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(in six parts)
A Clever Dummy (1917) Early 'Robot' Films in the Silent Era In many cases in these early 'robot' films, the automatons (or automated thinking machines, often functioning as robots or servants) could prove to be dangerous or deadly after running amok, as in Frankenstein (1931). Early depictions of "mechanical men" included these short films (often comedies and usually one-reel) - sometimes reflecting the encroachment of machinery and the increasing fear of industrialization: An Animated Doll (1908), from Essanay
An Extraordinary Duel (1909, Fr.),, from Pathé Frères, about two dueling men (one black, one white) who kept destroying each other, but then were reanimated and rebuilt to continue fighting
The Rubber Man (1909), from the Lubin Company, about a mechanical creation that ran amok through a town and village before being short-circuited by being doused in a water trough
Dr. Smith's Automaton (1910, Fr.), from Pathé Frères
A Mechanical Husband (1910, UK), about a girl who objected to her father's choice of a man and fell in love with an automaton
The Automatic Motorist (1911, UK), a comedic fantasy take-off of Georges Melies' A Trip to the Moon (1902), and a mix of live-action and stop-motion animation, in which a mechanical chauffeur drove a newly-wed couple on a honeymoon trip to Saturn
The Inventor's Secret (1911), from Biograph (and writer/director Mack Sennett), about a cop (Dan, portrayed by Sennett) who set out to retrieve a missing girl and collect a $500 reward, but mistook an automatic doll for the child
The Electric Leg (1912, UK), about the invention of a primitive prosthetic or electric leg for disabled individuals by Professor Bound, but for one amputee, the artificial leg had a mind of its own; he lost control of it and it took a man into a girls' dormitory
The House of Mystery (1912, Fr.), from Pathé Frères, with a mechanical policeman
Sammy's Automaton (1914, Fr.), about Sammy thoughtlessly turning a lifeless mannequin-dummy into an uncontrollable, lascivious automaton
The Automatic House (1915), from Empress, about an automatic maid in a "automatic house"
The Mechanical Man (1915), from Universal, about a "mechanical man" (Walter Frederick Trevallion, as Phroso)
Hoffmanns Erzählungen ( aka Tales of Hoffman) (1916, Ger.), was told in three stories/parts about the hero's past loves; in the first, the hero young Hoffmann (Kurt Wolowsky) fell in love with a life-sized automaton, a living marionette named Olympia (Alice Scheel-Hechy); he had been duped by Coppelius (Friedrich Kühne) into wearing a pair of magic eyeglasses that made inanimate objects come to life; when the deception was revealed, the automaton was torn to pieces
Homunculus (1916, Ger.), an expressionistic, six-part serial about diabolical, mad scientist Dr. Hansen's (Adolf Paul) (and his assistant Edgar Rodin's (Friedrich Kühne)) creation of a bitter, soulless, artificial man, the Homunculus (Olaf Fønss), that became tyrannical
A Clever Dummy (1917), from Mack Sennett and Triangle/Keystone, about an inventor named Samuel Tinker (James Donnelly) who created a remote-controlled mechanical robot dummy modeled after the building's janitor (silent film comedian Ben Turpin known for his crossed-eyes); then to further romance, the janitor traded places with the dummy during a vaudeville stage performance to get closer to a woman in the show with whom he was smitten.
The Automatic Motorist
(1911, UK)
Homunculus (1916, Ger.)
A Clever Dummy (1917)
The Golem (1920, Germ.) (aka Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam)
Der Golem (1920, Germ.) (aka wie er in die Welt kam) The Golem (1920, Ger.) (aka Der Golem) Golem Paul Wegener directed three influential adaptations of the Golem legend by Gustav Meyrinck: Der Golem (1914, Ger.) (aka The Monster of Fate)
Der Golem Und Die Tanzerin (1917, Ger.) (aka The Golem and the Dancer) - notably the first horror film sequel
Der Golem (1920, Ger.) (aka The Golem: or How He Came Into the World), with Karl Freund as cinematographer The first expressionistic film was based upon Central European myths and influenced later 'Frankenstein' monster films in the early 1930s with themes of a creator losing control of his creation. The Golem, played by Wegener himself, was an ancient clay figure from Hebrew mythology that was brought to life by Rabbi Loew's magic amulet to defend and save the Jews in 16th century Prague from a pogrom threatened by Rudolf II of Habsburg. The giant man-made, clay creature roamed and lumbered through the Jewish ghetto of medieval Prague to protect it from persecution.
The Master Mystery (1919 or 1920) (aka The Houdini Serial, and Le Maitre du Mystere) Q, or The Automaton Director Burton King's and Harry Grossman's independently-produced serial (with 15 episodes, some of which are lost) was made by Studio Pathe in France. It starred magician and trick escapist artist Harry Houdini as heroic Justice Department/secret service agent Quentin Locke who battled a threatening and criminal international cartel/corporation (the Patent Company). The serial featured a huge, mechanical, evil robot named Q or The Automaton (Floyd Buckley), the cartel's protective robot-servant. The criminal mastermind had a goofy-looking face and a barrel-shaped pelvis. Houdini exposed the robot as a human in disguise. This film had one of the earliest (if not the first) on-screen theatrical representation of a traditional robot.
The Mechanical Man (1921, It.) (aka L’Uomo Meccanico) Mechanical Man Writer/director Andre Deed's short silent film (only parts of which survive, in a fragmented form - in total, about a third of the original 80 minutes in length) featured a giant, super-powered, 9-10 foot-tall, colossal evil "mechanical" robot, designed to commit robberies and create mayhem. It was programmed and remotely-controlled by evil villainess adventuress Mado (Valentina Frascaroli) to cause severe damage with its fiery, acetylene blow-torch hands and its massive bulk. The lumbering robot had headlights for eyes, and had the capability of running at high speed. The film's finale featured a climactic battle at a masked ball in the Opera House between the first monstrous robot and a second mechanical robot, specifically created (with similar specifications) to destroy the first one.
Metropolis (1927, Ger.) "Fake" Maria This future dystopic silent film from director Fritz Lang featured one of the earliest robots (and also female!), a great iconic image. At the time, most robots were either asexual or male. The story was set in the year 2026 in the city of Metropolis. The luxurious, futuristic, Art Deco city - an industrial world with skyscrapers and bridges, was divided or stratified into an upper, elite, privileged class of powerful industrialists and a subterranean, nameless, oppressed and exploited, ant-like worker/slave class. An elite, privileged ruling technocracy, led by Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), was run on the back-breaking labor of underground masses of toiling workers who ran the machines. The children were cared for by the beautiful heroine Maria (Brigitte Helm), who brought them to a forbidden artificial grotto of the ruling class. There, her beauty overwhelmed Freder (Gustav Frohlich), the son of the ruler of Metropolis, and he fell in love with her. When he went searching for her, he became appalled by the horrors of the working world and the waste of life. After discovering the workers' clandestine meeting led by Maria, Freder's controlling, glacial father conspired with archetypal mad scientist Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) to create an evil, robotic Maria look-alike duplicate (explicitly created to replace a specific human), in order to manipulate his workers and preach riot and rebellion. The Art Deco-styled female robot (also Brigitte Helm) was constructed and brought to life by Rotwang as a metal android (later inspiring Star Wars' C-3PO). It was supposed to resemble the dead wife of the city’s ruler. Rotwang had kidnapped the virtuous and compassionate union leader heroine Maria, and created an evil doppelganger of her in his laboratory - in a stunning transformation scene in which he copied Maria's face and body onto the metal surface of the robot. She was to deceptively become an evil, seductive and sadistic version of Maria. The robot had a fully-armored head, with slits for eyes and mouth, sculpted shoulders, as well as a mechanically-jointed body with armor-like coverings on the legs and feet. The android was created in order to discredit the real Maria by - among other things, performing lascivious, erotic dances to a frenzied male audience to incite them to riot (as part of the aristocracy's plan to brutally subdue them).
Der Herr Der Welt (1934, Germ.) (aka Master of the World) Giant Industrial Robot, and Army of Killer Robots Prolific director Harry Piel's fourth science-fiction film (of a quartet of science fiction films) was a tale about robots created to take the place of human labor, but also posing a potential threat of taking over the world. Robot inventor, machine manufacturer and scientist Dr. Erich Heller (Walter Janssen) and handsome mining engineer Werner Baumann (Siegfried Schürenberg) discussed a futuristic world where robotic machines would liberate mankind from hard labor or dangerous occupations (such as mining). In his work, Heller was assisted by Professor Wolf (Walter Franck), a demented and crazed colleague who had completed work on a giant robot (equipped with death rays) in Heller's long absence. While confronting Wolf with overstepping his authority, Heller ordered the entire project to be dismantled, and was 'accidentally' killed by the robot under Wolf's control. Soon after, Wolf's evil plan was to displace mine workers with a vast army of killer robots, thus leaving the laborers unemployed. In fact, the robots were attacking the mine workers who tried to get their jobs back. Baumann had warned Wolf that the workers would revolt if they lost their jobs, although Wolf's evil plan was to crush any revolts with his 'war machines' and achieve world domination ("master of the world"). In a climactic scene in the laboratory, there was a stand-off between Baumann, now in love with Vilma (Sybille Schmitz) - the widow of Dr. Heller and rightful owner of her dead husband's company, and Wolf, who ordered his giant robot to attack Baumann. Wolf was assaulted and killed by his own machine when he was caught in the cross-fire of death rays (looking like static electricity bolts). The lab and the robot were destroyed in an explosion.
Giant Robot
Flash Gordon (1936) (aka Space Soldiers) Ming's Army/Guards (possibly non-robotic!) In this popular 13-part serial, blonde polo player Flash Gordon (Larry 'Buster' Crabbe) and Dale Arden (Jean Rogers) joined up with Dr. Zarkov (Frank Shannon) on his home-made rocketship and went to the planet Mongo. There, they confronted the evil ruling emperor, Ming the Merciless (Charles Middleton), with pretty daughter Princess Aura (Priscilla Lawson). At the time, the planet Mongo was on a collision course with Earth. Zarkov was able to persuade Ming to stop Mongo's destructive path, although the tyrannical Ming then decided to take over Earth himself - and abduct Dale for himself. In the first chapter, Flash, Dale, and Zarkov were taken prisoner by Officer Torch and two helmeted, mechanized robotic guards, known as "Annihilants". Ming's deadly army was composed of these mechanical robotic soldiers with scientifically-advanced rifles. When they went outside, the guards appeared to be wearing some kind of undergarment under their armored suits. [Note: Some regarded the army's soldiers as non-robotic, as per the comic strip which portrayed the guards as human when they took off their helmets.]
Armor-Suited Robots
Undersea Kingdom (1936) Volkites This early action-packed Republic Pictures serial (with twelve episodes or chapters) was produced in haste to compete with Universal's Flash Gordon (1936) serials. It starred naval action hero Lt. Ray "Crash" Corrigan (Ray Corrigan) and featured the lost city of Atlantis at the bottom of the sea. Trash can-like robot soldiers with zap rays guns (Atomguns) called Volkites were commanded by warlord Unga Khan (Monte Blue), the evil tyrannical ruler of the Black Robes and remote-controlled by his equally-evil henchman Captain Hakur (Lon Chaney, Jr.). The Volkites were used to attack the sacred city of Atlantis.
The Phantom Creeps (1939) "Iron Man" Universal's 12-part serial titled The Phantom Creeps, was advertised as having: 12 Spine-Shivering Action Chapters. This was the last serial for Bela Lugosi who starred as mad scientist Dr. Alex Zorka intent on taking over the world. He invented a fearsome, slow-moving 8-foot golem-like iron monster or robot that he referred to as "his iron man" (played by 7'4" tall stuntman Ed Wolff), featuring a sculpted round human-like head. The super-strong robot was remote-controlled, designed to "crush all opposition and make me the most powerful man in the world" - according to Dr. Zorka.Friends,The OnePlus 3 represents the third year we’re making smartphones, and expectations from our fans are higher than ever. In year three, we didn’t feel it was defensible to keep selling our devices via an invite system, and took the necessary steps to be able to go invite free. The response has been overwhelming, and the OnePlus 3 is the fastest selling device we've ever made.You might have noticed that when you place an order for the OnePlus 3, the estimated shipping date kept getting longer as time went by. The reason for this is simple. We were confident in the OnePlus 3 when it launched, but sales in mainland Europe have been way better than what we expected. Therefore, we’ve decided to temporarily pause sales in some countries in order to give inventory time to replenish.Sales for the following regions will be temporarily paused on oneplus.net from August 9th 0:00 (CEST) until September 12th 23:59 (CEST):Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain. Sales in Hong Kong will also be paused during this time frame.We are working hard to secure more stock and fire up more production lines so that we can fulfill our goal of putting premium products into the hands of as many people as possible. With this note I wanted to give customers in affected regions enough advance notice to be able to purchase a OnePlus 3. If you’re planning to purchase but can’t do it before we pause sales, we’ll be offering an in-stock notification service where you can sign up with your email address to be notified when we’re back in stock.Thanks for your patience and thanks again for your vote of confidence with OnePlus.Never SettleI am super excited to show you what’s new at Your Lighter Side headquarters. I also love hearing from you, so please keep writing about what you’d like to see, and especially what you’re trying that you like. Your comments and letters are absolutely appreciated.
I also am so thankful for you pinning these pictures to your Pinterest pages, and linking back to my work on Facebook and Twitter. You’re helping spread the word, and I so appreciate that you do. I also appreciate that you leave my recipes here on the site and link to them rather than posting them elsewhere. Thank you thank you!
It’s time to bring the cauliflower crust out to play again–only I’m fabulizing. It’s like bedazzling your favorite Hello Kitty tote to take it to the next delicious stage of nirvana.
Why not zhoozh up fall with a bit of delicious flavor and give your lips something to smile about, especially as football season begins?
Topped with decadent, fresh toppings and using the same crust you’ve grown to love over the years, I made this crust with fresh, processed cauliflower.
When you go fresh, there’s no need to pre-cook. Simply process, add with the egg and cheese, and go for it!
See all of those toppings? I went for full-on color, flavor and texture here. Try your favorite toppings and see what you create!
Topped with Provolone cheese and pesto, you’re going to impress your friends and family–but really, this is about you, too! Pamper your tongue.
A close up of all of those decadent toppings. The nutritional information includes all the crust and topping ingredients listed below, so be sure to adjust based on your personal tastes.
Cauliflower Pizza Crust with Gourmet Vegetarian Toppings
Full of Italian flavor and fresh vegetables, this gold standard of gluten-free pizzas remains nearly unchanged, even after four years. The cheese and cauliflower crust set up beautifully when allowed to cool, forming a tasty, hand-holdable crust (especially the next day) that also lends itself to bread sticks and other recipes on this site.
Serves 8
for the crust:
2 cups processed raw cauliflower (to the size of couscous)
2 cups part-skim shredded mozzarella
2 large eggs
2 Tbsp dried fennel seed (or your favorite seasonings)
for the toppings:
1/2 cup pizza sauce
1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
3 chopped artichoke hearts
1/2 cup chunky-chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped green pepper
1-1/2 cups fresh green spinach
1 chopped roasted red bell pepper (about 1/2 cup)
10 small sliced green olives
4 slices provolone cheese
1/4 cup basil pesto
Preheat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.
Combine crust ingredients in a bowl. Press into a circle on a greased 12″ pizza pan by sprinkling the crust mixture around the pan and then gently pressing the mounds together. This prevents thick spots in the center of the pan.
Bake for 12-15 minutes, or until the edges are a golden-brown color. Allow to cool for five minutes. Gently slide a metal (or plastic if the surface is non-stick ad may scratch) spatula around the edges to loosen from the pan slightly.
Top crust with sauce, cheese, artichoke hearts, onion, peppers, spinach and olives. Place Provolone slices on top. Top with pesto.
Place under a broiler on high for 3-5 minutes, or until golden and bubbly, or bake for 10-15 minutes more in a 425 degree Fahrenheit oven until golden and bubbly.
Allow to cool for 10 minutes for the crust to solidify. Cut and serve.
SERVES: 8
NOTES: Crust can be frozen without the toppings after the first baking. Simply thaw, top and then bake for 12-15 minutes in a 425 degree Fahrenheit oven.
Crust can be doubled, but extend baking time.
NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION PER SERVING: Calories: 264, Carbohydrates: 7.4 grams, Fiber: 2.1 grams, Net Carbohydrates: 5.5 grams, Protein: 19 grams, Fat: 18 g
With the cauliflower bread sticks:
What do you think? Please share on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest and drop me a line! I love to hear from you."Today we must say goodbye to our beloved friend and player, Antonio "cyx" Daniloski. Toni had a car accident on his way back from Frankfurt airport and died of the consequences.
Starting point was a missed flight from Frankfurt to Shanghai (China), which our entire Counter-Strike 1.6 team was suspected to take. Unfortunately, Antonio "[cyx]" Daniloski missed the flight and received another flight on Thursday morning.
On his way back from the airport, he had a car accident due to a tire failure and died of it's consequences.
Our thoughts at this difficult time for us go to Tonis family, relatives and friends. We mourn a friend and player who was always loved by everyone in our [mouz] team and the whole gaming community and because of his commitment and engagement he was one of the most important and famous personalities of all time in [mouz].
Our Counter-Strike 1.6 team is already on their way back to Germany and we've canceled our presence and Intel Extreme Masters Global Challenge Shanghai."
"This is an extremely sad day for everyone. We from SK Gaming want to express our condolences to Tonis family, friends, relatives, his home mousesports and his fans. Having you as a player in the e-sport scene was something special, both as a extremely skilled player and also as one of the friendliest players we have ever met."It wasn’t too long ago that fine dining in Roanoke meant going to a stodgy, pseudo-French restaurant that was sandwiched between car dealerships in a strip mall on Franklin Road. Nothing against strip malls, but…oh wait…everything against strip malls. They’re kinda ugly. They waste land. They trap us in our cars, forcing us to drive endlessly from mediocre restaurant to mediocre restaurant.
*Deep breath. Deep looooong breath.*
This post is not about city planning. It’s about the resurgence of good food in Roanoke. New, interesting, urban eateries have been popping up in the Star City faster than I can visit. Each trip home, I hit a couple of them by wooing relatives away from the tried and true (sorry, Denny’s), and after my most recent round, I have a batch of newish favorites just in time for the new year.
Here are a few eateries that have wowed me, but it’s in no way an exhaustive list. Which newcomers to Roanoke’s restaurant scene have your mouth watering? And if you don’t live in Roanoke, which would you like to try during a visit?
*
Lucky, 18 Kirk Avenue: Let’s start with fried chicken. In an unusual bout of good meal-ordering judgement (I routinely order the worst thing on any menu), I picked it at Lucky. Not only was the bird humanely raised, which made me feel good about eating it, it was also moist and breaded with a flavorful, crisp crust that, to borrow a term, would make you wanna smack your mamma. Many places bill themselves as gastropubs, but Lucky actually holds up on both measures—gastro and pub. The food is delicious, and the drinks have been voted the best in town. To top it all off, the interior is cozy with a huge, dark wood bar and intimate booths, each illuminated by a retro, red “Exit” sign, which makes mealtime feel intimate and just a little bit funky.
1906 Ale House, 1910 Memorial Avenue: First, a disclaimer—try as I might, I don’t like beer—but my friend Jess, who was visiting Roanoke from New York City does. Before we ordered dinner, he noticed that 21st Amendment, a San Francisco craft beer, was among the twenty on tap. Jess raised his eyebrows. “That’s a really good beer,” he said, clearly surprised to encounter this West coast brew in a Blue Ridge valley. Thankfully, beer isn’t the only surprise at 1906 Ale House. Our muscles and grass-fed bison burgers were cooked to perfection, so good, that I dragged family there for a dinner redux just a few days later.
Local Roots, 1314 Grandin Road, Southwest: Next door to the historic Grandin Theater (where yours truly was once a projectionist), is Roanoke’s most committed farm to table restaurant. Local Roots lives up to its name with many menu items telling you exactly where they originated—Hollow Hill Bison Strip, Sunburst Farm Trout, Bramble Hollow Heritage Chicken. There’s no guess work here. Just good eatin that does of good job of helping local farmers.
The River and Rail, 2201 Crystal Spring Avenue: My brother Mike and I found ourselves starved in Roanoke’s Crystal Springs neighborhood a few weeks back. We stumbled into The River and Rail, drawn by the restored Lipes Pharmacy sign on the building’s side. Inside, we were greeted by another historic touch—railroad themed photos, many by the famous photographer O. Winston Link—and plate after plate of good food. The deviled eggs were like Momma would have made…had Momma been a regionally renowned chef. Mike said his roast beef sandwich was just about the best he’d ever had, and he works at a Roanoke bar known for its subs and sandwiches. My burger was thick, moist, and dripping with the restaurant’s signature “fancy sauce.” And if burgers tickle your fancy, watch the restaurant’s Facebook page for periodic half-priced burger nights.
Wasena City Tap Room and Grill, 806 Wasena Avenue: I go to the Tap Room for its location as much as its food. Everything I’ve ordered there—burgers, fish tacos, salads, fries—has been tasty with generous portions, but what stands out for me is the space. Located in a former ice house with luxury apartments on the upper floors, this neighborhood bar is open, bright, and just a little gritty. Inside, red brick soars up to giant crisscrossed beams. Outside, the patio sits yards away from the Roanoke River and one of the city’s best parks, which, consequently, is the perfect spot to walk off a belly full of food or those mimosas you shouldn’t have had with brunch.- Not allowed to officially have a job at a young age and in dire need of cash, a number of middle and high school students are turning up their entrepreneurial – but unhealthy and technically illegal – efforts, starting pop-up junk food shops on campuses in the Bay Area and beyond.
Last school year, one student at Pinole High School, who asked not to be named, earned hundreds of dollars selling candy and chips to friends – his duffel bag-turned-underground office the hub of all his transactions, most of which occurred in between classes.
He was making so much money, his aunt urged her son, then a junior at El Cerrito High School, to start a similar business too, according to a story first reported in Oakland Magazine.
The boy’s mother pitched in too. She wanted him to start saving for college. So she regularly took trips to Costco to buy boxes of junk food, effectively turning her son turn into a mobile vending machine when the teachers weren’t looking. He’d have to repay her for the products with his profits, which averaged about $25 to $35 a week.
It’s not just high schoolers who are getting in on the action. Students at Claremont Middle School in Oakland often take off to buy candy, Cheetos and Takis at Eddie’s Liquor Store in Rockridge and then sell the bags of salty, sweet and fatty snacks to their friends for about a buck a bag.
“Why not?” asked one student who asked not to be named and who saw nothing wrong with the school-time sales. He estimates there are about a dozen or so kids who sell the junk food throughout the week. And he said the teachers never seem to say anything, despite it not being OK.
No one keeps track of how many students and schools are involved in this phenomenon; some school administrators contacted by KTVU were surprised to learn that this was evening happening. And those school districts that were contacted downplayed the prevalence of contraband chips circulating on their campuses.
Selling anything, but especially junk food, on school grounds, violates both California and federal law. Not only are kids selling items without business permits, but selling any type of non-nutritional food product during the school day on a campus that participates in federally subsidized free lunch and breakfast programs is against the law.
Cynthia Butler, spokesperson for the California Department of Education, said the state began requiring more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains in school meals in 2012 to create a healthier school environment. Two years late, the US Department of Agriculture developed national standards to mirror those in California, she said. That meant vending machines selling chocolate and chips were out.
Despite the evidence that there are students who sell junk food underground, Oakland Unified School District spokesman John Sasaki said there doesn’t appear to be a “major problem, partly because the moment school leaders find out about something like this, they move to shut it down.”
He added that if students are caught with “ the “product," it is confiscated, as are all moneys received in payment for said product. The students involved in this kind of enterprise are dealt with swiftly, and their parents are engaged in the process.”
He said sometimes students don't even know they aren't allowed to do this and so staff will explain it to them.
“We, of course, support and foster our students' entrepreneurial spirit,” Sasaki said. “But when they are at school, we always want them focused on learning and not trying to make money."The Nigerian winger was 11 when his parents were killed in religious riots in Kaduna. He reflects on his journey from the depths of personal tragedy to his pride at joining Chelsea
To Victor Moses, the images have a dream-like quality. The Nigeria winger had prayed since the beginning of July for the completion of his transfer from Wigan Athletic to Chelsea and there had come a point when he feared that it would not happen.
But, in a whirlwind week at the end of August he signed for £9m, was introduced to the Stamford Bridge crowd before the Newcastle United game, felt his eyes widen and his stomach flip during his first training session and then, the finale, watched the European Super Cup against Atlético Madrid as an unused substitute.
Moses speaks in shy, hushed tones but they do not disguise the awe and excitement that he feels. His arrival at Chelsea marks a significant staging post in his quest to reach the game's summit, even if it pales in comparison to his broader journey from the depths of personal tragedy. His parents were murdered in Nigeria and Moses fled to England as an 11-year-old asylum seeker. He feels that they look down on him with pride.
Moses's focus is on the future and the opportunities that he intends to grasp. He hopes to make his debut at some stage of the grudge fixture at Queens Park Rangers on Saturday, although to give it such billing feels crass in the light of what he has lived through.
The 21-year-old bristles with quiet determination. He was Chelsea's final attack-minded signing of the summer, following Eden Hazard, Marko Marin and Oscar, who joined at a total cost of £60m, and with Juan Mata and Ramires also vying for prominence in Roberto Di Matteo's line of three behind the main striker, the competition for places is ferocious.
It is reasonable to wonder whether Moses, who was Wigan's main man last season and is becoming something similar for Nigeria, will enjoy the minutes that a talent like his wants and needs. He had no hesitation, though, in signing up for the challenge.
"I don't really know if it was Di Matteo or if it was the chairman or whoever but I knew that Chelsea were interested in me and that was it, really," Moses says. "For a club to come and get you, they are going to use you at some stage. I know that there are a lot of players at Chelsea but if I do get my chance, I just have to grab it."
Moses already has Chelsea stories to tell. He smiles when he recalls standing on a chair in Monaco, in the build-up to the Super Cup final, and being ordered to sing and dance for the amusement of his team-mates. The initiation routine for new recruits has become a feature at many clubs. "I was nervous," Moses says. "I thought: 'What am I going to sing?' because when I stood there, I literally didn't know what to sing."
For the record and the grime fans out there, Moses "kind of sang a Skepta song". "It's a little bit embarrassing," he says, "… everyone watching me, thinking: 'What is he singing?' But it was all right."
Moses has needed more than the occasional superlative of late. "The first training session was unbelievable … seeing JT, Ashley Cole, Torres and people like that, it was incredible, kind of crazy," he says. "And the Super Cup, when I was watching it, I was thinking to myself: 'I can't actually believe that I'm here.' I didn't get on but I still got a [runners-up] medal."
Moses's appetite for precious metal, though, has been fired by a different encounter. "I saw the Champions League trophy the other day, it was at the training ground," he says. "Everyone was having their picture taken with it but not me. It was the players that played in the Champions League. I just walked away, although I did touch it. I thought to myself: 'Hopefully, we will win it again this year.'"
Moses's single-mindedness and strength of character is evident and it is easy to connect it with the manner in which he has coped with his childhood trauma. His father, Austin, was a Christian pastor in Kaduna, and his mother, Josephine, helped with his work.
Violence, though, was depressingly familiar between the Muslim majority and the Christian minority and when riots erupted in 2002, Moses's parents, who were obvious but unflinching targets, were attacked in their home and killed. Moses was given the news as he played football in the street. He became a target, too, and, after being hidden by friends for a week, he was sent to England, where he was placed with foster parents in south London. Upon his arrival in the country, he knew nobody.
"Definitely, wherever they are at the moment, they should be proud of me, looking down being proud," Moses says of his parents. He is not ready to open up publicly about the bereavement and the gamut of emotions that he has run, but he does reflect on the work ethic that has guided him and been in place from the outset.
"It has been a long journey [from Nigeria] and I just want to keep strong and work hard for myself, whether it's football or not football," Moses says. "I have to thank God for being where I am, it's like a dream come true and, if I keep working hard, who knows, I'll probably end up in Barcelona one day."
Moses has fond memories of the street-football days in Nigeria – "No boots, just in your bare feet, a little ball got chucked in and we started playing" – and, also, the English after-school equivalent. He always wanted to be a professional footballer and he was spotted by Crystal Palace as he kicked a ball about in Norbury Park. They brought him into their academy and recommended him to Whitgift, the fee-paying school in Croydon where he could benefit from the superb facilities.
He was a prodigy, utterly prolific in front of goal, a man among boys. He led the Whitgift under-14 team to the FA Youth Cup in 2005; they beat Grimsby school 5-0 in the final, with Moses scoring all five. Grimsby played in red shirts, which prompted the Grimsby Evening Telegraph into the first of many bible-based headlines for the player: "Holy Moses – wonder player parts red sea."
He made his Palace debut at 16 and was called up by England at every youth level. He won the Golden Boot at the European Under-17 Championship in 2007, in which England lost to Spain in the final, but his momentum was checked at Under-21 level. Stuart Pearce fielded him only once, against Uzbekistan in 2010, and the manager substituted him at half-time. Moses was not called up for the next game. "I played for England Under-16s, 17s, 18s, 19s, 20s and then 21s … then … I just decided to make the decision to play for Nigeria," he says.
Moses based the decision, in part, on where he felt full international opportunity would knock. He was conscious, he says, of the "great players" that England produce. "Every year," he adds, "you can see young players coming up and doing really well."
His declaration for Nigeria has thrilled fans across Africa, where the Premier League is revered, although it did prompt Pearce into a hurried phone call to ask him what he was doing. Moses has his eyes on the Africa Cup of Nations that takes place in South Africa from 19 January-10 February next year, at which Nigeria will compete if they can see off Liberia in the second leg of the final qualifying round. They drew the first leg 2-2 in Liberia last Saturday, with Moses setting up both of his team's goals. The return is in Calabar on 12 October.
"When I got to Nigeria [last week], everyone seemed to support Chelsea," Moses says. "It was a good experience to see Chelsea fans in Nigeria, screaming my name and stuff. When I got to Liberia as well, it was the same thing. They watch the Premier League everywhere in Africa."
The topsy-turvy nature of Moses's recent existence is epitomised by his having played more matches this season against his current employer than for them. He completed the 90 minutes for Wigan against Chelsea on the opening weekend, which was a test of his professionalism, particularly as he says he knew Chelsea had made a bid for him before the kick-off. "Wigan must have rejected it," he says. They rejected four bids in total, starting with £3.5m in early July.
Moses |
the White House toward some of her current colleagues. “I had a job to do,” was the considered reply. (New York Post: “HIL STILL AIMS TO KILL!”)
The only question that seemed to throw her concerned her actual Senate record. After we’d gone through her positions and policies in some detail, I suggested that for all she’d been busy doing in the Senate, I couldn’t find an instance where she had taken a politically unpopular stance or championed a big idea, like health-care reform, that might not yield immediate benefits but was the right thing to do. Interviews with colleagues and observers seemed to imply an unspoken disappointment that her talents promised a record of more height and substance than she had displayed—he one consistent criticism I heard was that her record was marked by overwhelming caution. Could she refute their doubts, and point to a few examples of politically brave votes?
Clinton laughed. “Oh, well, see, my view is, how do you get things done? When you’re in the minority, getting things done is not easy.” She cited her work after September 11: “I think taking on the administration over the effects from breathing the contaminants that were in the air, fighting to get the tracking and screening programs set up, going back time and time again—”
I couldn’t help breaking in. These were certainly worthy programs, but where is the political risk in standing up for the victims of September 11?
She tried again: “I voted against every tax cut, and I represent the richest people in America.”
But you’re a Democrat!
“But I have a lot of constituents for whom those tax cuts were personally quite important.”
Aren’t they Republicans?
“I had no support in the financial-services community when I ran in 2000—none,” she replied, rather reinforcing the point. “That’s a slight exaggeration—I have worked really hard to develop credibility with them, but I have voted against their tax cuts, I have voted against repealing the estate tax, I took on Alan Greenspan at a hearing about his appearance before the budget committee.”
I was about to suggest that these might qualify as politically brave actions for a Republican, when her answer took a sharp turn toward the personal.
“Everything I do carries political risk because nobody gets the scrutiny that I get,” she said finally. “It’s not like I have any margin for error whatsoever. I don’t. Everybody else does, and I don’t. And that’s fine. That’s just who I am, and that’s what I live with.”
Hillary Clinton is viewed through the lens of her larger ambition—and ambition is definitely there. Though she has always downplayed the issue, Clinton apparently flirted with running for the presidency in the 2004 election. According to one insider, in 2003 Mark Penn had created a unit within the polling firm of Penn, Schoen & Berland so clandestine that most of the staff didn’t even know it existed. It operated in a room whose computers had been disconnected from the company’s network. Penn polled to find out whether Clinton could break her pledge to serve a full term in the Senate and still maintain enough political viability to run for president. (Penn wouldn’t confirm—or deny—this episode, and said he believed that “at no time was she ever leaning in that direction.”) Ultimately, of course, she chose not to. But she must have been tempted. “Some very important people were coming to her on bended knee asking her to run,” a close friend of Clinton’s told me. “That was the phrase she used: ‘on bended knee.’”
This past July, Clinton was the keynote speaker at the Democratic Leadership Council’s annual conference in Denver. Her appearance at such a resonant event heightened speculation that she is preparing to run. The DLC was formed after Walter Mondale’s landslide loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1984 election, to guide the party back to the political center. Bill Clinton chaired the organization when he was governor of Arkansas, and it served as a crucial vehicle in his advance to the presidency.
If you were studying how to get elected president, and you had examined Bill Clinton, you might, as he did, give a series of national policy speeches that, taken together, shape a platform right before the political class’s eyes. Hillary Clinton has done this. You would seek as best you could to position yourself as far as possible from the party’s leftward fringe. Hillary Clinton has done this, too, recalibrating when necessary. And if you wanted people to draw a pointed comparison to his presidential campaign, you might give a speech, as Clinton did in Denver, laying out a positive, centrist, credibly detailed message that echoed a lot of what Bill Clinton had said—although you probably wouldn’t go quite so far as to swipe his campaign’s catchphrase, as Clinton did when she struck the refrain: “It’s the American dream, stupid!”
Clinton has nothing like her husband’s skill at delivering a speech. She doesn’t dominate the room the way he does. Her political talent is precisely the opposite—she dominates in the Senate by yielding. She has a kind of anti-talent for hitting the right cadence, and her flat, midwestern voice lends itself poorly to impassioned exposition. When she tries to increase her register, it comes out as a sort of strained honk. An odd fact of Clinton’s public persona, an implicit acknowledgment of this shortcoming, is her reliance on sentimental videos to connect with her audience—essentially outsourcing the emotional element of a speech. Video presentations were a key part of both her 2000 announcement speech and her second-term nomination-acceptance speech in Buffalo this past June, where she elicited little more than pro forma applause. Afterward, when the crowd rose to its feet and the luminaries onstage poured into the audience, she herself inexplicably disappeared. It was her husband who characteristically soaked in the mass adoration and shook hands until his aides dragged him away.
Clinton has done what traditionally must be done to win your party establishment’s nomination for president. But her husband had the benefit of running as an outsider against a tired, intellectually listless Democratic Party. A lot has changed since then. The DLC, a band of outsiders twenty years ago, has become the veritable embodiment of what and who is connoted by the term Democratic establishment. Years of tireless study have made Hillary Clinton the consummate insider—but at a time when antiestablishment fervor in the Democratic base is at its highest point in a generation. It is not just her war vote but the very fact of being a Clinton that threatens her: an emerging liberal critique, especially virulent in the blogosphere, blames the Clintons and their self-absorption for the atrophy that has befallen the party. Clinton has reached the top of the Democratic establishment that once thwarted her. But that is looking like a less viable launching point to the presidency than at any time since she got to Washington.
There remains another option—one to which she is unquestionably well suited. As an admiring senator put it to me, “Hillary Clinton is everyone’s secret choice for majority leader.” It’s a line you hear often on Capitol Hill, and it has two possible meanings. For some it’s polite code for “Lord, I hope she doesn’t run for president.” But for others—I’d venture to say the majority—it is a compliment genuinely felt, an acknowledgment that she has satisfied the lions of the Senate and, should she wish to, might one day rank among them.
Clinton has overcome many unique obstacles to succeed in the Senate, but she has followed Washington’s well-worn path to power, acquiring patrons with a connoisseur’s discerning eye. Those whose talents can keep pace with their ambition are always in need of new patrons as they move ahead. This inevitably means leaving old ones behind, and sometimes disillusioning them. Out of all the people I asked to talk to about Clinton for this article, only one person refused: Jay Rockefeller.
Even though the Democrats are in the minority, Byrd, as the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, remains worth cultivating. His forty-eight-year career makes him the longest-serving senator in U.S. history: of the 1,885 people who have ever been in the Senate, Byrd has served alongside more than 400. Clinton, he tells aides, is among his very favorites. As I waited in the antechamber to his office, I noticed a letter atop the in-box on the desk thanking Byrd profusely for his help “funding key funding priorities for New York” in the fiscal year 2007 Homeland Security appropriations bill, and singling out each of his staffers for praise. The letter was signed, in looping cursive, simply, “Hillary.” “I guess I’m blowing myself up a little,” Byrd told me sheepishly, “but I think of her as a pupil of mine.”
The story emerging from Clinton’s top advisers about her Senate career, however, does not suggest a thirst to stay. They clearly and unequivocally assert that when she sets her mind to learning and doing something, she’s successful—often against very long odds—and that she has proven to be a great leader for New York. If Clinton decides to run, this will be the theme of her campaign.
Her advisers try to give the impression that it’s all they can do to keep up. “We recently tried to review what she did in the Senate,” Penn told me, “and it took sixteen hours. And I don’t think we covered it all. There are very few people I could sit down with for whom, even after thirty years, it would require sixteen hours to review all the bills and positions and the involvement in so many issues.” When I remarked that most of the issues struck me as small-bore, he conceded as much, but insisted that they did not truly define Clinton. “In a Republican Senate, she has learned to gain ground a yard at a time,” he said. “But she hasn’t lost the ability to throw the long ball.”
Yet it is fair to wonder if Clinton learned the lesson of the health-care disaster too well, whether she has so embraced caution and compromise that she can no longer judge what merits taking political risks. It is hard to square the brashly confident leader of health-care reform—willing to act on her deepest beliefs, intent on changing the political climate and not merely exploiting it—with the senator who recently went along with the vote to make flag-burning a crime. Today Clinton offers no big ideas, no crusading causes—by her own tacit admission, no evidence of bravery in the service of a larger ideal. Instead, her Senate record is an assemblage of many, many small gains. Her real accomplishment in the Senate has been to rehabilitate the image and political career of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Impressive though that has been in its particulars, it makes for a rather thin claim on the presidency. Senator Clinton has plenty to talk about, but she doesn’t have much to say.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.For a technology with so much promise, augmented reality hasn’t exactly got off for the best start. After initially being the sole domain of advertisers, it has slowly crept into common use through the likes of Snapchat and Pokémon Go, but has so far failed to provide the experiences to make it central to our lives.
One area with the most potential, however, is toys. AR games are now a small but steady offering in the market, and with iPads and other touchscreen devices now providing a major source of entertainment to children, there is a clear potential for fun activities that connect the digital and real worlds.
But for AR to truly take the toy market by storm, it needs to be the subject of a major toy craze, and so far no product has come close.
SwapBots, however, could be the exception. In a sea of new toy ideas it stands out for one reason: it combines physical and digital play throughout its use, rather than the AR item being immediately set down and forgotten about after being scanned.
And perhaps more importantly, it’s causing quite the buzz among the toy industry, with serious interest from some major US retailers.
Each SwapBot set comes with a three-pack of bots and a supporting video game. There are a total of nine bots to collect, each with its own character realised in AR-suitable yet gorgeous illustrations, which can be scanned on a tablet or smartphone to turn them into fully fleshed out 3D characters.
Kids can then use these to play games, explore stories and do battle with each other, with content that having tried, I can confirm is genuinely fun to play, and which comes with a no in-app purchases guarantee.
But where it gets interesting is that each bot is made up of three totem-like parts, which fit together like Duplo, meaning their heads, bodies and legs can be swapped to create a host of different configurations: 729 in total.
This keeps the physical element firmly in the toy, and gives it far greater longevity than other AR offerings.
The idea behind this style of play is that it provides a far more developmentally beneficial way of interacting with touchscreen devices – an inevitability in modern childhood – and so assuages parental concerns about the proliferation of passive screen time.
It’s also priced at a level that kids can pay for with pocket money. SwapBot’s recently launched Kickstarter is offering a three-pack for £16 – with discounts for larger numbers – and it’s likely the bots won’t cost much more when they find themselves on retailer’s shelves.
Add the collectable nature of the bots – there are three packs at present, but the range is likely to expand in time – and the highly appealing and varied character designs, and it’s easy to see SwapBots becoming a go-to for parents looking to keep their little ones engaged.
Given the artful blending of toy and AR design, it’s perhaps no surprise that behind SwapBots is Draw & Code, a Liverpool-based mixed reality company made up mostly of parents. The company has been making waves in mixed reality technologies for some years, producing a number of commercial projects including an AR art exhibition, numerous VR installations and a host of projection-mapped buildings.
SwapBots, however, is the first commercial product Draw & Code has produced, and it sees the company turn their expertise to their own needs as parents.
“SwapBots was conceived over a few drinks after exhibiting our augmented reality prototypes in Silicon Valley,” explained John Keefe, SwapBots co-founder and director of Draw & Code. “We wanted to do something radically different to the enterprise and health uses of the tech that proliferated at the time and interactive toys seemed like the perfect fit.”
It’s also enjoyed a fantastic pool of first-generation testers, with the Draw & Code team’s children providing vital feedback during the toy’s development.
Now SwapBots is ready for commercial production, the team are trying to get it into shops with a current tour of US tech shows. In doing so, they’ve generated some serious interest from US retailers, and with a Kickstarter campaign to show interest and get the toy into people’s hands, it’s quite possible the AR toy could become widely available in shops before long.Conflict, an influx of displaced families and erratic weather are hitting food security in Cameroon's Far North
By Mbom Sixtus
YAOUNDE, Cameroon, April 11 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Harvesting a crop in Cameroon's Far North Region is becoming an increasingly uncertain proposition.
Armed conflict between Boko Haram militants and Cameroon's armed forces in the region has made it difficult for some farmers to access their fields, deepening food security, said Felix Gomez, the World Food Programme's country director.
At the same time, the region is hosting 75,000 Nigerians who have fled that country's Boko Haram insurgency and 82,000 internally displaced people affected by the spillover of the conflict to Cameroon since 2013, officials say.
That has helped feed a food deficit in Cameroon's Far North Region of 132,000 tons, according to a government assessment issued last June.
Just as problematic, climate change is gradually rendering the traditional agricultural calendar unreliable, making just getting in a crop hard work, farmers in the region say.
"We have been losing our crops and witnessing significant drops in agricultural output for the past 15 years. We no longer master the planting season. Rice cultivation is so delicate that when you miss the planting period slightly, you just have to mourn for your loss," said Ziga Adibe, a farmer in Maga and coordinator of rice grower's initiative in the region.
"What we learned from our parents as children is no longer useful," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
To cope, farmers need to try to grow a wider range of crops, including drought-resistant and fast-growing seeds, as well as try new methods of irrigation and rely more on weather forecasts, said Bongkiyung Emmanuel Nyuyki, an expert on meteorology and agriculture with the Department of National Meteorology.
But a lack of meteorological stations and people trained to use them means farmers like Adibe are often frustrated by a lack of information they can use, Nyuyki said. The first forecast for the region produced by the National Metrology Center was issued in January, and the second only earlier this April.
That forecast predicted "very sunny weather and mist episodes (and) few but severe thunderstorms which would result to water stress, waves of heat and risks of meningitis, malaria and conjunctivitis," Nyuyki said.
Nyuyki said that, besides relying on the Cameroon meteorological service, farmers could depend on international climate models, which have predicted below-normal rainfall for the 2016 planting season.
Such models may not be local and specific enough to help farmers make good decisions, however, international experts warn.
Nyuyki said dropping water tables and drying rivers were likely to hurt availability of water for people and cattle this season.
"The main agricultural products - maize, groundnuts, millet, sorghum and rice - suffer enormously due to their high dependence on rainfall. The June 15 deadline for (starting) farming has been unreliable with early as well as late onset of the planting season year in and year out," he said.
Frequent floods, as rainfall becomes more irregular and intense, also have hit harvests in the region, he said.
Adibe, the farmer from Maga, said the changes had led to his rice harvests falling by at least 25 percent over the last 5 years.
Gomez, of the WFP, said at least 200,000 people in Cameroon's Far North face acute food insecurity in 2016. Altogether 1.4 million people in the region - about a third of the population - are estimated to face some level of food insecurity, he said.
To help combat hunger, WFP is providing food and monthly cash to some people, and distributing agricultural inputs such as seeds and fertilisers in collaboration with the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization to help farmers prepare for the coming planting season.
But some farmers fear they may not have access to their farmlands due to insecurity emanating from the Boko Haram insurgency in the region.
Denise Brown, WFP's regional director for West and Central Africa said in February that more than 5.6 million people in areas affected by Boko Haram violence in Nigeria Cameroon, Chad and Niger are facing hunger this year.
Gomez said WFP has been helping Boko Haram refugees and their host communities in Cameroon's Far North since June 2013, and intends to scale up its assistance this year due to increasing demand.
(Reporting by Mbom Sixtus; editing by Laurie Goering :; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, women's rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit http://news.trust.org/climate)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.The talk in Europe is that everyone has been told to back off a bit while the British referendum is going on. There was an embarrassing moment the other day when rumours circulated of plans for a European army but the announcement is scheduled for a day or two after the referendum.
Good luck trying it without the British Army, by the way, Jean-Claude.
Anyway, no one seems particularly unhappy at this state of torpor. Several countries have said that there cannot be anything even in the next year or two which even hints at Treaty change and thus the prospect of a referendum. Even if Britain were to vote Remain, their voters would still be trigger happy.
But away from the headline stuff, day to day work has to continue in the EU’s earthly paradise, and right now there is a fair bit of head scratching at the Central Bank. There has been another quarter of negative inflation. This despite Mario Draghi’s attempt at quantitative easing, and his assurances that everything will be all right.
Consumers, of course, don’t mind negative inflation in the short term: it makes their pay packets go further. But for a finance minister it is a disaster. Oh, for the days of 10 percent inflation, when your debts in real terms dwindled away before your very eyes! That is what Pier Carlo Padoan, finance minister of Italy, must be thinking.
Italy has a debt:GDP ratio of 133 percent. Traditionally it inflated the debt away, the old Lira devalued and there were spurts of growth.
Not so now. No growth, pretty well, since the recession; no chance of devaluation, and all the debt having to be repaid while the means to repay it deflates away.
The same goes for other indebted countries, the usual olive belt suspects and, increasingly, France. They point out that the ECB’s mandate is to keep inflation at or near 2 percent, and that the Germans are stopping Mr Draghi from doing it.
But the next European crisis, if it occurs (let’s be generous), will most likely be with the banks. Wolfgang Schaeuble (it’s those Germans again) has repeatedly criticised Italian banks for their lack of stability, and there is much to criticise.
Total bad loans are over €300 billion, of which some €80 billion are sofferenze, loans to bankrupt companies from which nothing can be recovered, but which have not yet been written off.
Italy set up a €5 billion fund to rescue failing banks, which got up as far as €4.25 billion and then spent a billion underwriting the capital raising of a minor lender. The discrepancy between the big numbers and the small ones is not difficult to spot. Even leveraging the fund isn’t going to get it anywhere near what is required if there is a bank run.
Could there be a bank run? Well, shares in Italian banks fell 40 percent earlier this year. The markets are edgy.
Into this steps the European Union, as ever several steps away from reality. The new wheeze is that banks which are systemically important (big) should have to hold even more capital than at present required (with which they are already struggling).
The French and Italians have complained, but short of telling the Commission to get out more there is little they can do.
Brussels has stupidly invited the market’s spotlight to return to the state of the continent’s banks. Germany’s Schaeuble has welcomed the move, from the safe position that Germany’s banks were rescued from their Greek exposure by the whole of Europe.
There is a crisis brewing in the Eurozone and it would be interesting to hear the Remain camp’s views. Don’t, please, give us the one about this being a Eurozone problem.
One of the parties to the next euro rescue will be the European Commission, and if Britain is still a member of the EU when the music stops it will have to contribute billions.
Would you join a club with these problems? So why stay in one?
Tim Hedges, The Commentator's Italy Correspondent, had a career in corporate finance before moving to Rome where he works as a freelancewriter, novelist, and farmer. You can read more of his articles about Italy hereExamples include expanding much-needed access to Medicaid funding for treatment, directing the Drug Enforcement Agency to require additional training for opioid prescribers, and tapping into federal grant money for medical crises.
An emergency declaration would add public attention and political momentum to the issue, and it would also let the Trump administration fast-track a number of policy steps to address the crisis, which the report says is killing so many Americans it’s the equivalent of “September 11th every three weeks.”
President Donald Trump is expected to give what he’s calling a “ major briefing ” to the nation Tuesday about the nation’s opioid crisis. The address, delivered from his home in Bedminster, New Jersey, comes on the heels a new report from his presidential opioid task force, which called for the president to declare a state of emergency around the issue.
“We believe that at this point, the resources that we need or the focus that we need to bring to bear to the opioid crisis, at this point can be addressed without the declaration of an emergency, although all things are on the table for the president,” Price said.
Update 8/8 5:23 p.m. ET: Following a meeting with the president regarding the opioid crisis, Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price told reporters Trump wouldn’t declare a state of emergency right now.
Read more
Update 8/8 5:23 p.m. ET: Following a meeting with the president regarding the opioid crisis, Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price told reporters Trump wouldn’t declare a state of emergency right now.
“We believe that at this point, the resources that we need or the focus that we need to bring to bear to the opioid crisis, at this point can be addressed without the declaration of an emergency, although all things are on the table for the president,” Price said.
President Donald Trump is expected to give what he’s calling a “major briefing” to the nation Tuesday about the nation’s opioid crisis. The address, delivered from his home in Bedminster, New Jersey, comes on the heels a new report from his presidential opioid task force, which called for the president to declare a state of emergency around the issue.
An emergency declaration would add public attention and political momentum to the issue, and it would also let the Trump administration fast-track a number of policy steps to address the crisis, which the report says is killing so many Americans it’s the equivalent of “September 11th every three weeks.”
Examples include expanding much-needed access to Medicaid funding for treatment, directing the Drug Enforcement Agency to require additional training for opioid prescribers, and tapping into federal grant money for medical crises.
Still, critics say a declaration wouldn’t fully address the crisis.
Many have pointed out that the president’s commission didn’t address the effects of repealing the Affordable Care Act. According to a Congressional Budget Office score of the most recent Republican proposal to eliminate the law, 16 million people would lose their healthcare over the next 10 years.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat who sits on the bipartisan commission chaired by New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie, said the ACA repeal — and the fate of Medicaid that goes along with it — was “the elephant in the room.”
Others, like Gary Mendell, founder of addiction group Shatterproof, said the report focused too much on medicine and not enough on other holistic ways to approach the problem, like behavioral and family therapy.
“There are not enough trained therapists to deliver those,” Mendell told the New York Daily News.
No matter how many therapists there are, the Trump administration’s budget proposal for 2018 could cancel out steps it is taking to address the opioid crisis. Big cuts are proposed for entities like the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.As noted, Joey Styles and Jesse Ventura were this week's guests on X-Pac 1,2,360 with Sean "X-Pac" Waltman. Below are some highlights from the interview with Jesse:
Jesse on Hulk Hogan being an "office stooge":
"That's what Hogan turned out to be and I found out why. In my court case they brought up the numbers for WrestleMania III, the big one at the Silverdome, and Hogan got paid more money than all the rest of us combined... and Andre was included with us. Andre The Giant and all the rest of us combined did not make what Hogan made. So you can see why he didn't want he didn't want any union. He didn't want any interference." [Editor's note: Andre the Giant reportedly made the same as Hogan for the match, per Dave Meltzer of The Wrestling Observer]
Jesse on the greatest compliment ever:
"Probably the greatest compliment I was ever paid, was old Freddie Blassie, Classy Freddie Blassie, I heard one day in the dressing room said, there's only one guy who calls his shots completely with Vince. He goes, that's Jesse Ventura. That's probably the proudest thing I ever had said about me in wrestling."
Jesse reveals an interesting conversation with Vince McMahon:
"It was funny. When I used to work one-on-one with Vince doing the tapes and all that in Connecticut, I said to him one day, and this was right prior to doing Predator, I said, Vince, the key to this business is to go get famous at something else and the come back to it, isn't it? And he looked over at me and smiled, it was just he and I, and he said, now you're learning."Edmonton police are searching for a suspected thief who fled a West Edmonton Mall jewelry store wearing a gold chain valued at $28,500.
The man walked into a WEM jewelry store on Sunday, Nov. 27 and was looking at some gold chains, police said in a news release Monday.
"After inspecting a few smaller chains, he asked to try on a much larger one valued at $28,500," the release said. "The male put on the gold chain and then fled the store without making an attempt to pay."
Surveillance photos show the man running in a parking garage wearing what appears to be a heavy gold chain around his neck.
The suspect is described as a "skinny" Caucasian or Native male between 18 and 29 years old, six feet to six-foot-two and weighing about 180 pounds.
He was wearing blue jeans, a black T-shirt, white running shoes, a diamond-checkered winter jacket and a white ball cap with a logo.
Anyone with information is asked to contact city police or Crime Stoppers.Nintendo Cinematic Universe
This article is about an upcoming series of films. Editors must cite sources for all contributions to this article. Edits that do not follow this standard will be reverted without notice.
Nintendo Cinematic Universe. Logo of the
The Nintendo Cinematic Universe is an upcoming cinema franchise produced by Sony Pictures in cooperation with Nintendo. The line is part of Tatsumi Kimishima’s effort to improve the Nintendo brand’s visibility in other media[1].
Films
Phase One
Phase One will center around the origin stories of several heroes and their head-hunting by a mysterious paramilitary organization only known as the Super Multiversal Anti-Scelerat Hyper-Brotherhood Project (SMASH).
Pik-Min : Disgusted by Hocotate Freight's senseless exploitation of the innocent Pikmin, Captain Olimar must train Louie to become a real hero.
: Disgusted by Hocotate Freight's senseless exploitation of the innocent Pikmin, Captain Olimar must train Louie to become a real hero. Mario : Once the proud protector of the Mushroom Kingdom, the legendary warrior Mario must make do as an archeologist in Brooklyn until a fateful encounter.
: Once the proud protector of the Mushroom Kingdom, the legendary warrior Mario must make do as an archeologist in Brooklyn until a fateful encounter. The Smashers : After receiving a mysterious letter, Mario and the rest of SMASH must brace for a cataclysmic assault against the Mushroom Kingdom.
: After receiving a mysterious letter, Mario and the rest of SMASH must brace for a cataclysmic assault against the Mushroom Kingdom. The Pokémon Company has announced that it will produce content for the NCU, although no further information was made available.
References
Mario (film)
This article is about an upcoming movie. Editors must cite sources for all contributions to this article. Edits that do not follow this standard will be reverted without notice.
Mario is an upcoming live-action feature film produced by Sony Pictures in partnership with Nintendo. It is part of the Nintendo Cinematic Universe.
Plot
In the past, the legendary warrior Mario, along with his resentful brother Luigi, has protected the Mushroom Kingdom from the vicious assaults of their enemies, chief among them the Turtle Tribe. However, an incident causes Mario to fall out of favor with Princess Peach, the kingdom's ruler. He is banished from the kingdom and sent down a pipe, which transports him to a city called Brooklyn in a strange world. Mario finds that he can no longer use his Mushroom Kingdom power-ups in this world, leaving him as a normal human. While getting accustomed to his new surroundings, Mario makes friends with a young archeologist named Daisy and her small team. However, back in the Mushroom Kingdom, Luigi, still jealous of his brother, sets in motion a plan to take over the Mushroom Kingdom while also seeking to destroy Mario once and for all.[1]
Direction and cast
Casting information so far has been sparse, in a deliberate effort to make the film’s marketing campaign more secretive and staggered to replicate "the feel of videogame hype", in contrast to the comparative openness of film production. However, it’s been hinted that there are talks to have John Leguizamo make a cameo[2].
Production
Producer Avi Arad saw videogame adaptations as the future of Hollywood, and wanted to "set the standards" for all videogame movies to come. Strong from the success of Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures, Arad negotiated a Metal Gear movie deal with Konami. Although almost successful, the talks fell through immediately after he told Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima that the Metal Gear Solid film would not be stand-alone, but a rather a "launching point” for a continuing "Metal Gear cinematic universe", featuring other films such as a “Revolver Ocelot spinoff” and an "Otacon origin story". After this setback, Arad sought Nintendo as a movie partner, describing them as far more accommodating in the goal of creating a cinematic universe[3].
Director Jon Favreau stated that he has a long and fond history with the Mario series, looking back on his experience with a defective Donkey Kong Country 2 cartridge[4].
"I first noticed how the label was tarnished in a couple of ways but I didn't think this would become relevant. Later on when I turned on the game, the music became more and more distorted as I played. I was slowly realising that the tarnished label meant something more, something grander. It was at this moment I realised that horror and dark elements could be implemented into a Mario movie."
The director emphasized that the film will "explore the darker aspects of the rich Mario mythos, but without comprising the brand’s sense of accessibility and fun"[5].
ReferencesSharing is caring
~ by Ether
The feeling of longing is an unpleasantly familiar feeling to those who have been involved in a relationship with a narcissist or similarly emotionally unavailable individual. Longing for your feelings to be reciprocated, your talents to be recognized, time to be allotted for you, gratitude for energy invested, that small ‘loan’ to be returned, approval, disapproval or… just a message on your phone would be a start…. there are never-ending ways that interactions with a narcissist leave us… wanting.
The problem is that we misinterpret this longing for love.
Longing is a powerful emotion that seems to emanate directly from the heart and reach out for something that it can’t connect with, and each time that it cannot connect with what it is searching for, the pain becomes more intense.
Although narcissists are aware that they bring about this feeling in others by their actions and use it to manipulate them, they can’t relate to it on a personal level. They have other emotions to manage that we don’t identify with, such as extreme entitlement and disdain and a never satisfied hunger for the next ego boost.
The feeling of longing has been represented as unrequited love in the theme of love poems for centuries, but no one is more familiar with this pain than those who didn’t see the red flags of a narcissist and fell in love, only to be left with feelings of longing and nothing substantial to hold on to.
It is a debilitating feeling and doesn’t allow you to see the worth in anything else until the feeling is reciprocated or settled in some way. When it is reciprocated, the sky is blue again, the birds are singing again, life stops being black and white and returns once again to glorious technicolor and you can move once more, at least for a short amount of time. Those who have studied narcissists note that the periods of reciprocation or recognition become strategically further and further apart to increase the suffering and to lower the expectation placed on the narcissist.
This longing can lead us to partake in addiction type behaviors in order to replace the feeling of a reciprocated connection, such as heavy smoking or drinking, under-eating, overeating and any way possible to try to satisfy a longing that can’t be satiated by a narcissist. This is just one of the reasons that people generally leave a relationship with a NPD person in worse conditions than when they started.
The refusal of narcissists to give healthy closure does nothing to improve this situation.
The profound feeling of longing that emerges isn’t only based upon emotional damage that we have sustained at some point. It also takes place on an energetic level. Energy in the form of love, time, effort, money. Energy cannot continue to flow in one direction over large periods of time, without negative consequences for the giver. Energy needs to be grounded, to find a healthy source to grow, to flow and to ebb or to be reciprocated. With a narcissist, it just disappears into a black hole, and such nutritious valuable energy is consumed without gratitude and with no appreciation of its value.
The continuous expenditure of energy that is not healthily received or used causes longing. We are proffering our energy for a purpose, for a reply, for a conclusion. When we reach out to a narcissist it does not connect correctly, it is wasted, which leads us into a cycle of sending out more energy looking for the ‘metaphysical’ plug socket, but when unable to find it, it increases the feeling of longing. It’s why we can’t let go – we just can’t – until the energy is dealt with constructively, until it is retrieved and sent into the direction it should go in.
Many people describe narcissists as black holes, who take people’s energy and give nothing in return. Then, they simply move to the next source with no idea of the value of what they were honored to receive. Food is food to a narcissist, whether it is junk food or caviar, it’s all the same to them. Get what you can, move on, rinse and repeat.
This is why closure, and the refusal of those with NPD to give healthy closure to relationships plays |
Elly Beinhorn.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
When Von Gronau was offered the post as air attaché at the German Embassy in Tokyo, he invited Doris to be his assistant – an opportunity to leave pre-war Germany that the young woman excitedly took and which started her lifelong enchantment with Japan. Having little to do, she toured the country witnessing many scenes that seemed to linger on from a different age, including the many precautions taken to prevent commoners seeing the Emperor, or the fact that Tokyo then consisted almost entirely of buildings made from wood and paper.
"I saw all of Japan," she said. "In Hokkaido in the far north they had not seen many 'Dijin' – big-nosed white people – and the children would bunch around the car like grapes to look at me." At the Embassy, Doris von Behling got to know the spy Richard Sorge, who worked for the Soviet Union, regarded as one of the most influential intelligence officers of all time. When food became scarce during the war, diplomats were permitted to visit China to obtain supplies. Von Behling seized the opportunity, visiting occupied Shanghai and Peking by ship and rail, each trip lasting for several weeks.
When the United States entered the war she recalled how the Japanese became very nationalistic, never imaging that they would not be victorious or that the country could ever be besieged. A Japanese military officer told her not to bother with black-out curtains as there never would be an air raid; a certitude all too soon proved wrong. Without air-raid shelters, people endured the first raid on Tokyo in 1942 in earth holes. Doris recalled it as one of the most terrible events in her life. She received a "diploma for bravery" the next day from a Japanese official, which she managed to bring back to Germany years later.
Towards the end of the war she met her future husband, Rolf Magener, who had staged an ingenious escape from internment in British India in 1944, together with six fellow POWs including Heinrich Harrer, who later wrote Seven Years in Tibet. Doris and Rolf survived the systematic bombing of Tokyo during the winter of 1944-45 and the firestorm caused by incendiary bombs in March 1945 which left over half of the capital destroyed and killed more than 100,000 people.
"Incendiary bombs were the only bombs that were dropped because the wooden houses would easily catch fire," she said. "A dreadful hot wind arose in the firestorm. We were terrified and thought we would never survive; in some places people on fire threw themselves into rivers but the rivers were already boiling. We eventually got out from the shelters to see a total wasteland of ash."
Listening to Emperor Hirohito announcing Japan's surrender on the radio in August 1945, Doris was witness to the Emperor's voice being heard in public for the first time and was baffled to find that her translators were not readily able to understand his formal, courtly, archaic Japanese. It took several days before she and Rolf found out exactly what had happened.
"We did not know that the atomic bombs had been dropped for some time," she said. The Tokyo newspaper only reported in three lines that Japan had been attacked by a special bomb, and no official announcement was made. People only knew through friends and relatives. At the approach of a single enemy aircraft a warning of "Eki" would be given, as this was only a photo-reconnaissance plane. For a full raid, the warning was "Hentai" and everyone would take to air-raid shelters, but because the atomic bomb was dropped from a single aircraft, only the "Eki" warning was given and the inhabitants of Nagasaki had not taken shelter, which is why so many were killed."
After the American occupation, fearing they would be repatriated to Germany separately and would never find each other, Doris, British high church, and Rolf, Russian Orthodox, were married in a Japanese ceremony with two witnesses at a police station.
They whiled away the time before repatriation. Rolf wrote down his escape adventures, eventually published in 1954 as Prisoners' Bluff, and republished in 2001 as Our Chances Were Zero, with Doris smuggling pages past the guards under her skirt after each visit. Doris learnt Japanese painting and flower-arranging and one by one exchanged her valuables for scarce food.
After repatriation in 1947 they were interned south of Karlsruhe and, after many complications, were finally able to settle, penniless, in Frankfurt am Main. Rolf worked for Deutsche Commerce and BASF and the couple divided their time between London and Heidelberg for the next 40 years.
Rolf's work also allowed for extensive travels including further trips to Japan, for which they always kept a special admiration, and they installed a small Japanese stone garden as part of their garden in Heidelberg.
"After an adventurous life, everything turned out well," Doris said.
Doris von Behling, survivor of First and Second World Wars: born London 15 May 1911; married Rolf Magener; died Heidelberg 23 September 2010.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
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Subscribe nowIn years to come, people will no doubt ask me “Nigel, where were you when Japan beat South Africa at the 2015 Rugby World Cup?”
Well …
I had been at Wembley Stadium for most of the day.
Argentina had held a press conference at midday, 24 hours prior to their opening game against New Zealand at that iconic sporting venue.
At its completion, there was a three hour gap, during which the commentary gear and telecommunication line back to New Zealand was tested. Georgia beat Tonga in a minor upset whilst a few stories were written and filed for the early morning sports bulletins. The All Blacks delegation of Coach Steve Hansen, Daniel Carter and Beauden Barrett arrived for their pre-game press conference and a kicking session for the two players.
At the end of our allotted time pitch side, all members of the fourth estate present climbed back up the stairs to the media room at Wembley to process our newly acquired material.
As we collectively sat down to write, cut and craft, South Africa and Japan strolled onto the sun drenched turf in Brighton for their Pool B encounter.
Two studious looking male Japanese journalists immediately downed tools and set up station at the end of a long work table in front of one of the 42 inch LCD TVs that are dotted around the walls of the media centre and its adjacent lounge.
The duo’s female colleague continued to work diligently on, as did the others in the media centre, save the occasional glance towards the big screen when points were scored.
I wandered past our journalistic brethren from Japan a couple of times in the first half on my way to fill up my coffee cup and grab another piece of shortbread.
At 3 nil to Japan, I gave them a nod. “Solid start lads” I remarked, which drew polite smiles.
Moments after Japanese captain Michael Leitch scored and with the lead at 10-7, another caffeine hit was required.
Another wee nod to our Japanese friends as I pass through – “You’ve got this lads” I say with a smile.
Two grins beam back at me again.
Halftime arrived with South Africa up 12-10 and the two Japanese gents were trying to turn the sound up on the TV.
Being a helpful kiwi bloke, I offered assistance and promptly turned off the TV.
The pair’s mortification is obvious, but brief, as I quickly get the TV restarted.
I take this as my cue to leave.
With work completed and filed; it was time to begin the long trek back from Wembley to Kingston upon Thames.
Three other members of the Kiwi press contingent were kind enough to offer me a lift back to their hotel which was close to a bus stop that would allowed me to carry on to my own lodgings.
So off we wander to where the car was parked, pausing briefly to take a group photo of my travelling companions against the backdrop of Wembley Stadium once the car was packed.
And so the journey back began, as did the conversation.
It was standard male banter; a light-hearted, quadrangular review of recent experiences that included squirrel hunting, the flag debate (that didn’t last long – we’re all over it), music, “where are we?”, a few movies quotes (I went with the overhead projector line from “The Castle”), the weeks accommodation, the young fella’s plans for his night on the town, “I have no idea where we are”, French rugby fans, should our driver have turned left back there and what is this tool in the yellow Toyota Celica doing?
The car came to a stop behind the afore mentioned tool in the banana coloured import at which point the senior man our traveling party pointed out an Argentinean restaurant to our left.
We all turned and looked and that’s when we saw it.
Inside the restaurant, a TV screen with the rugby showing on it.
“Can you see the score, mate?”
“Nah”.
“Look harder cuz.”
“I still can’t get see it.”
But we all saw what popped up next on the screen.
South African flanker François Louw is crouching down on the turf with a confused, crest fallen look across his face.
Upon seeing that, out came the smart phones (not the driver mind you, but I’m sure if he could have, he would have), 4G engaged and utilised as we tried to catch up on what we missed.
That being the greatest upset in the history of rugby.
So, in years to come, when people ask “Nigel, where were you when Japan beat South Africa?” my reply will be “in a French made rental car driving through the suburbs of South West London talking crap with three other blokes”.
NIGEL YALDEN IS RADIO SPORT’S RUGBY EDITOR AT THE RUGBY WORLD CUPLONG BEACH >> Health inspectors closed a local donut shop last week after finding live cockroaches flocking to the coffee station.
An inspector with the city’s Bureau of Environmental Health visited Heng Heng Donuts at 924 E. Pacific Coast Highway Tuesday and discovered a number of serious health violations, including six live cockroaches milling around the coffee station, bags of coffee, inside a cabinet and under the cappuccino machine, according to paperwork filed with the city.
In addition, the inspector noted there were no paper towels or air dryer in the employees’ bathroom and ham croissant sandwiches were being kept in a too-warm environment next to the donuts. The report indicates the display was 73 degrees, and the ham could be potentially hazardous if not kept at or below 41 degrees or above 135 degrees.
A Heng Heng employee voluntarily trashed 10 ham croissant sandwiches, and the shop closed with orders to provide proper sanitation in the bathroom and clean the facility free of vermin.
The shop has not yet reopened.Whole Foods may be toast. Granted, it's toast made from pricey, gluten-free, organic honey oat bread. But toast nonetheless.
Shares of Whole Foods (WFM) plunged more than 10% Thursday after the high-end natural grocery chain reported sales and profits that missed analysts' forecasts. Its outlook did not impress investors either.
Whole Foods has been cutting prices to try and counter its bad reputation for being too expensive. But doing that has hurt its profit margins.
Making matters worse, many people STILL refer to the company as Whole Paycheck.
It doesn't help that Whole Foods was found in late June to have been overcharging customers for some packaged, weighed goods in New York City.
Co-CEOs Walter Robb and John Mackey have apologized for the mispricing and blamed it on human error.
Related: Whole Foods CEOs admit to overcharging
During the company's conference call with analysts Wednesday evening, Robb stressed that the company is doing what it can to ensure that this won't happen again.
"Clear and transparent pricing is integral to how we operate," Robb said. "We have taken immediate steps to address these issues including improving our training regarding in-store packing, weighing and labeling processes and expanding our third-party auditing process company-wide."
But Whole Foods is finding it difficult to overcome this bad publicity.
Robb said that same-store sales, which is one of the most important measures of a retailer's health, fell during the week that New York City accused Whole Foods of price gouging.
Related: You won't believe the $%#! you've been eating
And sales have only recovered slowly since then.
"The impact was really felt across the whole country, not [just] in New York City. This was national news," said Whole Foods CFO Glenda Flanagan.
That's really a bad sign for the company.
"The combination of falling margins and slowing sales growth presents a long term danger to profitability. The whole purpose of reducing prices should be to attract and keep more customers," said Stephen Ward, an analyst with retail research firm Conlumino, in a report Thursday.
Disappointing Wall Street has become routine for Whole Foods lately. The stock fell more than 10% last year and is now down about 30% so far in 2015.
Related: Whole Foods to launch lower-cost chain
And investors seem skeptical that the company's plans to create a new store concept -- 365 by Whole Foods Market -- will work.
Whole Foods said earlier this year that it will open a handful of these new stores in 2016. They are likely to be aimed at younger consumers in urban areas, will be smaller than typical Whole Foods stores and offer cheaper products.
Analysts grilled the company about the new stores during the call. One wondered if the 365 stores will eat into sales at existing Whole Foods locations. After all, the 365 stores are opening in many markets where Whole Foods already has a presence.
Mackey admitted that this could be an issue.
"Will there be some cannibalization of Whole Foods? I mean probably," he said. "But we don't know exactly how much until we do it. It'll probably be less than when we open up an actual branded Whole Foods Market store, because it's going to appeal to a little bit different customer, we think. So it is an experiment."
That's a scary thing to hear from a CEO of a struggling company. If you're Facebook (FB), Netflix (NFLX) or Starbucks (SBUX), you can afford to experiment a bit. Because you can afford to fail. Whole Foods cannot.
Related: Wegmans opening its first New York City store
The biggest problem that Whole Foods faces is that organic is no longer niche. It's mainstream.
Walmart (WMT), Costco (COST) and Kroger (KR) have recognized that and all now offer organic food for cheaper prices. So have privately held chains like Publix, Wegmans and Trader Joe's.
Whole Foods is a victim of its own success. So now it's trying something else. And Mackey is not even sure how it will pan out.
Another analyst asked him if the main goal of 365 was to attract new customers or "capture" more trips from existing shoppers.
"It's both. It's both," Mackey said. "Although not to quibble with words, we never feel like we can capture any customers. At best, we can rent them for a little while if we continue to create value and service to them."
Right now, it looks like Kroger and Costco are renting more of those customers.The threat of a cancellation to this week’s game between Missouri and BYU became a bit more realistic Sunday afternoon following a released statement from University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe. Boiling in controversy related to alleged negligence toward marginalized students’ experiences, students at Missouri are demanding a change in the president’s office. Wolfe released a statement on Sunday saying he and university leaders are cognizant of the concerns and have been working to address those issues, but he did not say he would resign. So, for now, the protests will continue. This could put Missouri’s game this weekend against BYU in Kansas City in jeopardy, as members of the football team have said they will not participate in any football-related activities until Wolfe is out of office.
The Kansas City Star shared a copy of the contract for the series between Missouri and BYU back in January. In it are details of what happens in the event either school has to cancel the game. While exemptions and alternate plans are outlined, one thing that is seemingly pretty straightforward is what happens in the event of a forfeit, for whatever the reason may be. The school in need of cancelling the game would be contractually be obligated to pay the other university a sum of $1 million within 30 days from the date of the cancelled game.
Per the contract;
“The parties agree that if one party cancels, forfeits, unilaterally delays or postpones, or fails to appear at, any game (there and similar actions hereafter referred to as “cancel”), actual damages — including those relating to public relations, radio and television broadcasts, lost profits, and other consequential damages — would be difficult or impossible to calculate. The parties further agree that processes, including litigation, to determine damages would be both unnecessarily expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, the parties agree that if one party cancels (hereafter, the “defaulting party”) any game or games, the defaulting party shall pay as liquidated damages to the other party One Million Dollars ($1,000,000) for each cancelled game, to be paid no later than thirty (30) days following the scheduled game.”
Football players announced their intention to sit out of any football-related activities until that demand is met, and on Sunday head football coach Gary Pinkel joined them, along with the rest fo the team, in a show of unity by the program and members of the student-body. If Missouri does not have a team to take the field on Saturday against BYU, it will result in a forfeit, and thus cost the school $1 million to BYU.
Missouri is also two games shy of becoming bowl eligible, with three games to play (including the BYU game). The two-game series with BYU was signed off on in November of 2014. Missouri is scheduled to visit BYU in 2020 in the second game on the contract.
Follow @KevinOnCFBCNN’s Jake Tapper lashed out at White House on Friday as “un-American” after the network and other news organizations were denied entry into a press gaggle with White House spokesman Sean Spicer.
The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and Politico joined CNN on a list of media outlets that were excluded from a 13-member “pool” that traditionally includes the five major networks. The White House has expanded the number of organizations that have access to the group, which critics say gives it the ability to punish unfavorable coverage.
Members of the pool are responsible for disseminating information to other outlets after the event ends.
“This is a wild deviation from basic White House protocol, which normally allows any credentialed news organization to participate,” Mr. Tapper said, Mediaite reported. “I have to say, even in the darkest days of the Obama White House’s war against Fox News, the Obama White House never banned Fox from attending any sort of press gaggle or briefing. This is clearly President Trump punishing news organizations for providing basic accountability.”
Former President Obama technically did not ban Fox News from a press gaggle, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. The Washington bureau chiefs of ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News Channel and NBC vowed not to take part in an October 2009 interview with executive pay czar Kenneth Feinberg when the Obama administration tried to exclude Fox News.
“Some at CNN & NYT stood w/FOX News when the Obama admin attacked us & tried 2 exclude us—a WH gaggle should be open to all credentialed orgs,” Bret Baier of Fox’s “Special Report” tweeted Friday.
Mr. Tapper went on to call the White House’s actions “not acceptable” and “petulant.”
“Apparently this is how they retaliate when you report facts they don’t like. We’ll keep reporting regardless,” CNN said in a statement released Friday.
President Donald Trump has had a turbulent relationship with the network and has referred to its reporting as “fake” news.
Some at CNN & NYT stood w/FOX News when the Obama admin attacked us & tried 2 exclude us-a WH gaggle should be open to all credentialed orgs https://t.co/8Vjcs0KCPR — Bret Baier (@BretBaier) February 24, 2017
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.So what if you made the running surface hard? Really, really, really hard, actually
The extraordinary events will be remembered for years to come
Australian Sailing's CEO, John Lee, is about to depart in a little under a fortnight
Yep. That would be the other two-finger salute. You know, ‘V'.
V is for Vaikobi
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Michele Korteweg on the 2019 St. Maarten Regatta
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J/70 Midwinter Championship overall
J/70 Midwinter Championship overall Midlife Crisis crushes the final day with three bullets Peter Duncan's Relative Obscurity only needed eight of the nine races at the J/70 Midwinter Champion to collect the 2019 title. Fifty J/70s enjoyed postcard Biscayne Bay conditions for three days, but none more than the Relative Obscurity team by Christopher Howell
America's Cup Official Newsletter published
America's Cup Official Newsletter published The newsletter has contributions from the Defender and and five teams on the Challenger side. The organisers of the 36th America's Cup Regatta and Prada Cup and supporting events, have released their first newsletter - summarising the main news stories they have published - and a great opportunity to catch up on what you may have missed. by 36th America's Cup Media
Ahhh, like what the?
Ahhh, like what the? Australian Sailing's CEO, John Lee, is about to depart in a little under a fortnight Australian Sailing's CEO, John Lee, is about to depart. In a little under a fortnight, actually. Former Etchells World Champion, and current General Manager, David Edwards will sit in the role once again... by John Curnow, Editor, Sail-World AUS
FD Worlds in New Zealand overall
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18ft Skiff Club Championship overall
18ft Skiff Club Championship overall Asko Appliances team recover from capsize and take the trophy The Asko Appliances team had to recover from a mid-race capsize before taking out the 2018-2019 Australian 18 Footers League Club Championship in a dramatic day of 18ft Skiff racing on Sydney Harbour today. by Frank Quealey
It's a wrap - 2019 RORC Caribbean 600
It's a wrap - 2019 RORC Caribbean 600 Very much on the bucket-list of any offshore sailor The 11th edition of the RORC Caribbean 600 attracted 76 teams from 21 countries and crews from six continents. The highly diverse fleet were challenged by the tough conditions and captivated by the beauty of a stunning race course. by Louay Habib
J/70 Midwinter Championship day 2
J/70 Midwinter Championship day 2 Peter Duncan's Relative Obscurity nails perfect day A fresh breeze in the mid-teens on Biscayne Bay made for an exciting Saturday for 50 J/70s competing to be the 2019 J/70 Midwinter Champion. Three more races were accomplished, bringing the total to six, five of which have been won by Peter Duncan by Christopher Howell
Egnot-Johnson wins 2019 Nespresso Youth MR
Egnot-Johnson wins 2019 Nespresso Youth MR KNOTS Racing Team took out the 2019 Nespresso Youth International Match Racing Nick Egnot-Johnson and his RNZYS Performance Programme KNOTS Racing Team – Zak Merton, Sam Barnett and Alistair Gifford – have notched up another big victory, taking out the 2019 Nespresso Youth International Match Racing Cup. by Andrew Delves
49ers: Kiwi Olympic selectors handed a headache
49ers: Kiwi Olympic selectors handed a headache Kiwi 49er crew Dunning-Beck and Gunn give YNZ Olympic selectors a headache Kiwi 49er crew Logan Dunning-Beck and Oscar Gunn have given the Yachting New Zealand Olympic selectors a headache, after they beat the Olympic Champions, Peter Burling and Blair Tuke for the New Zealand 49er title, at Murrays Bay SC. by Richard Gladwell, Sail-World.com/nz
SailGP Sydney – Kyle Langford Talks Wing Trim
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Big price tag forecast for new The Ocean Race boat
Big price tag forecast for new The Ocean Race boat Veteran VOR skipper says new "The Ocean Race" boat has €24-25m pricetag Weekly French language sailing newsletter "Tip and Shaft" features an interview with veteran Volvo Ocean race skipper Bouwe Bekking on his options for the next fully crewed around the world race, now labelled "The Ocean Race". by Tip and Shaft/Sail-World.com/nz
North Sails Weekly Debrief
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J/70 Midwinter Championship day 1
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RORC Caribbean 600: Top of the Class
RORC Caribbean 600: Top of the Class Prizewinners get the rum The 2019 RORC Caribbean 600 Prize Giving will be held tonight, Friday 22nd February and it is a special evening celebrating a premier race in the world yacht racing calendar. by Louay Habib
Inside Melges: The February Issue
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Wizard wins the RORC Caribbean 600 Trophy
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18ft Skiff Club Championship final this weekendTom Hanks’ role of a surveillance-loving CEO in the new tech thriller “The Circle” was based on tech executives like CEO Jack Dorsey, he joked during an interview with none other than Dorsey himself Monday. “I played you! I played you,” Hanks said during a panel at ’s office in San Francisco that also included co-stars Emma Watson and Patton Oswalt as well as director James Ponsoldt.
The panel also drew some other parallels between the world of surveillance in “The Circle,” which features a company with a network of cameras all around the world, and social media. “Fame is not being achieved, it’s being afflicted on people,” said Oswalt in a reference to the power of social media. He also argued that in the future, people may choose to completely disconnect and not be on social media at all — a statement that prompted Hanks to quip: “Wouldn’t that be great, Jack?”
Dorsey himself chimed in to talk about his own company’s role, arguing that Twitter had to highlight positive use of social media. “We can’t just be tool-makers here,” he said.
Watson said that she liked her character in the movie in part because it highlights the roles of women in tech. “The tech industry notoriously has issues with diversity,” she said. Dorsey agreed and said that his company had been trying to change the gender composition of its leadership. “It’s really important for people to see what they can aspire to be,” Dorsey said, adding: “The important thing is not just diversity, but inclusion.”
Watch the entire interview below:Marco Rubio and Chris Christie have a simple, terrifying message for 2016 voters: vote for me or there’s a fairly good chance you’ll die. They don’t phrase it that way, but it’s the |
basis as GERS, which allocates to Scotland a population-based share of spending on things like defence and interest payments on the UK’s national debt. The projections also assume Scotland’s onshore revenues and spending grow in line with those in the rest of the UK. Independence could have implications for the validity of these assumptions:
An independent Scotland might have been able to negotiate a good deal on the share of the UK’s debt it took on. Lower debt would mean lower debt interest payments and would therefore reduce the budget deficit. However, it is worth noting that even if an independent Scotland had inherited none of the UK’s central government debt, its budget deficit would likely still be substantial: around 7.6% of national income (rather than 9.4%) in 2016-17 and 4.4% of national income (rather than 6.2%) in 2020-21 holding all other elements of our projections fixed.
Independence could affect Scottish economic performance. A weaker performance – which perhaps may be expected in the short term – would tend to push up Scotland’s deficit. But if, as the Scottish Government have previously claimed, independence would allow policies to grow the Scottish economy more quickly, such faster growth would tend to push up revenues and reduce Scotland’s deficit.
Independence would also, in principle, give the Scottish Government more freedom to tax and spend more or less, which could have implications for the Scottish budget deficit. In practice, however, if an independent Scotland faced a budget deficit anything like that in our projections, spending cuts or tax rises would be needed to put the public finances on a firmer footing.
But while the precise numbers would almost certainly differ if Scotland were independent, the recent weakening in Scotland’s public finances – driven to a significant extent by falls in oil revenues and associated economic activity – clearly would have made it more difficult for an independent Scotland to manage its public finances. The oil revenue and public finance forecasts produced by the Scottish Government in the run up to the referendum also look increasingly further away from what is now expected.
The volatility of oil revenues
Oil revenues are notoriously volatile though. For the UK as a whole, they were £6.0 billion in 2009–10, over £11.0 billion in 2011–12, and just £2.2 billion in 2014–15. This volatility also makes them difficult to forecast. The OBR, for instance, has had to revise down its forecasts in 12 out of the 13 times it has updated them.
Of course if oil prices and production had risen rather than fallen, rather than revising down earlier revenue forecasts, the OBR would be revising them up. This might mean we would be revising down projections of the Scottish budget deficit rather than revising them up as has been the case.
So it’s perhaps an unfair criticism of the Scottish Government to say it got its forecasts of oil revenues wrong – so did the OBR, and any revenue forecast for something as volatile as oil will be ‘wrong’. The right response to this is to take this uncertainty into account when setting policy. Therefore more problematic is the fact that in its analysis of the potential path of oil revenues, the Scottish Government considers scenarios where the revenues come in higher than the OBR forecasts but does not consider scenarios where revenues come in less than the OBR forecasts. In other words scenarios are skewed to the “upside” – and this can prove problematic if, as has happened, revenues keep coming in under forecast.
Having said this, it’s important to remember revenues can come in ahead of forecasts too. The OBR’s forecasts assume an oil price of $35.50 during 2016 but the recent modest rebound in prices means they have averaged around $41.00 in the last week. The additional revenues this may bring in if sustained would be far from enough to fill the “Fiscal Gap”. But it’s a timely reminder that what comes down can also go up.
Notes on methodology for projecting Scotland’s fiscal position beyond 2014–15
In order to project forward the GERS 2014–15 figures to the period covering 2015–16 to 2020–21 using figures from the OBR’s March 2016 EFO, the following method is used:
Spending is projected on the basis that government spending in Scotland remains the same proportion (9.2%) of UK-wide government spending as in 2014–15.
Onshore taxes are projected on the basis that the amount paid per person in Scotland grows in line with forecast growth in onshore revenues per person for the UK as a whole. This means onshore tax revenues per person in Scotland are projected to be 96.6% of the average for the UK as a whole, as in 2014–15.
Offshore (oil and gas) taxes are projected under the assumption that Scotland’s share of overall UK offshore tax revenues remains the same as in 2014–15 at 82%.
The same basic set of assumptions was used in our last projections too, although these were, of course, based on GERS 2013-14 and the figures available in the OBR’s March 2015 EFO.
We have chosen the assumptions on the basis of their simplicity. As with any economic or fiscal forecast or projection, the projections outlined in this observation are subject to a number of sources of potential error that mean actual outturns will differ. This includes errors in the OBR forecasts for the UK as a whole; and trends in spending and government revenues in Scotland relative to the UK differing from the above assumptions. There are some reasons to suggest that, if anything, the assumptions are more likely to lead us to under-estimate rather than over-estimate Scotland’s fiscal deficit relative to that of the UK as a whole. First, Scottish Government plans to borrow additional money to fund capital investment mean Scottish Government spending may fall less between 2014–15 and 2020–21 than equivalent spending in the rest of the UK. This would tend to increase Scotland’s share of overall UK government spending; in contrast, we have assumed this share would remain constant. Second, the OBR forecasts revenue growth to be particularly strong for taxes like capital gains tax, inheritance tax and stamp duties, which make up a relatively smaller share of Scottish revenues. All else equal, this would tend to suggest growth in revenues per person in Scotland would be lower than for the UK as a whole. Third, while our revenue projections account for declines in oil revenues, our projections assume that GDP from the North Sea rises in line with onshore GDP. If North Sea GDP declined, as one might actually expect, then Scotland’s cash-terms deficit would represent a larger percentage of GDP. (Of course, as noted above, if oil prices rebound, oil revenues and North Sea GDP would likely grow more quickly than we have projected).
Figures for Scotland’s deficit if it inherited a 0% share of UK central government debt are calculated by subtracting estimates for Scotland’s population share of the UK’s central government net debt interest payments from our baseline projections for Scotland’s public spending.Part I - Finished March 12th
It was a quiet night on the streets of PlanetMinecraft City. Everyone was at the LiveTV Arena, watching the return of the legendary “PMC Podcast” series. One of the key users in the original series left after some unfortunate events occurred, which soon led to the series’ cancellation. Naturally, after so many years all of the city’s users were eager to see this revival. All except one.
The story of the user null_string started out a couple of years after the city was built. This user kept to herself to an extent that no one really knew anything about her. Submissions were not her strong point and the same could be said for “Chatroom” activity. However, she had a great interest in the “Forum” center, which was the primary place for discussions of a more intellectual nature. Because of null_string’s low activity in the “Chatroom”, she had no prior knowledge of the “PMC Podcast”, so on the night of the premiere, all she could do was take a walk around the park.
The park was divided into two main sections - the Member section, which had a board of all current citizens of PlanetMinecraft City and the Team section, which had a board of the city’s high ranking officials. As null_string walked towards the part of the path that split into two, each part leading to one of the two sections, she noticed two figures doing something with both boards in the park. This puzzled her, because there were only two people who could modify those boards, both of which should have been at the LiveTV Arena. Quickly, she shouted:
“Hey! What are you two doing?”
The figures suddenly turned, both at the exact same moment. From the distance null_string stood from, they seemed like they were the same person entirely. In the blink of an eye, they both started running, both on parallel sides, both at the same time, both the same way.
Instead of chasing after them, null_string came closer to the boards, trying to determine what the two figures were doing. She looked at the Member board first, but couldn’t find anything of interest because of the large amount of text there. She couldn’t find anything relevant on the Team board either, until she noticed a small but important detail. According to the board, there were currently eleven “Chat Moderators”. She began counting:
One.
Two.
Three.
…
...Nine
Ten.
It was in that moment that null_string realized: one member had been erased from the board.Get the biggest Weekly Politics stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
A Birmingham man who once posted former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s personal details online has fled to Syria to join the fighting.
Computer hacker Junaid Hussain has skipped bail pending investigations into violent disorder allegations and it is understood he has travelled to the Middle East troublespot.
Hussain, 20, was jailed for six months in 2012 for stealing personal information relating to the former prime minister and his family.
He hacked into the personal Gmail account of the former Prime Minister’s special adviser Katy Kay using an ID ‘trick’ and took email addressees and private phone numbers of Mr Blair, his wife Cherie, and sister-in-law, as well as contacts in the House of Lords and Parliament.
The former student from Kings Heath, who once led a group of teenage hackers called Team Poison, also blocked a police anti-terrorist hotline after bombarding it with more than 100 prank calls.
It is believed he travelled to Syria last year while on police bail.
He recently boasted on social media that he was accompanied by another British jihadist who was also being monitored by the authorities at the time.
On Twitter he uses the alias Abu Hussain al-Britani and has posted photos of himself brandishing an assault rifle and wearing a scarf to hide his identity.
On June 4, Hussain tweeted a reference to the black flag associated with Islamists: “One day the flag of tawheed will fly over 10 Downing Street and the White House.”
Prime Minister David Cameron has warned that jihadists were plotting terror attacks on the UK and that militants returning from fighting in Iraq and neighbouring Syria now represent a greater threat than those from Afghanistan.
He said it was estimated that up to 450 Britons were fighting in the conflicts in Syria and Iraq.
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Make sure you download the FREE Birmingham Mail app for Apple and Android devices.In 1939, a Russian engineer proposed a “flying submarine” -- a vehicle that can seamlessly transition from air to water and back again. While it may sound like something out of a James Bond film, engineers have been trying to design functional aerial-aquatic vehicles for decades with little success. Now, engineers may be one step closer to the elusive flying submarine.
The biggest challenge is conflicting design requirements: aerial vehicles require large airfoils like wings or sails to generate lift while underwater vehicles need to minimize surface area to reduce drag.
To solve this engineers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) took a clue from puffins. The birds with flamboyant beaks are one of nature’s most adept hybrid vehicles, employing similar flapping motions to propel themselves through air as through water.
“Through various theoretical, computational and experimental studies, we found that the mechanics of flapping propulsion are actually very similar in air and in water,” said Kevin Chen, a graduate student in the Harvard Microrobotics Lab at SEAS. “In both cases, the wing is moving back and forth. The only difference is the speed at which the wing flaps.”
Coming from the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, this discovery can only mean one thing: swimming RoboBees.
For the first time, researchers at SEAS have demonstrated a flying, swimming, insect-like robot -- paving the way for future duel aerial aquatic robotic vehicles. The research was presented recently in a paper at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Germany, where first author Chen accepted the award for best student paper.
The paper was co-authored by graduate student Farrell Helbling, postdoctoral fellows Nick Gravish and Kevin Ma, and Robert J. Wood, the Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SEAS and Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
The Harvard RoboBee, designed in Wood’s lab, is a microrobot, smaller than a paperclip, that flies and hovers like an insect, flapping its tiny, nearly invisible wings 120 times per second. In order to make the transition from air to water, the team first had to solve the problem of surface tension. The RoboBee is so small and lightweight that it cannot break the surface tension of the water. To overcome this hurdle, the RoboBee hovers over the water at an angle, momentarily switches off its wings, and crashes unceremoniously into the water in order to sink.
Next the team had to account for water’s increased density.
“Water is almost 1,000 times denser than air and would snap the wing off the RoboBee if we didn’t adjust its flapping speed,” said Helbling, the paper’s second author.
The team lowered the wing speed from 120 flaps per second to nine but kept the flapping mechanisms and hinge design the same. A swimming RoboBee changes its direction by adjusting the stroke angle of the wings, the same way it does in air. Like a flying version, it is still tethered to a power source. The team prevented the RoboBee from shorting by using deionized water and coating the electrical connections with glue.
While this RoboBee can move seamlessly from air to water, it cannot yet transition from water to air because it can’t generate enough lift without snapping one of its wings. Solving that design challenge is the next phase of the research, according to Chen.
“What is really exciting about this research is that our analysis of flapping-wing locomotion is not limited to insect-scaled vehicles,” said Chen. “From millimeter-scaled insects to meter-scaled fishes and birds, flapping locomotion spans a range of sizes. This strategy has the potential to be adapted to larger aerial-aquatic robotic designs.”
"Bioinspired robots, such as the RoboBee, are invaluable tools for a host of interesting experiments -- in this case on the fluid mechanics of flapping foils in different fluids,” said Wood. “This is all enabled by the ability to construct complex devices that faithfully recreate some of the features of organisms of interest."
This research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.Big Plans for Little Haiti
My students need 12 copies of the textbook, The Language of Composition, to prepare for the AP Language test and be the first class in our school's history to average a passing score on the AP Language test!
My Students
My students come from an underserved community; they do not have access to the materials that other students their age do to prepare for AP tests, and eventually save money on college classes.
My students are primarily of Haitian descent, with resiliency built into their bones.
They are driven, intelligent, and resourceful, yet do not benefit from the resources of students with similar aspirations. When they are faced with an obstacle, they immediately begin looking for ways through it, not just around. They are critical thinkers, and are undoubtedly the leaders of tomorrow. My students believe in themselves, each other, and the power of a good education.
My Project
I have requested twelve copies of the textbook, The Language of Composition, to help my students prepare for the AP Language test, and be the first class in our school's history to average a passing score on the AP Language test! These books will give my students access to the materials that are common in AP language classrooms across the country. This textbook is top-of-the-line, and priced accordingly, thus my students can't afford to purchase it independently. If my students can get their hands on these textbooks, they will be able to write their own future, and will not be subject to the statistics that surround the neighborhood they are from. This book will give them invaluable insight into preparing for the AP exam, which inevitably prepares them for college. My students will use these textbooks to engage in rhetoric as a field of study, and once they pass the AP exam, will be able to save on tuition when they go to college. Passing an AP exam is an obvious boost when it comes to applying to college, not just in terms of being a competitive applicant, but in terms of increasing the confidence of my students. At a high school where college is often seen as a luxury for the very few, this group of kids can all make it a reality: it starts with proper AP textbooks!
This project will help put my students on a college-bound track, plain and simple.
AP exams make them competitive as applicants, but also push them to be be more critical thinkers. I want my students to feel proud of where they are from, and of the education they receive. I also want them to feel empowered to continue their education outside of the classroom, and that's what a powerful textbook can do: give kids the skills to critically engage with the world around them!Formatting may be lacking as a result. If this article is un-readable please report it so that we may fix it.
Posted on September 23, 2014, Viet Do Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Pre-Order Chopped by 25%
Update 10/1: Now that the game is fully released, different deals are now available. With up to 27% off for Shadow of Mordor! Details below.
If you’ve read the Silmarillion, odds are you’re going to end up getting the end-of-the-month’s release of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. Chock full of LOTR lore, the game is selling for $59.99 on console and $49.99 as a digital download for PC. Of course, if you’re going the pre-order digital route, you bet there’s a discount available.
This week GMG is running a 20% off coupon slashing $10 off the $49.99 list price for the PC digital version (aka Steam key). That’s a whopping $20 cheaper than on console! Also available is the Season Pass which gives you fast access to a few select in-game exclusives 3 days after release (along with the eventual content DLC):
Pre-ordering Shadow of Mordor on the PC also gets you a nifty “The Dark Ranger” DLC bonus – also available on the console version. The pack contains an exclusive playable character skin darker than the vanilla version. The DLC also include a “Test of Power” challenge mode, pitting you against Sauron’s minions and allowing you to get upgrades before starting the campaign.
If you were hoping there was some sort of console discount available for Shadow of Mordor, you’re out of luck!
For console gamers, pre-order discounts are an extremely rare thing, but there is at least one incentive offer worth looking into. Best Buy offers a $10 Rewards credit to “My Best Buy” members that pre-order the console version through them. You’ll also get the Best Buy signature “Flames of Anor Rune bonus” – not found at other retailers.
On the Season Pass front, you’ll get to unlock a variety of in-game content uncomfortably close to the release date of the actual game (October 3rd for beginning of the Season Pass access). Keep your pitchfork at bay because this is only for the initial content, with future content along with story mission coming along further down the line.
Thus far as an incentive for getting the Shadow of Mordor Season Pass so early, you’ll receive:
Guardians of the Flaming Eye (content exclusive to Season Pass)
Test of Power, Speed, and Wisdom early access
Endless Challenge (whatever that means)
Update 10/3: We’ve updated the post with details on the Season Pass for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor along with a new coupon which discounts the game at 20% vs the previous 25%.
Game deals and info listed by the crew at Dealzon. Spot something good? Let us know in the comments.Last week, I posted some obfuscated Python which generates Penrose tiling. Today, I’ll explain the basic algorithm behind that Python script, and share the non-obfuscated version.
The algorithm manipulates a list of red and blue isosceles triangles. Each red triangle has a 36° angle at its apex, while each blue triangle has a 108° angle.
In Python, we can represent such triangles as tuples of the form (color, A, B, C). For the first element, color, a value of 0 indicates a red triangle, while 1 indicates blue. The rest of the tuple gives the co-ordinates of the A, B and C vertices, expressed as complex numbers. Complex numbers work well here since they can represent any point on the 2D plane – the real component gives the x co-ordinate, while the imaginary component gives the y co-ordinate.
As you can see, we draw an outline along the sides of the triangle, but not along the base. This allows each triangle to connect with another triangle of the same color, forming the rhombus-shaped tiles that are visible in the final Penrose tiling.
Now here’s the fun part. Given a list of such triangles, we can subdivide each one to generate another triangle list. A red triangle is subdivided into two smaller triangles as follows:
The above subdivision introduces a new vertex P, located at a point along the edge AB which satisfies the golden ratio, \(\frac{1 + \sqrt{5}}{2} \).
Similarly, each blue triangle is subdivided into three smaller triangles:
This subdivision introduces two new vertices: Q along the edge BA, and R along the edge BC, at points which also satisfy the golden ratio. As well, two of the resulting triangles are mirrored – I’ve drawn a highlight in the corner of each triangle to help identify which ones are mirrored and which are not.
All of the above steps can be performed using just a few lines of Python. This function accepts a list of triangles represented as tuples, subdivides each one, and returns the new triangle list:
goldenRatio = ( 1 + math.sqrt( 5 )) / 2 def subdivide (triangles): result = [] for color, A, B, C in triangles: if color == 0 : P = A + (B - A) / goldenRatio result += [( 0, C, P, B), ( 1, P, C, A)] else : Q = B + (A - B) / goldenRatio R = B + (C - B) / goldenRatio result += [( 1, R, C, A), ( 1, Q, R, B), ( 0, R, Q, A)] return result
And here’s some code to actually draw the triangle list. It uses pycairo, a Python wrapper around the excellent cairo drawing library.
for color, A, B, C in triangles: if color == 0 : cr.move_to(A.real, A.imag) cr.line_to(B.real, B.imag) cr.line_to(C.real, C.imag) cr.close_path() cr.set_source_rgb( 1.0, 0.35, 0.35 ) cr.fill() for color, A, B, C in triangles: if color == 1 : cr.move_to(A.real, A.imag) cr.line_to(B.real, B.imag) cr.line_to(C.real, C.imag) cr.close_path() cr.set_source_rgb( 0.4, 0.4, 1.0 ) cr.fill() color, A, B, C = triangles[ 0 ] cr.set_line_width( abs (B - A) / 10.0 ) cr.set_line_join(cairo.LINE_JOIN_ROUND) for color, A, B, C in triangles: cr.move_to(C.real, C.imag) cr.line_to(A.real, A.imag) cr.line_to(B.real, B.imag) cr.set_source_rgb( 0.2, 0.2, 0.2 ) cr.stroke()
Using all of the above code, we can, for example, start with a single red triangle, subdivide it several times, and draw the result after each subdivision. You can see the tiling pattern begin to emerge:
You can even begin the sequence using another triangle list. Here’s some code to start with a “wheel” shape consisting of 10 red triangles:
triangles = [] for i in xrange ( 10 ): B = cmath.rect( 1, ( 2 *i - 1 ) * math.pi / 10 ) C = cmath.rect( 1, ( 2 *i + 1 ) * math.pi / 10 ) if i % 2 == 0 : B, C = C, B triangles.append(( 0, 0j, B, C))
If we subdivide this wheel shape repeatedly, we get the following sequence of tilings. Notice that each tiling contains a lot of symmetry – both reflective and rotational symmetry around 5 different axes:
If you study either the top or bottom row of this sequence carefully, you’ll notice that for each tiling except the first, an upside-down copy appears in the tiling to the right. I’ve drawn some yellow outlines to make this more obvious. Looking at it another way: if you take any of these tilings, subdivide it twice, flip it vertically and enlarge the result, you’ve basically added another ring around the tiling. By repeating this process indefinitely, you can see how a Penrose tiling could be made to completely fill the entire plane.
Finally, here’s a (non-obfuscated) Python script which ties everything together: download penrose.py. It starts with a wheel pattern, subdivides it 10 times, and renders the enlarged, cropped result inside a 1000x1000 image.
I pieced this explanation together from various sources: mainly this page at UBC and the Wikipedia entry. Mind you, this is not the only algorithm which can generate a Penrose tiling. Another method involves projecting a 5-dimensional set of lattice points onto a 2D plane. I haven’t taken the time to fully understand that one, but it seems to open up the possibility of interesting color patterns.As of April, casual dining establishments serving sex appeal along with the beer and hot wings can call themselves anything but "breastaurants." That's when Doug Guller trademarked the term for exclusive use at Bikinis Sports Bar & Grill, the company he founded in 2006.
RELATED: BREASTAURANTS TAKE AIM AT HOOTERS
"Breastaurant" describes a dining spot with female servers in revealing outfits. In June, a trade publication, The Nation's Restaurant News, reported that this portion of the casual dining segment had grown to over $2 billion in annual sales.
According to Darren Tristano, executive vice president of the food industry research firm Technomic, 80 percent of the business comes from male customers. "The female servers play a big role in drawing that demographic," he said.
Not everyone approves of the model. Serial entrepreneur and Camping World CEO Marcus Lemonis of CNBC Prime's "The Profit" owns Rose's Café & Bakery, a gluten-free organic restaurant with locations in Evanston and Highland Park, Ill., so he knows a thing or two about running a food service business. In an interview, he opposed using sex to promote one.
"I'm very passionate about steering away from it," he said. "I don't see any value in it long term. How many people can you attract, and what is the risk of offending somebody?"
Whatever the long-term prospects of the breastaurant might be, there's no denying that it's an important piece of the casual dining segment.
This article by Daniel Bukszpan originally appeared at CNBC.com.
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This Stock Doesn't Get Enough RespectSanfrecce Hiroshima, the reigning champions, may have pipped Emperor’s Cup holders Yokohama F. Marinos to the title on the final day of the 2013 league campaign, but the Purple Arrows will be hungry for revenge when the two sides meet on Saturday in the Fuji Xerox Super Cup, the curtain-raiser for the new J.League season.
Hiroshima lost twice in league action to Yokohama last season and Hajime Moriyasu’s side was denied a league and cup double on New Year’s Day when they were beaten 2-0 in the Emperor’s Cup final at National Stadium, the venue for Saturday’s match.
In fact, Hiroshima has not beaten Yokohama in two years, losing four matches against one draw with two goals scored against nine conceded, a record that Moriyasu was keen to put behind him.
“I’ve never won against Marinos since I have been manager,” said Moriyasu, who has won the league in both of his first two seasons in charge. “They are a very good team and although we respect them, we want to give them a game, play our style and win the title.”
“We’re in this game because we are the champions and that makes me very happy,” he added. “We have worked hard in training and I want the players to show the result of that tomorrow. We want to win this title to get us off to a good start.”
Hiroshima have seen Japan reserve goalkeeper Shusaku Nishikawa leave to join Urawa Reds in the close season and has welcomed Takuto Hayashi back between the sticks following his transfer from Vegalta Sendai.
Midfielder Yoshifumi Kashiwa, signed from Ventforet Kofu, is injured, but 2012 J.League Player of the Year and Golden Boot winner Hisato Sato is fit, as are other key men Yojiro Takahagi and Toshihiro Aoyama.
The Super Cup will be the final one at the existing National Stadium before it is demolished and rebuilt for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
“For me personally and for the team, the National Stadium has a lot of memories,” said Moriyasu. “This is the last Super Cup at this stadium and we want to be the team that wins the title.”
Yokohama imploded during the final few weeks of the league campaign last year and finished runner-up behind Hiroshima.
Veteran striker Marquinhos has left to join Vissel Kobe, but Yasuhiro Higuchi’s side will be a threat from set pieces from the likes of 2013 J.League Player of the Year Shunsuke Nakamura and new signing Jungo Fujimoto.
The league champions have won the last five Super Cup titles but Higuchi is hoping his side can reverse that trend.
“It’s been nine years since Marinos played in this game so we want to take the opportunity to win the title and get the season off to a good start,” he said.
The match will also serve as a warm-up for both teams ahead of the Asian Champions League. Hiroshima takes on China’s Beijing Guoan on Tuesday in Group F, and Yokohama is away to South Korea’s Jeonbuk Motors in its Group G opener on Wednesday.
Hiroshima kicks off its J.League campaign away to Diego Forlan’s Cerezo Osaka on March 1 and Yokohama is at home to Omiya Ardija the following day.The Time Ships is a 1995 science fiction novel by Stephen Baxter. A sequel to The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, it was officially authorised by the Wells estate to mark the centenary of the original's publication. The Time Ships won critical acclaim. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award in 1996,[1] as well as the British Science Fiction Association Award in 1995.[2] It was also nominated for the Hugo, Clarke, and Locus Awards in 1996.[1]
Plot summary [ edit ]
After the events related in The Time Machine, the Time Traveller (his first name, Moses, is given in the novel but applied to the Time Traveller's younger self) prepares, in 1891, to return to the year 802,701 and save Weena, the Eloi who died in the fire with the Morlocks. He reveals that the quartz construction of the time machine is suffused with a radioactive substance he calls Plattnerite for the mysterious benefactor who gave him the sample to study twenty years earlier, in 1871.
The Time Traveller departs into the future and stops in AD 657,208 when he notes the daytime sky has gone permanently dark. He arrives and is abducted by a branch of Morlocks more culturally advanced than the ones he met before. One of their number, Nebogipfel (the name of a character from Wells's The Chronic Argonauts), explains after hearing the Time Traveller's own story that the conflict between Eloi and Morlocks never occurred due to the Writer's publication of the story that became The Time Machine. The timeline he sought to go to is inaccessible to him now. The Morlocks of this timeline have constructed a Dyson sphere around the inner solar system and use the Sun's energy to power it. Humans as the Time Traveller knows them live on the sunlit inner surface of the Sphere while the Morlocks live on the outer shell. The Time Traveller convinces Nebogipfel that he will help him understand the time travelling mechanism of the Time machine if the Morlock takes him back to it.
When he thinks he is unobserved, the Time Traveller reactivates his machine and travels to 1873 to persuade his younger self to stop his research on Plattnerite. Nebogipfel, who took hold of the Time Traveller once he realised what he was doing, follows him there. As the Time Traveller attempts to persuade his younger self, whom he asks to call "Moses" to avoid confusion, to stop his research by providing Nebogipfel as proof that reality is changed by time travel, a tank-like Juggernaut pulls into Moses' yard. The army personnel on board, commanded by Hilary Bond and accompanied by an older version of the Time Traveller's friend Filby, take Moses, Nebogipfel, and the Time Traveller to their 1938, where World War I has stretched over twenty-four years due to the discovery of time travel which was influenced by the latter's work. Britain's major cities are all encased in Domes, and with the contributions of Austrian expatriate Kurt Gödel, the government hopes to win the war by altering Germany's history conclusively.
Nebogipfel explains to the Time Traveller that they've entered another future as a result of their actions in Moses' past. During another bombing raid on London by the Germans, Gödel provides a vial of Plattnerite and leads to the only escape available, a Time-Car prototype. Upon hearing this and what society would be like after the war (a pessimistic view mirroring Wells' own), the Time Traveller and Nebogipfel mount the vehicle and insert the Plattnerite. Moses is killed in an explosion when he tries to save Gödel, and the Time-Car travels back to the Paleocene and is wrecked on a tree. After weeks of bare survival, the Time Traveller and Nebogipfel are discovered by a scouting party from the Chronic Expeditionary Force commanded by Hilary Bond that arrived from 1944 to find them based on their remains in her time. Some time later, a German Messerschmitt plane arrives over the campsite, drops a Carolinum bomb (analogous to an atomic bomb in our world; see Wells's The World Set Free), and devastates the time-traveling Juggernauts and all but twelve of the Force. Nebogipfel and the Time Traveller are away from the campsite at the time.
Over the next year and a half, the stranded soldiers under Hilary Bond's command start the colony of First London. In off moments, Nebogipfel has worked on repairing the Time-Car and acquired shavings of Plattnerite to power it on a journey through time. When the Time-Car is ready, the Time Traveller joins Nebogipfel in a fifty-million year journey through which they see First London expand and develop colonies on the moon and in Earth orbit. Eventually, human tampering with the Earth's environment renders the planet uninhabitable, and they depart for the stars. When the Time-Car finally stops due to depletion of its Plattnerite fuel, Nebogipfel and the Time Traveller are tended by a Universal Constructor, a life form (or lifeforms) composed of thousands of nanotechnological entities. They see that there are few stars left in the night sky; this is due to the human descendants colonising many worlds and constructing Dyson Spheres around the host star. The goal of the Universal Constructor is to harvest the energy of the sun to build time-travel vehicles from Plattnerite and travel to the beginning of the universe. However, this goal is not due to be completed for a million years.
Nebogipfel and the Time Traveller acquire enough Plattnerite from the Constructors to journey to the point in the future (i.e., another million years hence) when the Constructors will have finished building their time ships. Once the Time Traveller and Nebogipfel reach this point, the Constructors integrate them into a time ship and thus begins the journey back to time's beginning. At this central point from where all matter and energy and timelines branch off, the Constructors apparently start a new history in which they become something even more grand and knowledgeable than before. These successors of the Constructors place the Time Traveller and Nebogipfel into the Time Traveller's original history in the year 1871. It is revealed that the Time Traveller himself is the mysterious stranger who gave his younger self the Plattnerite sample under the alias "Gott |
“Hey! Watch it! Watch the face! Hey! You coaching over here or what?”
“Sorry!” I tried to act sincere, I was still trying to be positive, “All right kids, that’s some great energy!” I knew that I didn’t want to be responsible for messing these kids up, yelling at them, they’d be turned off from sports for years, I don’t know if there’s any truth to that, but they’re not even my kids, I couldn’t deal with the pressure, the responsibility, all I could do was offer blanket, generic praise, “You kids are so fast! All right! You guys are doing great!”
And then that Sunday it was our first game, I hadn’t really done any coaching yet, these kids never got past the layup line. But what could I do? I bought one of those dry-erase clipboards, the ones with the basketball court outline, for making plays and stuff. But it was a blowout, worse than the worst basketball I’d ever seen, just an overall poor example of human beings trying to do something together.
All I could do was stand there and clap, “All right Johnny! Nice shot!” it was an air ball. “Great hustle Timmy! Keep hustling!” all while the parents sat there on the sidelines and scowled at me. Some dude came up during halftime and got in my face, “I’m Jimmy’s dad. I don’t think he’s getting enough playing time. And did you guys even practice? Did you teach them how to shoot lay-ups? Which one’s your kid?”
And I really wanted to get right back in this guy’s face, like hey pal, what are you doing on Tuesday nights that you’re so busy you can’t be the coach, huh? And you’re going to come over here and start bossing me around? Why don’t you ask your wife about why the kids couldn’t line up for layups, she was at the practice, enabling your little jerk-off son, he just kept fucking smiling at me, slapping that ball, slap, slap, slap.
But what could I have done? I just tried to keep up that positive attitude, I told Jimmy’s dad, “Hey Jimmy’s dad, you’re doing some great cheering over there! I’m really happy with the energy you parents are giving off! Keep up that clapping, that’s what we need to keep doing, clapping and cheering! All right! We’re going to have a great season, it’s so much fun! Just thanks for being here! Thanks for letting little Jimmy be a part of our team! All right! Thanks!”Playing the Barbarians is a waste of time... why not play England or France?
The British and Irish Lions play only six games before their first Test against Australia and they need tough fixtures to be battle-hardened and up to speed. To be blunt, playing the Barbarians in Hong Kong on Saturday will do absolutely nothing to help them prepare for the pace and professionalism of the Wallabies.
When the Barbarians lined up against England last weekend they were clearly dishevelled and uninterested — it was a waste of a fixture for an England side about to tour Argentina and a match that the RFU should seriously reconsider if it is approached in such ridiculous fashion.
It was a hot, sunny day at Twickenham and the Baa-Baas paid a heavy price for their self-proclaimed ‘team bonding’ drinking sessions in the week building up to the match. I just hope the same mindset does not apply on Saturday.
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Here we go again: The British and Irish Lions take to the field for another training session in the sweltering heat Getting hot in here: Toby Faletau keeps cool in front of a fan sprinkling water during a training session
It was a sad sight which made me question whether they really are from a bygone era of amateur rugby. For Derek Quinnell, the team manager, to sit in a press conference before facing the Lions and talk about a self-imposed booze ban is frankly embarrassing.
Even worse, the players then went to the races that evening and posted pictures of themselves online with glasses of wine in their hands and bottles of beer on the tables. You only have to read the views on social media sites to see what supporters think of this.
Professional players preparing with beer-fuelled ‘bonding sessions’ is a million miles away from the image the game should have in the 21st century. It frustrates me to think about the young fans at Twickenham hoping to be inspired by the Barbarians’ trademark style of free running, skilful rugby, who were instead presented with players clearly unfit for purpose.
One of my proudest moments playing rugby was winning the Hong Kong Sevens in 1981 with the Barbarians but it was a different era. The prestige of facing the Lions should be cherished, as should the prestige of the Barbarians themselves.
Day at the races: Barbarians Schalk Brits (right) and Marco Wentzel enjoy a glass of wine
Different era: The Barbarians' drinking culture contrasts with that of top international sides
Who are the Barbarians?
The Barbarians were founded in 1890 in Bradford by William Percy Carpmael. Most sides ended the season in March but Carpmael conceived a select touring side to play post-season matches.
In 1948, they faced Australia — their first international match — as part of a fundraising effort to help the Australians get home. It was such a success that international matches became traditional.
The Baa-Baas have always played in distinctive black and white hoops, but players all wear their respective club socks.
31 countries have represented the Barbarians, with Norway the latest to join the list after Erik Lund played against England on Sunday.
Once a player is selected, he is a club member for life. The Barbarians have more than 2,800 members.
Most of the world’s great players have represented the Barbarians, though it is a tradition to select at least one uncapped player.
Barbarians matches should not be treated as exhibitions; this is why I tried as England coach to get these games promoted to Test status, for which players received international caps.
The Lions also must admit they are here purely for commercial reasons. I have no problem with that in itself, but they cannot also pretend this is to help them prepare for their Test series.
When you step off the plane for the rugby Sevens tournament in Hong Kong there is a buzz about the place, but that simply isn’t here yet. Why not invite a Test team such as Tonga or Fiji, who would relish this honour in their 100th year as a union, to face the Lions? Even better, playing England or France would bring this fixture so much spice and be infinitely more valuable to players and coaches.
Lessons need to be learned from day one. In 2005, I knew as head coach we had to play a game before we flew to New Zealand to make the sums add up, so we organised a game against Argentina in Cardiff. It was a full-on Test and a good start to the tour.
The motivation of wearing the red shirt will be massive for the Lions compared to the Barbarians and one look at the strength of the team named by Warren Gatland on Thursday makes it clear this is going to be a cricket score. Of the 23-man squad, 17 have never played for the side before, but the six veteran Lions have 430 caps between them and have played in 19 Lions Tests, so this offers a perfect blend of youth and experience.
Big freeze: Paul O'Connell - who will be captain on Saturday - has an ice bath in Hong Kong
Sam Warburton’s knee injury is a concern, but his absence also shows just how strong the back row is on this tour. Dan Lydiate, Toby Faletau and Justin Tipuric are a devastating trio who could start the first Test — a nice balance of a great tackler, ball carrier and scavenger in the back row.
On the bench lurks Ireland captain Jamie Heaslip, a powerful runner who could make a devastating impact late in the game against the burning lungs and tired legs of the Barbarians, a scratch team who have not had time to get organised defensively.
Against a team of this power the Barbarians will not have the defensive structure or commitment to stop the Lions. Only three of their players — scrum-half Dimitri Yachvili, hooker Schalk Brits and No 8 Sergio Parisse — can match their opposite number man for man.
Dynamic: Faletau (right) and Tipuric (centre) join Lydiate the back row
Next up for the Lions on Wednesday are the Western Force, who are well rested and have beaten New Zealand’s Super Rugby heavyweights the Crusaders and the Highlanders at home this season. They will be well organised and so difficult to break down — it will be a totally different game, tight, brutal and a huge shock to the system.
When I played for the Lions in 1980 and 1983 that first game was of monumental importance — it was always against a good, tough side — as getting off on the right foot and building momentum towards the first Test is crucial.
We flew out to the country 10 days before the first game to bed in with the squad together and get used to the climate and culture. It built up to a first game in a packed stadium to kick things off.
Young guns: Stuart Hogg (left) and Owen Farrell both start in the back line in Hong Kong
Pulling on the Lions jersey for the first time is a feeling you cherish for ever, but you don’t imagine doing it in front of 20,000 empty seats.
This tour to Australia is a potential banana skin for the Lions because everything suggests they should win the series. But this first game against the Barbarians is not a step forward in the right direction. It is simply a sidestep.He dazzled viewers with his outrageous performance in the first semi-final in Kyiv. Now Montenegrin diva Slavko Kalezic has moved on to even bigger things. He’s starring in a promo video for the new series of The X Factor UK.
The promo, which aired during the grand final of reality hit series Love Island, is the first glimpse that UK viewers have been given of the 2017 series of The X Factor. And fans of Slavko won’t be disappointed — he is the only auditionee to feature in the video.
The 20-second video stars Slavko performing Beyonce’s 2012 single “End of Time”. Fans of the Montenegrin artist may recognise the song from his audition on X Factor Adria in 2013. And his UK audition performance seems to have made just as much an impression on the judges.
Starting with an energetic “You ready?!”, Slavko peps up the judges and instantly puts a smile on Simon Cowell’s face. Improving on his X Factor Adria performance, Slavko has brought along his Eurovision power braid, and proceeds to whip it around, “Space” style.
Judges Sharon Osborne, Louis Walsh and Nicole Scherzinger are also shown to be wowed by Slavko’s high energy performance. Being a classically trained actor, the Montenegrin artist is able to bring energy to his performance and totally electrify the room.
From the “End of Time” to “Space”
Earlier in the year, William and Deban reviewed Slavko’s performance of “End of Time” for X Factor Adria.
Our wiwi duo were blown away by Slavko’s swagger, and noted that he had most of the judges up on their feet and dancing.
William commented, “You have to be bold and brave to show up to an X Factor Adria audition with that kind of swagger and originality.” Deban added, “He gets it!”
“End of Time” has become a signature song for Slavko. He gave a special performance at his Eurovision PreParty Spain performance, wowing the Madrid audience with his combination of Queen Bey, his power braid and a revealing sheer bodysuit.
Slavko is best known for his outrageous performance of club banger “Space” at Eurovision 2017. While the song did not make it out of the semi-final, it won over fans and has become an iconic hit from Kyiv.
The X Factor UK has discovered future Eurovision performers such as Ruth Lorenzo, Jedward and Lucie Jones. But it’s also given a second chance to performers such as Saara Aalto, whose unsuccessful attempt in the 2016 Finnish national final eventually led to her placing second in the 2016 series of The X Factor UK. Will Slavko follow in her footsteps?
Series 14 of The X Factor UK will begin in August. Stay tuned for full coverage of Slavko’s X Factor journey.
READ MORE SLAVKO KALEZIC NEWSCopyright by WSPA - All rights reserved
Associated Press / WSPA Staff - A 2014 graduate of Belton-Honea Path High School was killed in a shooting early Sunday morning at Winston-Salem State University.
19-year-old Anthony White Jr. played football for the BHP Bears according to Bears coach Russell Blackston. White was an Information Technology Major at WSSU.
A memorial was posted to the BHP Football Facebook page Sunday afternoon.
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=958046120935733&id=363635903710094
The university says a suspected gunman is on the loose and visitors to the campus on Sunday are urged to stay away.
University spokesman Aaron Singleton says a second student injured in the attack was released from the hospital early Sunday. His name and condition were being withheld.
The shooting was reported around 1:20 a.m. Sunday near a dormitory. The campus was locked down for about three hours.
Singleton says police are looking for a suspect, but he would provide no other information.
The historically black school was celebrating its homecoming weekend, when former students and staff return.
(Portions Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)Nintendo is offering an incentive to the world’s finest researchers to find and report security vulnerabilities for the Nintendo 3DS family of handheld game systems. In coordination with HackerOne, Nintendo will pay up to U.S. $20,000 for the discovery of critical security vulnerabilities.
Nintendo is dedicated to providing video game fans worldwide premium entertainment in a welcoming and secure environment. To that end, Nintendo invites highly skilled researchers to find and address vulnerabilities on the Nintendo 3DS handheld system that could jeopardize that environment. Nintendo is committed to creating a better game-play experience for all through those actions.
Certain conditions apply to this program. To learn about the full details, and to report Nintendo 3DS security vulnerabilities, please visit https://hackerone.com/nintendo.
About Nintendo: The worldwide pioneer in the creation of interactive entertainment, Nintendo Co., Ltd., of Kyoto, Japan, manufactures and markets hardware and software for its Wii U™ and Wii™ home consoles, and Nintendo 3DS™ and Nintendo DS™ families of portable systems. Since 1983, when it launched the Nintendo Entertainment System™, Nintendo has sold more than 4.4 billion video games and more than 696 million hardware units globally, including the current-generation Wii U, Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo 3DS XL, as well as the Game Boy™, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, Nintendo DSi™ and Nintendo DSi XL™, Super NES™, Nintendo 64™, Nintendo GameCube™ and Wii systems. It has also created industry icons that have become well-known, household names such as Mario™, Donkey Kong™, Metroid™, Zelda™ and Pokémon™. A wholly owned subsidiary, Nintendo of America Inc., based in Redmond, Wash., serves as headquarters for Nintendo’s operations in the Western Hemisphere. For more information about Nintendo, please visit the company’s website at http://www.nintendo.com.
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HackerOne is the #1 hacker-powered security platform, helping organizations find and fix critical vulnerabilities before they can be criminally exploited. As the contemporary alternative to traditional penetration testing, our bug bounty program solutions encompass vulnerability assessment, crowdsourced testing and responsible disclosure management. Discover more about our security testing solutions or Contact Us today.The kingdom of Granada falls to the Christian forces of King Ferdinand V and Queen Isabella I, and the Moors lose their last foothold in Spain.
Located at the confluence of the Darro and Genil rivers in southern Spain, the city of Granada was a Moorish fortress that rose to prominence during the reign of Sultan Almoravid in the 11th century. In 1238, the Christian Reconquest forced Spanish Muslims south, and the kingdom of Granada was established as the last refuge of the Moorish civilization.
Granada flourished culturally and economically for the next 200 years, but in the late 15th century internal feuds and a strengthened Spanish monarchy under Ferdinand and Isabella signaled the end of Moorish civilization in Spain. On January 2, 1492, King Boabdil surrendered Granada to the Spanish forces, and in 1502 the Spanish crown ordered all Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity. The next century saw a number of persecutions, and in 1609 the last Moors still adhering to Islam were expelled from Spain.Jason Heap, 38, an atheist with a seminary degree, has applied to become a U.S. Navy chaplain, just in time to step into the hornet's nest called Congress. (Full disclosure: Heap graduated from the seminary that employs me and is well regarded by his former professors.) In applying openly as an atheist, he has raised questions about the Constitution, Congress, and the role of military chaplaincy.
Some lawmakers are trying to bar atheists from joining the chaplain corps -- the House approved an amendment to the defense authorization bill last week that was designed to keep the Pentagon from accepting atheist chaplains.
"The notion of an atheist chaplain is nonsensical; it's an oxymoron," said Rep. John Fleming, R-La., sponsor of the amendment. "It is absurd to argue that someone with no spiritual inclination should fill that role, especially when it could well mean that such an individual would take the place of a true chaplain who has been endorsed by a religious organization."
The military and Congress are sworn to protect the Constitution, which guarantees the free practice of religion. They are not supposed to impose state-mandated beliefs or prohibit people from practicing what they believe in order to serve their country. Insisting on belief in God (as if it were self-evident what the word "God" means) is a violation of the religious freedom of those in military service, including chaplains.
In fact, it is possible to be deeply religious and not believe in God. Estimates are that there are about as many Buddhists in the U.S. as Muslims, but being a Buddhist carries no requirement to believe in God (Gautama Buddha was an enlightened human being, not a god). Plenty of Buddhists don't believe in God and don't even think about it much because it isn't an important question in Buddhism. A Buddhist teacher is likely to say that if believing in God makes you a better, more compassionate and moral person, that is good, but if it makes you hostile, mean, narrow-minded, or judgmental of others, you need to get that idol out of your mind. The famous Buddhist saying, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him," is a metaphorical shorthand for this principle of not getting attached to the idea of something that stands in your spiritual way.
The military accepted its first Buddhist, Jeanine Shin, as a chaplain in 2004. Chaplain Shin describes her work as providing
Spiritual ministry, care, and counseling outside the confines of a traditional place of worship... Military chaplains exist because of the U.S. constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion... I think one misconception is that military chaplains function as missionaries or that they preach killing. However, most chaplains really are concerned with ensuring that individuals, whether in the military or hospital or prisons, have access to services and sacraments of their respective faith...I think that if a chaplain were to engage in [proselytizing] behavior they would have very little credibility with other Marines and Sailors and therefore be very ineffective in their jobs.
Jason Heap is endorsed by the 74-year-old Humanist Society, which trains people in moral leadership, rituals, and ceremonial roles. At Brite Divinity School, Heap received both the intellectual sophistication and pastoral training to serve the needs of a variety of religious members of the military, including those whose beliefs he may not share.
Under the Constitution, Congress cannot exclude an atheist from military chaplaincy, and it would be a better military if atheist troops could seek spiritual and moral guidance from someone they trust. The need for diverse chaplains is great because a larger number of soldiers turn to chaplains than seek out clinicians when they want to discuss problems. A clinical assessment goes on a military record, but chaplains keep their conversations confidential.
In our military today, more members identify as atheists or agnostics than the combined total of Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus, but these latter groups now have their own chaplains. My friend and colleague Chaplain (Col.) Herman Keizer, Jr. (ret.) spent 34 years as a chaplain, and he advocates unequivocally for expanding the chaplaincy to meet the religious needs of an increasingly diverse military. He had the honor of swearing in the Army's first Muslim chaplain, who stood in a long line of firsts, first Roman Catholic, first Rabbi, first Hindu, etc., all of whom faced resistance. It is time for an atheist first--over a quarter of a million in military service say they have "no religious preference," a self-identification that is growing in those under age 30.
The Department of Defense can only require a candidate for chaplaincy to meet educational requirements and possess a statement of status that comes from the endorsing body of the candidate's tradition. That body agrees to endorse as chaplains, leaders who can function and minister in the pluralistic and multi-faith context of the military. Can a chaplain whose purpose for ministry in the military is to gain converts to his faith truly minister to those not part of her or his tradition? If a chaplain cannot minister to an atheist, the question becomes, who will minister to atheists?
On July 31, the Forum on Military Chaplaincy released the following statement, saying it:
Strongly supports the recruitment and retention of highly qualified, clinically trained chaplains who are representative of and committed to a chaplaincy reflecting a broad and inclusive range of interfaith, multicultural and diverse life experiences. This inclusive outreach extends to chaplains representing the gay, lesbian and bisexual communities of faith, as well as those of minority beliefs, including Humanists. They, too, are valued members of our country's military and must be embraced fully. Our soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen, and coastguardsmen deserve nothing less!
A member of the Forum, Professor Kurt Fredrickson of Fuller Theological Seminary noted, "In the end, chaplains are very important, and if Humanist chaplains meet a need for our military, this concept must be embraced."Black gun (Photo: Getty Images / iStockphoto)
Full-time college employees are now allowed to carry guns on campus, but only a small percentage of those employees have indicated they will do so, according to information from several law enforcement agencies.
A law allowing employees at public universities with the necessary permits to carry a concealed firearm went into effect Friday. But before they can carry their weapons on school grounds, employees need to alert campus or local law enforcement.
As of this week, a small fraction of the 27,000 eligible employees at the Tennessee Board of Regents and University of Tennessee college systems had chosen to take advantage of the new law, according to multiple agencies.
Police at UT-Knoxville had fielded requests from 72 employees who wanted to be able to bring their guns on campus, a spokeswoman there said Thursday.
At Middle Tennessee State University, 15 to 20 of about 2,000 eligible employees had asked law enforcement to carry guns on campus, according to an estimate from the school's police chief, Buddy Peaster. Peaster added that he expects more employees to register there through the rest of the month.
Seventeen employees at the University of Memphis had applied to carry firearms by Friday, according to the police chief there.
Other state schools have seen significantly lower interest in the law, which won wide support in the General Assembly despite strong opposition from higher education officials and campus law enforcement.
Austin Peay State University logged six requests to carry by Thursday. Tennessee State University had three, a spokesman said. Three employees at Volunteer State Community College have registered to carry guns there, a spokesman said.
Metro police — who are logging requests for Nashville campuses that don't have their own law enforcement, such as Nashville State Community College — have logged two requests to carry guns by Thursday. Both of those requests came from employees at a local UT satellite campus.
As of Friday, 11 employees had completed the notification process to carry a handgun on the East Tennessee State University campus. Seven of the 745 full-time employees at UT-Martin had registered by the end of the week.
Supporters of the new measure, which was allowed to become law without Gov. Bill Haslam's signature in May, said allowing responsible gun owners to carry their weapons on campus could prevent or stop a mass shooting. Law enforcement challenged that assertion, saying police are better trained to respond to such an emergency.
College officials have indicated that the law has created bureaucratic headaches at many of the state's smaller campuses. Colleges and law enforcement had to scramble to establish policies that outlined several exceptions to the law and allowed administrators to track the guns on campus without violating the law's strict confidentiality requirements.
Gannett Tennessee reporters Autumn Allison and Brian Wilson contributed to this report. Reach Adam Tamburin at 615-726-5986 and on Twitter @tamburintweets.
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Read or Share this story: http://tnne.ws/296dYsDA "high risk" sex offender who caused public outcry when placed near a school has been moved to a new temporary location -- near another school.
The man, who has temporary name suppression, was initially housed near Te Kura Maori o Nga Tapuwae in Mangere East when he was released from prison in May.
Members of the community condemned the lack of communication surrounding the housing and pupils at the school alleged they filmed the man making hand and tongue gestures at them.
He was subsequently moved, and is now living around 300 metres from Jean Batten Primary School in Mangere.
In a newsletter to parents, the school highlighted the rehousing and said it had spoken to the Department of Corrections about the man's monitoring.
Corrections has assured the school the man will be "very closely supervised" and "will be visited frequently by probation staff and police".
His movements will be monitored 24 hours a day and any attempt to interfere with his electronic monitoring device will result in Corrections being notified "within five minutes".
The newsletter also reminds parents about the guest sign-in procedures at the school and advises them on how to broach the topic with children, saying: "It is not helpful to focus on one individual".
In a statement released to Newshub, Corrections says the offender will be subject to ongoing assessment to identify any likelihood of further offending.
The offender was only released from prison after the department unsuccessfully applied for a Public Protection Order from the High Court, which would have required him to live at a secure facility on prison grounds.
The court instead imposed an Extended Supervision Order, meaning the offender had to be released.
Corrections says finding accommodation for released offenders can be challenging, but public safety is the primary priority.
"We use comprehensive risk assessment tools which are applied on a regular basis and allow staff to consider potential risk scenarios, including predictions about an offender's possible offending behaviour and likely victims," says northern operations director Lynette Cave.
Corrections also says it has contacted five other local school principals and surrounding neighbours to inform them of the release and says it is happy to meet with anybody who has concerns.
Newshub.The Ohio Medical Marijuana Task Force will introduce a bill this week to legalize medical marijuana in the state.
If lawmakers pass the bill, and an approved doctor recommends it, patients could buy medical marijuana for treatment in Ohio within the next two years.
Within the proposal, legislators say the Ohio Department of Health will oversee a Medical Marijuana Control Commission. The nine member commission will have to adopt rules and regulations within one year of the bill’s passage.
Lawmakers say the bill will allow medical marijuana in the form of edibles, patches, plant materials and oils. Homegrown marijuana will not be legal.
A member of the Ohio Medical Marijuana Task Force, Representative Kirk Schuring, said in the bill there will be workplace protections and rules for local dispensaries.
He said only physicians licensed under the state medical board will be able to recommend medical marijuana to their patients.
"This is a very transparent program we're talking about here,” Rep. Schuring said. “Physicians who want to recommend medical marijuana to their patients again would have to report every 90 days on the ailment, the type of medical marijuana they have recommended. At the end of the day we feel that the market will drive it.”
Ohio families in support of legalizing medical marijuana say they’re happy some of their voices are being heard. Dana Kovach says she’s relieved the discussion has turned into action.
"The fact that they listened, I just can't explain it,” she said.
For 13 years Kovach has been vocal. She showed up at the statehouse Tuesday, thanking the Ohio Medical Marijuana Task Force for their work in introducing a bill to legalize pot for medical use.
Her teenage son, CJ, was diagnosed with a rare form of pediatric cancer at age 3.
"I mean to watch your child suffer, unnecessarily because he's built up such a tolerance to these drugs over the past 13 years, it's just, it's Christmas for us today,” Kovach said.
CJ could be prescribed medical marijuana for his pain within the next two years in Ohio, if lawmakers pass a bill to legalize it.
"It just means that finally our voices have been heard, finally our children are going to have relief, no more seizures, no more pain,” Kovach said.
Members of the Ohio Medical Marijuana Task Force will introduce a bill this week to legalize pot for medical use. Legislators want the bill signed by the governor before June, and before the November election.
"To the folks that are still pursuing ballot initiatives, this has not been a stall tactic, this is an issue to which we've taken very seriously,” Representative Cliff Rosenberger said.
Volunteers with Ohioans for Medical Marijuana started petitioning for signatures last week to get their own measure on the November ballot. Officials with the group said Wednesday, they will still move forward with their initiative plans.
The Drug Free Action Alliance opposes medical marijuana legalization. Officials said if legalization comes to the state, they would rather see a bill than a ballot measure.
"We believe that medicine and every medicine should go through the FDA process where you have rigorous testing and good trials to know what the outcomes are,” Executive Director Marcie Seidel said.The Himba (singular: OmuHimba, plural: OvaHimba) are indigenous peoples with an estimated population of about 50,000 people[1] living in northern Namibia, in the Kunene Region (formerly Kaokoland) and on the other side of the Kunene River in Angola.[1] There are also a few groups left of the OvaTwa, who are also OvaHimba, but are hunter-gatherers. The OvaHimba are a semi-nomadic, pastoralist people, culturally distinguishable from the Herero people in northern Namibia and southern Angola, and speak OtjiHimba, a variety of Herero, which belongs to the Bantu family within Niger–Congo.[1] The OvaHimba are considered the last (semi-) nomadic people of Namibia. Contents
Culture Edit
Tribal structure Edit
[7] with his grandson A traditional regional Leader or Headman of the OvaHimba - Chief Kapuka Thom († 2009) of the Vita (Thom) Royal Housewith his grandson Because of the harsh desert climate in the region where they live and their seclusion from outside influences, the OvaHimba have managed to maintain and preserve much of their traditional lifestyle. Members live under a tribal structure based on bilateral descent that helps them live in one of the most extreme environments on earth. Himba girl at work Under bilateral descent, every tribe member belongs to two clans: one through the father (a patriclan, called oruzo) and another through the mother (a matriclan, called eanda). Himba clans are led by the eldest male in the clan. Sons live with their father's clan, and when daughters marry, they go to live with the clan of their husband. However, inheritance of wealth does not follow the patriclan but is determined by the matriclan, that is, a son does not inherit his father's cattle but his maternal uncle's instead. Bilateral descent is found among only a few groups in West Africa, India, Australia, Melanesia and Polynesia, and anthropologists consider the system advantageous for groups that live in extreme environments because it allows individuals to rely on two sets of families dispersed over a wide area.[9]
History Edit
Anthropological investigations Edit
Color perception Edit See also: Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate Several researchers have studied the OvaHimba perception of colours.[30] The OvaHimba use four colour names: zuzu stands for dark shades of blue, red, green and purple; vapa is white and some shades of yellow; buru is some shades of green and blue; and dambu is some other shades of green, red and brown. It is thought that this may increase the time it takes for the OvaHimba to distinguish between two colours that fall under the same Herero colour category, compared to people whose language separates the colours into two different colour categories.[31]
Notable Ovahimba Edit
Vipuakuje Muharukua, member of Parliament
See also Edit
Literature Edit
References EditWorking ballot by ballot, county by county, the Republican Party is attempting to alter voting laws in the biggest and most important swing states in the country in hopes of carving out a sweeping electoral advantage for years to come. Changes already on the books or in bills before state legislatures would make voting harder, create longer lines, and threaten to disenfranchise millions of voters from Ohio to Florida, Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, Georgia to Arizona and Texas.
