar Clown stated that he has done numerous experiments on his own Devil Fruit, insinuating that he managed to enhance its power after consumption. He has not yet explained what his research was or how he did it though. He also managed to create his own version of artificial Devil Fruits, whereas Vegapunk failed; these are restricted to the Zoan class, named SMILE.[25]
Rumble Balls
Main article: Rumble Ball Tony Tony Chopper, during his six year apprenticeship under Dr. Kureha, created a drug called the "Rumble Ball" that enhances the effects of his Devil Fruit. Thus far he is the only one shown to have consumed it. According to him, the Rumble Ball disrupts the wavelengths of Devil Fruit forms.[59] It is implied that the "Rumble Ball" will activate when consumed by any Zoan type Devil Fruit user, albeit with different but slightly similar effects. After two years of training and research, Chopper was able to replicate the Rumble Ball's effect without having to consume any at all (except in the case of his Monster Point, which now requires only one and is under his full control).
Early One Piece
In the original two pilots of One Piece, Luffy's Devil Fruit power, the Gomu Gomu no Mi, was the power of the Gomu Gomu tree that grew once every 50 years and there were no signs that other such powers existed.[60]
Translation and Dub Issues
Many of the Fruit names come from Japanese onomatopoeia and Japanese vocabulary. In some cases finding a suitable dub or translation name is awkward.
Manga and Anime Influences
The rumor that Jabra recounted about Devil Fruits housing actual devils is similar to the Hindu belief about belerics; because of this the Hindus of Northern India avoids the trees and will not sit in its shade. However, Beleric fruit is also known for its medicinal properties and is used by Hindu physicians for various ailments.
The other part of Jabra's rumor about the fruit's devil tearing out and killing the consumer from within is similar to another Hindu legend, particularly the version in Villivakkam, about two rakshasa brothers: Vatapi would take the shape of a fruit or meat and Ilvala would offer the "food" to innocent mendicants passing by. Vatapi would come out by tearing through the victim's body. However, this failed against Agastya.
Trivia
ReferencesAfter hatching the ‘Express Bus’ program that caters to North-to-South-and-vice-versa commuters on EDSA, the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) is now planning a bus rapid transit (BRT) service for Metro Manila commuters from East-to-West and vice-versa.
Ready for presentation and approval from President Aquino is Metro Manila's first BRT system, which could be operation in as early as three years from now.
The Php4.9-billion BRT system stretches for 27.2 kilometers and will connect Quirino Highway to the Manila City Hall. 300 buses are projected to use it to pick up and drop-of some 279,476 passengers in any of the planned 32 stations by the time it starts operations in 2018.
DOTC Secretary Joseph Emilio Abaya stresses that the BRT project will alleviate the high volume of traffic caused by people travelling in this direction on a daily basis and connect them as well to the Light Rail Transit Line 1 (LRT1), Metro Rail Transit Line 3 (MRT3) and the Philippine National Railways (PNR)."When you look at the concerns that the public raise about the BBC, when they're given a list, these don't rate high," Mark Thompson told the Royal Television Society International Conference in London.
The corporation has come in for criticism in recent years over the pay of its "top talent" and executives. In July, it emerged that members of the BBC's executive board, including Mr Thompson, were given a pay increase last year despite promises to exert control over senior management salaries.
Its annual report showed an increase in overall numbers and pay. In total, the executive board was paid £4,769,000 in the year to March 31 2010, up from £4,601,000 in 2008-9. The BBC's total wage bill went up £9 million to £1.012 billion, and the number of employees earning more than £100,000 rose from 308 to 313.
Despite a ban on bonuses in the BBC's main public-service arm, John Smith, the chief executive of its commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, received bonus and incentive payments totalling nearly £400,000.The Election Commission banned on Saturday senior Madhya Pradesh minister Narottam Mishra from contesting elections for three years for allegedly using paid news to fan his assembly election campaign in 2008.
“As per law, Mishra stands disqualified from the date of issuance of order and debarred further for three years from contesting elections,” an Election Commission official said.
The EC decision came on a complaint by Rajendra Bharti, who had fought the 2008 elections as a BSP candidate, but is now with the Congress.
Mishra is considered number two in the state government and the decision is being seen as a big blow to chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan who is battling a string of farmer suicides and crop protests.
Mishra said he would challenge the EC move in the high court. “I have said that I have not given any money to the media and media has said it has not taken any money from me. But despite this, if EC has taken a decision based on possibilities and imagination, we will move the court on this. And we hope we will get justice,” he said
Bharti had moved the EC saying that his opponent Mishra paid for coverage in the local media during assembly elections in 2008 from Datia. Bharti, a Congress leader, was the MLA from Datia in 1985 and 1998 but lost the election against the minister in 2008 and 2013.
Mishra had moved the state high court urging the court to quash the investigation against him by the EC by declaring the Section 10 of representation of people act outside the powers of ECI. But court rejected his plea.
Mishra, who is the public relations minister, is also the chief spokesperson of the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government. The Congress has demanded his resignation.
BJP state president Nand Kumar Singh Chauhan said it was an unfortunate development, terming the EC move ‘dooshit (polluted)’. He too said the party will appeal before the high court.
(with agency inputs)
First Published: Jun 24, 2017 13:59 ISTA GYM FOR GEEKS
The would-be burglar counts himself lucky that he saw an interior light switch on and immediately spotted your shadow moving across the window curtain, giving him time to flee.
Not that anyone was home. The burglar is frightened away by a cheap motion-detector you plugged into a hobby microcontroller that turned on the electric motor that slowly waved a plastic fin in front of a lamp.
No, it's not that scene from Home Alone but a practical example of the many kinds of devices people can hack together with like-minded tinkerers thanks to the "maker movement" — inventors, hackers, and artists forming local groups around the world — that is now also emerging in Memphis.
click to enlarge
"It's a gym for geeks," said Brett Henley of the MidSouth Makers, describing the three-year-old group's community workshop (or "maker space") tucked away in the light-industrial south end of Bartlett's historic district. The facility is bristling with tools and technology ranging from a glass kiln to a sandblasting booth to cutting-edge 3D printers that Henley's colleagues built from parts they made on other 3D printers.
Much of what the group produces seems to be more tools for making other things, but it's a normal pattern of incremental development in the maker movement. Educating and encouraging each other is as important to the MidSouth Makers as building cool stuff. "We collect hobbies," explained another member. "We do a lot of different things; it's like 'hobby ADHD.'"
A GLOBAL MOVEMENT
Makers love to tweak, disassemble, re-create, and invent new uses for technology.
click to enlarge Justin Fox Burks
Designing a stencil to be sandblasted onto a pint glass
When they work or goof around together — pooling their money and tools — their most interesting projects bridge the gap between digital and physical, creating practical or quirky devices normally beyond the capabilities of basement inventors.
The maker movement got its name and its flagship publication in 2005 when tech publishing executive Dale Dougherty launched MAKE magazine shortly before organizing the movement's first expo, Maker Faire, in San Francisco. Dougherty coined the term "maker" to replace or rebrand "hacker," a term too intertwined with cyber crime.
Dougherty's first issue of MAKE showed readers how to make a $14 video camera stabilizer from household items, how to take professional-quality aerial photos using a kite, how to tame a jumble of wires into a 5-in-1 network cable, and how to read the magnetic stripe on a credit card "to find out what your credit card company really knows about you."
Since then, more than 200 local maker groups have set up "maker spaces" — many holdouts prefer "hacker spaces" — all over North America, and an additional 250-plus groups have set up collective project spaces throughout the world.
THE ARDUINO MICROCONTROLLER
Many makers are fond of simple robotic and automation projects, and the Arduino is at the heart of many of these inventions. The Arduino is a dirt-cheap, flexible, open-source microcontroller — essentially, the brain of a computer — that enables artists, designers, hobbyists, and (mostly) hackers to create interactive objects or environments. Running on free software, an Arduino board can sense the environment around it by receiving input from a variety of available plug-in sensors and can, in turn, affect its own surroundings by turning on lights and motors.
click to enlarge Justin Fox Burks
Donndelinger's quad helicopter
Examples of Arduino-controlled projects:
• Flame-throwing jack-o'-lantern
• Secret knock-detecting door lock
• LED turn-signal for cyclists, sewn into a jacket
• Tree-climbing robot
• Enable a houseplant to post a tweet when it needs watering
• Web-based controllers for home appliances, HVAC, and security
(pro tip: change the password often)
• Radio-controlled quadcopter with sonar anti-collision/crash protection
• Greenhouse automation
• RFID access control system
[via Instructables.com]
REMAKING THE ECONOMY
While the maker movement attracts many members from the tech sector, its attraction is rooted in more old-fashioned impulses, analogous to the DIY urban homesteading culture. And like urban homesteading practices (canning, back-yard chickens, front-yard vegetables, knitting), maker practices can either save time and money or suck time and money away, |
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Germany later said Spanish produce was not the source of the infection, and Spanish farmers are now demanding hundreds of millions of euros in compensation.
Jose Maria Pozancos, the head of the Spanish fresh produce exporters group Fepex, said he wants Germany to apologize, reimburse Spanish farmers at least 400 million euros ($584 million) for their losses, and help Spain repair damaged consumer confidence.
Spanish produce exporters have seen a 40% decline in demand since the crisis began, Pozancos said.
Germany has seen 630 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) -- a form of kidney failure -- in the current outbreak, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. That's more cases of HUS than in any other recorded outbreak, worldwide.
Fifteen patients in Germany have died of HUS, according to the center, while six died of enterohemorrhagic E. coli, a strain that can result in abdominal cramps and bloody diarrhea and causes intestinal hemorrhaging.
The center said 1,601 people have that E. coli strain but do not have HUS.
Infections have also been identified in Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, according to the organization.
Two women and a man who traveled last month to northern Germany were hospitalized in the United States with HUS as of Friday, Chris Braden of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. A fourth person developed bloody diarrhea, but was not hospitalized, he added.
Two U.S. service members in Germany also developed diarrhea, Braden said. "We have no expectation that this will spread in our country," he added.
The U.S. government website foodsafety.gov says that since 1996, "there have been at least 30 reported outbreaks of food-borne illness associated with different types of raw and lightly cooked sprouts. Most of these outbreaks were caused by Salmonella and E. coli."
The World Health Organization says that in 1996, "an outbreak linked to contaminated radish sprouts in school lunches caused 9,451 cases" of E. coli in Japan.
CNN's Frederik Pleitgen, Al Goodman and Per Nyberg contributed to this report.The incredible story of two Titanic survivors and tennis icons - including one who refused to have frostbitten legs amputated and won U.S. Open TWICE
As the RMS Titanic makes a second run to the big screen next month, little is said about two athletes who survived the tragedy and went on to dominate professional tennis.
Richard Norris Williams and Karl Behr were among the best of the best in the tennis world - and their lives were thrown into disarray when the 'unsinkable' ship met its end in 1912.
Behr was a 26-year-old Yale graduate when he boarded the Titanic, mostly in pursuit of his future wife, Helen Newsom.
A lot in common: Richard Norris Williams, left, and Karl Behr, right, were both both highly ranked American tennis players who also survived the 1912 Titanic disaster
Disaster: The RMS Titanic sank in the Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 2012, killing about 1,500 people
After the massive ship hit an iceberg on that fateful night, Behr was offered the chance to get out early with Newsom as they boarded lifeboat No. 5 - the second boat to escape.
It was widely reported that Mr Behr proposed to Newsom in the lifeboat that carried them away from the doomed vessel.
The couple were married about a year later - in March 1913.
Between 1906 and 1915, Behr was ranked in the U.S. top ten seven times - reaching No. 3 in 1914.
Doomed ship: This map shows the path of the Titanic when it sank and fell to the ocean floor on its way to New York
He died in 1949, and was posthumously inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame in 1969.
Richard Williams was 21 when he boarded the Titanic with his father on his way to the US Championships at Newport before entering Harvard in 1912.
Comeback: James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, is being re-released in 3D next month
His father was reportedly crushed to death one of the Titanic’s smoke stacks as the ship split in two.
Despite being waist-deep in the freezing waters of the Atlantic Ocean, Williams survived and was taken aboard the RMS Carpathia, the steamship made famous for plucking hundreds of Titanic passengers to safety.
A doctor offered to amputate Williams’ badly frozen limbs, but Williams rejected the doctor’s recommendation.
Williams went on to reach the quarter finals of the U.S. Open just months later, and won the tournament in 1914 and 1916.
He also won the Wimbledon title in 1920 and achieved a gold medal at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris.
In 1957, Williams was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame.Quebec, Canada
SAAQ Inspection "Vignette"
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Sean, I've gotta say, after reading your post about the reason behind the Skyline being illegal in the U.S. I definitely heard a few bells ringing! The situation seems similar to what's going on here in Quebec, Canada.First; there are 2 local Forums that are worth mentioning here, that have helped keep the public informed, and fight for our rights, respectively: RHD Quebec and the Import Vehicle Owners Association of Canada. Both have the full story in every detail in their sticky threads, along with links to the PDF for the study etc...Since publishing this article GTRCanada has now started an RHD legal sub-forum filled with lots of information as well: GTR-Canada ~ Subforum for RHD Legal Information As I understand it, in our case, federally we are allowed to import any car that was not originally offered on Canadian soil, only 15 years after the date of manufacture. But now some of the provinces started acting out against federal law, like in B.C. how the ICBC study really made life difficult for people out there. Anyway, now our own provincial government passed a law practically overnight a few years back, and gave zero prior notice to the public or those it may affect, they put a moratorium on the registration, of un-inspected right hand drive cars. So that specifically meant that if your car had a license plate already, you're fine, if you don't have a plate yet, you'll never ever get one. Pointe Finale, as they say.... or so it would seem.And what about the people who have cars and may be waiting to get inspected? Even those who had appointments for inspections days after the announcement would not be able to get plated! So their cars make excellent paper weights now.In Montreal alone there are 16 differentthat sell all kinds of imported vehicles, Supra's, WRX's, Evo's, 300ZX, Silvia's, and of course Skylines. How many of them must have had cars in transit that were already purchased, which they will not be able to sell here. No Warning was given to them, they attempted to band together, they hired a lawyer paid like a $50,000 retainer amongst 8 of the shops, and the lawyer then said,which meant, the lawyer did some research, found out who they would be up against, and thats how much they would fight this he figures.The reason we couldn't get our cars plated was a technicality that came from the wording of the law, really they were banning the inspection of RHD vehicles, which meant it had nothing to do with safety, or emissions or anything like that from a legal perspective, it must be that their inspectors are not able to properly evaluate a car that has a steering wheel on the right hand side. This meant that this little sticker here, is your go free pass, if you have one on your front window already, you're golden.Now, in Quebec, the police have the ability to send your car for an "Obligatory Vehicle Safety Inspection" if your vehicle appears to be falling apart on the road and is unfit to drive. I'll be honest, I've received one such infraction while driving a Chevy Van 30 Cargo van downtown, something about fuel lines leaking, and doors that are jammed shut, and parts of the body falling off... So I know the pain of this "Forced inspection" all to well. Its a hundred something dollars for the initial inspection, and the list is about a hundred points long, they usually fail most cars at least once, if not twice, and they offer to fix up your car for you, at an inflated rate compared to a regular mechanic anywhere else. Then its another $70 something every time for re-inspection. But thats where it gets complicated, if you fail the first time, then you have a limited number of days before your car cannot be registered ever again, and the title must be scrapped. So this forced inspection is serious business, especially for those who have cars that they may not be able to get a part in time to pass inspection! Those driving imported vehicles...The government initially set a date of one year, at which point they would "Consider" whether to make the law permanent or not, the first year passed and they still didn't decide, (all the while no one can plate their cars... but hey! hold on to them still, because we maaaay allow them soon!). They decided to extend the ban for yet another year and this time conduct a study. They conducted astudy on RHD cars, comparing them to classes of other cars that were not even close to the same class. They achieved some inflated numbers, and decided. Those who had plates are now on "grandfather" status, which is fine for now I guess.Their only claim for wanting to ban them was because they were cheaper, yet a lot more powerful, younger kids were getting them, and crashing and killing people. That's like saying Motorcycles are dangerous so we're not going to allow them anymore... Oh wait! they essentially did do that when they tripled the registration fee for motorcycle license holders.What ever happened to the peoples' choice? I thought we were at least smart enough to decide for ourselves if we are capable of driving a certain type of car or not, and if not then at least we could consider a compromise where by we must pass a "driving test" for RHD vehicles? I know I'd pass just fine, as so would everyone else I know who owns one.So if they weren't banned for safety reasons, then why would somebody, put up a Million dollar barrier on this law, who could be that deeply invested in it? As you suggest as well, some local media were suggesting the car dealerships were getting hurt business-wise. But this was also just around the time as the economy was slowing down, and we were heading into the recession, and people were not buying cars, so of course it makes sense to pay less and get more for your money by buying an imported vehicle. But the dealer's complained, and pointed at charts with dropping line graphs screaming "it's RHD's fault, they're stealing our business, offering higher quality, better reliability, more performance and power, at a much lower price! We just can't compete with that" But honestly, I doubt thats even the case, the type of people whobuy an RHD car, is not necessarily the same type of person whohave otherwise bought a new car. They're two separate groups.Anyways, I suppose that stopped new cars from coming in, but what were they to do about all the thousands of us, RHD cars already plated and on the road?...Well, it wasn't long after that, when the environment minister of Quebec suggested starting emissions testing for cars 15 years or older, funny how that's also the same number of years for the import law. I'm not saying they're definitely related, but that is some sort of coincidence. She was even as harsh as to suggest that failing an emissions test would prove a vehicle unfit to be on the roads. To this day, nothing has been enacted from the environment minister's office, and we keep our fingers crossed.This is a beautiful province, with a fantastic life style, but man are some of the laws unusual, such as the whole "turning right through a red light "situation. It used to be it was illegal everywhere in Quebec. Then people complained and said that was stupid, so they changed it! Now, you can turn right on a red light, everywhere... Except! - on the island of Montreal. That makes sense... anyways, I digress with the red light thing, but what I'm really trying to say is; I just find it hard to believe that they would go through all this, passing law's in the middle of the night, targeting one specific type of vehicle, costing their own citizens and businesses millions in lost assets and potential sales, and there was no public provocation for this, it's not like there's a group of angry elderly citizens out there saying "stop RHD vehicles". But the pressure is coming from somewhere, we know that for sure!For now, we stay banded together, and we'll continue to fight, to hold on to our Skylines, our Supras, our Evo's and our WRX's. Hopefully one day, we may live in a more free-market based society.On that note, I'm left feeling a little nostalgic, and down trodden, so I present foramusement, one of my favorite Skyline videos, it's short, but sweet:(CBS News) Chick-fil-A's public relations head died Friday amid an ongoing controversy over the fast food chain CEO's views on same-sex marriage.
In a statement, Chick-fil-A announced that Don Perry, vice president of public relations, died suddenly Friday morning.
"Don was a member of our Chick-fil-A family for nearly 29 years," the statements said. "For many of you in the media, he was the spokesperson for Chick-fil-A. He was a well-respected and well-liked media executive in the Atlanta and University of Georgia communities, and we will all miss him."
"Our thoughts and prayers are with his family," the statement added.
A company spokesman, working with a third-party public relations agency, could not confirm reports he had died of a heart attack.
Perry, who joined Chick-fil-A in 1983 as the Atlanta-based company's first public relations profession, leaves behind a wife, three sons and a grandson.
According to his official company bio, he was responsible for "developing and overseeing external communications and publicity programs in support of key company initiatives."
Chick-fil-A flap sees calls for action from both sides of same-sex marriage debate
Chick-fil-A's political grilling
The news comes as Chick-fil-A faces increasing calls for boycotts among politicians and activists after chief executive Dan Cathy expressed opposition to same-sex marriage.
"I think we're inviting God's judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say, you know, 'We know better than you as to what constitutes marriage,'" Cathy said in an interview on The Ken Coleman Show last month.
Cathy has talked about his socially conservative leanings before, but his recent comments became a catalyst for pro-LGBT activism.
Although some conservatives defended Chick-fil-A for sticking to Christian values, the criticism was much more overwhelming and the company's public relations worked to control the damage.
By Friday, Chick-fil-A's Facebook page and website were full of defensive statements. It denied accusations it created fake Facebook profiles and claimed it had voluntarily withdrawn from Jim Henson's Kids' Meal Puppets because of safety concerns. The company also went out of its way to insist it doesn't discriminate.
"The Chick-fil-A culture and service tradition in our restaurants is to treat every person with honor, dignity and respect - regardless of their belief, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender," the company said in a statement on July 19.Discover Techniques on How to Manage Stress Once And For All
Here Is A Preview Of What You'll Learn...
Understanding What Stress Really Is
What Are The Causes Of Stress?
The Negative Impact That Stress Can Have In Our Lives
How Stress Endangers Your Health
Identify And Sorting Out Your Stressors
Stress In The Workplace
A Stress Management Support Group
What Stressors Are In Your Power To Control?
What Stressors Are Beyond Your Control?
Coping With Stress In Your Life
Relaxation Techniques For Stress Relief
A Stress Journal Template
Strategies To Go Up Against Stress
Making Plans And Taking Action Against Your Stress
How To Be Victorious Against Stress
A Stress Management Solutions Guide and Much More!
Are you tired of always feeling worried about an uncertain future? Are you sick of feeling like you’re constantly under pressure? Have you had enough of feeling bogged down by stress, and feeling helpless to control it?Stress is all around us every day and is inevitable and unavoidable. How do we live the life we always wanted? How do we manage stress? How do we acquire stress management skills?In this book “Stress Management Techniques On How To Deal With Stress And Anxiety” you will learn specific, step by step strategies and gain information to take stress under your control once and for all. There are ways to manage stress; we can all learn stress management skills.Most books assume that we are able to rid ourselves of all stresses and all of a sudden, our lives are easy and carefree. But the simple fact is that stress is part of life and when you learn what stress really is, what we can and can’t control, then with a plan we can take charge of our lives in amazing ways.Are you ready to manage stress and take your life back into your own hands? Are you ready for a Stress Free Life?Then I invite you to read on, and learn how to take control of your stress—once and for all.Tags: manage stress, stress management, stress management techniques, stress relief, stress reduction, stress free you, stress free living, stress and anxiety, stressProvincial governments should make their own decisions about putting a price on carbon pollution and not wait for the federal government to act, says a new report by Canada's Ecofiscal Commission.
The report says putting a price on carbon emissions is the most practical way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change and Canada can't afford to dither about which level of government is going to take the lead.
"Canadians are bearing the costs across the country," said Chris Ragan, chair of the Ecofiscal Commission, in an interview with CBC News.
"The sooner we get policies in place that change corporate and household behaviour and start to drive those emission reductions, the better off we'll be."
The commission members include a wide range of economists, former political leaders, academics and business people from all political stripes. Its mandate is to take a non-political approach to big policy issues in Canada.
Its newest report, The Way Forward, points out that some provincial governments are already taking steps to reduce carbon pollution.
"We actually think there are real advantages to taking these actions provincially, and part of the evidence for that is that provinces are already acting," said Ragan.
For example, B.C. has had a carbon tax since 2008, and Alberta prices carbon and makes big companies cut emissions and pay into a technology fund if they don't. Quebec has linked its cap-and-trade system with California's, and Ontario is expected to announce its carbon plan soon.
The report says action by the provinces will work the best.
"Let them design the systems to their own provincial realities, and let them recycle the revenues in the way that is best for their local economies."
The report concludes that putting a price on carbon emissions could help the economy, because revenues earned from taxing pollution could be directed back into provincial economies.
"The biggest gains to the provinces come from introducing the carbon-pricing system now and actually using those revenues in a sensible way," added Ragan.
Conservatives oppose carbon pricing
Carbon pricing is a controversial political issue that could pop up during the upcoming federal election.
The federal Conservative government has resisted putting a price on carbon, saying it will result in "a tax on everything." Instead, it's bringing in regulations to control emissions sector by sector.
Greenhouses in Delta, B.C., are heated by wood chips that are burned using a state-of-the-art system that captures CO2 and feeds it back to plants. A new report says provincial carbon-pricing systems, such as B.C.'s carbon tax, can encourage cuts to emissions and raise revenue that can be reinvested in clean-energy programs. (Jonathan Hayward/Canadian Press)
That approach has drawn criticism, because, after years of promises, Ottawa has yet to impose rules on the industry that produces the most greenhouse gases — the oil and gas sector.
Last December, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told the House of Commons that introducing carbon pricing would be "crazy" under the current instability caused by dropping oil prices. However, in a year-end interview with CBC's Peter Mansbridge, Harper pointed to Alberta's carbon-pricing system as a model that could be implemented on a "broader" scale.
The Opposition NDP has been pushing for a national cap-and-trade system.
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau recently waded into the issue during a speech in Calgary suggesting the medicare approach to carbon pricing — allowing provinces to design their own systems with the federal government setting national targets.
The medicare approach is familiar to Canadians said Ragan, although he insisted the commission is not siding with any party.
"Not everything that is national needs to be federal," he said.
"Canada has a long history of provincial action, and many of the things we think of being most important in our day-to-day life are, in fact, done by the provinces."
The report recommends that provinces increase their prices on carbon over time. The commission says the pricing should be tough enough to provide incentives to cut emissions, and the price should apply to the largest number of polluters possible.
It also recommends that provinces should co-ordinate their carbon prices down the road to reduce the effects of having a patchwork across the country, but concludes that's not essential in the short term.
The bottom line advice for the federal government during this process is what Chris Ragan calls "the three-S approach."
"S No. 1 is: seriously study the issue. S No. 2 is: support the provinces. And S No. 3 is: stay out of it."This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division.
Every country has found itself face to face with this situation at the close of a great war. From Rome under Caesar to France under Napoleon down even to our own Civil War, the problems arose as to what could be done with the soldiers to be mustered out of military service.
—Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane to President Woodrow Wilson, 1918
What to do with returning soldiers—how to reintegrate them into peacetime society—was a central challenge for the U.S. government after World War I.
Of course, it was not the first time the U.S. had waded into the waters of international conflict: the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War were all precedents. Yet the Great War represented the first time the nation fully harnessed its industrial might and political capital while also drafting a military to fight overseas. During the Civil War, roughly 8 percent of the military was conscripted, compared with 72 percent during World War I.
Ultimately, the First World War helped spur activism on behalf of and by veterans while also laying the groundwork for a 20th-century disability-rights movement. It is possible to trace the formation of a vibrant veterans’ movement by exploring the Library’s exhibit “Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I,” holdings in the Prints and Photographs Division and the papers of Woodrow Wilson in the Manuscript Division.
Civilian gratitude for the sacrifices of the American Expeditionary Force shared space with fear regarding the kind of values and infirmities veterans might carry home from abroad. They returned to an economy lumbering toward recession, a militant labor force willing to strike for better pay and benefits and a public anxious about political radicalism, race and immigration.
In some cases, government actions helped to darken the national mood. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ginned up antipathy toward immigrants and unions, for example, by painting each with the brush of political radicalism, jailing thousands and deporting hundreds, including the anarchist political activist Emma Goldman. Organized labor saw the brief gains it made during the war evaporate; immigrants witnessed Congress pass restrictions on immigration that would remain for decades.
Upon discharge, veterans received $60, just enough to purchase new clothes. Even with the freshest of threads, returning WWI veterans encountered great obstacles in such an environment. By April 1919, an estimated 40 percent or so of veterans remained unemployed.
None of this is to say the government ignored veterans entirely. As the U.S. entered the war in 1917, Congress passed the Smith-Hughes Act to promote vocational training in agriculture, industrial trades and home economics. The following year, the government created the United States Employment Service to place workers in jobs created by mobilization and aid returning veterans in finding work.
Ultimately, the service referred 6 million workers for roughly 10 million job openings, but proved less helpful to veterans once funding diminished after the war. The Smith-Hughes Act also struggled to live up to its promises: Veterans complained of distant and unhelpful vocational counselors, among other problems.
For black veterans especially, the transition proved harrowing. Emboldened by military service and seeking to lay claim to the rights of citizenship, many black veterans endured harassment by white racists and even death; lynching doubled in the years between 1917 and 1919. During summer 1919, cities across the country, including Washington D.C., experienced horrible race riots that resulted in millions of dollars in property damage and over 100 deaths. Governments, state and federal, did little to assuage the inequality and indignities suffered by returning black soldiers.
Realizing that veterans needed a political voice, a cadre of military officers established the American Legion in 1919. It was one of nearly 175 organizations established in the wake of the war to represent veterans, but it quickly became the most politically powerful veterans lobby in the nation. Within its first year it drew 843,000 members; by 1931, it claimed over a million.
The organization’s advocacy for veterans, particularly its efforts to draw attention to their sacrifices, raised public awareness regarding military service and its effects. “The first duty of the American Legion,” national commander Hanford MacNider argued, “is to see that those men who came back from their service, blinded, maimed, broken in health and spirit, who must live the war forever in their homes through the country, get a square deal from the Government they fought for.”
Critics took the organization to task for its hypernationalism and militant anticommunism, which sometimes targeted immigrants and union activists and contributed to civil liberties violations. The legion also reasserted racial hierarchies—local branches were allowed to exclude African-American veterans—and failed to truly advocate for black soldiers.
Still, the American Legion’s full-throated advocacy and political influence helped to persuade the government in 1921 to establish the United States Veterans Bureau, a precursor to today’s U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Though the bureau struggled with accusations of waste, graft and corruption, this imperfect beginning did establish veterans as a legitimate political voice in American politics and set the tone for future efforts to reintegrate returning soldiers into the body politic.
World War I Centennial, 2017–18. With the most comprehensive collection of multiformat World War I holdings in the nation, the Library is a unique resource for primary source materials, education plans, public programs and on-site visitor experiences about the Great War including exhibits, symposia and book talks.It’s a shoot-out in Tarlac!
After months of trials and tests to find out who really is hungry enough to be crowned as the country’s best Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team, the Tarlac E-Sports League will soon find out who will be crowned king as it prepares for the LAN finals of its CS:GO pro event this coming April 28, 2017 in SM City Tarlac.
Founded late last year as a joint effort by the City Government of Tarlac itself and the organization, WASD Philippines, the pro tournament describes itself as the one to set the “perfect barometer for the state of Philippine Counter-Strike due to the sheer caliber of the teams in attendance”.
4 teams are currently confirmed to be appearing at the LAN finals, namely team Fallen5, team ACG.TteSports, Gaon Gaming which hails from the Visayas, and Mindanao’s Cyberia Gaming Hub.
In addition to the 4 confirmed teams, 8 teams will also be looking to secure a coveted slot for the tournament, namely team 1nconsistent, Mineski-CS:GO, Fractals, Tipsy Pigs, Alpha Dogs, Imperium Pro Team, Wolves of War,and Reges Terrae, through the Ascension Tournament which will be kicking off later this week.
The Tarlac E-Sports League Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Grand Finals will be taking place in SM City Tarlac, this coming April 28, 2017, with the event’s doors to open at 10:00 AM. The event is also part of Tarlac City’s 19th Charter Anniversary and is one of the major Esports events in the country to be directly sanctioned and co-organized by a government body.A non-profit company is developing an open source, 64-bit “lowRISC” SoC that will enable fully open hardware, “from the CPU core to the development board.”
University of Cambridge spinoff “lowRISC” is a not-for-profit company with a goal of making a completely open computing eco-system, including the instruction set architecture (ISA), processor silicon, and development boards. The first step is to develop a new system-on-chip design based on the new, 64-bit RISC-V ISA developed at the University of California, Berkeley.
Further goals listed by the project include:
To create a fully open SoC and low-cost development board and to support the open-source hardware community. This will involve volume silicon manufacture.
To explore and promote novel hardware security features
To make it simple for existing companies and especially semiconductor startups to create derivative designs, e.g. by sharing scripts, tools, source, and our experience
To create a benchmark design to aid academic research
The RISC-V design (see farther below) currently is sufficiently advanced that the lowRISC project can begin designing an SoC around it. So far, however, there are few details. “It’s early days to be honest, probably too early to give block diagrams, specs etc.,” wrote lowRISC team leader Robert Mullins in an email to LinuxGizmos.
RISC-V prototype silicon
(click to enlarge)
Mullins is a professor at the University of Cambridge, and was co-founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The other team-members are Alex Bradbury, a frequent Raspberry Pi contributor working out of the same Computer Laboratory as Mullins, and Gavin Ferris of Dreamworks. There’s no formal relationship with the Pi Foundation, claims the lowRISC project.
An initial FPGA version of the SoC is expected in the next six months, with a test chip due for fabrication by the end of 2015. Tape out of production silicon is expected in late 2016 at the earliest.
Early versions of the SoC will not include a GPU. Initial clock-rate goals for the SoCs are 500MHz to 1GHz at 40nm and about 1.0-1.5GHz at 28nm. The SoC design will be released under BSD, a permissive open source license.
RISC-V: a new kind of ISA
Earlier this month, UC Berkeley’s Krste Asanović and David Patterson, leaders of the RISC-V project that forms the basis of lowRISC, posted a white paper on RISC-V, as well as a blog post in EETimes that summarizes the white paper. According to the paper, RISC-IV will initially target Linux-based Internet of Things (IoT) devices, with plans to spread throughout the computing spectrum.
Asanović is professor and director of the ASPIRE Lab at UC Berkeley that is leading the RISC-V project. Patterson, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, coined the term RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) and helped develop the architecture back in the ’80s along with Carlo Sequin and others.
The authors pose a cogent argument for creating a new, fully open instruction set. The RISC-based ISAs in ARM, x86, MIPS, and Power architectures are controlled by companies that “have patents on quirks of their ISAs, which prevent others from using them without licenses,” write the authors. Licensing is expensive, so academics and smaller projects are shut out. Only about 10-15 companies have licenses, for example, that allow them to create custom ARM cores. “Licenses stifle competition and innovation by stopping many from designing and sharing their ISA-compatible cores,” they continue.
Other problems and inequities in the current system include the fact that the companies that own ISAs, such as ARM, Intel, IBM (Power), and Imagination Technologies (MIPS), depend on outsiders to write most of the software around the platforms, and yet these key stakeholders have no control over the ISAs themselves, say the authors.
There now exists in the larger open source community the talent to improve the ISAs and write new ones better than the gatekeeper companies can accomplish on their own, add the authors. A fully open ISA like RISC-V would encourage more free-market competition and innovation, faster time to market via open source methodology, and more affordable processors, they conclude.
One challenge with RISC-V and the lowRISC project built around it, is that there are already two open source RISC ISAs: SPARC and OpenRISC. Asanović and Patterson claim that only RISC-V meets all the requirements necessary for a competent open ISA, and that RISC-V has benefited from the example of SPARC and OpenRISC, learning from their mistakes. In addition, SPARC’s 64-bit address version (V9) is proprietary, and “OpenRISC may have lost momentum,” they add.
So far, UC Berkeley has developed eight silicon implementations of RISC-V, and there are external projects underway in India, the UK, and the US. Thanks in part to the open-source Chisel hardware design system, “one 64-bit RISC-V core is half the area, half the power, and faster than a 32-bit ARM core with a similar pipeline made in the identical process,” the authors claim.
This “Rocket” core “is about the same performance level as an ARM A5 when configured the same in the same process technology, but is 64-bit instead of 32-bit,” wrote Asanović in an email to LinuxGizmos. (See the project’s comparison data farther below.)
RISC-V simulator
Meanwhile, a simulator called ANGEL for the RISC-V CPU, developed by UC Berkeley’s Sagar Karandikar, has been posted on the RISC-V project site. The simulator, implemented in JavaScript, boots Linux in a Chrome browser.
The screenshots below show the ANGEL RISC-V simulator booting to an ASH shell in Chrome on a Nexus 10 tablet. After the “Boot Linux” button is clicked, ANGEL downloads a 3MB Linux kernel and loads it into a simulated RISC-V processor.
ANGEL RISC-V simulator booting in Chrome on a Nexus 10
(click images to enlarge)
According to the project’s website, the ANGEL simulator running via Chrome implements an “RV64IMA” 64-bit RISC-V processor running in 10MB of memory, and executing roughly 1.5 million instructions per second. The simulator takes about 10 seconds to boot to ASH, after which you can issue BusyBox commands. (The simulator failed to trigger Android’s soft-keyboard on our Nexus 10, but on our Ubuntu desktop we could input BusyBox commands at the ASH prompt.)
RISC-V vs. Cortex-A5 smack-down
The RISC-V project has published a comparison between a 64-bit “Rocket” RISC-V core and ARM’s 32-bit Cortex-A5. Both cores offer single-instruction-issue, in-order pipelines, and both are implemented using the same TSMC process. Additionally, the Rocket provides “an MMU that supports page-based virtual memory” and optionally offers an IEEE 754-2008-compliant FPU, capable of both single- and double-precision floating-point operations, including “fused multiply-add,” says the project. The tabulated data shows that “the RISC-V core is faster, smaller, and uses less power,” states the project’s website.
ARM Cortex-A5 RISC-V Rocket RISC-V / ARM
ratio ISA register width 32 bits 64 bits 2 Frequency > 1GHz > 1GHz 1 Dhrystone performance 1.57 DMIPS/MHz 1.72 DMIPS/MHz 1.1 Area excluding caches 0.27 mm2 0.14 mm2 0.5 Area with 16KB caches 0.53 mm2 0.39 mm2 0.7 Area efficiency
(DMIPS/MHz/mm2) 2.96 4.41 1.5 Dynamic power
(mW/MHz) < 0.08 0.034 >= 0.4
“We plan to open-source our Rocket core generator written in Chisel in the near future,” adds the project. “We are currently in the process of cleaning up the repository. Please stay tuned.”
Further information
More information on lowRISC may be found at the lowRISC.org website. The first RISC-V workshop will be held on January 14-15, 2015 in Monterey, Calif. A RISC-V boot camp will be held at the end of the workshop. More information about RISC-V is available at the RISC-V website.
— with additional reporting by Rick LehrbaumHow arms might be repaired in the near future. Credit@LenoreRasmussen
Last night, NASA rocketed off an advanced material from Cape Canaveral in Florida to the International Space Station aiming to examine how it behaves in a zero gravity space environment. Lenore Rasmussen at Ras Labs, together with researchers and engineers at the US Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have been developing a synthetic muscle that might be used to improve prosthetic limbs and possibly help |
his 12 years as an assistant with the San Antonio Spurs and trimmed it down to the basics – getting back on defense, playing with energy, and keeping the ball out of the paint.
The second-year head coach’s bare bones approach has been an overwhelming success, as he’s taken a team that ranked 27th in defensive rating (107.5 points allowed per 100 possessions) during his first season with the team in 2013-14 and helped them ascend the #11 spot in that category (102.7) this year. After beginning the season 0-16, the Sixers are 3-7 in the month of December, and defense has been the thing that’s fueled the team’s recent success. Philadelphia has allowed just 98.2 points per 100 possessions this month, the fifth-best mark in the league during that stretch.
“We’re now 11th in the NBA in defensive efficiency, and we were 30th [at times last season],” Brown said proudly following shoot-around on Tuesday morning in Miami. “We just haven’t let one or two [key concepts] go, and we’ve zoomed in on them, and we have since [training camp]. I’m seeing carryover and improvement.”
In 10 games this month, the Sixers have allowed the fifth-lowest field goal percentage on shot attempts within five feet (54.7%), the fourth-lowest from 5-9 feet (36.6%), and the sixth-lowest on three-pointers (32.1%). To see what that looks like, hover over the Sixers’ defensive shot chart from 2013-14 (pictured below) and check out the marked difference on attempts in the paint and beyond the arc this month.