"The potential effect on voters is that it reduces opportunities for them to return their ballots," said Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark, adding she was not consulted by the state. "This is not promoting ballot accessibility. I'm very worried about this. I'm just stunned." Detzner's order could have its biggest impact in Pinellas, where Clark promotes voting absentee and is planning for the upcoming special election [in March] in Congressional District 13 to replace the late Rep. C.W. Bill Young.
Shaming the GOP for its determination to shave a few points off Democratic election turnout obviously hasn't had an impact. Unblushable, the party is still at it. Instead of doing all they can to encourage every eligible person to vote, Republicans have been relentlessly imposing new restrictions to make it harder In Florida on Monday, for instance, the secretary of state imposed new restrictions requiring completed absentee ballots to be returned solely to local supervisors' offices. This raised the eyebrows of a number of local election supervisors, including:In 2012, 250,000 voters cast absentee ballots in Pinellas county, more than in any other Florida county and more than 10 percent of the statewide total for absentees. Some 105,000 of those ballots, 42 percent, were dropped off at 14 branch locations chosen by Clark. Those are barred under the new rules.
The Brennan Center for Justice, which closely follows changes and attempted changes in voting laws, released a list earlier this month of what's been happening in the year since the 2012 presidential election. Among the findings:
• At least 90 restrictive bills have been introduced in 33 states.
• 18 of those bills are still pending in seven states.
• Eight states have already passed nine restrictive bills this session.
But there's a flip side. Brennan also found that at least 234 bills to expand access to voting have been introduced in the past year in 45 states. Ten states have passed 13 such bills and 78 bills are still pending in nine states.
The Presidential Commission on Election Administration set up by President Obama last March as a consequence of the long queues and other obstacles to voting last year is charged with improving the voting experience to establish best practices for states and localities holding elections. The commission began holding hearings in September and is supposed to present its report later this year. But its mandate is far too narrow. As Common Cause stated in a letter to the commission:
“The problems we saw on Election Day presented as long lines, inadequate poll worker trainings, and too few options to cast a ballot. But it is what is underneath these problems that should be the focus of our reform. The root cause of the problems we saw were antiquated voter registration systems, under-resourced election offices, and restrictive voting laws and deceptive practices targeted at minimizing participation by specific populations.”
Depending on a bipartisan commission to resolve issues that are, in great part, partisan in nature is a non-starter.New rules drawn up by Italy likely to bring NGOs under coast guard control, which they fear will hamper rescue attempts
Charities that rescue migrants and refugees from the Mediterranean have reacted angrily to plans to make them subject to a new code of conduct drawn up by Italy and endorsed by other EU countries.
The move is likely to bring them under the control of the Libyan and Italian coast guards, which might constrain their ability to save passengers from overcrowded and unseaworthy smuggling boats.
Italy considers closing its ports to boats carrying migrants Read more
The Italian government, which is under intense political pressure over the surge in refugee numbers, convened an emergency meeting with France and Germany in Paris on Sunday.
The three countries are considering extra funding, as well as efforts to reduce what they describe as the “pull factor” created by the presence of NGOs (non-government organisations) in the Mediterranean.
But a proposal by Italy to unilaterally close its ports to ships containing migrants is expected to be shelved because it is in clear breach of international maritime law.
Some Italian |
I'm not sure that pairing Winslow and No. 14 would be the move for a team that has dealt away two of its next four first-round picks. And yet, all of that said, Riley has a way of saying something and then explaining how circumstances change. So it's better probably to look at it from the 76ers' perspective, and whether they would get more elsewhere if they were to move out of No. 3. And they probably could.
Q: On one hand, we're so desperate for young talent that we kind of have to take best player available regardless of fit. On the other hand, if we draft a center we're essentially throwing the pick away because we have Hassan Whiteside. Would you rather take best player available even if it's a center who's best-case scenario would be get used as trade bait or take a player who might fit better? -- Nico, Charlotte.
A: Unless the center prospect is an overwhelmingly better selection than the next best option, I still believe there are enough gaps that you'd have to consider other positions. Under your scenario, I'm not sure how you then would showcase a prospect as a potential trade chip if you were featuring Whiteside 38 minutes a night. What you would like to find is some type of insurance in case James Johnson, Dion Waiters or even Wayne Ellington can't be retained in free agency due to salary-cap constraints.
CAPTION Spoelstra: No need to show anger to appease outsiders. Spoelstra: No need to show anger to appease outsiders. CAPTION Spoelstra: No need to show anger to appease outsiders. Spoelstra: No need to show anger to appease outsiders. CAPTION Dwyane Wade: Braids a tribute to Iverson Dwyane Wade: Braids a tribute to Iverson CAPTION Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra says his team showed grit in loss to the Phoenix Suns. Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra says his team showed grit in loss to the Phoenix Suns. CAPTION Miami Heat guard Dwyane Wade says his team's loss to the Phoenix Suns hurt his team and their hopes of getting to the playoffs. Miami Heat guard Dwyane Wade says his team's loss to the Phoenix Suns hurt his team and their hopes of getting to the playoffs. CAPTION Miami guard Josh Richardson talks about the obstacles that lead hs team's loss to the Phoenix Suns. Miami guard Josh Richardson talks about the obstacles that lead hs team's loss to the Phoenix Suns.
Q: With the changes to the CBA that allow teams to keep their top players by hugely overpaying them over what an outside team can offer, while initially making it easier to keep your top talent which is a good thing, would it not create a situation in which a franchise is salary capped out and dead if that player's performance dramatically drops or he becomes injury prone as those contracts will be impossible to trade? There has got to be a mechanism in place for teams to drop bad contracts. -- Peter, Miami.
A: The mechanism is foresight and forethought, which is why during last summer's free agency Pat Riley said teams would live to regret certain contract offers and why he has downplayed pursuing "whales" this offseason, when the result well could be overvalued contracts for many of the leading men in free agency. But you also can't avoid the process out of fear. If there is someone you like at the moment and see potential enduring success, then you pay that price. Even with the Chris Bosh contract, if not for the blood clots, an argument could have been made for that as a value contract.
iwinderman@sunsentinel.com. Follow him at twitter.com/iraheatbeat or facebook.com/ira.winderman
For daily Heat mailbag go to sun-sentinel.com/askiraA Calgary man says a permit fee from the city adds insult to injury in the cost of repairs he must make after discovering a marijuana grow-op in his rental property.
Fraser Tuff rented out a home in the southeast neighbourhood of Mahogany in December.
Tuff called police when he became suspicious the tenant had started a grow-op. A grow-op was discovered inside and Tuff may have to pay up to $40,000 to fix the house.
Fraser Tuff was surprised to find out how much reporting a grow-op in his rental property would cost him. (CBC)
He also has to pay $5,000 to the city for an environmental inspection permit and $1,800 for a fence around the house.
The city says the $5,000 fee is to cover the cost of city inspectors who supervise the clean up.
"The whole process is going to end up being incredibly costly to me and so looking back on it I kind of wish that I would have just phoned them and said get out now," he said.
Reporter Alana Cole will look at the damage grow-ops do to a home and what it can cost an owner to repair tonight on CBC News Calgary starting at 5 p.m. MT.
"However, I thought the safe thing to do would be to call the police and the right thing to do would be to get the guy arrested, because if I kick him out of my house he's just going to move into someone else's right?"
Tuff said the city should waive the fee to encourage people to do the right thing.
"I'd like them to do whatever they can to help me," he said. "I don't expect them to buy materials for my house or pay for the labour to fix it, but I do expect that they don't nickel and dime me with bureaucratic garbage."
The damage from this grow-op will cost the property's landlord thousands of dollars. (CBC)
Ald. Diane Colley-Urquhart said the city needs to review these costs.
"We really need to look at the way the bylaw stands and see what kind of discretion we can bring to it so we don't further penalize a homeowner," she said.
Colley-Urquhart said most grow-ops are owned by organized crime, and the criminals should have to pay all the fees.Updated.
The Bier Abbey in Schenectady, shuttered by authorities last month for almost $700,000 in unpaid taxes, will reopen at 3 p.m. Thursday (8/11), according to its Facebook page. An online help-wanted ad posted Tuesday says, in part, “Reopening and Restaffing – looking for all positions immediately.”
A spokesman for the state Department of Taxation and Finance, James Gazzale, tells me the business still owes $652,947.19, meaning it has paid about $40,000 of what was owed initially, but that the department on Monday decided to allow Bier Abbey to reopen. Speaking generally, Gazzale said, a business seized for back taxes will be allowed to resume operations if owners demonstrate a good-faith effort to begin repaying the outstanding tax debt.
A message left Tuesday on the pub’s voicemail was not returned.
Its Facebook post about reopening says in part:
We may be a little less than 100% getting back up to speed but you should expect the same level of product and service moving forward. You will begin to see some changes over the coming months as we reinvent what we are doing.
When the seizure happened, on July 12, my colleague Larry Rulison reported:For the American police officer, see Benjamin B. Tucker
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (; April 17, 1854 – June 22, 1939) was a 19th-century proponent of American individualist anarchism which he called "unterrified Jeffersonianism"[1] and editor and publisher of the individualist anarchist periodical Liberty.
Early life and influences [ edit ]
Tucker at a young age
Tucker made his editorial debut in libertarian circles in 1876, when Heywood published Tucker's English translation of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's classic work What is Property?. In 1877, Tucker published his first original journal, Radical Review, which ran for only four issues. From August 1881 to April 1908, he published the periodical Liberty, "widely considered to be the finest individualist-anarchist periodical ever issued in the English language".[2] In 1892, he moved Liberty from Boston to New York.
Anarchism [ edit ]
Tucker said that he became an anarchist at the age of 18.[3] Tucker's contribution to American individualist anarchism was as much through his publishing as his own writing. Tucker was also the first to publish an English translation of Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own, which Tucker claimed was his proudest accomplishment. Tucker also translated Mikhail Bakunin's book God and the State.[4] In the anarchist periodical Liberty, he published the original work of Stephen Pearl Andrews, Joshua K. Ingalls, Lysander Spooner, Auberon Herbert, Dyer Lum, Victor Yarros and Lillian Harman (daughter of free love anarchist Moses Harman) as well as his own writing.
According to Frank Brooks, an historian of American individualist anarchism, it is easy to misunderstand Tucker's claim to socialism. Before Marxists established a hegemony over definitions of socialism, "the term socialism was a broad concept". Tucker as well as most of the writers and readers of Liberty understood socialism to refer to one or more of various theories aimed at solving "the labor problem" through radical changes in the capitalist economy. Descriptions of the problem, explanations of its causes and proposed solutions (for example, abolition of private property, cooperatives, state-ownership and so on) varied among socialist philosophies.[5]
However, not all modern economists believe Marxists established a hegemony over definitions of socialism. As the modern economist Jim Stanford states:
But capitalism is not the only economic system which relies on markets. Pre-capitalist economies also had markets-where producers could sell excess supplies of agricultural goods or handicrafts, and where exotic commodities (like spices or fabrics) from far-off lands could be purchased. Most forms of socialism also rely heavily on markets to distribute end products and even, in some cases, to organize investment and production. So markets are not unique to capitalism, and there is nothing inherently capitalist about a market.[6]
Karl Marx acknowledged the theory of market socialism, though he strongly disagreed with the theory, especially the theory of Proudhon who happened to be an influence on Tucker's individualist anarchism.[7]
According to James J. Martin, a historian on individualist anarchism, the individualist anarchists (including the views of Tucker and his support for the labor theory of value) made the individualist anarchists and their form of American mutualism an alternative to both capitalism and Marxism.[8]
Tucker said socialism was the claim that "labor should be put in possession of its own"[9] while holding that what "state socialism" and "anarchistic socialism" had in common was the labor theory of value.[10] However, instead of asserting as did other anarchists that common ownership was the key to eroding differences of economic power and appealing to social solidarity, Tucker's individualist anarchism advocated distribution of property in an undistorted natural market as a mediator of egoistic impulses and a source of social stability, saying:[11]
The fact that one class of men are dependent for their living upon the sale of their labour, while another class of men are relieved of the necessity of labour by being legally privileged to sell something that is not labour. [...] And to such a state of things I am as much opposed as any one. But the minute you remove privilege, [...] every man will be a labourer exchanging with fellow-labourers. [...] What Anarchistic-Socialism aims to abolish is usury. [...] [I]t wants to deprive capital of its reward.[12]
Tucker first favored a natural rights philosophy in which an individual had a right to own the fruits of his labor; then he abandoned it in favor of "egoism" (influenced by Max Stirner) in which he believed that only the "right of might" exists until overridden by contract. He objected to all forms of communism, believing that even a stateless communist society must encroach upon the liberty of individuals.[13] For instance, Sheldon Richman wrote:[14]
[Tucker] denounced Marx as the representative of "the principle of authority which we live to combat." He thought Proudhon the superior theorist and the real champion of freedom. "Marx would nationalize the productive and distributive forces; Proudhon would individualize and associate them."
Tucker connected his economic views which included his opposition to non-labor income in the form of profit, interest and rent with those of Marx, Proudhon and Josiah Warren in the following form:
The economic principles of Modern Socialism are a logical deduction from the principle laid down by Adam Smith in the early chapters of his "Wealth of Nations," – namely, that labor is the true measure of price. [...] Half a century or more after Smith enunciated the principle above stated, Socialism picked it up where he had dropped it, and in following it to its logical conclusions, made it the basis of a new economic philosophy. [...] This seems to have been done independently by three different men, of three different nationalities, in three different languages: Josiah Warren, an American; Pierre J. Proudhon, a Frenchman; Karl Marx, a German Jew. [...] That the work of this interesting trio should have been done so nearly simultaneously would seem to indicate that Socialism was in the air, and that the time was ripe and the conditions favorable for the appearance of this new school of thought. So far as priority of time is concerned, the credit seems to belong to Warren, the American, – a fact which should be noted by the stump orators who are so fond of declaiming against Socialism as an imported article.[15]
Liberty [ edit ]
Liberty was a 19th-century anarchist periodical published in the United States by Tucker from August 1881 to April 1908. The periodical was instrumental in developing and formalizing the individualist anarchist philosophy through publishing essays and serving as a format for debate. Beside Tucker, contributors also included Lysander Spooner, Gertrude Kelly, Auberon Herbert, Dyer Lum, Joshua K. Ingalls, John Henry Mackay, Victor Yarros, Wordsworth Donisthorpe, James L. Walker, J. William Lloyd, Florence Finch Kelly, Voltairine de Cleyre, Steven T. Byington, John Beverley Robinson, Jo Labadie, Lillian Harman and Henry Appleton. Included in its masthead is a quote from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon saying that liberty is "Not the Daughter But the Mother of Order".
Four monopolies [ edit ]
Tucker argued that the poor condition of American workers resulted from four legal monopolies based in authority:
For several decades, his focus became the state's economic control of how trade could take place, and what currency counted as legitimate. He saw interest and profit as a form of exploitation, made possible by the banking monopoly, which was in turn maintained through coercion and invasion. Tucker called any such interest and profit "usury" and he saw it as the basis of the oppression of the workers. In his words, "interest is theft, Rent Robbery, and Profit Only Another Name for Plunder".[16] Tucker believed that usury was immoral, but he upheld the right of all people to engage in immoral contracts:
Liberty, therefore, must defend the right of individuals to make contracts involving usury, rum, marriage, prostitution, and many other things which are believed to be wrong in principle and opposed to human well-being. The right to do wrong involves the essence of all rights.[17]
Tucker asserted that anarchism would become meaningless unless "it includes the liberty of the individual to control his product or whatever his product has brought him through exchange in a free market – that is, private property".
Land monopoly [ edit ]
Tucker acknowledged that "anything is a product upon which human labor has been expended", but he would not recognize full property rights to labored-upon land:
It should be noted, however, that in the case of land, or of any other material the supply of which is so limited that all cannot hold it in unlimited quantities, Anarchism undertakes to protect no titles except such as are based upon actual occupancy and use.[18]
Tucker opposed granting title to land that was not in use, arguing that an individual should use land continually in order to retain exclusive right to it, believing that if this practice were not followed, there was a land monopoly.
Money and banking monopoly [ edit ]
Tucker also opposed state protection of the banking monopoly, i.e. the requirement that one must obtain a charter to engage in the business of banking. He hoped to raise wages by deregulating the banking industry, reasoning that competition in banking would drive down interest rates and stimulate enterprise. Tucker believed this would decrease the proportion of individuals seeking employment and wages would be driven up by competing employers, saying: "Thus, the same blow that strikes interest down will send wages up".[19]
Tucker did not oppose individuals being employed by others, but due to his interpretation of the labor theory of value he believed that in the present economy individuals do not receive a wage that fully compensates them for their labor. He wrote that if the four "monopolies" were ended, "it will make no difference whether men work for themselves, or are employed, or employ others. In any case they can get nothing but that wages for their labor which free competition determines".[20]
Tariffs and patents [ edit ]
Tucker opposed protectionism, believing that tariffs caused high prices by preventing national producers from having to compete with foreign competitors. He believed that free trade would help keep prices low and therefore would assist laborers in receiving their "natural wage". Tucker did not believe in intellectual property rights in the form of patents on the grounds that patents and copyrights protect something which cannot rightfully be held as property. He wrote that the basis for property is "the fact that it is impossible in the nature of things for concrete objects to be used in different places at the same time".[21] Property in concrete things is "socially necessary". Since "successful society rests on individual initiative, [it is necessary] to protect the individual creator in the use of his concrete creations by forbidding others to use them without his consent".
Because ideas are not concrete things, they should not be held and protected as property. Ideas can be used in different places at the same time and so their use should not be restricted by patents.[22] This was a source of conflict with the philosophy of fellow individualist Lysander Spooner, who saw ideas as the product of "intellectual labor" and therefore private property.[23]
Victor Yarros on Tucker [ edit ]
According to Victor Yarros:
[Tucker] opposed savagely any and all reform movements that had paternalistic aims, and looked to the state for aid and fulfillment. [...] For the same reason, consistent, unrelenting opposition to compulsion, he combated "populism," "greenbackism," the single-tax movement, and all forms of socialism and communism. He denounced and exposed Johann Most, the editor of Freiheit, the anarchist-communist organ. The end, he declared, could never justify the means, if the means were intrinsically immoral – and force, by whomsoever used, was immoral except as a means of preventing or punishing aggression.[24]
Attitude towards unions [ edit ]
Tucker rejected the legislative programs of labor unions, laws imposing a short day, minimum wage laws, forcing businesses to provide insurance to employees and compulsory pension systems.[24] He believed instead that strikes should be organized by free workers rather than by bureaucratic union officials and organizations. He argued that "strikes, whenever and wherever inaugurated, deserve encouragement from all the friends of labour. [...] They show that people are beginning to know their rights, and knowing, dare to maintain them".[25] Furthermore, "as an awakening agent, as an agitating force, the beneficent influence of a strike is immeasurable, [...] with our present economic system almost every strike is just. For what is justice in production and distribution? That labour, which creates all, shall have all".[26]
Anarchist society [ edit ]
Tucker envisioned an individualist anarchist society as "each man reaping the fruits of his labour and no man able to live in idleness on an income from capital, [...] become[ing] a great hive of Anarchistic workers, prosperous and free individuals [combining] to carry on their production and distribution on the cost principle"[27] rather than a bureaucratic organization of workers organized into rank and file unions. However, he did hold a genuine appreciation for labor unions (which he called "trades-union socialism") and saw it as "an intelligent and self-governing socialism", saying: "[They] promise the coming substitution of industrial socialism for usurping legislative mobism".[28]
In Tucker's individualist anarchism, governments would exist consisting of any belief and in any shape, or form, but the governments would be supported by voluntary taxation and those who chose not to pay the taxes would not get the benefits or protection of the voluntary government. Historian James Martin states:
The abolition of compulsory taxation would mean the abolition of the state as well, Tucker asserted, and the form of society succeeding it would be on the line of a voluntary defensive institution. [...] There were two methods of government. [...] The other was the anarchist method of "leadership", inducing the individual to the "goal of an ideal civilization" through persuasion and "attraction". [...] Two aims of anarchist activity, the abolition of compulsory taxation and the abolition of legally-protected money and land monopolies, form the main theme of his critical writing.[29]
Private defense forces [ edit ]
Tucker did not have a utopian vision of anarchy, where individuals would not coerce others.[24] He advocated that liberty and property be defended by private institutions. Opposing the monopoly of the state in providing security, he advocated a free market of competing defense providers, saying that "defense is a service like any other service; [...] it is labor both useful and desired, and therefore an economic commodity, subject to the law of supply and demand".[30]
He said that anarchism "does not exclude prisons, officials, military, or other symbols of force. It merely demands that non-invasive men shall not be made the victims of such force. Anarchism is not the reign of love, but the reign of justice. It does not signify the abolition of force-symbols but the application of force to real invaders".[31] Tucker expressed that the market-based providers of security would offer protection of land that was being used, and would not offer assistance to those attempting to collect rent:
"The land for the people" means the protection by voluntary associations for the maintenance of justice of all people who desire to cultivate land in possession of whatever land they personally cultivate and the positive refusal of the protecting power to lend its aid to the collection of any rent, whatsoever.[32]
Embrace of egoism [ edit ]
Tucker abandoned natural rights positions and converted to Max Stirner's egoist anarchism. Rejecting the idea of moral rights, Tucker said that there were only two rights, "the right of might" and "the right of contract". After converting to egoist individualism, he said: "In times past, [...] it was my habit to talk glibly of the right of man to land. It was a bad habit, and I long ago sloughed it off. Man's only right to land is his might over it. If his neighbor is mightier than he and takes the land from him, then the land is his neighbor's, until the latter is dispossessed by one mightier still".[33] In adopting Stirnerite egoism in 1886, Tucker rejected natural rights which had long been considered the foundation of libertarianism.
This rejection galvanized the movement into fierce debates, with the natural rights proponents accusing the egoists of destroying libertarianism itself. So bitter was the conflict that a number of natural rights proponents withdrew from the pages of Liberty in protest even though they had hitherto been among its frequent contributors. Thereafter, Liberty championed egoism although its general content did not change significantly.[34] This led to a split in American individualism between the growing number of egoists and the contemporary Spoonerian "Natural Lawyers". Tucker came to hold the position that no rights exist until they are created by contract. This led him to controversial positions such as claiming that infants had no rights and were the property of their parents because they did not have the ability to contract. He said that a person, who physically tries to stop a mother from throwing her "baby into the fire", should be punished for violating her property rights. He said that children would shed their status as property when they became old enough to contract "to buy or sell a house" for example, noting that the precocity varies by age and would be determined by a jury in the case of a complaint.[35]
Tucker also came to believe that aggression towards others was justifiable if doing so led to a greater decrease in "aggregate pain" than refraining from doing so, saying:
The ultimate end of human endeavor is the minimum of pain. We aim to decrease invasion only because, as a rule, invasion increases the total of pain (meaning, of course, pain suffered by the ego, whether directly or through sympathy with others). But it is precisely my contention that this rule, despite the immense importance which I place upon it, is not absolute; that, on the contrary, there are exceptional cases where invasion – that is, coercion of the non-invasive – lessens the aggregate pain. Therefore coercion of the non-invasive, when justifiable at all, is to be justified on the ground that it secures, not a minimum of invasion, but a minimum of pain. [...] [T]o me [it is] axiomatic – that the ultimate end is the minimum of pain[36]
Tucker claimed that ownership in land is legitimately transferred through force unless contracted otherwise.[37] However, he said he believed that individuals would come to the realization that "equal liberty" and "occupancy and use" doctrines were "generally trustworthy guiding principle of action" and as a result they would likely find it in their interests to contract with each other to refrain from infringing upon equal liberty and from protecting land that was not in use.[38] Though he believed that non-invasion and "occupancy and use as the title to land" were general rules that people would find in their own interests to create through contract, Tucker said that these rules "must be sometimes trodden underfoot".[39]
Later life [ edit ]
In 1906, he opened Tucker's Unique Book Shop in New York City promoting "Egoism in Philosophy, Anarchism in Politics, Iconoclasm in Art". In 1908, a fire destroyed Tucker's uninsured printing equipment and his 30-year stock of books and pamphlets. Tucker's lover Pearl Johnson, 25 years his junior, was pregnant with their daughter Oriole Tucker. Six weeks after his daughter's birth, Tucker closed both Liberty and the book shop and retired with his family to France. In 1913, he came out of retirement for two years to contribute articles and letters to The New Freewoman which he called "the most important publication in existence".
Later, Tucker became much more pessimistic about the prospects for anarchism. In 1926, Vanguard Press published a selection of his writings entitled Individual Liberty in which Tucker added a postscript[40] to "State Socialism and Anarchism",[41] which stated:
Forty years ago, when the foregoing essay was written, the denial of competition had not yet effected the enormous concentration of wealth that now so gravely threatens social order. It was not yet too late to stem the current of accumulation by a reversal of the policy of monopoly. The Anarchistic remedy was still applicable.
Furthermore, Tucker argued:
Today the way is not so clear. The four monopolies, unhindered, have made possible the modern development of the trust, and the trust is now a monster which I fear, even the freest banking, could it be instituted, would be unable to destroy. [...] If this be true, then monopoly, which can be controlled permanently only for economic forces, has passed for the moment beyond their reach, and must be grappled with for a time solely by forces political or revolutionary. Until measures of forcible confiscation, through the State or in defiance of it, shall have abolished the concentrations that monopoly has created, the economic solution proposed by Anarchism and outlined in the forgoing pages – and there is no other solution. [...] [It] will remain a thing to be taught to the rising generation, that conditions may be favorable to its application after the great leveling. But education is a slow process, and may not come too quickly. Anarchists who endeavor to hasten it by joining in the propaganda of State Socialism or revolution make a sad mistake indeed. They help to so force the march of events that the people will not have time to find out, by the study of their experience, that their troubles have been due to the rejection of competition.
By 1930, Tucker had concluded that centralization and advancing technology had doomed both anarchy and civilization:
The matter of my famous 'Postscript' now sinks into insignificance; the insurmountable obstacle to the realization of Anarchy is no longer the power of the trusts, but the indisputable fact that our civilization is in its death throes. We may last a couple of centuries yet; on the other hand, a decade may precipitate our finish. [...] The dark ages sure enough. The Monster, Mechanism, is devouring mankind.[42]
According to individualist anarchist historian James J. Martin, Tucker wrote in private correspondence when referring to the world scene of the mid-1930s: "Capitalism is at least tolerable, which cannot be said of Socialism or Communism". He went on to observe that "under any of these regimes a sufficiently shrewd man can feather his nest".[43] Susan Love Brown claims that this unpublished private letter, which does not distinguish between the anarchist socialism Tucker advocated and the state socialism he criticized, served in "providing the shift further illuminated in the 1970s by anarcho-capitalists".[44] However, according to the editors of the 1970 edition of Martin's book Men Against the State the editors state on the back cover they believed a "new generation has prompted the reissuance of this book",[45] pointing to renewed interest in the views of Tucker and the other individualst anarchists and their market socialism[46] rather than capitalism or anarcho-capitalism.
Tucker died in Monaco in 1939 in the company of his family. His daughter Oriole reported:
Father's attitude towards communism never changed one whit, nor about religion. [...] In his last months he called in the French housekeeper. 'I want her,' he said, 'to be a witness that on my death bed I'm not recanting. I do not believe in God![47]
In popular culture [ edit ]
In the alternate history novel The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith as part of the North American Confederacy Series in which the United States becomes a libertarian state after a successful Whiskey Rebellion and the overthrowing and execution of George Washington by firing squad for treason in 1794, Tucker served as the 17th President of the North American Confederacy from 1892 to 1912.
References [ edit ]Bluebeard’s Bride is an investigatory horror tabletop roleplaying game for 3-5 players, written and designed by Whitney “Strix” Beltrán, Marissa Kelly, and Sarah Richardson, and based on the Bluebeard fairy tale.
In this game you and your friends explore Bluebeard’s home as the Bride, creating your own beautifully tragic version of the dark fairy tale. Investigate rooms, discover the truth of what happened, experience the nightmarish phantasmagoria of this broken place, and decide whether or not you are a faithful or disloyal bride.
*Back the game, download it from our first update, and give it a try!*
Bluebeard’s Bride is based on the Powered by the Apocalypse system used in Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Monsterhearts, Masks, and more. It's a simple system; when your character takes an action that fits a move, the move tells you what happens, or you roll two six-sided dice to find out. Since this is a horror game, we have modified it so that the majority of moves use no dice; this harkens back to telling ghost stories around the fire.
Bluebeard’s Bride produces adult feminine horror fiction like Crimson Peak, American Horror Story, or The Company of Wolves, making it fun for horror fans and dark fairy tale fans alike. And the Powered by the Apocalypse system gives Bluebeard’s Bride the strong, yet flexible system necessary to tell your own flavor of horror.
The Bluebeard fairy tale is simple enough: A young bride is wed to an ugly, but powerful man with a blue beard. On their wedding night he must attend to other urgent matters. He gives her the keys to every room, inviting her to explore… but one room in his house is forbidden. The bride eventually falls prey to her curiosity and opens it, discovering the gruesome sight of former brides who had been murdered... evidence that reveals her husband to be a killer of women.
When you play Bluebeard’s Bride, you aren’t repeating the dark events of that morbid tale. You’re following the skeleton of that story to tell a new one covered in your own bloody fingerprints. The Bride’s story is unpredictable and engaging, leading her down a dark path to an unknown future. Your fate, the terrible contents of the final room, may not yet be fixed, but every step you take moves you closer to your doom.
Your experiences in Bluebeard’s house are guided by the original fairy tale, a framework that ties your story to the many tellings of the Bluebeard myth—past, present, and future. You move from room to room, gathering tokens and encountering horrors, before eventually making your way to the final room—and sealing the Bride’s fate forever. And along the way, questions arise...
What will you find in your new husband’s house?
What horrors will haunt you?
What darkness will you find within yourself?
But in the end, there is only one question for a new Bride: will you open the final door?
At this point, you may be wondering how all of you are supposed to play as the Bride at one time. The psyche of any person is complex, and the Bride no less so. In your story, each player takes the role of a distinct part of the Bride's mind—a Sister—who guides the Bride through Bluebeard’s house, armed with little more than a set of keys.
And those Sisters don’t always agree. Each of you speaks as these aspects of her psyche would speak, deciding what actions the Bride takes, pushing the Bride deeper into the mysteries of each room, and provoking new horrors along the way.
The Sisters take turns in moving to the forefront of the Bride's personality, guided by a core mechanic of the game: The Ring. Whichever Sister holds the Ring is the main guide of the Bride’s actions.
Over the course of play, the Sisters may suffer trauma (physical or mental); should a Sister receive too much trauma, she shatters. When a Sister shatters, the Bride loses that part of herself to madness...and that lost Sister becomes part of the house’s horror and darkness, adding to the twisted nightmares the Bride must endure.
When you start play, each player picks one of the five Sisters to play. Each Sister is different, with specific Traits that make her stronger or weaker than her fellow Sisters in certain areas, and custom abilities that are unique to her alone.
Bluebeard’s Bride is designed as a one-shot game where you play out your fairy tale version of Bluebeard in 3-4 hours. Each game is its own story, its own investigation, its own beautiful, macabre dance. The Bride from your game may even leave behind a legacy of her own, inspiring her very own room to be explored by future brides of Bluebeard. Replayability is high as you investigate other rooms, interact with new Sisters, and explore the horrors of new Groundskeepers and their own dark twists on rooms you may have already been to. Even the final room is shaped by the players and their decisions.
You might never encounter the same room between any two games of Bluebeard’s Bride, or you might investigate the same room in different games, and each time that room will have its own, new dread skew. The game is molded through and through by the people at the table and the fears they bring. And you’re unlikely to dredge the full depths of Bluebeard’s house and their nightmares in a single game...
The game of Bluebeard’s Bride is not only your gateway to this manor of misery and horror—it is also a beautiful tome, one that brings elegance and unsettling grace to any bookshelf.
Bluebeard’s Bride will be available as a premium edition 8” x 8” hardcover featuring a Smythe sewn rounded case binding with an embossed, spot gloss, and stamped cover. The estimated 96 pages will be printed on quality matte paper, and will feature blue and gold spot color. The book will include beautiful blue and gold metallic end papers and a silk bookmark. Our goal is to create a display-worthy book, with every detail carefully thought out.
The Book of Rooms is a guide through the rooms of Bluebeard’s house, a vade mecum of the horrors you can find there. Behind each keyhole is a mystery of what happened, to who, and why… Do you dare to open the door?
In addition to the core text of Bluebeard’s Bride, we are also offering this curated hardcover full-color Book of Rooms. The rooms will each be fully illustrated with all you need to entice the Bride at your table—Mysterious Objects, Themes, and a description of the room as you open the door. Each room reveals a different kind of dread that you can explore time and time again. The Book of Rooms will include approximately 40 pages and 20 rooms to start, and more may be added by stretch goals throughout this project.
The Book of Mirrors is a collection of playsets for Bluebeard’s Bride, an array of dark reflections of the original fairy tale. Each one takes the tale into a new place with new fears and grotesqueries...do you dare to look in the mirrors?
We are also offering this hardcover full-color Book of Mirrors. The playsets in the book will each be fully illustrated with images to show off the particular strangeness of each mirrored world. With these playsets, you’ll have a slew of new ways to play Bluebeard’s Bride that all still keep its core issues and ideas. The Book of Mirrors will include all the playsets unlocked through this Kickstarter, and will likely be an 8” x |
minute. The dragon knight is pretty strong in combat, with a lot of hitpoints, a burning breath, and a charge attack that knocks the enemy being charged far away. His attacks are especially effective against buildings, and when slain, the hero inside reappears, exactly where the knight was when it died.Mercenaries on this map are perfectly mirrored, with one middle "netural" camp, and two camps on each team's side of the map. The topmost camps are knights, the bottom ones are ogres, and the middle neutral one is also ogres. This map encourages splitting your team, since traveling as five ensures the shrines will be captured behind you before you secure the knight. However this also sets up interesting opportunities for group ganks, and offers a very clear set of decisions, as covering both objectives and the dragon knight spreads your forces super thin, and losing even a single one of the objectives requires a rapid adjustment of your strategy.Long grass serves as the main line of sight blocker in this map, and its placement encourages ganking players rotating towards the mid dragon knight. A team on the defensive has but to send four players to guard the knight and a single player to backstab any shrine that's abandoned, although this offers the enemy a juicy opportunity to just grab their mercenaries. While the knight is indisputably strong, he doesn't add too much to teamfights, especially at higher levels, where a players ultimate would probably contribute more.Overall, the map is very satisfying, with clever positioning and rapid adjustment being key. Its also nice to play on a lush green map when all the other maps are dreary and grey, or scorched and dead.This is a two lane map, and at first glance might seem too small for five players. That is very deceptive, as at the beginning of the game there is a full half of the map that isn't visible, the mines. The primary objective in this map is collecting skulls, which are in the possession (and I assume being used by) zombies in the mines. When the mines open you can descend into them through the two entrances, one in the middle of each lane. The mine is infested by groups of zombies, which drop skulls when killed, and a huge golem in the center of the mine that drops a large number of skulls. There is a total of a hundred skulls, and when all 100 are collected, each team spawns a Grave Golem (in opposing lanes) which wander forward and siege your opponents base. Their power and hit points are proportional to the amount of skulls your team collected, which means that a team that ignored the mines might find themselves losing a fort, more, or potentially the game.There are five mercenary camps in the middle of the map, four ogre maps, and one central knight camp. These camps are super important, as it is common for one team to only go into the mines to grab a couple skulls and capture all the mercenaries, wrecking the enemy forts while they're occupied cutting through the undead, and then defending the golem push. This map offers all kind of interesting decisions, and one of its strengths is how it rewards proper communication. Its entirely possible to contest skulls, and have a huge fight in the mines around the huge golem, its also possible to almost completely ignore them, or to split your efforts. There's also the balancing of offence vs defense, where players must decide whether its more important to push with their golem or stop the opposing golem from attacking, often resulting in awesome teamfights around defensive structures.It is important to note that is fairly easy to tell how many enemies are down in the mines, as the zombies appear on the map, and the rate at which they die is a huge clue. Golems will also respawn where they died and only attack buildings, which means that while the first golem can be fairly easy to deflect, the following ones are not, and they tend to do quite a number on forts.In Heroes there are four "types" of heroes, heroes can be either ranged or melee, and are categorized as either "Assassin", "Warrior", "Support" or "Specialist". Depending on what general role they are supposed to cover. In general, a balanced game is supposed to have one of each category, but in practice, mixes seem a lot more varied, and heroes don't seem to conform exactly to their role.Two mechanics that must be mentioned in this section are "mounts" and "hearthstones". Due to the absence of gold, there are no TP scrolls like in DotA, so instead heroes have an active channeled ability that allows them to teleport to base. This ability has next to no cooldown and is broken by any damage. Heroes also have "mounts", usually in the form of horses, that allow them to quickly travel to other parts of the map, using a mount is broken by damage, and mounting takes a few seconds. Not all heroes have mount however, as some enjoy the ability to teleport to allies (with a long cooldown) or to burrow or fly to any location in the map instead.It is also very important to be aware that all heroes have the same movespeed, making mounting up one of the few ways to effectively chase down an escaping hero. It also makes gap-closers and teleportation abilities incredibly important, as being able to blink away often ensures your survival.: Assassins are exactly what it says on the tin, heroes designed to deal massive amount of burst damage and bring down other heroes. Usually equipped with a gap closer or a stun, and occasionally with invisibility. It is worth mentioning in this section that invisibility in Heroes works like it does in SC2, an "invisible" unit can't be targeted, but is still visible as a shimmer on the ground, and can be hurt by area of effect abilities. Attacking breaks invisibility, but, crucially,. Assassins tend to be on the squishy side, ranging from brittle to fragile, with the notable exceptions of Kerrigan, whose passive ability grants her shields proportional to how much damage she deals to non-hero units, and Illidan, whose Metamorphosis heroic ability provides additional health points for each hero his initiation hits. Assassins are generally considered a "must have" on any team, as without their damage dealing potential it becomes very hard to bring down heroes. The Assassins currently available in Heroes are: Kerrigan, Nova, Falstad, Demon Hunter, Illidan, Raynor, Zeratul and Tychus.: Warriors are the damage sponges of the game, usually armed with really high hp totals, and generally low damage output. It can be very daunting to face a warrior as an assassin, simply because they are often equipped with self heals, helpful auras and a boatload of HP. Warriors however generally sacrifice damage in order to achieve this, preferring utility and tankiness. Warriors often have good stuns, making them invaluable when facing down squishy assassins, they rely on their team to get the damage needed done. Generally warriors are good to have, although not as essential as assassins, they work wonderfully well when paired with assassins however, as they complement each other's strengths and weaknesses. The Warriors currently available in Heroes are: Stitches, Arthas, Diablo, Tyrael, E.T.C., Barbarian and Muradin.: Support heroes are heroes whose greatest strength is their ability to support their allies. Usually this involves healing or shielding their allies from damage, as well as hindering the enemy, supports often have ultimates that either deal a lot of damage or really aid their allies, making them teamfight heroes. Shields are one of the more elegant mechanics in Heroes, with shields being essentially temporary HP that are hit first, Shields can usually be applied to allies and buildings alike. Supports most often have a heal of some sort (be it shields or actual healing) and an ability which stuns or slows, but make up for it with relatively poor damage. The Supports currently available in Heroes are: Uther, Malfurion, Tassadar, Tyrande, Brightwing and Li Li.: "Specialist" is the catch all term for heroes that don't fit any of the above three categories, usually because they emphasize a specific niche to a large extent. Specialist's viability in lineups really depends on both the map, and the supporting lineup, for example, Gazlowe is a fantastic jungler, being able to take on mercenaries from an early level, in maps where it is more important to be able to engage enemies defending an objective, he can find himself rather limited, although he'd be fantastic at defending the same objective. Since there are only four specialists and each is rather unique, I'll touch briefly on each.For fans of StarCraft, the user experience is going to be very familiar, playing games gives you "exp" which levels up your account. Certain levels unlock certain things, like an extra free hero slot, or the ability to complete daily quests. Speaking of, there are also daily quests, and hero specific quests, which give exp and also unlock skins and the like. Leveling up gives you gold, which you can use in lieu of real money to purchase heroes. As of right now accounts also start with gold, although its not known if that will continue to be the case. The bottom line is you don't need to spend a cent to enjoy the game, and the leveling progression is pretty fast, with daily quests, and bonus exp for playing on weekends and with friends, its a breeze to get past the first 10 levels.The free heroes rotate every week, which means even if you don't play a lot and level super fast you'll still have a variety of heroes to play, and it also gives you a chance to try most heroes before purchasing them. You can also try unpurchased heroes in single player from the store. Unlike what I expected, it doesn't feel like pay to win, and its perfectly feasible not to spend any money, (I, GMarshal, haven't spent any real money, and I've been loving it). The interfaces are intuitive to anyone who's played a blizzard game before, and there are chat channels, which is nice. The battle net friend system is the same its always been, and its really easy to party up.One of the issues is the absence of all chat, which would make the game more enjoyable, I often find myself wishing I could ask the opposing Abathur what his build is, and the like, and its annoying not to have, along with no voice chat. The ping system however is comprehensive, allowing you to transmit a variety of commands, and pinging things like mercenaries will display a message saying "PlayerX wants to do Siege Orges" or "Tyrande wants to retreat"The ability to suggest players and add them is well designed and intuitive, and its easy to request people for friends after a game ends. Overall the entire design seems solid, with the lessons learned in SC2 taken to heart. That's not to say there isn't room for improvement, like tabs for chat and the ability to resize the chat window, but its a marked improvement over what the SC2 user experience has been for years, and shows that thought went into the design.
The Good
IT IS FUN!!
Fighting as a Blizzard character versus other Blizzard characters tugs at the heart strings of almost anyone who has ever played a Blizzard game and this game satisfies like no other. Smacking Diablo in the face as Barbarian or Valla is more satisfying in this game than it was in D3. The Hyperion’s shadow scares everyone on the other team from fighting and when Kerrigan jumps on you fear is all you feel.
There is no way to emphasize this enough, despite the scorn some people seem to heap on it because it is "casual" and despite mechanics many of us speculated would be boring, the game is incredibly fun. When you're playing time shoots by. Its the type of game that can swallow afternoons without you noticing. Its the type of game where you are actively excited to play again.
Fighting as a Blizzard character versus other Blizzard characters tugs at the heart strings of almost anyone who has ever played a Blizzard game and this game satisfies like no other. Smacking Diablo in the face as Barbarian or Valla is more satisfying in this game than it was in D3. The Hyperion’s shadow scares everyone on the other team from fighting and when Kerrigan jumps on you fear is all you feel. There is no way to emphasize this enough, despite the scorn some people seem to heap on it because it is "casual" and despite mechanics many of us speculated would be boring, the game is fun. When you're playing time shoots by. Its the type of game that can swallow afternoons without you noticing. Its the type of game where you are actively excited to play again. Two premade teams with good communication make for EPIC games
While we just mentioned that games end quickly once you get a strategy going, this quickly turns around when BOTH teams have a strong strategy and are executing it well. We played one game in a five player stack where it lasted nearly 40 minutes and was very very back and forth on cursed hollow. Unfortunately there is no video but here is a short battle report:
Both palaces were completely vulnerable by the end of the match, the mercenaries were all on cooldown, and the curse was far out of reach for either team (for you Dota players imagine having only your throne with no Rosh on the map and the Aegis/cheese gone, LoL players - neither team had an inhib and baron is gone the buff also completely gone). There was a lot of pushing and pulling all game but our lanes were starting to push and we decided to go all in hoping we didn't get backdoored. The opposing Falstad (who has a global teleport for his mount ability) was interrupted while channeling for a backdoor during our push and we killed him off quick, letting Kerrigan’s Torrasque Ultralisk ultimate tank the palace damage while we finished the game.
While we just mentioned that games end quickly once you get a strategy going, this quickly turns around when BOTH teams have a strong strategy and are executing it well. We played one game in a five player stack where it lasted nearly 40 minutes and was very very back and forth on cursed hollow. Unfortunately there is no video but here is a short battle report: Both palaces were completely vulnerable by the end of the match, the mercenaries were all on cooldown, and the curse was far out of reach for either team (for you Dota players imagine having only your throne with no Rosh on the map and the Aegis/cheese gone, LoL players - neither team had an inhib and baron is gone the buff also completely gone). There was a lot of pushing and pulling all game but our lanes were starting to push and we decided to go all in hoping we didn't get backdoored. The opposing Falstad (who has a global teleport for his mount ability) was interrupted while channeling for a backdoor during our push and we killed him off quick, letting Kerrigan’s Torrasque Ultralisk ultimate tank the palace damage while we finished the game. Games are quick
I don't know how many times I have wanted to fit in a game of dota with my brother and found that I just didn't have an hour to queue up, and play. In Heroes that's not a problem, with most games lasting 20 minutes, at most. That's *incredible*, it feels like the condensed MOBA experience, as it scratches many of the same itches, but without the suffering that goes into trying to hold on to a losing 45 minute game, or playing a game that's lost from the 15 minute mark, but having to struggle on. This is an incredibly good thing, because it means almost every minute of the game is packed with action. In twenty minutes you might get 15-20 kills, get mercenaries, dive into the mines and slay a bone golem, and destroy four forts. There's never a moment in Heroes where you just feel like your only alternative is to sit back and farm, or where you're sitting in base wondering what to do, you're either fighting over objectives, taking objectives, defending a push or sieging the enemy. There's never that creeping moment of frustration where you feel like all you can do is lurk behind the walls of your base and hope not to die, as the carries of your team do the heavy lifting and you're rendered utterly powerless. At every stage of the game, your hero is contributing, and the speed of the game means that losses sting a lot less. When you lose a game in League or DotA, its a significant time investment, which is one of the reasons some players get so upset at defeat, in Heroes, you have an unpleasant game and its over quickly, and you probably have time for another game.
I don't know how many times I have wanted to fit in a game of dota with my brother and found that I just didn't have an hour to queue up, and play. In Heroes that's not a problem, with most games lasting 20 minutes, at most. That's *incredible*, it feels like the condensed MOBA experience, as it scratches many of the same itches, but without the suffering that goes into trying to hold on to a losing 45 minute game, or playing a game that's lost from the 15 minute mark, but having to struggle on. This is an incredibly good thing, because it means almost every minute of the game is packed with action. In twenty minutes you might get 15-20 kills, get mercenaries, dive into the mines and slay a bone golem, and destroy four forts. There's never a moment in Heroes where you just feel like your only alternative is to sit back and farm, or where you're sitting in base wondering what to do, you're either fighting over objectives, taking objectives, defending a push or sieging the enemy. There's never that creeping moment of frustration where you feel like all you can do is lurk behind the walls of your base and hope not to die, as the carries of your team do the heavy lifting and you're rendered utterly powerless. At every stage of the game, your hero is contributing, and the speed of the game means that losses sting a lot less. When you lose a game in League or DotA, its a significant time investment, which is one of the reasons some players get so upset at defeat, in Heroes, you have an unpleasant game and its over quickly, and you probably have time for another game. You get to play your hero.
If you've ever played DotA, gotten into all-pick, knowing you want to play a specific hero and had someone else pick it right away, you know there's a certain level of discontent that goes with it. Its not the end of the world, but it changes your mentality. Especially as a new player, when I had to have a guide open to even know what skills to pick, it was really frustrating. Heroes does it in a different way, which has its ups and its downs. In Heroes you pick your hero before queuing, which has its upsides and downsides:
The upsides: it lets you play what you want to play. Working on getting better as Malfurion? You're guaranteed to get him. Trying to get the "three wins" achievement? You can pick your strongest hero. It also has the added benefit of letting the matchmaking system auto balance your teams, and makes games shorter by removing the picking phase, it also stops the annoying trend in DotA all pick of picking a hero and immediately being counterpicked by something that crushes your hero.
The downsides: It removes the strategic part of picks and bans, which is something that's going to have to be implemented if Blizzard wants the game to be played more seriously. It denies pubs the ability to coordinate picks after they know who their teammates are, and it sometimes winds up with really wonky teams, where you have two specialists and no synergy. It also means that you might select a hero unsuited to the map you get, since you have no way of knowing ahead of time.
Overall however, it feels far more positive than negative, its different, refreshing and enjoyable to be able to play 50 games in a row as Zeratul if you so wish, and have a more or less balanced team around.
If you've ever played DotA, gotten into all-pick, knowing you want to play a specific hero and had someone else pick it right away, you know there's a certain level of discontent that goes with it. Its not the end of the world, but it changes your mentality. Especially as a new player, when I had to have a guide open to even know what skills to pick, it was really frustrating. Heroes does it in a different way, which has its ups and its downs. In Heroes you pick your hero before queuing, which has its upsides and downsides: The upsides: it lets you play what you want to play. Working on getting better as Malfurion? You're guaranteed to get him. Trying to get the "three wins" achievement? You can pick your strongest hero. It also has the added benefit of letting the matchmaking system auto balance your teams, and makes games shorter by removing the picking phase, it also stops the annoying trend in DotA all pick of picking a hero and immediately being counterpicked by something that crushes your hero. The downsides: It removes the strategic part of picks and bans, which is something that's going to have to be implemented if Blizzard wants the game to be played more seriously. It denies pubs the ability to coordinate picks after they know who their teammates are, and it sometimes winds up with really wonky teams, where you have two specialists and no synergy. It also means that you might select a hero unsuited to the map you get, since you have no way of knowing ahead of time. Overall however, it feels far more positive than negative, its different, refreshing and enjoyable to be able to play 50 games in a row as Zeratul if you so wish, and have a more or less balanced team around. Surprising strategic depth
The game is far, far deeper than it seems at first glance. Its hard to encompass in broad terms, since it very much matters what map the game is taking place on, but it always seems like there are strategic choices to be made. An example: on Haunted Mines, when you take the mercenaries is a crucial, crucial decision that really impacts how the game plays out. If a team decides to go for the mercenaries before the undead spawn, then it ensures that you'll have to fight for skulls in the mines, as the pushing power of the golems is undeniable. However if the mercenaries are up when the undead spawn, the teams must choose, the team that decides to go for skulls will have great pushing power, if they can defend the massive mercenary push if the enemy decides to forego collecting skulls. If the enemy contests skulls, there's always the threat of a single enemy hero capping the mercenary camps, and your team finding itself faced by a golem of equal strength and waves of mercenaries pounding on your walls. However splitting your team is a recipe for defeat in detail, because if you lose two or three heroes you will find yourself confronted by the fact that the enemy can happily seize both skulls and mercenaries. Suddenly, communication, vision and timing are absolutely crucial.
The shared experience mechanic means that an advantage for a single enemy translates to an advantage for their whole team, thus making mistakes immediately punishes you. Allowing enemies to seize mercs gives them both exp and extra pushing power, and being down a fort can mean a full level advantage for the enemy. Coordinating teamfights, on defense and offense is absolutely crucial to victory, with the team that can initiate and fight best, winning, even if they are at a level deficit. For a game that is purportedly casual, the strategic understanding necessary to succeed is surprisingly complex.
The game is far, far deeper than it seems at first glance. Its hard to encompass in broad terms, since it very much matters what map the game is taking place on, but it always seems like there are strategic choices to be made. An example: on Haunted Mines, when you take the mercenaries is a crucial, crucial decision that really impacts how the game plays out. If a team decides to go for the mercenaries before the undead spawn, then it ensures that you'll have to fight for skulls in the mines, as the pushing power of the golems is undeniable. However if the mercenaries are up when the undead spawn, the teams must choose, the team that decides to go for skulls will have great pushing power, if they can defend the massive mercenary push if the enemy decides to forego collecting skulls. If the enemy contests skulls, there's always the threat of a single enemy hero capping the mercenary camps, and your team finding itself faced by a golem of equal strength and waves of mercenaries pounding on your walls. However splitting your team is a recipe for defeat in detail, because if you lose two or three heroes you will find yourself confronted by the fact that the enemy can happily seize both skulls and mercenaries. Suddenly, communication, vision and timing are absolutely crucial. The shared experience mechanic means that an advantage for a single enemy translates to an advantage for their whole team, thus making mistakes immediately punishes you. Allowing enemies to seize mercs gives them both exp and extra pushing power, and being down a fort can mean a full level advantage for the enemy. Coordinating teamfights, on defense and offense is absolutely crucial to victory, with the team that can initiate and fight best, winning, even if they are at a level deficit. For a game that is purportedly casual, the strategic understanding necessary to succeed is surprisingly complex. Its Aesthetically Pleasing
The game has been made really pretty. Its clear that many of the graphic assets aren't done yet, especially for heroes, but the game is brimming with details that show the care and love that has been put into the game, the satisfying way the gates open, the hidden gears under the palace that turn and close at the beginning of the game, the game is brimming with little details that make the game a pleasure to look at. The jousting pavilions on dragon shire, that hint that where the mercenary camp now stands once had knights fighting for each others honor, the little animation for the curse, where the raven hovers menacingly over every unit, the fact that the tied up sharks in Blackheart's Bay can be accidentally cut down by abilities.
The music, the WarCraft 2 soundtrack that fills me with nostalgia every time it plays. The fact that the music is so good that I'm not interested in muting it. The unit response dialogues, which just scream blizzard. The entire game just screams Blizzard, and that is a very, very good thing. If you've played Diablo, Warcraft or StarCraft, this game will bring back fond memories, even if you haven't the seer amount of love and care put into the little details, make the game downright pleasant to just look at. Every few matches I notice something new, like how injured towers start crumbling and you can see that they are full of gears.
The Bad
Talent Tree is limited until account level 8
Honestly, for all the things that this game limits you from based on account level, the only thing that makes ZERO sense to us in our first time experiences is the fact that not all talents are available in a match until your account hits level 8. Sure, account level 2 players might be forced to play a vs AI game, thats fine, the one game is enough to get you to account level 3 for Player vs Player matches. But once you get into those 5v5 matches, you are very very disadvantaged for no fault of your own because you aren’t account level 8. Not only do you only have 2 talents of a possible 4 for each “breakpoint” in game hero level but you only have one of your two heroic abilities available to you. Sure, maybe new players might be overwhelmed with more options, but honestly, I would rather have a weaker Zeratul because I experimented with my talents unsuccessfully, not because I am forced to have a weaker Zeratul. His most useful skills unlock at account level 8, so trying to play him before that feels like a waste of time. You are less a glass cannon and more of a glass spoon at any level below 8.
Limiting player talent options to level 8 is just mean to new players.
Honestly, for all the things that this game limits you from based on account level, the only thing that makes ZERO sense to us in our first time experiences is the fact that not all talents are available in a match until your account hits level 8. Sure, account level 2 players might be forced to play a vs AI game, thats fine, the one game is enough to get you to account level 3 for Player vs Player matches. But once you get into those 5v5 matches, you are very very disadvantaged for no fault of your own because you aren’t account level 8. Not only do you only have 2 talents of a possible 4 for each “breakpoint” in game hero level but you only have one of your two heroic abilities available to you. Sure, maybe new players might be overwhelmed with more options, but honestly, I would rather have a weaker Zeratul because I experimented with my talents unsuccessfully, not because I am forced to have a weaker Zeratul. His most useful skills unlock at account level 8, so trying to play him before that feels like a waste of time. You are less a glass cannon and more of a glass spoon at any level below 8. Limiting player talent options to level 8 is just mean to new players. While the game looks polished, there are definitely still some bugs
Currently Tassadar’s forcefield ultimate lets people walk through it from time to time. It might be related to whether they are touching the forcefield when it first appears, but we aren’t sure on how it works exactly. Stitches’ hook doesn't always grab - the model is slightly wider than the actual hitbox from what we’ve seen. Not by much, but definitely by a little bit smaller. Arthas’s Sindragosa ult, well, sometimes it flies in the opposite direction you initially tried to send it. There are also some performance concerns, insofar as server stability and game engine, but these are to be expected in an alpha, and there's no doubt blizzard is working on them.
While surprisingly well balanced, there are some concerns
Some heroes are especially strong while others will have a hard time finding where their niche is. On streams and other community sites, Raynor is seen by players as especially troublesome. His Hyperion ultimate is powerful, his chasing ability as an assassin is strong with the right talents, his auto attacks do quite the damage, his penetrating round is a knockback, and he has an AoE buff for every allied character around him. He also has an ability that automatically heals him whenever he falls below 30% hp for about 30% of his max hp once every 45 seconds. Oh and his passive? Anytime an enemy unit dies around him his cooldowns are reduced by 2 seconds, enemy heroes reduce his cooldowns by 20 seconds. So if raynor assists with two enemy kills in a teamfight within five seconds at less than 30% hp well it can proc again and heal him once more. Quite the tanky assassin Jimmy happens to be.
Kerrigan, well she’s not quite as bad as Raynor, but she fits into every team comp and there is never a moment where you think, I really wish Kerrigan wasn’t on my team. While we ran a pushing Kerrigan in most of our games, an “active” Kerrigan exists, where you have four active talents to make her an extremely effective assassin with the equivalent of eight skills. So if you like hotkeys Kerrigan is for you. Her damage and utility of her kit is ridiculously powerful and can punish poor positioning almost more than anyone else in this game.
Other champions don’t really feel like they have a place. While LiLi can heal a lot, Malfurion can heal very well, can split push a lane left by himself if he has to, has a rooting ability and can restore mana to his allies. Some heroes have alternatives that simply do a better job but of course, this could change with some number changes and hero exploration.
That said, at no point do opposing Heroes feel unfair. There is never a feeling of "wow the opposing team has tychus, gg" or "our team has abathur, gg". There are definite strengths and weaknesses, but its clear that all heroes are on the same page, even if some don't feel as powerful as others.
Some heroes are especially strong while others will have a hard time finding where their niche is. On streams and other community sites, Raynor is seen by players as especially troublesome. His Hyperion ultimate is powerful, his chasing ability as an assassin is strong with the right talents, his auto attacks do quite the damage, his penetrating round is a knockback, and he has an AoE buff for every allied character around him. He also has an ability that automatically heals him whenever he falls below 30% hp for about 30% of his max hp once every 45 seconds. Oh and his passive? Anytime an enemy unit dies around him his cooldowns are reduced by 2 seconds, enemy heroes reduce his cooldowns by 20 seconds. So if raynor assists with two enemy kills in a teamfight within five seconds at less than 30% hp well it can proc again and heal him once more. Quite the tanky assassin Jimmy happens to be. Kerrigan, well she’s not quite as bad as Raynor, but she fits into every team comp and there is never a moment where you think, I really wish Kerrigan wasn’t on my team. While we ran a pushing Kerrigan in most of our games, an “active” Kerrigan exists, where you have four active talents to make her an extremely effective assassin with the equivalent of eight skills. So if you like hotkeys Kerrigan is for you. Her damage and utility of her kit is ridiculously powerful and can punish poor positioning almost more than anyone else in this game. Other champions don’t really feel like they have a place. While LiLi can heal a lot, Malfurion can heal very well, can split push a lane left by himself if he has to, has a rooting ability and can restore mana to his allies. Some heroes have alternatives that simply do a better job but of course, this could change with some number changes and hero exploration. That said, at no point do opposing Heroes feel unfair. There is never a feeling of "wow the opposing team has tychus, gg" or "our team has abathur, gg". There are definite strengths and weaknesses, but its clear that all heroes are on the same page, even if some don't feel as powerful as others. Laning is boring
There is no incentive to lane other than to gain experience. Since everyone shares exp, and exp is capped in lane (one person collects experience just as well as five in one lane) there is no direct incentive to having more than one person in every active lane with creeps.
This means that on some two lane maps you have two laners and three players roaming doing mercenary camps and ganking lanes. Sounds fun right? Maybe theres a team fight in the middle of the map, maybe theres a big fight where the two roaming groups find eachother? Thats great but the guys who are laning turn into experience towers. They sit there, and just try not lose the towers they are guarding. If they get low, they back off a bit and eventually the minions will get close and you get their exp anyway. The only time this changes is when you need to worry about Dragon Shrines in that scenario you need two people in at least one lane to ensure they don't get both shrines. In this case you end up with a 2-1-1-1 set up with one roaming ganker. But laning still sucks. You push a lane you are easily gankable, you dont push a lane, you’ll get exp but accomplish not much else. Heck pushing lanes early doesn’t even result in much tower damage or lane/map control because the lanes are so short to begin with.
In short, laning is something that needs to be looked at to make it more fun. They killed last hitting and they killed the ‘laning phase’ but you need to have someone in every lane for exp or else you will fall very behind. Its only ok to leave lane when your lane opponent has also left or when going for a major objective such as the curse on cursed hollow, or doubloons on Blackheart Bay (and even here bot lane should probably never leave due to relative distance to the captain and a strong truly neutral mercenary camp).
There is no incentive to lane other than to gain experience. Since everyone shares exp, and exp is capped in lane (one person collects experience just as well as five in one lane) there is no direct incentive to having more than one person in every active lane with creeps. This means that on some two lane maps you have two laners and three players roaming doing mercenary camps and ganking lanes. Sounds fun right? Maybe theres a team fight in the middle of the map, maybe theres a big fight where the two roaming groups find eachother? Thats great but the guys who are laning turn into experience towers. They sit there, and just try not lose the towers they are guarding. If they get low, they back off a bit and eventually the minions will get close and you get their exp anyway. The only time this changes is when you need to worry about Dragon Shrines in that scenario you need two people in at least one lane to ensure they don't get both shrines. In this case you end up with a 2-1-1-1 set up with one roaming ganker. But laning still sucks. You push a lane you are easily gankable, you dont push a lane, you’ll get exp but accomplish not much else. Heck pushing lanes early doesn’t even result in much tower damage or lane/map control because the lanes are so short to begin with. In short, laning is something that needs to be looked at to make it more fun. They killed last hitting and they killed the ‘laning phase’ but you need to have someone in every lane for exp or else you will fall very behind. Its only ok to leave lane when your lane opponent has also left or when going for a major objective such as the curse on cursed hollow, or doubloons on Blackheart Bay (and even here bot lane should probably never leave due to relative distance to the captain and a strong truly neutral mercenary camp). The team NEEDS coordination
In such a team oriented game, trying to play in a pub is frustrating. There is some form of built in matchmaking which attempts to make “balanced” teams in terms of composition (I have never played a solo match with 4 total assassins or supports for example). With no voice communication in this fast paced game (15-20 minutes for a match compared to 30-40 in |
a Governor General's award in 1978 for their work on the venue. In addition to professional productions, the Grand Theatre also hosts the High School Project, a program unique to North America that provides high school students an opportunity to work with professional directors, choreographers, musical directors, and stage managers. The Palace Theatre, in Old East Village, originally opened as a silent movie theatre in 1929 and was converted to a live theatre venue in 1991.[89] It is currently the home of the London Community Players, and as of 2016 is undergoing extensive historical restoration. The Original Kids Theatre Company, a nonprofit charitable youth organisation, currently puts on productions at the Spriet Family Theatre in the Covent Garden Market.[90]
Literature [ edit ]
London serves a core setting in Southern Ontario Gothic literature, most notably in the works of James Reaney. Modern writers include fantasy writer Kelley Armstrong, Man Booker Prize winner, Eleanor Catton, Scotiabank Giller Prize nominee, Joan Barfoot, and winner, Bonnie Burnard. Emma Donoghue, whose 2010 novel, Room, was adapted into a 2015 Academy Award-winning film of the same name, also lives in London. Words is an annual literary and creative arts festival that takes place each November.[91]
Livability [ edit ]
Springbank Park, located along the Thames River, is London's largest park
The city's cost of living is low compared to other southern Ontario cities. According to the London St. Thomas Association of Realtors, the average price of a home in the London and St. Thomas area in 2016 is $274,383, which is substantially lower than the national average of $467,082. It is also well below the average home prices of nearby cities including Toronto ($736,670), Hamilton ($510,204), and Kitchener-Waterloo ($364,290).[92] The 2015 average rental rate for a one-bedroom apartment is $781.
London has nine major parks and gardens throughout the city, many of which run along the Thames River and are interconnected by a series of pedestrian and bike paths, known as the Thames Valley Parkway.[93] This path system is 40 km (25 mi) in length, and connects to an additional 150 km (93 mi) of bike and hiking trails throughout the city.[94] The city's largest park, Springbank Park, is 140-hectare (300 acre) and contains 30 km (19 mi) of trails. It is also home to Storybook Gardens, a family attraction open year-round.
London is among the best places to retire in Ontario, according to Comfort Life, a publication for seniors because of safety, affordability and the short distance to nearby beaches such as Port Stanley, Port Burwell and Lambton Shores.[95]
Sports [ edit ]
London Majors, Spring 2008
Budweiser Gardens is home to the London Knights and the London Lightning
London is currently the home of the London Knights of the Ontario Hockey League, who play at the Budweiser Gardens. The Knights are 2004–2005 and 2015–2016 OHL and Memorial Cup Champions. During the summer months, the London Majors of the Intercounty Baseball League play at Labatt Park. London City of the Canadian Soccer League, is the highest level of soccer in London. The club was founded in 1973; it is the oldest active professional soccer franchise in North America.[96] The squad plays at Cove Road Stadium at the German Canadian Club. Other sports teams include the London Silver Dolphins Swim Team, the Forest City Volleyball Club, London Cricket Club, the London St. George's Rugby Club, the London Aquatics Club, the London Rhythmic Gymnastics Club, the London Rowing Club, London City Soccer Club and Forest City London.
Labatt Memorial Park is the oldest operating baseball diamond in North America
Football teams include the London Beefeaters (Ontario Football Conference).
London's basketball team, the London Lightning plays at Budweiser Gardens as members of the National Basketball League of Canada. Finishing their inaugural regular season at 28–8, the Lightning would go on to win the 2011–12 NBL Canada championship, defeating the Halifax Rainmen in the finals three games to two.
There are also a number of former sports teams that have moved or folded. London's four former baseball teams are the London Monarchs (Canadian Baseball League), the London Werewolves (Frontier League), the London Tecumsehs (International Association) and the London Tigers (AA Eastern League). Other former sports teams include the London Lasers (Canadian Soccer League)
In March 2013, London hosted the 2013 World Figure Skating Championships.
The University of Western Ontario's teams play under the name Mustangs. The university's football team plays at TD Waterhouse Stadium.[97] Western's Rowing Team rows out of a boathouse at Fanshawe Lake. Fanshawe College teams play under the name Falcons. The Women's Cross Country team has won 3 consecutive Canadian Collegiate Athletic Association (CCAA) National Championships.[98] In 2010, the program cemented itself as the first CCAA program to win both Men's and Women's National team titles, as well as CCAA Coach of the Year.[99]
The Western Fair Raceway, about 85 acres harness racing track and simulcast centre, operates year-round.[100] The grounds include a coin slot casino, a former IMAX theatre, and Sports and Agri-complex. Labatt Memorial Park the world's oldest continuously used baseball grounds[101][102] was established as Tecumseh Park in 1877; it was renamed in 1937, because the London field has been flooded and rebuilt twice (1883 and 1937), including a re-orientation of the bases (after the 1883 flood). The Forest City Velodrome, at the former London Ice House, is the only indoor cycling track in Ontario and the third to be built in North America, opened in 2005.[103]
Current franchises [ edit ]
Government and law [ edit ]
Wellington Street in downtown London viewed atop London City Hall
London's municipal government is divided among fourteen councillors (one representing each of London's fourteen wards) and the mayor. Matt Brown was elected mayor in the 2014 municipal election, officially taking office on 1 December 2014.[104] Prior to Brown's election, London's most recent elected mayor was Joe Fontana; following Fontana's resignation on 19 June 2014, city councillor Joe Swan served as acting mayor[105] until councillor Joni Baechler was selected as interim mayor 24 June.[106] Until the elections in 2010, there was a Board of Control, consisting of four controllers and the mayor, all elected citywide.[107]
Although London has many ties to Middlesex County, it is a totally separate entity; the two have no jurisdictional overlap. The exception is the Middlesex County courthouse and former jail, as the judiciary is administered directly by the province.[108]
In spite of some controversy about this move, London was the first city in Canada (in May 2017) to decide to move a ranked choice ballot for municipal elections starting in 2018. Voters will mark their ballots in order of preference, ranking their top three favourite candidates. An individual must reach 50 per cent of the total to be declared elected; in each round of counting where a candidate has not yet reached that target, the person with the fewest votes is dropped from the ballot and their second or third choice preferences reallocated to the remaining candidates, with this process repeating until a candidate has reached 50 per cent.[109]
In 2001, the City of London first published their Facilities Accessibility Design Standards (FADS) which was one of the first North American municipal accessibility requirements to include Universal Design. It has since been adopted by over 50 municipalities in Canada and the United States.[110]
City councilors [ edit ]
In addition to mayor Matt Brown the following were elected in the 2014 municipal election for the 2014-2018 term.[111][112]
Councillor Office Communities Michael Van Holst Ward 1 Chelsea Green, Fairmont Bill Armstrong Ward 2 Pottersburg, Nelson Park, Trafalgar Heights Mo Mohamed Salih Ward 3 Huron Heights Jesse Helmer Ward 4 East London Maureen Cassidy Ward 5 Stoneybrook, Northdale, Northerest, Uplands Phil Squire Ward 6 Broughdale, University Heights, Orchard Park, Sherwood Forest Josh Morgan Ward 7 White Hills, Medway Heights, Masonville, Hyde Park Paul Hubert Ward 8 Oakridge Park, Oakridge Acres, Anna Hopkins Ward 9 Byron, Lambeth Virginia Ridley Ward 10 Westmount Stephen Turner Ward 11 Cleardale, Southcrest Estates, Berkshire Village, Kensal Park, Manor Park Harold Usher Ward 12 Glendale, Southdale, Lockwood Park, White Oak Tanya Park Ward 13 Downtown London, Blackfriars, Piccadilly/Adelaide, SoHo, KeVa, Woodfield, Oxford Park Jared Zaifman Ward 14 Glen Cairn Woods, Pond Mills, Wilton Grove, Glanworth
Provincial ridings [ edit ]
The city includes four provincial ridings. In the provincial government, London is represented by New Democrats Terence Kernaghan (London North Centre), Teresa Armstrong (London—Fanshawe) and Peggy Sattler (London West), and Progressive Conservative Jeff Yurek (Elgin—Middlesex—London).[113]
Federal ridings [ edit ]
The London and surrounding area includes four federal ridings.[114] In the federal government, London is represented by Conservative Karen Vecchio (Elgin—Middlesex—London), Liberals Peter Fragiskatos (London North Centre) and Kate Young (London West), and NDP Irene Mathyssen (London—Fanshawe).[115]
Crime [ edit ]
Statistics from police indicate that total overall crimes in London have held steady between 2010 and 2016, at roughly 24,000 to 27,000 incidents per year.[116] The majority of incidents are property crimes, with violent crimes dropping markedly (up to about 20%) between 2012-2014 but rising again in 2015-2016. In July 2018, Police Deputy Chief Steve Williams was quoted as saying many crimes go unreported to police.[117]
Research by Michael Andrew Arntfield, a police officer turned criminology professor, has determined that on a per-capita basis, London, Ontario had more active serial killers than any locale in the world from 1959 to 1984.[118] Arntfield determined there were at least six serial killers active in London during this era, some unidentified but known killers in London included Russell Maurice Johnson, Gerald Thomas Archer, and Christian Magee.[119]
Civic initiatives [ edit ]
The City of London initiatives in Old East London are helping to create a renewed sense of vigour in the East London Business District. Specific initiatives include the creation of the Old East Heritage Conservation District under Part V of the Ontario Heritage Act, special Building Code policies and Facade Restoration Programs.[120]
London is home to heritage properties representing a variety of architectural styles,[121] including Queen Anne, Art Deco, Modern, and Brutalist
Londoners have become protective of the trees in the city, protesting "unnecessary" removal of trees.[122] The City Council and tourist industry have created projects to replant trees throughout the city. As well, they have begun to erect metal trees of various colours in the downtown area, causing some controversy.[123]
Transportation [ edit ]
Road transportation [ edit ]
London is at the junction of Highway 401 that connects the city to Toronto and Windsor, and Highway 402 to Sarnia.[124][125] Also, Highway 403, which diverges from the 401 at nearby Woodstock, Ontario, provides ready access to Brantford, Hamilton, the Golden Horseshoe area, and the Niagara Peninsula.[126] Many smaller two-lane highways also pass through or near London, including Kings Highways 2, 3, 4, 7 and 22. Many of these are "historical" names, as provincial downloading in the 1980s and 1990s put responsibility for most provincial highways on municipal governments.[127] Nevertheless, these roads continue to provide access from London to nearby communities and locations in much of Western Ontario, including Goderich, Port Stanley and Owen Sound.
Since the 1970s, London has improved urban road alignments that eliminated "jogs" in established traffic patterns over 19th-century street misalignments. The lack of a municipal freeway (either through or around the city) as well as the presence of two significant railways (each with attendant switching yards and few over/underpasses) are the primary causes of rush hour congestion, along with construction and heavy snow. Thus, traffic times can be significantly variable, although major traffic jams are rare.[128] Wellington Road between Commissioners Road E and Southdale Road E is London's busiest section of roadway, with more than 46,000 vehicles using the span on an average day[129] City council rejected early plans for the construction of a freeway, and instead accepted the Veterans Memorial Parkway to serve the east end.[130] Some Londoners have expressed concern the absence of a local freeway may hinder London's economic and population growth, while others have voiced concern such a freeway would destroy environmentally sensitive areas and contribute to London's suburban sprawl.[128] Road capacity improvements have been made to Veterans Memorial Parkway (formerly named Airport Road and Highway 100) in the industrialized east end.[131] However, the Parkway has received criticism for not being built as a proper highway; a recent city-run study suggested upgrading it by replacing the intersections with interchanges.[132]
Public transit [ edit ]
London Transit Commission Bus
In the late 19th Century, and the early 20th Century, an extensive network of streetcar routes served London.[133][134]
London's public transit system is run by the London Transit Commission, which has 44 bus routes throughout the city.[135] Although the city has lost ridership over the last few years, the commission is making concerted efforts to enhance services by implementing a five-year improvement plan. In 2015, an additional 17,000 hours of bus service was added throughout the city. In 2016, 11 new operators, 5 new buses, and another 17,000 hours of bus service were added to the network.[136] Bus service is currently the only mode of public transit available to the public in London, with no available rapid transit networks like those used in other Canadian cities. However, city council approved a bus rapid transit (BRT) network, named Shift, in May 2016. The network will consist of two corridors serving each end of the city, and meeting at a central hub in the downtown. Construction is expected to begin in 2018, with the service fully operational by 2025.[137]
A separated bike lane in Wortley Village
Cycling network [ edit ]
London has 330 km (205 mi) of cycling paths throughout the city, 91 km (59 mi) of which have been added since 2005.[138] In June 2016, London unveiled its first bike corrals, which replace parking for one vehicle with fourteen bicycle parking spaces, and fix-it stations, which provide cyclists with simple tools and a bicycle pump, throughout the city.[139] In September 2016, city council approved a new 15 year cycling master plan that will see the construction of an additional 470 km (292 mi) of cycling paths added to the existing network.[138][140]
Intercity transport [ edit ]
The Via Rail station in downtown London is Canada's fourth busiest railway terminal.
London is on the Canadian National Railway main line between Toronto and Chicago (with a secondary main line to Windsor) and the Canadian Pacific Railway main line between Toronto and Detroit.[141] Via Rail operates regional passenger service through London station as part of the Quebec City–Windsor Corridor, with connections to the United States.[142] Via Rail's London terminal is the fourth-busiest passenger terminal in Canada.[141]
London is also a destination for inter-city bus travellers. London is the seventh-busiest Greyhound Canada terminal in terms of passengers,[143] and connecting services radiate from London throughout Southwestern Ontario and through to the American cities of Detroit, Michigan and Chicago, Illinois.
London International Airport (YXU) is the 12th busiest passenger airport in Canada and the 11th busiest airport in Canada by take-offs and landings.[141] It is served by airlines including Air Canada Express, and WestJet, and provides direct flights to both domestic and international destinations, including Toronto, Orlando, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Calgary, Cancún, Vancouver, Varadero, Punta Cana, Montego Bay, Santa Clara, and Holguin.[144]
Plans [ edit ]
The city of London is considering bus rapid transit (BRT) and/or high-occupancy vehicle lanes (HOV) to help it achieve its long-term transportation plan. Additional cycleways are planned for integration in road-widening projects, where there is need and sufficient space along routes. An expressway/freeway network is possible along the eastern and western ends of the city, from Highway 401 (and Highway 402 for the western route) past Oxford Street, potentially with another highway, joining the two in the city's north end.[128]
The City of London has assessed the entire length of the Veterans Memorial Parkway, identifying areas where interchanges can be constructed, grade separations can occur, and where cul-de-sacs can be placed. Upon completion, the Veterans Memorial Parkway would no longer be an expressway, but a freeway, for the majority of its length.[145]
Education [ edit ]
London public elementary and secondary schools are governed by four school boards – the Thames Valley District School Board, the London District Catholic School Board and the French first language school boards (the Conseil scolaire Viamonde and the Conseil scolaire catholique Providence or CSC).[146] The CSC has a satellite office in London.[147]
There are also more than twenty private schools in the city.[146]
London is home to London Central Secondary School, the highest ranking academic school in Ontario.[148]
The city is home to two post-secondary institutions: the University of Western Ontario (UWO) and Fanshawe College, a college of applied arts and technology.[146] UWO, founded in 1878, has about 3500 full-time faculty and staff members and almost 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students.[149] It placed tenth in the 2008 Maclean's magazine rankings of Canadian universities.[150] The Richard Ivey School of Business, part of UWO, was formed in 1922 and ranked among the best business schools in the country by the Financial Times in 2009.[151] UWO has three affiliated colleges: Brescia University College, founded in 1919 (Canada's only university-level women's college);[152][153] Huron University College, founded in 1863 (also the founding college of UWO) and King's University College, founded in 1954.[154][155] All three are liberal arts colleges with religious affiliations: Huron with the Anglican Church of Canada, King's and Brescia with the Roman Catholic Church.[156] London is also home to Lester B. Pearson School for the Arts one of few of its kind.
Fanshawe College has an enrollment of approximately 15,000 students, including 3,500 apprentices and over 500 international students from over 30 countries.[157] It also has almost 40,000 students in part-time continuing education courses.[157] Fanshawe's Key Performance Indicators (KPI) have been over the provincial average for many years now, with increasing percentages year by year.[158]
The Ontario Institute of Audio Recording Technology (OIART), founded in 1983, offers recording studio experience for audio engineering students.[159]
Westervelt College is also in London. This private career college was founded in 1885 and offers several diploma programs.[160]
Sister city [ edit ]
London currently has one sister city:
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ London's long term climate record has been recorded at various climate stations in or near the city of London since 1871. From 1871 to 1891 at London, 1883 to 1932 at London South, 1930 to 1941 at Lambeth Airport, and 1940 to present at London International Airport
Further reading [ edit ]House Democrats are hammering Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai over his decision to cut nine companies from a program that provides subsidized internet service to low-income people.
Forty-one Democrats, including Reps. Ro Khanna (Calif.), Anna Eshoo (Calif.) and Ron Kind Ronald (Ron) James KindSteel lobby's PR blitz can't paper over damaging effects of tariffs Congress should stop tariff power grab, bring balance to US trade policy Ocasio-Cortez sparks debate with talk of 70 percent marginal rate MORE (Wis.), signed a letter on Tuesday saying that Pai’s move would hurt poor communities.
“Your action will hurt those in our country that need the most help,” they wrote. “Your arbitrary decision will hurt poor children and widen the digital divide.”
Pai's decision has sparked an uproar among Democrats.
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The House letter follows one sent on Friday from 15 Democratic senators that also blasted the decision.
“This action does nothing but create a harmful chilling effect on potential provider participation and unfairly punish low-income consumers,” that letter, which was signed by Dem Sens. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Cory Booker (N.J.) and Elizabeth Warren Elizabeth Ann WarrenWoman to undecided Biden: 'Just say yes' to 2020 bid Raising taxes on the wealthy is 'extremely popular,' says Dem pollster 64 percent say Democratic Party supports socialism, says poll MORE (Mass.), said.
Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (N.J.), the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, also blasted the decision earlier this month, calling it a “baseless action.”
On Feb. 3rd, Pai cut nine companies from the FCC’s Lifeline program, which provides families with $9.25 a month to help subsidize paying for internet. Those companies had been approved just weeks before, near the end of then-Democratic Chairman Tom Wheeler's tenure.
Pai took over as FCC chairman at the end of January. He's said one of his chief priorities will be bridging the digital divide between well-connected communities and poor and rural areas that lack easy access to telecommunications or broadband.
The new chairman defended dropping nine companies from the broadband program, saying he took the action to give the agency more time for review and insisting he was committed to helping expand internet access.
“Hyperbolic headlines always attract more attention than mundane truths,” he wrote in a blog post on Medium.
“For example, a story detailing how the FCC was undertaking further review of the eligibility of 1% of Lifeline providers wouldn’t generate too many clicks."The changes to Irish Water announced this week not only fail to meet the concerns of parliament and the public, they make it impossible to see any reasonable case for continuing with metering and domestic water charges.
You’d think, with all that’s happened, the Government would have listened – to the public, and to their representatives in parliament. Alas, it was not to be. The Taoiseach set the tone after the public marches two weeks ago. When asked if parliament could, now, debate Irish Water, he said that we could, after his Government had decided exactly what changes were to be made.
And in fairness, that’s exactly what they did. The Minister, the Tánaiste and the Taoiseach marched into the chamber at 3pm on Wednesday, told us how it was going to be, and marched straight back out again. Leaving the rest of us to ‘debate’ their latest edict. It was a signature move from a government that no longer even pretends parliament has a role in the affairs of the Irish nation.
And what was lacking in style, was also lacking in substance.
The announcement failed to deal with the fear of privatisation. The law will be changed so that Irish Water can only be privatised following a plebiscite, or majority vote of the public. But as with the current legislation, which prohibits private ownership, that public vote can be bypassed simply by changing the law that requires it.
The announcement failed to deal with opposition to double taxation. The State spends about €1bn a year on water services, with more coming from commercial water charges. But in 2015, that will fall to about €660m. The gap will come in part from domestic charges – meaning the public will be charged twice for the same thing – first via taxes like VAT and motor tax, and then again via water bills.
The announcement failed to provide sufficient safeguards for those who can’t pay. The revised net charge will be €60 or €160, for a home with one or more than one person living in it, respectively. €160 mightn’t seem like a lot of money when it’s being discussed at the Cabinet table, where the average wage is north of €160,000, but the stark reality is that many people in Ireland today don’t have it.
A pensioner in Wicklow asked me some months ago what a trickle of water would mean for her. She lives on €100 a week, and at the end of the year, doesn’t have €100, or any euro, to give to Irish Water. The Government is reducing the €100 to €60, and providing easy pay options. This doesn’t address her problem, which is that she hasn’t got any money to give. And it gets worse. The cost of the meter outside her door, of billing her, and providing customer service – will be more than the €60 a year she has to pay. So she is being billed in order to cover some of the costs of billing her. This is ineptitude and sheer nastiness at an almost incomprehensible level. Almost.
The announcement failed to ensure fairness for the 42 towns in Ireland with no wastewater treatment service – towns like Arklow, Cobh, Youghal, Bundoran and Killybegs. Clear precedence exists where only one service, or an inadequate level of a service, exists. Areas on boil-water notices won’t pay for the water coming into their homes. Nor will people with wells. People with septic tanks won’t pay for wastewater treatment. But for some reason, the residents and businesses of these towns are being forced to pay for a wastewater treatment service that doesn’t exist.
The announcement failed to stimulate conservation of water. The charge is now a flat rate. Yes, there is some mechanism whereby using less than a specific amount will reduce the bill, but it’s not clear what effect this will have. In fact, it’s entirely possible that water usage will increase. I’ve already heard several people suggest that, now they’re being made pay for the stuff twice, they’re going make sure they get their money’s worth!
Finally, there’s the issue of whether domestic water charges should now be applied at all. While some argue against charges for ideological reasons, there was merit to the initial position, which was as follows: We need to borrow ten or fifteen billion euro to invest in the system, we can’t get it from anywhere else, so we’ll impose a charge, just for this new investment, and use it as security to borrow the money off-balance sheet.
But that’s not the position any longer. We’re now told Irish Water’s going to spend just €600m a year on capital investment. But in 2010 the local authorities between them spent €400m on capital investment, meaning the additional investment is just €200m per year. That €200m could easily have been found by creating Irish Water and driving down the operating cost base. Scottish Water was set up to bring municipal water services together, and reduced their cost base by 40% in the first five years. In 2010, the operating expenses for Ireland’s water network was €800m. A 40% reduction would yield €320m a year – much more than the €200m increase in capital investment.
Based on these numbers, domestic charges don’t make political, economic or commercial sense. If this whole thing comes down to a few hundred million a year in new investment, then all that was required was this: Set up Irish Water; maintain existing spending through central taxation and commercial charges; drive down the cost base through scale, coordination and new technologies; reinvest this saved money in the system – both to renew existing and build new infrastructure for the future. No commercial semi-state, no domestic charges, no water meters, no humiliation of pensioners, no problem.
Instead, somewhere between €500m and €750m is being spent on water meters. Many millions more will be spent each year on billing and customer service. And for what? The net amount raised through domestic charges will be about €90m. So the first decade or so of bills…will cover the cost of the bills. We’ve ended up somewhere between Flan O’Brien and Kafka.
The Irish Water debacle is the latest example of the social and economic cost of a broken political system. It started with the Government allowing just three hours on the legislation last year. It continued with Wednesday’s charade. Parliament should be a place of free thinking and real debate, an ideas factory that crafts legislation in the interests of the nation. But real debate, and new ideas, are feared. Dissent is quelled. And so we get legislation like Irish Water – where the design is flawed, the quality of construction is shoddy, the launch is a disaster and, after doing a lot of damage, the product is recalled. Only the same team go to work on it again with the same out-dated tools…and ‘round and ‘round we go.
It’s time for change. We need a new management team – one that not only listens to parliament, but works with it to modernise politics, and to get things like Irish Water right.
This Article originally appeared in the Sunday Independent on Suday, November 23, 2014.SAN DIEGO—Republican Mayor Kevin Faulconer confronted the issue of climate change not long after taking office in this coastal city.
Faulconer, 49, became mayor in 2014 after winning a special election to replace former Mayor Bob Filner (D). The list of decisions for the new GOP leader included whether to support an expansive climate action plan.
Every city in the state is required to have a climate road map as part of its general plan. When Faulconer took over, San Diego had a draft blueprint crafted by an interim mayor who was filling in after Filner resigned following allegations of sexual harrassment.
The temporary mayor, Todd Gloria, was a Democrat, and his climate plan had ambitious goals. He wanted to switch to 100 percent renewable power and cut the city’s carbon emissions in half. Both would be done by 2035. It was unclear initially whether Faulconer would accept those aspirations.
“Faulconer inherits this plan, so it’s his prerogative as mayor, if he wants, to shred it,” said Pete Hasapopoulos, organizer of the Sierra Club’s My Generation campaign, which seeks a transition to 100 percent clean energy. He was among those supporting Gloria’s version.
The Republican mayor didn’t take a hatchet to the plan, or even a red pen. He shepherded the project to passage late last year with only a few minor changes.
“He barely touched it,” Hasapopoulos said.
The plan contains a series of steps to hit the 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions, including a full switch to renewable electricity, improving the energy and water efficiency of buildings, getting commuters out of cars, diverting landfill waste, and adding trees.
Faulconer’s embrace of the plan comes as Republicans running for the party’s presidential nomination have questioned the reality of warming and whether it’s caused by human action. Front-runner Donald Trump in a South Carolina rally at the end of December called climate change a “hoax.”
“Obama’s talking about all of this with the global warming and the—a lot of it’s a hoax, it’s a hoax,” Trump said. “I mean, it’s a moneymaking industry, OK? It’s a hoax, a lot of it” (ClimateWire, March 21).
Trump competitor Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has criticized “global warming alarmists” and has said Democrats are lying about climate change to force illegal energy policies (ClimateWire, Dec. 9, 2015).
Faulconer said in an interview that “climate change is happening” and San Diego is a leader in addressing it. He doesn’t look at climate change “through a partisan lens,” he said.
“God knows there’s enough partisanship on the national level,” Faul
coner said. “I look at it from a quality-of-life standpoint for us in San Diego; protecting the environment... that’s part of what makes us special in San Diego, our clean air, our water, our sunshine, our open space. So protecting that for future generations, that’s incredibly important.”
He added, “You can’t get caught up in political back-and-forth. You’ve just got to move forward on what you think is best.”
Future candidate for governor?
Some in the political world see Faulconer and his work on the climate action plan as important beyond San Diego. He’s running for re-election this year. But he’s been mentioned as a possible candidate for governor in 2018.
“I think he’s all but certain to run,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant with GrassrootsLab in California. Golden State mayors can use their office as a springboard into state politics, he said.
“It’s one of the few options that Republicans have in California,” Madrid said of the governorship.
San Diego is the second largest city in the state, Madrid noted, with “a very large Republican base.” It has more people—and voters—than the San Francisco Bay Area, composed of nine counties.
Madrid noted that former California Gov. Pete Wilson (R), elected in 1990, was a San Diego mayor. He used his local perch to get elected to the U.S. Senate. Then he came back to the state as its governor.
For his part, Faulconer says he’s focused on the current election and on his mayoral duties.
“When you’re mayor of a large city, you’re always going to get people talking about what your next step may or may not be,” Faulconer said. “I'm proud of what we've accomplished. We've got a lot of positive momentum in San Diego. I’ve tried to do it in a style that’s not Republican or Democrat or independent.”
Gloria, the former interim mayor, said Faulconer’s work on the climate plan could help his candidacy for governor if he runs.
“I’m a Democrat but I do think that his support and full embrace of the climate plan would serve him well if he decides to go that way,” Gloria said. “Being connected to an internationally significant climate action plan, I think, would catch the attention of California voters.”
GOP is different in Calif.
Madrid said some Republicans in California are addressing climate change.
“Kevin is a very prototypical California politician, in that he’s very environmentally conscious,” Madrid said. “As a Republican, that’s kind of outside of the traditional stereotype.”
But it’s not atypical of Republicans representing coastal California areas, Madrid added.
“California tends to be very environmentally progressive but very fiscally responsible,” Madrid said. “[Faulconer] clearly checks both of those boxes very well.”
Faulconer’s father, Jim Faulconer, was assistant city manager of Oxnard, Calif., in the 1970s and ‘80s. So the current mayor “grew up watching government work. That’s probably the mold that he’s cut from. He’s more of a practical decisionmaker as opposed to an ideologue,” Madrid said.
Faulconer said he spent nights watching the City Council as a child while his mother went to night school.
“I grew up knowing the importance of community involvement,” Faulconer said. “From park and rec to libraries to other city functions, I understood the push and pull of city issues.”
Others said the reality of California is that you can’t win statewide office without having an environmental bent.
“If I were an adviser to him or any candidate for California, I would say the world’s changed,” said Hasapopoulos of the Sierra Club. “You want to appeal to a majority of Californians, you want to have something substantial to say about climate change, something to point to that shows you’re sincere about it.”
Some critics
Not everyone sees San Diego’s climate action plan as significant. Larry Remer, a regional Democratic strategist, said of the road map: “I don’t think there’s any substance. I don’t think there’s any there there.”
The plan, for example, could have added requirements that all new homes have solar.
“If you’re trying to reduce greenhouse gases, isn’t one of the easiest places to begin solar?” Remer asked. A mandate to include recycled water systems in new homes also could have been included, he said.
As for Faulconer, Remer said, “I think the guy did a poll and found out San Diego cares about the environment, and decided to position himself as good on the environment.”
Nicole Capretz, executive director of the Climate Action Campaign, a nonprofit that she said is “watchdogging” the plan, disagrees. San Diego’s blueprint is a legally binding document, meaning the city could be sued for failing to meet the targets. The strategies in the plan and their resulting cut to greenhouse gas emissions have all been carefully calculated, she said.
Capretz was director of environmental policy for Gloria when he drafted the road map. She said the only reason requirements on solar and graywater for new homes weren’t included is that those would be a small piece of the greenhouse gas pie, while other measures are more momentous.
Capretz credited Faulconer for supporting the plan. Mayors confront climate change more directly than most politicians, she said.
“While I think it’s extraordinary he’s taking the bold action he did, he’s from a beach community where our cliffs are eroding, where our beaches are getting smaller because the water’s coming up,” Capretz said. “We’re in a drought, and we’ve experienced unprecedented heat waves. It’s hard to ignore that.”
Capretz added that “the one area where [Faulconer] will be facing accountability is in implementing the plan. He’s not given a free ride just for passing the plan.”
Faulconer said he sees the city’s climate plan as an economic and environmental opportunity.
His said his goal is to bring together the environmental and business communities “to fashion a plan that will make San Diego one of the green energy and solar capitals of the world, while doing the right thing to protect our environment, |
, Sargent Solomon Musa, Captain Komba Mondeh, Lieutenant Tom Nyuma, Captain Julius Maada Bio and Captain Komba Kambo—[54] launched a military coup that sent president Momoh into exile in Guinea, and the young soldiers established the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC), with 25-year-old Captain Valentine Strasser as its chairman and Head of State of the country.[55]
Sargent Solomon Musa, a childhood friend of Strasser, became the deputy chairman and deputy leader of the NPRC junta government. Strasser became the world's youngest Head of State when he seized power just three days after his 25th birthday. The NPRC junta established the National Supreme Council of State as the military highest command and final authority in all matters, and was exclusively made up of the highest ranking NPRC soldiers, included Strasser himself and the original soldiers who toppled president Momoh.[55]
One of the highest ranking soldiers of the NPRC Junta, Lieutenant Sahr Sandy, a trusted ally of Strasser, was assassinated, allegedly by Major S.I.M. Turay, a key loyalist of ousted president Momoh. A heavily armed military manhunt took place across the country to find Lieutenant Sandy's killer. However, the main suspect, Major S.I.M Turay, went into hiding and fled the country to Guinea, fearing for his life. Dozens of soldiers loyal to the ousted president Momoh were arrested, including colonel Kahota M Dumbuya and Major Yayah Turay. Lieutenant Sandy was given a state funeral and his funeral prayers service at the cathedral church in Freetown was attended by many high-ranking soldiers of the NPRC junta, including Strasser himself and NPRC deputy leader Sergeant Solomom Musa
The NPRC Junta immediately suspended the constitution, banned all political parties, limited freedom of speech and freedom of the press and enacted a rule-by-decree policy, in which soldiers were granted unlimited powers of administrative detention without charge or trial, and challenges against such detentions in court were precluded.
The NPRC Junta maintained relations with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and strengthened support for Sierra Leone-based ECOMOG troops fighting in Liberia. On 28 December 1992, an alleged coup attempt against the NPRC government of Strasser, aimed at freeing the detained Colonel Yahya Kanu, Colonel Kahota M.S. Dumbuya and former inspector general of police Bambay Kamara, was foiled. Several Junior army officers led by Seargen Mohamed Lamin Bangura were identified as being behind the coup plot. The coup plot led to the firing squad execution of seventeen soldiers in the Sierra Leone Army including Colonel Kahota M Dumbuya, Major Yayah Kanu and Seargent Mohamed Lamin Bangura. Several prominent members of the Momoh government who had been in detention at the Pa Demba Road prison, including former inspector general of police Bambay Kamara, were also executed.[56]
On 5 July 1994 the deputy NPRC leader Seargent Solomon Musu, who was very popular with the general population, particularly in Freetown, was arrested and sent into exile after he was accused of planning a coup to topple Strasser, an accusation Seargent Musa denied. Strasser replaced Musa as deputy NPRC chairman with Captain Julius Maada Bio, who was instantly promoted by Strasser to Brigadier.
The NPRC proved to be nearly as ineffectual as the Momoh-led APC government in repelling the RUF. More and more of the country fell to RUF fighters, and by 1994 they held much of the diamond-rich Eastern Province and were at the edge of Freetown. In response, the NPRC hired several hundred mercenaries from the private firm Executive Outcomes. Within a month they had driven RUF fighters back to enclaves along Sierra Leone's borders, and cleared the RUF from the Kono diamond-producing areas of Sierra Leone.
With Strasser's two most senior NPRC allies and commanders Lieutenant Sahr Sandy and Lieutenant Solomon Musa no longer around to defend him, Strasser's leadership within the NPRC Supreme Council of State was not considered much stronger. On 16 January 1996, after about four years in power, Strasser was arrested in a palace coup at the Defence Headquarters in Freetown by his fellow NPRC soldiers.[57] Strasser was immediately flown into exile in a military helicopter to Conakry, Guinea.
In his first public broadcast to the nation following the 1996 coup, Brigadier Bio stated that his support for returning Sierra Leone to a democratically elected civilian government and his commitment to ending the civil war were his motivations for the coup.[58] Promises of a return to civilian rule were fulfilled by Bio, who handed power over to Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, of the Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP), after the conclusion of elections in early 1996. President Kabbah took power with a great promise of ending the civil war. President Kabbah opened dialogue with the RUF and invited RUF leader Foday Sankoh for peace negotiations.
On 25 May 1997, seventeen soldiers in the Sierra Leone army led by Corporal Tamba Gborie, loyal to the detained Major General Johnny Paul Koroma, launched a military coup which sent President Kabbah into exile in Guinea and they established the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC). Corporal Gborie quickly went to the SLBS FM 99.9 headquarters in Freetown to announce the coup to a shocked nation and to alert all soldiers across the country to report for guard duty. The soldiers immediately released Koroma from prison and installed him as their chairman and Head of State.
Koroma suspended the constitution, banned demonstrations, shut down all private radio stations in the country and invited the RUF to join the new junta government, with its leader Foday Sankoh as the Vice-Chairman of the new AFRC-RUF coalition junta government. Within days, Freetown was overwhelmed by the presence of the RUF combatants who came to the city in thousands. The Kamajors, a group of traditional fighters mostly from the Mende ethnic group under the command of deputy Defence Minister Samuel Hinga Norman, remained loyal to President Kabbah and defended the Southern part of Sierra Leone from the soldiers.
Kabbah's government and the end of civil war (2002–2014) [ edit ]
After nine months in office, the junta was overthrown by the Nigerian-led ECOMOG forces, and the democratically elected government of president Kabbah was reinstated in February 1998. On 19 October 1998 24 soldiers in the Sierra Leone army were executed by firing squad after they were convicted in a court martial in Freetown, some for orchestrating the 1997 coup that overthrew President Kabbah and others for failure to reverse the mutiny.[59]
In October 1999, the United Nations agreed to send peacekeepers to help restore order and disarm the rebels. The first of the 6,000-member force began arriving in December, and the UN Security Council voted in February 2000 to increase the force to 11,000, and later to 13,000. But in May, when nearly all Nigerian forces had left and UN forces were trying to disarm the RUF in eastern Sierra Leone, Sankoh's forces clashed with the UN troops, and some 500 peacekeepers were taken hostage as the peace accord effectively collapsed. The hostage crisis resulted in more fighting between the RUF and the government as UN troops launched Operation Khukri to end the siege. The Operation was successful with Indian and British Special Forces being the main contingents.
The situation in the country deteriorated to such an extent that British troops were deployed in Operation Palliser, originally simply to evacuate foreign nationals. However, the British exceeded their original mandate, and took full military action to finally defeat the rebels and restore order. The British were the catalyst for the ceasefire that ended the civil war. Elements of the British Army, together with administrators and politicians, remain in Sierra Leone to this day, helping train the armed forces, improve the infrastructure of the country and administer financial and material aid. Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Britain at the time of the British intervention, is regarded as a hero by the people of Sierra Leone, many of whom are keen for more British involvement.[citation needed] Sierra Leoneans have been described as "The World's Most Resilient People".[60]
Between 1991 and 2001, about 50,000 people were killed in Sierra Leone's civil war. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their homes and many became refugees in Guinea and Liberia. In 2001, UN forces moved into rebel-held areas and began to disarm rebel soldiers. By January 2002, the war was declared over. In May 2002, Kabbah was re-elected president by a landslide. By 2004, the disarmament process was complete. Also in 2004, a UN-backed war crimes court began holding trials of senior leaders from both sides of the war. In December 2005, UN peacekeeping forces pulled out of Sierra Leone.
In August 2007, Sierra Leone held presidential and parliamentary elections. However, no presidential candidate won the 50% plus one vote majority stipulated in the constitution on the first round of voting. A runoff election was held in September 2007, and Ernest Bai Koroma, the candidate of the main opposition APC, was elected president. Koroma was re-elected president for a second (and final) term in November 2012.
Struggle with epidemic (2014–2016) [ edit ]
In 2014 an Ebola virus epidemic in Sierra Leone began, which had widespread impact on the country,[61] including forcing Sierra Leone to declare a state of emergency.[62] By the end of 2014 there were nearly 3000 deaths and 10 thousand cases of the disease in Sierra Leone.[61] The epidemic also led to the Ouse to Ouse Tock in September 2014, a nationwide three-day quarantine.[63] The epidemic occurred as part of the wider Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa. In early August 2014 Sierra Leone cancelled league football (soccer) matches because of the Ebola epidemic.[64] On 16 March 2016, the World Health Organisation declared Sierra Leone to be free from Ebola.[65]
14 August 2017 mudslides [ edit ]
Several mudslides occurred around 6:30 AM on the fourteenth of August 2017 in and near the country's capital Freetown.
Geography and climate [ edit ]
A map of Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone map of Köppen climate classification
Sierra Leone is located on the southwest coast of West Africa, lying mostly between latitudes 7° and 10°N (a small area is south of 7°), and longitudes 10° and 14°W. The country is bordered by Guinea to the north and east, Liberia to the southeast, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west and southwest.[66]
Sierra Leone has a total area of 71,740 km2 (27,699 sq mi), divided into a land area of 71,620 km2 (27,653 sq mi) and water of 120 km2 (46 sq mi).[67] The country has four distinct geographical regions. In eastern Sierra Leone the plateau is interspersed with high mountains, where Mount Bintumani reaches 1,948 m (6,391 ft), the highest point in the country. The upper part of the drainage basin of the Moa River is located in the south of this region.
The centre of the country is a region of lowland plains, containing forests, bush and farmland,[66] that occupies about 43% of Sierra Leone's land area. The northern section of this has been categorised by the World Wildlife Fund as part of the Guinean forest-savanna mosaic ecoregion, while the south is rain-forested plains and farmland.
In the west, Sierra Leone has some 400 km (249 mi) of Atlantic coastline, giving it both bountiful marine resources and attractive tourist potential. The coast has areas of low-lying Guinean mangroves swamp. The national capital Freetown sits on a coastal peninsula, situated next to the Sierra Leone Harbour, the world's third largest natural harbour.
The climate is tropical, with two seasons determining the agricultural cycle: the rainy season from May to November, and a dry season from December to May, which includes harmattan, when cool, dry winds blow in off the Sahara Desert and the night-time temperature can be as low as 16 °C (60.8 °F). The average temperature is 26 °C (78.8 °F) and varies from around 26 to 36 °C (78.8 to 96.8 °F) during the year.[68][69]
Environment [ edit ]
Human activities claimed to be responsible or contributing to land degradation in Sierra Leone include unsustainable agricultural land use, poor soil and water management practices, deforestation, removal of natural vegetation, fuelwood consumption and to a lesser extent overgrazing and urbanisation.[70]
Deforestation, both for commercial timber and to make room for agriculture, is the major concern and represents an enormous loss of natural economic wealth to the nation.[70] Mining and slash and burn for land conversion – such as cattle grazing – dramatically diminished forested land in Sierra Leone since the 1980s. It is listed among countries of concern for emissions, as having Low Forest Cover with High Rates of Deforestation (LFHD).[71]
There are concerns that heavy logging continues in the Tama-Tonkoli Forest Reserve in the north. Loggers have extended their operations to Nimini, Kono District, Eastern Province; Jui, Western Rural District, Western Area; Loma Mountains National Park, Koinadougu, Northern Province; and with plans to start operations in the Kambui Forest reserve in the Kenema District, Eastern Province.[71]
Habitat degradation for the African wild dog, Lycaon pictus, has been increased, such that this canid is deemed to have been extirpated in Sierra Leone.[72]
Until 2002, Sierra Leone lacked a forest management system because of the civil war that caused tens of thousands of deaths. Deforestation rates have increased 7.3% since the end of the civil war.[73] On paper, 55 protected areas covered 4.5% of Sierra Leone as of 2003. The country has 2,090 known species of higher plants, 147 mammals, 626 birds, 67 reptiles, 35 amphibians, and 99 fish species.[73]
The Environmental Justice Foundation has documented how the number of illegal fishing vessels in Sierra Leone's waters has multiplied in recent years. The amount of illegal fishing has significantly depleted fish stocks, depriving local fishing communities of an important resource for survival. The situation is particularly serious as fishing provides the only source of income for many communities in a country still recovering from over a decade of civil war.[74]
In June 2005, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and BirdLife International agreed to support a conservation-sustainable development project in the Gola Forest in south eastern Sierra Leone,[75] an important surviving fragment of rainforest in Sierra Leone.
Government and politics [ edit ]
Sierra Leone is a constitutional republic with a directly elected president and a unicameral legislature. The current system of the Government of Sierra Leone is based on the 1991 Sierra Leone Constitution. Sierra Leone has a dominant unitary central government and a weak local government. The executive branch of the Government of Sierra Leone, headed by the president of Sierra Leone has extensive powers and influences. The president is the most powerful government official in Sierra Leone.[76]
Within the confines of the 1991 Constitution, supreme legislative powers are vested in Parliament, which is the law making body of the nation. Supreme executive authority rests in the president and members of his cabinet and judicial power with the judiciary of which the Chief Justice is head.
The president is the head of state, the head of government and the commander-in-chief of the Sierra Leone Armed Forces. The president appoints and heads a cabinet of ministers, which must be approved by the Parliament. The president is elected by popular vote to a maximum of two five-year terms. The president is the highest and most influential position within the government of Sierra Leone.
To be elected president of Sierra Leone, a candidate must gain at least 55% of the vote. If no candidate gets 55%, there is a second-round runoff between the top two candidates.
The current president of Sierra Leone is former military junta leader Julius Maada Bio.[77] Bio defeated Samura Kamara of the ruling All People's Congress in the country's tightly contested 2018 presidential election. Bio replaced outgoing President Ernest Bai Koroma after Bio was sworn into office on 4 April 2018 by Chief Justice Abdulai Cham. Bio is the leader of the Sierra Leone People's Party, the current ruling party in Sierra Leone.
Next to the president is the Vice-president, who is the second-highest ranking government official in the executive branch of the Sierra Leone Government. As designated by the Sierra Leone Constitution, the vice-president is to become the new president of Sierra Leone upon the death, resignation, or removal of th
Parliament [ edit ]
The Sierra Leone Supreme Court in the capital Freetown, the highest and most powerful court in the country
The Parliament of Sierra Leone is unicameral, with 124 seats. Each of the country's fourteen districts is represented in parliament. 112 members are elected concurrently with the presidential elections; the other 12 seats are filled by paramount chiefs from each of the country's 12 administrative districts. The Sierra Leone parliament is led by the Speaker of Parliament, who is the overall leader of Parliament and is directly elected by sitting members of parliament. The current speaker of the Sierra Leone parliament is Sheku Badara Bashiru Dumbuya, who was elected by members of parliament on 21 January 2014.
The current members of Parliament of Sierra Leone were elected in the 2012 Sierra Leone parliamentary election. The All People's Congress (APC) currently has 70 of the 112 elected parliamentary seats and the Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP) has 42 of the elected 132 parliamentary seats. Sierra Leone's two most dominant parties, the APC and the SLPP, collectively won every elected seats in Parliament in the 2012 Sierra Leone parliamentary election. To be qualified as Member of Parliament, the person must be a citizen of Sierra Leone, must be at least 21 years old, must be able to speak, read and write the English language with a degree of proficiency to enable him to actively take part in proceedings in Parliament; and must not have any criminal conviction.[76]
Since independence in 1961, Sierra Leone's politics has been dominated by two major political parties: the SLPP and the ruling APC. Other minor political parties have also existed but with no significant support.[78]
Judiciary [ edit ]
The judicial power of Sierra Leone is vested in the judiciary, headed by the Chief Justice and comprising the Sierra Leone Supreme Court, which is the highest court in the country and its ruling therefore cannot be appealed; the High Court of Justice; the Court of Appeal; the magistrate courts; and traditional courts in rural villages. The president appoints and parliament approves Justices for the three courts. The Judiciary have jurisdiction in all civil and criminal matters throughout the country. The current acting Chief Justice of Sierra Leone is Valicious Thomas [3]
Foreign relations [ edit ]
Embassy of Sierra Leone in Washington, D.C.
The Sierra Leone Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation is responsible for foreign policy of Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone has diplomatic relations that include China, Russia,[79] Libya, Iran, and Cuba. Sierra Leone has good relations with the West, including the United States, and has maintained historical ties with the United Kingdom and other former British colonies through membership in the Commonwealth of Nations.[80] The United Kingdom has played a major role in providing aid to the former colony, together with administrative help and military training since intervening to end the Civil War in 2000.
Former President Siaka Stevens' government had sought closer relations with other West African countries under the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) a policy continued by the current government. Sierra Leone, along with Liberia and Guinea, form the Mano River Union (MRU). It is primarily designed to implement development projects and promote regional economic integration between the three countries.[81]
Sierra Leone is also a member of the United Nations and its specialised agencies, the African Union, the African Development Bank (AFDB), the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).[82] Sierra Leone is a member of the International Criminal Court with a Bilateral Immunity Agreement of protection for the US military (as covered under Article 98).
Administrative divisions [ edit ]
The 12 districts and 2 areas of Sierra Leone
The Republic of Sierra Leone is composed of four regions: the Northern Province, Southern Province, the Eastern Province, and the Western Area. The three provinces are further divided into 12 districts; and the Western Area is divided into two districts.
The provincial districts are divided into 149 chiefdoms, which have traditionally been led by paramount chiefs, recognised by the British administration in 1896 at the time of organising the Protectorate of Sierra Leone. The Paramount Chiefs are very influential, particularly in villages and small rural towns.[83] Each chiefdom has ruling families that were recognised at that time; the Tribal Authority, made up of local notables, elects the paramount chief from the ruling families.[83] Typically, chiefs have the power to "raise taxes, control the judicial system, and allocate land, the most important resource in rural areas."[84]
Within the context of local governance, the districts are governed as localities. Each has a directly elected local district council to exercise authority and carry out functions at a local level.[85][86] In total, there are 19 local councils: 13 district councils, one for each of the 12 districts and one for the Western Area Rural, and six municipalities also have elected local councils. The six municipalities include Freetown, which functions as the local government for the Western Area Urban District, and Bo, Bonthe, Kenema, Koidu, and Makeni.[85][87][88]
While the district councils are under the oversight of their respective provincial administrations, the municipalities are directly overseen by the Ministry of Local Government & Community Development and thus administratively independent of district and provincial administrations.
Military [ edit ]
The Military of Sierra Leone, officially the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces (RSLAF), are the unified armed forces of Sierra Leone responsible for the territorial security of Sierra Leone's border and defending the national interests of Sierra Leone within the framework of its international obligations. The armed forces were formed after independence in 1961, on the basis of elements of the former British Royal West African Frontier Force present in the country. The Sierra Leone Armed Forces consists of around 15,500 personnel, comprising the largest Sierra Leone Army,[99] the Sierra Leone Navy and the Sierra Leone Air Wing.[100]
The president of Sierra Leone is the Commander in Chief of the military, with the Minister of Defence responsible for defence policy and the formulation of the armed forces. The current Sierra Leone Defence Minister is retired Major Alfred Paolo Conteh. The Military of Sierra Leone also has a Chief of the Defence Staff who is a uniformed military official responsible for the administration and the operational control of the Sierra Leone military.[101] Brigadier General Alfred Nelson-Williams who was appointed by president Koroma succeeded the retired Major General Edward Sam M’boma on 12 September 2008 as the Chief of Defence Staff of the Military.[102]
Before Sierra Leone gained independence in 1961, the military was known as the Royal Sierra Leone Military Force. The military seized control in 1968, bringing the National Reformation Council into power. On 19 April 1971, when Sierra Leone became a republic, the Royal Sierra Leone Military Forces were renamed the Republic of Sierra Leone Military Force (RSLMF).[103] The RSLMF remained a single-service organisation until 1979, when the Sierra Leone Navy was established. In 1995 Defence Headquarters was established, and the Sierra Leone Air Wing formed. The RSLMF was renamed as the Armed Forces of the Republic of Sierra Leone (AFRSL).
Law enforcement [ edit ]
Law enforcement in Sierra Leone is primarily the responsibility of the Sierra Leone Police (SLP). Sierra Leone Police was established by the British colony in 1894; it is one of the oldest police forces in West Africa. It works to prevent crime, protect life and property, detect and prosecute offenders, maintain public order, ensure safety and security, and enhance access to justice. The Sierra Leone Police is headed by the Inspector General of Police, the professional head of the Sierra Leone Police force, who is appointed by the President of Sierra Leone.
Each one of Sierra Leone's 14 districts is headed by a district police commissioner who is the professional head of their respective district. These Police Commissioners report directly to the Inspector General of Police at the Sierra Leone Police headquarters in Freetown. The current Inspector General of Police is Brima Acha Kamara, who was appointed to the position by former president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah.
Economy [ edit ]
A proportional representation of Sierra Leone's exports
By the 1990s economic activity was declining and economic infrastructure had become seriously degraded. Over the next decade much of the formal economy was destroyed in the country's civil war. Since the end of hostilities in January 2002, massive infusions of outside assistance have helped Sierra Leone begin to recover.[104]
Much of the recovery will depend on the success of the government's efforts to limit corruption by officials, which many feel was the chief cause for the civil war. A key indicator of success will be the effectiveness of government management of its diamond sector.
There is high unemployment, particularly among the youth and ex-combatants. Authorities have been slow to implement reforms in the civil service, and the pace of the privatisation programme is also slackening and donors have urged its advancement.
The currency is the leone. The central bank is the Bank of Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone operates a floating exchange rate system, and foreign currencies can be exchanged at any of the commercial banks, recognised foreign exchange bureaux and most hotels. Credit card use is limited in Sierra Leone, though they may be used at some hotels and restaurants. There are a few internationally linked automated teller machines that accept Visa cards in Freetown operated by ProCredit Bank.
Sierra Leone is a country that is exposed to vulnerable situations (not so as a result of the non-existence of natural wealth), but more to do with poor management of its natural wealth (linked with the concept of resource curse).[105]
Agriculture [ edit ]
[106] A farmer with his rice harvest in Sierra Leone. Two-thirds of Sierra Leone's population are directly involved in subsistence agriculture
Two-thirds of the population of Sierra Leone are directly involved in subsistence agriculture.[106] Agriculture accounted for 58 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2007.[107]
Agriculture is the largest employer with 80 percent of the population working in the sector.[108] Rice is the most important staple crop in Sierra Leone with 85 percent of farmers cultivating rice during the rainy season[109] and an annual consumption of 76 kg per person.[110]
Mining [ edit ]
Rich in minerals, Sierra Leone has relied on mining, especially diamonds, for its economic base. The country is among the top ten diamond producing nations. Mineral exports remain the main currency earner. Sierra Leone is a major producer of gem-quality diamonds. Though rich in diamonds, it has historically struggled to manage their exploitation and export.
Sierra Leone is known for its blood diamonds that were mined and sold to diamond conglomerates during the civil war, to buy the weapons that fuelled its atrocities.[111] In the 1970s and early 1980s, economic growth rate slowed because of a decline in the mining sector and increasing corruption among government officials.
Percentage of GDP by sector (2007)[107] Rank Sector Percentage
of GDP 1 Agriculture 58.5 2 Other services 10.4 3 Trade and tourism 9.5 4 Wholesale and retail trade 9.0 5 Mining and quarrying 4.5 6 Government Services 4.0 7 Manufacturing and handicrafts 2.0 8 Construction 1.7 9 Electricity and water 0.4
Annual production of Sierra Leone's diamond estimates range between US$250 million–$300 million. Some of that is smuggled, where it is possibly used for money laundering or financing illicit activities. Formal exports have dramatically improved since the civil war, with efforts to improve the management of them having some success. In October 2000, a UN-approved certification system for exporting diamonds from the country was put in place and led to a dramatic increase in legal exports. In 2001, the government created a mining community development fund (DACDF), which returns a portion of diamond export taxes to diamond mining communities. The fund was created to raise local communities' stake in the legal diamond trade.
Sierra Leone has one of the world's largest deposits of rutile, a titanium ore used as paint pigment and welding rod coatings.
Transport infrastructure [ edit ]
There are a number of systems of transport in Sierra Leone, which has a road, air and water infrastructure, including a network of highways and several airports. There are 11,300 kilometres (7,000 miles) of highways in Sierra Leone, of which 904 km (562 mi)[67] are paved (about 8% of the roads). Sierra Leone highways are linked to Conakry, Guinea, and Monrovia, Liberia.
Sierra Leone has the largest natural harbour on the African continent, allowing international shipping through the Queen Elizabeth II Quay in the Cline Town area of eastern Freetown or through Government Wharf in central Freetown. There are 800 km (497 mi) of waterways in Sierra Leone, of which 600 km (373 mi) are navigable year-round. Major port cities are Bonthe, Freetown, Sherbro Island and Pepel.
There are ten regional airports in Sierra Leone, and one international airport. The Lungi International Airport located in the coastal town of Lungi in Northern Sierra Leone is the primary airport for domestic and international travel to or from Sierra Leone. Passengers cross the river to Aberdeen Heliports in Freetown by hovercraft, ferry or a helicopter. Helicopters are also available from the airport to other major cities in the country. The airport has paved runways longer than 3,047 metres (9,997 feet). The other airports have unpaved runways, and seven have runways from 914 to 1,523 metres (2,999 to 4,997 feet) long; the remaining two have shorter runways.
Sierra Leone appears on the EU list of prohibited countries with regard to the certification of airlines. This means that no airline registered in Sierra Leone may operate services of any kind within the European Union. This is due to substandard safety standards.[112]
As of May 2014 the country's only international airport had regularly scheduled direct flights to London, Paris, Brussels and most major cities in West Africa.
In September 2014 there were many Districts with travel restrictions including Kailahun, Kenema, Bombali, Tonkolili, and Port Loko because of Ebola.[113]
Energy in Sierra Leone [ edit ]
Overview [ edit ]
As of 2016, access to electricity in Sierra Leone was at about 12% for the entire population. Of this 12%, about 10% of the population was located in the urban capital, Freetown. This leaves around 2% of the rural population with access to electricity.[114] The majority of the population relies on biomass fuels for their daily survival, with firewood and coal used most prevalently.[115] The burning of these sources has been reported to have adverse health effects on women and children.[115] A 2012 study was done on the correlation between Acute Respiratory Infection (ARI), and burning biomass fuels in the home. The results were that 64% of children were diagnosed with ARI where firewood stoves were used, and 44% where charcoal stoves were used.[115] The use of coal and firewood has also posed environmental concerns as they are both conflict with the push for more sustainable sources energy.[116] As a result, the commercialization of firewood and coal has been a point of contention with aid donors and government agencies such as the Ministry of Energy and Water Resources and the Forestry Division.[116] There have been strong pushes for both solar and hydropower to become the dominant sources of energy in Sierra Leone because of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, particularly goal number seven (affordable and clean energy). Sierra Leone's tropical climate, heavy annual rainfall, and abundance of rivers give it potential to realistically pursue more solar and hydropower alternatives.[117]
Solar Energy [ edit ]
In conjunction with the UK's Department for International Development (DFID), Sierra Leone has set the goal to provide solar power to all of its citizens by 2025.[118] This overarching goal has been broken down into smaller goals as well. The first of these goals is to provide solar power to at least 50,000 homes in 2016, the second is 250,000 homes by 2017, and finally to provide power to 1,000,000 people by 2020.[118] This initiative falls under the Energy Africa access campaign which seeks to provide electricity to 14 different African countries by 2030.[114] Previous to this compact agreement, Sierra Leone's private sector for solar energy was weak, as it provided energy to less than 5% of the target population.[114] Part of the reason for this was due to the import duties and taxes and the lack of quality control.[114] In order to ensure that the Energy Africa goal is met, Sierra Leone has agreed to remove its import duties and Value Added Tax (VAT) on certified solar products.[118] This change will attempt to encourage foreign investment while providing affordable, quality solar products to its citizens. It is estimated that there will be a 30% to 40% cost reduction on solar products with the lack of duties and taxes.[114]
Hydroelectric power [ edit ]
As of 2012, Sierra Leone has 3 main hydroelectric plants. The first is the Guma plant which was decommissioned in 1982, the second is the Dodo Plant which is located in the Eastern Province, and finally the Bumbuna plant.[117] There is also potential for several new hydroelectric plants to be opened on the Sewa River, Pampana River, Seli River, Moa River, and Little Scarcies.[117] Amongst all these projects, both finished and potential, the Bumbuna dam still remains the largest of the hydroelectric projects in Sierra Leone.[117] It is located near the Seli River and Freetown and was estimated to produce about 50 megawatts of electricity.[119] There were plans to increase its capacity 400 megawatts by 2017 which would cost around $750 million.[120] It has been projected that the Bumbuna dam could potentially reduce the amount of spending on foreign fuel and save the country at least $2 million a month.[121] In the past this project received its funding of over $200 million from a combination of the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the Italian company Salini Impregilo.[119]
Society [ edit ]
Demographics [ edit ]
Sierra Leone's total population, from 1961 to 2003
In 2013 Sierra Leone had an officially projected population of 6,190,280[1] and a growth rate of 2.216% a year.[67] The country's population is mostly young, with an estimated 41.7% under 15, and rural, with an estimated 62% of people living outside the cities.[67] As a result of migration to cities, the population is becoming more urban with an estimated rate of urbanisation growth of 2.9% a year.[67][122]
Population density varies greatly within Sierra Leone. The Western Area Urban District, including Freetown, the capital and largest city, has a population density of 1,224 persons per square km. The largest district geographically, Koinadugu, has a much lower density of 21.4 persons per square km.[122]
English is the official language,[123] spoken at schools, government administration and in the media. Krio (derived from English and several indigenous African languages, and the language of the Sierra Leone Krio people) is the most widely spoken language in virtually all parts of Sierra Leone. As the Krio language is spoken by 90% of the country's population,[67][124] it unites all the different ethnic groups, especially in their trade and interaction with each other.[125]
According to the World Refugee Survey 2008, published by the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Sierra Leone had a population of 8,700 refugees and asylum seekers at the end of 2007. Nearly 20,000 Liberian refugees voluntarily returned to Liberia over the course of 2007. Of the refugees remaining in Sierra Leone, nearly all were Liberian.[126]
The populations quoted above for the five largest cities are from the 2004 census. The figure for Freetown is for the Western Urban Area (Greater Freetown). Other figures are estimates from the source cited. Different sources give different estimates. Some claim that Magburaka should be included in the above list, but there is considerable difference among sources. One source estimates the population at 14,915,[128] whilst another puts it as high as 85,313.[129] "Pandebu-Tokpombu" is presumably the extended town of Torgbonbu, which had a population of 10,716 in the 2004 census. "Gbendembu" had a larger population of 12,139 in that census. In the 2004 census, Waterloo had a population of 34,079.
Religion [ edit ]
Mosque and church in Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone is officially a secular state, although Islam and Christianity are the two main religions in the country and are both very influential in the government. The constitution of Sierra Leone provides for freedom of religion and the Sierra Leone Government generally protects it. The Sierra Leone Government is constitutionally forbidden from establishing a state religion, though Muslim and Christian prayers are usually held in the country at the beginning of major political occasions, including presidential inauguration and the official opening of the new session of Parliament.
According to a 2010 estimates by the Pew Research Center[4] 78% of Sierra Leone's population are Muslims (mostly Sunni), 20.9 are Christians (mostly Protestants) and |
be his own fate. “We are Libyans, this is our country and if someone has done something wrong here, they have to be judged in this country,” said Igtet. “Abu Khattala told me he is sure of his innocence. He said he has no problem to go to the court in Benghazi and face these issues there.”
Khattala never made it to a Benghazi court. In June 2014, he was captured by US special forces in a villa south of Benghazi, interrogated on a Navy ship for 13 days, and brought to the United States. US prosecutors have accused him of being a ringleader of the Benghazi assault. He has denied the charge. His trial is scheduled to begin in September.
Contacted by Mother Jones, Lieberman’s office said he was not available for comment.
When Khattala was nabbed, he was one of the FBI’s most-wanted terrorists, and bureau agents participated in the mission that grabbed him. Yet months earlier, Lieberman was working for a Libyan who had reached out to Khattala. Now, Lieberman may be Trump’s choice for FBI chief. If Lieberman does end up in the job, it will certainly be a first: an FBI director who once was a foreign agent for an overseas politician who cozied up to an alleged terrorist accused of killing Americans.
Will Republicans and conservatives care about this Benghazi connection?The Skip Barber Racing School has filed for bankruptcy, according to documents provided to The Drive, with somewhere between $10 million and $50 million in outstanding liabilities.
The school filed a petition for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York on Monday, according to the copy provided to The Drive.
The most prominent creditor by far is Lime Rock Park of Connecticut, the court filing reveals, with Skip Barber Racing School owing the track $1.225 million for track rent. Somewhat ironically, Lime Rock Park is owned by Skip Barber himself, who founded the school that bears his name. Barber has long since divested himself of Skip Barber Racing School, selling off controlling interest in it back in 1999.
The school also owes rent to several other race tracks across America, including $239,617.19 to Road Atlanta, $169,568 to California's Monterey County (the lawful owner of Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca), $112,000 to Mid-Ohio, $105,983 to Palm Beach International Raceway, $56,623.77 to Virginia International Raceway, and $29,600 to Willow Springs, among other unsecured claims to creditors.
The filing declares that the school possesses assets valued at roughly $5.3 million. That includes a listed $1,489,500 worth of automobiles and $1.6 million in auto parts. It also places a value of $2 million on the Skip Barber Racing School brand name and training techniques.
The Skip Barber Racing School was created in 1975, after Barber retired from professional racing and set about teaching high-performance driving as a coachable skill. According to the website, the school helped to launch the racing careers of Josef Newgarden, Spencer Pigot, Marco Andretti, Conor Daly, and many other professional drivers; it also counts celebrities as Tom Cruise, Patrick Dempsey, and Jerry Seinfeld among its graduates.Don’t worry about terrorism: baths are much more dangerous.
At least I think that’s the subtext of the latest infographic from The Economist – house journal to Davos man, Euro technocrats and the rest of the globalist elite.
Terrorism is here to stay, get used to it, the Ecommunist advises:
TERRORIST attacks are fiendishly hard to prevent. Anyone can rent or steal a lorry and drive it at a crowd. Especially in America, it is all too easy to buy high-powered semi-automatic weapons that can kill scores of people in moments. Neither great planning nor great intelligence is required to carry out such attacks. Thus it seems likely that much of Europe and America will have to get used to acts of Islamist-inspired terrorism becoming, if not routine, at least fairly regular occurrences.
It goes on:
Barack Obama was correct when he said earlier this year that the danger of drowning in a bathtub is greater than that of being killed by terrorists. Baths are a one-in-a-million risk. Even if the terrorism deaths in San Bernardino and Orlando were doubled to give an annual death toll, the risk would still be about one in 2.5m.
Well yes. But so what? A bath is a soothing, relaxing experience whose charms not even that scene in A Nightmare On Elm Street has quite managed to ruin. You can read magazines; you can wallow in every variety of bubbles and scented, therapeutic oils; you can improve the dextrousness of your toes by turning the hot tap on and off with your feet; you can listen to the radio; you can think deep thoughts.
Also, baths – in the unlikely event that they are going to kill you – do not alert you to your imminent demise with a bloodcurdling scream of “Allahu Akbar”; nor do they torture you beforehand like happened to some of the victims at the Bataclan massacre in Paris; nor are they undiscriminating. If you die in the bath, chances are you’re going to be elderly or infirm and probably on your way out anyway.
But the more serious point is this: reports like this have the dangerous consequence of buoying up the liberal elite’s complacency.
You hear this argument a lot from progressive intellectuals: terrorism is not an existential threat to our society; by paying undue attention to it we are “doing what the terrorists want”; extreme security measures are counterproductive because the inconvenience they cause law-abiding people outweighs the marginal improvements in public safety; etc.
I don’t buy this for the same reason I don’t buy the baths false analogy.
Baths – and the even more dangerous cars and horses and motorbikes and guns and alcohol – are risks we willingly endure because they improve our lives and make us happy.
Terrorism is pure evil. The idea that we should just learn to shrug our shoulders – as I’m sure many Ecommunist readers would like – and just go “Yeah, well it’s one of those things” is a counsel of despair, indeed it is the counsel of the devil.
There’s stuff we can do to stop it, a lot more – especially when it comes to draining the swamp which produces it.
Silly comparisons with bath mortality don’t help. They’re just glib defeatism.8 July 2016 in Beijing, People’s Republic of China
UNESCO and Talkmate host an official launch event to celebrate the beginning of a new and exciting partnership on the development of the World Atlas of Languages. The joint partnership aims at developing innovative and scalable ICT-supported models to access data on linguistic diversity around the world, encourage collaboration among different stakeholders and raise awareness on the importance of linguistic diversity and multilingualism for sustainable and inclusive development.
Building on the existing UNESCO’s Atlas of Languages in Danger, a new online collaborative platform “World Atlas of Languages” will provide a wide range of technical and collaborative facilities to all stakeholders to access and share own data on linguistic diversity, information about good practices, existing language teaching and learning solutions, and host user-generated content.
UNESCO and Talkmate launch event brings together a number of leading scientists, governmental officials, public and private organizations, UN organizations, as well as civil society to raise awareness of all stakeholders on the importance of linguistic diversity and multilingualism for sustainable and inclusive development. Accordingly, the thematic roundtable on “Language matters for development” assesses the current situation of linguistic diversity, identify existing challenges and new opportunities arising from scientific and technological development, and exchange the scientific information among higher educational institutions, national public institutions on language linguistic diversity, and application of languages in different domains, as well as form a new institutional network working on language issues.A paralympic athlete who had his carbon fibre blade stolen has received a replacement one ahead of competing in an international event in Berlin next week.
Monaghan athlete Shane McLaughlin said the new blade has been tested and small adjustments have been made.
Speaking on RTÉ's News at One, Mr McLaughlin said the blade is identical to the one that was stolen, but the socket is newer.
He said it has been an expensive replacement but the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Dun Laoghaire and Ability Matters have paid for the cost of it.
Mr McLaughlin said he has not given up hope that the old blade will be found and he has appealed to whoever stole it to give it back, and said he does not intend to press charges.
"All I appeal for is to get the other blade back. Just leave it back wherever and whenever and if they don't want to contact someone, just leave it at the side of the road, at the side of a hedge, where it's going to be noticeable and somebody will come along and they will contact the guards, or else they will contact me at my home house.
"Personally, I’m not going to do anything and if the Garda Síochána in Clones or Monaghan want to prosecute, that's up to the gardaí," he said.
The 42-year-old, who had his left leg amputated in 2012, is due to compete in the Berlin Open, an international paralympic competition that begins on 19 June.
His original blade was stolen from his car outside his home in Clonkeencole in Clones on 5 June.After months of speculation, Doctor Strange has been found.
Benedict Cumberbatch is in negotiations to take on the titular role in Marvel's film, slated for release on July 8, 2016.
Read more Benedict Cumberbatch's 'Doctor Strange' Casting Sets Twitter Ablaze
Joaquin Phoenix was at one time in negotiations, but Ryan Gosling, Jared Leto, Tom Hardy, Justin Theroux, Ethan Hawke and Keanu Reeves. For the past few months, some of Hollywood's biggest names have been linked to the role.was at one time in negotiations, but the talks fell apart in early October. Other names floating around included Cumberbatch,and
Benedict had been an early contender for the role and was again in the running after Phoenix dropped out. But his schedule, including his theater commitments, were always a conflict. But with Marvel not shooting Strange as early as previously believed, it looks like time will not affect this good doctor.
Read more Is Benedict Cumberbatch Too Obvious a Choice for 'Doctor Strange'?
Cumberbatch comes with an incredibly large fan base thanks to his Sherlock show and impeccable dramatic cred. And with The Imitation Game shaping up to be a major awards contender this season, a best actor nomination (or more) could also be on his curriculum vitae.
Scott Derrickson is directing the Marvel feature, which centers on a former neurosurgeon who serves as the Sorcerer Supreme — the primary protector of Earth against magical and mystical threats. Doctor Strange made his first appearance in the Marvel Universe more than 50 years ago, and was first created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in the pages of Strange Tales No. 110.I really like all the features that WordPress gives me. But I hate writing blog posts inside of WordPress. I want to do all my writing inside Emacs! Ideally, I’d be able to write my posts in Org-Mode, and publish them to my site from within Emacs. That’s today’s project.
First, I’m going to install org2blog. But org2blog needs xml-rpc.el as a prerequisite. I add the Tromey package archive (http://tromey.com/elpa/) to my package-archives, and install xml-rpc.el from there.
I then add the Git submodule for org2blog:
<p>git submodule add https://github.com/punchagan/org2blog.git elisp/external/org2blog 1 <p>git submodule add https://github.com/punchagan/org2blog.git elisp/external/org2blog
elisp/external
load-path
Remember, in episode 8 I set things up so that any directories inwould automatically be added to my
Now I need to give org2blog my login information. I decide to take the advice of the org2blog README, and keep my sensitive login information in my ~/.netrc file. The relevant.netrc line looks like this:
machine virtuouscode login MYLOGIN password MYPASSWORD 1 machine virtuouscode login MYLOGIN password MYPASSWORD
With that set up I can configure org2blog:
; It seems I need to do this first to make package loading work (package-initialize) (require 'netrc) (require 'org2blog) (setq abg-netrc-vc (netrc-machine (netrc-parse "~/.netrc") "virtuouscode" t)) (setq org2blog/wp-blog-alist '(("virtuouscode" :url "http://avdi.org/devblog/xmlrpc.php" :username (netrc-get abg-netrc-vc "login") :password (netrc-get abg-netrc-vc "password") :tags-as-categories nil))) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 ; It seems I need to do this first to make package loading work ( package-initialize ) ( require'netrc ) ( require'org 2 blog ) ( setq abg-netrc-vc ( netrc-machine ( netrc-parse "~/.netrc" ) "virtuouscode" t ) ) ( setq org 2 blog / wp-blog-alist'( ( "virtuouscode" : url "http://avdi.org/devblog/xmlrpc.php" : username ( netrc-get abg-netrc-vc "login" ) : password ( netrc-get abg-netrc-vc "password" ) : tags-as-categories nil ) ) )
Now that I know about the netrc package, I think I might go back and get rid of that secrets.el file I created in a previous iteration, and move my Gist login info into.netrc.
Since I blog so much, I go ahead and make some global keybindings:
(global-set-key (kbd "<f9>") 'org2blog/wp-new-entry) (global-set-key (kbd "S-<f9>") 'org2blog/wp-post-buffer) 1 2 ( global-set-key ( kbd "<f9>" )'org 2 blog / wp-new-entry ) ( global-set-key ( kbd "S-<f9>" )'org 2 blog / wp-post-buffer )
Now when I hit F9, I get a buffer that looks like this:
I can edit the buffer as an ordinary Org-Mode file, and then hit C-c d to publish it as a draft.
Now, there are a few nits left to iron out. For one thing, the default HTML that Org-Mode generates isn’t quite compatible with my blog’s stylesheet. I customize org-emphasis-alist to ensure that <em> and <strong> tags will be generated instead of <i> and <b>.
Now I turn my attention to making sure source code listings look pretty. First, I install the htmlize package using the package manager, so that Org-Mode can generate pretty source-code markup. Then, I change the org-export-htmlize-output-type option to css to cause it to generate HTML marked up with classes instead of inline styles.
The marked-up output won’t do me much good without a stylesheet to map classes to styles. Rather than write one from scratch, I tell Org-Mode to generate one for me with M-x org-export-htmlize-generate-css. Here’s a small sample of the generated code:
<style type="text/css"> <!-- body { color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; }.org-bold { /* bold */ font-weight: bold; }.org-bold-italic { /* bold-italic */ font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; }.org-border { }.org-buffer-menu-buffer { /* buffer-menu-buffer */ font-weight: bold; }.org-builtin { /* font-lock-builtin-face */ color: #483d8b; }... 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 <style type ="text/css"> <!-- body { color : #000000 ; background-color : #ffffff ; }.org-bold { /* bold */ font-weight : bold ; }.org-bold-italic { /* bold-italic */ font-weight : bold ; font-style : italic ; }.org-border { }.org-buffer-menu-buffer { /* buffer-menu-buffer */ font-weight : bold ; }.org-builtin { /* font-lock-builtin-face */ color : #483d8b ; }...
I pull out the CSS, save it as http://avdi.org/stylesheets/code.css, and update my blog template to link to that stylesheet.
And that’s it! Now I can blog from the comfort of Org-Mode.
And yes, as you might have guessed: this post was written and posted from inside of Emacs. Even the screenshots were automatically uploaded and linked into the post by org2blog!Ten-year-old Kayden Culp, a special-needs child who has a hearing impairment and speaks with a lisp, had been bullied in the past, relatives said.
Other boys he considered his friends “would make fun of him and pick on him and tease him,” his mother, Tristyn Hatchett, told the San Antonio Express‑News. “He was usually the brunt of that kind of joke, but he kept playing with them.”
On Sunday afternoon, Kayden hopped on his bike and headed out to play with three boys in a shed not far from home in Kerrville, Tex., relatives said.
Not long after, his parents received some alarming news: That shed was on fire.
Relatives rushed to the scene.
“We went out there not knowing it was Kayden on fire,” his aunt, Tanya Kasper, told The Washington Post.
When first responders arrived, they found Kayden “severely burned,” and he was airlifted to a hospital, police and fire officials said in a joint statement.
Family members and police said the boy was placed in a coma while his medical team tended to his second- and third-degree burns, which covered 20 percent of his body, from his bottom lip to his belly button.
In an ambulance, Kayden told his family that another boy “did this to me — he set me on fire,” his aunt said. “We haven’t heard his voice since Sunday.”
[Bullies allegedly tormented a 9-year-old boy. Relatives say it may have driven the child to suicide.]
But the accounts from Kayden’s family and the authorities in Kerrville tell different stories.
Family members had alleged that one of the boys doused Kayden with gasoline and another set him on fire.
“This was no accident!” Hatchett, Kayden’s mother, wrote on Facebook earlier this week.
“I need the police to arrest the … boys involved with the pre-meditated attempted murder of my 10 yr old son Kayden Culp!” she wrote.
“There’s no reason they should not already be incarcerated,” she added to the Express-News. “The other boys who were there [have] been telling kids at school that it was not an accident, that it was intentional.”
Kasper, the boy’s aunt, said family members cannot comprehend “somebody being so young having an intention to hurt another child.”
Indeed, the Kerrville Fire Marshal’s Office, which is investigating the incident, said in a statement Wednesday that a “juvenile has been identified as the individual responsible for causing the victim’s severe burns.” Authorities said a juvenile was taken into custody and charged with first-degree arson, a felony.
But at a news conference Thursday, Kerrville Fire Chief Dannie Smith said that “based on the results of our preliminary investigation, it does not appear that this event was premeditated or that there was any intent to harm any of the juveniles present.”
“We have not been able to produce any evidence to suggest that there was any intent to commit bodily injury to any of the four juveniles,” the chief told reporters, according to CBS affiliate KENS.
Police Chief David Knight told reporters that the juvenile who was charged threw accelerant onto an existing fire in the shed and that the flames ignited the container. When the boy “discarded” the burning accelerant container, it “inadvertently” struck Kayden, Knight said.
The chief said investigators believe the three boys and Kayden were “friendly” with each other and that “no one was coerced to be there.”
But Kasper, the boy’s aunt, told KENS that her nephew was only friends with one of those boys.
“They weren’t friends,” she said. “At least one of them we know about had a past with him. He didn’t like Kayden.”
[A boy who killed himself wrote a letter about bullying. His struggles may have started at home.]
Ashley White, a family friend, told the Express-News she had seen the boys playing in the area and, later, she heard sirens and saw the smoke spilling from the shed.
She phoned Kayden’s parents.
“They later said a lady up the street had helped put the fire on Kayden out,” she told the newspaper.
“I’m praying it was an accident,” she said. “But if it wasn’t an accident, justice needs to be served, because no child deserves to go through what he’s going through.”
Kayden Culp. (GoFundMe)
Kayden’s mother said Thursday morning that Kayden’s condition is improving.
“They have taken him off the epinephrine,” Hatchett wrote on Facebook. “He was able to stabilize his heart rate and blood pressure on his own all night. Still on feeding and breathing machines. He is going in for his second dressing change soon. We will know more about the severity of his burns and lung damage afterwards. His swelling seems to be reducing now. The last dressing change caused him to plummet.”
She added: “We want to thank everyone, everywhere for all of the thoughts, prayers and support. I can’t express how grateful we are. Truly amazing. We need the good to outweigh the evil.”
Late Thursday night, she added that Kayden “has done fairly well” in recovery.
“He has 3rd degree burns on his arm, neck and chest,” she wrote. “He will be getting skin grafts tomorrow. He is fighting infection and pneumonia now. Blood pressure and heart rate still doing well. Please keep praying.”
Hatchett also said she is seeking an attorney for her son.
Relatives call Kayden a loving child who struggles to fit in.
He has shown signs of autism, they said, but the disorder has not been diagnosed.
“Life has been a challenge from the get-go,” said Kasper, his aunt.
Kasper set up a GoFundMe page, writing that her nephew “needs prayers and lots of support. … Money is something that will not fix everything, but it will give the parents a chance to stay beside him and his other siblings. Kayden is going to change the world and he is now a voice for other children that are dealing with a ‘bully’.”
The campaign raised more than $29,000 before Kasper announced Friday morning that she was closing the account.
“I want to thank everyone that has contributed to the cause,” she wrote. “I am closing the account with the faith and gratitude that #TEAMKAYDEN has raised enough money to be able to start helping our family lay the foundation to solid new beginnings for this cause.”
A YouCaring site, which has raised $192,000, says: “He’s going to be in the hospital for quite a while enduring something no person, let alone a child, should ever have to go through.”
Read more:
Your child might be a bully. Here are 7 ways to stop that behavior.Orlando will host a third college football bowl game at the Citrus Bowl, sources told the Orlando Sentinel.
The Orlando Sports Foundation, which originally pitched the Cure Bowl as a game that could be played at UCF’s Bright House Networks Stadium and would benefit breast cancer-related charities, will manage the new bowl. It will not be affiliated with the Florida Citrus Sports, which oversees Orlando’s Capital One Bowl and Russell Athletic Bowl.
The game is expected to match teams from the American Athletic Conference, UCF’s current league, and the Sun Belt. It will be played before the Russell Athletic Bowl in December and would not conflict with any potential College Football Playoff or national championship games Orlando hopes to host in the future.
It initially appeared the new Orlando bowl would be played this year, but the game is now on track to debut in 2015.
City of Orlando officials stated they would be holding a news conference Wednesday at the Citrus Bowl to announce a partnership between the city and a local sports foundation.
Alan Gooch, who leads the Orlando Sports Foundation, declined to comment on the announcement Monday.
Sun Belt commissioner Karl Benson confirmed that his league is looking into a possible game in Orlando.
“It hasn’t been a secret that the Sun Belt has indicated a desire to be involved with a fourth guaranteed game,” Benson told the Sentinel Monday. “I don’t think it’s been a secret that there’s been an organization in Orlando that has attempted to launch a game.”
American Athletic Conference commissioner Mike Aresco said during a teleconference the league would announce a new bowl partnership Wednesday.
Gooch previously told the Sentinel in 2013 that the Orlando Sports Foundation was interested in creating the game “to keep raising money for breast-cancer research through a bowl game.”
Gooch said back in 2013 that several conferences were interested in participating in a game in Orlando, but the group was “continuing to go through that process.” He added there was also interest among several television networks.
Orlando already hosts two bowl games at the Citrus Bowl: the Russell Athletic and Capital One bowls. The Russell Athletic Bowl has agreements with the Atlantic Coast and Big 12 conferences to send teams to the game, while the Capital One Bowl has agreements with the Big Ten, Southeastern and Atlantic Coast conferences starting in 2014.
The Citrus Bowl is in the middle of a $200 million renovation, which is expected to be completed in time for this year's bowl season.
Conference realignment has expanded the number of teams in the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC, leading the leagues to sign more agreements with bigger bowl games. Other leagues like the American, Conference USA, Mid-American, Mountain West and Sun Belt have been scrambling to secure formal postseason partnerships.
Staff writer Mark Schlueb contributed to this report.Top Muslim leaders in the United States on Wednesday released a detailed refutation of claims by the terrorist group ISIS that its actions in Iraq and Syria are in keeping with Islamic law. The letter, signed by 111 prominent clerics from around the world, lists dozens of ways in which the clerics assert that ISIS has consistently violated Islamic law.
It urges ISIS leader and their followers to “Reconsider all your actions; desist from them; repent from them; cease harming others and return to the religion of mercy.”
Related: Obama’s Tough Talk May Not Be Enough to Beat ISIS
Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a presentation at the National Press Club in Washington that the purpose of the letter is to “debunk and expose the falsity” of the claim that ISIS is operating within the dictates of the Islamic religion.
The letter is written in classical Arabic, but an English translation was provided to reporters. Addressed to ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and to “The fighters and followers of the self-declared ‘Islamic State,’” it addresses 24 different statements or actions by ISIS and its members that the signatories say are specific violations of Islamic law. The violations cited stem from the obvious – murder, torture, desecration of corpses, and forced conversions – to more obscure violations, such as the illegal declaration of a caliphate and the issuance of fatwas (binding religious rulings) without the proper authority.
“These are 24 points, and point-by-point, their ideology has been rejected,” said Muzammil H. Siddiqi, chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America, the most senior Islamic jurisprudential body in the U.S.
“This so-called Islamic State is not a state and does not represent anything that is Islamic,” said Oussama Jammal, secretary general of the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations. “None of their actions pass any litmus test to show that they have a sound understanding of Islamic ideas.”
Related: Fighting ISIS Could Mean Higher Ratings for Obama
The list of signatories includes Islamic clerics from around the world, including Sheikh Shawqi Allam, the Grand Mufti of Egypt; Sheikh Mustafa Cagrici, the former Mufti of Istanbul; Sheikh Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, Mufti of Palestine; and dozens of other highly-regarded Islamic clerics.
Awad, of CAIR, said that he believed the American Muslim community “has spoken many times” about its opposition to ISIS, but that “it is time for mainstream Muslims around the world to condemn” the group.
Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:Ashima Shirashi Climbs her unrepeated problem, The Wave V10/11 Central Park © Francois Lebeau
New York, best known for its yellow cabs, retail stores and phenomenal skyline. It's a city full of coffee culture, alternative fashion. And rock climbing...
This lesser known fact may come as a surprise to most people. New York's not exactly the place you look to go when scouting for your next climbing destination. However, hidden within the various parks of the city are a large number of rocky outcrops that have a culture and community all of their own. Add into the mix the fact that people have been establishing routes here since the 1970's and you have a great climbing location, if only you knew where the boulders where.
I moved to the Big Apple in April 2012. Being a self-proclaimed climbing addict, I was a little disheartened to be moving away from the beautifully shaped gritstone crags of the UK to one of the world's largest metropolitans. I decided I was going to make the most of my time here in the 'concrete jungle'. After all, I'd heard that there were a couple of climbing gyms including Brooklyn Boulders, the largest centre in the city, so all was not lost. The gym was bustling with people and for a short time I was satisfied with my new home. I'm all for plastic pulling when it comes to training, but I'm more of an outside climber myself. After a couple of weeks, I started to ask around to see if anyone knew of climbing spots nearby. There were a few people that knew of some climbing in Central Park at a place called Rat Rock, but that was all. That night when I got home, I promptly began my search for rock climbing in the city and the location of Rat Rock with the intention of going there the next day.
I showed up at the rock early and to my surprise found a group traversing it. They were attempting a route named The Polish Traverse, a notoriously difficult V5 that was the test piece of the area. They were very welcoming and helpful in pointing out the boulder problems they knew, but when I asked where I could find a complete guide they had no idea. It turned out there was no real guidebook to rock climbing in the city and the routes were simply known through word of mouth.
Phil Schaal getting set for the dyno on Yo Yo Jimminy, V11 © Francois Lebeau
I returned to the rock several times that week to work on problems that locals had pointed out and on one of those days I met a couple of guys named William 'Bill' Piehl and Lorenzo Montanez. Bill had been climbing in the city for twenty years and filled me in on the history of climbing in New York including the many famous locals and visitors that climbed there; Yuki Ikumori, Lynn Hill, Ashima Shiriashi, Sasha Digiulian, Kevin Jorgeson and Ivan Greene. Even Sir Edmond Hillary was rumoured to have scrambled around on the rocks of Central Park. All this knowledge though was carefully held in the minds of locals, generally un-documented and in danger of being lost to time. I came to a conclusion. Why don't I document this knowledge in the form of a guide allowing more people to enjoy rock? It would build the community and immortalise the rich history of climbing in the most unlikely of places. How hard could it be?
Armed with Bill's knowledge, great support from the local climbing community and my seemingly endless free time while I waited for my Visa to arrive, I decided I would go ahead with the book project. We began documenting in May 2012 and figured we would have it all done by September. It quickly became apparent that my four month turnaround was an overly ambitious goal even with the forty hours a week I was spending writing, shooting images and exploring the city to find more crags. September came and went and I had only managed to document ten areas of the more than thirty we had found from our hundreds of hours travelling pretty much every street in Manhattan in search for rock. One of the main things slowing down progress was getting images for the guide, not helped by the fact that firstly I wasn't much of a photographer and just couldn't seem to capture the true feel of climbing in New York, and I didn't know many climbers to shoot pictures of.
Ivan Greene on the Monolithic Boulder project, Harlem River Drive © Francois Lebeau
In a wonderfully fortunate turn of events which is characteristic of New York, I met a brilliantly talented climbing photographer by the name of Francois Lebeau while at a gallery viewing in Williamsburg. After a brief chat we decided we would work together and organised to go shoot some images that week. With his talent behind the camera and my time freed up to focus on the writing, the project began to build momentum. Over the next few months, the guide quickly came together and Francois was out relentlessly snapping climbers from the local community, plus one or two celebrities.
By December, news of the guide was now humming around all the gyms with people psyched at the thought that they could climb in their city. We had completed documenting the hundreds of routes, both low and highball, with grades ranging from VB to V12; all there was left to do was find a graphic designer with some urban flair to do the book justice. Once again, the perfect person showed up at the right time in the form of talented designer and climber Anna Porreca. With a background in fashion advertising, Anna worked her creative magic on the guide, capturing the feel of the city's unconventional climbing perfectly.
By November 2013 after an estimated 2000 hours of combined work effort, we were finished and the guide was released by Sharp End Books with support from the Access Fund. It's taken blood, sweat and plenty of flappers to bring this guide to you and we're psyched to share this with everyone. My hope is that this guide will bring together the fragmented climbing community in New York whilst preserving and enriching the areas of history, sharing it with those who visit. I hope that this guide will pique your interest into visiting the boulders of New York. Perhaps I'll see you there?
Sasha Digiulian climbs Life is Beautiful © Francois Lebeau Gaz Leah on Wild Style, V12, Central Park © Francois Lebeau
Top Boulder problems:
The NYC Bouldering guide © Francois Lebeau There are over 30 bouldering locations in New York City and hundreds of boulder problems. Picking the best hasn't been easy but here are some of the favourites:
Polish Traverse, V5, Rat Rock West, Central Park South
Flake Route, V0, Rat Rock East, Central Park South
French Connection, V6, Sherman Boulders, Fort Tryon
Voodoo Bullshit, V2, Worthless Boulder, Central Park North
Ambidextrous, V5, Traverse Wall, Fort TryonA North Korean student, the son of an aide to Kim Jong-un’s executed uncle, is on the run in France after evading an abduction attempt by Pyongyang’s agents, according to foreign diplomats.
“There was an attempt to force him to go back, but it is thought he escaped and is somewhere in France. There is an attempt to locate him but he hasn’t been found yet,” said one diplomatic source.
The architecture student, referred to only by his surname Han, vanished from Paris last month. He is believed to be the son of a close confidant of Jang Song-thaek, Mr Kim’s once powerful uncle who was executed last December on treason charges. His father was killed recently as part of the purge of Jang’s allies.
“Since the 1980s, when the regime changes and someone is executed and his relatives and friends and family are studying abroad, they are brought home,” said Park Sung-jin, Paris correspondent for Yonhap, South Korea’s biggest news agency. “If Han returned he would likely be kept in a political prison or executed. That has happened many times. He knew what was awaiting him, so he escaped.”
The student’s disappearance has lifted the lid on the murky ties between France and the communist regime.
Despite having no official diplomatic relations with the dictatorship, France has invited North Korean students from privileged backgrounds to study architecture in Paris since 2002.
Mr Han was studying at the prestigious Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Architecture de Paris-La Villette. He had left North Korea for the French capital in 2012, along with nine other North Koreans, five of whom are posted at another architecture school in Belleville. They are in their third year of a five-year course. “We didn’t decide out of the blue to take on students from North Korea, the decision was made by the French culture ministry to whom we answer. This is over our heads,” said a head teacher at the La Villette school, who recalled her surprise when the first batch of students turned up wearing badges with the portrait of their “Dear Leader”.
The students were kept under close surveillance, she said. “There is often an Asian man in a three-piece suit waiting in the courtyard, checking up on attendance and if they get good results,” she added. “When one failed part of his exam and was sent home, a representative from the North Korean delegation in Paris wanted to take it in his place. We had to explain that wasn’t possible.”
After long denying its existence, the French foreign ministry confirmed that a “cooperation programme” involving “students from North Korea trained in architecture in Paris” had been in place for the past decade.
It had no further comment.
The programme was set up by Jean-Noel Juttet, a former French ambassador to Japan, who said he was asked by the French foreign ministry to find ways of “maint |
000 emails were destroyed by the Clinton camp -- in a feverish ploy to evade investigation. Rep. Chaffetz, along with Trey Gowdy, have been leading the way in Congress in pursuit of the truth, regarding the Clinton email scandal. Many on the left have lobbied for Trump to 'let go' of the Hillary investigation in order to 'heal the country' after a bitter and tumultuous campaign. However, nothing has been graceful about Hillary since her loss and it shouldn't surprise anyone if Trump, along with incoming AG Sessions, decided to pursue a case against her with energetic fervor -- draining the swamp of those implicated in the biggest political corruption cabal since Tammany Hall circa mid 19th century. Source: Washington Examiner
"This was never a political targeting in the beginning and just because there was a political election doesn't mean it goes away," House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told reporters Monday. "There were a lot of other characters that were involved in this that we have to look at." "This was potentially one of the largest breaches of security in the history of the State Department," he said. "It cannot and should never be repeated again. How is it that so much information was able to migrate out into the world? These are still open questions that we need to finish up so that they don't happen again." Chaffetz wants to review the security clearances of Clinton aides who helped manage the "extremely careless" email process described by FBI Director James Comey. Chaffetz said he is inclined to hold Bryan Pagliano, a key Clinton IT aide, in contempt of Congress for flouting subpoenas last year. "You can't just get a subpoena from Congress to testify and not show up," he said. The Utah Republican wants to target more senior officials, such as State Department Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy, in light of FBI suggestions that he tried to set up a "quid pro quo" with the FBI to suppress revelations that Clinton's email server held classified information. FBI leadership could also be a live target of the review, as Republicans are troubled that Va. Gov Terry McAuliffe, a longtime ally of the Clintons, made campaign donations to the wife of Andrew McCabe, the agency's second-in-command. "I'm very concerned about the straight-up conflict of interest that Mr. McCabe had," Chaffetz said. "That's something we'll continue to spend resources on."
Hillary for prison, 2017.
Content originally generated at iBankCoin.comDYLANBROCHILL has quickly risen through the ranks of Chiptune. From relative obscurity to undeniable infamy. It’s our pleasure to present you CHIPLEXTRO. A 5 track EP with perfectly polished and happily floating melodies. The album is complex but not abrasive, it clearly marks a new level of excellence for DBC, though it’s reminiscent of the heavy layering and attention to detail he’s become known for.
Visit http://soundcloud.com/dylanbrochill for more great stuff from DYLANBROCHILL.
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5 Tracks - Length: 11:37Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio) on Thursday said that he would become the GOP presidential nominee after a contested Republican National Convention.
“I am going to leave Cleveland as the nominee,” he said during the annual New York State GOP gala in New York City.
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“Whether you believe it or not, it’s going to happen,” Kasich added. "We are going to go to a convention. This is not about the nomination. This is about who can win the White House after defeating Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails County GOP in Minnesota shares image comparing Sanders to Hitler Holder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' MORE.”
Kasich said that either Clinton or Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersSenate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Bernie Sanders Town Hall finishes third in cable news race, draws 1.4 million viewers Woman to undecided Biden: 'Just say yes' to 2020 bid MORE would escalate the national debt if elected president.
“We have $19 trillion in debt,” he said. "When the debt goes up, your opportunities to get a job go down. By the time they’re done giving away all the free stuff, the debt will be up to $30 trillion and no one will be able to get a job. This is why we have to stop them.”
Kasich added that GOP voters should reject Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE and Ted Cruz Rafael (Ted) Edward CruzCornyn less popular than Cruz in Texas: poll Trump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020 Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington MORE, because they are too unlikable.
“Do you know what will happen if we nominate people who have high negatives and can’t beat Hillary?” he asked. "There’s a very good chance your Senate majority leader becomes your Senate minority leader.
“We risk losing everything from the White House to the state house to the court house if we don’t promote a positive, uplifting message. It’s not pie in the sky," he said.Jan 6, 2015
3D Systems unveils the CocoJet, a chocolate 3D printer at 2015 CES in Las Vegas today. Developed in collaboration with The Hershey Company, the CocoJet 3D printer prints custom designs in dark, milk or white chocolate, making it an ideal tool for bakers and chocolatiers craft confections.
Much like traditional 3D printers produce plastic objects, CocoJet heats and squeezes chocolates instead of plastic filaments. As chocolate is temperature dependent, it is very important to control the heating and cooling cycles accurately.
CocoJet debuted at the 3D Chocolate Candy printing exhibit at Hershey's Chocolate World on December 19, 2014. Visitors to Hershey's Chocolate World Attraction can witness live 3D printing, see examples of finished 3D printed chocolate, interact with a library of 3D graphics pre-loaded on iPads and be scanned to see what they would look like as a piece of 3D chocolate.
"Our partnership with Hershey, the largest producer of quality chocolate in North America and a global leader in chocolate and confections, allows us to create unique, exciting and personalized edible experiences," said Chuck Hull, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, 3DS. "Our preview of CocoJet at CES showcases the power and possibilities of 3D printing, and extends our experience and innovation in culinary 3D printing."
The collabration with Hershey was meant to incorporate 3D chocolate printing into Hershey's Chocolate World live experience, and 3D Systems says it provides valuable market research on the consumer applications for chocolate 3D printing.
"We are now using 3D technology to bring Hershey goodness to consumers in unanticipated and exciting ways," said Will Papa, Chief Research and Development Officer, The Hershey Company. "3D printing gives consumers nearly endless possibilities for personalizing their chocolate, and we look forward to continued development of this amazing technology."
3D Systems is also showcasing its ChefJet series, the first professional-grade food 3D printers, in its CES 2015 booth. The full-color ChefJet Pro will be food certified and produce edible 3D printed candies and decor, says the company. Built from 3DS' ColorJet Printing (CJP) technology, the ChefJet Pro features intuitive, chef-friendly Digital Cookbook software and creates intricate candies and sweets with a variety of flavor options. The ChefJet Pro is expected to be commercially available in the second half of 2015.
3D Systems says they intends to share its commercial plans for this class of chocolate 3D printers at a later date. Watch a video of this technology below.
Posted in 3D Printers
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Jay wrote at 1/12/2015 1:15:00 AM:"...and each pre-filled 8 ounce cartridge is only $16.95..." XDMN wrote at 1/8/2015 8:57:46 PM:How much does it cost?Axlotl wrote at 1/6/2015 4:52:52 PM:at least print failures will be yummyOfficials will announce Tuesday whether state troopers were justified in fatally shooting Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, a leader of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation.
Finicum, 54, was killed as police tried to arrest key figures in the refuge takeover. His death on Jan. 26 spurred claims that police acted without provocation, with some labeling his death a murder. The FBI has said Finicum was shot after he tried to elude police and reached for a gun.
The Deschutes County Sheriff's Office investigated the shooting, recently turning over results to Malheur County District Attorney Dan Norris. He was asked to oversee the investigation by Tim Colahan, Harney County district attorney, to provide an independent assessment. The shooting occurred in Harney County.
A news conference is scheduled Tuesday in Bend to release the results of the investigation. The sheriff's office hasn't released the time and place publicly, asking media to send an email to the office to attend.
The announcement is expected to provide more details about what happened in the operation conducted jointly by the FBI and the Oregon State Police.
The FBI already has issued one statement and an aerial video without audio of the confrontation. It shows officers approaching Finicum and his collapse in the snow. Finicum was carrying a loaded 9mm handgun, the FBI said.
Two witnesses involved in the police stop contested some points in the FBI description of what happened. Finicum's family has said his death wasn't justified. Finicum ranched and cared for foster children on his ranch outside Colorado City, Arizona.
His widow, Jeanette, has scheduled her own news conference in St. George, Utah, for Tuesday afternoon.
The shooting occurred as a Jeep and truck carrying occupation leaders drove north on U.S. 395 to a community meeting in John Day. About 20 miles outside Burns, police stopped the Jeep carrying Ammon E. Bundy, 40, of Emmett, Idaho. Bundy was the main leader of protesters who seized the wildlife refuge headquarters three weeks earlier. Also in the Jeep were Bundy's bodyguard, Brian D. Cavalier, 44, of Bunkerville, Nevada; and the driver, Mark C. McConnell, 37, of Buckeye, Arizona.
Robert "LaVoy" Finicum talks to media during a press conference Jan. 12, 2016. Thomas Boyd/Staff
Police also stopped the pickup driven by Finicum and carrying Ryan C. Bundy, 43, of Bunkerville, Nevada; Ryan W. Payne, 32, of Anaconda, Montana; Shawna J. Cox, 59, of Kanab, Utah; and Victoria Sharp, 18, of Lakeside, Montana. Ryan Bundy is Ammon Bundy's older brother.
The three in the Jeep surrendered to police as did Ryan Payne. The FBI video showed that Finicum then sped away from the traffic stop, crashing into a snow bank after encountering a police roadblock. The FBI later said he was shot by state troopers when he reached into his jacket for the handgun.
The Bundy brothers, Payne, Cavalier and Cox all were arrested on a federal conspiracy charge. McConnell and Sharp were released without charges. Sharp has since appeared regularly at rallies and other events in honor of Finicum and has spoken out against federal authorities. McConnell returned to Arizona and has continued to participate in a self-described patriot group, according to a recent Facebook post.
McConnell, Sharp and Cox all have recorded their own accounts of the traffic stop, which have been widely shared on social media. Cox also detailed the events of that afternoon in an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Initial claims by witnesses that Finicum was shot while he was surrendering with his hands up spurred virulent reaction in social media posts. Sharp has said Finicum was shot repeatedly and that more than 100 rounds were fired into the truck where she and the others were cowering. FBI officials have said officers fired flash-bang devices and sponge projectiles with pepper spray capsules at the truck.
Law enforcement officials have yet to release autopsy findings on Finicum's death. His family said it commissioned a subsequent private autopsy but hasn't released the results.
-- Les ZaitzAbout
Take truck and SUV customization to the next level with the SEMA Global Media Award winning product, the Hitch Demon! Using this WiFi enabled micro projector, controlled by your smart phone, you can represent the things you love. Go ahead, unleash your demon!
Hitch Demon fits most standard 2” hitch receivers and works on most pickup trucks, vans, motorhomes, box trucks and many SUV’s. So whatever your ride, you can express yourself.
Is 'because it's awesome' a good enough reason? To show your pride, whether that's for the team, the family, the country or your business.
Think your the number one super fan? Prove it.
Have the cutest kids in the world? Show us.
Got that trophy buck/elk/trout and want to brag? Go for it.
Want to show your love of God, country or whatever you hold most dear? Display it with pride.
Hitch Demon slides right into the hitch receiver of your suitable vehicle and locks in with the hitch pin. The Hitch Demon then runs on your vehicle’s power using the trailer power plug. It also has its own battery that will allow it to run for about 30 minutes before being charged again.
Hitch Demon couldn't be easier to use. Just plug it in, download the app, upload your pictures and go!
Now this is the amazing part…Hitch Demon broadcasts its own WiFi signal, allowing the user to control it using the iOS and Android compatible app. From the home screen, the app can access the camera roll on the device where you have saved or taken dozens of images. Simply click on the desired image, easily crop it within the app, and upload it to Hitch Demon. Hitch Demon also comes with a convenient remote control, so you can easily change images without needing to connect to WiFi.
Size Specifications • Weight: approximately 3 pounds • Fits in hitch receiver size: 2”x2” • Projected image size: 12”x9.5” at 18” distance; 14”x11.5” at 22” distance • Flexible arm allows for adjustment of projection location • Arm extends up from receiver approximately 17” depending on bend radius
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User Interfaces • Hitch Demon app (iOS and Android) for uploading and maintaining images stored on projector • Supports WiFi communication with Hitch Demon app on iOS and Android • Infared remote control for remote control operation of projector (must be line of sight for operation) • On/Off button • WiFi On/Off button.
Power Specifications • Operates on 12V DC vehicle power • Powered through flat 4 pin connector at hitch receiver • Internal backup battery
Projector Specifications • 640x480 pixels • 4:3 aspect ratio • Brightness: 50 lumens
Hitch Demon was invented by Trevor Seal, a long time automotive enthusiast. From Hot Wheels as a kid, to rebuilding cars with his Dad, automotive is a big part of who he is. The idea for Hitch Demon started several years ago when Trevor attempted to use projectors, mounted to the rear view mirrors, to project flames down the side of the van.
Ultimately, that endeavor became a bit too complicated and Trevor’s wife suggested he conduct his experiments on his own truck and leave her car out of it. That’s when the idea hit. The tailgate would make for a perfect screen. Not only that, there was already a secure, sturdy mount in place, not to mention a power supply. As Trevor started to refine the projector and weave in WiFi technology for easier use, he soon realized that he needed to expand the team—and skills needed to make this happen.
Hitch Demon has gone through multiple revisions in order to land with a patented, reliable, dust and water resistant, sweet-lookin accessory. The first prototype was introduced at SEMA in Las Vegas, the biggest aftermarket automotive show in the world. Among the 100,000 industry leaders from 100 countries, Hitch Demon was awarded the Global Media Award for presenting one of the best new products at the show.The Arizona Coyotes face the Florida Panthers on Thursday night, and Mike Smith will tend goal for them.
Normally, this wouldn’t be news: He’s the starter, after all. But he’s also been terrible this season: 2-4-0, with a 4.29 GAA and an.858 save percentage. At even strength, even worse:.855 save percentage. This includes the 7-3 drubbing from the Tampa Bay Lightning on Tuesday.
“Smitty had an average night. Again. And we didn’t play that well in front of him,” said Coach Dave Tippett.
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Tippett’s defended Smith throughout the team’s struggles, and he has a point: The Coyotes have inexplicably been sloppy in defensive coverage this season. Players like Oliver Ekman-Larsson have made some downright amateurish mistakes, which Tippett chalks up to trying to do too much to pull the team out of its slump.
“He’d certainly like to make a few more stops, but we have to clean up some of the stuff in front of him. We’re missing assignments, just plain and simple. Giving up opportunities we shouldn’t be giving,” he said.
“You start pressing. Overdoing things, instead of getting in a rhythm.”
So the Coyotes focused on defensive coverage in practice, and Smith gets another chance at finding his groove against the Panthers.
It’s an important start for him. One assumes Devan Dubnyk will get a start over the weekend as the Coyotes play Saturday in Carolina and Sunday in Washington.
“He came around, he played a couple strong games there before we came out on the road. And while his numbers have been just as bad – five goals against on 43 shots at even strength – one good performance while Smith struggles could make things interesting.
Story continues
Of course, a good performance from either goalie could just mean that the Coyotes have finally put together a solid game, which hasn’t happened much in their 3-4-1 start: Fox Sports notes that they’ve only led for a total of 47:54 this season.Update: Reaction from Saginaw runner who felt blast at finish line
SAGINAW, MI — A photograph of a woman wearing a Saginaw Valley State University race shirt with fake wounds on her legs and face, meant to appear as a Boston Marathon bombing victim, has gone viral.
The photograph drew attention and criticism from members of the online community after the 22-year-old woman, identified by Buzzfeed as Alicia Ann Lynch of Michigan, posted the photograph to her Twitter account, @SomeSkankinMI.
The account has since been suspended.
The story gained national news coverage in the days following the tweet as online mobs rallied against Lynch and her costume.
Buzzfeed reports that online users found a photograph of Lynch's driver's license to the same Twitter account and used the information to contact Lynch and others associated with her.
Lynch told Buzzfeed that she and her family have received death threats and she lost her job in the days following the Tweet.
Lynch's name is listed as a participant in the Oct. 19 SVSU Healthy-U 5K Run & Walk.
A knock on the door of a Saginaw home associated with Lynch went unanswered on the evening of Sunday, Nov. 3.
Twitter user Sydney Corcoran, who identified herself online as a victim of the Boston Marathon bombing whose mother lost both her legs, Tweeted to Lynch's account that she should "be ashamed."
Others criticized Lynch, though some asked for online haters to give her a break for the mistake:
Question
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What is your opinion about the costume? Let us know in the comments section below:Originally from Ohio, Julie always dreamed of a job in science. Either shooting for the stars or delving into the mysteries of volcanoes. But, life never leads where you expect. In 2007, she moved to Mississippi to be with her significant other.
Now a mother of a hyperactive red headed boy, what time she’s not chasing down dirty socks and unsticking toys from the ceiling is spent crafting worlds r
Originally from Ohio, Julie always dreamed of a job in science. Either shooting for the stars or delving into the mysteries of volcanoes. But, life never leads where you expect. In 2007, she moved to Mississippi to be with her significant other.
Now a mother of a hyperactive red headed boy, what time she’s not chasing down dirty socks and unsticking toys from the ceiling is spent crafting worlds readers can get lost it. Julie is a self-proclaimed bibliophile and lover of big words. She likes hiking, frogs, interesting earrings, and a plethora of other fun things.Last week, among a gathering of friends, we ended up debating for many hours, the subject of creation, religion, and god. It was a lively discussion to say the least, and one I was ill-equipped for, after drinking 10 glasses of wine, and on many occasions, found it difficult to articulate my proper thoughts, much as I imagine, did many of my friends. One rather large mistake we made, was not stipulating a suitable foundation to base our friendly discussion upon, which led to us going around in circles for far too long, as well as relying, far too much on our inter-cranial intuitions, thinking that because we can think certain things, that they must then be granted validity of truth, even in the face of objectivity and even when experimentation says that is not the case. But I want to express what foundation is required for this kind of discussion in order for it to be relevant, to others, as well as any future discussions I get into on the subject, and, somewhat selfishly, articulate my proper thoughts from last night.
First and foremost, one must understand the difference between objectivity and subjectivity. The definition of ‘objectivity’ is “existing independently of perception or an individual’s conceptions.” However, the definition of ‘subjectivity’ is “belonging to, proceeding from, or relating to the mind of the thinking subject and not the nature of the object being considered.” So, pursuant to this, an objective fact exists regardless of whether or not you believe in it. By ignoring objective facts in any debate, you may as well pillow fight instead of debating any subject in which objective facts cannot be agreed upon, as it would be preferable to the frayed nerves and spilled wine of not being able to agree on 2 + 2 = 4, or specific to last night, that Quantum Mechanics is the most verified and repeatable theory in all of human existence (denying it is tantamount to denying the existence of oxygen because you can’t see it.) However, a subjective fact is something that is contingent on an internal state of being, or thought in one’s mind. It is not wholly based upon the outside world, and it has no basis in reality for anybody else save for the thinker. An example would be, ‘religion makes me feel better’. It may do that, but that does in no way, shape, or form mean that religion helps other people, or is a beneficial characteristic in all religious people. I, myself know many unhappy religious people as well as many happy religious people. Happiness and religion are not definitively linked by subjective thoughts, though they are correlative. But on the other hand, the world being spherical and weighing 6×10^24 kg is true, whether you agree with it or not, or even, whether you know it or not.
Secondly, in order to be intellectually honest, one should only give their opinion on a hugely complicated issue, when they understand, at the very least, more than one facet of such a multi-faceted issue, as is the issue of creation. For example, if one wishes to discuss creation: where did the Universe come from? It is not sufficient to tackle this question from the basis of your philosophical intuitions. At best, you will arrive at an answer that is insufficient (i.e. the ancient Greeks) or at worst, and far more common, an answer that is simply wrong. Instead, such questions can only be tackled and overcome, if one also understands Einstein’s Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Inflation (not the monetary kind), String Theory (or the multi-verse theory,) as well as having an understanding of the religious texts (though not necessary, but helpful in contrasting), philosophical intuitions (and their limitations), neuroscience, and evolution. Even then, not only must you comprehend each of them individually (to varying degrees,) but how they come together and bounce off each other and form a cohesive whole. We all know that nothing exists in isolation on this planet and in this universe, yet invariably in such debates, issues are debated in pure isolation and just assumed to be true in an inclusive environment. Any viewpoints you have on the matter of creation, absent knowledge of the above subjects (and perhaps a few others I may have neglected to mention) are meaningless. If you do not understand that time is relative, then you will ask the question, what came before the Big Bang, but time didn’t exist before the big bang so the question is irrelevant. If you are unable to comprehend that quantum fluctuations create something out of nothing, because nothing is inherently unstable (and not a preferred state of being as philosophers will have you think), will naturally led you to the question, why is there something rather than nothing? The question is again, meaningless. The two states are not equal, and the latter may not even exist at all.
Any opinion made on creation, of the Earth, of the Universe, of God, that does not consider the positions and objective facts of relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, as well as that of many others is ineffectual. If one does not take into the account the facts of the reality we live in, then the subsequent statement, having been made in light of its absence, has no basis in reality, and thus the statement can be tossed aside with nary a second thought as to its validity, and the chagrin of the speaker (unfortunate as that maybe.)
Neuroscience shows us that we are far more emotional than rational. It tells us that we cling to stories that make us feel good, rather than preferentially embrace the truth, and that we cling further to feel-good-stories in the face of hard-realities. It tells us that our faculty is completely subjective in the absence of objective facts, and thus cannot be trusted in painting a real picture of the world, and as such, any statement made about creation, about god, about religion, that is subjective, is irrelevant, no matter how personal or true it may feel to the orator.
Last night’s debate with my friends was enjoyable, though equally frustrating. Everybody’s opinions are not equal, and anybody’s opinion that does not respect the reality of the Universe they live in, is wrong before the first word oscillates from their vocal chord. Just because someone says something is true, does not make it true, and the inability to comprehend objectivity and subjectivity is tantamount to acknowledging one’s own ignorance. Human beings are not truth-seekers, we are truth-creators, and the only tool that we have created that can possibly acknowledge objectivity in our reality, is science. It is the combined effort of hundreds-of-thousands of independent minds each attempting to rip apart and prove wrong each others theories and hypothesis’. In such an environment (the opposite of religion in which the majority of people simply take it on evidence-based faith; an oxymoron in and of itself, i.e. their holy books), only the theories, that can withstand the brutal assault of the smartest people in the world day-in-day-out remain, and successfully describe reality in such a way as no individual could have done on their own, remain standing. Ignore such objectivity at the peril of your own ignorance. I know no simpler way to put a hard truth.
“The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.” – Marcus Aurelius
I’ve believed false-realities before, and know how hard it is to attempt to overcome the emotional attachment and bias that our irrational minds create to them, but it can be done, and on the other side, a better subjective reality can exist if one is open-minded enough. Perception is not reality, though our minds operate as if it was. The reason why is simple, our brains can only process a tiny fraction of the information it receives through its five senses, and so when you think, or seek some kind of subjective reality, your mind attempts to find corroborative, correlative nuggets of said-subjectivity out of the tiny fraction of information it receives, and bends your thinking to that fraction, subsequently giving you the false impression that that view is inherently true. This is the biggest problem in religious-style thinking. Our intuitions are far more often wrong, than right, and this is why anybody expressing subjective opinions, in light of objective reality, should have their views dismissed with no thought to the personal benefit they receive from it. It is harsh yes, but unfortunately necessary.
“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not your believe in it.” – Neil Degrasse TysonLa Jetée Theatrical release poster Directed by Chris Marker Produced by Anatole Dauman Written by Chris Marker Starring Hélène Chatelain
Davos Hanich
Jacques Ledoux Narrated by Jean Négroni Music by Trevor Duncan Cinematography Jean Chiabaut
Chris Marker Edited by Jean Ravel Production
company Argos Films Distributed by Argos Films Release date 16 February 1962 ( ) (France)
(France)
Running time 28 minutes Country France Language French
German
La Jetée ( French pronunciation: [la ʒəte]) ("The Jetty", here referring to an outdoor viewing pier at an airport) is a 1962 French Left Bank science fiction featurette by Chris Marker. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel. It is 28 minutes long and shot in black and white.
It won the Prix Jean Vigo for short film. The 1995 science fiction film 12 Monkeys was inspired by and borrows several concepts directly from La Jetée, as does the 2015 12 Monkeys television series developed from the film.
Plot [ edit ]
A man (Davos Hanich) is a prisoner in the aftermath of World War III in post-apocalyptic Paris, where survivors live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. Scientists research time travel, hoping to send test subjects to different time periods "to call past and future to the rescue of the present". They have difficulty finding subjects who can mentally withstand the shock of time travel. The scientists eventually settle upon the prisoner; his key to the past is a vague but obsessive memory from his pre-war childhood of a woman (Hélène Chatelain) he had seen on the observation platform ("the jetty") at Orly Airport shortly before witnessing a startling incident there. He did not understand exactly what happened, but knew he had seen a man die.
After several attempts, he reaches the pre-war period. He meets the woman from his memory, and they develop a romantic relationship. After his successful passages to the past, the experimenters attempt to send him into the far future. In a brief meeting with the technologically advanced people of the future, he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed society.
Upon his return, with his mission accomplished, he discerns that he is to be executed by his jailers. He is contacted by the people of the future, who offer to help him escape to their time permanently; but he asks instead to be returned to the pre-war time of his childhood, hoping to find the woman again. He is returned to the past, placed on the jetty at the airport, and it occurs to him that the child version of himself is probably also there at the same time. He is more concerned with locating the woman, and quickly spots her. However, as he rushes to her, he notices an agent of his jailers who has followed him and realizes the agent is about to kill him. In his final moments, he comes to understand that the incident he witnessed as a child, which has haunted him ever since, was his own death.
Cast [ edit ]
Jean Négroni as narrator
Hélène Chatelain as the Woman
Davos Hanich as the Man
Jacques Ledoux as The Experimenter
Ligia Branice as a woman from the future
Janine Kleina as a woman from the future
William Klein as a man from the future
Production [ edit ]
La Jetée is constructed almost entirely from optically printed photographs playing out as a photomontage of varying rhythm. It contains only one brief shot (of the woman mentioned above sleeping and suddenly waking up) originating on a motion-picture camera, this due to the fact that Marker could only afford to hire one for an afternoon. The stills were taken with a Pentax Spotmatic[1] and the motion-picture segment was shot with a 35 mm Arriflex.[2] The film has no dialogue aside from small sections of muttering in German and people talking in an airport terminal. The story is told by a voice-over narrator. The scene in which the hero and the woman look at a cut-away trunk of a tree is a reference to Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo which Marker also references in his 1983 film Sans soleil.[3]
Interpretation [ edit ]
In Black and Blue, her study of postwar French fiction, Carol Mavor describes La Jetée as taking "place in a no-place (u-topia) in no-time (u-chronia)" which she connects to the time and place of the fairy tale. She goes on to say "even the sound of the title resonates with the fairy-tale surprise of finding oneself in another world: La Jetée evokes 'là j'étais' (there I was)". By "u-topia", Mavor does not refer to "utopia" as the word is commonly used; she also describes an ambiguity of dystopia/utopia in the film: "It is dystopia with the hope of utopia, or is it utopia cut by the threat of dystopia."[4]
Tor Books blogger Jake Hinkson summed up his interpretation in the title of an essay about the film, "There's No Escape Out of Time". He elaborated:
What [the main character] finds... is that the past is never as simple as we wish it to be. To return to it is to realize that we never understood it. He also finds–and here it is impossible to miss Marker's message for his viewers–a person cannot escape from their own time, anyway. Try as we might to lose ourselves, we will always be dragged back into the world, into the here and now. Ultimately, there is no escape from the present.
Hinkson also addresses the symbolic use of imagery: "The Man is blindfolded with some kind of padded device and he sees images. The Man is chosen for this assignment because... he has maintained a sharp mind because of his attachment to certain images. Thus a film told through the use of still photos becomes about looking at images." He further observes that Marker himself did not refer to La Jetée as a film, but as photo novel.[5]
Reception [ edit ]
In 2010, Time ranked La Jetée first in its list of "Top 10 time-travel movies".[6] In 2012, in correspondence with the Sight & Sound Poll, the British Film Institute deemed La Jetée as the 50th greatest film of all time.[7]
Science fiction writer William Gibson considers the film one of his main influences.[8]
Legacy [ edit ]
The video for Sigue Sigue Sputnik's 1989 single "Dancerama" is also an homage to La Jetée.[9]
The film is one of the influences in the video for David Bowie's "Jump They Say" (1993).[10]
Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1995) was inspired by and takes several concepts directly from La Jetée (acknowledging this debt in the opening credits).
The 2003 short film La puppé is both an homage to and a parody of La Jetée.[11]
Kode9 in collaboration with Ms. Haptic, Marcel Weber (aka MFO), and Lucy Benson created an homage to La Jetée in 2011, for the Unsound Festival.[12]
Northern Irish rock band Two Door Cinema Club screened the film at the launch party for their 2016 album Gameshow. The final track on the album, "Je viens de la", is inspired by La Jetée and describes the journey of the film's protagonist.[13]
Related media [ edit ]
In 1996, Zone Books released a book which reproduced the film's original images along with the script in both English and French.[14]
Home media release [ edit ]
In Region 2, the film is available with English subtitles in the La Jetée/Sans soleil digipack released by Arte Video. In Region 1, the Criterion Collection has released a La Jetée/Sans soleil combination DVD / Blu-ray, which features the option of hearing the English or French narration.
See also [ edit ]The first fully post-FBI shocker ABC/WaPo poll is out and it is a shocker: in a poll that saw Hillary lead by a dominating 13 points as recently as one week ago, moments ago ABC/WaPo/Langer Research announced that Trump has not only taken the lead from Hillary, but this is the first time he has done so since May.
As a reminder, this is the same |
use the bro-minology, but I'm really just bustin' some balls here. I kid because I care. But I also kid because, c'mon. Sometimes we can all stand to laugh at our damn selves."
One big problem with Chinen's argument is that unlike Mailer, he doesn't lay out the stakes, which is notable because there's plenty to care and worry about. Record sales are atrocious and—in spite of an amazing range of new, vital music made by musicians young and old—the music risks becoming a museum piece. Have you been to a jazz concert recently? (Odds are no!) Often the audience can be broken into three main groups: aging jazz fans; aging concertgoers (bourgeois types who subscribe to the local orchestra and care about a range of performing arts, but don't obsessively track new jazz releases); and then a bunch of what Chinen would apparently call jazzbros. There's no one else to speak of. The problem isn't that the young jazz-listening audience is dominated by a subgroup that might be identified as jazzbros. It's that the entire group is jazzbros.I’m really not sure what to make of it. But I’m extremely intrigued by this series of comments by former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski on the NewsHour. I’m cutting out some cross-talk and comments by the other guest Stephen Hadley (who held the same position under President Bush) to focus on Brzezinski’s comments …
The real issue is, who is feeding Wikipedia on this issue — Wiki — Wiki — WikiLeaks on this issue? They’re getting a lot of information which seems trivial, inconsequential, but some of it seems surprisingly pointed. JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, what are you referring to? ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Well, for example, there are references to a report by our officials that some Chinese leaders favor a reunified Korea under South Korea. This is clearly designed to embarrass the Chinese and our relationship with them. The very pointed references to Arab leaders could have as their objective undermining their political credibility at home, because this kind of public identification of their hostility towards Iran could actually play against them at home.
… JUDY WOODRUFF: And what is it — what are you worried about with regard to the knowledge that… ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: It’s not a question of worry. It’s, rather, a question of whether WikiLeaks are being manipulated by interested parties that want to either complicate our relationship with other governments or want to undermine some governments, because some of these items that are being emphasized and have surfaced are very pointed. And I wonder whether, in fact, there aren’t some operations internationally, intelligence services, that are feeding stuff to WikiLeaks, because it is a unique opportunity to embarrass us, to embarrass our position, but also to undermine our relations with particular governments. For example, leaving aside the personal gossip about Sarkozy or Berlusconi or Putin, the business about the Turks is clearly calculated in terms of its potential impact on disrupting the American-Turkish relationship.
Hadley goes on to say that a simpler answer is that there’s just some very damaging stuff in a quarter of a million documents. And I suspect he’s right. But I’m also not ready to dismiss Brzezinski’s speculation. It’s one of the oldest trick in the intel book to seed bogus documents into a cache of authentic ones. And while the idea here would be that all are genuine, the same logic of concealment would apply.At noon, Washington, D.C.’s air temperature was a simmering 89 degrees – the hottest location in the entire U.S. Factoring in the humidity, it felt like a suffocating 94 in Washington.
On Weather.com’s map of U.S. temperatures, D.C. was hotter than any other city by at least 3 degrees.
Granted, we currently have a 2-3 hour sunshine advantage over the Southwest, but we’re taking it to neighbors in the Southeast as we’re several degrees warmer than Atlanta, New Orleans, and Miami.
The 89 degree reading was not only warmer than any location on Weather.com’s map, but also warmer than any of the hundreds of observing locations nationwide, which includes many small towns.
The Web site Cool.Wx.com has a page that lists the location in the U.S. with the warmest temperature every hour. Washington, D.C. Reagan National is the posted “winner” at both 11 a.m. (15 UTC) and noon (16 UTC).
Remarkably, over the past 10 days, D.C. is the location farthest north to have logged the warmest temperature in a given hour. By far, most of locations with the warmest temperatures each hour have been in Florida, Texas, and Arizona.
The warm, humid airmass affecting the D.C. area right now is, in fact, record-breaking.
Sunday’s low of 70 degrees was the warmest on record, breaking the old record of 69 from 1974.
The low temperature this morning only reached 72 degrees, four degrees above the highest low temperature on record for the date of 68 (from 1995). There’s an off-chance we’ll drop below 72 before midnight, especially if we get a drenching thundershower. But it’s unlikely we’ll drop below 68 – so another record seems inevitable.
Today’s record high temperature of 96, from 1877, probably won’t be matched, but we could get as hot as 92-94.
Air this hot and this humid is certainly not common this early in the year, but seems to simply be an extension of the pattern which established itself at the beginning of May. The average temperature this month is running almost 8 degrees above average. From May 10-12, we tied (May 10 and 11) or broke (May 12) record high low temperatures daily.
[This May is on track to be among the warmest and driest on record in D.C.]
Washington, D.C. has a history of occasionally being the U.S. hot spot. Here are just a few previous examples we’ve documented:
June 18, 2014
July 16, 2013
July 17, 2012
June 20, 2012
July 22, 2011Nobody has broken out of the Idaho State Correctional Institution in more than 20 years. Prison officials like to think a hard-bitten corps of sentries with names like Cookie, Bongo and Chi Chi has had something to do with that.
The institution is the only state prison in the U.S. to use snarling, snapping sentry dogs to patrol its perimeter.
In a program begun in 1986, 24 mean dogs — mostly German shepherds, Rottweilers and Belgian malinois, with a few boxers and pit bulls — roam the space between the inner and outer chain-link fences 24 hours a day, ferociously defending their territory.
Get too close to the fence and they will bare their teeth, bark and lunge. Set foot in their space and they will attack.
The animals themselves are former death-row inmates — dogs that were deemed too dangerous to be pets and would have been destroyed at the local pound if they had not been given a reprieve and assigned to prison duty.
"We're basically giving them a second chance at a good, healthy life," said Corrections Officer Michael Amos, who heads the sentry dog program. "Those same instincts that make them a bad pet make them good sentries."
Prison officials say the canines save on manpower and are more reliable during power outages than electrical security systems and more effective in the fog and the dark than the humans posted in the lookout towers. They also seem to have a powerful deterrent effect.
No one has escaped from the 1,500-inmate medium-security prison since the dogs were brought in. No one has even tried to get past the fences since the early 1990s.
"The average offender has no problem engaging in a fight with a correctional officer — they're used to fighting with humans. But they don't want to mess with a 100-pound Rottweiler who has an attitude and who wants to bite the snot out of them for climbing that fence," said James Closson, a dog trainer in Boise who arranged the donation of some overaggressive dogs to the prison when the sentry program was new.
Dependable sentries
Over the years, the dogs have bitten handlers, badly mauling a staff member who in the late 1990s entered the kennel without first making sure all the animals were caged. But no inmates locked up at the prison have been bitten, authorities said.
Dogs were once widely used as sentries in the U.S., particularly after World War II, when canines that had been trained by the military were pressed into civilian service. The practice fell out of favor during the civil rights era as police dogs became associated with racist and repressive law enforcement, said Chris Byrne, owner of Stonehill Kennel and Unlimited Dogs, which provides police dogs to the New York Police Department.
Many prisons continue to use dogs for tracking escaped inmates or sniffing out drugs or other contraband, but not as sentries.
"Most facilities have gone to electronic motion detectors or electrical fencing," said Jay Christensen, deputy warden of security at the Idaho prison. "But technology can be circumvented. We had a guy at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution get through a motion detector system a few years back" by moving so slowly that the sensors didn't pick him up.
"The dogs are much more dependable and the cost is really low," he said.
Convict shot
In the early 1990s, three inmates at ISCI tried to escape through the one portion of the fence that wasn't guarded by dogs at the time, Christensen said. The guards in the towers could not see them in the dark, but a dog along a nearby section of the fence sounded the alarm by barking.
The ruckus alerted the nearest tower guard, who fired a shot, hitting one of the convicts, Christensen said. The two others were so frightened by the shot that they gave up, and all three were recaptured, he said.
Officials promptly reconfigured the fence so that there were no sections without dogs, he said.
Angus Love, executive director of the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, an inmate advocacy group, said he knows of no complaints about the use of prison sentry dogs.
The dogs work two days on and one day off. On their days off, they are returned to their kennel, where their handlers groom them, play ball and tug-of-war with them, or, in the summer, let them splash in a plastic kiddie pool. The handlers have to be alert at all times because of the danger of getting bitten.
Low-cost security
Adam Goldfarb, a spokesman for the Humane Society of the United States, said that the Idaho prison appeared to be handling the dogs well, but that he had mixed feelings about the program.
"We love the thoughts behind it, of taking dogs who would otherwise be euthanized and finding a way to work with them and give them a kind of purpose to their life," Goldfarb said. "But we'd have concerns of the dogs being harmed in some way, if an inmate could throw or poke something through the fence that could harm the dogs. And I'm not sure what kind of life that is for a dog. When people have dogs in their home, we would certainly discourage them from leaving the dog on a chain or in a pen for most of their life."
The program, with 36 dogs in all, costs less than $100,000 a year, including food and veterinary care, Christensen said. He worries that one day, officials will come up with the $300,000 or more he estimated it would cost to replace the animals with electric fences or motion detectors.
"Is this K-9 program going to survive for ever and ever? Probably not," he said. "But I tell you, I do not want to be the deputy warden of security who takes these dogs off the perimeter. I consider that a risk to the public."A man who covered his face and tried to swipe the cash box from the Hare Krishna lunch line on the University of Florida campus Thursday afternoon was quickly thwarted by a group of Krishna supporters, who police say cornered him until officers arrived.
UF Police Sgt. Tim Peck said his agency got a report at 12:55 p.m. that someone had taken the money box from the Krishna lunch table at the Plaza of the Americas — Krishnas have served lunch to students and UF community members for years.
Anthony Davila Stirling distracted the cashier, took the cash box and ran, but several people detained him until officers arrived, Peck said.
Stirling was taken to the Alachua County Jail and he's charged with grand theft and wearing a hood or mask during a crime, jail records show.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
OKLAHOMA CITY - An apartment fire kept fire crews busy Saturday morning near N.W. 23rd St. and Villa.
The blaze broke out at the Chateau Deville Apartments and damaged five units in all.
Sweet Brown said, “Well, I woke up to get me a cold pop and then I thought somebody was barbecuing. I said, ‘Oh Lord Jesus, it’s a fire.’ Then I ran out, I didn’t grab no shoes or nothing, Jesus. I ran for my life and then the smoke got me, I got bronchitis! Ain’t nobody got time for that.”
According to the apartment manager, the fire started in a woman’s home who is bound to a wheelchair.
She was treated for smoke inhalation at a local hospital.
We’re told the entire complex may be without electricity for some time.
The American Red Cross is helping those families displaced by the fire.The gap between Jeb Bush and Republican voters is this big. Photo by Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
You could almost call this week the official start of the 2016 presidential race. Yes, the “invisible primary” of jockeying and influence has been going on since the end of the last election. But it’s only been in the last few days that the structure of the field, on both sides, has become clearer.
For Democrats, clarity means the picture is still static. Hillary Clinton still towers over every potential competitor, the most popular person in the Democratic Party not named Barack or Michelle. Need proof? In a survey released this week, 50 percent of Americans said they could support Clinton in an election. And in a hypothetical primary—drawn from an average of available polls—almost two-thirds of Democrats support Clinton over everyone else in the field, from Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren to Vice President Biden. And, contrary to some observers, this isn’t like 2006 or 2007. Then, Clinton was a modest favorite in the field. Now, she’s the undisputed leader.
Where things have changed are in the internal dynamics of the party. A year ago, the left of the Democratic Party didn’t have an ideological leader. Now, it arguably does in the form of Warren. Many see this as a prelude to a presidential run, but it’s just as likely that she tries to institutionalize her influence as a party broker, someone who speaks for liberal Democrats and can claim concessions in return for support. Or, as Dana Milbank argues for the Washington Post, a left-wing analogue to former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, who now serves as president of the conservative Heritage Foundation.
If that’s true, then the ambiguity of Warren’s status in the presidential race—“Is she running?”—is a strategic choice. The more Clinton, or anyone else, is worried about a Warren insurgency, the more likely it is that that person will try to adopt her positions or assuage her concerns as an ideological leader. No, the eventual Democratic nominee won’t be Elizabeth Warren, but she might sound like her.
On the Republican side, chaos still reigns. On Thursday, political scientist Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia published a ranking of the GOP presidential field. It has seven sections—from an empty “first tier” of front-runners to a seventh tier of shameless hucksters—and 21 candidates, including Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.
But of all of these candidates and potential candidates, we now have a standout. On Tuesday, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush announced that he was exploring a presidential run, following discussions with family and supporters over the Thanksgiving holiday. “As a result of these conversations and thoughtful consideration of the kind of strong leadership I think America needs, I have decided to actively explore the possibility of running for President of the United States,” Bush wrote in a message on Facebook.
The case for Bush is easy to make. The son of one president and the brother of another, he has deep ties to the donor class of the Republican Party, which—according to the New York Times—might try to coalesce around a single candidate in the early stages of the primaries. Indeed, with his moderate beliefs on immigration and conservative orthodoxy on taxes, he appeals to the business-oriented and “establishment” officials and lawmakers in the party.
And while it seems Bush would have trouble with actual Republican voters, who favor hard-line leaders like Walker or Texas Gov. Rick Perry, it’s also true that these are voters who chose an architect of Obamacare—former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney—to run against President Obama. Bush’s heresies on immigration and Common Core are big, but they’re not fatal. And they’re balanced by his staunch social conservatism—Bush, remember, was the man who ordered doctors to keep Terri Schiavo on life support in 2003.
With all of that said, I am very skeptical that Bush could survive the primaries. It’s not so much his qualifications as it is his skill, drive, and personality. The first warning sign is his stated aim for a candidacy. Here’s the New York Times:
“I think people are ready for somebody honest, frank, and willing to tell them what they think,” said [former Secretary of State James] Baker, adding of Mr. Bush, “I think he could run in a primary where he’s true to himself, his values, and policy positions.”
That is the campaign Mr. Bush’s small inner circle is hoping he will run.
“We often say, ‘Let Jeb be Jeb,’ ” is how Mike Murphy, a longtime adviser, put it.
Mr. Bush seemed to be musing on such an approach last week before a gathering of chief executives in Washington, when he said that a Republican hopeful had to be willing to risk the nomination in order to remain competitive in November. “Lose the primary to win the general without violating your principles,” Mr. Bush said at the event, sponsored by The Wall Street Journal.
Unless Bush plans to drag the Republican Party in a different direction than where it is, this is just untenable. As a candidate, Bush will have to reconcile himself to where the party is, and if he can’t do that—if he refuses to do it—then he’ll lose.
There’s also the fact of his long sabbatical from the groundwork of politics. Bush hasn’t run a competitive race in more than a decade. He’s spent little time on the trail, and he can’t seem to connect to grassroots Republican audiences; during a campaign stop in North Carolina this year, he alienated the headliner—Thom Tillis—with pro-immigration and pro-Common Core rhetoric, forcing Tillis to distance himself from Bush. It was a disaster.
For as much as observers have compared Bush to Romney—center-right politicians in a hard-right party—there’s a key difference: Romney spent half a decade courting the various factions of the GOP before winning the nomination in 2012. If Bush has that kind of hustle, he just hasn’t shown it.
In pop-cultural terms, Republican insiders want to believe that a Bush campaign would be the Watch the Throne of politics, a triumphant return to form for a once-successful figure. But there’s a good chance it becomes the Kingdom Come—an expensive, high-profile failure.This post was contributed by a community member.
A 25-year-old Rockville resident was arrested and charged with obstruction and hindering after recording his interactions with police with a video camera on January 15.
The resident, Jared Parr, posted the video and audio of the interaction on his YouTube channel, Rockville CopWatch, where he has posted a number of videos covering the police activity in Rockville.
Patch spoke with Parr to find out, among other things, why he started RockvilleCopWatch and what he hoped to accomplish through his videos and actions.
Rockville: What made you start Rockville CopWatch?
Jared Parr: Police interaction is nothing new to me, it goes back since I was pretty young, and it's never been positive from what I remember. Admittedly, there were some times when I deserved it, but a lot of times I didn't. I was kind of put off by what seemed like a systemic problem of harassment and intimidation.
In school, that's what they teach you. You can trust a police officer. As I got older, I realized—no, you can't trust police officers. They're trained to incriminate you, to have you incriminate yourself rather.
I saw a systemic problem, and I wanted to hold them accountable and help people realize that these are supposed to be public servants. They're supposed to be protecting people, not trying to incriminate them, especially when they haven't done anything.
Patch: Are there any specific incidents in the past that made you think, I really need to do something about this?
JP: I think it was a combination of a lot of incidents. Some of it was merited on my part, I admit to that, but regardless, it was also just the way that they treated you. Even if it were an asinine thing, they would still treat you like less than human. It's this mentality that I quickly started to see that they don't respect the people that they're supposed to be serving.
Patch: Were you getting positive feedback or support when you started the channel?
JP: A lot of my friends were like, 'What's the point of this?' and 'It's a waste of time.' My response to that was, 'You do what you can, when you can.' If you have the ability to record something, just record it. If you have extra time, just do it because that has saved a lot of people. There's been a lot of cases where it's just somebody walking by, and they see something going on and they record it, and that dramatically changes the outcome of the case.
Patch: How much time do you devote to Rockville CopWatch?
JP: It varies. For a while I was doing a lot of speed camera warning in Rockville. Just holding a sign saying'speed trap' so people would slow down.
I really don't devote a super amount of time to it. It's not consuming my life. When I have time, I'll do it. Maybe once a week for a little bit.
Patch: What are your plans for the future of Rockville CopWatch?
JP: I definitely plan on continuing to do it because the problem isn't resolved.
I hope other people start joining, but as far as commitment, you just do what you can when you can and you can't really ask for anything more than that.10. I Would Never Have Got Into The Wrestling Business In The First Place
You caught me on a good day. Much is going on in my life at the time, and it is truly time for me to just sit back and reflect. Life is all about decisions---we make some good ones, we make some bad ones. However, at the end of every life lesson, all that really matters is what did we learn about ourselves. How can we take each and every experience and make us better human beings for it. Because, quite frankly, thats really all we can do with our mistakes. We cant rewind, we cant do over, we just have to live, learn and move on. The things I would have done differently throughout my wrestling career didnt really consist of moments. There werent too many moments in the wrestling business that had I decided to go another way, my life would be dramatically different. What I would have changed had to do with the important decisions that indeed did have a huge impact on my life. Solets start at the beginning.There is no doubt about this. With all the highlights throughout my career that you think I may have experienced, there were at least 10 lowlights for every single one. But, let me start from the beginning. The moment I made the decision to make professional wrestling my career, I knew right then that I was painting myself into a corner because my options would be very limited. If I had ever decided to leave WWF, where was I going to go? At that time, I knew that ECW wasnt going to be a main stay. To me, it just never had the feel of turning into a full-fledged viable third promotion. It had nothing to do with Paul Heyman, or the talent that was there, but it did have everything to do with MONEY. So, if you ever wanted to explore other options---there was only WCW. You had no other options. You werent working for a mobile phone provider where you have 10 options---you had ONE. This is something that I still deal with today. When you have a resume that consists of 23 years of sports entertainmentexactly what are you going to do with that?As VentureBeat points out, the old Messenger was popular with users in the Asia-Pacific region, and according to Bloomberg, the old Yahoo Messenger actually still had a weirdly strong following among oil traders who used the app to bid and gossip on commodities prices. Apparently those two groups aren't enough to keep supporting such a dinosaur of an app. In a blog post, Yahoo explained the shut down:
While today we provide basic interoperation between the legacy product and the new Messenger, we encourage all of our users to complete their transition to the new Yahoo Messenger as we will no longer support the legacy platform as of August 5, 2016. We intend to continue our focused efforts on the new Messenger, with a goal of delivering the best experience to our users.
After August 5th, anyone still using the legacy Messenger will no longer be able to log in or send messages. Same goes for messages sent through third-party apps built on top of Yahoo's API. The new Messenger, however, is still available on the App Store and Google Play.12 arrested in San Francisco in Dakota Access Pipeline protest
Pedestrians pass One Sansome St. in San Francisco in this file photo. Pedestrians pass One Sansome St. in San Francisco in this file photo. Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close 12 arrested in San Francisco in Dakota Access Pipeline protest 1 / 3 Back to Gallery
San Francisco police arrested a dozen people Monday who were protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline at Citibank headquarters in the city, officials said.
Demonstrators filled the street outside the building at 1 Sansome St. and filed into the lobby just before 9 a.m. carrying signs that read, “Water is Life” and “Citi Don’t Fund Dakota Access.”
Twelve protestors were arrested in the lobby on suspicion of trespassing after three orders for dispersal were ignored, said Officer Carlos Manfredi, a police spokesman.
They were expected to be cited and released, Manfredi said.
The protestors locked themselves to one another to prevent access to the elevators in the building, said Laurel Sutherlin, a 39-year-old San Francisco resident who joined the protest.
“The level of inconvenience of having to go to a different entrance when going to work is awfully small when compared to people putting their lives on the line to stop [the Dakota Access] from happening,” Sutherlin said.
The protest, organized by Diablo Rising Tide, demanded that Citibank halt financing of the $3.8 billion crude oil pipeline project that is expected to span 1,168 miles.
“Today was really about pulling the veil back and exposing [Citibank’s] association with this bigger controversy,” Sutherlin said. “Citibank still has the opportunity to pull out.”
The Standing Rock Sioux and environmental groups say the pipeline project threatens historic and sacred sites and drinking water from the Missouri River.
Ongoing protests in North Dakota took a turn Thursday when police stepped in and arrested about 140 people.
Sarah Ravani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SarRavaniI think what’s most outstanding about Divergent’s 3D printed car tech is that it envisions a future that I would want to live in.
Certainly I appreciate the electric, autonomous concepts, beta prototypes and tech demonstrators that every single other carmaker trotted out to the Consumer Electronics Show this year. But the only future they offer is one where I have to work on my commute to work and more lithium gets mined out of the more remote corners of the globe.
Divergent’s car is certainly disruptive, maybe the most disruptive car at the show, but it’s human-driven and gasoline-powered.
Well, the actual car itself, a tandem one-door/two-seater supercar called the Blade is mostly a proof of concept. It’s a badass proof of concept, sure, and it’s one that tests the company’s ability to put its tech on the road, but it seems like it’s a very bright envelope around an incredibly cool process.
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I’ve seen 3D printed cars before, but they’ve always been blocky and clunky, hideous and not good at being cars. I always got the feeling that companies built them just because they could; they were never lighter, cooler, better than traditionally-manufactured vehicles.
Divergent is 3D-printing their whole cars out of metal. Aluminum and titanium frames, crash structures, suspension assemblies, the whole lot. I mean, not the carbon fiber reinforcements, and not the wheels and tires, but the rest of it.
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Divergent builds the car with metal powder fused by lasers. There are no steps or clunky chunks in the design as each piece is all kind of a single gigantic weld.
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The technical term is ‘sintering,’ or ‘quad-laser direct metal laser sintering’ if you want to sound extra badass. It’s melting the metal directly into a solid form.
And the shapes this process allows are extraordinary. They look completely organic. Making a part like the suspension assemblies with traditional means would require some kind of master technician milling out gigantic block of metal by hand. It would be nigh impossible on a basic level, utterly unfeasible as part of a production car.
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I had initially thought that Divergent made their pieces like this to show off how weird they could make their parts shaped.
I was quickly corrected when I floated the idea at the show floor. Divergent stresses that these are the optimal shapes for the component’s strengths and loads.
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They make their parts look like this not just because they can, but because there’s no lighter or stronger way to make them.
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Divergent’s own hardware and software evolves its car parts. It’s like nature in car form. Of course they all end up looking like alien bird bones.
Divergent recently signed its first deal with a major car manufacturer, Peugeot. The deal went through, Divergent’s CEO Kevin Czinger explained, after Google listed Divergent as one of its favorite companies, then urged Peugeot’s CEO Carlos Tavares (the same guy who pushed Nissan into developing its colossal electric car program) to check its work out. Six months of “intensive due diligence” followed, where Peugeot basically checked all of Divergent’s work. Divergent would produce a part, and both Divergent and Peugeot test it to make sure it matched expectations in tensile strength and performance.
When Peugeot finally OK’d the deal, Divergent showed Peugeot how it could take a whole 200 kilos (nearly a quarter ton) out of its family hatchback 308.
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That affords not only incredible gains in fuel economy and performance, but it also simply cuts down on a lot of the steel we’re trucking around the world, burning fossil fuels for production.
The weight savings came not from component versus component weights of traditional metal stamping versus 3D printing. Divergent’s methodology gave them better material properties, allowed the use of better materials in better locations and allowed better optimized designs. How pieces can be fit together is totally different when its limitations are opened up by 3D printing. Divergent wasn’t changing part by part; it was changing the whole system of the car. Today’s cars aren’t pieced together necessarily in the best way for strength or lightness; they’re pieced together in the best way given the limitations of stamping out big pieces of metal. Looking at how all the pieces of Divergent’s own 3D printed design gives you a sense of how differently a car can be when you remove those limitations.
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I asked Czinger about the earliest days working with Peugeot. How far along was a major OEM like that in 3D printing? Were they at a kind of step one? Step zero?
“This is about a production process,” Czinger corrected me. This isn’t just about 3D printing.”
These are wonderful gains for the car world, but they’re not my favorite part about Divergent.
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The thing about 3D printing cars means you don’t just have to use heavy stamped metal parts; you don’t need humongous half-mile long assembly lines to produce them. Something like a warehouse on the edge of town could house enough 3D manufacturing ability to produce an entire car.
And there’s no inflexible tooling.
“The machine doesn’t care if an hour before it was making a truck, or an hour later it’s building a supercar,” Czinger beamed.
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He envisions a world where there are many more car designers, easily computer-modeling whole front ends for cars and sending the data to be materialized at a local factory.
This isn’t like Henry Ford building assembly plants around the world to hammer together complete knock-down kits. This is like the kit car boom of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, only without all of the limitations and cheesiness of having to use fiberglass. Divergent’s future isn’t sitting in traffic like today, only with the hum of gas engines replaced by electric quiet. Divergent’s future is a much richer, more diverse, more flexible, and more environmental car ecosystem. So many more designs, saving so much fuel and material and waste.
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Unlike half the shit I saw at CES, I desperately want to see this vision of the future come real. Peugeot is already invested in it; I hope more car companies follow.There was even a rating agency, the Kroll Bond Rating Agency which gave this particular pool an investment grade rating. According to the Wall Street Journal, " (Kroll) said the securities are structured so that half the loans in the pool could default and all the bonds still would be repaid, while the lending company absorbs the losses. The high interest rates on the loans are expected to cover any losses from people defaulting." Through February, approximately 12% of these loans (as well as those of another company called Exeter) were 30 days past due and 1/3 were more than 60 days.
Transparency, Provenance and What A Distributed Ledger Would Look Like
In a previous blog post on subprime mortgages I explained why using a distributed ledger would have helped deter the crisis. I also described data provenance and why I thought it made sense for asset backed securities. In this post I am going to go a step further and describe who I think needs to be a part of the supply chain in order to make a distributed ledger a robust solution for the problems of lack of transparency and tracking audit trails. I will also go through the process of what a typical asset backed transaction looks like and why being able to track and monitor it is necessary for establishing proper audit trails of the supply chain and increases transparency. Transparency is a very good thing.
In order for provenance to work really well, getting the entire ecosystem to agree to protocols and standards (Identity and who can read/write/view) is very important. Also getting all the players on the ledger is necessary so let's map out who needs to be the nodes (in no particular order):
Auto finance companies- (giving loans to people who may or may not be credit worthy)
Banks
Underwriters- selected by the seller to purchase the ABS and resell them to investors. They are supposed to perform due diligence on the assets and the structure of the transaction and confirm that the prospectus and other documentation are accurate. Once they sell, they don't have any more interaction with, or interest in, the transaction.
Lawyers- part of the above process.
Rating Agencies
Private Investors and other Transaction Participants- (those who buy the ABS's from the sellers and can re-sell them)
Servicers- perform duties that are stipulated in the servicing agreement for the transaction investors. Servicers take a fee for performing these obligations. They typically collect all income from the assets, enforce the assets as needed and may perform any evaluations needed to substitute assets. Servicer reports to the security holders information on collections and how the assets are performing. This helps determine the payment streams or losses to investors. Servicers evaluate and approve loan modifications, short sales and other default strategies to mitigate losses. It also takes control in the case of foreclosures to undertake actions in the trustee's name. (The seller and the servicer have more knowledge of the transaction than any other participants.)
Trustees- applies funds delivered and instructed by the servicer and provided in the transaction documents to pay interest and principal on securities, to fund reserve accounts and purchases of additional assets. Trustees act as Asset Custodians, analytics providers and paying agent.
Seller- (the party that sells the ABS)
Independent Accountants
Regulators
A Typical Asset Backed Security Transaction
A seller transfers assets in 2 ways: A trustee receives pass through certificates that show ownership interests in the assets or a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) is created. Seller of the assets can sell them through an SPV directly or through underwriters to investors. A pooling and service agreement or something similar forms the basic document which sets forth the relationships between the parties and the assets. (a very long, hard to understand document) The seller along with underwriters and/or private investors, determines the structure, drafts the documents and prices the transaction. The seller selects other participants for the deal including |
2012/12/03/15641738-north-korea-claims-discovery-of-unicorn-lair?lite
Man calls cops, prostitute -shorted him http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/06/15730413-man-arrested-after-complaining-to-cops-that-prostitute-shorted-him-10-minutes?lite
Beer Can Festivus Pole in a Nativity Scene http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/09/15785729-beer-can-festivus-pole-placed-beside-nativity-scene-in-florida?lite
Gaming News
Streets of Rage remake cancelled – http://www.gamespot.com/news/canceled-streets-of-rage-remake-footage-appears-6401094
Xbox 720 for holiday 2013? – http://www.gamespot.com/news/xbox-720-for-holiday-2013-report-6400831
Warcraft, valor points per boss up from 25 to 40
Warcraft : Cinder – Kitty now available on the Blizz store with 100% of revenue going to American red cross through December 31.
Look Ahead at Patch 5.2 WoW: 5.2 – Transmog changes, any 2h to modify any other 2h, same with 1h weapons, so 2h axe mog to be a 2h sword Patch 5.2 will add new architecture, geography,and a new story. A new raid is currently planned that will be similar in quality to Ulduar, and of course more dailies Patch 5.2 will bring about talent changes, looking at less used talents and making them more attractive and bringing them in line with current talents picked more often
Ghostcrawler Interviews consolation loot from the bonus roll 28g 50s the “Fail Bag” in the future looking to have different rewards, like bonus valor, more gold, gems, or rare chances at blue BoE gear, pets or mounts while transmog for legendaries is under debate, it is “somewhat likely for the future” Currently more ret pallies than Rogues MoP daily quests have shown players aren’t excited about competing with other palyers for mob tagging Blizzard realizes that Golden Lotus, Kalaxxi have enough dailies to burn folks out, but Shado Pan and Augst Celestials are more reasonable
Discussion Points: Describe your perfect sandwich
FOFFs, Random Questions and much more!
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RAY
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And of course a huge shout out to our awesome chat room!Kansai Electric Power Co. is planning to reactivate an idled nuclear reactor on the Sea of Japan coast on May 17 at the earliest, sources close to the matter said Tuesday.
The planned restart of the reactor 4 at the Takahama plant in Fukui Prefecture is expected to bring the total number of online commercial nuclear reactors across Japan to four.
Reactors 3 and 4 passed the stricter safety standards introduced after the 2011 Fukushima No. 1 meltdowns and restarted in February last year. But immediately after that, unit 4 was shut down due to a technical problem.
The operation of reactor 3 was also suspended in March 2016 after the Otsu District Court in a neighboring prefecture of Shiga ordered the utility to shut it down. The two reactors have remained offline for more than a year since then.
But Kansai Electric has stepped up its efforts to reactivate the two reactors as the Osaka High Court reversed the lower court ruling in March.
Kansai Electric also plans to reactivate reactor 3 unit in early June, the company said earlier.NHL.com continues its preview of the 2015-16 season, which will include in-depth looks at all 30 teams.
ST. LOUIS -- It's business as usual for the St. Louis Blues as they enter the 2015-16 season.
Business as usual from a standpoint of continuing regular-season success, which has been a staple the past four seasons under coach Ken Hitchcock; their 389 points are more than any other team.
But despite all the regular-season success, the Blues have one Stanley Cup Playoff series win to show for it, including last season's loss to the Minnesota Wild in a Western Conference First Round series.
Change was expected during the offseason, but much of the core remains in place. The biggest change was the acquisition of right wing Troy Brouwer, goalie prospect Pheonix Copley and a third-round pick in the 2016 NHL Draft from the Washington Capitals for right wing T.J. Oshie.
With a few other minor alterations, the Blues feel they're in a good position to be among the Stanley Cup contenders again. And with a new season starting Oct. 8, Hitchcock, who signed a one-year contract May 26, wants his players looking ahead and not back.
"My opinion is when you sit and think about the past, you do yourself no good," Hitchcock said. "If you learn from the past, that's when you do yourself a whole bunch of good. We want to learn from what happened, which is why we're doing the things we've done in training camp. We've learned and we want to put it in place, but we want to focus on Game 1 of a very important season. But it's like learn and now move on. And the moving on means getting better and not running and hiding."
Brouwer and center Kyle Brodziak, a free agent who signed July 2 after spending the previous six seasons with the Wild, were the Blues' top offseason acquisitions. Both provide the abrasive, tough, physical style the Blues believe they will need moving forward in Hitchcock's fast and reckless style of play.
"Reckless for a 63-year-old man might be different than reckless for some young bucks," captain David Backes said. "[Hitchcock's] seen something that's going to be tweaked in our systems where we are more reckless and more on the move and playing a faster game rather than slowing it down. Not that we played slow; but making that fast game our identity and trending in that direction and getting transition, capitalizing on odd-man rushes and being more dangerous off the rush. That makes us a better team."
The Blues' top line is expected to consist of left wing Alexander Steen, who set NHL career-highs in points (64) and assists (40) last season; center Paul Stastny, who had 46 points in 74 games in his first season with Blues; and right wing Vladimir Tarasenko, who led the Blues in goals (37) and points (73) last season. The Blues signed Tarasenko to an eight-year, $60 million contract July 7.
Left wing Jaden Schwartz, who set NHL career-highs in goals (28), assists (35) and points (63) last season, is expected to play with center Jori Lehtera, who had surgery Aug. 4 to remove a bone chip from his right ankle but returned late in the preseason, and either Dmitrij Jaskin or Brouwer at right wing.
Depth at forward could push Backes, who scored 26 goals last season, to third-line center. His linemates could include Robby Fabbri, the 21st pick of the 2014 NHL Draft, at left wing, and Jaskin or Brouwer. Brodziak will center the fourth line with left wing Steve Ott and right wing Ryan Reaves.
Schwartz has gotten time in camp at center and Backes has played some right wing, his natural position, so there's plenty of choices for Hitchcock.
Center Patrik Berglund will start the season on injured reserve while recovering from Aug. 28 surgery on his right shoulder and isn't expected back until January. The Blues brought in veterans Scott Gomez and Scottie Upshall on professional tryouts.
The Blues, who finished tied for fourth-fewest goals allowed with 197, will have the same top-four defensemen as last season: Alex Pietrangelo, Kevin Shattenkirk, Jay Bouwmeester and Carl Gunnarsson.
The big change comes with the third pairing.
Gone are veterans Barret Jackman, who signed with the Nashville Predators, and Zbynek Michalek, who signed back with the Arizona Coyotes after being traded to the Blues on March 2. They'll be replaced by Robert Bortuzzo, acquired March 2 from the Pittsburgh Penguins, and 2012 sixth-round pick (No. 176) Petteri Lindbohm.
"It'll be different," said Bouwmeester, who had his streak of consecutive games played end at 737 last season because of a groin injury that bothered him the rest of the season. "It's a couple younger guys I guess, but I think it's good. Nowadays you look around and it's more than ever a young man's League. Both of those guys [Bortuzzo and Lindbohm] came in last year and showed they can play. They've got to be excited of course. It's good when you have fresh blood. That excitement kind of wears off on guys."
Chris Butler, a native of St. Louis, was re-signed to be the seventh defenseman, and draft picks Joel Edmundson (2011, No. 46) and Colton Parayko (2012, No. 86) have pushed hard during training camp but likely will start with the Chicago Wolves of the American Hockey League.
Brian Elliott and Jake Allen provided a strong 1-2 punch for the Blues last season, and they'll return to form a solid duo again.
Allen, who was 22-7-4 with four shutouts, a 2.28 goals-against average and.913 save percentage, got more playing time than Elliott down the stretch and earned the starting role during the six-game series loss against the Wild.
Elliott, was 26-14-3 with a 2.26 GAA and.917 save percentage in 46 games, and his five shutouts gave him a Blues-record 21. But it was the second time in as many seasons and third time in four he started the playoffs as the backup.
Last season Allen played well after Elliott sustained a knee injury and Hitchcock stuck with Allen during the postseason.
"We turned away from Elliott twice because of injury, not because of play," Hitchcock said. "It's unfortunate that he got hurt, but when he got hurt the other guy jumped on it last year so that's the way we went. Elliott had a better year than Jake. Jake had a great finish and so that's the way we went."
The Blues were one of three teams, along with the Vancouver Canucks and Pittsburgh Penguins, to finish last season in the top 10 in power play and penalty kill. The Blues' power play was fourth at 22.3 percent and the penalty kill was seventh at 83.7 percent.
Brouwer could further boost the power play. Of his 46 goals the past two seasons with the Capitals, 20 of them came with the man-advantage, including eight of his 21 goals last season.
There was some question whether Hitchcock would return for a fifth season with the Blues after the first-round playoff loss to the Wild.
Hitchcock would not commit to coming back when the Blues held their close-out meetings, but after some soul-searching and conversations with general manager Doug Armstrong, he decided to return to try to make good on not only the regular-season record but the postseason record. The entire coaching staff, which includes associate coach Brad Shaw and assistants Kirk Muller and Ray Bennett, return.
"We own both records," Hitchcock said. "We own the record in the regular season and we own the record in the playoffs, so let's learn from it; let's use it to get better."They might not be the sort of folks you'd expect to hear making such complaints, but several Mountain View families with income from companies like Apple and Google say rent increases are now a source of considerable anxiety.
"We want to stay here, but we're just terrified that we'll be pushed out" by rent hikes, said Ravit Ortiz, the treasurer for Bubb School's Parent-Teacher Association whose husband works at Google. "I don't think it's fair to tear our child away from an incredible community and start all over again."
According to data firm Real Facts, average asking rents in Mountain View are on the rise, with an average increase of 12.4 percent between the first quarter of 2013 and the first quarter of 2014. The average rent for a three-bedroom apartment was $3,387 in March, up from $2,954 in 2012.
Ortiz said that Silicon Valley's housing shortage is forcing her to consider the possibility of working and spending time away from her kids -- just to pay rising rents in Mountain View. Downsizing is out of the question, as she jokes that her duplex unit has rooms as small as some of the bedroom displays in Ikea.
"I love helping out all the kids, I'm an executive board member on the PTA," Ortiz said. "It's fun, it's wonderful, but I just feel it's looming that eventually we won't be able to do it anymore. Our landlord did communicate with us that our rent would mostly keep going up."
The rising cost was made clear to Carol Williams (we've changed her name to avoid repercussions from her landlord) when her family had to leave their home last year and find another one within the school district their three children attend. To pay their new rent of nearly $5,000 a month (their old place was $4,200), Williams said she and her husband -- a manager at Apple -- have had to dip into retirement and their kids' college funds. "We don't even have money to live from the income my husband makes. We have to live off stock and savings just to live here. We're thinking maybe we need to move to another state."
Williams said their home was the cheapest suitable place they could find south of the railroad tracks. She said everything that was cheaper was too small for their three kids.
When your kids are in public school, "everything shrinks down into this very localized situation and your options are much more limited," Williams said. "You are under the stress of, "Oh my gosh, I might need to pull my kids out of their comfortable environment where they are thriving and put them somewhere else.'"
The high rents have been a shock to her family, having moved from Michigan four years ago. They had owned a 3,000-square-foot home there which cost $240,000. That would buy a Silicon Valley home a little bigger than shack, Williams said.
A search on Craigslist shows that three- and four-bedroom homes typically rent for $4,000 to $5,500 a month in southwestern Mountain View.
"I think there should be a cap on how much money you can charge for a house," Williams said. "There's no rhyme or reason, it's insane almost."
Williams is acutely aware of what is being pointed out by the group, the Campaign for a Balanced Mountain View: there is a housing shortage in the city and the region that's driven by yet another tech industry boom. "The problem with Mountain View is there's not a whole lot" of housing options, Williams said.
Like everyone else the Voice interviewed, Williams would prefer to pay a mortgage rather than rent, but because of the intense competition for a small number of homes, "there's no way we could afford (to buy a home)," she said. "You have to put $500,000 down. People are so desperate they are (buying) with cash. Unless you have a huge amount of money in cash you aren't even going to get it."
Some parents are wondering if they should move further south, and commute. But Ortiz says her family's quality of life has improved because her husband has been able to commute by bike to his job at Google.
"One of the reasons we love living here is my husband can actually bike to work which has improved his health tremendously and it's safe because there's bike lanes, there's trails," Ortiz said.
"Some things that I've heard people talk about is moving to San Jose or down to the Morgan Hill or Gilroy area where rent is cheaper, then sending their kids to private schools," said Bubb parent Erin Hung. "I wouldn't want to send my child to private school because I like to have the diversity that Bubb has."
Two families said the only way they can afford to live in Mountain View is because their landlords have been generous in not raising their rent. But these families wonder how long that will last.
"If our landlord came and doubled (the rent) we would still be getting an OK deal," said Hung, adding that she's saving money in case it increases. Not wanting to give the landlord any reason to raise the rent, she said, "We've had a couple things break here and there, we just repair it and don't bother the landlord."
Lauren Bond, who has kids in local schools and works as a nurse, said owning a home in Mountain View is now a "pipe dream."
"We are two full-time, well-paid, hard-working individuals and if we had not stumbled upon this wonderful home in Mountain View (and a rent amount that is ungodly low) we wouldn't have survived life in the Silicon Valley," Bond said in an email. "We have done this for three years and as of now, this has reached a level of disappointment such that our desire to own a home here is a pipe dream. It is sad because we love Mountain View, we work for the hospital, we support the community and we love the school district, but we are not willing to subject our children to a life in a box, with a green square for a yard. It is our realization, however, that it is also because of no other choices."
Williams said the lease for her home is about to expire, and she says she is "freaking out" about the possibility of having to abandon her holistic healing business to take a higher paying job she doesn't really want.
Less-affluent families are making much bigger sacrifices.
"I was actually in the classroom and I was talking to one of the kids and he was like, 'Yeah, I am sleeping on the floor with my brother,'" Ortiz said. "You try not to show your facial expression but it's just heartbreaking."
The housing crisis, she said. is affecting everybody, across the board. "I just feel for everybody."There is, to the best of my knowledge, only one retail space that is actually inside a subway station in the LA metro system. This unique retail space sits underground by the Hope Street entrance of the busy 7th/Metro subway stop (servicing the Red, Purple, Blue, and future Expo lines).
I’ve known about this retail space for years and imagined it being activated by some kind of “convenience store.” Many pedestrian-oriented cities in the world have metro stations that also have stores inside them. To me, it’s always been a sign of “urban maturity” that I wish LA would eventually have (i.e., becoming pedestrian-oriented and having businesses that cater to that demographic by setting up shop in places like metro stations, etc.).
So you can imagine how excited I was when I learned that a new business called “Rush” will be opening very soon inside this space at 7th/Metro. The owner of Rush Snack Bar, Andrew Cohen, told me this snack bar concept will have “a variety of fresh juices; All different types of pastries; Salads, sandwiches, sodas, chips and gourmet coffee.”
He continues by saying, “My idea of this concept is to do it in a very European manner. Very clean, fresh, and deliver a great product at a very inexpensive price. My potential customer is very diverse. My space is located in the financial district, which means I have the guy in a suit, I have the FIDM fashion student which is located a couple blocks from me, as well as your everyday worker. So I would really like to accommodate everyone, including people that aren’t even using the metro! Have some music playing with good vibes hoping every customer’s 1-2 minutes will be enjoyable and will return.”
According to Andrew, Rush Snack Bar is almost done building out and if all inspections go smoothly (crossing fingers) we could see it open by the end of this month (June). And I hope that somehow this sets a precedent for future metro stations in LA to include more retail and restaurant options inside (including Union Station becoming more of a destination in itself instead of just a transfer point).
Other subway stations with businesses that caught my eye…
Madrid, Spain
Barcelona, Spain
Taipei, TaiwanPlease enable Javascript to watch this video
More than three dozen people were injured Tuesday morning after a vacuum truck exploded at a wastewater disposal facility in the Santa Paula area, prompting evacuations and road closures in the surrounding area.
The explosion occurred about 3:46 a.m. in the 800 block of Mission Rock Road (map), about half a mile southeast of the 126 Freeway, officials from the Ventura County Sheriff's Office and Fire Department said.
"It sounded like a car was coming through my house," said Mike Morin, who cares for dogs at a nearby animal rescue.
The truck had been spraying a combustible white liquid at the time of the incident, fire Capt. Mike Lindbery confirmed to KTLA. The explosion spread the hazardous material around in a 300-foot radius, he said.
Two workers at the scene, three firefighters and an ambulance driver were hospitalized with unknown injuries, according to Sheila Murphy, a county spokeswoman. Twelve others were being held for observation, she said.
Lindbery later said 37 people had been injured, mostly with minor injuries.
The three firefighters' boots had "spontaneously combusted" when they came in contact with the white liquid from the vacuum truck, said Rick Macklin of the Ventura County Fire Department.
The compounds appeared to be sulfuric acid and an organic peroxide, according to Dr. Robert Levin, Ventura County Public Health's medical director.
The owner of Santa Clara Waste Water Co., where the explosion occurred, said the business was established in 1959 and never had a major problem such as Tuesday's. The plant only takes nonhazardous waste, owner Doug Edwards said.
"This is unheard of, that's why we're so taken aback," Edwards said.
The truck that blew up was delivering industrial waste, he said.
Aerial footage showed firefighters working to extinguish several small spot fires that were still burning at the facility as of 10 a.m.
The blaze was being allowed to burn out on its own into the night. Authorities hoped to begin an investigation into the cause of the explosion by 8 p.m.
Fire officials did not want to spray water on the blaze because they were afraid chemicals would run into the nearby Santa Clara River.
Mandatory evacuations were ordered for all residents within 1 mile of 815 Mission Rock Road, authorities said. A shelter-in-place order was issued for residents within 2 to 3 miles of that location. A Red Cross shelter was open at 530 West Main Street (map).
Mission Rock Road was closed to all traffic until further notice. For several hours, a 6-mile stretch of Highway 126 was closed in both directions between Wells and Peck roads (map).
Briggs and Olivelands elementary school were closed as a result of the incident.
The cause of the explosion, which occurred about 50 miles west-northwest of downtown Los Angeles, was not immediately known.
Updates on road closures, evacuation orders and shelters were available online at vcemergency.com. The sheriff's Office of Emergency Services set up a hotline for the incident at 805-465-6650.
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Ha, yeah, remember how I said I wasn't sure how the holidays would affect this? Apparently my own brain sabotaging this chapter repeatedly was the actual culprit.
Chapter Text
While it had started relatively normally, their second year at Beacon was going to be complicated by the addition of the Vytal Festival. The school was prepared for the biennial event, but it pushed up their second year away mission and generally disrupted the normal flow of classes.
Additionally, the influx of students had them all on edge, doubly so when Yatsuhashi swore he saw someone who looked like Farris in the group of Haven students.
Coco tried not to let it get to her, but she found herself scanning groups of students from Haven for the familiar face, but there were too many - and she didn't see them that often. She wasn't so concerned about Farris as she was about Velvet's old team showing up to harass her - as if they didn't have enough problems with team CRDL.
Professor Goodwitch grabbed her attention after class shortly after other students started arriving. "Miss Adel, if I could have a moment?"
"Of course, professor." Coco turned to her teammates and told them to go on ahead. She wondered why Goodwitch wanted to speak with her - they were all performing well in their classes - and dating teammates wasn't against the rules (even though it was generally frowned upon due to potential issues down the line). Had she noticed what was happening with team CRDL? What to do about the team had been weighing on her mind. She couldn't go against Velvet's wishes and confront them directly, or go to the professors, but surely if one of them brought it up first…
"Would you - and the rest of team CFVY - be willing to help organize the dance that's supposed to open the Vytal Festival next month? We're in need of some…" she tapped her riding crop against her thigh as she thought of the word she was looking for, "…responsible individuals who would be able to pull together a successful event."
Coco's brow furrowed - that wasn't what she'd been expecting. "May I ask why us?" The brief confusion as to why their team gave way to disappointment - if Goodwitch had brought up CRDL and how they'd been treating Velvet, she could express her concerns without breaking her promise to her teammate.
"Team CFVY is an ideal candidate for this task as you represent multiple cultures on Remnant getting along harmoniously - exactly what the Vytal Festival is about."
"Of course." Coco pursed her lips. "Though we have that away mission coming up."
"You should be back in plenty of time."
"I'll confirm with the rest of my team, but I'm sure it won't be an issue."
"Perfect, thank you Miss Adel." Goodwitch pulled out her scroll and tapped at it for a moment, and Coco's buzzed a moment later. "On that subject - I just sent you the registration information and rules for the tournament. Team CFVY qualified with ease - we'd just need you to fill out some paperwork to confirm your participation."
"Of course, thank you professor." Another thing to talk to the rest of her team about. She also wanted to talk to Fox and Yatsu about team CRDL, see if they had any ideas. Of course, she wasn't even sure they would have known there was a problem if Blake hadn't approached Coco the week before.
"Miss Adel?"
Coco startled out of her thoughts. "Was there something else, Professor Goodwitch?"
"I was wondering if there was something else you wanted to talk to me about."
She hesitated. Technically Goodwitch was asking - there was no way she didn't know about team CRDL - but it wasn't enough for Coco. She couldn't bring herself to say anything first - not when Velvet had been so insistent about letting her handle it.
"No ma'am."
"If you're sure."
Coco nodded and went to catch up with the rest of her team.
When the study sessions a few days later moved from Advanced Grimm Studies to braille, Yatsuhashi went back to the dorm room.
Coco hadn't joined the three of them for their impromptu study party, opting instead to spend some time in the room alone reviewing what was expected of them for the year.
He let himself in quietly, not wanting to disturb her if she was busy.
She was hunched over her desk, intently looking at something on her scroll. Her beret and sunglasses were set to one side.
Yatsuhashi set his things down on his own desk before walking up behind her. "Penny for your thoughts?"
"Goodwitch sent out the tournament rules for the Vytal Festival." She sat back, dropping the scroll onto her desk. "And I'm trying to make sense of them."
He picked up her scroll, starting to look over the rules, one hand on the back of her chair. "What isn't making sense?"
"Us participating." She leaned back to rest her head against his arm and he abandoned the scroll on the desk. "Velvs doesn't like fighting people and I wouldn't want her wasting her weapon - or exposing it - for something as superficial as this. Fox still struggles sometimes against unknown combatants - especially when there are multiple. He'd do well in the singles round, but the doubles or even team round? Not so much. And you and I - we're good, but we're heavy hitters. We would do so poorly in the doubles round - to the point that I don't think getting to singles would be a viable option. But when Goodwitch sent the information, she said we'd already qualified and all she needed was for us to fill out and sign the form - and the one she sent was already filled out." She shook her head. "I think she expects us to participate."
His hands went to her shoulders, thumbs digging into the tight muscles along the back of her neck. After having watched the Vytal Festival for years, he couldn't disagree with her assessment of how Fox and Velvet would do, but there was something about her assessment of the two of them that bothered him. "You really think we'd do so poorly?"
She tilted her head back to meet his eyes. "I think we'd do our best, but I'm not sure it's worth trying." She sighed, closing her eyes. "But everyone seems to expect us to enter. Though, if somehow we make it to the finals round, you'd be a better contender than I would. I'd send Fox, but he'd have to compete in the doubles round first - and I'm not going to ask him to do that."
"It's not a choice you have to make on your own, you know. You can ask Fox and Velvet what they think first."
The reminder had her relaxing a bit, helped along by his gentle massaging. She had been planning to ask them, she just wanted to figure out her own thoughts on the subject before seeking theirs out.
"Do you want to know what I think?" he continued.
She closed her eyes as the tension eased out of her neck and shoulders. "Always, Yatsu."
The tenderness in her voice with that had him smiling. "I think you're underestimating Velvet's desire to prove to people she can defend herself - and Fox's ability to handle himself in new situations. But you're right. This isn't what we do - not really." He tapped the back of the chair thoughtfully. "Though - if team CRDL is participating, it might give us a chance to vent some frustrations."
That was an enticing proposition - no matter how remote the chances of them getting paired up actually were.
"Not that they're the only team I'd mind having an excuse to shoot," Coco mused.
He had to agree - especially with Farris floating around Beacon, there was a good chance that Velvet's old team was here for the tournament. Gods knew they were looking forward to a chance to exact revenge.
Fox and Velvet walked in at that moment, dropping their books on their desks and coming over to where Coco and Yatsu stood. "If we're going to have a cuddle pile, I vote we do it on a bed again," Velvet said, wrapping an arm around Yatsuhashi's waist. "What's got you two looking so serious?"
"The tournament," Coco said, reaching for Fox's hand. "What do you think? Should we enter? We qualified."
Velvet agreed to it almost immediately. "I think it'll be fun. I'll be able to take photos too."
"It'll at least be more interesting than listening to it." Fox smiled. "Coco used to have it on all the time when we were kids - we went a couple times when it was hosted in Atlas."
"So it's settled." Yatsuhashi gave Coco's shoulder a squeeze. "Nothing wrong with giving it a shot and seeing what happens."
"I'll turn in the application, then." She picked her scroll back up off the desk and sent off the confirmation with just a few taps. "I'm sure we'll find out more once we get back from the away mission." She pulled up the next message. "Though, speaking of the tournament, Goodwitch asked if we'd be willing to help plan out the dance."
"Us? Why?" Velvet asked.
"She thought we'd be a good choice - something about being a great team to represent the Vytal Festival's symbol of unity and harmony between the kingdoms. I reminded her we had our second year mission coming up and she said we should be back in plenty of time, so what do you think? It doesn't look like there's a whole lot to do beyond setting up and decorating."
"I wouldn't be opposed," Yatsuhashi said.
Velvet looked up at him and then shrugged. "Sounds like fun."
Fox was grinning, which could only mean he was about to say something snarky. "As long as I get to pick out the color scheme."
Even with planning the dance, the four of them still had to squeeze in their regular training schedule.
Like most mornings, it was quiet in the gym when Yatsuhashi and Fox got there.
"Coco wants to do something about team CRDL," Yatsuhashi said, breaking the silence near the end of their routine. It had been something that had been bothering him since Coco had brought it up a few days prior. He trusted Fox to have a level head on the matter.
"I know." He punched the heavy punching bag Yatsuhashi was bracing for him, causing the whole thing to shake, despite his teammate's grip. "We shouldn't though."
"Why not?" Yatsuhashi agreed with Fox, but he was curious as to his teammate's thoughts on the issue.
Fox slammed his fist into the bag hard enough to make his aura flare. "Do you know why I train early in the morning?"
"I assumed it was because you preferred the solitude or simply were more of a morning person than Coco."
He laughed at that and gestured sharply to the room at large. "How many people are here right now?"
Yatsuhashi looked around, not sure where this was going. "Three, plus us, so five?"
"Exactly." He slammed his fist into the bag again. "I come here at this hour because whenever there's too many people, there's a high chance they'll decide that the blind man is a prime target for harassment."
Yatsuhashi frowned. "Does Coco know?"
"Of course. I've convinced her to leave it to me - that it doesn't help to interfere."
Yatsuhashi nodded, remembering Velvet's words from the year before - she had expressed the same sentiment. "So what do we do? Leave Velvet to fend for herself?"
"Of course not." Fox stepped away, taking a long drink from his water bottle. "But you do it in a way that doesn't involve detention from Goodwitch for a month. You go with her to lunch, be a deterrent without confronting them." He reached out, patting Yatsuhashi on the arm. "Velvet can protect herself. But just because she's stubborn about asking for help doesn't mean you can't."
"And what about you?" Yatsu asked, letting go of the bag.
"What about me?"
"Are you just as stubborn about asking for help?"
Fox laughed and gestured to the mostly-empty room. "I didn't even have to ask. You're just a morning person." He clasped Yatsu's shoulder. "Come on, Coco set up a tux fitting for the two of us. Something about needing to have a proper suit for the dance."
While the boys were out getting their clothes for the dance, Coco took Velvet shopping. The small boutique Coco had dragged her to had a wide assortment of dresses and accessories perfect for the dance - and none of the employees had batted an eye at Velvet's rabbit ears.
When they'd first arrived, it'd been a flurry of measurements and cloth, taking almost two hours before settling on the perfect dress for each of them.
Velvet kept running her hands over the soft cloth - the teal dress Coco had suggested wasn't her normal color, but it was absolutely gorgeous.
"You don't think it's too low-cut?" she asked again, shifting to see the dress from a different angle. Not that she thought Yatsuhashi would mind the view.
"I don't, but if you do I'm sure they could adjust it." Coco walked up behind her, carrying a pair of silver heels for Velvet to try on.
Coco was already in a form-fitting, chocolate-colored dress. It had an equally deep neckline |
– the Prius has massive reliability issues, the NDDP Nissan has yet to even claim a podium, the CR-Zs and Lambos have piled up a ton of non-scoring finishes between them, and LEON Racing may not have the resources yet to mount a serious title challenge.
So will the BMW juggernaut romp to the championship in GT300, or will the Silver Arrows of Mercedes-Benz or the deep blue Boxer attack of Subaru spoil the party for Bavaria’s favorite automaker? As compelling as the GT500 title race is, the GT300 championship may be just as interesting to follow over the last two races.
AdvertisementsMarcos Maidana is a 24 billion to 1 underdog against Floyd Mayweather on May 3, or whatever, but the Argentine slugger says he's got his plan, and while he is working on speed to hopefully keep up with Floyd's advantage in that category, power is his main focus.
Maidana's buildin' hurtin' bombs:
"We're working on speed every day and I'm getting quicker. But it's not all about that. I'm also training harder than ever before so I can keep the pressure on Mayweather. I have that one-punch KO power in both hands but I won't only be going for the head. Most of Floyd's opponents have done that but his defence is so good. I will be putting some of my power into a lot more body shots than he usually gets."
If Maidana (35-3, 31 KO) has any hope of beating Mayweather (45-0, 26 KO), he almost certainly will have to knock him out. I just can't imagine a scenario where Maidana outpoints Mayweather over 12 rounds and doesn't stop him. The general belief, I think, is that it will be hard for Marcos to even get to Floyd, let alone batter him with body shots, but he's got to do something, and that sounds like as good an idea as anyway. What else is he going to do? Box him? Out-think him? Use his craft to score the decision win?Now playing: Watch this: End of an era: BlackBerry stops making BlackBerrys
Enlarge Image BlackBerry
It's a big nail in the coffin for phones from BlackBerry.
The Canadian company said Wednesday it will shut down its phone business after the failure of its latest bid to use Google's Android software to stimulate interest. Instead, BlackBerry will rely on others to design, build and sell the devices so it can save on capital.
"The company plans to end all internal hardware development and will outsource that function to partners," CEO John Chen said in a statement.
So far, BlackBerry has named just one such partner: Indonesia-based BB Merah Putih.
BlackBerry's decision closes a significant chapter in one of the most storied franchises in the phone industry, and it puts an even higher premium on the company's shift of focus to software and services. BlackBerry was among the high flyers in the early days of mobile phones. Legions of "CrackBerry" addicts in the white-collar workforce tapped away at its trademark physical keys in the early 2000s.
Like many other companies, BlackBerry failed to anticipate the rise of Apple's iPhone and of phones running Google's Android software, which knocked BlackBerry back on its heels for years. Consumers have paid little attention to its phones despite the company's attempts to modernize the BlackBerry software and, in a last-ditch effort last year, to embrace Android.
It's been an unstoppable descent. In 2009, BlackBerry controlled one-fifth of the phone market, just behind Nokia. Today, it holds a tiny fraction of 1 percent, according to Gartner.
On Wednesday, BlackBerry posted fiscal second-quarter results that saw it swing to a loss of $372 million, or 71 cents a share, from a year-ago profit of $51 million, or 24 cents a share. Revenue fell by a third to $334 million.
Analysts, on average, forecast a loss of 5 cents a share and revenue of $394 million.
BlackBerry declined to comment on how many jobs would be cut, only noting that it has been "transitioning our mobile solutions work force" for quite some time.
Washing its hands
Chen confirmed on a call with analysts that BlackBerry will have little to do with future hardware efforts and will only collect a royalty fee on any phone sold by its partners.
BlackBerry had previously teased a second Android phone to come, but that's unlikely to show up.
It's unclear whether future phones from the partnership will make their way to mature markets like the US, where the carriers have been lukewarm about carrying the devices. There remains, though, a small but dedicated base of users who appreciate the physical keyboard and focus on security.
A BlackBerry spokeswoman said she didn't believe this move would hurt the ability for these phones to enter the US market. She also declined to comment on the prospect of a licensed phone using BlackBerry 10 software.
Chen hinted at other interested companies looking to strike similar partnerships around the world, but didn't provide any names. He also hinted that there would be high-end devices focused on security.
BlackBerry plans to complete the shutdown of the internal hardware business by the end of this fiscal year.
Transformation finally takes hold
In 2013, CEO John Chen came into BlackBerry with a mission to transform the company, focusing more on software and services. At the same time, he had to keep a foot in the phone business, which still generated a significant chunk of the company's revenue. Even in the most recent quarter, it accounted for 30 percent of the company's revenue.
But Chen has always been lukewarm about the phone business. He has said on multiple occasions that he would drop out of phones if that business couldn't generate a profit, which many took as a warning. He also never felt entirely comfortable as a pitchman for the devices. In July, he didn't bother to show up at the unveiling of BlackBerry's Android-powered DTEK 50 phone.
Sarah Tew/CNET
The DTEK 50 was a sign of things to come. The phone was built by Alcatel OneTouch and is virtually identical to Alcatel's Idol 4. Chen had already signed deals to outsource much of manufacturing to other partners, including getting Foxconn to build some of its phones. Until now, though, the company has kept significant internal resources devoted to hardware.
BlackBerry's final Hail Mary, its embrace of the Android operating system, was the brainchild of veteran phone executive Ron Louks. He assumed that wider access to Android apps, combined with its reputation for security, would turn some heads in the corporate world. It did not. The first Android-powered phone, the BlackBerry Priv, was a high-end premium device that landed with a thud last year.
Louks left BlackBerry in May. BlackBerry named Ralph Pini, who ran the radio-frequency technology development business at the company, to replace him.
Back from the edge
Credit does go to Chen for keeping BlackBerry alive after his predecessor, Thorsten Heins, nearly killed the company with a push to create a line of more mainstream-friendly phones running on the revamped BlackBerry 10 operating system.
Heins believed the BlackBerry Z10 could compete against the likes of the iPhone and Galaxy S franchises. Instead, the failure of the Z10 and the successor models spurred many predictions (including our own) of its demise.
Chen believes the software business now is on solid enough footing to rip the bandage off the hardware unit.
"We are reaching an inflection point with our strategy," he said. "Our financial foundation is strong, and our pivot to software is taking hold."
Updated at 8 am PT: To include a response from the company.
Now playing: Watch this: BlackBerry's new phone isn't bad
End of an era: BlackBerry stops making BlackBerrys (CNET Update) Your browser does not support the audio element.Turkey-Russia-Iran meet in Ankara for ‘de-escalation zones’ in Syria
ANKARA
AFP photo
Delegations from Turkey, Russia and Iran met in Ankara on May 18 for discussions to declare “de-escalation zones” in rebel-held areas of Syria, another round of talks will be held in Iran on May 21, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu has stated.“There are recommendations about which soldiers should be deployed in de-escalation zones. The countries can give troops under the supervision of the U.N. We want it to be under the supervision of an institution. But there are no concrete steps yet and no decision has been taken yet. Nobody will hesitate if it is under the U.N. roof,” Çavuşoğlu said during a televised interview on May 18.A U.N. resolution is necessary for imposing sanctions on parties violating the ceasefire in Syria but there has yet to be any action in line with that, he added.Ankara has urged Washington to focus on finding a political solution in Syria as much as it works on defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).Russia, Turkey and Iran agreed in a memorandum signed on May 4 to establish four separate de-escalation zones in Syria for at least six months. The largest de-escalation zone includes Idlib province and the adjoining districts of Hama, Aleppo and Latakia provinces.Russia, Turkey and Iran will form a joint working group on de-escalation zones in Syria within two weeks, in order to delineate the lines of the de-escalation areas and security zones, as well as to resolve other operational and technical issues related to the implementation of the deal, according to a memorandum signed by the countries.The guarantors will finalize the maps of the de-escalation zones by June 4. According to the accord, checkpoints will ensure the safe flow of humanitarian aid and provide secure passage for civilians. Observation points will also monitor the cease-fire in the region.Turkey was offered the establish a cease-fire observation mission in the opposition-held Syrian province of Idlib during a meeting last month in Astana, Deputy Prime Minister Veysi Kaynak told the Hürriyet Daily News on May 12.Belief pools — no public offering of tokens needed
Carsten Munk Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 5, 2017
https://flic.kr/p/a6GJGZ — ‘pool’ by Graeme Maclean, CC BY 2.0
What if your project didn’t have to sell its tokens in an ICO (which can be a regulatory no-no)?
What if the project token coins could get some initial value, so you could reward contributors with them in order to grow the project?
What if the believers in your project could come together collectively in a ‘belief pool’ to help make that happen?
I’m a project token believer and I have spare cash that I’d like to use to show my belief in projects, but I don’t have time to engage in ICOs or trade on token markets, nor do I desire the significant risk or volatility of a token investment. I’m probably not the only one who feels like that, too.
Additionally, I’d like to be able to withdraw at any point if I cease to believe in a project. I also don’t want my belief to be an outright donation, either — the projects should not receive my cash up front. In fact, I’d much rather give money to those who have done the work for the project (those who has received project token coins for contributing) or otherwise benefited it.
What I could do, without involving the project at all, is to state a unilateral contract (Unilateral contracts are a contract type where one party is legally obligated to uphold the terms of the contract.) that after a year has passed I will only once accept an offer from anybody to purchase 1 project token coin for 1 ETH.
Notably, the 1 ETH would stay in my possession until I’ve accepted an offer, but I’ve encumbered it.
That would mean that in a year and thereafter, there’d be possibility for somebody to sell me their 1 project token coin for 1 ETH — giving it a price of 1 ETH at that moment. You could then speculate that the price of the project token coin is at least some percentage of 1 ETH today.
Similarly, I could insert a term that I could withdraw from the contract at any point unless I’ve already accepted an offer; or add additional terms related to acceptance or withdrawal.
This unilateral contract is pretty simple to encode in a smart contract.
First, I transfer ownership of my 1 ETH to the smart contract. After a year has passed, and the caller has 1 project token coin that the smart contract can transfer away from him, he/she can call the ‘purchase’ function of the smart contract, get my 1 ETH, I get his 1 project token coin and then the smart contract self-destructs.
I can as well call the ‘withdraw’ function at any point before the purchase has been made, getting my 1 ETH back. This does not mean this is the economically right thing to do in order to factually support the project token’s value.
No public offerings, no primary market
It’s worth noting that in this setup, there would be no primary market where the issuer of the project token (the project) conducts public offerings and sells the project token coins to investors in exchange of cash or ETH — it’d be all give-away or rewards for contributing, but the recipients of the project token coins (such as the people doing work) could liquidate their project token coins on any market through speculators, including decentralised secondary markets for tokens (such as 0x).
Generally it seems, if there’s a tradable token, there can be speculators, who’ll trade them where they can, no matter what the issuer does. If it’s non-tradable, they’d buy the token using a smart contract and then trade the rights of the smart contract (like you can today purchase a share w/ a BVI and sell the shares of the BVI). Or trade the private key that holds the project token coin.
Belief pools
To finish this up — I can transparently join together with other project believers in a ‘belief pool’ and decide that in a year in a ‘liquidity event’ we’ll collectively sell our ETH in exchange for project token coins.
This could happen at a particular set price, or using a particular method (dutch auction, slow, partial release of the ETH into market, etc.), shared withdrawal conditions, or dissolving conditions (such as that the market value is higher than set price) or any other ways we desire. There could even be multiple belief pools surrounding a project. The factual belief pool implementation that would make this work economically is not yet here.
It may also very well be that nobody is interested in selling project token coins at the price a particular belief pool requests, if for example the open market price is higher and then believers can withdraw easily.
Given that we are able to come together in a public, transparent smart contract to do so, the belief pool can also function as a way for the speculators of the open market to help assess the project token coin value today (which likely would be non-zero).
The project would also be able to reward project believers for being part of belief pools with project tokens (‘paying’ a kind of interest) or other rewards (t-shirts, etc.) for the act of backing the value of the project token.
Similarly, project believers can help guide the project as they are stakeholders—as the ability for believers to withdraw from a pool provides information on the health of the project or direction. Granting ‘interest’ project tokens would also allow for co-participation in picking what contributors or project goals should receive project coins for work done.
If a project forks, also you could imagine project believers being able to vote with their beliefs on the ideal direction of the project by transferring their beliefs to a new belief pool benefiting the token holders of the new project token.
Future work
Disclaimer: This concept is not explored fully from economic or legal perspective. It’s meant as a discussion starter, but I believe there’s likely a belief pool implementation that could do the trick. Randomness on when factual ‘liquidity event’ happens could get interesting.
I can also recommend joining DecStack, a virtual co-working space for decentralised projects of any kind (2400+ member strong) and the “ICOs” channel there.
Carsten (@stskeeps) is CTO at Zipper Global Ltd., (@zipperglobal)In 1932, Milton S. Hershey had a grand vision and established the Hershey Hockey Club, starting what would become a rich and storied hockey tradition. Originally the Hershey B’ars, they competed in the Tri-State Hockey League and the Eastern Amateur Hockey League before eventually joining the AHL for the 1938-1939 season.
Today Hershey is proud to boast 11 Calder Cup Championships, 11 straight years as the AHL’s Regular Season Attendance Leader, and the longest continuously operating hockey club still in its original city.
To celebrate the rich tradition of hockey in Hershey, here’s a video tribute to the organization to kick off NoVa Caps’ upcoming coverage of Hershey’s historic season which will include articles on the club’s first season, Calder Cup Championship seasons, and Hall of Famers.
By Julie Beidler
Follow @juliebeidlerWhat does it take to be an American?
Sungkwan EJ Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 7, 2017
Off-year elections never get so much attention and often are virtually ignored by a majority of voters. In fact, this year only 40% of Americans have a general election. In places with statewide elections like New Jersey — the first general election since the 2016 presidential election — however, campaigns are becoming increasingly spirited as Election Day nears. In addition to the occasional personal attacks and negative ads, New Jersey voters this year saw a common thread running through multiple campaign materials throughout the state: a racist rhetoric against immigrants and ethnic minorities.
On November 1st, hardly a week before Election Day, voters in Edison woke up to election fliers that read “Make Edison Great Again.” The images, which made a popular round on the social media by now, read “DEPORT” over two Board of Education candidates, one of Chinese descent and the other Indian descent. The flyer goes on to say that “the Chinese and Indians are taking over our town! …Enough is Enough!” and describes them as “the outsiders.”
Condemned by mayoral campaigns of both parties, it’s distasteful, disrespectful, and wrong. It’s incredibly awful campaign tactics, it’s illegal (NJ Election Law requires all political communications to be labeled with an identification statement.), and it’s racist. More importantly, this mailer is the archetype of a wrong notion growing more and more pervasive today: perpetual foreigner syndrome.
Perpetual foreigner syndrome is the idea that those of color, and especially those with a “foreign” name or those who can speak another language, are simply not American, regardless of where they were born or how long their families have been here. It is the idea that assigns people into only one category or the other and divides our country in the false dichotomy of us versus them.
Ms. Falguni Patel, one of the candidates whose photo was used in the mailer, in fact was born and raised here in New Jersey. Yet, the flyer paints the Asian Americans with one broad stroke as foreigners and calls for their deportation. Ms. Patel’s response: “Where are you going to deport me to?”
Perpetual foreigner syndrome has been the core message several other campaign literatures were built on these few weeks. One flyer implied that a Sikh mayoral candidate in Hoboken is a terrorist and another in Somerset County described a Latino candidate a threat to the county’s “special quality of life,” all in hopes of stoking fear, bigotry, and hatred against immigrant communities.
Unfortunately, such an idea has also become more pronounced outside of political campaigns that have immediate advantages to claim in promoting the bigotry. Just a few weeks ago, a teacher at Cliffside Park High School (just blocks away from where I lived in high school) told her class to “speak American,” because our troops “are not fighting for your right to speak Spanish…They are fighting for your right to speak American.” (Side note: the teacher has returned to her job just after two weeks’ leave. Over 40% of the student body at CPHS are Hispanic.)
Again, the presumption behind her remarks is that any language other than English is not American. As an immigrant, I find this hurtful. And as an Asian American, I find it frightening.
Throughout our history, the nativist perception has led to unforgettable, deeply painful incidents, such as the death of Vincent Chin, an automobile worker beaten to death by two angry white laborers yelling “it’s because of you motherfuckers that we are out of jobs.” Or, just earlier this year, the death of Srinivas Kuchibotla an Indian immigrant who, along with his co-worker, was shot after being called a “terrorist” and “get out of my country.”
How am I to feel safe speaking Korean with my family in the public, let alone looking (hell, being) Asian? And inevitably, I have to wonder: how long do we have to have been here to be accepted as American?
Like many other ethnic minorities and immigrants, Asian Americans have been subject to racist attacks of varying degrees. (Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Internment of Japanese Americans, Watter’s World segment in 2016, “where are you from?…I can go on for hours.) Perhaps because of the over-exposure, we have come to almost accept such attacks and rhetoric today — especially those who live alongside so many Asian Americans in Bergen County and Edison. But let us not normalize the racism and divisive rhetoric.
Let our voice be heard in such critical issues. Racism is not limited to one political party or candidate, and neither is civic engagement. This Election Day, let us all exercise our voting rights as American citizens in a show of solidarity. Whoever the perpetrators of the racist campaign literatures this year, let us show them that we will not be intimidated by the bigotry or vitriol — that we as a community and as a country will not accept the hatred.
In the wake of the so-called “Muslim Bans,” many immigrants have adopted the title of an iconic poem by Langston Hughes as their rallying cry: “I, too, sing America.” If we truly do sing America, serving civic duties as voting comes as a natural first step. Not just once every four years, but at every opportunity, consistently and repeatedly.
In the words of former president George W. Bush, “our identity as a nation — unlike many other nations — is not determined by geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood.This means that people of every race, religion, and ethnicity can be fully and equally American.”
Edit: I found yet another example of campaign literature stoking “racial divides and fears.” This one is in the race for Nassau County Executive. According to Professor Mitchell S. McKinney of the University of Missouri, “the mailer…is a classic fear appeal and the framing of the enemy to fear is certainly based on race.” The New York Times described it “Willie Horton, Updated for the Trump Era.”I’m startled at Brad DeLong’s ignorance: he thinks there’s something new about science fiction novels where the science in question is economics.
This theme actually goes back a long way. I once stumbled across Robert Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon, a very early novel that’s actually inspired by the then-popular doctrine of secular stagnation, which argued that rising savings and declining investment opportunities would lead to persistent problems in getting people to spend enough.
Oh, by the way — it’s a terrible novel, though not as bad a novel as The Internecine Project is a movie. Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes novels, on the other hand, are economic science fiction worth reading.
Update: Several commenters mentioned Issac Asimov’s Foundation novels. It’s somewhat embarrassing, but that’s how I got into economics: I wanted to be a psychohistorian when I grew up, and economics was as close as I could get.I heartily accept the motto, “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe – “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.
–Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849
Watching the new FBN show Freedom Watch with the Judge this weekend, I watched Judge Andrew Napolitano ask Reason TV‘s Nick Gillespie if the gulf oil spill was “arguably the fault of the federal government” because BP had originally wanted to drill in 500 feet of water off the Louisiana coastline — a depth for which they had ample prior experience — but the United States Government overrode the State of Louisiana’s permission to BP, forcing the oil company to drill in far deeper waters where risks of a disaster were far higher.
Gillespie, editor of Reason.com and Reason.tv and the editor-in-chief of Reason magazine for eight years, answered:
I think it’s the fault of BP first and foremost because they clearly didn’t follow the best practices for capping wells and having back-up systems. But there’s no question this is a federal issue. It’s taking place in federal waters on a federal seabed. There is a role for the government to play here both in taking blame and figuring out what to do.
Making an argument for government presence, Nick Gillespie is clearly not any sort of an anarchist — individualist, voluntaryist, anarcho-capitalist, mutualist, agorist, or otherwise.
Then again, neither was Ludwig von Mises — whose writings on economics are the gold standard for arguments against state intervention into markets — nor Ayn Rand — whose Atlas Shrugged has without question inspired more people to join libertarian groups than any other novel in history — nor was Robert A. Heinlein — whose science-fiction writings first converted me to libertarianism — and neither is Glenn Beck, whose new novel, The Overton Window, I recently recommended to the Libertarian Futurist Society as a candidate for its Prometheus Award as the year’s best libertarian novel.
So should advocates of what Samuel Edward Konkin III tagged as minarchy — a belief in some minimal rather than zero government — be welcomed into circles, discussions, and organizations of people calling themselves libertarian?
Glenn Beck — whose voice daily reaches three million radio listeners and a couple million more on his Fox News Channel show — has been made to feel unwelcome.
Speaking to Judge Napolitano earlier in that same Freedom Watch, Judge Napolitano had the following exchange with Glenn Beck:
Judge Napolitano: “Okay, Glenn Beck. We know from your TV and radio appearances and your new novel and the conversations we’ve had that you don’t like big government. Glenn Beck: Right. Judge Napolitano: Are you a libertarian? Glenn Beck: Yeah, I think so. I say that with respect to libertarians ’cause I don’t think they want me in their camp.
Glenn Beck isn’t alone in being made unwelcome in the libertarian camp.
A 2008 article on Nolanchart.com titled “Essential Science Fiction and Fantasy for Libertarians” bylined “Dan Clore, libertarian,” flippantly writes off the novel that has produced more libertarian converts than any other, saying, “And finally, the list of possibilities intentionally excludes Ayn Rand’s egregious enormity Atlas Shrugged.”
Jeff Riggenbach, whose Wikipedia stub describes him as “an American libertarian journalist, author, editor, broadcaster, and educator” — and who in 1983 praised my novel The Rainbow Cadenza in the San Jose Mercury News as “that rare thing, a genuinely intellectual thriller” — writes in his June 2, 2010 Mises Daily article “Was Robert A. Heinlein a Libertarian?“:
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is unquestionably a libertarian novel. It is unquestionably one of the three or four most influential libertarian novels of the last century. But whether its author, Robert A. Heinlein, can plausibly be described as a libertarian in his personal political views remains a troubled question.
Now let’s get to me. Before I’d ever met anyone else who called himself a libertarian I’d started a campus libertarian group on my college campus. I was regularly writing for libertarian newsletters and magazines within a year after that. I organized meetings of a libertarian supper club with Murray Rothbard as its first speaker in 1974, and organized the first conferences on counter-economics — with Samuel Edward Konkin III and Robert LeFevre as featured speakers — in 1974 and 1975. I reviewed Murray Rothbard’s book, For A New Liberty, in Murray Rothbard’s own journal, The Libertarian Forum. I’ve written two novels that have received gold coins as awards from the Libertarian Futurist Society and a third novel that was a finalist. I’m also known for having written one of the most popular books defending the right to keep and bear arms — a position that when I took to the Op-Ed page of the Los Angeles Times to present quite possibly lost me TV writing work that might have kept my financial-hardship-strained marriage from busting up. I’ve gotten other awards and accolades from libertarian organizations, libertarian celebrities, and libertarian publications.
Yet when on June 16th I praised Glenn Beck’s novel for its libertarian content, a Facebook friend named Chris Tolliver wrote on my Facebook wall, “I have lost all respect for you, J Neil. Agorist, you are not. Statist, you are. Glenn Beck and libertarian do not go together. He’s not a libertarian.”
Then this past Friday when Brad Spangler, director of the anarchist Center for a Stateless Society, thanked his Facebook friends for voting him a high ranking in a website poll asking for guest suggestions for Freedom Watch with the Judge, I discovered that my name wasn’t even on the list. Upon being told of this Brad Spangler — a true gentleman — immediately added my name to the list and posted a Facebook message asking his supporters to vote for me as well, but I’d already taken the point that if you want to be popular among libertarians — when it comes time to decide who they want speaking for them — you’d better stick to their agenda as closely as any corporate flack or White House press secretary.
A lifetime of devotion to liberty isn’t even close to being enough for many libertarians to think of you as being a member of their little clique.
And I do mean little.
If being a lifetime worker for liberty isn’t enough for some people, evolving towards liberty from a mainstream state-approving belief system is likely to have you looked at the way a life-saving transplanted organ is regarded by blindly hostile white corpuscles — with results just as fatal to the body.
It just doesn’t take much for libertarians to treat you like a Jew trying to join the Episcopalian-run country club.
It might be enough that you express a belief in God, while most radical libertarians are hostile to religion.
Being a believer in limited rather than zero government is another reason for the blackball to be dropped into the bowl.
Think the United States is historically an overall force for good in the world, or have good things to say about the Founding Fathers? Get ready for many libertarians to call you a Neocon, no matter how many wars you’ve demonstrated against.
And God forbid that you have anything good to say about Israel, Mormons, Jesus Christ, or Country Music.
When the hell did the libertarian movement become more exclusive than the Bohemian Grove?
Devotees of liberty are facing the strongest push towards totalitarian global statism I’ve seen in my lifetime. The libertarian movement is too small, too fragile, too marginalized already for anyone as potentially decisive to the cause of liberty as Glenn Beck, Ayn Rand, Robert Heinlein — and yes, me, especially now when I’m working my ass off to produce a movie based on my most popular libertarian-themed novel, Alongside Night — to be treated with adolescent dismissal.
Wise up. Robust libertarian movements have historically been rerouted back onto the Road to Serfdom by far less.
Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Libertarian Ideals from the 2011 Anthem Film Festival! My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available free on the web linked from the official movie website. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!The Environmental Protection Agency will have to review the safety of thousands of chemicals — many commonly found in items Americans interact with every day — under legislation Congress is expected to pass this week.
The bill, an update of the 40-year-old Toxic Substances Control Act, allows the EPA to gather more information about a chemical before it can be used in the United States, while limiting how and when states can act to regulate a chemical themselves.
The current Toxic Substances Control Act, signed by President Ford in 1976, gave the EPA authority to review the potential human and environmental risks of chemicals, but the agency restricts only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of chemicals used in products in the United States including detergents and pesticides.
Some states, like California, have filled the void and set stringent requirements. Other states have not, leaving a patchwork of chemical regulations that almost derailed the current effort, which preempts states from setting new rules if the EPA is reviewing a chemical.
California Secretary for Environmental Protection Matthew Rodriquez said by phone Tuesday that he is reassured changes to the bill that Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) pushed will allow the state to continue regulating potentially toxic chemicals.
The new bill requires the EPA to review the safety of all chemicals currently used in items on the market, and make the results of the safety review available to Congress and to the general public.
The agency will also be required to consider the effect of chemicals on infants, pregnant women and the elderly as part of its review, but will not have to consider cost.
The EPA will no longer have to show a chemical is potentially a risk before testing it. Currently, a chemical can enter the market within 90 days unless the agency can prove it might be dangerous.
https://twitter.com/EPWBoxer/status/733331016803311616
Streamlining state efforts
With federal power to regulate chemicals limited under existing law, California and a handful of other states have set their own standards over the last few decades.
In return for broad federal authority to regulate what goes into American products in the new bill, the chemical industry has insisted on limits to the power of states to add additional regulations of their own.
Boxer said in an interview Tuesday that Congress has to think about the broader effect of the new law on all states.
California might have robust regulations, but “it can’t do everything for the whole country,” Boxer said. “They’ve been fabulous, and they’ll do more but now there is a federal program, so assuming there is a good EPA... Californians will be better protected because they’ll have the federal program and the state program. If the EPA does nothing then it’ll be pretty much [the] status quo.”
The bill still allows states to regulate chemicals above the federal levels in certain situations.
“Would I rather have absolutely no preemption? I would," Boxer said. "But the way we have it now it still allows for a very robust program by our state.”
All state laws, rules and regulations for chemicals that were in place on April 22 will not be preempted by the new federal law. In the future, if a state regulates a new chemical and the EPA regulates it differently, the federal standard would preempt the state's rules.
States are required to pause on regulating a chemical being reviewed by the EPA unless they get a waiver or the federal review takes longer than three and a half years. States can also regulate a chemical if the EPA isn’t reviewing it or for 18 months after the agency says it plans to review it.
Boxer said she hopes the short time frame will spur states to move quickly on the chemicals they have concerns about.
Rodriquez praised the waivers, the fact that existing state regulations are grandfathered in and the 18-month window to regulate. The state will want to keep an eye on what chemicals the EPA might consider reviewing, he said, so California can act quickly if it needs to.
“The preemption provisions have been scaled back in a way that we think provides the state with some flexibility,” he said. “We’ll work with it. Many times these chemicals don’t appear out of nowhere.”
Rodriquez questioned whether Congress will give the EPA the funding it needs to promptly test and regulate thousands of chemicals.
“If they can’t go ahead, we would intend to proceed under California law,” he said. “I think there will still be a robust chemical regulatory program going on.”
Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), one of four California House members who opposed the bill, echoed that concern by saying while the bill is better than current law, he’s concerned that “potential future actions by California could be preempted or delayed without adequate assurance that the new federal process would be prompt, effective and appropriately funded.”
In the state Assembly, Huffman cosponsored a bill that required the state Department of Toxic Substances Control to proactively identify and regulate potentially dangerous chemicals.
On Tuesday, Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Ken Calvert (R-Corona) released the Interior and Environment Appropriation bill, which cuts EPA funding by $164 million for fiscal year 2017 and holds staff at 15,000 positions. Calvert voted in favor of the Toxic Substances Control Act overhaul.
https://twitter.com/RepMimiWalters/status/735230870852898817
Moving fast
Congress has tried before to overhaul the Toxic Substance Control Act, with members divided on how it should look and whether states should still be allowed to implement more stringent restrictions on chemicals than those levied by the federal government.
Boxer and other senators blocked the bill for most of last year.
The bill has moved quickly since late last week, when Boxer and other senators announced they had reached a compromise. The House voted 403-12 Tuesday evening to approve the bill, and the Senate could vote on it as early as Thursday.
Voting no with Huffman were Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough) and Tom McClintock (R-Elk Grove).
McClintock said the bill was supposed to expedite and standardize the EPA's evaluation of toxic chemicals, but it broadens the EPA's powers and no longer allows it to consider cost as part of a chemical's risk evaluation, while still allowing states to adopt more stringent standards and raise fees.
"This is a well-intentioned bill that accomplishes the opposite of what it is designed to do," he said in a statement.
Speier said in a statement that the bill accommodates industry over consumers.
"California |
life after years of drug use. (Photo by Gabriel Olsen/FilmMagic) Mike Tyson credits veganism with improving his life after years of drug use. (Photo by Gabriel Olsen/FilmMagic) Photo: FilmMagic
Image 8 of 48 Former U.S. President Bill Clinton began a vegan diet after his heart surgeries, and he wanted to shape up and lose weight before daughter Chelsea's 2010 wedding. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton began a vegan diet after his heart surgeries, and he wanted to shape up and lose weight before daughter Chelsea's 2010 wedding. Photo: Slaven Vlasic / Getty Images
Image 9 of 48 Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, became a vegan after a visit to Farm Sanctuary, which houses animals rescued from factory farms. Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, became a vegan after a visit to Farm Sanctuary, which houses animals rescued from factory farms. Photo: KIMIHIRO HOSHINO / AFP/Getty Images
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Image 11 of 48 Actor/comedian Russell Brand has been a vegetarian since he was 14 and became a vegan in 2011 after watching the documentary "Forks Over Knives." Actor/comedian Russell Brand has been a vegetarian since he was 14 and became a vegan in 2011 after watching the documentary "Forks Over Knives."