Some of that success in the paint must be attributed to the play of rookie center Nerlens Noel, who ranks ninth in the NBA in opponent field goal percentage at the rim (min. 8.0 FGA defended within five feet per game), allowing just a 47.1% conversion rate on those attempts.
Michael Carter-Williams has also impressed on the defensive end of the floor. In the month of December, the Sixers have allowed 2.9 fewer points per 100 possessions with him on the floor. During that stretch, he’s held his nightly assignment to an average of 8.5% below their normal contested field goal percentage on shots he defends.
But beyond defensive-minded bookends Carter-Williams and Noel, less likely members of the team have stepped up on that end as well. In fact, Philadelphia’s most effective three-man defensive combination during the month of December has been Luc Mbah a Moute, Henry Sims, and Hollis Thompson, who have held opponents to 90.1 points per 100 possessions in 78 minutes on the floor together. It doesn’t hurt that all three are above-average rebounders for their positions; that group has the best defensive rebounding percentage (85.5%) of any that has played at least 75 minutes for Philadelphia this month.
What makes the Sixers’ recent play on the defensive end even more impressive is the fact that Philadelphia’s league-high turnover rate (19.0 turnovers per 100 possessions) has actually increased during the month of December, from 18.7 to 19.4. All season long, they’ve paced at about 23.8 points per game allowed off of turnovers, nearly five points more than any other team in the league. Brett Brown imagines what the Sixers’ defensive numbers might look like if his team could eliminate some of those giveaways.
“Imagine if we could reduce our turnovers,” he said. “Our defense has been, at times, good enough to win games, but because of [turnovers] we can’t. So I think if we can not turn it over as much, which would help our transition defense, maybe we can move into the single digits [in terms of league defensive efficiency rankings].
“Our defense is moving in the direction we want.”
*Stats via stats.NBA.com, shot chart via StatMuse.comWho's Right? Obama or the 'Base'? When President Barack Obama lashed out at the liberal base of the Democratic Party – condemning many on the Left as “sanctimonious” purists – he underscored how profoundly his actions have alienated some of his past supporters and how little he understands why. Email
Printer friendly At a press conference on Tuesday, Obama compared the current liberal furor over his tax-cut deal with Republicans to the fury on the Left over his abandonment of the “public option” in health-care reform. But the latest anger among progressives reflects more than that; it is a cumulative disgust. What the Left sees is a politician who ran on a platform of “change” – who cited Martin Luther King’s “fierce urgency of now” phrase – but then blinked at reversing disastrous policies of his recent predecessors. Instead, Obama offered more “continuity,” a change of heart that was pleasing to an entrenched Washington/Wall Street Establishment. Though the cave-in on extending George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich may have exposed the growing void in Obama’s support among progressives, the hollowing out of his base has been underway since shortly after his election. Despite promises to close the Guantanamo Bay prison and to respect the rule of law, Obama soon began moon-walking those commitments. He ducked a fight with Congress over Guantanamo and found excuses not to enforce U.S. and international laws regarding torture and other war crimes. Unlike politicians in Great Britain, Obama and congressional Democrats didn’t even conduct fact-finding investigations into how the Bush administration led the nation into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or how Bush waged the “war on terror.” Obama insisted on “looking forward, not backward.” Yet, while devising legal rationalizations for not holding Bush and his aides accountable for torture, aggressive war and other serious crimes, the Obama administration has explored novel legal theories for indicting WikiLeaks for releasing internal government documents revealing details about the brutality of Bush’s wars and the often cynical U.S. diplomacy that surrounded them. Progressives have found these double standards – which put Obama in league with the likes of neoconservative Sen. Joe Lieberman – galling. Obama also infuriated progressives by failing to chart a significantly different course on war policies. He kept Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates at the Pentagon, the first time in history that a newly elected U.S. president of a different party hasn’t made a change in that key job. Gates and other Bush holdovers in the military high command then mouse-trapped Obama into an escalation in Afghanistan by limiting his access to less confrontational options. Obama’s Afghan War strategy won praise from Washington’s influential neocons but not from Obama’s core supporters. The surrender on the “public option” was also not the minor detail that Obama described at his news conference. Though it’s true that the whittled-down version that was finally abandoned would have affected only a few million people, a broader “public option” – say, one available to all businesses – might have attracted tens of millions and saved trillions of health-care dollars. But Obama portrayed the “public option” as something of a pet rock for leftists. “If that’s the standard by which we are measuring success or core principles, then, let’s face it, we will never get anything done,” Obama said, showing an uncharacteristic flash of public anger. “People will have the satisfaction of having a purist position and no victories for the American people. “And we will be able to feel good about ourselves and sanctimonious about how pure our intentions are and how tough we are, in the meantime, the American people are still seeing themselves not able to get health insurance because of pre-existing condition.” Bending to Republicans Yet, as Obama himself has acknowledged, his “signature” health-reform bill and its mandate that Americans must obtain private-sector insurance from profit-making companies was actually scripted by Republicans, such as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Obama’s new tax deal with the Republicans is a similar abandonment of Democratic principles. Most Democrats would favor paying Americans to work on improving the nation’s infrastructure or other domestic needs, rather than trusting Republican faith in tax cuts to stimulate the economy. Indeed, the idea of running up the federal deficit by another $900 billion to pay for the tax cuts might undercut the prospects of creating meaningful infrastructure jobs. There’s little doubt that the Republicans will cite the widening deficit as a reason to block any direct government plan to put Americans back to work. So, the tax cuts (and the 13-month extension of jobless benefits) in the Obama-Republican compromise might spur some short-term consumerism but won't address the nation’s long-term structural deficiencies. It will mean Americans buying many manufactured goods produced in China or other low-wage countries, adding to the balance-of-trade deficit as well as the budget deficit. But the deal won’t bring the kind of sustained growth that a healthy economy needs, nor will it make the United States more competitive. The compromise doesn’t devote a penny to high-speed rail, or investments in research and development, or a boost in green jobs. However, by adding nearly $1 trillion to the deficit over two years, it will increase pressure for draconian cuts in social and other domestic spending in the future. The new tax cuts also don’t address the disturbing disparity of wealth in the United States. Indeed, they make the problem of two countries (one rich and pampered, the other increasingly poor and desperate) worse. Not only do the rich get the lion share of the benefits – with at least a quarter of the benefits going to the top one percent of earners – but the working poor will actually see their taxes rise slightly because the Making Work Pay credit will lapse. [For the breakdown, see NYT, Dec. 8, 2010] Negotiating Under Coercion There’s also little prospect for this deal to create a healthier political climate. Obama made clear he was making these concessions because the Republicans had, in effect, taken the American people “hostage” and that he saw his response as comparable to police negotiating with hostage-takers. In a remarkable comment, the President said: “I think it’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage-takers, unless the hostage gets harmed. Then people will question the wisdom of that strategy. In this case, the hostage was the American people, and I was not willing to see them get harmed.” However, when police negotiate with hostage-takers, the goal is not to give them whatever they want and then let them get away. It is to wear down the hostage-takers, making minor concessions (like pizza deliveries) in exchange for letting hostages go and – if that doesn’t work – sending in the SWAT teams to kill the hostage-takers and save as many hostages as possible. If police made hostage-taking a sure-fire way to get rich and face no accountability, the nation would be awash in hostage-takings. But that is what President Obama essentially told the Republicans – and it’s a sure bet that they will dream up other instances where Obama will have to choose between harm to the American people and caving in. In fact, the Republicans will be offered a chance early next year to block an increase in the debt limit. They could demand major cuts in social programs as they did in 1995 – and if Obama doesn’t comply, they could force a shutdown of the U.S. government, with suspended Social Security payments, no Medicare for elderly patients, shuttered national parks, etc. What will Obama do then or in some similar instance? Now that the Republicans know that he can be easily rolled, what is stopping them doing it again and again? And what lesson will foreign leaders take from Obama’s admission that he can be coerced? It’s a safe assumption that foreign embassies in Washington are sending home cables about this public display of presidential capitulation. This spinelessness may be what upsets the Democratic base the most. Although Obama faults progressives for an unrealistic desire for purity, they see a need for courage and principle even in the face of pain. They believe the Republicans have become stalwart defenders of corporatism and thus tenacious enemies of any government effort to constrain corporate power and to address the nation’s needs. Many progressives had hoped that Obama would emerge as an articulate advocate for a more energized government that would fight for the interests of average citizens against the power of money. Instead, what they see in Obama is an obsessive conciliator, always looking for ways to compromise even with the most intransigent (or corrupt) foe. To them, Obama may have drawn many lines in the sand (as he said) but he’s too quick to rub them out and draw new ones. Obama’s Challenges To be fair to Obama, he was confronted with extraordinary crises when he took office. The economy was teetering near collapse; two U.S. automakers were heading toward permanent bankruptcy; the federal deficit was near $1.3 trillion; and American troops were at war in faraway countries. The choices before Obama were not easy ones. If he had chosen to shake up the political-economic system – rather than settle it down – he might have tipped the country and the world into a full-scale depression. And he would have taken a pounding from the U.S. news media and the political elite. The high-decibel accusations about Obama as an anti-business, closet-Muslim socialist would have been even louder than they were. Egged on by the powerful right-wing voices on talk radio and cable news, the surge of gun-toting Tea Party anger might have been even more intense. The Left’s longstanding neglect of media would have left Obama standing much more exposed than some on the Left like to admit. Obama is also correct when he says many progressives are unrealistic about what can be achieved when the Right has a huge megaphone to the American people’s ear and the Left has done little to match it. Still, realism does not have to mean surrender; compromise does not have to mean repudiating principles and endangering long-term prospects. From failing to hold Bush and his aides accountable for crimes of state to letting the Washington/Wall Street powers-that-be frame the parameters for what’s possible, Obama repeated many of the mistakes that President Bill Clinton made, with a parallel result – a resurgent Republican Party and an empowered right-wing extremist faction. Obama now faces the risk of more demands and more “hostage-taking.” Though he may wish to avoid confrontation, it will surely find him. For those on the Left – whether Obama loyalists or critics – there are daunting challenges ahead. Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. [For a limited time, the three-book set is available for the discount price of only $29. For details, click here.] To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment about this or other stories, you can use your normal e-mail address and password. Ignore the prompt for a Google account.) To comment to us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue reporting and publishing stories like the one you just read, click here. Back to Home PageWindows 10 SDK Preview Build 14267 Released By Clint Rutkas / Senior Technical Product Manager, Windows Developer Team Share Share Skype
Today, we released a new Windows 10 SDK Preview to be used in conjunction with Windows 10 Insider Preview (Build 14267 or greater). The Preview SDK is a pre-release and cannot be used in a production environment. Please only install the SDK on your test machine. The Preview SDK Build 14267 contains bug fixes and under development changes to the API surface area. If you are working on an application that you need to submit to the store, you should not install the preview. This is a pre-release of the Windows 10 SDK. This release should only be installed on test machines, and is not supported in a production environment. The APIs and software included in this preview should not be expected to be final and may not be included in the commercial version.
The Preview SDK can be downloaded from developer section on Windows Insider.
For feedback and updates to the known issues, please see the developer forum. For new feature requests, head over to our Windows Platform UserVoice.
What’s New
This Windows SDK includes the following updates and additions to the Windows namespace since Windows SDK 10586.
Windows.Gaming.Input.Custom Enables hardware vendors to create runtime class libraries that provide rich access to their game controllers’ functionality.
Windows.UI.Composition MinBlend looks at source and destination pixel and chooses the minimum of the two. The 3×2 transform added to CompositionSurfaceBrush enables a transform to be applied to a brush before it is used to paint the visual.
Windows.Web.Http.HttpClient Windows.Web.Http.HttpClient API now allows you to explicitly turn off reading HTTP responses from cache and ensure that your request goes on the network.
Debugging tools for Windows (Windbg, kd, cdb, ntsd) now have improved support for universal app debugging. This update also requires the Universal C Runtime Library (uCRT), which is available via Windows Update. KB and MSDN documentation will be available within a few weeks.
Known Issues
Emulator There is no Windows 10 Mobile Emulator available for Preview SDK Build 14267.
Installation Errors This SDK should not be installed on any production level operating systems. Installing on a production level OS may result in a failure to install the SDK.
Cannot submit apps to the store This SDK will update your SDK tools and Windows App Certification Kit required for creating apps. Apps built with these tools will be prevented from submitting to the store. To restore your machine, you will need to uninstall all previous Windows SDKs and need to repair your Visual Studio installation.
If the SDK fails to install and presents the following error, “Windows Phone IP over USB Transport (IpOverUsbSvc)’ (IpOverUsbSvc) failed to start. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system services.” Then make sure you are installing the SDK on a build of Windows 10 build 14267 or greater and that machine is configured to be a Windows Insider.
API Updates and Additions
namespace Windows.Gaming.Input.Custom { public static class GameControllerFactoryManager public struct GameControllerVersionInfo public struct GipFirmwareUpdateProgress public sealed class GipFirmwareUpdateResult public enum GipFirmwareUpdateStatus public sealed class GipGameControllerProvider : IGameControllerProvider public enum GipMessageClass public interface ICustomGameControllerFactory public interface IGameControllerInputSink public interface IGameControllerProvider public interface IGipGameControllerInputSink : IGameControllerInputSink public interface IXusbGameControllerInputSink : IGameControllerInputSink public enum XusbDeviceSubtype public enum XusbDeviceType public sealed class XusbGameControllerProvider : IGameControllerProvider } namespace Windows.UI.Composition { public sealed class AnimationClass : CompositionObject public sealed class AnimationGroup : CompositionObject, IIterable<KeyFrameAnimation> public enum CompositionCompositeMode { MinBlend = 3, } public enum CompositionGradientWrapMode public sealed class CompositionLinearGradientBrush : CompositionBrush public sealed class CompositionMaskBrush : CompositionBrush public sealed class CompositionSurfaceBrush : CompositionBrush { Matrix3x2 Transform { get; set; } } public sealed class Compositor : IClosable { AnimationClass CreateAnimationClass(); AnimationGroup CreateAnimationGroup(); ConditionalExpressionAnimation CreateConditionalExpressionAnimation(); ConditionalExpressionAnimation CreateConditionalExpressionAnimation(ConditionalExpressionAnimationSelection selection); CompositionMaskBrush CreateMaskBrush(); ScrollTracker CreateScrollTracker(); } public sealed class ConditionalExpressionAnimation : CompositionAnimation public enum ConditionalExpressionAnimationSelection public sealed class ScrollTracker : CompositionObject public class Visual : CompositionObject { AnimationClass AnimationClass { get; set; } float RelativeHeight { get; set; } float RelativeOffsetX { get; set; } float RelativeOffsetY { get; set; } float RelativeWidth { get; set; } bool SnapToPixels { get; set; } } public enum VisualEvents : uint } namespace Windows.Web.Http.Filters { public enum HttpCacheReadBehavior { NoCache = 3, } }
The Preview SDK is a pre-release and cannot be used in a production environment. Please only install the SDK on your test machine. If you are working on an application that you need to submit to the store, you should not install the preview. This is a pre-release of the Windows 10 SDK. The APIs and software included in this preview should not be expected to be final and may not be included in the commercial version.
Updated February 24, 2016 11:36 amA sixth-grader has been calming the nerves of straphangers for weeks at a subway stop in Brooklyn, according to reports.
Ciro Ortiz, 11, was inspired to set up an advice booth at the Bedford L train stop in Williamsburg after being bullied at school.
He charges subway riders $2 for five minutes of what he calls “emotional advice.” He’s been at it every Sunday since October and makes about $50 each day, The New York Post reported.
Ortiz told the Post that dealing with change is the most common problem he sees among the adults he has talked with. He said they look back and think about how much better things used to be.
His advice to them is to accept change.
“It’s going to happen – it’s always going to happen. Life is always changing,” he said.
Those are words of wisdom from a junior counselor in the ephemeral scene of a New York City subway station.TBogg is Tom Boggioni, a writer based in San Diego, Ca. More specifically in Pacific Beach. Okay, in Crown Point, if you must know. Happy now? He was once known as a "somewhat popular blogger" back when blogs were a 'thing'. He is writing the Great American Novel, minus the 'great' part.
Remember Liz Cheney?
The blonde spawn created during an unholy union between a man and woman for the express purpose of keeping the man out of the draft during the Vietnam war? The woman who threw her sister’s gay-marriage under the bus and then drove over it, back and forth, until it looked like the face of a guy who’d been shot by a vice-president? The lady whose family managed to almost alienate everyone in a state with a population equal to that of a slow day at Disneyland? The woman who quit the race faster than a Palin gets pregnant? The desolate and rocky place where charisma can find no purchase and the sun never shines?
That Liz Cheney? Yeah, her.
Seems like she was less than honest about how much money her campaign was taking in by having her dad call old friends and suggest (“You’ve got a nice face. Be a shame if somebody shot you in it“) they make a contribution. According to TPM, Liz claimed she raised $1 million during the fourth quarter and, like a dating profile on eHarmony, there was some ‘untruth’ involved:
While Cheney was running she claimed that she raised $1 million in the fourth quarter of 2013, which was more than the $847,646 Enzi said he raised in the same period. It turns out though, she raised much less than what she claimed, according to Federal Election Commission reports highlighted by National Journal. National Journal reports that Cheney actually raised $720,000 in the fourth quarter of 2013 and her campaign spent over $900,000.
That $900,000 was also more than any non-incumbent candidate in any of the better states spent for the same period.
So, to sum up: despite her family’s name, Liz Cheney couldn’t get her dads friends to donate more than whatever change they had in their car’s ashtray. Additionally, the people of Wyoming hated her no matter how much she tried to buy their love.
Basically Liz Cheney is about as popular in Wyoming and elsewhere as a gay pride parade during Laramie Sheep Week….Silicon Valley hasn’t been a prominent player in the pitched fundraising battle over whether to ban same-sex marriage in California — until now.
Google co-founder and president Sergey Brin this week donated $100,000 to the No on 8 campaign, while co-founder Larry Page added a $40,000 donation, a Mercury News analysis of state campaign finance records show. With the contribution, Brin matches talk show host Ellen DeGeneres for the largest individual donation during the campaign’s final weeks to oppose a proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.
Google did not respond to initial requests for comment Thursday on the donations by Brin and Page, but the Mountain View Internet search giant is one of a very few Silicon Valley corporations officially on record opposing Prop. 8.
“While there are many objections to this proposition — further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text — it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8,” Brin wrote in an item he posted Sept. 26 on the official Google blog. “While we respect the strongly held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality.”
The six-figure donations by DeGeneres and Brin were among a group of large donations from celebrities and other prominent figures that recently have flowed into Equality California, the lead organization battling Prop. 8. Marin County resident and “Indiana Jones” filmmaker George Lucas gave $50,000, while Lucasfilm donated an additional $50,000, both this week.
Actor T.R. Knight of “Grey’s Anatomy” gave two $50,000 donations, while Monica Rosenthal, an actress in the comedy series “Everybody Loves Raymond” and the wife of series writer and executive producer Phil Rosenthal, gave $25,000.
Those large donations are among $9.2 million in large donations received by Equality California ( www.noonprop8.com ) since Oct. 6, when the dueling Prop. 8 campaigns last filed their extensive fundraising reports, according to records filed with the California Secretary of State.
ProtectMarriage.com, the lead political organization supporting a ban on same-sex marriage, has raised about $1.7 million in large donations since Oct. 6, state records show.
Contact Mike Swift at (408) 271-3648 or at mswift@mercurynews.com.Recently Jezebel told me that evil computer-software retouches photographs of beautiful woman to make them more beautiful. Jezebel also told me that I should be outraged by this. Being a beautiful woman, I had a feeling I’d fall victim to this monstrosity, so I quickly jumped on the internet to look at pictures of myself. What I found WILL SHOCK YOU.
Here is an unedited photo of me in an Angry Birds hat my dad gave me for Christmas. Notice my naturally red eyes from either crying all night or doing lots of drugs.
So imagine my dismay when I get online and find an edited version of this photo on INSTAGRAM, a misogynistic, woman-hating social media application site that hates women and uses “filters” to filter out “imperfections.”
Notice that my eyes are no longer naturally red. And my skin has yellowed due to Instagram’s default “jaundice” filter. Most outrageously, look at the position of the bed post! What is Stanley Kubrick trying to say with that!?
I quickly got on Facebook, the lazy (wo)man’s Reddit, to escape that haunting image only to discover that my “friend” Grant Collins (a fellow Chicago comedian and hater of all things natural and woman) had further edited my photo.
Note the disappearance of my Angry Birds hat, my eye bags, and my jaw line. Note the adjustment of my eye size and placement. Note the replacement of my blonde hair with an adorable brunette haircut. Note the nose thinning, the cheeks rouging and the minor plumping of my bottom lip.
Needless to say I’ve defriended Grant (but not on Facebook or to his face just in case he becomes famous).
I’ll be the first to admit, the final product is quite an improvement. I went from looking like a bummed-out stoner to a half-Japanese sex robot. But I am OUTRAGED. What will young women who grow up with the knowledge that all professional photographs have been digitally retouched think of this?? Will they feel the need to go back and retouch all of their photos?? That would take forever!
I know this is super controversial, but I feel like maybe we shouldn’t do this anymore. Maybe we should just start hiring people for pictures who are really pretty but have a little arm fat or something.
I think this is an issue we should really spend a lot of time talking about. Saudi Arabian women can wait until tomorrow. It’s not like they’re going anywhere… they aren’t allowed to drive.Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks at an event at the the Iowa State University Alumni Center in Ames on July 26, 2015. (Brian C. Frank/Reuters)
The renewed talk of a possible presidential run by Vice President Biden in 2016 reveals two political facts about Hillary Clinton's candidacy — facts that underline the dueling realities of her 2016 political campaign.
Let's start with the second fact first. And it is: Clinton has major image problems with the general electorate, problems that lead Democrats to somewhat openly wonder whether it might be time to mount a more serious primary challenge to her in the form of Biden.
As I've written regularly in this space, Clinton does have serious image problems. Her favorability numbers have collapsed since she became a candidate, and large majorities — especially among those who identify as independents — do not believe she is honest and trustworthy.
What those numbers suggest is that Clinton's candidacy to date has reminded many people of the things they didn't like about her husband's time in office or, perhaps, her own presidential bid in 2008. That's due, at least in part, to the amount of negative attention her private e-mail account at the State Department — and how she decided which e-mails to hand over and which to delete — has received. That story, as well as the focus on donors to the Clinton Foundation and the occasional appearances of quid pro quos (no proof of any wrongdoing has emerged) have made it very difficult for Clinton and her team to tell a positive, forward-facing story about her candidacy.
Now, to the other indisputable fact of the Clinton candidacy: She is going to be very, very hard to beat in a Democratic primary.
Despite her slide among the general electorate — a dip fueled by Republicans lining up almost in unison against her and independents turning away from her — Clinton's numbers among Democrats remain quite strong.
Two charts built by the Fix's own Philip Bump tell that story.
The first details Clinton's standing among a variety of groups — including Democrats — in NBC-Marist polling in Iowa and New Hampshire.
She is massively popular among Democrats in both early states, a striking contrast to her relative lack of popularity among both states' general electorates.
Then there's this chart, which shows Clinton's standing nationally among a variety of subgroups — taken from a recent CNN-ORC survey:
Again, massively popular among Democrats, not so much among everyone else.
And, it's not just that Clinton is viewed favorably by Democrats. It's that, for all the attention that Sen. Bernie Sanders's campaign has drawn of late, Clinton still looks very solid in primary matchups against her possible opponents.
Here's Clinton vs. Sanders (and the rest) in a mid-July Washington Post-ABC News poll:
And, here's that same poll with Biden included:
Could those numbers change if/when Biden formally entered the race? Absolutely. But it's hard to imagine Clinton giving away massive amounts of ground to Biden because his appeal and hers don't seem all that different — as illustrated by this tweet from the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza:
What is the case for Biden over HRC? Youth?❌ Gender?❌ Broad party support?❌ Lefty cred?❌ Money?❌ Superior campaigner?❌ Makes no sense. — Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) August 2, 2015
Democrats decided about a year ago (maybe 18 months ago) that they were putting all their eggs in Clinton's basket. (You could date that decision to, roughly, when it became clear Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Ma.) was serious about not running.) That decision meant two things: 1) She would have the vast majority of the money, endorsements and establishment support in a primary, making it tough to seriously challenge her and 2) Democrats would spend every minute between then and Nov. 8, 2016, fretting about the decision to put all their eggs in Clinton's basket.
The emergence of the Biden talk comes at a time when Clinton fretting has reached a peak. But, the twin underlying realities of Clinton's candidacy won't be changed by Biden or anyone else — not even, and this has to scare Democrats, Clinton herself.The Hilbert Guide
A cookie cutter approach to PVP in Star Trek Online by Hilbert@mancom
You can comment on this guide in its thread on the STO forums.
Contents
The intention of this guide is to give you the information you need to stop being a liability for your side in a PVP match.
You won't be given information about various concepts and how to make your own decisions.
You will be given exactly one basic build for your ship class that you just need to implement. A solid build is an important first step, because you cannot succeed without a good build. Then you can begin practising how to fly it.
Since I will give you exactly one build, there are often ways to modify the build without changing the core idea - like choosing a different ship within a class or using different energy types. If you know what you are doing, you can make these adjustments. But if you really knew what you were doing, you probably wouldn't need a cookie cutter guide.
Since there are now many items in the game that are timegated (reputation system), require membership in a fleet and sufficiently advanced fleet holdings or are only obtainable from chance-based events (lockboxes, doff packs), I provide Basic, Advanced and Elite configurations for the ships. These are variations of a common theme. The Basic version can be easily set up by a single player without progress in the reputation system. The Advanced version includes gear from the reputation system, lower level fleet gear and easily obtainable doffs. The Elite version additionally includes high-level fleet gear and rare items that can only be obtained by chance or for high prices on the exchange. Despite using expensive gear, the Elite version is not supposed to be the best ship design in the game, it is intended to be a competitive and easy to learn build that is largely independent of shortlived "flavour of the week" fads.
The bridge officer abilities for the Basic layout are chosen in way so that they are available from either the bridge officer trainer or from candidates that you can easily buy from the exchange or C-Store.
For the most part the guide gives gear recommendations which are easily obtained and comparatively cheap. Since the changes in Season 7 regarding how one acquires STF gear have made some of the items more difficult to get and the fleet starbase and reputation systems offer new items that can be unlocked, the Basic gear recommandations are now accompanied by a suggested gear progression that you can use as an outline of how to upgrade your gear over time.
The Basic builds use ships that you get for free during leveling up. If you don't have that ship, you don't have to pay tons of dilithium to obtain it, you can simply get the Mirror version of the ship in a usually cheap reward box on the exchange.
All the Basic gear is available from the dilithium store (beneath your mini map) or as PVE mission rewards.
The following list gives the sources for the items that are not available in the dilithium store.
Item Source Assimilated Module ("Borg console") Omega reputation Assimilated Deflector Array Omega reputation Assimilated Subtranswarp Engines Omega reputation Assimilated Regenerative Shield Array Omega reputation M.A.C.O. Resilient Shield Array Omega reputation Adapted M.A.C.O. Covariant Shield Array Omega reputation Kinetic Cutting Beam Omega reputation Subspace Field Modulator Klingon War: Skirmish Paratrinic Shield Array Klingon War: Past Imperfect Plasma-Disruptor Hybrid Beam Array Klingon War: Past Imperfect Plasma-Disruptor Hybrid Dual Heavy Cannons Klingon War: Past Imperfect Supercooled Combat Impulse Engine Breen Invasion: Cold Case Polarized Parabolic Deflector Breen Invasion: Cold Call Obelisk Subspace Rift Warp Core Solanae Dyson Sphere: Sphere of Influence Omni-Directional Antiproton Beam Array Solanae Dyson Sphere: Sphere of Influence Antiproton Beam Array Mk XI [Acc]x2 Solanae Dyson Sphere: Sphere of Influence
(mission replay after the first run) Plasmonic Leech Fed: Exchange (was part of a lockbox)
KDF: C-Store Vandal Destroyer Advanced Fleet weapons Fleet Starbase T2 Enhanced Engineering Consoles Fleet Dilithium Mine T2 Red Matter Capacitor Preorder bonus for the Collector's Edition Advanced Tactical Vulnerability Consoles Fleet Spire T3
This guide is built around your spacebar. You will have to pilot your ship, keep pressing spacebar all the time and every now and then use heals on yourself and your allies.
Keybinds
As to make this spacebar way of PVPing possible, you have to use keybinds to bind abilities to your spacebar.
Download the file spacebar.txt (right-click, then "Save target as...") and place it in your STO directory which is usually at
C:\Users\Public\Games\Cryptic Studios\Star Trek Online\Live
Start STO, log in with the character you want to play, go into a space map. (There are different keybind sets for ground and space!) Then enter the following command into your chat box:
/bind_load_file spacebar.txt
This keybind file changes three keys:
Your spacebar now activates not only your energy weapons, but also all abilities that you place in tray 7 (we will get to this in a second) and redistributes your shields. The T key now sends a message to your team announcing your current target. Your fourth mouse button (if your mouse has four buttons) will now trigger shield redistribution. You can use this if you don't want to fire your weapons (thus not use spacebar) but still want to redistribute shields - e.g. if you have been hit by Scramble Sensors.
Filling tray 7
You can select different views for your tray. It shows two or three out of ten possible rows. You can add an ability to multiple locations of your tray (e.g. in two different rows) by pressing P to bring up the ability list and then dragging it to your tray.
Select tray 7 and add the abilities that are required by the individual ship builds (see the respective sections). |
president she’ll be able to keep her job,” said Nichols. “I would imagine he gave Lynch a slip of paper that had on it a couple of things about the career prosecutors that are working the case. What was on that? The things they have on them. The drugs, women, men, whatever.”
“She is to show the prosecutors what they’ve got and if they indict or don’t do what she says, that’s what’s coming out. So he gave her that slip of paper.”
“I wasn’t there, but I wrote the book that they use, and I did it so many times that I know the M.O.,” Nichols continued. “The strange meetings, the quick meetings, the ‘accidental-on-purpose’ meeting. Bill Clinton wasn’t in Atlanta to play golf; he was there to deliver a message.”
He went on to say that the Clintons want the attorney general to go after anyone that speaks out against the Justice Dept.’s decision not to indict Hillary.
“They want Loretta Lynch to prosecute some of the protestors against Hillary,” said Nichols. “Bill Clinton told her that he wanted her to step up and indict somebody for hate speech because that will clear the road for the rest of the way for Hillary. It’ll back down the conservative people that they figure is going to raise their voices.”
“They’re going to put that down.”
Considering that Lynch has openly supported the idea of shutting down free speech in the name of political correctness, it should come as no surprise that Lynch will go along with anything else her Clinton handlers tell her to, especially if it means keeping Hillary out of jail.
Watch the full interview with Larry Nichols below:The Justice Department likes to brag about being tough on the banking industry. But just how tough?
Not as tough as the Treasury Department would like, apparently, at least when it comes to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Bernie Madoff.
Getty Images Bernie Madoff.
The government has been looking into whether J.P. Morgan, which had a two-decade relationship with Madoff, ignored warning signs that the operation he was running was actually a giant Ponzi scheme. Banks are supposed to report suspicious activity by clients.
But the Treasury Department, in its investigation, couldn\’t seem to catch a break: In May, the Treasury’s inspector-general office subpoenaed J.P. Morgan for Madoff-related documents, but J.P. Morgan declined. Then Treasury asked the Department of Justice to enforce the subpoena, but the Justice Department declined that request in September.
The documents included internal interviews that J.P. Morgan conducted with more than 90 employees after Madoff\’s arrest in December 2008. And the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates national banks, had originally asked for the documents in 2009. J.P. Morgan had argued that the documents were protected by attorney-client privilege and \”work product\” immunity.
The behind-the-scenes development is from a letter from the Treasury’s inspector general, stamped Oct. 8. It was posted on the website of Government Attic, which posts documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, and previously reported by Newsweek.
After the Justice Department declined to enforce the subpoena, the OCC and the Treasury\’s inspector-general office agreed that the latter“could not undertake further actions regarding the matter,” according to the letter.
“As a result we are closing this matter accordingly,” a Treasury special agent wrote. A Justice Department spokesman in Washington declined to comment. A Treasury Department spokesman didn\’t immediately return a call for comment.
— Christina Rexrode
Christina Rexrode covers banking for MarketWatch. Follow her on Twitter @chris_rexrode. Follow The Tell @thetellblog.
Read more about Bernie Madoff from MarketWatch and the Wall Street Journal:
Madoff victims recount the long road back.
Madoff prison interview: ‘If they had checked me, I would have been found out.’
Madoff says J.P. Morgan knew all alongAfter being into craft beer for a few years, or a few days, folks often eventually want to age beer. When I decided to start cellaring beer I wasn’t sure what beer to start with. I felt like everything worth cellaring was rare or only sold in Belgium or California. Later I realized, thanks to Josh’s post about Tips on Cellaring Beer, that there were lots of “shelf” beers available to cellar. That is why I’ve decided to share a recent experience with everyone. The experience of a food and beer pairing featuring a 17 year Sierra Nevada Bigfoot vertical.
Background on Bigfoot
I’m thinking many people have had Sierra Nevada Bigfoot so I’m not going to do a full review of each year or even the current year. I’m instead focusing on the changes that we found over the years, this is after all the best part of doing a vertical tasting[footnote]Or so I thought beforehand[/footnote]. However, here’s a quick overview of what to expect from a fresh Bigfoot: notable presence of classic American hop flavors over a rich bready caramel malty body that does little to cover up a strong alcohol presence.
Having been first brewed in 1983 makes Bigfoot one of the first American barley wines up there with Anchor Old Foghorn from 1975. It’s gone on to be produced every year and win multiple awards at the World Beer Cup and the Great American Beerfest.
One last thing to keep in mind before we get to the beers themselves, Sierra Nevada switched from the twist off caps to pry-off caps in 2007. The problem with the twist off caps is that they are nowhere near as good at keeping oxygen out. Oxygen has a harmful effect on beer leading to oxidation which is described as flavors of cardboard or sherry.
The Times They Are a Changin’
After a few years, storage conditions becomes important so all vintages were refrigerated for the course of their life. The vertical was not in a straight order and instead jumped around. This eased the ability to detect what was changing between larger sets of years. Going year by year things would be more likely to seem to blend together and not stand out as much. The order of the years is laid out on the menu below:
The following thoughts were generally echoed by everyone in attendance, all of whose palates I have complete faith in. What we discovered was that the 17 years of beer breaks down into three large groups:
2014 – 2008: Hop Bliss
The fresher beers demonstrate a slowly decreasing, as we go back in time, the amount of hops. That slow decrease is starting from such a high level of hop presence that even by 2008 there remains a notable hop flavor. This goes against most traditional thought on the retention of hops. The beers in this period all had a notable alcohol presence but only the 2014/13/12 seemed to be notable hot, after that it began to mellow.
2007 – 2001: Harsh Heat
This whole period was nasty and unenjoyable. The beers here were varying levels of intense alcohol heat and harsh flavors. Slight oxidation began to show in increasing levels as you work back toward 2001. I’m not sure where the harsh flavors came from though I guess it’s a combination of oxidation, deterioration of hops, and changes in the malt profile. All this nastiness seems to have peaked around 2005/2003 with things cooling off after that.
2000 – 1998: Beautiful Balance
1999 was the first year we had from this range and we were all blown away by the quality. It’s strange to see what developed here after so many years of undesirable beer. Starting in 2000 the harsh flavor and alcohol heat faded away fast bringing out a number of complex flavors, caramel and dark fruit top among them. Absolutely no hop presence in any of these 3 years at all, no notable oxidation either. If you can stand to keep a Bigfoot in your cellar for 14 years you will be well rewarded with a delicious and complex beer that bears no relation to a fresh bottle. You could’ve easily convinced me these vintages were an entirely different brew.
A few days before the tasting began I read Patrick Dawson’s book Vintage Beer which I wrote a blog post about back here. Patrick did a 10 year vertical of many beers, including Bigfoot, and included a graph of the flavor changes him and his tasting team detected. It’s interesting to see the differences in what he detected vs. what we found.
Year By Year Breakdown
As we had the beers out-of-order here is a straight year-by-year breakdown for those curious about a specific year they may have downstairs.
2014 – Shockingly hoppy compared to the rest. Smoother heat then the middle range of years. Some soapy characteristics, no idea what that’s about.
2013 – Hot alcohol heat and very hoppy
2013 Barrel-Aged – Quite a bit different from the standard 2013. Nowhere near as hoppy, quite a bit sweeter, and definite oak character
2012 – Surprisingly fresh hops, flavors are becoming harsh but still good.
2011 – Harshness is starting to build and hoppiness has faded away. Smoothed out flavors and heat.
2010 – Slightly hoppy and a little hop. Starting to head downhill.
2009 – Wow, still happy after all these years! You could fool me that this was only a year old.
2008 – Still hoppy with smooth alcohol and plenty of fresh Bigfoot flavors
2007 – Much hotter with almost no oxidation.
2006 – Still in the middle range of harshness
2005 – Somewhat harsh and hot. Kinda the worst of all.
2004 – Light harshness with alcohol heat. Some oxidation but not much.
2003 – Similar to the 2001 but less oxidation.
2002 – Hot and harsh, nothing else of value here.
2001 – Surprisingly strong after all these years. Notably oxidized but still tasty.
2000 – Definitely back on the upswing to high-quality beers. Caramel, melanoidins hints of fruit, very little alcohol heat,
1999 – Any possible cardboard and oxygen flavors have folded back in and created an amazing beer.
1998 – Tannic and dark fruit jump out and dominate the aroma and flavor.
There Was Some Food Too…
Everyone came here to read about a Bigfoot vertical, but the best part of this dinner was not, as I alluded to earlier, the beer. So what was the best part of this dinner? Well, it’s split, first there is the astoundingly delicious food. I’m no foodie and am not going to dig into each meal but rest assured it was all delicious and ranks among the best food I’ve ever eaten[footnote]Chowder is forever ruined for me[/footnote]. The second part of the split was the revelation that my friend cooked all these things himself! None of us gathered there, some who had known the generous host far longer than I, had no idea he could prepare anything like the delicacies we enjoyed. Anyway, this is not a food blog but still… here is some tantalizing food porn that leaves my mouth-watering for what once was.
Have you done any verticals of Bigfoot? From 1 year to 30? If so share your thoughts below!While one of the big holdups for Office for iPad was getting the software just right, another was Apple’s policy that apps that sell things — including subscriptions — use Apple’s in-app purchase mechanism and hand over 30 percent of that revenue to Apple.
This had been a big sticking point historically, so it was one of the key question marks looming over this launch.
Indeed, Microsoft does offer Office 365 subscriptions within the just-released Word for iPad and the other Office apps and, yes, it is paying the 30 percent cut, Apple confirmed to Re/code. Microsoft declined to comment on the matter.
Apple has taken a hard line with all manner of publishers that want to sell things, even subscriptions that go well beyond the iPad content: If anything is sold in the app, the sellers have to use Apple’s method and hand over 30 percent.
Meanwhile, on Twitter, both CEOs were playing nice-nice.
“Welcome to the iPad and AppStore,” Cook said in a tweet.
Nadella replied in a tweet of his own: “Thanks @tim_cook, excited to bring the magic of @Office to iPad customers.”
That said, Apple used the launch as a chance to tout all the many other productivity apps also on iPad.