Image 12 of 48 Chelsea Clinton is a vegan. She reportedly served vegan dishes and a vegan and gluten-free cake at her wedding. Chelsea Clinton is a vegan. She reportedly served vegan dishes and a vegan and gluten-free cake at her wedding. Photo: Neilson Barnard / Getty Images
Image 13 of 48 Actor/rapper Common was a vegan, but he now eats dairy and fish. Actor/rapper Common was a vegan, but he now eats dairy and fish. Photo: Frazer Harrison / 2012 Getty Images
Image 14 of 48 Actress Daryl Hannah is a longtime environmental activist and vegan. Actress Daryl Hannah is a longtime environmental activist and vegan. Photo: Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images
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Image 16 of 48 Actress Portia de Rossi and comedian/talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. The couple are both vegans. Oh, and Ellen has a blog: http://vegan.ellen.warnerbros.com. Actress Portia de Rossi and comedian/talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. The couple are both vegans. Oh, and Ellen has a blog: http://vegan.ellen.warnerbros.com. Photo: Christopher Polk / Getty Images for PCA
Image 17 of 48 "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" author Jonathan Safran Foer is a vegetarian. He also wrote the 2009 book "Eating Animals," which Natalie Portman cites as turning her vegan (until her pregnancy). less "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" author Jonathan Safran Foer is a vegetarian. He also wrote the 2009 book "Eating Animals," which Natalie Portman cites as turning her vegan (until her... more Photo: Fernando Leon / Getty Images
Image 18 of 48 "Glee" actress Jane Lynch is vegan. "Glee" actress Jane Lynch is vegan. Photo: Kevin Winter / Getty Images
Image 19 of 48 Former "My So-Called Life" actor and 30 Seconds to Mars musician Jared Leto says he's a strict vegan. Former "My So-Called Life" actor and 30 Seconds to Mars musician Jared Leto says he's a strict vegan. Photo: Theo Wargo / Getty Images for Samsung
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Image 21 of 48 Actress Jessica Chastain, who recently starred in "The Help" and "Tree of Life," is a vegan. Actress Jessica Chastain, who recently starred in "The Help" and "Tree of Life," is a vegan. Photo: Frazer Harrison / Getty Images
Image 22 of 48 Heather Mills, ex-wife of Sir Paul McCartney, is a vegetarian and animal-rights advocate. She recently opened the V Bites Vegan Restaurant in Brighton, England. Heather Mills, ex-wife of Sir Paul McCartney, is a vegetarian and animal-rights advocate. She recently opened the V Bites Vegan Restaurant in Brighton, England. Photo: Tim Whitby / Getty Images
Image 23 of 48 Musician Moby has been a vegan for over 20 years. Musician Moby has been a vegan for over 20 years. Photo: Ethan Miller / Getty Images
Image 24 of 48 Former Smiths frontman and singer Morrissey has been a vegetarian since he was "11 or 12 years old." Former Smiths frontman and singer Morrissey has been a vegetarian since he was "11 or 12 years old." Photo: MARTIN BERNETTI / AFP/Getty Images
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Image 26 of 48 Actress Natalie Portman has been a vegetarian since she was 8, and was vegan until she was pregnant and started craving eggs and dairy. She also has a line of vegan shoes. Actress Natalie Portman has been a vegetarian since she was 8, and was vegan until she was pregnant and started craving eggs and dairy. She also has a line of vegan shoes. Photo: Michael Buckner / Getty Images
Image 27 of 48 Actress Olivia Wilde was a vegan, but reportedly sought comfort in cheese after her divorce in 2011. She now sticks to a vegetarian diet. Actress Olivia Wilde was a vegan, but reportedly sought comfort in cheese after her divorce in 2011. She now sticks to a vegetarian diet. Photo: Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images
Image 28 of 48 Ozzy Osbourne cut out meat and dairy from his diet in late 2011 in a bid to get healthier. Ozzy Osbourne cut out meat and dairy from his diet in late 2011 in a bid to get healthier. Photo: Larry Busacca / 2011 Getty Images
Image 29 of 48 Actress Pamela Anderson has been a vegetarian for years, and is an outspoken animal rights activist and PETA spokesperson. Actress Pamela Anderson has been a vegetarian for years, and is an outspoken animal rights activist and PETA spokesperson. Photo: Michael Buckner / Getty Images
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Image 31 of 48 Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney has been a vegetarian for over 25 years. He co-authored "The Meat Free Monday Cookbook," with his daughters Mary and Stella. Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney has been a vegetarian for over 25 years. He co-authored "The Meat Free Monday Cookbook," with his daughters Mary and Stella. Photo: Kevin Winter / 2012 Getty Images
Image 32 of 48 After struggling with low-energy, actress Fran Drescher overhauled her diet opting to live a vegan and gluten-free lifestyle. After struggling with low-energy, actress Fran Drescher overhauled her diet opting to live a vegan and gluten-free lifestyle. Photo: Alexandra Wyman / Getty Images
Image 33 of 48 Prince was a vegan for years, but he's now a vegetarian. Prince was a vegan for years, but he's now a vegetarian. Photo: Stuart Wilson / Getty Images
Image 34 of 48 Basketball player Raja Bell has been a vegetarian since he was 2 years old (he only eats cheese occasionally, according to a Washington Post article). Basketball player Raja Bell has been a vegetarian since he was 2 years old (he only eats cheese occasionally, according to a Washington Post article). Photo: Ronald Martinez / Getty Images
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Image 36 of 48 Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons has been a vegan since 1998. Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons has been a vegan since 1998. Photo: Stephen Lovekin / Getty Images
Image 37 of 48 Musician Shania Twain was the first celebrity to earn the Sexiest Vegetarian Alive honor, in 2011. She says she hasn't eaten meat since 1993. Musician Shania Twain was the first celebrity to earn the Sexiest Vegetarian Alive honor, in 2011. She says she hasn't eaten meat since 1993. Photo: Jason Merritt / Getty Images
Image 38 of 48 A lifelong vegetarian (she is the daughter of Linda and Paul McCartney, after all), designer Stella McCartney doesn't use leather or fur in her collections. A lifelong vegetarian (she is the daughter of Linda and Paul McCartney, after all), designer Stella McCartney doesn't use leather or fur in her collections. Photo: Samir Hussein / Getty Images
Image 39 of 48 "Jackass" star Steve-O stopped eating meat after kicking drugs. He then gave up eggs, fish and dairy. "Jackass" star Steve-O stopped eating meat after kicking drugs. He then gave up eggs, fish and dairy. Photo: Christopher Polk / Getty Images
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Image 41 of 48 Indie musician Ted Leo of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists has been a vegetarian since 1988 and vegan since 1998. Indie musician Ted Leo of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists has been a vegetarian since 1988 and vegan since 1998. Photo: Cory Schwartz / Getty Images
Image 42 of 48 Former professional boxer and "The Hangover" actor Mike Tyson became a vegan because of a family history of obesity. He reportedly lost over 100 pounds after making the change. Former professional boxer and "The Hangover" actor Mike Tyson became a vegan because of a family history of obesity. He reportedly lost over 100 pounds after making the change. Photo: Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images
Image 43 of 48 After being diagnosed with the autoimmune disease Sjogren's Syndrome, professional tennis player Venus Williams switched to a raw, vegan diet. Her sister Serena Williams switched as well, for moral support. less After being diagnosed with the autoimmune disease Sjogren's Syndrome, professional tennis player Venus Williams switched to a raw, vegan diet. Her sister Serena Williams switched as well, for moral... more Photo: Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images
Image 44 of 48 Weird Al Yankovic has been a vegetarian (and sometimes vegan) since the 1990s. Weird Al Yankovic has been a vegetarian (and sometimes vegan) since the 1990s. Photo: Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images
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Image 46 of 48 "Bridesmaids" actress/writer Kristen Wiig took the title of Sexiest Celebrity Vegetarian in 2011. "Bridesmaids" actress/writer Kristen Wiig took the title of Sexiest Celebrity Vegetarian in 2011. Photo: Cindy Ord / Getty Images
Image 47 of 48 Actor Woody Harrelson has been vegan for over 25 years. Actor Woody Harrelson has been vegan for over 25 years. Photo: Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty ImagesHillary Clinton speaks during a Glassdoor Pay Equality Roundtable on Tuesday in N.Y. Mary Altaffer/AP
NEW YORK CITY – Hillary Clinton is waging a tightly targeted campaign against Bernie Sanders in her adopted home state, one that's exposing the demographic weaknesses of the Vermont senator's insurgent challenge to her in the Democratic presidential primary.
Clinton's events in the Empire State routinely focus on a particular subset of voters, allowing her to narrowcast a specific message that resonates with them. Whether it be women, African-Americans or seniors, the Clinton operation is ever cognizant about catering to a targeted group's sweet spots.
Sanders, meanwhile, continues to rely on the mega-rally, packing as many supporters as he can into a venue and delivering his standard sermon of progressive platitudes – an approach that has defined his campaign from the start.
It's a stark difference in strategy between the two candidates one week before the New York Democratic primary, in which 291 delegates are at stake – the largest single-state total to date. Sanders currently trails Clinton by around 250 pledged delegates. Her lead swells to nearly 700 when including superdelegates.
Sanders is playing from behind in polling here, too, trailing Clinton by 12 to 14 points, according to recent surveys of the race. The numbers show him shouldering double-digit deficits with women and minorities, hobbling him from expanding outside of his overwhelmingly white, progressive base.
On Tuesday, Clinton marked Equal Pay Day by participating in a roundtable in midtown Manhattan organized by Glassdoor, a California-based company that collects data on corporations and employee salaries.
The event stressed that women still only make 76 cents for every dollar paid to men, and that African-American and Hispanic females fare even worse, earning just 64 cents and 56 cents, respectively, for every dollar white men earn.
"The last time I checked, there's no discount for being a woman. Groceries don't cost us less, rent doesn't cost us less, so why should we be paid less?" Clinton said in her remarks.
She then sat down at a table for 45 minutes with a panel that included researchers in the equal pay field and Megan Rapinoe, a member of the World Cup-winning U.S. women's national soccer team. Rapinoe is among a group of players who have filed a complaint against the U.S. Soccer Federation, accusing the organization of compensating female players at a level far below that of player's on the U.S. men's national soccer team.
"We cheered when they won the World Cup and we cheered when they won the Olympic gold medal and we noticed that our men's team hasn't yet done that," Clinton said to laughs. "Yet somehow the men are making hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the women."
Clinton said passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act – which would make wages more transparent – and paid family leave were two solutions lawmakers could enact to help remedy the gulf.
Day Piercy, a New York City resident who attended the event and plans to vote for Clinton, said afterward that it was this type of small setting that underlines the former secretary of state's substantive advantage over Sanders on a vast range of issues.
"I'm a big women's rights activist and I haven't seen him do anything on those issues, specifically. If he gets called on it, he'll give lip service to it. But he doesn't talk about domestic violence, he doesn't talk about sexual assault … he doesn't talk about equal pay. He's a one-line man, right? It's income inequality and he's got a plan for what we should do and it's a simple rhetoric plan," Piercy says.
To be fair, Sanders regularly lists "equal pay for equal work" in his speeches as a goal he shares. But he often mentions it only briefly, before readily moving on to other topics. Clinton's willingness to devote entire events to single issues conveys a dedication and sophistication that reverberates with voters looking for more than slogans.
"That's not rhetoric," says Piercy, gesturing to the room she just exited. "We're really talking about a problem of pay equity and how do we get to equal pay, and let's really talk about it. I see [Sanders] really up there at the high-level vision, and I agree with everything that he says. The question I have is, how are we going to move forward, given the gridlock we've got in Congress, given the huge divide between the right wing and more liberal people."
Pay equity is just one example of the hyper-focused Clinton campaign strategy.
On Sunday, former President Bill Clinton was dispatched to Queens for an event focused on Latino voters, before heading to three historic, Harlem churches with predominantly African-American congregations.
"When we had Bill Clinton [in the White House], somebody said that Bill Clinton thought he was the first black president," New York Rep. Charlie Rangel told the crowd at one event, according to the Wall Street Journal.
On Monday, as the former president spoke at a event for seniors in the Bronx, Hillary Clinton campaigned on gun violence prevention on Long Island. For most of the somber hour, family members of gun violence victims relayed their harrowing stories. One previously undecided mother who lost her son to a shooting announced her support for Clinton.
Sanders' events, on the other hand, are almost always bigger and flashier than Clinton's and usually bursting with more energy. The Sanders campaign tallied more than 11,000 people at a rally in Buffalo on Monday. On Wednesday, celebrities Spike Lee and Tim Robbins and band Vampire Weekend will be featured at a rally in Manhattan's Washington Square Park.
But bigger isn't always better – and it's not clear that Sanders' large-scale rallies are doing much to make inroads with the blocs of voters he needs most. He trails Clinton by 40 points in New York among African-Americans, according to NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist polling. He's behind her among women by 20 points. Without cutting into those gaps, Sanders' path to victory here appears improbable.
The Sanders campaign says it does many of its smaller events in private, before the candidate takes the stage in front of the masses.
"At almost every rally we have meetings beforehand with groups ranging from labor to nurses to Native Americans. Sometimes he meets with local volunteers who have been out knocking on doors and asks for unvarnished feedback on what they're hearing. It's a very effective way for him to absorb information," Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs says.
At the Glassdoor roundtable, where barely a few hundred people showed up and some seats in the theater were empty, Clinton was asked if she was hopeful the issue of pay equity was garnering real traction in the political realm.
She didn't deliver a stemwinder of an answer, or one that could be easily tossed on a bumper sticker. But she left those in attendance with the strong impression she would be committed to following through on it later.
"I'm actually optimistic, but I'm also very focused in making sure that we don't lose the impetus behind this conversation," she replied.When you think of open source software, you might think of a few specific projects depending on your area of interest. If you work on web applications, the term “open source” might conjure up visions of Apache or Node.js; if you’re into big data, then perhaps Hadoop comes to mind; if you care a lot about security, you might think of OpenSSL; if you’re a front-end developer, then maybe jQuery and React pop into your head. In all cases, you’re thinking about those projects that have succeeded and, to some degree, achieved a level of ubiquity in their respective arenas. It’s with this success in mind that a lot of open source authors venture out, sharing their code with the hopes of reaching a similar level of success and ubiquity.
There’s a peculiar mix of altruism and egotism that goes into releasing an open source project. On the one hand, you might be solving a problem that others are struggling with, and sharing your solution will save them a lot of time. On the other, the near-fantastic rock star status of those who have created successful open source projects (think John Resig, Ryan Dahl, and Linus Torvalds) drives people to overshare in the hopes of also achieving such status. This has resulted in a glut of open source projects being released into the wild and their creators venturing out on marketing campaigns to attract users.
You need to be aware of this trend and the reality of open source today: most open source projects are crap, and you need to be careful which ones you use.
Note: For the purposes of this post, the term “use” refers to including the project in your application.
Background
As the maintainer of a reasonably popular open source project (ESLint[1]), and an architect at Box, I make a lot of decisions around which open source projects should be used in some widely-used applications. I end up investigating some open source project roughly once a week, and most of the time, end up pretty disappointed with what I find. I want to use open source code as much as possible, but I can’t do it at the expense of maintainability, security, or a whole host of other concerns. Replacing a working custom-built solution with an open source one sounds like an easy win, but in reality, could cause a lot of problems if the wrong open source project is used.
This post contains the top issues I find in open source projects that cause me to reject their usage.
Your project doesn’t have a license
This might seem basic, but there are a significant number of open source projects that are published without a license. Simply saying “this is open source” doesn’t make it so, nor does sharing your code publicly on GitHub or BitBucket automatically mean it can be used. Any code that doesn’t explicitly have a license specified is considered “all rights reserved” by the author (this is standard copyright law in the United States[2]). That means you don’t have any legal right to use, reproduce, distribute, or otherwise use the code without the consent of the author.
If the project seems promising and passes the other checks I use (see below), then I might contact the author and ask for a license to be added. I absolutely won’t use a project that doesn’t have its license terms explicitly defined in the source code repository, so I also will not accept just an email from the author granting me a license.
Takeaway: When you publish your project, make sure you have specified a license. Include a LICENSE file in the repository and mention the license in your README.
Your project is GPL/LGPL licensed
Many credit GPL with the rise in popularity of open source as well as the success of Linux. For those unaware, the GPL has a clause that allows anyone to use the project in its compiled form with no repercussions but if you modify the source code or include it in another project then you must open source that as well. The exact text is as follows[3]:
You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
So when you license code as GPL, that license becomes viral whenever you distribute it, which means including the code in your own open source project. That is a showstopper for businesses wishing to incorporate code from these projects. (You can still safely use the code locally, such as running Linux on a server or using a build-time tool. It’s just including the code in your application that can be problematic.)
The LGPL[4] slightly modifies the terms of the GPL such that you can link to the project so long as the application doesn’t contain any actual code from the project itself. Here’s the relevant clause:
A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library, but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked with it, is called a “work that uses the Library”. Such a work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and therefore falls outside the scope of this License.
That means your open source project can link to a LGPL library without triggering the viral clause of the GPL, making it safe to use in business.
However, most of the code I deal with is not compiled. JavaScript, Python, PHP, CSS, etc., are a significant gray area because there is no distinction between the source code and the distributed artifact - they are one in the same. If I use a GPL or LGPL JavaScript library that is sent to the browser as part of my application, does that count as distribution? I’ve asked a couple of lawyers about this and the general response I’ve received is, “this is definitely a gray area that hasn’t been decided by the courts.” Perhaps someday someone will bring such a case to the courts and we can know for sure, but in the meantime, I just don’t use GPL or LGPL projects.
Takeaway: If you can choose a more permissive license for your project than GPL or LGPL, please do.
You aren’t maintaining the code
It seems that a lot of people see open sourcing something as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. They worked hard on some code and the payoff is fame and appreciation from an adoring crowd. But how many of those projects will be around in six months? A year? Is the project something you’re committed to maintaining, or was it just a passing fancy? Why would I want to use that project? It was interesting to you this weekend, but if I come to rely on it, can I count on you continuing to update it?
When evaluating a project, I typically look at:
When was the last commit? Are there responses to the most recent issues? When was the version released? Are pull requests being merged at all?
These all tell me how well the project is being maintained. If the most recent commit is a year ago, then I’m pretty sure no one is maintaining it. The larger the project, the more this means the project is likely abandoned. Further, it likely means the author hasn’t really thought about the project in a while and might not even remember all of how it works (both bad signs). The smaller the project, the shorter the timeframe I consider (a project with one author and zero commits in three months is likely abandoned).
Similarly, the activity in issues and pull requests says a lot. Is the author engaging with people at all? Open to accepting feedback and patches? And are those turned around into new versions? If I’m going to rely on something, I need to know that either the author will fix problems or my patches will be accepted when I find problems.
Periodically I’ll get people telling me that they’ll maintain something if I use it. That’s a nice though, but saying you’ll maintain something is very different from actually doing it. I prefer to see a track record of maintenance happening regardless of my involvement.
Takeaway: If you’re unsure that you want to work on this project for more than a year, think twice before encouraging people to adopt it. Don’t lead them down a dead end. Build up a pattern of maintaining your code and let that speak for itself.
You don’t have documentation or tests
I group documentation and tests together because they are similar: documentation describes how the end user should use the project and tests describe how the project should technically work. If a project is missing either of these or both, then I don’t consider it worth my time to investigate. A lack of documentation means I need to dig through the code to figure out how to use it and a lack of tests means there’s no way to tell when something breaks. Both situations are dire if you intend to rely on the functionality in a product.
Takeaway: Make sure you have documentation and tests for at least the core parts of the project.
You aren’t using the project
This is an interesting occurrence in the world of open source: people who don’t use the projects they create. Sometimes, this the result of an open source project that began as a weekend hobby project and the author doesn’t want to leave the source code to die on their computer. Instead, they open source it with the hope of “letting it live,” like releasing an animal into the wild. I frequently see people announcing such projects on their Twitter stream, proudly proclaiming that this project they spent 48 hours on is now ready for use. They themselves aren’t using it in any product or in any way that could be considered “production,” but they would like you to do so.
Weekend projects might be fun to play with, but relying on them for something important is placing a huge bet on an unknown quantity. I generally prefer to use projects that others are already using. The reason is simple: the more production-like places the project is used, the more someone is interested in maintaining it.
If you yourself, the author, aren’t using the project in some production environment then you are essentially asking me to take a risk that you’ve been unwilling to take. I didn’t even attempt to use ESLint at Box until it had been in existence and use on my own personal projects for eight months. Even then, I ended up spending a lot of time chasing down bugs and fixing compatibility issues. ESLint got better not just because it was open source, but because I was putting it through a lot in my day-to-day work.
Takeaway: You should always be your project’s first user. Make sure you’ve created something that’s useful for yourself first, then ask friends to try it out.
In closing
I think open source is wonderful for many reasons, but not all open source projects are created the same. “Free” isn’t the same as “good,” and projects that don’t measure up (based on the criteria) in this article should be handled with care. As I said in the introduction, the majority of open source projects are crap, so picking out the good ones is a tough job. When you succeed, you’re able to accelerate and stabilize your code base; when you fail, you can cause immeasurable harm to that same code base.
This isn’t to dissuade anyone from open sourcing their work - please continue to do so. Just realize that there is a significant bar for open source projects that are reliable enough to use in a product. If you want your project to succeed, you should be aiming for that bar. If you’re just sharing so your code can live on, be sure to say so in your README. There’s plenty of room in the open source ecosystem for both categories of projects, we just really need people to be better about pointing out which is which.
Update(2015-Dec-15): Clarified language around GPL and LGPL license. Also added note that “use” means including in your application to further clarify the concerns.
ReferencesNew to GIS? Don’t know where to start? This beginners guide to GIS provides all the information that you need to understand what GIS is, and how it can be a great asset for you, and your organization.
As you are here I’m guessing that the term GIS or web GIS has popped up at work.
Maybe your organization has decided to start using GIS to make better sense of their data, or you were looking into ways to map your data, and that search led you to the term “GIS”.
If like me, the first thing you did when you heard this term was head over to Wikipedia, you will have been confronted with lots of complex jargon and even some scary looking algorithms:
Formula for calculating aspect in GIS, Wikipedia
Now, before you get disheartened or fall asleep, I have some good news for you!
GIS isn’t that complicated, what’s more it can even be fun. Once you’ve finished this short book not only will you understand what GIS is all about, but you will have the background knowledge and vocabulary required to discuss GIS and its associated tools with confidence.
You will even learn the basics of operating a GIS, preparing map data and sharing interactive maps in a web GIS.Mark Meckler traveled to Manhattan to spend some time in Glenn Beck’s studio. First, he was interviewed on the Convention of States Project:
The concept of a Convention of States (COS), as outlined in Article V of the Constitution, has been the topic of great conversation recently. From Mark Levin’s book, The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic, to the gathering of state legislators at Mount Vernon last month, the idea of a COS is gaining momentum. On radio this morning, Mark Meckler of Citizens for Self Governance joined Pat and Stu to discuss the ins-and-outs of what a COS would mean for America.
“Well, so you know, I think all of us can identify the problems. We know there are plenty of problems in Washington D.C., and I think one of the things we all acknowledge is over the last few years we’ve seen [politicians] not going to fix the problems in Washington D.C.,” Mark said. “We’ll complain about it and whine about it. We do plenty of that… What we don’t do is provide an answer.”
“There’s really is the answer the answer is the American people. It’s found in Article V of the Constitution – that second clause says that we have the right to call a Constitutional Convention,” he continued. “It was set up that way for this situation where the federal government had become tyrannical, needed to be restrained by the people. And so we are calling for an Amending Convention under Article V.”
According to Article V, two-thirds of the state legislatures, or 34 states, must approve an application for a convention to occur. State legislatures would then send delegates to the convention, with each state getting one vote on proposed amendments. For an amendment to pass and become a part of the Constitution, it would have to be approved by three-fourths, or 38, of the state legislatures. Mark admitted that just a couple of years ago he would not have believed the support for such a gathering existed, but he has recently had a change of heart.
“I’ve spent the last couple years studying the issue, and then I had Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, one of the few lawyers ever to take an Article V case before the Supreme Court case. The plan, for me, is pretty simple,” Mark explained. “You need to argue: In roughly 4,000 state legislative districts around the country, you need roughly 100 people in each district to be willing to call their legislative representative and ask for a convention… That’s not a high bar. And I started to talking to reps all over the country and they said, ‘We don’t get 100 calls on anything. If you can generate a hundred calls then we’re going to be motivated to at least take a serious look.’”
Regardless of how you feel about the idea of a COS, it is important to recognize the power Article V of the Constitution grants the American people and the states.- Advertisement -
Thanks to community modder TwistedMexican, we now have some additional game code referencing The Sims 4 Pets. As he poked through game code, he discovered an animation snippet which indicates Cats and Dogs will be able to walk on certain objects:
Pets will be able to walk on top of the following objects: Counters
Bars
Fridge
Tables
Beds <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?> <I c=”SurfacePortalDefinition” i=”snippet” m=”snippets” n=”surfacePortalDefinition_ Bar” s=”155512″> <U n=”value”> <L n=”animation_mapping”> <U> <E n=”key”>CAT</E> <U n=”value”> <T n=”factory”>151822</T> </U> </U> <U> <E n=”key”>DOG</E> <U n=”value”> <T n=”factory”>151822</T> </U> </U> </L> <L n=”portal_pairs”> <U> <U n=”portal_end_offset”> <T n=”y”>-0.25</T> </U> <U n=”portal_start_offset”> <T n=”x”>0</T> <T n=”y”>-1</T> </U> </U> <U> <T n=”is_internal”>True</T> <U n=”portal_end_offset”> <T n=”y”>0.25</T> </U> <U n=”portal_start_offset”> <T n=”x”>0</T> <T n=”y”>-0.25</T> </U> </U> </L> </U> </I>
This does not man that pets would be restricted solely to these objects, but this is some new information believed to be added with the last game patch. We’ve yet to hear anything on an official level, but we have plenty of proof Pets are being worked into the game.Auburn defensive back signee Carlito Gonzalez was absent from the first day of Auburn's practice and will not enroll this fall after failing to qualify academically..
According to coach Gus Malzahn, Gonzalez is "in the process of looking for a junior college" and will not play at Auburn this season.
Gonzalez, a three-star safety, had been working to finish a high school course in order to become academically eligible. At SEC Media Days last month, Malzahn did not appear concerned about the status of Gonzalez' eligibility and said he expected Gonzalez to be on campus in time for the start of fall camp.
Gonzalez was rated as the No. 29 safety in the nation coming out of Stephenson in Stone Mountain, Ga. The 6-foot-1, 190-pounder was one of the Tigers' longest-standing commits in the 2017 class, having pledged to the program on Aug. 9, 2015 and remaining loyal to his commitment through two different defensive coordinators, Will Muschamp and then Kevin Steele, as well as three different defensive backs coaches: Travaris Robinson, Wesley McGriff and now Greg Brown.
Gonzalez is the second member of Auburn's 2017 class to fail to qualify academically, joining four-star athlete Alaric Williams, who enrolled at Garden City Community College this summer.
"Like I said, (Gonzalez is) in the process of looking for a junior college and (he'll) go to a junior college and try to get here," Malzahn said.David West doesn't do hype or hyperbole. He does reality, even when it's not what people particularly want to hear. That's why his comments on Oct. 1, Media Day for the Pacers, rippled throughout the nation.
On that day, the eve of the start of training camp for the Pacers, all we knew was that Lance Stephenson had signed with Charlotte and Paul George had broken his leg. The only logical viewpoint was that the expectations for a team that had reached the Eastern Conference finals the previous two seasons would have to be drastically downgraded.
“You have to give yourself a realistic starting point," West said then. "So obviously we can't be talking about competing for a championship, even being in title contention, we just have to talk about figuring out a way to get the best lineups on the floor, the best guys on the floor to give us a chance to compete.”
West was feeling every bit of his 34 years and 11 NBA seasons that day. He had never really planned to go beyond 10, and in fact had only signed on with the Pacers – twice – because he saw the potential for a championship. Now, it appeared he was stuck with a fading team in the twilight hours of his career. He had consistently stated he would retire after his contract expires at the end of next season, and that felt more certain than ever. In fact, he later acknowledged he probably would have retired in 2013 if the Pacers had won the championship then.
Oh, but look at him now.
Having sat out the first 15 games to rehab the ankle that was sprained in the pre-season, West returned to the Pacers for Friday's game with Orlando at Bankers Life Fieldhouse. And he returned a rejuvenated man. Not only one eager to get in on the excitement the young guys had been stirring up in his absence, but one who's revised his season expectations and perhaps |
lived there. Instead they are trying to gather information by listening to all 26 999 calls from that night from people who said they were inside one of those 23 flats.
Detectives have appealed for information about who else might have been in the block that night and are looking at “all imaginable sources” of information about who could have been inside those flats, including talking to fast food delivery companies and schools, she said.
Talking to survivors seeking help at the Westway relief centre reveals some of the complexities facing police, particularly around the number of unregistered residents. One man said he had been sleeping on a sofa with friends who lived on the 22nd floor for months, because he was homeless after a marital problems; he was not registered to live there, but had lost all his belongings. He survived because he was at the local mosque at the time of the fire.
Another man had returned from America, where he was with his girlfriend, who recently gave birth to their child. He had let a family friend stay in his flat; she now faces homelessness because she was not registered at the address. A teenage boy said he was sharing a one-bedroom flat with his aunt because it was cheaper than renting a two-bedroom property, but he, too, was not registered to live in the block.
In an emailed response, the Metropolitan police said the names of the deceased would only be published once formal identification has taken place, with the agreement of the coroner and the family.
Even now, nobody is listening to the Grenfell survivors | Seraphima Kennedy Read more
“The complexity of this work should not be underestimated. The Metropolitan police service understands the distress and desire for answers and we remain committed to providing answers as soon as we possibly can,” the statement added.
Asked why lists of residents, survivors and presumed victims were not being released, the Grenfell Response Team, which has taken over the crisis response from the local council, said: “We know that around 80 people have been confirmed dead at this point in time, and that the police have said they expect this number to increase. There is a complex mapping exercise under way to establish the number of households and people who were in the tower at the time of the fire.”
A member of the local residents committee, who asked not to be named, acknowledged that there was “unhappiness about the numbers”, adding: “I tend to subscribe to the cockup rather than conspiracy theory. They are shifting through ash and trying to work out what is human ash and what is a chair leg. They are talking about this going on until December. I do feel a certain sympathy.”A few years back, two left-leaning writers, Andy and Lana Wachowski, adapted the story of Guy Fawkes, a Catholic radical who is remembered primarily for his failed attempt, on November 5, 1605, to blow up the Houses of Parliament and kill King James I. The Wachowski brothers movie, V for Vendetta, made Fawkes the hero and presented the British crown as an oppressive dictatorship that was meant to echo, at least in technique, certain aspects of the administration of George W. Bush, down to the hooded prisoners, the orange jump suits and the unapologetic embrace of harsh interrogation techniques.
The meaning of Fawkes is, of course, not fixed. The Wachowski brothers’ retelling of the Fawkes’ story was later embraced by libertarian supporters of Ron Paul. During the 2008 campaign, “Remember, Remember The Fifth of November” became a rallying cry for Paul boosters, who shared at least some of the revolutionary fire of both Fawkes and the Wachowskis. On November 5, 2007, Guy Fawkes Day, Paul supporters raised more than $4 million online.
Now, the Fawkes mythology has come full circle. The Republican Governors Association has embraced the symbolism of Fawkes, launching a rather striking website, RememberNovember.com, with a video that showcases far more Hollywood savvy than one can usually expect from Republicans. Again, the Fawkes tale has been twisted a bit. This time, President Obama plays the roll of King James, the Democratic leadership is Parliament, and the Republican Party represents the aggrieved Catholic mass.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
The politics and substance aside, this strikes me as a remarkable bit of political messaging, not just for its cinematic quality. The RGA, under the control of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, is clearly stepping out of the stodgy, safe territory it normally inhabits. It is aiming to tap into the vast well of anti-government fury now coursing through the nation. Who would have guessed that Barbour would embrace the symbolic value of the same would-be mass murderer as the Wachowski brothers?
One other note, RGA message wizards have intentionally not circulated this video on YouTube or made an embed version of it publicly available. (Swampland asked for, and was granted, special dispensation.) They want people to view it on their site, RememberNovember.com, in the hopes of building a grassroots army.
UPDATE: I notice quite a bit of electronic dust this post has stirred up on the interwebbing. A couple points: First, as I suggest in the post, the tale of Fawkes has been so thoroughly appropriated by so many that it is just not right to associate the latest appropriators with the intent of the original criminal in 1605. The RGA is not calling for a violent uprising here. It is tapping into well-established online anti-government memes. (Remember 1984.) The Wachowski brothers, who were themselves referencing a comic book adaptation of the Fawkes story, were not calling for violence when they made their movie. Ron Paul supporters were not calling for violence when they decided to raise $4 million in 2007. To suggest that this is what the RGA is doing now is, it seems to me, overly simplistic and inflammatory. Second, there has been some speculation in the comments that the RGA fed me the Fawkes reference. They did not. But the connection is not exactly a stretch for anyone who has closely followed Republican politics online (and yes, here I am counting Paul as a Republican). Aside from the Remember November refrain, the classical music, the near-apocalyptic crises messages, the suggestions of totalitarian intent, the imagery of Castro and marching soldiers, the sound of a ticking clock all points to a well established online narrative, where Fawkes thrives as a sort of folk hero for all ideologies. These sorts of videos are made to go viral. They are intended to be edgy, provocative. They are meant to tap into running passions, online story lines. This one is very successful at accomplishing its viral mission.(Santa Barbara, Calif.) -- A team of physicists at UC Santa Barbara has seen the light, and it comes in many different colors. By aiming high- and low-frequency laser beams at a semiconductor, the researchers caused electrons to be ripped from their cores, accelerated, and then smashed back into the cores they left behind. This recollision produced multiple frequencies of light simultaneously. Their findings appear in the current issue of the science journal Nature.
"This is a very remarkable phenomenon. I have never seen anything like this before," said Mark Sherwin, whose research group made the groundbreaking discovery. Sherwin is a professor of physics at UCSB and a co-author of the paper. He is also director of the campus's Institute for Terahertz Science and Technology.
When the high-frequency optical laser beam hits the semiconductor material -- in this case, gallium arsenide nanostructures -- it creates an electron-hole pair called an exciton. The electron is negatively charged, and the hole is positively charged, and the two are bound together by their mutual attraction. "The high-frequency laser creates electrons and holes," Sherwin explained. "The very strong, low-frequency free electron laser beam rips the electron away from the hole and accelerates it. As the low-frequency field oscillates, it causes the electron to come careening back to the hole." The electron has excess energy because it has been accelerated, and when it slams back into the hole, the recombined electron-hole pair emits photons at new frequencies.
"It's fairly routine to mix the lasers and get one or two new frequencies, Sherwin continued. "But to see all these different new frequencies, up to 11 in our experiment, is the exciting phenomenon. Each frequency corresponds to a different color."
In terms of real-world applications, the electron-hole recollision phenomenon has the potential to significantly increase the speed of data transfer and communication processes. One possible application involves multiplexing -- the ability to send data down multiple channels -- and another is high-speed modulation.
"Think of your cable Internet," explained Ben Zaks, a UCSB doctoral student in physics and the paper's lead author. "The cable is a bundle of fiber optics, and you're sending a beam with a wavelength that's approximately 1.5 microns down the line. But within that beam there are a lot of frequencies separated by small gaps, like a fine-toothed comb. Information going one way moves on one frequency, and information going another way uses another frequency. You want to have a lot of frequencies available, but not too far from one another."
The electron-hole recollision phenomenon does just that -- it creates light at new frequencies, with optimal separation between them.
The researchers utilize a free electron laser -- a building-size machine in UCSB's Broida Hall -- to produce the electron-hole recollisions, which they note is not practical for real-world applications. Theoretically, however, a transistor could be used in place of the free electron laser to produce the strong terahertz fields. "The transistor would then modulate the near infrared beam," Zaks continued. "Our data indicates that we are modulating the near infrared laser at twice the terahertz frequency. This is where we could really see this working to increase the speed of optical modulation, which is how you get information down a cable line."
The electron-hole recollision phenomenon creates many new avenues for research and exploration, Sherwin noted. "It is an interesting time because there are a lot of people who can participate in doing this kind of research," he said. "We have a unique tool -- a free electron laser -- which gives us a big advantage for exploring the properties of fundamental materials. We just put it in front of our laser beams and measure the colors of light going out. Now that we've seen this phenomenon, we can start doing the hard work of putting the pieces together on a chip."
In discussing the research team's discovery, Sherwin cited Michael Polanyi, the Hungarian scientist and science philosopher. "He talked about growing points in science, and I'm hoping this is going to be one of those, where a lot of people can use it as a foundation for going off in a lot of different directions," he said. "I want to continue working on it, but I'd like to see a lot of other people join in."
Also contributing to the research is the paper's second author, R.B. Liu of The Chinese University in Hong Kong. "This is an excellent example of the value of communicating with scientists from all over the globe," said Sherwin. "If we had never met, this research would not have happened."
###Bobby Jindal walked out to the microphone with a glaze in his eyes and seemed hopped up on Red Bull as he shuffled through the Republican response speech to President Obama. If the Republican Party thinks he's their solution they are sadly mistaken.
Instead of launching his national political career, he just about ended it. Some people thought he reminded them of Kenneth from 30 Rock, but at least Kenneth has some enthusiasm. Not only was he zombie-like throughout, but he didn't even have his facts straight. Too much Red Bull?
But Democratic leaders in Congress rejected this approach. Instead of trusting us to make wise decisions with our own money, they passed the largest government spending bill in history -- with a price tag of more than $1 trillion with interest. While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a'magnetic levitation' line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called 'volcano monitoring.' Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, DC
.
As Newsweek documented, the levitating train is a complete myth.
A widely repeated claim that $8 billion is set aside for a "levitating train" to Disneyland is untrue. That total is for unspecified high-speed rail projects, and some of it may or may not end up going to a proposed 300-mph "maglev" train connecting Anaheim, Calif., with Las Vegas.
The truth never seems to be a problem for the Republican Party. Jindal also boasted that government is ineffective by sneering at the government response to Hurricane Katrina. Yes, under Republicans and George Bush, Hurricane Katrina was a disaster -- one led by his own party. Way to go there, Bobby. I don't think Americans have forgotten that fact, and it was an idiotic analogy to use. Pretty much like most of his childlike stories.
Dave N: Don't you think he and Sarah Palin seem fated for each other?... Birds of a feather and all that.
UPDATE: Digby has her take:p455w0rd's MOTD Customizer
Discord
Twitter @TheRealp455w0rd
Patreon: p455w0rd
My site
A Forge Server Side-Only mod to customize your server MOTD!
This mod requires p455w0rdsLib which can be found here for 1.9.4-1.10.2 and here for 1.7.10.
Features
Vanilla Compatible
1.7.10, 1.9.4, 1.10, and 1.10.2 compatible
Customizable Random MOTDs
Customizable PlayerList tooltip
On first run, the mod will generate the two required files for MOTD customization in <server root dir>/CustomMOTD
There are 2 files used for configuration.
customotdlist.txt
This mod supports multiline MOTDs (2 lines as per vanilla). To set a new line, use the pipe | character in the entry in custommotdlist.txt
Each entry in custommotdlist.txt is a separate MOTD entry. This is why the pipe character is used for 2nd line
customplayerlist.txt
Contains the replacement template for the player list tooltip
Variables
{playercount} - number of players currently on the server
{maxplayers} - maximum number of players the server supports
{difficulty} - server difficulty level
{mcversion} - server Minecraft version
{radio} - obfscated radio bars
{playerlist} - list up to 10 players currently online
Color Codes and Formatting
Full support for default Minecraft color codes and formatting
to use an ampersand (&), use two ampersands in succession (&&).
bb but Plugins already do this :C
Yes they do, and I feel the less dependent modded servers are on systems like Bukkit/Sponge, the better. I have been told that Forge can't possibly do what bukkit plugins can..I beg to differ..by Maxwell Foret on February 16, 2013
Christopher Dorner made himself useful by demonstrating a pattern of left-wing psychology from which we all can learn. His story was too intriguing for the media to avoid when styled as that of a hard-working altruistic cop unfairly fired for reporting corrupt police who were too rough with helpless innocents being arrested for no reason.
As the story was intended to be told, the loyal crusader for justice risked himself to punish the evil offenders, taking to the streets for the public and heroically dedicating his life to weeding out the wicked ones. Who could oppose the selfless oppressed underdog of this superhero narrative?
But scratch the surface and the phony posturing becomes clear, revealing traits we see in every revolution and call for “rights” to be recognized. Claiming to have suffered perceived prejudice since shortly after birth, Dorner expresses his frustration with society, as if some supernatural force has selected him for random misery and failure. He solely concerns himself with accusations, blame, and excuses rather than constructive plans for personal betterment and success.
In his manifesto, Dorner aligns with leftist politics, while admitting his long depression and deep saturation in entertainment products, though not considering their possible connection and relation to a lifestyle of frustration and outbursts.
One will always encounter struggle, opposition, and difficulties needing to be overcome. How we face these reveals character and yields the results obtained. Marcus Aurelius devised a morning prayer to prepare a positive outlook and bulwark, declaring the most trying expectations and explaning why one must not break under their weight:
Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill will, and selfishness — all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother; therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Traditionalists view problems to dissect their holistic structure, revealing the key broken aspects needing repair. Venting, faulting, and acting out is personally satisfying because it feels like something is being accomplished by lashing out at the world, but this pleasure is a false narrative that attempts to shift the consideration of the problem from its true origin.
The frustrated one dreams of revenge by making others suffer, gaining advantage through a lose-lose proposition that hurts others by making their situation worse. If your situation is already bad, hurting others who are doing well makes you more equal, and thus an underdog’s justice finds moral ground from which to undermine and spoil everything healthy, strong, and sensible.
A culture of revenge consists of an infinite chain of attacks against one’s perceived enemies, with no goal greater than sustaining a string of bitter destruction. The supposed enemies are not real, the supposed slights are insubstantial, and the entire weltanschauung is grossly defective, yet damage is performed because one has conjured this false reason for their misery and just as faulty a plan for its remedy.
Well adjusted people use time tested solutions to set disorder straight. When you instead see crazy explanations and wild crusades proposed in place of solutions, dysfunctional and futile thinking are busy at work.
Dorner vowed warfare against former colleagues, admitting his plan to murder many people. He then explains the purpose of his killing spree was to supposedly “clear his name” and drive out corruption from the police force, as if such killings have ever led to that result, or could be reasonably expected to.
The revolutionary performs actions for his own purposes and then lies about his motivations to cast them in a benevolent light. Actions at odds with claimed purposes is a dead give away of incoherence, and suggests the actual motivations are unknown or unmentionable, often being little more than a personal problem not yet addressed.
As Dorner fled to a cabin for the last battle in his police war, reality had crept in and encircled him. He realized his hero fantasy didn’t hold up, was factually incorrect, and that suicide was an appropriate exit. Being unable to spin the tale further, he cleared himself away just as illegal aliens self-deport when local enforcement is announced.
This cognition from self-reflection should be forced on all advocates of unsustainable practices and politics so they must confront their deranged projections. At that moment, they will have to either find some historical precedent to buttress their propositions or admit being swept away by a nutty fantasy that enticed them because of troubling emotional or personal failings.
Perhaps they will go quietly and walk away from their mistakes or check themselves out, sparing us an expensive tantrum to clean up afterward.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.DUBAI: The United Arab Emirates ranks number one in the world for treating women with respect, according to a major scientific study comparing development and well-being among all 132 nations of the world.
His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, said the evidence on respect for women reflected fundamental truths about Emirati culture and traditions.
“We have the deepest respect for women. We respect their sacrifices and their dedication as partners in the building of our nation. In many sectors they have been able to contribute more than men because UAE society gives women a supportive environment to achieve their full potential. Their contributions have outweighed those of men in many sectors, and this reflects the supportive environment that the UAE has always provided for women.”
The global Social Progress Index also ranked the UAE as number one for the lowest level of violent crime, the lowest homicide rate, the lowest undernourishment rate, and the highest rate of enrolment in secondary education.
The report was produced by a team of prominent international economists led by Professor Michael Porter of Harvard Business School, as part of an initiative launched by the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council.
The index is designed as an objective and transparent measure that is more holistic than relying only on economic indicators to judge a country’s overall well-being. It includes 54 measures that track the capacity of a society to meet the basic human needs of its citizens, to establish the building blocks that allow citizens and communities to enhance and sustain the quality of their lives, and to create the conditions for all individuals to reach their full potential.
For the index as a whole, the UAE ranked number one in the Middle East and 37th worldwide.MIAMI—Speaking with reporters while putting the finishing touches on Miami's new stadium Saturday, construction workers at Marlins Park admitted they had no idea what the structure would be used for, despite having built baseball stadiums in the past. "We installed a big pool back there, so maybe all the seats are for people waiting in line to swim?" said foreman Frank Davies, sealing one of the large, inexplicable dual aquarium tanks behind home plate. "But there's that giant rainbow thing with the pink flamingos we built at the edge of the grass that sometimes lights up and moves like a windmill, so I'd say my best guess is this is a really big miniature golf hole or a theme park for disabled children." Major League Baseball has yet to rule the field fit for play, as the stadium has no traditional dugouts, Marlins management having opting instead for two giant sets of wax lips.
AdvertisementThe Clemson University fraternity that Tucker Hipps was pledging has been suspended, according to university officials.A release said Clemson University hearing board issued a five-year suspension of the university’s Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity for alleged violations of the student organization conduct code.The university’s investigation stemmed from reports of incidents that occurred during the new-member education process held in the fall of 2014. It was not a criminal investigation, and it concerned actions by the organization, not by individual students.Hipps' body was found Sept. 22 in the lake near the Highway 93 bridge after an early-morning group activity run with fraternity members. Clemson University Spokeswoman Cathy Sams would not comment on the Tucker Hipps' case."We are obviously aware there is a criminal investigation underway so while it is, it wouldn't be appropriate for us to comment," said Sams.Previous Stories: Sheriff on Hipps' death | Hipps' parents speak | Dive team investigates | Student's body found under bridge | Tucker Hipps' bioThe hearing board’s decision is not final and is subject to an appeal process and further review, the release said.Sigma Phi Epsilon released a statement Wednesday afternoon in response to the suspension.The release said that the fraternity's national office "has been investigating anonymous allegations spread through social media that Hipps’ death was linked to hazing. Though both the fraternity and Clemson University have found the chapter in violation of their respective conduct policies, neither have been able to produce evidence suggesting Hipp’s death was the result of hazing."CEO Brian Warren said, “We haven’t found evidence to suggest this was related to hazing, but hazing and fraternity pledging are real problems on college campuses that need to be address. It’s the reason SigEp is committed to replacing the outdated and broken pledge system with an experience based on equal rights and responsibilities for all members.”Warren also said, The pain of Tucker's death has only been worsened by the fact that we don't appear to any closer to understanding what happened."For web users (not on mobile): click here to read full statement.
The Clemson University fraternity that Tucker Hipps was pledging has been suspended, according to university officials.
A release said Clemson University hearing board issued a five-year suspension of the university’s Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity for alleged violations of the student organization conduct code.
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The university’s investigation stemmed from reports of incidents that occurred during the new-member education process held in the fall of 2014. It was not a criminal investigation, and it concerned actions by the organization, not by individual students.
Hipps' body was found Sept. 22 in the lake near the Highway 93 bridge after an early-morning group activity run with fraternity members.
Clemson University Spokeswoman Cathy Sams would not comment on the Tucker Hipps' case.
"We are obviously aware there is a criminal investigation underway so while it is, it wouldn't be appropriate for us to comment," said Sams.
Previous Stories: Sheriff on Hipps' death | Hipps' parents speak | Dive team investigates | Student's body found under bridge | Tucker Hipps' bio
The hearing board’s decision is not final and is subject to an appeal process and further review, the release said.
Sigma Phi Epsilon released a statement Wednesday afternoon in response to the suspension.
The release said that the fraternity's national office "has been investigating anonymous allegations spread through social media that Hipps’ death was linked to hazing. Though both the fraternity and Clemson University have found the chapter in violation of their respective conduct policies, neither have been able to produce evidence suggesting Hipp’s death was the result of hazing."
CEO Brian Warren said, “We haven’t found evidence to suggest this was related to hazing, but hazing and fraternity pledging are real problems on college campuses that need to be address. It’s the reason SigEp is committed to replacing the outdated and broken pledge system with an experience based on equal rights and responsibilities for all members.”
Warren also said, The pain of Tucker's death has only been worsened by the fact that we don't appear to any closer to understanding what happened."
For web users (not on mobile): click here to read full statement.
AlertMeBehind China's recent 6.9 per cent growth in GDP lies a bigger fact: between 2009 and 2030, the country will add 850 million to its middle class. I would call that a killer fact.
Nothing else on Canberra's agenda – talk about innovation, relations with India or tax cuts for business – competes with that statistic for its potential impact on Australian living standards. It is equivalent to a new continent emerging somewhere to Australia's north with 850 million more consumers asking Australia to fill its supermarkets, sell them places in our schools and universities, invest our expertise in aged and health care and let them come as tourists, investors and cashed-up migrants.
A killer fact that sweet deserves to be interrogated. To what extent can we trust it?
It was presented in a 2010 OECD working paper by Dr Homi Kharas, now co-director in the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution. His prediction was that by 2030 Europe would add only 16 million to its middle class. Small stuff, and North America's middle class was set to shrink by 16 million. In this context, 850 million more middle-class Chinese dominate world economic prospects. That means the Chinese middle class will grow from 12 per cent of its population in 2009 to 73 per cent in 2030. By middle class, Kharas means household income equivalent to between $US16,000 ($20,254) and $US160,000 per year, a widely used definition.That didn't take long. The craze of "Tebowing" has come full circle, with Detroit Lions linebacker Stephen Tulloch striking the pose made famous by Tim Tebow after sacking the Denver Broncos quarterback Sunday afternoon.
Ever since Tebow was seen kneeling and praying while his teammates celebrated around him after the Broncos' dramatic win over the Miami Dolphins last week, fans everywhere have been posting photos online of themselves imitating the pose in various situations.
Tebow has been in full support of the fad, although he might not feel the same way about Tulloch jumping aboard the bandwagon in a mocking manner.
Then again, Tebow had plenty of other things to worry about during the Broncos' 45-10 loss to the Lions. Tulloch's sack was the second of seven times the Denver quarterback was knocked to the ground, and Tebow was just plain off the mark most of the game for the second week in a row.
Broncos Coach John Fox said after the game he would have to evaluate game film before deciding who his starting quarterback will be next week against the Raiders.
Sounds like Tebow's stint as an NFL starter could be coming to a quick end, allowing scores of "Tebowers" around the world to return to more sensible activities -- like flash mobs and planking.
ALSO:
NFL Week 8 two-minute drill
Life at the bottom of the NFL has its moments -- mostly bad
-- Chuck Schilken
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Photo: Linebacker Stephen Tulloch of the Detroit Lions reacts by "Tebowing" after making a sack on quarterback Tim Tebow of the Denver Broncos. Credit: Justin Edmonds / Getty ImagesVMworld 2016 promises to bring security of the vSphere platform and security in general to the forefront. Over the past 4 years security sessions at VMworld have leaped forward to into the Top 15 out of nowhere! That is all because of a sea change in how security is managed at scale. New and interesting challenges that years ago weren’t on anyone’s radar are now front and center. IT administrators are under pressure from security teams and auditors and are looking to VMware to help provide the tools and guidance necessary to running a secure SDDC. We are looking to NOT disappoint this year!
Let’s go over some of the sessions that will be shown at VMworld 2016. Note that some of these sessions are “Tech Preview” of technologies we are working on. I think you’re really going to enjoy how we look at tackling some of these critical issues!
First up. Encryption. This has been a long time challenge in the virtualized datacenter. There’s a myriad of solutions out there. Some do encryption at an array level (either hardware array or virtual array like a virtual storage appliance), some do encryption within the guest using methods that, arguably, incur a management penalty once you go beyond a fixed set of virtual machines. Add to that the serious question of “How do I manage all the encryption keys?!”
In the Technology Futures track I’ll be presenting with my Product Management partner in crime Salil Suri, a session (CTO8856) called “vSphere Encryption Deep Dive: Technology Preview”. We will demonstrate a different way of looking at encryption. How about encryption done at the hypervisor, below the virtual machine, where the virtual machine is completely unaware of its disks being encrypted nor does it have any idea what keys are being used? In addition, it’s independent of the storage platform. It works the same way on NFS or Block or other storage. How about a solution that’s not an onerous IT management nightmare? Simple is GOOD! We will also discuss key management using 3rd party key managers and also go over a little thing we like to call “Encrypted vMotion”. This is all breakthrough technology stuff and we can’t wait to show you! If you have to check that box for encryption at rest and for vMotion then this is a MUST ATTEND event! This session is at a Tech 301 level.
Next up is INF8850, vSphere Platform Security presented by myself and Salil. It’s a great overview of all of the vSphere platform security work we have introduced since vSphere 6.0 Update 2 and a sneak peek of the Technology Preview sessions we’ll be talking about in other sessions. If you’re the IT nerd and you’re there with your director or above, this is the session to send him or her to while you go to the Deep Dive sessions and prep for all of their questions that are sure to follow. This session is at the Tech 201 level.
The next Deep Dive session is INF8858, vSphere Identity: Multifactor Authentication Deep Dive. In this session Product Manager Johnny Ferguson and I will cover the changes that came out in vSphere 6.0 Update 2 for Multifactor Authentication. We’ll show you how to setup RSA SecurID for the vSphere Web Client (and H5 Client!) and how to set up Smartcard Authentication. In addition, we’ll talk about some roadmap items around identity and we will be asking for your feedback on what you’d like to see. This is a great opportunity not only to learn how to set up your environment for better identity security but also directly influence where we should be going in this space! This session is at the Tech 301 level.
The next session is INF8845, vSphere Logs Grow Up! Tech Preview of Actionable Logging with vRealize Log Insight. The main speaker for this session will be Antoan Arnaudov, the PM for vSphere logging, and yours truly. This session will be a combination of a Tech Preview of some super cool logging enhancements to vSphere and an introduction of the vRealize Log Insight for vSphere edition that all vSphere customers have access to TODAY! The logging enhancements to vSphere are extensive. Have you ever made a change to a Virtual Machine and noticed that the log tells you “Virtual Machine reconfigured”? That’s not terribly helpful. You and your security team want visibility! In this demo, which I JUST finished and can’t wait to show you, you’ll see a whole lot more data like how much memory was added or what network was the machine moved from and to. The latter part is where the security discussion comes in. The amount of visibility into changes in your infrastructure this will give your logging solution (like Log Insight) will be tremendous! We’ll go over some use cases and show you how to maximize your Log Insight for vCenter installation. This session is a Tech 301 level.
Finally, my “favorite” topic, VM Escape, will have a Group Discussion! VM Escape – Let’s talk with Kevin Christopher and Mike Foley This will be INF10734-GD. For those of you that follow me on Twitter you know this is a topic near and dear to my heart. Rarely a week goes by when I don’t get a question on “VM Escape”. And it won’t be just me talking about! I’m bringing in a VMware kernel engineer to join me! Who better to discuss this topic IN DETAIL than Kevin Christopher? If your security folks are in a panic about this topic, then this is a MUST ATTEND! Very few slides will be shown. Get your security folks to write down all the questions THEY want answered and bring them! This session promises to go deep so it’s at a Tech 301 level.
Here’s a table of the sessions I’m presenting in.
Session ID Description Speakers Date and Time CTO8856 vSphere Encryption Deep Dive:
Technology Preview Mike Foley Salil
Suri Tuesday 30-Aug at 5:00pm INF8850 vSphere
Platform Security Mike Foley Salil Suri Monday 28-Aug at 11:00am INF8858 vSphere Identity: Multifactor
Authentication Deep Dive Mike Foley Johnny Ferguson Wednesday 31-Aug at 2:30pm INF8845 vSphere Logs Grow Up! Tech Preview of Actionable Logging Antoan Arnaudov Mike Foley Thursday 1-Sep at 12:00pm INF10734-GD Group Discussion: VM
Escape – Let’s talk with Kevin Christopher and Mike Foley – INF10734-GD Mike Foley Kevin Christopher (VMkernel
Engineer) Thursday 1-Sep at 10:30am Additional sessions you may find interesting from a security
perspective are: Session ID Description Date and Time INF7764-QT Quick Talk: Has the hypervisor
been commoditized? Sunday 28-Aug at 1:00pm INF8459 VMware Security: How to Meet Your Compliance Objectives
Using Cool Technology Tuesday 30-Aug at 11:00 AM INF8516-QT Quick Talk: VMware Security: The
Whole Is Greater than the Sum of Parts Sunday 28-Aug at 3:00pm
Where do I get more??
Go to http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/vmworld/security for the latest updates on security sessions at VMworld.
I’m looking forward to seeing you all at VMworld 2016 in San Francisco and Barcelona!President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence meet with Congressional leadership including House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis in the Oval Office of the White House on December 7, 2017. (Olivier Douliery - Pool/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence meet with Congressional leadership including House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis in the Oval Office of the White House on December 7, 2017. (Olivier Douliery - Pool/Getty Images) MORE HIDE
Democrat and Republican Leaders Receive Briefing by Mattis in Situation Room
Congressional leaders received a briefing from Defense Secretary Jim Mattis while they visited the White House for negotiations.
“The President’s meeting with Congressional leadership moved from the Oval Office to the Situation Room where they are all receiving an update on our military by Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis,” said White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders.
The situation room is a secure installation inside the White House that serves as a military and intelligence nerve center for the president, and also allows for classified conversations to take place. The room was first installed by President John F. Kennedy during the cold war in 1961.
It is unclear what the specifics of the briefing were, but during remarks to the press before the meeting, Mattis said: “The number-one priority for our country is to make certain we protect this Constitution and our way of life.”
“We’ve got great bipartisan support. I’m confident we’ll walk out of this with it,” Mattis said.
The seal of the White House Situation Room hangs on a wall inside the complex at the White House in Washington, |
short but select Brown Line, which has a relatively upper-middle class ridership. Chicago has a tradition that the mayor’s house in the city is supposed to be respectable but not lavish. (You weren’t supposed to ask about the Daley family’s summer house across the lake in Michigan.)
… Two people approached the teenager from behind as he was walking and talking on his cell phone, according to a police report that said one of them “placed his arm around the victim’s neck in a bear chokehold.” Then, the other attacker punched Zach Emanuel in the face, knocking him to the ground, the report said. Accoridng to the police, the teenager dropped his phone, and his attackers took it, then patted him down and asked, “What else you got?” Then, they forced him “to enter his security code to unlock the phone” and ran off. Zach Emanuel was left with a chipped tooth and a fat lip, the source said. According to the police report, he was treated by his “personal physician for a laceration and blunt-force trauma to the mouth/face.” No weapon was involved, the source said. The mayor, who attended the funeral Saturday of slain teen Demario Bailey, was “crestfallen” over his son being the victim of a strong-arm robbery, the source said. … Earlier this week, the mayor spoke about his teenage son when asked about the trip the family was taking to Chile for the holidays. “This is Zach’s last year before he goes off to college — if I don’t kill him before he goes there,” he said then. “But that’s a side note. That has nothing to do with the vacation. That just deals with having a teenaged boy at home.”
So I’m not sure if I totally believe the mugging story. Hizzoner gets a police cruiser parked out front 24×7.
There’s always something interesting going on with the Emanuel clan:
So perhaps this will be one crisis Rahm lets go to waste?
But whatever happened with the Emanuels, their public story is what happened in private to my in-laws, who didn’t get round-the-clock police protection, a few miles west of there in the Austin neighborhood in 1967-1970. Except it happened three times to their children and their children were ten years younger. I’m sure T.N. Coates could explicate how, if you study the footnote on p. 322 of some sociology book, you can see how it was all the children’s fault, but I must confess to not being up to speed.The REAL Story on "Billie Jean"...
Recording and Mixing "Billie Jean"....The year is 1982. The song is "Billie Jean". The sonic image of Michael Jacksons' "Billie Jean" is a perfect example of what happened, when I sat around dreaming awhile, about combining different recording techniques to produce a unique musical canvas with a tremendous'sonic personality'.Of course I was comfortably ensconsed in Westlake Audio’s beautiful new Studio ‘A’ on Beverly Boulevard, with my good friends Quincy Jones, Micheal Jackson and Rod Temperton. We were doing our favorite thing... We were making music!!! We had just started recording Michael Jackson’s album “Thriller”...We were recording Michael’s song “Billie Jean”.....I recorded the drums,(played by the fantastic drummer, N'Dugu) with as tight, and powerful a drum sound as I could come up with. Of course I put N'Dugus' drum set on my plywood drum platform. Also at this time, I had a special kick drum cover made that covers the whole front of the kick drum. There's a slot with a zipper in it that the mike fits through. When the kick drum mike is in place, in the slot in my drum cover, I zip the opening tightly shut around the mike.I brought in my old pal George Massenburgs' spectacular sounding, portable, 12 channel recording console and used it to record the rhythm section. With it I recorded the bass, drums and guitars on my analogue 16 track, with no noise reduction equipment in the way of that fantastic sound!In my estimation, the the result of the song “Billie Jean”, is a perfect example of what I call “Sonic Personality”. I don’t think there are many recordings, where all you need to hear is the first few drums beats, and you instantly know what song it is.Great albums always start with great songs...."Billie Jean" is just such a superb song! Of course, Michael wrote "Billie Jean"..Quincy says that the lyric that Michael wrote is highly personal. I’m sure that’s true. Michael told us... it was about a girl, that climbed over the wall at Michael’s house, and was lounging out there, by the swimming pool.... she was laying out there, near the pool, lounging... hangin’ out... with shades on, her bathing suit on. One morning she just showed up! Kind of like a stalker, almost. She had accused Michael of being the father of ONE of her twins... Is that possible? I don’t think so....When it came time for me to mix "Billie Jean", it was business as usual... When I am working with Michael, Quincy, Rod, Jennifer, Sergio and so on..... I am allowed total ceative freedom with the sonics of the music... In other words, I am always left to myself when it is time to mix. My mixes can take hours, days or even weeks.... I firmly believe that a mix is not finished, until it is on a Record for sale at Tower....So I had been mixing "Billie Jean" for a day or two. I’d do a mix...... Say I was up to mix number 2.... (At that time I was mixing onto 1/2” analogue.) I thought it was killer!!!I called MJ, Quincy and Rod into the control room and played mix 2 for them. They loved it!!! They were all dancing and carrying on like crazy!!! Smiles all around! Then Michael slipped out of the control room, turned around and motioned to me to follow him... Then he whispered to me, “Please Bruce, it’s perfect, but turn the Bass up just a tiny bit, and do one more mix, please....” I said to him...”OK Smelly, no problem”...(When we were recording “Off The Wall”, Quincy gave Michael the nickname of “Smelly” because when Michael liked a groove, he’d call it “Smelly Jelly.” Also Michael doesn’t curse, and when MJ wants to say a bad word he’ll simply call it “Smelly”... The name has stuck...)Then I went back into the control room to add Michael’s tiny bit of bass to my mix... Quincy pulled me over into the corner and said “Please Svensk... “(Svensk is Quincy’s nickname for me. It means “Swedish Man” in Swedish... When you have a genuine Quincy Jones nickname like ‘Svensk” - You are truly honored....) Q said to me.... “Add a little garlic salt to the snare and the kick. Just a squirt!!!”) so I went back into the control room and added a little garlic salt to the snare and the kick. Just a squirt!!! Now I was up to mix 20 on "Billie Jean".Well, this went on for about a week. Soon I was up to mix 91!!! I had a stack of 1/2 inch tapes almost to the ceiling!!! I would do a few mixes, we’d listen... Then do a few more. We had it PERFECT!!! We thought we had a really ‘HOT’ mix on “Billie Jean”. I played Mix 91 for the boys... Everybody smiled... but Quincy had one of his funny looks on his face...I thought.... Hmmmm.... Oh, Oh....Quincy said “You know Svensk, just for the fun of it, can we listen to one of your earlier mixes???” My heart jumped because I knew that my earlier mixes were dynamite!!! Then Quincy said, “Let’s hear mix number 2!!!” Oh WOW!!!! Hallelujah!!! I love mix 2!!!!We listened to mix 2... IT WAS SLAMMIN’!!! EVERYONE IN THE STUDIO WAS GROOVIN’ AND DANCIN’ and HAPPY, and actin’ IGNORANT!!!!Well, here’s the deal. When “Thriller” was released to the Whole World by Epic Records, on Tuesday, November 30, 1982, it went to Tower Records with MIX 2 OF "Billie Jean" on it!!! AND, when the single of "Billie Jean" came out it was MIX 2!!!The REAL Story of "Billie Jean"...Bruce SwedienMr.Reliable, the perennial 8/10 player, a man who never let anyone down ever.
Denis Irwin is a Manchester United and Ireland legend.
For some reason, Denis Irwin doesn't come up in everyday conversation in the way that some of his team-mates of the past do, and that is just not fair, because anyone who played with him, or even watched him play, knows what a truly brilliant player he was. Perhaps it's his calm demeanour and low-profile attitude, but whatever the reason, Denis Irwin is not celebrated as much as he should be.
We want to put that right, here are a collection of moments, stats, and anecdotes from the career of a truly brilliant player.
He made a name for himself at Oldham Athletic.
Although Irwin started out at Leeds United, it was at Oldham where he really began to shine. After 167 appearances and 4 goals, Irwin signed for Manchester United for a mere £625,000, which would go down as a seriously shrewd piece of business by Alex Ferguson.
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His list of major honours is absolutely stunning.
-7 Premier League titles.
-3 FA Cup winner's medals.
-4 Charity Shield winner's medals.
-1 League Cup winner's medal.
-1 Cup Winner's Cup medal.
-1 Champions League winner's medal.
-1 European Super Cup winner's medal.
-1 Intercontinenal Cup winner's medal.
-1 Championship Play-Off Final winner's medal.
He was voted into the 'Overall Premier League Team Of The Decade' 1991-2001.
Sir Alex Ferguson claims that Irwin is the first name on the team sheet for his all-time XI.
Last year Sir Alex Ferguson was quoted as saying the following regarding Irwin:
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"People ask you who is your best Man United team, it is absolutely impossible. But honestly, I would say Denis Irwin would be the one certainty to get in the team. I called him an eight out of 10. At Highbury in one game he had a bad pass back in the last minute and Bergkamp came in and scored. After the game the press said 'you must be disappointed in that pass back. I said, well, one mistake in 10 years isn't bad. He was an unbelievable player.
High praise indeed.
He made his Ireland debut in September 1990
Just after his move to Manchester United, Irwin made his Ireland debut on September 12, 1990, in a friendly against Morocco in Dalymount park. He would go on to play for Ireland 56 times, scoring 4 goals.
He was an absolute master of the penalty kick.
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He scored 11 out of 12 Premier League penalties for Manchester United and never missed a spot-kick while wearing the green jersey.
And he could bang in a free-kick as well!
He earned the trust of Roy Keane.
Something not many men can claim to have done.
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And they were both crap at golf.
This hilarious video shows that the lads were utterly useless at golf, but loved a good laugh.
Irwin loved to get forward, with devastating effect.
He was as solid as a rock at the back, but often caught teams off-guard with his calculated attacks from full-back.
And he finished off Eric Cantona's favourite moment in football.
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Denis Irwin had'swag' before it was a thing.
And we're sure he despises what it has become today.
Today he works as a pundit for MUTV.
...And spends his spare time playing football with mimes on stilts.
Denis Irwin, the ultimate unsung hero.
Photo credit: SportsfileWait a minute! Do you hear that? The pop of catchers’ mitts, the chatter around the diamond, the glorious thud of flipped bats crashing onto the grass... baseball is back, baby!
Welcome to year two of The 30 here at SI.com. All season long, I’ll rank all 30 major league teams and delve into the biggest stories swirling around the game. The rankings will change, but one thing will always remain the same: No matter who you root for, I am horribly biased against your favorite team.
With spring training underway, let’s survey the landscape. Which teams could make playoff runs? Which teams could get caught in limbo? And which ones are a year (or 12) away from contending? All that and more, right after we celebrate the Marlins relaxing their facial hair ban, clearing the way for... Mattingly sideburns!
30. San Diego Padres
Of the 73 pitchers who qualified for the ERA title last season, only knuckleballer R.A. Dickey threw a slower fastball than the 83-mph offering delivered by Jered Weaver. Only James Shields fared worse by park-adjusted, fielding-independent pitching. So the Padres … gave Weaver a one-year, $3 million deal? It makes sense when you consider the alternatives. The Friars will likely run out the worst rotation in baseball this year, with such thrilling options as Jhoulys Chacin, Clayton Richard, Trevor Cahill, Christian Friedrich, Jarred Cosart and Paul Clemens making up the rotation. Even if Weaver gets cuffed around (which he probably will), the Pads will take 30 starts and 150-plus innings wherever they can get ‘em.
You can watch this team to see how promising young outfielders Manuel Margot and Hunter Renfroe develop and to enjoy Wil Myers finally emerging as one of the best all-around players in the league. Just make sure to time your beer runs for when the Padres are playing the field.
29. Cincinnati Reds
Set the over/under line on combined stolen bases for Billy Hamilton and new starting second baseman Jose Peraza at 110. After finishing second in the majors in steals last year, the Reds might lead the majors in that category if the trade of longtime veteran Brandon Phillips to Atlanta allows Peraza’s slap-and-dash game to flourish as hoped. Granted, the over/under on combined home runs for Hamilton and Peraza should be set around five, and the Reds don’t have anything resembling a star player on the roster other than Joey Votto and (maybe) slider-of-death-wielding reliever Raisel Iglesias.
Given that state of play—and with the Reds being at least a couple years away from sniffing contention—it’d be cool to see them go all the way and build the equivalent of Whitey Herzog’s 1985 Cardinals, with one slugger in the middle of the lineup and jackrabbits everywhere else. Get Rajai Davis and a few other speedy friends to Queen City, and let’s have some fun.
28. Philadelphia Phillies
One-quarter of the way through the 2016 season, the Phillies were contenders. Sure, much of that early success was built on a flukish and unsustainable 14–3 record in one-run games. But there were flashes of potential, especially when young righthanders Vince Velasquez, Aaron Nola and Jerad Eickhoff were at the top of their game. The next step is to see how good those three starters and the rest of the team’s most promising young players can be. Will Maikel Franco develop enough of a batting eye to become an elite power threat? Is Odubel Herrera the poor man’s Bobby Abreu, or could his excellent on-base skills help him develop into something more closely resembling the original version? How will likely 2017 callups J.P. Crawford, Roman Quinn, Jorge Alfaro and Nick Williams fare in their first extended taste of big league action? If the Phillies get more hits than misses off those questions, this could be an intriguing team as early as 2018.
27. Atlanta Braves
The new orthodoxy in sports holds that the middle is the worst place to be; either push hard for a championship, or strip everything down to the nub and go into total rebuild mode. When I asked Braves general manager John Coppolella last year about that all-or-nothing tack, he winced. Losing over and over can be incredibly painful—so much so that it can scar everyone involved, from players to management to fans who might get so turned off that they stop supporting the team. Also, trying to tank outright might not carry a big payoff if there are no Bryce Harpers at the top of the draft board in a given season.
Sure, the Braves are still going primarily with a youth movement as they move into their new, publicly financed boondoggle of a stadium. But they’re vying for respectability too, acquiring starters Bartolo Colon, R.A. Dickey and Jaime Garcia to eat innings, plus Brandon Phillips and catcher Kurt Suzuki for experience up the middle. If any of those veterans somehow run into 100 strong innings or 300 great plate appearances to start the season, expect an all-out blitz to cash in on any shred of trade value they may have.
26. Chicago White Sox
If the Braves are clinging to a veneer of respectability in their rebuild, the White Sox seem on their way to a far more aggressive teardown. The Pale Hose didn’t merely trade away 30-something free agents-to-be over the winter; they dealt two cornerstone players in their 20s who offer multiple years of team control. The thinking behind flipping staff ace Chris Sale and multi-tool outfielder Adam Eaton was that the Sox could be best equipped for sustainable success if newly acquired top prospects like Yoan Moncada, Michael Kopech, Lucas Giolito and Reynaldo Lopez all come of age around the same time.
GM Rick Hahn is far from done, too. In third baseman Todd Frazier, first baseman Jose Abreu, leftfielder Melky Cabrera, closer David Robertson and especially supernaturally consistent and value-priced lefty Jose Quintana, the Sox have multiple other attractive trade pieces who don’t figure to make it to August in the same uniform. A Robertson trade could happen any minute after this column goes live: The Nationals and White Sox have been discussing a deal for the veteran reliever for a while, and Washington nabbing Matt Wieters on a two-year contract could create enough catching depth to make a Robertson-for-young backstop deal a reality.
Morry Gash/AP
25. Milwaukee Brewers
Trading away high-priced veteran stars isn’t as easy as it used to be. Mega-revenue clubs like the Yankees and Red Sox, as well as next-tier teams like the Giants, are now butting up against the luxury tax, with great motivation to stay under that threshold and avoid major financial penalties. Even the Dodgers—arguably the most well-heeled team, given an $8.5 billion TV deal everyone hates and the theoretically unlimited wealth that comes with insurance money—don’t seem eager to make it rain anymore.
That leaves the Brewers in a potentially tricky spot. Not long ago, Ryan Braun might’ve seemed like a perfect chip: a middle-of-the-order slugger whose production outpaced his hefty annual salary, which multiple teams would seem likely to pay anyway. With multiple big-market clubs now watching their spending and gearing up for the free agency orgy coming in the fall of 2018, Milwaukee figures to have fewer suitors for their franchise player. Braun is also 33 and a bit past his prime at this point. Still, don’t count out brainy Brewers GM David Stearns and his skilled front office. They’ve made a bunch of nifty moves already; Braun being owed $76 million over the next four years (with $18 million deferred until 2022–31) might not be that prohibitive given how quickly contract values are rising; and the former MVP remains one of the top hitters in the National League and a defensive asset (he was the seventh-best leftfielder in the majors by Defensive Runs Saved last year) even at his advanced age.
One more wrinkle to watch: Braun gains full veto rights over any trade on May 14, when he reaches 10-and-5 status (10 years in the majors, five or more with one team). How many Melvin Upton Jr. strikeouts would it take for the Blue Jays and Brewers to make a pre-Victoria Day (May 22, for all our American readers) blockbuster to happen?
24. Oakland Athletics
Most bottom-rung teams don’t bother building good bullpens. That strategy makes some sense: Relievers are notoriously unreliable and volatile, and locking down late-inning leads becomes far less valuable when you’re only going to line up for handshakes 70 times in a season. The A’s are likely to finish at or near the bottom of a loaded AL West this year, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at their pen. The addition of veteran righthander Santiago Casilla, along with a potential full season of health for electric lefty Sean Doolittle, gives Oakland one of the deepest relief corps in the league. That’s a big reason why you should bet the over on the rock-bottom A’s lines being floated by sportsbooks, and why this team will be more competitive than many pundits expect.
23. Minnesota Twins
During his time writing for Baseball Prospectus, then-writer (and now-Cubs special assistant to the GM) Jason Parks wrote a column entitled “Prospects Will Break Your Heart.” As much as we get carried away with the potential of kids in A-ball, the bottom line is that the failure rate for highly-touted young players is disturbingly high. The rebuilds these teams at the bottom of these rankings are banking on? They all rely heavily on top draft picks and other kids blossoming into stardom—which is anything but a sure thing.
The good news for teams like the Twins is that they get to play the numbers game. Miguel Sano is a 23-year-old beast who is emerging as one of the most potent power hitters in the league. Byron Buxton, the former No. 1 draft pick, started flashing his all-world potential in the second half of last season. Twenty-four-year-old German rightfielder Max Kepler impressed as a rookie. Top pitching prospect Jose Berrios should finally get a shot at sticking in the major league rotation all season long at age 22. These and other young Twins come with holes in their resume, but the sheer number of talented youngsters poised for major playing time this year in Minnesota portend at least some improvement. Baseball Prospectus actually pegs the Twins winning 80 games (!) and finishing second in the AL Central (!!) this season. That’s an optimistic scenario that assumes big things from a lot of unproven commodities. What we can say with more certainty: This could, on many nights, be a fun team to watch.
22. Tampa Bay Rays
For the 47th billionth year in a row, computers and human beings disagree wildly on the Rays. An amalgam of multiple difference projection systems—including BP’s PECOTA, Fangraphs, ZiPS and others—project the Rays to win 82 games this season. That’s a tough one for a lot of us humans to swallow, since Tampa Bay finished dead-last in the AL East in 2016 with just 68 victories.
Here’s where a stat called Base Runs comes in handy. Base Runs measure how many runs a team should have scored and allowed based on a number of component stats. Through that, we can deduce how many games a team should have won, assuming a league-average distribution of events (i.e. the team’s hitters and pitchers produced average results, rather than terrific or awful results, in high-leverage situations). The 2016 Rays were spectacularly unlucky in a bunch of different ways, most notably going an MLB-worst 13–27 in one-run games. Normalize all of that miserable luck, and Base Runs pegs them as an 81-win team last year—a full 13 games better than their actual record, and just about right in line with this year’s computer projections.
There are still plenty of real-life reasons to believe the Rays won’t finish above.500 this season. They traded away one of their best players in Logan Forsythe as well as one of their most talented young starters in Drew Smyly, and the bullpen hasn’t changed much after finishing dead-last in the American League last season in park-adjusted, fielding-independent pitching. Still, there’s upside here, from a rotation that’s still talented even without Smyly to young players like the already underrated Kevin Kiermaier carrying breakout potential. If you’re the type who likes to wager on sporting outcomes, split the difference and figure the Rays for something like 75-plus wins. That would still probably leave them in last place in the East, but also competitive more often than not.
21. Arizona Diamondbacks
In 2015, A.J. Pollock was one of the best players in baseball, hitting.315/.367/.498, blasting 20 homers, swiping 39 bases and saving more runs with his glove than all but three major league centerfielders. By advanced metrics, that made Pollock roughly a seven-win player; in other words, the Diamondbacks could expect to win about seven more games with Pollock putting up those numbers than they would have with a generic Triple A callup or backup outfielder type. Led by Pollock (and his burly running mate Paul Goldschmidt), the D-Backs won a respectable 79 games in 2015. On April 1, 2016, Pollock fractured his elbow—an injury forced him to miss all but 12 games last season. As a result, Pollock’s impact on the team was basically nil, and thanks largely to that injury, the D-Backs won just 69 games last season.
There’ll be other factors in play of course, such as whether newly acquired Taijuan Walker can lead a stronger showing for Arizona’s four under-28 starting pitchers. Who knows, maybe the team could snag better attendance (and more revenue to buy players) from a stadium they claim requires $187 million in renovations they’d rather not pay for (or that they would pay for, in exchange for weakening taxpayers’ position). But if Pollock returns to peak form and plays 150 games this year, that alone could swing the D-Backs from terrible to semi-respectable.
Chris Carlson/AP
20. Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim
The Angels are another team with a lot of starting pitching variance, enough to swing their 2017 results by a lot. It starts with righty Matt Shoemaker, who’s making his return after suffering a fractured skull last September. Still, the biggest question mark is Garrett Richards. As Yahoo’s Jeff Passan reported, Richards underwent stem cell therapy in lieu of having Tommy John surgery to repair his damaged right elbow. If successful, the procedure could greatly help a Mike Trout-led squad that improved a very shallow roster over the winter.
With the Rangers, Astros, and Mariners all projected to be potential playoff teams this year, even a best-case scenario for Richards and the Halos probably doesn’t end with October glory. But if Richards can return and sling 96-mph fastballs all year long, both the Angels and the future of sports medicine stand to reap major long-term benefits.
19. Miami Marlins
The death of Jose Fernandez is something we won’t forget for a long time, and his obvious love of the game and joie de vivre made his untimely passing that much more painful. But the cold, hard, crass reality is that the Marlins figure to struggle on the field as a result. Miami trotted out a thin rotation even when Fernandez was around; with him gone, the de facto staff ace is erratic lefty Wei-Yin Chen. The No. 2 starter is probably Edinson Volquez, who rated as one of the worst pitchers in the AL last season with the Royals by just about every measure. Picking up righty Dan Straily from the Reds in a January trade should help a bit, but this will probably be another also-ran year for the Fish despite trotting out what should again be one of the best outfields in all of baseball.
18. Kansas City Royals
The most interesting middle-of-the-road team in baseball this year, the Royals could dramatically impact multiple pennant races, even if not their own. A.500 team last season that was considerably worse than that (73 wins) per Base Runs, Kansas City will try to find a way to topple the loaded Indians in the AL Central as well as several skilled rivals in the wild-card race. It'll do so despite some of its biggest advantages of recent years eroding. The three-headed bullpen monster that served the Royals so well during their World Series runs in 2014 and ‘15 now has just Kelvin Herrera left. Their impenetrable outfield defense isn’t as strong with formerly all-world leftfielder Alex Gordon advancing into baseball’s equivalent of middle age. Yet faced with the prospect of seven key players eligible for free agency after the 2017 season, GM Dayton Moore refused to fold. Instead, rather than deal walk-year players Wade Davis and Jarrod Dyson for prospects, he traded both for major league-ready talent in the form of slugging outfielder Jorge Soler and back-end starter Nate Karns.
With the core four of first baseman Eric Hosmer, third baseman Mike Moustakas, centerfielder Lorenzo Cain and shortstop Alcides Escobar (as well as lefty starter Jason Vargas) still wearing royal blue, Moore might be faced with a lot more difficult decisions in July. If the diminished Royals stumble early and Moore fears losing several of those players to free-agent suitors, Kansas City could suddenly blow past Brooklyn and San Francisco for the title of hottest rental market in the country.
17. New York Yankees
The slow, methodical trot toward The Bryce Harper and Manny Machado Sweepstakes continues apace. A Yankees team that not long ago shot the moon at every opportunity for the likes of Alex Rodriguez, CC Sabathia, Jacoby Ellsbury and other veteran players who aged horribly has taken up fiscal prudence and patient roster-building over the past couple years. Avoiding more megadeals for players in their 30s keeps the organization (mostly) free of major commitments beyond 2018. Trading away Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, Brian McCann and others has netted a slew of exciting prospects, giving the Yanks arguably the deepest farm system in the AL.
For this season, that means we’ll get a chance to see more of Baby Bombers Gary Sanchez, Greg Bird, Aaron Judge and others. Those young guns, combined with a talented bullpen that’s been replenished by bringing Chapman and his history of domestic violence back to the fold, should some half-decent results this season. When Harper, Machado, Josh Donaldson and others hit the open market at the end of next season, expect a feeding frenzy, with the Yankees looming as the biggest shark in the herd.
16. Pittsburgh Pirates
The Pirates’ run of three straight playoff appearances from 2013 through ‘15 marked a terrific time for the team’s history. That first postseason berth ended two decades of Bucco futility, including a thrilling wild-card game win and a competitive NLDS versus St. Louis that went the distance. Though each of the next two seasons ended with losses in that wild-card game, three straight tastes of October baseball was something few other teams could claim.
Still, you wonder if this era of Pirates baseball will be defined by what-ifs. Pittsburgh is coming off a return to sub-.500 baseball in 2016. One of the greatest players in franchise history, Andrew McCutchen, might never again approach the MVP form he flashed in 2013 and seems destined to leave soon—whether by trade or via free agency after the ‘18 season. GM Neal Huntington has stubbornly held onto his best prospects, and we’ll see the fruits of that approach this year as Gregory Polanco, Jameson Taillon, Tyler Glasnow, Austin Meadows and other dynamic young players make their mark. But for a team that got the immaculate new ballpark it so craved to increase revenue streams—in an MLB environment in which smaller-market clubs gets tens of millions of dollars every year from the league between revenue sharing, national TV deals and the massively lucrative MLB Advanced Media—you wonder what might have happened if the team hadn’t stopped short. Could just one big-ticket free agent have been enough to push an already analytically opportunistic team to greater heights? Would a couple of ambitious deadline deals have resulted in World Series runs? If the Cubs are indeed poised to dominate the NL Central for the next half-decade, did the Pirates miss a window they might not get to open again for a long time?
Gail Burton/AP
15. Baltimore Orioles
The Orioles are the AL equivalent of the Pirates: a good team that plays in a beautiful ballpark, with three playoff appearances in the past five years, a management team (and manager) that squeezes the most out of less-than-elite talent and an owner that frustratingly hasn’t been willing to spend the extra buck to push the club over the top. In Baltimore’s case, at least the spending part has picked up more recently. A year after hiking Opening Day spending by nearly $30 million, the O’s re-signed 2016 AL home-run leader Mark Trumbo to a three-year deal, keeping the team’s core of sluggers intact.
That leaves the biggest difference between the Pirates and Orioles as a possible stumbling block: a lack of front-line, homegrown pitching. The hope is that Kevin Gausman can seize the role of ace this year after hurling 179 2/3 quality innings in 2016. A breakout by former top-five draft pick Dylan Bundy (1.5 homers per nine innings and some of the worst fielding-independent results of any AL starter last year) would be most welcome, too. If Chris Tillman’s shoulder injury lingers beyond the first week or two of the season, standout performances by Gausman and Bundy would become less of a luxury and more of a necessity for Baltimore to make it back to the playoffs.
14. Detroit Tigers
The death of Tigers and Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch on Feb. 10 will be felt in many corners. For Detroit sports fans, it means losing a win-at-all-costs chief executive who wasn’t afraid to spend money in a manner more befitting a team in New York or Los Angeles. More remarkably, Ilitch’s death means we say goodbye to a man who knew how to combine enormous wealth with real empathy, as in his quiet but substantial support for civil rights heroine Rosa Parks.
As with Jose Fernandez (and recently deceased Royals pitcher Yordano Ventura), we try to assess the on-field implications, too. Over the winter, rumors circulated that Detroit might be willing to trade a number of stars, from walk-year outfielder J.D. Martinez to superstars Miguel Cabrera and Justin Verlander. With both Ilitch and win-now former GM Dave Dombrowski out of the picture, Al Avila could conceivably look to build around 2016 AL Rookie of the Year (and part-time plumber) Michael Fulmer, the live arms acquired in the ‘15 David Price trade with the Blue Jays and other young talent—that is, if the Tigers don’t come through. After all, this is a team that finished just two games behind Toronto and Baltimore in the wild-card race last year.
13. Colorado Rockies
Ladies and gentlemen, your hot sleeper pick of 2017!
To understand why the Rockies are getting some love after six straight sub-.500 seasons, let’s take a trip through Advanced Stats Land. At first glance, last year’s team looked like the same old flammable Rox, with the team’s starting pitchers posting a 4.79 ERA—fifth-worst in the majors. Adjust for the pitcher’s nightmare that is Coors Field, though, and a very different picture emerges: By park-adjusted ERA, Colorado actually fielded the eighth-best rotation in baseball last season and finished ninth-best by park-adjusted, fielding-independent pitching. Now here’s the best part: They’re probably going to get better. With no starter older than 27, the Rockies will run out one of the youngest rotations in the league this season (assuming talented rookie righthander Jeff Hoffman makes the rotation as hoped). Twenty-five-year-old righthander Jon Gray emerged as the staff ace last year, wielding a 95-mph fastball and punching out an eye-popping 26% of the batters he faced, and rotation-mates Chad Bettis, Tyler Anderson and Tyler Chatwood all showed flashes of promise in their own right.
For all the debate about park effects and outsmarting a home environment that swells ERAs, the solution has always been simple and obvious, yet out of reach: build a pitching staff with guys who can actually pitch. This is the best collection of starting pitching talent the Rockies have ever assembled in their 24-year history. That’s why this team could get really interesting, really soon.
12. Toronto Blue Jays
Here’s another team like the Pirates and Orioles that’s followed up recent success by puzzlingly stopping short of addressing gaping roster holes. In Toronto’s case, the holes consist of two outfield spots that will likely produce middling to terrible offensive results, a defensive liability at the other outfield spot and a first baseman who hits like a second baseman from the 1970s. The fact that the Blue Jays play in a far bigger media market than Pittsburgh or Baltimore—with the added revenue that comes with it—makes these half-measures even more frustrating.
This is still a good team though, one that could claw its way to a third straight playoff berth. If that happens, it’ll be in large part thanks to some clever shopping. After inking starters J.A. Happ and Marco Estrada to bargain multi-year deals following the 2015 season (and eschewing far more expensive but not more productive options like David Price and Zack Greinke), the dollar-conscious front office scooped up lefty-mashing utilityman Steve Pearce and veteran ground-ball specialist relievers Joe Smith and J.P. Howell to cheap deals this winter. Now the Jays just have to hope their once formidable offense doesn’t start to fade away with Edwin Encarnacion gone to Cleveland, the re-signed Jose Bautista aging and the punchless Justin Smoak not yet exiled to Esterhazy.
11. New York Mets
We got a taste of what the Mets’ rotation could do when Noah Syndergaard burst onto the scene in 2015, propelling an already loaded starting five all the way to the World Series. Two years later, Syndergaard is the undisputed ace of a rotation that’s still extremely young |
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Venezuela is a funny sort of “dictatorship”. The private media enjoys a 90 per cent audience share and routinely pump out vitriolic anti-Chavez propaganda, pro-opposition areas are plastered with billboards featuring Capriles’ smiling face, and jubilant anti-Chavez rallies are a regular event across the country.
Venezuelans went to the polls on Sunday for the 15th time since Hugo Chavez was first elected in 1999: all of those previous elections were judged as free by international observers, including ex-US President Jimmy Carter, who described the country’s election process as “the best in the world”. When Chavez lost a constitutional referendum in 2007, he accepted the result. Before his massive registration drives, many poor people could not vote. In stark contrast to most Western democracies, over 80 per cent of Venezuelans turned out to vote in Sunday’s presidential elections.
Even opponents of Chavez told me that he is the first Venezuelan president to care about the poor. Since his landslide victory in 1998, extreme poverty has dropped from nearly a quarter to 8.6 per cent last year; unemployment has halved; and GDP per capita has more than doubled. Rather than ruining the economy – as his critics allege – oil exports have surged from $14.4bn to $60bn in 2011, providing revenue to spend on Chavez’s ambitious social programmes, the so-called “missions”.
His critics attack him for his association with autocrats and tyrants such as Gaddafi, Ahmadinejad and Assad.
His critics attack him for his association with autocrats and tyrants such as Gaddafi, Ahmadinejad and Assad. They have a point, but given the West’s own support for dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kazakhstan – whose regime is currently paying Tony Blair $13m a year for PR services – a giant glasshouse looms behind them. Venezuela’s main allies are fellow Latin American democracies, themselves ruled by progressive governments that Chavez helped inspire, such as Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia.
That’s not to say that Venezuela is free of problems, or even close. Security was the main concern of Venezuelans I spoke to, and little wonder: violent crime has surged, with up to 20,000 people murdered last year. An ineffective and often corrupt local police and justice system, the spill over from conflict in neighbouring Colombia, and a society with more guns than people are largely to blame. The government is beginning to roll out a national police force, but urgent action is clearly required.
But when it comes to his relationship with his opposition, Chavez has arguably been pretty lenient. Many of them – including Capriles – were involved in a US-backed, Pinochet-style military coup in 2002, which failed only after Chavez’s supporters took to the streets. It was incited and supported by much of the private media: I wonder what would happen to Sky News and ITN if they had egged on a coup d’état against a democratically elected government in Britain. Five years later, the government refused to renew the licence of one broadcaster, RCTV, because of its role in the coup. Even many Chavistas acknowledge that it was a tactical mistake, but I wonder how many governments would tolerate TV stations advocating their armed overthrow.
Venezuela’s oligarchs froth at the mouth with their hatred of Chavez, but the truth is his government has barely touched them. The top rate of tax is just 34 per cent, and tax evasion is rampant. Why do they despise him? As Chavez’s vice-minister for Europe, Temir Porras, puts it to me, it’s because “the people who clean their houses are now politically more important than them”. Under Chavez, the poor have become a political power that cannot be ignored: no wonder even Capriles at least claimed he would leave the social programmes intact.
Chavez’s critics in the West are entitled to passionately disagree with him. But it’s time they stopped pretending he is a dictator. Chavez has won fair and square. Despite formidable obstacles, he has proved it is possible to lead a popular, progressive government that breaks with neo-liberal dogma. Perhaps that is why he is so hated after all.
Twitter: @OwenJones84
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Subscribe nowChicago police discovered a cache of water bottles containing human waste earlier this month. Sunday they arrested 7 protesters who may have been using them.
Chicago Police arrested about seven people prior to a 2 p.m. march that began at Grant Park.
A spokesperson for Chicago Police Command Center said the arrested protesters were found with bottles filled with urine and feces.
Police declined to comment on the affiliation of those arrested.
For the most part, the largest protest has been peaceful as an estimated 1800-2200 demonstrators march down Michigan avenue.
Police Clash With Black Bloc
Protesters dressed in black yell "Shame! Shame! Shame!" at police officers on Michigan Avenue. (Published Sunday, May 20, 2012)
Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said earlier Sunday that he was happy with his department.
"It's a very big job but we are a very big deptartment," he said. "We are well trained and well equipped"
Around 3:15 p.m a group of Black Bloc anarchists broke off from the march and attempted to scuffle with police, but the situation was quickly contained.
For the latest updates on NATO in Chicago, check our live blog and our special NATO section. Be a part of the conversation by using #NATORedZone on social media.Brazilian artist Fernando de la Rocque (pronounced 'hockey' and not 'roach' like it should be) creates art with pot smoke by repeatedly blowing the smoke at a piece of paper with a stencil taped to it. :/ Art, ladies and gentlemen!
It takes him a week to do a single print -- blowing about five joints of smoke onto a paper daily.
Smoking marijuana is illegal in Brazil, but some of Rocque's pot-stained prints are selling for $2,500 each. A show featuring the work opened last week at an alternative gallery in Rio's stylish Ipanema neighborhood.
*non joint related coughing* $2,500 apiece?! I'm in the wrong f***ing business. Brobro here is smoking five joints a day, finishing one print a week and selling them for up to $2,500? *does the math* That's it, somebody drive me to the nearest medical dispensary, I'm getting an ounce. Then I'll need you to take me for some fro-yo. But only one of the places that lets you add the toppings yourself. I'll show you a true artiste at work!
Hit the jump for several more shots including a finished piece of Arnold Schwarzenegger which may or may not be an homage to him smoking that joint in 'Pumping Iron'.
Thanks to daniel, who creates art the old fashioned way: with the dried blood of his enemies. See?! Now that's what I'm talking about!Even though Vin Diesel’s character Groot only says three words during Guardians of the Galaxy, Vin Diesel didn’t only record the three words one time. In an interview on the red carpet of the Guardians of the Galaxy world premiere, Vin Diesel revealed that he said “I am Groot” over a thousand times in doing his voice work for the role.
“I was really lucky, because I had a director, who is willing to indulge and wanted to really capture all the nuances of this character. What we know about Groot is that he’s got a wooden larynx so although he’s saying other things, other than “I am Groot,” all the novice ears or someone oblivious to his nuances of his speech can hear is “I am Groot.” It sounds like he’s just repeating his name. Because of that, when I came into the recording room, there was a fifty page document that on the left hand side it said “I am Groot,” and on the right hand side, it would have a paragraph or a sentence explaining what he was really meaning or what he was really trying to say. And so when you have that level of detail, when you have a director that committed, when you have studio so hellbent on creating such a great CGI character, I feel like I’m coming into a team…a winning team already. And all I have to do is spend a week there in the ADR booth breathing life into it,” said Vin Diesel.
Guardians of the Galaxy is scheduled to be released in movie theaters on August 1, 2014.A lead coffin within a medieval stone coffin was found at the Grey Friars dig site where the remains of King Richard III were discovered. (Credit: University of Leicester)
After the remains found in a parking lot in England were confirmed last year to belong to King Richard III, archaeologists turned their attention to a mysterious coffin-within-a-coffin found at the same site -- and have exhumed a second body.
The lid of a large limestone coffin was lifted by eight people to reveal a smaller lead coffin inside. The lead coffin has gone to the University of Leicester's School of Archaeology and Ancient History for opening and laboratory testing.
King Richard, who died in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, was hastily buried by Grey Friars. Although many people may be buried at the site of the former Grey Friars Church, archaeologists say this is the first time they have seen a lead coffin within a stone coffin.
"None of us in the team have ever seen a lead coffin within a stone coffin before," said Grey Friars site director Mathew Morris. "We will now need to work out how to open it safely, as we don't want to damage the contents when we are opening the lid."
RELATED New primate species Lavasoa dwarf lemur discovered
Researchers suspect the remains could belong to one of three prominent people known to be buried at the friary. Two are leaders of the English Grey Friars Order; Peter Swynsfeld and William of Nottingham, who died in 1272 and 1330 respectively.
The other possibility is "a knight called Mutton, sometime mayor of Leicester," according to church records. Researchers believe the mayor referenced was the knight Sir William de Moton of Peckleton, who died between 1356 and 1362.
Researchers also hope to find the headless remains of three Franciscan friars hanged and then beheaded for treason on the orders of Henry IV, in 1402. Roger Frisby, Walter Walton and John Moody were accused of spreading rumors that King Richard II was still alive, and planning to retake the throne.
The friars' decapitated bodies were put on display in Oxford and London Bridge before being lost. Some historians believe the remains were claimed and buried by sympathizers at the Grey Friars dig site.After college on the G. I. Bill at what is now New York University, Zinn enrolled at Columbia to pursue a Ph.D. in history, continuing his political activities around New York City. He wrote a creditable dissertation, on Fiorello La Guardia, which is still occasionally cited by scholars and which would constitute Zinn’s only sustained engagement with archival documents. The well-received manuscript earned Zinn an offer from Albert Manley, the president of Spelman College, the black women’s college in Atlanta, to chair the school’s history and social sciences department. So in 1956, Zinn, his wife, and their two young children packed up their Chevrolet and headed South. At Spelman, the fledgling civil rights movement was attracting the middle-class black college students who would become its vanguard. Zinn’s apartment provided a gathering place for the young activists.
The fight for racial equality consumed his time at Spelman, and he became an adviser to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, formed during the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. Zinn poured his heart into this historic and righteous undertaking, bringing him into contact with the movement’s leaders. He would remain loyal to the SNCC even after its controversial ouster in 1966 of its chairman John Lewis in favor of Stokely Carmichael, to the dismay of Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, and other national movement leaders. Zinn’s activism led to his second book, SNCC: The New Abolitionists, charitably described by Duberman as “an on-the-spot work of reportage”—personal observation might be a better term—“rather than a comprehensive scholarly account.”
Also appearing in 1964 was The Southern Mystique, a collection of Zinn’s writings on civil rights (mostly published previously), which promised to herald his arrival as an intellectual force. It was reviewed by C. Vann Woodward, Ralph Ellison, and Lillian Smith, but none found much to admire in it beyond Zinn’s agreeable prose and nature. They called his arguments shallow and mystifyingly detached from any discussion of the South’s unique historical experience. But if Zinn’s stature as a thinker failed to rise in these years, Duberman writes, his profile as an activist did, as his “flair for the theatrical” and his “genius at engaging an audience” won him speaking invitations and requests from leftist causes.
Although Zinn ran afoul of various nasty Southern martinets in the civil rights years, his worst antagonist turned out to be Spelman’s own president, Albert Manley. The university’s first black leader, Manley was “strict and autocratic,” Duberman writes; “forced to walk a tightrope between a limited endowment and white racist power,” he frowned on his students’ activism and Zinn’s encouragement of it. In 1963, Manley fired Zinn, ostensibly on scholarly grounds. Zinn mistakenly believed that he had tenure—how such an extraordinary confusion came to pass is not fully explained—and asked the American Association of University Professors for help. In the negotiations, Manley threatened to publicize an old incident in which local police found Zinn and a Spelman student alone in his car at night at the end of a cul-de-sac. Zinn insisted that nothing sexual had occurred, but he still did not want his wife, who was prone to depression, to find out. What really happened? Duberman says there is no way to know. Manley refused to yield, and the AAUP dropped the case. Zinn secured an offer from the government department of Boston University, and the family returned north.
As Zinn was throwing himself into the SNCC, many of his peers in the historical profession were throwing themselves into scholarship. Some were hard at work overturning the central assumptions of their fields, challenging what John Higham had labeled the “consensus” history of their predecessors—so called because this older generation had tended to discern patterns of ideological agreement in the American past more than the persistence of class struggle. In truth, while consensus historians did stress the relative placidity of America’s experience compared to Europe’s, they were not the Cold War cheerleaders that their successors caricatured. Some of them—C. Vann Woodward, Kenneth Stampp, John Hope Franklin, and even those favorite New Left whipping boys Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.—produced work that was in its own way powerfully revisionist, in some cases paving the way for the radicals who followed. Still, it was the young generation of the 1960s that broke open the limits of what constituted legitimate and respected history.
The shifts that the radical historians of the 1960s triggered were diverse enough to defy encapsulation. A strict taxonomy might demarcate differences between the self-consciously Marxist work of an early wave, whose members included current or former Communists, Trotskyists, and Schachtmanites, and that of a younger cohort who listed toward anarchism and the counterculture. It might also distinguish between the earlier work of figures such as James Weinstein and Christopher Lasch, which focused on politics with a strong anti-liberal bent, and the “new social history” of the early 1970s, which tended to avoid or downplay politics except in the loosest sense, preferring investigations into social mobility, family life, or other topics that fell under the rubric of “history from the bottom up.” Radical history had other distinguishing traits, too, including an anti-Cold War framework that looked cynically at American motives abroad and—too often—benignly on the Soviet Union’s; and, at a methodological level, a disdain for the hoary conceit of objectivity, with some radicals maintaining that research should be unapologetically yoked to the political agenda of the New Left.
Zinn never seems to have grasped that scholarship begins in a freedom to explore topics that may appear remote from today’s pressing concerns.
Zinn shared many of these tenets. He relentlessly criticized American policy and seems to have stayed silent about the Soviet Union. He wrote of his commitment to “value-laden historiography” and declared that historical research should be carried out to serve present-day political ends. Yet for all these affinities, Zinn remained aloof from the intellectual ferment of the seminar rooms, journal offices, and conferences where radical history was being born. At Wisconsin, where William Appleman Williams’s jaundiced view of America’s global role was most influential, the start-up journal Studies on the Left published work by Eugene Genovese, Ronald Radosh, Lloyd Gardner, Gabriel Kolko, and Staughton Lynd—the last a close friend of Zinn’s at Spelman in the early ’60s—but never Zinn. Nor did Zinn ever write for a journal of later vintage, the Radical History Review. Nor, according to Duberman, did he “participate in the necessary but time-consuming efforts that others … devotedly put into establishing the Radical Historians Caucus of the American Historical Association” or other professional ventures.
Zinn expressed his radicalism through activism—first on the Vietnam War (he sympathized with the NLF) and then on a host of successor issues, on and off campus. That activism, more than his writing, came to constitute his public identity. In 1971, Boston University hired a new president whose authoritarian tendencies made Spelman’s Manley look like Mister Rogers. John Silber, swaggering in from Texas, had a vendetta against the left, especially professors who politicized their research. But Silber’s ostensible concern for academic freedom was belied by his tyrannical style. Heedless of due process, intolerant of dissent, Silber imposed his will on the faculty and students, generating only more unrest. And Zinn became Silber’s archenemy, subject to capricious punishments and unwarranted invective. Duberman reports that when Zinn received an offer to teach in Paris and secured Herbert Marcuse to teach in his stead, Silber vetoed what should have been a routine leave of absence. Silber also denied Zinn promotions and raises for years. In 1982, with help from the AAUP, he won an appeal to gain his long-withheld back pay.
That Zinn deserved sympathy for his victimization by Silber, however, does not mean that his own ideas or pursuits were admirable. And Duberman, though averse to scrutinizing Zinn’s political views, is quite prepared to take on his callow notions about higher education. At B.U., Zinn regularly and cavalierly denounced prevailing academic standards, arguing that the university should teach “relevant” subjects and forego what he described as the “endless academic discussion” of “trivial or esoteric inquiry” that goes “nowhere into the real world.” Duberman doesn’t buy it. Relevance is an uncertain guide to those embarked on a long, tortuous path of scholarship. And the question of which topics are “trivial or esoteric,” Duberman notes, is hardly self-evident. The academic gatekeepers of the early 1960s would surely have deemed much of the “endless academic discussion” taken up by the New Left historians—was the class consciousness of workers forged on or off the shop floor?—to be inconsequential or arcane; yet to those who could glean what was at stake in the debate, the questions were significant. Zinn never seems to have grasped that scholarship differs from more perishable forms of writing precisely in that it begins in a freedom to explore topics that may appear remote from today’s pressing concerns but that can still change our understanding of the world.
Duberman is exceedingly gracious toward Zinn, praising his warm heart, his honorable intentions, his noble commitments. One could almost miss the damning portrait of Zinn’s thinking that ultimately emerges. But damning it is: just as his thoughts on scholarship appear jejune, so Zinn himself—his measure taken in full—comes across as a lazy, conventional theorist, with an undeveloped political philosophy. Zinn’s Marxism, for example, was muddled: “He never considered himself an ideologue,” Duberman writes. “Howard found the Marxian idea of redistributing society’s wealth according to need a congenial one, but he also felt considerable attraction to the anarchists’ anti-authoritarian stance. He was even willing to acknowledge now and then that capitalism had ‘developed the economy in an enormously impressive way,’ increasing ‘geometrically the number of goods available’—though failing to distribute them justly.” In the end, Duberman concludes, “Howard, in fact, wasn’t much interested in political theory, nor did he pretend to have a creative, original contribution to make in that regard.” Duberman is kind to spare Zinn the burden of working out his own “creative, original” philosophy, but the shortcoming cannot be so easily excused, given Zinn’s ambitions, any more than we can excuse Zinn’s trite calls for politically useful history. Duberman makes it easy to see why Zinn earned Silber’s contempt.
What liberated Zinn from Silber’s fist was the publication of A People’s History of the United States in 1980. The book sold well and garnered an American Book Award nomination. In the years after its publication, it consistently found new readers, especially after Matt Damon—who as a boy lived next door to Zinn—plugged it in the film Good Will Hunting. Damon later turned the book into a History Channel series, and in time it also launched a raft of spin-offs. By Zinn’s final years—he died in 2010—the franchise was earning him some $200,000 annually.
A People’s History caught the imagination of the public, or a portion of it, for several reasons. Foremost was its uncomplicated and ideologically attractive message, enlivened by Zinn’s palpable passion and customarily lucid prose. An easily drinkable blend of the radical history that was now ripe on the vine, the book gave readers the American experience as seen by the losers and the victims. Or as Zinn memorably put it: “the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish … the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America.” In casting himself in solidarity with grassroots movements of protest, Zinn found a winning formula: how could you not root for Zinn and his rag-tag cast of plucky underdogs against the slaveholders, robber barons, imperialists, and protectors of privilege?
Zinn justified his overt display of sympathy with a stark methodological declaration. He abjured any pretense of having written a comprehensive or balanced account. Having long ago disavowed objectivity, having dismissed even the hope of unpoliticized scholarship, Zinn stated plainly that he meant to take sides. Since “selection, simplification, [and] emphasis” were “inevitable,” what mattered was only which selections, simplifications, and emphases the historian chose. And while the canons of academic culture might hold that those choices, those acts of historical interpretation, were “technical problems of excellence,” Zinn said that they constituted “tools for contending social classes, races, nations.” Thus, even more than its sympathies for the proper set of good guys, A People’s History enchanted readers with its knowing iconoclasm. The Constitution, the Civil War, the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima—all were self-serving acts, Zinn said, perpetrated by those in power to maintain power. In the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era, this stance was alluring. To ascribe noble or even mixed motives to the powerful was to fall into a retrograde naïveté; but to share Zinn’s blanket contempt for society’s elites conferred a hip, superior cynicism. Moreover, it wasn’t just the particulars of American history that Zinn’s book claimed to expose: it was the enterprise of scholarly history itself. In reducing previous scholars’ interpretive arguments to “tools for contending social classes, races, nations,” Zinn was in effect saying that Big-Time History—with its formidable air of authority, its footnotes and archival documentation, its vetting by communities of expert scholars—had really just served to shore up the power of established elites and put down stirrings of protest.
Upon its publication, A People’s History won some kind words from critics praising its author’s effort to transmit the new academic arguments of the 1960s and 1970s to wider audiences. But on the whole the reviews were not kind. The cultural historian Michael Kammen called the book a “scissors-and-paste-pot job” and deemed the book’s “bottom up” history to be “as unsatisfactory as ‘elitist’ history.” He pointed out that it was not too much to expect a book of 600 pages to include America’s “grandeur as well as tragedy, magnanimity as well as muddle, honor as well as shame.” In the New York Times, Eric Foner, something of a radical historian himself, explained why Zinn’s bugaboo of “balance” was a red herring: historians are obliged to explore the viewpoints of elite actors, however unattractive, not to parcel out sympathy in proper proportions, but to show, in a faithful account of the past, the interconnectedness of the rulers and ruled, and of all strata of society, and how one group’s experiences influence another’s. But Zinn reduced historical analysis to political opinion. He assessed a work of history by its author’s partisan loyalties, not its arguments about causation, influence, motivation, significance, experience, or other problems he deemed “technical” in nature.
The fatal flaw of Zinn’s historical work is the shallowness of his critique of scholarly detachment.
Despite his soft spot for Zinn personally, Duberman doesn’t flinch from rehearsing these and other flaws. “Sometimes A People’s History lacks nuance,” he writes (ever so gently), “with the world divided into oppressors and oppressed, villains or heroes.” Not only did this division devolve quickly into Manichaeism; it also trivialized Zinn’s own heroes by depicting their labors as ineffectual. “The history of the U.S.,” Duberman notes, “is treated as mainly the story of relentless exploitation and deceit.” Even the civil rights movement is regarded in A People’s History as little more than a brief surge of activism that ended in burned-out ghettos, persistent inequality, continued racial conflict, and white indifference.
Yet when it comes to Zinn’s demand for history to be judged for its political utility, Duberman is finally too indulgent. He can never bring himself to say that the fatal flaw of Zinn’s historical work is the shallowness, indeed the fallaciousness, of his critique of scholarly detachment. Zinn rests satisfied with what strikes him as the scandalous revelation that claims of objectivity often mask ideological predilections. Imagine! And on the basis of this sophomoric insight, he renounces the ideals of objectivity and empirical responsibility, and makes the dubious leap to the notion that a historian need only lay his ideological cards on the table and tell whatever history he chooses. He aligns himself with the famous line from the British historian James Anthony Froude, who asked rhetorically if history “was like a child’s box of letters, with which we can spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not suit our purpose.” Froude made this observation in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Martin Duberman, then, shows himself to be a more subtle and probing historian than Howard Zinn. He navigates artfully between sympathy and criticism, recognizing complexity where Zinn prefers simplicity. But in the end Zinn matters to us not because of his own scholarly contributions, which were meager, but as an expression of the radical history of the 1960s. Unfortunately, Duberman is not particularly clear-eyed about—or much
given to examine—the merits of radical history itself, of which Zinn was only a small part. Perhaps hemmed in by his own political leanings, Duberman mostly avoids the larger set of questions.
The tenet of radical history that has aged least well is its subordination of analytical problems to political sympathies. The New Left historians were hardly the first cohort of scholars to enlist history in the service of a political crusade or a social agenda. The idea was put forward, in different form, by the Progressive historians of Charles Beard’s time, notably James Harvey Robinson, and many subsequent schools and individuals later embraced it, including some of the Cold War anti-Communists against whom the New Left historians were rebelling. Conversely, many scholarly-minded radical historians grasped the foolishness, even the danger, of allowing present-day politics to shape one’s readings of past events. It was Christopher Lasch who decried “the worst features of progressive historiography reappear[ing] under the auspices of the new left: drastic simplification of issues; … reading present concerns back into the past; strident partisanship.” Quoting Zinn’s directive for historians to decide “from a particular ethical base what is the action-need of the moment and to concentrate on that aspect of the truth-complex which fulfills that need,” Lasch growled: “In the face of such critics, the consensus historians need no defense.”
The question of politicized scholarship was in fact deeply divisive not just between the “consensus” historians and the New Left historians, but also among the New Left historians themselves. Some of the young radicals, such as Lasch, Weinstein, and Genovese, insisted that the political or social influence of their scholarship would of necessity unfold slowly, incrementally, and through the sinuous, indirect paths of the culture. For all their leftist bona fides, these men agreed with their stodgy forebears that the intellectual had to hew to the highest standards of rigor; it was by the strength of their scholarship that they might revise entrenched beliefs that gave rise to the social conditions that, as a political matter, they decried. Genovese, most vociferously, flatly rejected the siren song of “relevant” history: he, too, hoped at the time for a socialist future, but he believed that it was best served by history that was true to the evidence, valid in its interpretations, and competent in its execution. This rift in the New Left between “scholars” and “activists” eventually led to the collapse of Studies on the Left, as well as to a donnybrook at the meeting of the American Historical Association in 1969, at which Staughton Lynd, a leading activist, ran for association president on an insurgent plank, prompting the cantankerous Genovese—still very much a radical—to bellow from the floor that Lynd and his allies were “totalitarians.”
Lynd's insurrection sputtered, but his and Zinn’s position wormed its way into the thinking of generations of graduate students, and it is distressingly easy today to find tendentious scholarship that exhibits a Zinn-like habit of judging historical acts and actors by their contemporary utility. As much as radical history contributed invaluable new arguments and perspectives to historical scholarship, it has also left an unhappy legacy of confusing or commingling political and scholarly goals. At its most egregious, this confusion takes the form of polemical potboilers such as Zinn’s or, worse, propagandistic screeds such as Peter Kuznick’s and Oliver Stone’s The Untold History of the United States. (Three decades after Zinn, five decades after William Appleman Williams, it takes chutzpah to claim that a conspiracy-laden tale about America’s unremitting malice has somehow been “untold,” but then one wouldn’t expect Stone’s history to be any more subtle than his movies.) Such cant will usually be called out by responsible historians, left, right, or center. More troubling is that “the pragmatic fallacy,” as David Hackett Fischer called it, has insinuated itself into a good deal of historical literature even by respected and able historians, at a level deep enough to be nearly invisible. While excellent work is done by self-identified leftists, too much academic work today assumes such dubious premises as (to name but a few) the superiority of socialism to a mixed economy, the inherent malignancy of American intervention abroad, and the signal virtue of the left itself. Franklin Roosevelt’s rescue of capitalism is routinely treated as a disappointment because he did not go all the way to socialism. Truman’s suspicion of Stalin is treated as short-sightedness or war-mongering. Anti-Communism of even the most discerning sort is lumped in with McCarthyism as an expression of mass paranoia. Labor’s mid-century decisions to work with management to secure good wages and benefits are seen as selling out. And too seldom is it acknowledged that throughout its history the left has operated from low motives as well as high ones, and has caused social harm as well as social improvement, and has destroyed as well as created.
Likewise, in the academic realm, left-wing radicalism has bequeathed a mixed and uneven legacy. At many times in our national experience, there have been radicals who have applied needed pressure to those in the seats of institutional power, forcing them to change unjust practices, reconsider self-serving conclusions, and honor unfulfilled principles. At such times, the radicals’ work has been most salutary, bringing greater equality and justice to the political sphere, opening horizons in the intellectual world. But there have been times, too, when some radicals—political and intellectual—have embraced zealotry and maximalism, or betrayed their own ideals, and allowed their impatience with the imperfections of those in power to lead them into deluded or destructive movements. In writing as or about radicals, historians owe it to their readers to include the bad with the good, the ignoble with the noble—not in the service of “balance” but in the pursuit of intellectual honesty. The most regrettable aspect of Howard Zinn’s full and lusty life is not that he chose to ignore this responsibility. It is that he never seemed aware of it in the first place.
David Greenberg is a professor of journalism and media studies and of history at Rutgers and the author of Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (Norton), among other books.Justin Trudeau absolutely ecstatic at the choice of Navdeep Bains as a "new cabinet" Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development to promote "social" progress, justice, equality, and diversity.
W
I must introduce a parenthetical protest against the abuse of the current term'social justice'. From meaning 'justice in relations between groups or classes' it may slip into meaning a particular assumption as to what these relationships should be; and a course of action might be supported because it represented the aim of'social justice', which from the point of view of 'justice' was not just. The term'social justice' is in danger of losing its rational content — which would be replaced by a powerful emotional charge. I believe that I have used the term myself: it should never be employed unless the user is prepared to define clearly what social justice means to him, and why he thinks it just.1
Although overly ambitious and imperfect, the Trudeau government's efforts to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada should cause Evangelicals to applaud Trudeau's sense of social justice.
What we do for the least of these should not only define who we are as Canadians, but who we are as Christians as well.
Follow our ongoing coverage of the migrant invasion of the West.
[1] T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 1948, 1962, 1967, pp. 16-17, footnote 2
henever I hear the expression "social justice" I am reminded of what T. S. Eliot had to say about this phrase in a footnote to the introduction of his excellent Eliot wrote:Today, almost seventy years after the first edition of this book was published, that the rational content of "social justice" might be replaced by a powerful emotional charge is no longer a danger but rather something that has long since come to pass. It does indeed, now, mean a particular assumption as to what the relationships between groups or classes should be, namely that all groups and classes ought to relate to each other as equals, with of course the understanding implicit in all egalitarian dogmas that some, as Orwell wrote, "are more equal than others". Moreover, almost every course of action that is justified today by the cause of social justice, stands condemned as unjust before the tribunal of "justice" as Plato and Aristotle understood this term, an understanding which corresponds quite well with the use of the same term in the Christian Scriptures.True justice, in the classical understanding of the term, is both the external requirement that we pay what we owe to God, the law, and to other people and the internal virtue of habitually so doing. This excludes any form of egalitarianism for our obligations towards God and Caesar are different from each other, and our obligations to our fellow men vary greatly in accordance with our relationship to each. What a man's owes to his wife and children he does not owe to his neighbour's wife and children, |
the time of the smartphone. Is there something inherent about being connected to everyone at all time that could have an effect on your desire / fantasy to have consensual, non-monogamous sex?
POLY ON THE RISE
Purely anecdotal, but there seems to have been a point in the last 10 years where “polyamory” seems to have become more discussed. The search trends back up this assertion. But like the uptick in more “connected” swinging, poly represents more connected relationships.
MILLENNIALS COMING OF AGE
We’ve noticed (again…anecdotal evidence) that younger swingers are starting way more “open”. They seem to be ok with separate rooms and separate dating.
Other?
Above are things that are directly related to our “connectedness” with one-another. What about influences that aren’t? Politics? Social/cultural value shifts? Economic changes? If this “blip” happened around 2008, I might correlate it to economics, but it was during a boring part of George Bush’s term as president. He wasn’t even campaigning yet…just making a mess in Iraq.
Connectedness
The theme that keeps reappearing when we look at technologies like mobile / Facebook, and the correlating trends of people wanting more “connection” /FWB in their swinging partners, is the word “connectedness”. We would need to do some real time-consuming research to understand what’s happening, but hopefully we can use our social tools to crowd-source some anecdotes. Cultural shifts don’t necessarily happen with a spike, so we’re left scratching our heads.
What are your thoughts?
ShareLegendary Liquid pays homage to the one & only Lenzman, celebrating 10 years of his glorious sound. An ear for a good sample has seen his music gain a huge following in that time & deservedly so.
Soulful, deep, melancholic, yet fun, Lenzman walks his own path. This set is only part 1 of 2, for those of you who may be missing some of your own favourites ;)
Thanks for listening, enjoy!
Starz feat. Kevin King
Joanie's Theme feat. FD
I Want You
Lose You VIP feat. Cliff
Stuck feat. Treez & Jo-S
Mesmerized
Bittersweet, Part 2 feat. Riya
Diamonds
Rags To Riches
Move & Focus feat. Dan Stezo
Cherry Blossom
Wordsworth VIP
Artificial Intelligence feat. Steo - What You Had (Lenzman Remix)
Vale Of Tears
Total Science & S.P.Y feat. Kevin King - Past Lives (Lenzman Remix)
Zero T - My Name (Lenzman Remix)
Close To Me
Random Movement - I Stayed Around (Lenzman Reinterpretation)
Sugar Hill
Ice Cold Soul feat. Switch
African Dream
Download: http://bit.ly/2fVh2iZOne shouldn't laugh at the Belgium relationship scandal involving Thibaut Courtois and Kevin de Bruyne but it's near impossible not to. The pair have been international team mates for some years and were all set to link up again at Chelsea until De Bruyne made a sharp exit.
De Bruyne is doing well at his new Bundesliga club Wolfsburg and Courtois has of course made himself completely at home at Chelsea. Both young men are seeing their careers rise and De Bruyne has achieved so much in his 23 years that he recently brought out an autobiography.
In that book he spoke of his relationship with a young lady by the name of Caroline Lijnen (pictured together to the left, pic from HLN). As De Bruyne sees it, Courtois stole his girl and the rift was potentially huge. The former Chelsea player claimed in his book that Belgium manager Marc Wilmots asked him if he should drop Courtois from the national squad over the scandal.
Caroline Lijnen had kept quiet but since De Bruyne released his book she's decided it's fair to have her say. And that she does.
Quoted by Voetbal Krant, Lijnen says "I remained silent over the past year and a half. Not because I wanted to say nothing, because I could not say anything. The parents of Kevin would take legal action if I would tell my version of the story.
"In the summer of 2012 I was told that Kevin himself had an affair with my then best friend. I then faced a choice with him. He choose whether for me or for her, I wanted to give him a chance. We have seized that opportunity, but our relationship has never been the same after that."
Lijnen went to Madrid with a friend of Courtois to visit the goalkeeper, a holiday which had the full backing and knowledge of De Bruyne. But, things happened.
"Thibaut gave me in that one night, what I'd sorely missed for three years with Kevin. With Thibaut I could have good conversations and he also cooked nicely for me. Such a thing Kevin never did. And then suddenly we clicked."
Stop laughing. This is serious stuff.
@Sport_WitnessGlen Faulman takes his self-anointed moniker "The Hamilton Kid" seriously. Besides being a bar owner, steelworker and punk rock singer, Faulman is a collector, and lover, of all things Hamilton.
He finds wonder and awe in the untold numbers of things that have been made here.
The downtown home he shares with his wife, Jodie, is crammed full of more than 200 artifacts — waxed paper, appliances, bricks, tools, bathing suits, maps, books, games and more — all made in Hamilton. There are Tuckett Tobacco tins, Peller and Grant's Spring beer bottles, even Hamilton-made condoms.
In his driveway, Faulman keeps two bullet-nosed Studebaker Champions, one a dilapidated dark blue 1950 model; the other, a working 1951 coupe in eggshell blue. One he found in Bradford, the other he hauled home from Peterborough on the back of a flatbed truck. They both came off the line of the North End auto plant that supplied Canada with Studebakers from 1948 to 1966. About 700 workers lost their jobs when the plant closed.
When Art Gallery of Hamilton curator Melissa Bennett heard about Faulman's collection, she decided it deserved to be on view. She went to his house and selected an array of artifacts and put them on display at the AGH Design Annex on James Street North.
Called "Things Made Here," the free exhibition includes a 19th-century sewing machine, a 1950s table top hockey game, nail samples, graphic ads and an antique brass cash register. It opened Jan. 31 and continues through March 21. An opening reception will be held Friday. And Faulman will be there to answer questions.
"Everything on this wall is out of my kitchen," says Faulman, dressed in an NHL Hamilton Tigers' replica hockey jersey and pointing to a metal tray from long-gone Regal Brewing.
The slogan on the tray reads "Spell it backwards." It takes a while to figure out the joke. Then it comes. Regal spelled backwards is "lager." It's hard to resist a chuckle.
"See, it still makes you smile and it's 90 years old," Faulman says.
Faulman, 42, has been collecting for about ten years. When he's not browsing the Internet or poking through flea markets, he works 12-hour shifts on the Stelco (he doesn't like calling it U.S. Steel Canada) Z-line. He is also part owner of This Ain't Hollywood, the popular rock club on James Street North and has fronted two punk bands, The Sam Lawrence Five and the Steel Town Spoilers. He started calling himself "The Hamilton Kid" as a stage name with The Sam Lawrence Five.Author Topic: What was the burgler symbol Gandalf scratched on Bilbo's door?
Ockle Burr
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 550
posted 03:42 PM What is the burgler symbol Gandalf scratches on Bilbo's door in The Hobbit? Tolkien normally goes to great lengths to describe the runes and writing of elves, dwarves and other citizens of Middle Earth. However, one rune that is never described (as far as I can tell) is the one that allows Thorin and his party to find Bilbo. As Gandalf leaves Bilbo after his first visit to Bag End in "The Hobbit" he scratches a quuer little symbol on his door that means, "Burglar (or expert treasure hunter) wants good job, plenty of excitement and reasonable reward." I have pored over the four novels as well as "Unfinished Tales" and "The Silmarillion" and have found nothing. I have found no resource depicting this symbol on the internet. Did Tolkien ever describe the rune? If not, why? He invented whole languages! (This all stemmed from my quest to find the perfect first tattoo, but I think this may be something the Council could discuss.) From: Connecticut, USA | Registered: May 2001 | IP: Logged |
Jóhnny, the Jester
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 579
posted 08:51 PM i dont blive he dose. it might not have need to be told about because biblo dident notice them. if bilbo had noticed the would have been dusced but it was not really a great importance! dose that help a bit From: Q-Tip | Registered: May 2001 | IP: Logged |
Roland
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 218
posted 10:58 PM I had thought that Gandalf scratched the rune letter 'G' (for Gandalf) on the door. -So that the dwarves would know Gandalf's choice for their burglar. ------------------
Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back. From: The greatest nation on God's green Earth | Registered: Feb 2001 | IP: Logged |
Ockle Burr
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 550
posted 10:33 PM Nope, it wasn't the "G" rune... here's all the relevant textual material that I have: from The Hobbit: "After a while [Gandalf] stepped up, and with the spike of his staff scratched a queer sign on the hobbit's beautiful green front-door." (p 6) Gloin: "'And I assure you there is a mark on the doorthe usual on in the trade, or used to be. Burglar wants a good job, plenty of Excitement and reasonable Reward, that's how it is usually read.'" (p 18) and from Unfinished Tales: Gandalf: "'I will put the thief's mark on his door, and then you will find it.'" (p 349) (All page references from Ballentine editions) So there is a rune, though it may simply be a letter T... I was just wondering if Tolkien ever explained it in any writing, or if it was not meant to be known. From: Connecticut, USA | Registered: May 2001 | IP: Logged |
Mellon
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 402
posted 04:10 PM I was curious about that mark the first time I read There and Back Again, and have never found anything to describe it. ------------------
'Speak, friend, and enter' From: houston, tx usa | Registered: Mar 2001 | IP: Logged |
Cernunnos
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 652
posted 06:09 PM It was a picture of a bag with 'SWAG' written on it, of course!
------------------
Whereas the light perceives the very heart of the darkness, its own secret has not been discovered.
From: Perth, Scotland | Registered: Jun 2001 | IP: Logged |
Dingalen
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 330
posted 09:57 AM I am afraid to ask - but I am just too curious: SWAG? My hypotheses on the mark on the door is, that it was not a regular letter, but a some kind of secret code sign (a thief's mark, i.e. something only insiders of the shadowy buisness would know).
I don't think it would have had any ethymological significance. Like the red cross on a white field signifying medical aid. From: Somewhere in the Netherlands | Registered: Mar 2001 | IP: Logged |
Cernunnos
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 652
posted 08:41 AM I guess swag might be a rather obscure word for non-native-English speakers. Means burglar's loot. Probably originally a piece of thieves cant (= slang).
------------------
Whereas the light perceives the very heart of the darkness, its own secret has not been discovered.
From: Perth, Scotland | Registered: Jun 2001 | IP: Logged |
Ockle Burr
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 550
posted 12:27 PM Thank you all for breathing life into my inagural post... lamentably we are no closer to an answer, but we have moved onto Monty Python references, so I'm sure we're headed in the right direction! Legolas: "You see that orc over there? the tall one with the eye on his shield?" Sam: "The one wearing the cap?" Legolas: "NO, not that one. More to the left: the one with the long arms that sort of hang down like this; wearing the goat skin." Sam: "That's never a goat skin. Sheep maybe." Legolas: "Nevermind that! The point is, I could hit him nine times out of ten!" I'm sorry... I seem to have strayed from the point... maybe this belongs in a different topic... From: Connecticut, USA | Registered: May 2001 | IP: Logged |
Marcho Blackwood - MSS
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 270
posted 12:56 PM Hey, Joe! You American? Me too! I from Chicago New York! You my friend! I give you good deal! Look, real diamond! No ^&^! We buddies, I give you good deal! You can trust me! I have watches too! Hey, Joe, come back! Really! Good Deal! Come back!... &^$% tourists! From: Bindbale, North Farthing | Registered: Feb 2001 | IP: Logged |
Ockle Burr
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 550
posted 01:44 PM Yes, tourists can be annoying... I wonder if anyone's seen them around here? From: Connecticut, USA | Registered: May 2001 | IP: Logged |
Dingalen
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 330
posted 08:59 AM Yeah, tourists. Americans. Brrr... From: Somewhere in the Netherlands | Registered: Mar 2001 | IP: Logged |
Ockle Burr
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 550
posted 01:52 PM American? I didn't realiZe how many of the people here were British. Oh well... I'M American, and I got the "swag" reference immediately... None of this, however, brings me any closer to discovering just what exactly that rune on Bilbo's door looked like. Oh well, case closed. File this as one of the unanswerable questions posed to the Council... I'll just have to get a tattoo of the good old stars and stripes. This message has been edited by Ockle Burr on 07-19-2001 at From: Connecticut, USA | Registered: May 2001 | IP: Logged |
gram
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 24
posted 04:21 PM Yep, MB, you are correct. The text explaining that drawing says that the runes B and D with a diamond are on the door. You can barely make them out when looking at the drawing. It is drawing 91.
-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-
AE5,Ex26Yw1E¾^z³= AE5,ExxwP%1Ej^
AE5,Ex37zE1E¾^z³= X#w6Ykt^AT`Bz7qpT1Ej^
From: New Zealand | Registered: Aug 2000 | IP: Logged |
Isiltári
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 2385
posted 09:28 PM Topics like this are what make this site so fantastic. From: Mirkwood | Registered: Jul 2002 | IP: Logged |
The Laurenendôrian
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 106
posted 06:07 AM Brilliant!
It seems to me that the logical continuation of this is to ask why those runes were used. From: Taruithorn | Registered: Oct 2000 | IP: Logged |
Thorin
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 816
posted 09:47 AM That's what I was curious about, Laur.
B : Burglar
D :?? Excitement??
diamond: Reward
Using Gloin's definition of the mark(s), of course. From: Helsinki | Registered: Aug 2001 | IP: Logged |
White Gold Wielder
Steward of Minas Tirith
Citizen # 2
posted 09:50 AM I'll have to see the image before I can be of more help.
Can anyone get it up here? From: Chicago | Registered: May 2000 | IP: Logged |
Glóin the Dark
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 2102
posted 11:56 AM I assure you, Thorin, that my interpretation of the markings was accurate. If you arrived at Mr Baggins' home late, in such an undignified manner that you didn't notice the symbols, then that's your own fault! From: Belfalas | Registered: Apr 2002 | IP: Logged |
gram
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 24
posted 04:17 PM I have not been able to find the drawing in question on line. It is titled "Gandalf" and is drawing 91 in the book J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator
by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. That book is very, very good and highly recommended.
The drawing itself shows the front door to Bag End. There is a bell pull to the left of the door, two shrubs flanking the door, the door knob in the middle of the door, and Gandalf standing to the right of the door facing to the left like he is looking at the door. Just to the left of the shrub on the right hand side you can barely make out three symbols on the door, in vertical alignment. The top most symbol is the 'B' rune, below it is the 'D' rune, and below it is the diamond:
B
D
diamond
Here is an image of the rune alphabet used in the hobbit so you can see what the 'B' and 'D' rune look like. The diamond is just a diamond shape with a long vertical axis.
Maybe someone else can have better luck finding the "Gandalf" drawing by J.R.R. Tolkien on line. If not, then go to the book store and look in the book. Bring some money, though, because you might just get hooked and buy the book. It has a list price of $25 US.
[ 08-29-2002, 04:18 PM: Message edited by: gram ] From: New Zealand | Registered: Aug 2000 | IP: Logged |
Fabian
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 1948
posted 12:55 PM There's nothing more dangerous than a wounded mosquito From: Sweden, land of... err... stuff. | Registered: Mar 2002 | IP: Logged |
Isiltári
Guard of the Citadel
Citizen # 2385
posted 06:54 PM Pardon? From: Mirkwood | Registered: Jul 2002 | IP: Logged |SPOKANE, Wash. – The Spokane Chiefs announced today the acquisition of goaltender Jayden Sittler and a fifth round draft pick from the Lethbridge Hurricanes in exchange for two selections in the 2016 WHL Bantam Draft.
“We are excited to add a goaltender of Jayden’s caliber to our roster,” said Chiefs’ General Manager Tim Speltz. “Jayden has great experience and is a quality person who will also be a big part of our leadership group.”
Sittler, a 6-foot-1, 205-pound native of Red Deer, Alberta, played 39 games with the Hurricanes last season, posting a 2.94 goals against average and.905 save percentage with one shutout. In 70 career WHL games – split between Lethbridge, Victoria and Kootenay – the 1996-born netminder has a 3.24 GAA and.903 SV% with two shutouts. He added two playoff appearances during the 2016 WHL Playoffs, allowing just 3 goals on 50 shots over 102 minutes.
In the trade, the Spokane receives Sittler and a fifth round pick (107th overall) while sending Lethbridge a third round (52nd) and seventh round (140th) pick.
All included draft selections are for the 2016 WHL Bantam Draft.PM's encounter with sea creature while on holiday in Lanzarote is not the first time that a jellyfish has caused him pain
David Cameron is known for floating serenely above the political fray, suffering very little damage to his own reputation even as his government is forced into U-turns or his ministers are forced to resign.
But on holiday in Lanzarote this week the prime minister's luck ran out. Bobbing gently in the Spanish waters, Cameron suddenly received a painful sting from a jellyfish.
It seems that the PM was warned that "there's loads of jellies down there" as he approached the sea at Arrieta beach, and prudently removed his children from the ocean.
But he waded in himself, subsequently emerging "shouting in pain", one local told the Daily Mirror.
Another tourist recorded his exact quote: "Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!"
Downing Street said the sting was minor and did not require treatment.
However, this is not the first time a jellyfish has caused Cameron pain. Before he became prime minister, the Tory leader was caricatured as just such a sea creature by Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell. But that wasn't because he had a venomous sting or because, like the Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish, he was essentially immortal. "It's this business about transparency," Bell explained.
"There's a terrible, frightening lack of substance about Cameron. You can listen to him for an hour – honestly, I don't know what he's about. He loves his family. It's all so trite. You know, he's against wrongdoing. There's nothing really there. That's the sort of sense I get with him. There's nothing much in there. So a jellyfish is quite a useful way of getting it across."Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said Sunday that his and President Trump’s “first priority” is to ensure Texas gets Hurricane Harvey relief money, which means Congress upon its return Tuesday should connect appropriating the funds to increasing the federal debt.
Congress had largely been expected since the deadly storm hit southeast Texas on Aug. 25 to pass a spending bill free of amendments, add-ons or other legislation to avoid the kind of political wrangling that for months delayed emergency funding for 2012’s Superstorm Sandy.
Members of Congress were then expected to resolve the debt ceiling issue. However, the realization that recovery efforts could cost as much as $190 billion has resulted in White House concerns about having enough ready cash.
"The president and I believe the [debt ceiling] should be tied to the Harvey funding,” Mnuchin told “Fox News Sunday.” “With Harvey, it's moved the situation up earlier. And without raising the debt limit, I'm not comfortable that we would get the money that we need this month to Texas to rebuild."
Trump is asking for at least $7.9 billion in disaster relief.
The government's cash reserves are running low because the debt limit has actually already been reached, and the Treasury Department is using various accounting measures to cover expenses.
Mnuchin originally had said that Congress would need to raise the $19.9 trillion borrowing limit by Sept. 29 to avoid a catastrophic default on the debt, allowing the government to continue borrowing money to pay bills like Social Security and interest.
But on Sunday, he said that deadline had moved up due to unexpected new spending on Harvey.
The Republican-controlled Congress -- which includes fiscal conservatives adverse to more spending or borrowing -- must upon returning also promptly agree on another key issue, passing a spending resolution to keep the federal government fully operational past Sept. 30.
“Our first priority is to make sure that the state gets money,” Mnuchin also said Sunday. "So we need to put politics aside.”
Trump in recent weeks suggested that he’d “close down” the government if the resolution doesn’t include money for his campaign-promised U.S.-Mexico border wall.
He has purportedly backed off the threat in recent days, in the aftermath of deadly and destructive Harvey. However, Mnuchin on Sunday declined to discuss the issue.
“I can’t really comment if it’s out the window,” he said. “I know that the wall is a huge priority to the president and we want to make sure that we get money for that. (But) I would say the president and my first objective right now is for the people of Texas and make sure we get the funding to do that.”
Mnuchin's spending-debt ceiling pitch resulted in a quick and favorable response from Congress’s top two Democratic leaders.
“Given the interplay between all the issues Congress must tackle in September, Democrats and Republicans must discuss all the issues together and come up with a bipartisan consensus,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, New York, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California, said in a joint statement.
Trump plans to meet with congressional leaders from both parties this week as lawmakers return to Washington after their summer recess.
Congress will also upon its return begin working on Trump’s plan to overhaul the federal tax code. Mnuchin said the plan is similar to the one presented in April, with the White House and Congress continuing to work out the “complicated details.”
He also suggested the White House wasn’t overly concerned about whether the plan includes ways to offset the loss of federal revenue from the tax cuts.
“The way we are going to pay for things is with economic growth,” Mnuchin said. “I think we may be in a situation where the administration believes we’ll get more economic growth than perhaps the models that come out of Congress. But we’ll be working with them on that.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.A human rights organization, Reprieve, has shared a report on a United States drone strike that killed twelve men and wounded dozens more in a wedding convoy near Radda in December. The report is based off interviews with local villagers and features eyewitness accounts of the one of the worst drone attacks in the history of Yemen.
According to NBC News, Baraa Shiban of Reprieve, a human rights organization based in the United Kingdom, investigated the drone attack and found that a “convoy of 11 cars and trucks carrying about 60 people traveling from the home of the bride to the neighboring village of the groom” was “waiting in a valley for more guests to join.” A drone approached and, according to Ahmed Mohammed Al Shafe’ee, a 70-year-old shepherd, a “loud explosion” was heard from the valley.
When Al Shafe’ee arrived, bodies were scattered all over. He found out that his 25-year-old son, who was the father of seven, including a baby born just fifteen days ago, was one of the people killed in the attack.
The women and children were screaming and crying. They live in a remote area of Yemen and there are few places to run from the drones. “We live in fear day and night. Our children and women cannot sleep,” Al Shafe’ee apparently told Shiban.
From a list of men killed in the drone attack, Shiban concluded they were “shepherds and [qat] farmers, who ranged in age from 20 to 65.”
Reports of civilians killed have circulated in Yemen ever since the attack. The Yemen government found the reports credible enough to compensate a local tribe for what happened.
According to NBC News, President Barack Obama’s administration is apparently investigating the drone strike. White House National Security Staff spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden stated:
Before we take any counterterrorism strike outside areas of active hostilities, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured – the highest standard we can set…And when we believe that civilians may have been killed, we investigate thoroughly.
An anonymous US official told NBC News, “Given that there are claims of civilian casualties, we are reviewing it.”
It has not been the public standard to investigate drone strikes when allegations of civilians killed have been reported. For example, in September 2012, an attack in Yemen reportedly killed 13 civilians. The Obama administration maintained silence, and, despite requests for comment, never suggested it was investigating the strike because there were claims civilians were killed.
In fact, days before Obama was re-elected as president, Yemen President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi visited the US and praised drones. “They pinpoint the target and have zero margin of error, if you know what target you’re aiming at,” he said. It indicated Yemen would continue to be a client state of the US in the war on terrorism.
Just this year, when reports from human rights groups—Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—were released, the White House said nothing about regularly investigating strikes when allegations spread that civilians were killed. And, in Obama’s speech at the National Defense University in May 2013, where he addressed the issue of drone strikes, he did not say anything about the US having a responsibility to investigate whether civilians were killed if allegations of civilian casualties were made. Instead, he sought to downplay the risk that drones pose to civilians.
This statement from a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Staff should be viewed with an over-abundant amount of skepticism. What does it mean there’s an “investigation”? If civilians are found to be killed, is there even a process for accountability or taking responsibility for an “error” or, worse, a war crime? Is there even a mechanism setup for compensating these individuals? Why should we think anything will happen that meaningfully addresses the rage of Yemenis when the administration still insists on speaking only “generally” about drone strikes to shield the CIA and other government agencies from having to disclose information on the policy and legal basis for drone attacks?
Should one view this is as anything other than some public relations ploy to dupe Yemenis into believing their dead family or community members actually matter to the Obama administration? (more…)S O SAYING, light-foot Iris pass’d away.
Then rose Achilles dear to Zeus; and round
The warrior’s puissant shoulders Pallas flung
Her fringed ægis, and around his head
The glorious goddess wreath’d a golden cloud,
And from it lighted an all-shining flame.
As when a smoke from a city goes to heaven
Far off from out an island girt by foes,
All day the men contend in grievous war
From their own city, but with set of sun
Their fires flame thickly, and aloft the glare
Flies streaming, if perchance the neighbours round
May see, and sail to help them in the war;
So from his head the splendour went to heaven.
From wall to dyke he stept, he stood, nor join’d
The Achæans—honouring his wise mother’s word—
There standing, shouted, and Pallas far away
Call’d; and a boundless panic shook the foe.
For like the clear voice when a trumpet shrills,
Blown by the fierce beleaguerers of a town,
So rang the clear voice of Æakidês;
And when the brazen cry of Æakidês
Was heard among the Trojans, all their hearts
Were troubled, and the full-maned horses whirl’d
The chariots backward, knowing griefs at hand;
And sheer-astounded were the charioteers
To see the dread, unweariable fire
That always o’er the great Peleion’s head
Burn’d, for the bright-eyed goddess made it burn.
Thrice from the dyke he sent his mighty shout,
Thrice backward reel’d the Trojans and allies;
And there and then twelve of their noblest died
Among their spears and chariots.Employees should be careful of what they write in private messages after the European Court of Human Rights ruled companies are entitled to read their workers’ emails.
In a landmark case that has implications for citizens of countries that are signatories to the ECHR convention, the court ruled that a firm was within its rights to read the emails of a man it had fired for contacting his fiancee on Yahoo messenger.
Employers can monitor private messages but they still need a good internet and email policy #hrhttps://t.co/FDoIxfdzTr — Concentric HR (@concentrichr) January 13, 2016
Getting personal
Bogdan Barbulescu, a Romanian engineer, had argued that the company had failed to respect his right to privacy. However, because he also used his personal Yahoo account for work, the court maintained that his employer was allowed to read all messages written or received in the account.
The company had previously banned staff from sending or receiving personal mails and warned them that accounts would be monitored.
Not unreasonable
Barbulescu filed the complaint at the EHCR in 2008, after being sacked the year before. He took the case to the Strasbourg-based body after a Romanian court and court of appeal had ruled against him in earlier hearings.
In its ruling, the EHCR stated it was not “unreasonable that an employer would want to verify that employees were completing their professional tasks during working hours.”The Colorado sexting scandal at Canon City High School could cause 100 students to face felony charges. A police investigation into the sexting issue at the school was prompted after a tip that minors were sharing explicit photos of themselves, often using “ghost apps” to hide the nude photos from their parents.
According to a Fox News report about the Colorado sexting scandal, Canon City police officials have warned parents to review the cell phone usage of their teenagers to see if their child has also engaged in sexting by sending explicit selfies. The police investigators urged parents that quick action might prevent the nude or nearly nude photos of their minor children from being posted to the internet or becoming public.
Students could face charges in Colorado high school sexting scandal https://t.co/NsG9XHD1YH pic.twitter.com/ogNBP45BuP — NBC Nightly News (@NBCNightlyNews) November 7, 2015
Canon City High School Superintendent George Welsh has not stated how many student are being investigated as a part of the sexting scandal, MSN reports. Numerous students have been suspended from the high school due to their alleged involvement in the explicit images sharing via their smartphones. Welsh said the school will not release the names of the students in an effort to protect their privacy.
Police Chief Paul Schultz said that Colorado school district officials turned the cell phone of one student into his department after receiving a phone call tip about the sexting problem. Upon reviewing the phone, the officers found “several hundred” photos that prompted the investigation. Efforts to identify all the students involved with sending the explicit photos remains ongoing.
So many football players were among those suspended in the sexting scandal that the final game of the season had to be forfeited. Both male and female students from Canon City High School have reportedly been involved in the sexting that prompted the suspensions.
A police bulletin given to parents offered details about the apps, which can be used to hide photos on a cell phone. The notice from the Colorado police also strongly urged parents to discuss the risk that any sexting photo send to a significant other can wind up on the internet forever and criminal charges could be filed due to the sharing of the pornographic images of minors.
A hotline has been created for use by Canon City High School students who are concerned about getting suspended or facing criminal charges for sexting. According to statements made to the media by Superintendent Welsh, some of the students involved in the sexting scandal could face legal charges or serious consequences. The local prosecuting attorney’s office has stated that “common sense” will be used when decisions about levying criminal charges are made.
Sexting scandal ‘involving 100 students’ sweeps Colorado high school https://t.co/jE90ExwWf1 pic.twitter.com/8qsMnUhExq — Press TV (@PressTV) November 8, 2015
District Attorney Thom LeDoux said he would take into consideration whether or not any of the Colorado sexting teens was coerced into sharing photos. LeDoux also said the possible involvement of any adults, as well as if sexual contact corresponded to the images, would also be factors reviewed during the potential legal charges process.
Possession of explicit photos of minors is a felony in Colorado. The stiff penalties associated with the sharing of nude or nearly nude photos of minors laws were written to protect children from sexual predators — before the birth of the smartphone.
If convicted of sharing explicit photos a minor, the Colorado sexting scandals participants would be required to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives. LeDoux said he would levy the felony charges if doing so was in the “best interest of the community” and if exploited victims emerged.
What do you think about the Colorado sexting scandal and the trend of teens sending nude photos on their cell phones?
[Image via Shutterstock.com]Tonight, Noah Hawley has made the dream of Marvel fans worldwide come true. The Legion showrunner just confirmed he is currently developing a Doctor Doom movie for 20th Century Fox.
ComicBook was at the producer's panel for Legion at San Diego Comic-Con, and Hawley had this to say:
MORE: Fantastic Four Is Still Big Part Of Fox's Plan, Simon Kinberg Explains What Went Wrong "I'm developing a film for Fox and I'll just say two words. Doctor. Doom."
For fans, this announcement is one they did not see coming. Doctor Doom is one of Marvel's most iconic villains, but he has yet to get his due in theaters. The baddie has been featured in both of 20th Century Fox's Fantastic Four films, but the genius hasn't |
Former Prime Minister Hariri laid the blame for the attack at the feet of Hezbollah following the attack.
Shattah had reportedly been on his way to a meeting of the March 14 Alliance due to be held at the Center House in the downtown area, when his convoy was hit by the blast.
The Alliance is made up of representatives from political parties and individuals who are against the current regime in neighboring Syria. The on-going violence in Syria has spilled over the border into neighboring Lebanon on a number of occasions, where the population is divided over its support of embattled President Bashar Assad.
Mohammed Shattah was an outspoken critic of Bashar Assad and had openly voiced his opposition to the influence of Hezbollah in Lebanon.(CNN) It's been almost 900 days since the US-led war on ISIS began. But as the Trump administration nears -- with its promise to bomb "the s*** out of ISIS" -- where does the campaign against the militant group stand?
One survey suggests ISIS lost nearly a quarter of its territory in Iraq and Syria last year alone, and more than a third since its peak.
Its finances have taken a hit, according to the US-led coalition and 180 "senior" leaders have been taken out by 17,000 airstrikes.
The group's slickly produced, often gruesome, media output has been massively reduced, but, according to one analyst, it's of higher quality than before.
Here's ISIS state of play before Donald Trump takes office.
ISIS' caliphate shrinks in 2016
ISIS is losing ground across its self-proclaimed caliphate, according to a new report.
JUST WATCHED Donald Trump's Middle East challenges Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Donald Trump's Middle East challenges 03:06
Global intelligence and analysis firm IHS Conflict Monitor, which uses open-source intelligence including social media and on-the-ground sources, estimates that ISIS lost 17,600 square kilometers (6,800 square miles) of the land it held in Iraq and Syria over 2016. ISIS' caliphate in the two countries shrunk by 23% over the course of the year, according to a survey and map released by IHS. The group lost 34% in the same region compared to January 2015.
The US-led coalition say ISIS has lost 27% of its territory in Syria -- and 61% in Iraq -- from its peak.
De facto capital remains in Syria
In addition to ISIS' de facto capital of Raqqa, the militant group retains patches of land not far from Homs and around the ancient city of Palmyra -- control of which it regained from the Syrian regime late last year. It also has a presence in the countryside around the eastern city of Deir Ezzor.
IHS reported spikes in territory lost by ISIS when the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, took control of the strategic city of Ash Shaddadi in March, moved on to Manbij in May, and in mid-October when Euphrates Shield, Turkey's ground operation against ISIS in Syria, retook the symbolically significant town of Dabiq.
ISIS fights off advances on Mosul
ISIS's presence has been felt in Samarra, and also recently in attacks in Baghdad
But the group is mostly confined in urban centers to Mosul, where it's on the cusp of losing the east bank of the city. That would leave it with just the west side, although some estimates suggest the battle for the group's final stronghold in Iraq could continue to drag on into March.
IHS points to a spike in territory lost by ISIS in May when Iraqi security forces kicked militants out of Rutba and western Anbar, and another in October when the operation to retake Mosul began.
US Air Force Col. John L. Dorrian, spokesman for the US-led operation against ISIS, says the group has lost Ramadi, Falluja, Hiit, Qayyara and Sharqat.
Beyond Iraq and Syria
Late last year, ISIS also lost control of Sirte, its final stronghold in Libya, but continued to retain perhaps hundreds of fighters in the country.
This could pose a threat to the already volatile security of Libya's cities and also perhaps serve as a platform for plotting attacks in nearby Europe.
Meanwhile in Afghanistan, in the east of the country, an initial wave of US airstrikes backing an Afghan army campaign pushed the militant group back.
But ISIS has proven to be a resilient presence in a handful of provinces, attracting extremists alienated by the Taliban's superannuated insurgency. The suicide bomber that killed dozens late last year at a Shia mosque in Kabul claimed affiliation with ISIS.
Finances have been hit hard
According to Dorrian, airstrikes against ISIS' infrastructure and cash storage facilities have reduced the group's revenue "or cost them anywhere from $4.5-6.5 million" per month.
ISIS' loss of territory has also reduced the number of civilians it can tax, Dorrian said, and the 600 airstrikes against oil facilities and oil truck shipments hasn't helped its finances either.
Pay to ISIS fighters has been disrupted as well as death benefits for suicide bombers.
ISIS-inspired global attacks
Since declaring its caliphate in June 2014, the self-styled Islamic State has conducted or inspired more than 140 terrorist attacks in 29 countries other than Iraq and Syria.
Those attacks have killed at least 2,043 people and injured thousands more, according to a running CNN tally
ISIS' direct level of involvement in these attacks varies.Morihiro Saito – Traditional Aikido Volume 4
When O-Sensei was not in Iwama, I was in charge of the teaching. I do not know who taught in Hombu dojo when O-Sensei was not there for obvious reasons, I was in Iwama. I rarely went to Hombu dojo. During 1960-61 O-Sensei was very vital. He then sometimes went to Tokyo to teach Aikido, though not many days would pass before students of the Hombu Dojo called me asking me to take O-Sensei home! O-Sensei was giving them a hard time, scolding them for not practising the correct way. In Iwama O-Sensei used to do his own practise in the mornings and then I was the only student to take part. In return for his special teaching I worked in O-Sensei’s farm. Interview with Morihiro Saito Sensei by Mats Alexandersson
Morihiro Saito Sensei was born on March 31, 1928 in a farming village near the Iwama dojo where he would spend more than twenty years training directly with Aikido Founder Morihei Ueshiba. Due to his 24-hour on and 24-hour off working shift with the Japanese National Railroad he was able to spend long periods of time alone with Morihei Ueshiba as his student and training partner – particularly as the Founder formulated his post-war system of weapons training. Early morning classes were devoted to prayer at the Aiki Shrine followed by weapons practice, the study of Aiki-Ken and Aiki-Jo and their relationship to empty-handed techniques.
Morihiro Saito acted as the guardian of the Aiki Shrine until his passing in 2002. He is famous for his dedication to preserving the exact form of Morihei Ueshiba’s techniques as he was taught them during his training under him in Iwama.
This is the second section of the English translation of a three part interview that originally appeared in “Answers from Budoka” (“Budoka no Kotae” / 武道家の答え), published by BAB Japan in 2006. You may wish to read Part 1 before reading this section.
Morihiro Saito and Morihei Ueshiba
Tanren Uchi (“forge cutting”) in Iwama, 1955
Budoka no Kotae – Talking to Morihiro Saito Sensei, Part 2
Q: Is that everyday?
A: Yes. Mondays and holidays are off, but there are no days off for the uchi-deshi. They have training in the morning, for the first half of the day. In the evening, together with the sumi-komi (live-in) students, about thirty of forty students gather together.
Q: The dojo must get full, doesn’t it?
A: Right now there are ten people with just the sumi-komi students alone. They take their meals here, and they just reimburse us for the actual costs. But when they cook together a lot of problems come up! They come from different countries, there are people who don’t eat meat, or people who don’t eat fish.
Q: Especially with religious considerations, foreigners who are looking into things like Zen often don’t eat meat or fish, right?
A: That’s why I make it a condition of entrance that they not bring religion or politics with them. There are places in foreign countries that fight wars over religious differences, but here we function with absolutely no relation to that. The Kami-sama are enshrined in the dojo, but those Kami-sama have a connection to Budo that is not religious. They have been worshipped by warriors since ancient times, so there is no religious atmosphere. Everybody faces the front without reluctance, bows and claps their hands before starting practice.
Q: What about you? Is there some religion like Soto Zen Buddhism that has been passed down to you from your ancestors?
Aikido Founder Morihei Ueshiba’s grave in Kozanji
A: I was born into Shingon Buddhism, but there was no cemetery at that temple. A Soto Zen Buddhist temple nearby made a nice cemetery, so after I moved there I became a Soto Zen Buddhist. The Founder is now buried in a Shingon Buddhist temple in Tanabe, Wakayama called Kozanji (高山寺). One of his last wishes was “make me a grave here”, but for some reason Ni-Dai (Kisshomaru Ueshiba) had a grave in Wakayama Prefecture. That’s why people can’t take a day trip to visit the grave. It’s really pretty tough to get all the way to Wakayama.
In my case, since this was the Founder’s dojo, I believed that it is my responsibility to transmit what I was taught by the Founder. At one time a lot of things were said, but opinions have changed, and the number of requests to come here have greatly increased.
We first built a foundation of static training (個体稽古). Then the method built in stages into flowing techniques and then throwing without touching.
Q: Both here and Hombu Dojo must each have their own good points, this is is a wonderful place, isn’t it?
A: Any path is the same, but in those days the method of teaching was differentiated depending upon the dojo.
Q: Differentiated in what way?
A: Rather than saying that it was differentiated, it may be that the teaching became differentiated. In the end, in a place where one teaches for four days, or a place where one teaches for one week, or a place where one teaches 365 days a year the method of teaching changes.
Q: How was the teaching done here?
A: As you might expect, we first built a foundation of static training (個体稽古). Then the method built in stages into flowing techniques and then throwing without touching. Flowing techniques were from third-dan, so in the beginning we were only allowed to do static training, but now flowing training is the primary focus in Tokyo.
When one uses strength in Tokyo they get scolded. That’s the difference. We were taught to hold on strongly, to hold firmly in grabbing techniques.
Further, the Founder always emphasized strongly in his teaching that the sword, the staff and empty hand techniques are one thing. We are doing it that way, but in Tokyo the sword and the staff are not taught at all.
Q: Not at all?
A: They don’t teach it at all. For that reason, the fact of the matter is that high ranking students in Tokyo go to Iaido to learn the sword, or Muso-ryu (Shinto Muso-ryu Jodo) to learn the staff. The Founder did not teach either the sword or the staff in Tokyo. Here he taught everything from the basics on up…. We’re in the middle of student camps right now, students from Osaka Prefecture University were here and tonight students from Tokushima University will be coming. We’ll continue with the camps until the beginning of April.
Aikido Founder Morihei Ueshiba with students from Meiji University in Iwama
Yasuo Kobayashi – front, second from right
Q: How many people come from each university?
A: If too many come then we can’t accommodate them, so we limit it to about twenty people. Ibaraki University, Japan University, MIyagi University of Education, Tohoku University, Iwate University, Hirosaki University, the other day the students from Osaka Prefecture University went home, tonight Tokushima University comes, and when they’re finished Kanagawa University and Aichi University will come and then we’ll finally be done.
Three or four nights, or at the most five nights. We have all of the necessities for preparing meals, so the students go shopping and cook their own food.
Q: And they are normally each taught by the shihan in their area?
A: Yes, that’s right.
Q: Are those shihan very junior to you?
A: Yes, there aren’t very many people senior to me.
Q: It must be very exciting for them to come here, isn’t it?
A: Of course, since this was the dojo where the Founder performed his shugyo. But was that Tanabe? Some place inconvenient. Ha-ha-ha, in the morning they train outside swinging the sword and the staff. In the evening they train with the regular students. So there are more than sixty people and nobody can move! Ha-ha-ha-ha.
Q: Is that so?
A: Previously we had thirty-six mats (Note: tatami mats, about three feet by six feet each), but when the students began to come, the Founder in his later years said to expand that and we expanded the mat space. This is sixy mats, and I’m feeling that it would be good to have at least a hundred. But there are methods of training, no matter how tight the space is.
“The basic principle of Aikido is just to attack.”
Q: Is exchanging techniques with the ordinary students helpful to you?
A: For that reason, they go home happy.
Q: How does that work? In terms of level.
A: Depending upon the school it can be very different. Also, the teachers who bring students here are very broad minded! Because there are also many shihan who tell their students not to come here. Many of those are in Hombu in Tokyo – “Don’t go to Iwama!”, they say. A shihan at one of the universities is also an instructor at Hombu, but he says “Don’t go to Iwama!” and doesn’t allow his students to come here. Because we do static training here. When they learn and then go home it’s difficult to train with them.
Q: Subtle differences emerge?
A: Yes, they do. It’s a little embarrassing to talk about, but all paths tend to split in multiple directions…
Q: Looking at things in the long term, are there clear differences and destinations depending upon whether one does static practice or soft practice?
A: A clear result emerges! Oh yes, during combined training, it can be clearly seen there. It’s not even worth arguing about.
Morihei Ueshiba initiates with an attack
Budo – Moritaka Ueshiba’s 1938 Technical Manual
The Budo in which one attacks first
Q: By the way, many people say “in the Budo called Aikido there are no attacking techniques.”?
A: No, that’s ridiculous, the basic principle of Aikido is just to attack. Rather than talking about striking, by “attack” we mean that the basic principle is to strike the opponent and draw them out. It’s not a crushing blow, one enters in flash and when the opponent moves to counter they must extend their hand. To trap that hand is a basic principle.
Q: That makes sense, doesn’t it?
A: There are many places that don’t know this and practice by just waiting for the other person to come strike. The basic principle is different. Shomenuchi, you know, all starts with with an attack from my side. Like the example in this book, one strikes and moves forward, then grabs their chest.
Q: I see, One strikes from their side and then makes them receive the attack…this is a precondition.
A: Also right here in the Founder’s book it says “Move forward from your side and attack”. Recently people from that other school all said there are no attacks in Aikido, but that is mistaken. The basic principle is to attack… It is said “There is no defense that surpasses an attack” (攻撃に勝る防御なし) – at least in the case of shomenuchi, that is an attack.
Q: Is what you’re calling an attack different than what you’d see in the case of combat sports?
A: It’s different. It’s a matter of drawing out the opponent’s Ki, or absorbing their feelings, or matching with them, or connecting with them, and then controlling them.
Demonstration for the Jieitai (“Self Defense Forces)
Morihiro Saito and Morihei Ueshiba, 1955
Aikido is bodywork like swordwork
(and swordwork like bodywork)
Q: When you do that, is it also possible to explain that in the context of the so-called combat arts?
A: Yes, when one really moves in accordance to the principles, the movement of one against many is connected to the handling of the sword, and connected to the movements of the staff. For that reason, in Aikido one must also train in sword and staff that is specifically for Aikido. Whichever one you omit, your Aikido will not be complete.
It may be annoying for me to repeat this, but that group in Tokyo, perhaps because they have too much pride, don’t come here to learn. They learn the sword through Iaido and the staff through Muso-ryu. In Iaido it’s like the sword is put against the waist. In Aikido we do it while twisting the hips. It’s the opposite! In Iai one thrusts the hips forward and then draws them back in a flash, but in the sword of Aikido we twist the hips and pull.
Iaido is a wonderful Budo, but in the case of Aikido the meaning and the goals are different, so they are incompatible. Further, in the end the method of using the staff in Aikido and Muso-ryu is different. Because in Aikido the unified principles of bodywork like swordwork and swordwork like bodywork are one.
Q: Here everything is like that?
A: That’s how we are doing it. This may be the only place in the world. However, the Founder taught everything from these kinds of basics here, he didn’t teach them in Tokyo.
Continued in Part 3…
Published by: Christopher Li – Honolulu, HIYou’d never know it, given his modesty, but M is a great cook. He is, as we know, master of the pressure cooker. And he’s also pretty incredible with stews, grains, soups, and beans. The last time he told me he had “made breakfast” while I was at the gym, I walked into the apartment to find scrambled tofu, vegan hash browns, English muffins with natural jam, vegetable juice, and hot oatmeal. That’s not a breakfast. It’s four. We should all hope to be as easygoing and effortlessly gifted in the kitchen as he.
M is also pretty handy with a blender, and makes what might be my favorite smoothie—dare I say it—ever? I know I’ve probably said that before. After all, I do love my mellow green smoothie, my sinful smoothie, and my butternut squash smoothie. But M’s morning smoothie, which is a mix of bananas, peanut butter, mixed berries, and—the magic ingredient—frozen cherries, almost puts all other smoothies to shame. It’s rich, delicious, and full of nutrition, and it’s made from the simplest ingredients. For two people, simply…
Begin with 2 cups of frozen mixed berries:
And add 2 frozen bananas, 2 cups of almond milk, 2 teaspoons of cinnamon, and 2 heaping tablespoons of peanut butter:
Blend, adding more almond milk as needed. When the mix is blending well, add about a cup of frozen cherries, and keep going until the mix is this smooth and creamy:
For those of you who don’t have Vita-Mixes, this may tax your blender a little, but as you can see from the photos, M makes his smoothies in a regular blender. So those of you who are scared of raw food prep sans Vita should take heart: it’s perfectly possible to make delicious beverages without one.
I like to top mine with frozen cherries, which are so delicious:
I can guarantee that it tastes as incredible as it looks! Try it soon, and prepare to be amazed.
And now, it’s early on a Monday, and I’m preparing myself for the rocky transition back into the work week. It’s tough recovering from holiday weekends. I do, though, have plenty of food porn to share throughout the week, so I’ll be back bright and early tomorrow!
In the meantime, happy Monday to you all.
xoThough most of the focus right now when it comes to the DC Extended Universe is on Justice League – and understandably so – there’s a hushed excitement starting to build around Batgirl. Why? Well, for one, the character deserves a proper big screen adaptation, but aside from that, Wonder Woman has now proven that female superheroes can flourish at the box office.
Of course, there’s also the fact that Joss Whedon is behind the camera here, and as such, it’s very likely that this is going to be a big hit for the franchise. Granted, we don’t know too much about it just yet, but with reports saying that the director is eyeing The New 52 for inspiration and hoping to cast an unknown, it seems like Batgirl could soon become one of the DCEU’s most promising projects.
Hoping to heighten that anticipation even more is another leak from 4chan, which has been on fire lately with news pertaining to Warner Bros.’ burgeoning cinematic universe. We’d usually give you the ‘take this with a grain of salt’ message at this stage, but by now, you either buy into these rumors with excitement and giddiness or completely dismiss them as being nothing more than fan fiction.
Anyways, this latest leak has some interesting news relating to Barbara Gordon’s upcoming standalone film. According to the report, Batgirl is now a priority for the studio, thanks to the success of Wonder Woman, and will apparently cover the character’s origin story, using flashbacks to do so – not unlike Patty Jenkins’ aforementioned movie. Not only that, but apparently, Alysia Yeoh, James Gordon Jr. (who’ll be the villain), Robin and even Black Canary may be involved, with the latter only coming in for a cameo to help introduce her into the DCEU.
But wait, there’s more. In an effort to increase the diversity in their franchise, Warner Bros. is hoping to cast a woman of color to play Batgirl. Unfortunately, there’s no mention of which actresses the studio’s looking at, and we haven’t heard anything yet on who might be in the running, but if true, then this at least narrows it down in regards to who may land the role.
That being said, nothing’s set in stone at this point and with Whedon busy working on those Justice League reshoots, it’ll likely be some time before we hear anything official about the casting. Still, you can’t deny that Batgirl is quickly becoming one of the most exciting projects on WB’s slate and we’ll be sure to keep you right up to date with any and all further updates as they emerge.Despite the ancient origins of these tools, some blacksmiths have preserved the art that is the production of handmade flint and steel fire making kits.
In fact, had they not done so, steel strikers would essentially have become extinct as fire making tools.
Attempts at mass production have shown that it is simply not possible to maintain the necessary high standards required for the production of reliable and easy-to-use flint and steel kits.
When it comes to fire lighting, handmade is king.
Some blacksmiths have gone a step further and have developed their skills to such a degree that they exclusively produce flint and steel kits, including all of the materials you need for preparing tinder and kindling.
One such craftsman works for Flint and Steel, a company which puts together the finest range of handmade flint and steel fire making kits available on the market today.
Such a kit makes a wonderful gift for anyone with an interest in the outdoors, from experienced hunters to novice Boy Scouts.
Perhaps the best flint and steel kits are those which combine the ancient knowledge of our forebears with some slightly more modern innovations.
While many natural materials can be used as tinder in their raw as well as processed forms, nowadays one of the most reliable materials in use is commonly known as char cloth.
This term describes pieces of cloth, such as cotton or linen, that have been enclosed in a container and subsequently scorched by exposure to heat.
Despite the excellent properties of char cloth, it was not used during the medieval period or in previous epochs. This wasn’t because we had not realized the potential of such materials, but rather because textiles were expensive and hard to come by for common folk.
It would have been criminal to waste such a precious resource at the time! It was only at the dawn of the industrial revolution that textiles were commonplace enough to be used as an easy source of tinder for fire making.
Even with the apparent superiority of char cloth, the beauty of the flint and steel fire making approach is that you can opt to use whichever kind of tinder you like.
The step-by-step process remains the same, no matter which materials you use.
In areas where birch trees are prevalent, such as the forests of Northern Europe, certain species of birch bark fungus would have been used.
These and other fungal species are great for holding an ember for long period of time, and you can even transport them with relative ease for future use.
One of the major advantages of flint and steel kits lies in the fact that the tinder remains in close contact with the flint at all times while being struck by a steel striker.
This gives a very high success rate when it comes to sparks hitting the tinder. With a bit of practice, you’ll be able to produce an ember in a matter of seconds.Megan Rapinoe tears ACL during training; no time frame for recovery
Midfielder Megan Rapinoe tore the ACL in her right knee during United States women's national team training on Friday, U.S. Soccer announced Saturday.
Rapinoe, 30, starred during the Americans' run to the Women's World Cup this past summer and is among the finalists for the FIFA World Player of the Year award.
U.S. Soccer said Rapinoe's injury was confirmed by an MRI scan after she was hurt in Honolulu, but no time frame was given for her recovery.
Terrence Lee/Icon Sportswire "I'll be doing everything I can to get healthy as soon as possible," midfielder Megan Rapinoe said of her torn ACL.
"I want to thank my teammates and the staff for the amazing support I've received so far," Rapinoe said in a statement. "I know I'll be in the best of hands moving forward and I'll be doing everything I can to get healthy as soon as possible.
"This is obviously a very difficult time, but I do feel super confident in my recovery as I've gone through this before and I know what the process will be like. I want everyone to know that I'll be fine, and that I'm currently accepting any recommendations for TV shows to binge watch and great restaurants that deliver in Seattle. I'm also going to get really good at FIFA 16."
The serious injury could potentially rule out Rapinoe for next summer's Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
"All of our hearts feel for Megan and she's certainly a major part of this team, both on and off the field, so to see her go down is tough," U.S. coach Jill Ellis said. "Players getting injured is always hard, but all of her teammates know that one of the strengths of this team is depth and everyone in the player pool is prepared to step up as we continue to prepare for Olympic qualifying.
"Megan has a great support system and she's very resilient, so we know she will be back as soon as possible."Owners of two popular beach shacks in North Goa’s Anjuna village were arrested on Tuesday after a police team caught waiters and guests with drugs during a raid. Superintendent of Police (North Goa) Chandan Choudhury told IANS that Edwin Nunes, owner of Curlies shack, and Rohan Shetty of Club Nyex have been taken into custody under the Narcotics, Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act.
Besides, three tourists from Bengaluru were also picked up from Curlies shack after drugs were found on them, reported Times Now.
The arrests come after the police had launched a crackdown on rave parties and late-night music events across Goa. The crackdown was launched after two tourists from Kerala and Tamil Nadu had died of suspected drugs overdose at two separate nightclubs in Anjuna a few days ago.
Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar on Tuesday said the police crackdown on drugs, rave parties and late-night music events would continue. “Late night rave parties are illegal, and it is where drugs are consumed and distributed,” Parrikar had told reporters on the sidelines of an Independence Day function in Goa. “Rave parties on beaches or remote areas should be totally stopped.”During Google’s recent earnings conference call, Google chief business officer Omid Kordestani said that YouTube is now bigger than any individual US cable network when it comes to attracting 18-49 year olds, advertising’s most sought after demographic.
Despite YouTube’s apparent inability to generate much of a profit, the popular video sharing site has seen user engagement metrics skyrocket in recent months. Speaking to this, Kordestani relayed that viewers are spending more time watching YouTube videos than ever before. Year over year, the amount of time users, on average, spend watching videos is up an impressive 60%. Underscoring this tremendous growth, Kordestani added that this is the fastest growth rate in viewing time YouTube has seen in over two years.
DON’T MISS: This magician stumped Penn & Teller with the most beautiful magic trick we’ve ever seen
As one would expect, the increase in viewing hours is mostly attributable to mobile devices. In the last year alone, the average time mobile users spent watching YouTube clips more than doubled. More to the point, the average time users spend watching YouTube videos on mobile devices now checks in at 40 minutes.
The takeaway from this is that YouTube has successfully transformed itself from a site where users go to watch one-off videos into a site where users stick around for nearly an hour. Of course, this is no happy accident. Over the past few years, Google has rolled out a number of varying site enhancements in an effort to increase the site’s ‘stickiness’. From suggested videos to auto-playing of new videos following the conclusion of another, Google’s experimentations are clearly paying dividends.
“The number of users coming to YouTube, who start at the YouTube homepage similar to the way they might turn on their TV, is up over three times year-on-year,” Kordestani said. “Plus once users are in YouTube, they are spending more time per session watching videos.”
What’s especially interesting is that YouTube has taken on an entirely new identity in the eyes of young children.
Speaking to this point, TechCrunch writes:
For younger users especially, YouTube is already equivalent to TV. According to a recent study from Miner & Co., TV is no longer the first choice for kids’ entertainment with 57 percent of parents reporting that their child prefers mobile devices to TV when it comes to video viewing. Additionally, 58 percent of kids in households with tablets have their own device, the study also discovered, and half the kids, when disciplined, will have their tablet taken away and are left “only” with TV. That has created a generation of kids for whom “TV is punishment,” the firm noted.
Ah, to be a kid again.
While all of this is promising, the question of profitability still looms overhead. Back in 2014, YouTube generated about $4 billion in revenue for Google while not contributing much in the way to the company’s bottom line. When asked about YouTube’s 2015 profitability during last week’s earnings conference call, Google executives were tellingly mum on the issue.
That said, the increased user engagement YouTube is enjoying can only help shift things in the right direction. Speaking to this point, Google did note that the number of advertisers running video ads is up 40% year over year. Additionally, the search giant said that many of its top advertisers are spending 60% more on YouTube advertising than they were last year.Over the past several years, mobile has become the go-to platform for most people’s media consumption. From audio playback to movie streaming, there is a growing amount of content available in your pocket and on your tablet, and the market is still expanding.
Today we are seeing a move towards high-end 3D gaming environments, live music aids, and even home studio audio software suites designed to work on mobile devices and tablets. However, Android sadly has not been the forefront of this growing market, that position is firmly held by Apple.
Particularly in a creative capacity, tablets are quickly replacing laptops for music creation and live performance uses. Not to mention that there’s a whole market for digital effects, which can be purchased at much lower costs than traditional analogue equipment.
However, the migration towards more digital content demands higher levels of processing power, on a platform limited by smaller batteries and thermal limitations. Android owners pride themselves on having some of the best hardware in the market, so why is it that Android seems so far behind its rival when it comes to audio applications?
A little about audio processing
Our mobile phones are more than powerful enough for simple playback tasks. However, as processing power has increased, we have also begun to demand more signal processing from our mobile devices, at a lot more of it in real-time, too.
We may take it for granted, but even when playing a game, every sound file takes time to be hauled from memory, converted from binary information to numerical values, before being pushed to a DAC, takes up valuable clock cycles. Additional post processing, such as passing the file through your optimized EQ settings or supplementing the sound with extra reverb, takes up even more time, and modern applications are becoming increasingly complex.
Although modern mobile processors long surpassed the multiple GHz mark and can match high-end PC equipment in core count, these simple figures are not all that matters when it comes to digital signal processing. Different processors designs complete different tasks in a different number of clock cycles, making some CPUs faster than others at the same tasks. This is why direct GHz and core count comparisons don’t always apply across designs.
With real-time audio, it is essential to be able to process floating point data, digital numbers with a decimal point, and SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) instructions quickly, preferably all within the short amount of time between samples, which is typically 44100 or 48000 kHz for most audio applications. Floating point units, a mathematical coprocessor commonly found in CPU core designs, are used for calculating mathematical operations on the digital audio signal with high levels of accuracy.
Multiple cores are not so important for audio -- instead brute speed is the key.
Multiple cores are not so important for audio, as most DSP algorithms are not optimized for multiple threads, instead brute speed is the key. The limitations of mobile processors, in this regard, can be found in the smaller memory bus bandwidth and smaller CPU cache’s, compared with beefier desktop grade CPUs. This can mean that your mobile CPU might actually end up spending more time waiting for data that it does processing it.
An example of one of the more – if not the most – demanding audio processing tasks is time stretching, where the tempo/speed of an audio sample is altered without the trade-offs in pitch/frequency alteration that can come from changing a samples wavelength. In this technique, audio is converted to digital, a Fast Fourier Transform algorithm then extracts the frequency information from the sound, which is used to correct/restore frequency information as the sample is stretched or shrunk in the time domain.
Sounds pretty complicated right? This type of process puts a huge strain on the CPU, which can result in unacceptable latency. There are actually fewer than five FFT algorithms in the world which can run this type of process on mobile devices efficiently.
The maximum latency in any real-time system should ideally not exceed 20ms, which is roughly the perceptual limit of delay in humans. Any longer and our brains will notice the difference between sound coming in and out of a system, or between a button press and something happening on screen. Unfortunately, typical Android latency lies in the region of 100 to 250 milliseconds.
In a bid to increase performance and work around some of these shortcomings, mobile SoC developers, like Qualcomm, have started including their own dedicated DSP hardware alongside their main processors.
ARM & DSP
ARM has long included floating point units in nearly all of its core designs, excluding the Cortex-M3 and below, and supports extra Digital Signal Processing and SIMD extensions in its mobile processors.
ARM’s SIMD extension and NEON engine are particularly important for these types of scenarios
This DSP processing capability is aimed at keeping power consumption down, while offering the maximum performance available, up to 75 percent higher than that which can be achieved without the extensions. ARM’s tools are used for a range of common mobile applications, from monitoring sensors, to voice recognition, VOIP, and audio encode/decode.
ARM’s SIMD extension and NEON engine, found in the commonplace ARMv7 architecture, are particularly important for the types of scenarios that we are talking about. ARM has made particular optimization for faster sleep, 4-8x DSP algorithm performance enhancements, dedicated tools for Fast Fourier Transform applications, and a whole host of other optimization for performing complex and processor heavy mathematical calculations on a strict power budget.
The move to ARM’s 64-bit ARMv8 architecture could also have some useful benefits for audio software developers and consumers, as audio applications can be heavily memory dependent, and 64-bit could allow for devices with larger pools of RAM.
However, there is only so much that ARM can do on its own, and ARM’s library only really serves as an example |
. It was found that at a certain amount of the supplement, the modified BC composites displayed homogeneous structures, which exhibited a certain level of miscibility. The FTIR results demonstrated some specified interaction between the hydroxyl group of BC and the functional groups of the supplemented polymers. The supplements of these polymers significantly affected characteristics of porous structures, mechanical properties, water absorption capacity and biocompatibility. These modified composites have potential applications for a wide range of fields, including biomedical materials, tissue engineering, drug delivery, food packaging and membrane separation.
Nano- and micro-fibrillated cellulose research at VTT
Nanocellulose has been shown to be potentially very useful for a number of technical applications in the future. The key to understanding how nanocellulose will behave in different applications is to have a thorough understanding of how the structure and interactions of nanocellulose affect its function and hence its suitability for different applications. The research performed at VTT relates to the whole production chain of nanocellulose - from selection of raw materials to development of production process and modification of nanocellulose material according to the needs of various applications. Successful use of nanocellulose in different applications requires profound understanding of structural and molecular properties of nanocellulose. The most important properties are: 1) Aspect ratio, i.e., the diameter and length of the fibrils; 2) Range of polydispersity (the preparations are usually mixtures of fibrils with different size distribution); 3) Surface chemistry, specifically how the surface has been modified by adding chemical functionalities, such as charge, hydrophobic groups, etc.; and 4) Impurities and other polymers present (nanocellulose consists seldom of only cellulose, and other compounds present may have a major impact on the properties of the preparation). At the moment nanocellulose research at VTT can be divided into five main research areas: Soft matter - emulsions, encapsulation, stabilization of dispersions, hydrogels; Condensed matter - composites; Porous matter - filters, adsorbents, scaffolds; Thin films - barriers, supports and adhesive layers; and Use of nanocellulose in fibre-based structures.
Current manufacture and product parameters of tubular cellulosic implants
There are still no artificial implants for small but vital blood vessels in the heart, brain and limbs. Implants made from synthetic polymers and even products fabricated from protein- based materials are not able to fulfil the requirements. Due to the specific structure and properties, the polysaccaridic material bacterial nanocellulose (BNC) proved to be first choice for development of novel tubular implants. Current synthetic strategies to design prototypes will be presented. Valuable relevant product parameters relate lengths up to 150 mm, inner diameters of 1-6 mm, bursting strengths of more than 1000 mm Hg and suture retention strengths around 5 N. Recent three-month studies in sheep show positive key parameters: handling during surgery, biocompatibility, mechanical stability and ingrowth of endogenous cells. Remaining problems concerning the thrombosis rate and ways to overcome them are discussed.
Oxidation of g-irradiated microbial cellulose results in a bioresorbable, highly conformable novel biomaterial
Conformability to tissues and adequate mechanical strength are clinically useful properties of resorbable biomaterials used in soft tissue repair. Here we show that controlled oxidation of microbial cellulose sheets that have been pre-irradiated with g-radiation results in a resorbable and fully conformable membrane that can be rapidly rehydrated in aqueous fluids. In vitro studies showed that degradation of the resorbable membranes occurs in two major phases: (1) initial rapid degradation of about 70-80% of the entire sample followed by (2) slower degradation of an additional 5-10% which eventually levels off leaving a small amount of nonresorbable material. In vivo, prototype materials showed marked degradation at all time points, with the most rapid degradation occurring in the first 2-4 weeks. The inflammatory reaction to the test devices was mild to moderate and was most prominent at the early time points, consistent with a rapidly absorbed material.
Innovative bacterial nanocellulose medical devices: From incubator to human body
Bacterial nanocellulose (BNC) has gained significant scientific interest during last few years as an emerging biomaterial for applications as vascular grafts, scaffolds for bone regeneration, cartilage tissue repair surgical meshes and skin substitute. The unique combination of good biocompatibility with good mechanical properties makes BNC attractive for variety of applications in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Successful commercialization of BNC medical devices requires however reproducible device biofabrication processes and extensive preclinical in vitro and in vivo evaluation to guarantee safety and performance of this new biomaterial. Each processing step has to be developed for full-scale production in a cGMP environment. Although successful FDA approval for simple devices may be based on 510 k process, more advanced devices may require clinical trials. There is only very limited literature data on BNC long term performance in preclinical studies and only one report on clinical performance of BNC in the human body. There is also very limited literature on the effect of the purification processes on endotoxin content, tissue integration and biomechanical performance. Collaborative efforts from the BNC scientific and corporate community are highly desirable in order to promote broad use of BNC as implants and biomaterials for regenerative and reconstructive surgery.
Commercializing bacterial nanocellulose: My 15-year experiment
The presentation is about the author's personal perspective on technology commercialization based on his experience as co-founder of a bacterial cellulose company, Xylos Corporation. The various roles of the scientific/technical founder may play as the company evolves will be described. Activities in various areas including product development, regulatory compliance, intellectual property expansion, manufacturing and marketing, that contributed to the commercialization of the company's products will be described briefly. In conclusion, a method of analysis (i.e. TRIM) to be used as a guide for decision-making in commercializing a platform technology (such as bacterial nano cellulose) will be proposed.
Twenty-five years of entrepreneurial experience with bacterial cellulose
Our presentation is an account of 25 years experience of entrepreneurship, research and development of bacterial cellulose production in industrial levels, and its use in the medical field. This is not an academic work; it is a simple speech about the pleasures and pains of the effort to transform a technology and the perception of the potential applications of a new material, in patents and effective products.
Implementation of industrial production bionanocellulose material
Bowil Biotech is a biotechnology company that is working in the production of bionanocellulose materials. In 2011, the company purchased from the Technical University of Lodz, innovative know-how knowledge of production bionanocellulose, dressing materials called CelMat" and bacterial strain Gluconacetobacter xylinus E25. Bowil Biotech company purchased the right to patent and trade mark called CelMat®. Currently, work is underway on the implementation of technologies for industrial production and the creation of wide range of products of bionanocellulose material. The first production will be a medical and cosmetic products.
Bionanocellulose is a modern biomaterial formed as a result of natural processes taking place in the nature with bacteria. As a result of this process the cellulose fibers are formed in nanometer dimension. Technology of production this kind of fibers is a result of many years of research of Polish scientists of Technical University of Lodz. The result of this work is appreciated all over the world, numerous scientific papers and patents were published, in which technology of Bowil Biotech company is based on. Bionanocellulose, thanks to its properties, has been used in medical, biotechnological, cosmetic, textile, paper, electronic, acoustic, and the food industry.
Michael Bernstein m_bernstein@acs.org 504-670-4707 (New Orleans Press Center, April 5-10) 202-872-6042 Michael Woods m_woods@acs.org 504-670-4707 (New Orleans Press Center, April 5-10) 202-872-6293
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EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE: Sunday, April 7, 2013, 10 a.m. Eastern Time Note to journalists: Please report that this research was presented at a meeting of the American Chemical SocietyJust-Mobile's AluPen Digital has got to be the most easy-to-use and sensitive stylus we have ever tested
Compared to every single rubber-tipped stylus we've used in the past, the AluPen Digital is hands down the most responsive and highly-sensitive one we tested. Most of that is because of its very fine 1.8mm, polyacetal plastic tip that essentially performs as well as your finger does due to it being actively powered using the internal battery to replicate the same level of realism of a human finger - only in pen form. And that also means that thanks to the ultra-slim tip, the AluPen Digital is a very precise stylus to write and draw with. The tip on the AluPen Digital is even finer than Adonit's noteworthy Jot Script, albeit the difference in size is negligible in real world usage. The AluPen Digital's polyacetal tip effortlessly glides on top of glass touchscreens much better than any other rubber-tipped stylus we've used including Adonit's plastic-disc Jot Pro stylus. It's precise, and best of all it writes like you'd expect a pen to function when you put it up against the glass thanks to that fine polyacetal tip and ultra-conductive sensitivity feature of the whole stylus being powered to mimic the natural conductivity of the human finger.
While the AluPen Digital isn't as smart as some other Bluetooth 4.0-connected styli, it does work flawlessly with iPad apps such as Penultimate, which has palm-rejection already built-in so that you can actually take notes on a virtual lined/graphed paper using any passive stylus.Kid Rock says he stopped using the flag in concerts in 2011 but has repeatedly demonstrated his love for Confederate regalia, while telling people protesting the systemic racism and oppression those symbols represent to “kiss his ass.” This month, Jack Roskopp created a timeline further detailing Kid Rock’s history with the Confederate flag for the Metro Times.
How can Christopher Ilitch and Little Caesars Arena’s stakeholders back their decision to have Kid Rock headline the arena’s opening, when the artist’s problematic views and actions are so well-documented? Little Caesars Arena is providing a platform to an artist who has used symbols of white nationalism and openly supports policies and politicians that are harmful to most of Detroit residents.
Why choose Kid Rock when there are "worldwide stars and Detroit icons" like Stevie Wonder, Eminem and Jack White who don’t support messages of racism, bigotry and hate through their brands, art, words and actions? The decision to have Kid Rock is willfully ignorant and indicative of a larger problem.
Decisions are being made that routinely ignore the perspectives, needs and experiences of Detroit’s residents of color – even though we make up 91 percent of the city’s population. An increasing number of residents are concerned (and outraged) that two Detroits are emerging. One Detroit with a bustling downtown and beautiful pockets filled with resources, entertainment and new developments to attract upwardly mobile residents and big businesses; and another Detroit where neighborhoods are neglected, infrastructure is crumbling, education is failing, and opportunities are hard to find.
These concerns are strengthened by the fact that the Little Caesars Arena will be funded by more than $200 million in taxpayer bonds that were initially earmarked for Detroit’s schools and public parks. The funds would have provided crucial resources at a time when the city’s education system and neighborhoods are undergoing major redevelopment.
Oh, and did I mention that arena owners are under no legal obligation to use a small percentage of revenue to develop services and resources for Detroit’s residents? Talk about community-driven development.
Kid Rock opening this arena that is subsidized for by Detroit’s taxpayers only proves that the outrage and concern many residents feel are justified. It’s a slap in the face to the people who lovingly endure the ups and downs of our city, and symbolic of the ongoing erasure of longtime Detroiters as people who contribute to the city’s growth and deserve to be considered and engaged in decisions affecting them. As redevelopment continues to leave out underserved and marginalized residents, I continue to wonder who we’re revitalizing Detroit for, and, perhaps more importantly, how can we ensure that this growth isn’t coming at the expense of our communities?Antibodies, produced by the body’s immune system to fight off infection, can also be used by scientists to study proteins. A new antibody has provided new insights into what causes neurons to die in Huntington’s disease.
From mutations to disease
Huntington’s disease is caused by a mutation - a genetic stutter - in the huntingtin gene. The mutation is a repetitive string of three individual ‘letters’ of the genetic code. In normal copies of the huntingtin gene, there are around 17 C-A-Gs in a row. In people with the disease, there are 36 or more of C-A-Gs.
The structure of an individual antibody
But the huntingtin gene doesn’t cause the disease directly. Damage only occurs when the cells of your body read the gene and make the huntingtin protein. So, to understand HD, we need to understand everything we can about the huntingtin protein.
Proteins are large, complicated molecules. They start out as chains of building blocks, like strings of beads. The building blocks are called amino acids, and there are 21 of them to choose from.
The C-A-G expansion that causes HD alters the structure of the huntingtin protein. Whenever a cell reads ‘C-A-G’ in DNA, it adds an amino acid called glutamine to the protein it’s making. The more C-A-Gs there are in the huntingtin gene, the more glutamines there’ll be in the huntingtin protein.
These extra glutamines change the huntingtin protein into something that causes harm to neurons, probably in lots of different ways. Figuring out exactly how the damage occurs, and finding ways to stop it, is the challenge facing HD researchers.
Compared with most proteins, the human huntingtin protein is huge - it has 3,144 amino acids, all interacting with each other in complex ways, and coming together to make a massive structure. Huntingtin is so huge and complicated that we don’t even know what shape it is.
Antibodies
To study proteins, scientists commonly use a tool called an antibody. Antibodies are themselves proteins. They’re made by the immune system to detect and fight invading microorganisms.
What makes antibodies special is their ability to recognize other chemicals, and stick to them. Each antibody has its own very specific target that it will stick to.
With a protein as large as huntingtin, lots of different antibodies can recognize it, each sticking to a different bit.
Scientists can ‘manufacture’ antibodies that stick to a particular protein, by injecting the target protein into animals like mice, ‘tricking’ their immune system into making antibodies that stick to it.
Using antibodies to study huntingtin
“ The antibody doesn’t stick to huntingtin when it is found in clumps. In fact, if you mix it with clumps of mutant huntingtin protein it actually dissolves them! ”
A team of scientists led by Jason Miller and Steve Finkbeiner of the University of California, San Francisco, have been using antibodies to try to understand which bits of the huntingtin protein are toxic.
They began by injecting purified huntingtin protein into mice, causing them to produce antibodies that stick to the protein. In fact they generated 480 different antibodies.
They then checked each antibody in turn, to see which of them preferred to stick to ‘mutant’ huntingtin with its extra glutamines.
Most of the antibodies stuck to huntingtin however many glutamines it contained. But Finkbeiner’s team was interested in the small number of antibodies they found that did show some preference for mutant huntingtin.
Antibodies can be modified so they glow. That lets scientists use them to ‘tag’ cells that contain a specific protein. Cells with the protein you’re interested in light up when the glowing antibody is added.
The robot microscope
This team has built a robotic microscope that can take thousands of pictures of neurons over the course of days or weeks. We recently discussed this with Finkbeiner in our ‘Oz Buzz’ interview at the HD World Congress.
Using their robotic microscope allows the team to study individual neurons for long periods of long time.
The team used the microscope and antibodies together, to see if they could predict which cells are going to die.
The idea is that if a particular antibody to huntingtin lights up cells that are more likely to die, the part of the huntingtin protein they’re sticking to must be very important.
Doing all this is even harder than it sounds. Finkbeiner’s team had to do some sophisticated math to understand the connection between protein production and death. But they were successful, and found interesting results with the charmingly named antibody 3B5H10.
Images of neurons in culture from the Finkbeiner lab. Cells in green and yellow have been ‘tagged’ so they glow, revealing the shape of the cells. Image credit: Dr S. Finkbeiner
When neurons producing mutant huntingtin lit up with this antibody, they were much more likely to die. This tells us that the structure recognized by this antibody is bad news for cells.
What the antibody recognizes
Armed with this knowledge, Finkbeiner’s team tried to figure out what exactly their antibody is sticking to. They discovered that it probably sticks to a single bit of mutant huntingtin.
Many scientists are interested in protein ‘aggregates’ in cells that express mutant huntingtin. These aggregates are clumps of protein that shouldn’t be there - like piles of uncollected trash. These aggregates are found in the brains of patients who died of HD - so, many people have wondered whether they are responsible for killing neurons.
But surprisingly, the 3B5H10 antibody doesn’t stick to huntingtin when it’s in these clumps. In fact, if you mix it with clumps of mutant huntingtin protein, it actually dissolves them!
That supports the idea that cells are damaged by single pieces of mutant huntingtin, floating freely around, rather than big clumps of it.
What does this mean?
The 3B5H10 antibody is a good tool for scientists studying how the mutant huntingtin protein kills neurons. But it’s also important for developing drugs for HD.
In the past, a number of studies have been done to try and search for drugs that dissolve the clumps of protein formed by mutant huntingtin in cells.
Finkbeiner’s research tells us that might not be the best way to find effective drugs. The antibody tells us that neurons with big clumps of protein aren’t the ones that are going to die.
This research is important because it shows how we can discover important and unexpected results in cells, then use that information make sure that only the best and safest drugs go into human patients.Crocodile traffic hazard warning as hot WA nights see them go walkabout
Updated
City dwellers are used to congested traffic slowing down roads, but in Western Australia's north it could well be a crocodile causing the obstruction.
Police in the Kimberley town of Kununurra recently released a photo of a freshwater crocodile caught in the headlights on the main access road into town.
The relatively harmless crocodile species are common in the waterways around the town.
Local Department of Parks and Wildlife officer Matt Byers said the animals often exited the water during the hot wet season nights.
"This time of year with the hotter evenings, it's not uncommon for the animals to get out of the water," he said.
"They're basically trying to cool off, as silly as it sounds.
"So they'll hop out of the water and like any lizard, they're keen to walk."
With no crocodile cross-walks in place, motorists are being asked to drive slowly and carefully around the animals if possible.
But if a reptile is blocking traffic, it is time to call in the experts.
"If it becomes an issue, we can help relocate them and get them off the road," Mr Byers said.
"Fortunately most of the them are freshwater crocodiles and smaller in size, and you can handle them quite easily if you know what you're doing.
"They can obviously still bite but there are ways to do it safely.
"The easiest way is covering the animal, which puts it out of any distress it might be in.
"It's actually an offence to handle them, unless you're licensed, and so we certainly don't recommend for anyone else to do it."
Topics: animals, human-interest, kununurra-6743
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This screams all kinds of desperate from sony, but the same can be said for their last string of movies from spiderman to Ghostbusters. They really really want to be the next lego movie and I doubt this is going to be anything close to that. CraftyArts Show https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxfTNGCSmfbirGM0ioD_IHw CraftyGaming https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_kTGyHdFym4MhGcLtyPRhA Lemur Talks https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8GMpXKVsWora5zNXZEJ1xw Furries https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrHMDiShwc0jw8tu1goNhVA Streaming games every Wednesday at 9pm https://www.twitch.tv/ijimtm Something other then youtube? https://vid.me/RottenEgg Subscribe here to watch "CraftyArts" https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxfTNGCSmfbirGM0ioD_IHw Support This channel. Subscribe and become a patreon http://www.patreon.com/user?u=95677&alert=1 Twitch sometimes at random but always at 9pm every Wednesday https://www.twitch.tv/craftyandy
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213“Or You Could Ask Us”: On Talking Over Muslim Women
While out with my sister in her mostly white neighbourhood, we walked by an elderly woman dressed in a velour tracksuit, plastic visor, and sunglasses I’m certain were purchased from an infomercial. She was speed walking but slowly strolled towards us, pulled down her sunglasses, looked us both up and down and hissed, “Jeeeeeezuuus.” It took a few seconds to register exactly what happened, but my sister and I couldn’t continue walking – we were laughing too hard.
Another time alone at a bus stop one late night after work, a man came up to me and said, “Why are you wearing that? You shouldn’t have to wear that.” He didn’t shout (usually my cue to walk away) but he seemed unstable and aggressive. I was too frightened to respond, I didn’t want to encourage him and I couldn’t laugh it off. The vibe he was giving off showed me he was capable of much more than aggressive unsolicited advice. I quickly walked away to a more crowded bus stop a few blocks down the road, only to keep looking over my shoulder in case he followed me. Not wanting to concern my loved ones and feeling slightly ashamed of not standing up for myself, I didn’t tell anyone.
In both instances, my sister and I were dressed normally – well, by our standards. I was wearing my headscarf and she her niqab (added face covering). Any variation of both cases have happened to every Muslim woman I know, regardless of whether or not they choose to cover. In my experience, it’s certainly not a daily or even weekly event – sometimes it doesn’t happen for months – but it’s happened enough times to be an ongoing issue in my life. These moments come in the form of the As Seen on TV sunglasses lady, which almost feels like being assaulted by an SNL character or the scary bus stop guy, or an innocent comment reminding me I’m Muslim (not that it’s easy to forget). Of course, not every interaction is unpleasant but the amount of stories I’ve swapped with my fellow Muslim women are countless, which is why it’s so frustrating to see our stories be told by other people.
Recently, I came across this story from the Australian Daily Telegraph in which a nice white lady learns a hard lesson. The author, Tanya Smart spends an afternoon dressed like a Muslim without actually having to be one. Dressed completely in black, she wears what Richard Dawkins respectfully likened to a trash bag: a traditional long loose dress called an abaya and a niqab. (I sometimes dress similarly to this, and it’s perfect if you’re cold and want to wear your pyjamas under a dress.) However, the author comes to the conclusion (after one day of dressing like the “other”) that life as a shapeless Muslim woman is hard. The poor girl can’t smile! Children laugh at her! Strangers gave her weird stares!
Regardless of how offensive this is, it’s also old, played out and boring. Having someone regarded as traditionally attractive play dress up to see what it’s like being marginalized in a controlled environment is hardly ground-breaking. Tyra Banks used to do it on her show all the time. Smart clearly thinks she’s being brave, and maybe she is. It certainly does take courage to wear a niqab; I don’t even think it’s something I could do. She thinks she’s experiencing or shining a light on the plight of poor, fettered Muslim women everywhere and perhaps she did get a taste of what it could be like for some. The thing is, I don’t care. I don’t wear a niqab, but there’s nothing she could have experienced that I haven’t already heard from any of the women I know who wear it every day. She could have just asked, but then again she probably wouldn’t have gotten paid for that.
I don’t live in a constant fear of being attacked, but, like any woman, it’s something that’s always in the back of my mind. Sometimes, the thought goes too far back and I assume that because I grew up and live in a relatively safe and diverse Canadian city, that sort of thing wouldn’t happen to me. Unfortunately, reality hits and I realize it could happen anywhere. Just this summer, a Saudi Arabian student in the UK was stabbed 16 times on her way to school. Like me and thousands of other women in United Kingdom, the victim was wearing a hijab.
Smart expressed her fear of being pushed in front of a subway car, but at the end of the day she was on a paid assignment and won’t ever have that fear again. She went home, took off those clothes and now has a fascinating story to tell over cocktails. When attacks against Muslims or anyone who appears to be Muslim are on the rise, when just being brown is actually just enough to be pushed in front of a subway car, racist orientalism isn’t going to help anyone.
The silencing and total lack of engagement in regards to Muslim women is dangerous. Under the false pretense of concern, time and time again I see my reality be dissected. It’s true, there are Muslim women who are oppressed and there are definite problems within our community. However, there’s almost only that one narrative. Being painted as a homogenous group of silent, invisible women puts me in the position of a victim before I’ve even had the chance to speak up for myself. Most recently, a video of Ben Affleck’s appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher went viral, it was great to see a sensible response on racism. The takeaway for me (other than how weird it is to now have to rely on the star of Gigli to defend Muslims) is the noticeable lack of female opinion in these discussions. Our absence proves to me that Bill Maher or Sam Harris aren’t at all concerned about women not driving or getting beaten by their husbands. To them, we’re nothing more than a political point or a device to push their racist and xenophobic agenda.
When I picture myself, it’s as a pretty average 23-year-old woman, and I can only hope I will someday be given the right to be average. So many times I’ve had people who’ve never met a Muslim before say to me, “You’re nothing like I expected!” I would usually just smile and change the subject to avoid confrontation, but once I asked, “What did you expect?” To which a co-worker responded in a way they variably thought of as a compliment, “You’re just so open!” If we are all as persecuted they say, if we truly can’t think for ourselves and need to be saved, who exactly are they trying to save us from? Because I can’t help but feel as though people like Bill Maher and Tanya Smart have a lot more in common with the guy at the bus stop than anyone who’s ever been on my side.
$ Donation Amount: Updating Amount... Like this article? Tip The Toast! Select Payment Method PayPal Loading... Personal Info First Name * Last Name Email Address * Donation Total: $1.00"By changing space, by leaving the space of one's usual sensibilities, one enters into communication with a space that is psychically innovating. … For we do not change place, we change our nature."
Osmose (1995) is an immersive interactive virtual-reality environment installation with 3D computer graphics and interactive 3D sound, a head-mounted display and real-time motion tracking based on breathing and balance. Osmose is a space for exploring the perceptual interplay between self and world, i.e., a place for facilitating awareness of one's own self as consciousness embodied in enveloping space.
Immersion in Osmose begins with the donning of the head-mounted display and motion-tracking vest. The first virtual space encountered is a three-dimensional Cartesian Grid which functions as an orientation space. With the immersant's first breaths, the grid gives way to a clearing in a forest. There are a dozen world-spaces in Osmose, most based on metaphorical aspects of nature. These include Clearing, Forest, Tree, Leaf, Cloud, Pond, Subterranean Earth, and Abyss. There is also a substratum, Code, which contains much of the actual software used to create the work, and a superstratum, Text, a space consisting of quotes from the artist and excerpts of relevant texts on technology, the body and nature. Code and Text function as conceptual parentheses around the worlds within.
Through use of their own breath and balance, immersants are able to journey anywhere within these worlds as well as hover in the ambiguous transition areas in between. After fifteen minutes of immersion, the LifeWorld appears and slowly but irretrievably recedes, bringing the session to an end.
In Osmose, Char Davies challenges conventional approaches to virtual reality. In contrast to the hard-edged realism of most 3D-computer graphics, the visual aesthetic of Osmose is semi- representational/semi-abstract and translucent, consisting of semi-transparent textures and flowing particles. Figure/ground relationships are spatially ambiguous, and transitions between worlds are subtle and slow. This mode of representation serves to 'evoke' rather than illustrate and is derived from Davies' previous work as a painter. The sounds within Osmose are spatially multi- dimensional and have been designed to respond to changes in the immersant's location, direction and speed: the source of their complexity is a sampling of a male and female voice.
Based on responses from approximately 25,000 individuals who have been immersed in Osmose since the summer of 1995, the after-effect of immersion in Osmose can be quite profound. Immersants often feel as if they have rediscovered an aspect of themselves, of being alive in the world, which they had forgotten, an experience which many find surprising, and some very emotional. Such response has confirmed the artist's belief that traditional interface boundaries between machine and human can be transcended even while re-affirming our corporeality, and that Cartesian notions of space as well as illustrative realism can effectively be replaced by more evocative alternatives. Immersive virtual space, when stripped of its conventions, can provide an intriguing spatio-temporal context in which to explore the self's subjective experience of "being-in-the-world"—as embodied consciousness in an enveloping space where boundaries between inner/outer, and mind/body dissolve.The Finnish Security Intelligence Service Supo is complaining that nation-state-level attackers aren’t even bothering to hide themselves from prying eyes.
That news comes in the agency’s review of intelligence activity in 2016, announced here.
The major trends in cyber-intelligence Supo highlights in the report are increasing attacks against Finland’s foreign and security infrastructure, espionage attempts, and actors abusing Finnish data networks “in espionage targetting third countries.”
On the other hand, attacks against critical infrastructure fell sharply in 2016.
Regarding attempts to compromise the country’s “foreign and security policy,” the report notes: “Most observations were related to an APT28/Sofacy attack in which no particular effort was made to conceal the activity... It is justified to assume that also the number of cases which have not come to the authorities’ knowledge has increased.”
APT28 has been blamed for attacks on Georgia, Eastern Europe, NATO, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and in 2014, FireEye went public linking the group to the Kremlin.
Other tags hung on the group are Sofacy, Pawn Storm and Fancy Bear.
Supo said it saw several cases of intelligence gathering attempts in data networks, focussed on what seems to be identity fraud against a small number of key personnel in government and business.
In such cases, the report says, “Finnish authorities do not have the competence to identify or counter such information gathering systematically” – so individuals and employers need to be vigilant. ®How The Hell Did Tesla Get The Model S Landboat To Go 0–60 MPH In 2.5 Seconds?
August 24th, 2016 by Zachary Shahan
The Tesla Model S is a big car. It’s in the “large luxury sedan” or “full-size luxury car” class (or, depending on your country and preferred classification, some similar variation that indicates to buyers it is big). It’s a completely unsurprising fact that the only two “production cars” in history that are quicker to 60 mph than the Model S are two-seat sports cars that cost way, way, way more than the Model S P100D. This is a landboat that seats up to 5 adults and 2 children, plus has a ton of storage space. It’s a bit absurd that it’s competing with 2-seat sports cars that cost $1 million or more.
So, how the hell did Tesla achieve such a quick 0–60 mph (0–100 km/h) time? Last time Tesla announced a blisteringly low time to 60 mph (2.8 seconds), it blew people’s minds, and a bunch of commenters said that it would be close to impossible to beat that time with a Model S with street-legal tires.
But Tesla did it.
It’s in the Battery, Baby
When info was unofficially leaking that new Model S P90Ds could get to 60 mph in 2.6 seconds, the only clear explanation we could find was that the battery had changed quite a bit — specifically, it was presumed that the car was housing a 100 kWh (energy capacity) battery that also had more power capacity, and was just being software-limited to 90 kWh energy capacity. It seems that was the case, but the details of how exactly Tesla improved the batteries seems quite complicated and interesting.
“It’s a complete re-do on the cooling architecture,” Tesla CTO JB Straubel said on a media conference call yesterday afternoon in California. “It’s pretty amazing we can do that without changing the external size and shape of the battery pack.”
In other words, Tesla found a way to better cool the battery (and maybe stick more battery cells into the pack), which allowed it to also let more power dart out of the battery when the driver steps on the electricity (time to update our terminology, ya know?).
If you’re still thinking this is pushing things pretty close to acceleration limits, you’re in good company. Tesla CEO Elon Musk added that, with current battery tech, this is “very close to the theoretical limit.”
Hmm, wait, “very close” means Tesla could go ultra low. Furthemore, did you catch that he noted it was the theoretical limit with current battery tech?
Yup, once Gigafactory 1 gets rolling and Tesla + Panasonic are pumping out the new battery cells they’ve designed together (based on “the first principles of physics and economics”), Tesla will presumably be able to do even better on 0–60 times.
The lower limit I’ve seen people claiming is possible with street-legal tires is 2.3–2.4 seconds to 60 mph. This is not my area of expertise, so I won’t insert my own calculations on that, and we’ll all just have to wait to see when Tesla inches lower on a Model S … or a top-of-the line Model 3?
Electric Motors & Batteries & Fuses
But maybe you’re still confused how a 5+2 large sedan can beat every McLaren, every Lamborghini, and all but one million-dollar+ Porsche and one million-dollar+ Ferrari off the line, so let’s keep talking.
As you should well know by now, electric cars offer “instant torque.” Whereas it takes a bit of time for a gasoline car to get to max power, fully electric cars do so almost immediately. (Note that the world’s quickest “production car” is a plug-in hybrid electric car, the out-of-production Porsche 918 Spyder, only 918 of which were produced.)
Nonetheless, that doesn’t make a Renault Twizy as quick as a Tesla Model S, or a Tesla Model S 60 as quick as a Tesla Model S P100D — even if it does make a Smart Fortwo Electric more fun than a Camaro.
Clearly, the motors are part of what makes a car quicker or slower, so I’ll just skip over that bit, but the batteries are also critical.
As we discussed in a previous article looking at BMW i3 vs Tesla Model S batteries, there are various trade-offs when considering which battery technology to use and how to design a pack. Energy density is what most of us are most familiar with — that’s how many kWh of electricity you can stuff into a battery. Safety is another. Cycle life |
B.A. in Philosophy from George Washington University and a Juris Doctor from Cardozo School of Law. He has authored or co-authored appeal briefs in U.S. v. Knox and U.S. v. Various Articles of Merchandise, Schedule No. 287, among other cases, and amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. Oakes and Maryland v. Craig. His articles have been published in Playboy, the Washington Post, The Gauntlet and other print publications. In 1989, he was the recipient of the Free Press Association's H.L. Mencken Award for Investigative Journalism for his Playboy series, The Child Porn Myth. He currently practices in the area of trademark and copyright law.NEW DELHI: The Indian market might be in a bear phase, but experts are already advising investors to buy into fear. This is something that is in line with Warren Buffett’s style of investing.The ace investor once famously said, “Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.” That's what value investing is all about.“First and foremost, it's important to understand that the market is incredibly undervalued right now. As the famous Warren Buffett always does, look to ‘value-invest’,” said Raghu Kumar, co-founder of RKSV.“Right now, values of many fundamentally-sound stocks are high. Yet their prices are low. Banking stocks have taken a massive blow. Capitalise on them by buying aggressively. Once the market turns around, they will rise the quickest,” he said.MSCI India's premium to MSCI Asia over the last 10 years was at 30 per cent and that has risen to 39 per cent now. For the past 10 years, Indian stocks have traded at an average PER of 18 times one-year forward earnings. At present, the same stands at 15.6 times one-year forward earnings.Most of the blue chip stocks are down in double digits from their highs, which makes a strong case for value investing. The December quarter earnings have not cheered investors, but they should pick up over the next two to three quarters, experts said.“India continues to have a stronger growth among the emerging markets and we believe that strong growth is reflected in India’s overweight position in FIIs’ asset allocation,” R Sreesankar of Prabhudas Lilladher said in a report."While the market does not give a bullish direction unless we see a significant downside in earnings in FY17, we are close to the level that offers good value on investments,” he said.The S&P BSE Sensex has plunged over 20 per cent from its record high of 30,024, which technically puts the index in a bear phase. Most of the corrections in Indian market are largely led by what is happening globally and that will continue to weigh for some more time.The short-term trend does not look all that bullish, given the fact that global growth is showing signs of slowdown, uncertainty around US Federal Reserve’s rate hike, crude glut, China jitters and relentless selling by foreign institutional investors (FIIs).There are no immediate triggers that can take the market higher at least in the near term, apart from Budget 2016. But investors who are looking at the equity market with an investment horizon of more than three years can certainly look at putting in money at current levels or on dips."If you look at the Indian market, for a long time it had run up valuations that were extremely expensive, especially in the aftermath of the Modi election. We saw that a lot of stocks were very rich across sectors and that has come back to normal range,” said Sandeepa Arora, President, IIFL Capital."We are still not seeing the market being very cheap. But this is a market where opportunities are emerging, especially in the largecap space. Some of the stocks are actually starting to look extremely attractive and we are advising clients to look at those stocks and invest in them selectively,” said Arora.The only thing supporting our market is our macros, which have become better in the past 3-4 years thanks to falling crude oil prices, which are trading at a multi-year low.This is also reflected in our currency, which was relatively stable compared with other emerging market currencies all through 2015, but has been losing ground in 2016, already down over 2 per cent against the US dollar so far this calendar."India’s growth rate has been phenomenal, and considering how it fared so well despite the global meltdown, it shows how well positioned our economy is,” said Kumar of RKSV. “Sentiments rule market. Right now, due to what's happening in the west, we have been witnessing a selling frenzy," he said."Investors should diversify their portfolios to bet big on a few fundamentally sound smallcap stocks. The BSE Smallcap index has fallen almost 20 per cent. The index follows the Sensex. When the Sensex picks up, the smallcap index will pick up faster. Be sure to capitalise on that movement,” said Kumar.SolarCity has chosen to invest heavily in the Nevada solar power sector in a move that has brought the renewable energy provider into direct competition with traditional providers like NV Energy. While consumers welcome the self-sufficiency and low costs of renewable solar energy compared to conventional grid power, recent legislation in support of fossil fuel-based energy is impeding further solar grid development.
With over 290 days of cloudless sunshine per year in Las Vegas alone, Nevada is a prime location to harvest free and abundant solar energy. It’s no wonder that SolarCity rooftop solar chose the Silver State to spurr the arguably overdue large-scale transition from energy sourced from fossil fuels to clean and renewable power.
Despite being the largest provider of photovoltaic panels in the U.S. with demand for solar power only increasing, SolarCity saw its Nevada endeavor hampered by the state’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) last year.
The December 2015 decision to increase energy rates for a household with photovoltaic panels marked an escalation in a proxy war waged between traditional energy based in fossil fuels and renewable energy based in solar power.
Since veteran investor Warren Buffet owns NV Energy and visionary entrepreneur Elon Musk owns SolarCity, the market competition has been labeled as the ‘battle of the billionaires’ over the future of renewable energy. In Nevada, for now.
Elon Musk vs. Warren Buffett
Two companies, two billionaire investors and two very different views of how the world should be powered.
Dubbed the “Oracle of Omaha”, “Boss of Berkshire Hathaway” and “King of ROI” (returns on investment), even from a young age Warren Buffett demonstrated a pronounced gift for finance and investment. Buffett is an undeniably talented entrepreneur, but he arguably personifies a stagnating conventional paradigm in the midst of a seemingly ever-accelerating technological revolution.
Because the majority of Buffett’s investments are in more traditional technologies and energies, SolarCity’s active presence in Nevada stands to literally cut into his territory and increasing consumer demand for Musk’s product could put Buffet’s holdings at a risk for loss.
“With SolarCity’s panels, households will likely produce more than enough electricity and thereby sell surplus energy back to the grid.”
Elon Musk, on the other hand, is the man behind disruptive technologies that have the goal of transitioning from fossil fuels and the effect of decentralizing traditional institutions, giving consumers more direct access to resources and information. Via SpaceX, He’s publically voiced his ambitions to make humanity an interplanetary species, but first, he’s working on making humanity a zero-emission species.
Musk represents the next generation of entrepreneurs. He made his money relatively young by leveraging technology to create products that consumers demand.
With PayPal, he challenged the model of traditional banking as a brick-and-mortar location by eliminating the middle man and reducing the costs of banking. Despite the fact that Tesla vehicles are electric and the majority of electricity is still currently generated from burning fossil fuels, the fact that they can run on renewable energy is helping accelerate the transition and implement the change that Musk wants to see. This could also be one more reason to invest in generating large-scale solar power.
The key difference between these two men and their business models highlights a larger economic issue. On one hand, Musk and SolarCity base their business on providing consumers with more efficient, and therefore, cheaper energy while also improving environmental impact.
On the other hand, Buffet and NV Energy seek to create demand for a product by eliminating competition.
These two contradictory business ideologies characterize the Nevada “Solar Wars.”
Back to the Future Barter Economies?
Nevada households equipped with rooftop solar panels have reported producing more electricity than needed. As a result, neighbors will often share excess energy by funneling surplus power back into the grid. From there, neighbors who are perhaps experiencing shortage can draw reserves from the grid. Ideally, homeowners would be able to sell their excess energy to neighbors and utility companies alike.
Combined with Tesla’s Powerwall, consumers would be able to store plenty of excess energy for their own uses.
For now, however, legislation and anti-“going off the grid” regulations that vary by state impede such power sharing, and more and more, even installing methods of generating alternative energy like solar panels.
Will consumer demand for more efficient and therefore, cheaper energy force both providers and legislators to reflect popular preferences?
Almost 20 years after PayPal was founded, Big Banks and national governments alike have transitioned to including an online banking model, and now, are even developing proprietary blockchain technologies. It seems that Buffett would be wise to invest in renewable energies.It’s impossible to have an uninterrupted conversation with Kelly Kittleson in her home. Kittleson, who lives in Hillsboro, Oregon, is a single mom with four kids. But her children are not the distraction. The two youngest—a boy, age 2, and a girl, age 4—sat quietly with us at the kitchen table. They hardly made a peep while we chatted. Instead, about every five minutes, a low-flying plane screamed above the rooftop. “They are constantly going over all the time,” Kittleson complained. “It’s crazy. When I first moved here, it felt like they were going to crash into our house.”
Kittleson’s house is directly beneath the final approach for the primary runway at Hillsboro Airport. The perimeter fence is visible from her backyard, where her kids spend countless hours. But the noise, it turns out, is just a nuisance. What really scares Kittleson is the lead. Like most Americans, she had no idea it was still in use in airplanes—the last remaining mode of transportation in the United States to use leaded fuel. (It was banned from automobile gasoline in 1996 after a phase-out that commenced with the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970.) When the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality surveyed the airport in 2005, it found a lead cloud hovering above Hillsboro, a circular plume spanning 25 square miles. At its center—right about where the Kittlesons live—lead levels were twice as high as the National Ambient Air Quality Standard threshold set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
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In children, lead can damage the central nervous system, resulting in learning disabilities, stunted growth, and hearing loss, as well as cause anemia. Recent findings indicate that children who are repeatedly exposed exhibit violent behavior in later life. Adults may be at risk of kidney failure, cardiovascular disease, cancer, stroke, miscarriages, and premature births.
Even at infinitesimal levels in the blood, lead has been linked to ADHD. Kittleson’s 8-year-old son has been diagnosed with the disorder; she now suspects her 4-year-old daughter might be showing symptoms too. Valorie Snider, who lives nearby, also has a son with ADHD. “Airplanes circle over the top of our house,” she told me over coffee at a Starbucks across the road from the airport. “The windows rattle. Sometimes it feels like an earthquake.”
Both families have the same pediatrician, James Lubischer. “I never knew how much [lead] would impact us until Dr. Lubischer told me,” Snider said. She herself has been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, Hashimoto’s disease (a thyroid disorder), and adrenal fatigue. She wonders if the lead has anything to do with these ailments.
Lubischer told me later that he lives right under the flight-training path, and that his daughter, too, has ADHD. He acknowledges that it’s challenging to prove a direct connection to lead in a specific instance—much like a case of lung cancer in an individual smoker. While an inordinate number of residents I met in Hillsboro have health problems, the evidence is anecdotal, and there have been no longitudinal studies tracking illness in populations close to these “general aviation” airports (a term that covers nearly all types of flight activity except scheduled commercial passenger service).
Even so, Lubischer believes the scientific evidence is clear. He cited the work of Joel Nigg, a professor of psychiatry, pediatrics, and behavioral neuroscience at Oregon Health & Science University, who has published two influential papers showing a propensity to ADHD in children with only slightly elevated lead levels. Todd Jusko, now a professor in the University of Rochester’s department of public health sciences, conducted an earlier study, published in 2008 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. Jusko found that children’s cognitive abilities declined with blood lead levels of 2.1 micrograms per deciliter—less than half the level currently deemed toxic by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It was a sunny weekday morning in mid-April when I stopped on the way to the Kittlesons to take a look at the Hillsboro Airport. Single-engine prop planes soared overhead in near-constant succession, dispersing lead into surrounding neighborhoods.
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Since 1990 the population of Hillsboro, a bedroom community 15 miles west of Portland, has nearly tripled, to more than 91,000, largely because semiconductor and biotech firms have moved into the area. The boom has transformed the town’s airport. Once home to weekend aviators, it has become a hub for corporate jets, a pilot training school, and a spillover facility for Portland International Airport. Training flights, in particular, are problematic. Student pilots perform touch-and-go’s—repeated landings that require gunning the engine at each go-around. They also do laps above the airfield. Takeoffs and landings at Hillsboro now total more than 200,000 annually, making it one of the busiest general aviation airports in the United States.
While jets and turboprops run on kerosene-based fuels, the majority of general aviation aircraft are piston-powered and consume aviation gasoline, or avgas, which is produced in several grades. The most common is 100-octane low lead, or 100LL, used by 167,000 aircraft, about 75 percent of the nation’s general aviation fleet. (People in the industry use the terms 100LL and avgas interchangeably.) No other country in the world has a fleet that still relies predominantly on leaded gasoline.
By the 1940s lead had become the go-to additive to avgas because it produced a fuel with low anti-knock properties, increasing horsepower while adding only a smidgen of extra weight. Lead’s toxicity had been well documented in innumerable studies. But most scientists (and pilots) assumed small doses were benign. By the 1960s advances in detecting trace amounts in the blood told a different story.
The lead added to avgas is a clear liquid known technically as tetraethyllead. Only one company in the world makes it: Innospec, a Colorado-based chemical corporation, which produces it at a plant near Liverpool, England. In addition to its anti-knock qualities, tetraethyllead performs several functions in piston-powered airplane engines. It boosts performance and reduces wear and tear. It also prevents something called “early detonation,” which can melt pistons and trigger an explosion. At the moment, there is no widely available substitute. Unleaded blends are in development but still experimental. The upshot: piston-engine planes consume about 248 million gallons of avgas a year, spewing out 551 tons of lead.
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These planes operate primarily from general aviation airports, of which there are about 3,000 in the United States (though most are podunk airstrips that see little activity). In 2010 the EPA compiled data on avgas emissions at the busiest of these airports—those with emissions of more than 1,000 pounds of lead a year. Hillsboro, with 1,360 pounds annually, ranked 21st on the EPA’s list of 58. Many of these airports are situated in heavily populated neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, for instance, some 14,000 people live within a mile of Van Nuys Airport, which sees annual lead emission totals above 1,500 pounds.
At least 3,200 students who attend schools near the Hillsboro Airport are at risk. A Montessori preschool is located across the street from the airport’s entrance, and a day care center is situated just 800 yards from the end of the main runway. According to statistics gathered by the Natural Resources Defense Council, nationwide more than three million children attend schools in close proximity to airports where avgas is burned.
In 2011 Marie Lynn Miranda, a professor of pediatrics and dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan, published a groundbreaking study in Environmental Health Perspectives on the effects of aviation gasoline on children. Miranda sampled 66 airports in North Carolina where air-quality sensors had recorded at least 448 pounds of lead emissions per year and found that blood lead levels in children living nearby were alarmingly high. She explained to me that lead accumulates in human tissue—every exposure adds more of the toxin to your body. “Children are more vulnerable because of their higher metabolic rate,” Miranda said. “So if you and your child were exposed to the same amount of lead, your child would uptake five times as much.”
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Miranda’s study has galvanized efforts to ban avgas by local grassroots organizations such as Oregon Aviation Watch, an environmental advocacy group in Hillsboro founded by Miki Barnes, a social worker. In battles with city, state, and federal policy makers, citizens like Barnes are trying—so far largely without success—to stop airport expansions, reroute flight paths, and curb air traffic.
During my visit to Hillsboro, representatives from the Port of Portland and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) held a meeting at the town’s civic center to hear public comments on the port’s proposal to add a third runway to the airport. Port officials brought copies of their 246-page environmental assessment, which projects a nearly 40 percent increase in lead emissions by 2021, to 1,840 pounds annually, as a result of increased flight traffic (though not necessarily of the proposed runway.)
The hearing was standing room only. More than 60 residents turned out, and nearly two dozen of them took to the lectern to make impassioned pleas not to approve the project. “Do you know what lead does?” Barnes asked when she testified. “It reduces IQ. It’s linked with ADHD. It’s linked with miscarriages. It’s linked with birth defects. It’s absolutely toxic. [The runway project] is shameful.” Residents could each speak for five minutes, but it took Barnes only two before she got teary-eyed.
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During a break in the proceedings, I spoke to Renee Dowlin, the Port of Portland’s manager for the project. Lead, she told me, “is not the Port of Portland’s issue. It is a federal issue, which the EPA and FAA will deal with. Nor do we have control over the number of planes that can come to the airport. We are preempted by the FAA because we accept federal money.”
Barnes is unconvinced. “There are legal precedents for airport operators to limit these flights,” she insists. “The Port of Portland simply chooses not to do so because it values the revenue generated from the sale of leaded avgas over the well-being of the community.”
So why has the federal government done nothing to halt the use of avgas? By law, the EPA is required to make an “endangerment finding” when it deems that a pollutant or toxin presents an imminent threat to public health—and the health risks of lead are well established. Under the Clean Air Act, the agency must promptly set rules to regulate or ban harmful emissions from any source once it makes such a finding. But it hasn’t done so with avgas, despite having published dozens of studies on lead’s toxicity, including a 2000 report warning that “there currently is no demonstrated safe concentration of lead in blood, and adverse health effects can occur at lower concentrations.”
In March 2012, Friends of the Earth filed a lawsuit against the EPA, accusing the agency of having “unreasonably delayed” its duty to make an endangerment finding. Between the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970 and 2007, piston-powered planes burned 14.6 billion gallons of avgas, expelling 34,000 tons of lead into the environment. Each year avgas accounts for nearly 60 percent of total lead emissions in the United States. (The remainder derives mostly from the metals industry.)
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“We got rid of lead in cars,” says John Froines, a professor of environmental health sciences at UCLA, “and there is no argument that says we should allow it in aircraft.” Froines directed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Office of Toxic Substances in the 1970s, where he wrote the first lead standards.
Meanwhile, the EPA has commenced yet another study, which it expects to complete in May 2014. Justin Cohen, communications director for the agency’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality, would not speak about the new study or allow me to interview anyone at the EPA about it (or anything else avgas-related) on the record. Instead, he pointed me to the agency’s website, where I learned how scientists will use computer models to calculate lead emissions at various airports. But if computers can already determine lead pollution at any airport, why does the EPA need another investigation to conclude that avgas is endangering public health? Cohen wouldn’t comment, and Kim Hoang, air toxics risk coordinator for the EPA’s air division, whose staff created the computer models in 2011, declined requests for an interview.
Marianne Engelman Lado, an attorney with Earthjustice who is leading the legal team for Friends of the Earth, told me, “[The EPA] has argued that they need to do more monitoring. And after they study the results, they can think about doing an endangerment finding. So we could be looking many, many years down the road before there’s even any set of deadlines for getting lead out of avgas. But when you think about the harm that lead causes, there’s grounds to be calling for major change at a very fast pace.”
“We know what the answer to the question about the problem of lead is,” Froines says. “It’s not something that needs further study. That’s ridiculous.”
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Instead of dealing directly with lead in aviation fuel, the Clean Air Act left it to the EPA administrator to decide whether to tackle avgas emissions; if that happened, any new regulations could not “adversely affect safety.” Remember that part about lead preventing engines from exploding? That’s why industry groups, including the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, the National Air Transportation Association, and the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, have been reluctant to support a ban on avgas until a “drop-in” replacement fuel is available. They insist that such a fuel must match the performance of avgas across all parameters, cost the same or less (now about $6 per gallon), and require no changes to aircraft or the fuel distribution infrastructure, such as pumping stations, tanker trucks, and pipelines.
Peter White, who manages the FAA’s new Fuel Programs Office—created specifically to focus on avgas—doubts that many petroleum companies would invest the cash and assets needed to develop a spec-for-spec substitute until the EPA is compelled to make a move. In February 2012 the FAA announced a set of formal recommendations, known as the Fuel Development Roadmap, to “support [the] transition to an unleaded aviation gasoline.” EPA officials have indicated they won’t ban avgas (unless forced to by a judge) until a suitable substitute is available. Doing so, they say, would wreak economic havoc, grounding most of the general aviation fleet. The Fuel Programs Office is bringing the EPA and FAA together in an unprecedented partnership to resolve the stalemate. “We’re trying to incentivize fuel producers to help develop new [unleaded] candidates,” White told me.
Nonetheless, he reckons a free-market solution is going to need some legislative prodding. So does Representative Henry Waxman of California. Last October Waxman, a Democrat, wrote to FAA administrator Michael Huerta, pleading with him to fast-track the availability of unleaded avgas. “There is a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the future of 100LL and it’s stymieing growth,” White said. “Without some sort of regulatory change, some sort of requirement, there’s really no other force that’s going to drive 100LL off the market and bring in a replacement.”
* * *
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At the moment only two small firms are exploring replacements for 100LL. Swift Fuels, based in West Lafayette, Indiana, has developed an unleaded avgas by blending isopentane, a chemical found in mouthwash, with mesitylene, an industrial solvent. According to project co-founder Jon Ziulkowski, the fuel, called 100SF, can be manufactured from renewable biomass sources, such as switchgrass and sorghum, and burns cleaner than 100LL, with 30 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
In Ada, Oklahoma, engineers at General Aviation Modifications Inc. (GAMI) have developed a rival fuel to the Swift blend called G100UL. GAMI co-founder George Braly hopes to license the formula, for which a patent is pending, to a major refiner, such as Phillips 66, the nation’s largest producer of avgas. “But avgas is a specialty fuel,” Braly said. “It’s a pain for [Phillips and other companies] to make because the volume is so small. So they want status quo until there’s no other alternative.” Phillips declined to comment.
Could either fuel emerge as a drop-in replacement? Brian Watt, Innospec’s vice president of strategic planning and regulatory affairs, is doubtful. “People have been looking at 100LL replacements for 40 years, and there is still not a credible alternative,” he told me. “Legislation would help.”
Peter White sees things differently. “I don’t want to say yes or no until we really have the chance to evaluate all the data,” he said. It’s up to the FAA to certify specific engine models permitted to burn any new fuel, but that will take years. “It’s a huge effort,” White observed. “You need to collect data, there are material compatibility issues, there are operability issues, there’s performance, there’s weight—a whole bunch of things you need to address and a very large number of models.”
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FAA officials have said they’re committed to certifying a drop-in avgas replacement by 2018. But as Waxman pointed out in his letter to Huerta, certification is only the initial step. After 2018, he wrote, “it may be 11 years or more before the new fuel will be phased in. This extended time frame is simply too long, given the certain and serious harms to human health from lead exposure.”
Ordinary unleaded gasoline—mogas—might, in fact, offer the simplest and quickest interim solution. While its octane is lower than that of 100LL, “it has been conclusively shown that over 80 percent of all current piston-engine aircraft can operate on mogas,” notes Kent Misegades, director of the Aviation Fuel Club, a nonprofit group formed to champion unleaded alternatives to 100LL. The hurdle with mogas is finding it without ethanol. Because of the EPA’s 2005 Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) requirement, automotive fuel in the United States must be blended with ethanol. This works fine for cars but can be catastrophic in airplanes.
The reason is that ethanol is hygroscopic, meaning it absorbs water—for example, water that forms from condensation in a fuel tank. In cars, ethanol can damage engines but (usually) isn’t life-threatening. In airplanes, however, ethanol not only is corrosive but can retain moisture that may freeze in the frigid air at higher altitudes. “It’s like throwing ice cubes through your fuel system,” Ziulkowski explains. “It will cause the engine to stop in midair.”
For his part, Misegades is making headway. He says, “Despite all the odds against us—and with no help from the FAA, EPA, avgas suppliers, or our own aviation lobbies—we have been able to slowly increase the number of airports now offering mogas.” In the United States, all gasoline is produced initially without ethanol. Petroleum refiners add just enough to fulfill their RFS quota. Once that has been met, the untainted surplus is sold to consumers who prefer it for engines more susceptible to ethanol damage, including those in boats, snowmobiles, farm equipment, power tools, lawnmowers, and vintage automobiles. Misegades’s group taps into this supply. Of the 3,600 airports that carry avgas, at least 118 have an adjacent pump supplying ethanol-free mogas. As for 100LL, Misegades, who is an aerospace engineer and recreational pilot, admits, “Our continued use of a substance that was banned decades ago in cars makes us look like cavemen.”
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In March U.S. District Court judge Amy Berman Jackson dismissed the Friends of the Earth lawsuit against the EPA. She didn’t address the obvious hazards of avgas or dispute that mitigating lead emissions was one of the principal objectives of the Clean Air Act. Instead, her written opinion hinged on the language of the act, which she found ambiguous. She ruled that the EPA’s responsibility to make an endangerment finding was discretionary, not mandatory.
So what comes next? “We’re weighing our options,” says Lado of Earthjustice. “I think legal action is still needed to put the pressure on.” One possibility is to petition the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. But there is also a wild card: the entity with the greatest power to eliminate lead in avgas may be Innospec, its sole producer. In 2012 tetraethyllead generated one-tenth of Innospec’s $776 million in revenue, down from 90 percent in 2000. Today, sales of tetraethyllead to avgas producers account for just 3 percent of Innospec’s business. The remainder comes from their customers in Algeria, Iraq, and Yemen, which still blend the additive into gasoline for older cars. But with phase-outs under way in those countries, demand is waning fast. “As soon as they get their refineries and motor fleet sorted out, [tetraethyllead] there will be gone,” Innospec’s Watt predicts.
For the time being, Watt says that the company is committed to keeping its Liverpool plant running until there is a suitable 100LL replacement. And yet, he admits, “If we weren’t making money on it, we’d obviously do something different.” Annually, Innospec sells about 450,000 gallons of tetraethyllead to avgas producers. “But we’ve already been stepping down [production] every year,” Watt says. Outside the United States, there are about 60,000 aircraft that require avgas, but most can operate on the mogas that’s readily available in the rest of the world, which doesn’t blend ethanol with fuel. “Our position with the aviation market is that we don’t want to be in this business long term,” he says. “There is no future for tetraethyllead.”
All the more reason, urges Lado, “to get the phase-out process under way now. [The EPA] is wasting time. The handwriting is on the wall that lead is bad, that lead is being spewed from these airplanes, and that lead has to go.”GENEVA (Reuters) - An estimated 3,500 people, mainly women and children, are being held as slaves in Iraq by Islamic State militants, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
Yazidi sisters, who escaped from captivity by Islamic State (IS) militants, sit in a tent at Sharya refugee camp on the outskirts of Duhok province July 3, 2015. REUTERS/Ari Jala
The Islamist group, which also controls large parts of Syria, is responsible for acts that may “amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and possibly genocide”, particularly against minorities, a report said.
Iraqi security forces and allied groups including Kurdish Peshmerga fighters have also killed and abducted civilians, it said. “Some of these incidents may have been reprisals against persons perceived to support or be associated with ISIL (Islamic State),” it added.
At least 18,802 civilians were killed in violence in Iraq from January 2014 to October 2015, and 36,245 civilians were wounded, the report said, calling the figures “obscene”.
The U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq and the U.N. human rights office estimated that 3,500 people were “currently being held in slavery” by Islamic State, which seized mainly Sunni-populated areas in the north and west in 2014.
“Those being held are predominantly women and children and come primarily from the Yazidi community,” said the joint report issued in Geneva, referring to a non-Muslim minority in northern Iraq viewed by Islamic State as devil-worshippers.
“But a number are also from other ethnic and religious minority communities.”
The Sunni Islamists, who claim responsibility for suicide bombings in Baghdad against Shia mosques and markets, should face prosecution for international crimes, said Francesco Motta, director of the U.N. human rights office in Iraq.
“They use civilians as shields. They use children in armed conflict, they also directly target civilian infrastructure and that can amount to war crimes but they can also constitute crimes against humanity,” he told a news briefing by telephone from Baghdad.
The group seeks to “basically eliminate, purge or destroy minority communities”, Motta said.
“We’ve seen communities like the Yazidi in particular bear the brunt of this. Yazidi were basically given the option by ISIL to convert or to be killed.
“The intent seems clear... the international crime of genocide,” he added. “The intention was to destroy part or the whole of the Yazidi people.”
The report detailed Islamic State executions by shooting, beheading, bulldozing, burning alive and throwing people off buildings. Doctors, teachers and journalists opposed to its ideology have been “singled out and murdered by ISIL”.
“We have a lot of information on the recruitment of children, children as young as nine, to train them sometimes to use them as suicide operatives in their operations, but also forcing them to give blood and also take armed combat roles in other parts where conflict is taking place,” Motta said.
Between 800 and 900 children in Mosul had been abducted for military and religious training, the report said.
Ramadi, capital of Anbar province, was recaptured from Islamic State in late December, and the tide of fighting appears to have turned against the group.
“We still have grave fears for civilians in areas under Daesh (Islamic State) control as the armed forces and those supporting the government move closer to those areas,” Motta said.
(Corrects timeframe for casualty figures in paragraph four)Teddy Roosevelt on Opening Day. (Photo by Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Opening Day is about the future, about things unseen. And yet, while you toasted Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper, Adam Lind and Adam Eaton, a new season and a Nats win on the third day of April, you missed something pointing toward the past, something you’ve most definitely seen before.
It happened in the middle of the fourth inning, as those grinning politicos with the steroid heads gallivanted across right field, led by the bespectacled Teddy Roosevelt. “C’mon Teddy, keep it up!” urged Jerome Hruska, the voice of Nationals Park, offering a clarion clue amid the din.
The older Rushmore trio lagged well behind, until a strangely recognizable denouement, deja vu on a day that should encourage jamais vu. Jefferson and Washington simultaneously jostled past Roosevelt and then slapped hands in sinister glee. Lincoln roared past that trio for the win. And Teddy tumbled to the ground, holding up his hands to ask this cruel world why he deserved such a fate.
Like I said, you missed it. Scott Ableman didn’t.
“To have Teddy be way ahead, in the lead, and then get attacked by the other presidents was just something too familiar, something we hadn’t seen in five years,” said the leader of the populist Let Teddy Win movement, whose existential purpose seemed permanently retired five years ago. “I felt a sense of foreboding; I really did. I wasn’t joking about it. I thought, ‘Oh my God, maybe they’re trying to recapture something that was lost.’ I mean, there was a lot more interest in the Presidents Race, I think generally, when Teddy’s losing streak was a national story. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”
Or can you? Because while you’ve been paying attention to the explosive offense and the explosive bullpen, the Teddy shtick has arisen. Already this season, according to Ableman’s invaluable Web site, Roosevelt has tripped and fallen near the race’s end, and also been distracted by a blueberry pie. He’s faded at the finish line, and also been rattled by a sign reading “BOO!” He’s been tackled by George Washington, and also been sidetracked by a giant lucky penny on National Lucky Penny Day. He’s dived into the stands to avoid hot lava, and also become hopelessly sidetracked by a hamburger.
“I mean, it’s right out of the old playbook,” Ableman said.
Which means Teddy has lost, and lost, and lost again. The official standings halfway through the home slate? Jefferson 14, Lincoln 13, Washington 13, Screech the Eagle 1, and Teddy 0. Nada. Zip.
This is silliness, yes, but it’s also news, in a way. After all, The Washington Post slapped Teddy’s first win on A1 five years ago. And it’s hard to overstate how much attention his epic losing streak — which stretched more than 500 games — generated that summer, as the Nationals cruised toward their first division title and first playoff appearance.
Teddy made the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and lured out an “ABC World News Tonight” crew. He prompted an ESPN piece (narrated by Ken Burns), a John McCain quote (“I’ve been paying a LOT of attention to the fact that one of the truly great presidents in history has NEVER won a race,” he said in those simpler times) and a statement from White House Press |
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AdvertisementsOnly 6 months after it's release? Wow thanks samsung!
Ok, sarcasm aside, i guess giving the amount of devices that aren't even being updated at all, this is good news. But still, we know independent developers do nothing short of small miracles a few days after the official google release. Though i'm still imensly grateful to every dev and they're the only reason for me still having this phone, a proper samsung developing team with the proper resources has the obligation to do better and faster, so i can't help but to feel a bit screwed over by them. They surely aren't doing it because they care about the client, else their attitude would be different so there must be a different agenda in the background. On my expense. I shouldn't need to feel grateful when they release an update. Not when what i bought never worked properly to begin with with samsung's development nor it never will even with 3rd party development while samsung doesn't will it.
So, I'm not planning on still having my S3 by then. They didn't really do much during my phone's lifetime to keep me for a client. They still don't. To be rather honest all i found on samsung was disapointment. So, as soon as i'll have the chance, i'll try to replace it. I'm here to be proven wrong but my expectations for anything coming from samsung are really low at this point.FEATURED VIDEO
As Refinery29 points out, the strangest alteration made before the camera starts to click is bras underneath the bathing suits. “They put a push-up bra under the bathing suit. And we retouch out the bra…a lot of [staffers] would complain because they even did it with strapless stuff. When you’re wearing a strapless bikini, in no way, shape, or form [can] you have cleavage. It’s physically impossible with the way gravity works.”
How many times have you tried on something strapless or a bathing suit in general hoping to have even a fraction of the cleavage the model in the window sports only to be sorely disappointed? I’m, um, “blessed” in that region and even I’ve found myself continually let down by how I look in a bathing suit versus how it looked on the website’s model. Nice to know there’s a concrete reason for that other than my sad Mom Boobs.
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Then come the big guns. Sarah admits that both nipples and that padded bra are photoshopped out. She was also routinely asked to make breasts look less like actual breasts — to make them rounder, higher and more symmetrical. She says most models weren’t more than an A cup, which is another pleasant revelation as I’ve found myself cursing the gods that I wasn’t blessed with a 23-inch waist along with my DDs. For most very slender women, big, perky breasts aren’t part of the natural package. But the talent of photo retouchers has convinced millions of women that it’s not only possible, but relatively common.
Another thing you probably believe to be real is the unnaturally smooth underarms the models sport. I’ve taken selfies from a high angle after a recent pit shave and been frustrated that there’s still a shadow of gray, even though there’s no stubble. Sarah says the underarm area always looks gray in photos, even if there’s no hair. The armpits are retouched at VS and because of that, many models didn’t even bother shaving. “They come to these photo shoots and, like, they have their arms up in the classic beach pose, and they have, like, hairy armpits. They all have stubbly pubes — all the normal stuff [non-models have].”
I would give a lot to see the “before” photos of models with super hairy pits. I just feel like I need this.
Sarah also says they have to provide extra curves for the models. “Models are thinner than you actually think they are, and we retouch them to look rounder.” And as far as simply hiring curvier models? It won’t sell. She says Victoria’s Secret tried using models with different body types to no consumer response.
So in the end, it’s the consumer that dictates what companies put into print and with the exception of Aerie, who famously swore off retouching a few years ago to positive financial result, most won’t bother because it simply won’t make them money. We speak with our dollars, and as long as Victoria’s Secret sees a profit using incredibly unrealistic images, they have no reason to stop.
Though that may sound bleak, it’s still wonderful that “Sarah” shared this information. It’s not like it’s some huge surprise that they photoshop, but hearing the details might go a long way toward shushing the voice in our head that says we need to look that insanely perfect.
Because as we now know, not even the models do.PUTRAJAYA (THE STAR/ASIA NEWS NETWORK) - The minute of silence to be observed for the victims of the ill-fated Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 is expected to be held some 45 minutes after the special plane transporting the remains of the victims taxies down the runway at Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) on Friday morning.
The one minute is expected to fall sometime between 10.45am and 11.30am, said Communication and Multimedia Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Shabery Cheek.
"We hope the people can be ready for the moment of silence expected to be held during that time.
"An announcement will be made for the nation to stand and observe the one minute of silence," he told a joint press conference on Wednesday on the ceremony to receive the remains of the MH17 victims.
Traffic is expected to come to a standstill at the following locations during the moment of silence - Penang Bridge, Bangunan Sultan Abdul Samad in Kuala Lumpur, KLIA, KLIA2 and Sultan Iskandar Customs, Immigration and Quarantine Complex in Johor Baru.
Ahmad Shabery said that people could also observe the moment of silence in their office, vehicles and even in school.
He said the plane transporting the remains would be here by 9.45am on Friday, if it depart from Amsterdam at 2pm (Netherlands time).
"We have asked all radio stations to broadcast the ceremony at Kompleks Bunga Raya.
"As for television, we hope that they would not show entertainment programmes except for sports on that day.
"However, we want all channels, be they movie or drama, to broadcast the moment of silence, of which the template will be decided later," he said.
Ahmad Shabery said police personnel would be on hand to manage the traffic flow for the convoy of the remains enroute to the burial grounds in the respective states.
The Yang di-Pertuan Agong Tuanku Mu'adzam Shah would be attending the ceremony at KLIA while the Sultan of Perak Sultan Nazrin Shah is expected to be in Ipoh to receive the remains.
Elected representatives, especially all Members of Parliament and foreign ambassadors, have also been invited for the ceremony at KLIA.Portland Commissioner Chloe Eudaly's proposed tenant protection rule up for vote Thursday could entangle Portland in a lawsuit that could block or delay some or all its provisions, attorney John DiLorenzo says.
Multifamily NW, an association of companies that own or manage many homes and apartments in Portland, intends to sue the city if it passes an ordinance requiring landlords to help pay substantial moving costs for tenants whom they evict without cause or who say they must move as a result of a landlord increasing their rent by 10 percent or more in one year.
DiLorenzo asserts that the proposal conflicts with Oregon state law that prohibits rent control measures.
Eudaly said the ordinance does not infringe on landlords' rights to raise rents, but instead requires landlords to share the financial burden when they "choose to cause an economic displacement".
"We feel very confident that this is highly defensible in court," Portland's newest commissioner said.
DiLorenzo has sued the City of Portland at least seven times, including a case over misspent utility money that dragged out for more than five years and cost the city roughly $13 million.
He said Eudaly's office failed to consult with landlords about "unintended consequences" before drafting the ordinance. He also argued that Eudaly's office rushed her proposal.
"I don't believe any of this has been drafted in a collaborative process at all," DiLorenzo said.
The rule could go into effect the day it is passed -- just over a week after Eudaly publicly disclosed her plan. That would require a unanimous council vote. The rule would last throughout the housing emergency set to expire in October, unless the City Council votes otherwise.
DiLorenzo provided The Oregonian/OregonLive a list of potential hardships that he said could result if the city requires landlords to pay tenants hit with no-cause evictions or 10 percent rent hikes $2,900 to $4,500 to help them relocate.
Homeowners who wish to move back into a home they own would have to pay those fees, he complained. Landlords who need to raise rents by 10 percent to cover the costs of necessary repairs also would face them, he said. So would landlords who want problem tenants out for good reason but face challenges in documenting the just cause, he said.
Eudaly called the hypothetical scenarios DiLorenzo posed "misinformation to rile up opposition."
"The landlord lobby likes to conjure up these bad tenant boogeymen," Eudaly said. "I don't believe in policy-making based on personal anecdote and I certainly don't believe on policy making based on fantasy or myth."
She said, however, she is considering exempting "mom and pop" landlords with a limited number of properties from having to pay the fees.
Eudaly said her office has spoken with several landlords who expressed their support for her tenant protection plan.
Her staff did not consult DiLorenzo or Multifamily NW because she does not believe they have real solutions, she said.
"If they're coming to testify on Thursday, I'm all ears," Eudaly said. "I'm so excited to hear what their solutions are."
Commissioner Nick Fish called Eudaly's proposal a "thoughtful compromise," considering that she advocated rent control during her campaign and won handily. He also urged landlords to come up with alternative solutions to the housing emergency.
"If there is a different and better approach I want to hear it," Fish said. "If we have to fight this in court, so be it."
Commissioner Dan Saltzman said he thinks the emergency ordinance, which requires five votes, will pass Thursday. His chief concern is the effect economic displacement has on children and their education.
Mayor Ted Wheeler has already said he supports Eudaly's proposals. Commissioner Amanda Fritz declined to comment.
--Jessica Floum
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As the Iowa primary draws near, the Republican race has come down to some basic questions: Can Donald Trump’s insurgent campaign maintain its support? And if it can’t, where do his votes go? Ad Policy
It seems unlikely his voters would flock to candidates like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio—not with the deep animus flowing towards the Republican establishment. Alternately, if Trump’s voters flee him because they deem the reality television star unelectable, why would they turn to fellow insurgents like Ben Carson or Mike Huckabee, who are even harder to envision in the Oval Office?
Standing in the gap is Senator Ted Cruz, a candidate every bit as uncompromising and angry as Trump—but with enough experience in elected office to seem plausible. Cruz also has a significantly strong campaign infrastructure, deep-pocketed donors, and skyrocketing poll numbers.
If Republican voters continue to support him at this rate, Cruz will become easily the most conservative major presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater.
Cruz’s strategy is pretty clear. Forget reaching out to minority voters, young women, or moderate voters sitting on the fence. Go hard at the GOP’s true base—white Americans more likely to be male, religious, and possessing clear conservative views—and motivate them as energetically as he can to show up at the polls.
On the campaign trail, Cruz is quick on his feet and armed with a silky-smooth stump speech that is delivered word-for-word every time. Not unlike Donald Trump, though on a smaller scale, Cruz is good at creating small “controversies” that earn him both free media exposure and the adoration of hard-right voters. At a recent event in Charles City, Iowa, Cruz was asked about Hillary Clinton’s role in Benghazi. He noted that when his daughter lies, she gets a “spanking,” and that “voters have a way of administering a spanking” as well. LIKE THIS? GET MORE OF OUR BEST REPORTING AND ANALYSIS
The crowd loved it, but reporters on the tour quickly wrote up the exchange with a slight twinge of horror at a “spanking” analogy that involved the most prominent woman in American politics. By the time Cruz got to his next event in Cresco two hours later, “spanking” was trending on Twitter back in Washington.
Cruz knows when he’s baiting reporters, and relishes it—and so do his supporters. One of Cruz’s big laugh lines on the campaign trail is that, by the end of his presidency, “there’s gonna be a whole lot of newspaper reporters and editors and journalists that have checked themselves into therapy.”
About 12 hours before Ted Cruz began his “Cruzin’ to Caucus” bus tour that day, a Philadelphia police officer was shot by a local man claiming allegiance to ISIS. Right-wing radio buzzed with the news all morning. Rush Limbaugh began several segments with updates on the officer’s condition.
When Cruz got to a lunchtime event in Osage (population 3,619), a man who said both his sons were sheriff’s deputies asked about the shooting and opined that “We need to either send ISIS running, or put them in their hole in the sand.” ”Along with your titanium spine,” he asked Cruz, “do you have the brass ones to do that also?”
Cruz, who had already worked the shooting into his normal stump speech, thanked the man for “officially the most colorful question” he’d received on the bus tour, and then teed off on President Obama, not unsubtly blaming the administration for the officer’s mortal wounds.
“One of the most shameful things we’ve seen in the last seven years is President Obama and his attorneys general repeatedly attacking and vilifying law enforcement, holding them out for public ridicule and attack,” he said. Cruz pivoted to the events in Ferguson and Baltimore, and noted the increased crime rate after the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray—also Obama’s fault. “What happens when you attack cops for doing their job?” Cruz asked. “They naturally pull back.”
There was a time, about a year ago, when the anti-establishment leader of the Iowa polls could have sounded much different. Senator Rand Paul was widely considered to be a dark horse in Iowa, where libertarian voters delivered his father a third-place finish in 2012, only three points behind the winner, Rick Santorum. Paul, who opened an office in Detroit in late 2013 for conservative outreach to the black community, traveled to Ferguson to meet with local leaders after the killing of Michael Brown. He openly backed a voter drive in black neighborhoods there. “If we want to win elections, we’ve got to try to compete for African-American votes,” Paul said at the time.
Cruz has taken that strategy—backed by the Republican National Committee in its famous postmortem following Mitt Romney’s loss—and essentially set it on fire. He has no inclination to talk about police relations with black communities, other than to defend law enforcement. Cruz has pushed an equally uncompromising line on immigration reform. He routinely bashes “amnesty” and uses it as a cudgel against Senator Marco Rubio, who lent his name to bipartisan immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship in 2013.
On his bus tour of Iowa, Cruz was accompanied by the state’s fourth-district Congressman, Steve King, who is arguably the most powerful foe of immigration reform in either chamber of Congress. Long before Trump, King pioneered painting undocumented immigrants as drug mules and criminals, claiming that many have “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’ve been hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” Cruz made King a national co-chair of his presidential campaign.
In stark contrast to anything Rand Paul might have put together—a new Republican party for a changing America—Cruz clearly sees Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign as a template. Reagan advanced Nixon’s Southern strategy of exploiting racial tensions to turn out white voters (he began his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a small town where civil-rights activists were murdered several years prior) and also cemented the evangelical right as a fundamental part of the Republican coalition.
Evangelicals helped deliver Republicans the White House in all but two elections from 1980 until 2004, but its influence has waned in recent years. Cruz’s desire to revive it was obvious from day one of his campaign, which Cruz launched at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.
In early January, Cruz stood alongside evangelical leader James Dobson in Iowa and declared, “If we allow non-believers to elect our leaders, we shouldn’t be surprised when our government doesn’t reflect our values.”
Throughout his January tour of Iowa, Cruz began his stump speech by invoking God’s blessing for the state. When he outlined five actions he planned to take on his first day in office, three were obvious appeals to evangelicals. First, President Cruz would immediately beginning a federal investigation into Planned Parenthood “and those horrible videos.”
He would also issue a government-wide edict against “religious persecution,” with the implication that it is currently targeting Christians. Cruz said under his administration, American soldiers would enjoy “the right to seek out and worship God almighty with all of [their] hearts, minds, and souls, and their superior officer has nothing to say about it.” (American troops are already free to pray, but Cruz is referencing a conspiracy theory popular on the evangelical right that Obama banned prayer in the military. In reality, the Defense Department simply issued a rule against proselytizing, which forbid officers and chaplains from trying to convert people under their command to a different faith.)
Cruz added that he would shred the Iranian nuclear deal, and “begin the process of moving the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, the once and eternal capital of Israel.”
One key test for the most conservative evangelicals is whether a candidate would ban abortion even in cases of rape or incest. Marco Rubio, also making a play for evangelicals, doesn’t support a rape exception, but does his best to avoid saying so directly. “My goal is to save as many lives as possible, and I’ll support anything that does that. Even if it has exceptions,” he has said.
But Cruz doesn’t sugar-coat it. When a man posed the question to Cruz at a rally in Decorah, Cruz said he is “absolutely” opposed abortion in the case of rape. “As horrible as that crime is, it is not the baby’s fault,” he said. “It is not the baby’s fault, and it does not make sense to blame the child, the innocent child who through no fault of himself or herself—it makes no sense to sacrifice that child’s life.” After some heckling by a crowd that was clearly on Cruz’s side, the questioner left before Cruz finished his answer.
By speaking the right language, and sewing up the endorsement of people like Falwell and Bob Vander Plaats, the hugely influential and politically active evangelical leader in Iowa who backed both of the state’s primary winners in 2008 (Mike Huckabee) and 2012 (Rick Santorum), Cruz has captured the religious-right vote there. His current polling lead in Iowa is largely due to strong evangelical support; in a recent poll, Cruz had twice as many evangelical supporters as Ben Carson, and three times as many as Donald Trump.
Cruz closed every campaign stop with a plea to attendees: that they pray every day until the caucus. “Just one minute saying, ‘Father God, please continue this awakening, continue this revival. Awaken the body of Christ to pull us back from the abyss,” he implored, before reciting Second Chronicles 7:14, where God speaks to Solomon.
“If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray, and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear their prayers and I will forgive their sins, and I will heal their lands.” After the recitation, Cruz noted it was the bible verse Ronald Reagan had his hand upon when he took the oath of office in 1981.
This all represents a serious rebellion against Republican leadership on the strategic level, but Cruz’s policy apostasy is much less pronounced. Comprehensive immigration reform would likely be off the table under President Cruz, and he would fully eliminate the corporate tax instead of just lowering it. He’s also fond of red-meat policy proposals like “shutting down the IRS.”
But broadly speaking, Cruz’s platform is a fairly standard menu of slashing tax cuts, steep deregulation (he likes to joke that the only difference between locusts and regulators are that “you can’t use pesticide on regulators”) and increased defense spending. He’s somebody that Republicans in Congress would find generally agreeable.
Why, then, hasn’t a single Republican governor or Senator endorsed Cruz’s campaign?
The party establishment correctly sees Cruz as someone who has demagogued them for strictly personal gain. In 2013, congressional Republicans were well-positioned to extract some big concessions from Obama in budget negotiations after the president was weakened by the disastrous roll-out of healthcare.gov, and as nervous Senate Democrats looked ahead to a rough midterm election. But Cruz swooped in and single-handedly demanded the impossible goal of stopping Obamacare in the budget deal.
The conservative grassroots quickly mobilized to this cause, the government shut down when Democrats refused to give in to the obviously over-reaching demands. Republican favorability ratings plummeted, albeit temporarily, and when the dust settled and a budget deal was signed, the GOP didn’t get much of anything.
The only Republican to benefit was Ted Cruz, gaining both fame and fortune from grassroots conservatives after the episode. His fundraising totals reached new heights in the final quarter of 2013, and he is now armed with campaign trail stories about taking on the weak-kneed wimps who lead the GOP. He often jokes that he needs “a food taster in the member’s dining room back in Washington.”
For all of their loathing, GOP elites seem powerless to stop Cruz. He has three large SuperPACs backing him, each funded by a different ultra-wealthy benefactor. Robert Mercer, a hedge-fund billionaire who got extremely rich by using computer models to outsmart the stock market, is one of the financiers; Mercer’s company has been the subject of both IRS and congressional investigations for potentially shorting the federal government a whopping $6 billion in taxes. (Mercer must love Cruz’s line about abolishing the IRS.)
The Wilks family of Texas, who made their fortune in fracking, funds another of the Cruz Super PACs. Their interest isn’t just energy extraction, however—the Wilks see themselves as religious crusaders trying to reinstill Christian values in a lost nation. One of their preoccupations is teaching the Bible in public schools. “[Students] are being taught the other ideas, the gay agenda, every day out in the world so we have to stand up and explain to them that that’s not real, that’s not proper, it’s not right,” Farris Wilks explained recently on the Christian Broadcasting Network.
The third Super PAC is funded primarily by Toby Neugebauer, an energy investor from Texas, who donated $10 million earlier this year, one of the largest individual donations of the 2016 cycle. Neugebauer is a strictly transactional player, who in the past flew then-Governor Rick Perry around on his private jet to ply him for better access to shale formations in north Texas.
Flush with all this cash, Cruz has paid keen attention to new rules governing the Republican primary. After 2012, when Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum mounted uncomfortably strong challenges to Mitt Romney, the RNC made a new rule that nobody can be nominated without winning a majority of the vote in at least eight primary states. This was designed to prevent insurgent candidates from running close second and thirds to the chosen establishment nominee in more moderate states, racking up potentially enough delegates to win or at least force a convention fight.
But this rule is already backfiring on the RNC, because with such a crowded field of candidates, nobody is foreseeably going to get above 50 percent in any of the early states—and nobody will until a lot of candidates drop out.
As noted by The Wall Street Journal last year, Cruz spotted this potential problem and began quietly sending emissaries to Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Virgin Islands. Each of these territories counts as a primary state, and if Cruz can run the table in those territories, he already has five of the eight majority votes needed to qualify for the Republican nomination. Cruz’s former Harvard Law professor, Alan Dershowitz, has called Cruz “off-the-charts brilliant,” and you certainly get a sense of that watching Cruz make his run for the White House.
Combined with the fact Cruz is running a close second nationally in polls and is well-positioned to grab any Trump voters who eventually abandon ship, he may just be the most well-positioned candidate for the Republican nomination. It seems unlikely Cruz’s retrograde approach to politics would be successful in a general election, but if he gets that far, he’d become one of only two people who can feasibly become president. He must like those odds.After the mudbath of the Republican debate in Detroit a few days previous, the face-off between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in a Democratic presidential debate in Flint on Sunday, two days before today's primary, seemed tame by comparison. But it was easily the most sharp-elbowed exchange between the two so far this election season. As in our Truth Squads of
, we fished out Michigan-specific claims made by the Democratic candidates during the two-hour event. We begin with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, starting with her most troublesome statements.
Who:
Hillary Clinton
What:
Statements during March 6 Democratic candidates' debate in Flint
The Call:
Foul
Statements under review
"(Bernie Sanders) was against the auto bailout. In January of 2009, President-elect Obama asked everybody in the Congress to vote for the bailout. The money was there, and had to be released in order to save the American auto industry and 4 million jobs, and to begin the restructuring....I voted to save the auto industry. He voted against the money that ended up saving the auto industry."
Listening to Clinton's accusation at Sunday's debate, a Democratic primary voter in Michigan might be forgiven for concluding Sanders was against the 2009 auto bailout...in large part because Clinton literally said he "was against the auto bailout." That statement is untrue. Sanders was not against the auto bailout. He favored extending help to U.S. auto companies at the time, but opposed another part of that legislation that was to bailout large financial firms. Let's go to
that begins in fall 2008 to unpack what makes Clinton's attack misleading. Recall that the nation was in full-blown fiscal crisis with large financial institutions collapsing and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac placed under conservatorship by the Treasury Department. That October, Congress passed and then-President George W. Bush signed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (or TARP), authorizing up to $700 billion to help strengthen the financial sector. Sanders was not a fan. In December, Congress tried to pass a separate $14 billion package for the wounded auto industry, a measure that both Sanders and Clinton supported. But that effort failed. So Bush, by then a lame duck, countered by setting aside part of the TARP package to aid U.S. automakers. Then in January, just before President Obama took office, some lawmakers tried to block a new release of TARP funds that would have also helped the auto companies. Sanders was among this group, but again because of his objections to the Wall Street bailout, not to auto aid, as he made clear at the time.
"I know the state of Michigan has a rainy day fund for emergencies. What is more important than the health and well-being of the people, particularly children? It is raining lead in Flint, and the state is derelict in not coming forward with the money that is required."
What is required to correct, or at least mitigate, the damage done by lead in Flint's municipal water supply is a figure that changes often. The damage to both people and infrastructure is still being assessed and solutions are being debated. Flint Mayor Karen Weaver, who appears in a Clinton campaign ad, estimates
just to replace damaged pipes. That's a lot of money, a lot more than the state can simply find in a rainy-day fund, which stood at about
. But the legislature has made money available since the crisis emerged in the fall. The most recent state allocation was $30 million for residential water bills; but in various pieces,
"Well, I think that the people here in the region, who knew about this and failed to follow what you just said, rightly, the law required, have been eliminated from the EPA."
Not exactly. To date, only one EPA official - Susan Hedman, regional administrator - has left the agency, resigning effective Feb. 1. Emails suggest
so far, they remain in their jobs. The agency has been widely criticized for taking a bureaucratic approach to the problem and not moving quickly to correct it.
"I am also going to go after companies like Johnson Controls in Wisconsin. They came and got part of the (auto) bailout because they were an auto parts supplier and now they want to move (their) headquarters to Europe."
During the tense times of the auto bailouts, Johnson Controls, a Wisconsin-based company did indeed
. But much like Ford Motor Co., it didn't receive any direct funding itself, but pushed for help for General Motors and Chrysler, reasoning that if those Detroit companies went down, they would take smaller companies like Johnson Controls with them. In short, Johnson Controls did not get a direct bailout, but benefited indirectly from the aid given to Chrysler and GM. Earlier this year Johnson Controls
with Tyco International that would move its international headquarters from Milwaukee to Cork, Ireland, saving the corporation $150 million a year in taxes. The move has been criticized by both Clinton and Sanders.
"We have a lot of communities right now in our country where the level of toxins in the water, including lead, are way above what anybody should tolerate. We have a higher rate of tested lead in people in Cleveland than in Flint."
No foul here.
even in Michigan, there are cities where children have higher lead levels than they do in Flint, although the reason isn't necessarily water, but other ways lead can get into a human body - lead dust from paint in older homes, mainly. And Cleveland does indeed have alarmingly high levels of lead in children's blood; the New York Times recently reported the percentage of children with elevated lead levels is
.
"I believe, if you look at the data, the situation has only gotten worse with these emergency managers (in Detroit Public Schools) that have put the system further in debt."
This is true. Both the district's finances and academics have deteriorated since 2009 when Gov. Jennifer Granholm appointed the first emergency manager for Detroit Public Schools. In 2009, the DPS deficit was
. By last week, when Gov. Rick Snyder appointed retired Judge Steven Rhodes, who presided over the city's municipal bankruptcy, to be DPS' fifth emergency manager,
. Enrollment over the same period has dropped from about 92,000 students in 2009 to about 46,000 students today.
The call: Foul
A lot of claims were made from the stage in Flint, and this was a debate, with time limits and, realistically, not much time to discuss nuances of policy and current events. But Clinton distorted Sanders' record on the auto-industry bailout, potentially a lethal blow in a state like Michigan. She later acknowledged indirectly that what Sanders objected to was the Wall Street component to the aid package that also helped automakers, but only after being confronted by Sanders. A clear foul. In other claims, as in her assertion that the EPA had cleaned house, she was factually incorrect. She also went too far in declaring that Johnson Controls was bailed out, though the supplier did benefit from the auto aid. But Clinton is correct about the Detroit Public Schools' failure to thrive under state emergency management, and yes, lead is a problem in a lot of places other than Flint.The Benefits of a Smoke-Free Lifestyle
If I Quit Smoking…
You may ask yourself, “What exactly happens if I quit smoking?” If you have even a glimmer of a thought that quitting smoking might not be worthwhile, especially after years of the habit, these live longer, healthier and wealthier benefits will surely change your mind. “If I quit smoking?” Make that when.
Add Years Back to Your Life
That sounds like a lofty promise for quitting. But when cigarettes are gone from your life, you do in fact greatly improve your chances of living longer.
According to a study by Sir Richard Doll and colleagues that appeared in the BMJ in 2004, people who were able to stop smoking before they were thirty years of age lived almost as long as those who had never picked up a cigarette. The researchers also discovered that three years of healthy life were added to people who stopped smoking in their sixties.
What Quitting Does to Your Body
Although you may not consciously be aware of the benefits of quitting in the first few days, your body is actually reaping the rewards almost as soon as you’ve stubbed out your last cigarette.
Twenty minutes after your last puff your blood pressure and heart rate drop; within 12 hours, your carbon monoxide levels are back to normal. When you were smoking, carbon monoxide levels in your blood were raised, which hindered its ability to carry oxygen to your cells.
Your lungs will start to regain some of their normal functions within two to three months of quitting. You will be able to breathe easier and will be coughing much less than people who continue to smoke. Every single cigarette you smoke damages your breathing.
After one year of quitting smoking your risk of heart attack drops sharply. During your years of devotion to cigarettes, the smoke you inhaled damaged the structure and function of blood vessels, which increased the risk of a dangerous build-up of plaque in your arteries. Over time, plaque hardens and narrows the arteries, increasing the risk of a heart attack. After two to five years, the chance of you having a stroke is nearly the same as that of a non-smoker.
Your risk of cancer of the mouth, throat, esophagus and bladder is cut in half five years after quitting smoking. Tobacco smoke damages the DNA in your cells, the 'instruction manual' that tells cells how to develop. This can cause cells to grow out of control which is how cancerous tumors begin to form. According to the 2010 U.S. Surgeon General's Report, one of every three cancer deaths in the United States would not happen if nobody smoked.
Remember that when you quit, it’s not only your health that will improve but that of your children as well. Secondhand tobacco smoke damages the tissues of unborn babies and it can lead to short- and long-term health concerns in children, such as bronchitis and pneumonia.
Further Benefits if You Quit Smoking
Although there are many scientifically proven benefits to quitting smoking, there’s a whole world of social and lifestyle advantages to kicking the habit too. These include:
Saving lots of money: Smokers typically pay higher life and health insurance premiums, and not having to buy cigarettes anymore can keep a lot of cash in your wallet.
Leading a more active lifestyle (no more gasping for air on that hike)
Smelling a lot sweeter – you may have not noticed the foul odor smoking can cause...but it’s likely that others have.
Feeling more confident that you’ll be there to take part in happy future events, such as graduations and weddings
Being a healthy living role model to those around you
Whatever age you are, it is never too late to give up smoking and enjoy the benefits of a cigarette-free lifestyle.
By Paul Arnold
Sources
Doll R, Peto R, Boreham J, Sutherland I. "Mortality in relation to smoking: 50 years' observations on male British doctors". BMJ. 2004. 328 (7455): 1519.
Office of the Surgeon General. A Report of the Surgeon General: How Tobacco Smoke Causes Disease. 2010Screenwriter Vanessa Taylor has taken part in Jeff Goldsmith‘s tremendous Q&A podcast to discuss her first produced feature film, Hope Springs – a romantic drama in which Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones play an older couple reigniting their relationship.
Before Taylor and Goldsmith got going on that, however, talk revolved around her TV work, from Alias to the upcoming, third season of Game of Thrones.
So this following quite is Taylor explaining what she’s learning from head writers D.B Weiss and David Benioff on that show.
I’ve actually been learning a particular lesson this season. My bosses [Weiss and Benioff] seem to be becoming more visual storytellers. All of the episodes of the third season seem to open with a particularly cinematic opening. And they’re less about clever dialogue and transition and more about these huge cinematic… just the visuals of it all. And so I’m |
drugs to treat malaria. But for a long time, it had to be derived from the sweet wormwood plant Artemisia annua — a slow and expensive process.
That changed in 2013, when pharmaceutical firm Sanofi used synthetic biology to produce artemisinin at an industrial scale. The company did this by taking the plant's genes for making artemisinic acid and putting them in yeast, allowing them to produce the drug more quickly and efficiently. The effort is widely cited as the first large-scale drug project to use synthetic biology and as a major achievement for the field.
2) Creating bacteria from scratch In 2010, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute published the results of a 15-year, $40 million project to make the first synthetic cell. How did they do it? They took the genomic code from one bacterial species, made it in a lab from scratch, and then put it into an entirely different species — that lived.
The genome they made also included some deleted genes and new sequences that acted as watermarks. And, all in all, the scientists created the first life-form living on completely synthetic genetic material. They called it the first synthetic cell. (However, they didn't say that they created life itself from scratch. Had they put the DNA into an already-dead cell, nothing would have happened.)
This work didn't create bacteria that was useful for any particular purpose, but it was an important proof of principle that a cell can survive on lab-made DNA.
3) Creating yeast from scratch In 2014, a team of researchers from many institutions including Johns Hopkins University revealed that they had synthesized an entire yeast chromosome from scratch. And the chromosome functioned when put back into a yeast cell. This was an especially impressive feat because yeast's genetic material is more complex than bacteria's.
The scientists called the DNA they made a "designer chromosome" because they deleted any sequences that they found unnecessary and added in elements that will allow future researchers to easily delete any gene they want. The goal is to rewrite the entire yeast genome in five years. So far, they've done about 3 percent of it, by length. Only 15 more chromosomes to go.
So how do you design an organism from scratch?
The main tool here is the computer. Researchers work with the code of existing organisms' genetic material as essentially a text file, tweaking it, deleting parts, adding parts, adding parts from other organisms, whatever they want.
Then they need to take that information and turn it into physical DNA. So they use a DNA synthesis machine that creates actual DNA from the necessary molecules. DNA that has been made by a machine is considered "synthetic DNA."
The researchers have to get that DNA into the organism of choice, and the techniques here can vary depending on the type of cell. Shorter chunks of DNA are easier to work with than longer chunks, which is why you see many small DNA pieces in the graphic below (from Nature News).
How do scientists program cells to act like a computer?
This is an approach that has garnered a lot of interest. It's essentially designing genes to function in logical circuits, sort of like computers. It has attracted work from many academic groups and startups. And even high school students are now participating in the yearly synthetic bio iGEM competition, which included 245 teams in 2013.
Here's the idea. Genes can be thought of like an input/output system that already does some simple logic. The inputs are molecules that interact with genes to help turn them on or off. The outputs are what the gene makes after it's turned on — usually a protein of some sort. For example, the gene for the enzyme that digests lactose naturally turns on whenever there's lactose around, but not glucose.
SCIENTISTS HAVE DESIGNED CELLS TO DO ADDITION OR SUBTRACTION
Scientists have come up with clever ways to manipulate, combine, and tweak these stretches of DNA to do some pretty interesting things.
In 2012, Swiss researchers showed that they could get mammalian cells to do math. They created genes that only turn on if two particular inputs are there at the same time — so that the genes essentially compute an "AND" function. And they made others that compute other functions. By combining basic logical functions — "AND," "OR," "NOT," and combinations of them — they got cells to do binary addition and subtraction like computers do and then show the right answer by glowing red or green. Others have done projects that also involved memory.
In another example (pictured), a team from the University of California at San Francisco created a plate of E. coli bacteria that can sense and then trace out an edge of a picture. It's a demonstration of simple logic that could someday get built up into far more complex code. The logic they programmed is as follows: (1) If you sense light, make a certain cell signaling molecule. (2) If you're sensing the signaling molecule (meaning you're near a cell that's in the light) and are not yourself sensing light, then manufacture a dark pigment.
Researchers have also made DNA elements that are toggle switches that can be turned on or off, ones that reduce noise in response to negative feedback, and ones that create an oscillating signal, among others.
There are now thousands of such interchangeable building blocks held in various databases, such as the public one run by the BioBricks Foundation. The idea is to use these tools to engineer living machines that can perform a variety of tasks.
What about changing the molecules of DNA itself?
Normally, the cellular factories that construct proteins from DNA instructions are doing so from a limited number of types of parts. There are only 20 standard amino acids — the building blocks that make up the estimated 19,629 human proteins.
But what if an engineer wants to use a lab-made amino acid, a new widget that's never been seen in nature?
First, they'd have to mess with DNA. The DNA that codes for proteins is read three letters at a time, and all of DNA's four letters (A, C, T, G) already have a hard translation for what amino acids they code for. And all of the combinations are already taken.
SOME SCIENTISTS WANT TO EXPAND THE DNA ALPHABET WITH MORE LETTERS
So, in order to use new amino acids, some engineers want to expand the DNA alphabet with even more letters. This is tricky because it requires retrofitting artificial DNA letters onto eons-old cellular machinery.
In May, 2014, researchers published in Nature that after screening some 300 possible new DNA letters, they found ones that E. coli bacteria would accept. They called these new letters X and Y. The bacteria were able to use their existing machinery to copy DNA containing X and Y for 24 generations (about 15 hours). But researchers have only shown that the cells could copy the DNA, not actually use it. Next up, they'll need to demonstrate that they can get cells to read these new letters to actually make proteins.
Other groups have been focusing on the chemical backbone that holds DNA together. They've created DNA with several other backbones, called XNAs, and have shown that they can get cells to accept and copy them. One possibility is to use such techniques to make DNA that's hardier and more resistant to degradation.
What are the major challenges in synthetic biology?
1) Designer cells can evolve — in unpredictable ways As helpful as evolution has been for actual life in the real world, life's ever-changing nature is annoying if you're trying to engineer life to become a predictable tool.
Here's why: cells acquire random mutations in their DNA. And some cells will produce more offspring than others or completely die off. The result is that every new generation is slightly different than the one before. That can be an annoyance if, say, you are trying to design cells to perform a specific task in a pharmaceutical factory.
2) Cells are very messy Another challenge is that cells are far more disorganized than a circuit board or computer program. The elements of a circuit board can be lined up in a precise order so that the output of one element can be funneled straight into the input of the next.
But a cell is an altogether messier situation. The molecules in a cell, including those that people are using as inputs and outputs, are generally lumped together in the same space and — literally — jiggling around randomly. So there's a way higher chance of something cross-reacting, and that can cause problems.
3) Mammals' cells are difficult A third challenge is that cells from more complex creatures, like mammals, tend to be far more difficult to engineer than, say, bacteria.
Mammals' cells, for example, usually have two copies of each gene in a cell, whereas bacteria generally have one. Also, the processes that regulate what genes get used are more multilayered and complicated. And inserting and deleting genes in mammals' cells is also far more difficult. (Although in the past few years, a new gene editing system called CRISPR has made deleting genes easier.)
How would I know if my food contains synthetic biology products?
You generally wouldn't know. There's no federal law that requires ingredients from synthetic biology to be labeled. This is the case in the US for all genetically engineered foods, including GMO corn and soy and products made from them.
Several ingredients produced by synthetic organisms (but not actually containing these organisms) are on the market in soaps, cosmetics, and foods. You can read a good review of what's going on with these ingredients and (non-)transparency about them in this New York Times story here.
Isn't there a risk that these artificial cells could escape into the wild?
That's one concern, although researchers aren't usually in the habit of simply sending these organisms to the dump without precautions.
There are generally rules in place for them to kill any lab organisms before disposal, generally in a high-temperature, high-pressure oven called an autoclave. (Even a dead lab mouse that hasn't been genetically altered gets autoclaved first, too.)
In some cases, researchers have made organisms that can only survive in the lab — by, for example, tweaking them to need a nutrient that doesn't exist in the wild. It's also possible that scientists could program a kill switch that would turn on at a certain point. (So, for instance, a cell designed to kill cancer could be programmed to self-destruct after it's done its job.)
Is this going to be one more technology that only the rich will get to use while the rest of the world suffers?
Well, only time will tell. Legally, it's possible to patent most of the things that these people are doing. But it's not necessarily the case that that's how synthetic biology will play out. Many people support an open source model, where all information is free for everyone to use.
In a recent piece in Nature, writer Bryn Nelson describes this debate as a clash between engineers and computer scientists, who tend to favor the open source model, and biotech people, who often argue that patents provide economic incentives for innovation.
So far, synthetic biology has been using both. For example, the people uploading genetic sequences into the BioBricks catalog must affirm that they won't claim the sequences as their own intellectual property. But most companies making commercial products, like drugs and food ingredients, are working under the patent system.
Further reading
Profile of and a Q&A with Craig Venter, the biggest name in synthetic bio
Profile of Jim Collins, synthetic biology pioneer
The New Yorker wrote a big piece on synthetic biology in 2009. Old, but still good.
The debate over unlabeled synthetic biology products on the market'Homeland' filming in the Fan District will cause street closures Friday Copyright by WRIC - All rights reserved Video
RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) -- Showtime series 'Homeland' will be filming in Richmond's Fan District on Friday.
Neighbors are invited to watch the filming from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m., although fans are not allowed to make noise or use flash cameras while filming is happening.
From 3 p.m. Friday until 2 a.m. Saturday, Strawberry Street will be closed between Hanover and Grove Avenues.
Copyright by WRIC - All rights reserved
There will be no parking on Strawberry Street between Grove and Hanover -- or on Grove Avenue's north side between N. Davis and N. Shields -- for most of the day Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. There will also be parking restrictions on Strawberry Street during "wrap day" on Monday.
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Three-and-a-half years ago, the experimental rock outfit Ween called it quits after 25 years. "It's time to move on," Aaron Freeman, aka Gene Ween, told Rolling Stone in May 2012. "I'm retiring Gene Ween."
This Presidents' Day Weekend (February 12 and 13), that retirement will end when the band reunites for two concerts at the 1st Bank Center in Broomfield, Colorado – their first shows since their farewell gig in Denver on New Years' Eve 2012.
In a press release, Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo, Jr. (aka Dean Ween) said that the two shows will be "fucking mind-blowing" and that they will feature "new stuff that nobody has ever heard live before". Check out a poster and trailer for the event below.
Watch Aaron Freeman (Gene Ween) discuss his solo project and working with Skrillex via Pitchfork.tv:
Embedded content is unavailable.In this article, I'm going to walk you through transformations in the canvas, as well as shadows and gradients. Transformations are an extremely valuable set of methods that allow you to start being creative with the way you draw objects on the canvas. Let's get started after the jump!
Setting Up
You're going to use the same HTML template from the previous articles, so open up your favourite editor and paste in the following code:
Here we have nothing more than a basic HTML page with a canvas element and some JavaScript that runs after the DOM has loaded. Nothing crazy.
Translations in Action
Translate essentially shifts the entire coordinate system.
One of the simplest transformations in canvas is translate. This allows you to move the origin point of the 2d rendering context; the (0, 0) position on the canvas. Let me show you what this means.
First, place a square in canvas at the position (0, 0):
It will draw itself at the top left hand edge of the canvas. Still - nothing out of the ordinary here.
Now, try translating the 2d rendering context and drawing another square in the same position:
What do you think will happen? Have a gold star if you guessed that the new square will be drawn at the position (100, 100). No play time for those who guessed wrong. Sorry!
So what happened here then? As far as the code for drawing the second square is concerned, you drew it in the same place as the first square. The reason for this is that you basically shifted the entire coordinate system of the canvas so that its (0, 0) position is now at the place (100, 100).
Does it make a little more sense now? I hope so. It can take a little while to get your head around, but it's a simple concept once you understand it.
You probably wouldn't use this transformation too much on its own, as you could simply draw the second square at (100, 100) to get the same effect. The beauty of translate, though, is that you can combine it with other transformations to do some pretty cool things.