“We’re excited that Office is coming to iPad — now part of the more than 500,000 apps designed specifically for iPad. iPad has defined a new category of mobile computing and productivity and transformed the way the world works,” Apple said in a statement. “Office for iPad joins an incredible lineup of productivity apps like iWork, Evernote and Paper by FiftyThree, that users can choose from to inspire them to do more with this powerful device.”Who won the day? Ron Paul
He may be running well behind Mitt Romney in New Hampshire, but so is everyone. And Ron Paul is so far unchallenged in his second-place showing in the Granite State, where he has invested resources for months and held repeated town halls in a bid to build out his base from the well-known Paul-ites to something bigger and more mainstream.
To that end, he held a massive rally on his return to the state Friday, a reminder of the devotion of his fans.
The state's open primaries are bound to help Paul's final tally, since independents - with whom he fares well - can vote in either party's race. An NBC/Marist poll released late in the day showed Paul getting 22 percent in New Hampshire, nine points north of Santorum.
More importantly, Paul showed he is playing to win with a heavy ad buy in South Carolina for a TV spot that lances Rick Santorum, who's currently seen as the conservative Romney alternative with momentum.
Santorum is running third place in New Hampshire, and given Romney's lock on first place, the race is really for the second slot. For that reason, Paul had a good day.
Maggie Haberman is senior political reporter for Politico.Police were called to a home on First Street after an attempted stabbing Wednesday night. The stabbing happened at a fraternity party on the 300 block of Russell Boulevard.
The attack began after two party-goers got into an argument. The suspect then tried to stab the victim twice, according to the Davis Police Department.
"The victim was able to stop the attack long enough for other party goers to intervene and separate the two," said Lt. Glenn Glasgow. "The victim sustained a minor injury to his hand when he grabbed the knife to stop the assault."
Lt. Glasgow described the knife as a "pocket knife-like instrument." (The knife pictured is not the specific knife. It's a stock image).
Police would not reveal the name of the fraternity where the party was taking place because it's an ongoing investigation, and could have evidence of value while they conduct that investigation.
The suspect is described as a White male adult in his 20s, about 6-foot 4-inches tall with a thin build and blonde hair.
"They didn't know each other," said Glasgow of the two involved in the incident. "I don't know what the argument was over."
After others intervened, the victim was taken to the home on First Street, at which point police were called.
We'll update this story as we learn what fraternity house, and other information:
For easy updates: Sign up for Breaking News Alert emails.
Anyone with information about this incident is urged to contact the Davis Police Department at 530-747-5400VANCOUVER, British Columbia – Just hours before the end of Google's $1 million hack challenge, a teenager who once applied to work at Google without getting a response, hacked the company's Chrome browser using three zero-day vulnerabilities, one of which allowed him to escape the browser's security sandbox.
The tall teen, who asked to be identified only by his handle "Pinkie Pie" because his employer did not authorize his activity, spent just a week and a half to find the vulnerabilities and craft the exploit, achieving stability only in the last hours of the contest.
A demonstration of the teen's hack took a slight departure from other hack demonstrations this week. Instead of opening the calculator application on the targeted machine to demonstrate success, Pinkie Pie's hack ended with an image of an axe-wielding Pinkie Pie pony, a character from the wildly popular My Little Pony animated TV series.
The hack qualifies him for one of the top $60,000 prizes that are part of Google's $1 million Pwnium challenge, and could be the launch of a new security career.
The teen said the escape from the sandbox was surprisingly more easy to do than other parts of his exploit.
"I got lucky because I found a way to do that relatively early," he said.
The sandbox is a security feature in Chrome and some other browsers that’s meant to contain malware and keep it from breaking out of the browser and affecting a computer’s operating system and other applications. Sandbox vulnerabilities are highly prized, because they’re rare, hard to find and allow an attacker to escalate his control of a system.
Google declined to discuss details of the three vulnerabilities the teen used in his exploit until the company can create and distribute a patch.
He dropped the exploit just hours before the end of the three-day contest, which was held at the CanSecWest conference in Canada.
Pinkie Pie was one of only two contestants in the contest, which Google launched only this year. The other contestant was Russian university student Sergey Glazunov whose zero-day exploit kicked off the contest on Wednesday for another $60,000 win.
Glazunov’s attack took advantage of the Chrome extension subsystem to sidestep the browser’s sandbox. The exploit used two zero-day vulnerabilities, which Google quickly patched within a day of Glazunov's demonstration.
Glazunov has an advantage over Pinkie Pie in hacking Chrome. He’s one of Google’s most prolific bug finders and earned around $70,000 for previous bugs he’s found under the company’s year-round bug bounty program. As such, he's very familiar with the Chrome code base.
Pinkie Pie, wearing shorts, a t-shirt and glasses, said he'd never submitted a vulnerability report to Google before, but he had sent his resume to the company last year seeking a job. He wrote in his cover note that he could crack Chrome on OSX, but he never got a reply.
But now it looks like the teen might soon be riding his pony into the Googleplex. A member of Google's security team on-site at the conference said they'd be sure to follow up on his resume now.
Photo: Kim Zetter/WiredDjango Unchained is certain to tick all the boxes for Tarantino lovers: sharp dialogue, fast action, a high body count and a marvelously cool soundtrack. The film is largely a homage to the spaghetti western, and specifically the movies of Sam Peckinpah. It’s crazy, brutal fun, but in the aftermath of the recent massacre of schoolchildren and teachers in Newtown, people will inevitably question the wisdom of showing video-game frequency splatter-violence in such a graphic manner, in a nation where the sad, lonely, depressed and plain psychotic can obtain an assault rifle almost as easily as a cheeseburger.
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Set two years before the start of the civil war, back in an era where the 2nd Amendment made some sort of sense, Django starts life as an unlikely buddy movie. An ex-dentist turned bounty hunter, Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), teams up with Jamie Foxx’s Django, a slave whom he frees, initially to serve his own ends. Waltz is on the hunt of three brothers, whom only Django can identify. The pair bond during this bloody quest, and subsequently become partners, as Django is apprenticed to Schultz in the art of bounty hunting. Of course, he’s a natural, and soon wants to pursue his own agenda. Thus he and Schultz travel to Mississippi intent on freeing free Django’s wife, the German speaking Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). She is captive on a plantation owned by Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), a cruel southern villain, whose Francophille affectations are ruthlessly ridiculed. In a movie blessed with several great performances, this is a nice turn by DiCaprio, who works the role solidly, rather than trying to camp it up and scene steal.
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The main problem I had with the film was Jamie Foxx as the lead. He’s a cool, charismatic actor, but often seemed either miscast or misdirected in this picture, being outshone by Christoph Waltz in the first half of the movie, and then by Samuel L. Jackson in the second. For me, Jackson steals the film with an absolutely superb performance as Stephen, Candie’s mercurial ‘house nigger’. Wisely, Jackson opts against playing Stephen as a cowering Uncle Tom, instead showing him as an aggressive, controlling, manipulative figure, complicit with Candie in the oppressive racism against his own people. Stephen’s shivering, jocular public persona is at odds with the measured and entitled private audiences he enjoys with his supposed master, Candie. These show him to be the power behind the throne. Indeed, it’s only when Fox is allowed to take on similar attributes, in a scam to win Candie’s trust and free his beloved Broomhilda, that he finally seizes command of the picture.
Waltz is also superb as the German bounty hunter. The early scene where he shoots the local sheriff dead, then stages the entire town and its Marshall, is a great piece of writing and acting. It’s recreated, with predictable diminishing returns, at a couple of other points in the film.
As with all Tarantino pictures, Django is a highly intelligent movie masquerading as dumb-ass escapism, and tackles truths that more worthy (and therefore less gifted) filmmakers shy away from. Stephen’s dark and complex persona, illustrating the notion that racism, like sexism, is fundamentally about economic and social inequality and the subsequent abuses of power that engenders, simply wouldn’t have worked in the hands of less compromising artists as Tarantino and Jackson. There is an ongoing highly queasy incestuous flirtation between Candie and his faded southern belle sister, mischievously named Lara Candie-Fitwilly. You laugh at this comic turn, yet are simultaneously rendered uneasy at the pain and iniquity behind it.
Back to the violence: it’s essentially cartoon stuff and I laughed loudly at most of it. I found the controlled, spare but up-close-and-personal brutality of Tarantino’s early films to be much more real and therefore more disturbing. In Britain, some depressed no-mark will watch this, wish they had a gun, know they can’t get one, and just go home and have a wank and forget all about it. In America, where gun violence is fetishized and ritualized, enshrined in the constitution by the second amendment, the picture is more problematic, and movies like this will be inevitably scapegoated by those unwilling to grasp the toxic nettle of gun control. And that would be a shame. After all, actors with toy guns don’t kill people, losers with real ones do.A troubling study has discovered what we've all thought for some time: congress, literally, does not care what you think. Professors at Princeton and Northwestern examined more than 20 years worth of data, looking to answer a basic question: Does the government represent the people?
Their study examined data from approximately 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to policies that ended up actually becoming law. What they found was deeply disturbing: The opinions of 90% of Americans had basically no impact at all.
The results highlight deep problems in our electoral system which concentrates effective power in the hands of a precious few. Individual voters, even though they receive a vote, hold no sway in the eventual decisions made by politicians. Instead, politicians are controlled by key figures who control large blocks of votes, such as business owners or union representatives.
“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy” the authors wrote in the paper.
The only thing that has an influence? Money. At the same time the opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners have zero influence in policy, the top 10% of earners, business interests, and people who can afford lobbyists are all able to exert influence despite representing an incredibly small part of the electorate.
The findings paint a bleak picture of a nation caught in the grip of corruption, where moneyed interests get what they want and the rest of us get what we get.
The details are shocking
The researchers found that in the past 5 years, the 200 most politically active companies spent $5.8 billion influencing our government via lobbying and campaign donations.
In return, those same companies got $4.4 trillion in taxpayer support. That works out to a 750x or 75,000% return on their investment. It's no wonder the rich keep getting richer with those type of astronomical returns.
The whole system now amounts to a vicious cycle of legalized corruption.
The study highlights the urgent need for campaign finance reform as when the cost of winning elections goes higher, politicians become ever more dependent on the small porttion of the population who can bankroll their campaigns.
The numbers are shocking:
Cost to win a Senate seat in 2014: $14,351 PER DAY
Percentage of Americans who donate more than $10,000 in ANY ONE ELECTION: 0.05%
The numbers show clearly that an incredibly small group of people pay for politicians to be in office and are then, in turn, the recipients of favors.
Don't give favors, don't get money to be elected. Simple.
This is why the average elected official spends around 30-70% of their time in office fundraising for the next election.
Clearly, something needs to change, as our political system has slowly dissolved into a feudal system where the very wealthy puppeteer our government officials and in turn the country.“…both a cinematic and culinary masterpiece that stresses the importance of integrity, diligence, and family…”
The only thing I like as much as eating delicious food is watching it prepared. I can’t get enough of the attention to detail with colors, fresh ingredients, and the sharp sizzle sounds of cooking meat that makes your mouth water without needing to smell or taste the food itself. With the 15th and 16th seasons of Hell’s Kitchen starring Chef Gordon Ramsey green-lit back in 2014 and 6 seasons of Master Chef starring Gordon Ramsey, Graham Elliot, and Joe Bastianich sparking another competition show called Master Chef Junior in 2013, it is clear that the world will never get tired of reality cooking shows. When it comes down to it, everyone eats, and food provides us a way in which to express ourselves as individuals. When it comes to dining on the food served by others, we could be expressing our economic status by being able to afford expensive, gourmet meals, or we could be appreciating our cultural values by dining on ethnic-specific meals. Gordon Ramsey often asks the contestants on his shows to “put themselves on a plate,” or rather create something that defines them as people and as chefs. However, in every cooking show I’ve ever seen, besides putting something on a plate that shows people who you are, the importance of pride and in serving only the best dishes is stressed above all else. The film Chef (directed by and starring Jon Favreau, 2014) is both a cinematic and culinary masterpiece that stresses the importance of integrity, diligence, and family while deftly showcasing the new, 21st century world of social media.
Carl Casper (played by Jon Favreau) is an exceptional chef, bubbling over with creativity and skill that has made a name for himself in the culinary world. With the help from his kitchen staff, sous chef Tony (played by Bobby Cannavale) and line cook Martin (played by John Leguizamo), he intends to blow the taste buds right off blogger and food critic Ramsey Michel (played by Oliver Platt) with his ambitious and out of the box new menu. Unfortunately, he finds himself at the mercy of restaurant owner Riva (played by Dustin Hoffman), who orders Carl to play it safe and serve the menu people have grown to love for the last decade. After Ramsey Michel posts a scathing review, belittling Carl for his lack of creativity, lack of heart, and merely subpar food, Carl breaks down and becomes a social media sensation. Without a job or prospects from other restaurants, Carl’s ex-wife Inez (played by Sofía Vergara) encourages him to spend more time with his son Percy (played by Emjay Anthony) while also nudging him to take his culinary abilities to the food truck business where he could be his own boss and cook the food that makes him happy. Inez’s ex-husband Marvin (played by Robert Downey Jr.) provides him with the truck, but it is Chef Carl Casper along with his son and loyal line cook Martin who will make his business successful while turning him into a better father, a better chef, and a better person along the way.
Any foodie, like myself, who watches Chef will be amazed by the incredible dishes and techniques showcased throughout the film. Besides the high-class cuisine shown in the beginning, the film also shows how succulent and crowd-pleasing foods like home-cooked barbeque and even something as simple as a grilled cheese sandwich can be sexy and a work of art in itself. Make sure you watch the short clip after the end credits where Jon Favreau is shown being taught how to cook that grilled cheese sandwich. Every detail is agonized over, leaving nothing overlooked, from the hottest spot on the pan to when the chef needs to step back and allow the sandwich to be felt on its own. This is similar to the impressive style in which Jon Favreau tackled both starring in and directing this film. There is a pleasant balance between the cooking itself as well as the dramatic story shown throughout. His use of Twitter and of showing the tweets themselves pop up on the screen was a clever use of social media to drive the plot forward at times. It also showed just how important social media can be as a marketing tool while also expressing the generation gap where the younger generation of today has so much at their fingertips that the older generation couldn’t even fathom existing at one time.
The all-star cast in this film was beautifully blended and the story allowed for each actor and actress to give some of their best performances. While you could tell this story meant a great deal to Jon Favreau as director and lead actor (known for his work both directing and acting as executive producer on such projects as Ironman and The Avengers series), it was Sofía Vergara who helped give this story its soul. Known for her roles in the hit ABC television series Modern Family as well as the poorly received film Hot Pursuit alongside Reese Witherspoon, Sofía’s Columbian heritage is often the butt of the joke and the comedic relief. Yet here, in the film Chef, her Columbian heritage is celebrated, and her role as both a successful businesswoman and mother while always encouraging her ex-husband makes her one of the most likeable characters in the film. Her warmth and love for her family are reverberated in every aspect of the film, rubbing off on Jon Favreau’s character which essentially expresses the entire message of the film: stay true to yourself, give only your best, but don’t forget to be there for those who love and depend on you.
After seeing Chef pop up on my Netflix list of suggested movie titles, I saw its great reviews and interesting premise, but put off watching it until now. Now, I am so impressed at how great of a film this is that I want so much more from Jon Favreau. Obviously, he has made a huge impact in the super hero movie industry, but this work in an independent film was impressive. For this film in particular, he gets a whopping 10/10 from me. Perhaps I’m partial to this film given my love for the culinary world, but paired with the world of social media and the great messages about family and personal integrity, it is hard to argue with how sweet and well-made this film really is.GENEVA Nations should agree to a moratorium on developing robots for war that can function autonomously before it is too late to stop their use, a U.N. human rights expert warned Thursday.
U.N. special rapporteur Christof Heyns urged a temporary freeze on producing or using so-called "killer robots," saying it would give nations time to think through the implications of creating them while "the genie is still in the bottle" technologically.
Programming machines to kill without humans making decisions could encourage more wars and make it more difficult to hold anyone accountable for war crimes, he told reporters in Geneva.
"Time is of the essence," he said of the need to decide now on how to use the robots, before they become a practical reality. "Trying to stop technology is a bit like trying to stop time itself it moves on."
Heyns said the technology is quickly emerging and nearly available now that could lend machines the power to autonomously kill humans after "the turn of a switch," but lack the ability to make fine distinctions according to international humanitarian law. "We are pretty close," he said.
In a report to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Heyns urged nations "to declare and implement national moratoria on the production, assembly, transfer, acquisition, deployment and use" of the robots to give time to develop a global framework for their use.
Another big danger of developing these kinds of robots, he said, is that it will make it easier for nations to go to war because of the increasing detachment between people and the decision to kill.As a trainer that travels to my clients’ locations, I must often step into those dreaded “globo-gyms” of the nation. While I don’t have anything against these gyms, they do tend to have a higher proportion of members that know very little about actual fitness. Unfortunately, many of the “trainers” at these gyms are just as clueless.
But lately I’ve been noticing a growing trend that has me pleasantly surprised; more and more people are wearing proper weightlifting shoes for their training sessions. If you’re one of the people that just scratched your head and said, “Shoe for Weightlifting?” then this article is for you.
The Origin of the Weightlifting Shoe
Shoes designed specifically for lifting weights were first employed by Olympic weightlifters in the early 1900’s, the basic design of which was not perfected until the 1950’s. The main component of this design that made the shoes different than previously worn sneakers and boxing shoes were the solid raised heels, low top cut and straps across the instep. While this design is still being perfected today, the basics are the same.
Purpose of a Solid Raised Heel When Lifting
The heel design of a weightlifting shoe accomplish three distinct things; stability, power transfer and shoulder control. Lifting shoes usually have very dense heels that will not compress. This results in better stability while holding weight in any position. A more stable footing will result in less movement of your ankle and knees (wobble) which makes it easier to accomplish a lift.
A solid heel also means that the power transferred from your foot to the floor has nothing between it “leaking” the kinetic energy. This is the biggest problem I see in the gym; people wearing shoes that were meant to provide spring or cushion to lift weights. You need stability when lifting, not protection from running stresses or air shox to make you jump higher.
Finally, a higher heel will also allow your shin angle to be more parallel to the floor when you descend. This shifts your hips closer to the heels and allows the trunk to be in a more upright position at the bottom of a squat. In this position, a lifter can utilize more shoulder muscle to control and press the bar overhead.
Purpose of the Straps
You will notice that most lifting shoes are equipped with one or two straps across the instep region of the shoe. No, these are not just design embellishments, they actually serve a purpose. The straps provide greater stability at the sides of the shoes. The lateral side (outside) of the shoe is generally of higher concern as most lifters tend to push out against a shoe when lifting. Ever seen someone lift in a pair of Converse AllStars and their foot looks like it is spilling over the side of the shoe? This is where the straps come into play.
Other Design Features
Some other common and important features of a real lifting shoe include the material used for the upper and the sole. Most brands these days employ a synthetic leather material to create the upper. The goal is for the material to be very supportive yet flexible in the toe area. A few boutique brands such as Risto still use solid leather for their uppers.
The sole of the shoe is also somewhat unique in its design. Again, the area under the forefoot must be made to flex when the lifter goes into a split, so unique steps are taken such as scoring lines in the sole under the ball of the foot to increase flex. The grip is also extremely important and most Oly shoes (slang for lifting shoes) will almost “stick” to the floor.
When to Wear Weightlifting Shoe
This type of footwear is suitable for just about any type of weight training; Olympic, Power Lifting, and your typical gym Weight Lifting. Obviously Olympic weightlifters benefit the most from this type of shoe but exercises such as squats, power cleans, overhead press and anything else where you are standing and moving weight will be noticeably improved.
When NOT to Wear Weightlifting Shoes
You do not want to wear these shoes when you are doing any type of dynamic training or cardio such as plyo, jumping rope, climbing rope, running, etc. Not only will it kill your shoes it will likely kill your feet and back as well! Remember, these shoes are made extremely rigid and tight fitting so anything other than lifting in them is ill advised.
The one exception to this is the newer styles of CrossFit shoes made by Reebok and Inov-8. They have been engineered to provide stability AND function as a light duty trainer. These are great options if you are doing CrossFit or some other MetCon style workout that includes lifting.
I hope after reading this you can now understand why more and more people are wearing weightlifting shoes in the gym. Regardless of what your end goals are – sports, fitness competitor, health, etc – the proper footwear will help you lift more weight safely.
Author
“Wreckshop” Rob Smith is a strength coach, a primal nutritionist, a personal trainer and a blogger. He writes year-round for WLShoes.com and is often a guest author on popular heatlh and fitness sites.What's the worst possible insult you could throw at someone? Calling them a bad Overwatch player.
A parent shared the disciplinary slip that their daughter received at school for insulting a fellow student after her pencil was stolen. Instead of going with a tried-and-true insult like "doo do |
Geffen 1987
Susan Robkin Surfacing to Breathe 2004
The Roches The Roches Warner Bros.
Keep on Doing Warner Bros. 1982
Ron Angelo Warner Music Italy 1994
Vasco Rossi Canzoni per me EMI 1998
Todd Rundgren Todd Rundgren & His Friends 2002
Jack Russell For You 2002
Sabicas/Joe Beck Rock Encounter Polydor 1970
Fernando Samalea Padre Ritual Los Anos Luz 1999
Full Femme Los Anos Luz 2000
Richie Samborra Stranger in this Town
David Sancious Cinema 2005
John Sebastian
Neil Sedaka
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Charlie Sexton
Martin Sexton Wonder Bar WEA/Atlantic 2000
Shankar & Gingger Shankar & Gingger 2001
One in a Million 2001
Jules Shear Watchdog EMI 1983
The Eternal Return EMI 1985
The Great Puzzle Polygram 1992
Healing Bones Polydor 1994
Horse of Different Color: 1976-1989 Razor & Tie 1994
Joanne Shenandoah Life Blood Silver Wave 1995
Michelle Shocked Arkansas Traveller Mercury 1992
Vonda Shepard By 7:30 Three Roads 1992
Chinatown 2002
Ben Sidran Live at Montreaux Arista 1978
Carly Simon Carly Simon Elektra 1971
Boys In The Trees Elektra 1978
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Come Upstairs Alex 1980
Hello Big Man Warner Bros. 1983
Spoiled Girl Epic 1985
Coming Around Again Arista 1987
Best of Carly Simon Elektra 1975
Lucy Simon
Paul Simon Still Crazy After All These Years Columbia 1975
One Trick Pony Warner Bros. 1980
Negotiations and Love Songs 1971-1986 Warner Bros. 1988
1964-1993 Warner Bros. 1993
Paul Simon Anthology Warner Bros. 1999
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Kenneth Sivertsen Remembering North NYC Records 1994
One Day in October Norway Music 2000
SMAP 009 Victor 1996
Kathy Smith 2 Stormy Forrest 1971
Michael W. Smith Big Picture Geffen 1986
Phoebe Snow Phoebe Snow Columbia 1974
Second Childhood Columbia 1976
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Burt Sommer Burt Sommer Buddah 1971
Rick Springfield Hard to Hold RCA 1984
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James Taylor That's Why I'm Here Columbia 1985
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Mary Travers
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Jay Ungar/Molly Mason Collection: Catskill Collection Fiddle & Dance
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Various Artists Every Man Has a Woman Polygram 1984
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Various Artists Birth of Cool Funk Vintage Jams [Box] Delta 1998
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Various Artists Pure Swing: Hold Your Hats Delta 1998
Various Artists Metallic Assault: a Tribute to Metallica Big Eye 2001
Various Artists Not the Same Old Song & Dance: Aerosmith Tribute Cleopatra 1999
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Various Artists Respond Koch 1999
Various Artists Jazz Noel Windham Hill 1999
Various Artists Pure Swing: Hold Your Hats Delta 1998
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Tom Waits Rain Dogs Island 1985
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Leah Zicari Hard Road Jericho 2001
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Original Soundtrack Sporting Club Buddah 1971
Original Soundtrack City of Angels Warner Bros 1998Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction is a unique and very interstitial writing guide that uses original images and visual exercises to educate and inspire. The book won the 2014 British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Non-Fiction, and is a Hugo Award finalist for Best Related Work. I talked to editor Jeff VanderMeer and artist Jeremy Zerfoss about what exactly they’ve created.
Why Wonderbook?
JZ: Why ask why? Drink Wonder dry! I think that for myself, I can’t really speak for Jeff’s reason for creating Wonderbook, but I feel it fills an untouched niche in the writing and creation world – the idea that a book can be a learning tool, a visual guide, evolving online resource and objet d’art all at once. It also work works on many levels, which is nice: it’s a fantastic read, a brilliant resource and damn fine looking book on a table. It’s the bumblebee of the writing world – it flies because nobody told it it can’t.
JV: A “sense of wonder” is sometimes denigrated as escapist, but a true sense of wonder earns that description with an edge, in my opinion—it’s grounded in something real or useful or important. There are also the Wunderkammer, or cabinets of curiosities, which in their best examples are expressions of curiosity and passion about our world. Wonderbook is meant to stimulate the senses, to energize, to celebrate and explore creativity, and, oh yes, teach creative writing. But in the sense of an immersive journey.
Does that reflect your idea of how to teach writing, Jeff? Can you say more about this idea of immersion as it relates to teaching?
JV: it’s not always the case that you have the time to pay deep attention to every single writing student you might encounter during a workshop or masterclass, but immersion does mean in reading their manuscripts to try to inhabit the work from the viewpoint of the creator as much as possible, to be sympathetic to whatever the writer is trying to do, not resistant to it. Only by completely inhabiting the manuscript can you then have a good idea of what kind of critique will be most helpful. If you cannot do this, you should admit as much to the student, and frame it in the context of a failure on your part, not theirs. And, in your other interactions with the person, including the workshop itself and one-on-one meetings to talk about their writing, you also gain some idea of the best way to say what you have to say. Again, in an ideal environment. Usually, things are a little too crowded or rushed to meet the ideal, but in trying to do so, and in engaging in a “no bullshit” approach in the workshop as a whole, you can attempt to be of the best use to the student. By “no bullshit” I mean no received ideas about careers that are 20 years out of date, even if this means you need to aggressively analyze your own tendencies to say things you haven’t fact-checked. To in talking about the art of writing to avoid imposing, for example, your top three rules about a particular topic, but instead presenting a range of options, and pointing out which tend to work less well. It’s so important to impress upon writing students that there is no magic bullet—that there is in fact an incredibly self-affirming and fun journey ahead of them of testing out any number of approaches and ideas to find what works best for them.
In some ways Wonderbook seems more like a web or constellation than a discrete object–there’s the text, there’s the art, and there’s the website, which has all kinds of extras and exercises and, from what I understand, is still growing! When I open the book, it seems to want to keep growing, too–color bursts out and lines spread in every direction. What kind of beast have you guys created here? How would you characterize it?
JZ: It started just like that, though Jeff always referred to it as an ‘evolving, living book’ — one that has evolved and mutated and changed, over and over throughout its creation. It was quite complex just on my side handling the initial layout and art, and if you ever see the diagrams that Jeff would send me there were hundreds of bursts of inspiration at random moments. His synapses were firing full bore for a few years there — living stories, evolving hydra, etc. A good book grows with people, and Wonderbook should provide years of growth and development. Of course, some of his notes were on leaves, so he might have just been frolicking in a fit of inspiration from nature.
I like to think that the book’s totem spirit, if you will, is the cover beast – the massive leviathan Lefmatzlaxian, with a city on her back ever growing, reaching into the sky to her sister city above. People really connect with her — she’s very friendly and welcoming.
JV: I wanted a layered book, one that you can go back to again and again and see in a different light. So, in a sense, you choose a path through the book via the images or the main text, or, perhaps a combination of image and the incidental text, or through the sidebar articles. The book is integrated in that you can read it end-to-end, but you can definitely choose your own adventure, too. Given how used to the visual we are in our daily lives through the internet, this layering seemed like it would appeal without being overwhelming.
This is a book for writers that works through pictures, maps, and graphs. Can you say something about the relationship between writing and visuality? What can an image do for a word artist?
JV: A lot of writers think in images and visualize their scenes and characters, so although all of this is conveyed through words, it’s building pictures in the reader’s mind. So to convey some concepts through illustrations, charts, complex diagrams—this seemed useful. Especially since this meant creating a relationship between concept and image that is the creation of metaphor or analogy—an essential part of fiction writing.
JZ: I’m not a writer, much, but I do feel like the best inspiration for my random writings and artwork come from driving and walking, seeing mountains, old buildings, weird structures, people on random walks, just stuff. My mind always wants to fill the empty places with purpose – you can pull inspiration from an old piece of tile at times, there’s always art or stories waiting underneath the skin of reality, gestating. All you have to do is peek. Much of my art is based on dreams and the desert landscape.
I love what you say about empty spaces, Jeremy. Is there a connection between the desert and dreaming?
JZ: I think every person has an ideal location or setting that enhances their mind, especially subconsciously. For me there is definitely a connection between my dreams and expansive wastelands — I like the blank openness of the desert, the feeling of untapped space and hidden creatures.
Wonderbook seems designed to appeal specifically to writers of speculative fiction. You’ve got all this fabulous weird art, and essays from well-known fantasy and science fiction writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Neil Gaiman. What about people who don’t write genre fiction? Do you think they’d be interested in Wonderbook? Should they be?
JV: It’s a general writing book that happens to use examples from non-realistic fiction. It uses the vernacular of the fantastic in its images, but is meant to exist at a hierarchical level where any writer can get something out of it. We’ve now got evidence, too, of artists and musicians using it for inspiration. Some of the diagrams, like the Science of Scenes, have helped to inspire a whole CD of music (forthcoming), because the beats and progressions of fiction can, in the attempt to chart them in a pseudo-scientific way, relate more clearly to the beats and progressions in music. I can’t speak to how well it works for any particular creator, but this was the goal: something that will hit the sweet spot of any non-realist out there but also be of use to others as well.
Wonderbook is very playful, both in the tone of the language and in the images–really a delight to explore, which is probably why my kids stole my copy as soon as it arrived. Since it’s sort of a teaching text, I’m wondering if you could say something about the pedagogical value of play. Or maybe just the value of play in general, for artists.
JZ: Playing around with stuff is a great way to explore new ideas and techniques – you have to just drop pretense and screw around at times to get over hurdles as well. Jeff included a lot of fun ideas in the book that are just there to get the mind thinking and I tried to get the imagery as well to incorporate that feeling of fun. Like, don’t be so darn serious, have fun with this. Then come back and let’s kick butt. A few of the images that Jeff loved were born out of random doodles I did on my own, he’d just see them online and email me up and it’d go in the book for no more reason than it fit the spirit and was fun. If you follow Jeff online he’s always posting these random quests for people, “Go to the first person you see and describe them the attributes of a hermit crab and then hi-five them!” or similar things, “Wear something blue, swear it is red when asking for compliments!”, etc.
JV: Play is exercising the imagination, and often a form of storytelling. In that sense, we’re all fiction writers. Encouraging creative play is so important in loosening up the subconscious and giving yourself permission to write, I think. It’s also restorative—like physical exercise it gives back so much to the person who engages in it. While it may seem like a no-brainer to say this, I don’t always think here in the U.S. that the culture gives us permission to engage in creative play just for its own sake.
I love bad advice. Can you give me some rules that express what Wonderbook is NOT about? What are some of the worst pieces of advice you’ve been given as artists?
JZ: Always do what people tell you is right. Never go your own way. Never follow the path untrod. Everyone is right except you. Always obey the rules. The best art is based on people before you, your style will suck if it isn’t just like everyone else’s, that’s why they’re famous and you’re not. Feed the bears.
JV: Wonderbook is not about imposing my view of writing on other writers, which is something you see a fair amount of because it’s, well, easy. It’s easy to just say, “this is what worked for me and thus it will work for you.” What I hope Wonderbook says instead is “there are many ways, and here are some examples of those ways,” and gives space to the writer reading it to bring their own thoughts and opinions into the process.
The worst advice I’ve ever gotten has always had to do with someone not seeing me for the writer I am but for the writer they wanted me to be.
Finally, since we talked about play—a game! I’m going to give each of you three lines from the wonderful guest essays in Wonderbook, and you respond to them as you like. Go!
For Jeff:
“Writer’s block can be as much a matter of perception as reality.” ~ Matthew Cheney (I love his essay!)
JV: I love this essay too. I asked Matt to write it because I don’t have writer’s block–simply because I have so many projects started that I haven’t finished that if I get blocked on one thing, I move to the next one. But I find the constant emphasis on daily word count can make someone who hasn’t written for a month feel blocked even though perhaps all they needed to do is think about what they were writing for a while. I know writers who might think about a novel for a year before ever typing a word. Are they blocked? No. Writing is not about efficiency. It’s not about being part of a machine or being your own factory with stockholders who are clamoring to see a profit from your endeavors, an end product. Writing is messy and inefficient and there’s nothing wrong with that. I am also always struck by those cases of writer’s block that occur because the writer has been denied the time or the space to write—or even the language, like Mercè Rodoreda, forbidden to write in Catalan for so long. Nothing to a pure writer is more painful than being induced into writer’s block. Or even just because life gets in the way.
“As a fiction writer, I don’t speak message. I speak story.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
JV: On the slush pile all the time, we see stories from well-meaning writers who think that simple reversals of “normative” situations constitute political statements, who think that imposing their message from on high will somehow get the job done. But politics lives at the sentence and paragraph level, and it comes out through the details of the lives of the characters and their particular situations. So in part this is what Le Guin is saying, and in part that theme is often subtext. Even these three novels I just finished—Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance. Well, they are indeed each about the word that forms their title, but it is all sublimated in situation and character—story.
“I want my stories to contain some things I have no words for, things I cannot say.” ~ Karen Joy Fowler
JV: In part I would interpret that to mean “I write characters that are not me,” but also that things come out in the writing that you didn’t expect, and things come up from your subconscious and into descriptions, situation, and dialogue that you realize form a hidden part of the ideas and issues you’ve been thinking about or reading about. At perhaps the most numinous level, I do believe in an element of the spiritual in fiction, in the sense that some of the best fiction is a reaching beyond, a reaching for some understanding of what cannot be understood. But we must make the attempt.
For Jeremy:
“Sometimes a book will stimulate a series of VIBRANT DREAMS.” ~ Rikki Ducornet
JZ: This is very true — the subconscious will pick up the most innocuous things you read or see or experience and churn it into a frothy mess you’ll wade through some night, maybe years later. Sometimes the connection is hard to see, and I’ve had books that spark a series of vivid daydreams even. I had to stop reading and just go do something else — too much input, too much crazy thoughts.
“Images unseeable from the vantage point of so-called ‘real life’ may be more evocative of the real than the real itself.” ~ Karen Lord
JZ: I have a sneaky feeling this is why books about animals make people cry so much — how many people took a second look at medical and pharmaceutical practices after reading ‘The Rats of Nimh’? On that note… after ‘Finding Nemo’ was released an awful lot of fish were rescued via toilets — reality vs. perceived reality can really take a punch in the arm if you write brilliantly.
“While we’re on the topic of homogenization, I would like to add: Don’t do it. Leave things lumpy.” ~ Charles Yu
JZ: In any form of expression it’s the rough bits that build connections and character. We like characters that have flaws, connectable issues that we can relate to—drinking problems, divorce, health issues, bad days—realistic scenarios that we, as readers, have either experienced or been affected by. If it’s squeaky clean we can’t connect or empathize nearly as well.
I feel art is the same – the stuff that people relate to the most has rough edges and a created feel with soul, depth and humor. The prettiest sunsets come from pollution.
Jeff VanderMeer‘s most recent release is Annihilation from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which will release the other two volumes of his Southern Reach trilogy (Authority and Acceptance) throughout 2014—along with HarperCollins Canada, The Fourth Estate (U.K.), and publishers in 15 other countries. Paramount Pictures and Scott Rudin Productions have acquired the movie rights. A three-time World Fantasy Award winner and 13-time nominee, VanderMeer has been a finalist for the Nebula, Philip K. Dick, and Shirley Jackson Awards. His nonfiction appears in the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among others.
Jeremy Zerfoss is an artist working out of Las Vegas, who has worked with various publishers and companies including Cheeky Frawg, Raw Dog Publishing, Symantec and Abrams. He was recently nominated for a Hugo along with Jeff VanderMeer for his work on Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~What? Come on now people, we all know Toph's a rough girl and it looks like Sokka enjoyed it.As you can guess, this is a follow up from me other pic I posted a few days ago. [link] And thank you Leona for writing these little ficlets to go with the pics.Of course me stupid scanner has once again screwed up the colors. And please ignore all the anatomy mistakes. Stupid anatomy! Its still a heartless b***h so it is! But one day I shall conquer it and make it my b***h!Hey don't give me that look. Its 6 in the morning over here and I haven't slept yet okay.Oh and if you don't like this kind of stuff, then what the hell are you doing here looking at it?Toph and Sokka (c) Mike and BryanArt (c) The PhoebsterFiclet (c) = Leona629Leinster Rugby will not give anymore information on Sean O'Brien's injury setback until later in the week, after they receive a full medical report.
O'Brien suffered the problem during rehab on the hamstring injury which he sustained on Six Nations duty last February.
The Ireland and Leinster flanker has been blighted with hamstring problems for a long time now and missed the Championship opener against Wales due to a tightness in the muscle.
He returned to play against France but after just 20 minutes of action, the Tullow Tank went down in agony and has not been on the field of play since.
Blues head coach Leo Cullen set alarm bells ringing before the Guinness PRO12 win against Benetton Treviso.
"Seanie has that high hamstring tear which can be complicated. It wasn't a complete rupture like some of the other players have had. It is quite complicated. It is slower than we would have liked."
An update from Leinster defence coach Kurt McQuilkin did not offer any hope at today's media update at Blues HQ Cian Healy is not expected to feature in Friday's Guinness PRO12 semi-final, with the prop suffering from "general wear and tear" and he has been training away from the rest of the squad.
Rob Kearney (ankle) is "making good progress" while there was some good news on another batch of players.
Johnny Sexton (neck and shoulder) has been "flying around the place" according McQuilkin who confirmed that Luke Fitzgerald is back training after tweaking his medial ligament in the last meeting with Ulster.Allen West has become known for over-the-top, even violent, rhetoric. Now, his caustic statements, and a change in his district, could endanger his congressional future.
West’s latest outburst: that President Barack Obama will lose the 2012 election in a brutal bloodbath, was shocking to some. But it’s pretty standard fare for the Florida Congressman, who called on his supporters to “gather their muskets” and go to Washington to throw the “tyrant” Obama out of office.
West has become known for over-the-top rhetoric. The Tea Party Republican, who once called himself a modern day Harriet Tubman leading African-American voters away from the Democratic Party “plantation,” has raised eyebrows by calling on his supporters to “gather their muskets” and march on Capitol Hill, for affiliating with biker gang that doesn’t allow black members, and for vowing to “bring the left to its knees.”
And West’s opponents are using his rhetoric to raise cash. Murphy reported taking in $1.4 million in 2011, including releasing a video highlighting what the campaign called West’s radical and offensive statements from the past year. Frankel has raised a similar amount, though neither campaign has matched West’s prodigious fundraising. West has raised more than $4 million so far for his re-election bid, more than four times either of his rivals.
But behind the overheated rhetoric there’s a stark reality: West is one of the country’s most endangered members of congress.
No “brutal bloodbath” is anticipated, but when Florida redistricting is completed and the 2012 election rolls around West faces the prospect of being a one-term congressman.