Let's take a look at the next transformation on the list.
Scaling Your Visuals
As you've probably guessed, the scale transformation is used for resizing. More specifically, the scale transformation is used to scale the 2d rendering context.
Remove the code that you worked on with the translate example, and add the following code:
This will draw a standard square at the position (100, 100), with a width and height of 100 pixels. So how do we scale this?
Properties in scale are multipliers for the x and y dimensions.
The scale transformation is used in a similar way to translate, in that it's called before you draw the objects that you want it to be applied to. It's important to point out that the properties in scale are multipliers for the x and y dimensions. This means that a scale of (1, 1) would multiply the size of the 2d rendering context by one, leaving it the same size it was before. A scale of (5, 5) would multiply the size of the 2d rendering context by five, making it five times larger than it was previously. Simple.
In your case you want to double the size of the square, so you apply a scale of (2, 2):
Which results in a square that is two times the size:
However, notice how the square is now being drawn in a different position than it was being drawn before you applied scale. The reason for this is that scale multiplies the size of everything in the 2d rendering context, including coordinates. In your case, the position (100, 100) now becomes (200, 200); the coordinates are twice the size that they would be without being scaled.
To get around this, we can perform a translate that moves the origin of the 2d rendering context to the position that you want to draw the square. If you then apply scale and draw the square at position (0, 0), its position won't be shifted:
Which results in a square that is twice as large as the original, but that is drawn at the same position as the original:
It's being aware of these little quirks in transformations that really helps when using them. Most of the common issues with transformations seems to be a result of not fully understanding how they work.
Rotating Elements
So far, all the transformations that you've dealt with have been pretty unexciting. Fortunately, the rotate transformation is here to save the day, and it's easily my favourite of the bunch.
I'm sure rotate needs no introduction, so let's jump right in and rotate a square 45 degrees (remember that degrees need to be in radians):
Which positions a square at (100, 100) and rotates.. woah, hang on! This doesn't look right:
See what happened? The square seems to be trying to escape the browser window, rather than rotating on the spot at the position (100, 100). This is because rotate, like all the transformations, affects the entire 2d rendering context, and not objects individually.
Here is an illustration of what happens to the coordinate system when you perform a 45 degree rotate :
Notice how the entire coordinate system has rotated 45 degrees from the point of origin (0, 0)? This is what caused the square to look like it was escaping the browser window, simply because the position (100, 100) had been rotated slap bang on the edge of the browser.
The simple way to get around this issue is to combine rotate with translate, like so:
Performing the translate moves the origin point of the 2d rendering context (0, 0) to what should be the central point of the square (150, 150). This means that any rotation will now be based around the position (150, 150). If you then draw a square with a negative x and y position, equal to half of the square's width and height, you'll end up drawing a square that looks like it has been rotated around its central point:
The rotate transformation is likely the hardest of them all to understand fully. It's important to remember that transformations are performed on the entire 2d rendering context, and, if you want to rotate a shape around its central point, you'll need to combine rotate with translate.
Let's move onto something a bit more visually impressive.
Adding Shadows
Adding shadows to objects is delightfully simple.
Canvas comes supplied with a few properties for manipulating the appearance of the objects that are drawn on it, and one set of these properties allows you to add shadows.
Adding shadows to objects is delightfully simple. It simply requires the shadowColor property to be set on the 2d rendering context to a colour that isn't transparent black, and either of the shadowBlur, shadowOffsetX, or shadowOffsetY properties to be set to a value other than 0.
Try out the following code:
This will give the shadow a fifteen pixel blur, and will set the colour to solid black:
Pretty standard stuff so far.
If you set the shadowBlur to 0, change the shadowColor to a light grey, and give a positive shadowOffsetX and shadowOffsetY :
You'll end up with a solid shadow that appears slightly to the right and below the object that has been drawn:
As cool as shadows are, they can be a bit of a resource hog.
It's important to remember that shadows affect everything that is drawn after they are defined, so it's useful to use the save and restore methods to save you from having to reset the shadow properties once you've used them.
Keep in mind that performance can suffer when you're applying a shadow to lots and lots of objects at the same time. In some cases, it might be worth using a PNG image with a shadow instead of drawing an object manually and applying a dynamic shadow using code. We'll cover how to use images with canvas in the next installment of this series.
Creating Gradients
You can create two types of gradients in canvas - linear and radial.
The last features that I want to cover with you in this tutorial are gradients. There are two types of gradients in canvas, the first being linear (straight) gradients. You can create a linear gradient using the createLinearGradient method (surprisingly enough), which looks like this in pseudo-code:
The first set of two arguments are the x and y position of the start of the gradient, and the second set of arguments are the x and y position of the end of the gradient. It's also important to point out that a gradient in canvas is actually a type of colour value, so you apply them to the fillStyle and strokeStyle properties.
Here is an example of how to create a linear gradient that runs from the top of the canvas, all the way to the bottom:
Notice how you assign the gradient to a variable, then use that variable to call the addColorStop method. This method allows you to set the colour at particular points along the gradient. For example, the position 0 would represent the start of the gradient (the first x and y position), and 1 would represent the end of the gradient (the second x and y position). You can also use decimal points between 0 and 1 to assign a colour at a different point along the gradient, like 0.5 would be half way along.
By applying the gradient variable to the fillStyle property, you end up with a nice gradient that goes from white (at position 0 at the top of the canvas), to black (at position 1 at the bottom of the canvas):
But you don't always have to use linear gradients; you can also create radial gradients!
Radial gradients are created with the createRadialGradient method, which looks like this in pseudo-code:
The first set of three arguments are the x and y position as well as the radius of the circle at the start of the gradient, with the final three arguments representing the x and y position as well as the radius of the circle at the end of the gradient.
Sound confusing, right? It is a bit, so let's jump in and create a radial gradient to see what happens:
You've created a radial gradient that has a starting point at (350, 350) with a radius of 0, and an ending point at (50, 50) with a radius of 100. Can you guess what this will look like? 20 points if you guessed it would look like this:
If you're anything like me, that's not what I expected to see. I've used radial gradients before in applications like Adobe Photoshop, and they look nothing like that! So why does it look like this then? Well, that's what it's meant to look like, weirdly.
Check out this diagram that depicts exactly how a radial gradient works in canvas:
Interesting, isn't it? It basically allows you to create a cone shape, but what if you want to create a proper radial gradient like the one in Photoshop? Fortunately, it's simple.
Creating a proper radial gradient just requires you to place the two circles of the gradient at exactly the same x and y position, making sure that one of the gradient circles is larger than the other:
The code above creates a radial gradient that sits at the centre of the canvas. One of the circles in the gradient has a radius of 0, while the other has a radius of 250. The result is a traditional radial gradient that travels from the centre of the canvas outwards, like so:
That looks better! I was honestly amazed when I saw how radial gradients were implemented in canvas. I bet it's tripped a lot of people up when they see that cone shape. Oh well, at least you know how to create proper ones now.
It's worth pointing out that gradients in canvas are also quite intensive operations. If you want to cover the entire canvas in a gradient, I'd first consider applying a CSS3 gradient background to the canvas element itself.
Wrapping Up
In this article, we reviewed how to perform basic transformations on the canvas, including translations, scaling, and rotation. You also learned how to add shadows to objects, and how to create gradients. It doesn't sound like like much, but transformations, in particular, form the backbone of some of the coolest stuff that can be achieved in canvas.
In the next entry in "Canvas from Scratch", we're going to break away from drawing objects and take a look at how to manipulate images and video in the canvas. This is where things start to get really interesting! Stay tuned!Why my kids are better prepared for fiscal responsibility than DC
Yesterday, I “helped” my second-oldest open her first credit union checking account. I say that I “helped,” but my only real contribution was telling her it’s okay if she doesn’t buy checks but keeps the 5 temporary checks she got from them as backups. “You won’t need them,” I said. “It’s 2017. Money is easier now than ever before.”
She’s still in high school but I put her one one of my credit cards to get her established. Having her as an authorized user gives her credit history while protecting her from making silly teenager mistakes. Every thing she uses it on must be approved, documented, and accounted for in the end. Now that she has a debit card, I’ll be using it to pay the expenses she accumulates on my card every month. If she’s ever short, I’ll work out a plan to cover it for her temporarily, but I anticipate she’ll never be short. So far she’s just used it for teenage essentials: gas, food, and an occasional pair of shoes when she’s worked extra hours.
As an active high school senior, she holds two jobs. I disagree with this particular choice but I support her right to make it. I wouldn’t say she’s overworked, necessarily, but it does create scheduling problems from time to time. She will learn from now until graduation one of two things: overextending herself brings challenges that she’ll want to avoid in the future or she’s capable of managing her time even when split between school, home, and work. Either way, it’s a great lesson I wish I’d have learned at her age.
Spend only what you can afford. Pay all of your bills on time. Work hard to generate enough revenue. Don’t go into debt unless absolutely necessary. These lessons are easy for a parent to teach a child, but they’ve clearly gone unlearned in Washington DC. More accurately, they’ve been ignored. The Democrats abandoned any semblance of fiscal responsibility a hundred years ago. The Republicans seem to ebb and flow in their understanding. Unfortunately, the current GOP-controlled Congress seems to have let those ideas completely fall to the wayside.
Obamacare must be fully repealed. Any replacement for it should be designed to systematically remove the federal government from the insurance business altogether. Defenders of the current plan will say that it’s a repeal that’s fixing the problem the only practical way going forward. The reality is that it’s the only way they imagine being able to pretend like they’re doing the right thing while still being economically irresponsible for the sake of votes.
One thing is guaranteed: if a Democrat were president today (God forbid), Congress would pass full repeal and either a conservative replacement or no replacement at all. Why? They’d know it would get vetoed. The fact that whatever they pass will likely be signed has forced them to reveal their real intention of continuing down the path towards big government fiscal failure just to avoid political losses in 2018.Abstract Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are often accompanied by atypical visual, auditory, and tactile sensory behavior. Evidence also suggests alterations of the olfactory system, but the pattern of findings appears mixed. To quantify this pattern systematically, we conducted a meta-analysis. Studies were included if they examined olfactory function (i.e., odor threshold, or odor identification) in ASD compared with healthy age-matched control groups. We also coded for the potential moderators gender, age, and IQ. Articles were identified through computerized literature search using Web of Science, PubMed, and Scopus databases. A total of 11 articles compared odor threshold and/or odor identification between cases and controls (for threshold, n = 143 ASD and 148 controls; and for identification, n = 132 ASD and 139 controls). Effects sizes showed a substantial heterogeneity. As a result, the 95% prediction intervals were wide and ranged between a large negative and a large positive effect size for odor threshold, [-1.86, 2.05], and for odor identification, [-1.51, 2.52]. Exploratory analyses suggested that age and IQ may be potential moderators. To conclude, the large heterogeneity is consistent with the notion of both hyposensitivity and hypersensitivity in individuals with ASD. However, future research needs to predict and test the specific direction of the effect to provide convincing evidence for atypical olfactory functions in ASD. Keywords: autism, olfactory sense, meta-analysis, odor threshold, odor identification
Discussion The goal of the present study was to summarize quantitatively the empirical evidence for changes in olfactory function in individuals with ASD. Although only few studies with small sample sizes were available, the meta-analysis provided strong evidence that the effect sizes varied substantially among the studies for both threshold and identification tasks. This heterogeneity is clearly apparent in the large 95% prediction intervals (see Figures, ) for the threshold task [-1.86, 2.05] and for the identification task [-1.51, 2.52]. These intervals imply that for a future study, the true effect size may fall between very negative and very positive. As such, the results are consistent with the idea of both hyposensitivity and hypersensitivity in individuals with ASD. To investigate this heterogeneity, we explored the role of potential moderators that may be associated with hyposensitivity and hypersensitivity: proportion of males, mean age, and mean IQ score in the ASD group. For threshold, mean age below 30 and mean IQ below 113 tended to be associated with hyposensitivity whereas mean age above 35 and mean IQ above 113 tended to be associated with hypersensitivity. However, mean age and mean IQ correlated with each other (r = 0.72). This makes it difficult to separate the unique contribution of each variable. For identification, increases in mean IQ were associated with increased hyposensitivity. These results are surprising because they suggest that mean IQ is associated with opposite effects depending on the task: increased mean IQ is associated with hypersensitivity on a threshold task and hyposensitivity on an identification task. However, these findings from the meta-regression need to be interpreted carefully (Borenstein et al., 2009). First, they are based on few studies with low precision and thus, the findings are very tentative. Second, they are based on mean differences in the groups and may not apply to individual data (i.e., ecological fallacy). Third, mean IQ may be only a correlate of the underlying, yet unknown mechanism. Given the substantial heterogeneity among observed effect sizes, future research should focus on a particular group of individuals to establish hyposensitivity or hypersensitivity (or neither). Notably, the present results imply that 35-year old males with ASD and an IQ around 115 would show opposite effects on threshold and identification tasks, that is, hypersensitivity on the threshold task and hyposensitivity on the identification task. To determine if this is not simply a chance finding, future research should study well-characterized individuals with standardized methods and consider the role of potential moderators. Any potential moderators should be reported completely to avoid missing data. Sample size should be large to reduce the uncertainty in the obtained estimate. Although a power analysis is often recommended to determine sample size, a power analysis seems cumbersome in the present context, as the effect sizes were heterogeneous and their direction was unclear. Critically, a power analysis is meaningful only from the perspective of null hypothesis significance testing with its focus on the p-value. In contrast, a Bayesian approach would allow researchers to analyze the data after every participant (Wagenmakers et al., 2015). This simplifies data collection because participants would not have to be recruited unnecessarily. In the Bayesian approach, participants might be recruited until the evidence is strong (e.g., Bayes Factor > 10). In the analysis, a default prior could be used that predicts only the direction of the effect (hyposensitivity or hypersensitivity), and subsequent analyses could evaluate the robustness of the findings depending on the prior (Wagenmakers et al., 2016). Another advantage is that Bayesian analysis can provide support for the null hypothesis (i.e., there is no group difference), something that null hypothesis significance testing cannot provide, even in high-powered studies (Dienes, 2016); for an example in addiction research, see here (Beard et al., 2016). Also, Bayesian analyses permit the calculation of credible intervals (Wiens and Nilsson, 2016). These capture the actual precision of the estimate, whereas it is incorrect to interpret confidence intervals in terms of precision (Morey et al., 2015). Furthermore, the study should be pre-registered and designed to minimize risk of bias (Nosek and Lakens, 2014; Nuzzo, 2015). Last, the raw data should be available online to facilitate future meta-analyses (Nosek et al., 2015; Munafò et al., 2017). In particular, meta-analyses that use the raw data (rather than aggregated data) can model individual data to avoid typical fallacies such as the ecological fallacy (Lakens et al., 2016).
Conclusion The present meta-analysis provides convincing evidence for heterogeneity among effect sizes that exceeds that expected by chance. Demographic variables such as age and IQ may account, at least in part, for this heterogeneity, and their effects may differ depending on the task. Future studies should be conducted on well-defined samples with standard methods to assess olfactory functions in ASD. If a study is pre-registered and uses Bayesian statistics, participants could be added consecutively until the evidence is convincing for hyposensitivity, hypersensitivity, or neither.
Author Contributions ML and SW developed the study concept. ML and CT jointly searched the databases and extracted the data. SW analyzed the data and produced the figures. ML, CT, and SW wrote the manuscript.
Conflict of Interest Statement The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Acknowledgments Funded by internal funds from Stockholm University, a program research grant from The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (M14-0375:1) to ML, and a research grant from the Swedish Research Council (2015-01181) to SW. We thank Kim Ströberg for assistance in data extraction.Foreign soldiers who fought for Ukraine have been abandoned by Kiev Friday, April 1, 2016 8:40:00 PM
Photo: A Russian citizen and veteran of the War in the Donbas hands President Poroshenko an application for Ukrainian citizenship in November of 2015. His request was denied in February of this year. He is the husband of a Ukrainian citizen, and the father of ten Ukrainian children. He is now facing deportation to Russia.
On Monday, March 28th, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a decree amending the procedure for granting citizenship to foreigners serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, a move that came in response to mounting pressure on the Ukrainian President to provide citizenship to foreigners who fought in the war in the Donbas against pro-Russian separatists. To many who answered Kiev’s call to come to the Donbas to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression, however, Poroshenko’s decree on Monday is little more than a slap in the face, as they still find themselves facing deportation from the country.
When Russian-backed separatists started the war in eastern Ukraine, hundreds of foreigners flocked to the country in defense of Kiev. As the majority of foreign volunteers came from Belarus and Russia, countries that share visa-free regimes with Ukraine, most entered the country as “tourists”, with a valid stay of up to 90 days. Not only have most foreign volunteers from these two countries overstayed their authorized period, most are unable to return to their home countries due to fear of reprisal.
While Poroshenko’s amendment on Monday has been presented as a gesture of respect and indebtedness to the foreigners who fought for Ukraine’s freedom, a closer examination of the document reveals that the law has, in fact, changed |
parents and even this Christmas a friend bought me one, which he’d painted to look like a member of Kiss, Gene Simmons.
'Alice Cooper signed my Alice Cooper custom pony and sang the My Little Pony theme tune and I couldn’t believe he just sang that. And he said he had daughters that liked the show.
'It’s great fun to be able to collect something and the ponies are so cute who couldn’t love them?
'Some people like football, some people collect stamps or coins. I collect My Little Pony and it makes me happy. It’s always great to get a new pony and take it to put it in its place in the Pony Room.'
Miss Butler says she finds her Pony Room comforting because it reminds her of her childhood.
'My Pony Room is my little piece of the world. All mine! I can just be me there, a proud geeky collector of small colourful ponies.
'My Dad gets involved with the Pony Room periodically when I need his help installing yet more shelves,' she added.
'Mum just likes to come and look at them because they’re pretty. Everyone in my life is really supportive of my collecting. I think it helps being an “out and proud” collector who isn’t afraid to say “I collect My Little Pony”.
'If you say it with that much confidence and talk about it like its normal, because for me it is normal, then who can really argue with that?
'Even the people I work with don’t mind me bleating on about them and when I had some delivered to work once, I had a crowd of women around me pointing out which one they liked best.
'In short, it’s fun. Why be all serious when you can have My Little Pony instead?'
Miss Butler's partner Joe said: 'It took a bit of getting used to but I like it now, especially with how happy it makes her'
The start of a great collection: Miss Butler loved playing with her My Little Pony toys when she was growing up in the 1980s but gave it all away to a charity shop when she left home
Nostalgia: But as she was about to leave university, Miss Butler got a pang for her ponies and started up the collection again
Skydancer army: The original My Little Pony toy line ran from 1982 to 1995 and included a 'Skydancer' range that featured ponies with wingsBill Campbell, a longtime Apple board member, has passed away after long battle with cancer, reports Re/code.Bill Campbell’s relationship with Apple dates back to 1983, when he joined the company as vice president of Marketing. Next to Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Mike Markkula, Campbell was the longest-serving board member in the company’s history.Here's what Apple CEO Tim Cook and Campbell had to say when he retired in 2014.“Bill’s contributions to Apple are immeasurable and we owe him a huge debt of gratitude. On behalf of the board and the entire company, I want to thank him for being a leader, a mentor and a friend," said Cook. “When Bill joined Apple’s board, the company was on the brink of collapse. He not only helped Apple survive, but he’s led us to a level of success that was simply unimaginable back in 1997.”“Over the past 17 years, it’s been exciting to watch history unfold as Apple emerged as the premier technology company in the world. Working with Steve and Tim has been a joy," said Campbell. “The company today is in the best shape that I have seen it, and Tim’s leadership of his strong team will allow Apple to continue to be great going forward.”Campbell ran companies like Intuit and held key positions at Apple, Claris, and Go. He also served on various boards. Many tech leaders including Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Jeff Bezos looked to him for advice, leading to his nickname, 'The Coach'. Our sincerest condolences to his friends and family.Joe Skipper / REUTERS Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) (L) speaks to reporters as a previously caught live Burmese python is held by Wildlife Commissioner Ron Bergeron (R), near in the Everglades, Florida January 17, 2013.
Senate Democrats who oppose gay marriage are becoming an endangered species. Today Florida Senator Bill Nelson told the Tampa Bay Times: “Simply put, if The Lord made homosexuals as well as heterosexuals, why should I discriminate against their civil marriage? I shouldn’t, and I won’t.” Nelson added that he will add his name to the petition of senators urging the Supreme Court to declare prohibitions on gay marriage unconstitutional.
Nelson joins six other Senate Democrats—Tom Carper (Del.), Bob Casey (Pa.), Kay Hagan (N.C.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Mark Warner (Va.), and Claire McCaskill (Mo.)—who have flipped on the issue of same-sex marriage in the past two weeks. Republican Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois also backed gay marriage earlier this week. That makes Nelson the 51st senator to support same-sex marriage, giving the position majority backing in the U.S. Senate.
On Tuesday I mentioned that Nelson would “be a good bet” to endorse gay marriage due to public opinion in his state. According to a Washington Post poll from October, 54% of Floridians think same-sex marriage should be legal. Nelson also voted for the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in 2010.
There are now six Senate Democrats who disapprove of gay marriage: Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), Tim Johnson (S.D.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) and Joe Donnelly (Ind.).Philippine performance artist jailed for “offending religious feelings”
By Joseph Santolan
9 February 2013
In late 2010, Philippine performance artist and tour guide Carlos Celdran, dressed in late nineteenth century attire, entered Manila Cathedral during an ecumenical service celebrating the distribution of bibles and silently held up a cardboard sign with one word: “Damaso.” Celdran was escorted from the church by security guards. He was subsequently arrested and charged with “offending religious feelings,” a criminal offense in the Philippines. He was found guilty and sentenced to an indeterminate jail term of up to one year, one month and 11 days.
The event occurred in the thick of a political debate in the Philippine legislature over a proposed Reproductive Health (RH) bill. As a measure reforming sex education and access to contraceptives in the Philippines, the bill is limited indeed. It maintains the criminalization of abortion and allows schools to opt out of sex education on religious grounds, but it does provide free condoms to a small section of the poorest members of the population. The Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines fiercely opposed the bill.
On September 30, the Catholic Bishops Council of the Philippines (CBCP) threatened to excommunicate President Aquino from the church if he continued to back the RH bill. On the same day, Celdran entered the Cathedral, which is always open to the public, and held up his sign.
The word “Damaso” is the name of a character taken from Jose Rizal’s anti-colonial novel Noli Me Tangere first published in Spanish in 1887. The novel is trenchantly satirical, each character vividly captures and lampoons the various social types that populated late Spanish colonial Manila—bureaucrats and their hangers-on, an ignorant and utterly backwards native elite, and a rapacious and manipulative clergy. Father Damaso embodies this last group. A cruel and arrogant Franciscan priest, he lies to imprison his personal enemies, rapes a woman and fathers a child, who winds up being a key figure in the novel.
Rizal was the son of a well-to-do family from Laguna province south of Manila. His family leased a hacienda from the Dominican religious order on which they managed the work of tenant farmers. Rizal was able to travel throughout Europe to obtain his education as an eye doctor. He wrote two novels exposing the evils of Spanish colonialism and in particular the medieval obscurantism of the Roman Catholic Church.
At the instigation of the church, Rizal was arrested, tried and executed by firing squad in 1892. In 1896 the Philippine revolution against Spain broke out under the leadership of Andres Bonifacio. The gains of the revolution were immediately shattered by the intervention of US imperialism, which conquered the islands in a protracted and bloody war.
American colonial officials made Rizal the national hero, posing him as a non-violent reformist who simply wrote books but did not take up arms. The Noli, as his novel is now referred to, became required reading in every high school. It was read in a bastardized Tagalog translation that eviscerated the wit, style and substance—the Enlightenment spirit—of the novel. Essentially all anti-clerical references were purged.
Statues of the new, inoffensive Rizal were erected in every plaza —town square—across the country, and his profile stamped on the one peso coin. Each such plaza, situated at the town center, is surrounded by four institutions: city hall, the public market, the elementary school, and the Roman Catholic church.
It is impossible to overstate the pervasive reach of the Catholic Church in the Philippines. It has repudiated none of its medieval, obscurantist past. In 1719, the Spanish Governor General was assassinated by a crowd of Dominican friars when he encroached upon their interests. They marched from Manila Cathedral to the Palacio del Governador and stabbed him to death with knives and then appointed the archbishop as the new governor general. Precious little has changed since then.
From the superstitious injunctions of mitre-headed prelates to the ubiquitous dissemination of cheap plastic scapulars, the church has labored to preserve conditions of grotesque social inequality by fighting off modernity with Marian devotion; science with dancing Santo Nino dolls; and class struggle with the inculcated sense of passivity and submissiveness.
The Catholic Church does more than meddle in the affairs of state; at times, it runs them. Until his death in 2005, Cardinal Sin was a kingmaker. He named the church’s presidential candidate in each election; he intervened during the late days of the anti-Marcos struggle to effect the rise to power of Corazon Aquino. Nearly every bourgeois politician in Philippine society bows before this power and quite literally kisses the archbishop’s ring; those few who do not at least affect a polite curtsey. The front organizations of the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) are no different. They stage prayer rallies and thank the CBCP for their political support.
When Carlos Celdran, dressed as Jose Rizal, held up the word “Damaso” in front of the red capped, dour faced elders of the Manila Cathedral, he violated article 133 of the revised penal code of 1930—written during US colonial control of the Philippines. It states that it is a crime to “offend religious feelings,” which is defined as to “perform acts notoriously offensive to the feelings of the faithful.” This law is carte blanche for the suppression of free speech by religious institutions. What evidence is needed to substantiate offended feelings?
The transcript of Celdran’s trial highlights this. One of the four witness produced by the Catholic church “explained that the word ‘DAMASO’ pertains to a priest, who committed something against the church. Although she admitted that she did not know the meaning of the word, however, she claimed that every time she hears the word ‘DAMASO’ it is very traumatic to her.”
Oozing hypocrisy from every pore, the head of the Church in the country, Cardinal Rosales stated that he “had forgiven Celdran.”
The grotesque legacies of political dynasties, religious backwardness, and American imperialism, all refracted through a society riven by extreme inequality, have produced a country in which the headlines always have a hint of the farcical to them. The brilliant wit of Rizal has been reduced to textbook pap; the masses are told by religious leaders to flagellate themselves bloody; and a man has been imprisoned for a symbolic challenge to the Catholic Church.do you go on /mu/ or /lit/? if so i want to tell you i'm sorry because i've probably called you a faggot or something nope.
lowkey i hate a lot of the people who listen to my music. they’re mostly entitled white men who casually use words like that. if you come to my shows and say something even relatively in the same sphere as that word i will fight you. i wish you motherfuckers lost your infatuation with me after Fantano said i suck. honestly i don’t make music for you or your friends. i make music about how people like you and your friends are the source of galactic anxiety. i am not the same as you. i don’t think messages like this are charming or funny. fuck you.By LetsRun.com
April 18, 2015
BOSTON — New England-based Americans Ben True and Molly Huddle kicked off Boston Marathon weekend in style as both notched American record-breaking road 5k victories at the B.A.A. 5K on Saturday morning on Boston Common. In addition to the wins (this was True’s third title and Huddle’s second in a row), both broke the American road record with True’s 13:22 eclipsing Marc Davis‘ 13:24 American record from 1996 and Huddle’s 14:50 bettering Deena Kastor‘s 14:54 AR from 2002. Both previous records were set at the Carlsbad 5000. Huddle’s time is good for fourth on the all-time 5K road list, two seconds behind what Genzebe Dibaba ran three weeks ago at the Carlsbad 5000.
Both races came down to sprint finishes as True pulled ahead of Kenyan Stephen Sambu in the final 200 meters to win by one second. Huddle emerged victorious in a three-way kick against Ethiopians Sentayehu Ejigu and Mamitu Daska. Both True and Huddle took home $12,500 for their performances ($7,500 for the win plus $5,000 for the American records) plus whatever bonus they get as part of their contracts with Saucony. And that number could grow even more shortly thanks to John Legere:
Recap, analysis, video interviews and results below.
The Men’s Race:
The pace was quick from the beginning in the men’s race and as the leaders passed the two-mile mark on Hereford Street in 8:34, several men were still in contention including True, Sambu, Daniel Salel and Philip Langat. It was True and Sambu, who had been making the race, running shoulder-to-shoulder from the 2k mark onwards, and in the final mile, those two began to pull away from the field. Sambu, the more distance-oriented of the two (he has track PRs of 13:13 and 26:54 vs. 13:02 and 27:41 for True), began to ratchet up the pace in an effort to drop his rival. As the two made the final turn from Boylston Street onto Charles Street on Boston Common, Sambu had the inside track and a slight lead on True. True pulled even with Sambu with 150 to go, and with 100 left he gained a meter or two on Sambu, holding that edge as he raised his arms to cross the finish line and break the record.
The Women’s Race
The women’s race also went out quickly, but played out slightly differently. Ethiopian Mamitu Daska, who won last year’s B.A.A. 10K and Half Marathon and was second in the 5K, and Gelete Burka, who beat Shalane Flanagan in the Stanford 10,000 two weeks ago, had the lead at the mile at 4:38 with Huddle and several others well back of those two in the 4:40s range. The leaders slowed in the second mile as the pack reeled them in, with Huddle, Daska, Burka and others coming through between 9:36 and 9:40. As they ran past the marathon finish line on Boylston Street, Huddle focused on maintaining contact. After crossing Arlington Street and with the Boston Public Garden on her left, Huddle started to pick it up knowing that she had only 200 meters remaining once she made the turn onto Charles Street. Huddle, Ejigu and Daska were all together on the American flag-lined finishing straight but in the end it was Huddle who kicked best, motoring away to win in 14:50, just a second ahead of Ejigu.
Quick Take #1: True confirmed that he is in good shape after a rough stint at altitude
True spent the winter training in Boulder in preparation for the U.S. Cross Country Championships but struggled to adapt to altitude and was just 11th in that race. Without former training partner Sam Chelanga (now in James Li‘s group in Tucson), True didn’t know exactly where he stood fitness-wise, but today’s race confirmed that he is coming along just fine.
“I knew since last year this course was fast,” True said. “Last year, the time (13:26) surprised me. They said that this course this year is supposed to be a little bit faster than last year so I figured I might be able to run a little bit faster. It’s hard to tell this year, training by myself, what kind sort of fitness I’ve been in especially after a fairly dismal race at U.S. Cross, so this is a nice confirmation that I’m in the shape I need to be at this point in the year and looking forward to a good summer.”
Quick Take #2: The new course worked out great
The two fastest 5Ks on American soil — the Carlsbad 5000 and the B.A.A. 5K — both changed their courses this year. Carlsbad added a pair of 180-degree turns to make the race more spectator-friendly, while the B.A.A. removed two 90-degree turns and both the men’s and women’s records ended up going down in Boston. It’s hard to say whether one course is definitively faster (the weather in Boston — 50s and still — was perfect today and better than the warm, windy Carlsbad conditions this year) but True seemed to think that reducing the number of turns helped him run slightly faster this year which makes sense.
Quick Take #3: Marc Davis was happy to see his record go
Davis works as the B.A.A.’s communications manager and was present at the finish line to see his record go down. At Friday’s pre-race press conference, Davis mentioned that with the new course, the record could go down, but didn’t mention that he was the current record holder. Afterwards, he said he was happy for True:
“He was so close last year, “Davis said. “There was every opportunity for him to do it here today and he clearly went out there, proved we put together a great course for him and went out there and did his job. All the congrats to him. I almost lasted 20 years with it but I’m happy because as I always say, it’s a cliche, but records are made to be broken.”
Quick Take #4: Huddle didn’t come in with designs on the record but realized mid-race that it was a possibility
“It was in the very back of my mind,” Huddle said. “I knew the course was very fast last year and when they made course improvements again this year, I thought you could run a record….At two miles, I did the math and realized even though I was in about fifth, sixth place, I was on American record pace so that kind of got me more momentum for the last mile.”
The race was incredibly fast overall as the second through seventh-place finishers all set all-time marks for place in a road 5K. No race had ever seen four women break 15:00.
The time bodes well for Huddle, as Genzebe Dibaba, who ran 14:18 indoors to set a new 5,000 world record, ran 14:48 in Carlsbad three weeks ago.
“It’s kind of like new territory for me,” Huddle said. “I think the world 5K record probably will get chipped away. I think this is a good place to do it. For me to be anywhere close to that takes a lot to wrap my mind around.”
Quick Take #5: Huddle’s focus is squarely on the 10,000 this year
Huddle said that she still plans on running a couple of 5,000s but that she will do the 10,000 at USAs and Worlds as she doesn’t feel that she runs well after prelims (the 5,000 has prelims at Worlds; the 10,000 does not). She also said she drew inspiration from Kara Goucher (2007 Worlds) and Shalane Flanagan (2008 Olympics), who both medalled in the 10,000 recently. No American woman has ever medalled in the 5,000 at Worlds or the Olympics; Huddle was 6th in the 5,000 at the 2013 Worlds.
“I was looking back at what we were successful with in the past and that gave me some confidence if those girls can do it than maybe I can do it too,” Huddle said.
Quick Take #6: Daska made the right decision
Daska, who eighth at World XC three weeks ago, was initially entered in the Boston Marathon but didn’t think her strength was there and switched down to the 5K instead. It looks like she made the right decision, as she was rewarded with a big pb (her previous best was 15:14 here last year).
Quick Take #6 Great day for Saucony
Saucony, based in nearby Lexington, Mass., sponsors both True and Huddle. Saucony is not one of the biggest running shoe brands, but they got both American records at their hometown race. Well done.
*Results below, photos here.Flippantly putting the grave environmental tragedy of it all to one side for a moment, the Deepwater Horizon oil leak isn't just causing extensive damage to the Louisiana coastline. What about our accents? Our lovely British accents? Thanks to the BP link, they've been destroyed too. Don't know about you, but whenever I'm around Americans, I tend to exaggerate my Britishness in a pathetic bid to win their approval. Those days are gone.
The first time I visited the US, I ran into trouble at immigration. Half the group I was travelling with decided to get drunk on the plane, which probably would've been fine with all the other passengers if it hadn't been for the unrelenting cackling and yelping and removal of trousers. I was fairly drunk too, incidentally, but only because I was so terrified of flying I'd decided to blot out the whole of reality by glugging myself into an inflight coma. From my slumbering perspective the flight was a warm 15-minute snooze. To the other passengers it must've felt like a 30-year sentence in baboon prison.
Upon arrival, we were identified as troublemakers and hauled off one-by-one for a comprehensive bothering. Instantly I realised my only hope of avoiding instant deportation was to behave like a minor royal – not an aloof, chilly posho, but a genial gosh-what-a-wonderful-country-you-have Hugh Grant-type, one who smiles a lot while using slightly formal language. I apologised profusely by saying, "I apologise profusely." The officer started out prickly – one of his opening gambits was, "You could be spending the night in jail, wiseguy", which simultaneously impressed and scared me – but several minutes of profuse apologies and crikey-I'm-sorry delivered in an embellished British accent appeared to disarm him, and I was released without being subjected to gunfire.
That's my recollection, anyway. Perhaps he just got bored with watching me grovel. But from that point on, my dial was set to 150% British for the duration. I said "Good day" to receptionists and "I beg your pardon" to waiters. At one point I think I even said "Toodle pip" to a cabbie. Incredibly, rather than calling me a dick, they said they loved my accent. The US was a magic country where strangers liked me on the strength of my voice alone, unlike cold anonymous London where, rather than break their stride, pedestrians would blankly step on your face if you were dying on the pavement, quietly tutting at the blood on their shoes.
On a subsequent trip I discovered mockney was just as useful, and deliberately roughed my accent down in gas stations or bars, saying "blimey" and "bloke" and "bleedin' 'ell", even if I was only asking the way to the toilet (sorry, "bog"). This was even more popular than my Little Lord Fauntleroy act. Thank God I can't do a Liverpudlian accent. I'd probably have adopted a Beatles persona in record shops.
But now, as a company with the word "British" in its name pisses apocalyptic quantities of oil into the ocean, and CEO Tony Hayward pops up on the news to make tactless statements in a British accent, anglophilia is shrivelling. Things must be bad when gimpy Cameron has to reassure us that BP wiping its arse on the Gulf of Mexico won't disturb the "special relationship" between the US and the UK. Of course it will.
Never mind that BP is an international company. Never mind that 39% of its shares are held in the US, that half its directors are American. It's got the word British in the title, and that'll do. It genuinely feels like our fault. Like you, I've never supervised the offshore drilling policy of a major oil company, but I can't help feeling responsible. It's like watching a news report in which someone with your surname has been caught having sex with a hollowed-out yam. The disgrace is shared, however irrationally.
And to be honest, the Americans are thus far admirably restrained about the whole thing. If a company called Texan Gloop belched a carpet of black gunk over Norfolk, we'd be surrounding the US embassy and burning sarcastic effigies of Boss Hogg within minutes. And that's just Norfolk: flat earth and windmills. Having vandalised Louisiana and laminated thousands of pelicans, the BP spill now threatens to disfigure the Miami coastline, corrupting its relentlessly cheery blue-and-yellow colour scheme with a sea of rainbow black. Congratulations, people of Britain. Even though, strictly speaking, it isn't your fault.
Clearly a rebrand is in order if we're to maintain any national pride whatsoever. Trouble is, BP's already had one: 10 years ago it changed its name from British Petroleum to BP following a merger with a US oil company. Since that's not enough to dissociate it from Britain, Britain itself will have to change its name. It'll still need to feel quintessentially British, mind. For the tourists, like. How about London Kingdom? Great Crikey? Yeoman Island? Hobbiton? Churchill-on-Sea?
Let's face it: to recoup our cultural value, it's either that or we all head over there and start cleaning the mess up ourselves, while muttering "blimey" and "gosh" and doing our best to be charming. If you've got a fly-drive holiday booked, start practising that Hugh Grant act now. Chances are you'll need it.Orange County's school district has agreed to let a group of atheists hand out nonreligious literature to students at 11 high schools in response to a Bible distribution held earlier in the year.
The "passive distribution" is happening Thursday, May 2, the same day as the Congress-designated National Day of Prayer.
School district officials said the same rules apply to this distribution as the previous event in January, when the group Members of World Changers of Florida Inc. was permitted to place copies of the Bible on tables during lunch periods for students to pick up.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation and its Florida chapter, the Central Florida Freethought Community, will hand out the atheist materials at the following 11 high schools:
Apopka High School Boone High School Cypress Creek High School Colonial High School Edgewater High School Evans High School Jones High School Timber Creek High School University High School Wekiva High School Winter Park 9th Grade Center
Orange County Public Schools listed the following titles as approved materials:
"The Age of Reason"
"What They Said About Religion"
"Ten Common Myths About Atheists"
"What is Wrong with the Ten Commandments?"
"What is an Atheist"
"Nontheistic Students in Your School"
"Humanist of the Year Award"
"Don't Believe in God? You may be a Humanist"
"Why Women Need Freedom From Religion" *
"What is a Freethinker?" *
"Secular Student Alliance" brochure *
The school district indicated that the last three titles listed should have solicitation materials removed from the last page.
The district added students will only be allowed to visit the distribution table during non-instructional time, including lunch and between classes, and no student may be excused from class to visit the table.
School employees are also not allowed to assist or participate in the distribution.
The National Day of Prayer has been observed annually in the U.S. since it was enacted in 1952 under then-President Harry Truman. It has been held on the first Thursday in May since 1988.• Between 2011 and 2015, 3.8 billion opioid pills were prescribed across Ohio.
As the opioid crisis has received more attention, grim statistics about overdose deaths have started to lose their shock value. But the Ohio lawsuit, viewable in full below, includes several jaw-dropping new figures about the depth of the state’s problem.
Some of the companies — most notably Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin — have already paid out multi-million dollar settlements in previous lawsuits over the opioid epidemic, which sees an average of 91 fatal overdoses per day. Deaths from prescription opioids have more than quadrupled since 1999, according to the CDC.
The lawsuit, filed May 31 by Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, targets five of the world’s largest opioid drug manufacturers: Purdue Pharma, Endo Health Solutions, Johnson & Johnson, Allergan, and Israel-based Teva Pharmaceutical Industries.
The state of Ohio is suing five drug companies that manufacture prescription painkillers, alleging that they created a “human tragedy of epic proportion” by pushing misleading claims about the addictiveness of their products.
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The state of Ohio is suing five drug companies that manufacture prescription painkillers, alleging that they created a “human tragedy of epic proportion” by pushing misleading claims about the addictiveness of their products.
The lawsuit, filed May 31 by Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, targets five of the world’s largest opioid drug manufacturers: Purdue Pharma, Endo Health Solutions, Johnson & Johnson, Allergan, and Israel-based Teva Pharmaceutical Industries.
Some of the companies — most notably Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin — have already paid out multi-million dollar settlements in previous lawsuits over the opioid epidemic, which sees an average of 91 fatal overdoses per day. Deaths from prescription opioids have more than quadrupled since 1999, according to the CDC.
As the opioid crisis has received more attention, grim statistics about overdose deaths have started to lose their shock value. But the Ohio lawsuit, viewable in full below, includes several jaw-dropping new figures about the depth of the state’s problem.
• Between 2011 and 2015, 3.8 billion opioid pills were prescribed across Ohio.
• In 2016 alone, 2.3 million Ohio patients — roughly 20 percent of the state’s population — were prescribed an opioids.
• In 2015, more than 1.6 million opioid pills — 182 per patient — were prescribed in Ross County, an area hit especially hard by the epidemic.
• 4,149 people died from overdoses last year in Ohio, a 36 percent increase from 2015 when the state led the nation in fatal overdoses.
• From 2000 to 2015, the number of fatal drug overdoses in Ohio increased by 642 percent.
• 70 percent of infants placed in Ohio’s foster care system are children of parents with opioid addictions.
The lawsuit alleges that the companies engaged in “a well-funded marketing scheme” to “spread false and deceptive statements about the risks and benefits of long-term opioid use.”
The suit seeks unspecified financial damages. “It is just and it is right that the people who played a significant role in creating this mess should now pay to clean it up,” DeWine said, according to the Columbus Dispatch.
Johnson & Johnson and subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals reportedly called the allegations in the lawsuit “both legally and factually unfounded,” while Purdue Pharma said the company shares “the attorney general’s concerns about the opioid crisis and we are committed to working collaboratively to find solutions.Department of Homeland Security (DHS) personnel lost more than 200 firearms and close to 1,900 badges over a three-year period, according to a new watchdog report.
Between fiscal 2014 and 2016, DHS personnel lost 228 firearms, 1,889 badges and 25 secure immigration stamps, with many left unattended or unsecured, DHS's Office of the Inspector General said in an audit released Tuesday.
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Those numbers are down slightly from the inspector general’s last audit, conducted in 2010, which found that DHS personnel lost 289 handguns, rifles and shotguns over a three-year period.
The latest audit found personnel do not always safeguard sensitive assets, and were not always held accountable for failing to do so. In a review of 115 case files, auditors noted 65 instances where badges, firearms or stamps were not properly protected, according to the report.
In one example, two off-duty Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers left their firearms unattended in backpacks while on a beach in Puerto Rico. When the officers returned, the bags were gone.
In another instance, a Transportation Security Administration officer left his firearm in a bag in the back seat of his car while having dinner with his family. When the officer returned, the rear passenger side window was shattered and the bag was gone.
In a third case, a Customs and Border Protection officer left his backpack containing his wallet and government badge in an unlocked public gym locker. When he returned, his belongings were gone.
“DHS cannot ensure its sensitive assets do not fall into the hands of criminals or pose additional risk to national security and public safety,” the audit states.
A stolen ICE firearm was used to kill a man in a September 2015 robbery near San Francisco. Four other cases ended with police recovering lost assets from convicted felons, including three firearms and one badge, according to the report.
Of those 65 cases, 22 officers did not receive any disciplinary action, and none of the officers received remedial training, though the department’s policy does not require such training.
Items were typically lost or stolen from vehicles, residences or public locations.
The report also concluded that personnel were not properly tracking and recording the status of firearms, badges and stamps, making it difficult to locate assets.
The report included six recommendations for improving asset management in the department. Among the recommendations were strengthening the policy manual for asset management, re-training employees who handle property inventory records and standardizing law enforcement and non-law enforcement badges.
The Department of Homeland Security agreed with all six recommendations, according to the report, with target implementation dates in mid-2018.An Albanian policeman and police dog check cars in Elbasan, 50 miles south of the capital, Tirana, ahead of the 2018 World Cup Group G qualifying soccer match between Albania and Israel, on Nov. 12, 2016. Police in Kosovo says Islamic terrorists planned to attack the match. (Photo11: Hektor Pustina, AP)
Police in Kosovo say they have arrested 19 people and thwarted simultaneous Islamic State attacks in Kosovo and neighboring Albania, including a planned assault on the Israeli national soccer team during a match.
The suspects, who were planning “synchronized terror attacks,” were rounded up over the past 10 days in Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia, police said in a statement Wednesday.
The suspects were receiving orders from Islamic State member Lavdrim Muhaxheri, the self-declared “commander of Albanians in Syria and Iraq," police said.
The statement said officers searching the suspects' homes and premises found explosive devices, weapons and electronic equipment, including “religious material and literature from well-known authors recognized for their extremist ideology.”
The groups in the three countries, coordinated by two Albanians who are part of the Islamic State terror group in Syria, had “clear targets" on who should be attacked and when, police said.
“They were planning to commit terrorist attacks in Kosovo and also (an attack) against (the) Israeli football team and their fans during the Albania-Israel match,” Kosovo police said, according to Reuters.
The Nov. 12 match, part of the qualifying round for the 2018 World Cup group, was moved from the northern Albanian city of Shkoder to Elbasan, south of the capital of Tirana, for security reasons, the Associated Press reports. Saturday's event included heavy police presence, but there were no incidents.
Most of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority are nominally Muslim, but largely secular. Kosovo, backed by the West, declared independence from Serbia in 2008.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2fzISk4January 2001
h after being given Baichuan capsule by ig in order to investigate its acute hypotensive effect. Results: 1. Baichuan capsule in the dosage of 0.6 or 0.3 g·kg-1 for twenty days by ig could reduce the blood pressures of SHR obviously and there was also a little hypotensive effect if the dosage was 0.15 g·kg-1; 2. Baichuan capsule in the dosage of 0.6 or 0.3 g·kg-1 once by ig could reduce the blood pressures of renal hypertension rats obviously and there was also some hypotensive effect for Baichuan capsule in the dosage of 0.15 g·kg-1. Conclusion: Baichuan capsule has obvious acute and chronic hypotensive effects.
Objective: To investigate the acute and chronic hypotensive effects of Baichuan capsule. Methods: We indirectly measured tail artery blood pressure of awake |
.
“Now and forever, your gratification is my gladness.”
Ahhhh...
*
Upon hearing that Inez had mounted and seduced her squid, the other prisoners resolved to enact their own such assignations. Throughout the month of June, Atoll K became the scene of an epic and unprecedented orgy. Owing to the universal workings of a ubiquitous Eros, each tumor received from its former host prolific doses of humanigens. It occurred to Inez that menstrual blood and seminal fluid had probably not been put to such a purpose before, but that was no reason to doubt the efficacy of her scheme.
Day and night, through sun and rain, the couplings continued. The tumors took palpable satisfaction in the new ethos of Atoll K, even to the point of declining to punish perceived sloth in the soybean fields and alleged inefficiency in the processing pavilion. By kissing their squids, or so it seemed, the prisoners had given karkínos a new understanding of itself, awakening the better angels of its nature. For the moment, at least, concupiscence had domesticated the crab monsters.
Predictably, the truce did not endure. By the summer solstice, the tumors had become tyrants again. Whips were applied, rations withheld, water supplies appropriated.
“Let us have no illusions,” Inez told her fellow citizens. “Whether we slake their lust or not, they remain the gods of Atoll K, and we the mere mortals.”
“A pox upon them all,” said Meredith.
“Amen,” said Barry.
*
Amen. So be it. And so it was. On the first day of September, having been repeatedly suffused with intelligible cells, Inez’s glioblastoma fell ill. Seventy-two hours later, the wretched thing died. Suspecting foul play, its fellow squids vowed vengeance, but these threats came to nothing, for by now all the other tumors were sick, too weak to lift a tentacle. By the end of the month, each malignancy had devolved into a putrescence suggestive of the title character’s fate in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.”
The cancer survivors lost no time drawing up their plans for escape. They agreed to construct a raft from the wooden food crates, using four of the 55-gallon drums as pontoons, mobility to be supplied by human muscles working tofu paddles. If Atoll K was indeed in Long Island Sound, then by following a steady northern course, using sun, moon, and stars as navigation instruments, they were certain to hit southern Connecticut within a day.
An excellent plan, Inez thought, foolproof in fact, and yet it bore only bitter fruit. Wrapped in eternal murk, the raft remained waterborne for a week, two weeks—a whole month—without making landfall. In time the weather turned as deadly as a crab monster, contriving a chronic hurricane that one by one took hold of the Atoll K refugees and dragged them into the turbulent bay. When at last the storm abated and the raft ran aground on a shrouded shore, Inez was the only passenger still on board.
*
Salt-stained, sun-blistered, she staggered across the white sands that hemmed the fogbound coast. She reached a hedge of kelp marking the tide line, and there she collapsed, weary and dehydrated. For several minutes she lay prone on the beach, gasping and grieving, and then, as inevitably as if inhaling Philoghast’s ether, she descended into sleep.
Awakening, Inez found herself attended by a dozen muzzy figures bearing Smartwater and mozzarella sticks. She drank eagerly, feasted greedily. In a matter of minutes her mind cleared, and she surveyed her benefactors.
“Welcome to Atoll X,” said the man who’d pressed the water bottle to her lips.
“Carpe diem,” said the woman who’d fed her cheese.
Briefly Inez imagined that she’d died and gone to heaven, though the afterlife hypothesis had never seemed credible to her. The twelve members of the rescue party all wore white, hooded robes, the sort of attire an angel might favor, though she saw neither wings nor halos. If not of seraphic descent, she reasoned, then perhaps these people constituted a religious order—for they specifically evoked the gentle and ascetic Essenes, proprietors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as depicted in various TV miniseries about the formative years of Christianity.
“When I left Atoll K, there were nine of us,” said Inez. “All the others died.”
“How sad,” said the water man.
“ ‘And I only am escaped alone to tell thee,’ ” the cheese woman quoted.
Bizarre and surprising as her life on Atoll K had been, none of those experiences had prepared her for what occurred next. A majestic female inhabitant of Atoll X approached, threw back her hood, and allowed the setting sun to cast her handsome features in bronze. The two sisters embraced for a protracted interval, their kisses moistened by tears of joy.
“Atoll X,” said Inez, pulling away. “I don’t understand,” she added, but in fact she did. “Let me guess. We’re talking about the second half of the equation.”
“The second half, exactly,” said Alexis. “For weeks on end, months on end, the fact of your cure made me ecstatic. But then one day those sentiments turned against me. My beloved sister’s brain tumor was gone, but her vulnerability remained—and so did mine. I don’t remember coming to this island, but here I am.”
The water man said, “Unless one can shake off that awful sense of impending oblivion...”
The cheese woman said, “Unless one can find refuge in some illusion or other...”
“Then sooner or later one ends up on Atoll X,” said the water man.
“Even illusions are less effective than commonly supposed,” Alexis noted. “Simone de Beauvoir said it well. Immortality is no consolation for death.”
“Then I belong here,” said Inez. “I never shook it off. I knew I was cured of cancer, but not of the other thing. Briefly I confused the two, but—”
“We all confuse the two,” said the water woman.
“Otherwise we would go mad,” said the cheese man.
“There must be a lot of you,” Inez said.
“We’ve never counted,” said Alexis. “Eventually, I suspect, Philoghast himself will come to live among us.”
Inez asked, “Room for me, too?”
“Of course, sweetie. You’ll receive your robe tomorrow.”
Alexis clasped Inez’s hand and guided her along the tide line. The trek took the sisters past numerous creatures, all oblivious to their tragic transience: a colony of barnacles clinging to a rock, a starfish recently cast into a tide pool, a maundering snail, a soaring heron, an iridescent dragonfly. Even the sun, Inez had read, would one day die.
Exploiting her distracted state, a seagull swooped down, opened its beak, and snatched the remaining mozzarella stick from Inez. Both sisters laughed hysterically, and they continued laughing long after the incident had ceased to be amusing. When Alexis reported that such exuberance was common on Atoll X—though not so common as rage—Inez took comfort in the news, though she could not decide why. Instead of further pondering the problem, she fixed on the thieving gull, imagining what it might be like to have wings, but then the bird vanished, a creature without consolation and needing none, reveling in its brittle freedom, savoring the unmerited morsel, swallowed by the mist.
“Thanatos Beach” copyright © 2011 by James Morrow
Art copyright © 2011 by John Jude PalencarA teenager died in Uttar Pradesh after being hit by a speeding train on Sunday night when she tried to escape the clutches of three men who attempted to molest her in an incident that underscores concerns about women’s safety in India.
Police said the 15-year-old girl from Firozabad district had gone to a local market to pick up some medicines when the accused tried to drag her into an auto rickshaw. She managed to free herself but came in the path of the train while trying to escape.
The men witnessed the incident and got away in the auto rickshaw. They are yet to be arrested, officials said.
When the girl did not return for several hours, her father, a factory labourer from the Gatoji Kalan area, went to look for her and found her mangled remains near the train tracks.
“An FIR was lodged at the Dakshin police station in Firozabad against the three accused, Lalla, Kamran and Monu,” informed Sri Prakash Yadav, police station in-charge.
According to reports, the father filed a complaint on Monday based on the statements of witnesses.
However, police lodged an FIR a day later after preliminary investigations, as they initially suspected it was a suicide.
First Published: Oct 06, 2015 19:35 ISTHey, guys! In today’s post, I’m going to tell you how to make relaxing bath salts. I wanted to get your creative and relaxing senses tingling. This project only takes a few minutes of your time and a few items in your kitchen.
The holidays are just around the corner and you know that means? Headaches, traffic jams, and long lines, what more could you ever want? Listen, I know you are busy trying to make everyone happy, but you need to slow down and give yourself some love. After all the pumpkins pies and sugar cookies have been baked, light a few candles and relax.
The beautiful thing is that you don’t need to leave the house or spend all your money at a spa. All you need to do is grab Epsom Salt and a few drops of essential oils. The benefits of homemade bath salts go beyond skin deep. Besides improving circulation and clearing acne, bath salts can also help relieve muscle tension and arthritis.
If I’ve convinced you to give this diy a try, here is a simple guide you can use to create your relaxing bath experience. What kind of homemade products do you use? Don’t forget to subscribe to my blog for more posts. I would also love it if you shared this post on social media. I put a lot of time and effort into this baby blog, so feel free to share!
What You’ll Need:
1 cup sea salt
1 cup epsom salt
¼ cup baking soda
2 tablespoon carrier oil (coconut oil, jojoba oil, grapeseed oil)
10-20 drops of essential oil
dried herbs (optional)
glass bowl
wooden spoon
airtight container
How To Make Bath Salts?
Step 1:
Combine the sea salt, Epsom salt and baking soda in a bowl.
Step 2:
Add the carrier oil.
Step 3:
Add essential oils and dried herbs of your choice.
Step 4:
Stir all the ingredients with a wooden spoon and store in an airtight container.
Recipes To Try
Grapefruit and Ylang Ylang Bath Salts
Ingredients:
1 cup sea salt
1 cup Epsom salt
¼ cup baking soda
2 tablespoon avocado oil
½ teaspoon vitamin E oil
11 drops of grapefruit essential oil
9 drops of Ylang Ylang essential oil
Directions:
In a bowl, combine sea salt, Epsom salt, and baking soda. Pour avocado oil and vitamin E oil. Add grapefruit and ylang-ylang essential oil. Stir with a wooden spoon until blended.
Vanilla Honey Bath Salts
Ingredients:
1 cup sea salt
1 cup Epsom salt
¼ cup baking soda
2 tablespoon jojoba oil
½ teaspoon vitamin E oil
1 tablespoon of raw honey
8 drops of vanilla essential oil
Directions:
In a medium bowl, combine sea salt, Epsom salt, and baking soda. Pour jojoba oil and vitamin E oil. Add the vanilla essential oil and honey. Stir with a wooden spoon until blended.
Rosemary Tea Tree Bath Salts
Ingredients:
1 cup sea salt
1 cup Epsom salt
¼ cup baking soda
2 tablespoon jojoba oil
2 tablespoon dried rosemary
5 drops of rosemary essential oil
15 drops of tea tree essential oil
Directions:
In a medium sized bowl, combine sea salt, Epsom salt, and baking soda. Add jojoba oil and dried rosemary. Pour essential oils and stir with a wooden spoon until blended well.
Eucalyptus and Rosemary Bath Salts
Ingredients:
1 cup sea salt
1 cup Epsom salt
¼ cup baking soda
2 tablespoon jojoba oil
½ teaspoon vitamin E oil
12 drops of eucalyptus essential oil
8 drops of rosemary essential oil
Directions:
In a medium bowl, combine sea salt, Epsom salt, and baking soda. Pour jojoba oil and vitamin E oil. Add eucalyptus and rosemary essential oils. Stir with a wooden spoon until blended.The most mind bending temples that Zelda has to offer. In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the Water Temple is located on the bottom of Lake Hylia. When you first enter the Water Temple, you're greeted by a three story drop to the bottom of the Temple. Leaving you thinking: "Aw fuck..."Then after an hour or two you figure out: "Holy shit! I can make the water rise!" You then think that your a fuckin' genius, but you're only 2% through the Temple.When (if) you get to a room filled with water and a tiny little island in the middle, no, you are not high. Nor are you getting haunted by BEN. No, it's far worse. You're fighting Dark Link. After many failed attempts (even though you coulda used the Megaton Hammer), you get another Hookshot... But this time it's twice as long!Now, it's all downhill from here. After you get the Boss Key and enter the boss dungeon, you're suddenly snuck up on by a tentacle monster that's gonna penitrate your ass! (Not)After defeating Chaos- er... Morpha, you get you're next heart piece and the blue medalion!Twenty-six-year-old Queensland native Matthew Simmons has taken out the 2015 Nissan PlayStation GT Academy competition, becoming the first-ever Australian to win the gamer-sourced racing challenge.
Now in its seventh year, the Nissan PlayStation GT Academy is a development competition created by Nissan, PlayStation and the people behind the iconic driving simulator Gran Turismo, aimed at turning bedroom gamers into professional racing drivers.
Outperforming top gamers from Mexico, North Africa, Turkey and the United States, Simmons, a Brisbane-based Australia Post contractor, proved victorious in the GT Academy International race camp based at the UK’s Silverstone circuit.
Other camps comprise pools from Asia (India, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia and Japan) and Europe (France, Italy, UK, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Hungary, Poland and Czech Republic).
Nissan Australia says Simmons is now on his way back home to pack his bags before moving to the UK to take part in an “intense” Nismo driver development program, where he'll attempt to qualify for his international race licence ahead of officially becoming a full-time professional Nissan racing driver – or ‘Nismo Athlete’.Editor’s Note: This feature appears in the most recent issue of THE RING Magazine which is available on Digital NOW. The cover star is our new pound-for-pound No. 1, Gennady Golovkin.
Miguel Cotto is one of the most accomplished Puerto Rican boxers of all time, winning world titles in four weight classes during his 17-year pro career.
Cotto was born in Providence, Rhode Island, but his family relocated to his ancestral home in the Caribbean when he was 2 years old. He started boxing when he was 11 and enjoyed a stellar amateur career, winning silver at the World Junior Championships and appearing at the World Championships and Olympics before leaving the unpaid ranks with a record of 125-23.
Cotto turned pro in early 2001. With his fledgling years mapped out by promoter Top Rank, he got his first title shot in September 2004 against unbeaten puncher Kelson Pinto, whom Cotto stopped in six rounds for the vacant WBO junior welterweight belt.
He would make six defenses before abdicating the title to move up to welterweight, where he promptly won the WBA strap. During his reign he impressively turned back the challenges of Zab Judah and Shane Mosley – both at his home away from home, Madison Square Garden.
He feels the Judah fight was the best performance of his career.
“I felt everything came together that night,” Cotto told THE RING.
Cotto lost his unbeaten record and title at the hands of Antonio Margarito in the summer of 2008. He rebounded to collect his third world title against Michael Jennings and defended once, but then ran into a prime Manny Pacquiao. Cotto twice got off the canvas early but was stopped in the final round.
He stepped up to junior middleweight in search of a title in a third weight category and met Yuri Foreman in front of 20,000 at Yankee Stadium – the venue’s first boxing event since Muhammad Ali-Ken Norton III in 1976. Cotto picked his opponent apart and eventually stopped him in Round 9.
After turning back the spirited challenge of Ricardo Mayorga and beating fierce rival Margarito in a grudge rematch, Cotto took on Floyd Mayweather Jr. Although he lost a decision, he gave Mayweather a stern test.
Cotto looked a shell of himself while dropping a decision to Austin Trout seven months later.
To his enormous credit, Cotto was able to reinvent himself under trainer Freddie Roach’s tutelage. He sought out a meeting with RING and WBC middleweight boss Sergio Martinez, and the fighting pride of Caguas shocked the pre-fight favorite by dropping him three times in a frenzied opening stanza and again in the ninth. The Argentine’s corner pulled their man out in the 10th frame.
“It is special for me,” Cotto proudly said of being the first Puerto Rican to win major world titles in four weight classes. “I don’t want to compare myself with (other Puerto Rican greats). I just think about Miguel Cotto and not anybody else. Four is just a number. I just try to do my job the best always, and I did it the night of the Martinez fight. That put me in this category.”
Cotto defended his championship once but then lost to Canelo Alvarez by a unanimous decision, which Cotto insists was undeserved.
He returned from a 21-month hiatus in August to add another title to his collection, this time at 154 with a wide unanimous decision over Yoshihiro Kamegai.
Having achieved so much, Cotto could be forgiven if he’d chosen to retire already. He says he will walk away at the end of the year, but what still burns inside him to want to continue fighting at this point?
“I’m a father of four, I’m the head of my family,” he said. “I want to be remembered for my family as the guy who brought everything together to bring them to best possible future. That’s all I need as motivation.”
Cotto, now 37, owns his own promotional company, Promociones Miguel Cotto, and he also founded Fundacion El Angel, which helps prevent child obesity. He enjoys golf (his handicap is 18) and cooking. He graciously took time to speak to THE RING about the best he fought in 10 key categories.
BEST JAB
Ricardo Torres: I think the best jab was Ricardo Torres, the guy from Colombia. He caught me with good jabs in the fight.
BEST DEFENSE
Floyd Mayweather Jr: He was so slippery in every moment of the fight. It was so difficult to get to him.
HAND SPEED
Paulie Malignaggi: I think Paulie Malignaggi was one of the quickest guys I ever faced. At the time of our fight he came in really good shape. He came in good condition and he made me work really hard to beat him.
BEST FOOTWORK
Manny Pacquiao: I think Manny. He was so quick to get around. To hit him was very difficult for me because he moved so well.
BEST CHIN
Yoshihiro Kamegai: I hit Mayorga so hard it was so hard to believe he was still standing in front of me, but I think Kamegai had the best chin. I punched him with all my best and flush shots and the guy kept coming.
SMARTEST
Mayweather: No doubt, Floyd Mayweather. You can catch him with one good shot, but it is so hard to catch him twice that it makes me believe he is the smartest one.
STRONGEST
Ricardo Mayorga: Mayorga was the strongest opponent I ever faced. I put my hands on him and he didn’t move. He was solid as a rock.
BEST PUNCHER
Randall Bailey: This guy Randall Bailey, in my first title defense back in 2004. He caught me with a good right hand but I handled it well and I did my job.
BEST SKILLS
Mayweather: Boxing and fundamentals, I would say Mayweather. The difficulty with Mayweather is that he’s so hard to catch him twice with the same mistake. He had very good skills. He had all the shots.
BEST OVERALL
Mayweather: I think Floyd. He was smarter than everyone else. He was a really good boxer. He did everything about as well as anybody.
Questions and/or comments can be sent to Anson at [email protected] and you can follow him on Twitter @AnsonWainwright.
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On the cover this month: THE RING 100
No posts found.Peshawar: This Al Jazeera video, which shows men digging trenches in a graveyard under a blazing sun, says Pakistan is digging graves in an anticipation of deaths from the looming heatwave, given that meteorologists have predicted that 2016 is set to be the hottest year ever recorded globally.
Last year, more than 1,300 people died of intense heat, with mortuaries running out of space and bodies decaying for want of graves. The provinces are bracing themselves for a repeat of a situation that caught them unawares last year. As elsewhere in the country, emergency response services have been mobilised in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to keep casualties from heatwave at minimum.
“We have issued essential supplies and emergency kits to our centres in Peshawar and Mardan to stay prepared for the hot weather ahead,” said Emergency Rescue Service (ERS) 1122 spokesperson Bilal Faizi here at the ERS Headquarters.
According to ERS Director General Asad Ali Khan, with Ramazan approaching and the Pakistan Metrological department (PMD) forecasting hot and humid weather in coming weeks, ERS had established special units to facilitate public with cases of heatstroke.
The US-based National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which observes weather patterns, has said that April was warmest month ever on record, making 2016 to be the hottest year yet and by a biggest margin ever. April’s land and sea temperatures at 1.11°C is warmer than average April temperatures between 1951 to 1980, which NASA uses as a standard reference point to study recent climate change.
In Pakistan, the heatwave experienced this year has surpassed the country’s own record of high temperature. In 2010, Pakistan had its hottest temperature in history on May 26, when the mercury hit an astonishing 53.5°C at the town of Mohenjudaro in the southern Sindh province.
According to Weather Underground, the 53.5°C reading was the hottest temperature ever recorded in Pakistan and the hottest reliably measured temperature ever recorded on the continent of Asia. On May 1, 2016, temperature recorded in Larkana in Sindh was 54°C, indicating a new record.
Although there is no reliable data available, media reports have consistently reported deaths every year in Pakistan due to heatstroke. “Heatstroke is a condition caused by body overheating, mostly due to prolonged exposure to or physical exertion in high temperatures,” Dr Tahira Mufti, who runs her private clinic in Peshawar, told News Lens Pakistan.
She said heatstroke could occur if body temperature rose to 40°C or higher. Heatstroke can quickly damage brain, heart, kidneys and muscles, she added. The damage worsens, she said, if treatment is delayed, increasing risk of serious complications or even death.
Dr Tahira said that there was lack of awareness among public regarding how to provide first aid to heatstroke patients. Due to this, every year many people who could easily be saved through first aid die on the way to hospital.
“Symptoms of heatstroke include rapid breathing, nausea and vomiting, an absence of perspiration despite the heat, a racing heart rate, headache, dizziness and flushed skin.”
Causes of heatstroke, she said, were exposure to hot and humid weather or environment, strenuous activity, wearing excess clothing, dehydration and drinking alcohol that could affect the body’s ability to regulate temperature.
Doctors recommend that in case of heatstroke, patients should be immediately removed to a cool shady place, cooled off with damp sheets, given a cool shower and rehydrated.
“Take immediate action to cool the overheated person while waiting for emergency treatment,” said Dr Tahira. “But prevention is better than cure. Heatstroke could be avoided with a care.”
As for the hot month of Ramazan ahead, the doctor suggests, people should avoid eating greasy food, wear light clothes and keep their heads covered outdoors. Tea, coffee and caffeinated drinks should be avoided as these are diuretics that dehydrate the body.
This article originally appeared in News Lens and has been reproduced with permissionHi Guys!
So now that we’ve launched season 2 of Flux Buddies (or FLUX BUDDIES 2.0 if you will!), you may have noticed that we have a new feature in the intro, and that’s a spotlight for the amazing artwork you talented guys have created!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NDB9gSy_GU
First off, a big thank you to Aeverelle and Boa for our first episode spotlights! Unfortunately, in the rush to get FB2.0 up and running and our excitement to show off our favourite bits of art, we forgot to contact Aev and Boa beforehand to ask for permission to use their work - we’re so sorry for that! Going forward, we’d like to set up a proper system so we don’t trip up again!
If you’d like to have your art featured in the intro spotlight, please upload your lovely work to Tumblr as usual, but use the hashtag “’#fluxbuddiesintro” This way, we can easily search for art, and we’ll know that we have your permission to use your creation in our episodes!
We’re looking forward to seeing your beautiful work - I’m so chuffed to see so much stuff that’s been inspired by our crazy adventures already! Thank you guys for all the awesome work you do, and I hope to see more of it in the future :D
-KimOr maybe the results from Gallup’s latest poll are all part of a natural cycle. Every seven years or so, the bottom appears to fall out of the global-warming market. In 2000, for instance, 72% of Gallup responders said they worried a great deal or fair amount about global warming, a peak result over the last 22 years Gallup has polled on the question. In 2004, that number plunged to 51%, after a relatively mild recession had people worrying more about their pocketbooks. In 2008, the number rose again to a decade-long peak of 66% as America searched for a President whose mere visage would force the oceans to retreat and the Earth to cool.
Three years later, after America’s worst post-war recession, we’re suddenly back to being practical:
Americans continue to express less concern about global warming than they have in the past, with 51% saying they worry a great deal or fair amount about the problem — although attitudes appear to have stabilized compared with last year. That current level of worry compares with 66% just three years ago, and is only one percentage point higher than the low Gallup measured in 1997. …. While Americans’ self-professed understanding of global warming has increased over time — from 69% saying they understand the issue “very well” or “fairly well” in 2001, to 74% in 2006 and 80% in the current poll — their concern about global warming across several measures is generally in the lower range of what Gallup has found historically.
Its other measures in the poll show a rather nuanced picture. The number of people who believe the global warming issue has been exaggerated actually declined since last year, from 48% to 43% this year, which is still higher than any other time in the past ten years. The number of people saying that AGW has been underestimated rose from 25% to 29%, still well below the 38% in 2006.
However, the number of people who believe that AGW has already begun fell to 49%, the first time since 1998 that it has gone below a majority level. Absolute skepticism — those who say AGW will never happen — has risen over the last few years, coming in at 18%, slightly down from last year’s 19%. A majority still believe that pollution is the major cause of higher temperatures, but at 52% that’s just slightly higher than last year’s series low of 50%, and well below the 58%-61% range that Gallup found from 2003 through 2009. Those who believe that higher temperatures come from natural cycles peaked last year at 46% and fell back a bit this year to 43%, still well above the 33%-38% range of 2003-2008.
The cycle shows that global-warming hysteria is a hobby for those enjoying a fat economy. When times get lean, people want energy at low cost and a focus on jobs rather than expanded regulation. Voters tend to discover their inner skeptics when the bills mount and the revenue drops.Starting with Bungie's last Halo creation — Halo: Reach — Halo has gone down a steady path of popularity decline. With each new release after Halo 3, game sales have decreased, along with the overall player base. Halo 5 might be incredibly successful due to its business model, but Halo as a franchise has fallen from its pedestal as the creme de la creme of first-person shooters.
One question many ask is, what caused the decline in the first place? One question many ask is, what caused the decline in the first place? For many, there are specific aspects of the more recent Halo titles that sully the experience — things like the addition of the ability to sprint, art style changes, and quality of story have all been points of grief for Halo community members, among others. Therefore, it is for this reason that I believe that Halo's recent struggles can't be tied down to any one thing. Rather, it is a combination of these things that, when applied to the games together, create an experience that feels and plays very different to Halo's established formula. With this in mind, I intend to analyze and dissect what I feel are collectively the fanbase's biggest issues with the latest Halo installment — Halo 5 — and identify what Halo 6 will need to change in order to avoid making the same mistakes twice. While a lot of it is subjective, I've spent a lot of time reading into Halo 5's reception and feedback (two years in fact) and I'm confident when I say that what I list below is fairly representative of the way the general community feels about the game. Something to keep in mind is that I myself personally enjoy Halo 5. What I'm saying here doesn't necessarily represent how I feel (though some of it does). My goal in this piece is to identify what I think the community thinks overall, not to push my own views forward. Since identifying everything wrong with a game such as Halo 5 is a large undertaking, this article would be quite large if I covered everything in one go. In this first article, I'm going to talk about the big stuff: Performance
Story
Core gameplay
So, activate your energy swords, prime your plasma grenades, and load your battle rifles. Let's dive right in. Stop reading now if you want to avoid Halo spoilers!
Performance: Polish is a priority If features don't work, then there's no point in having them at all. Arguably one of Halo 5's most devastating issues (and The Master Chief Collection's, as well) is the lack of polish. The game is full of performance snags at every turn — game freezes, user interface lag, and poor hit detection in matches only represents the tip of Halo 5's iceberg of bugs. Here, the bugs are not features, as the old saying would lead you to believe. Rather, they do nothing but take away from what Halo 5 has to offer. If features don't work, then there's no point in having them at all. Ask any Halo 5 player how often they use the Theater mode. I'd bet money that the vast majority of them would say rarely, or even never, due to how unreliable it is. The simple fact is this: the content of your game doesn't matter if the content itself doesn't even work. Halo 6 needs to prioritize performance, and both Microsoft and 343 Industries need to devote adequate time for the game to be optimized efficiently before release. Story: Halo needs character development and plot clarity It's no secret by now that the biggest failing point of Halo 5's campaign was its narrative. Halo 5 promised a lot. It promised a chance to meet and connect with Blue Team, the Master Chief's Spartan-II brothers and sisters from childhood, as well as the opportunity to be introduced to four brand new Spartans — Fireteam Osiris. All of these characters would revolve around a plot centered around one of Halo's most beloved characters, Master Chief's AI companion, Cortana, who had returned after Halo 4's emotional conclusion to her story. However, Cortana is not who she once was, and her new plans for the galaxy would shake it to its core.
So, what went wrong? Why was the story received so poorly among fans? After participating in and listening to as much critical discussion among the Halo community that I could, I've come to the conclusion that the biggest flaws about Halo 5's narrative are the over-saturation of characters and the lack of adequate clarification about the plot. Having too many characters means that none of them receive adequate development or presentation in the story. Having too many characters means that none of them receive adequate development or presentation in the story, and unfortunately, Halo 5 had so many characters in it that none of them felt well written. Generally, in gaming, the most successful stories tend to have only a few main characters, with the rest of the cast supporting as minor roles. In the case of Halo 5 and its plot, the main characters should have been Master Chief, Cortana, Locke, and the Warden Eternal. But, that wasn't the case. Halo 5 attempted to present its entire cast as main characters, with all of them sharing the "center stage" position. In addition to inadequately characterizing the cast, this issue has the added side effect of taking time away from the plot. With so much time being devoted to giving every character a bit of the spotlight, time spent efficiently providing exposition is reduced. This results in a rushed feeling for the story. Details about the plot that should have been given to the player as they progressed through the game are instead dumped on them all at once at occasional intervals. "Wait, what?" was not an uncommon reaction to Halo 5's unfolding story.
What Halo 6 needs to do is re-adjust the character presentation of Halo 5. Have the game give adequate time to develop and explore the core characters to the narrative, while leaving the minor ones to assist from the sidelines. And that is not a bad thing, by the way. Stories are often made or broken depending on the quality of their side characters. Good minor characters help to bring the setting of the story to life, as well as contribute to the work's theme — all while leaving the door open for proper, natural flow of in-game events and clarity on why they're happening, as opposed to overwhelming exposition dumps. Core gameplay: Return Halo to its roots Perhaps the largest point of contention among Halo fans is the new style of gameplay. With the series nearing its 16th birthday, some fans argue that Halo should drastically change to avoid becoming stale. I would say that the majority, though, want Halo to return to its roots. One only has to look at the series' exponentially decaying mindshare since 2010 to see that the altering of Halo's mechanics has, at least in part, produced a negative impact. But I believe that 343 Industries can bring back the classic feel of Halo, while also satisfying fans that want new, fresh gameplay by designing Halo 6 as a modular experience.
Unlike altering core mechanics, innovation through sandbox and map design lets the developer choose where and how things are innovated upon. The more modern Halo games changed the foundation mechanics themselves, the older games changed Halo by building upon that foundation with innovations in the sandbox and in map design. It is for this reason that I call it "modular." Halo 2 and 3 innovated by "adding a module" onto the classic Halo formula. Think of vehicle boarding, man-cannons, or equipment items. Whereas Reach, 4 and 5 innovated by adding base traits like the ability to sprint, clamber up ledges, or by giving the player armor abilities. The fundamental difference between the two is that with modular design, there is significantly more room to work with. When you change a base mechanic for all players, every single map and element of your weapon/vehicle sandbox must change to fit around that alteration — because that alteration is made to the core mechanics of character control. But when you make changes in the game's maps or sandbox, things that vary from match to match such as man-cannons or power-ups, a form of dynamic gameplay occurs. This form of emergent play helps the game and every match in it to feel fresh and new, while also retaining the core mechanics that make Halo, Halo. And the best part of it is, if players decide they don't like a certain change, |
in the center of defense, and the US have had a rotating cast of characters there over the past 20 months. It’s got to stop, and to be perfectly honest, it should have stopped with the Azteca game. If there was ever a defensive result that should have made a US coach double down, that’s the one.
READ: Beasley at left back? Youngsters will have to push him out of the job
Omar Gonzalez and Matt Besler are as individually talented as anybody in the central defensive pool save for maybe Geoff Cameron (who doesn’t play there for his club team, which in my eyes more or less rules him out except as an emergency measure). Give them every chance to be the foundation now, rather than learning painful lessons when the games really matter.
What will that all add up to for the US? Wins and points, I think. Shots from the run of play at the very least, is what I would bet on.
Will it be enough to advance out of the group at next year’s World Cup?
Right now, I don’t care. The important part is getting there first.Let’s start with the fundamental paradox: Our personal technology in the 21st century—our laptops and smartphones, our browsers and apps—does everything it can to keep us out of crowds.
Why pack into Target when Amazon can speed the essentials of life to your door? Why approach strangers at parties or bars when dating sites like OkCupid (to say nothing of hookup apps like Grindr) can more efficiently shuttle potential mates into your bed? Why sit in a cinema when you can stream? Why cram into arena seats when you can pay per view? We declare the obsolescence of “bricks and mortar,” but let’s be honest: What we usually want to avoid is the flesh and blood, the unpleasant waits and stares and sweat entailed in vying against other bodies in the same place, at the same time, in pursuit of the same resources.
And yet: On those rare occasions when we want to form a crowd, our tech can work a strange, dark magic. Consider this anonymous note, passed around among young residents of greater London on a Sunday in early August:
Everyone in edmonton enfield woodgreen everywhere in north link up at enfield town station 4 o clock sharp!!!!
Bring some bags, the note went on; bring cars and vans, and also hammers. Make sure no snitch boys get dis, it implored. Link up and cause havic, just rob everything. Police can’t stop it. This note, and variants on it, circulated on August 7, the day after a riot had broken out in the London district of Tottenham, protesting the police killing of a 29-year-old man in a botched arrest. So the recipients of this missive, many of them at least, were already primed for violence.
It helped, too, that the medium was BlackBerry Messenger, a private system in which “broadcasting” messages—sending them to one’s entire address book—can be done for free, with a single command. Unlike in the US, where BlackBerrys are seen as strictly a white-collar accessory, teens and twentysomethings in the UK have embraced the platform wholeheartedly, with 37 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds using the devices nationwide; the percentage is probably much higher in urban areas like London. From early on in the rioting, BBM messages were pinging around among the participants and their friends, who were using the service for everything from sharing photos to coordinating locations. Contemplating the corporate-grade security and mass communication of the platform, Mike Butcher, a prominent British blogger who serves as a digital adviser to the London mayor, wryly remarked that BBM had become the “thug’s Gutenberg press.”
Nick de Bois, one of Enfield’s representatives in Parliament, was whiling away that Sunday afternoon at the horse races in Windsor, where a friend’s wife was celebrating her 40th birthday. It was a fine day of racing, to boot: In the third, Toffee Tart bested Marygold by just half a length, paying off at 7:2. “Unusually for me, I hadn’t looked at my handheld in two hours,” de Bois says. But when he did look, he saw something disturbing. Gossip was swirling about more riots that night, with Enfield named as a likely target. De Bois decided he had better cut his race day short. “I never even had a chance to recover my losses,” he deadpans.
By five in the afternoon, he was on the streets of Enfield Town, along with a handful of police. Was there a riot? No—not really, not yet. But there was a gathering crowd, a mixed-race group of mostly young men, just milling around in small bunches. Some were conducting what de Bois describes as “reckys”—reconnaissance missions—around the town center. “They were just having a good look!” he says.
Then, at around 6 pm, as if at some unvoiced command, the street exploded. The crowd hit a Pearsons department store, a Starbucks, an HMV. Police were able to move in and contain the violence—or so they thought—to a small part of the town’s shopping district. “Of course, there were side roads,” de Bois says. “But broadly speaking, the looting had been contained. Calm had been restored.” It was a loose version of what the British call kettling, an anti-riot tactic where police keep a disorderly crowd penned in, often for hours, to avoid their causing any more trouble.
Only then, though, did the situation in Enfield get truly surreal. De Bois was standing outside the sealed-off zone, behind one line of police, in an open area that led to the train station. As he watched in amazement, more and more people—some disembarking trains at the station, some stepping out of cars—continued to pour into the plaza. Riot police were convoying in, too, but their numbers couldn’t possibly keep up. And even if they did, it was impossible to definitively separate the would-be rioters from the bystanders.
Right behind a line of armor-clad police who had successfully contained a riot, this new crowd of hundreds was gearing up to touch off a second riot. As 7 pm approached, face coverings went up, and a small group walked past de Bois with a crowbar. Gangs began to break windows throughout the plaza—one local jewelry store lost nearly $65,000 in stock. Police would descend on a group, but then the crowd would disperse, only to reconstitute itself someplace else a few minutes later. Part of the issue was a peculiarity of British policing: Largely because most cops lack guns, they can’t easily carry out mass arrests, even in emergencies. Instead, each arrestee is physically accompanied by individual officers for booking. With their numbers already stretched thin, the police could not take looters off the streets without further depleting their own ranks.
But there was also something strange about the character of this riot, and these rioters—something that seemed to make the violence unstoppable. At base, it was their confidence: their surety that, as they streamed out of their cars and trains, or as they milled around in small groups, or even after they were dispersed by police, they would always find one another in sufficient numbers. As de Bois wandered through the crowd, he buttonholed one of the young men, asked him who they all were and why they were there. “Don’t worry,” said the looter to the MP, in a tone of gruff reassurance. “We’ll be out of here soon.”
The year 2011 brought waves of crowd unrest on a worldwide scale unseen for more than three decades. From January’s revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia through a summer of sit-ins and demonstrations in Europe, India, and Israel to the Occupy Wall Street movement in the fall, the past year saw a new generation of activists rediscover—and subtly reinvent, through social media—the massive street action as a means of political expression.
But on both sides of the Atlantic, there was a rash of more mysterious, more malicious-seeming crowds in which technology appeared to play a central role. Riots over four days in Britain spread across the country and caused millions of dollars in property damage. US cities struggled with their own disorder: In Kansas City, Missouri, gunfire injured three after hundreds of high school students descended on an open-air shopping mall, while Philadelphia imposed a curfew to fight a long string of surprise gatherings by teens. At least five cities saw an innovative form of robbery, where a large group of kids would simultaneously run into a store, take items off the shelves, and run out again. To be sure, technology wasn’t at the root of all the crowd mayhem: For example, an investigation of a group robbery in Germantown, Maryland, determined that the thieves had hatched their plan on a bus, not online. But with most of these events, there was some sort of electronic trail (Facebook, Twitter, texts, BBM) that showed how they coalesced.
Groping for what to call these events, the media christened them “flash mobs”—lumped them in, that is, with the fad in which large crowds carry out a public performance and then post the results on YouTube. So at around the same time that Fox was running a lighthearted flash-mob reality show called Mobbed, and Friends With Benefits, the high-grossing rom-com starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, featured a flash-mob dance in Times Square, pundits and public officials suddenly began railing against flash mobs as a threat to public order. The convenience store knock-overs became “flash mob robberies,” or even “flash robs.” “The evolution of flash mobs from pranks to crime and revolution,” declared one of my local papers, the San Francisco Examiner, after the hacktivist group Anonymous had helped to create subway shutdowns.
Here is where the story got a bit uncomfortable for me personally. The Examiner ‘s flash-mob timeline, which ended in a terrifying stew of rioting and revolution, literally began with my name. Back in 2003, as a sort of social experiment, I sent an email to friends and asked them to forward it along, looking to gather “inexplicable mobs” of people around New York. Then, over the span of just a couple of months, I watched in amazement as my prank turned into a worldwide fad. I should add that the first flash mobs weren’t like either the Friends With Benefits kind or the burn-and-loot kind—or, maybe I should say, they were a little like both. Like the happy mobs, they were good-natured spectacles, and they often involved the crowd performing some benign group action: bowing before a robotic dinosaur, making birdcalls in Central Park. Like the violent mobs, though, they were highly spontaneous; the crowd was told where they were going and what they would do there only minutes beforehand. And the goal of the get-togethers was not to entertain but, if I may borrow a phrase, to “link up and cause havic.”
I even called my events “mobs,” as a wink to the scary connotations of a large group gathered for no good reason. But I didn’t come up with the name flash mob—that honor belongs to Sean Savage, a UC Berkeley grad student who was blogging about my events and the copycats as they happened. He added the word “flash” as an analogy to a flash flood, evoking the way that these crowds (which in the original version arrived all at once and were gone in 10 minutes or less) rushed in and out like water from a sudden storm. Savage and I never met while the original mobs were still going on, but today we work just a block away from each other in San Francisco—me at Wired, him at Frog Design, where he’s an interaction designer—so we now can get together and commiserate about what’s become of our mutual creation. It had been bad enough to see the term get appropriated by Oprah to describe a ridiculous public dance party featuring the Black Eyed Peas. Now the media was stretching the term to include just about any sort of group crime. “It means everything and nothing now,” Savage says morosely.
One reason the term “flash mob” stuck back in 2003 was its resonance, among some sci-fi fans who read Savage’s blog, with a 1973 short story by Larry Niven called “Flash Crowd.” Niven’s tale revolved around the effects of cheap teleportation technology, depicting a future California where “displacement booths” line the street like telephone booths. The story is set in motion when its protagonist, a TV journalist, inadvertently touches off a riot with one of his news reports. Thanks to teleportation, the rioting burns out of control for days, as thrill-seekers use the booths to beam in from all around to watch and loot. Reading “Flash Crowd” back in 2003, I hadn’t seen much connection to my own mobs, which I intended as a joke about the slavishness of fads. I laughed off anyone who worried about these mobs getting violent. In 2011, though, it does feel like Niven got something chillingly correct. He seems especially prescient in the way he describes the interplay of curiosity, large numbers, and low-level criminality that causes his fictional riots to grow. “How many people would be dumb enough to come watch a riot?” the narrator asks. “But that little percentage, they all came at once, from all over the United States and some other places, too. And the more there were, the bigger the crowd got, the louder it got—the better it looked to the looters … And the looters came from everywhere, too.”
That last line passed for science fiction in 1973. The not-infrequent riots that wracked American cities in the 1960s tended to be strikingly localized, with rioters taking out their aggression on the immediate neighborhood in which they lived. By contrast, Nick de Bois says that of the 165 or so people arrested so far for the looting in Enfield Town, only around 60 percent hailed from the local borough, which includes not just greater Enfield but a few surrounding towns. The other 40 percent commuted in from elsewhere, including locales as far afield as Essex and Twickenham, each a good hour’s drive away. Instead of teleportation booths replacing telephone booths—how quaint!—it turned out that those phones merely had to shrink down enough to fit into our pockets.
In trying to understand how and why crowds go wrong, you can have no better guide than Clifford Stott, senior lecturer in social psychology at the University of Liverpool. Stott has risked his life researching his subject. Specifically, he has spent most of his career—more than 20 years so far—conducting a firsthand study of violence among soccer fans. On one particularly dicey trip to Marseilles in 1998, Stott and a small crowd of Englishmen ran away from a cloud of tear gas only to find themselves facing a gang of 50 French toughs, some of them wielding bottles and driftwood. “If you are on your own,” a philosophical fellow Brit remarked to Stott at that moment, “you’re going to get fucked.” This, in a sense, is the fundamental wisdom at the heart of Stott’s work—though he does couch it in somewhat more respectable language.
To Stott, members of a crowd are never really “on their own.” Based on a set of ideas that he and other social psychologists call ESIM (Elaborated Social Identity Model), Stott believes crowds form what are essentially shared identities, which evolve as the situation changes. We might see a crowd doing something that appears to us to be just mindless violence, but to those in the throng, the actions make perfect sense. With this notion, Stott and his colleagues are trying to rebut an influential line of thinking on crowd violence that stretches from Gustave Le Bon, whose 1895 treatise, The Crowd, launched the field of crowd psychology, up to Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist behind the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971. To explain group disorder, Zimbardo and other mid-20th-century psychologists blamed a process they called deindividuation, by which a crowd frees its members to carry out their baser impulses. Through anonymity, in Zimbardo’s view, the strictures of society were lifted from crowds, pushing them toward a state of anarchy and thereby toward senseless violence.
By contrast, Stott sees crowds as the opposite of ruleless, and crowd violence as the opposite of senseless: What seems like anarchic behavior is in fact governed by a shared self-conception and thus a shared set of grievances. Stott’s response to the riots has been unpopular with many of his countrymen. Unlike Zimbardo, who would respond—and indeed has responded over the years—to incidents of group misbehavior by speaking darkly of moral breakdown, Stott brings the focus back to the long history of societal slights, usually by police, that primed so many young people to riot in the first place.
Meeting Stott in person, one can see how he’s been able to blend in with soccer fans over the years. He’s a stocky guy, with a likably craggy face and a nose that looks suspiciously like it’s been broken a few times. When asked why the recent riots happened, his answers always come back to poor policing—particularly in Tottenham, where questions over the death of a young man went unaddressed by police for days and where the subsequent protest was met with arbitrary violence. Stott singles out one moment when police seemed to handle a young woman roughly and an image of that mistreatment was tweeted (and BBMed) throughout London’s black community and beyond. It was around then that the identity of the crowd shifted, decisively, to outright combat against the police.
Stott boils down the violent potential of a crowd to two basic factors. The first is what he and other social psychologists call legitimacy—the extent to which the crowd feels that the police and the whole social order still deserve to be obeyed. In combustible situations, the shared identity of a crowd is really about legitimacy, since individuals usually start out with different attitudes toward the police but then are steered toward greater unanimity by what they see and hear. Paul Torrens, a University of Maryland professor who builds 3-D computer models of riots and other crowd events, imbues each agent in his simulations with an initial Legitimacy score on a scale from 0 (total disrespect for police authority) to 1 (absolute deference). Then he allows the agents to influence one another. It’s a crude model, but it’s useful in seeing the importance of a crowd’s initial perception of legitimacy. A crowd where every member has a low L will be predisposed to rebel from the outset; a more varied crowd, by contrast, will take significantly longer to turn ugly, if it ever does.
It’s easy to see how technology can significantly change this starting position. When that tweet or text or BBM blast goes out declaring, as the Enfield message did, that “police can’t stop it,” the eventual crowd will be preselected for a very low L indeed. As Stott puts it, flash-mob-style gatherings are special because they “create the identity of a crowd prior to the event itself,” thereby front-loading what he calls the “complex process of norm construction,” which usually takes a substantial amount of time. He hastens to add that crowd identity can be pre-formed through other means, too, and that such gatherings also have to draw from a huge group of willing (and determined) participants. But the technology allows a group of like-minded people to gather with unprecedented speed and scale. “You’ve only got to write one message,” Stott says, “and it can reach 50, or 500, or even 5,000 people with the touch of a button.” If only a tiny fraction of this quickly multiplying audience gets the message and already has prepared itself for disorder, then disorder is what they are likely to create.
The second factor in crowd violence, in Stott’s view, is simply what he calls power: the perception within a crowd that it has the ability to do what it wants, to take to the streets without fear of punishment. This, in turn, is largely a function of sheer size—and just as with legitimacy, small gradations can make an enormous difference. We often think about flash mobs and other Internet-gathered crowds as just another type of viral phenomenon, the equivalent of a video that gets a million views instead of a thousand. But in the physical world, the distance separating the typical from the transformational is radically smaller than in the realm of bits. Merely doubling the expected size of a crowd can create a truly combustible situation.
It was this problem of sheer volume, in retrospect, that tripped up Ryan Raddon—aka Kaskade, a Santa Monica, California, electronic dance artist—in his ill-fated PR stunt last July. The plan was simple enough: To celebrate the release of Electric Daisy Carnival Experience, a documentary about the electronic dance music scene that prominently featured him, Raddon would put on a short show outside the premiere, at the iconic Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. He got a permit from the fire department to shut down one lane of traffic. The idea was that the crowd would assemble on the sidewalk; he would cruise in, playing music on the back of a truck, and stop right in front, blocking that one agreed-upon lane. Really, it was a very elegant plan, and at 1:36 pm, he sent out the fateful tweet:
Today@6pm in Hollywood @Mann’s Chinese Theatre. ME+BIG SPEAKERS+ MUSIC=BLOCK PARTY!!! RT!
As Raddon was to discover, though, the math of physical space is unforgiving. The stretch of sidewalk directly in front of the theater is around 130 feet wide by 12 feet deep, while the outer courtyard offers a second viewing area of perhaps twice that size. Since even a dense crowd accommodates only around one person per 4.5 square feet, this would imply a maximum audience of about a thousand. By the time Raddon’s truck arrived, though, the crowd had swelled to roughly 5,000, stretching both ways down the block and thickly obstructing all six lanes of traffic. Police and news helicopters rotored overhead; fistfights began to break out. There was nowhere for Raddon’s truck to pull in, so the police directed him around the corner.
Then they tried to disperse the crowd, sending a line of riot cops down Hollywood Boulevard. They barked an order to leave the street, even though the sidewalks could not fit another person, let alone another thousand. Some fans responded by throwing bottles at the police, who in turn shot beanbag cannons into the crowd. Pandemonium ensued, with Raddon’s fans surging onto the tops of police cars and resisting arrest. Around the corner on Orange Drive, a cruiser was set ablaze. The dismal drift of the event is well captured in Raddon’s Twitter stream, which started out so cocksure just before his arrival but which escalated, over the course of 90 minutes, into an agitated blizzard of all-caps:
6:58 pm
Everybody CHILL OUT!!! The cops are freaking out. BE SAFE AND LET’S HAVE SOME FUN!
7:18 pm
EVERYONE CHILL NOW!!! The block party has officially been shut down! BUT THIS IS TOO CRAZY AND WE NEED TO BE SAFE!
7:31 pm
EVERYONE NEEDS TO GO HOME NOW! I DON’T WANT THIS TO REFLECT BADLY ON EDM OR WHAT WE ARE ABOUT. BE RESPECTFUL AND CHILL OUT!!!
When I meet Raddon a few months later—at the studio suite in Santa Monica that he shares, a bit incongruously, with the R&B legend Booker T. Jones—he’s still puzzling over why so many people came. At first blush, this sounds like false modesty: A week before we meet, a fan poll cosponsored by DJ Times magazine named him “America’s Best DJ,” a serious honor in the electronic dance scene. But as Raddon points out, he doesn’t even have a major-label record deal, and with 138,000 followers, he certainly doesn’t rank very high among musicians on Twitter: Lady Gaga now has more than 16 million, a minor big-label star like Jason Mraz boasts more than 2 million, and indie heavies like the Decemberists top 200,000, easy. It’s hard to believe that even Mraz, or “Weird Al” Yankovic (2.2 million), could draw out 5,000 people on just four hours’ notice.
Really, Raddon was right: On their face, at least, the numbers don’t add up. It’s not as if his appeal is somehow regional to Southern California; the electronic dance music fan base is truly worldwide. So even a generous estimate of around 10 percent local would put barely more than 13,500 of his Twitter followers within driving distance of the show. How did he get nearly half that many people to drop what they were doing and almost immediately schlep out to Hollywood Boulevard? And how did that crowd, of all crowds—a fan base known for its gratuitous hug-giving and cuddle-puddling—escalate into a full-blown riot?
To the first question, at least, Raddon has come up with a preliminary answer, and it’s a smart one, because it gets at the changing nature of the subculture he inhabits. It has become a cliché these days to talk about “engagement” in social media, about the magical way that some users and institutions online are able to punch above their weight, as it were, in the devotion of their relatively small groups of followers. But among dance music fans, super-engagement is a real and rational phenomenon, because social media serves not just as a diversion or a supplemental source of information but as the entire lifeline of their scene. Even the largest house acts have tended not to be on major labels. Raddon himself is signed to a small New York-based outfit called Ultra Records, which sells all its music online; it’s vanishingly rare for an Ultra artist to hit the Billboard Hot 100, but the label’s YouTube channel is the fifth-most-viewed music channel of all time and the 11th-most-viewed channel of any type. Unless you’re extremely diligent about following Raddon or his label or other big acts on social media, you might never hear about even the major shows in your area.
“Electronic dance music is still something that you have to find,” Raddon says. “It’s not on the radio, it’s not on TV. These people really had to search me out.” And the sense of shared community this engenders cannot be overstated. Ten years ago, the dance music scene was finely sliced into such an interminable array of genre divisions that it became a joke: aquatic techno-funk, down-tempo future jazz, goa-trance, hard chill ambient, techxotica, and so on. In the past decade or so, though, despite all the ways that the Internet encourages music to nichify, the rise of social media has actually pushed electronic dance music in the opposite direction. Witnessing its sheer numbers, sensing its collective power, the dance scene has reunified, becoming more of a mass phenomenon—an undifferentiated subculture of millions. It turns out that the thrill of collective identity, a moblike feeling of shared enormity, is far more exciting to fans than were their endless dives down rabbit holes of sonic purism.
Can you see how this starts to hint at an answer to the second question? The one about why a raver crowd became a riot? Think of it this way: To show up at Kaskade’s block party—and to hang around even after, or especially after, the police have come to send you home—is a decision that’s about far more than taste in music. It’s about being part of a group that has long felt invisible (no radio, no TV) despite the existence of enormous numbers. One might call this the emergence of mega-undergrounds, groups of people for whom the rise of Facebook and Twitter has laid bare the disconnect between their real scale and the puny extent to which the dominant culture recognizes them. For these groups, suddenly coalescing into a crowd feels like stepping out from the shadows, like forcing society to respect the numbers that they now know themselves to command.
Every disorderly flash mob that I’ve mentioned in this story has been, at root, a mega-underground phenomenon. In many cases, this brings us back around to the uncomfortable subject of race. In the US, the biggest and most important of the urban flash mobs that politicians have railed against (and that right-wingers now fret about as representing the specter of black insurrection) weren’t gathered by calls to violence, as in London. Instead, they were essentially about African-American teenagers showing their numbers, about kids taking over—for a brief window of time—some highly visible public spaces where they normally feel less than welcome. In Kansas City, a police investigation found that the mobs in April 2010 were gathered via Facebook, bringing between 700 and 900 kids to the aptly named Country Club Plaza, lined with plush stores. The Philadelphia mobs that same spring were touched off by a popular dance crew called Team Nike, who tweeted about the public performances they were giving; as in LA, though, these tweets got widely forwarded with an eye toward creating impromptu street parties on South Street and at the Gallery mall. Elijah Anderson, a Yale sociologist and Philly native who studies poor urban communities, has coined the term “cosmopolitan canopy” to describe these kinds of spaces. They’re the places where people of different races and class backgrounds come together, which makes them the closest thing we have today to a commons; for teens, especially poorer teens, the cosmopolitan canopy represents society and authority in the way that a statehouse or bank headquarters ought to but doesn’t.
And it’s not too far a stretch to extend this same idea into the realm of protests. This is, at root, the way that Occupy Wall Street defied expectations to become a genuine political force. The media harped on how these protests grew through Twitter, but it was really the movement’s Tumblr—wearethe99percent.tumblr.com—that made it work. Those photos of struggling Americans essentially virtualized the occupation; the street protesters were merely the visible symbol of the giant, subterranean mob of Americans struggling to get by. What’s really revolutionary about all these gatherings—what remains both dangerous and magnificent about them—is the way they represent a disconnected group getting connected, a mega-underground casting off its invisibility to embody itself, formidably, in physical space.
None of this can entirely explain Enfield, though. What remains shocking about that riot is the way it evolved in the moment, forming and reforming, eluding attempts to contain it. I keep coming back to one particular video from that night, a 50-second clip that captures the moment when G. Mantella, a mom-and-pop jewelry store, got hit for $65,000 in merchandise. Seriously, go watch the video right now, if you’re near a browser: It’s at wrdm.ag/riotvideo. The camera moves at walking pace toward the store, through a large but loose milling crowd. Who is a spectator? Who is a looter? Everyone looks simultaneously like neither and both. There’s a remarkable moment at 0:30 where a guy in a hoodie walks by, clutching a smartphone to his chest, looking cannily over his shoulder. He’s clearly taken on the group identity, but his peculiar expression betrays something strange about the nature and extent of his affiliation. The device in his hands connects him but it also frees him, allowing him to stay in and out of the mob at the same time.
The camera approaches the jewelry store just as three police vans come screaming up, and the looters stream out of the store at top speed. It’s the only point in the video that you see a real, thick, densely packed crowd, and that’s at the moment right before it gets dispersed. What isn’t clear from the video—what I didn’t realize until I took the train up to Enfield Town and made my own walk from the station to the square—was just how open this whole space is, how far back the buildings sit from the relatively wide streets. In LA, it had taken the confidence of a thickly gathered mob of ravers to confront the police. Here in Enfield, you had a few hundred people ranging around, gathering to loot, dispersing, and then reconvening soon thereafter to strike again. This was the pattern in Brixton, too, in South London, where rioters looted and burned a shopping district, scattered, and then reemerged a half-mile away to hit an electronics superstore. As Nick de Bois says, “It was organized, but it was dynamic.”
Really, what the video reveals is an extra dimension to the phenomenon of “power,” which turns out to be about more than sheer numbers. In the pre-cell-phone era—as Cliff Stott observed in Marseilles—overall numbers didn’t matter one bit if you could not keep physically connected. In Among the Thugs, Bill Buford’s first-person account of soccer hooliganism, he describes the remarkable discipline that even these drunken, anarchic yobs had to maintain to carry out violence against opposing fans: “Everyone is jogging in formation, tightly compressed, silent.” Step out of the phalanx to grab a pint or take a piss and you might never find your fellows again; in the meantime, the opposing mob might find you alone. Today, by contrast, a crowd’s power is amplified by the fact that its members can never really get separated. A crowd that’s always connected can never really be dispersed. It’s always still out there.
Among the more idealistic people who organize protests, not riots, there are dreams of creating special tools that can guide crowds in the moment, making them even more effective at thwarting or eluding police. At the London Hackspace, a maker workshop in the city’s Hackney borough, I met up with Sam Carlisle, codeveloper of an app called Sukey. Initially concocted to aid a series of student actions last winter—protesting an enormous hike in university fees that was being pushed through by the new Conservative-led government—Sukey has the very specific goal of frustrating that police tactic of kettling, which can imprison activists on the street for hours. To combat this maneuver, Sukey polls protesters in real time to identify exit points to public spaces that are blocked by police. Carlisle and his fellow developers are talking with protest groups about how to expand the app’s reach, creating dedicated apps for multiple smartphone platforms, in multiple languages, for use all around the world.
It’s a great idea in principle. But it seems hard to believe that any dedicated app for crowd communication could possibly be more effective than BBM was in London. In a protest crowd of any significant size, there will be a huge contingent that steps out at the spur of the moment, with no thought of downloading a special app or even bookmarking a URL. When disorder strikes or danger looms, they will fall back on the social ties they have already established, the tools they already possess, the patterns they already follow.
Among tech journalists, BlackBerry is considered to be “old-fashioned, lame, commoditized technology,” as Mike Butcher, the blogger and digital adviser in London puts it. But BBM is private, decentralized, blindingly fast, and—most important—ubiquitous. My colleague Robert Capps has called this phenomenon the Good Enough Revolution (issue 17.09), though I doubt he imagined that last word would ever assume, as it did in the streets of London, such an uncomfortably literal connotation. For tech to become effective as a tool for civic disorder, it first had to insinuate itself into people’s daily lives. Now that it has, there can be no getting rid of it. The agent provocateur lives inside our pockets and purses and cannot be uninstalled.
By the end of “Flash Crowd,” Niven’s fictional journalist, the guy accused of setting off the giant riot in the first place, has dreamed up a system to stop the violence from recurring. It involves the police both curtailing the teleportation technology and commandeering it. Cops, in his scheme, would get to ban all arrivals near the site of unrest, switching the booths so that they only send—directly to the inside of a police station or mass jail.
In the aftermath of the UK riots, the proposals floating around Parliament sounded every bit as intrusive, if not more so. Representatives of Facebook and Twitter were called in to discuss emergency plans to throttle their services. Research in Motion, the maker of BlackBerry, has promised (or so it has been reported) that it would halt BBM if riots happened again. But for the same basic reason that the technologies have proved instrumental in crowd disorders—the ubiquity of their use, among not just young people but all classes and professions—one has to doubt whether governments and tech companies will really have the stomach to carry out these draconian countermeasures. Vital emergency personnel routinely rely on BBM and other smartphone services, so an outright shutdown might easily sacrifice more lives than it saves.
So what’s a police force to do? In late September, the Dallas Police Department played host to a conference called SMILE (Social Media, the Internet, and Law Enforcement), and this question was very much in the air. Mike Parker, a captain at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, said that his force monitors social media and looks to disrupt problems before they start. He used an example of an entertainer—he wouldn’t specify the name—who tweeted to his half-million followers that he would be making a guerrilla appearance at a local electronics store. Once the police were tipped off to this, they helped to make a clever intervention: By the time the celebrity showed up, store employees had set up a folding table near the front for him, and two cops hung around to watch. “You can imagine how happy he wasn’t, when he showed up,” Parker says with barely restrained glee. “His whole plan was to create a spontaneous, ‘cool’ event, and instead it ended up looking organized.”
But to stay abreast of such would-be mobs, police would need to monitor social media with a level of intelligence—attuned to popularity, cognizant of slang, filtering for location—that right now is beyond the reach of even sophisticated tech startups, let alone cash-strapped police departments. The pitfalls of this task were apparent when David Gerulski, from a firm called DigitalStakeout, took the podium to give a demo. With his service, he promised the assembled officers, they could stop tinkering with social media and “go back to kicking down doors and sticking guns in people’s faces!” On the |
of tweets and buzz on the film. Which is even more reason you need honest and brave criticism to prevail.
In a world without dissent, the powerful will rule and underdogs will die. Do you want your cinema to be controlled in the hands of a few? Critics are not your enemies, they are your friends.
The real enemies are within your system. The stars who charge salaries that make your project unviable. The marketing spends you invest to beat the competition that puts you at greater risk. The lack of effort in writing or picking the good scripts. The money spent on foreign trips, lavish sets for dance numbers, business class tickets, five star hotels, success parties, audio launches and invites, buying your own tickets to keep the halls housefull… These are the things you can do without.
Criticism, you can do with.
(PS – Bourbaki just got to know that it was scary scenario for the RJ. Got threats too. The way it happens in those bad zimbly zouth films. Only difference is in real life they are scary. So he has decided to opt for something non-filmy now)
(PS1 – More discussion on the controversy is going on here : http://j.mp/1cKMF3F, http://j.mp/175Ibq3 & http://j.mp/1cKMLIu ) Also, another post on the same issue is here.
(PS2 – If you have problem with Bourbaki, his Godfather Banksy got an answer for you here.)Donald Trump wants America to know that he’s smart. When pressed, he’ll cop to being greedy and even a bit dishonest in his past dealings. He’ll admit he’s said inflammatory things over the course of his campaign and even kinda sorta maybe apologize for some of them. But he’s a smart guy. A rich guy. A savvy operator who wants America — or at least a certain slice of America — to believe he’s now going to be on their side.
But in Monday night’s debate he not only revealed himself to be a bit of an ignorant, blustering fool. He also showed that he’s not nearly as shrewd as he likes to think he is by stumbling into an elaborate trap: Alicia Machado.
It started near the end of the debate, when Hillary Clinton took a hard — indeed, awkwardly so — pivot to bring her up:
HOLT: We are at the final question. CLINTON: One thing, Lester. He tried to switch from looks to stamina. But this is a man who has called women pigs, slobs, and dogs. And someone who has said pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers, who has said— TRUMP: I never said that. CLINTON: Women don't deserve equal pay unless they do as good a job as men. And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest. He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called they woman “Ms. Piggy.” Then he called her “Ms. Housekeeping,” because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name. TRUMP: Where did you find this? CLINTON: She has become a US citizen, and you can bet she's going to vote this November.
It’s the perfect Trump anecdote. It shows Trump being misogynistic and racist. But it also shows him being disparaging to low-wage workers. The story also has a perfect punchline about becoming a citizen and registering to vote — a key issue for Clinton, whose demographic base includes a relatively large share of “unlikely voters,” especially Hispanics, who have traditionally turned out at a lower level.
Clinton’s campaign was ready with a bilingual video to drive home the importance of the moment:
Trump blundered right into it
One of Clinton’s key campaign themes since the convention has been that it’s too easy to get under Donald Trump’s skin. In her nomination acceptance speech, Clinton said “a man you can bait with a tweet” lacks the composure necessary to be an effective president.
Much of the debate was dedicated to proving that point, with Clinton gently needling Trump by calling him “Donald” and mentioning the $14 million he borrowed from his father.
The Machado gambit fit the same mold. Trump’s initially response to was dig back deeper into his years-old and completely irrelevant feud with comedian Rosie O’Donnell. Then this morning, still smarting over the attack, he raised the stakes by launching new attacks on Machado’s character and weight.
As my colleague Emily Crockett writes:
What’s remarkable about the Fox and Friends exchange, other than its cruelty, is that Trump brought up the Miss Universe moment unprompted. It was a moment during the debate that looked bad for Trump, and he had to have known that. But Trump couldn’t help himself. Much like when he kept attacking the family of a fallen Muslim American soldier who criticized him at the Democratic National Convention, Trump couldn’t help trying to reassert his dominance after being publicly called out for saying something shameful. And he just didn’t seem to understand how cruel and offensive his comments would sound to most people. Trump also didn’t deny, either on Fox and Friends or during the debate, that he called Machado “Miss Piggy” or “Miss Housekeeping.” Machado says Trump called her those names to her face.
This is, simply, a blunder.
Whether or not Trump was mean to a beauty pageant contestant years ago is not an obvious focal point for a national political campaign. If Trump were to refuse to engage and maybe vaguely apologize, it would be easy for him to switch the conversation to something else. But by bringing it up on his own, he gave the story new legs.
Machado was ready for Trump
And it now turns out that Machado was eager to inject herself into the 2016 election and had been working on it for some time.
Cosmopolitan is out today with a long feature story on Machado headlined “Former Miss Universe Alicia Machado Won't Be Defined by Donald Trump's Fat-Shaming.”
The author of the story, Prachi Gupta, is the person who conducted a devastating interview with Ivanka Trump earlier in September. The Machado article includes photographs that were taken a week ago, making it clear that the groundwork for the debate moment was laid some time ago. And the story advances the anti-Trump narrative with new anecdotes about his crass behavior:
As she prepped for her portrait session, Machado recalled another incident of Trump’s fat-shaming. Toward the end of her reign of Miss Universe, she was writing thank-you cards in the Los Angeles Miss Universe office when he asked her what she wanted to do next. “You'll never be an actress,” he told her, “because you are too fat to be an actress, and nobody wants fat girls on TV shows.”
The tagline at the bottom of Gupta’s story reads, “Election day is Nov. 8. If you haven’t registered to vote yet, you can do so here.”
So @lucia_graves happened to interview Alicia Machado on Friday (!) because she's brilliant and clairvoyant. https://t.co/pBKTXb6L8y — Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) September 27, 2016
It turns out Machado also set up an interview with the Guardian’s Lucia Graves, timed perfectly for the debate clash; the New York Times also has a fresh Machado story based on interviews.
Trump is a sucker
During the primaries, Marco Rubio characterized Donald Trump as a “con man,” and he won’t apologize for it even though he’s now on the Trump Train.
Instead, like many Republicans, Rubio seems to have decided to choose to believe that he is in on the con. Trump may not have been his first choice for nominee, but at least he is a vehicle through which the Republican Party can hope to win the White House and pass some of its priority legislation.
The Trump we are seeing unfold over the past 24 hours, however, is something different.
Not just a crude bully, a racist, a liar, or a misogynist — it’s Donald Trump as a sucker. The feud with the Khan family from earlier this summer is widely regarded as a self-inflicted fiasco, but at a minimum it appears to have been a genuine accident — the Khans’ speech was not scheduled for primetime, and Democrats seem to have underrated how powerful it would be.
The new war with Machado is nothing like that. The Clinton campaign laid surprisingly intricate groundwork to turn her into a major story both at the debate and in the days following it.
And Trump fell for it, revealing a new side to himself that the public hasn’t really seen before.
Watch: How presidential debates are won and lostBitcoin is well-entrenched as the preferred payment for cybercriminals like the WannaCry hackers who have hit more than 300,000 computers over the past week, but cryptocurrencies offering more anonymity are threatening to displace it.
A key reason for bitcoin’s dominance in the nefarious online underworld, say technologists and cybercrime experts, is its size – the total value of all bitcoins in circulation is more than twice that of the nearest of hundreds of rivals.
That makes it easy for victims to access enough to pay the ransoms demanded, and for hackers to cash out of it via online exchanges to spend money in the real world.
Bitcoin was set up in 2008 by someone – or some group – calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto, and was the first digital currency to successfully use cryptography to keep transactions secure and hidden, making traditional financial regulation difficult if not impossible.
Money is sent from one anonymous online “wallet” to another with no need for a third party to validate or clear the transactions.
In the WannaCry attack, the addresses of three anonymous bitcoin wallets were given to victims, with a demand for ransom payments from $300 worth of bitcoin, with a promise the affected machines would be decrypted in return, a promise that no evidence has shown will be kept.
But since the way that Bitcoin functions is via the blockchain – a giant, virtually tamper-proof, shared ledger of all bitcoin transactions ever made – payments can be traced, if users do not have the sophistication to take further steps to cloak themselves using digital anonymity tools.
“In the initial days of bitcoin, people…didn’t realize they were recording for posterity on the blockchain every financial transaction that ever took place,” said Emin Gun Sirer, a computer science professor at Cornell University.
Bitcoin addresses are anonymous, but users can be traced through IP addresses or by analyzing money flows.
If criminals using bitcoin want to stay truly anonymous, Gun Sirer said, they have to go through a number of additional, complex steps to make sure they do not get caught.
It is not yet clear what level of sophistication the WannaCry hackers have when it comes to laundering their cryptocurrency, as none of the money has yet been moved out of the three bitcoin wallets linked to the ransomware, which have had over $80,000 worth of bitcoin paid into them so far.
But some have suggested that the fact that the WannaCry hackers demanded bitcoin shows how amateur they are.
“If it was me, I would want people to use bitcoin all day, because you can trace it,” said Luke Wilson, vice president for law enforcement at Elliptic, a London-based security firm that tracks illicit bitcoin transactions and that counts the U.S. Federal Bureau for Investigations (FBI) among its clients.
Wilson, who used to work at the FBI, where he set up a taskforce to investigate the use of virtual currencies, did not disclose all the ways that Elliptic and law enforcement agencies find criminals using bitcoin. But sometimes, he said, the offenders make as obvious a mistake as withdrawing money from a bitcoin wallet directly into their bank accounts.
Cat-and-mouse game
More sophisticated criminals use obfuscation methods that make it very hard to be tracked down. One of the most basic ones is a technique known as “chain-hopping,” whereby money is moved from one cryptocurrency into another, across digital currency exchanges – the less-regulated the better – to create a money trail that is almost impossible to track.
Newer and more complex money-laundering methods have also emerged in recent years, which make it very difficult for law enforcement and bitcoin security firms such as Elliptic or New-York-based Chainalysis to track down cybercriminals.
“It’s a cat-and-mouse game – as police and companies like Elliptic catch up to criminals’ techniques, they invent new techniques,” said Jerry Brito, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Coin Center, a not-for-profit advocacy group focusing on public policy issues around cryptocurrency.
These techniques are not foolproof, however – chain-hopping, for example, relies on unregulated exchanges that do not carry out know-your-customer (KYC) checks, and security firms say they will develop ways to trace such methods.
Monero Hack
Easier, perhaps, would be for cybercriminals to use next-generation cryptocurrencies that have built-in anonymity from the start, such as Monero, Dash and Z-Cash.
And indeed, experts said late on Tuesday that a computer virus that exploits the same vulnerability as the WannaCry attack had latched on to more than 200,000 computers and begun using them to manufacture – or “mine” – Monero currency.
But with a total value of around $425 million – a little over 1 percent of that of bitcoin – converting that currency into spendable cash might not be so easy, and it is also much harder for victims to access, alternative payments experts said.
That is why the Monero attack did not demand a ransom, but rather used the infected computers’ computing power to create new currency.
“This used to happen in bitcoin before it became big – there were loads of botnets that went into computers that used to mine bitcoin, but you now can’t basically mine bitcoin on normal computers because you need specialist hardware,” said Chainalysis CEO Jonathan Levin.
Levin said such bitcoin-based attacks were carried out several years ago, when mining it was still largely a hobby for tech geeks using their home computers.
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As the bitcoin price has risen and as transaction numbers have grown, the computers have become so specialized that only they can only perform the function of bitcoin mining.
“If Monero does become adopted and is as big and liquid (as bitcoin), that means the crime (will) move from using computers to mine to getting to extortion,” Levin said.Beloved progressive rockers Dopapod packed the Concord Music Hall last night, playing their hearts out for a great late night party post-Phish. While the Vermont jammers got the city rocking with two great nights at Wrigley Field, it was Dopapod that brought it all home with a great performance after the last show in Chicago, IL.
Among the many highlights from the show was the band’s song “New James,” which saw the group break into the Parliament Funkadelic classic “Flash Light.” The song was played as a tribute to the late Bernie Worrell, who succumbed to a lengthy battle with cancer last Friday, June 24th. Dopapod did the song justice, with Eli Winderman working his magic on the keys.
Watch a video of the funky jam, courtesy of iccuspunk on YouTube.
You can see Dopapod’s full setlist and a gallery of images from Jeremy Scott Photography, below.
Setlist: Dopapod at Concord Music Hall, Chicago, IL – 6/26/16
Set: Cure, Psycho Nature, New James -> Flash Light -> New James, Weird Charlie > Nerds, 8 Years Ended -> Black and White, STADA, Present Ghosts
E: Sonic
*the words to Nerds were replaced with Jon SnowREAD THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://therepopulation.com/news/updates/february-update-2019
Development roadmap
Combat basics updates
Targeting system
Auto-target
Implemented Line of Sight revamp fixes
Astronomy system cleanup and updates
Character Select area cleanup
Player account/character updates and cleanup
Environment adjustments
Area clean up, two areas rebuilt
Island Prototype completed
New Island templates completed in Dev
First planned is Inventory
Item System
Ability System
PC/NPC System
Combat Skill Progression
Astronomy System Updates
Horticulture
Races spec system
Factions
Adversarial Camps (Spawners)
Quest/Mission system
Create new NPC's
Updated Guild System
Crafting Basics
Housing Revamp
Combat Progression and title awards
Player Merchants
Player Auction House
World Auction House
UI/UX
Terra Corp. Island
The Road to Rhyldan
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://therepopulation.com/news/updates/february-update-2019
It is our pleasure to bring you this next development update. As is the case with many of the previous updates, there are several topics we would like to cover, from creative content to issues more technical in nature. Our goal is to always be as transparent as possible regarding the development process, as we re-imagine the world of Rhyldan.Today's update will cover everything from Roadmap history and the new roadmap outline, the new Starter Island, New areas, the new in-game Timeline, Character Select, Account disconnection issues progress and the new dev servers!As we continue with development during this years first quarter no new Additions to the roadmap have been made. We’ll continue to progress on the same planned path for the remainder of this quarter. Because we are all excited, this is the first topic we want to bring to you.Work to complete goals from the previous year's roadmap continued into the new year allowing us to complete several goals. With so much forward movement it is an exciting time for us and we know you must be as ready to see a development roadmap update as we are to give it.A new Roadmap page will be added with the site updates that will contain more detail for this road map as well as additions in the future. The page will be easily searchable as well so you wont have to search throughout older news updates.Terracorp island Whiteboxed in devThe new Tutorial/Starting Island: We are enthused with the progress made on our development server for the new Tutorial Island. Recently, we have completed the final stage of white boxing granting our artists the ability to move forward with the terrain.They’ve been hard at work sculpting the island's features and completing the vertex painting. Now we have begun texturing the terrain to give it a more natural feeling environment for our players to explore.Expanding the tutorial region to six areas has allowed us to create a region that will remain an active part of the world in the future. Here on the island players will explore territories controlled by the three factions, neutral areas, festival grounds, an agricultural area, and undeveloped wilderness.Looking forward, players will encounter a variety of content as we move through build phases. Players can test their mettle and settle scores against opponents in the arena, get their hands dirty on the homestead as they learn farming and hydroponic skills, stroll through the shopping district, or enjoy festival events.If schedules permit a player could take time to reflect in the halls of the museum whilst being surrounded by history.Expanding the landmass to multiple areas grants us the ability to use this as the test bed for the main world map. This will allow us to identify additional issues and account for any overhead we may not yet be aware of. Using the Island as our template for the rest of the world we can see where our limitations are and what optimizations and changes are needed. Areas of concern for us are latency issues (lag), area transitioning (zoning) and account stability.With such a variety of areas, and content planned for the area we have begun to create buildings to represent them. Players will be introduced initially to four new buildings. These will be considerably less temporary and/or industrial in appearance than those currently in-game.It is our goal to give these assets a more modern and permanent flare that reflects both the humble origins of Terra and the new styles cultivated on Rhyldan. These buildings will be decorated with a host of assets as time passes. Many of which will be of a high tech nature in appearance. We'll continue to update older assets to fit with our new theme.Our focus has been to create a unified theme that will blend the new assets with those that are currently in-game by addressing issues such as some of the dark almost post-apocalyptic colors and styles. Each Nation will have its own flare that will reflect their uniqueness while still falling into the same style of art.We do want to let you know that the selection of nation and initial armor will remain in the character creation process; in the future, these will be moved to the island.Once that is brought into the game after the Character and NPC system revamps, you will be able to chose your initial gear while learning the basics that include the differences between each type of armour and weapons.Like any story, our writers are faced with challenges and unique choices as it evolves. The story of the little planet Rhyldan and humanity is no different. As time has progressed, writers have moved on, and as visions matured the story has seen revisions. In order to ensure the residents of Rhyldan stand the best chance of survival, we’ve altered the timeline of events.These alterations include expanding to an established colonization time of one hundred and fifty years since arriving. New events and characters have been established in order to make a more consistent and cohesive environment across the world. This timeline lore has been used to shape the visual lore aspects as well. Be it the scarring on the planet's terrain from Star Fall, the hybrid vegetation from debris caches, or the architecture within your cities....Never Lose the Way: App Turns Phone Into Navigation HUD
The typical GPS will get you where you’re going, but they require having yet another piece of hardware stuck in your car. The Hudway app uses just your phone and a non-slip surface to create a futuristic-looking heads-up display (HUD) navigation projection on your windshield.
To use the app, you have to start off in a place with internet access. Enter the starting and ending points and let the app configure your route, and then you’re free to start on your journey. Place the phone (iOS only at the moment, but an Android version will follow soon) on the dashboard just under the windshield. As you drive, the app will shine a reflection onto the windshield telling you which way to go and how far until the next turn.
The app isn’t perfect – it’s a little blurry and almost invisible in the daylight. The developers point out that the app is meant to be used in low light or low visibility situations, not in the bright light of day. Hudway is available to download now, but if you want the ad-free version it’ll cost you a whopping 99 cents.During the campaign, Trump argued that Americans should vote for him because he would rarely leave Washington. He promised that he wouldn't go golfing or take vacations, because there was too much work to do.
But President Donald Trump frequently uses his luxury properties for government business and leisure, prompting ethics concerns over a president appearing to promote his private enterprise at public cost.
As of July 4, Trump has spent 50 days at his properties since taking office — and 36 of those were at one of his golf properties. The precise number of times Trump has played golf isn't known, however. His administration has tried to hide Trump's activity, keeping his traveling press pool away and often refusing to confirm whether he has played golf. Instead, social media has become a source of crowd-sourced reporting into the president's whereabouts.By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Contributing Writer
In ABC’s freshman series FOREVER, Tuesdays at 10 PM, Ioan Gruffudd plays Dr. Henry Morgan, a medical examiner attached to the NYPD who sometimes seems similarities to older cases – because Henry is actually 250 years old. He can be killed, but always resurrects nearby, naked and in water; he’s spent his existence trying to figure out why. Having had his heart broken repeatedly by outliving the women he loves, Henry is reluctantly drawn to the NYPD homicide detective (Alana de la Garza) he works with; he’s also worried about the health of his long-ago adopted son (Judd Hirsch), who is aging while Henry remains forever youthful.
FOREVER creator/executive producer Matthew Miller, an alumnus of the CHUCK writing/producing staff who also created the series GROWN UPS and developed 666 PARK AVENUE for television, participates in a FOREVER panel arranged by ABC for the Television Critics Association. Afterwards, he engages in a one on one follow-up discussion.
Of FOREVER’s origins, Miller tells the panel, “I guess the real story was it was pilot season, and I was putting my five-year-old son to bed, and he asked me, ‘Daddy, are you ever going to die?’, as kids do. And so I said, ‘No, of course I’ll never die,’ because I didn’t want to upset him. And then I realized you’re supposed to build trust through honesty with children. So I said, ‘Okay. I will die someday, but it won’t be for a very long time, and by then, you’ll probably want me to be dead.’ At which point, he burst into tears, and my wife ran into the room. I was kicked out of the room, and she continued raising my child, and I went off to write television.”
This gets a laugh. Miller continues. “That was the impetus for the idea, and then from that I extrapolated, and I said, ‘Well, okay. So what if a character wouldn’t or couldn’t die,’ and all the great things you could do with immortality. And then I started to think, but, well, what if my son wasn’t immortal? Would watching him grow old and die be too painful? Would over time, the curse of immortality, the affliction, be more than I could bear? So in the end of it, I decided it was probably better to die someday. But from that came this idea of a character who had the thing that all of us want more than anything, immortality, and he didn’t want it any more. So what would that look like? What would that guy do for a living? From that came this medical examiner idea, which is if he was initially a doctor that he would work as a medical examiner purely for research to be able to examine bodies and study the science and try and figure out some way to end his curse.”
When the panel ends, Miller discusses further details.
ASSIGNMENT X: If Henry is aware that he not only resurrects, but vanishes from wherever he died to resurrect naked and in water, he’s aware something supernatural is going on, so why does he think he may find a clue to his condition in examining the corpses of ordinary people?
MATTHEW MILLER: I think for him it’s a combination of science and mysticism. There’s something obviously that defies science, there’s a supernatural quality to the show, that he can’t explain. And he does explore that stuff as well. It’s a simultaneous thing. But he still at his core is a man of science. And so he believes that there’s some version of some science that can get him out of this.
AX: Given that Henry has lived through the premiere of quite a few inventions, is he a fan of older technology?
MILLER: Yeah. That’s the fun stuff is watching all of him – his office, even his lair, his little laboratory, is filled with a lot of old lab equipment and occasionally some computers and modern things. It’s the combination of both.
AX: FOREVER is set in New York, but where do you shoot?
MILLER: New York.
AX: And did you cast Judd Hirsch partly because he’s such a quintessential New Yorker?
MILLER: Yes. Everything about Judd Hirsch is right for the role.
AX: And Alana de la Garza?
MILLER: I knew her from a show called DO NO HARM that a buddy of mine worked on.
AX: The lead in that was a modern version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so her last two roles have been as women involved with unusual men.
MILLER: Yeah, exactly. It’s true. There’s something about her.
AX: Were you familiar with Ioan Gruffudd before casting him in the show?
MILLER: Yes. Our kids go to preschool together. I knew him from the parking lot, so it was interesting.
AX: Did you encounter him at some point and think, “You know, he seems like …”
MILLER: “He’s the guy.” Absolutely.
AX: Is there anything else you would like to say about FOREVER?
MILLER: Watch it.
Related Exclusive Interview with Ioan Gruffudd on FOREVER
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Related Posts:Ravi Shastri Cliches: How well versed are you?
Ravishankar Jayadritha Shastri, undoubtedly the finest commentator India has ever produced, has earned quite a name for his pearls of wisdom on air. Abhishek Mukherjee, Nishad Pai Vaidya and Abhijit Banare set a challenge to the readers to let them test their loyalty towards the legend.
Ravi Shastri, the Voice of Cricket, has continued to mesmerise the audience with his baritone, pronunciations, and well-chosen words that have been classified as clichés by the ignorant. They are jealous, of course: the citizens of cricket have always pounced on the remote control to raise the volume of the television when the Legend of the Microphone has a go.
But how well do you, the audience, know Ravi Shastri? How big a Ravi Shastri fan are you? Do take the RJS quiz and find out. If you get a question right, do note down your score. Once you are done, scroll down to the bottom to know how good you are.
Q1: Why is there a hole in a wall at Ravi Shastri’s place?
A: Because he threw the kitchen sink away.
Q2: Why did Ravi Shastri want to take up nursing as a course?
A: Because he wanted to do just what the doctor ordered.
Q3: Why did Ravi Shastri not want to become a captain?
A: Because he wanted a coin where all three results are possible.
Q4: Why did Ravi Shastri want to become an electrician?
A: Because he wanted everything to ultimately go down to the wire.
Q5: What did Ravi Shastri announce at a beauty contest of insects?
A: “In the end, cricket was the winner.”
Q6: Where does Ravi Shastri hang his clothes?
A: From a cliff-hanger.
Q7: What is Ravi Shastri’s favourite utensil?
A: Obvious, given his life is full of pressure-cooker situations.
Q8: Where does Ravi Shastri get his fish from?
A: Outside the off-stump.
Q9: Why does Ravi Shastri always forgive a newbie who irons his clothes?
A: Because he is new to the crease and needs to get his eye in.
Q10: What does Ravi Shastri utter when he sees an old man die?
A: Aged… (pause)… and taken!
Q11: Why does Ravi Shastri buy matchsticks by the kilo?
A: Because that way the match is always in the balance.
Q12: Why did Ravi Shastri not learn the numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, 9… at school?
A: Because when he tried learning, someone always pulled the odd one back.
Q13: Why does Ravi Shastri like putting up fences?
A: Because he deals in boundaries.
Q14: Why is Ravi Shastri easily satisfied?
A: Because he couldn’t have asked for anything better.
Q15: Why does Ravi Shastri endorse blenders?
A: Because he loves mixing it up nicely.
Q16: What movie connects Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton, and Ravi Shastri?
A: Something’s Gotta Give.
Q17: Why was Ravi Shastri always in demand when they made tug-of-war teams?
A: Because he pulled, and pulled hard.
Q18: What did Ravi Shastri say when he first met Arnold Schwarzenegger?
A: “He’s got good arms.”
Q19: Why can Ravi Shastri never drive fast?
A: Because it’s always jam-packed out there.
Q20: Why wasn’t Ravi Shastri suprised when Sachin Tendulkar announced his retirement?
A: Because he saw that coming.
Q21: Why does Ravi Shastri not drink beer with vampires?
A: Because he prefers situations with no mug with the bat.
Q22: What did Ravi Shastri say when he first met a giraffe?
A: “He makes good use of his height.”
Q23: What did Ravi Shastri say when Jack Hobbs’ rib broke during a match?
A: It was a cracker-jack of a game.
Q24: Why did Ravi Shastri say when the spaceship took off?
A: It’s up in the air…
Q25: What did Ravi Shastri say to the broke real estate agent?
A: That he was losing the plot thick and fast.
Q26: Why did Ravi Shastri always score a full 100% in his exams?
A: Because he never believed in half-measures.
Q27: When did Ravi Shastri fall in love with the female astronomer?
A: When he saw her finger had gone up!
RJS Scores:
0 — 8: You’re terrible. You are probably one of those heathens who have been brought up on lesser mortals like Alan McGilvray, Brian Johnston, John Arlott, or Richie Benaud. To improve your RJS score, go to a nearby park and yell “Can you hear me, Mumbai?” fifty times at the top of your voice, ignoring the others. If you’re not comfortable with Mumbai, pick the city of your choice.
Note: This works best with Kolkata, which you should pronounce as Kolkota for maximum effect.
9 — 17: You’re decent, but far from perfection. You’re easily fooled by the likes of Mark Taylor, Michael Holding, or Harsha Bhogle, who think knowledge or sense of humour are the key factors. To improve your RJS score, start talking to people, and deprive yourself of food for a whole day for any witty comment or impressive display of knowledge you make.
18 — 26: You’re almost there; all you need is to do is strip yourself of the humility you possess. For every situation you get a chance to display your arrogance and still cannot make it, you need to force yourself to listen to Rameez Raja on air for an hour.
27: Hello, Mr Shastri. Thank you for visiting our site.
Here is bonus consolation question, in case you have not been able to get a single one:
What is Ravi Shastri’s favourite ammunition?
(Abhishek Mukherjee is the Deputy Editor and Cricket Historian at CricketCountry. He blogs at http://ovshake.blogspot.in and can be followed on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/ovshake42)
(Abhijit Banare is a reporter at CricketCountry. He is an avid quizzer and loves to analyse and dig out interesting facts which allows him to learn something new every day. Apart from cricket he also likes to keep a sharp eye on Indian politics, and can be followed on Twitter and blog)
(Nishad Pai Vaidya is a Correspondent with CricketCountry and anchor for the site’s YouTube Channel. His Twitter handle is @nishad_44)India and Israel today signed seven agreements to increase cooperation in key sectors like space, agriculture and water conservation after Prime Minister Narendra Modi held in-depth talks with his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed for setting up of USD 40 million worth India-Israel Industrial Research and Development (R&D) and Technical Innovation Fund.
Prime Minister Modi said, "we are of one view that together our scientists and researchers would develop, build and implement mutually beneficial solutions in the field".
"Our decision to establish a bilateral Technology Innovation Fund worth USD 40 million for research in industrial development will help us in achieving this goal.
"We regard thriving two-way trade and investment flows as the bedrock of a strong partnership. Prime Minister Netanyahu and I agreed on the need to do more in this direction. Businesses on both sides should take primary lead in such efforts," he said.
Must Watch: Why Is Israel Called A Startup Nation?
In the water sector, two agreements were signed to increase cooperation on water conservation and state water utility reform in India.
Modi said that Israel is among the leading nations in the field of innovation, water and agricultural technology and "these are also among my priority areas in India's development".
"We agreed that efficiency of water and resource use; water conservation and its purification; productivity increases in agriculture are key areas in deepening our bilateral cooperation," he said.
In the agriculture sector, the two countries have agreed for India-Israel Development Cooperation - a three-year work programme in agriculture from 2018 to 2020.
They also agreed for cooperation regarding cooperation in atomic clocks.
Besides, separate MoUs were signed on cooperation in GEO-LEO optical link and cooperation in Electric Propulsion for small satellites.
Modi also said that during their talks he and Netanyahu agreed to to do much more together to combat terrorism to protect their strategic interests.Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
Fox News seemed to be attempting to create a link between child abuse, and the possibility that the Boy Scouts of American may allow gay members, volunteers and staff.
It was reported on Monday that the vote, expected next week, could give individual scout troops the freedom to welcome gay scouts.
BSA national leaders said they were “actively considering an end to its decades-long policy of banning gay Scouts or Scout leaders.”
The news channel has come under heavy criticism because one of its reporters seemed to be trying to create a link between the possibility of gay scout leaders, and an increase in sexual abuse.
Media Matters drew a link between several reports on the Boy Scouts of America’s recent announcement that it may drop the ban, some of which seemed to suggest that gay scout leaders would be more likely to be paedophiles.
A reporter for Fox News, Doug McKelway, said on Tuesday’s edition of America’s Newsroom: “Others say, and I’m sure we’ll hear a lot of this in the coming days, a lot of people who don’t want their kids to go camping out deep in to the woods for days on end with guys who are avowed |
made/had a compatibility patch for the old mod, I'm flattered, but it probably won't work with the new one, so be wary of that.
What else.... I toned down the camera movement on the reload and hipfire animations. There was a weird black spot on the stock that I managed to get rid of as well.
(*New version has less nauseating reload camera*)
This took way to long. I'm surprised that it came out so well, at least the 1st person sets (3rd person still needs work but they do exist). As this was my first time visiting 3D animation land, I barely got out alive and sane. BUT, I managed to take care of all the issues with hand movement, misalignment, and other nonsense to bring you this:Enjoy your new toy. You cannot break it by clicking to fast or reloading during the animation. It comes with everything you need:1st person hipfire bolt charge - with and without a scope1st person aiming bolt charge1st person reload - with and without a scope3rd person bolt charge3rd person reloadHR receiver meshHR regular stock meshHR short stock mesh(HR advanced stock already has slots for the bolt on both sides. How curious...)Some assembly will be required until I set up a Mod Manager thing. You know the drill, just unzip and place in \Fallout_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Not possible without:ShadeAnimator's F4AK - the future is here. Animations are now easy as pie thanks to this wonderful tool. http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/16694/?robersonb1 - a great YouTube tutorial I watched probably a hundred times, and for answering some questions.NifSkope of course! Because otherwise WHAT THE HELL IS A.NIF?Bethesda - for a malleable and mod-friendly new Fallout (ya knuckleheads, why'd you go and change the hunting rifle?)If you enjoy this mod, and if you consider yourself a connoisseur of the more refined, classier things FO4 has to offer, keep an eye out because WAR sometimes changes. I'm talking an all-in-one mod with item condition/ repair, more ammo types and dynamic firemodes, a huge assortment of spooky in-game music, bigtime stats rebalance, special effects, a beefed up arsenal, and more.It’s August, the dog-tired end of the NBA’s summer, with precious little going on, and two full months between now and the day that NBA players have to show up to take goofy photos on media day.