The main problem for West: redistricting. Florida voters in 2010 approved two “fair districts” amendments that severely curtail political gerrymandering in the state. As a result, West, who lives in Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s Palm Beach district (he denounced his congresswoman last year on the House floor as vile, despicable and not a lady…”) but who ran for office in an adjacent, more Republican-friendly one in 2010, will face a tougher road in 2012.
“West has problems on two fronts,” says Steve Schale, a veteran Democratic consultant who ran the Barack Obama Florida campaign in 2008. “First, he is an ideologue representing a swing seat, which regardless of party, will eventually cause you to wear out your welcome — just ask Allan Grayson. Secondly, thanks to the combination of fair districts and the growth trends in South Florida, he will have no choice but to run for re-election in a district that is at worst a likely Democratic seat.”
Currently, there are two Democrats vying for that seat: former Fort Lauderdale Mayor Lois Frankel and businessman Patrick Murphy. If redistricting maps are drawn more compactly, either one will likely gain an advantage as Florida’s 22nd District is redrawn more compactly in Democrat-heavy Palm Beach.
It’s not just redistricting that has made West vulnerable. His vote to raise the debt ceiling after tea party freshmen vowed not to, enraged his Tea Party base. Meanwhile, his vote for Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare voucher plan upset seniors, who make up a significant share of his district’s population, and made him a prime target of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
For all of those reasons, West is considered one of the 12 most vulnerable freshmen lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
West first ran for the District 22 seat in 2008, losing to Democrat Ron Klein 45 percent to 54 percent. He was more successful in the swing district in 2010, sweeping in with a Republican wave, and beating Klein by a nearly identical margin to his 2008 loss — only with much lower overall turnout than the presidential year. Of course, during the 2010 campaign, West also called on his supporters to make Klein scared to come out of his house.
That kind of talk may have been popular with Tea Partiers two years ago, but as the tea party movement has worn out its welcome with the American people, West’s rhetoric has begun to look even more out of place.
Perhaps for that reason, West last year petitioned statewide to get on the ballot for 2012.
Once his district’s makeup is known, West will have to answer to voters for his rhetoric, along with his votes. Ironically, redistricting changes could in theory, mean West is making his case against his nemesis, Wasserman Shultz.
Only in Florida.I usually put article dates on the meta page to keep posts evergreen. But this article is about current events, so I'll put it on top. November 23rd, 2017. Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the USA.
The Bitcoin Brothers
For a long time, I considered myself very different from my brother. He bought Nikon lenses when I went Canon. He did Mechanical Engineering when I did Electrical. His first car was a Toyota Celica and mine a Toyota Corolla.
I could go on, but you get my point. So many differences. And yet, we look, sound, and act the same. When things are similar, it throws the differences into sharp relief. You see two identical cars; one is white, the other is hot pink. Yet it's the pink car that stands out. All you see is pink.
The same goes for Bitcoin Core (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Both are thoroughly similar on so many levels, but this fact just makes their differences so much more profound.
The Bitcoin blockchain forked on August 1, 2017. This resulted in two Bitcoin chains, usually referred to by their "ticker" symbols – BTC, commonly called Bitcoin and BCH, normally called Bitcoin Cash.
There is (an acrimonious) debate about which is the "real Bitcoin." Let's put that aside for the moment. If you're a casual observer and you're reading about Bitcoin, it's probably BTC.
There are a vast amount of cryptocurrencies out there. In fact, as I write this I imagine more have launched. Even some you'd find obscure are trading for 100s of millions USD a day.
There are already hundreds of cryptocurrencies coexisting in the market. The addition of one more token shouldn't necessarily be that unusual. However, in the case to BTC and BCH there is a case to ask if these tokens can coexist.
Because of their common heritage, BTC and BCH compete for the same "hashpower," which represents the computational power behind each blockchain. Miners use their hashpower to calculate the cryptographic hashes that secure the blockchain. For some currencies, this computational "hashpower" could be someone with their computer at home. For Bitcoin, this hashpower is vast warehouses of specialty-made computer hardware.
Approximately every 10 minutes a BTC and BCH miner produces a block for their respective chains. This block has Bitcoin transactions plus a reward for the miner.
The mining infrastructure for Bitcoin is immense. It was recently estimated to consume more energy than most African countries. This infrastructure secures the Bitcoin Blockchain. And it's big money.
So why are there two chains? Why did the chain fork at all?
This is where the conversation online gets murky. Underlying the conversation is a years-long debate about the direction of Bitcoin. Most of the conversation pivots on technical choices and the teams behind each coin. You don't need to dig far to find yourself neck deep in conspiracy theories, ad hominem attacks, and fake news – The whole lot.
You'll find plenty of passionate advocates (and even more trolling) on these technical differences. Big blocks versus small blocks. Segregated Witness (SegWit). SegWit2x. Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA). ASICBOOST. Layer 2. VISA-scale payments, Vaporware mining rigs. And that's the just tip of the iceberg. Technical differences are plentiful.
But for the moment, put them aside. The technical differences might be critically important, but more often than not they're used to obfuscate the conversation.
A more useful discussion is the direction that they're taking Bitcoin. Even a small change is controversial. Some changes are big. Some could be tiny. But with Bitcoin, you're taking that change and blowing it up to a trillion-dollar scale. Both the stakes and the rhetoric get high.
For Bitcoin enthusiasts, these are topics steeped in high passion. Bitcoin leans libertarian. Both sides believe in building a token based upon concepts of decentralization, anti-fragile, peer-to-peer. Both sides believe in taking down banks and corrupt financial institutions.
These beliefs underpin both sides of the BTC-BCH debate. And yet, you'll see a tidal wave of arguments that one or the other is centralization. Too much power to the miners, or the nodes, or whomever.
You'll see advocates for either side make passionate (and believable) claims that the other is slippering close to centralization. Centralization is antithetical to all Bitcoin.
Much of this communication is via memes, trolls, and a whole lexicon of meme-terminology. If you're an outsider getting your first look into this multi-billion dollar industry, you're in for a surprise on the level and type of dialogue surrounding it.
So What's the Difference?
At its core, BTC is going down a track of a "store of value." Others have called the chain a system of settlement. The Bitcoin become a piece of digital gold. As the chain gets mined, the price of BTC is set to escalate. It's promoted as the safe place to stash and grow your wealth.
BTC has limited transaction volume. Rather than solve this in BTC, the proposal is to use sidechain (Layer) solutions. Working alongside BTC, these solutions are intended to provide inexpensive high volume transactions. Eventually, this all gets settled back to BTC.
Mining is critical to this store of value. I'd argue that the mining is the value. Although experts like Fred Wilson put forward a different view.
Either way, mining escalated to meet the value of BTC. Each block "mined" gives the miner a reward in Bitcoin. That reward is Bitcoin itself. Each time the cost of BTC goes up, the reward from mining goes up.
When the mining increases, the BTC algorithm adjusts to make mining more computationally difficult. This is called "difficulty adjustment." For BTC it happens approximately every two weeks.
It's easy to see how this rachet can work. Price inflation encourages more investment in mining. It doesn't matter if you believe mining leads the price or if the price leads the mining. The mining infrastructure is a reflection of the BTC price escalation.
The BCH philosophy takes a different approach. The BCH community wants Bitcoin to be a means of exchange and payment. They also believe in the strength of the chain. These payments need to be on the blockchain and not externalized into other systems.
BCH wants to scale Bitcoin on the Bitcoin chain. The theory is that the more people there are who are using the chain, the more robust it will be. BCH proponents point to evidence that the chain can scale to meet demand. BTC proponents are less sure.
These philosophies may not seem diametrically opposed, but they are in practice. Each puts forward a different view of how Bitcoin grows and how Bitcoin is robust.
BTC wants to be digital gold — a store of value that is robust through adoption and layers of new technology. It's supported by the "Core" development team, a group of high technical ability. Faith in the Core team is important to many BTC-backers.
BCH wants to be ubiquitous. Proponents see the robustness emerging from the network if people globally are using BCH to exchange payments, make transactions, and save. This network brings both the robustness and the value.
I'll fess up. The BTC model makes me nervous. As a store of value, it's vulnerable to corrections. If a store of value loses value, it's integrity could shatter. Perhaps that'll never happen, but it's not hard to at least find scenarios where it does.
I like how BCH is robust through its utility. It also has underlying fundamentals that make it possible to price. I've taken the same approach with BTC and struggled to find the fundamentals.
At the same time, for BCH to succeed, it needs adoption, and that remains a big question. And yet, BTC versus BCH could be academic. Both are under pressure from other coins ("Alts"). There is plenty of innovation happening outside Bitcoin.
Other narratives often follow the "true Bitcoin" or "Satoshi's vision." These discussions are moot. The key point is that both philosophies are valid. It's a matter of personal belief and working through the scenarios yourself.
The (Very) Short Horizon
Let's zoom back in to November 2017.
"The Flippening" is a transfer of value from BTC to BCH. The "flip" is intended to mean BCH is now worth more than BTC. Right now BCH hovers around 10 to 15% of the BTC price. The mining hashpower follows the same metrics, as the mining infrastructure will work the chain that gives the highest |
and info on the M3 CRT @
Positives: Between the engine with 450hp and the custom exhaust, the sound is incredible. I have the impression that it's more noticeable inside than outside (you can feel vibrations under the seat!).
Getting going in 1st or 2nd gear you can already tell that it's not a normal M3.
The color (matte grey paint) is magnificent. I was afraid of how it might come out, and I wasn't the only one, but everybody thinks it's great.
The chassis seems to have been custom tuned...the car has impressive stability even on fast curves. To be confirmed on the track in mid March.
The seats are great, both in design and seating position. And the rear passengers love them too.
Negatives: The shocks can be adjusted for shock and rebound, I have to try out different settings since right now the smallest imperfection in the road is felt.
It's impossible to be discreet in this car. Even if the exterior mostly is, you can hear it coming from far away and the brakes are even sometimes audible
(competition pads?)
Overall: For the time being, mostly positive.
The magic of the e90 m3 is preserved, even augmented. You really have the impression that it's a special car (especially the alcantara steering wheel and the steering feel!)
I don't regret anything but I'll wait for the break in period to be over before giving you a full review.
M3 CRT track results from the Autobild Ultimate BMW M Model Track Shootout
Autobild Shootout Sachsenring lap time BMW M3 GTS (on semi-slicks) 1:37.30 BMW M3 CRT 1:38.87 BMW F10 M5 (driven by Claudia Hürtgen. Other cars were driven by Autobild drivers) 1:38.90 BMW 1M Coupe 1:40.18 BMW M3 Coupe DCT 1:40.52 BMW M3 Sedan DCT 1:40.60 BMW M3 Convertible DCT 1:42.63 BMW X6 M 1:43.67 BMW X5 M 1:43.72 BMW E60 M5 1:43.77
My BMW M3 CRT Delivered!Quick review since the car is still under break in period (1,900km break in, 170km/h max speed, 5,500 revs max). Apparently the engine is limited during this period, according to the sales guy. I have driven 600km up to now.Official specs and info on the M3 CRT @ http://www.m3post.com/forums/showthread.php?t=548729 Positives:Negatives:Overall:M3 CRT track results from theCavorting with Hollywood’s finest does, however, come with risks. Hollywood donors ignore Romney
If there’s any question that Hollywood loves President Barack Obama, a few names for you: Billy Crystal, Meryl Streep, Sharon Stone, Scarlett Johansson and Salma Hayek.
Oh, and Robert Downey Jr., Diane Keaton, Jamie Lee Curtis, Reese Witherspoon, Christie Brinkley and two Fondas, Peter and Bridget.
Story Continued Below
These silver screen superstars rank among actors or actresses who together in May made 330 reportable contributions to Obama’s reelection campaign for a total of $130,000, new federal campaign finance records indicate.
How many does Mitt Romney count among his donors last month?
Four.
As in a number too small to field a basketball team. Fewer, too, than the number of his campaign donations attributable to accountants (88) and actuaries (11).
Nick Searcy, perhaps the most notable of Romney’s cast of May actor-donors, contributed $250 to Romney on May 21. His credits include bit roles as Sheriff Rawlins in “The Fugitive” and Frank Bennett in “Fried Green Tomatoes.” More recently, he’s starred in the FX cable series “Justified.”
Searcy’s management agency declined to elaborate on the donation. “We are respectfully passing on this opportunity, as we are not interested in participating at this time,” wrote the office of Joe Rice at Abrams Artists Agency.
Character actors William Shockley, Nina Onuora and Richard Huisman also contributed to Romney last month.
If Romney still longs for Hollywood’s attention, he may take heart in that “Charles in Charge” sitcom lead Scott Baio and veteran actor Jon Voight recently attended one of his California fundraisers and whose donations will likely appear in his next financial report, due out next month.
In addition to raising money from the red carpet set — even George Takei, “Sulu” in “Star Trek”, beamed $5,000 Obama’s way — Obama has recently employed numerous A-listers, such George Clooney and Sarah Jessica Parker, in a bid to raise cash not only from other actors but the general public.
One popular Obama fundraising technique this cycle is offering average Americans a chance to win dinner with the president and a Hollywood star — in exchange for a small-dollar donation.
While these contests are rigged, and donations aren’t technically required to enter, Obama has nonetheless succeeded in scoring significant cash — and valuable personal information — from legions of workaday supporters.
Cavorting with Hollywood’s finest does, however, come with risks, namely turning off independents and energizing conservatives.
The Republican National Committee, for one, has created advertisements chiding Obama for his coziness with Vogue Editor Anna Wintour and conducting a fashion show-themed fundraiser featuring a bevy of bold-faced names.
Four years ago, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) outrightly declared Obama the “biggest celebrity in the world” in a campaign ad meant to question his positions on energy and taxes.Last time we heard from Palmer Luckey, the one-time poster boy for VR, he was quietly ousted from Facebook after a $100,000 donation to a pro-Trump “shitposting” group came to light.
Now Luckey, who sold his VR company Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014, is back, and his new company is concerned with national security.
The New York Times reports that his newest business venture uses lidar technology — commonly used in self-driving cars — for surveillance on country borders or high-level sites such as military bases. The report added that the technology, when completed, could be used to detect threats such as drones, but ignore more common objects such as birds or other wildlife. It is proposed as an alternative to full-scale border walls, such as the one President Trump has pledged to build between the U.S. and Mexico, due to potentially vast cost savings.
Luckey confirmed the outline of his new venture in a statement to the Times:
We are spending more than ever on defense technology, yet the pace of innovation has been slowing for decades. We need a new kind of defense company, one that will save taxpayer dollars while creating superior technology to keep our troops and citizens safer.
Peter Thiel, a tech advisor to President Trump, is planning to support Luckey’s new company with investment from his fund, the Times’ report noted. There’s no information on other potential financial backers at this point.
Already, the company — which is located in Southern California — has hired “a handful” of staff, including former Oculus employee Christopher Dycus.Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. (Screen grab via GRITtv)The false narrative of Columbus “discovering” the Americas still pervades history books and the Eurocentric mindset of the United States. Learn the true history of what author and professor Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz calls the legacy of Columbus’ voyages: the annihilation and conquest of Native Americans.
An injury to one is an injury to all, the old labor slogan goes. What if we applied that idea to US indigenous history? How does the history of genocide affect all people in the United States even today?
This week, as some in the United States mark Indigenous People’s Day, author and professor Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz suggests that while remembering native history is good, it would be far better if we took the time and all got a lot smarter about how the treatment of Native Americans set wheels in motion that affect us all through to the present.
In her new book An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, longtime author-activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz corrects the record: The precolonial continent wasn’t untamed, uncultivated: “There was a road from Alaska down to southern Mexico; roads that [went] from east to west, north to south... Not paths... not roads just for hunting paths or migrations.” These were trade routes, reports Dunbar-Ortiz. “They had stops; they had places to stay... And trade items from central Mexico ended up in what is now Quebec and the Great Lakes area and vice versa.”
Before colonial capitalism, there existed what she calls “indigenous socialism.” The destruction of that economy through war, denial of self-determination, dispossession, criminalization and violence against women affected no group more than indigenous people, but they weren’t the only ones.
Colonialism, she argues, served as “an escape valve for the mother country.” Peasants thrown off their lands with the enclosure of the commons were assuaged with an offer of land “where they could be lord,” she says. But poor settlers too were “duped.”
“Corporations are predators to everyone now,” she said.
Understanding indigenous history not only reveals a lot about how we all live and why; reconnecting the dots of this history gives glimpses of alternatives and ways, she suggests, to, as Naomi Klein says, “change everything.” Dunbar-Ortiz traces her own heritage to Oklahoma white settlers and to Cherokees. Her other books include Red Dirt, Growing Up Okie, Outlaw Woman and Blood on the Border, A Memoir of the Contra War. The video of our conversation can be seen on The Laura Flanders show at GRITtv.org, or on Telesur English. The text has been edited lightly for publication.
Laura Flanders: I got [the message] very strongly that this isn’t necessarily a book for indigenous people. They may well know this history. It’s for the rest of us. Why is it needed?
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: It’s for everyone to understand, for the settlers, for the immigrants, to understand indigenous people’s experience of the United States and point of view. As a historian, I really wanted to call it the True History of the United States because it’s not just that there are two points of view. There are the colonizer and the colonized, but do you really want to identify with the colonizers?
Yet that’s exactly what our history for the most has done. What’s different when you look at it from the colonized point of view?
First of all, you see the United States founded as a settler state. It’s a republic; it’s called a republic. The French called their republic a republic, but it was still a colonizer – colonized Algeria and Vietnam – but the United States, of course, is exceptional. It could not possibly be a settler state; it could not possibly be imperialist; it’s rescuing people, helping people. The very first emblem of the Puritans when they came over was a very tired, weary looking native person with a kind of limp bow and arrow saying, “please come help us, come save us.”
Hence that very typical idea that this was a land without people or culture, that needed the civilization that the settlers would bring....
This was Zionism, and this was the new Jerusalem. The Puritans had a whole philosophy and ideology of this being a place given to them by their god.
Different from South America, we’re led to believe in our history books that here was no culture that you could see, like the Aztecs or the Incas. Instead there were roaming bands of people on horseback...
... in an untamed forest, a vast wilderness that had not been tamed. Of course, it’s not true at all. The valley of Mexico influenced both south and north, the birth of civilization sort of like in the Old World: the Tigris and the Euphrates in Egypt, and it went everywhere. Corn and the farming went all the way up to the Great Lakes, to [the Northeast] and to the Sub-Arctic. Ninety-nine percent of the indigenous population in North America were farmers who lived in towns and had grain storages, and very sophisticated governance.
And roads.
The roads are the most amazing thing. Until I did this book, I had known about the roads in the Southwest (they are very connected to central Mexico), because that’s my [area of specialization]. I had no idea that there was a road from Alaska down to southern Mexico – the Pan-American Highway today; roads crisscrossing that [went] from east to west, north to south in every direction. They were all trade routes. They were not paths; they were not roads just for hunting paths or migrations. There were roads that were used. They had stops; they had places to stay. They had markets and trade, and trade items from central Mexico ended up in what is now Quebec and the Great Lakes area and vice versa. All of those artifacts tell you there was this enormous amount of trade, and in general, the Toltecs, before the Aztecs, created turquoise as the means of exchange. So they had monetary systems.
It’s fascinating. I learned so much from this book, I have to say, so thank you for the many years you put into writing it. You write repeatedly that you cannot talk about capitalism in the US without talking about colonialism.
Well, in general, I think you cannot talk about capitalism without colonialism. Even Marx said that the primary accumulation of capital came from the looting of the Americas and the enslavement of the Africans and of native peoples. In the first century of Spanish-Portuguese colonization, native slavery was legal. It was replaced by African slavery. Once the church wanted to enslave the natives, have them build their missions and so forth.
It’s interesting you say that even the colonial class, many of them were people who had been, if not enslaved, at least dispossessed inside the colonial countries. Originally, the not-very-United Kingdom.
Yes, the United Kingdom and in Spain. Those who were displaced by the fencing of the commons all over Europe and England were without any means of income and they were thrown into labor in the textile mills as sheep became a commodity.
The landless peasants who maybe harvested berries in the forest or grazed their livestock on the lord’s land, were made pretty vulnerable, particularly vulnerable to a promise that land could be theirs.
It solves, as Peter Linebaugh writes, it solves a contradiction between the creation of the landless possibly volatile class of people who are very angry about their dispossession, so offer them land far away and they too can be a lord. It’s an escape valve for the mother country, and then when the United States – when it’s a republic – uses its colonization on the rest of the continent as an escape valve from a volatile, unhappy, lower class.
Don’t make trouble here. Go west.
Right. Find some land and it will be your own.
You said “motherland,” but you also talk about patriarchy.
The oppression of women, of course, goes back – the division of labor and so forth. In Europe and in England, women had a lot of authority pre-Catholic, pre-church times, of being the medicine people, of being the farmers, the people who kept the seeds, the spiritual people. There were some men, but this was mainly a woman’s role – sort of the intellectual class. With the fencing of the commons and the Crusades, the lords and the monarchy, and the church targeted then these people of pre-Catholic religious practices and this is the burning and killing of the witches, millions of people, mostly women were killed.
A large proportion of whom were called witches for failure to pay rent? Why is it important to tell this story and for us to understand it today, we who are not indigenous people?
We need to understand what a settler state is and the role we play. I mean half my family are settlers, Scotch-Irish on the Dunbar side. I’ve really studied this sort of family history and they were among the losers on the frontier who ended up in Oklahoma. You could not make a living farming; you could not compete with the plantation and slavery, so you were subordinate to them as a tenant or sharecropper because they kept eating up land – and yet they kept their hope. They would go to the next frontier and they were going to make it this time, so they end up in Oklahoma and then the dust bowl and everyone is dispossessed, and they go to California. So, I know that story very well, yet the consciousness that’s there is that this is still possible. There is still this sense that there is the American dream.
But your other side are Cherokee?
Yes, so I have a split personality, but I can see both sides. I have a lot of sympathy for people who were duped and they don’t like to think that they were duped, but they were duped. I just think it’s very liberating to know the truth. I really believe in that old adage, the truth will make you free.
You still haven’t explained how that settler history and the consciousness and that tradition plays out now or affects us now?
Look at the Tea Party. Those are people who want that dream back. They are mostly descendants of the old settlers. Spain had its own settlers too. Not being Jewish and not being Muslim meant you could be an old settler and you had a certain nobility. So there’s this sense, there was also an ideology created of nationalism during the Andrew Jackson era of the old settlers being actually the indigenous people. Not only this idea of manifest destiny and Zion, but also that the Indians are fading away and they present to us settlers as in Last of the Mohicans: Now it’s yours, we’ve had our time; it is now your land to take care of. That is a very strong mentality that they are the indigenous. Just like the Afrikaners in South Africa.
It also speaks to me of the reality that we’ve had experiences of different economic systems in the United States on this territory, on this continent. Going back and thinking about the pre-capitalist culture is liberating, also in the sense that you stop equating “civilization” with a particular economic system. There was another one.
Yes, and it was socialistic. Indigenous socialism. Collectively – this is why native property wasn’t recognized: Because it was collectively owned and then they tried to allot it. They literally put in the Dawes Act (the Allotment Act) that selfishness had to be created for civilization to flourish among the native people. The other aspect that I think that we have to be aware of is that every inch of territory that is now the United States was taken by warfare. War on the native people, many of these were genocidal wars, and in every case, native people resisted in one way or another to stay on their land: they don’t just give up. In this 300 years of warfare, 100 of it under the United States republic preceded by 200 years of settler-colonial warfare, most of it by local armed militias, a certain kind of warfare developed that was the root and foundation of the US military. Acted out time and again: you look at Vietnam, it resonated so much with the Indian wars. They even use a lot of the same terminology that they used, like “Indian Country.”
There is so much more in the book and I really encourage people to really look at it. You are pretty critical of corporations and foundations and their relationship to native land and native issues. Do you want to talk about that?
Corporations are predators to everyone now, but native people are kind of the canaries in the mine in the 19th century. The United States government – which had a federal trust responsibility under the treaties to protect native land from outsiders, from settlers coming in or companies coming in – instead did the opposite and would give leases and give contracts without consulting the native people. So the corporations ran rampant from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In Oklahoma, it was mainly petroleum and mining. All through the West, mining and seizing land, simply transferring it or making native land into so-called public lands that is then leased out to the government.
If we had just been paying closer attention, we might have seen what would happen next to everyone.
Exactly.
You also have a very different approach to the Second Amendment...
The Second Amendment is – many African-Americans have noted correctly that it applied to militias to police the plantations informally. Often these were very poor white people who were hired to be the militias and very brutal. But long before that, initially, I think the ongoing – at least in that point of time – the major crisis of the US was wanting to get into the Ohio Valley and to expand. The militias that controlled native people and burned their towns – and burned their food – killed people, carried this out without the government criticizing it or punishing it, but not necessarily condoning it.
You have dedicated a lifetime to writing history that refuses to do anything other than apply a race, gender and class lens to everything that you do. You have also been actively involved in movements that go back to the ’60s, through the American Indian Movement (AIM) right to the present. Any lesson to people out there or message to those who may think this is old political correctness, we’ve done this, now we can all be one people again? We don’t need this-one’s history and that-one’s history; we’re ready now for a new era?
Native people may be in a stronger position politically almost than any other group in the United States right now. People are looking to Native Americans: Well, what is it that’s going on? Idle No More really alerted people.
They talked on this program [about] how native treaty rights might be the way we stop corporate exploitation of the dirty tar sands or other dirty oil resources.
Exactly. With democracy within native nations that can control the tribal governments that are so attached to the federal government – that’s been a long struggle to break that colonialist tie where that’s who they answer to rather than the people – then it’s a very, very strong basis for fighting the corporations.
But still important that we tell these peoples’ histories.
It’s important that we tell all people’s history, but especially native people because it is the history of this country and it is what is lost, and we should really be mourning it – what was lost. When people read that first chapter “Follow the Corn,” I think there will be this great sense of sadness. There’s a great sadness, I think, in people about native people and the genocide. But there are two things: It’s worse than you imagine, what you thought was lost. [And] don’t give up on native people. They survived; they are survivors – and have survivor skills. They survived the worst genocide in human history – the greatest numbers over the greatest times. They know a lot that is going to be very important as we face some difficult times ahead.
Roxanne, thank you for bringing us so many more stories that I hope people will come to remember and appreciate. An Indigenous People’s History of the United States is just out; we’ll put a link at our website. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, thanks for coming in.On October 18, Google announced that it would begin pushing users with a Google account to Google's encrypted search homepage. The move to make searches more private has caused an uproar among search marketers and SEO experts, who will now get limited information about how site visitors found them.
The move is part of Google's ongoing response to concerns over the privacy of its services, especially for people connecting from public WiFi networks exposed by exploits like Firesheep. Google has offered secure search since April of 2010. But as the change is rolled out, any Google user that has logged into a Google account will be sent to the HTTP Secure search page by default, and their search queries and results returned by Google over the HTTPS connection will be encrypted.
It also means that most of the sites logged-in users visit as a result of their query won't have any idea how the user found them. “When you search from https://www.google.com,” Google search product manager Evelyn Kao wrote in Google's official blog, “websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won't receive information about each individual query.” Paid search results will still pass that information to the advertised site when users click to visit them. The only way for site owners to get any information on what drives signed-in Google users to their sites will be through Google Webmaster Tools—which provides the top search terms used for a site for the past 30 days, without any details on the page visited within a site.
There are no figures available from Google on what percentage of users make searches while logged in. But the changes mean that anyone who goes from one of Google's other services, such as Gmail or Google Plus, to the Google search page will automatically have their searches encrypted. The potential loss of detailed information on “organic” searches has raised the ire of search marketers, as Search Engine Land's Matt McGee reported. Some accused Google of making the change in order to push more sites to pay for search placement.
Tony Verre, the CEO of Silver Arc Search Marketing in Milwaukee wrote in Search Engine Journal that the move creates a “double standard,” where those who can afford paid placement in search results get access to a wealth of data on the user's search history while those sites that are unpaid results for a search—and ranked highly by Google's own algorithms for what the user is looking for—get nothing. "You don’t have to look too hard to see this move places [paid search] data on a pedestal,” Verre wrote. “It’s unfiltered by privacy now and you get true conversion data from them.”
Meanwhile, website owners that have collected referrer data and tracked search terms through other tools will be left in the dark.Twitter is struggling. Its disappointing financial results, mass layoffs and declining user experience show things aren’t well for the little blue bird. And now this: the replacement of the beloved “fav” star with a heart.
The time has come to ask whether, given the purpose of Twitter in comparison to other social networks, it’s time for the investors and merchant bankers to get out of the way. A ubiquitous mass communications platform belongs not in Wall Street but in the commons.
Twitter is replacing favourites with likes – but does anyone heart it? Read more
The hearts are the final straw: it’s time to nationalise Twitter.
The concept of nationalising social networks isn’t new. David Mitchell put forward a compelling case for Facebook’s nationalisation due to its de facto monopoly status.
But while Mark Zuckerberg has made a profitable business out of selling the intimate personal details of Facebook’s users to advertisers, Twitter is struggling to find a way to build revenue out of its platform.
Twitter is different to traditional social media networks like Facebook and MySpace. At its most basic level, it’s really just one giant chat room. Its value isn’t in connecting people who already know each other in real life, or reminding you that your teenage crush ended up with the school bully and they now have four kids, but in building relationships with people you otherwise would probably never meet or interact with.
It’s infrastructure for basic communication, which is why people are so upset over the change to hearts: imagine if, instead of saying “OK” on the phone to a relative stranger, you were forced to say “I love you”. It’s that basic.
Despite spinning the heart to existing users as a more “expressive” and “universal” symbol, Twitter has admitted the change is really about making the platform easier for new users.
But how many times can the company change what works in pursuit of more users before its base packs up and moves on? It’s not the relatively recent new features – sharing images, videos and Vines – that catapulted Twitter into the mainstream. It was the idea that your 140 character message, no matter how inane, could be read and shared across the world, sparking conversation, debate, new ideas and friendships.
Twitter hasn’t been successful because of decisions by investors – it’s been successful in spite of them.
So how do you monetise an intangible combination of excitement and trepidation sparked by the overwhelming awe of talking to the whole world?
Twitter’s attempts to squeeze money out of a product that users value purely because of it what it allows to be created, rather than what it creates itself, haven’t yet succeeded. In fact they risk alienating its existing base and pushing the product into irrelevancy.
Geo-blocking video content, injecting more and more advertising, selling access to curated content like Moments and trying to get more personal information out of users (by asking for your birthday, for example), all come across as desperate attempts to rapidly generate revenue and satisfy the demands of investors. But the less genuine Twitter becomes, the less likely users will stick around.
As well as providing an online space for socialising and discussion, Twitter plays an important role in the working lives of many – particularly journalists. Its ubiquity makes it a valuable space to find sources, get story ideas and break news. In fact, many news publications regularly publish stories consisting entirely of Tweets.
Activists and campaigners have used Twitter to bring important issues into the public sphere and force them to be taken seriously by both the media and politicians. #BlackLivesMatter is a powerful example of a Twitter hashtag that transformed into a movement for civil rights and racial justice.
Trying to revert this apparatus into a “regular” social media network, with all the gimmicks and shovelware that comes with that, fails to acknowledge that Twitter just can’t make money from its core purpose. That should be proof enough that casual social interaction and its ability to shape news and current affairs are anathema to the desire for profit.
Twitter hasn’t been successful because of decisions by investors, business developers and advertisers – it’s been successful in spite of them.
Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey cites the popular Citizens Band Radio movement of the 1970’s as a key inspiration for the platform. Calling Twitter usernames “handles” is a direct throwback to the days of CB Radio, where users would interact with one another, tell jokes and share information.
Ultimately CB Radio went out of the fashion with the advent of online chat rooms, which in turn have been replaced by social networks like Twitter.
Former Twitter engineer: Jack Dorsey's return brings hope for more diversity Read more
CB Radio wasn’t privately run. It was government administered and regulated. There was no point in trying to monetise it, because it wasn’t the platform itself that was valuable; it was the networks created by users that made it interesting and useful.
Like CB Radio, Twitter isn’t an end product. It’s infrastructure that plays too socially and politically useful a role to be left in the hands of investors and stockbrokers. Whether it’s through state nationalisation, some sort of global governance framework or a user maintained co-operative, it’s time to take Twitter out of the world of finance and put it firmly in the hands of the public – before it goes broke, or wrecks its user experience entirely, or both.You’d be wrong to think that computer games were invented in the 1970s. Games were being developed more than 60 YEARS ago by trail-blazing researchers.
Fun titles included Tennis For Two
Granted, it might not look like much – one horizontal line with a small vertical line and what looks a bit like a smudge on the screen.
But they represent the tennis court, net and ball flying between two players who served and volleyed using controllers with buttons and rotating dials.
The game was played by two people using separate controllers connected to an analogue computer and used an oscilloscope for the screen. It was on a cathode-ray tube – a bit like an old black and white TV set.
It was invented by William Higinbotham to stop visitors to a science exhibition getting bored. Hundreds of people queued to play the game during open days at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New Year.
Other pioneering computer games
The Nimrod computer that allowed people to play Nim at the 1951 Festival of Britain. Nim is a parlour game where players are presented with piles of matches, with the winner being the person to remove the last match. It was built by British company Ferranti, but was specifically designed to show off the computer’s processing power – rather than for fun.
Several years earlier, the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement device was invented. The patent was filed in January 1947 and issued in December 1948. It was a missile simulator, inspired by radar displays from the Second World War, using circuitry to control the beam and position a dot on the screen. But screen overlays were used because it was impossible to create graphics at the time.
In 1952, OXO/Noughts and Crosses – was created for the EDSAC computer at Cambridge University. It used a rotary telephone controller for game control, but again was designed as part of a PhD thesis on human-computer interaction.
Fast forward 10 years, and Spacewar! arrived. Two players control a starship and try to destroy the other – and it proved to be very popular.
Pong is considered by many to be one of the very first video arcade games, and was released in 1972. It later become the subject of a lawsuit by the makers of an earlier table tennis game, who successfully argued the concept was stolen from them.
Sources: Brookhaven National Laboratory, Wikipedia, wired.com, APS physics, Britannica.com
MORE TOP STORIESEstablishing battlefield control.. standby. A quick heads up about all the recent more or less stealth updates happening on MentalOmega.com in the Factions information pages.
Posted by Speeder on Jul 25th, 2016
I have updated the information pages about the Structures, Infantry, Units & Tech Trees of the three original sides. This information now matches the state of the mod that it is currently in and will most likely be released as in the upcoming months. The Allied/Soviet/Epsilon Info pages that open the Factions information will be updated last as they'll contain lore and updated storyline details for each of the subfactions. The Foehn pages will be up shortly before the release so that the surprise is not (entirely) spoiled, and the new Stolen Tech page will appear last. Click to see a full tech tree.
There will also be a new trailer before that happens, in which you'll be able to see the Foehn subfactions in their full glory, including their bases with all their structures.
Stay tuned for more updates!ESPN on Thursday suddenly ended its collaboration with PBS' "Frontline" on an investigation into the NFL's response to concussions and head injuries among players. The investigation includes a documentary, "League Of Denial," that is set to appear Oct. 8 and 15 on PBS.
According to the New York Times, the NFL had a lot to do with ESPN's decision.
Citing two unnamed sources described as having "direct knowledge of the situation," James Andrew Miller of the New York Times reported that the NFL pressured ESPN to pull out at a lunch meeting of top officials from both sides.
Both the NFL and ESPN denied that the league was involved in the decision. Via John Ourand of Sports Business Journal:
NFL: "It is not true that we pressured ESPN to pull out of the film. The lunch was requested several weeks ago by ESPN." — John Ourand (@Ourand_SBJ) August 23, 2013
New from ESPN: “The decision to remove our branding was not a result of concerns about our separate business relationship with the NFL." — John Ourand (@Ourand_SBJ) August 23, 2013
More from ESPN: "As we have in the past including as recently as Sunday, we will continue to cover the concussion story aggressively.” — John Ourand (@Ourand_SBJ) August 23, 2013
Shortly after PBS announced the end of its partnership on Thursday, ESPN issued a statement claiming that it backed out due to a lack of editorial control.
"Because ESPN is neither producing nor exercising editorial control over the Frontline documentaries, there will be no co-branding involving ESPN on the documentaries or their marketing materials. The use of ESPN's marks could incorrectly imply that we have editorial control. As we have in the past, we will continue to cover the concussion story through our own reporting".
However, the New York Times reported that the NFL began pressuring ESPN after the trailer for the documentary was released on Aug. 6. The trailer shows people discussing players suffering from dementia and brain disease as a result from playing professional football. The NFL is being sued by thousands of former players claiming that the league hid information linking football-related head trauma to brain injuries.
ESPN spokesman Chris LaPlaca said on Thursday that the network's decision to withdraw had nothing to do with its contractual relationship with the NFL, per Richard Sandomir of the New York Times.Nearly two years ago I launched a Vegan 101 Series to celebrate one year of being vegan. This is just one way that I try to provide new vegans, or the veg-curious, resources and tips on the vegan journey.
Today the series is back, to host the prolific Robin Robertson, a gourmet vegan chef, who is on a virtual tour with her new book Fresh from the Vegan Slow-Cooker.
I had the pleasure of meeting Robin at Vida Vegan Con in 2011 and am delighted to bring her wise words on vegan crockpot cooking to all of you!
Robin Robertson, author of 19 vegan and vegetarian cookbooks, is a 25-year veteran restaurant chef, caterer, columnist, cooking teacher, and food writer. She writes the “Global Vegan” column for VegNews magazine and was a contributing editor and columnist for Vegetarian Times. She lives in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.
Vegan Cooking with a Slow Cooker
Although slow cookers first became popular for cooking cheap cuts of meat, it’s interesting to note that bean cooking was actually the intended use of the first slow cookers. Beans are a natural fit for the slow-cooking method: cooking beans from the dried state, as well as recipes that use cooked beans.
When I first began using a slow cooker, I relied on it primarily to cook dried beans. I then began using those cooked beans to make chili and hearty soups and stews in the slow cooker. Because beans take longer to cook than vegetables and other ingredients, I prefer to use beans that have already been cooked in most of my recipes in order to avoid overcooking the vegetables. Another reason for using precooked beans in recipes is that you can drain off the cooking liquid after cooking the beans, making them |
, under which Congress may jail those who refuse to provide the information it needs. The Supreme Court in 1821 recognized that without the ability to hold in contempt and imprison those who refused its demands, Congress would be “exposed to every indignity and interruption, that rudeness, caprice or even conspiracy may mediate against it.”
That’s a fair description of where we are today, especially the notion that Congress should do nothing to jeopardize Mr. Mueller’s work. This gets it backward: Our democracy is rooted in the idea that it’s more important for the American people’s elected representatives to get the information they need than for wrongdoers to be held criminally liable. Which is why Congress can compel information from witnesses who refuse to testify, but what they say cannot be used to prosecute them.
Unfortunately Republicans helped put themselves in this fix by the way they fumbled on the Lois Lerner case. Though the House held the former Internal Revenue Service official in contempt for refusing to answer questions about the agency’s targeting of conservative groups, then-Speaker John Boehner took the cheap way out. Instead of ordering Ms. Lerner jailed until she talked or the session ended, Congress forwarded the matter to an Obama Justice Department the speaker knew would never take the case to a grand jury.
To their credit, there are now Republicans in Congress trying to get the real story on everything from Russia’s election-year meddling to the firing of James Comey. But their efforts are being frustrated by hostility from the press and a lack of cooperation from key witnesses and institutions, including the Trump Justice Department.
Take the Comey case. The then-FBI director was asked at a House hearing in September 2016 whether he’d made his decision to recommend not charging Hillary Clinton criminally “before or after” the FBI had interviewed her. He insisted it was “after.”
But now we have transcripts of Office of Special Counsel interviews with Comey associates who suggest he was sharing drafts of a Clinton statement months earlier. Senators have rightly demanded the FBI provide the unredacted transcripts. So far the FBI has stonewalled.
Meanwhile Devin Nunes, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is threatening to hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt unless they turn over information related to the Russia investigation. Mr. Nunes wants to know something perfectly within Congress’s rights to demand: what the FBI’s relationship with former British spy Christopher Steele was, and whether the now-discredited dossier about Mr. Trump that Mr. Steele produced was used to obtain warrants from a court under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Over in the Senate, Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) says he may subpoena two FBI agents whom Justice won’t let testify before the committee about Mr. Comey’s firing. Mr. Grassley could well be the man who forces people to start taking Congress seriously: As a young senator, he cited Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, William French Smith, for contempt for failing to fork over documents related to the investigation of a defense contractor.
Where these investigations ultimately end up, no one can say. But until Congress backs up one of its contempt findings with detention, it invites Roger Goodell levels of cynicism.
Write to mcgurn@wsj.com.When we think of storing information today, we conjure up rows of giant computer servers that house endless streams of digital data. All the world’s information, it seems, will one day be preserved as ones and zeros in permanent, stable, and indestructible devices. So it may sound strange that ice, an ephemeral, unstable, and brittle substance, has been one of the world’s most permanent means of information storage. The cloud, in fact, has nothing on ice. Ice holds the key to understanding how the climate has changed over millions of years, and may change Earth in years to come. We asked a host of scientists to help us thaw out the information.
Climate Records
Spruce Schoenemann/University of Washington
The hardened plains and peaks of ice that make up Greenland and the Antarctic preserve information about Earth’s former climates, going back millions of years. As snow accumulates in these regions year after year, the higher snow layers exert pressure on the lower ones, squeezing out air. Under pressure, snowflakes transform into dense grains of ice that fuse together into glacial sheets.
But not all the air escapes. About 10 percent of it gets trapped when snowflakes transform into ice crystals. Those miniscule air bubbles contain the atmospheric gases—nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, methane—from the time periods in which they were trapped. Climate researchers are particularly interested in the greenhouse gases.
Also in Climate The Hidden Ocean Patch That Broke Climate Records By Dennis Hollier Nothing has caused climate scientists quite as much recent trouble as the so-called “global warming hiatus.” Not only did this approximately 14-year lull in the rise of global mean (or average) temperatures provide fodder for a variety of misguided climate...READ MORE
“Ice cores are the primary way in which we reconstruct the atmosphere going back a million years or so,” says paleoclimatologist James White, professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder and director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. “It’s one of the few archives of the past that is clean enough that you can actually get carbon dioxide and methane concentrations.”
Retrieving information from ice cores is labor-intensive. The oldest ice core, dating back about 890,000 years, is a cylinder of ice over 3,000 meters long (almost 10,000 feet); it was extracted in 2004. In the lab, researchers crush samples of the cores in vacuum containers to release the trapped air and measure the concentration of the gases released.
By studying the contents of the trapped air bubbles researchers can understand how the levels of greenhouse gases have changed over time. “That helps us understand the physics of how the climate system behaves,” White explains. From there, they can hypothesize how the various amounts of greenhouse gases being released in the atmosphere today will affect the future climate.
Warning Blooms
Steffi Lutz/University of Leeds
Those red, yellow, green, and black spreads that you see on glacier snow and ice are caused by various species of algae. And those colorful spores have a message for us.
Algae make colorful pigments in order to survive. When the sun melts the ice on glacier tops in summer, the algae spores come up to the surface from within the ice. When algae first transform from spores into active photosynthesizing organisms, the chlorophyll in their bodies makes them green. But then algae start producing different pigments to protect the chlorophyll from too much sun. “It’s like when you go into the sun and you get too much of it, you put sunscreen on,” says Liane Benning, a biogeochemist from the University of Leeds. “This is their sunscreen.”
Five years ago, scientists discovered ice algae, which color ice black. “People just assumed it was dirt,” Benning says. “Once they looked at it in terms of the biological component, they [found] a very specific pigment that keeps algae black.”
The colored ice absorbs more sun than white ice, and melts faster. “Algae speed up the melting rate, and if you melt more, you have more nutrients in the water for algae to grow,” Benning says. This melt-induced algal growth causes a reduction of up to 20 percent in albedo—the proportion of the light reflected by a surface—becoming a self-perpetuating loop.
Benning explains that snow and ice algae are blooming more often, more densely, and in larger areas than ever. That’s an indication, she says, “that ice is melting faster, and algae obviously help the faster melting.”
Love Notes
BJ Kirschhoffer/Polar Bears International
Polar bears are solitary animals that need some way of finding each other during mating seasons. Unlike brown bears, who mark their forest territory by rubbing their backs against trees or rocks, polar bears have never had vertical structures on which to leave scents, says George Durner, a research zoologist with the United States Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center. Instead they evolved to leave mating cues in the ice.
Together with Durner and colleagues, Megan Owen, a behavioral ecologist at the San Diego Zoo, studied how polar bears find each other through notes left in ice. Owen and her team gathered and catalogued samples of polar bear footprints in Alaska and let zoo bears sniff them. Owen says males were clearly more interested in the scents collected from females, and, in particular, in scents from females that weren’t nursing young cubs and would be available for breeding. Both males and females undergo significant hormonal changes during the breeding season, and the scents left in ice indicate their availability to mate. The scents of tracks left by male bears can sound an alarm for mothers with cubs, because aggressive male bears can kill the young.
Owen is still studying the biochemical compounds polar bears use to write their messages. Polar bears have large sweat glands on their paws—larger than anywhere else on their body—so they definitely pass some information through sweat. But the full message is probably a mix of various metabolic byproducts of bears’ biochemistry, Owen says. “It’s a combination of sweat and urine and body odor that reflects the biochemistry of that reproductive status and that time of year,” she says. “That’s the information content.”
One factor though, is changing the delivery of the message. Warming temperatures are thinning the arctic ice and causing fractures. “Suddenly you get a bunch of breaks,” Durner says. “Tracks are disrupted. The physical nature of the seascape becomes more difficult for bears to travel on, and reduces the ability of bears to communicate effectively.”
Eternal Mountains
Timothy Creyts & Michael Wolovick/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University
In the heart of Antarctica lies the Gamburtsev Mountain Range, roughly the size of the European Alps, which, as researchers discovered last year, has not changed for 34 million years. Usually, natural forces like water and wind erode the rocks, but Gamburtsev has been spared the erosion. The three-mile thick ice encasement that covers the range preserved it, because of how water and ice interact in the concaved, spoon-like valleys.
The heat that emanates from earth melts the ice in the bottom of the valleys between the ridges. This creates a pool of water underneath the ice. The pressure of the heavy ice sheet on top of the water pool pushes it in various directions. Because the meltwater sits on a hard rock surface, it can’t trickle down. The weight of the ice sheet pressing against the water causes it to flow uphill—following the path of least resistance, says glaciologist Timothy Creyts at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “All [water] wants to do is just find a preferred path and flow in that preferred path, which is outward,” he says. As this water moves up, it reaches the ridges, where the ice is thinner and the temperature is colder. There, the water refreezes. The force of the ice sheet causes the newly hardened meltwater to hug the curves of the ridges as it flows over them.
Creyts and his colleagues at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory say this process has kept the Gamburtsev Mountain Range in its youthful form, making it the oldest place on the planet still looking so young. While the rest of the earth keeps changing, Creyts says, the Gamburtsev’s range ice will likely continue to preserve the snapshot of the prehistoric earth. Unless, that is, increased warming finally causes the snapshot to fade.Three-Minute Fiction Round Four: Little Words
It's already time for Round Four of our Three-Minute Fiction short story contest! This round, we have a new challenge and a new judge: writer Ann Patchett, bestselling author of Bel Canto and The Magician's Assistant.
Round Four Rules Your story must be 600 words or less and four of them must be: plant button trick fly One entry per person. Your deadline is 11:59 p.m. EDT, Sunday, April 11. Round Four Official Rules
Our Three-Minute Fiction contest has a simple premise: Listeners send in original short stories that can be read in three minutes or less. That, according to the official rules, means 600 words or less. To make things even more interesting, we set up a device for each round to serve as the jumping-off point for the story.
Patchett's not only picking our winner; she's also given us the challenge to inspire your stories. For Round Four, your story must include these four words: "plant," "button," "trick" and "fly."
"They're dull little words, little everyday words that I want to see in all of the stories," Patchett tells NPR's Guy Raz. "People can use them as nouns, as adjectives or as verbs." You can also use the words in any tense, if used as verbs.
"It's really nice to have little markers to go by, something to sort of occupy one side of your brain while the other side of your brain is being very creative," Patchett says. "I think of these four words as the splint that will hold the story together."
Patchett says she picked those four words because they work in a lot of different ways. For example, she says, "you can plant information, and you can have a plant on your windowsill."
The winner of Round Four will receive signed copies of Patchett's nonfiction books What now? and Truth and Beauty: A Friendship. We'll read the winning story on air, plus post some of our favorites on NPR.org.
As in our last round, we're going to be assisted by students from The Iowa Writers' Workshop, who will read the stories and pass the best of the best on to Patchett. Patchett actually attended the workshop while learning to write short stories herself. She says writing short stories helped her make the jump to novels, though it happened at a point in her life when she needed to take a leap.
"I was a waitress. I was 25, 26 years old, and my life was going nowhere," she says. "I was writing short stories -- and I was selling short stories -- but I thought, 'Man, I really need to write a novel. Or I'm going to be a waitress for the rest of my life.'"
"That was the real reason I decided to try to write a novel, because at that time I thought I was a dyed-in-the-wool short story writer. Once I wrote a novel, I never went back. That was my form, that was the place I felt really, really comfortable. And I loved writing novels."
If you write a bad short story, you'll throw it away. If you get halfway through it and it's not working, you can dump it and try something else.
But writing short stories can be good exercise, even for novelists. "People are willing to take more risks as a short story writer," she says. "If you write a bad short story, you'll throw it away. If you get halfway through it and it's not working, you can dump it and try something else. I see a lot more creativity and excitement in the short story."
Patchett actually attended the workshop and trained as a short story writer. But early on, she realized she needed to make a leap.
"The thing that can happen can be extremely subtle," she adds. "Having something happen doesn't mean that your main character gets run over by a bus, which is what I always used to tell my students," because they were always having their characters run over by buses -- never cars."
"A story really should capture the moment in which things turn, and, as we all know, sometimes the most important things turn over a glance, a cup of coffee, walking the dog,” she says. “It can be a very natural moment in your life, but the story focuses on the moment when things change"
"So that's what I like. I like creativity, I like a risk, and I like a little plot."Unsealed Remington Documents Posted by Public Justice Show Defective Triggers in Millions of Rifles Could Fire on Their Own
Gun Owners Need to Claim Free Trigger Replacements ASAP
By Arthur Bryant
Chairman
Public Justice today made over 118,000 previously-sealed Remington documents available to the public on a new website, www.remingtondocuments.com. The documents show the company knew for decades the trigger in the Remington Model 700—the most popular bolt-action rifle in America—and a dozen other Remington models could fire when no one pulled it. Remington denied that fact (and still denies it), hid the truth, and kept selling the rifles. As a result, hundreds of people were maimed or killed—and millions are still at risk.
In December 2015, CNBC published an investigative report and aired a one-hour special, Remington Under Fire: The Reckoning, based in part on some of these documents. Public Justice’s new Remington Rifle Trigger Defect Documents website is making them public so people who own these rifles can protect themselves, their loved ones, and others.
Over 7.5 million Remington 700 and other rifles with this defective trigger are now in gun owners’ hands. A proposed settlement in Pollard v. Remington Arms, a national class action in federal court in Kansas City, MO, would provide free trigger replacements to all owners of Remington Model 700, Seven, Sportsman 78, 673, 710, 715, and 770 rifles who file claims. Everyone who owns one or more of these rifles should stop using them and submit a claim for each rifle.
Details about the proposed settlement are provided on Public Justice’s new Remington Rifle Trigger Defect Documents website and on the proposed settlement web site, http://remingtonfirearmsclassactionsettlement.com. To submit a claim, go here or here.
Proposed class members should file claims as soon as possible. They have until November 18, 2016, to opt out of the proposed settlement or object to it. A hearing on whether to approve the proposed settlement is scheduled for February 15, 2017.
The proposed settlement does not provide a free trigger replacement for Remington Model 600, 660, or XP-100 rifles, which were recalled in 1979. Their triggers can still be repaired for free. Everyone who owns one or more of these rifles should stop using them, get them repaired for free, and consider filing a claim for the compensation the proposed settlement provides. Go here for the Model 600 and 660 recall info and here for the XP-100 recall info.
The proposed settlement also does not provide a free trigger replacement for Remington Model 721, 722, and 725 rifles, which have the same defective trigger, too. Everyone who owns one or more of these rifles should stop using them (unless you get the defective trigger fixed) and consider filing a claim for the compensation the settlement provides.
Public Justice won public access to the documents it released today—and all of the documents in all lawsuits ever filed against Remington over these defective triggers—with the help of the plaintiffs’ lawyers in Pollard v. Remington Arms. To see the letters agreeing to public access, click here.
The documents were sought by Public Justice, in part, so Richard Barber of Montana—an NRA member and avid sportsman whose 9-year-old son, Gus Barber, was shot and killed when a Remington 700 fired without a trigger pull in 2000—could avoid Remington’s threat to sue him for contempt of court if he disclosed what he knew about the trigger’s defects. For more details on Richard Barber and Public Justice’s work to unseal the documents, click here.
Based on the documents, CNBC then published and broadcast Remington Under Fire: The Reckoning, and several related follow-up pieces. To see CNBC’s coverage, click here.
Public Justice’s new website includes PowerPoints and Timelines highlighting key documents and exposing Remington’s willingness to endanger its customers, their friends, and families to maximize profits. They reveal what Remington knew and what the company did—and didn’t—do, including decisions not to recall the rifles because it would cost too much and to destroy test results. They shine a light on the company’s response to customer complaints, triggers tests that failed, and Remington’s efforts to mislead its customers, the press, and the public.
The PowerPoints and Timelines were provided by Timothy Monsees of Monsees & Mayer, PC, attorneys experienced representing people injured by the Remington 700 and other rifles with the defective trigger. Elijah Ltd. designed and is hosting the website.
Public Justice was not involved in negotiating and has taken no position on the proposed settlement in Pollard v. Remington Arms. We believe strongly, however, that, to the extent that the proposed settlement leads to the replacement of the defective triggers in these rifles – or stops these rifles from being used – it will have performed an important public service.
If you own one of these rifles or know someone who does, please visit Pubic Justice’s new Remington Rifle Trigger Defect Documents website and take action, immediately.ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean has a plan that will produce a nominee before his party’s convention in August, avoiding what he fears could be a “really ugly and nasty” fiasco.
Democratic leaders have begun complaining he has bungled the party’s nominating process and alienated voters because of his failure to engineer a political compromise in the DNC’s ill-advised decision to strip Florida and Michigan of all its delegates. But Mr. Dean, whose polls show the party’s internecine warfare is hurting its chances in November, has been talking to party bigwigs about a deal and now says the delegations will be seated before the nominating roll of the states is called.
The conventional wisdom says the battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will go all the way to the convention. But Mr. Dean wants it over well before that, and possibly before the last of the 10 remaining primaries are completed in June. And it is likely that will happen.
The scenario Mr. Dean and party leaders fear most is a bitter political floor fight in Denver that will deeply divide the party and send a message to the country that if the Democrats can’t govern themselves, how can they govern the country?
“There’ll be some nasty fights if it goes to convention, and people will walk out,” Mr. Dean told the Associated Press last week in an unusually blunt interview in which he said the candidates’ bitter infighting threatened to demoralize the party’s base and weaken its chances in November.
Mr. Dean’s stern admonition to both candidates to stop the attacks on one another, telling their supporters to “keep their mouths shut,” got lots of media attention. His plan to bring the nominating fight to an end, possibly before June, got little notice.
That plan calls on the remaining 350 or so undeclared superdelegates to break their neutrality sooner rather than later, providing enough votes to produce the 2,024-delegate majority needed to clinch the nomination. “There is no point in waiting,” Mr. Dean said, adding that he has been “talking to a fairly significant number of — by and large — nonaligned people about how we might resolve this.”
Indeed, neutral superdelegates (governors, members of Congress, Democratic National Committee members and other VIPs) have begun to break their silence in the last two weeks, all breaking for Mr. Obama: New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey and this week, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
So far, the delegate math favors Mr. Obama. Turning the corner into this week, he had 1,631 pledged delegates to Mrs. Clinton’s 1,501. Even if Mrs. Clinton were to win a majority of popular votes in most the remaining primaries, she still would not be able to pass him, because the party’s proportional delegate award system effectively preserves Mr. Obama’s lead.
The deceptive nature of the system at its very worst was seen in Texas where Hillary won, yet Mr. Obama edged ahead of her in the state delegate count because of its Byzantine system of separate caucuses that gave him four more delegates than she received.
She will likely win in Pennsylvania, but Mr. Obama will take Indiana and North Carolina and probably most of the smaller Western states to come.
Meanwhile, Mr. Dean hopes the rest of the superdelegates will follow his advice and declare their vote during the coming weeks and effectively end the race. If Mr. Obama’s lead holds, as is likely, he will be close to 2,000 delegates, allowing the superdelegates to put him over the top.
As for Florida and Michigan, Mr. Dean is making it clear to party leaders that once the nomination race is all but over, there will be an agreement to seat both delegations under a proportional formula still to be worked out.
But neither campaign is ready to compromise at present. “Let me just say that the campaigns believe that kind of deal is premature right now,” he said.
Meantime, John McCain has been effectively reaching out to the GOP’s base to unite his party and assemble an organization for the general election. He has put Lew Eisenberg, former partner at the big Wall Street investment bank, Goldman Sachs, in charge of fund-raising. Insiders tell me contributions have risen significantly.
Mr. McCain picked conservative strategist Frank Donatelli, White House political director under President Reagan, to be the Republican National Committee’s deputy chairman and the campaign’s liaison to the RNC.
He has also hired former RNC political director Mike DuHaime, who ran Rudy Giuliani’s presidential bid. A veteran strategist who oversaw the voter turnout apparatus that re-elected President Bush, he will help build the RNC’s campaign operation.
It may take months before the Democrats entirely get their act together, and how unified it will be remains a huge question. Meanwhile, Mr. McCain is already running his campaign, airing TV ads, staffing state and regional operations and sharpening issues the GOP believes will defeat a divided and dispirited opposition.
Donald Lambro, chief political correspondent of The Washington Times, is a nationally syndicated columnist.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Posted
Japanese and US nuclear experts warn that another earthquake hitting Fukushima could spark a disaster worse than Chernobyl.
Source: 7.30 | Duration: 8min 29sec
Topics: nuclear-energy, ethics, grief, earthquake, emergency-incidents, emergency-planning, nuclear-accident, tidal-wave, nuclear-issues, air-pollution, land-pollution, water-pollution, world-politics, journalism, activism-and-lobbying, japan
Transcript
LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: One more major earthquake in Japan and the nation could face a nuclear disaster 10 times the scale of Chernobyl. That's what experts are telling 7.30.
When Japan was hit last year by a massive earthquake and tsunami, the world feared nuclear catastrophe.
The nation's Fukushima nuclear reactors were inside the disaster zone.
We've not heard much about them for a while, but the danger certainly hasn't passed.
Experts say the situation inside Fukushima reactor number four is precarious, as North Asia correspondent Mark Willacy reports from Fukushima.
MARK WILLACY, REPORTER: It's said fortune favours the brave. And after enduring an earthquake, a tsunami and a series of nuclear meltdowns, the people of Fukushima reckon they're due for some luck.
For 13 months, this track was idle. Horses and people kept away because of the fear of radiation. But today, Fukushima is out for a flutter.
So is this a sign that Fukushima's luck is turning? Possibly. But few here actually realise that a few kilometres to the east is the spent fuel pool of the Fukushima nuclear plant, containing enough nuclear fuel to spawn a catastrophe to dwarf Chernobyl.
In the gloom of this pool, a 1,331 highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel assemblies each containing dozens of rods.
ROBERT ALVAREZ, INSTITUTE OF POLICY STUDIES: The spent fuel pool number four at Fukushima, based on my sorta calculations, contains roughly 10 times more cesium 137 then released by the Chernobyl accident.
MARK WILLACY: It's also clear from this footage that the pool is littered with debris from last year's disaster.
HIROAKI KOIDE, NUCLEAR ENGINEER (voiceover translation): The nuclear fuel in that pool is 2.5 times what's needed in a reactor core. It contains 5,000 times more cesium than was released by the Hiroshima bomb and the pool is just hanging there. We don't know when it could collapse.
MARK WILLACY: This is where the pool sits, five storeys above the ground next to the reactor. That is how things are supposed to look. This is how the reactor building looks now after a hydrogen explosion blew it apart. The blast tore off the roof and caused a reinforced wall of the fuel pool to bulge by up to 3.5 centimetres. As for the hundreds of tonnes of spent fuel, until this month its only protection from the elements was a white plastic sheet. Some nuclear experts warn Japan is literally playing with fire.
HIROAKI KOIDE (voiceover translation): If there's a crack in the pool and water drains out, the fuel rods will be exposed. It will then be impossible to cool the fuel. So if an accident happens, 10 times more cesium than has already been released by the Fukushima meltdown will go into the atmosphere. Depending on which way the wind is blowing, Tokyo could become uninhabitable.
MARK WILLACY: Hiroaki Koide is a senior nuclear reactor engineer at Japan's prestigious Kyoto University and one of the experts raising the alarm.
HIROAKI KOIDE (voiceover translation): As soon as possible, those fuel rods should be removed. Earthquakes are striking almost every day around the Fukushima plant, so I'm praying that a big one won't hit.
MARK WILLACY: This warning is echoed by international nuclear safety experts, among them, Robert Alvarez, a former advisor to the US Secretary of Energy.
ROBERT ALVAREZ: You have a very, very large concentration of radioactivity where the only thing that keeps that radioactivity from being released through a catastrophic fire is a pool of water. That pool is 100 feet off the ground in a structurally damaged building in a high-risk earthquake zone. I mean, what more you can be worried about?
MARK WILLACY: But the operator of Fukushima TEPCO brushes all this aside, arguing that despite being open to the elements and in a damaged building 30 metres above the ground, the pool is safe.
YOSHIMI HITOSUGI, TEPCO SPOKESMAN (voiceover translation): We checked its condition the other day and although there is a bulge in one wall, we don't think this will have any effect on the soundness of the pool or the building. We believe both can withstand a large earthquake.
MARK WILLACY: And on the matter of removing the fuel rods, TEPCO appears in no great hurry.
YOSHIMI HITOSUGI (voiceover translation): The original method was to take out the spent fuel via crane attached to the ceiling of the building, but that's been damaged, so we are thinking of installing a crane for this. We would like to start removing the fuel some time next year.
ROBERT ALVAREZ: They have to have a heavy overhead crane. They're going to have to manipulate the spent fuel under water constantly, put it into containers that are very heavy involving perhaps containers that may weigh as much as 100 tonnes.... This requires extraordinary precautions, even under a routine basis, so given the magnitude of the damage, that sort of ups the stakes quite a bit in terms of the capability to safely remove this material.
MARK WILLACY: Ever since the meltdowns, TEPCO has maintained a veil of secrecy over what's happening at Fukushima. But one man has managed to penetrate it. Tomohiko Suzuki is a rarity in Japanese journalism: a reporter prepared to put his health on the line to get to the truth.
TOMOHIKO SUZUKI, JOURNALIST (voiceover translation): When I went undercover as a worker at the Fukushima plant, I wore protection gear, but over my sleeve I wore this watch, which has a secret camera inside.
MARK WILLACY: With his secret camera watch and other hidden devices, Suzuki recorded life inside the Fukushima plant. Working next to the reactor four building, he was shocked by what he was told about the fuel pool 30 metres above him.
TOMOHIKO SUZUKI (voiceover translation): I spoke to a worker who helped reinforce the reactor four building. He said the spent fuel pool has vast amounts of heavy water in it and that the steel support frames were damaged, but he told me that the reinforcement of the pool was jerry-rigged, so if a typhoon or a tornado hits, it will be dangerous.
MARK WILLACY: Sound far-fetched? Well, just last month a neighbouring prefecture to Fukushima was smashed by the most violent tornados recorded in Japanese history.
MISUHEI MURATA, FORMER JAPANESE DIPLOMAT: I call it the sickness of Japan. First, we hide, then we postpone and then we assume no responsibility.
MARK WILLACY: Misuhei Murata is a former Japanese ambassador to Switzerland. He's brought his fears about the fuel pool to the attention of the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
MISUHEI MURATA: TEPCO and the Government of Japan not only lacks the ability, but the intention.
MARK WILLACY: So in your opinion if there was a problem with that fuel pool, it would be the end of Japan?
MISUHEI MURATA: Yes. There is no-one who denies that.... We cannot sleep peacefully.
MARK WILLACY: So who should be the people of Fukushima back? A collection of nuclear experts, journalists and concerned activists struggling to be heard, or TEPCO with its history of cover-ups and incompetence?
VOX POP (voiceover translation): I do not believe TEPCO. I do not feel safe at all. Radiation levels are still high.
HIROAKI KOIDE (voiceover translation): TEPCO says the fuel pool can withstand the next big earthquake, but I can't believe this. That's why I'm so worried.
ROBERT ALVAREZ: Nothing like this has ever happened before and we are sort of charting unknown waters here. And this is a problem that if such an event were to occur, it would be of an international dimension.
LEIGH SALES: Mark Willacy reporting.This piece is part of a series on Tim Edgar's new book, "Beyond Snowden."
One of the most important revelations following the disclosures by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden was the inadequate oversight of highly invasive U.S. surveillance programs.
Both internal and external checks failed to quickly identify illegal collection of domestic communications. Tim Edgar’s new book, Beyond Snowden, serves as an important reminder that the oversight system remains badly broken, and recommends that government surveillance programs rely more on technology to enforce privacy protections.
In the current political environment where the same party controls both Congress and the executive branch, the danger that U.S. surveillance program misuse will remain undetected is even greater, because there’s less incentive to probe the activities of one’s own party.
The current oversight system still largely relies on self-reporting by NSA, which has repeatedly failed to detect its own missteps in a timely manner. At the same time, both congressional and judicial oversight of complex surveillance programs lack sufficient technical expertise to independently look under the hood, making them highly reliant on the attestations of top NSA officials.
Having seen the government’s national security operations from both inside the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the White House, Edgar provides a striking critique of all branches of government. “Far too often, the three branches of government have competed with each other not in keeping surveillance within bounds but in avoiding accountability,” he writes.
NSA oversight is critical, given the agency’s long history of mismanaging large, sensitive programs. In more than a decade covering the spy agency as a journalist, I found repeated instances of mismanagement at NSA, stretching back to at least 1999, when a pair of NSA studies cited lack of vision at the agency.
The secret loosening of internal checks on NSA programs following the 9/11 terrorist attacks resulted in the warrantless surveillance program, Stellar Wind. This program incorporated portions of an earlier NSA program, known as ThinThread, but with its privacy protections stripped out.
Edgar reminds us that the judicial checks put into place after parts of Stellar Wind were revealed by The New York Times and USA Today in 2005 and 2006 failed to prevent or even quickly identify problems with the NSA’s program that tapped the internet backbone and collected vast swaths of domestic phone records. This failure led to repeated violations of court orders and, in the case of the internet backbone taps, Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
The agency chalked up these problems to misunderstandings of its own technology, rather than a desire to pry into the lives of tens of thousands of Americans. That defense was hardly confidence-inspiring.
These admissions of program failures, which didn’t come straight from the Snowden trove but from the political pressure he triggered, was one of the most significant revelations that followed the Snowden disclosures.
Continued problems with NSA’s program that taps the internet backbone led it to curb an element of the program, because it proved too difficult to execute without committing privacy violations. That the agency made this decision, and made it public, signals progress, but it came eight years after the issue was initially identified.
The best way to resolve the NSA oversight dilemma is to make it far less reliant on agency self-policing, lawmakers’ political incentives to probe the powerful spy agency, and a secret court that lacks sufficient technical expertise.
Edgar points to multiple technical solutions that show promise and should at least be piloted as part of the next round of surveillance reform, when Congress reevaluates a critical component of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as Section 702.
While Edgar somewhat facetiously calls this approach technical “magic,” it’s just math. By creatively using encryption techniques—an approach somewhat similar to those deployed in the ThinThread program before those privacy protections were stripped out—the NSA could design its technology to police itself.
With the goal of enabling national security analysis without collateral damage to privacy, Edgar points in particular to processes known as encrypted search or homomorphic encryption, which allow analysts to conduct complex analysis of data sets while they are still encrypted. Analysts would only obtain the data that is truly relevant to their search.
“You can collect the data you need, but only if you provide a rigorous technical proof that offers guarantees for the privacy of the data you do not need,” Edgar writes
Privacy benefits aside, creating a more disciplined collection system is arguably more effective, because it is more focused. Given the NSA’s chronic challenges with managing large programs, designing programs to collect data sets that are more focused on the information it truly |
from the S60.
Similarly, the quality of the stills are nothing worth shouting about but probably good enough for a keepsake.
Of course, that ultra-wide angle lens has a tendency to warp the world around you, so watch those straight lines.
Video framerate seems stable, with little in the way of frame loss even in fairly dark conditions. The lens provides an adequately wide perspective which should show off most of what’s in front of you, whether you’re mountain biking or using the S60 as a dash cam. In favourable conditions, video quality is grainy but good enough — but in the wrong conditions, this isn’t the case.
There seem to be “pollution simulator” levels of glare under certain conditions, mostly when you’re facing the sun or directly under bright white cloud. Check out this still image taken on a bright yet overcast Melbourne day:
Under such conditions, color and detail become washed out; clarity diminishes and you might find that you’re left with less than adequate footage. A makeshift lens hood may help the situation.
Using The S60
The S60 is equipped to shoot 1080p video at 30 frames per second, and capture still images of up to 12 megapixels. You can use it as both a webcam and a USB mass storage device, and even connect your smartphone using the SooCoo app. The battery life provided by the 1050mAh removable Li-ion cell is pleasantly surprising, providing around two hours of solid recording in our tests (expect less when you’re turning it on and off all the time).
A smartphone connection provides a preview of your S60’s viewfinder, albeit with a few seconds’ worth of delay. You can start recording, take still photos, adjust camera settings and even download video and still images you’ve shot straight to your iPhone or Android device. The only drawback is that you’ll need to connect directly to the device using your iPhone’s Wi-Fi connection, though it all works as advertised.
The S60 is a cheap weatherproof means of shooting high definition video, and given the right conditions you’ll be quite pleased with the footage. The camera comes with a decent selection of mounts to facilitate sticking the S60 on helmets, dashboards, handlebars and tripods. Easy access to removable batteries and storage means you can stock up on Li-ion cells and MicroSD cards before you head out too.
There are also a few nifty features hidden away in the S60’s menu. These include cyclic recording, which splits your footage automatically into clips of two, five and ten minutes. It’s worth noting that the S60 only records clips of 30 minutes before creating a new file, so don’t expect hour-plus-long recordings.
There’s also a motion detection recording mode, and the usual adjustments you’d expect to white balance and exposure value while recording video. In still photo mode you can get a little more hands on with the photo controls, and even shoot a time-lapse sequence using the in-built (but limited) functionality.
Unfortunately the S60 has its fair share of flaws also. Aside from some build quality and footage issues, the LEDs on top of the unit cast an unsightly shadow as a result of their proximity to the lens barrel. In completely dark conditions these LEDs cast a “V” shaped beam of light, which won’t ruin your shot but will surely make you wish that SooCoo had put a little more thought into their placement.
Lastly, the instruction manual is confusing and unhelpful. There are very few images and illustrations, and the instructions barely qualify as English. Nowhere does the manual specify which memory card (or maximum size) is to be used, and is littered with phrases like “as shown in below pictures” when no pictures are included.
Why Buy An S60?
If you can live with the risk of less-than-stellar footage, slightly questionable build quality and you’re happy to explore and figure everything out without a manual to help, you might just get on with the S60. If you’re in the market for a budget action or dashboard camera 6 Ways To Use GoPro Cameras That Don't Involve Extreme Sports 6 Ways To Use GoPro Cameras That Don't Involve Extreme Sports GoPro cameras can be used in plenty of ways other than shooting extreme sports, six of which we'll be exploring in this article. Read More, you can comfortably save $300 on the price of the real deal and walk away from your next downhill trail with more than just memories and bruises.
Then again if you really want to guarantee top quality footage and are buying a device that you want to last you, you should absolutely be considering the real deal in the form of a GoPro or one of its equally-pricey rivals. You simply can’t rely on the S60 in the same way, but that might not matter too much if you’re only looking for a grainy keepsake, or looking for an occasional use action cam.
Our verdict of the SooCoo S60 :
The S60 is a cheap weatherproof means of shooting high definition video, and given the right conditions you’ll be quite pleased with the footage. It isn’t the same build quality as a $400 GoPro, but then it’s 1/4 of the price. 6 10
Soocoo S60 Action Camera Giveaway
Send your products to be reviewed. Contact James Bruce for further details.Well, Officer Willie couldn't understand what Jesse was saying and said that made it disrespectful. By the way, you are not required to respect the police by law, that includes clownish buffoons named Officer Willie. Office Willie's little, tiny, immature ego (you didn't think I was going to the other place) was bruised. The poor baby was devastated and lost his temper and started screaming at this retarded boy. The boy, given his disability, didn't understand what was going on. But then with mental cases like Officer Willie even fully mature, totally rational people, would have trouble understanding what was going on. Officer Willie need a rubber, well, a rubber room and some medications to sedate him. After that he needs a nice warm jail cell.
A neighbor witnessing the insane police officer throwing his toys out of the cot tried to tell him that the boy is retarded and can't speak properly and didn't understand what was happening. Well, adrenaline junky Officer Willie was already high on his own exaggerated powers, threatened to arrest the neighbor and ordered him to go back into his house. This is man who is clearly unstable emotionally and impervious to reason. He needs a straightjacket not a badge and a gun.
Jesse did what most kids, especially those with developmental issues, would do. He ran to his mother for help. His mother, Pamela Ford, opened the door of her home to see what was going on. She then witnessed the maddened Officer Willie, and his partner in crime, Officer John Howard, fire tasers into the frightened boy. Tasers are deadly weapons and routinely kill people.
Jesse did not commit a crime. He was not a suspect in a crime. He was being questioned by a power-hungry thug. He is a minor, who, if questioned has a right to have a parent present. He is mentally challenged and doesn't understand what is going on. He doesn't know that cops are dangerous to all peaceful people. He doesn't understand that many of them, like Officer Willie, are mental cases who get their rocks off by hurting people and ordering them around.
By now the thugs were in a feeding frenzy. Ford and a family friend, Christopher Peyton, kept telling the officers that Jesse was retarded and handicapped and had no idea what was going on. But who would when facing an enraged, irrational, wild animal?
The officers responded to this information by using pepper spray on the boy and punching him multiple times. Of course, the fuckwads called for back-up so 20 of their fellow brother thugs descended on the house. Numerous people continued to plead with the officers and tell them they were beating up a retarded kid! They didn't care.
They handcuffed the boy and tossed him into a police car and then went in their Newspeak mode. The boy, who was a victim of a violent assault, was charged with assaulting a "peace officer." This is not a peace officer by any means. And Jesse didn't assault the police, they assaulted him. Typical of how cops twist things to mean their opposite. He was charged with resisting arrest. That means running to his mother for help. And he was charged with "obstructing official business." These are catch-all accusations that police routinely throw at someone when the police are in the wrong.
Jesse is taken to court and the judge says he's mentally incompetent to stand trial and dismisses the charges. If the boy was mentally incompetent to defend himself in court, then he was mentally incompetent to be subjected to an illegal police interrogation. Dayton and little Willie are being sued, as should be the case. But Officer Willie and Co., should be removed from duty, without pay. Criminal charges should be laid against them and, if convicted, they should be sent to jail. In addition, Willie and friends should individually be required to make financial restitution to the boy they assaulted
Here are the facts as described in the legal suit brought against Willie and the City of Dayton. The police of chief in Dayton seems to hide his email address. I urge you to send an email to Mayor Gary Leitzell instead. His email is gary.leitzell@daytonohio.gov. As always be respectful to the mayor but demand the removal of Hooper and Howard from the Dayton police force as threats to public safety.
Jesse Kersey, 17, is mentally challenged. And like many with this problem he has a speech impediment. He was outside his house riding his bike when a gang member, also called the police, stopped him to question him, apparently for no reason at all. Perhaps the thug in blue just wanted to throw his weight around. The criminal, by the way, goes by the name of Officer Willie Hooper. Willie? Really? What is he, 10-years-old?
Labels: police abuse10-16-2017 (Photo: File:Mi6.london.arp.jpg) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules Twitter: @BatchelorShow
Why is Mueller chasing Steele? @ConradMBlack
Robert Mueller, Comey’s friend and benefactor (who has packed his staff with notorious Clintonians), is reduced to a shakedown operation on former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, including a Gestapo-style dawn raid on his home with armed men in his bedroom and Mrs. Manafort in night attire (as people often are when asleep at night), followed by hours ransacking the home. This is not the conduct of a serious investigation getting warm in a chase for evidence of monstrous improprieties. The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Richard Burr (R., N.C.), who all but asked for the Medal of Freedom for not going to lunch at the White House with other Republican senators during the health-care struggle in the Senate (showing his independence), and Senator Mark Warner (D., Va.), who has been announcing for months with tedious antagonism that they have “lots of smoke” but not yet a fire, acknowledged last week that they have nothing because the whole argument is in the Steele Dossier, hearsay of hearsay commissioned by Trump enemies and riddled with salacious and scatological fatuities.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/452532/donald-trump-steele-dossier-never-trumpers-are-desperateAbout
A few years back, I had a long look at my life. I just wanted to break free! And I am sure, most of you out there would know where I'm coming from. But it looked grim. How could I solve an issue that seemingly only 1% of the world can solve? I decided to think outside the box.
First, I looked at everyone else. There is a hell of a lot of people out there who have the same problem that I do, and whatever 99% of them are doing, is wrong. So, what were they doing to solve the issue? Get more income, and be free!
This age old solution is a lie! Only 1% of people who try to break free this way will actually do it, and it will be more luck and inheritance than skill. As you increase your income, you generally have to pull more hours. And your expenses will slowly creep up too. Not to mention that pesky flaw in the plan, inflation! When I first started my career, I set an income goal for myself that was in the high earners bracket... 10 years later, and I have achieved that goal, but my income is now only in the average earners area!
So... with all this taken into consideration, I knew what I had to do to dramatically increase my chances of breaking free... The opposite of what everyone else is doing! I instantly took my focus away from my income, and started focusing on my expenses.
“Sure, that’s just budgeting” you say? Kind of… But I went one step further. I aimed on ELIMINATING the ‘compulsory’ expenses. Power, water, and the big one, shelter. But without compromising on the comforts that modern living can provide. And after massive amounts of research, I stumbled upon the solution!
A completely self-sustainable motorhome, that is so massive that it has more living space than most apartments. Complete with a spa, ensuite to the main, fully computerised entertainment throughout, and a lockup garage… And all for under $80,000.00 AU!