This is why we post videos like this. A highlight package featuring a very young Kevin Garnett, Allen Iverson, and Stephon Marbury absolutely going at it in a 107-102 Minnesota Timberwolves win over the Philadelphia 76ers. Take the time to take a look:
Absolutely fantastic to see Garnett, 15 years on, still being counted on as a franchise-level go-to player. So cool to see Marbury and Iverson, who duked it out for the Rookie of the Year award the year earlier (Marbury made the playoffs, but AI won the trophy), going at each other. Bill Curley’s in there. Sam Mitchell’s hustling his ass off. Candace Parker’s brother shows up. Dudes in short-sleeved polos cheer along. Terry Porter whiffs on a high-five. KG hugs the hell out of Marbury, who would force his way out of Minnesota via trade 11 months later. Kay-Gee makes the since-banned throat gesture and mouths “it’s over” two years before Vince Carter utilized the same motion at the 2000 Slam Dunk Contest. It’s a wonderful thing, this clip.Not all PC games require expensive graphics cards and massive rigs. Here are 16 great PC games that you can play on a typical budget system - or even a laptop.
While most people think of PC gaming as the domain of gamers with beast-like rigs, bristling with graphics cards and a water-cooling system that looks like something from a giant desalination plant, the reality is, many great PC games have extraordinarily low system requirements.
How limbo-low are we talking? Well, something that can run perfectly well on a cheap standard laptop or desktop built within the last few years. Some of these games are PC versions of console indie games, but many remain only available on PC (and Mac and Linux), and range from indie games as well as classic games. Some
Below is a selection of popular and critically liked games that fit these criteria. Although their system requirements still vary (and are available on store pages), all of them should at least run on a system with a dual core processor, a basic dedicated graphics card (or a recent edition of Intel HD Graphics), and a couple gigs of RAM. If you're still not sure, the list details which ones have free demos.
PC Exclusives
This point and click serial is currently on its second episode, and is recommended for those who like reading as well as gaming, such is the depth of its narrative Kentucky Route Zero
Kentucky Route Zero is a point-and-click adventure game structurally similar to Telltale's The Walking Dead. It's spread across five acts -- two of which are available as of this writing. The acts are on sale individually or collectively in a season pass.
Reviews compare Kentucky to classic adventure games, but also call it more interactive narrative than game. Players follow a traveler who must explore secret roads in the caves beneath the state of Kentucky. Kentucky is pretty much about exploration and its writing, the latter of which has received most of the praise heaped upon the game.
OS: Windows, Mac, Linux
Demo: None
Gunpoint is one of the best low-spec PC games released this year
Gunpoint
Gunpoint is an adventure game more based on puzzles and stealth. The main mechanic in its 2D levels is that you're able to jump great lengths, stick to walls and ceilings, and rewire devices like light switches, doors, and enemies' weapons. For instance you can wire a light switch to open a security door, or a guard's gun to turn out the lights in order to trick enemies. The game encourages players to play around with this system to discover their own ways to sneak through environments. Gunpoint also features a noir-inspired story centering on espionage, murder, and mystery, complete with rain-soaked backdrops, trench coats, and smooth jazz music.
OS: Windows
Demo: Steam, Official Website
A mashup of classic games, Rogue Legacy is a classic side-scrolling arcade adventure
Rogue Legacy
Rogue Legacy is a roguelike that uses elements from Metroidvania games, randomly generating side-scrolling castles for you to explore. The new character you start with every time you die is the next family member in the bloodline, who may occupy one of a few classes and have varying attributes like nearsightedness, abnormal stature, or dyslexia. The game starts off pretty brutal but let's you upgrade your character with gold and becomes pretty addictive due to this and its randomization.
OS: Windows
Demo: Official Website, Desura
Proof that it's not all fun and games on a starship. Well, it is... until your crew get sucked out of a hull breach
FTL: Faster Than Light
One of 2012's most critically-acclaimed games, FTL is a roguelike where you command a space ship crew through randomized star systems, encountering enemy ships, traders, distress beacons, and new crew members along the way. Each death and restart gives you the opportunity to play with a new ship and new crew.
Combat has you not only make offensive and defensive decisions, but also manage where your ship's power goes as well as internal conditions like fires and oxygen. FTL is difficult and addictive in the same vein as Rogue Legacy.
OS: Windows, Mac, Linux
Demo: None
Wargames don't all have to be complicated numbers and inexplicable icons, as Unity of Command demonstrates
Unity of Command
Realistic PC strategy games (also called Wargames) at a glance can look like some of the most complex known to man, but Unity of Command takes that genre and gives it a more accessible face. It's actually not extremely different from Advance Wars or Fire Emblem, managing to carry the same addictive nature in its turn-based gameplay. Unity just puts that gameplay style on top of the realistic backdrop of Stalingrad. Late last year the developers also released an additional campaign in its Red Turn DLC.
OS: Windows, Mac, Linux
Demo: Steam, Official Website
If you fancy playing something a little different, CTHCC is a break away from the usual PC fare
Cherry Tree High Comedy Club
Have you ever wanted to play Persona 3 or 4, but only the social links and day-to-day life segments? That's basically what Cherry Tree High Comedy Club is. It plays out the daily life of a high school student trying to start a comedy club over the course of spring break by recruiting friends. Players explore a town and converse with characters while balancing life tasks like homework, jobs, and different hobbies. Living and breathing on its unique characters and dialogue, Cherry Tree is kind of like the video game equivalent of a high school TV series.
OS: Windows
Demo: Steam, Desura, Official Website
Another point and click adventure, and another game that features a robot as its main protagonist. But Primordia has a charm all of its own Primordia
The developer of the recent iOS release Gemini Rue, Wadjet Eye games, has been known for its contributions to reviving classic-style point and click adventures over the last few years. Its latest PC game, Primordia, takes that gameplay to a unique new setting.
Players follow a traveling robot (voiced by Bastion's Logan Cunningham) who ends up in a metropolis in a world where robots took over after humans disappeared. The quest eventually turns into a search for the truth about what happened to them.
OS: Windows
Demo: Official Website
Mount and Blade is a great twist on the wargaming genre, and its vibrant modding community continues to add interest with some really cool new updates to the game
Mount and Blade
This medieval mercenary simulator puts players in the middle of a fictionalized sandbox world and tasks them with building an army and negotiating alliances or conflicts with various warring countries. Battles play out in real time where players can lead dozens of characters into the fray.
Mount & Blade has had a few expansions adding features as well as different historical settings. The game is more famously known however for its many mods adding more settings and features to the game. There's even a Star Wars mod.
OS: Windows
Demo: Steam
All the fun of a Diablo-style game, but with none of the bloated spec requirements
Torchlight II
The original Torchlight from a group of former Diablo developers gained some notoriety on Xbox 360 but the sequel remains PC-only. Torchlight II is a much bigger game than the original, adding not only multiplayer but also a thicker quest.
No longer confined to one town and a bunch of dungeons, the sequel takes players to various areas across the world and many more dungeons with an all new range of character classes. The original game's character retirement feature has been replaced by the ability to play New Game plus several times.
OS: Windows
Demo: Steam, Official Website
PC Versions of Console Games
Hotline Miami is a brutal, tough, bloodbath of a game. Definitely one for more experienced players
Hotline Miami
One of 2012's most critically acclaimed indie games, Hotline Miami is one of the most intense top-down 2D shooters in recent memory. Its extremely fast-paced one-hit-death gameplay is made fun by instant respawns and a uniquely gruesome combat system.
Hotline Miami is especially praised for its brutal depiction of violence set against a surreal storyline. The techno-synth soundtrack alone get's almost as much praise as the game itself, and is available for separate purchase on PC.
OS: Windows, Mac
Demo: None
If platforming and puzzles are your thing, FEZ is a safe bet for many hours of enjoyable gaming
FEZ
One of Xbox Live's most well known games, FEZ is an adventure platformer all about solving puzzles. It takes graphics styled after old 2D games and gives them a unique 3D twist, requiring players to explore side-scrolling environments from multiple angles.
FEZ's puzzles require a lot of exploration and extremely deep investigation of its environments, eventually requiring players to decode the secrets of the game's world at large.
OS: Windows
Demo: None
If you grew up gaming in the 80's, this GTA parody packs plenty of laughs
Retro City Rampage
Retro City Rampage is basically a celebration of 1980's media in the form of an NES-style Grand Theft Auto parody. Much of the praise for this game goes to its clever use of pop culture references for that era, so players who remember the 80's will definitely get a lot out of it.
OS: Windows
Demo: None
Proof that the point and click adventure category is far from dead. Machinarium is a real charmer - and brain-tickler
Machinarium
Machinarium is a point and click adventure in the classic sense but made in a more modern age. Set in a world populated by robots (not unlike Primordia actually), the game is known and has gotten awards for its storyline and especially its detailed, high resolution art.
OS: Windows, Mac, Linux (official website only)
Demo: Steam, Desura, Playism, Official Website
Metroid meets Indiana Jones in an old-school game with brutal, old-school levels of difficulty. Prepare to die. A lot.
La-Mulana
A rare case of a Japanese indie game getting western exposure. La-Mulana takes at least part of its inspiration from the NES game Spelunker. It's sort of a Metroid-type platformer with an Indiana Jones aesthetic and a crushing difficulty curve that asks players to learn the old school way -- by dying repeatedly.
OS: Windows
Demo: None
Edge looks simple, but beneath its straightforward graphics are some mind-bending puzzles
Edge
Edge gained a bit of attention on iOS due to some issues with copyright over its title, but also quietly launched on Steam in 2011. That version contains both the original game as well as the expansion Edge Extended. The game is a sort of isometric puzzle platformer where players control a cube that rolls over obstacles to get through intricately-designed levels while acquiring points. The challenges show a surprising amount of variety with the simple game mechanics at hand, which includes things like switches, balancing on moving walls, and mechs. The graphics also manage to be simple but also colorful and flashy.
Other than achievements, the main advantage of the Steam version is the possibility of playing it with a keyboard or a controller, which feels more accurate and reliable than a touch screen.
OS: Windows, Mac, Linux
Demo: Steam
Only got a minute to play? In that case, half-minute hero gives you plenty of time for a quick game
Half Minute Hero
Half Minute Hero is a game where you have to finish an entire RPG in less than 30 seconds. You have to explore the world map, run through single-second battles, upgrade your character, and eventually defeat the villain all under a time limit.
The version offered on Steam is advertised as the definitive one, with all the various modes and other features from the PSP and Xbox 360 versions including HD graphics. This game actually includes what it calls multiple RPGs that each must be completed under a ridiculously short time limit.Special counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly seeking to interview White House staffers who were present at the time 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 dictated Donald Trump Jr.'s initial statement on a controversial meeting he had with a Russian lawyer ahead of the 2016 presidential election, CNN reported Thursday.
According to the report, Mueller and his investigative team want to speak with those involved in order to see if relevant details were purposefully left out and probe how the misleading statement came to be.
These staffers, who may include top aides to the president, have not yet been interviewed, one source told CNN.
Mueller has not yet requested to interview the president, but only a handful of people he believes could be possible witnesses to the event.
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The president's eldest son has become a key figure in the various Russia probes after meeting with a woman — described as a Russian government lawyer — who was offering dirt on then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE.
Trump Jr. has denied that he received any damaging information about Clinton after taking the meeting.
Trump Jr.'s first response on the matter claimed that he "primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children," which was later shown to be false after he released his email correspondence about setting up the meeting. It was later reported that the president helped dictate the first statement by Trump Jr.
News of Mueller's interest in Trump aides and the statement on Trump Jr.'s meeting signals that the special counsel is interested in learning more about the intent and decision-making behind the statement and the meeting itself.
The report comes hours after Trump Jr. met with Senate investigators behind closed doors.
"Out of respect for the special counsel process, the White House doesn't comment on any individual special counsel request," White House special counsel Ty Cobb told the news outlet.
Mueller's office declined CNN's request for comment on the story.More Blogs
Michael Bay is well known for the child-like glee with which he infuses every over-the-top, ridiculous action scene he directs. He is truly an auteur, and the naive innocence which he brings to his directing can make most any stupid movie romp enjoyable. Unfortunately, hoping to cement his artistic credibility by landing that coveted writer/director credit a la Clint Eastwood, Bay also decided to try his hand at writing screenplays. And due to my elite Hollywood status as a quasi-respectable Internet comedian, I of course had access to this attempt, and due to my shaky moral compass, I of course decided to post a few excerpts of it for you here: Find more from Robert on Twitter Facebook or his own site, I Fight Robots. Because fine bitches jump over robots while firing giant machine guns all the goddamn time; you just need somebody to tell you where to look.I am proud to announce the newest release of OpenShot Video Editor, version 2.3! This is one of the biggest updates ever to OpenShot, and is filled with new features, performance improvements, and tons of bug fixes!
Take a quick look at our release video below, which highlights some of our biggest new features.
Also, check out this awesome 2D animation created by my daughter with OpenShot 2.3 (my kids are the best testers and are experts at breaking OpenShot)!
Transform Tool
We have added a new transform tool, which allows real-time transformations in the video preview window. Right click on any clip, and choose “Transform” to enable the tool. Using your mouse, move and scale the clip as needed, all while enjoying a real-time preview. Animating the location and scale of clips has never been easier!
Zooming Improvements
Zooming in and out of the timeline, in order to increase precision of your edits, has been greatly improved. When zooming the timeline, it now centers on your mouse position, similar to image editing applications. The zoom scale is also now saved in each project file, which saves some time when jumping back into a project. When your mouse is over the timeline, hold CTRL+mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and out.
Razor Tool
Back by popular demand, the razor tool from OpenShot 1.4.3 has returned from the dead. Click on the Razor toolbar button to switch to razor mode. Now click on any clip or transition to quickly cut them (holding CTRL and SHIFT modify the razor to only keep the left or right side). Alternatively, you can cut a clip at the Playhead position by right clicking and choosing “Slice”, by using CTRL+K, or by grabbing the edge of the clip and dragging.
Improved Title Editors
Many improvements have been made to the Title Editor and Animated Title Editor. Both editors now display a grid of thumbnails, to make finding the right title easier. Save dialogs are no longer used, and instead title files are saved directly into your project folder. New “Edit Title” and “Duplicate Title” menus have been added, to assist in quickly making changes to titles.
New Preview Window
Previewing files now has its own dedicated video player, which allows for multiple video preview windows at the same time. Also, audio files render a waveform by default. The speed of previewing files is also improved, using the improvements mentioned below.
Huge Performance Improvements for Real-time Previews
Performance improvements are always a high priority, and we’ve made some really great improvements to the speed of real-time previews. We’ve also fixed some bugs related to freezes and hangs, caching improvements, frame detection, and better logic to determine the max size of our preview window, so we can optimize by not rendering images and frames larger than the preview window. The end result is the best real-time preview performance yet for OpenShot.
New Documentation
I have finally gotten around to publishing a User Guide for OpenShot 2.x. I am using the Sphinx documentation system (which is really great), and I think this will be very useful for new users, and any user who wants to get the most out of OpenShot. It is currently only available in English, but I will soon start the translation process for it.
Audio Improvements
Fixes for audio sample distribution, caching, off by 1 errors, and various frame boundary improvements (Thank you Nelson H). Also, improvements to audio device management, which is how OpenShot communicates with the audio system on each OS.
Improved Export Dialog
Export dialog has been improved to re-load the project, clear cache, and export without requiring any ties to the real-time preview system. This fixes many freezes and hangs when attempting to export, and is a much more stable approach. Also, on Linux, export progress is now displayed on the launcher icon (in Unity and other launchers).
New Windows Build Server
As you might have heard, my Windows development system (and build server) died (again)... stopping all Windows builds for a few weeks. Hard-drive and motherboard issues (and possibly other problems too). A HUGE thanks to John Fields and his band of merry Open Source Saturday folks. They donated a wonderfully nice computer (i7, 16GB RAM), and their only request was that it be called StarLord! Done! StarLord is up and running, and is working beautifully!
GitHub Bug Management
With the help of a few volunteers (Ankit, Justin, Jt, and others), we’ve been able to reduce our GitHub bug count from over 380+ bugs to less than 200. Many of those 200 should be resolved with version 2.3, so I still have some work to do in this area, but making great progress! I’ve also added some GitHub templates when filing new bugs, to help increase the quality of new bug reports, and guide users on generating and attaching log files.
Translations
OpenShot 2.3 is fully translated in 11 languages, and partially translated in more than 60 others. If you notice untranslated text in your native language, please feel free to submit your own translations on LaunchPad.
100% translated in the following languages:
Spanish
French
Italian
Portuguese
Brazilian Portuguese
Greek
Ukrainian
Catalan
Malay
Icelandic
English (United Kingdom)
Patreon & PayPal Donations
If you use OpenShot, support OpenShot, or just want to ensure its continued development, please consider a small donation, or help us spread the word. It is expensive and time consuming to build and distribute OpenShot, and any contribution would be hugely appreciated!
We accept PayPal, Bitcoin, and Patreon donations, and we’ll list your name in the credits of OpenShot (which is pretty awesome)!
Additional Features
Added new welcome tutorial message, which contains a checkbox for disabling anonymous error and metrics reporting. That can also be adjusted in the Preferences, but it has been often requested to allow new users to opt-out.
All child windows now center on parent window
Ability to easily display frame numbers on frames
Improved accuracy when calculating frame numbers
Improvements to frame accuracy, especially when zoomed in at max zoom
Dramatically increased speed of selecting and unselecting large numbers of clips/transitions.
Refactor loading properties for selected items, to improve speed.
Refactoring and improving preview playback of files, and preview playback during resize/trim (which now maintains aspect ratio correctly).
Improving long filename support in file tree/list views, and improving thumbnail/grid view on all listviews (effects, transitions, titles, animated titles, etc...)
Updating translation files (with a few minor corrections to string formatting arguments).
Improving test_translations.py script, which helps me detect problems with missing formatting args.
Fixed an issue preventing the track names from being translated on launch.
Adding "width x height" to list of profiles on Export and Profiles screens, to make the output resolution more clear
Improved logic for "Next Marker" and "Previous Marker" buttons to include the selected items (start and end positions), to allow quickly jumping to the beginning or end of a selected clip.
Prompting user to find missing files when opening a project, and updating translation template.
Prompt user to save before creating or opening new project file (if needed)
Make effects container on a clip visible on hover (regardless of how small the clip is).
Tweak tooltips of clip title so they don't cover up the menu button and effects.
Making settings save to disk as they are changed in preferences.
Setting focus to Project Files on launch, so the properties filter doesn't auto get tab focus (preventing certain keyboard shortcuts).
Switching snapping logic to compare pixels (not time), so it's still useful at close and far zoom levels. Reducing snapping to 10 pixels. Fixing bug when updating new properties for a clip.
Bug FixesGetty Images
Patriots coach Bill Belichick routinely draws attention during press conference for short, dismissive, impatient, and/or sarcastic answers. On Friday, he provided a meaningful explanation regarding the differences between the way a guy runs in a straight line and how he runs on a football field.
The question emerged because quarterback Jacoby Brissett ran the 40-yard dash in 4.94 seconds at the Scouting Combine. That’s 0.14 seconds slower than Peyton Manning’s effort in 1998.
“The time-speed is always a tricky thing because time-speed isn’t football speed,” Belichick said. “When you run a 40-yard dash there’s nobody in front of you, nobody’s going to hit you. It’s just Point A to Point B, and there’s something to be said for that. Football’s in a lot of cases not like that. So a player’s running a ball or running full speed covering a kick or running the ball and there is people in front of him and people trying to tackle him, it’s a little different speed than running a sprint on the stop watch.
“We look at that more as competitive speed and when you see competitive speed in a game, whether that’s scouting in the draft or watching a competitive NFL game, sometimes competitive speed takes over for a little bit for what the time-speed is or isn’t. We’ve seen a lot of fast guys not be the first guy down on kickoff coverage. We’ve seen a lot of guys that aren’t that fast be the first guy down on kickoff coverage and so forth.
“And there are some players, Lawrence Taylor was one that however fast he needed to run, he ran and caught the guy. It didn’t matter what that guy’s time-speed was. It didn’t matter what Lawrence’s time-speed was. If he was behind him and he had to catch him, he caught him. So again, there’s just another element to that. I don’t think there’s any doubt about Jacoby’s athleticism and his physical strength and stature. I would say his speed is not slow. I don’t know whatever the next adjective is, but I certainly wouldn’t call it that. He’s got long legs. He eats up a lot of ground. He certainly showed enough speed on that quick sweep play on the touchdown run that we needed for that situation.”
Indeed Brissett did, running the ball 27 yards into the end zone. So regardless of his time-speed, he possesses the ability to run fast in game situations, when he needs to.
Belichick still possesses the ability to be sarcastic during a press conference. Asked about the team’s blue-on-blue look from Thursday night, Belichick said, “I mean I can’t even tell you how excited I was about the uniforms last night. That’s really incredible.”
Yes it is, Bill. Yes it is.The Trump transition team did not respond to request for comment on the meeting.
The Freedom Party, founded in the 1950s by ex-Nazis, surged this year to nearly capture the largely ceremonial presidency of Austria in May, but was defeated in a final runoff on Dec. 4. Still, its ascendance, alongside the rise of rightist parties in many European countries and with Mr. Trump’s victory, has raised new questions about political realignment across the continent.
Mr. Strache’s trips to New York and Moscow were clearly intended to convey the impression that the Freedom Party, which still leads all opinion polls ahead of the two mainstream parties that have governed Austria since World War II, has international standing and intends to continue vying for power.
A text of the cooperation agreement, published in Russian on the website of United Russia and in German on the website of an Austrian journalist, Claus Pandi, outlined plans for regular meetings and collaboration where suitable on economic, business and political projects. It said the accord was valid for five years, but was not legally binding.
It was signed for United Russia by Sergei Zheleznyak, a deputy to the party’s general secretary who is among the Russian officials barred from the United States since March 2014 for supporting the Russian actions in Crimea.
In welcoming the Austrians at party headquarters, Mr. Zheleznyak specifically mentioned Europe’s “migration crisis” as a field for cooperation, according to United Russia’s website.Black Tom explosion Black Tom pier shortly after the explosion Location Jersey City, New Jersey, US Coordinates Coordinates: Date July 30, 1916
2:08:00 a.m. (EST; GMT−5) Attack type Sabotage Deaths 4 Non-fatal injuries Hundreds Perpetrators Imperial German agents Motive sabotage
The Black Tom explosion on July 30, 1916, in Jersey City, New Jersey, was an act of sabotage by German agents to destroy American-made munitions that were to be supplied to the Allies in World War I.[1][2] This incident, which happened prior to American entry into World War I, is also notable for causing damage to the Statue of Liberty.[3]
Black Tom Island [ edit ]
Black Tom Island, lying off a Jersey City pier, 1880
The term "Black Tom" originally referred to an island in New York Harbor next to Liberty Island. The island was artificial, created by landfill around a rock of the same name, which had been a local hazard to navigation.[4] By 1880, an island was transformed into a 25-acre (0.10 km2) promontory,[5] and a causeway and railroad had been built to connect it with the mainland to use as a shipping depot.[6] Between 1905 and 1916, the Lehigh Valley Railroad, which owned the island and causeway, expanded the island with landfill, and the entire area was annexed by Jersey City. A mile-long pier on the island housed a depot and warehouses for the National Dock and Storage Company.
Black Tom was a major munitions depot for the Northeastern United States. Until early 1915, American munitions companies could sell to any buyer. After the Blockade of Germany by the Royal Navy, however, only the Allied powers could purchase from them. As a result, Imperial Germany sent secret agents to the United States to obstruct the production and delivery of war munitions that were intended to be used by its enemies.[7]
On the night of the attack, about 2,000,000 lb (910,000 kg) of small arms and artillery ammunition were stored at the depot in freight cars and on barges, including 100,000 lb (45,000 kg) of TNT on the Johnson Barge No. 17.[8] All was waiting to be shipped to Russia.[9] Jersey City's Commissioner of Public Safety, Frank Hague, later said he had been told the barge was "tied up at Black Tom to avoid a twenty-five dollar towing charge."[10]
Explosion [ edit ]
View of the Lehigh Valley pier after explosion
Wrecked warehouses and scattered debris after explosion
After midnight on July 30, a series of small fires were discovered on the pier. Some guards fled, fearing an explosion. Others attempted to fight the fires and eventually called the Jersey City Fire Department. At 2:08 am, the first and largest of the explosions took place. Fragments from the explosion traveled long distances, some lodging in the Statue of Liberty and some in the clock tower of The Jersey Journal building in Journal Square, over a mile away, stopping the clock at 2:12 am.[11] The explosion was the equivalent of an earthquake measuring between 5.0 and 5.5 on the Richter scale[10] and was felt as far away as Philadelphia. Windows were broken as far as 25 miles (40 km) away, including thousands in lower Manhattan. Some window panes in Times Square were shattered. The stained glass windows in St. Patrick's Church were destroyed.[12] The outer wall of Jersey City's City Hall was cracked and the Brooklyn Bridge was shaken. People as far away as Maryland were awakened by what they thought was an earthquake.[13]
Property damage from the attack was estimated at $20 million ($454,000,000 in 2017 dollars using the CPI conversion). The damage to the Statue of Liberty was estimated to be $100,000 ($2,273,000 in 2017 dollars using the CPI conversion), and included damage to the skirt and torch.[14]
Immigrants being processed at Ellis Island had to be evacuated to lower Manhattan. Although one contemporary newspaper report estimated that up to seven[15] people died in the attack; 4 did definitely die,[16][1] including a Jersey City policeman,[17][18] a Lehigh Valley Railroad chief of police,[19][20] a ten-week-old infant,[18] and the barge captain.[18] Injuries numbered in the hundreds. Smaller explosions continued to occur for hours after the initial blast.
Investigation [ edit ]
In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, two watchmen who had lit smudge pots to keep away mosquitoes were questioned by police but the police soon determined that the smudge pots had not caused the fire and that the blast had likely been an accident.[21]
Soon after the explosion suspicion fell upon Michael Kristoff,[22] a Slovak immigrant.[23] Kristoff had served in the US Army in World War I, but admitted to working for German agents (transporting suitcases) in 1915 and 1916 while the US was still neutral.[citation needed] According to Kristoff, two of the guards at Black Tom were German agents.[citation needed] It is likely[according to whom?] that the bombing involved some of the techniques developed by German agents working for German ambassador Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff and German Naval Intelligence officer Franz von Rintelen, using the cigar bombs developed by Doctor Walter Scheele.[24] Suspicion at the time fell solely on German saboteurs such as Kurt Jahnke and his assistant Lothar Witzke, who are still judged as legally responsible.[25][26] Later investigations in the aftermath of the Annie Larsen affair unearthed links between the Ghadar conspiracy and the Black Tom explosion.[citation needed]
Additional investigations by the Directorate of Naval Intelligence also found links to some members of the Irish "Clan na Gael" group, the Indian "Ghadar Party" and Communist elements.[27][28] The Irish socialist James Larkin asserted that he had not participated in active sabotage but had encouraged work slowing and strikes for higher wages and better conditions, in an affidavit to McCloy in 1934.[29][30]
Aftermath [ edit ]
The Russian government sued the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company operating the Black Tom Terminal on grounds that lax security (there was no entrance gate; territory was unlit)[31] permitted the loss of their ammunition and argued that due to the failure to deliver them the manufacturer was obliged by the contract to replace them.[9]
The Lehigh Valley Railroad, advised by John J. McCloy, sought damages against Germany under the Treaty of Berlin from the German-American Mixed Claims Commission. The Mixed Claims Commission declared in 1939 that Imperial Germany had been responsible and awarded $50 million (the largest claim) in damages which Nazi Germany refused to pay.[32] The issue was finally settled in 1953 on $95 million (interest included) with the Federal Republic of Germany.[33] The final payment was made in 1979.[34]
The Statue of Liberty's torch has been closed to the public since the explosion due to structural damages.[35][36] Access was not opened after the 1984–1986 restoration which included repairs to the arm and installation of a new gold-plated copper torch.[37]
Legacy [ edit ]
Landfill projects later made Black Tom Island part of the mainland, and it was incorporated into Liberty State Park. The former Black Tom Island is at the end of Morris Pesin Drive in the southeastern corner of the park, where a plaque marks the spot of the explosion. A circle of American flags complements the plaque, which stands east of the visitors' center.
The inscription on the plaque reads:
Explosion at Liberty! On July 30, 1916 the Black Tom munitions depot exploded rocking New York Harbor and sending residents tumbling from their beds. The noise of the explosion was heard as far away as Maryland and Connecticut. On Ellis Island, terrified immigrants were evacuated by ferry to the Battery. Shrapnel pierced the Statue of Liberty (the arm of the Statue was closed to visitors after this). Property damage was estimated at $20 million. It is not known how many died. Why the explosion? Was it an accident or planned? According to historians, the Germans sabotaged the Lehigh Valley munitions |
looking weird, and having the gall to appear on a movie screen:
Mr. Stiller is a perfect case study in male insecurity. Depending on the role, the camera angle, the costume, and the hair and makeup, Mr. Stiller, 50, swings between polarities of trollishness and desirability. In some movies, he appears dwarfish and deformed with a head that's too big for his body and empty space-alien eyes. He is of average height but looks shorter. And when bulked up, he appears hunched and musclebound. But when he fixes those baby blues on the camera and thrusts out his jaw to accentuate his cheekbones, he can pass as handsome: just barely.
The coldest bar is Holden's assertion that Stiller is "a devastatingly handsome specimen with his laser-blue eyes and prominent cheekbones," but only in Stiller's imagination.
My mom always told me that you should keep your "list of people I find very ugly" to yourself, and I've found that rule easy to follow thus far, but I guess I can't pretend to know what I would do if afforded such an illustrious platform as the section of the Times that is mostly full-page ads.
We are living in a post-"#Wizwearscoolpants" world, and no one is containing themselves for any reason anymore.
Please note: generally when the New York Times Arts section goes completely off the rails, it is for the force of good.31 JAN 3302
Speculation is rife at Obsidian Orbital this morning following a close-quarters encounter with an unidentified Diamondback Explorer. According to Chloe Anders, a member of the surveillance team at Christian Dock, the mysterious vessel came within 10 kilometres of the station while performing what was described as a "high-speed pass":
"I saw it approach and assumed it was about to submit a docking request, but instead it just started circling the station. It had an unusual designation – "S6: 7" – so I tried hailing it, but there was no response. Then our sensors lit up. I couldn't believe it – the damned thing was scanning the station! I told the weapons team to stand by, but the next thing I knew, it was gone."
Asked for her opinion of the vessel's purpose, Anders said: "I know it sounds crazy, but when I saw it circling the station like that, the only thing I could think was that it was looking for something."Russia Accuses Ukraine Of 'Terrorist' Attack In Crimea
Enlarge this image toggle caption Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
President Vladimir Putin says he'll beef up Russia's military force in Crimea, after Russia's security service claimed that it thwarted a would-be terrorist incursion from Ukraine over the weekend.
The Federal Security Service, the FSB, said that teams of commandos from Ukraine's defense forces made two attempts to enter the Black Sea peninsula, with the intention of sabotaging vital infrastructure. The FSB said Ukrainian forces attempted to cover the infiltration by directing heavy fire at the Russian side, killing two Russian servicemen.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko dismissed the Russian claims, calling them "fantasy" and a "provocation." Poroshenko issued a statement saying that Ukraine would never use terrorism to regain its occupied territory.
The U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, said the U.S. "has seen nothing so far that corroborates Russian allegations of a Crimea incursion."
Russia's President Putin accused Ukrainian authorities of resorting to terror, instead of seeking to solve problems through negotiations. "This news is very alarming, indeed," Putin said. "Our special services have prevented a reconnaissance and sabotage group of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry from getting into Crimea."
So far, Russian officials have not addressed the question of why, if Russian forces were so severely attacked, the Kremlin waited three days to make the allegations.
The Russian defense ministry announced the Russian navy will conduct exercises in the Black Sea intended to protect Crimea from underwater saboteurs.
Putin said it would be "pointless" to hold another round of peace talks under the so-called "Normandy Format," because Ukrainian leaders are not interested in searching for compromises. The Normandy Format brings together the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France. Russia had earlier agreed to attend a meeting of those leaders on the sidelines of the G-20 meeting next month in China.
Ukraine's ambassador to the United Nations said his country fears that Russia will use the claims of attempted sabotage as a pretext for further military action against Ukraine. Russia has been building up its forces in Crimea in recent months.
Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March of 2014, after Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms took control of key government buildings. President Putin initially denied that Russia had deployed soldiers on Ukrainian territory, but later said the troops were necessary to protect people there whose primary language is Russian.
Russia claims that Crimean citizens requested to be part of Russia following a hastily-organized referendum. Few other nations have recognized the legitimacy of that vote, which was conducted without international monitoring.• City sources say United and Chelsea made late ‘overtures’ for Spaniard • Guardiola will replace Manuel Pellegrini at Etihad Stadium on 1 July
Manchester City believe they beat Manchester United and Chelsea to the hiring of Pep Guardiola, with the Spaniard receiving 11th hour “overtures” from each club due to an awareness he was close to agreeing to replace Manuel Pellegrini.
Guardiola, who will replace the Chilean on 1 July to start a three-year contract, had previously been targeted by United. Sir Alex Ferguson met the 45-year-old in September 2012 during Guardiola’s sabbatical to discuss him one day becoming manager at Old Trafford.
Pep Guardiola to join Manchester City as head coach in summer on three-year contract Read more
In the end Guardiola chose to join Bayern Munich, yet sources at City indicated that United had tried to revive the deal, with Chelsea also making overtures to the Spaniard having sacked José Mourinho at the end of last year.
As recently as December, United viewed Guardiola’s favoured destination to be City, yet given the state of uncertainty over Louis van Gaal’s future at Old Trafford it is thought the executive were compelled to persuade him to change his mind.
Chelsea require a manager for next season having hired Guud Hiddink as an interim head coach for the rest of this campaign following Mourinho’s departure.The question here may be less will they and more have they. CIA Director John Brennan told CBS’ 60 Minutes that he views ISIS attempts to attack the US as “inevitable.” He follows that up by saying that successful attacks are not necessarily inevitable, but have they already taken place?
Scott Pelley: Is ISIS coming here? John Brennan: I think ISIL does want to eventually find it’s, it’s mark here. Scott Pelley: You’re expecting an attack in the United States? John Brennan: I’m expecting them to try to put in place the operatives, the material or whatever else that they need to do or to incite people to carry out these attacks, clearly. So I believe that their attempts are inevitable. I don’t think their successes necessarily are.
What constitutes an attack attempt? The San Bernardino attack at least appears to qualify. At least one of the two perpetrators, Tashfeen Malik, came to the US after becoming radicalized abroad and may have posted pro-ISIS propaganda online during the attack. Syed Farook reportedly had conducted “overseas communications” with people the FBI suspected of organizing terrorism. Two weeks before the attack, Farook got $28,500 under mysterious circumstances.
For a larger-scale attack, ISIS might face more difficulties; at least they haven’t attempted a Paris-style attack here yet. Brennan tells CBS that the Paris attacks were a failure of intelligence, and a lesson to his own organization:
Scott Pelley: What did you learn from Paris? John Brennan: That there is a lot that ISIL probably has underway that we don’t have obviously full insight into. We knew the system was blinking red. We knew just in the days before that ISIL was trying to carry out something. But the individuals involved have been able to take advantage of the newly available means of communication that are–that are walled off, from law enforcement officials. … We gotta work harder. We have to work harder. We need to have the capabilities, the technical capabilities, the human sources. We need to be able to have advanced notice about this so that we can take this– the steps to stop them. Believe me, intelligence security services have stopped numerous attacks– operatives– that have been moved from maybe the Iraq to Syria theater into Europe. They have been stopped and interdicted and arrested and detained and debriefed because of very, very good intelligence.
And that’s doubly important, now that ISIS has increased its capabilities in a very alarming direction:
Scott Pelley: Does ISIS have chemical weapons? John Brennan: We have a number of instances where ISIL has used chemical munitions on the battlefield. Scott Pelley: Artillery shells. John Brennan: Sure. Yeah. Scott Pelley: ISIS has access to chemical artillery shells? John Brennan: Uh-huh (affirm). There are reports that ISIS has access to chemical precursors and munitions that they can use.
Interestingly, Reuters corroborated that claim in an exclusive report this afternoon:
Islamic State militants attacked Kurdish forces in Iraq with mustard gas last year, in the first known use of chemical weapons in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, a diplomat said, after tests by the global chemical arms watchdog. A source at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed that laboratory tests had come back positive for the sulfur mustard, after around 35 Kurdish troops were sickened on the battlefield last August. The OPCW will not identify who used the chemical agent. But the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because the findings have not yet been released, said the result confirmed that chemical weapons had been used by Islamic State fighters.
All of the above underscores the need for a forward strategy against ISIS rather than a reactive strategy. The US and its allies have tried to pick apart ISIS with a light precision-bombing campaign, but the terror quasi-state has expanded into Libya and moved to weapons of mass destruction in the meantime. Brennan says the CIA is doing its part, with both intelligence and operational covert assets on the ground. That would help destroy ISIS as part of a massive, coordinated offensive to dislodge, isolate, and trap ISIS’ army, but the air-alone war appears to have only done mild damage and encouraged ISIS to harden its assets. Brennan has a tough job, but an even tougher task selling current US strategy against ISIS as anywhere close to sufficient for the administration’s declared goals.
Watch the entire interview below:Ingredient List Print Recipe For the Filling: 8 ounces cream cheese, softened
1 large egg, lightly beaten
2/3 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
6 ounces mini chocolate chips For the Cupcakes: 3 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 cup unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder
2 cups water
2/3 cup vegetable oil
2 tablespoons white vinegar
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
Confectioners’ sugar, for dusting
Reaffirm Your Faith in the Cupcake
Last summer was officially the end of the cupcake era for me. A great food to be sure, but all the stores, TV shows, magazine articles and books that shot up too fast, too soon and too frequently ruined cupcakes for me. Then one day on the road, a friend of my in-laws brought me a plate of these little black-and-white beauties, and my faith was restored. These are simple to make, and while kids love them, you will love them even more. They are rich and decadent and just tart enough with the cream cheese to allow you to eat several.
Instructions
Active: 30 min
Total Time: 1 hr
Servings: about 3 dozen cupcakes
Preheat the oven to 350°. Line three 12-cup muffin tins with paper liners.
Make the Filling
In a medium bowl, beat the cream cheese with the egg, sugar, and salt until blended. Stir in the chocolate chips.
Make the Cupcakes
In a large bowl, whisk the flour with the sugar, salt and baking soda. Sift in the cocoa powder and whisk to combine. Add the water, oil, vinegar and vanilla and whisk just until the batter is smooth.
Scoop 2 tablespoons of batter into each muffin cup. Scoop 1 tablespoon of the filling on top of the batter, followed by another 1 tablespoon of the batter. Bake the cupcakes for about 30 minutes, until firm and no longer sticky to the touch; turn the pans halfway through baking. Let the cupcakes cool in the pans for 5 minutes, then turn them out onto a rack to cool completely. Dust with confectioners’ sugar before serving.
MAKE AHEAD The cupcakes can be refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 3 days.
Originally published in Andrew Zimmern’s Kitchen Adventures on foodandwine.com.
Photograph by Stephanie Meyer.
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There are days of loss and sadness, fear and depression, when it hurts too much to pray, and all the cheery old praise songs sound tinny and hollow. Hymns and Lamentations is an album for those days. With haunting new arrangements of hymns that deal honestly with grief and doubt, the vulnerable sound of the piano and vocal create a place of silence and sympathy. Original melodies and sensitively re-imagined classics articulate faith and doubt, without turning away. These are not songs to make you cheer up; these are songs to let you know you’re not alone in your grief.
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released July 21, 2015
© and ℗ 2015 Eric Pazdziora. All Rights Reserved.
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all rights reservedYes, we want fries with everything (Picture: Come Fry With Me)
London’s newest foodie trend is restaurants that only serve one thing. Because who wants choice really?
There’s Burger & Lobster (does what it says on the tin), the Cereal Killer Cafe (hipsters gone mad in the cereal aisle) and the protein-rich Bad Egg.
We thought we’d become numb to the novelty restaurant, those trendy one-tricky ponies, but that’s until we heard about Come Fry With Me. It’s a restaurant that only serves chips. They had us at chips.
Come Fry With Me (which, for some unknown reason, has an aviation theme; a somewhat over-elaborate set up for two bad puns – yes, there is a Mile Fry Club) will open permanently in Covent Garden in the autumn.
The aviation theme is slightly superfluous (Picture: Come Fry With Me)
But you can have a sneak preview today (July 22) – they’re popping up at Box Park – or this weekend (July 24-26) at the Clapham Foodies festival.
(Picture: Come Fry With Me)
Before you roll your eyes, let us describe the menu for you. You can choose between fries flavoured with melting truffle and parmesan, sticky Marmite, and curry, or you can have your fries topped with steak and stilton, chilli con carne, or bacon and melted cheese.
(Picture: Come Fry With Me)
And there’s the perennial favourite – the chip butty.
(Picture: Come Fry With Me)
Or, if the common potato isn’t your thing, you can have a medley of parsnip, courgette and carrot fries, or, of course, the modern classic – sweet potato fries.
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If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em we say. Now, who do we talk to about speedy boarding?
Come Fry With Me opens in October. Check out the menu here and book tickets for this weekend’s Clapham Common Foodies Festival here.
MORE: 19 times chips were better than sex (well, it’s National Chip Week after all)
MORE: Someone has made a burger bun out of french fries, because chips
Advertisement AdvertisementPolice say Guaymar Cabrera Hernandez, 24, held a knife to a woman's neck in the parking lot of a mosque in Montgomery County, demanded she get out of her car, threw a brick at her and then drove off. News4's Shomari Stone reports. (Published Friday, Aug. 21, 2015)
A Maryland man carjacked a woman just 30 minutes after he was released from prison, according to police.
Guaymar R. Cabrera-Hernandez, 24, of Hyattsville, was charged Friday with armed carjacking, armed robbery and first-degree assault.
Cabrera-Hernandez was released from the Montgomery County Detention Center Monday, Montgomery County Police said. Less than a mile away, Cabrera-Hernandez found a 38-year-old woman sitting in her car in the Islamic Education Center parking lot on Montrose Road in Potomac, Maryland, police said.
The victim saw Cabrera-Hernandez enter the parking lot, disappear and reappear moments later, approaching her lowered driver’s side window, police said.
Cabrera-Hernandez held a knife and brick in his hands, police said. He put the knife to the victim’s throat and demanded she get out of the car, police said.
As she got out of the car and moved away from Cabrera-Hernandez, he threw the brick at her, police said. He then drove from the parking lot.
Investigators checked with the detention center about releases, and the victim identified Cabrera-Hernandez from a photo, police said.
On Wednesday, Cabrera-Hernandez carjacked another driver on Loughboro Road in Northwest Washington.
After a brief police chase, Cabrera-Hernandez crashed into a wooded area near River Road and Little Falls Parkway in Bethesda, police said. He took off into the woods and crossed back into D.C., where police took him into custody, police said.
He admitted to the Potomac carjacking incident when detectives interviewed him, police said.NEW YORK (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will skip an Asia-Pacific summit in Russia hosted by President Vladimir Putin in early September, the White House said on Monday.
U.S. President Barack Obama pauses before he delivers the commencement address for the 2012 graduating class at Barnard College in New York May 14, 2012. REUTERS/Larry Downing
The White House made official what had been widely assumed, since the APEC gathering will take place the same week as the Democratic national convention in North Carolina, where Obama will accept his party’s nomination for re-election on September 6.
Both countries have denied using summit decisions to snub the other.
The White House announcement followed Putin’s decision, after his return to the Kremlin last week, to pull out of a summit of the Group of Eight major industrialized nations to be hosted this weekend by Obama at the Camp David presidential retreat.
U.S. officials had long signaled that a presidential trip to Vladivostok was unlikely so close to the November election, and one Obama aide had dismissed the notion it was retaliation for Putin’s cancellation.
Russia’s senior official for APEC, Gennady Ovechko, told reporters in Washington on Monday that Moscow had heard a year ago that Obama might not be able to attend the Vladivostok meeting because of the U.S. political calendar.
“In May 2011, there were some approaches from the United States government on this issue. And again, it’s easy to understand. We were quite sympathetic,” Ovechko said after a talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a U.S. think tank, on Russia’s goals for APEC this year.
“We (would) be very happy if the U.S. president could visit Vladivostok for the summit, though we admit there could be some important domestic circumstances that could prevent him from coming,” Ovechko said.
The two leaders have agreed to reschedule their meeting, the first since a rocky encounter in 2009 at Putin’s dacha outside Moscow, to the sidelines of a G20 summit in Mexico in June.
Moscow has denied that Putin’s decision to skip the G8 and instead send his junior partner, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, was intended as a slight to Obama. They insist Putin was staying home to fill posts in his new cabinet.
But some Kremlin watchers see it as message from Putin that as long as he is in charge, Russia will not bend to Washington’s will. The “reset” in relations that Obama has pursued is threatened by disputes over missile defense and Syria.
Some U.S. policy makers believe that a key reason that Putin is staying away is to avoid looking weakened on the world stage while he reasserts himself in the face of recent protests at home.
Putin’s absence could also spare Obama, who had planned Oval Office talks with him, from having to fend off new Republican accusations of being too soft on a former Cold War foe.
A trip to Russia just two months before the election would have cut into Obama’s time to devote to his hard-fought run for a second term.
Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, confirmed the president’s decision not to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit during a visit to New York.Looking for news you can trust?
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This post first appeared on the ProPublica website.
First, a sex scandal, followed by a messy cover-up and an even messier fessing-up. The sequence has become all but routine in Washington.
But the criminal case against two-time Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards is anything but run-of-the-mill. While campaign finance experts may not agree on whether the charges are merited, they seem to uniformly acknowledge that the charges against Edwards are unprecedented. Here’s a quick look at why, drawing from the prosecution’s indictment, the defense’s expert witnesses and what’s been reported.
What are the charges against Edwards, exactly? The government lays out its case in a federal grand jury indictment, which you can read in its entirety. Essentially, Edwards is charged with violating campaign-finance law for accepting large sums of money from two wealthy supporters. The money went to concealing Edwards’ mistress, Rielle Hunter, from his wife and from the American electorate, the government alleges.
At issue here is whether the nearly $1 million in funds from longtime Edwards supporters Rachel “Bunny” Mellon and now-deceased Fred Baron were in fact campaign contributions. If they were, as the government alleges, the donations would violate both disclosure laws and contribution limits. The government also has to prove that Edwards knew about the payments.
Edwards pleaded not guilty. He said he has personal regrets but never broke the law.
So what constitutes a campaign contribution? By law, a campaign contribution is “any gift, subscription, loan, advance, or deposit of money or anything of value made by any person for the purpose of influencing any election for Federal office.”
The indictment explains it this way:
Anything of value provided for the purpose of influencing the presidential election, including (a) contributions to a candidate and his/her campaign; (b) expenditures made in cooperation, consultation, or concert, with, or at the request of suggestion of, a candidate or his/her campaign; and (c) payments for personal expenses of a candidate unless they would have been made irrespective of the candidacy.
Ah, so the question is whether the money was meant to influence the campaign, right? Yes, and we’ll see what the court decides. But it almost goes without saying that a sex scandal and lovechild splashed in the headlines would have hurt—if not derailed—Edwards’ campaign.
Edwards’ legal team has reportedly countered that the money was merely intended to hide the affair from Edwards’ cancer-stricken wife, Elizabeth, and it had nothing to do with his protecting his campaign.
Prosecutors evidently aren’t buying that the payments were just to protect Edwards’ marriage. In the first paragraph of the 19-page indictment, prosecutors argued that Edwards’ “public image as a devoted family man” was a centerpiece of his candidacy, and that cultivating and publicizing that image was part of the campaign’s communication strategy for electoral success.
Also worth noting: Edwards once told ABC News that he had spoken with Elizabeth about his infidelity in 2006, and yet the hush-money was paid out in 2007 and 2008.
The government’s case also leans on a 2000 advisory opinion from the Federal Election Commission in which a donor tried to give $10,000 in funds to candidates on the condition that the money was to “be used solely for personal expenses,” and not for campaign purposes, according to the News & Observer. The donor’s reasoning was that he wanted to “express deep appreciation” to the candidate for giving up private sector opportunities to pursue public service. The FEC said no, ruling that personal donations are only permissible if they would have been made “irrespective of the candidacy.”
Is there specific evidence tying the donations to Edwards’ candidacy? In the indictment, prosecutors point to a note between donor Rachel Mellon and Edwards’ aide Andrew Young. Around that time, Edwards and Young had been discussing individuals who could support Edwards’ mistress, who was pregnant with his child, according to the indictment. Young apparently gave Mellon a call. Here’s what she told Young, emphasis ours:
The timing of your telephone call on Friday was “witchy.” I was sitting alone in a grim mood—furious that the press attacked Senator Edwards on the price of a haircut. But it inspired me—from now on, all haircuts, etc., that are necessary and important for his campaign—please send the bills to me. … It is a way to help our friend without government restrictions.
Mellon had by that time already contributed the most she could legally contribute to his campaign, but proceeded to write $725,000 in personal checks that ultimately went to Hunter’s living and medical expenses, the indictment alleged. The memo lines of the checks indicated they were for furniture items—”chairs,” “antique Charleston table,” “book case.” (Mellon’s legal team told the New York Times that the money was a personal gift, and she didn’t know how Edwards used it.)
Edwards also accepted more than $200,000 from Baron, his former campaign finance chairman, which went to Hunter’s travel and accommodations. (Some of the facts here are contradictory: After news of the Edwards-Hunter affair broke, Baron said he sent money to keep Hunter out of the media but he did so without Edwards’ knowledge. Along with denying paternity of Hunter’s child, Edwards said publicly in 2008 that “had no knowledge of any money being paid.” However, AP reported yesterday that prosecutors have notes between Edwards and a campaign writer that show Edwards acknowledging he knew about Baron’s payments—though he said he didn’t ask for them.)
Neither Mellon nor Baron are named in the indictment, but are listed as Person C and Person D, respectively.
So, why are legal experts skeptical of the government’s case? First, nobody can recall a similar case. And the lack of a clearly applicable legal precedent makes it risky.
Plus, the standard of proof for a criminal case is higher than for a civil case. U.C. Irvine law professor and campaign finance expert Richard Hasen, who wrote a good piece for Slate [13] on the Edwards ordeal, wrote on his election law blog on Monday: “The law is murky and the facts are murky, and it is going to be very hard to prove in a criminal prosecution beyond a reasonable doubt that Edwards willfully violated clear law.”
Both sides have sought experts to bolster their interpretations of the law. Politico reported that the prosecution has been seeking out former FEC commissioners to testify and has had at least one decline because the case “seems somewhat of a stretch.”
The Edwards legal team has retained two expert witnesses. One, former FEC chairman Scott Thomas, said it was his view that the payments “would not be considered to be either campaign contributions or campaign expenditures” according to campaign finance law, and that the government’s understanding of the law was incorrect. “A criminal prosecution of a candidate on these facts,” Thomas wrote, “would be outside anything I would expect after decades of experience with the campaign finance laws.”
What’s at stake for Edwards—and for the Justice Department? If found guilty of the government’s charges, the already-disgraced Edwards would lose his law license and could face a maximum of five years in prison and a maximum $250,000 fine on each of the indictment’s six counts.
For the government, the case could mean a step toward redemption—or yet another high-profile failure—for the same Justice Department unit that in 2008 botched the politically charged prosecution of the late Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens.When I first laid eyes on the original Samsung Galaxy Note I thought it was a bit of a Marmite smartphone. I loved the easily viewable display, but I hated answering it because it made me feel ridiculous. Years of Trigger Happy TV had conditioned me to mock giant phones and now in a cruel twist of fate I was having to review one.
In the end, however, I rather liked it and it seems so did most of you guys because the Galaxy Note sold like hot cakes, as have its second and third-generation siblings. This explains why other manufacturers have decided to jump on the bandwagon with similar offerings, including the Sony Xperia Z Ultra on review today.
Knowing these 'phablets' are here to stay, I decided to see whether there's still a niche for over-sized phones (or undersized tablets) and if Sony has hit the nail on the head with the Xperia Z Ultra.
Sony Xperia Z Ultra review: Design
Unless you're eight feet tall with fingers like bananas, make no mistake, the Xperia Z Ultra is a beast. It manages to dwarf the already sizable Galaxy Note 3 and the HTC One Max, making it the biggest 'phablet' on the market. Until next week, that is. The reason for all the bulk is simple ─ Sony wanted to cram in a 6.4-inch display.
Now I like a large display size as much as the next man or woman, but it gets to a point where holding it with one hand can prove difficult (yes, that's what she said). It also meant typing on the keyboard in landscape mode required me to physically move my hand to reach the inner-most keys.
Sometimes it felt like the Xperia Z Ultra was wandering into a design minefield as far as usability is concerned, because certain tasks ended up being made more difficult by its sheer bulk. Pressing the back button when using it one-handed, for instance, meant adjusting the position of your hand and stretching.
"Take my strong hand!"
There were, of course, tasks where the Xperia Z Ultra comes into its own. Reading websites, checking emails, typing in portrait, watching movies, playing games ─ the almost Nexus 7-sized display is immensely practical.
In the Xperia Z Ultra's defence, the 6.5mm thickness, 212g weight and slim bezels make it feel like a high-end piece of kit, which it should when it commands a high-end price tag. I especially liked the shiny back plate, which is made from glass. Sure, it attracts dust and smears like it’s going out of fashion but that bothered me very little.
The buttons and general build quality is also great. Admittedly I was in no rush to see how well it would fare if I dropped it but I got the feeling it would probably survive. Which is reassuring given the slippery backplate. What I didn't like was the plastic covering over the mini-USB connection and microSD card slots as they felt a bit cheap.
These flaps do have a purpose, it must be said. The Xperia Ultra Z1 is water resistant - more so than its smaller Xperia Z cousin - to the point where you could, if feeling brave, drop it into the bath and it will live to tell the tale. While I never tried that out, it did survive running water from a tap.
One particularly cool feature is the ability to use a pen and pencil to draw on the screen, instead of a dedicated stylus. While the pen worked very well, the lead side of a pencil was a bit iffy, leaving the odd line broken unless I pressed down hard. Sadly, the display can't detect pressure so lines will always be the same thickness, regardless of the pressure applied.
Like a big television, it's strangely easy to adjust to the Xperia Z Ultra's sheer size. However, I always felt stupid answering a call in public. Of course, you could use a hands-free device and all is solved. How long you actually spend on the phone will have a bearing. If only occasionally, you could argue the benefits of that big-old display outweigh the embarrassment.
It will probably jab you in the hip
That's assuming you can actually carry the phone with you. Tight jeans, small handbags, compact man bags and small pockets may prove to be problematic. Still, it can be pocketed, which is more than you can say for the iPad Mini, Nexus 7 and other 7-inch tablets.
Sony Xperia Z Ultra review: Display
For all the bulk, you would hope the Xperia Z Ultra's display is top-notch. Fortunately, it really is. The wide viewing angles are forgiving for sharing content with adjacent chums and the detail is superb, thanks to the full HD 1920x1080 pixel display. Brightness is also excellent but not eye-burningly strong. Colours look more natural and less saturated out of the box than they do on a Samsung device.
Whether watching a film, checking out the latest YouTube sensation (Drift Cats, anyone?) or for reading websites, the Xperia Z Ultra excels. Other displays may offer better sharpness, for instance, but few can offer the same impact a 6.4-inch display affords. Whack on a pair of good headphones and your content will immerse you that little bit more.
Alongside the Xperia Z1's smaller display, the pixels-per-inch (ppi) number is less on the Xperia Z Ultra, at 441ppi and 341ppi respectively. Is the difference noticeable? Not especially. Beyond a certain point the human eye struggles to perceive the difference anyway. Just know that your eyes will thank you in years to come for going for such a large, high-quality display instead of something that causes you to strain.
Sony Xperia Z Ultra review: Specs & Hardware
Another benefit of the Xperia Z Ultra's 179x92x6.5mm size is that it allows plenty of room for powerful internals. The star of the show is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor clocked at an impressive 2.2GHz, which allows it to fly along with hardly any noticeable pauses or jittering.
Android isn’t currently quite as smooth as Windows Phone or iOS but this is about as close as it gets for now. Games with intensive 3D graphics like Shadowgun: DeadZone run smoothly, apps open and close satisfyingly and there's rarely ever a hold-up when jumping between tasks. Nothing really requires this much processing might, but it's reassuring to have.
The Xperia Z Ultra also comes equipped with 2GB of RAM, Bluetooth 4.0, DLNA, NFC and 4G connectivity as well as 16GB of storage out of the box. It seems a bit cheap for Sony to not put a microSD card in the box, but at least you have the option of up to a 64GB boost in capacity.
Some of you may be sad to know there's no fingerprint scanner. Personally, I'm not bothered at all. However, knowing you may be tied to the phone for 18 or 24 months, the lack of 4k support does seem a shame. Granted, there's not a lot of ultra-high-definition content out there but it will become more prominent and the Galaxy Note 3 is already on the bandwagon. Hopefully a firmware update will rectify the situation, especially when Sony itself films its TV and film content at 8k.
Call quality was good - loud and clear - but can sometimes sound a tad distant, which is perhaps down to the active noise cancellation and HD Voice algorithms working their magic. The benefit is background noise is kept to a minimum, even in a relatively noisy area.
Sony Xperia Z Ultra review: Android
Android 4.2.2 runs the show, which means the Xperia Z Ultra narrowly misses out on Android 4.3 but an update has been promised. Over the top is Sony's own overlay, which sometimes feels a bit dated but it does the job well.
Highlights include the customisable notification bar and changes to the Sony Walkman player app, movie player and photo gallery (Album, as it's known) all of which were for the better. While there's not a lot of 'bloatware' apps to trawl through, I rarely found myself using PlayStation Mobile or Xperia Privilege. To be fair, you can always uninstall what you don't want.
The inclusion of OfficeSuite is useful for work but not as useful as Microsoft Word or Google Docs, while Pixlr can be handy for photo enthusiasts. File Commander can be helpful if you are a bit of a media hoarder. TV SideView lets you control a Sony TV with your Xperia Z Ultra, which you may or may not find useful.
Although purists will probably want Android in its vanilla form or with a custom launcher in tow, I was happy enough to use what Sony had provided ─ although in time the customisation bug so associated with Android was starting to bite again. Sony's offering is functional and stable, but there are options out there that will significantly improve the aesthetics and will slightly improve performance.
For those addicted to apps or reliant on a particular one, the Google Play Store offers a wealth of options, including the trendy staples such as Instagram and SnapChat. There are also plenty of awesome games out there to whittle away the time. Sadly, you will have to trawl through a lot of drivel to find new apps and games. Quality not quantity, Google.
Sony Xperia Z Ultra review: Camera & video
Tablet cameras are rarely worth writing home about, but what about hybrids? In the case of the Xperia Z Ultra, it's a mixed bag. The Exmor RS 8-megapixel sensor allows for some detailed shots that are pretty accurate in colour, but can appear soft in places. It's a reasonably accomplished camera but not in the same league as the Nokia Lumia 1020 and other recent flagship smartphones.
The lack of a flash does little to help the cause, especially when a lot of photos are going to be taken when lighting is anything but ideal at, say, a club or pub.
At least there's a 2-megapixel front-facing camera for'selfies' (if they float your boat) and video calls plus a number of photo options designed to let you tweak a shot. It will even do all the work for you with Superior Auto, a |
: eaglessoar - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - January 20, 2011
Subject: want more! lack of material especially with the bookend cuts leaves you wanting more though what you do get is a real treat! nice flow the whole way through, like one long song! - January 20, 2011want more!
Reviewer: clementinescaboose - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - November 24, 2010
Subject: the one this is absolutely the source you want for this show...that and the show itself is out-fucking-standing...in a previous review, i docked a star due to brevity, but that's just not fair. there's plenty of short snippets like this that i've handed out five to, so this should be no less... - November 24, 2010the one
Reviewer: yippierb - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - February 28, 2010
Subject: uhhhhhhhh! YER MAN IS CORRECT YOU... will CONTINUE TO RETURN..AND ENJOY. Beast/best Dead ever!!! Who was even close to this in 68/69? influential...ya think? - February 28, 2010uhhhhhhhh!
Reviewer: groovernut - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - January 11, 2010
Subject: wow I agree with the other this show is a clean recording and very vital... give it a listen. - January 11, 2010wow
Reviewer: cglover - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - December 3, 2009
Subject: jazzy goodness Thank you everyone who made this show possible. Jazzy as hell, great show, amazing sound- what a gem. - December 3, 2009jazzy goodness
Reviewer: JustAFloatingSage - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - September 3, 2009
Subject: whoa!! NowThatsAShow!!! Note to self:
dude...you came across the real mccoy.... very very very much...
careful: it rocks really loud and the recording is the best that could be fabricated
... don't listen to this when falling asleep or waking up...
... do listen to this when you need to be transported into a world of sounds
oh yea... DO NOT be bummed out about losing DarkStar at the end
BumCity - September 3, 2009whoa!! NowThatsAShow!!!
Reviewer: oh_uh_um_ah - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - May 8, 2009
Subject: The GRATEFUL DEAD "Live On Stage" January 20, 1968 at the Eureka Municipal Auditorium, Eureka, CA, U.S.A.
~^|\_@|@_/|^~
~/\~
Super 68' Soundboard!
A "Must Have" show! Classic 68' Sound, you're gonna freak. This show is a trip. Too bad "Dark Star" fades out 3 minutes into the song...
Thank you Mr. Miller!
Remember to click the "DeadLists Project" link and get the poster for this show.
The IA recommends users of Windows XP view this web-page with RealPlayer. RealPlayer is a free media player you can download at
For easy streaming or downloading use RealPlayer. Click the VBR M3U link to open the songs in the Playlist. If your Playlist is not open, open it by clicking the Playlist icon at the lower right hand corner of RealPlayer. Once the songs are in the Playlist, double click the song to play it, then click the record button at the lower left hand corner of Realplayer to record it. When the red line reaches the other end click the stop button to download the song. Your song is in the RealPlayer Downloads folder. Repeat these steps for each song.
Eat, Drink, Be Merry and Listen to the GRATEFUL DEAD.
Thanks for the LOVE from 1968. ~^|\_@|@_/|^~~/\~Super 68' Soundboard!A "Must Have" show! Classic 68' Sound, you're gonna freak. This show is a trip. Too bad "Dark Star" fades out 3 minutes into the song...Thank you Mr. Miller!Remember to click the "DeadLists Project" link and get the poster for this show.The IA recommends users of Windows XP view this web-page with RealPlayer. RealPlayer is a free media player you can download at www.realplayer.com For easy streaming or downloading use RealPlayer. Click the VBR M3U link to open the songs in the Playlist. If your Playlist is not open, open it by clicking the Playlist icon at the lower right hand corner of RealPlayer. Once the songs are in the Playlist, double click the song to play it, then click the record button at the lower left hand corner of Realplayer to record it. When the red line reaches the other end click the stop button to download the song. Your song is in the RealPlayer Downloads folder. Repeat these steps for each song.Eat, Drink, Be Merry and Listen to the GRATEFUL DEAD.Thanks for the LOVE from 1968. - May 8, 2009The GRATEFUL DEAD "Live On Stage" January 20, 1968 at the Eureka Municipal Auditorium, Eureka, CA, U.S.A.
Reviewer: Dagwood420 - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - February 28, 2009
Subject: Come to Humboldt Thank you soooo much for this recording. Humboldt is a destination for a lot of deadhead fanatics. This recording has been such a great reminder that Humboldt has and always will be a refuge for like minded individuals that need a haven. Loving you--always. Sunshine daydream, walk you in the tall trees, of Humboldt.
DAGWOOD - February 28, 2009Come to Humboldt
Reviewer: Cliff Hucker - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - February 11, 2009
Subject: Sing, Siing, Sing... This just might be the best sounding file archived here? It surely is one of the most profoundly jazzy sets the band has ever performed.
January '68 and this suite swings like a Benny Goodman arrangement with Gene Krupa sitting in. It doesn't get any better than this one! (100 pts) - February 11, 2009Sing, Siing, Sing...NEWINGTON — Gun maker Sig Sauer has filed a civil suit against the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives claiming the federal agency wrongfully classified a “muzzle brake” Sig designed to reduce recoil, as an item “intended only for use” when making a silencer.
NEWINGTON — Gun maker Sig Sauer has filed a civil suit against the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives claiming the federal agency wrongfully classified a “muzzle brake” Sig designed to reduce recoil, as an item “intended only for use” when making a silencer.
Sig claims that gun silencers are “subject to burdensome legal requirements” and by calling its muzzle brake a part for a silencer, the federal agency is subjecting it to “economic injury.”
“If classified as a silencer, no market exists for the subject device given that it will not silence, muffle, or diminish the report of a firearm and yet it would still be subject to the burdensome requirements set forth above as if it really is a silencer,” Sig argues through Manchester attorney Mark Rouvalis and Virginia attorney Stephen Halbrook.
ATF Director B. Todd Jones is named as defendant in Sig's lawsuit and has 21 days, after being served, to respond to the civil action, dated April 7.
Sig claims it designed the muzzle brake which “effectively reduces recoil and muzzle rise when a shot is discharged” and as such, it's not subject to regulation under the federal Gun Control Act.
“Accordingly, it will be highly marketable to consumers and will generate profit,” according to the suit.
If classified as a silencer or muffler, “no market would exist for the device,” because consumers would not subject themselves to the “required burdens” associated with silencers, to buy a device that doesn't perform as a silencer, Sig claims.
Silencers are subject to specific marking, record keeping and transfer restrictions, according to Sig.
The Newington gun maker's suit, filed in the U. S. District Court of New Hampshire, states that it submitted a rifle, with its muzzle brake, to the ATF on April 4, 2013 for evaluation. The device is described as 9.5 inches long and permanently attached with a weld to a 6.5 inch barrel, making the overall barrel length 16 inches.
The ATF responded, by letter dated Aug. 26, 2013, that the device is constructed as a silencer component commonly referred to as a “monolithic baffle stack,” the suit states.
“Welding it to a barrel does not change its design characteristics or function,” Sig says it was informed by the ATF.
In a Sept. 6, 2013 followup letter, Sig asked the federal regulatory agency for reconsideration, while reporting that sound meter testing proved the device amplified, not muffled sound, when a gun with it was fired. It also included evidence showing the device offsets and corrects recoil of a firearm when attached, Sig claims.
By letter dated Feb. 21, the ATF stuck to its original finding, stating that Sig's device is a part intended only for use in making a silencer. In its subsequent lawsuit, Sig tells the federal court the ATF did not dispute its evidence showing otherwise.
Due to the ATF's “erroneous” classification of the device as a silencer, Sig has and will continue to suffer economic consequences, it tells the court. The ATF failed to “articulate a satisfactory explanation for its classification and “failed to examine the relevant data,” the suit claims.
The federal agency also failed to address Sig's contention that there are similar devices on the market that are being transferred without being treated as firearms, Sig claims.
Sig asks the court to set aside ATF's determination as unlawful, to declare that its muzzle brake is not a part only intended for use in silencers, and to award it costs and damages.At a time when animated movies seem to be made on the flimsiest of premises, it's nice to know that the people behind such delights as The Secret Of Kells and Song Of The Sea are continuing to turn out handcrafted, visually sumptuous work. The latest from Cartoon Saloon is The Breadwinner.
Adapted from Deborah Ellis' young adult novel by Anita Doron, The Breadwinner follows 11-year-old Parvana, who lives with her family in one room of a bombed-out apartment building in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital city during the Taliban rule. Parvana's father – a history teacher until his school was bombed and his health destroyed – works from a blanket on the ground in the marketplace, reading letters for people who cannot read or write. One day he is arrested for the crime of having a foreign education, and the family is left without someone who can earn money or even shop for food. As conditions in the family grow desperate, only one solution emerges: forbidden by the Taliban government to earn money as a girl, Parvana must transform herself into a boy and become the breadwinner.
Nora Twomey is in the director's chair for the film, which boasts Angelina Jolie as one of its executive producers. "I am proud to be a part of this beautiful film with this timely and very important subject matter,” Jolie says in a statement. “Millions of girls around the world have to grow up before their time, working to provide for their families at a very young age and in difficult circumstances. They have the strength to do what no one should ask little girls to do. I hope this film is able to bring this discussion to a broader audience. As much as it is an important and very meaningful film, it also stands on its own as a great piece of art. Director Nora Twomey and her team have done something very special. They have breathed life into the characters and paid respect to the subject matter and to a country where women often struggle."
The movie will be out in the US this autumn, but has yet to announce a UK date. Perhaps it'll follow the pattern of Song Of The Sea and arrive here on the heels of an Oscar nomination...Mr. Choi said Officer Yanez spotted Mr. Castile, a 32-year-old school cafeteria worker, driving along a stretch of road near the state fairgrounds with his girlfriend and her young daughter. Officer Yanez believed Mr. Castile matched the description of a suspect in a nearby armed robbery from a few days earlier, radioing a colleague that Mr. Castile’s “wide-set nose” seemed to match the surveillance video from that case, and that his car also had a broken taillight.
Image Officer Jeronimo Yanez outside the City Council chambers in St. Anthony, Minn., in 2013. Credit Christian Dobratz, via Associated Press
But when Officer Yanez pulled Mr. Castile over in the tiny suburb of Falcon Heights, the conversation described by prosecutors started out as ordinary, with no mention of the robbery and no discussion of the smell of marijuana that Officer Yanez would later recount to investigators. (Mr. Choi said Wednesday that Mr. Castile was not a suspect in the armed robbery case.)
Mr. Castile, who had been pulled over dozens of times before, seemed to know the routine: He kept his seatbelt fastened, greeted Officer Yanez and handed over his insurance card, according to prosecutors’ version of events. Then, before his girlfriend said he reached for the wallet that contained his driver’s license and permit to carry a pistol, Mr. Castile said, “Sir, I have to tell you that I do have a firearm on me.”
Within seconds, Officer Yanez, of the St. Anthony police, had shouted, “Don’t pull it out,” and Mr. Castile and his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, tried to assure him that he was not grabbing the gun. But Officer Yanez quickly fired seven rounds, fatally wounding Mr. Castile just 62 seconds after the traffic stop began. An instant later, Mr. Castile moaned and said, “I wasn’t reaching for it.”
“His dying words were in protest that he wasn’t reaching for his gun,” Mr. Choi said.
Mr. Castile’s death is among the highest-profile cases of the countless police interactions with black men that have roiled the country, and especially Minnesota, in the last two years. The case drew international attention, largely because Ms. Reynolds streamed the aftermath on Facebook Live, calmly but firmly recounting her version of events and disputing Officer Yanez’s narrative as blood soaked through Mr. Castile’s white T-shirt.Click For Pics From The SAG Awards Red Carpet!
Octavia took home the award for outstanding female actor in a supporting role, while she and the rest of the cast of ‘The Help’ earned the Actor for best performance by an ensemble!
The SAG Awards is one of Hollywood’s biggest nights! Check HollywoodLife.com for all the winners!
Outstanding Performance By A Cast In A Motion Picture
The Artist
Bridesmaids
The Descendants
The Help
Midnight In Paris
Outstanding Performance By A Male Actor In A Leading Role
Demian Bichir, A Better Life
George Clooney, The Descendants
Leonardo DiCaprio, J. Edgar
Jean DuJardin, The Artist
Brad Pitt, Moneyball
Outstanding Performance By A Female Actor In A Leading Role
Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs
Viola Davis, The Help
Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
Tilda Swinton, We Need To Talk About Kevin
Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn
Outstanding Performance By A Male Actor In A Supporting Role
Kenneth Branaugh, My Week With Marilyn
Armie Hammer, J. Edgar
Jonah Hill, Moneyball
Nick Nolte, Warrior
Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Outstanding Performance By A Female Actor In A Supporting Role
Berenice Bejo, The Artist
Jessica Chastain, The Help
Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids
Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs
Octavia Spencer, The Help
Outstanding Performance By An Ensemble In A Drama Series
Boardwalk Empire
Breaking Bad
Dexter
Game Of Thrones
The Good Wife
Outstanding Performance By A Male Actor In A Drama Series
Patrick J. Adams, Suits
Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire
Kyle Chandler, Friday Night Lights
Byran Cranston, Breaking Bad
Michael C. Hall, Dexter
Outstanding Performance By A Female Actor In A Drama Series
Kathy Bates, Harry’s Law
Glenn Close, Damages
Jessica Lange, American Horror Story
Julianna Margulies, The Good Wife
Kyra Sedgwick, The Closer
Outstanding Performance By An Ensemble In A Comedy Series
30 Rock
The Big Bang Theory
Glee
Modern Family
The Office
Outstanding Performance By A Male Actor In A Comedy Series
Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock
Ty Burrell, Modern Family
Steve Carell, The Office
Jon Cryer, Two And A Half Men
Eric Stonestreet, Modern Family
Outstanding Performance By A Female Actor In A Comedy Series
Julie Bowen, Modern Family
Edie Falco, Nurse Jackie
Tina Fey, 30 Rock
Sofia Vergara, Modern Family
Betty White, Hot In Cleveland
Outstanding Performance By A Male Actor In A TV Movie Or Miniseries
Laurence Fishburne, Thurgood
Paul Giamatti, Too Big To Fail
Greg Kinnear, The Kennedys
Guy Pearce, Mildred Pierce
James Woods, Too Big To Fail
Outstanding Performance By A Female Actor In A TV Movie Or Miniseries
Diane Lane, Cinema Verite
Maggie Smith, Downton Abbey
Emily Watson, Appropriate Adult
Betty White, Hallmark Hall Of Fame: The Lost Valentine
Kate Winslet, Mildred Pierce
More SAG Awards:ETA: Young Wizards: Lifeboats is out! Click here for its page at the Ebooks Direct store.
When the renowned saurian Species Archivist to the Powers that Be summons young wizard Kit Rodriguez to participate in an urgent off-planet intervention intended to save many millions of lives, Kit’s hardly going to say “no.”
He soon discovers that not only he, but his wizardly partner Nita Callahan and her sister Dairine, his friend Ronan Nolan, and tens of thousands of other wizards from Earth have also been drafted in to intervene on the distant world called Tevaral. There the planet’s single huge moon Thesba has become tectonically unstable and will very soon tear itself apart, its massive fragments smashing down onto the surface of Tevaral and utterly destroying it. The wizards’ mission: to extract Tevaral’s hominid population and “raft” them off-planet to new homeworlds before the apocalyptic disaster begins.
There’s only one problem: millions of the people of Tevaral don’t want to go.
Kit, Nita and their thousands of fellow Earth wizards must now race against time to find a way to save all the Tevaralti despite their near-symbiotic relationship with their beloved world and its unique life forms. As doomsday inexorably draws nearer, hope is fading fast, and it seems like it’s going to take a miracle to keep the people of Tevaral from being wiped out. True, wizardry is all about miracles. But will one turn up in time?…I was recently asked by a friend of mine if I could go with her to the Virginia Center Commons, where the only Hot Topic in Richmond north of the James River is evidently – something of a strange request, but it had been a while since I’d been to Virginia Center Commons, and I’m never one to turn down the chance to see a woman try on corsets, so I agreed. Of course, once we got to the mall, I understood why she’d asked for an escort, and indeed, why she needed one. As I said, it had been quite a while since my last visit to Virginia Center Commons, so I was almost floored by the state of the mall.
The first signs of trouble are obvious just driving in – the massive parking lots which wreath the mall lie almost empty, the biggest cluster being a group of about forty cars in front of the food court – this is on a Friday night mind you. The mall itself looks just as bad on the inside – I’d wager close to half of its ninety or so storefronts lie vacant, including an entire wing of one part of the mall where one anchor store, Dillards, closed up with no one else moving in. Of course, things for the other half of the mall’s stores with still open-doors aren’t entirely optimistic either – most are just as empty of patrons as the vacant stores next to them, little surprise for a mall so starved for tenants it boasts three barber shops/hair salons. As for the patrons themselves – I’ll just say it didn’t take long for me to see why my friend asked if I would go with her.
Opened in 1991, and located just off both National Route 1 and Interstate 95, Virginia Center Commons was the gem of Richmond’s Northside throughout the 1990s, and after serving as the final blow to struggling competitors like the Cloverfield Mall and the Azalea Mall, became Richmond’s hippest and busiest mall until Short Pump and Stony Point both opened in 2003. Around the middle of the 2000s, the mall started to lose its luster and some of its clients, but looking at the derelict that Virginia Center Commons mall is today, you’d never have known this was once the place to be in Richmond.
It’s an increasingly familiar tale across the country – once the symbols of American capitalism itself, shopping malls have been hit hard by a combination of changing times and the continuing economic troubles having hit the retail particularly hard. It would have been a struggle for malls and the retail industry to adapt to things like the rise of web retail and increased automation, even in the best of economic times – add in the recession, which has claimed chains from Circuit City to Borders to Blockbuster, with many more teetering on the edge, and ‘for lease’ signs have become more common than storefronts in many shopping centers. Many economists warn that the worst is still to come, some even going so far as to predict malls may go the way of the mom and pop stores they replaced.
One need only look over the recent change in fortunes for Virginia Center Commons to get an overview of that – the mall saw its first troubles with the rise of competing malls opening in Stony Point and Short Pump, and much like Virginia Center Commons did with Cloverleaf and Azalea Malls, both began drawing away retailers and customers, and in the case of Short Pump, residents from Richmond’s Northside where Virginia Center Commons is located.
Then of course, came the recession, which as mentioned when I talked about my hometown of Ashland, which is just a jaunt up Route 1 from Virginia Center Commons, has hit Richmond’s Northside like a bombshell, and the fortunes of the area from Ashland to Lakeside, along with it’s residents, still have yet to recover, and indeed, are in some ways getting worse, as more residents move away to better parts of the area. Of course, the worst is still to come for the mall. Among the long list of struggling retailers are giants like JC Penny’s and Sears, which like many other malls, form two of Virginia Center Commons remaining anchor stores, and in an era when JC Penny’s rotating doors see more CEO’s out than customers in, and when Sears doesn’t even own the Sears Tower anymore, both are looking as store closures, if not outright bankruptcy or liquidation, and the loss of one, let alone both, would spell the end of many malls, Virginia Center Commons included. It certainly doesn’t help that Simon Malls, which owns Virginia Center Commons, is having problems of its own, and may deem the mall unsalvageable, and close it down to try to get the stocks back in the black. Word has just been announced that a 400,000 square foot outlet mall is to be built a couple of miles up the road, and when it opens its doors to retailers and customers alike, it may strike the final blow that Virginia Center Commons barely missed from Short Pump or Stony Point. When you add in the continuing rise of web retail and the still floundering economy, the writing may be on the wall for Virginia Center Commons – already officially a dead mall, it would need a miracle to stay open another year or two, let alone recover. The time may come soon that Virginia Center Commons may shut its doors for good, be yet another blow to the still devastated Richmond Northside I call home.
Yet that may be more than anything why the impending loss of Virginia Center Commons hits home for me. Having been raised on the Richmond Northside for much of my life, this was the mall I grew up with, Virginia Center Commons having been opened shortly after I was born. As a child, it was the mall my parents took me to go talk to Santa, where my grandparents took me to get toys, where me and some kids from preschool went to go meet the cast of Mighty Morphing Power Rangers. As a teen, this was where me any by now older friends went to go hang out whenever we could, where I took my first girlfriend on our first date, where I got my first tastes of freedom as a young adult. As an adult, I’ve already watched my hometown turn into skid row, and my favorite bookstore shutter its doors for good – so it saddens me now that Virginia Center Commons is far more likely to end up a footnote on Deadmalls.com than it is to survive even another year or two.
I hope that’s not the case, I really do. But when the writing on the wall is so clear, not just for Virginia Center Commons, but for hundreds of malls in similar situations across the country, it may be time to face the facts – this mall is dead. It simply doesn’t know it yet.by DAVE MARTINEZ
PORTLAND, OR. – If this season has been a statement for the New York Red Bulls, Sunday’s victory over the Portland Timbers serves as the first of several potential exclamation marks.
With the win, New York became the first team to clinch a playoff spot — and that was the least of their achievements. The Red Bulls overtook first place in the Eastern Conference and tied Supporters’ Shield leading Vancouver Whitecaps in the overall table as well.
“It’s significant in the sense that we’re being rewarded for continuing to believe in ourselves and push really hard but it’s not really the end goal,” head coach Jesse Marsch said after the match. “It’s a big step because to get to the playoffs this early in the season says a lot about our team and about the season we’ve had but we’re not stopping. We’re going to make sure that we’re all focused on the end goal.”
Sunday’s match served as a microcosm of the Red Bulls’ season. New York played their “high energy, high press” game on the road against a dangerous Timbers side. The high line once again choked the life out of their opponent. The top four attackers interchanged masterfully — despite the addition of two first-time starters on the field. Their team-first defense repelled several Portland jaunts into their area.
And once again, Luis Robles stood on his head.
All in all, the Red Bulls exhibited a familiar blueprint on Sunday night — one that has ultimately awarded them a place amongst the best teams in MLS.
“I think we showed that when we are committed to play the way we want to play, that we can really command the game,” Marsch said. “We showed that we’re a deep team and that when guys step on the field, that they are talented and they know their roles. We showed that this team has heart and belief in what they are and who they are.
“We weren’t happy with the performance in New England,” Marsch continued. “For these guys to come back and lay it all out here like this and empty the tank certainly shows a lot about their character.”Episode summary: Unlike the field of self-driving cars, the fields of construction, mining, agriculture, and other classes of “heavy industry” involve a huge variety of equipment and use-cases that go beyond traveling from A to B. The heavy industry leaders of today are no farther behind automakers in their understanding that AI and automation will be essential for the future of their companies. In this episode, guest Dr. Sam Kherat discusses the applications of AI in heavy industry, including: What type of capabilities and functions are automate-able, and at what level. He also shines a light on how AI might affect the future of the industry within the next 2-3 years, and in what ways we can expect large equipment to become more autonomous.
We’d like to thank RE-WORK for introducing us to Dr. Kherat at their autonomous vehicles conference in San Francisco.
Expertise: Dr. Sam Kherat: Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana and MSEE from Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois. Dr. Kherat has expertise in the fields of robotics, autonomous excavation, and mining systems. He currently teaches robotics courses at the Mechanical Engineering Department at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois
Brief recognition: Dr. Kherat was involved in the DARPA Grand Challenges and Urban Challenge. He was previously Adjunct Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and member of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU.)
Dr. Kherat’s publications include The IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, ASME, the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, and Advanced Technology (C-TAT).
He has been a keynote or guest speaker at several conferences or symposia including SAE’s Driver Assist and Autonomous Vehicle Technologies in Pittsburgh, 2005 & 2011, NI week in Austin TX, 2008, IEEE’s Industrial Forum: in Anchorage, Alaska, May, 2010, AUVSI’s Unmanned Systems Interoperability Conference, San Diego, CA, October, 2010. He received very complimentary feedback from the Oregon Office of Energy and the WA State Dept. of Ecology, on his presentation to help with cleanup efforts at the Hanford site.
Current affiliations: Dr. Kherat is on the Technology Committee for the Robotics Technology Consortium.
Big Idea:
Autonomous equipment in heavy industry may be widely adopted well before most consumer vehicles are self-driving.
The key application for AI in heavy industry is related to how vehicles can perceive their surroundings and each other. For the time being vehicle automation within heavy industry is limited to the use of GPS and a fusion of sensors such as RADAR and LiDAR. Full automation is only currently in place for heavy vehicles that have to make repetitive maneuvers, such as hauling ore. However, in the future this is set to change and it may happen sooner in the heavy industry space than in the arena of autonomous personal vehicles, for a number of reasons:
First, while there is an erie strangeness to sitting in a compact car that drives itself down the highway, there is absolutely nothing strange or unusual about automating heavy machinery work. Manufacturing, mining, and agriculture have always eagerly automated tasks whenever possible, and there is little resistance to doing so now with the advent of AI. We’ve covered a number of applications of machine learning in robotics in previous articles, it’s worth noting that as industrial robots gain dexterity, their heavy equipment counterparts are likely to gain autonomy.
Second, the operation of heavy equipment requires specific, valuable skills (the operation of a crane or of an industrial earth-moving vehicle is not something taught in a weekend seminar). Some of these skills are hard to come by, and expensive. Corporations eager to get more work done at less cost are benefitted financially by automation – much more so that an individual person would be financially benefitted by having an autonomous car of their own.
Third, while the self-driving car field may be seen to have a safety “barrier” preventing adoption, the heavy industry world could be seen to have a safety “imperative.” Commercial vehicles on the highway must constantly handle interactions with other cars, pedestrians, crossing guards, signs, lights and more. For the most part, heavy equipment operates on private property (such as mines, construction sites, factories) that doesn’t require the same number of dangerous and unpredictable interactions. Similarly, heavy industry work such as mining is inherently dangerous, and autonomous systems would likely save lives.
These advances are bound to have a knock-effect in many industries including mining where automation will increase speed and safety, the factory where it will make moving products more efficient and in warehousing to facilitate storing and locating inventory.
Bringing Insight to Action: In order for us to see more rapid advances with AI in the heavy industry changes may need to be made in the way companies conduct their research and development. While currently, independent companies are using the same hardware and repeating the same tests, the development of a centralized data bank could save everyone time and money. It would mean that companies can dip into the consortium of information and use it to create algorithms to suit their individual applications (Dr. Kherat goes into detail on such a common data bank in the full interview audio, embedded above).
There will be much more creative freedom for autonomous developments in heavy industry as compared to commercial self-driving cars. Businesses involved in manufacturing, construction, agriculture, or other heavy industries may be benefitted by looking at the autonomous innovations of industry leaders in their sector – and better understanding how equipment autonomy (and it’s resulting efficiencies) may impact their operations and finances.
Interview Highlights from “AI in Heavy Industry” with Dr. Sam Kherat:
The following is a condensed version of the full audio interview, which is available in the above links on Emerj’s SoundCloud and iTunes.
(4.28) What are the aspects of machine learning and AI in heavy industry that are starting to drive business value?
Sam Kherat: In the heavy industry business…we have mobility, that’s the power train, the chassis, what drives the machine. The second component is the controls, which play a huge role in the stability of the machine, and making it go from point A to point B in a safe manner. The third component is tools. You have to have some way to quickly interchange your tools to continue doing the job. The fourth component is really behind in terms of development, and that it perception. That’s the ability of a machine to sense its surroundings…such as infrastructure. That’s what created this need to have some autonomous operations for the military because you want to be able to sense the distance and to sense when you have an intrusion coming in front of you and to be able to adequately swerve that. We’ve seen tremendous improvements in sensing technologies, whether it’s light-based like LiDAR also some improvements in RADAR systems. These systems complement each other…fusing has become a trend to enable a better sensing of the surroundings (for readers with a keen interest with sensor technology may want to listen to our machine vision interview with Cortica CEO Igal Raichelgauz).
(11.04) With an excavator or in a factory setting with some fork lift truck action…where do we see perception beginning to emerge meaningfully?
Sam Kherat: The industry is evolving so fast it’s amazing that just about a decade ago when you had a job, for example a construction site…where a foreman guides a machine operator, whether it’s a grader or a tractor, with some stakes that they dump on the ground so that the operator can see where to grade. Currently we have an automated system using GPS where the antennae are on eh blade itself and the whole thing is automated.
(12.18) So the machine can drive itself over there, know where it’s inserting the scoop and can pick the stuff up and know where to put it. Is this what’s happening?
Sam Kherat: Based up on a plan. Say you have a plan from somebody who wants to build a golf course…so the blade knows exactly where and how deep it needs to go to start pushing the dirt…The motion of the vehicle is controlled by the operator, but the operator has no control over its blade…Now with the future technologies that are being implemented we’ll see more automation. The machine is going to be able to perform all these tasks on its own and that is going to happen before we have autonomous vehicles.
(13.33) Yes, because we don’t have as many crashing into each other..?
You own your own construction site; you own your mine, so you can do what you want. Plus the social acceptance, When you really ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, how many tell you I want to be a miner, I want to be a construction worker? They would really rather do something else. It’s really not something that is appealing to a lot of high school students. So we want to take advantage of some of the skills that kids are growing up with, for example playing video games…give them a remote control and then the machine is away and they will do a good job.
(14.48) So we’re talking about in the future of AI in heavy industry and agriculture, because I’m sure that agriculture is big in heavy industry as well, to the best of my knowledge there are probably tractors that can drive perfect back and forth harvesting of a certain grain by itself, no people in it based on GPS. You’re talking about excavators doing something similar. The level of the blade and the adjustment of how earth is being moved is being done by a computer and sensors and a person is just controlling movement. Eventually the movement will be automated. And I’ve heard of dump trucks that have GPS and at the push of a button they can just perfectly align with where they have to be. Is this true?
Sam Kherat: Yes but it’s not just GPS, there has to be some sensing device on the machine itself because GPS gives you your location but you need some coordination. You mentioned the loading, so when you have a loader, putting whatever it is you need to put on a dump truck…then you have this coordination between the machines so they don’t bump into each other.
(16.19) I’d like to talk about these other kinds of sensors as well.
Sam Kherat: We’re really still at the infancy stage. We do have warning systems, just like you would have advanced cruise control on a car that slows down. We have an ability to tell the operator, “listen, you’re getting too close.” But there is no action. It’s not completely automated. The automation happens on the hauling systems where the truck goes from point A to point B. But it’s coming very quickly. The |
my very first application. So when I sit down to think about what to write about I thought I would like to tell you all about how and why I wanted to start coding and then why I decided to create a (yet another (i know)) music player, specially made for KDE/Plasma.
So here comes the story:
I've been using Linux/GNU for almost ten years now, that was when I was still in high school, I always thought Linux based distros looked so cool and kind of mysterious, so then I decided to wipe off my Windows XP installation and move to Ubuntu, since then I have not looked back and I'm glad because not only i found a great OS but also a great group of communities behind it. I first got involved with the community by making GTK/CSS themes and small icon sets.
Let's say I always found the visual part the most interesting, so I tried all the available desktop environments, visual appealing applications and themes. Among those apps, I always liked to check out the default music players of each distro and their set of multimedia applications.
I can say I've pretty much tested almost all of the Linux music players that have appeared in the wild. Some looked cool, others boring, and they worked... some others were buggy as hell... and many others were a very nice and complete tool to manage your local music collection but didn't look that great or well integrated.
Anyway, I finished high school and then went to University to the Arts program. Two years ago I also started the Computer Science bachelor program and then began to start developing small console apps. By then I was using elementary OS, because it looked nice and polish, and then was went I first wanted to create my very own music player to satisfied my own needs and also to learn a new graphic toolkit (GTK3)
I wanted to have a simple tiny music player that resembled a playlist where I could keep my favorite (Babes) music at the moment, I didn't care much about managing the whole music collection, as I didn't have much local music files anyway.
I did what I wanted and then I stopped developing it. By the time I tried Plasma once again and I liked it very much, the new Breeze theme looked awesome and the tools were much more advanced than the ones from elementaryOS and then I decided to stay. :)
I kept on using my small and kind of broken music player, but then I found myself using a lot the youtube-dl to get my music, given that most of the music I listen to is music that I've found/discovered while watching another (YouTube) music videos. That's when I decided to once again go back to Babe and make it fetch my favorite YouTube music videos. But by then I was using KDE/Plasma instead of a GTK based D.E. So i started learning about the Qt framework because I wanted Babe to look good and well integrated in the Plasma desktop.
My plans for Babe-Qt were simple: fetch my favorite music and then play it in a tiny interface. But, oh well, my music collection started to grow and then I decided i could make use of a collection manager integrated when needed, to be able to create another playlists besides from my favorites (Babes)... and then I implemented a full collection view, artist, albums, playlists and info view.
The "info" view then became really important: I wanted to be able to get as much information of a track besides the basic metadata information, I wanted to know about the lyrics, the artwork, the artist and the album. And even eventually I wanted to be able to find similar songs... and that is what Babe is now trying to aim at, but that's something I will tell you in a next blog post... I want to introduce a contextual music collection manager.
That's it for now, but I will be writing to you all back soon, and letting you know about:
-Current state of Babe
-Planned features
-The future
-Conceptual ideas
;)NEW YORK: India has the potential to become a multi-trillion dollar economy with a per capita income of about $40,000 by 2050 if it manages to grow at seven per cent annually for the next 30-35 years, a top World Bank official has said."If we can manage to grow at seven per cent for next 35 years, we will not only be the second largest economy in the world at that time but we will be prosperous and people will be rich enough," World Bank Executive Director for Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Sri Lanka Subhash Chandra Garg said.Addressing the Indian-American community at the Indian Consulate, Garg said India has the potential to become a multi-trillion dollar economy with a per capita income of about $40,000 by 2050 as against the current $2,000 but to achieve that it will have to grow at seven per cent annually for the next 30-35 years.However, he said that achieving and sustaining a seven per cent growth rate for 35 years is "very difficult" and "would require a lot of transformation in the way we manage our economy".He underlined that India will have to transform its agriculture completely, grow its services and manufacturing sectors and give a boost to healthcare and tourism.Garg noted that a "big challenge" will be to get people out of agriculture and use them in the manufacturing and services sectors, while also ensuring that agricultural production in the country increases.He acknowledged that the Indian government's push on manufacturing through its 'Make in India' initiative is required to boost the sector in the country and contribute to economic growth."We will need to produce for us and manufacturing will be a story which requires another transformation," he said adding that a much bigger concentration and necessity will be to boost the services sector.About 55 per cent of India's population is already working in the services sector but the country has to aim to bring this to 80-85 per cent of the population.Noting the advantage of demographic dividend which India has, Garg said there is need to transform this young population into extremely productive."We should plan to export one-two million people every year with new skills all over the world," he said, adding that the government should pursue a policy to equip its young people with training and skills and send them abroad to provide services in various fields.He noted that the World Bank is working very closely with the Indian government and contributing to making its vision of a strong and prosperous nation a reality.Garg said from the smart cities initiative to the Swachh Bharat campaign, the Bank is partnering with the government in projects that are aligned with its policies.Simon Cowell Named Top Earning Man on Primetime US Television
Forbes.com named Simon Cowell as the top earning man on primetime US television with an estimated earnings of $75 million based on estimated pre-tax earnings from June 1, 2008 to June 1, 2009.
The notorious American Idol judge and creator of the Got Talent franchise defeated The Apprentice creator Donald Trump ($50 million) and American Idol host Ryan Seacrest ($38 million) for the top spot.
Simon Cowell also created the programs American Inventor and The X Factor. He is also a record producer for his own label signing up Leona Lewis and Susan Boyle.
Donald Trump meanwhile owns the Miss Universe Organization (together with NBC) and has large businesses ranging from neckties to vodkas.
Ryan Seacrest hosts Los Angeles radio shows and celebrity news shows. He is also the creator of the series Keeping up with the Kardashians.
Cowell turned 50 with a lavish birthday party costing $1.6 million last month, October 3.
Rounding up the top ten are:
4. Charlie Sheen (Two and a Half Man)- $21 million
5. Steve Carell (The Office)- $20 million
6. Howie Mandel (Deal or No Deal)- $15 million
7. Kiefer Sutherland (24)- $ 13 million
8. Jeff Foxworthy (Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?)- $11 million
9. Hugh Laurie (House)- $10 million
10. David Caruso (CSI: Miami) and Patrick Dempsey (Grey’s Anatomy)- $9 millionAs I hopped on the Dash bus down Franklin toward home I couldn’t get that Batman character out of my mind. He was batty, all right, but he certainly isn’t the only one in this burg. That’s part of the charm of Hollyweird. And he led me to a mother lode of “bat-” etymologies.
Debate, for example, comes from Old French debatre, which is from Latin dis- (expressing reversal) + battere ‘to fight.’ The nerds on the high school debate team might be surprised to learn that debating originally meant physically, not just verbally, bashing your opponent. Chaucer spoke of “his cote-armour…In which he wold debate.”
In other words, debate was combat, another bat- word. Combat entered English in the mid 16th century from French combattre (verb), from late Latin combattere, from com- ‘with’ + battere, variant of Latin batuere ‘to fight.’
‘To fight with…’ reminds me that linguist Robert Hertz pointed out “He fought with his mother-in-law” can be interpreted three ways: ‘They argued,’ ‘They served together in the armed forces’ or ‘He used the old battle-ax as a weapon.’
AdvertisementsGoogle may be facing a fine of over €1bn as the European competition regulator is about to make the first of three antitrust decisions about the group's practices.
Google may be facing a fine of over €1bn as the European competition regulator is about to make the first of three antitrust decisions about the group's practices.
Google faces huge fine 'of over €1bn' in landmark EU case against its practices
The sanction would mark the first against the search engine's operations by a leading regulator.
According to the Financial Times (FT), officials in Brussels are expected to say that the firm abused its search market dominance to build its Google Shopping service in a matter of weeks.
In 2009, Intel was handed a €1bn abuse - but the penalty for Google is set to exceed that, the paper reports.
The European Commission and Google declined to comment on the investigation outcome.
While Europe’s competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager has been encouraged to take a tough stance on the case, there are fears that a hard decision may stoke transatlantic tensions.
President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord has already made the US-Europe bond vulnerable.
However, Ms Vestager is unlikely to be swayed based on potential political tensions.
Last summer, she broke records for fines, with a €3bn cartel fine against five European truckmakers and on the €13bn Apple tax bill.
Online EditorsOur Top 30 prospect week is coming to a close. We had some fantastic content this week and we finish with a closer look at the top 30 prospects by the entire TCB Staff:
The Crawfish Boxes' 2016 Top 30 Astros prospect list
1. A.J. Reed, 1B -- B+ (7.800)
Reed's top rank among Astros' prospects is well deserved. The minor league's' hitter of the year posted seasonal hitting stats reminiscent of the Cubs' Kris Bryant. Still, it's unusual for a first baseman to rank this high, because his hitting has to be so special. Between High A and AA, at age 22, Reed put up a.340/.432/.612 slash line. Displaying massive brute strength, Reed hit 34 HRs, as well good patience and OBP skill. Early on, some scouts questioned his bat speed. However, bat speed is sometimes overrated; and Reed has shown a combination of patience, power, pitch recognition, and intelligence, which enabled him to hit for both power and average. Like most power hitters, Reed will have some swing and miss in his game, but his K rate so far has been in the 20% range, which is not extreme. Given his 240 lb. size, Reed has limited speed and dexterity as a defensive player. He is a work in progress fielding first base, but he has sneaky athleticism which may enable him to develop into an average defender. The ZIPS projection system likes Reed and projects a ML line of.261,.338,.456 (wOBA.342).with a 2.6 WAR. Reed may well crash the major league party sometime this season. The likelihood of that happening probably factored into the Astros' thinking when they didn't upgrade first base during the off-season. Reed seemed to run out of steam in the Arizona Fall League, reportedly due to nagging injuries--and that's something to watch during the spring.--Clack
2. Alex Bregman, SS -- B+ (7.350)
Upside is nice, but prospects bust at such a high rate that you can't build a team or a system without some safe guys, too. Bregman is as safe as any prospect in the system, with a valuable utility man as his absolute downside (realistically, though, he's almost guaranteed to start at some position), but he doesn't sacrifice much in the way of upside for that high floor. A plus hit tool forms the gravitational center of his tool box, around which orbits every other tool, all of them average or better. He won't light the bases on fire, but he'll nab 15-25 bags a year in his prime. Though not a masher, expect similar power numbers as well. The Dustin Pedroia comp is well-earned, and Bregman has the ability to stick at short. -Brian
3. Francis Martes, RHP -- B+ (7.150)
Martes pitched brilliantly in 2015, posting a gaudy 1.04 ERA/2.78 FIP in Quad Cities with a 3.46 K/BB ratio and 7.79 K/9 ratio, before moving up to Lancaster and destroying the absurdly offensive-friendly environment to the tune of a 2.31 ERA/2.81 FIP with a 2.06 BB/9 ratio, a rich 9.51 K/9 ratio, and an excellent 4.63 K/BB ratio. He struggled some (in just three games at the end of the season) at Double-A Corpus Christi, partially due to a higher walk rate - again, over three games - and perhaps largely due to a ridiculously high.386 BABIP against. J.J. Cooper of Baseball America has compared him to Lance McCullers, but with better control at this stage. He sports a live, tailing fastball that sits in the 93-95 mile per hour range and touches 98, along with a hard and tight 11-5 curveball that flashes devastating potential and a changeup that is a work in progress but which shows the the promise of at least a decent secondary offering. It has also been reported recently that the system's best pitching prospect is working this spring on adding a cut fastball to his already-filthy repertoire - a significant development if he can master it, obviously. So he might get even better. Definitely a young man to keep an eye on this season. - Jason
4. Joe Musgrove, RHP -- B (6.850)
The odds have been stacked against Musgrove ever since draft day back in 2011. Injuries derailed him almost immediately, and it took him a while after that and his being traded to Houston to get his velocity back on track. It all came together at last in 2015, with the threat of being unprotected from the Rule 5 draft at season's end if he didn't show something special. Special his season was, with a stunning 12.4 K/BB ratio across the three levels he flew through. Musgrove's bread and butter is a 91-94 MPH heater with excellent sinker-like movement that he can spot at will. That alone likely ensures a solid middle-relief future at worst, but with his control and and a pair of decent secondary pitches, there's very real middle rotation upside here, and he could be ready for MLB action as soon as this season. -Brian
5. Kyle Tucker, OF -- B (6.600)
The excitement about Tucker should (and does, in the case of evaluators) stem from how loud his tools play. He has explosive bat speed and good control of the zone. His long, lanky frame projects to add a considerable amount of bulk as he matures, helping project legitimate middle of the order power as a ceiling for his pop. In 2015, Tucker struggled some with the transition to pro ball before rebounding a bit upon a promotion to Greeneville, where he slashed.286/.322/.393 with two home runs and a very efficient fourteen stolen bases in sixteen attempts. He went on to finish even more strongly, going 6-12 in the final playoff series of the season with two home runs to lead Greeneville to the Appalachian League championship. I do rate him lower than Reed and Bregman and Martes (for now) due to his proximity to the majors, but that doesn't change the fact that this is the guy I'm most excited about in our entire system. - Jason
6. Michael Feliz, RHP -- B (6.300)
He honestly has one of the best fastball/slider combinations in the system. And I actually like his mechanics. Sure, he has his flaws but they all do. He was given the opportunity to pitch in the majors this season and displayed his talent. It was probably a bit premature and it showed with his struggles in the control department. It's always been something that's plagued him but he did show well in the minors this season. The strikeout rate dipped to the lowest since his second season as a pro. That is cause for concern moving forward but his stuff is certainly giving to the idea of improvement. If it doesn't work out as a starter, he still has potential to be a late inning reliever. -Subber10
7. Colin Moran, 3B -- B (6.250)
2015 was a breakout season for Moran, though it wasn't quite as loud as some guys' like Francis Martes or A.J. Reed. Moran initially got out of the gate slowly, but not long after returning from an early-season concussion, he began showing notable, if unspectacular, growth in virtually every area of his game. He hit.349/.407/.538 in July and.299/.405/.514 in August. He hit six bombs in August alone, after hitting just seven in the entire 2014 season. His strike out rate didn't increase while his walk rate spiked a full three percent. He's still not a sexy prospect, but the last two months of the season really showed his upside for the first time. If it all works, he'll hit for average, get on base at a nice clip, and have just enough pop and just enough of a glove to be solid at the hot corner. -Brian
8. Daz Cameron, OF -- B (6.250)
Full disclosure - coming into the 2015 draft I viewed Cameron as more hype than ultimate production. Don't get me wrong, I think he'll be a major league player, and he might even be a major league star, but in a system which (at the time) featured Brett Phillips, I considered Cameron to be trade fodder, ultimately, more than an impact player for the Astros. Now, with Maverick gone and uncertainty surrounding whether Jake Marisnick will ever put it all together with the bat, Cameron has certainly seen his stock increase in my mind with regard to his future actually playing in Houston at Minute Maid Park. He has solid - if not quite universally spectacular - tools across the board, including a short, quick line drive stroke that plays foul line to foul line, potential for 30 stolen bases at the highest level, and excellent defense. I'd be pretty happy with a line drive hitter starting in centerfield and batting at the top of the lineup who sprays balls to all parts of the park, draws a fair number of walks, steals thirty bases, plays good (if not superstar) defense in center, and even manages to poke a few into the Crawford boxes over the course of a season. Pretty happy indeed. - Jason
9. Tyler White, 3B -- B- (5.850)
White's 2015 campaign was a breakout, which is odd to say since his numbers didn't see much of a spike. Hit hit well, hit for decent power, drew a truck load of walks, and limited strike outs. The difference this time was that he did it in Double-A and then in Triple-A. It was easy to write him off before; a polished college hitter beating up on inferior competition, benefitting from the Lancaster hitting environment. But no more. Now he's the guy who drew 84 walks against 73 strikeouts in the upper levels, while spraying line drives all over the place. Now he's the guy that looks like he could be a solid DH without ever hitting 25 home runs. Now he's a prospect worth watching. Assuming he doesn't win a spot at first or DH out of spring camp, he'll head to Triple-A to start the year, and could be one of the first guys called upon if Evan Gattis and Jon Singleton can't get their acts together. -Brian
10. Derek Fisher, OF -- B- (5.600)
Fisher was the 37th pick (out of the University of Virginia) in the 2014 draft. The Astros liked the toolsy outfielder who impressed at the college level, but didn't put it all together--partly due to injuries. Fisher has shown the combination of power and speed in the minors so far. In his first three at bats in High A, Fisher launched three home runs, including two grand slams. He combined for a 154 and 124 wRC+ in A and High A last year. He followed up with a 131 wRC+ against good competition in the Arizona Fall League. As always, the Lancaster numbers raise questions as to whether he can continue to mash outside of the offensive oriented Cal League. Fisher's performance at the higher minor league levels will be watched closely. Although Fisher is fast, his outfield defense is still rough around the edges. It remains to be seen whether he can improve his route running, which could be difference between a CF or LF prospect. --Clack
11. David Paulino, RHP -- B- (5.500)
The Astros have found ways to get value where there's little value to be expected. Francis Martes embodies that and David Paulino is a step behind him in that regard. Paulino is cranking up a big fastball and is following it up with a very good curve. He may not have the control that some of the pitchers ranked higher than him do, but he knows how to strike guys out. His strikeout percentage ranged from 25%-30% across three levels of challenges. He took every step needed and succeeded. His walk rate grew at every level but considering it was his first taste of full-season hitters and made it up to Lancaster is quite impressive coming from a 21 year old. -Subber10
12. Tony Kemp, OF -- C+ (4.950)
Tony Kemp is a 2013 fifth round draft pick who is now very close to major league ready. When Kemp was drafted, the Astros touted him as a lead off hitter who can foul off pitch after to pitch, frustrating opposing pitchers. The diminutive but athletic player is best suited for 2d base, but could see time in LF or CF, given the skills of the second baseman (Altuve) ahead of him. Kemp's downside as a hitter is a lack of power; but he may compensate with good contact and on-base skills, as well as speed and savvy on the base paths. The 5-7, 165 lb. Kemp tore up AA in Corpus Christi with a.353 BA,.457 OBP, and 155 wRC+. Kemp faced tougher going in AAA with a 88 wRC+. That marked his first minor league stint in which he was not well above league average as a hitter. 2016 may tell us whether Tony can adapt to AAA, and if he does, don't rule out the possibility that Kemp could see time as a utility player for the Astros in 2016. Steamer projects a.275,.335,.365 slash line if he played in the majors next year.--Clack
13. Jason Martin, CF -- C+ (4.850)
Very few have captured fandom from the TCB community like Jason Martin has. He's up there with the likes of Aaron West and it's all due to how humble he is despite his opportunities to his point. He's a very hard worker and has a drive to succeed that was very evident in his interview with Anthony awhile back. But, his ranking has more to do with him than an interview. He has speed, some power, and skills to be a very good player. His power wasn't as evident this year but he is just tapping into it. He struggled on the basepaths and will have to improve there in order to be a larger threat. -Subber10
I'm personally really high on Davis, and probably too high. He has his flaws, mostly with how much he strikes out and that's a big flaw. But, he has a lot to like. He has above average power which is something the Astros lack at third base. He has a very strong arm and was even a pitcher in college. He actually draws walks as well, 10% this season. And, even though he doesn't have great range at third base, he's very balanced and can do a lot within his range. Plus that arm is an asset from third. -Subber10
15. Brendan McCurry, RHP -- C+ (4.850)
People love their relievers with "stuff." Heck, Jeff Luhnow just swapped several good prospects for one reliever with "stuff." But you don't need "stuff" to be an effective reliever; just ask Trevor Hoffman. That isn't to say that McCurry, who generally maxes out around 92 MPH on a good night, will be that good, but with a plus curve and a solid change, not to mention plus command of all three pitches, he should be just fine without "stuff." His career 11.7 K/9 in the minors speaks to him having plenty of the right stuff. -Brian
16. Jon Kemmer, OF -- C+ (4.800)
Who? The 21st-round pick back in 2013 wasn't on anyone's list last year, but my goodness, what a year he had in 2015. He spent the entire season with the Double-A Hooks and was arguably their team MVP, hitting.327/.414/.574 and swatting 18 long balls in 104 games. Everything under the hood looks correct, too; a solid 10.6% walk rate, a reasonable 20.9% strike out rate, and though his BAbip will likely drop significantly, there's plenty of room for his average to fall before you start being concerned. He's not a.327 hitter, but he doesn't need to be. In trying to find some fault, I looked up his splits against southpaws and...nope; he still hit better than.300 against them, while walking more and maintaining a respectable.188 ISO. Is he the next J.D. Martinez? Maybe not. But maybe so. Sweet dreams. -Brian
17. Tyler Heineman, C -- C+ (4.750)
As probably the next catcher up after Stassi on the depth chart behind Castro, Heineman doesn't get a ton of love. He is one of my favorite catchers in the system and has been since he was drafted in 2012 out of UCLA. He defense and catching skills I hear are great so that's what will get him to the bigs but his bat is what I am most excited about with Tyler. The switch hitter is especially good and minimizing strikeouts and walks at a good clip. His hit tool is what I like the most. While he lacks POWER EXTREME, he makes up for it with his ability to get on base at a good clip. Something that the Astros lack is people to get on base late in the lineup to set up the top guys to drive him in. I think Heineman will be an excellent backstop for the Astros in the near future. - Blake
18. Miguelangel Sierra, SS -- C+ (4.700)
One of the Astros two big J2 signings in 2014 with the cool one million dollar bonus tag, Sierra has proved to be a good prospect. He played professionally for the first time and he played very well. He did everything well. Walk over 10% of the time. Knock three home runs despite being only 175 pounds and just seventeen at the time. Not many kids his age and size hit that many home runs in the DSL. Not many have OBP over.400 down there either. He's just very talented and not just a workout warrior that many of the IFA have become. -Subber10
19. Akeem Bostick, RHP -- C+ (4.650)
There's more than one way to skin a cat and Bostick learned a new way this season. Despite being highly drafted for his athletic frame and able to throw the ball up into the mid-90's, he found his success in a very different way this year. He made Jeff Luhnow look smart again for picking him up for a spare catcher of sorts. He suddenly had a big drop in his walk-rate and a spike in groundball rate which lead to 42 standout innings in Quad Cities. But, his numbers regressed back to his career numbers in Lancaster which leads to some question marks about how much he really has developed. -Subber10
20. Aaron West, RHP -- C+ (4.600)
How the mighty have fallen...and perhaps unfairly. It was easy to forget about West, a guy many here at TCB have loved since draft day, but it's time to jog your memory if you're one of those. After his 2014 season was dashed by injuries, the Astros brought West back slowly in 2015, allowing him to rack up just 84.1 innings of work over the year. But they were good innings, evidenced by his 2.88 FIP and 6.2 K/BB ratio for the Corpus Christi Hooks. His stuff still looks good, and he continued to use it effectively. There's a bit of mid-rotation upside remaining, but a back-end starter is more likely. That's not bad for the back-end of your top 20 prospects. -Brian
21. Teoscar Hernandez, OF -- C+ (4.600)
Man what a difference a year makes, he went from being a top OF prospect in our system to being passed up by at least Fisher, Kemmer, and possibly Kemp on the depth chart. He had big years in ‘13 and ‘14 but a down year in ‘15. The stats look similar with some deviations, ‘15, even though it was a down year is not far off from the "good" years for him. His awful late April and his power numbers in ‘15 are what really hurt him, especially doubles and triples. His homers were about par for the course and his walk to strikeout ratio is never going to be more than average at best. He is a Chris Carter/Domingo Santana type at the plate; low to average BA, less power, with good OF defense and someone who can steal bases. Unless he goes bananas, I don't think he is anything more than a fourth or fifth OF at best. - Blake
22. Max Stassi, C -- C+ (4.450)
This is the guy who's likely to be the MLB club's backup catcher all season and he can't even crack the top 20. Depth is fun. Dreams of a 25-30 home run catcher have all but vanished here as Stassi's strikeout rate has spiked each of the last two seasons, but that's not what matters. What matters his his elite receiving skills and good throwing arm. He'll spend the year learning from Jason Castro and the coaching staff while catching once or twice a week, and he may just take the full time job in 2017 once Castro hits free agency. And he will still run into the occasional mistake pitch and knock it over the wall. -Brian
23. Jamie Ritchie, C -- C+ (4.400)
Jamie Ritchie is one of the under-the-radar prospects in Houston's system...for now. It may be that Ritchie's defensive profile doesn't quite have the luster that Roberto Pena or Alfredo Gonzalez or Jason Castro's does, but he's still a pretty well respected defender, and his offense is really turning some heads here at TCB. Drafted in the 13th round of the 2014 draft (376th overall), Ritchie has increased his caught stealing percentage in Lancaster - it ranged from 17% to 24% before jumping to 28% in the last stop of the 2015 season for him - while never once, at any point or at any level, posting an on base percentage lower than his stellar.422 mark in Lancaster. He posted a 21% walk ratio at Quad Cities to begin the season in 2015 in 334 plate appearances - good for 70 walks in just that short time, or a pace of over 125 walks in a 600 plate appearance season. He's posted wRC+ numbers of 173 (Tri-Cities, 2014), 143 (Quad Cities, 2015), and 142 (Lancaster, 2015). He has walked 124 times (versus 107 strikeouts) in 677 career plate appearances, giving him an 18.3% career walk rate and a 15.8% career strikeout rate. He hasn't tapped into much power yet (only six professional home runs and ISO marks of.134,.100, and.135) but he's posted healthy BABIP numbers (.393,.322, and.377) in his career. All signs point to a catcher who could potentially be a sneaky-good major league contributor, possibly as soon as September 2017. - Jason
24. Jonathan Arauz, SS -- C+ (4.400)
Arauz is a relative unknown. Most hardcore astros fans recognize the name now because the Astros got him along with Ken Giles from the Phillies. But, that's pretty much all most know. The rest is that he's a very athletic short-stop that scouts really like. He was considered one of the best players to come out Panama in his IFA class. Like any other IFA he's really raw and has a lot to develop. The plate discipline is currently there, but will need improvement. The Astros recent history with lottery ticket trade returns have been really good and the minor league projection system called KATOH really likes him. It's based on a very small sample and can't really be trusted. -Subber10
25. Chase McDonald, 1B -- C+ (4.400)
Monster power plays well in Lancaster. Afterall, he hit thirty bombs. The problem is that his elite power is the only one that grades that high. He was able to get his batting average pretty high at times during the season but it was mostly BABIP inflated. He's a fair hitter but he strikes out a lot. Historically those rates climb at every level which leads to the idea of a 30% or higher strikeout rate in the majors. He has a lot of questions to answer in this area next season, but if he can, his ceiling is really high for a first baseman due to his monster power. -Subber10
26. Andrew Aplin, OF -- C+ (4.200)
Where lies the line between a starter and a very talented bench player? Wherever it is, Aplin is doing a tightrope walk across it. It was easy to lose track of him in 2015, with bigger breakouts seemingly happening left and right, but Aplin took a small, but important, step forward himself. After a mediocre debut in Triple-A in 2014, Aplin posted a.275/.392/.348 line with Fresno this year, joining Tyler White in an elite group of modern players who walk more than they strike out. He's a walk machine, he plays solid defense in center field, he'll nab 20 bases a year...these things we knew. Now we have some hope that he might hit just enough to be a decent starting player. If not, he still has that talented backup role as a floor. Aplin is a Major League player in the future; the question is how often he'll find himself in the lineup card. -Brian
27. Trent Thornton, RHP -- C+ (4.167)
Of all the guys Houston drafted in 2015, I probably enjoyed Thornton's debut half-season as much as anyone outside of the Big Three. The book on Thornton was pretty well-known; good stuff, the sexiest leg kick since Dontrelle Willis, and some command concerns. The first two were on display as a professional; his heater sits low 90's but can touch 94-95 on occasion, and he mixes in two average-at-worst secondaries. Surprising, though, was a strong 1.64 BB/9. Short-season stats for big program college arms against lesser competition aren't always telling, but it was a nice sign. He should start 2016 with the Low-A Quad Cities club and could easily see himself in Lancaster by year's end with a good performance. -Brian
28. Nestor Muriel, OF -- C+ (4.111)
Tools for days. Raw tools for years. That's all that matters here as it's all he's got. He had about as terrible of a debut you could dream of but he was also barely seventeen this season. That's the attraction. Research shows that on average, the younger you are when drafted, the better they turn out. Well Muriel was sixteen on draft day. This outfielder can do it all but has a VERY long way to go in order to develop real skills in the game of baseball. - Subber10
29. Matt Duffy, 3B -- C+ (4.100)
The Duff Man does a lot well but nothing great. He has average power. Can hit well. He has good plate discipline since he strikes out much less than most power hitters. However, he's not good defensively due to limited range and quickness. After he earned the PCL MVP, he was given a cup of coffee in the majors which included nine plate appearances. Because of his limited ability defensively, he'll have to prove his offensive performance is very real. -Subber10
30. Kyle Smith, RHP -- C+ (4.100)
There's no other way to put it |
sleep of delusion that grips all beings in an endless vicious cycle of ignorance and unnecessary suffering (around 528 BCE). Having awakened, he decided to “go against the current” and communicate his liberating wakefulness to suffering beings—that is, to teach the Dharma.
For forty-five years, he crossed and recrossed central India on foot conveying his profound, brilliant wakefulness directly as well as by means of explanations that grew into a great body of spiritual, psychological, and practical doctrine. His enlightenment as well as the doctrine leading to it have been passed down through numerous unbroken lineages of teachers, which have spread to many countries. Many of these lineages still flourish.
At the time of the Buddha’s death (ca. 483 BCE), his Dharma was well established in central India. There were many lay followers, but the heart of the Dharma community were the monastics, many of whom were arhats [worthy ones, who attain Nirvana at the end of this lifetime]. Numerous monasteries had already been built round about such large cities as Rajagriha, Shravasti, and Vaishali.
The first to assume the Buddha’s mantle, tradition tells, was his disciple Mahakashyapa, who had the duty of establishing an authoritative version of the Buddha’s teachings. Thus, during the first rainy season after the Buddha’s death (parinirvana), Mahakashyapa convoked an assembly of five hundred arhats. At this assembly, it is said, Ananda, the Buddha’s personal attendant, recited all of the master’s discourses (sutras), naming the place where each was given and describing the circumstances.
A monk named Upali recited all the rules and procedures the Buddha had established for the conduct of monastic life. Mahakashyapa himself recited the matrika, lists of terms organized to provide analytical synopses of the teachings given in the sutras. These three extensive recitations, reviewed and verified by the assembly, became the basis for the Sutra Pitaka (Discourse Basket), the Vinaya Pitaka (Discipline Basket), and Abhidharma Pitaka (Special Teachings Basket), respectively. The Tripitaka (all three together) is the core of the Buddhist scriptures. This assembly, held at Rajagriha with the patronage of the Magadhan king Ajatashatru, is called the First Council.
In the early centuries after the Buddha’s death, the Buddha Dharma spread throughout India and became a main force in the life of its peoples. Its strength lay in its realized (arhat) teachers and large monasteries that sheltered highly developed spiritual and intellectual communities. Monks traveled frequently between the monasteries, binding them into a powerful network.
As the Dharma spread to different parts of India, differences emerged, particularly regarding the Vinaya, or rules of conduct. Roughly a hundred years after the First Council, such discrepancies led to a Second Council in Vaishali, in which seven hundred arhats censured ten points of lax conduct on the part of the local monks, notably the acceptance of donations of gold and silver. In spite of this council and other efforts to maintain unity, gradually, perhaps primarily because of size alone, the Sangha divided into divergent schools.
Among the principal schools was a conservative faction, the Sthaviravada (way of the elders), which held firmly to the old monastic ideal with the arhat at its center and to the original teaching of the Buddha as expressed in the Tripitaka. Another school, the Mahasanghikas, asserted the fallibility of arhats. It sought to weaken the authority of the monastic elite and open the Dharma gates to the lay community. In this, as well as in certain metaphysical doctrines, the Mahasanghikas prefigured the Mahayana.
Another important school was that of the Sarvastivadins (from Sanskrit sarva asti, “all exists”), who held the divergent view that past, present, and future realities all exist. In all, eighteen schools with varying shades of opinion on points of doctrine or discipline developed by the end of the third century BCE. However, all considered themselves part of the spiritual family of the Buddha and in general were accepted as such by the others. It was not rare for monks of different schools to live or travel together.
According to the Sthaviravadin tradition (known in Pali as the Theravada), which continues today in Southeast Asia, a Third Council took place in the time of King Ashoka (r. 276-232 BCE) at which the king declared the Sthaviravadin teachings the standard from which all other schools deviated. Perhaps in reaction to this, the Sarvastivadins gradually migrated to the west. They established a bastion in the city of Mathura, from which their influence continued to spread. Over centuries, they dominated the northwest, including all of Kashmir and much of Central Asia. Today a Sarvastivadin Vinaya lineage still survives in all the schools of Tibetan Buddhism.
King Ashoka was the third emperor of the Mauryan empire, which covered all of the Indian subcontinent but its southern tip. His personal espousal of the Dharma and adoption of its principles for the governance of his immense realm meant a quantum leap in the spread of the Buddha’s teaching. The imperial government promulgated the teachings. It supported the monasteries and sent proselytizing missions to the Hellenic states of the northwest and to Southeast Asia. Under King Ashoka, institutions of compassion and nonviolence were established throughout much of India. These include peaceful relations with all neighboring states, hospitals and animal hospitals, special officials to oversee the welfare of local populations, and shady rest stops for travelers. Thus he remains today the paragon of a Buddhist ruler, and his reign is looked back upon by Buddhists as a golden age.
The Mauryan empire soon fragmented, but the Buddha Dharma continued as a dominant force throughout India in the early centuries of the common era. The kings of the Satavahana dynasty of central India followed Ashoka in adopting the Dharma as a civilizing and unifying force in governing disparate peoples. King Kanishka (r. first-second centuries), whose vast Kushan empire, centered on Gandhara, encompassed northern India and large parts of Central Asia, was a champion of the Dharma, hailed as a second Ashoka.
Under his patronage, a Fourth Council was held, at which major new commentaries on the Tripitaka were written, largely under Sarvastivadin influence. Under Kanishka, the Buddha Dharma was firmly planted among the Central Asian peoples whose homelands lay along the Silk Route, whence the way lay open to China. The Kushan empire also saw the flowering of Gandharan art, which under Hellenistic influences produced Buddha images of extraordinary nobility and beauty.
Traditional accounts of the Fourth Council say that the assembly was composed of arhats under the leadership of the arhat Parshva but also under the accomplished bodhisattva Vasumitra. Indeed it was at this time, about the beginning of the second century, that the way of the bodhisattva, or the Mahayana (Great Vehicle), appeared. It was this form of the Buddha Dharma that was to conquer the north, including China, Japan, Korea, Tibet, and Mongolia.
The most visible manifestation of the Mahayana was a new wave of sutras, scriptures claiming to be the word of the Buddha that had remained hidden until then in other realms of existence. The Mahayana replaced the ideal of the arhat with that of the bodhisattva. Whereas arhats sought to end confusion in themselves in order to escape samsara, bodhisattvas vowed to end confusion in themselves yet remain in samsara to liberate all other sentient beings. The vision of spiritual life broadened beyond the controlled circumstances of cloister and study to include the wide-open situations of the world.
Correspondingly, the notion of “buddha” was no longer limited to a series of historical personages, the last of whom was Shakyamuni [Siddhartha Gautama], but referred also to a fundamental self-existing principle of spiritual wakefulness or enlightenment. While continuing to accept the old Tripitaka, Mahayanists regarded it as a restricted expression of the Buddha’s teaching, and they characterized those who held to it exclusively as Hinayanists (adherents of the Hinayana, the Small Vehicle).
Great masters shaped the Mahayana in the early centuries of the common era. Outstanding among them all was Nagarjuna (fl. second or third century), whose name connects him with the nagas (serpent deities) from whose hidden realm he is said to have retrieved the Prajnaparamita sutras, foundational Mahayana scriptures [see pages 177-213]. Nagarjuna was born in South India and became the head of Nalanda, the great Buddhist university) a few miles north of Rajagriha, which was a major stronghold of the Dharma for a thousand years. Nagarjuna’s commentaries and treatises expounded the teachings of the Madhyamaka (Middle Way), one of the two main Mahayana schools. Another great master was Asanga (fl. fourth century), who founded the other main school, the Yogachara, which focused on experience as the ultimate principle.
Through most of the Gupta period (c. 300-c. 600), the Buddha Dharma flourished unhindered in India. In the sixth century, however, hundreds of Buddhist monasteries were destroyed by invading Huns under King Mihirakula. This was a serious blow, but the Dharma revived and flourished once again, mainly in northeastern India under the Pala kings (eighth-twelfth centuries). These Buddhist kings patronized the monasteries and built new scholastic centers such as Odantapuri near the Ganges some miles east of Nalanda. Though the Hinayana had largely vanished from India by the seventh century, in this last Indian period the Mahayana continued, and yet another form—known as Mantrayana, Vajrayana, or Tantra—became dominant.
Like the Mahayana, the Vajrayana (Diamond Vehicle) was based on a class of scriptures ultimately attributed to the Buddha, in this case known as Tantras. Vajrayanists regarded the Hinayana and Mahayana as successive stages on the way to the tantric level. The Vajrayana leaped yet further than the Mahayana in acceptance of the world, holding that all experiences, including the sensual, are sacred manifestations of awakened mind, the buddha principle. It emphasized liturgical methods of meditation, or sadhanas, in which the practitioner identified with deities symbolizing various aspects of awakened mind. The palace of the deity, identical with the phenomenal world as a whole, was known as a mandala. In the place of the arhat and the bodhisattva, the Vajrayana placed the siddha, the realized tantric master.
By the thirteenth century, largely as a result of violent suppression by Islamic conquerors, the Buddha Dharma was practically extinct in the land of its birth. However, by this time Hinayana forms were firmly ensconced in Southeast Asia, and varieties of Mahayana and Vajrayana in most of the rest of Asia.
China
The Mahayana entered China through Central Asia at the beginning of the common era. At first it was confused with indigenous Taoism, whose terms it had to borrow. The Kuchean monk Kumarajiva (344-413), brought to China as a prisoner of war, created a new level of precision in Chinese Buddhism. His lucid translation and teaching resulted in the formation of the Chinese Madhyamaka school (San-Iun, Three Treatises). Paramartha (499-569) was another great translator and teacher. His work made possible the development of the Fa-hsiang, or Chinese Yogachara, school.
Buddha Dharma’s golden age in China was the T’ang period (618-907). Monasteries were numerous and powerful and had the support of the emperors. During this time the other main Chinese Dharma schools—Hua-yen, T’ien-t’ai, Ch’an, Pure Land, and the tantric Mi-tsung—made their appearance. In 845, however, came a major persecution of the Dharma community, and the monasteries had to be evacuated. Thereafter the Buddha Dharma in China never recovered its former glory.
The Sung period (960-1279) was a time of blending Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian ideas and methods. Under the Ming dynasty (1368-1662), a fusion of Ch’an and Pure Land opened the way for a strong lay movement. During the Ch’ing period (1663-1908), the Tibetan Vajrayana made its mark on Chinese Buddhism, mainly through the imperial courts. Communist rule in the twentieth century reduced the Dharma community to a remnant, but in Taiwan the Dharma flourished, predominantly in Pure Land and other popular forms.
Korea
Buddha Dharma came to Korea from China in the fourth century CE. It flourished after the Silla unification in the seventh century. By the tenth century there were Korean versions of most Chinese schools. Paramount were Ch’ao, Hua-yen, and a Vajrayana form related to the Chinese Mi-tsung. The heyday of Korean Dharma was the Koryo period (932-1392), during which the comprehensive Tripitaka Koreana was published. Under the Yi dynasty (1392-1910), Confucianism became the state religion and the Buddha Dharma was forced into the background. A revival came after the end of Japanese rule in 1945, when the Won movement, a popular Buddhism much influenced by Ch’an, came to the fore. Nowadays, a kind of syncretic Buddhism is widespread in Korea.
Japan
The Buddha Dharma was brought to japan from Korea in 522. It received its major impetus from the regent prince Shotoku (r. 593-621), a Japanese Ashoka. He established Buddhism as the state religion of Japan, founded monasteries, and himself wrote important commentaries on the sutras. Initially, it was primarily the Sanron (San-Iun, Madhyamaka) school that spread. In the ninth century, six Japanese schools, originally brought from China—Kosha, Hosso, Sanron, Jojitsu, Ritsu, and Kegon—were officially recognized, with the imperial house adopting the Kegon Dharma.
During the latter part of the Heian period (794-1184), the Tendai and tantric Shingon schools became predominant. From the tenth to fourteenth centuries, various Pure Land sects began to prosper. Zen (Ch’an) came to Japan from China toward the end or the twelfth century, and remained a vital force in Japanese cultural life ever after; Soto and Rinzai are its two main schools. After the appearance of the Nichiren school in the thirteenth century, no further movements developed until modern times. All Japanese schools assimilated aspects of indigenous Shinto kami [deities inhabiting nature) and ancestor worship.
Since World War II, various modernizing lay movements such as Soka-gakkai and Rissho Kosei-kai have developed. Japan today boasts an unparalleled variety or Buddhist sects.
Tibet
The Buddha Dharma of Tibet (and Himalayan countries such as Sikkim, Bhutan, and Ladakh) preserved and developed the Vajrayana tradition of late Indian Buddhism and joined it with the Sarvastivadin monastic rule. The first spreading of Buddhism was initiated by King Trisong Detsen (755-797), who invited to Tibet the Indian pandit [learned man] Shantarakshita, notable for his brilliant synthesis of the Madhayamaka and Yogachara, and the great Indian siddha Padmasambhava. The tradition of the Nyingma school stems from this time. After a period of persecution, a second spreading came in the eleventh century, resulting in the foundation of the Kagyu and Shakya schools. A major part of Indian Buddhist writings were translated to form the Tibetan canon, which included tantric scriptures and commentaries, preserving many texts otherwise lost.
In the fourteenth century, a reform movement resulted in the formation of the Gelukpa school, the fourth of the principal schools of Tibetan Buddhism. By the late twentieth century, as a result of Chinese repression Buddhism in Tibet was reduced to a vestige, but it remained in Sikkim and Bhutan. Centers of Tibetan Buddhism also developed in northern India and Nepal as well as in Europe, Australia, and North America.
Mongolia
The Mongols were definitively converted to Tibetan Buddhism in the sixteenth century. Scriptures and liturgies were translated into Mongolian, and the four principal Tibetan schools flourished until the Communist takeover of the twentieth century.
Vietnam
Vietnam lay under Chinese influence, and the Chinese Mahayana sects of Ch’an (Thien) and Pure Land (Tindo) were well established in the country by the end of the first millennium. Theravada was introduced b the Khmers but remained largely confined to areas along the Cambodian border. A modern social-action – oriented movement fusing the two Mahayana sects began in Saigon in 1932. In 1963 Theravadans joined this movement, and a United Buddhist Congregation of Vietnam existed fleetingly. Today Buddhists in Vietnam remain intensely involved in politics and social action.
Burma (Myanmar)
Emissaries sent by King Ashoka in the third century BCE first brought the Dharma to Burma. By the fifth century, the Theravada was well-established, and by the seventh century the Mahayana had appeared in regions near the Chinese border. By the eighth century, the Vajrayana was also present, and all three forms continued to coexist until King Anaratha established the Theravada throughout the land in the eleventh century. Pagan, the royal capital in the north, adorned with thousands upon thousands of Buddhist stupas and temples, and was the principal bastion of Buddha Dharma on earth until sacked by the Mongols in 1287.
In succeeding centuries the Theravada continued strong, interacting closely at times with the Dharma centers of Ceylon [Sri Lanka]. The Burmese form of Theravada acquired a unique flavor through its assimilation of folk beliefs connected with spirits of all kinds known as nats. Today 85 percent of Burmese are Buddhist, and Buddhism is the official religion of the country.
Cambodia (Kampuchea)
The Buddhism of the Sarvastivadin school spread to Cambodia in the third century BCE and reached a high point in the fifth and sixth centuries. By the end of the eighth century, elements of Mahayana had also appeared. Succeeding centuries brought a fusion of Buddha Dharma with Shaivite Hinduism. In the fourteenth century, however, the Theravada was firmly imposed on the country by the royal house, and it has remained dominant. In 1955 Prince Norodom Sihanouk sought to unite the country under the banner of king, Dharma, and socialism.
Sri Lanka (Ceylon)
In the third century BCE, King Devanampiya Tissa turned to Theravada Buddhism. The Sinhalese king built the Mahavihara monastery and there enshrined a branch of the Bodhi Tree that had been brought from India. For more than two millennia since that time, the Mahavihara has been a powerful force in the Buddhism of Ceylon and other countries of Southeast Asia, notably Burma and Thailand. The Theravada in Ceylon remains the oldest continuous Dharma tradition anywhere in the world.
Nonetheless, factions reflecting the influence of other Indian or Theravada schools played a significant role. These centered around other great Sinhalese monasteries such as the Abhayagirivihara and the Jetavanavihara. Mahayana and tantric influences are also traceable, and Tamil Hinduism had an ongoing influence outside the monasteries. Associated with the Mahavihara was the preeminent teacher and writer Buddhaghosha (fl. fourth-fifth centuries), whose great Vishuddimagga (Path of Purity) gives a definitive account of the Theravada. In the twelfth century King Parakkambahu forcibly imposed the Mahaviharan brand of Theravada on the entire country.
The attempted conversion of the country to Christianity by Portuguese and Dutch colonists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries greatly weakened the Dharma in Ceylon but made it a rallying point for Sinhalese nationalism. In the following centuries Sinhalese kings turned to Burma and Thailand to refresh Sinhalese monastic lineages. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many Europeans came to the aid of Sinhalese Buddhism. By the time of independence in 1948, the Theravada was again thriving in Ceylon and exercising significant influence beyond its borders.
Thailand
Some form of Hinayana Buddhism arrived in Thailand from Burma in about the sixth century; however, the Mahayana seems to have been dominant between the eighth and thirteenth centuries. From the eleventh century, Hinduist Khmers were a major factor in many regions of the country. In the thirteenth century, however, the Thai royal house established Theravada Buddhism as the national religion.
Eventually, the Khmers were converted to Theravada and became strong supporters. In the nineteenth century, the reformist Dhammayut school, characterized by strict adherence to Vinaya discipline, arose under royal influence. Today it remains the dominant element in Thai Buddhism and has also influenced other countries of Southeast Asia. Ninety-five percent of the Thai population is Buddhist.
The Western World
Over the last two hundred years many Western intellectuals were drawn to and influenced by Buddhism. The exotic profundity of Buddhist thought inspired philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer and Henri Bergson. In the twentieth century there has been considerable attention to Buddha Dharma in academic circles, and fairly accurate translations of Buddhist texts have gradually become available since the 1930s. A new level of understanding has come about since the 1950s as authentic Asian meditation masters have established themselves in Western countries and taken on serious Western students.
Theravada Buddhism has had a significant impact since the 1930s, Zen since the 1950s, and the tantric Buddhism of Tibet since the 1970s. Recently Westerners have begun assuming leadership in age-old Asian lineages. Of course, significant numbers of Asian Buddhists have reached the West as part of immigrant populations. But thus far there has been little crossover of Buddha Dharma from this source into host cultures.
[This story was first published in 2008]Alexis Tsipras urges people to vote no in Sunday’s referendum as capital controls bite and vital tourism industry sees tens of thousands cancel holidays in Greece
This euro is destroying the European dream | Jonathan Freedland Read more
Greece’s economy is on the brink of collapse after the capital controls imposed ahead of Sunday’s referendum left the country with shortages of food and drugs, the tourist industry facing a wave of cancellations and banks with barely enough money to survive the weekend.
Banks said they had a €1bn cash buffer to see them through the weekend – equal to just €90 (£64) a head for the 11 million-strong population – and would require immediate help from the European Central Bank on Monday whatever the result of the referendum, in which the two sides are running neck and neck.
Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s prime minister, was fighting for his political life on Friday night, using a rally to say that a no vote would enable him to negotiate a reform-for-debt-relief deal with the country’s creditors.
The survival of the Syriza coalition, formed just over five months ago to repudiate five years of austerity programmes, was in doubt as Greece started to suffer shortages of basic provisions, including the sale of vital drugs in pharmacies nationwide.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A no rally in Athens on Friday. Photograph: Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images
Food staples, such as sugar and flour, were also fast running out on Friday as consumers started to feel the effect of the restrictions.
“We have shortages,” said Mary Papadopoulou, who runs a pharmacy in the picturesque district of Plaka beneath the ancient Acropolis. “We’ve run out of thyroxine [thyroid treatment] and unless things change dramatically we’ll be having a lot more shortages next week.”