Pledging just $50.00 AU, will get you a video series that details everything you need to know about making this a reality. I will show you exact amounts of money that you need to get started, and give you some tips and a budgeting plan. After, I will take you shopping for your platform. You will be amazed at what kind of massive coaches you can get for the price of a normal car. Using my skills as an engineer, I will show you exactly what you need, and some important key components to look at.
I will show you everything, from homemade centrifugal oil filters to cut the fuel bill down to a quarter of the price, to how to buy and install a huge solar farm for a fraction of the price you think it will cost. Including how to use legal gaps to your advantage, and keep your new home in places for free without breaking any laws.
Whether you intend on using it as a home to save for a mortgage, enjoy life more, or just tour Australia, this is well worth the time to invest in. And I say investment as this will cost you around $80,000.00 AU from start to finish, and a fully functional motorhome of this size never sells for less than $200,000.00 AU.
Join me in this project, and set yourself free!Stockholm was covered by at least 30 centimetres of snow early on Thursday morning, more than on any other November day since records began in 1905, according to national weather agency SMHI.
The previous November record was in 1985 and 2004 when the snow was 29 centimetres thick (however, that does not even come close to the all-time record for Stockholm: 76 centimetres in March 1909).
“In the morning around 21 centimetres had fallen. During the day another 15 to 20 centimetres fell,” SMHI meteorologist Elisabeth Saarnak told Aftonbladet on Wednesday.
On Thursday morning at 7am the snow was 39 centimetres thick at SMHI's weather station in Stockholm.
The sudden snowfall – brilliantly known as a'snow cannon' in Swedish – created huge problems for many commuters on Wednesday. Many buses across the capital and beyond were cancelled, and drivers were forced to abandon their cars on the motorway. Several reported being stuck in their cars for ten hours.
In the Järfälla suburb of Stockholm, public transport operator Nobina replaced their buses with boats taking passengers from Klara Mälarstrand in central Stockholm to Jakobsberg and Kallhäll.
READ ALSO: Four times Swedes took on the snow chaos and won
At 3am on Thursday traffic authorities were still at work salvaging vehicles that had got stuck in the snow, and warned commuters not to bring their car to work. Public transport operator SL also said that delays were expected on Thursday, especially for buses, and the local authority urged Stockholmers to work from home if possible.
“We completely understand that not everyone can work from home, but those who can should consider it. Otherwise, leave as early as possible. There will be a lot of people on the road at the same time,” council transport spokesperson Anders Porelius told Aftonbladet.
By Thursday evening clouds had moved north and snow had fallen over most of Västernorrland, Gävleborg and parts of Jämtland counties. Snow was also forecast to fall on southern country Kalmar.This Thanksgiving, Carve Out Time To Talk About End-Of-Life Wishes
Enlarge this image Katherine Streeter for NPR Katherine Streeter for NPR
The roast turkey and pecan pie may be the same as always, but growing numbers of families plan to add a tradition to their Thanksgiving holiday this week: a frank talk about their wishes for end-of-life care.
Paul Malley, president of Aging with Dignity, the agency behind Five Wishes, a popular living will template, says requests for the documents that guide decisions surrounding serious illness and death typically surge starting now.
"We see a bit of a Thanksgiving rush and a bit of a Christmas rush in December," says Malley, who notes that 30 million copies of Five Wishes have been distributed since 1998.
Now, turkey dinner with a side dish of death isn't everyone's idea of a festive meal. But end-of-life planning advocates say the holidays are an ideal time to have these conversations.
"People come home for the holidays," says Ellen Goodman, the longtime columnist and reporter. She co-founded The Conversation Project, which provides kits to kick-start end-of-life discussions. "It's one of those times when we're together. It's something that's important to talk about."
While many families will start such discussions for the first time this year, Dr. Patricia Bomba's family has made the talks a tradition since 1992.
"After the dinner dishes are cleared, the adults in our family stay at the table and talk about what matters most in our lives," says Bomba, who designs and implements community projects on palliative care as vice president and medical director for geriatrics for Excellus BlueCross BlueShield in New York.
Her family joke is: "There's no pumpkin pie until you tell me how you want to live until you die," she adds. But those holiday sessions helped guide serious decisions when Bomba's mother died, she says.
These conversations typically occur between middle-aged children and their elderly parents or grandparents, but they should include all of the adults in a family, Malley says.
"Don't just put your grandparents in the hot seat," he says. "It makes for a better and easier family conversation if everyone is in it together."
The goal is to ensure that people's preferences are honored. But the talks also can reduce the guilt and depression many family members feel after a loved one dies.
"You can talk about what your values are, who you want to make decisions for you, the care you want, the care you don't want," Goodman says.
Often, though, no one wants to broach the subject, even when they think they should. A 2013 Conversation Project survey found that while 90 percent of people said its important to have end-of-life discussions with their loved ones, fewer than 30 percent had done so.
Nationwide, about a third of adults in the U.S. have completed written advance directives that spell out wishes for care or designate the person they'd like to carry them out, according to a 2017 study in the journal Health Affairs.
Research shows that advance care planning, including the use of written documents, can increase the chances that people's end-of-life wishes will be followed.
But talking about it is key."Just checking the boxes is not what makes the difference,"says Jeannette Koijane, executive director of Kokua Mau, the Hawaii Hospice and Palliative Care Organization in Honolulu. "It's the conversation that makes the difference," she says.
Having those conversations in person is important, too, says Malley, who plans to help his parents, who are in their 70s, update their documents over the holiday.
"It's a natural time to discuss, "Which one of us boys do you want to be your health care agent?' " says Malley, the youngest of three brothers.
Still, starting such a conversation can be difficult, Goodman says.
"People think if I bring this up with my elderly parents, they're going to think I want them dead. Or there's something wrong," she says.
But if family members can explain that the goal is to understand what matters most to the person at the end of life, the conversation changes. The agency has put together a video that uses humor to show how to break the ice.
Goodman says sees a shift in the culture surrounding end-of-life wishes, even in the five years since The Conversation Project started.
Back then, the specter of "death panels" nearly derailed Obamacare. Today, end-of-life conversations are being paid for by Medicare and books like Atul Gawande's Being Mortal have topped the best-seller list.
"I'm convinced we're at a tipping point," Goodman says. "It's so important to get it right. When you get it wrong, you get something big wrong."
KHN's coverage of end-of-life and serious illness issues is supported by The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and its coverage related to aging & improving care of older adults is supported by The John A. Hartford Foundation.
Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit health newsroom whose stories appear in news outlets nationwide, is an editorially independent part of the Kaiser Family Foundationposter="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201612/158/1155968404_5237522229001_5237522152001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true Trump: Cancel Boeing’s Air Force One contract 'I think Boeing is doing a little bit of a number,' he says.
Donald Trump on Tuesday called for the cancellation of a Defense Department contract with Boeing to build the next generation of presidential aircraft, decrying the deal as too expensive.
“Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!” the president-elect wrote on Twitter.
Story Continued Below
“The plane is totally out of control. It’s going to be over $4 billion for Air Force One program and I think it’s ridiculous," Trump elaborated in brief comments to reporters at Trump Tower. "I think Boeing is doing a little bit of a number. We want Boeing to make a lot of money, but not that much money.”
The president-elect's most recent financial disclosure form, filed in May and detailing his 2015 holdings, showed that the Manhattan billionaire owned between $50,001 and $100,000 worth of stock in Boeing, a purchase he announced on Twitter in 2013. Jason Miller, a spokesman for Trump, said Tuesday morning that had Trump sold all of his stocks last June.
Miller added that the exact details of Trump's desire to cancel the Boeing order would be dealt with after he is inaugurated next month. But Trump's comments, Miller said, "really speaks to the president-elect’s focus on keeping costs down across the board."
Trump's surprise rebuke of Boeing's presidential aircraft project came on the heels of a private-sector victory of sorts for the president-elect: his team's successful negotiation with Carrier Air Conditioning to keep several hundred jobs in Indiana that had previously been slated to move to Mexico. The two very public interactions with private corporations, albeit ones who do significant business with the federal government, are early indicators that Trump seems intent on bringing his aggressive deal-making style with him to the White House.
Trump has thus far not shied away from breaking president-elect protocol in other ways too: He spoke on the phone late last week with the president of Taiwan, the first known communication between a Taiwanese leader and U.S. president or president-elect since 1979. Trump did not communicate with the State Department before taking the call, something past presidents-elect have done in similarly contentious situations, a department spokesman said Monday.
Trump's tweet came just 22 minutes after the Chicago Tribune published comments by Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who said he worried that Trump's promises of a more protectionist trade policy could hurt his company, which does robust business with China. Muilenburg told the Tribune that he would urge the president-elect to take a warmer stance toward the kinds of trade deals he railed against on the campaign trail, warning, "If we do not lead when it comes to writing these rules, our competitors will write them for us."
Boeing stock slumped Tuesday morning in the wake of the president-elect's remark, but rebounded somewhat as the morning progressed.
The Air Force said previously that it had earmarked $1.65 billion for two new presidential aircraft, which will be four-engine Boeing 747-8s. The source of Trump's $4 billion cost estimate for the program was not immediately clear, although a Government Accountability Office report from last March priced it at roughly $3.2 billion.
The two planes are so expensive, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said, because of the added features demanded by White House security personnel. Air Force One is “a flying White House, in terms of the security,” she said, noting that the new aircraft would be able to defend itself against missile attacks and give the president the ability to communicate with nuclear forces and allow him or her to run the government for extended periods of time if need be.
James said the experts offering the recommendations for the next generation Air Force One are “not political appointees. They are professional security people.”
"Air Force One, although it is a 747 platform, is way, way more than what you would think of as a commercial airliner," the Air Force secretary said. "This is carrying the president of the United States. It has to go long distances, it has to survive under difficult circumstances, much more difficulty than a normal civilian airliner. So it is a bit more complicated than perhaps meets the eye."
The Pentagon announced the deal with Boeing last January, awarding an initial contract worth nearly $26 million for initial research for the new planes, according to Reuters. The Defense Department awarded an additional $127.3 million contract in July to develop interior, power and electronic specifications for the next-generation aircraft, according to FlightGlobal, a publication that covers the aviation industry.
"We are currently under contract for $170 million to help determine the capabilities of these complex military aircraft that serve the unique requirements of the President of the United States," Boeing said in a statement released Tuesday morning. "We look forward to working with the U.S. Air Force on subsequent phases of the program allowing us to deliver the best planes for the president at the best value for the American taxpayer."
Speaking aboard the current Air Force One during President Barack Obama’s trip to MacDill Air Force Base, where he will speak to U.S. Central Command, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest questioned Trump's $4 billion figure. “Some of the statistics that have been, uh, cited, shall we say, don't appear to reflect the nature of the financial agreement between Boeing and the Department of Defense," he said.
Aircraft in the presidential fleet have “unique technical requirements,” Earnest said, adding that “the American people would expect that future U.S. presidents would benefit from unique and upgraded capabilities while they are traveling and representing the interests of the United States around the world.” He noted that the plane on which he and the president and the traveling pool were currently flying is "nearing the end of its projected life.”
In addition to the presidential aircraft that Trump will fly on as president, the Manhattan billionaire maintains a personal fleet that includes two planes and three helicopters. The New York Times reported last April that four of Trump's five aircraft are more than 20 years old, which is rare for someone of the president-elect's wealth. According to the Times, Trump's largest, and favorite, aircraft from the fleet is his 1991 Boeing 757, which has brushed 24-karat gold fixtures and leather toilet seats.
President Barack Obama voiced a similar concern shortly after taking office in 2009, when Reuters reported that he told a group of lawmakers that costs for a Lockheed-Martin program to replace the presidential helicopter fleet had "gone amok." He told that group, gathered at the White House, that reining in military spending would be "one of our highest priorities" and added that "the helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me."
Asked how Obama’s concerns about the Lockheed-Martin contract differed from Trump’s regarding the presidential planes, Earnest said the helicopter program was much further along that Boeing’s is now and had costs that had far overrun what was originally expected. He also noted that Obama raised his concerns about the helicopter program’s costs at a "historically difficult" time for the U.S. economy, which was mired in recession.
Obama ultimately asked the Pentagon to revisit the program and find a way to better control costs, Earnest said. The press secretary added, "I expect that that effective management of that program will result in a new presidential helicopter that President-elect Trump will be glad that he has.”Editor's note: For more great stories about global education visit our Teaching the World page.
KOLKATA, India — A heavy silence has crept into the Rawla residence on Penn Road in India’s Eastern city of Kolkata.
Sheena Rawla, who hasn’t left her home in several weeks, draws comfort from reading religious verses throughout the day. Her husband, Ajay Rawla, who runs a jute business, finds little solace in going to his office, but prefers instead, to look through cherished family photographs to alleviate his pain. Their two teenage children spend the day quietly reading or visiting friend’s homes to seek temporary refuge from the emptiness that has gripped their lives.
Five months ago, on a seemingly innocuous Friday afternoon, Ajay and Sheena’s youngest son hanged himself in the terrace room of his Kolkata home. Rouvanjit Rawla was a month shy of turning 13. Too young to understand the complexities of a modern world, yet traumatized enough to not want to belong to it anymore.
Rouwanjit committed suicide four days after he was caned by the principal of his school, La Martiniere, a prestigious private school in Kolkata, over disciplinary issues.
On that fateful Friday, Rouvanjit took stink bombs to school and was made to stand outside the classroom. Investigations by India’s National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) reveal that Rouvanjit allegedly suffered humiliation and abuse at the hands of the principal and three teachers over several months.
“The principal confessed to me he broke the cane on Rouvan’s back,” said Ajay Rawla, eyes filling with tears. “He showed no remorse.”
In June, Rawla filed a police complaint against the school’s principal and three teachers. “They say the heaviest burden on earth is the weight of the coffin of a child on his father’s shoulders. I have been that unlucky father.”
Rouvanjit’s death has sent shock waves across the country and has become a lightning rod for the issue of corporal punishment in Indian schools. The case has grabbed national attention because it involved a middle-class family and happened at one of the country’s most elite schools, a formidable 170-year-old institution with illustrious alumni.
India’s Supreme Court has banned corporal punishment in schools. Yet, as is often the case in India, there is a wide gap between the law and its implementation. Reports show children in India are routinely beaten in schools.
A 2007 national study by India’s Ministry of Women and Child Welfare Development reveals two out of three children across India’s 13 states have suffered physical abuse in schools, the most common form includes hitting with hands and stick, pulling hair and ears, kicking and making children stand for long periods of time in various positions.
UNICEF India, which calls corporal punishment invariably degrading, says this crime is rampant in every school district across the country. According to its reports, most children do not confide about the matter to anyone and suffer silently. The NCPCR, which is calling for the suspension of the principal, echoes UNICEF’s findings.
“Unfortunately, even the most reputed schools, we have a history and culture of this kind of abuse that’s meted out and widely accepted,” said Lov Verma, secretary of NCPCR in a phone interview. “We have the laws in place, but we need to change the mind sets.”
Sunirmal Chakravarthi, the principal of La Martinere has refused to resign. While he has apologized for the incident, Charaborty says the caning and the suicide are not related. He told the Indian Express newspaper: “Why should I resign? I am a teacher, not a criminal.”
In a largely conservative society, traditional values will take time to change, as reflected by the old guard which believes in the merits of disciplining children through some form of corporal punishment.
In newspaper columns and TV shows, eminent Indians have expressed this sentiment, referring to their own school days with a twist of nostalgia. Siddhartha Shankar Ray, a former chief minister of the state of Bengal, writes about how caning was part of growing up. “I learned to wear three or four pairs of shorts as protection [from caning,]” he wrote in a leading Indian newspaper.
Meanwhile, Rouvanjit’s suicide death has sparked a nationwide debate about improving communication between parents, teachers and kids.
Given the fierce competition to secure a spot in schools, starting from kindergarten, many parents are afraid to interfere with school authorities, reluctant to complain for fear of expulsion.
“If we complain, the teachers will take it out on our children,” said Manju Poddar, a housewife in Ludhiana, a mid-size city in the northern state of Punjab. “No one wants to take such a risk.”
Says Sankhya Reddy, a 6th grader in the southern city of Hyderabad, who didn’t want to name her school. “Teachers slap us on the cheek or hit us with a ruler if we are naughty. It’s very common, so we are used to it.”
With class sizes averaging 60 to 70 students, teachers in India are under a lot of stress. Says Ms. Ahmad, an 8th grade social sciences teacher at Step by Step, a private school in Noida, on the outskirts of New Delhi: “Classes are very large and the pressure on teachers is very great. However, in the interest of both students and teachers, schools need to devise a way of helping teachers handle this. Teachers also need to be empowered to express their point of view without fear.”
In the meantime, as the Rawla family awaits the police and the NCPCR’s final reports, their anguish seems to grow with each passing day. At the Rawla home, Rouvanjit’s presence can be felt everywhere, especially his room, a constant reminder to the family of his vivacious and spirited personality. His guitar sits on the top bunk of his double decker bed, Power Rangers action figures rest on the book shelf along with his favorite Percy Jackson series and his clothes line the cupboard.
“Rouvan was full of life, he was free with hugs to everyone,” said Anu Navlakha, Rouvanjit’s aunt, looking at the life-size photograph of Rouvanjit in the living room. “Several teachers spent several months breaking his spirit and he bore it stoically. He was no push-over, but he was sensitive. He didn’t want to hurt us, so he didn’t tell us anything. Our entire family is devastated by this loss.”
She shares a poem written by Rouvanjit’s friend on a Facebook site dedicated to her nephew, which has attracted hundreds of members.
Where have you gone
We grieve, we cry
We wipe our tears
The cut is deep
No balm can ease the pain
Life’s betrayal is completeThe 2017 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament has provided thrilling upsets and amazing comebacks in the first two rounds. Onion Sports presents a guide to the 10 players to watch in the Sweet 16.
Lauri Markkanen: Arizona’s Finnish freshman forward is just the latest product of Sean Miller’s famed Jyväskylä-to-Tucson recruiting pipeline.
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Devonte’ Graham: The Kansas point guard has amazed college basketball fans nationwide by having a recent arrest that only had to do with a traffic ticket.
Derek Willis: Kentucky will rely on the old-school veteran leadership of their only starter born before 1996.
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Isaac Haas: Purdue’s 7’2’’ junior is a specialist who excels at getting the ball down when it gets stuck between the rim and the backboard.
Sindarius Thornwell: The South Carolina senior guard and SEC Player of the Year was completely unknown until he had one good game in the NCAA Tournament.
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Quentin Goodin: The playmaking freshman hopes to overcome long odds to bring a national championship to wherever the fuck Xavier is.
Lonzo Ball: The star point guard has already verbally committed the next seven generations of his family to play for UCLA.
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Josh Jackson: The Kansas small forward has been able to maintain extreme focus throughout the season knowing that his teammates and coaches will always make excuses for his criminal behaviors.
Aldo: This south Florida native has provided Baylor with the end-to-end speed and staunch defense only a 1,100-pound, 15-foot crocodile can offer.
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Frank Mason III: Millions of fans will be cheering on the Jayhawks’ Mason in the hopes that he’ll solidify their only correct Final Four pick.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
Steven Gerrard and Glen Johnson have hit the news lately over their existing contract situation. Both, come July, could leave Liverpool FC on a free transfer.
Jon Flanagan and Suso also await contract extensions at Anfield.
But while Europe's top clubs could, in theory, agree deals for these players, the boot is also on the other foot.
The January transfer window will provide the first opportunity for the Reds to sign some top players from across Europe whose contracts are ready to expire. Pre-contract agreements can be penned by players who have less than six months remaining on their deals.
Here's who could be available to Liverpool next summer on a free – or even a cut-price deal in January if contracts remain unsigned.
Players under 24 may require compensation being paid.
Sami Khedira (Real Madrid)
Age: 27
Several clubs are said to be interested in signing the German defensive midfielder – Bayern Munich included – but would be a brilliant |
ald finished the game for Thomas. Seattle signed McDougald to a one-year deal in free agency figuring his starting experience from his time in Tampa Bay would give the Seahawks the insurance at free safety they didn't have when Thomas broke his leg last season. They may need it now, depending on the severity of Thomas' injury.President Donald Trump tweeted Sunday afternoon that if “something happens” as a result of a federal judge’s decision blocking Trump’s executive order on immigration, the judge and the “court system” will be to blame.
“Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril,” Trump tweeted. “If something happens, blame him and court system.”
On Friday, U.S. District Judge James Robart blocked Trump’s executive order temporarily barring visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States.
Trump lambasted him on Twitter as a “so-called judge” on Saturday, and continued to tweet criticism of Robart through Sunday morning.
Because the ban was lifted by a judge, many very bad and dangerous people may be pouring into our country. A terrible decision — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 4, 2017
Why aren’t the lawyers looking at and using the Federal Court decision in Boston, which is at conflict with ridiculous lift ban decision? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 4, 2017
The judge opens up our country to potential terrorists and others that do not have our best interests at heart. Bad people are very happy! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2017
Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2017
I have instructed Homeland Security to check people coming into our country VERY CAREFULLY. The courts are making the job very difficult! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2017
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) broke with Trump in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
“It is best not to single out judges,” McConnell said. “We all get disappointed from time to time. I think it is best to avoid criticizing them individually.”
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) also pushed back on Trump’s comments Sunday morning.
“I’ll be honest, I don’t understand language like that. We don’t have so-called judges. We don’t have so-called senators. We don’t have so-called presidents,” he said. “We have real judges.”
Vice President Mike Pence said in an interview aired Sunday that Robart “certainly” had the right to halt the order.South Korea's top court has unaniminously ruled to formally end impeached Park Geun-hye's presidency over a corruption scandal that has plunged the country into political turmoil.
The Constitutional Court's ruling on Friday sparked violent protests from Park's supporters, two of whom later succumbed to their wounds following clashes with police outside the building in downtown Seoul, according to authorities.
Dozens of protesters and police officers were also wounded in the scuffles.
In contrast, tens of thousands of South Koreans occupied a square in front of an old palace in the capital to celebrate Park's ousting.
The ruling opens Park, who no longer has immunity as a president, up to possible criminal proceedings - prosecutors have already named her a criminal suspect.
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: The day Park Geun-hye was ousted
It also marks the first time a South Korean president has been ousted before the end of their term since democracy replaced dictatorship in the late 1980s.
Election law now requires a snap poll to be held within 60 days.
Park, 65, has been accused of colluding with a friend, Choi Soon-sil, and a former presidential aide, both of whom have been on trial, to pressure big businesses to donate to two foundations set up to back her policy initiatives.
AL JAZEERA'S ROB MCBRIDE, IN SEOUL: On the upcoming election: It opens up all sorts of interesting prospects and possibilities. We have had in Park a second conservative president, and nearly 10 years of a conservative occupant of the Blue House. There is now a real feeling amongst many of the people who called for her impeachment, this younger generation engaged in politics that we’ve seen come out that they could be providing a kind of momentum that might see a liberal being elected to the president of South Korea. That could alter the whole geopolitical make-up of this part of the world, in particular the relationship with North Korea, and this scares many pro-Park people, many of the hawkish, more conservative people here who worry that any type of trying to opening up dialogue with North Korea is counterproductive in the carrot and stick approach - what they advocate is basically the stick with North Korea and to be tough with them. On North Korea's reaction: In North Korea the court's ruling has not gone unnoticed. It has been announced on the evening newscast that Park - with some relish it has to be said -is to be dumped out of office and according to North Korean television could well be treated no better than a common criminal in court.
She is also accused of soliciting bribes from the head of the Samsung Group for government favours including the backing of a merger of two Samsung affiliates in 2015 that was seen to support the succession of control over the country's largest "chaebol" conglomerate.
Park has denied any wrongdoing, but apologised for putting trust in her friend.
Park's action had "seriously impaired the spirit of... democracy and the rule of law," said constitutional court chief justice Lee Jung-Mi. "President Park Geun-hye... has been dismissed."
Prosecutors have arrested and indicted a slew of high-profile figures over the scandal, including Park's confidante Choi Soon-sil, top Park administration officials and Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong.
But Park has avoided a direct investigation thanks to a law that gives a sitting president immunity from prosecution for most of alleged crimes.
Since she's now no longer in power, prosecutors can summon, question and possibly arrest her.
Park will not vacate the official residence of the president of South Korea, the Blue House, on Friday as her aides are preparing for her return to her private home in southern Seoul.
She was not planning any statement on Friday, the Blue House said.
"That's been one of the uncertainties today because we are in unchartered territory," Al Jazeera's Rob McBride, reporting from Seoul, said.
"It was thought in one stage that the ruling would mean she would have to leave immediately but that doesn’t seem to be the case. She is there for this evening and we expect her to leave sometime over the weekend."
Park's parliamentary impeachment in December came after weeks of Saturday rallies that drew millions who wanted her resignation.
Overwhelmed by the biggest rallies in decades, the voices of Park supporters were largely ignored. But they have recently regrouped and staged fierce pro-Park rallies.
In anticipation of the ruling, Park supporters, many of them dressed in army-style fatigues and wearing red berets, and those who want Park gone began showing up around the Constitutional Court building.
A big television screen was set up near the court so that people could watch the verdict live. Hundreds of police also began preparing for the protests, putting on helmets with visors and black, hard plastic breastplates and shin guards.
Some of Park's supporters reacted with anger after the ruling, shouting and hitting police officers and reporters with plastic flag poles and steel ladders, and climbing on police buses. Anti-Park protesters celebrated by marching in the streets near the Blue House, carrying flags, signs and an effigy of Park dressed in prison clothes and tied up with rope.
The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said two people died while protesting Park's removal. An official from the Seoul National University Hospital said that a man in his 70s, believed to be a Park supporter, died from head wounds after falling from the top of a police bus.
READ MORE: The fall of President Park Geun-hye - A day-by-day look
An official from the Kangbuk Samsung Hospital in Seoul said another man brought from the pro-Park rally died shortly after receiving CPR at the hospital. The hospital official could not immediately confirm the cause of death.
Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn has led the government as acting leader since Park's impeachment and he will continue to do so until South Korea elects a new president by May.
He called on Park's supporters and opponents to put their differences aside to prevent deeper division.
"It is time to accept, and close the conflict and confrontation we have suffered," Hwang said in a televised speech on Friday.
People on both sides had previously threatened not to accept a Constitutional Court decision.
One of Park's lawyers told the court last month that there will be "a rebellion and blood will drench the asphalt" if Park is booted from office.
READ MORE: Profile: South Korea's Park Geun-hye
Park's critics want to see her appear on TV while dressed in prison garb, handcuffed and bound like others involved in the scandal. But some analysts worry that could create a backlash by conservatives.
Jean Lee, a journalist and global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Korea centre, told Al Jazeera there is a sense of fear among Park supporters that this decision will be a security threat.
"There is a lot of fear by the older generation, the old guard. There's fear it's made [the country] more vulnerable," Lee said.
Even after the election, imprisoning Park could still be a burden for a new government, which must pursue national unity to overcome security, economic and other problems, said Chung Jin-young, a professor at Kyung Hee University. Others say it will not be difficult.
Liberal Moon Jae-in, who lost to Park in the 2012 election, currently enjoys a comfortable lead in opinion surveys.
Pre-verdict surveys showed that 70 to 80 percent of South Koreans wanted the court to approve Park's impeachment. But there have been worries that Park's ouster would further polarise the country and cause violence.What would the world be like if SPEED, the all-motorsports channel, were converted into another all-general sports network. I haven't even included a question mark on that sentence, because we all know the answer: It would be a little more lame.
Our suspicions that SPEED owner Fox plans to convert the gearhead-focused network into an all sports affair have, unfortunately, inched closer to confirmation.
It's being reported that Speed Channel will change to an all sports channel next year. We hope … Read more Read
"While Fox has declined to comment on its planned channel, people familiar with the matter said the company will convert its niche sports channel called Speed into a broad-based sports network," reported the L.A. Times
That could be the end of everything from 24 Hours of Le Mans coverage (which I know from making non car people watch Steve McQueen's 1971 racing classic isn't for everyone) to Dumbest Stuff on Wheels. Where else will we watch "Hemi-Powered Headcases, Super-Charged Simpletons & Mooks" or complete coverage of the Goodwood Festival of Speed?
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So what will they call SPEED if it's all sports and not just motorsports? Fox Sports One? Does that mean they'll have exclusive coverage of athletes on 'roids and other performance enhancers? With Lance Armstrong getting back into the amateur circuit, there could be a market for that.
Not that we can entirely blame Fox. Leadership at SPEED has always been questionable and the non-racing programs are a mix of interesting and terrible. SPEED was once great but has become, at best, a good idea poorly executed.
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Racing may still be a part of this new channel — even a large part — but broadcast rights for various racing series are now up in the air.
UPDATE: Erik Arneson, VP of Media Relations at SPEED, had this to say:
No decisions from FOX Sports yet … everything still speculation at this point … we remain in active negotiations with multiple motor sports bodies, including NASCAR and F1.
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We take this to mean that they do not have confirmed rights to F1 next year or NASCAR beyond 2014.
Photo credit: SpeedANALYSIS/OPINION:
Get ready to fight back: Last week, the Health and Human Services Department announced a plan to share your medical records with over 35 federal agencies — all in the name of “health care,” of course. All in the name of “efficiency,” the favorite excuse used by fascists wherever they appear.
Of Obamacare’s many assaults on our quality of life, financial security and personal privacy, there was a pre-Obamacare signal from the federal government that any expectation of medical privacy was quickly becoming a quaint, and dead, notion. Transferring your previously private medical records into “electronic” form has been eyed by Congress as early as 1996 and was ensconced in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus bill.
The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act requires physicians and hospitals, under financial penalties, to transfer your secure paper-based medical records to an “electronic” system, i.e., the Internet.
The argument is it’s going to somehow make the health care system more efficient, a remarkable and ironic claim from the same clowns who brought us the Obamacare and the Veterans Affairs debacles.
What this really does is remove the privacy and control in your relationship with your doctor by removing your records from their office file cabinet and dumping them into the Internet “cloud” where everyone and anyone can access them.
Now we have specifics of why the federal government is coveting this astoundingly dangerous act. Announced last week was the Health and Human Services’ Federal Health IT Strategic Plan 2015-2020. And what a plan it is.
The Weekly Standard tells us it “details the efforts of some 35 departments and agencies of the federal government and their roles in the plan to “advance the collection, sharing, and use of electronic health information to improve health care, individual and community health, and research,” and offers a graph that shows exactly how this Kafkaesque scenario will unfold.
They will indeed collect (via electronic health records), share (patient information with “the community”) and use (stating the vague notion of “advancing the health and well-being of individuals and the community” as well as “advance research, scientific knowledge and innovation”).
Make no mistake about it: This is the start of a single-payer health care infrastructure. That alone is disturbing enough, as one of the main objections by citizens committed to maintaining personal freedom is governmental transition to fascism through the argument of making health care delivery more efficient, ergo, controlled by government.
By listing the federal agencies that will be participating in this health care scheme, the Federal Health IT Plan illustrates exactly why this is such a serious concern, and how it has nothing to do with delivering health care. Your personal health care information will be shared with an astounding 35 agencies (at least), offices and individuals including the Department of Defense, NASA, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor, the Federal Communications Commission, the HHS assistant secretary for legislation, the HHS office for civil rights, the HHS office for the general counsel, the Office of Personnel Management, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons.
Clearly, this is meant to establish the fact that every federal agency will be participating in this scheme and will have access to your health information. Not only should this be anathema to every American on principle alone, but having all of our personal information available in the cloud also poses ridiculously obvious general security threats to our personal security.
In the past few months, we have learned the computer systems of the White House, the State Department and Obamacare have all been breached. At one point, the State Department had to close down its systems for three days to regain control.
We know Obamacare was passed only because the Obama administration was comfortable with deliberately misleading the American people. We know that the federal government’s computer systems are not even remotely secure. Even under the circumstances of a government that knew what it was doing this would be unacceptable. But under one that has proved it has no regard for your security and has lied time and time again, and is run by glib, incompetent and malevolent fools, we must stand against this astoundingly shocking plan.
With the release of the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan, the HHS is required to seek input from the public and has opened a two-month period ending Feb. 6, within which you can be heard. If there is one thing that represents everything dangerous about an expanding federal government, this is it. Take a stand and make sure they know you reject this unacceptable violation of your privacy and expansion of the federal government’s control of our lives.
• Tammy Bruce is a radio talk-show host, author and Fox News contributor.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Fraudsters stole private information from the IRS on more than 100,000 taxpayers and used it to bilk the agency of tens of millions of dollars, Commissioner John Koskinen said Tuesday — though he insisted the breach didn’t affect most Americans.
The criminals gained access to the IRS through a new system called “Get Transcript,” which allows taxpayers to go online and get years’ worth of their own tax records. Mr. Koskinen said the perpetrators used information they already knew about taxpayers to fool the system into believing it was the taxpayer logging in, and then stole the transcripts with even more information.
In thousands of instances the criminals turned around and used that same information to file fraudulent returns, stealing potentially close to $50 million from the government.
“This is not a security breach. Our basic information is secure,” Mr. Koskinen insisted in a call with reporters to discuss the theft, which had gone on for months — dating back to February — but was only caught last week.
It’s the latest embarrassment for the tax agency, which has been dealing with reports of political targeting, wasteful spending and poor management that meant it paid out billions of dollars in bogus tax credit claims.
The IRS has also pleaded poverty, begging Congress to send more money and saying its services were suffering in the meantime. But Mr. Koskinen said while they were cutting elsewhere, they weren’t scrimping on security, and the breach wasn’t a result of lack of diligence.
Congressional overseers weren’t convinced.
“That the IRS — home to highly sensitive information on every single American and every single company doing business here at home — was vulnerable to this attack is simply unacceptable,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican and chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance.
Mr. Hatch said the IRS has been “repeatedly warned” it needed to do more to protect taxpayers but fell short.
The Get Transcript application had been highly touted in 2014 as a step in President Obama’s attempts to streamline government, and the agency had insisted at the time that it was taking strong security steps.
Logging in required giving the kind of personal identifying information that credit ratings bureaus keep — questions such as what street someone lived on years earlier — in order to prove someone’s identity.
Mr. Koskinen said the breach suggests that those steps are no longer enough to maintain online security. He said social media has made it much easier to build a massive database to come up with the answers to those questions, which likely helped the fraudsters gain access to the IRS‘ transcripts, which provided them with even more information.
“In some cases the criminals can answer the questions better than you can,” Mr. Koskinen said, blaming organized crime syndicates for the breach.
Mr. Koskinen said the fraudsters attempted to access information from 200,000 taxpayers and succeeded in about 104,000 cases.
Of those, fraudulent refunds were filed in thousands of cases — though the commissioner said it’s likely to be fewer than 15,000. He said the fraudsters appeared to be storing data for possible future use.
The IRS will pay for a credit-monitoring service for the 104,000 people whose IRS information was stolen, and will send letters to all 200,000 taxpayers whose accounts were tried by the fraudsters. The IRS said that isn’t strictly necessary since the information didn’t come from the agency, but said it wanted to alert taxpayers that their data is already out there.
The Get Transcript application has been shut down, and taxpayers who need their information will have to have it sent by mail.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.A Russian fighter aircraft was intercepted by two Turkish air force F-16s after the Russian craft violated Turkey's airspace near Syria on Saturday. Photo by Sergei Tsvetkov/Russian air force | License Photo
ANKARA, Turkey, Oct. 5 (UPI) -- Two Turkish Air Force F-16s intercepted a Russian fighter aircraft after it violated Turkey's airspace near Syria, further escalating tensions over Moscow's involvement in the Syrian civil war.
Turkey's acting undersecretary of foreign ministry summoned the Russian ambassador in Ankara, Turkey's capital, and "strongly protested this violation, demanded that any such violation not be repeated and affirmed that, otherwise, the Russian Federation will be responsible for any undesired incident that may occur," according to a statement released Monday by Turkey's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Turkish F-16s were conducting patrols in the Yayladağı-Hatay region, where the Russian aircraft was located on Saturday. The Russian fighter was "intercepted' before exiting Turkish airspace by entering Syria.
Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu called Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to protest the violation of airspace. Davutoğlu also called "his U.S., French, Italian and U.K. counterparts to evaluate the situation."
Russia's airstrikes in Syria began Wednesday. Moscow asserts it is targeting only Islamic State positions, but reports indicate Russia has also bombed rebel groups that oppose Russian ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
British Ambassador to Turkey Richard Moore said "Russia's incursion into Turkish airspace is reckless and worrying. U.K., and its other NATO Allies, stand shoulder to shoulder with Turkey."Bad error messages increase MTTR
Software errors are an unavoidable part of any software development process. Your application will not always function as planned. Things will go wrong, systems will be down, bugs will creep in, and users will do the wrong thing with your software. The real question is how long will it take you, or the operator who probably isn’t you, to recover from that failure. This is called mean time to recovery (MTTR) and it’s an important measure of the health of any software system. Many factors influence MTTR, but the one I want to focus on for this article are error messages. Note that you want a low MTTR.
Good error messages help operators and developers
When a problem arises, error messages help the software operator understand what has gone wrong. If the problem is part of the operational deployment then the error message will help the operator understand what the root cause of the problem is and quickly remedy it. That error message can also help the operator understand that the problem is not rooted in the operational deployment, but instead is a software issue that needs to be fixed by a developer. Finally, the error message may be an error that crops up during the development process. If that error message is well written and contains the appropriate information it will help the developer quickly fix the problem and improve software delivery times.
What are the essential elements of a good error message?
Report enough context so the reader knows what went wrong
Let’s pretend we have two pieces of Java software, simple-reader and complex-reader. Both of them do some kind of batch processing on XML files.
simple-reader only processes files from a single directory which the operator provides.
complex-reader processes several banks of XML files from disparate sources. This system is a connector between several legacy systems and some more modern ones. It reads these XML records from various sources some. The software fetches some from a FTP server, others from a Hadoop cluster, still more from a shared network drive.
Let’s say that simple-reader throws a FileNotFoundException with the path of the file when it encounters a problem reading from the directory. The operator or developer would receive the path to the file, and be able to remedy the situation
Let’s say that complex-reader also throws a FileNotFoundException with the path of the file when it encounters a problem reading from the directory (be it remote or otherwise). The operator or developer would receive the path to the file, and not know which of the subsystems that complex-reader was trying to fetch the file from when it encountered a problem.
complex-reader needs to be fixed by adding more context to the failure. What subsystem was it speaking to when it failed? What was the path on that subsystem? Was it a network failure or an actual read failure? Could the complex-reader report the number of files it had already processed from that endpoint before it failed? All of this information would help the operator find the real problem and fix it quickly. Probably by identifying a subsystem that’s down, or a networking issue that’s preventing complex-reader from fetching and reading the file.
Comparing and contrasting these two examples it becomes clear that more complex software needs more robust error messages. Give the operator the right amount of context to help them solve their problems.
If possible, help the reader know what to do next
The reader reading an error message should receive a call to action if it isn’t obvious from the message itself. This is especially true if the developer has special knowledge that can be encoded in the error message. You have to be careful with this sort of thing. Good advice encoded in an error message may quickly rot as technology and infrastructures change.
For example, if the complex-reader failed during a connection to read from an FTP site, and this site is often flaky, then the error message may read something like
Tried connecting to the FTP service at [49.132.9.1] [3] times before giving up. Service is often unreliable, try again in a couple of minutes.
This helps the reader know that being unable to connect is not an uncommon problem, that there could be a more serious underlying issue with the networking infrastructure, but that they shouldn’t panic until they’ve run the service after some wait time.
Wrap bad exceptions with in better custom ones
You can’t always control what exceptions are coming out of your software. Often times you use frameworks that throw exceptions while they run and you have no ability to control those. For the cases when you DO have the capacity to catch bad exceptions, the best thing you can do is transform them into more useful ones.
java.net.ConnectException as thrown by Java’s Socket class is a great example of a terrible error message because it doesn’t tell the reader the host and port of the destination system.
package com.mpinnegar; import java.io.IOException; import java.net.Socket; public class Connector { public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException { new Socket("localhost", 1111).getOutputStream().write("hello world".getBytes()); } } Invoking the above produces this error message Exception in thread "main" java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect at java.net.DualStackPlainSocketImpl.connect0(Native Method) at java.net.DualStackPlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(DualStackPlainSocketImpl.java:79) at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.doConnect(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:350) at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:206) at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.connect(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:188) at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:172) at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(SocksSocketImpl.java:392) at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:589) at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:538) at java.net.Socket.<init>(Socket.java:434) at java.net.Socket.<init>(Socket.java:211) at com.mpinnegar.Connector.main(Connector.java:11) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:62) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:498) at com.intellij.rt.execution.application.AppMain.main(AppMain.java:144)
Now let’s make this better by catching the exception and rethrowing it as our own special exception which includes the host and port. In this case I extended Exception, but I tend to extend RuntimeException whenever possible because I think checked exceptions are often more trouble than they’re worth.
package com.mpinnegar; import java.io.IOException; import java.net.ConnectException; import java.net.Socket; import java.net.UnknownHostException; public class Connector { public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, BetterConnectException { String host = "localhost"; int port = 1111; try { new Socket(host, port).getOutputStream().write("hello world".getBytes()); } catch (ConnectException | UnknownHostException exception) { throw new BetterConnectException(host, port, exception); } } } Which produces this error message. Notice that we've preserved the original stack trace so we don't lose any information about the original exception, but we've also added our own information Exception in thread "main" com.mpinnegar.BetterConnectException: Failed trying to connect to host [localhost] on port [1111] at com.mpinnegar.Connector.main(Connector.java:15) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:62) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:498) at com.intellij.rt.execution.application.AppMain.main(AppMain.java:144) Caused by: java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect at java.net.DualStackPlainSocketImpl.connect0(Native Method) at java.net.DualStackPlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(DualStackPlainSocketImpl.java:79) at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.doConnect(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:350) at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:206) at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.connect(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:188) at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:172) at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(SocksSocketImpl.java:392) at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:589) at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:538) at java.net.Socket.<init>(Socket.java:434) at java.net.Socket.<init>(Socket.java:211) at com.mpinnegar.Connector.main(Connector.java:13)... 5 more
Obfuscate sensitive data in your error messages
Logs, and by extension error messages, should never be considered a secure part of an application. They are often read by many different individuals with varying levels of access and authority. They can also live for months or years in archived form.
You should therefore sanitize any sensitive data that you write to an error message or log. The simplest way to do this in Java is to write an overridden.toString() method that doesn’t output any sensitive fields, outputs a small portion of those fields, or that outputs the full field only in some kind of developer mode to help with debugging. Below is an example of a class that obfuscates the user’s credit card number only when the system is setup to do so.
package com.mpinnegar; import static com.mpinnegar.Sanitizer.sanitize; public class Person { private String firstName; private String lastName; private String creditCardNumber; public Person(String firstName, String lastName, String creditCardNumber) { this.firstName = firstName; this.lastName = lastName; this.creditCardNumber = creditCardNumber; } //Getters and setters are omitted for brevity @Override public String toString() { return "Person{" + "firstName='" + firstName + '\'' + ", lastName='" + lastName + '\'' + ", creditCardNumber='" + sanitize(creditCardNumber) + '\'' + '}'; } }
package com.mpinnegar; public class Sanitizer { private static boolean isSanitizing = Boolean.getBoolean(System.getenv("shouldSanitizeData")); public static String sanitize(String sensitiveData) { if (isSanitizing) { return sensitiveData.replaceAll(".", "*"); } else { return sensitiveData; } } }
Demarcate your parameterized values
Often you will need to pass values into an error message. This helps the reader understand what the state of the system was when it failed. When passing these error messages in you should demarcate them from the text of the message. I use brackets ([ and ]), but you should use what makes the most sense for you. This is most important when you might output something that could be interpreted as part of the error message itself. Consider the following error message.
Tried printing to the screen, but failed.
What’s lost here is that the error message is actually telling the reader exactly what it tried to print. In this case it’s the empty string, but since there’s no demarcation it’s impossible for a reader to know that. Instead consider this improvement.
Tried printing [] to the screen, but failed.
Validate individual steps and tie your error messages to your code whenever possible
It puts more burden on the programmer, but whenever you can reasonably do so, validate input in a layered fashion so that you can respond with an error message specific to the problem at hand. Consider validating some data a reader has entered into a form which accepts first name, last name, and phone number.
In our example we require all fields except for the phone number, and the first name must be 20 characters or less in length. The last name is unbounded, but must be at least one character, and the phone number must be a 10 digit number after removing everything but the numbers.
Here’s a very simple, and very bad example. It provides almost no feedback to the reader on what went wrong. In our case we have a very simple form, only three fields, but in a real world example you may have tens of fields to deal with.
package com.mpinnegar; public class BadValidator { private static final int FIRST_NAME_FIELD_SIZE_LIMIT = 20; private static final int PHONE_NUMBER_FIELD_EXACT_SIZE = 10; private String errorMessage; boolean validate(String firstName, String lastName, String phoneNumber) { if ( firstName == null || firstName.length() == 0 || lastName == null || lastName.length() == 0 || (phoneNumber!= null && phoneNumber.replaceAll("[^0-9]", "").length()!= PHONE_NUMBER_FIELD_EXACT_SIZE) || firstName.length() > FIRST_NAME_FIELD_SIZE_LIMIT ) { errorMessage = "Error found in form data."; return false; } return true; } public String getErrorMessage() { return errorMessage; } }
Now let’s try again applying some of the lessons learned from above about layered validation. Note that it does take more code to do this. You don’t get this for free, but you’re making your application easier to use either when a developer sends a new request that’s bad and gets a reasonable error message back, or when an operator sends a bad request and now knows what they need to fix.
package com.mpinnegar; public class Validator { private static final int FIRST_NAME_FIELD_SIZE_LIMIT = 20; private static final int PHONE_NUMBER_FIELD_EXACT_SIZE = 10; private String errorMessage; boolean validate(String firstName, String lastName, String phoneNumber) { if (firstName == null || firstName.length() == 0) { errorMessage = missingRequiredValue("firstName"); return false; } if (lastName == null || lastName.length() == 0) { errorMessage = missingRequiredValue("lastName"); return false; } if (phoneNumber!= null && phoneNumber.replaceAll("[^0-9]", "").length()!= PHONE_NUMBER_FIELD_EXACT_SIZE) { errorMessage = "Phone number [" + phoneNumber + "] is invalid. It must be " + PHONE_NUMBER_FIELD_EXACT_SIZE + " characters long considering only the numbers and dropping everything else."; return false; } if (firstName.length() > FIRST_NAME_FIELD_SIZE_LIMIT) { errorMessage = "The first name field cannot be longer than " + FIRST_NAME_FIELD_SIZE_LIMIT + " characters. " + "The first name submitted was " + firstName + " which is " + (firstName.length() - FIRST_NAME_FIELD_SIZE_LIMIT) + " characters too long."; return false; } return true; } private String missingRequiredValue(String valueName) { return "Missing [" + valueName + "] which is a required field."; } public String getErrorMessage() { return errorMessage; } }
You can see in the above example how the length of the field is being shared between the error message and the actual code doing the validation. This helps cut down on the rot that can occur where error messages don’t match the code that they’re written against.
Notice that this isn’t perfect. We’ve written in the error message for the phone number that we’re dropping all the non-numeric characters. That’s a textual description of what the regex is doing. There’s nothing that prevents a developer from changing the regex without updating the error message.
Use parameterized logging in Java for your error messages (and other logs)
Your logging framework in Java should support parameterized logging (if you logging framework does not, get a new one). This is when you pass a string with placeholders in it (usually curly braces {}) to the logging framework’s log method, and then you pass a series of objects which replace the placeholders. Consider this log statement which does not use parameterized logging.
logger. debug ( "You just broke the world by passing me a this bad BigObject [" + objectWithReallyBigToString + "]" );
In the above form every time the code passes over this.debug() statement, even if your logger code is not in debug mode, you will pay the cost of the.toString() method on the objectWithReallyBigToString. This is because the code has to resolve the parameter’s value before passing it in.
Instead of that let’s do something better and use the logging framework’s parameterized logging. Notice how we use the {} which is where the logging framework will inject the value returned by objectWithReallyBigToString.toString()
logger. debug ( "You just broke the world by passing me a this bad BigObject [{}]", objectWithReallyBigToString );
Now because we passed the objectWithReallyBigToString object into the second parameter and let the logging framework build the string itself, we don’t incur the cost of calculating it’s string value each time we pass over that piece of code while we aren’t in debug mode. This can make a BIG performance difference in pieces of the code that are frequently visited.
Conclusion
Whenever you’re programming think about the reader who’s coming along after you whether it be another developer or an operator. They need to be able to quickly ascertain what’s going on. When they come along make sure your error messages don’t look like this.
Special thanks to pathslong, MikhailEdoshin, dorkinson, and FranknFreddys for their feedback on this article.The "WannaCrypt" ransomware has proven to be a disaster globally. This malware will encrypt a user's files and then |
of twine.The Twiners began as a humanitarian movement, intent on pacifism and tolerance, but during the Sisal Lash Incident of 1894 its members became fractious. The militant voices among them, as is sadly still too often the case, held sway. By this time most members were already achieving compositions of 70 and even 80 percent twine, and the heady rush of triumph imparted grandiose notions of superiority and a perverse sense of civil duty to lead and entwine others. Subsequent clashes with nearby cotton farmers over the virtues of jute led to angry citizen protests, and from within the group new factions argued over the future of coir.Exasperated with dissent and keen to continue the conversion of man into twine, in March of 1896 Saul Henequen ordered the group to pack its looms and relocate by rail to Oregon, where they founded the city of Cordings and resumed their studies in relative peace. Little was heard from the Twiners for the next three years, but in 1899 a figure appeared outside the young city of Medford. A man entered the town, dressed in robes and comprised entirely of twine. It was Saul Henequen.Henequen was a changed man. His bearing struck many as regal, but one account written years later by Woody Lathison (then a livery hand) read:Accounts vary, but all witnesses agree that as the panicked citizenry fanned out to discover the whereabouts of the drunken sheriff, Henequen executed a perfectly embroidered gesture toward a nearby copse wherefrom strode ten men in a disciplined line, each barking out his name and thread count as he emerged.At this sight, even the ever-curious whores (and have they since changed, gentle reader?) abandoned the brothel windows and fled screaming; the Twiners paid them no mind. Stopping only for a mysteriously brief foray into the barber's empty shop, the column marched through a fusillade of hurled stones and perhaps a few bullets (accounts are inconsistent) in a grim procession toward their final destination: the shed of tanner Epid Peltis.In a staff report on your site about whether nonsmoking actors use fake cigarettes when playing a part, the writer said there's no such thing as noncarcinogenic smoke, implying smoke is the primary danger. What about the new electronic cigarettes — since they're smokeless, are they noncarcinogenic?
Cecil replies:
Well, that’s the theory. Browsing online, we find claims like this: “[Our] premier line-up of smokeless electronic cigarettes utilizes innovative technology to provide a smoking experience without the dangers, hassle and even expense of traditional cigarettes.” Here one recalls the miracle drug diacetylmorphine, introduced in 1898 as a nonaddictive alternative to morphine by the German drug company Bayer, which also gave the world aspirin. Diacetylmorphine is better known by its trade name, Heroin. You see how well that worked out.
Like traditional smokes, electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, are a nicotine delivery device. The difference is that whereas the paper-and-weed variety involves burning tobacco and inhaling the smoke, e-cigarettes merely heat nicotine to produce vapor, and you breathe that — hence the vernacular term for this activity, “vaping.”
An e-cigarette consists of a mouthpiece, a battery, some electronics, a filament-type heater, and a disposable cartridge containing a mix of nicotine, propylene glycol, glycerin, and flavorings. When the electronics detect that the smoker has taken a drag, they switch on the heating element, warming air that’s then pulled through the cartridge, vaporizing some of the nicotine mix for easy inhaling. Many e-cigarettes are designed to mimic the tobacco kind, often with a colored LED tip that glows when the user inhales. However, other less literal-minded formats abound. For those who like wearing tweed and driving cranky British automobiles, an e-pipe version is available.
These things clearly have their advantages. The absence of combustion means no combustion byproducts — including tars, carbon monoxide, and other noxious chemicals — and also no risk of fires and burns. Those in the user’s vicinity don’t choke on tobacco smoke, although if you sit too close you can still get a snootful of secondhand vapor.
Relatively little research has been done on e-cigarettes since their appearance on the market roughly six years ago. However, while it would be foolish to say they’re harmless, studies so far suggest they’re orders of magnitude safer than conventional cigarettes.
In investigating e-cigs, the FDA has focused on two types of chemicals: tobacco-specific nitrosamines (TSNAs), which are carcinogenic, and diethylene glycol (DEG), a plain old poison. E-cigarettes were found to provide a 500- to 1400-fold reduction in TSNAs compared to traditional cigarettes, and DEG was found in only one cartridge tested. Of 16 studies reviewed in 2010, none found more than trace amounts of the carcinogens typical of tobacco smoke in either the nicotine solution or the vapor thereof. Nonetheless, since there’s no minimum safe level of a carcinogen, the FDA still warns against e-cigarettes.
Although you’re not sucking in smoke with e-cigs, you are inhaling vapor, which can be problematic. One study I came across reported that vaping for just five minutes made breathing more difficult. The propylene glycol in the nicotine solution can cause respiratory inflammation and increase asthma risk.
A test of 35 nicotine refills in various flavors found several were toxic to human cells, primarily due to the flavorings. Another study found that because of contamination by the heating filament, some vapor contained tiny particles of silica and metals such as tin, nickel, and chromium. Nine of eleven elements found in e-cigarette vapor were at an equal or higher concentration than that found in conventional cigarette smoke, with what fell implications no one knows.
The main thing, though, is that e-cigarettes can help reduce or eliminate smoking, even among those not trying to quit. Researchers in Italy furnished a group of volunteer smokers with e-cigarettes, excluding anyone who was consciously trying to stop smoking and providing no encouragement to do so. Despite this, 22 of 27 participants had reduced their consumption of conventional cigarettes by at least 50 percent after six months and nine had quit altogether.
Other studies have found that despite delivering minimal nicotine, e-cigarettes satisfy regular smokers and significantly reduce the craving to smoke. Compared to things like nicotine patches, e-cigarettes may make it easier to stop smoking because they preserve the ritual of holding a cigarette, taking a puff, and exhaling visible fumes. E-cigarette users we’ve talked to unanimously report the product is a passable substitute for the real thing, although some say they still smoke an occasional cigarette when under peer pressure.
Overall, notwithstanding my instinct that all change is for the worse, the evidence to date strongly suggests e-cigarettes beat smoking, which kills 443,000 Americans annually and is notoriously hard to stop doing — among people who try to quit on their own, 80 percent relapse within a month. Long-term research on health impacts is needed, and no doubt breaking the nicotine habit altogether is preferable to vaping. But e-cigarettes look like a good plan B.
Send questions to Cecil via cecil@straightdope.com.So here's what happened: everyone in the LADbible office was listening to Kisstory (as you do) when Eminem's 'My Name Is' came on.
What a song, ay? Takes us all back to the year 2000, when MSN was the best means of communication and streaming an album took three days.
via GIPHY
However, most people in the office didn't realise that there's a secret message when you play the song backwards.
Maybe it was just me being a bit of a square and researching songs backwards when I was 11, I don't know.
I reckon there'll be lots of you sat there reading this now like: "Well, yeah. Tell us something we don't know." But hopefully, this will be a glorious moment for the majority of you.
What better way to spend your day than listening to songs backwards. Right? Right?!
Check it out...
As you can see and hear, the words are: 'Hi! My name is... (what?) My name is... (who?) My name is... {scratches} Slim Shady. Hi! My name is... (huh?) My name is... (what?) My name is... {scratches} Slim Shady.'
But when you play it backwards... 'It is Slim. It's Eminem, it's Eminem, it's Eminem. It is Slim. It's Eminem, it's Eminem, it's Eminem.'
Was it intentional? Well. I like to think it was. If not, it's a very happy coincidence.
More Interesting Shit About Eminem You Might Not Know
Someone on Imgur has put together a shit load of interesting facts about Slim himself, check them out...
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Image credit: Imgur / blitzer1
The most interesting thing about Eminem has to be the 'fact' that he's a cyborg.
Yes, some people believe that the modern-day Eminem that we all know and love is in actual fact an IMPOSTER.
via GIPHY
There are several videos circulating the internet that claim Eminem is not who we think he is. Take this one, for example, which has me utterly convinced. Oh no, wait, I'm not.
As you can see, they've got this pretty much covered. The video's description states: "We will note that numerous celebrities have been replaced - whether by surgically modified impostors or by cloned doubles' remains to be ascertained on a case-by-case basis - usually after a removal from public view for several months prior to reappearing as having been through psychological hell, severe physical trauma, psychological transformation therapy or any number of other cover stories to justify that they seem to have changed significantly enough that people cannot fail to notice.
"This way the explanation for such noted changes is given pre-emptively. Drug, alcohol and sex addiction and rehab being those used most recently, possibly to derive an additional value of role model suggestions to legitimise such moral decadence among their fans, thus undermining balanced traditional family values in society."
Let's take a look at some photos of Em back in the day (pre-cloning)...
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Credit: PA Images
And let's have a look at him now (post-cloning)...
Eminem
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Credit: PA Images
Is it just me, or has he just lost weight and... you know... aged?
Well that's just not a good enough explanation for some people.
YouTube user, Spiritual Coaching 4 life After life waded in with their expert opinion: "So I was watching a playlist of Eminem's videos and in his more recent ones with the dark hair I noticed that he doesn't look the same at all and that his eyes (which is the key to your soul) are no longer blue... So I then start a search to find out why his eyes are now brown and I've come across everything from contacts to conspiracy and then I find this video.... This is just downright terrifying!!!"
Whereas Azrael Skylyn said: "I gotta say, I have noticed the past couple years that Eminem looked different than what I remember from when I was in my teens, but I just chalked it up to the fact that people change. But that picture comparison @7:00 is insanely different from one another, the ears especially are a totally different shape. And I have never heard of anybody getting total ear surgery to have completely different ears. In fact the newer Eminem pic in that comparison looks a lot like synthetic skin, or prosthetics, or just a different person who is a lookalike. The eyes are very different, too. So weird. I'm still on the fence about this though."
Bren, whose qualifications for his statement are being a former barber, says: "It's not the real Em. As a former barber I'll point out the impossible. The three pics at mark 1:27-1:34 show two different hair patterns on the left side of his head. The real Em's hair pattern grows forward at top side, then gradually slants downward, still leaning forward all the way to the edge.
"The new guy's hair grows forward at the top, then grows backwards at the side edge and then slants down. When hair is that short, nobody on this earth can change your hair growth pattern. It's like a fuzzy finger print... the real Em's hairline grows down closer on his forehead and temple area. Yet the other guy's hairline sits further back on his forehead and temple. IT'S A WRAP!"
Well, if that doesn't convince you then nothing will. Case closed.
Featured Image Credit: PA ImagesWhen you’re new to something, all the pain is out in the open. You stub your toes until they’re black and blue on things the veterans have all learned to avoid. This is both a curse and a gift.
A curse because it’s hard to make progress when you’re constantly getting snagged. Frustration is high and defeat feels scarily near. You might well give up entirely before you know the dance of the natives.
But a gift, too, because you have the clarity to make things drastically better. You won’t miss the non-sense the veterans have long since accepted as the norm. Once you’ve acclimated to the temperature of the pot, you’ll get boiled alongside all the other frogs. But until then, you’re in a magical position to make great strides. To propose radical solutions, deliberately ignorant ideas that just might be brilliant.
This is the time to do the impossible, because you don’t know enough to know what can’t be done yet.Milo Yiannopoulos is a fervent supporter of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Referring to Trump as “Daddy,” the ostentatiously gay British media personality provides a camp component to the presumptive Republican nominee’s fan base. What seems to excite Yiannopoulos about Trump is what seems to excite most of the tycoon’s voters: a brash, take-no-prisoners attitude. When I recently asked Yiannopoulos to name the Trump policies he favors, he replied with a very revealing answer. Trump supporters don’t care about the man’s policies, he said. “They want to burn everything down.” Suddenly Yiannopoulos’ Twitter handle, @Nero (followed by more than 200,000 Twitter users), made all the more sense.
Simultaneously vacuous and sinister, equal parts nihilist and narcissist, Yiannopoulos is the model Trump advocate. And as Trump comes under increasing scrutiny, Yiannopoulos, who writes for Breitbart.com, has gone to great lengths defending the worst elements of his campaign. Shortly after our encounter, which took place this March over brunch in Washington, Yiannopoulos published a long article championing the “alt right,” the largely Internet-based, populist movement that has surged to prominence on the heels of Trump’s success. Among its various constituencies, the alt right is comprised of mens’ rights advocates, pseudo-intellectual “race realists,” technocratic authoritarians whose paeans to Chinese efficiency resemble those of Tom Friedman (if Tom Friedman thought Ian Smith was a sell-out), and outright neo-Nazis. Speaking of the movement’s “intellectuals,” the bulk of whom write for avowedly racist and anti-Semitic publications like VDARE and American Renaissance, Yiannopoulos and his co-author described them as “dangerously bright.”
Yiannopoulos has also popularized the movement’s favored insult, hurled at mainstream conservatives deemed insufficiently willing to fight the pernicious wrath of the left: “cuckservative.” A portmanteau of cuckold and conservative, this sobriquet is meant to ridicule the spinelessness of conservatives who fail to acknowledge the greatness of Donald J. Trump. Drawing on a visceral sense that the establishment right actually takes pleasure in being humiliated by its intellectual adversaries, the roots of “cuckservative” are simultaneously pornographic and racist, intended to conjure images of flaccid white men watching their wives be sexually penetrated by blacks. The anti-Semitism of Trump’s alt right supporters, meanwhile, has been well-documented by Armin Rosen here at Tablet, myself in Commentary, and Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times, who faced a barrage of Jew-hatred on Twitter after merely posting an article critical of Trump. So worrying is the issue of Internet harassment of journalists that the Anti-Defamation League recently launched a task-force, including Leon Wieseltier and Tablet contributor Todd Gitlin, to address it.
Asked recently by Internet TV host Dave Rubin about this very phenomenon, Yiannopoulos nonchalantly replied:
Generation Trump, the alt right people, the people who like me, they’re not anti-Semites. They don’t care about Jews. I mean, they may have some assumptions about things, how the Jews run everything; well, we do. How the Jews run the banks; well, we do. How the Jews run the media; well, we do. They’re right about all that stuff. … It’s a fact, this is not in debate. It’s a statistical fact … Jews are vastly disproportionately represented in all of these professions. It’s just a fact. It’s not anti-Semitic to point out statistics.
What was actually most notable about Yiannopoulos’ loathsome reply was his avowal of Jewish identity, something he only mentions when the undeniable anti-Semitism of his followers becomes an issue. Though he has recently taken to claiming, when it suits him, matrilineal Jewish heritage, Yiannopoulos identifies religiously as Catholic, and he used to write a column for a Catholic newspaper in Britain. Nor did his alleged Jewishness stop him from sporting an Iron Cross medallion around his neck as a younger man.
Yiannopoulos pulls a similar trick when it comes to race. He himself cannot be a racist, nor can any movement with which he’s involved be accused of racism, because, as he put it to the New York Times, he has a “very anti-white bedroom policy.” Usually Yiannopoulos expresses his sexual predilections in more prurient fashion, with repeated mention of his desire for “black dick.” Yiannopoulos’ act is designed for a young, male, heterosexual audience that gets a rise out of such outlandishness, in other words, a huge segment of Trump’s constituency. It quickly becomes tiresome, however, to adults of whatever sexual bent.
Never mind how fetishizing African American men as sex objects complicates one’s contention that he is devoid of racism. Like the insistence that he can’t be an anti-Semite because his mother has Jewish ancestors, Yiannopoulos’ assertion that his carnal desires inoculate him from the charge of bigotry is a deflection ploy. Ironically, it’s also a form of the identity politics he claims to despise. While the “social justice warriors” (SJWs) Yiannopoulos mocks say they cannot be racist or anti-Semitic on account of their identities, Yiannopoulos flimsily asserts the same about himself. The alt right should be absolved of similar imputations, Yiannopoulos says, because its spokesman is a gay half-Jew with jungle fever.
***
With his homosexual minstrelsy in service of America’s first nakedly authoritarian presidential candidate and the extreme right-wing political movement that backs him, Yiannopoulos inspires comparison to “Diamond and Silk,” a pair of black women YouTube stars and fellow Trump supporters who speak in an exaggeratedly African American street vernacular to express support for a presidential candidate who pointedly refused to disavow the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke two days before the Louisiana Republican primary. All essentially perform stereotypical characters (the bitchy queen, the loud black woman) before audiences that, needless to say, are probably not well-represented among donors to the NAACP or Human Rights Campaign. (So hungry for fame are these “Stump for Trump” ladies that they even appeared on a white nationalist talk show.) Yiannopoulos’ gay blackface combines the mincing camp of Quentin Crisp with the reactionary politics of Jörg Haider and is the sort of thing that might have been mildly amusing on a pre-AIDS-era episode of Hollywood Squares.
Simultaneously vacuous and sinister, equal parts nihilist and narcissist, Milo Yiannopoulos is the model Trump advocate.
When we met in Washington, Yiannopolous was in the midst of his nationwide “Dangerous Faggot” tour of American college campuses, the typical visit characterized by a short, inflammatory speech by Yiannopolous about political correctness (which may consist of little more than him uttering “Feminism is cancer”), and raucous student protests. No minds are changed and no intellectual debate is had, but both sides get what they came for: Yiannopoulos feeds his ego as the self-declared “most hate-read journalist working today” and the students feel virtuous for challenging a misogynist pig.
Befitting someone vying to be Ann Coulter’s gay male doppelgänger, Yiannopolous’ shtick is shouting outrageous things solely designed to upset liberals. He has nothing original or interesting to share; criticizing American colleges and universities for abandoning the foundations of classical education has been de rigueur on the right since William F. Buckley Jr. published God and Man at Yale six decades ago. What has garnered Yiannopoulos so much attention, rather, is not anything he says but rather the crude and bombastic way in which he says it. If the ideal protégé of the American conservative movement has been modeled on Buckley—earnest and erudite stewards of free markets and the Western tradition standing athwart history yelling “stop”—Yiannopoulos is its attitudinal antithesis, a right-wing Bluto Blutarsky.
From his perch at Breitbart.com and on his Twitter feed, Yiannopolous made it big on the heels of “Gamergate,” one of those Byzantine, online scandals the exhaustive intricacies of which are knowable only to those with skin in the game or too much time on their hands. Basically, the controversy erupted after the ex-boyfriend of a female video-game developer wrote a series of blog posts accusing her of having slept with influential members of the industry to advance her career. As this is the Internet, those blog posts inspired a stream of sexist attacks on the young woman, up to and including the public revelation of her address and phone number in addition to numerous death threats. The contretemps ignited a broader and ongoing debate about ethics and the representation of women and racial minorities in video games. According to the angry game players who adopted “Gamergate” as their byword, the gaming industry is plagued by a cabal of censorious SJWs conspiring to take all the fun out of video gaming.
Yiannopolous quickly emerged as one of Gamergate’s most high-profile champions. Skillfully capitalizing upon his visibility as a charismatic antagonist of “SJWs” in the realm of video games, he offered himself up as a brash personality willing to battle progressives of all stripes, whether they be feminists, campus activists, or the gay rights establishment. For a while, there was something admirably mischievous in Yiannopolous’ antics, which combined the unsettling nature of an Andy Kaufman routine tinged with the rebelliously conservative spirit of the late Andrew Breitbart, eponymous founder of the website for which Yiannopoulos writes. But like the musings of the gangly blonde (and increasingly unhinged) firebrand he so admires, Yiannopoulous’ exploits became less funny once they developed real-world political consequences.
Yet upon closer examination, Yiannopoulos appears less an ideologue than a rank opportunist who is using politics to make a buck and become Internet famous. His career back in Britain, which ended rather ignominiously after a website he founded collapsed amidst accusations that he failed to pay employees, is largely unknown to his American devotees. That’s probably to their benefit considering how he once ridiculed video game players as “unemployed saddos living in their parents’ basements” before realizing the potential that championing their cause might have in launching his name across the pond.
Shortly after Yiannopoulos published his defense of the alt right, Buzzfeed reported that Yiannopoulos himself is “a group effort,” his public persona the work of many uncredited helping hands. According to Yiannopoulos’ former associates, his Breitbart.com articles, voluminous Tweets, and other social media postings represent the collective work of some 44 interns dispersed around the world who collaborate, at his beck and call, over the Internet. “Milo Yiannopoulos is not one person,” a former intern told Buzzfeed. Initially, Yiannopoulos did not dispute the story, stating, “It’s completely standard for someone with a career like mine to have researchers and assistants and ghostwriters.” After his curtain was pulled open, however, the new media Wizard of Oz tried to imply that he had hoaxed Buzzfeed, the article being an April Fool’s joke perpetrated on a hapless tech reporter by Yiannopoulos himself, though none of the article’s factual claims were ever disproven.
Though his gay dandyism and adherence to the maxim that “there is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about” stirs comparisons to Oscar Wilde, Yiannopoulos more resembles another literary archetype, satirized by great American novelists from Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe: the British fraud who, by dint of his accent and charm, manages to fool Americans into thinking he’s far cleverer than he actually is. From the fictional Duke and King, grifter confidence men who trick Huckleberry Finn into believing they are disinherited European royalty, to Peter Fallow, the hard-drinking tabloid reporter in Bonfire of the Vanities, Americans have been wise to this affectation for well over a century. Occasionally, however, we still fall for it.
To be sure, I enjoy critiquing self-righteous campus leftists as much as the next right-of-center journalist. But only as long as there is some overarching purpose. The anti-free-speech ideology increasingly embraced by university administrators and mainstream liberal writers is wrong not just on account of its censoriousness, but because it deliberately stigmatizes a particular set of ideas as immoral and unworthy of discussion. As much as they rightly decry this anti-intellectual climate, conservative intellectuals should ultimately be more eager to debate the actual substance of those proscribed ideas—free market economics, a colorblind legal system, American global hegemony, etc.—than trolling hypersensitive liberals. With Yiannopoulos, however, one suspects that there is nothing there beyond the petty insults, which is why he never advances beyond mockery and into substance. If his escapades were performed in the service of some discernible ideological goal, (advancing the cause of supply-side economics, say), they would be more intellectually defensible, regardless of one’s political disposition. As it is, Yiannopoulos is just a tedious bully, making him the perfect surrogate for the thoroughly postmodern Trump, who similarly believes in nothing other than himself.
Like that of most bullies, Yiannopoulos’ behavior says more about his own character than it does the people he attacks. Yiannopoulos has stated that he would change his sexual orientation if he could, a desire he certainly shares with a large but quiet number of gay men yet which nonetheless indicates a deep sense of personal shame. “I didn’t like me very much and so I created this comedy character,” Yiannopoulos revealed to the website Fusion last year when asked how he became the bombastic media personality he is today. “I don’t have feelings to hurt” he admits to the New York Times. It’s an age-old story: A self-loathing gay man internalizes the bullying and social ostracism to which he’s been subjected and takes it out on others.
Designed solely to titillate its audience, “Milo Yiannopoulos” is a caricature of what resentful, misanthropic, frat bros believe a gay man to be: morally depraved, sexually licentious, and utterly self-aggrandizing. Unlike the old Milo, the new Milo gets to have creepily adoring fans and, in his telling, sex with lots of black dudes. Unlike old Milo, new Milo sells his own brand of T-shirts. And unlike old Milo, the product of a broken home, the new Milo has a “Daddy” in Donald Trump.
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James Kirchick, a visiting fellow with the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, is a columnist at Tablet magazine and the author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age. His Twitter feed is @jkirchick.Image copyright Getty Images
Risks of a Chinese banking crisis are mounting, according to a warning indicator from the banking industry's global watchdog.
A key gauge of stress in the banking sector is now more than three times above the danger level, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) said in its latest quarterly review.
China's credit-to-GDP gap hit 30.1 in the first quarter of 2016, it said.
The BIS considers a credit-to-GDP gap of 10 to be a sign of potential danger.
A year ago the BIS quarterly review put the figure for China at 25.4.
Karishma Vaswani: Just how bad is China's debt crisis?
The BIS calculates the gap by looking at borrowing in relation to the size of the economy, and comparing that with the long-term trend of that ratio.
When the two start to diverge, the BIS argues, a banking crisis could be on the way.
The BIS has a central position in global finance as it provides banking services to central banks and monitors the international flow of money and credit.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption How healthy are China's banks? Robin Brant takes a look.
The health of China's banking sector has long been a source of concern for financial markets.
Since the financial crisis of 2007-2008 there has been a boom in credit as the Chinese government has attempted to spur flagging growth.
But some of that lending has not been productive and the IMF estimates that loans worth $1.3 trillion are at risk of default.
However, as the Chinese banking system is largely owned or controlled by the government, analysts say the government would bail out the banking sector if necessary.
Brexit recovery
In its latest quarterly review, the BIS also said the markets has shown resilience following the UK's vote to leave the European Union.
"The speed of the recovery took many by surprise, given the political and economic uncertainty that the vote had triggered," said Claudio Borio, head of the Monetary and Economic Department at the BIS.
But he warned that, despite recent gains, global financial markets are in a sensitive state.
"There has been a distinctly mixed feel to the recent rally - more stick than carrot, more push than pull, more frustration than joy.
"This explains the nagging question of whether market prices fully reflect the risks ahead. Doubts about valuations seem to have taken hold in recent days. Only time will tell," Mr Borio said.Yep, the Lakers really are going with this whole "play terrible basketball on purpose" thing. Last night against the Rockets, they attempted 10 three-pointers as a team—two more than Houston's Trevor Ariza fired up by himself—and sent the Rockets to the free-throw line 50 times. They did both of those things on purpose. Byron Scott thinks this is a good way to play basketball.
As you might guess, turning down extra points at one end and handing them out like Halloween treats at the other wasn't the soundest of strategies: the Rockets won by 18, and the game was never close. This will happen every night. Byron Scott is going to be unemployed by Christmas.
Keep an eye on the Lakers, because their season has the potential to get even more hilarious, very soon. They're in Phoenix tonight, where they'll get their asses kicked by the young, fast, three-bombing Suns; they've got a Friday-Saturday back-to-back against the Clippers and Warriors, to whom they will lose by a combined 9,000 points; then they've got the Suns again on Tuesday. If they are not 0-5 after that game, I will throw my car keys into a river.
It's really impossible to overstate how dumb this basketball is. Sacramento Kings owner Vivek Ranadive caught some shit around basketball Twitter yesterday for suggesting that his team could play 4-on-5 at the defensive end, leaving one player to cherry-pick for easy baskets at the other; that's a terrible, terrible idea, but this is no less dumb! In (dumb) theory, it's about turning down long jumpers in favor of getting to the hoop for high-percentage looks; since the Lakers don't have anyone who can even dream of doing that, in practice it has meant lots and lots and lots of midrange bricks.
Last night was no different:
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Look at this putrid shot chart! Behold its stupid majesty! This shot chart is the saucepan helmet of shot charts. This shot chart should be scored with Yakety Sax. The Lakers took a total of 24 shots from the basket area and three-point territory last night; they took 27 long two-point jumpers. I can't even get mad at this shot chart. I feel about this shot chart the way I feel about Shitbarf Guy: Yeah, he made some bad decisions along the way, but my life is better for it.
The thing is, you know that Kobe Bryant knows this is the basketball equivalent of driving your thumbs into your own eyesockets. Ol' Man Mamba's shown some spleen already this season, getting into it with Dwight Howard last night and earning himself a technical foul. And now that the Lakers are down both Steve Nash and Julius Randle, he's basically on a raft with Carlos Boozer and Jeremy Lin, playing 1991 basketball on the orders of a lesser Laker great with the whole world watching. If you think he's gonna go along to get along while his team gets duffed in the ear night after night, man, you're wrong as hell.
God, this is the best. Treasure these moments, basketball fans. We won't see them again.
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Photo via GettyThe most popular digital distribution platform in the world, Steam, has finally introduced the Indian Rupee has its currency of choice when it is being accessed in India. With this, Steam has brought along a rather major change in pricing for quite a few of its games in India.
The downside, however, is that not all games have the pricing yet, and according to Steam, games that don't have Indian pricing won't show up on the Indian Steam store page. PC gamers will simply have to wait for a while till the publishers of those games get around to giving them Indian pricing.
While a lot of the indie games available on Steam have become cheaper as a result of the currency change, the AAA games have gone in the exact opposite direction, and in many cases, have become much more expensive than they were before.
Tell us what you think about Steam's decision and implementation of bringing the Indian currency to the storefront in the comments below.Not to be confused with Stacey Martin
Stacy Martin (born 1 January 1991)[1] is a French actress. She is best known for her breakthrough role as the younger version of Charlotte Gainsbourg's character Joe in Lars von Trier's 2013 drama film Nymphomaniac.
Early life [ edit ]
Martin was born on 1 January 1991, and spent her early childhood in Paris. She moved to Tokyo, Japan when she was seven, where she lived with her French father, René, a hairstylist, and her English mother, Annette, until she was thirteen.[2] She then returned to Paris.[2] After finishing school, she moved to London to study Media and Cultural Studies at the London College of Communication whilst modelling on the side. She studied the Meisner technique of acting at the Actors' Temple.[1]
Career [ edit ]
In 2013, Martin starred as Young Joe aged 15 to 31, in Lars von Trier's drama film Nymphomaniac.[3][4] For her role in the film, which had real sex scenes and featured hardcore porn in some cases, Martin had a "porn double" and used a prosthetic vagina.[2][5] The role got her nominated for a Bodil Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. She was also a part of the Breakthrough Brits of 2014 which was organized by BAFTA to recognize emerging talents. She played Faye in Ben Wheatley's 2015 film High-Rise,[6] and Young Dora in Matteo Garrone's Tale of Tales, also in 2015.
Martin was a part of the Rag & Bone Spring 2014 campaign alongside Emile Hirsch. She also modelled for Miu Miu in their 2014 and 2015 Fall/Winter campaigns. She is also the face of Miu Miu's first fragrance.
In 2017, Martin appeared in a small role as the assistant of J. Paul Getty in Ridley Scott's All the Money in the World.[7]
Personal life [ edit ]
As of March 2014, she lives in London with her boyfriend, musician Daniel Blumberg.[1][2]
Filmography [ edit ]
(3rd from the left) with the cast of Nymphomaniac at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival Stacy Martinwith the cast ofat the 2014 Berlin Film Festival
Awards and nominations [ edit ]Goldman Sachs, one of the world's biggest investment banks, gave credibility to a deal dubbed the "unacceptable face of capitalism" by U.K. lawmakers and "underplayed" their role in negotiations, according to a critical report by MPs.
Sir Philip Green, who sold retailer British Home Stores (BHS) to a one-time bankrupt, which then collapsed 14 months later, was the prime focus of the report's criticism. However, Goldman Sachs, which maintained in its evidence that it only provided free advice and "preliminary observations" to Green, "added lustre to an otherwise questionable process", according to a report by the U.K.'s Work and Pensions committee released Monday.
The collapse of BHS, once a staple of the U.K. high street, has left a £571 million ($750 million) pension deficit and led to the loss of over 10,000 jobs.Diamond Profile Blog Joined May 2009 United States 9882 Posts Last Edited: 2011- |
of the first modern defences, manned from 1881 until 1956. In 1878, the Royal Engineers built batteries on the three corners of the island, designed as separate fortresses.
Construction upon the island's "South Fort" began in spring of 1878, being completed in 1880. Construction on the West and East forts began in summer of 1878, being completed in 1880 and 1881 respectively. These forts were armed with four 10" rifled muzzle loader guns, with two in the South Fort and one each in the east and west. In 1891, the East and West guns were replaced with two 6" BL (breech loading) disappearing guns. A 9.2" Mk I gun, also on a disappearing mounting, was installed in 1893, in the southern part of the island.
A controlled minefield was controlled from Inchkeith, and the 'test room' for the Submarine Miners was created in an artificial cave, closed off by a granite wall, on the north side of the island. This was later used as a Small Arms Ammunition store.
In 1899, Inchkeith had a Compressed Air Foghorn installed, providing two 3.5 second blasts every 90 seconds during fog.[36] This would remain in place until replaced after the second world war.
From the 1890s until the early 1905, the fort at Inchkeith underwent a sequence of gun improvements and replacements. In 1893-95 two 4.7" MK1 quick-firing guns were installed. (These had been removed from Fort Paull on the north bank of the Humber (which was disarmed, being deemed to be too close to Hull)). In 1898 the two 10" rifled muzzle loaders in the south fort were dismounted, to be replaced by two 6" Mk VII guns. The two 4.7" guns were replaced by 9.2" BL Mk X guns. By 1905 the armament of the island comprised: 1 x 9.2" Mk I gun on a disappearing mounting; 2 x 9.2" Mk X guns on Central Pedestal mountings; 2 x 6-inch Mk VII guns at the north fort (replacing a single Mk VI 6" on a disappearing mounting); 2 x 6" Mk VII guns in the southern fort. 1906-7 all the 6" guns were removed, leaving only three 9.2" guns in place. By 1911 the shore was being covered in Barbed Wire and by the end of the First World War a series of pillboxes had been built on the beaches round the island. By the end of the First World War the island was armed with three 9.2" Mk X guns and six 6" Mk VII guns.
Britannia HMS
During World War I, the Royal Navy battleship HMS Britannia, at the time a part of the 3rd Battle Squadron in the Grand Fleet, ran aground at Inchkeith on 26 January 1915, suffering considerable bottom damage. She was refloated after 36 hours and was repaired and refitted at Devonport Dockyard.[38]
View of a snow-covered Fife, with Inchkeith in the foreground, from Portobello
The Second World War [ edit ]
Between the wars the fort and its guns were maintained. In 1937 several Lewis Guns were supplied, for anti-aircraft defence, and a pair of 12 Pdr QF guns, which were for drill and practice. In 1938, following the Munich Crisis, the island was further mobilised, and had more Nissen Huts installed, presumably for equipment and personnel. On 21 February 1940 a sand-filled dummy shell had to be fired across the bows of the Naval trawler 'Peter Carey', to stop it straying into a mined area; the shell ricocheted off the water and ended up bursting into a tenement flat at 118 Salamander Street in Leith. Fortunately no-one was injured.[39][40]
Inchkeith was the HQ of the Outer Defences of the Firth of Forth in both wars, in conjunction with batteries at Kinghorn, on the north shore, and Leith on the southern. The defences were designed to protect Edinburgh and the naval anchorage from distant bombardment (the Rosyth Dockyard was out of range), and also to deal with ships attempting to force their way into the naval anchorage beyond the defences, and towards the Forth Rail Bridge and the Rosyth Dockyard). In both wars there were anti-boat and anti-submarine booms across the river at this point, and in the Second World War, there were Induction loops and controlled minefields controlled from Inchkeith.
In the Second World War new batteries were established further east at Elie and Dirleton but Inchkeith remained fully armed.
In May 1940, the island was issued with 40 "Board of Trade, Rocket Flares, Red", for alerting in the event that an invasion was attempted (or spotted).
The gun strength of the island in the Second World War was the same as at the end of the First World War: one "Major Full Time Battery" of two 6" guns covering the North side of the island, two 6" guns covering the South side and the water between the island and Leith, a further two 6" guns in the West Fort, and three 9.2" guns, the purpose of which to tackle any enemy warships standing off to bombard the naval anchorage or the city of Edinburgh. The island was armed for a time with 3" anti-aircraft guns to deal with German aeroplanes dropping magnetic mines. These were replaced by Bren and Bofors guns. The garrison of the island was over 1100 at its peak in the Second World War, with dozens of buildings, emplacements, fire control centres, and Nissen huts, many of which remain in varying states of repair.
Operation Fortitude North [ edit ]
Operations Fortitude North and Fortitude South were related to a wider deception plan called Operation Bodyguard. Operation Bodyguard was the overall Allied strategic deception plan in Europe for 1944, carried out as part of the build-up to the Invasion of Normandy. The major objective of this plan was to lead the Germans to believe that the invasion of northwestern Europe would come later than was actually planned, and to threaten attacks at other locations than the true objective, including the Pas de Calais, the Balkans, southern France, Norway, and Soviet attacks in Bulgaria and northern Norway.
Operation Fortitude North's fictional British Fourth Army were based in Edinburgh, and spoof radio traffic and Double agents were used as means to disseminate the misinformation. On 3 March 1944, members of a "Special RS (Royal Signals) Unit" from the British Fourth Army landed on Inchkeith, with a detachment of 22 men and 4 officers, with two radio vans. At the beginning of April, a further 40 men arrived, and proceeded to stage mock attacks of the Inchkeith defences via the cliffs, until their departure in September.
The aim of this ruse, unknown to the participants, was to make German High Command believe that a raid in Norway or elsewhere was being planned. Although Operation Fortitude was a great success, Inchkeith appears not to have been overflown by German Reconnaissance planes until 7 October. Examination of the footage taken in 1945 appeared to indicate that the plane flew too high to ascertain anything meaningful.[41]
Post-war era to present day [ edit ]
Post-war, defences were dismantled commencing late 1945. By early January 1946, only a small number of troops with a "nucleus" of coastal guns remained, and finally in 1956/7, all military use of the island ceased, and ownership passed over to the Northern Lighthouse Board, who performed a variety of renovations on the island from the early 1960s onwards.
The island, like Cramond Island, was previously worked as a farm. It is now abandoned, and unkempt.
In 1958, an experimental foghorn was installed, replacing the previous 19th century system. A diaphone system providing 4 blasts of 1.5 seconds once every minute was installed on Inchcolm, operated by radio telephone from Inchkeith. This was replaced with an electrically operated system controlled by an automatic fog detector in 1986.
In 1971 the lighthouse and associated buildings became Category B listed buildings,[37] and in 1976 the island and its fortifications became a scheduled monument.[42]
In 1986 the lighthouse was automated, allowing it to be remotely managed by a telephone connection. The Northern Lighthouse Board removed the permanent lightkeepers, and sold the island to businessman Tom Farmer (founder of Kwik-Fit).[43] Under Farmer's ownership, permission is needed to land at Inchkeith; he himself lives in Barnton in Edinburgh.[citation needed] The current lighthouse is powered by nickel-cadmium batteries, "charged on a time cycle of three times per week by one of two (12.5 KVA) markon alternators with TS3 Lister diesel engines."[36]
See also [ edit ]
Sources [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Coordinates:As we visited Universal Studios Hollywood to check out this year’s Grinchmas, there was a pleasant amount of change around the park to create an update for you guys. This update won’t be focused on Grinchmas, but rather on general changes around the park, the revealing of the new retail and dining facilities near the front of the park, decorations around the park, and of course Wizarding World of Harry Potter!
Let’s start off with noting that the Studio Directory is updated for the Grinchmas performance aboard the Studio Tour, and the Grinchmas activities at the Universal Plaza. Like a Universal Studios Hollywood tradition, most of the Upper Lot’s buildings are coated with snow. This excludes the brand new Springfield. The path leading to the Studio Tour has replaced all its banners with Grinchmas related ones. Don’t miss out on the Studio Tour during Grinchmas, as the Who-Ville sets host a 3 minute musical performance. As I touched upon earlier, there’s not much (if any at all) holiday related theming in Springfield. Besides projected snowflakes on the Simpson’s Ride building at night, there are these flowers over at the entrance to the area. Little Paris and Little London are on the Upper Lot, which pretty much means both areas are covered in a layer of snow. The buildings around Super Silly Funland and Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem were also appropriately decorated for the time of year. Both the entries to the Lower Lot and the Studio Tour have received decorations, nicely complimenting the styles of the signs. The Hollywood Grille is still under construction and will reopen in February as a new dining place to compliment the new retail and dining location across from it. The new retail and dining center is slowly being revealed. The entire side of the Universal Plaza is now to be seen by the public, though construction inside continues, the outside over there is done. It does look quite nice, very colorful. Though I’d rather have seen a new higher capacity ride in that spot. It was quite some room this new complex took in. In the little Paris section of the Upper Lot, construction walls still surround Mel’s, that will either be remodeled or replaced. In addition the French Street Bistro is currently closed for refurbishment. Down on the Lower Lot the reconstruction of the old NBCUniversal experience building continues. I believe it’ll turn into a store or dining location. Right next door on Transformers The Ride- 3D, some projectors have been replaced, creating crystal clear images, while some others are almost entirely green and could benefit from an upgrade. Let’s move on to the amazingness we call the Wizarding World of Harry Potter! Interiors of the shops in Hogsmeade are currently being worked on. Over at the Forbidden Journey, the green-house line for the ride seems to be near finished. A quick look at the majestic Hogwarts castle. To the back of the castle, where the big ‘show building’ is located that you can see next to the green house, is where the actual Forbidden Journey ride is positioned. Leads of operations have started training with the ride. Little is known regarding what phase they’re in. The Flight of the Hippogriff coaster has been testing for a while now. Hagrid’s hut next to the ride is also shaping up nicely. Here’s a last quick look at the wonder. Wizarding World of Harry Potter will most likely open in April of 2016, the park’s opening hours are 8:00AM-10:00PM or 11:00PM for many days that month, indicating that Harry Potter crowds are probably in full swing that month! Keep in mind that Universal Studios Hollywood is making a huge and important announcement regarding Wizarding World of Harry Potter tomorrow, December 8th! EDIT: UNIVERSAL STUDIOS HOLLYWOOD ANNOUNCED THAT THE WIZARDING WORLD OF HARRY POTTER WILL OPEN APRIL 7TH! That was it for this Universal Studios Hollywood Update, we’ve got a wonderful look at Grinchmas coming up soon, so stay tuned for a lot more Universal Studios Hollywood, very soon!
Thanks for checking out this Universal Studios Hollywood Update! Make sure to comment your thoughts below! Will you come visit Wizarding World of Harry Potter soon?
Make sure to follow us on our social media for exclusive coverage! Facebook–Twitter–InstagramIn the aftermath of the mass shooting of a dozen police officers in Dallas this week, some conservatives rushed to lay blame for the incident at the feet of the Obama administration.
Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh said on Twitter that "Obama's words & [Black Lives Matter]'s deeds have gotten cops killed." Texas congressman Roger Williams said that "the spread of misinformation and constant instigation by prominent leaders, including our President," contributed to the killings. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, said the shooting had "roots" in the "anti-white/cop events illuminated by Obama."
These statements are part of a broader narrative of a so-called "war on cops" carried out by the Obama administration and/or the Black Lives Matter movement, depending on who you ask. It's certainly true that some shooters of police, like the Dallas attacker, appear to be motivated by a hatred of white police officers or a twisted urge to seek revenge for police shootings of black Americans. But the simplistic and inflammatory notion of a "war on cops" is completely undercut by one fundamental datapoint: intentional attacks on police officers are at historically low levels under President Barack Obama.
Data from the Officers Down Memorial Page, which tracks law enforcement officer fatalities in real time, illustrates the point. During the Reagan years, for instance, an average of 101 police officers were intentionally killed each year. Under George H.W. Bush that number fell to 90. It fell further, to 81 deaths per year, under Clinton, and to 72 deaths per year under George W. Bush.
Under Obama, the average number of police intentionally killed each year has fallen to its lowest level yet -- an average of 62 deaths annually through 2015. If you include the 2016 police officer shootings year-to-date and project it out to a full year, that average of 62 deaths doesn't change.
It's worth pointing out that in 2016, year-to-date officer fatalities via shooting only are up 44 percent over last year, according to the numbers compiled by the National Law Enforcement Officer's Memorial Fund. But that's partially an illustration of how sensitive these numbers are to individual incidents: if you set the Dallas shootings aside, the year-over-year increase is only 17 percent. And as UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh points out, the 2016 numbers are roughly on par with the numbers for the past 10 years.
A gunman opened fire on police at a downtown Dallas protest against police shootings on July 7, 2016, killing five officers and injuring seven, as well as two civilians.
These figures in the chart above include all incidents in which a suspect intended to kill a police officer -- shootings, stabbings, assaults, bombings, and vehicular assaults. They exclude things like accidental shootings, job-related illnesses and traffic accidents. If you were to narrow it down to just shootings, the overall trend would be roughly the same: from 80 deaths annually under Reagan to 48 annually under Obama. Again, factoring in the 2016 shooting numbers, including Dallas, has a negligible effect on the average under Obama.
These falling fatality numbers aren't simply a function of better medical care for injured officers: overall assaults on officers are down too. In 1988, the last year of the Reagan administration, there were 15.9 assaults for every 100 sworn law enforcement officers according to the FBI. In 2000, at the end of the Clinton administration, there were 12.7 assaults for every 100 officers. By the end of the Bush administration that number fell further to 11.3. Under Obama in 2014, the most recent year for which the FBI has data, that number further fell to 9.0.
One area where the numbers are a little murkier is ambush attacks like the Dallas shooting, where killing police officers is the sole intent of the crime. These are generally very rare, with the number of officers dying in these attacks each year in the single or double digits. But they have become slightly more common: during George H.W. Bush's administration (the first administration for which the FBI provides complete data) roughly eight officers died in ambush attacks each year. That rose to nine under Clinton, and 10 per year under George W. Bush and Obama (through 2014).
The small numbers here make these attacks no less tragic -- one dead police officer is too many, regardless of the cause. But they have to be understood in the context of a striking overall improvement in officer safety.
It's tempting to place credit or blame for these figures with whichever president happened to be in charge at the time, as many conservatives have done in recent days. But in reality police officer safety is much more closely connected to broader social trends than to who happens to be sitting in the White House.
Since the early 1990s, for instance, violent crime has plummeted. Motor vehicles have become much safer. States have passed laws making the roadways safer for police. All of these factors have contributed to the dramatic drop on police fatality rates, from all causes, that we've seen over the past few decades.Hello there! It has been quite some time since I last posted but I am excited to be back! A lot has happened in the past year and a half. I gave birth (yeah-thats him up there…all 14 amazing months of him!), we moved to Massachusetts, and both Brian and I got new jobs. But, enough about me…on to the new recipe!
I have always made most of our food from scratch, but recently, I have become more committed to a clean eating lifestyle. For the past few months I have been baking homemade granola bars for Brian to take with him to work and the baby loves them. The problem is, the daycare the little monkey attends is a nut free zone and these granola bars are made with peanut butter. So I set out to create a nut-free granola bar that the monkey and the rest of the family would enjoy and could take to school/daycare. Well-the little man highly approves of these bars and so does Brian!
While technically these are granola bars, we all think they taste like oatmeal raisin cookies! Enjoy!
Soft and Chewy Oatmeal Raisin Bars
Ingredients:
1/2 cup coconut oil, melted
2 medium ripe bananas, mashed
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 cup raw honey
4 cups old fashioned rolled oats
scant 1/2 cup white whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/3 cup ground flaxseed
1/2 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
1/2 cup raisins
1 Tablespoon cinnamon
Directions:
1. Pre-heat oven to 325 °F and line a 9 x 13 baking dish with parchment paper.
2. In a large bowl, mix all wet ingredients together.
3. Add dry ingredients and mix until combined. Do not worry about over mixing.
4. Press mixture into lined pan and bake for 25 minutes.
5. Allow bars to cool completely before cutting (makes 16-24 bars…I usually cut it into 20 which lasts the three of us about a week!)
Advertisements1. “One size fits all” isn’t a game you can even think of playing. 2. You’re no stranger to walking out of a store because they don’t carry anything above a size 12. 3. And you know not to bother with sales because the largest size that’s ever in stock is an M. 4. Strapless bras are just a no-go zone for you. 5. Plus, all the bras that are comfortable and offer that perfect support cost an arm and a leg. 6. Actually, no. All clothes are more expensive than anything “normal” sized. 7. You have to try EVERYTHING on before you buy it. 8. Which really makes online shopping a chore because you never know what your size is. 9. Especially because all stores think people looking for plus-size clothing just want to look like a shapeless sack. 10. And forget about even thinking about getting jeans online. 11. You really can’t go to a cheap market or a random Ebay seller because you already know nothing will fit you. 12. Damn, most of the time have to tie your clothes up to fit your body the right way.
13. All your belt loops are broken from you constantly trying to pull your jeans up. 14. And your pants always rip on your inner thighs because of them always rubbing together. 15. Not to mention all the little balls of fabric that build up there too. 16. But even worse than that? The painful chub rub you get when you wear dresses or skirts. 17. You’re constantly buying baby powder to combat all the chafing. 18. But when you do chafe, you’re forced to wear pants for at least a few weeks. 19. Your pants fit perfectly around your booty and thighs but are always baggy down near your ankles. 20. Or are massive around your waist and give you major butt gap. 21. And jeans that actually fit well everywhere are usually two metres too long on you. 22. Most jeans you own are in that shitty stretchy material, so you always get a bad case of saggy butt syndrome. 23. Any time you wear jeans with holes, you’re left looking like a wrapped leg of lamb with marks everywhere.
24. Button-up shirts always pop open as you walk. Or sit. Or breathe. Or exist, really. 25. You’re constantly pulling dresses out of your ass crack. 26. In the summer, cute lil’ shorts really just look like underwear on you. 27. And whenever you walk with shorts on you have to constantly pull them out of your thighs because they really love to bunch up. 28. Actually… any tight clothing loves to creep up. 29. Skirts and dresses never sit the same at the front as they do in the back, thanks to your booty. 30. You have to stay away from any tops or pants with text on them because they warp out of control. 31. Fabric at the seams of all your pants and shorts always pull and go see-through from the strain. 32. And if you’re sitting in the middle of anything, you feel like your entire, kinda see-through, ass is in everyone’s lap as you get up to leave.
33. Every time a song references anything about bass or booty, all eyes are on you. 34. When you work out your boobs and ass get so damn sweaty. 35. To the point where you’re always afraid of leaving ass sweat marks on the ground when you stand up. 36. You have to hold your boobs as you run so you don’t knock yourself out. 37. And you don’t need anyone else to clap for you as you run because your thighs gladly do it for you. 38. A lot of swimwear either cuts into your hips or slides right off them. 39. So you’re usually forced to buy mismatched tops and bottoms for that perfect fit. 40. Normal clothes like singlets are deemed “too sexy” when they they’re on your body. 41. Which means everything casual you own is no longer work-appropriate. Even if it’s just a t-shirt and jeans. 42. You have to deal with people thinking they’re complimenting you by saying “they love a girl that’s not afraid to eat”. 43. And worst of all, people try to offend you by calling you fat, like it's anything more than a word. Mmmmm boy, bye.
Promoted byOne day, you and your roommate decide to make breakfast. You really want eggs, so you pull out your frying pan to make some.
Your roommate looks over your shoulder and says, “Hey, I don’t know how to make eggs! Will you teach me?”
You say, “Sure!”
So you teach your roommate how to use the frying pan to make eggs. You make some eggs, and they are delicious.
The next day, you wake up late. You walk into the kitchen and find your roommate in the middle of making some eggs!
Your roommate proudly shows you the frying pan he’s using to cook the eggs for brunch.
You gasp in horror.
“What’s wrong?”
“You used the frying pan to make brunch!”
“Uh, yeah, just like you taught me.”
“But you’re supposed to use the cast iron-skillet to make brunch.”
“Ins’t brunch just like breakfast, though?”
“Yeah, but brunch always uses the cast iron-skillet.”
“…Isn’t that a lot of trouble?”
“Hm, yeah.”
“So why do you do it?”Pokemon X and Y players have been treated to a new Vivillon variant, to celebrate 100 million Pokemon trades in the Global Trade Station.
To get this new Fancy Pattern Vivillon, load up one of the games on your 3DS and pick 'Mystery Gift' from the main menu. Choose receive gift, open the communication channel, and hit 'connect via internet'.
After a little loading, you'll get the option to receive this posh new butterfly. Accept, and then back out of the Mystery Gift menu and load your save game.
Find a Pokemon Center and chat to the girl in blue to get this one-of-a-kind Vivillon for your party. The critter is level 12, and comes in a Cherish Ball. It has Gust, Light Screen, Struggle Bug, and Hold Hands as its moves.
You have until July 31st to grab this special Pokemon before it flutters off into the ether, never to be seen again. Probably.Reading I Am Brian Wilson is like having a conversation with Brian Wilson.
In fact, it's more like having a conversation with Brian Wilson than having an actual conversation with him. This is the discussion that every music enthusiast and admirer of the man would want to have with Brian Wilson that would never be possible over the phone or face to face.
The entire book reads in Wilson's voice and the very nature of how he talks. How he tells stories is embedded in every sentence. Through its pages, he tells the tale of more than 50 years of making music, falling in love, facing countless losses, and wrestling with severe mental illness. The conversational style of the book makes it a quick read, because it literally feels like he's sitting across the table from you connecting the dots of his own life story as he writes it. It feels authentic, not only for its tone and style but for its flaws, since that's how Brian talks and thinks and acts. It's imperfectly flawless. It is an amazing body of work and one of the more unusual memoirs for more than the narrative.
Continue Reading
There is the sheer childlike charm to I Am Brian Wilson, which is again reflective of the man himself as well as a credit to ghostwriter Ben Greenman for assisting in capturing Wilson's character in book form. After just finishing it, the impression of his existence is overwhelming. Not only is Brian Wilson not made for these times, I'm not sure if he was made for this planet in an era. He's a humble genius whose biggest struggle has been with himself and those he trusted the most, a man who has only wanted harmony his entire life, a man whose life has been dedicated to making musical mythology, whose life, in turn, has became mythical. Wilson looks back with wonder, fear, fascination, love, and mercy. Love and mercy are more than a song or a movie to Wilson. They are a way of life, and this book is written with that in mind. With the possible exception of perhaps Eugene Landy, the psychiatrist whose controversial treatment upended Wilson's career in the '80s, Wilson is very objective and honest about his mixed emotions with other damaging figures in his life. Even with Landy, it just seems he's being up front and honest about his bitterness. The chapter centered around his father is gut-wrenching, but what's more stunning is the endearing perspective Wilson takes on his father.
"I have said how hard it is for me to talk about my dad, and that’s partly because I want to get it right.... I don’t like making the discussion all about how terrible my dad was," Wilson writes as he presents both the horribly abusive side of Murry Wilson as well as the loving side.
The structure of the memoir is another fascinating aspect of the book. It's vaguely in linear order, but on six different timelines that continually intersect. Many of the chapters are started from his favorite chair in his LA home as he talks about his modern-day routine, which leads to a memory. This again lends to the idea that he is telling you this entire story from that chair. The memories have memories inside of them, and it becomes clear what the milestones in his life were from his perspective.
There are two camps of Beach Boys fans: There are those who simply love the surf and car tunes from the first 10 albums and love the goofball antics of Mike Love, and then there is the Church of Wilson. This is definitely a book for the latter group, as well as a book for music geeks in general. But on another level, this is about persevering through mental illness and never giving up.
"I want people to know what I went through and want people to understand," Wilson said when I spoke to him. "I felt liberated, and it was good telling the honest truth."
His story hinges around all that happened to him in 1964 with the beginning of his mental collapse as well as the appearance of his genius. It hinges on Pet Sounds, on SMiLE, on Sunflower, Surf's Up, Holland, Love You, Today!, Summer Days. The albums he digs into the most are resoundingly his best works and fan favorites. It's a fascinating ride as he travels from backstage at The Royal Albert Hall for the performance of SMiLE in 2004, back to 1964 melting down in the Houston airport, to teaching his brothers to sing in the '50s, to 1970 and the cover shoot for Sunflower, to every step of his solo career, to brushing off the Beach Boys' efforts after Wilson left them to their own devices.
"Most fans of the band don't like those records. Some fans don't even know about them. There are only a few songs on those records that I like... but mostly they aren't worth thinking about too hard," he says.
There are also harrowing tales of insanity, drug abuse, and admitted failings as a husband and a father. It's impressive that Wilson completely owns up to his own madness and is genuinely regretful over bad decisions in the past, while wildly forgiving to someone like Mike Love, who gets about a sum total of two paragraphs in the entire book. You can tell it's another mixed bag of emotions for Wilson, because on the one hand, he had admired his Beach Boys songwriting partner since they were teens, but on the other, the bad blood between them has never been readily resolved. Yet the harshest thing Wilson has to say is "Mike had a funny way of looking at things."
It is also an open love letter to Wilson's supportive wife, Melinda, who saved him from Landy and got him back on track for his third act. This is the story of a hero as well as an artist, a genius, and a musician. He frankly portrays his mental illness from the beginning to his lowest depths to the heights he's at today. He gets into the darkest territory of his mind, but he was committed to presenting the truth as he saw it.
"I was scared of some of the memories," Wilson says about his commitment to the book. "I don't know how I did it. I don't know how."China's exports and imports of goods amounted to $4.16 trillion in 2013, topping the U.S. for the first time.
A new Standard Chartered report by Madhur Jha and other Standard Chartered economists, titled "Global Trade Unbundled," highlights just how much of a trading giant China has become.
"China is a true mega-trader — a position last held by colonial Britain, with trade significant not only as a share of world trade (11.5%) but also of its own GDP (47%)," according to Jha. "China will likely become a champion of free trade."
The U.S. is China's top export destination. China's trade with Latin America has risen more than 200 times since 1990 and is the fastest-growing corridor. China's trade is beginning to slow, however. Exports accounted for about 25% of GDP in 2012, down from 35% in 2007. And the slowdown is broad based.
The good news is despite the slowdown, exports to Latin America and Africa are still growing at "double-digit levels." Jha and the other authors identity a few reasons they think China will continue to be a leader of world trade.
The economic recovery in the developed world is a positive for China, as demand picks up. "China remains a leading force in world trade, having consolidated its position as key player in global supply chains." While China no longer has the low-cost advantage, it is moving up the value chain and has a larger share in medium and high-tech exports. "We believe it is unlikely that there will be significant migration of these processes out of China for lack of suitable replacement centers, with both the infrastructure and the scale to accommodate these exports." There is too much attention paid to Chinese exports and not enough to imports. "The focus on more balanced growth and structural reforms domestically will, over time, allow for lower savings and higher consumption," writes Jha. "…Some of this shift towards consumption will filter nto greater imports from the rest of the world, strengthening global trade growth and South-South trade in particular."
Standard Chartered economists expect Chinese trade to double in size by 2020.
"China's trade growth is unlikely to rebound to the double-digit level seen over the last couple of decades. However, it is important to remember that the sheer size of China's trade will mean that even 7% GDP growth, faster than the growth in developed world trade, would make China the single biggest contributor to world trade in absolute terms."
Here's a look at the China's major trade corridors in 1990 and 2012.Emergency personnel work at the scene of a fatal multi-vehicle crash on the eastbound side of the Bronx Expressway in the Bronx section of New York, Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2016. Authorities said a tractor-trailer crashed into several cars.
Emergency personnel work at the scene of a fatal multi-vehicle crash on the eastbound side of the Bronx Expressway in the Bronx section of New York, Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2016. Authorities said a tractor-trailer crashed into several cars. Seth Wenig — AP
Lower gas prices and and increased motor-vehicle mileage combined with risky activities like speeding and driving while texting is proving deadly for American drivers.
New preliminary 2016 data shared Wednesday from the New preliminary 2016 data shared Wednesday from the National Safety Council estimates that as many as 40,000 people died in motor vehicles crashes last year, a 6% rise from 2015. If those numbers bear out, it would be a 14% increase in deaths since 2014, the biggest two-year jump in more than five decades.
It also means that 2016 may have been the deadliest year on U.S. roads since 2007, the NSC says.
Crashes result in the very real cost of human life. But there are also millions more who are seriously injured—an estimated 4.6 million in 2016 according to NSC—and a financial cost to society as well. NSC estimates the cost of motor-vehicle deaths, injuries, and property damage in 2016 was $432 billion, a 12% increase from the previous year. Those costs include losses in wages and productivity, medical expenses, property damage, employer costs and administrative expenses, the NSC says.
The data comes one day after Toyota Research Institute CEO Gill Pratt, along with other executives from ride-hailing company Lyft, Volvo Car Group, and The data comes one day after Toyota Research Institute CEO Gill Pratt, along with other executives from ride-hailing company Lyft, Volvo Car Group, and General Motors testified before a House subcommittee about deploying autonomous vehicles and the potential for this technology to greatly reduce traffic injuries and fatalities.
In October, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released In October, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released traffic fatality statistics for the first half of 2016 that were equally abysmal. NHTSA reported, at the time, that there were 17,775 deaths on the road in the first half of the year, up 10.4% from the same period in 2015.
While both should be noted that NHTSA and NSC both paint a grim picture, the two entities calculate traffic death rates differently. NSC uses data from the National Center for Health Statistics, an arm of the CDC. It counts both traffic and non-traffic deaths that occur within a year of the accident, while NHTSA counts only traffic deaths that occur within 30 days. NSC's data also counts crashes on both public and private roadways such as parking lots and driveways.
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The NSC also released Wednesday a survey conducted by Toluna Group that shows the kinds of high-risk activities drivers are doing while on the road. The survey asked more than 2,000 people who drive at least 15 minutes on a |
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AKIRA GOTTFRIED, RANDY GOTTLIEB, AUBREY GOULD, YVONNE GOULETTE, FABRICE GRACE, MARILYN GRADY, DALE GRADY, JANICE GRADY, PAUL GRAESSLE, CRAIG GRAHAM, DAVID GRIFFITH GRAHAM, KATH GRAHAM, MICHAEL GRAHAM, PAM GRANADA, RENZO GRANT, JIM GRANT, JULIE GRANT, PETER GRANTHAM, DIANE GRANTHAM, PATT GRAY, LES GREAVES, JUNE GREEN, BERNIE GREEN, PETER GREEN, RICK GREENE, BERNIE GREENE, DORAN GREENE, JEANIE GREENE, PETER GREENMANTLE, STEVE GREGORY, CALVIN GREIG, DAVID GREIVE, GARY GRIFFITH, GUS GRIFFITHS, PETER GRIMES, BRIAN GRIMES, JULIE GRISWOLD, EILEEN GROENHUIZEN, FRITZ GROSS, ERIC GROSSET, OLIVER GROSSMAN, HELENE GROVERS, PETER GUERIN, JOE GUILBEAULT, BRIAN GUILLEMIN, MARIE NOELLE GUINWAN, TONY GUSTA, DENISE GUSTA, MATTHEW GUY, ALISTAIR GUY, BERNIE (DUBOIS) GUY, COLIN GUY, EWAN GUY, JEAN-PAUL --------------------------------------------------------------- HABER, BLAKE HABER, DONNA HARBER, HARVEY HABIB, PAT HACHER, ALLEN HACKER, FRED HADFIELD, ANTHONY HAGEN, MARIANNE HAGNAZARIAN, VIKE HAHN, KLAUS HALD, TOMMY HALFORD, ELENA HALL, CINDY KAY HALL, EVERET V. HALL, KEVIN MICHAEL HALL, STEPHEN HALONEN, GARY HAMAJI, MARY HAMILTON, BILL HAMILTON, MATT HAMILTON, STARR HARVEY HAMILTON, VIBEKE HAMLIN, AVERY HAMMILL, NEIL HAMMONS, SHAWN HANCOCK, DAVID HANCOCK, KEVIN HANEY, HEATHER HANEY, RAY HANLEY, BILL HANLEY, CAROLINE HANLEY, JOHN HANSEN, ARDEN HANSEN, DIANNA HANSEN, KJELD KINEI HANSON, JEANNIE HANSON, NOEL HANSON, JEANNIE HARDY, NICK HARE, JAMES HARIS, DON HARKER, BILL HARKER, LESLIE HARMAN, RAY HAROD, HERB HARPER, LEN HARRELL, BRUCE HARRIS, ARNOLD HARRIS, CAROL THOMAS HARRIS, JONAH HARRIS, TRAVERS HARRISON, HUGH HARRISON, MARK HARRYMAN, MELISSA HART, MAUREEN HARVEY, CRAIG HASLAM, SANDRA HASLAM, STEVE (REED) HASSELBERGER, CHANTALE HASSELBERGER, SUSAN HASSING, BILL HAUG, RALPH HAWLEY, KEN HAWLEY, NANCY HAY, GEORGE HAYES, GREGORY EUGENE HAZEL., INEZ HAZELWOOD, GERRY HAZELWOOD, TONI HEARST, NANY (DOWERS KUGLER) HECHE, ADAM HEDGECOCK, MIKE HEEDE, FRITZ HEID, MANFRED HEIDERER, MAX HEINRICHMEYER, LUDGER HEINS, ELLA HEISER, DAVID HELFENBERGER, VIRGINIA HENDERSON, NELSON HENDERSON, SABRINA HENDRICKS, CRAIG HENNING, DAN HENSON, ROGER HENWOOD, DAVID ROSS HENWOOD, ELAINE HEPNER, NORM HEREFORD, CHARLES HERMANN, ARNOLD HERMANN, SYLVIE HERMANS, KARL HERMANS, KATHY HERNANDEZ, AGAPITO HERNANDEZ, LESLIE HERNANDEZ, MARIO JR. HEYMANS, JOCIM HIATT, WARREN HIGGOTT, CAROL HILL, BOB HILL, ERIC SHAWN GILLIS HILL, GRANT HILL, JUDY HILL, SALLY LOUISE HILL, VAL HILLARD, THEO HILTON, RALPH HILTON, RICK HINDMARSH, GINNY HIRSHERBERGER, TORSTEN HITON, RICK HOBEL, ARLYN HOBEL, GENE GAIL HOFER, MARTIN HOFER, SUSI HOFFMAN, MARGIE HOGAN, IAN HOGBERG, ULF HOLLAND, GAIL HOLLANDS, BRETT HOLLELEY, PETER HOLLIDAY, CARL HOLLOWAY, DEBBIE BELL HOLLOWAY, DON C. HOLMES, DOUG HOLMES, LINDA HOLMSND, ALAN HOLROW, PAUL HOME, ULLI HOMIER, BERNARD HOOD, DOUGLAS HOOKER, BOBBY HOONG, ALAN CHOCK HOPKINS, RON HOPKINS, SUSAN HORN, ERNST HORNER, JACK HORROCKS, KAREN HORSTEDT, ROY HORVATIC, TRACEY HOTTOIS, PHILIPPE HOTTOIS, TERESA HOVERSON, SIG HOWARD, STEVE HOWARD, WALT HOWE, BERNICE HOXIE, BETH ANN HUBBARD, GREG HUBBARD, RICHARD HUBER, FRANK HUCKER, CHRISTINE HUFFAM, BLAKE HUGHES, DICK HUGHES, KEN HUGHES, RICHARD HUNT, MARTIN HUNT, PAGE HUNTER, REX HURST, NAN HURTADO, FRANK HURWITZ, JAY HURWITZ, PAM HUSS, MILLIE HUTCHERSON, MATT HUTCHINS, WAYNE HUTCHINSON, DAWN HUTSON, MIKE HUTTON, KIM (TAYLOR) --------------------------------------------------------------- ILICH, ROBERT IMBURGIA, PETER IMPNEY, CYNTHIA ISRAELSON, PRESTON IZNAOLA, MARTIN --------------------------------------------------------------- JACKSON, ADRIENNE JACKSON, CHARLES JACKSON, CLARISSE JACKSON, KEVIN JACKSON, TERRY ANN JACKT, LAUREL JACOB, RICHARD JACOBI, MONIKA JACOBS, CAROL JUNE JACOMIE, SAUNDRA JACONELLO, GILES BENJAMIN JACQUES, CATHERINE JAMES, BOB JAMES, LORI JAMTHEDEN, ANNIKA JAMTHEDEN, LARS JANSEN, LOTHAR JANSSON, BERNT JANSSON, CHRISTINE JANSSON, JAMINE JARAMILLO, DUANE JARON, TOM JARRETT, SCOTT JARVA, HARRIET JASNOCK, DEREK JASSO, ANNETTE KELLY JEFFERSON, TOM JELLISON, CECIL "DON" JENKINS, ROD JENKINSON, ARTHUR JENNINGS, LESLIE JENNINGS, MARGARET JENSEN, LARRY JENSON, DONNA JENZEN, DOMINO R. JEPSON, GARY JERLING, CARA JERLING, FRANCESCA JERLING, MARA JESSUP, AMOS JESSUP, ARIEL JESSUP, DALY JESSUP, JAN JIMENEZ, JOSE ANTONIO JIMENEZ, ONDINA JOHANSEN, JOHNNY JOHANSEN, OJVIND JOHANSSEN, ARNE JOHANSSON, LESLIE JOHNSON, JULIE JOHNSON, LAMONT JOHNSON, MARK JOHNSON, MATTHEW JONES, BOB JONES, HARDY JONES, JAMES "ROLI" JONES, MARK JONES, RORY JONSSON, BOB JORDAN, DAVID JORDAN, JULIE JORY, DORANNE JOYCE, TOM JUELICH, BAMBI JUELICH, ED --------------------------------------------------------------- KALAPUS, LARRY KANDA, CAROL ANN KAPLAN, STEVEN E. KARAGIANNIS, DIMITRI KARAS, DAVID KATHARY, DALE KATKE, TOM KAWALLER, PAUL KAY, BOB KAYSER, JOE KEAT, DAVID KEAT, URSULA KEATING, SANDRA KATHERINE (VOSS) KEATS, JEFF KEELEN, DON KEELER, DAVID KEELER, DON KELDERS, ANDRE KELLY, BESS KELLY, CHARLES KELLY, DENNIS KELLY, MIKE KELLY, PATRICIA KELLY, QUENTIN KEMBER, JANE KEMP, DAVID KEMP, PAM KEMP, RAY KEMPFF, STEPHEN P.S.J. KEON, GWEN KERN, LORI KERR, GUS KERSHAW, DORIS KERSHAW, JOHN KESSLER, STEPHEN EDWARD KETTERIDGE, GLYNN KEYES, KEN KHALIPA, MICHEL KIEFER, DORTHE KIEFER, MATHIAS KIENE, IRMGARD KIHNG, JIM KIMNACH, DON KING, CHRISTINA KING, FRANCIS KING, JOE KINNES, LARRY KINNINGER, RICHARD KIRDY, SABRINA KIRK, KEITH KIRKLAND, DAVID KIRN, |
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