Greek islands, where thousands of holidaymakers headed this week, have also been hit, with popular Cycladic destinations such as Mykonos and Santorini reporting shortages of basic foodstuffs. More than half of Greece’s food supplies – and the vast majority of pharmaceuticals – are imported, but with bank transfers now banned, companies are unable to pay suppliers.
Queues were reported at every cash machine in Athens on Friday night and business groups warned that the economic shutdown in the week since Tsipras called the referendum had already caused lasting damage to the economy.
“Imports, exports, factories, firms, transport – everything is frozen,” said Vasilis Korkidis, who heads the national Confederation of Hellenic Commerce. “The only sectors in demand are food and fuel.”
Korkidis said the economy had suffered losses worth €1.2bn in the past week and that the cost would have to be added to any fresh bailout deal. “Even in the best-case scenario, it is going to take months to recover from the shock of closed banks and capital controls,” Korkidis said. “Now that they are in place, capital controls may last for a year.”
Tourism, the mainstay of the Greek economy and its main export earner, has seen an estimated 50,000 holidaymakers cancelling bookings every day since Tsipras walked out of talks in Brussels a week ago. The Greek Tourism Confederation (SETE) announced that bookings were down by 40% in the past few days.
A decade of overspending: how Greece plunged into economic crisis Read more
The ECB will meet on Monday to decide whether to step up its help to Greece under its emergency liquidity assistance scheme. The head of Greece’s banking association, Louka Katseli, told reporters: “Liquidity is assured until Monday, thereafter it will depend on the ECB decision.”
Despite rumours, the Greek government kept the daily limit on cash withdrawals at €60 (£42) on Friday, gambling that the banks would have just enough money to cope with demand until the referendum, which was ruled lawful by Greece’s top administrative court.
Analysts warned that the yes side – which would be prepared to accept the terms demanded by the European commission, the ECB and the International Monetary Fund – would comfortably win if the banks ran out of cash altogether. Yiannis Dragasakis, the government’s vice-president, said ATMs were fully supplied with cash before the weekend.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wolfang Schäuble, the German finance minister, is depicted on a no poster outside the Bank of Greece in central Athens. Photograph: Alexandros Vlachos/EPA
On Friday, Tsipras urged Greeks to give him the mandate to negotiate a better deal, saying that his argument was supported by an IMF study showing that his country’s debts were unsustainable even on the rosiest economic assumptions. “I urge you to say no to ultimatums, blackmail and fear. To say no to being divided,” Tsipras said. It has emerged that the eurozone tried to stop the IMF publishing its study.
Huge crowds – from young students to pensioners with grandchildren in tow – packed Athens’ Syntagma square, jamming the nearby metro station and surrounding streets to hear Tsipras address a mammoth no rally on Friday night.
“I’m here to shout no at the top of my voice,” said Panos Stathopoulos, a recently retired dentist. “No to austerity; no to this European Union that seems to have no sentiment, nothing.”
Sporting a red-and-white OXI sticker, Stathopoulos said that after five years of austerity, “They know the situation very well, and still they keep trying to impose these measures on the weakest of us – I’m sorry for the founding fathers of the EU, I don’t think they ever envisaged a Europe like this.”
Greek referendum: what the experts say Read more
Friends and colleagues Eri, Constantina and Marta – all psychologists – said they had come because “we want to have hope.” They would vote no on Sunday because “we want to be able to express our own opinions, and to decide for ourselves, in our own country,” said Eri.
The yes campaign turned the centre of the open-air – and open-ended – Panathenaic Stadium in central Athens into a sea of Greek flags dotted with some EU ones. They also spilled out for about 50 yards down the avenue that runs across the stadium’s open side.
It was an altogether more rumbustious – and better-attended – demonstration than the one on Tuesday in Syntagma Square, which was marred by rain.
On Friday night, toting a big EU flag, Dimitris Tsaoussis, a financial analyst, said he was there to “tell my European family that we belong in Europe and we will stay in Europe”. Zacharias Sachinis, a marketing manager with a chemicals firms, who was at the rally with his wife and son, said he was going to vote yes on Sunday because “the euro is good for Greece”, even though he didn’t like “the dictatorship of Schauble.”
As on Tuesday, the atmosphere was good-natured. But below the surface calm there is deep concern – and some trepidation. With the approach of the referendum, growing numbers of Greeks are becoming reluctant to give their names to reporters.
“I came because we can’t be indifferent,” said one young woman emphatically. But she balked at identifying herself. So did her friend, who said: “We can’t predict the consequences of anything. That’s why we’re nervous.”
Polls have tightened in recent days following warnings from the commission and Greece’s eurozone partners that a no vote would mean its exit from the single currency. Support for the yes side is coming primarily from voters over 55, with all other age groups backing Tsipras.
An already tense atmosphere was heightened on Friday after it emerged that the country’s defence minister had said that the military could ensure internal security if necessary.
Greece’s post-war history of military dictatorship meant Panos Kammenos, who also heads the nationalist, rightwing Independent Greeks party, caused controversy when he said: “The country’s armed forces guarantee stability internally, the national sovereignty and the country’s territorial integrity [and] stability in relation with the country’s alliances.”
The Guardian view on the Greek referendum: hard to imagine a more dismal choice | Editorial Read more
Vicky Pryce, the Greek-born chief economic adviser at the Centre for Economics and Business Research, said: “There has been too much austerity, but a no vote would make things worse. It would almost certainly mean banks becoming insolvent, an exit from the euro and a much faster decline in economic activity with hyperinflation following as the drachma that is introduced instantly devalues.
“A yes vote would keep banks open and give a mandate for a deal to be struck that recognises the new Greek realities and includes, as the IMF now says, restructuring of the debt which every economist knows is unsustainable. This would offer some light at the end of the tunnel. A no vote would make that almost impossible to accomplish and could plunge Greece into years of economic turmoil.”And with that heretofore unseen demand came unwanted attention. Nearly exactly nine months after Dedication 2 dropped, Drama’s Atlanta’s studio — 147 Walker Street, where he recorded much of the Gangsta Grillz series, including Dedication 2 — was raided. Working in coordination with the RIAA, officers from the Morrow, Georgia, police department confiscated just about everything that was on the premises: recording gear, vehicles, 81,000 CDs. They also arrested Drama and his business partner Don Cannon, charged them each with a felony violation of Georgia’s RICO law, and held them on $100,000 bond.
“I saw cops jump out, M16s drawn, and they put me directly on the ground,” Drama recalled in 2008. “They were screaming and yelling, causing a ruckus … They brought the dogs in there, basically asking, ’Where are the guns and drugs?’ You tell them a bunch of times, ’Nah.’
“January 17, ‘07,” Drama says now. “That was a real pivotal moment.”
As The New York Times explained at the time, “The [RIAA] makes no distinction between counterfeit CDs and unlicensed compilations like those that DJ Drama is known for.” Meaning: the RIAA didn’t care that artists were working directly with Drama. Gangsta Grillz releases contained unlicensed material, meaning both the jacked beats and the artist’s own original verses, which were technically proprietary to the record labels with which they were then under contract. They were considered, as a whole, illegal.
RICO is short for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act; it was created in 1970 to combat the mafia, and gives law enforcement right to seize all your assets. Eventually, Drama’s lawyers negotiated the charges down from a felony to a misdemeanor. What he was actually convicted with was a violation of Georgia’s “true names and addresses” law. (It was a technicality of a law, promoted by the RIAA in many states, to define and fight bootlegging: to be considered legal for sale, a CD had to have an address on it.) Drama was fined $250,000. But he’d already had a bank account seized during the initial investigation, and that bank account was never returned to him. And that account, he said, had “waaaay more than $250,000 in it.”
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After the raid, Drama and Cannon were advised to find separate legal representation. Over the course of the proceedings, things got messy; for a couple of years, the best friends and business partners fell out altogether. At one point, as part of their agreement with the RIAA, they were forced to record an anti-bootlegging PSA for the RIAA. Awkwardly, without really speaking to one another, Drama and Cannon made themselves look in the camera and plead with faceless bootleggers to respect the rights of artists everywhere — the same kind of artists that they’d helped make iconic with Gangsta Grillz. The PSA was never released.
The RIAA had taken a big swing, and it had the desired effect. The sight of Drama and Cannon, in cuffs and county prison jumpsuits, sent a chill through the mixtape circuit.Trump Cannot Improve Relations With Russia When Trump’s Government and the US Media Oppose Improved Relations
Trump Cannot Improve Relations With Russia When Trump’s Government and the US Media Oppose Improved Relations
Paul Craig Roberts
President Trump Has Been Contradicted by His Own Government, Which Has Lined Up Against Him in Favor of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and the Russophobic Presstitute Media that serves the military/security complex and the neoconservatives.
I am afraid that The Saker and Finian Cunningham are correct. Nothing can come of Trump’s meeting with Putin, because, as Cunningham puts it, “Trump doesn’t have freedom or real power. The real power brokers in the US will ensure that the Russophobia campaign continues, with more spurious allegations of Moscow interfering to subvert Western democracies. Trump will continue to live under a cloud of media-driven suspicions. And thus the agenda of regime change against Syria and confrontation with Russia will also continue. Trump’s personal opinions on these matters and towards Vladimir Putin are negligible—indeed dispensable by the deep powers-that-be.”
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/395782-trump-putin-meeting-media-syria/
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47392.htm
Cunningham points out that instead of lauding the meeting as the beginning of the process to defuse the high tensions between the two major nuclear powers, the US media denounced Trump for being civil to Putin in the meeting.
What is missing from the media in the entirety of the Western world and perhaps also in Russia is the awareness that the dangerous tensions are orchestrated not only by Hillary and the Democratic National Committee, the neoconservatives, the US military/security complex, and the presstitutes, but also by President Trump’s own appointees.
Trump’s own ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, and Trump’s own Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, sound exactly like Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, the neoconservatives, the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN and the rest of the totally discredited presstitute media that is committed to raising tensions between the US and Russia to the point of nuclear war.
On the same day that President Donald Trump said “it is time to move forward in working constructively with Russia,” and the day after he said “I had a tremendous meeting yesterday with President Putin,” the ignorant, stupid, Nikki Haley, who Trump appointed as US UN Ambassador, publicly contradicted her president, forcefully stating: “we can’t trust Russia and we won’t ever trust Russia.” https://www.rt.com/usa/395814-us-trust-russia-haley/?utm_source=spotim&utm_medium=spotim_recirculation&spotim_referrer=recirculation&spot_im_comment_id=sp_6phY2k0C_395814_c_rDCXsj
The ignorant stupid Haley is still in office, a perfect demonstration of Trump’s powerlessness.
The ignorant stupid Haley has gone far beyond Obama’s crazed UN Ambassador, neocon Samantha Power in doing everything in her power to ruin the prospect of normal relations between the two major nuclear powers. Why does Nikki Haley work in favor of a confrontation between nuclear powers that would destroy all life on earth? What is wrong with Nikki Haley? Is she demented? Has she lost her mind, assuming she ever had one?
How can President Trump normalize relations with Russia when every one of his appointees wants to worsen the relations to the point of nuclear war?
How is President Trump going to improve relations with Russia when President Trump stands powerless in face of his dressing down by his UN Ambassador? Clearly, Trump is powerless, a mere cipher.
Joining Nikki Haley was Trump’s Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson. Tillerson, allegedly a friend of Russia, is also working overtime to worsen relations between the two nuclear powers by publicly contradicting the President of the United States, thereby making it clear that Trump is barely even a cipher. Tillerson, a disgrace, said that Putin’s refusal to admit that Putin elected Trump by interfering in the US election “stands as an obstacle to our ability to improve the relationship between the US and Russia and it needs to be addressed in terms |
08:13
A couple of weeks ago I was in Beijing. Although growth may have slowed somewhat, and there are some problems in the financial system, not least in terms of local government debt, it remains a vibrant and dynamic economy. Indeed, if you take away the language and the cuisine, Beijing could be a large American city.
We therefore welcome this contributed article by Thibaud Andre.
While football is being among the most popular sports in China, the Chinese national team did not go higher than 70th in the world rankings. Moreover, China's team was out of the World Cup 2014 and, as Goldman Sachs predicts, is not expected to do so for at least 20 years. Football is much loved in China, but not well played. As a result, most of Chinese people are big fans of European soccer, which seems to be more spectacular to many of them. Chinese football supporters bring much money to certain businesses inside the country as well as abroad. A lot of national companies take this opportunity to promote themselves on a global stage. Recently, several Chinese enterprises were among the main sponsors of the World Cup 2014. Moreover, China recently hosted French "trophée des champion", being the first destination of the championship in Asia, with an idea to broaden its international connections and go global.
English football is the most preferred among Chinese supporters
According to recent research, over 78 per cent of football fans in China prefer international rather than domestic football. In particular, English football is the most popular. It was recently announced that Arsenal is the most loved English team among Chinese supporters followed by Manchester United. Spanish, German and French teams including Real Madrid and Inter Milan are also loved by Chinese fans. As a result, these countries, particularly England, attracts a lot of Chinese tourists or students, studying in the UK, who regularly attend football games. As the Brazilian embassy, based in Beijing, reports, over 5,000 Chinese nationals visited Brazil during the World Cup 2014.
Sponsorship as a way to go global
Moreover, the fact that football is apparently a good opportunity for global promotion is clearly recognized by China-based companies. Several stand as the main sponsors of various football teams and events. Yingli, a China-based solar energy company, was among the others sponsors of World Cup 2014.
European football understand the crucial stake of China fans
Another "Go global" action, recently undertaken by China, was to host the French "Trophée des champion", where Paris Saint-Germain and En Avant Guingamp were competing at thwe Beijing Workers' Stadium. China has become the first country in Asia to host the championship. The incentives behind the partnership are to boost exchange between these two countries. Especially, the French side is apparently more interested in attracting Chinese football fans and developing their awareness and interest in French football. Is there a better way to attract Chinese fans than to arrange a true show with the best and most popular in France, Paris Saint Germain and its international star Zlatan Ibrahimovic?
Chinese are more involved in gambling on than playing football
It is not the secret that China is doing far from well in football on global stage regardless the fact that the Chinese are great lovers of the sport: they prefer to watch rather than to play. As a result, a large betting business had emerged in China regardless of the fact that it is illegal. During the World Cup 2014, Chinese fans were actively betting on match results. Some people seemed to be addicted to betting while losing large financial assets; others were betting small amount for fun while not being really interested in football. However, the World Cup brought a huge revenue to the betting market, which normally reaches $140 billion per year.
For more information on the China market: http://daxueconsulting.com/branding-china-2/It's been a few weeks, but tomorrow sees a new episode of The Flash on The CW -- and according to producer Andrew Kreisberg and actor Tom Cavanagh, the show comes back firing on all cylinders.
They spoke about the episode this morning in Burbank with a group of reporters, including ComicBook.com's Emily Donn.
"Hashtag game changer," joked Cavanagh when asked how he would sell this week's episode, titled "Out of Time," to the audience. "With no disrespect to any of the other directors or episodes we've produced, I think this is the best episode that we've done," Kreisberg added. "I think it's everything that The Flash can do – and I don't mean Barry Allen as a hero, I mean as a TV show – this episode delivers in spades. It's got amazing visual effects that you just don't see on television. It's full of heart, it's full of romance, it's full of genuine scares and it's the best episode of this show. Between this and Arrow, there's only a handful of episodes amongst ourselves that we kind of say that about and I definitely think this is it."
If there was a concern, Cavanagh said, it was that using up this episode with a few weeks yet to go before the season finale was a risk. "I think that what you've put in the bank beforehand is one of the greatest things about television. As opposed to 2 hours, we can put 15 hours in prior to this, so we have investment," Cavanagh explained. "So you read something like this and you get to pay off a little bit. And then the danger is, is it a precipice or is it the slippery side of the slope. What's been so impressive for us is that is a really strong episode of television and yet in the ones to come, we're springboarding off it. The danger is you do something like this and it's a pinnacle and you slide down and this is not the case for us. As we read the scripts, the next one that comes you're like, 'Oh. That happens!'"Homelessness in England is a national crisis and the government’s approach to tackling the problem has been an abject failure, a committee of MPs has said.
More than 9,000 people are sleeping rough on the streets and more than 78,000 households, including 120,000 children, are homeless and living in temporary accommodation, often of a poor standard, according to the Commons public accounts committee.
It says in a report that the attitude of the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) to reducing homelessness has been “unacceptably complacent”.
The government’s commitment to eliminate rough sleeping by 2027 will address only the “tip of the iceberg” and there is an unacceptable shortage of realistic housing options for homeless people and those at risk of homelessness, it says.
Meg Hillier, who chairs the committee, said: “The latest official figures hammer home the shameful state of homelessness in England and the abject failure of the government’s approach to addressing the misery suffered by many thousands of families and individuals.
“As we approach Christmas there are thousands of children in temporary accommodation – a salutary reminder of the human cost of policy failure. The government must do more to understand and measure the real-world costs and causes of homelessness and put in place the joined-up strategy that is so desperately needed.”
She suggested practical steps that could be taken now. “For example, targeting financial support on local authorities with acute shortages of suitable housing, rather than those councils which are simply ready to spend. That would make a real difference to people’s lives,” Hillier said.
The report says the number of people sleeping rough has increased by 134% since 2011, and there has been a 60% rise in the number of households in temporary accommodation since 2010.
The MPs make a series of recommendations to the government and call for a strategy by mid-June 2018 on how homelessness can be reduced. They say the DCLG has only just acknowledged that its “light touch” approach has not worked.
John Healey, the shadow housing secretary, said: “This damning crossparty report shows that the Conservatives have caused the crisis of rapidly rising homelessness but have no plan to fix it.
“This Christmas the increase in homelessness is visible in almost every town and city in the country, but today’s report confirms ministers lack both an understanding of the problem and any urgency in finding solutions.
“After an unprecedented decline in homelessness under Labour, Conservative policy decisions are directly responsible for rising homelessness. You can’t help the homeless without the homes, and ministers have driven new social rented homes to the lowest level on record.”
John Bird, the founder of the Big Issue, said: “The people we see sleeping rough and living on our streets represent the mere tip of the iceberg. The fact that the ‘hidden homeless’ aren’t even included in the final figures show the extent of the problem.”Get the biggest Manchester City 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
Manchester City have been handed a tough start to their Premier League title defence.
They start with a trip to Newcastle on the opening day before games against Liverpool (h), Stoke (h), Arsenal (a) and Chelsea (h).
Manuel Pellegrini's side play West Brom away on Boxing Day, Sunderland at home on New Year's Day and Southampton at home on the final day of the season.
The first Manchester derby will be at the Etihad Stadium on November 1. The derby at Old Trafford has been scheduled for April 11.
After a difficult start, City at least have the consolation of a more comfortable run-in.
They are at home on the final day of the season against Southampton. It follows games against West Ham (h), Aston Villa (h), Tottenham (a), QPR (h) and Swansea (a).
City face Arsenal at the Emirates before their first Champions League group game on September 16 or 17.
Their other games before European matches are Hull (a), Tottenham (h), United (h), Swansea (h) and Everton (h).
City's Christmas schedule includes games against Crystal Palace (h), West Brom (a), Burnley (h) and Sunderland (h).
Pellegrini will also have to contend with the African Cup of Nations in January. He could lose Yaya Toure for the tournament, set to be hosted in Morocco between January 17 and February 8.
The Ivory Coast midfielder could miss Arsenal at home on January 17 and Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on January 31."The best way to defend the country from attackers that don't really have an army, but come here as individuals, is to prevent their access into this country," Paul told reporters on Monday.
"It is about time, and I think Paris should wake us up to the fact that we can't just let anyone come to this country," he added.
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Paul initially signaled that the legislation would extend to all refugees, but his office clarified that moratorium only extends to the approximately 30 high-risk countries that Paul said have "significant jihadist movements."
The restriction bars all visas in those countries, including for students and tourists, and would be lifted once Congress certifies that a country has complete control over who is crossing its borders.
The proposal would also institute a 30-day waiting period for visas from countries that are currently part of America's Visa Waiver Program, which includes France.
The GOP presidential candidates have largely called for America to reexamine its refugee policies, especially for those coming from Syria, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 129 people and injured more than 300. The Obama administration is planning on admitting more than 10,000 Syrian refugees in response to the crisis prompted by the civil war there.
Multiple news reports have linked at least one of the Paris attackers to the Syrian refugee crisis.
Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas), another GOP presidential candidate, bashed the idea of letting in Syrian Muslim refugees as "nothing less than lunacy" Saturday on Fox News, but countered that Christian refugees fleeing persecution should be granted safe harbor.
Paul said he's open to private charities helping to resettle Christian refugees, but that those efforts have to be in the context of America's national security.
"In order to be safe, in order to be secure, we cant just say, 'Hey we've got an open door and we’re going to take people form the Middle East,'" he said, adding that Iran and Saudi Arabia need to step up to help resettle refugees.
--This report was updated at 3:37 p.m.Michael Buckner/Getty
Billionaire investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban isn't holding back his opinion about his frenemy, Donald Trump.
"There's that guy who'll walk into the bar and say anything to get laid. That's Donald Trump right now to a T. But it's all of us who are going to get f-----," Cuban said during an interview at the SkyBridge Alternatives (SALT) Conference in Las Vegas on Thursday night.
"We go way back, and it's a love-hate relationship," he said when conference organizer Anthony Scaramucci asked Cuban about the Republican presidential candidate.
He continued: "Everybody's got that friend that you just shake your head at. He's that guy who'd get drunk and fall over all the time, or just says dumb s--- all the time, but he's your friend."
To be clear, this is not a literal description: Trump can be embarrassing, but he famously doesn't drink alcohol, so he's not likely to fall over drunk.
Cuban also offered Hillary Clinton some advice on how to run against Trump: Get a running mate like Mark Cuban.
"I would get a vice-presidential candidate who's someone like me who would just throw bombs at Donald," he said. "And I would be like, 'Donald, I like you. We're friends, but you're a goddamn airhead.'"
Cuban praised Trump for tapping into the concerns of many ordinary Americans, but said that he did not have solutions for the problems he's identified.
"Being empathetic is one thing, and that's good," he said. "But given the office he's running for, trying to come up with a solution is even more important. And I don't think he's there yet."
Moving beyond politics, Scaramucci asked Cuban why he bought the Mavericks.
"Because I could," he said.
He continued:
I was a season-ticket holder, and I was at the opening game for the '99-2000 season. And I'm like, "We're undefeated. I'm excited." We had Shawn Bradley — we were set. I was like, "Wait a second, I can do a better job, and I can put my money where my mouth is now..." Within a couple months, I owned the Mavericks.
It's hard to argue with Cuban's timing: He could afford to put his money where his mouth was because he had sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo in April 1999 for $5.7 billion.The Pittsburgh Penguins made one final move on the trade deadline, adding forward Jussi Jokinen from the Carolina Hurricanes in exchange for a conditional sixth or seventh round pick. Carolina will also absorb an undisclosed amount of Jokinen’s $3M salary. The condition on the draft pick was also not announced but it is expected to be related to how far Pittsburgh goes in the playoffs.
“I’m really excited,” Jokinen said. “I’ve heard nothing but great things about the organization. I will do everything I can help us win the Stanley Cup.”
The 30-year-old Jokinen has six goals and five assists in 33 games for the Hurricanes. Carolina put him on waivers back on March 26, but he cleared. Since Carolina is taking on part of his salary, Pittsburgh was willing to bring him into the fold. But Pens GM Ray Shero said that Jokinen will bring some skill to the team.
“His versatility is really important to us,” Shero said. “Jokinen is a proven NHL player [and] he’s a very smart player [with a] good stick.”
Jokinen has spent parts of five seasons with the Hurricanes, including his best season when he scored 30 goals in 2009-2010. Canes GM Jim Ruthorford thanked Jokinen for his time in Carolina.
“We thank Jussi for his great service to our organization during the last five years,” Ruthorford said. “This deal is important for our team’s financial flexibility moving forward.”
Jokinen is expected to travel to Pittsburgh early Thursday morning and should be on the ice for their practice at 11 a.m.Some things are just too good to be true.
For four years Grantland seemed to defy this maxim. However, last Friday, months after its founder and creative force was ousted and the site hovered somewhere between no-man’s land and purgatory, ESPN pulled the plug on its destination for sports-meets-pop culture-meets-actually great writing. For Grantland, the clock had finally, and somewhat excruciatingly, ticked down to zero.
In fact, in the interest of full transparency, I will pull back the curtain and reveal an email I sent to the editors of Grantland in March of 2013, an email simply and dully titled “Contribution Inquiry” (I did not receive a response, and perhaps the generic and forgettable lede was a reason why. No hard feelings, of course!). While it was not successful in securing me an immediate full-time position with the site, I think it encapsulates nicely what I found so novel and thrilling about Grantland:
Hi there! Apologies for the cold emailing, but I wanted to inquire about contributing to Grantland. I imagine there are more proper channels, but I reckoned I’d try this hopefully more direct approach. I’ve been an ardent fan of Grantland since its launch (and prior too, in fact, when I heard about its impending launch last year). It offers what I truly love in online journalism, which is a genuine mixture of all things interesting – pop culture, Hollywood, sports, celebrities, and everything in between – and the articles are not just a regurgitation of what’s already been posted a dozen times elsewhere. It’s not always easy to find an original take, but I always strive to do so, and your work consistently succeeds at it.
[I won’t bore you with the rest of the email, which listed my (limited) credits and included a few writing samples, BUT I will pat myself on the back and note that one of the examples I sent along was an overly optimistic preview of the 2012 Mets which both touted Daniel Murphy’s potential contributions as the everyday 2nd baseman AND lauded then maligned-now redeemed former GM Omar Minaya’s draft history, two sentiments which were proven correct by this years’ (soul-crushing) post-season. So I was right, just four years premature.]
Mad Max-like battered wasteland of sponsored content and “14 Photos of the Lunar Eclipse Only 90s Kids Will Get,” Grantland was an oasis. Unlike so many other online destinations, Grantland felt like it like was aiming for something more, for something better. It’s easy to get lazy and complacent, and just do enough. Just rank the 10 Best Snick Cameos and call it a day. That’s usually enough, if not too much. But you could feel that the Grantland columnists and contributors, no doubt led by Bill Simmons, aspired for something special, something they were passionate about, something of which to be proud. And although there were bumps and bruises along the away, and although the In the time since Grantland’s debut the world of pop-culture criticism, and, specifically, television recaps – a relatively recent concept that served as a major function of my blog – has devolved, for the most part, into rote, paint-by-numbers plot summaries and/or a compilation of GIFs and unearned derision, along with misdemeanor assault on the English language. But, like Dorian Gray, as television criticism across the board has seemed to grow more empty and insipid, somehow reaching below Terra firma for the lowest hanging fruit, Grantland remained resolute and continued to present actual commentary and analysis, a panacea to the glorified TV Guide-synopses found so often elsewhere. In ax-like battered wasteland of sponsored content and “14 Photos of the Lunar Eclipse Only 90s Kids Will Get,” Grantland was an oasis. Unlike so many other online destinations, Grantland felt like it like was aiming for something more, for something better. It’s easy to get lazy and complacent, and just do enough. Just rank the 10 Best Snick Cameos and call it a day. That’s usually enough, if not too much. But you could feel that the Grantland columnists and contributors, no doubt led by Bill Simmons, aspired for something special, something they wereabout, something of which to be proud. And although there were bumps and bruises along the away, and although the homepage is now a tombstone, Grantland, in that way, was an unquestioned success, a triumph.
Sadly, the current picture of online journalism is a cluster (and, often, clusterfuck) of content farms, but Grantland stood out as a content kibbutz, a place where good writers worked together for the good of the whole, instead of slashing and burning, reaping and sowing and ravaging the soil until it’s barren and dry. If other farms are mass-producing GMO corn, Grantland was slowly, lovingly, growing and cultivating organic watermelon radishes (which, full disclosure, I don’t like very much, but it is a beautiful fruit). And, if we’re being honest, they were probably running the operation at a loss. Developing less product, paying the growers more and giving away the harvest for free, it’s not a very profitable model, and one that perhaps proved untenable. But it also proved admirable, and absolutely worth it. It just didn’t make good fiscal – or cultural – sense to conglomerate overlords ESPN Inc.
We very well might look back on Grantland as the web’s version of the ’27 Yankees, a Murderers
This is not a eulogy for good writing. If you want to make the argument that journalism is dead, that’s fine, and I’m sure there are many great articles out there discussing just that. Nor is this is a hagiography of Bill Simmons; although, if you wanted to write that article, it would not be without merit. This is a dirge for a shooting star, a white whale, a collection of voices and talent and vision that we might not see again in this ever changing, ever precarious landscape. It’s a tribute to an idea that was an inspiration, and a thank you to a place that stood as the gold standard in longform pop culture and sports journalism, offering what seemed like a limitless (and word-limitless ) amount of first-class content. This is not to say that you will no longer be able to find great, passionate, important writing, criticism and commentary on the web. Not at all. You’re just going to have a search a little for harder for it.
by Seth Keim
Seth is the founder of Jumped the Snark, but does some of his best work in 140 characters or less. He lives in Brooklyn and is currently on season 6 of Frasier.After being diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday, Hillary Clinton ran a two-hour national security meeting, gave a press conference, and spent an hour and a half in the heat at a September 11 commemoration ceremony. It was an impressive feat of physical strength that obliterated months of health conspiracies.
September 11 was a wild day in campaign 2016. After Hillary Clinton overheated and became weak at a 9/11 ceremony, an ugly feeding frenzy ensued that capped weeks of increasingly shrill conspiracy-mongering about her health.
However, by the end of the day, the tables had turned on her detractors after it was revealed she was maintaining a grueling work schedule while battling pneumonia:
Friday, day Clinton diagnosed w pneumonia, she appeared at 2 fundraisers, ran a 2-hour natl security mtg, did a presser, sat for CNN intvu — Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) September 11, 2016
Clinton sticks with campaign schedule 2 days after being diagnosed with pneumonia. But she's the "weak" one. https://t.co/jUCSt84xX7 — jawillie (@jawillie) September 11, 2016
Every candidate I have ever worked for has gotten sick on the trail and worked through it because you can't take days off in a close race — Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) September 11, 2016
I got pneumonia in college. It's exhausting. I'm impressed she's been campaigning with it at all. https://t.co/8ZxnS7rV2Y — Josh Barro (@jbarro) September 11, 2016
Doing events with pneumonia shows how strong Hillary is. Her detractors have now lost another one of their hit jobs. They should be ashamed. — Peter Daou (@peterdaou) September 11, 2016
The rush to condemn Hillary Clinton for feeling sick rather than wishing her well was another example of her opponents trying their best to disqualify her from running because they fear she cannot be defeated on the issues.
How insecure do you have to be about your candidate to hope his opponent is physically ill? — Peter Daou (@peterdaou) September 11, 2016
So courageous to attack a woman with pneumonia who continues to work despite feeling like crap. — Peter Daou (@peterdaou) September 11, 2016
Any gentleman running against an opponent who took ill would not revel in it–he would wish them good health soon. Any gentleman, that is. — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) September 11, 2016
Another day, another dramatic twist in the 2016 race.Councils are telling tenants to stay put in buy-to-let properties when landlords ask them to leave as they attempt to deal with Britain's housing crisis.
Even owners who try to return to their homes after living abroad are finding that tenants have been told to sit tight until they are evicted.
Going through the eviction process typically takes around four months and costs landlords hundreds of pounds.
Experts said the problem is "becoming acute" in London, Birmingham and other areas, particularly in the south, where demand for rental homes is high.
David Lawrenson, of LettingFocus.com, said: "It's stupid, the councils are within their rights to advise people to stay on but it doesn't encourage landlords to take on people who are [financially] vulnerable."
It partly comes back to immigration, as there are lots of people coming to this country and they typically want to rent properties Alan Ward, chairman of the Residential Landlords Association
The likelihood of landlords dealing with sitting tenants has grown as Britain's housing shortage has worsened.
Around five people compete for every property available to let nationally, rising to nearly nine for every rental home in London. Property experts Rightmove say demand is at an "all time high".
As the population has swelled due to people living longer and immigration, the country's housing stock has failed grow at the same pace.
The resulting imbalance - and the seemingly inexorable rise in house prices in the south - has pushed rents higher.
It has become particularly difficult for those on lower incomes to find suitable properties when they try to move, and many are turning to local authorities for help.
But those who approach the council are being told they cannot get local authority assistance unless they are homeless, and so should stay in privately rented properties until they are forced out by bailiffs.
The issue came to the fore in posts on internet forum Mumsnet.
A user posting under the pseudonym Aimlessly said: "Our family has just returned from living abroad and are planning on moving back into our property that we have been letting out.
"We just got a call this morning from the letting agents saying that our tenants have advised them that they can not find another property in their price range and the council is telling them to stay put. What?
"It is not like we are property investors and are just trying to get higher rent. We do not have any other accommodation. My children need to have a roof overhead and be placed in school. How can the council do this? What action can we take and how long should we expect to be displaced? Totally shocked!"
Alan Ward, chairman of the Residential Landlords Association, explained that councils were unable to help people unless they had nowhere else to go.
He said it was standard procedure to tell a tenant that if there were no places in the area that they could afford, perhaps because they had previously benefited from rent freezes, they needed to wait until they were evicted before seeking a council house.
He said the issue was now commonly faced by both "accidental" and professional investors in buy-to-let properties.
"It's becoming acute in some areas, not necessarily because there are fewer homes due to landlords exiting the market, but because there are more people seeking them. It partly comes back to immigration, as there are lots of people coming to this country and they typically want to rent properties," he said.
"The council only gets involved when a tenant is looking for social housing. Tenants are told they cannot be rehoused until the bailiffs are at the door."
• Mapped: how buy-to-let will lose money in 91pc of regions by 2021
Landlords faced with sitting tenants need to serve notice using a Section 21 form. If the fixed term in the contract has ended, that gives the tenant two months to find a new home.
If the tenant has been unable to find a new property after two months, the landlord can apply to a court for eviction. The cost is £280. Returning to live in a house that has been let is a legitimate reason to evict, Mr Ward said.
It can then take six to eight weeks for the judge to grant a possession order. If the tenant refuses to leave, bailiffs can be called. That typically costs another £110, according to the Residential Landlords Association.NEW DELHI: A 13-year-old girl's marriage to her adult step-brother after he impregnated her is sparking outrage in Tunisia A local court in Kef, Tunisia ruled that the unnamed girl, who is two years below the age of consent, "is considered fit for marriage" and permitted the pair to get married.A report published in The Independent stated that court officials interviewed the girl, after which they claimed that while there had been sexual relations between the step-siblings, the girl had not been raped.The pair was married soon after the court's decision, despite their parents' desperate efforts to stop the wedding.Under Tunisian law, having sex with anyone under the age of 15 is a punishable offense, and can land the guilty party in prison for up to six years. But a legal loophole allows the rapist to evade prosecution by marrying the victim.The incident has brought furious Tunisians out onto the streets in protest against the court's decision and an archaic, flawed law that lets the perpetrator get away with his crime.Demonstrators waved placards outside the national Parliament, some of which read, "How I met your mother? I raped her when she was 13."The government's child protection agency called for the marriage to be annulled, blasting the court's ruling as a violation of child rights Tunisia's Prime Minister Youssef Chahed has promised that a bill to change the law will be a "priority" to counter violence against women. He also vowed that 2017 would be "the year of the child."First, some biophysics. Fish scales have collagen fibers containing piezoelectric properties: Stress them and you generate a charge. Considering this, the researchers collected a large volume of them and used a demineralization process to make them transparent and flexible. Then they toyed with the hierarchical alignment of these treated scales, boosting their energy yield and effectively creating a bio-piezoelectric nanogenerator.
It can scavenge several types of ambient mechanical energies like body movements, machine and sound vibrations and wind flow. Even touching the nanogenerator produced enough electricity to light 50 LEDs. The result is a big step for self-powered flexible electronics, which could one day be developed into things like pacemakers energized by heartbeats that safely biodegrade in time. While it could also find applications in transparent and portable electronics, the biocompatibility likely makes this tech more valuable to medical uses like e-healthcare monitoring, in vitro diagnostics and edible devices.We all know that internationalization is important when it comes to bigger apps, or just the ones that are simply used across countries. Angular itself comes with very poor i18n support, which is why the community has built their own solutions to extend the framework’s functionalities to their needs. However, there’s finally a first-class solution evolving that will be baked right into the core.
In fact, I was honoured to give a talk on that topic at this year’s ng-conf with Chirayu Krishnappa and you can watch the recording of it right here. This article is a detailed write-up based on the talk and I hope it will answer all the questions it raised.
Understanding the process of i18n
When I started working on angular-translate two years ago, i18n to me, was really just about making it possible that the user of an application is able to change the locale through the user interface. So what is needed? Well, we have our application, we replace all strings with an abstraction that takes care of displaying the actual messages of a certain locale later at runtime, tokenize all our existing messages and write them into JSON so we can easily add new messages - Done!
Even if this approach works quite well (that’s the one angular-translate uses and it’s used in a lot Angular apps), it turned out that it also comes with it’s pitfalls. In addition to that, there are even some things left out when it comes to the whole i18n process.
You wonder what these things are? Just ask yourself: Who defines the tokens for each message that needs to be translated? In which file format does your translator receive your message bundles? What if your translator needs context for your messages in order to translate them properly, how do you provide it? And once the translator translated all your messages, how do you get them back into your existing application?
Right, all of a sudden we realise, that there’s much more required than just translating messages from one locale to another. In order to make i18n as a process a bit more clear, here’s a graphic that visualises a good i18n solution that covers all the problems we’re facing with existing solutions.
Let’s go through this step by step:
Developers write HTML templates - This should be super natural. In a good i18n solution, we as developers just write our HTML templates as usual, either manually or maybe dynamically generated by a server. In an Angular app those could be our routing views or templates for custom directives. Also important to notice: we should be able to write our templates in any language that we prefer, it shouldn’t be required to introduce tokens for every single message that needs to be translated. In fact, a simple HTML template that just contains plain text, is a valid template that can be translated.
Messages are extracted and bundled - In order to translate all of our application messages, we somehow need to extract them from our existing templates, bundle them together and hand them over to our translator in an expected file format (e.g. PO or XLIFF). The message extraction as well as the file format transformation should be done by automated tooling. We should be able to re-extract message any time as we’re developing new features in our application.
Translator translates messages - Once all messages are bundled as common translation file formats, the translator can take those files, import them in translation software of choice and use it’s graphical user interface to translate all messages to a different locale. The software then again, exports new translation files containing the new locale, which are handed over to us so we can process them.
Template/JSON generation - At this point, we need to decide in what way we want to implement i18n. We either want to generate new templates for each new locale so we can serve them accordingly from a web server, or we decide to use a client-side solution that e.g. consumes a certain JSON structure with the locale information and takes care of the locale change in the web browser. We might even need both solutions combined depending on our use case. However, whatever we decide to do, what we always need is tooling that allows us to do all these things.
As you can see, there’s really much more involved when it comes to i18n. What we also notice in this graphic, is that it’s an iterative process. No matter for which way we decide to get the new locale back into our application, we need to repeat that process over and over again as new features or changes happen in our application.
Okay cool, now we know what i18n is all about, but what is it with the new i18n solution that comes to the Angular core?
The new i18n story in Angular
Internationalization support in Angular has been very poor so far. You might know that there’s an ngLocale module you need to include, which is used by a couple components, like ngPluralize, date and currency filter to name a few, and that’s pretty much it. As we’ve already discussed, there’s so much more that comes into play when internationalizing an application, which is why there’s finally a new solution evolving that will bring first-class i18n support to the Angular framework.
Here’s a what the new solution will cover:
Tooling - As we’ve learned earlier, there’s a lot of tooling required in order to implement a smooth i18n experience for both, developers and translators. We work on all the tools that are needed to realise that process, which includes message extraction, file transformation, template generation and more. We’ll also provide APIs so you can write your own plugins to extend the pipeline to your personal needs.
Plural and Gender select - Pluralization and gender selection is a rather isolated topic that can and has to be done whether you want to support your apps in other languages or not. With the new i18n solution we’ll extend the existing string interpolation and support ICU Messageformat inside curlies in any template.
HTML Annotations - In order to get high quality translations, we need to provide our translators with context, descriptions and meanings. There’ll be a new syntax to annotate existing templates with meta information that will be extracted together with all messages. This syntax is and will always be backwards compatible, in fact, we’ll be able to use it in any website or application without breaking anything.
Server and Client - The new i18n solution will work for both scenarios, generate templates on the server side and dynamic locale evaluation on the client side. This is a very powerful fact, since we don’t force anybody to use a certain strategy.
Pseudotranslation - Since the process of translating messages from one locale to another can take very long and only once we get those translations back we actually see and realise that our application UI is completely broken with the new locale, the |
’s right, Donald Trump Jr., along with some other Trumps, are actually huge Pink Floyd Fans, as some digging into their social media has revealed. Shine on you crazy diamonds:
2010
At the roger waters concert he is playing The Wall. Perhaps the greatest of all time. If u don't like the music come for the light show!!! — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 13, 2010
Going to roger waters tonight at the staples center in LA. 3rd show I have caught this tour. Psyched. — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) December 1, 2010
2012
and some GN’R…
Axl just did some pink floyd and then went into November Rain. Sweet. http://t.co/s6DDZ9Ij — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 11, 2012
At Yankee Stadium about to see Roger Waters for the 4th time in 12 months. Can't wait!!! #TheWall — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 7, 2012
Great night at the Roger Waters concert with hubby@DonaldJTrumpJr!We had a late night but unfortunately can't sleep in when you have kids! — Vanessa Trump (@MrsVanessaTrump) July 7, 2012
Great night at the Roger Waters concert with hubby@DonaldJTrumpJr!We had a late night but unfortunately can't sleep in when you have kids! — Vanessa Trump (@MrsVanessaTrump) July 7, 2012
Another Brick in the wall part 2. "We don't need no education! #TheWall http://t.co/UCL9z8Rs — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 7, 2012
Bonus points for Neil too:
@DonaldJTrumpJr and I had an amazing evening last night at the Neil Young concert! Incredible performance!#lovedatenights — Vanessa Trump (@MrsVanessaTrump) November 28, 2012
Hey you, standing in the aisles (behind Eric & Lara)…
Pink Floyd A photo posted by Lara Trump (@laraleatrump) on Jul 6, 2012 at 8:52pm PDT
Is there anybody in there?
2016:
David Gilmour @radiocitymusichall awesome show tonight in #NYC #pinkfloyd #radiocity A photo posted by Donald Trump Jr. (@donaldjtrumpjr) on Apr 10, 2016 at 8:09pm PDT
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall?
Subscribe to Brooklyn Vegan onThe scare over a damaged dam in Oroville, Calif., highlights the rift between the conservative rural parts of the state and the left-leaning cities along the southern coast, USA Today reported.
Residents of Oroville, a conservative community, are dealing with dam repair – while others downstream were evacuated – over a dam which helps deliver drinking water to liberal Los Angeles. The threat of death and devastation raised eyebrows of those in the potential "sanctuary" state's minority, according to the report.
"That fact that the water benefits people hundreds of miles away from this danger is reverberating around these conservative communities that see little common ground with the far more liberal Californians on the coast and in Silicon Valley," according to USA Today.
The conservative Oroville community (pop. 16,000) even features a sign supporting seceding from California and creating a new state of Jefferson, showing the distrust of rural California vs. the liberal majority in the major cities, in a so-called "sanctuary state," using these communities for its water supply – with oft-limited funding.
"It's a refrain voiced time and again in Oroville and the surrounding towns: The liberal, more populated parts of California suck up all the political attention and public dollars, leaving little for the men and women who help grow the nation's food, fruits, and nuts," according to USA Today. "That dichotomy has bred a mistrust of state government and a healthy skepticism of federal officials, with the exception of Trump.
"How is it, the people here ask, that state and federal officials didn't seem to have the money to properly fix the dam's problems when they were first identified, but have seemingly untold millions available when the crisis finally arrived," the newspaper wrote.
California overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton, who won 61 percent of its popular vote, but Butte County, surrounding Oroville, favored Trump. Also, downstream neighbor Yuba County, went for Trump at nearly 58 percent, according to USA Today.
"As you know, I'm very much opposed to sanctuary cities," President Trump had told Fox News host Bill O'Reilly earlier this month. "They breed crime. There's a lot of problems. If we have to, we'll defund. We give tremendous amounts of money to California. California in many ways is out of control, as you know."A new accuser has alleged that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump victimized her with unwanted sexual advances.
Summer Zervos, a contestant on season 5 of “The Apprentice,” alleged in a news conference Friday in Los Angeles that Trump accosted her in New York and California.
Joined by attorney Gloria Allred, Huntington Beach resident Zervos said that after she was “fired” from “The Apprentice,” she continued to see Trump as a potential employer and mentor.
A visibly shaken Zervos said she met with him in 2007 at his office in New York. She claimed that the real estate mogul kissed her on the lips, catching her off guard.
“I was surprised but felt that perhaps it was his form of greeting,” she told reporters in a packed room at Allred’s office. “He said that he had never met anyone with my combination of being smart, attractive and with the largest set of balls, as I have,” she said.
Zervos said that as she was about to leave the meeting, Trump allegedly kissed her on the lips, again. “This made me feel nervous and embarrassed. This is not what I wanted or expected,” she said.
She went on to claim that he contacted her when he visited Southern California. She said she met with him for dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel and was taken to a bungalow where he “started kissing me open-mouthed,” and she alleged that he eventually grabbed her breast.
Zervos also claimed that Trump called her his “OC Angel.”
Allred, a civil rights attorney who frequently represents victims in high-profile harassment cases, sat next to a tearful Zervos. The attorney had harsh words for Trump.
“It is my understanding that your campaign may try to discredit the accusers and in essence are declaring war on women,” Allred said. “But women will not be silenced by this tactic. Women are now empowered, and they will not be bullied into silence anymore.”
When asked why she is just now coming forward, Zervos said she was prompted into speaking out by the “Access Hollywood” video, in which Trump made lewd comments about women, and his subsequent denials as more accusers come forward. Zervos also told reporters she is a Republican.
She is the latest woman to make sexual assault allegations against Trump.
The Washington Post published a story Friday in which a woman claimed Trump groped her at a Manhattan nightspot in early 1990s.
On Wednesday, the New York Times published a report quoting two women who claimed that Trump had groped or touched them inappropriately years ago.
Hours later, People Magazine posted a story alleging that Trump sexually assaulted one of its female reporters in 2005.
Speaking at a campaign rally Thursday, Trump dismissed the allegations as “outright lies.”
His campaign has said evidence is coming that will disprove the allegations.
“The campaign is working on bringing that information out,” said Trump’s running mate Mike Pence on the campaign trail today.Harry S. Stuff was an accomplished printer/publisher, typesetter, graphic designer, and advertising specialist active in Seattle in the early 1900s. Stuff founded local companies -- the Ivy Press, the Stuff Printing Concern, and the Associated Arts and Crafts Corporation -- and was active in various print trade organizations. He (and his beloved shop-dog, Piggy) played interesting roles during Seattle's Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909, and he and his first wife, Josephine E. Stuff, who served on numerous committees, were socially active. Stuff also designed posters and penned essays and books. He is now best remembered for having published a poster titled "The Eternal Optimist" in Seattle in 1914. It featured the whimsical image of a goofy, jug-eared, gap-toothed and uneven-eyed carefree loser with the oblivious caption "Me -- Worry?" Four decades later New York's juvenile-humor publication, MAD Magazine, adopted/adapted that unforgettable visage and promoted it as its iconic graphic mascot, "Alfred E. Neuman" -- one whose obtuse inquiry "What, Me Worry?" became a household phrase. Copyright infringement lawsuits ensued, but it was ruled that Stuff had failed to take legal steps to protect his work from others who used it in the years before MAD appropriated it.
The Print Biz
Harry Spencer Stuff was born to the Reverend G. L. S. Stuff and Elizabeth W. Stuff on August 10, 1869, in Chicago. As a youngster he became an apprentice at Colonel Elbridge L. Otis's Rochelle Register and printing house. It was on a Thanksgiving Day, he would later recall, that "I husked my last ear of corn and left an Illinois farm for the print-shop. I sacrificed a college scholarship for the 'University of Hard Knocks'" (Harry Stuff, "The Tale..."). "After serving a most rigid and thorough apprenticeship, [he] devoted himself to the printer's craft with unwavering interest" ("Late Harry Spencer Stuff...").
Stuff later moved to Minneapolis and then to Lincoln, Nebraska, where by 1896 he was operating his own printshop/publishing company, the Ivy Press (127 N 12th Street). By 1899 he was serving as a rep for fellow printshop owners when a labor battle was set to erupt in Omaha. "For several days it looked as if a big fight would result over the attempt to enforce the nine-hour [work] day... better judgment prevailed and the clash between employers and employees was averted. District Organizer Harry Stuff came up from Lincoln and labored diligently to prevent trouble, and made many friends. Mr. Stuff acted in conjunction with committees from the typographical, bookbinders', press-feeders', and pressmens' unions" (C. W. Fear).
It was presumably while living at Lincoln's Grand Hotel that he met another resident named Josephine Eleanor Widener [nee Wilson] (1866-1941), a divorcee and a public school principal. In 1901 the two married and by 1902 the couple -- along with the Ivy shop's dog, Piggy -- moved to Seattle, where they settled into a downtown residence (2109 2nd Avenue).
Printing and Publishing in Seattle
Stuff launched a printing and engraving company, the Ivy Press (Pythian Building, SW corner, 1st Avenue and Pike Street) -- where he provided the "Best Work, Quick... A Modern Printing Place." The shop's Arts and Crafts movement-inspired work was impressive, and the publication Inland Printer later remarked on its receipt, from Ivy, of "a package of exceptionally artistic and attractive printed matter. The typography, presswork and color combinations are excellent and the result is printing of the better kind" (Trezise). Business was apparently good, and that same publication also commented on Ivy's posh offices, which won praise for their "carpeted floor and nickel-plate finish" ("A Yankee Printer...").
In 1902 Ivy Press published Marion Frances Watt's book of poems, Cypress and Rose as well as a collection titled Maurice and Other Stories.
Stuff took on a business partner named Paul J. Smiley, eventually selling his interest in the firm and instead began to deal in type and printers' machinery from an outpost of the New York-based American Type Founders Company -- which was evidently headquartered at his University District home (3702 11th Avenue NE) along Portage Bay. Then in early 1905 The Seattle Daily Times announced that Stuff was leaving town to accept a new supervisorial job at the American Type Founders Company -- "the best position of its kind in the United States, because this company has [the] largest foundries and output of type" around ("Printer Gets Big Promotion").
But the move caused health problems for Stuff and before long he was back in Seattle -- accompanied by "brand new printing and engraving equipment... with a stock of the choicest papers from foreign markets" (Harry Stuff, "The Tale...") In late-1905 the Stuff Printing Concern (210-213 Oriental Block / 606 2nd Avenue) opened for business and Stuff hung a sign bearing a new logo -- the "Dollar Mark" -- a clever design that incorporated his initials, "H.S." Offering the public "Quality, hustle and square treatment," business was so good that "We soon needed more room" (Harry Stuff, "The Tale...").
Around 1906 Stuff headed back uptown to Pike Street, where "we found our present large, light, attractive and convenient quarters in the Kinnear Building" (1426 4th Avenue). "With nearly 3,000 feet of floor space, we are operating the most thoroughly modern Printing, Engraving and Lithographing Plant in the West" (Harry Stuff, "The Tale..."). Josephine Stuff began working as the Stuff Printing Concern's cashier, and by 1908 she was also attending classes as a University of Washington student, and serving as the Chairman of the First Unitarian Society. In 1913 the firm moved again (416 Union Street). Their listing in the Polk's Directory of 1914 noted that they provided services related to "Copper Plate Engravers, Embossing, Die Cutting and Advertising Specialties."
Stuff's Artistry
Harry Stuff's work earned praise early on. In 1905 The Seattle Daily Times noted that "His operation of the Ivy press in this city did more than any other one thing to bring to the attention of the printers of the United States the fact that the West is producing a quality of printing that is steadily increasing in merit. The work of Mr. Stuff has at all times shown the beauty of simplicity and originality of design..." ("Printer Gets Big Promotion").
One of the first items published by the Stuff Printing Concern in 1906, was a leather-clad booklet titled Songs o' the Sound, which featured Stuff's little graphic totem designs, poems evoking the natural features of the Seattle area's Salish Sea (e.g. Puget Sound) by Alice Harriman (1861-1925), illustrations by Seattle Times staff cartoonist Frank Calvert (1876-1920), and photographs by Webster & Stevens.
The Seattle Daily Times noted January 22, 1907, that Stuff was one of the founders of the new Associated Arts and Crafts Corporation, which had just filed papers with the Secretary of State's office in Olympia. He was also a member of Seattle Typographical Union No. 202, and in 1907 probably helped make the pitch to bring its annual convention to Seattle in 1909 -- the year of the Seattle's first World's Fair, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (A-Y-P). Then in November 1908 Seattle's branch of the Master Printers Association appointed him "to devise additional plans for educating the younger generation of printers in the details of the business" ("Invested...").
In 1909 Stuff's shop was hired to print items for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition -- for which Stuff's dog Piggy served as the official mascot. He apparently won quite the fan-base during his reign: When 2,500 Elks Club members marched from downtown up to the fair's campus (near Piggy's house) on July 28th, the dog trotted alongside them and people "at various points in the formation hoisted banners reading 'Piggy Is Coming,' 'Piggy Is Here,' and (as the wagging black tail receded into the distance) 'Piggy Has Went' (Stein and Becker, p. 84). Alas, Piggy apparently lost his collar -- "engraved with the words, 'A.Y.P.E. Mascot, Piggy,' and was [later] picked up downtown as a common vagrant. Luckily one of the arresting officers recognized the famous pup" and he was safely returned home (Stein and Becker, p. 119).
Piggy must have been much loved, as by 1908 Josephine was active with Seattle's Humane Society campaigns. The following year she joined the Woman's Century Club -- a local suffrage organization inspired by the presence of Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947). She served on its Social Service Committee along with Emily Inez Denny (1853-1918), a daughter of town co-founders David Denny (1832-1903) and Louisa Boren Denny (1827-1916). The Dennys were longtime friends with "Lake Union John" Cheshiahud (1820-1910), a noted Duwamish tribal chief who lived on a plot of land on Seattle's Portage Bay (directly across the bay from the Stuff home) -- that had been given him by David Denny -- and such connections likely led to Stuff's friendship with Cheshiahud.
Back in 1907 Stuff had produced a booklet with the regrettable title The Siwash -- a dated regional term originally used as a contemptuous reference to Indians. The Siwash included a photograph of Cheshiahud and his wife at their Portage Bay cabin, The Typographical Journal noted, and was "shaped like a cabin." It contained "the essence of Siwash wisdom reduced in the form of proverbs. Needless to say, the typographical treatment from cover to cover is in keeping with the subject" ("Seattle, Wash.").
A Growing Reputation
In 1910 Stuff wrote and designed a full-page ad that was published in The Seattle Daily Times. It told a brief history of his company, the story of his dog Piggy, quotations from some happy clients, and a large humorous cartoon of a printer's shop -- replete with a goofy-looking, jug-eared, and messy-haired young printer's assistant who was spilling some supplies on the floor. More about that kid later...
The following year saw the Stuff Printing Concern producing a souvenir program to mark the grand opening of the new Orpheum Theatre (3rd Avenue and Madison Street). The firm also published Cynthia Grey's Fingers That See -- a fictional account of blind students studying at a music school. In February 1911 Stuff attended the Printers' Cost Congress convention in Los Angeles, where he participated in a symposium, "The Printing Business of the Pacific Coast," and where it was announced that its 1913 gathering would be in Seattle. In 1912 Stuff participated in talks among Pacific coast-based print shops about "cost systems" ("Pacific Coast Printers..."). Later, in September of that year, Stuff -- as a member of the Seattle Typothetæ trade group -- traveled to Chicago to attend the National Typothetæ convention, and then headed to New York City. Stuff went on to take a job as a representative of the National Typothetæ, led the creation of its new Three Year Plan, and (later in 1918) helped the Tacoma Typothetæ. The Seattle Ad Club was another organization Stuff belonged to, and as its Honorary Chairman-of-the-Day on November 26, 1912, he addressed the assembled with a speech that included a quote that made the papers: "The sincere smile is one of the component factors in trade" ("Seattle Ad Club...").
In addition to his skills as a printer and engraver, Stuff was gaining recognition for his graphic designs. On April 26, 1914, The Seattle Daily Times ran his photograph along with a feature article, "Stuff Wins Honor At Big Exposition," describing how his design work had just been honored at the National Printing, Publishing and Advertising Exhibition in New York City's Grand Central Palace.
That same year Stuff designed a promotional poster commissioned by the Seattle Chamber of Commerce. It bore the legend "See Seattle in 1915." The Seattle Daily Times noted in an essay titled "Seattle Poster Stamp Wins Popular Favor -- Chamber of Commerce Receives Daily Inquiries for Specimens of Artistic Work" that the chamber had adopted the design and ordered 250,000 Seattle postal-style stamps printed, which it intended to give away. The stamp bore imagery "depicting the forty-two-story L.C. Smith Building and Elliott Bay in the foreground, the harbor filled with steamships and freighters and Mount Rainier in the background. The color scheme is a harmonious combination of turquoise, gold, and ivory" ("Seattle Poster Stamp...").
The following year of 1916 saw Stuff elected to the position of Western Representative of the United Typothetæ, based in the Transportation Building in Chicago. The Typographical Journal mentioned that "it is quite unnecessary to introduce Harry Stuff... His reputation is national in printing circles. His selection as author of the text book on Composition for the typographical technical series to be used at the Carnegie Institute at Pittsburg, and other trade schools, speaks for itself" ("Los Angeles...").
"The Eternal Optimist"
Of all Stuff's graphic design works, the one that that he is best remembered for was a poster he called "The Eternal Optimist." On June 24, 1914, a federal Register of Copyright was granted to "Stuff and Wilson" for this illustration of what would later be described as: a "picture of a boy with a broad, vacant smile revealing a missing tooth, and large outstanding ears and uncombed hair, which make him appear half-witted. The words 'Me -- Worry?' appear directly underneath the illustration" (Federal Supplement, p. 494).
Interestingly, that poster also featured a copyright symbol, a copyright credit to "Stuff & Wilson," and a publishing credit to the Stuff Printing Concern. The shop's home base of Seattle is also noted. But it was that copyright credit shared with "Wilson" that remains a minor mystery. The astute Seattle-based research librarian Leslie Meyer has recently posited the speculative theory that this was a nod to the maiden name of his wife Josephine -- who, that very same year, he would leave, and then divorce, after he moved to Los Angeles to set up shop as a publisher in the Black Building. Perhaps it was a farewell gift to her, or maybe there's another explanation...
While in California, Stuff was hired as a staffer at the Los Angeles Times-Mirror newspaper where he won accolades for his writings, and where he also designed and edited its in-house publication, Three Minutes. In addition, Stuff designed and edited its Sky-Blue Monday Letter, which the paper later touted as being "the oldest first-class, direct mail continuous approach today in America" ("Late Harry Spencer Stuff..."). While in California he also authored at least two books -- The Book of Holidays: What-When-Where-Why (1926), and The Story of the Olympic Games (1931).
Meanwhile, back in Seattle, Josephine operated her own retail store, the Book Lover's Shop (1909 North 45th Street) in the Wallingford neighborhood. In 1930 Stuff married another Nebraskan, Helen C. Pratt, the daughter of a pioneering attorney. In late 1937 Stuff became so ill that the couple retreated to her hometown of Kearney, Nebraska, for some familial support. Stuff died there of a cerebral hemorrhage on February 4, 1938. He was buried in the Pratt family plot in the Kearney Cemetery.
Stuff & Wilson
Not long after Stuff's passing, his widow, Helen, began to take legal action in response to the seemingly endless parade of companies who seemingly felt no compulsion to seek permission to use the village-idiot kid's likeness for their own commercial purposes. Among the offenders were a patent medicine advertisement published in 1915; Everett's Connor and Bailey cedar shingle business, which in 1922 used a look-a-like kid on their letterhead; Bob Adamcik's Café at Schulenburg, Texas, which used the kid -- and the slogan "When I was 8 Years Old, Me Worry? No" -- on its matchbooks; and advertising postcards mailed out by the Devil's Den Park in New Philadelphia, Ohio, and by Kelly's Horse Shoe Pike Inn.
Then there was the reverse-psychology campaign employed by anti-Franklin D. Roosevelt forces who used a similar doofus face -- accompanied by the slogan "I'm in favor of a fourth term" on postcards. Another variation stated: "Sure -- I'm for Roosevelt" on the front and on the backside: "If you are opposed to the Third 4th Term send these to your friends. 15 cards for 25c." And then there was a calendar produced by the La Budde Feed and Grain Co. of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And on and on...
Thus it was that on December 3, 1941, the copyright infringement case of Stuff v. La Budde Feed and Grain Company was heard by District Court Judge E. Duffy in Wisconsin. At issue, according to court records, was "a pictorial illustration" produced during the years 1938 and 1939, "which is identical to 'the Original [sic] Optimist,' carrying the words 'Me -- Worry?"' inscribed underneath. He is close to a wall in a room, on which hangs... a calendar bearing the name 'La Budde Feed and Grain, Milwaukee'" (Fed Sup p. 495). Within an attorney's presentation establishing Helen Stuff's grounds to bring the suit were some interesting details about the origins of "The Eternal Optimist." Harry Stuff "and one Wilson originated the pictorial illustration which is the subject of this suit.... Messrs. Stuff and Wilson published their work and offered it for sale to the general public with a notice of copyright inscribed thereon.... All copies of the illustration bore the required copyright notice. The complaint alleges that Wilson died at Hollywood several years prior to the date of Stuff's death, leaving no heirs surviving him" (Fed Sup pp. 494-495).
Stuff's widow was evidently maintaining that there actually had been a "Mr. Wilson" who'd partnered with her late husband, yet her case did not reveal his full name. She further asserted that he was long-since deceased, adding -- seemingly quite conveniently for her claim -- that he also had no heirs around. Perhaps. But, it is also possible that she resented the existence of a published reference to Stuff's first wife (nee Josephine Wilson), and also wanted to clear the field for her claim to be the sole inheritor of the copyright. Either way, La Budde's motion to dismiss the case was denied, but its final resolution remains a mystery.
MAD Men
Then, a quarter century later, matters started to get quite interesting. In 1954 Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993), the first editor of the New York-based popular juvenile humor publication MAD magazine, noticed a postcard in Mad's offices. It caught his attention because "It was a kid," Kurtzman recalled, "that didn't have a care in the world, except mischief" (Frank Jacobs) -- and he began thinking about how MAD might be able to use it. Soon, the face of that mischievous kid began popping up, like "Where's Waldo?" in crowd scenes and other spots in various MAD features.
When Kurtzman left to work for Playboy he was superseded as editor by Al Feldstein (1925-2014). "I decided that I wanted to have this visual logo as the image of Mad," Feldstein once recalled, "the same way that corporations had The Jolly Green Giant and the dog barking at the gramophone for RCA." What he chose was:
"this grinning idiot kid with a gap tooth and freckles and big ears... This kid was the perfect example of what I wanted. So I put an ad in the New York Times that said, 'National magazine wants portrait artist for special project.' In walked this little old guy in his 60s named Norman Mingo, and he said, 'What national magazine is this?' I said 'Mad,' and he said, 'Goodbye.' I told him to wait, and I dragged out all these examples and postcards of this idiot kid, and I said, 'I want a definitive portrait of this kid. I don't want him to look like an idiot -- I want him to be loveable and have intelligence behind his eyes. But I want him to have this devil-may-care attitude, someone who can maintain a sense of humor while the world is collapsing around him.' I adapted and used that portrait, and that was the beginning" (Heller).
The face was refined a bit by Mingo, eventually given a fictional name ("Alfred E. Neuman") and a modified slogan ("What? Me Worry?"), and by the July 1955 issue (No. 30) MAD had a new mascot -- one with an instantly recognizable face that generations of MAD readers would closely identify with that publication. Still, there's no escaping that it was the same zany face shown on Stuff's "The Eternal Optimist" poster back in 1914.
Thus, in 1966 Helen Pratt Stuff filed a series of infringement lawsuits against MAD for adopting the image that her deceased husband had successfully copyrighted so long ago. The stakes of this were very high, as MAD had by now been employing Alfred E. Neuman's face on, and within, the magazine, and various collateral products, countless times over the past decade. A copyright judgment for the Stuff estate would be very lucrative for her, and possibly financially devastating for MAD. And, based on the apparent evidence, the courts ruled in her favor.
Yet, when one case reached the appellate court MAD's lawyers had done their homework. And to assist them, MAD had reached out to its readership asking help in identifying exactly where and when the goofy face had originally appeared. Scores of responses -- some with perhaps a bit more merit than others -- apparently poured in.
The theory was posited that "similar looking" illustrations had appeared previous to "The Eternal Optimist" and that Stuff (and Wilson) had themselves been influenced by others. A specific graphic lineage would be eventually invoked: a painted ad "on the side of a 19th century traveling dentist's wagon with the slogan 'It didn't hurt a bit'" (Myrna Oliver); the Yellow Kid, the central character from Hogan's Alley, a newspaper comic strip by R. F. Outcault that had debuted back in 1895; an illustration "from a biology textbook as an example of a person who lacked iodine"; "a greeting-card alcoholic named Hooey McManus"; "a Siamese boy named Watmi Worri." One reader dug up a 1909 German calendar bearing a version of the inane smiling face" (Frank Jacobs). Al Feldstein himself firmly believed -- or at least convinced himself -- that "He'd been around for years; there had been many, many versions of this kid around" (Heller). It remains unknown whether or not anyone uncovered the cartoon of that young printer's apprentice that Stuff had included in that ad he'd designed and placed in The Seattle Daily Times way back in 1910…
Copyrights & Wrongs
Some of the images that people posited as antecedents for Stuff's character are seemingly without much merit, while others are a bit more intriguing. Long-story-short, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit finally ruled that while Stuff had initially registered his image properly for copyright protection back in 1914, he failed to defend it when others began using it over subsequent decades.
In the end, the court essentially ruled that there was evidence that the face had an evolutionary lineage dating back prior to Stuff's "The Eternal Optimist," and that by this late date it had passed into the public domain. And thus, Helen Pratt Stuff's previous court victories were overturned and that silly face of "The Eternal Optimist" would henceforth belong to all mankind.Electronic cigarettes (ecigs) were invented in 2004 in China and emerged in 2006 in the USA and Europe. Ecigs were initially manufactured mostly in China, but they are now also produced in other Asian countries, the USA and Europe. Tobacco companies entered this competitive market only recently, initially by purchasing existing brands (e.g., Blu, Green Smoke, Nicolite, E-Lite). In terms of public health, the production, use, and promotion of ecigs are the subject of heated controversies.
Cigarettes kill 6 million people each year globally (WHO 2104). Preventing tobacco smoking is therefore at the top of the public and global health agendas, and has led to an international treaty under the auspices of WHO, the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (Shibuya et al. 2003). Governments have implemented several interventions aimed at reducing smoking, including tax increases, smoking bans in public and working areas, and media campaigns. Major successes have been reported in many, but not all countries, allowing smoking prevalence to drop dramatically from, e.g., 80 % in males in the UK in the 1950s to 22 % nowadays (ASH 2014). However, all these “classical” interventions are currently facing their limits, since smoking prevalence is stalling in many countries, and is increasing in many Asian countries, in particular among women. Sweden ranks first in OECD countries with regards to its low prevalence of smoking in males. It represents an interesting model, since its male population has been using for decades smokeless tobacco products named snus. Swedish males exhibit the lowest rates of lung cancer and oral cancer mortality, two sites of cancers with high attributable fractions to tobacco smoking. There is a high proportion of snus users in Swedish males (26 %), and Sweden maintains a high level of tobacco use in its male population when the 19 % of smokers are included (Norberg et al. 2011). However, snus allows for a relatively low smoking prevalence, and high health benefits. The high level of consumption of smokeless tobacco in Sweden is explained by cultural habits, tradition and a strong marketing, rather than by public health efforts.
Snus is prohibited in the EU, except in Sweden, although it is a harm reduction strategy which could be sensibly considered. Snus represents a natural experiment in Sweden which tends to demonstrate that smoke kills, not nicotine, and that smokeless tobacco is much less dangerous than cigarettes. We may reasonably assume that a switch from smoking to smokeless alternatives and to ecigs and other nicotine vaporizers can be a useful harm reduction approach, in addition to the existing successful strategies implemented to fight smoking tobacco.
Those who oppose ecigs see them as a strategy from the tobacco industry to keep or even enroll new segments of the population into nicotine addiction, and they also underline the lack of evidence regarding the long-term safety of these new devices. Although the latter argument can be appropriate for drugs, it does not seem to be relevant regarding alternatives to cigarettes when used by smokers, because no other product than cigarettes kills half of its users. The relative risk for lung cancer exceeds 20 in daily smokers compared with non-smokers. The high prevalence of such a risky behavior explains why lung cancer kills more people than any other cancer. After one decade of rapid raise of ecigs and a growing number of published studies, there is still very little evidence of any risks associated with their usage (Hajek et al. 2014), suggesting that if any risk of ecigs is ever discovered, it should not be as frequent as lung cancer, nor with such strength of association. Even the strongest opponents to ecigs do not foresee that the risk of consumption of smokeless tobacco or ecigs, when used by smokers, may be comparable to the risk of cigarettes. The problem would therefore be the risk of ecigs use by young non-smokers, if it lead them to nicotine addiction and to subsequent smoking. Although theoretically possible, this risk has not yet been supported by any study (Hajek et al. 2014). In a publication that received much media coverage (Corey et al. 2013), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pretended that ecigs use by adolescents led to smoking, but in fact, this study was based on cross-sectional data that cannot be used to derive causal inferences. In addition, there is no evidence of such an issue with snus in Sweden, or with nicotine medications, which have been available without prescription for years. It seems that tobacco is needed to initiate nicotine addiction.
Another background element which may explain why many public health scientists and tobaccologists are opposed to ecigs has an historical origin. When the tobacco industry launched “light cigarettes”, many doctors and scientists advocated them as less harmful than regular cigarettes, when in fact they are as or even more dangerous. Cynically, the tobacco industry was well aware from the beginning of the absence of harm reduction from light cigarettes. It is noteworthy that the tobacco industry was not at the origin of the production of ecigs. They stepped in this market in 2012 only, when Lorillard purchased Blu ecigs. Today, the tobacco industry intends to lead this market and, using its influence on regulators, to eliminate competitors. Some analysts even foresee important losses for this industry if they keep selling cigarettes only, a reason why this industry is now investing massively in ecigs and in other new products (e.g., heated tobacco products). Several countries recently implemented regulations aimed at controlling ecigs use and at improving their quality. However, these regulations may have the undesired effect of fostering large companies, particularly tobacco and pharmaceutical companies, instead of small manufacturers, because only large companies can survive in a strictly regulated environment. This would stifle innovation and competition, and give the tobacco industry a leading position in this new market.
Finally, let’s underline the role of citizens and activist groups. Their influence was critical when the European Parliament gave up regulating ecigs as medicines in 2013. It reminds us of the role activists played in the early times of AIDS, when the medical and scientific communities were not yet mobilized against this emerging pandemic, the pharmaceutical industry was not yet committed to looking for drugs, and politicians were under the influence of various lobbies, in particular conservative and religious groups. Ecigs activists are defending their right to use alternatives to cigarettes and do not intend to let other people, including public health experts, dictate their lifestyle. They know that they are escaping from the fatal threat of smoking through much less harmful alternatives, and some of them are willing to fight hard to make their “vaping” products accessible. Implementing effective and acceptable policies implies to better understand the role of non-governmental organizations and activists, and to involve them in the elaboration of these policies, as suggested by the WHO Ottawa Charter almost 30 years ago (Hancock 2013).
The consultation procedure for the new |
’t like to eat. Trying out new food in different countries is extremely exciting, however not always end up very well, too sweet, too sour, too spicy, too stinky. Anyway, food in Thailand, Bali, Singapore is incredible. I just love everything I get there. And it’s also very cheap, eating out is cheaper than cooking by yourself and it saves you time buying groceries, storing food, preparing it and cleaning up afterward. A simple meal in Bali, Thailand, Vietnam can cost you from $1 to $3 depending on the place.
Sate Ayam, chicken satay with rice in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. Sea food feast in Krabi, Thailand. Delicious vegan food in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Pad Thai in Koh Lanta, Thailand. Light breakfast in Penang, Malaysia. Kopi Luwak is a part-digested coffee cherries eaten and defecated by the Asian palm civet. It’s the most expensive coffee in the world. My cup of coffee in Bali, Indonesia. Street food in Bangkok, Thailand. Killer burger on my cheat day in Budapest, Hungary.
When traveling to cheaper countries in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, take advantage of eating out as it will conserve a lot of willpower that needs to be spent on cooking. In more expensive countries like most of the Europe, the United States or more developed countries in Asia like Singapore, Malaysia, Japan can be very expensive to eat out. If you have a tight budget, get some groceries at a local store and cook at home, if you want to try local food, make new friends and exchange dinners. On weekends or special occasions treat yourself with a dinner or lunch at a restaurant trying out local meals. Exercise Exercising for me personally is the best way to maintain a healthy happiness level and have a feeling of achievement at the end of the day. It improves the sleep quality, allows quick adjustment to the environment and clears my head. I’ve been regularly exercising for around 14 years now and hitting the gym or going for a run has been one of the daily activities while traveling around the world. Playing basketball at the Green School in Bali, Indonesia. Regular session at the gym in Singapore. You should exercise no matter what kind of lifestyle you have or where you live, it has enormous benefits for your body as well as mentioned psychological benefits. Simply find something you really enjoy, whether it’s running, swimming, yoga, martial arts, body weight exercises, anything works as long as you break a sweat. Your mind is the limit, what your mind believes your body can achieve, if you are totally exhausted and you command yourself to do 10 pushups it will be definitely hard but if you truly believe it, picture yourself doing it, eventually you’ll find the energy and willpower to do it. Finding a gym is quite hard and can get pretty expensive if you’re staying short-term. For that reason use Foursquare to find local gyms near you, even if it’s 2–3 km away from you, you have a chance to do a light warm-up and run to the place. Christmas day workout in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. To get better deals at local gyms, always negotiate, no matter where you go, always ask for a discount or a special offer. If that doesn’t work, google coupons for gyms in that area, or use deal websites like Groupon (I’ve got a 1-month membership at Gold’s Gym in Downtown Los Angeles for $19.99/month). Entertainment
The iconic Santa Monica beach in Los Angeles, California, USA. Partying at the Khaosan Road in Bangkok, Thailand. Dubai from the observation deck of the tallest building in the world, Burj Khalifa in Dubai, UAE. Batu Caves in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, USA. The Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles, California, USA. Tegalalang rice terrace near Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. Chilling on the Gili Air island in Indonesia.
Eating a huge spider at Khaosan Road in Bangkok, Thailand. Traveling is generally entertaining experience but you can make it even better by visiting local clubs, pubs, bars, concerts, exhibitions, sport games, cinemas, hiking spots, city tours, and other touristic stuff. Once again, do a quick research and find what people are talking about in a certain area. Personally, I prefer to immerse myself in fewer activities and get a deeper understanding of culture and people, rather than seeing everything on a surface level. I recommend checking guides on Nomad List, checking traveling communities like TripAdvisor, Lonely Planet, and Travelfish. Meeting up with people Traveling and just seeing places gets pretty boring after some time (I’ve been there, done that). Missing out on meeting new people and making friends is a complete failure of traveling in general. At the very beginning it is very scary because you are in a new place, you don’t know the language, history, traditions, but you will be surprised if you start a conversation with a stranger. I’ve made hundreds of friends throughout my travels and now coming back to one or another country I have someone I know to ask out for a coffee.
Meeting people all around the world, Ubud, New York, Ho Chi Minh City, Sanur.
If you are more introverted you will find it very difficult and alienating to make new connections. However, nowadays our technology is bridging the gap between you and incredible people you want to meet. I’ve been meeting people in the bars, cafes, co-working spaces, conferences, tech events and meetups. Some of the platforms I’ve been using lately: Startuptravels, Meetup, Couchsurfing, Startup Weekend, Twitter, Facebook groups. Travel inspiration When I heard the term “digital nomad” I didn’t really understand what it meant. However, following people like Pieter Levels, Jon Yongfook, Noel Tock and Jacob Laukaitis, I’ve started to develop a taste of how cool and challenging this lifestyle can be. If you truly want to change your lifestyle and find ways to redesign your life, make sure to find these indirect mentors that share everything and inspire you to move forward.
Digital nomad lifestyle brings you anywhere, “Too fast to sleep”, 24/7/365 open library and a coffee shop for example. Once you become a digital nomad, you can work from anywhere, including this resort in Alcoy, the Philippines.
Working from a restaurant in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. The SEA co-working space in Phuket, Thailand. Usual nomad’s workspace, a café in Chiang Mai, Thailand.This thing will, with time and care (though not likely as much as needed on a traditional whet stone) put a *wicked* edge on your knife/knives.
That said, here are a few pointers I've figured out while using my kit:
* If you're going to buy a base/stand along with it, spring the extra money and get the metal one. The plastic one is loud and not great. I have one, I never use it. I just hold the whole setup in my non-dominant hand.
* Use a finger (I use my left hand's index finger) to keep the guide rod in the same area of the guide slot throughout. I just make it so that the rod rests on top of my finger, between the 2nd and 3rd knuckles. This eliminates any extra 'wiggle' in the angle of the hones.
* I spend most of my time using the coarsest and finest hones, but I had a few knives that needed some serious edge work. This did the trick, though I imagine the diamond set might be a bit faster. I have the time, and don't mind committing it, to get great results out of this kit.
* Before transitioning to the next grade fineness of hone, make sure that you cannot see any scratches from the previous coarseness. So, if you're on the 2nd-coarsest (120 'grit'), before you stop using it and switch to the 280/medium, ensure that you can't see a single scratch left from the 70/extra coarse. Doing this, along with keeping your angles of attack as tight as possible, will ensure fantastic results.
*When mounting a blade into the holder, follow Lansky's guides. Should be about 5/8"/11 mm from the edge of the jaws to the blade. Also, and this is more important in my experience, make sure that you center the blade along it's cutting edge inside the jaws, or get it as close as you can. This ensures that the angle of attack from the hones remains as close to the same along the entire edge as possible.
* Along those same lines, longer blades seem to offer a bit of a challenge, especially around the tip, if it curves at all. I find that I will work my BK7 in sections about 4"/100 mm long, and do the tip last. Shorter blades aren't as finicky about this. But think about it this way. If the angle of the hone is at 20° right in front of the clamp (approx. 5/8" away), then when it's 4" away, working the tip, it's angle is going to be more shallow.
So, in conclusion, this system isn't perfect. It's got a character, and can be a little wonky. But, if you're willing to spend the time in prep, and pay attention while sharpening, you can get some fantastic results. The photos show results, and my techniques for proper setup and holding.
Of course, do what you want. This is just what I've found works for me. :DThe controversy over Palestinian Authority payments to convicted terrorists and their families is expected to be a top priority when President Trump meets with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas at the White House on Wednesday, Fox News is told.
“Stopping the payment of terrorist families is a priority for this administration and this president, and a necessary foundation for real peace,” a senior administration official said. “We expect the president will make this point in the meeting.”
The role of the payments, which has gained prominence in recent days, has outraged lawmakers who have pointed to the case of American terrorism victim Taylor Force as a prime example of what they charge is the Palestinian Authority’s support for terror attacks against civilians. They claim some of the funds doled out by the P.A. come from American taxpayers.
Force was a West Point graduate who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, and was pursuing his MBA at Vanderbilt last year. Until, as his mother Robbi recalled, "Taylor was stabbed to death while he was in Israel by a Palestinian.”
BILL WOULD PRESSURE PALESTINIAN GOV'T TO CUT OFF TERROR-TIED PAYMENTS
Taylor, who was 28, was walking along the Mediterranean boardwalk promenade with friends in Tel Aviv, when he was savagely knifed to death on March 8, 2016.
His killer was identified as a Palestinian terrorist, 22-year-old Bashar Masalha, who authorities say went on a stabbing spree that also severely wounded 10 others before he was shot dead by Israeli police.
"All dads and all moms are proud of their kids. Taylor basically did everything right, but he was humble about it," said his father, Stuart.
Taylor's parents say their grief was compounded by the fact that the family of their son's murderer is making money off his death. The Palestinian Authority spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year paying jihadists and their survivors who were involved in acts of terrorism.
“It rewards attacks,” said former Ambassador Dennis Ross, who spent decades trying to forge Middle East peace as a top official in three administrations. “It offers a payoff for that, in other words it elevates it and makes it something to be admired.”
A congressional bill named for Taylor, the Taylor Force Act, would cut off the U.S. aid unless the Palestinian Authority stops the payments.
Ross spoke to reporters at a briefing held by the Washington, D.C.-based The Israel Project, which focuses on Middle East issues. Ross urged Trump to support the Taylor Force Act and to tell Abbas directly that the payments need to end.
“If the president would approach it in terms of saying, ‘look I understand it is not easy for you to do but I’m looking for each sides to take hard steps as proof that they are really ready to move towards finalizing and ending this conflict, I am prepared to stay invested if you are prepared to take a hard step’,” Ross said.
He said Trump should also tell Abbas, “What we can’t talk about, is you not doing it.”
South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, the leading sponsor of the Senate legislation, asked at a news conference last week: "Can you imagine growing up in a country where your government will pay you for killing someone else through a terrorist act?"
"If you die as a terrorist, as a'martyr,' your family will get an annual stipend greater than the average Palestinian earns. In this case, the terrorist who killed Taylor Force... was hailed as a hero, was basically given a state funeral, and his family was given money by the state," Graham said.
The House bill is sponsored by Colorado Republican Rep. Doug Lamborn and New York Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin.
"Taylor Force is an American hero," Zeldin said. "It’s about letting the Force family know that we stand with him and they stand with their son.... The United States Congress and President Trump will do the right thing."
Graham predicts that if the bill reaches Trump’s desk, he will sign it.
The U.S. government gives the Palestinian Authority more than $300 million a year. According to the P.A.’s online budget, it shells out that same amount to the families, or about 7 percent of its total budget.
Palestinian Authority Ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour said the government is “against killing innocent civilians from any side." But when Fox News pressed him to comment on Force’s case, Mansour was dismissive and would not address it.
"You cannot cherry-pick one case here or one case there. There are a large number of Palestinians who are receiving compensation, they are victims of Israeli terrorism or killed by Israeli soldiers."
Official Palestinian news agency WAFA also reported that a Palestinian official assured Tuesday that allowances for families of those killed by Israel would not be touched.
Taylor's parents say the payments to Masalha’s family were an additional shock after learning of their son's fate. His father was golfing when he suddenly received the phone call that no parent ever wants.
"I was actually out on the golf course, getting some practice putts and my cell phone rang. I recognized the area code, from Nashville, where Vanderbilt is and I figured it was my son calling from Israel, and he is borrowing somebody's phone. I said, 'Hello?'... [they said] 'this is the Chaplin at Vanderbilt University, I am on a speaker phone in a room with the Dean of Students and the Provost,' and I said to myself that this is not going to be a very good phone call.
"She proceeded to tell me that Taylor had been in a group of six students that had been walking to dinner, and that they had been attacked by someone who they believed was a terrorist, and he was stabbed, and he was transported to the hospital by ambulance but he didn't make it.”
Mrs. Force recalled, "I said they had the wrong person, it's not Taylor."
Since that harrowing moment, the Forces and Taylor's sister, Kristen, have embarked on a deeply meaningful mission in his memory -- trying to ensure that the incentives to commit terrorism are removed. An important step, they say, is for Congress to pass the Taylor Force Act.
"Our main mission is to spread the word about the legislation," Force said.
Ben Evansky contributed to this report.
Follow Eric Shawn on Twitter: @EricShawnTVThe closer we get to the 2016 NFL Draft, the less often you seem to hear Ole Miss wide receiver Laquon Treadwell mentioned as a possibility for the New York Giants with the No. 10 overall pick. In fact, no mock draft in our database since April 31 has Treadwell going to the Giants.
Well, Draft Insider Tony Pauline thinks that analysts may want to take another look at the assumption that the Giants have moved on from Treadwell:
Several teams are not buying into the "Laquon Treadwell is dropping down boards and now ranks as the No. 2 receiver in the draft" narrative that's been in the media recently. It's an opinion I agree with. They point to the fact no one ever believed Treadwell was a vertical receiver rather a game-controlling wideout, and he should be lethal on third down and in the red zone. It's another opinion I agree with. I've been told the New York Giants continue to show strong interest in Treadwell, and he is in the conversation for the 10th pick.
It is, of course, smokescreen time around the NFL. Pauline, one of the most veteran, well-respect draft insiders, knows that. You need to understand it, too. Take everything, from the idea that the Giants will select a defensive player no matter what at No. 10, to the idea that the pick could be Treadwell or Notre Dame offensive tackle Ronnie Stanley, with a grain of salt.
More: Laquon Treadwell prospect profile
Honestly, I have no idea right now if Treadwell to the Giants is a real possibility or a smokescreen. Based on his skill set, though, the idea does have merit.T-Mobile is just beginning to stretch its legs with its new rural 600MHz network in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Scarborough, Maine, the carrier's CTO Neville Ray told us today. The company plans to cover much more of the country with long-distance, building-penetrating LTE waves this year, and it's using the new network to set the stage for its 5G plans.
This year, T-Mobile plans to launch 600MHz LTE in Wyoming, Northeast and Southwest Oregon, West Texas, Southwest Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle, Western North Dakota, additional areas of Maine, Coastal North Carolina, Central Pennsylvania, Central Virginia, and Eastern Washington, the company said. That's a mix of places T-Mobile currently has coverage and places it does not.
According to Ray, Cheyenne and Scarborough were picked essentially as test markets. T-Mobile has coverage there already, but that coverage could be improved.
"We wanted to get our Nokia radio and our Ericsson radio into market testing, so we could get the network up, get the phones in, and get the phones finally tested," he said. The LG V30 will be the first 600MHz phone available later this fall, and it'll be joined by a Samsung phone that hasn't been named yet.
"We're going to look to push every phone we have to support this banding" in the future, Ray said.
Past those cities, "in some of the early areas we're leveraging existing cell sites where we may have coverage but don't have low-band," Ray said. "You're going to see us leveraging existing facilities and capabilities out of the gate, and then the next phase is pushing coverage into areas where we didn't have low-band."
The network won't be slow, either. Ray said T-Mobile has 40MHz of spectrum in many rural markets now, which can give theoretical download speeds of 150Mbps (and, in our experience, consistent downloads of 20-30Mbps.)
T-Mobile's nationwide 600MHz network, which it won at auction earlier this year, finally puts the carrier on theoretical par with AT&T and Verizon when it comes to coverage. Building the nationwide network will be much easier than it used to be, Ray said, because T-Mobile doesn't intend to put up a lot of new cell sites; instead, it can often piggyback on AT&T, Verizon, or utility company infrastructure.
While T-Mobile is moving at blinding speed with 600MHz, there's a brake on the rollout because in some parts of the country, T-Mobile will have to wait for TV stations still occupying the spectrum to move. That could take up to three more years, but the carrier is helping where it can—like paying low-power PBS repeater stations to buy new equipment to change their frequencies, Ray said.
In the short term, roaming will also come into play as T-Mobile aims to cover 321 million Americans by the end of the year. A promised deal with U.S. Cellular, which has strong networks in places like Maine and Iowa where T-Mobile is weak, is waiting on U.S. Cellular to fully support voice-over-LTE, Ray said.
"They're a CDMA network, so we want to make sure there's a voice path available for our customers," he said.
The 600MHz network has one extra twist, too: Ray explained that the new equipment can be software-upgraded to 5G, when the mobile 5G standard is finally set. (T-Mobile is aiming at 2020 for its 5G rollout.) While low-band 5G won't bring the multi-gigabit speeds that have been promised with shorter-range, millimeter-wave 5G, it will enable new business uses like networks of agricultural and pipeline sensors that can be very useful in rural industries.
"A sensor network which has got a battery that lives for five, eight, 10 years out there, that's impossible for LTE," Ray said. We'll test T-Mobile's 600MHz when we can get a phone for it.Each week in this report, I’ll be monitoring the performances of MLB rookies. I will emphasize those rookies who put up especially positive performances, while also taking care to mention rookies who are underperforming expectations. In both cases, I will dig into the underlying stats and attempt the difficult task of projecting forward.
Rookies are typically more unpredictable than their more experienced colleagues, and can, therefore, be a source of great profit in fantasy baseball; or great frustration. Stay tuned to this space every week to find out which newbies should be in the mix for your squad. So far I have avoided repeating any players, so check out last week’s Rookie Report to keep up to date on all the hottest youngsters. As I have begun to exhaust all the interesting rookies, starting this week, I will be revisiting some of the more impactful performers.
All stats are current prior to Tuesday’s games, and, as noted last week, any quoted Statcast numbers are directly from Baseball Savant.
Import your team to My Playbook for custom advice all season >>
Swimming
Cody Bellinger (1B/OF – LAD)
Following the placement of Joc Pederson on the 10-day DL, top prospect Cody Bellinger was called-up from Triple-A to make his MLB debut. In seven games Bellinger has given the league a glimpse of his future upside, slashing.320/.393/.600 with two homers, a 96.5 mph average exit velocity on line drives and fly balls, and a fine 10.2% Barrels/PA rate. Strong walk rates have been a staple of Bellinger’s minor league career, while his strikeout rate has bounced between 16% and 28%. Average was never expected to be Bellinger’s carrying tool, but as usual, if he can control his strikeout rate in the majors, he may be able to maintain a decent average while clobbering homers. In the short term, Bellinger appears destined to be optioned back to Triple-A when Pederson returns at the end of this week. Given Adrian Gonzalez’s age, Yasiel Puig’s injury history, and the Dodgers’ comfort with Enrique Hernandez and Scott Van Slyke in complementary roles, owners who grabbed Cody should try to hold him. As long as the expectation for his batting average is not much higher than.250, Cody Bellinger could easily be valuable contributing 20 HR in a half-season.
Guillermo Heredia (OF – SEA)
I invoked Heredia’s name in last week’s Report when discussing Taylor Motter’s playing time prospects. With the return of Jean Segura from the DL, it now appears that Heredia is seeing near-everyday playing time in left field. He also has two appearances in center. A relative unknown out of Cuba in 2016, the 26-year-old Heredia moved quickly through the minor leagues, displaying excellent contact ability, but limited power and speed at every level. So far in the majors between 2016 and 2017, Heredia has posted an excellent 87.3% contact rate with 9.4% BB% and 12.6% K%. Contact and average are about the extent of Heredia’s expected production going forward; his three HR and one SB in 159 plate appearances so far are not particularly exciting. Heredia seems to be a high-variance fantasy commodity. Odds are that his low-power, high-contact, defense-first skill set does not distinguish him much in Seattle’s outfield when Mitch Haniger returns and he finds himself on the bench, but there is also a non-zero chance that Heredia has been overlooked as an older prospect from Cuba and develops quickly into a solid everyday player. This makes him in interesting play in deeper leagues, where his contact ability will limit his downside while owners wait and see.
Jose Leclerc (RP – TEX)
The fireballing righty reliever debuted last year, and continued a trend of poor walk rates from the minor leagues. In 15 innings, he pitched to a 1.80 ERA despite a 1.60 WHIP. So far this year, Leclerc has seemingly found his control and has amped up his SwStk% to an eye-popping 23%, all of which has resulted in a 14.4 K/9 and 0.90 BB/9 and a 0.90 ERA. He currently leads all rookie pitchers in FanGraphs WAR. Mysterious unavailability on Monday aside, Leclerc is in the middle of an unsettled Rangers bullpen that has already spit out Sam Dyson, last year’s usurping closer. For the moment, Matt Bush has control of the ninth inning, and Jeremy Jeffress is the consensus setup man. Beyond that, Keone Kela and Tony Barnette are also in the mix for high-leverage situations, so Leclerc does not have a clear path to a late-inning setup role, let alone a shot to close. Also of concern is that his Zone% (rate of pitches thrown in the strike zone) is largely unchanged from last year at 44.2%. On the positive side, his first strike rate is up to 70.3% from 57.6% last year, and he is generating more swings and less contact out of the zone as well as less contact on swings in the zone. Those in holds leagues should give Leclerc a look, keeping a close eye on his walk rate and his usage by the Rangers.
Sinking
Christian Arroyo (3B/SS – SF)
Considered one of the Giants’ top prospects coming into the season, Arroyo had a down year at Double-A Richmond 2016 with only three HR and a.274 average, but is still considered by some prospect analysts to have a well above average hit tool. His spot in the majors was opened by the injury to Brandon Crawford, but he has been playing primarily at third, also making three appearances at shortstop. With Crawford expected back this weekend, Arroyo’s playing time is questionable going forward, depending on how indispensable the organization views Eduardo Nunez. At the plate, Arroyo has surprisingly launched two home runs, albeit with a.250 AVG. His 27.3% K% is surprisingly high, but in only 33 plate appearances, his solid 83.6% contact rate is more trustworthy. Still, without a carrying power or speed tool and playing time questions, Arroyo is best left on the waiver wire in all but the deepest leagues.
Jharel Cotton (SP – OAK)
When last we visited Cotton in the first Rookie Report, he had put together two starts with mixed results, but nothing seemed alarming enough to move me from my optimistic preseason position. Since, Cotton has not righted the ship, giving up five, two, and six (three earned) runs. His 6.33 K/9 and 4.00 BB/9 are both poor, and his SwStk% has plummeted to 8.4% from 12.5% last year. Looking deeper, it seems batters are swinging less frequently on his pitches out of the zone are making contact more often when they do. A quick look at Brooks Baseball does not reveal much difference in Cotton’s pitch movement, so it may be that batters have simply made an adjustment to him given a larger major league sample from which to draw. Cotton’s status as an undersized fringe prospect would not ordinarily afford him much margin for error. Oakland lacks a lot of high-end pitching talent, and with Sean Manaea and Daniel Mengden on the DL, Cotton is not likely in jeopardy of losing his rotation spot. In mixed redraft leagues, Cotton can likely be dropped, but there is still enough track record to hang on in keeper leagues. For sure, he deserves to be on fantasy benches until he shows that he can successfully adjust back to the league.
Hunter Renfroe and Manuel Margot (OF – SD)
Also in the first Rookie Report, I preached some degree of cautious optimism on both Renfroe and Margot, Margot especially impressing with his early power output. Margot has stayed pegged at three HR, while Renfroe has hit three more homers, but seen his average drift down to.210. As expected, neither is walking much, but Renfroe is striking out at a somewhat concerning 26.9% clip. After being caught stealing three times in a row, Margot has contributed three successful swipes in the last week. For a pair of prospects this free-swinging, there are likely to be many highs and lows as the season progresses. Near 20 homers for Renfroe and near 20 steals for Margot still seem reasonable, neither with a particularly helpful batting average. If that was good enough for fantasy owners pre-season, it should still be good enough now.
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Andrew Dominijanni is a correspondent at FantasyPros. For more from Andrew, check out his archive and follow him @ADominijanni.OSEN via Naver1. [+5,414, -343] Before we check that woman's gynecology records, let's get her psychology records checked first...2. [+4,250, -226] The only proof of her pregnancy and miscarriage last year is a record that says she missed her period for 4 weeks... and she got 1.6 billion won out of that.3. [+1,971, -87] Aigoo....4. [+951, -64] They've already lost the right to be parents... what kind of a mom uses her own child as a weapon to get money out of the father?5. [+797, -33] Now all that's left to find is whether Kim Hyun Joong is the father. What a historical makjang scandal.Ilgan Sports via Naver1. [+2,891, -146] This baby is being subject to a gene test as soon as he sees the light of the world... they seriously have no right to be parents.2. [+2,227, -70] The minute that child's born, he won't receive the blessing of his parents but will have to be subject to a gene test. What a sad reality...3. [+1,737, -105] The fate of the child is so sad... the minute he's born, he'll see that his mother is greedily using him to rip money off of his father who's a rib cage puncher... on top of that, he has take a gene test too.4. [+1,356, -75] I really am curious who the father is though5. [+223, -40] I don't even think a gene test is necessary right now, the child is obviously his. The woman knows very well who the father is, why would she go through with the pregnancy if it isn't Kim Hyun Joong's kid?CHICOPEE - State police unveiled a new tracking system Monday designed to quickly locate those with cognitive issues who are prone to wander - say for example, an autistic child or an adult with dementia.
The SafetyNet system by Lo-Jack provides subscribers with a special bracelet that specially-trained troopers can rapidly hone in on with special equipment.
The system can even be used on state police helicopters. “You can now come out to a very remote area and cover a large amount of area very quickly,” Lt. Col. Timothy Alben, of East Longmeadow, recently sworn in as superintendent of the Massachusetts State Police.
State police demonstrated the unit at Chicopee State Park. A state trooper, outfitted with the bracelet, took off into the woods and a second trooper, Adam J. Leonczyk, tracked him down within a short time.
“It can find a person with pin-point accuracy and hopefully find them before they get into a life-threatening situation,” said Lt. Robert Leverone, commander of the state police Special Emergency Response Team which has trained on the equipment.
The system, which the state police have been using for eight or nine months now, has already logged in some notable successes - including last May when it tracked down an elderly Marshfield man suffering from cognitive issues in about 30 minutes.
“What originally sometimes took days can now take place in far less time,” said Leverone, adding that the system, along with the potential to save lives, saves money and resources as well.
“It gives parents peace of mind,” said Susan Loring, director of the Autism Resource Center of Central Massachusetts. “It gives kids a measure of safety if they wander.”
The training and the equipment for the SafetyNet system are provided to state police at no charge, said Scott Martin, director of the Law Enforcement SafetyNet Division for LoJack.
Although the system, which includes a special antenna and hand-held device carried by the searcher, looks hi-tech, the basic radio technology behind it has been around since World War ll, Martin said.
Subscribers pay a $99 start-up fee and $30 a month for the service. Funding sources, for those who can’t afford the service, are available through a number of programs and organizations, including the Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation for Autism Martin said.
For more information on the system, go to LoJackSafetyNet.com or call 1-877-434-6384.For those times when you're not near a Wi-Fi network, being able to tether to your phone's data connection can be very useful indeed - provided your phone's OS, your data plan, and your network provider are all set up to provide tethering of course.
The latest Canary (developer) build of Chrome OS has added an "instant tethering" option that makes it easier to get online this way: once you've enabled the feature on the flags page (look for "enable-tether"), it appears as an option on the main settings page.
It's the same feature we saw come to selected Android devices earlier this year, and it works the same way - if you have a Chromebook and a phone signed into the same Google account, the Chromebook automatically picks up on the phone's data connection when Wi-Fi isn't available. You don't even need to take the phone out of your pocket.
Under the tether
Another added bonus of instant tethering is that the Wi-Fi hotspot being run from your phone automatically starts up and shuts down as needed, so it's not running all the time and wasting battery life while your Chromebook is switched off.
While it might not change your tethering life, it should make for a more seamless browsing experience when you're using your Chromebook away from home. Note though that the feature can only be used with a Pixel or Nexus device running Android Nougat, which will also need to have instant tethering enabled (under Google in Settings).
If you don't want to play around with the Canary build of Chrome OS then you'll have to wait for it to trickle down to the regular version of the operating system, which shouldn't take too long.
In the market for a Chromebook? Here are our picks of the yearOn Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” RNC Chairman and Trump Chief of Staff-in-waiting Reince Priebus, when asked about the Trump administration’s possible plans for a registry of Muslims, said that he wasn’t “going to rule out anything” but did say, “We’re not going to have a registry based on a religion.” The latter statement would be more reassuring if it weren’t for one remarkable fact: some of Trump’s top advisers and biggest supporters believe that Islam is not actually a religion.
Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael Flynn said last summer that Islam is a “political ideology” that hides behind the “notion” that it is a religion. “Islam is a political ideology,” he said during a speech to the anti-Muslim group ACT for America, on whose board he sits, during the summer. “It is a political ideology. It definitely hides behind this notion of it being a religion.” He also said Islam is “like a malignant cancer.”
Flynn’s comments sound a lot like televangelist Pat Robertson, who said last year that people should not view Islam as a religion but rather as a “political system masquerading as a religion.” In fact, this idea that Islam is not a religion is widely shared among Trump’s Religious Right backers. Last December, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins wrote that banning Muslims from immigrating to the U.S. would not be imposing an unconstitutional religious test because “only 16 percent of Islam is a religion”:
What most people either don’t realize or willfully ignore is that only 16 percent of Islam is a religion—the rest is a combination of military, judicial, economic, and political system. Christianity, by comparison, isn’t a judicial or economic code—but a faith. So to suggest that we would be imposing some sort of religious test on Muslims is inaccurate. Sharia is not a religion in the context of the First Amendment.
Of course, as we have noted before, this is a remarkable argument coming from the same people who believe that their interpretation of the Bible should be the foundation for policies on taxation and minimum wage laws, not to mention marriage and abortion. But Perkins and Flynn have plenty of company.
Perkins’ FRC colleague, retired Lt. Gen Jerry Boykin, has called Islam “a totalitarian way of life” that “should not be protected under the First Amendment.” Similar arguments were made by opponents of a mosque and community center in Tennessee. Bryan Fischer, then a top official with the American Family Association, called in 2010 for a ban on Muslim immigration and the “repatriation” of Muslims who have already immigrated. Fischer has also demanded an end to construction of mosques in America.
Flynn has also promoted a right-wing conspiracy theory that Sharia law is |
and even though I have early recordings, my style and competence has changed also, so it can only ever be subjective. All I can say is that it sounds as warm, rich and accurate as it ever did!As with most high end products, the K1 went through a period of being cossetted by me on account of it's price, but it was just too good to leave in a case and it gets played daily. I have gigged with it acoustically many times, recorded it and it is the usual uke I take to weekly band jams. It's just so playable and tactile to hold.All of that playing has taken it's toll though, and one thing that does not seem to be the greatest on the Kanile'a is that hand rubbed finish. It doesn't stand up to dings or scratches from strumming all that well and pretty soon I started to develop quite an amount of wear on the top where I strum. That really doesn't bother me, as I prefer a uke to look 'played', but it's something to be aware of. The finish generally can also go quite dull and dry looking after a while, but I try to keep it spruced up with a very light application of Axe lube which gives it a nice sheen. The way to avoid that on a Kanile'a is to get their highly acclaimed gloss finish on the same model, but I just don't really go in for gloss all that much. In fact one of the reasons I bought this was the simple understated looks.To assist with gigging I also fitted a strap button which was pretty painless and on the first photograph you will see that I didn't go down the route of adding a button to the heel of the neck, and attach my strap to a Martin strap adapter looped on to the headstock. That's not to say it's difficult to hold without a strap - it isn't, but on extended gigs it's just easier to have your hands free between songs to grab a beer!All other fittings on the uke are doing just great, and those open Grover tuners are just sublime. This thing holds it's tuning like no other ukulele I own. It needed no nut or saddle adjustment and intonation and tuning have been bang on since it arrived suggesting nothing in the build is (yet) starting to move.I still love the look of the bridge pins which really set this apart from many ukuleles, but the downside of overly fiddly string changes remains - just an extra layer of faffing that I don't really like. Oh well.So do I still recommend it? Well, as I say, it gets played daily and I would need to be facing a catastrophe to consider selling it. It probably just about sits as being my favourite instrument. If you get the opportunity to obtain one, don't hesitate.Web Performance in a Nutshell: HTTP/2, CDNs and Browser Caching Erik Witt Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 24, 2017 Successful websites need to be fast, scalable and secure. In this article we survey the state of the art of high-performance websites, in particular SSL encryption, HTTP/2, CDNs and browser caching. We’ll cover the major performance optimizations and show how we did it in our setup. Building a static website today is easier than ever. There are so many great things you can use to build a stunning landing page, blog or whatever you want. With static site generators like Jekyll, Hugo, Octopress or Hexo you can even take this to the next level and build your site hassling much less with HTML, CSS or JavaScript. Github pages, for example, are rendered with Jekyll. So almost anyone can build a great website today. There is one last step before becoming rich and famous, though: You need to host the site somewhere on the internet to make it accessible to everyone. That’s going to be just as easy, right? Well, not exactly. Example of a static website hosted in central Europe and loaded from the US. Putting the site on a server and setting up a domain for it is simply not enough these days. For a great website to be successful, it needs to excel in three things: speed, scalability and security. State-of-the-Art Hosting Especially with static sites, these requirements are not all that hard to achieve — in theory. But let’s take a look at what needs to be done in practice. HTTPS (SSL/TLS Encryption) I know what you are thinking: Do I really need SSL for my website? The simple answer is: You do! HTTPS does not only protect sensitive information like passwords, payment data or simply the user’s identity, but also provides authentication to make users confident they are surfing the legit website. HTTPS further ensures integrity, meaning no one can alter your content by, say, injecting ads without your permission. SSL simply builds trust. Browsers acknowledge that by highlighting secure websites or, in case of Google Chrome, labeling non-HTTPS websites as Not Secure. Also, with all current browsers, HTTPS is mandatory for HTTP/2– and you really want that for speed, but more on that later. Furthmore, Google boosts your SEO rank, if your site uses HTTPS. Browsers highlight secure websites which builds trust. Regarding the setup, things have become much easier with the Let’s Encrypt project. They generate certificates for free and there is tooling to fully automate domain authorization and certificate signing. But even with Let’s Encrypt, you still need to figure out how to install certificates on your server (or CDN), make sure the certificates are renewed on time (expiring every 3 month) and probably enforce their usage by configuring HSTS headers to prevent protocol downgrade attacks. But HTTPS is not only notoriously hard to set up from scratch, it also effects website performance if you don’t take precautions: Encryption is always hard on the CPU and TLS encryption will certainly add some overhead to your server-side processing. Keep that in mind for server capacity planning. An autoscaling server infrastructure that monitors throughput, deals with load spikes and ensures availability will be discussed below. The initial TLS handshake adds 2 additional roundtrips to the TCP handshake, which itself already needs 2, resulting in a 4 roundtrip handshake. Depending on the distance between client and server this can amount to more than a second only to set up the first connection. To speed up the handshake, you need to make sure that your server supports TCP Fast Open as well as TLS False Start and Session Resumption. These will halve the time of your handshake. There are even more considerations (e.g. dynamic packet sizing), of which Ilya Grigorik from the Google web performance team gives a great round-up. The most important optimization, though, is to use HTTP/2 with all its benefits. Getting rid of domain sharding and using a single HTTP/2 connection instead can already save you expensive connection setups. In essence, HTTPS is required for customer trust and security, but even with state-of-the-art tooling it impedes fast loading times and thus can diminish customer satisfaction. Also, the complexity of setting things up smoothly keeps many website providers from using HTTPS in the first place. HTTP/2 If you have HTTPS, you definitely want HTTP/2 (also called h2). The second major protocol version of HTTP has lots of optimizations and features that fix common HTTP/1.1 problems. It comes with server push to transfer multiple resources for a single request, header compression to drive down request and response sizes and also request pipelining and multiplexing to send arbitrary parallel requests over a single TCP connection. With server push, you can for example push the CSS and JS right after shipping your HTML without waiting for the actual request. Multiplexing and pipelining make a huge difference, in particular for websites with many assets such as images or videos. Take a look at this live comparison as well as the following example:
An example showing the impact of pipelining and multiplexing in HTTP/2.
You can see how HTTP/1.1 is limited to 6 concurrent connections, each of which can only load a single resource at a time. With HTTP/2 in contrast, all resources are fetched in parallel. But even HTTP/2 cannot trick physics and thus page load times are ultimately driven by the latency of each individual request. The only way to decrease that latency is to bring data closer to your clients. This brings us to the topic of caching. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) In a nutshell, CDNs are globally distributed cache infrastructures that store mostly static data in various locations. If a user accesses a CDN-backed website, she connects to the nearest edge location via Geo-DNS or IP Anycast and gets all cached resources from there. Using this nearby copy of the data highly decreases request latency and therefore page load time. How CDNs decrease the distance between data and clients globally. The CDN has to fetch all uncached (or even uncachable) resources from the application server. One advantage of proxying all requests through the CDN is a faster connection setup for clients. Because the CDN terminates HTTPS connections, a client only performs a fast TLS handshake with the nearby CDN edge server. The connection from the CDN to the server again is HTTPS and should be configured as a persistent connection to save expensive handshakes.
The CDN terminates SSL for fast handshakes and should use persistent backend connections.
Even though CDN edge servers are generally nearby, even a few tens of milliseconds per request can add up to a considerable delay. So let’s take a look at caching on the next level of the web stack. Browser Caching The fastest request is the one you don’t make. Browser caching is extremely efficient, especially for repeated page views and navigating through a website. Every request for a cached resource returns instantly and thus does not use a connection nor any bandwidth. The browser cache is an expiration-based cache that operates based on cache-control headers. Every cacheable object needs a time-to-live (TTL) set by the server via the max-age header. This value represents the time the cached entry is considered up-to-date. When the resource is requested after the TTL has expired, it has to be retrieved from the original server to make sure it is up-to-date. For versioned resources with ETag header or Last-Modified, bandwidth is saved by transmitting a Status 304 message (Not Modified) instead of the actual resource whenever the version hasn’t changed. The browser cache is great for storing assets like CSS, JavaScript, fonts, icons and even images, because they are slow to retrieve over the network and usually do not change often, if at all. Problems arise, however, when those assets change before their TTL expires, because then the cache returns stale resource versions. In order to cache these mutable assets, too, we have to use asset hashing. That means, a hash of the asset’s content is appended to its name and all references to it. If the asset changes, its name and references change as well and the resource can be cached safely. The good news is that build tools like webpack can already do asset hashing for you. In summary, it is essential to use the browser cache correctly and for as many resources as possible. Configuring cache-control headers on the server side as well as setting up asset hashing can be quite complex, but it is an absolute must for competitive website performance. Load-Balancing The obvious worst case for a website is an overload situation during which the server has to drop user requests or even completely breaks down. In order to cope with a high number of visitors or load spikes, we need our server infrastructure to scale horizontally. Scalable backend setup with load balancer distributing requests to stateless applications servers. The setup above shows a load balancer that uniformly distributes request over a number of stateless application servers. Statelessness is key here, because the load balancer does’t need to handle sticky sessions and the servers do not have to communicate with each other. Furthermore, it ensures fault tolerance, since failed servers are detected by the load balancer and removed from the routing protocol. Advanced load balancers can even use factors such as server capacity and response time to choose a server. Stateless servers are also easy to scale dynamically depending on the load. To scale up, you simply start an additional server and register it at the load balancer. To scale down, the load balancer drains all active connections to the server before shutting it down. This dynamic scalability needs to be combined with server resource monitoring to implement autoscaling. Hosting Summary To wrap things up, a website can be made fast, scalable and secure by combining these technologies: HTTPS for security
HTTP/2 for performance and efficiency
CDN and browser caching for performance
Stateless servers, load balancing and autoscaling Admittedly, this is quite a lot to deal with, if all you want is to bring your content online. So why not have someone else take care of all the hassle? Our Setup With Baqend, we tried to make setting up state-of-the-art web hosting for a static site as easy as possible. We are a spin-off from database and web performance research and heavily focus on performance and scalability. There is a short blog post that will walk you through the process using an example website. High Performance Website Hosting with SSL and HTTP/2 Made Simple
Hosting successful websites leaves you with a lot to take care of, from SSL encryption over CDN and browser caching to…medium.baqend.com Clone Your Website If you want try out how your website could perform in this setup, execute the following commands in your console (with wget installed). The example clones this blogpost to speed up Medium but you can replace the url with your own website: > npm install -g baqend
> baqend register
(your credentials...)
> wget -E -H -k -p -nd -P www https://medium.baqend.com/hosting-lessons-learned-6010992eb257
> mv www/hosting-lessons-learned-6010992eb257.html www/index.html
> baqend deploy
> baqend open The commands will (1) install the Baqend CLI, (2) register a new account with your given credentials, (3) clone your website into your current directory, (4) rename the html to index.html, (5) deploy the website to your free Baqend app and (6) open the website with the app’s default url. If your website ins’t too complex, this will clone and deploy your main page. In our test we cloned this Medium post to https://clone-test.app.baqend.com/. It makes quite a performance difference:
Original load time vs load time of cloned website on Baqend (loaded from the US).
If your website is comparably simple you could actually use this as a very simple way to speed up your landingpage. Obviously, you can optimize the cloned websites even more. The wget command isn’t perfect in this respect, after all. So let’s check out how fast websites in this setup actually get in the next section. Performance Measurements & Comparison There are many great tools that let you analyze your website performance like WebPageTest, Google PageSpeed or GTmetrix. We like to use GTmetrix because of its extensive report features and good rendering performance. Running it from Vancouver, Canada (with our backend standing in Frankfurt, Germany), we get an inital load time of 300–400 ms for our example website everymillisecondcounts.eu (see GTmetrix report). A more comprehensive overview is given by this timing table:
Timing for everymillisecondcounts.eu measured with GTmetrix from Vancouver.ST. LOUIS — There are many Republicans who have been embarrassed by the revelation on Friday of a tape showing Donald Trump making explicit remarks about trying to sexually assault women, in the most vulgar language.
But the man who faces possibly the most humiliation from this situation, and who has been squeezed into the tightest corner, is Ted Cruz.
Cruz may have had the worst timing of anyone in the Republican party this year when it came to Trump, initially refusing to endorse him in a dramatic speech at the convention in July, then caving and endorsing him just weeks before the explosive meltdown that has caused a mounting number of Republican officials to bail on the nominee. What makes this even more awkward is the fact that Cruz endorsed Trump even despite the fact that Trump had made a sexist attack on Cruz’s wife Heidi’s appearance, which along with Trump’s attack on his father Cruz had cited as one of the reasons why he refused to endorse him at first — and now the full scale of Trump’s misogyny is even more impossible to ignore.
On Friday night, Cruz tweeted a condemnation of Trump’s remarks in the video, saying “These comments are disturbing and inappropriate, there is simply no excuse for them” and “Every wife, mother, daughter — every person — deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.
As of Saturday afternoon, those were his last words on the subject. But according to a person close to Cruz, he and his circle are discussing whether to rescind his endorsement of Trump.
Both options — stick with Trump or ditch him — present political risks for Cruz. If he rescinds the endorsement, he could lend credence to the stereotype of him as a calculating opportunist who shifts with the political winds. But if he sticks to his endorsement of Trump, that’s tantamount to an endorsement of the shocking things Trump said, which could be worse long-term and even short-term as the Republican party edges closer to completely abandoning its nominee.
“This is a no-brainer,” said one Republican strategist who spoke on condition of anonymity. “His best move was to not endorse. He endorsed, which put him in the worst possible position. Now he’s been given an out to rescind his endorsement for very justifiable reasons. This is a gift. It’s not going to get better than this.”
If Cruz had just held on a few weeks longer without endorsing, “He would have been in the catbird seat,” the strategist said.
Former Cruz communications director Rick Tyler urged Cruz to pull his endorsement of Trump publicly on Twitter, tweeting, “Of course. Now, an hour from now is too late” when asked about it by a reporter.
Cruz senior adviser Jason Johnson tweeted a photo of himself with his hand over his face when the Trump tape story broke on Friday, saying, “Just another Friday in #2016. Can't even watch the news with my kids.” Johnson also approvingly tweeted Sen. Mike Lee’s video urging Trump to step down, and retweeted former Cruz running mate Carly Fiorina’s statement urging the same.
As of Saturday afternoon, the situation in Cruz’s camp was still not resolved, with one aide telling BuzzFeed News “nothing to share right now” and “the statement stands.”One of the most popular grocery stores in the US will attempt to prove that its unsanctioned Canadian cousin has affected its commerce and trademark rights
To your average person, a 6oz bag of dried pineapple is a non-threatening treat. To the cherished grocery store chain Trader Joe’s, that and other products including black bean quinoa chips and dark chocolate-covered edamame are worth a five-year legal battle.
Meet Pirate Joe, the man who (legally) smuggles Trader Joe's goods into Canada Read more
The company claims a rebel Canadian grocery operation called Pirate Joe’s is violating its trademark. Pirate Joe’s buys Trader Joe’s products, smuggles them across the border to Vancouver, and sells them.
The case is set to go to trial in November. For Pirate Joe’s to have a fighting chance against one of the most popular grocery stores in the US, its founder, Mike Hallatt, needs to raise some serious money. So he has turned to the internet, launching a crowdfunding campaign on the platform Crowd Justice, seeking $250,000.
That number pales when compared to the more than $1m Hallatt says he has spent at Trader Joe’s locations in the US, in order to supply Vancouver residents with goods that are not sold in their country.
“It’s the biggest bet in my life,” said Hallatt, who has lived and breathed Pirate Joe’s for more than five years. “Everybody in my world is telling me to quit, and yet customers are coming in and saying: ‘Oh my god, I’ll support you.’”
Trader Joe’s has a cult-like following in the US, where it is known for its friendly corporate culture, affordable prices and speciality food items. Its legal battle with Pirate Joe’s, however, has showcased its corporate might.
The company, which has not commented on pending litigation, sent Hallatt a cease-and-desist order almost immediately after he started Pirate Joe’s, in 2012. It then pursued a trademark case. That was dismissed in October 2013, because the court determined Trader Joe’s, a US company, couldn’t sue in Canada, where it does not have shops or offices.
It was a major win for Hallatt and his customers, many of whom do not have the time, money or documentation to cross the border to shop at the nearest Trader Joe’s, which is nearly 90km from Vancouver.
Celebrations ground to a halt last year, though, when the ninth circuit court of appeals overturned the lower court’s motion to dismiss, sending the case to trial.
The ninth circuit decision has had a significant impact on US trademark law. “Just opening the door to trademark owners to sue in US courts for acts that occurred abroad and to be able to survive a motion to dismiss is huge,” said Christine Farley, a professor at American University Washington College of Law.
Farley said the onus was now on Trader Joe’s, to prove that Hallatt’s business has affected its commerce and trademark rights in the US.
“The ninth circuit has essentially rolled out the red carpet for Trader Joe’s to make the claim and now the ball is in their court,” she said, “they have to figure out how to do it with this quirky set of facts.”
One such quirky fact is that Trader Joe’s, which is privately owned by the German grocery chain Aldi, has a Canadian and a US trademark but decided to pursue the case in a US court. Another is that Hallatt does not hide the fact he is an unauthorized retailer – in fact, he is open about the company’s frustrations with his operation and seems to revel in its relentless efforts to bring him down.
The Pirate Joe’s website declares that it is “unaffiliated, unauthorized, unafraid” and has a section titled “lawsuits n’ such”. Keen observers have also noticed that dropping one letter turns the chain’s name to “Irate” Joe’s.
Hallatt is one of Trader Joe’s best customers – he estimates he has spent $20,000 to $25,000 at stores each month in the past five years – at least $1.3m. But Trader Joe’s will not have to worry about such detail if Hallatt cannot raise the resources to fund a trial.
“If Mike Hallatt can’t pay a trademark attorney to do the litigation,” Farley said, “then they’ve won.”
Which is why Hallatt turned to CrowdJustice, a British platform recently expanded to the US that helps people raise money for court cases against high-powered adversaries. “What we’re setting out to do in general is to level the playing field in the legal system and democratize access to justice,” said CrowdJustice chief executive Julia Salasky.
Trader Joe's v Pirate Joe's, again: case against knockoff will return to court Read more
The Pirate Joe’s campaign launched on Tuesday and is seeking $50,000 initially, with the ultimate goal of $250,000.
The need to raise funds could be more pressing if Trader Joe’s efforts to stop Hallatt shopping at its stores are successful. Hallatt said the company has told him it plans to file a motion that would ask the court to stop him purchasing products ahead of trial.
He believes he has been unofficially blacklisted for years by stores across the Pacific north-west, which is why he hires fleets of local shoppers to buy goods requested by his customers. He then packs the goods up and takes them across the border.
When the legal battle began, Hallatt said, he wished Trader Joe’s would “just open in Canada already, put me out of my misery.” But motivation to continue the fight comes from his customers and the company’s focus on seeing him shut down.
“If I’m in my store and I’m unloading my van and people say, ‘This is the only thing my kids will eat,’ that’s encouraging,” he said.
“All I have got to do is get to November.”BERKELEY — The deaths of a Berkeley married couple by carbon monoxide poisoning in January could have been prevented had their landlords followed state law and properly installed carbon monoxide detectors in their Deakin Street apartment, a wrongful death lawsuit filed in Alameda County Superior Court alleges.
Related Articles Berkeley police: Couple died of ‘acute carbon monoxide intoxication’ Valerie Morash, 32, and her husband of nine years, 35-year-old Roger Hanna Morash, were found dead on the second floor of their home in the No. 4 unit of 3028 Deakin St., on Jan. 23. While carbon monoxide poisoning was initially ruled out as the cause of death because Pacific Gas & Electric crews could not find evidence of a carbon monoxide leak, authorities later determined that the couple and their two cats died of carbon monoxide poisoning, attorney Michael Bracamontes said Tuesday. Autopsy results showed “extremely high” levels of carboxyhemogloben in their blood, he said.
Susan Hanna, the mother of Hanna Morash, is suing the Deakin Street landlord/building owners Cindy M. Kwong, Tony M. Wong, and the Kwong/Wong Family Trust for damages on allegations that her son’s death would have been prevented had a carbon monoxide detector been installed near the couple’s sleeping quarters pursuant to California building code. A carbon monoxide detector was installed on the bottom floor, the lawsuit notes, but not on the second floor where Morash was found dead in a bedroom and Hanna Morash in a home office.
The source of the carbon monoxide has still not been determined, according to Bracamontes, and the couple’s former apartment remains tagged as unsafe while authorities continue their investigation. The other three units in the building remain occupied. The city of Berkeley did not return a call for comment Tuesday. An attorney for the defendants could not be reached.
“These were easily preventable deaths and that’s why we have carbon monoxide laws that require carbon monoxide detectors outside each sleeping area,” Bracamontes said.
The couple met while they were both undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and had lived in the Deakin Street residence for seven years. Valerie Morash received her Ph.D. in psychology from UC Berkeley and was working on her post-doctoral fellowship at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye-Research Institute at UC Berkeley. Roger Hanna Morash was a game developer who worked on numerous titles before starting his own gaming company, Glug Glug.
“These were two well-liked, young, successful individuals who were not only productive members of their community but were loved and respected by everyone who knew them,” Bracamontes said. “It is certainly a tragic loss when loved ones are taken from you in a senseless and preventable fashion.”It's not the first thing I would think of - to try to call 911 if a police officer just lunged at me. Nor might you think the officer would give you a chance to actually dial and speak, but he must have. Because as the story continues
"I pulled my arm back, grabbed my phone and called 911 to call for help," she said. I told the officer I had mental and hearing disabilities, and didn't understand why he was trying to hurt me..." In the 911 recording, Graham shouts at the officer: "You attacked me before you said anything! There is no point whatsoever for you to touch me like that, especially with my condition, so how dare you even touch me?"...
During the 911 call, another responding officer punched Graham several times in the face, and is heard loudly ordering her repeatedly to stop resisting.
the police report states: "As the officer approached, Graham squared off against him in a fighter's stance and attempted to strike him with closed fists. The officer responded with closed fist strikes to Graham's face, which brought her to the ground where she was handcuffed."
Here's where it gets totally bizarre and inexplicable Amazingly, even the police report states that she was hit in the face by the officer.If Graham did assume a figher's stance -- something she denies and an odd thing to do, but I suppose is possible -- is a police officer's immediate reaction supposed to be to "respond with closed fist strikes to Graham's face"?? (That was a rhetorical question). Far be it for me to suggest a more sensible approach might be to back off and try to calm everything down.
The police claim she was "resisting" but resisting, apparently, is in the eyes of the beater.
"That woman was not resisting, I saw it," said Graham's friend, Deborah Fenwick. "That woman doesn't have a violent bone in her body. She's got a heart of gold. If she would have understood the officer's commands in the first place, she would have absolutely complied with him."
A Kirkland woman who faces a felony assault charge is also accusing Federal Way officers of police brutality during her arrest.
"The incident and the force used to affect the arrest is under review."
"I could taste the blood going into the back of my sinuses," she said. "Once I was on the ground, I was hurt. All of a sudden there's all these cops on top of me pushing my face in the ground. It was just so unbelievably horrific and upsetting."
... To tell you the truth, since police officers are putting their lives on the line every day for me to be able to lead a trouble free life, if they think they need to punch someone to restrain them because they don't know that they have to stay in the car when they've been pulled over, even for something like talking on a cell phone while driving, I'm going to side with them.
Naturally, Graham is being charged with felony assault...and just as naturally...You can rest assured that after this review no police officers will be charged with assault and battery, or even disciplined. Megan, though, even if she doesn't end up in prison, is likely to nightmares for long to come.And she gets to read comments from people who write stuff like thisWarning: Report contains content that some may find disturbing
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ESTACADA, Ore. - Sheriff's authorities say a man drenched in blood walked into an Oregon grocery store Sunday afternoon carrying a knife in one hand, and a severed human head in the other, according to KGW-TV.
Once inside the Estacada Thriftway Harvest Market, deputies say Joshua Lee Webb, 36, stabbed an employee.
Co-workers of that employee rushed in and tackled the suspect, pinning him until law enforcement arrived.
A few minutes later, authorities said, a distraught relative called 911 after finding the body of a woman inside a home in the town of Colton, about 10 miles away.
That woman has now been identified as Webb's mother - 59-year-old Tina Marie Webb. The two lived together at a home in Colton, Oregon.
The two incidents are believed to be connected, according to Sandy Police Chief Ernie Roberts. Roberts wouldn't specify what evidence suggested that, citing the ongoing investigation.
The suspect was transported to a local hospital after his arrest, while the employee he's accused of stabbing was transported by air. The hospital told Sandy police Sunday night that the victim is expected to make a full recovery.
The gruesome murder and stabbing come as a huge shock to the small community of 3,000 residents.
"It's really a shame, on Mother's Day too, it's really a sad thing to see on Mother's Day," a resident near the grocery store told KGW.
Estacada Fire Department chaplains were on hand Monday to help grocery store employees and customers affected by the terrifying ordeal.Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE on Tuesday called the Democratic Party the “party of slavery,” blaming them for oppressing African-Americans.
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Speaking at a rally in Everett, Wash., the GOP nominee blasted 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 and her party for taking black voters for granted.
“Remember … the Republican Party is the party of Abraham Lincoln. Not bad,” Trump said. “It’s also the party of freedom equality and opportunity — people have forgotten it so long now.”
“It is the Democratic Party that is the party of slavery, the party of Jim Crow and the party of opposition.”
The remarks come after a week of Trump making an explicit pitch to black voters — who overwhelmingly favor Clinton, the Democratic standard-bearer — that included calling his opponent a bigot.
"Tonight, I am asking for the vote of every African-American and Hispanic citizen in this country who wants a better future, who wants to see real, positive change," Trump said Tuesday. "The inner cities of our country have been run by the Democratic regime for so long."
"These Democratic policies — the policies of Hillary Clinton — have produced only poverty, joblessness, failing schools, broken homes, and rising crime," he continued. "And it's only getting worse. They don't care about you."Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Mulder (David Duchovny) discuss the evidence with Annabelle (D.J. Pierce). Ed Araquel/Fox
Recently resurrected fan favorite The X-Files sent itself a love letter this week in the form of “Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” the third episode of the 10th season we waited 14 years to see. The show takes great joy in this episode, parodically lambasting many of its ’90s-era monster-of-the-week outings.
In those occasional money-saving trips into the bush, Mulder and Scully would wave their flashlights around wildly as they ran through the forest, fleeing or chasing dangerous creatures. The monster, typically represented by overly filtered shaky-cam footage, would pursue our heroes through a suspiciously Vancouver-esque representation of upstate Somewhere U.S.A., poorly disguised by motion blur, low frame rate, and limited color. You see, some monsters see only in red and orange, whereas others are limited to just greens or blues. Many monsters would make up for their poor-quality vision by breathing loudly or growling.
Fast-forward to 2016, and, unfortunately, in “Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” the only monster was the episode itself.
It starts out as a joke, when Mulder and Scully catch an unconvincing monster case. Once they hit town, the creature makes its first attack at a truck stop. The monster’s would-be victim is Annabelle, a black trans woman who transitioned about a year ago. In a jump cut to her interview with Mulder and Scully, we discover that she miraculously survived the attack because she hit the monster with her obligatory faux-alligator-skin purse.
It’s clear that this scene was written for the grown-up version of the ’90s-era 18-to-25-year-old dude-bro, who 20 years ago would have exclaimed, “Ha ha, it’s a tranny!” Now, in his middle age, he has grudgingly come into the vague awareness that tranny is a slur and that he’d better remember to call her she. This interpretation holds true later on, as Mulder struggles to explain gender identity to the identifiably cisgender monster. But does this representation help trans people, or is it still catering to the entertainment of our predators? Let’s examine.
Who is Annabelle? She’s played by actor D. J. Pierce, whose screen credits include This Is Drag and RuPaul’s Drag Race. Suspecting a case of transface, some additional research revealed that D.J. Pierce is also known as drag performer Shangela Laquifa Wadley and normally presents as male. Fox apparently couldn’t find a transgender-identified actress, but since gender scholars occasionally make the argument that some drag performers are on the trans spectrum, I’ll eschew the obligatory F for casting and assign a D-minus instead. But what about the character he plays?
Is it realistic that a racially marginalized trans woman ends up working as a prostitute at a highway truck stop and is violently attacked? Yes. Is it realistic that she hangs around after a monster attack and proceeds to casually discuss her regular use of crack cocaine with a pair of FBI agents? A quick survey of my trans sex-worker friends indicates a very strong unlikely. Let’s not mince words, this scene is played for laughs, and Annabelle is a caricature.
Does this episode make any effort to accurately depict her (very likely) tough daily struggle to survive, eking out an existence as a truck-stop sex worker? No, it does not. However, the show does use her later in the episode for additional laughs, when Mulder confronts the (ostensibly real, but ultimately benign) transforming lizard-man creature.
In context, the lizard-man is revealed to be a nonviolent, nonhuman lizard, who, against his will, has recently begun transforming into a human man during the day (a lizard “were-man,” if you will). He wishes nothing more than to cease transforming daily and return to his regular nonhuman lizard existence. Oh, and the fight with the trans prostitute was accidental.
Lizard-man: Man, she hit like a man.
Mulder: That’s because she used to be … She … once … She’s transgender.
Lizard-man: What? You can’t transform into a different sex! That’s nuts.
Mulder: It’s not nuts. It’s actually a very common medical procedure. You don’t need the surgery, technically—
Lizard-man: Maybe that’s what I could do. It’s a cure!
Mulder: No.
Not great. Does X-Files think it’s laughing with us, or at us in this depiction? How far, exactly, have trans people come in network TV depictions?
While the episode obeys some basic rules of 21st-century decency, like Mulder and Scully not misgendering Annabelle with wrong pronouns and paying basic lip service to the entirely nonanatomical nature of gender identity (“You don’t need the surgery, technically—”), it still relies on and reinforces some unfortunately well-tread stereotypes that audiences are already too familiar with.
Lizard-man: Well I’ve got to stop transforming. I’ll do the surgery.
Mulder: Completely different.
Lizard-man: I don’t care how much it costs, I’ll do it.
Mulder: They cut off … your genitals.
Lizard-man: No, I’ll leave it. That’s … that’s a step too far, isn’t it?
Mulder: Yeah.
Well, for better or worse, a transgender character has appeared on The X-Files |
charter is changed. According to the minutes on the Fed’s website:
"Bitcoin does not present a threat to economic activity by disrupting traditional channels of commerce. Illicit applications are rampant but not endemic to Bitcoin; sovereign-issued currencies and other precious goods are similarly used."
The collapse of Mt. Gox, once the leading Bitcoin exchange, has been widely covered and documented already. Same is true with closing down illegal traffic sites such as Silk Road. Suffice it to say speculators like volatility and this can give Bitcoin a Vegas like feeling. But knowing the amount of venture capital and private equity money pouring into this space, I would not dismiss the Bitcoin hysteria, because I believe digital currencies are not going to go away.
In our global economy, where instant payment is the norm, most B2B commerce is done via credit cards or Paypal. Having another alternative that does not provide any currency convertibility risk is not a bad thing. At the 2013 AFP Annual Conference in Las Vegas, I attended a session by Steve Mott titled, “Bitcoin and Other Alternative Currencies, Prospects and Legal Questions", Steve noted “treasurers need to think about potential implications for digital currencies being regulated and what ways Reg-E, OFAC, the Bank Secrecy Act and other regulations apply.” One of the take-aways was that Corporates have to realize how to support their trading partners if they decide to use Bitcoins.
Bitcoin applications for Corporate Treasurers
I came away with six Bitcoin applications for Corporate Treasurers
International Transfers
Procurement in “sensitive” countries - particularly if you’re trying to do business with countries that have lots of regulations, currency reporting requirements, and tax implications.
Intra company transfers
Tax protection events
Avoidance of repatriation complications
Hedging
It will be interesting to watch developments here. Even in my home city of Vancouver, we now have a bitcoin kiosk, although I have yet to buy my first Bitcoin.Image: Shutterstock/igor.stevanovic
Security firms have discovered Android apps that are laden with malware to turn your phone into a cryptocurrency mining machine, all for the benefit of someone else and to the detriment of your device. It’s of course a ridiculously inefficient way to get your hands on some digital currency—there’s a reason students have been hijacking university supercomputers to mine dogecoins—but that doesn’t seemed to have stopped someone trying it.
The BBC reports that security companies Lookout and Trend Micro found mining malware in several Android apps, a couple of which were listed in the official Google Play store: Songs and Prized.
“These apps have been downloaded by millions of users, which means that there may be many Android devices out there being used to mine cryptocurrency for cybercriminals,” wrote Trend Micro on their blog. Spain and France seemed to be particular hotspots for the malware, according to Lookout.
But while getting together a large group of machines is a tried and tested technique for mining cryptocurrencies, it doesn’t really work with phones; the hardware’s just not powerful enough. While they can technically mine, the return rate is so poor—“glacial” is the word that Trend Micro analyst Veo Zhang uses—that the whole operation is pretty pointless.
Lookout explained there’s no use even trying to mine bitcoin with such a ploy, because the difficulty rate and therefore the processing power required to mine is just way too high. “A recent mining experiment using 600 quadcore servers was only able to generate 0.4 bitcoins,” they wrote. That’s likely why this malware has been targeting litecoin and dogecoin, which are literally a million times easier.
But that compromise means the payoffs are also smaller, and at the rate a smartphone can mine, they’re not going to be funding any crypto-luxurious lifestyles soon. Lookout gave it a go:
When we tested the feasibility of mining using a Nexus 4 by using Android mining software such as the application “AndLTC”, we were only able to attain a rate of about 8Kh/s – or 8,000 hash calculations per second, the standard unit of measure for mining. Using a Litecoin calculator and the difficulty setting mentioned above we can see that this would net us 0.01 LTC after seven days non stop mining. That’s almost 20 cents.
Not exactly a get-rich-quick scheme, especially considering the effort and presumable investment put into the malware in the first place. But just because phones aren’t very good at mining cryptocurrencies doesn’t mean they don’t put a lot of effort into it. They do—so much so that this kind of malware could damage the hardware.
If your phone’s a slave to this kind of system, it’s likely to lose battery quickly, charge slowly, and potentially overheat. Your data plan could also get totally rinsed by the scheme if the malware tries to download a block chain (If your phone’s playing up, you might want to delete any suspicious-seeming apps).
As well as being a total nuisance to anyone whose device is infected, this attack clearly isn’t exactly the stealthiest of approaches. But as the world gets increasingly turned on by emerging cryptocurrencies that are easier to mine when they first start out, we can probably expect to see more similar scams in the future. Not everyone has access to a whole lab of (poorly secured) computers to satisfy their dogecoin appetite, after all.Activision and Sledgehammer Games have announced new details about upcoming content for the Quartermaster and Orders with the Winter Siege event in Call of Duty: WWII.
There will be a new Quartermaster visiting the Headquarters during the event, Captain Butcher — a former British Special Forces soldier. Captain Butcher will visit the HQ during the event from time to time with all new Winter themed items. He brings new Winter Siege uniforms, cosmetic items, and all new weapon variants. Activision says that all the weapon variants coming to the game in this update only have cosmetic differences. There are no stat based changes other than offering 2XP boosts, similar to how current weapon variants are.
Alongside this, there will be new, special orders from Major Howard which will offer players a new way to directly get one of the new weapon variants for free. The orders will be rotated every day to offer fans a way to unlock new variants of each of the new weapons coming for free. There are other rarity of the new weapons coming to Call of Duty: WWII, which can be unlocked through Collection Bounties, similar to how collections work in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered, or the new Winter Supply Drop. Winter Supply Drops can be earned by playing games and leveling up; players will also receive 1 free Winter Supply Drop each week by logging in.
The new weapons coming are: GPMG LMG, the Sten SMG, the Gewehr 43 Assault Rifle, Trench Knife, and Ice Pick.
Activision and SHG also says there will be a special Winter Siege Supply Drops in the Quartermaster. During this event, Winter Siege Supply Drops will be replacing Rare Supply Drops. The Winter Siege Supply Drops can be earned through Quartermaster Challenges, end of match drops, or by completing orders. Players will also be able to use Call of Duty Points to get these Winter Siege Supply Drops, but Activision says there are many ways to earn the Drops for free in game.
The Winter Siege event kicks off December 8 at 10AM PT and ends on January 2 at 10AM PT.
Learn more about Winter Siege here.Published by Steve Litchfield at 8:52 UTC, September 4th 2014
Billed as an 'affordable flagship' at IFA 2014, Microsoft has launched the Lumia 830, with Lumia Denim software, 10MP 'PureView' camera and OIS, plus a replaceable battery and optional Qi wireless charging. Think of it as a cross between last year's 820 and the newer high end 930. News, plus some hands-on pics below.
From the press release:
Lumia 830: The affordable flagship The Lumia 830 offers the best of Lumia and the latest from Microsoft in a pocket-friendly design and price.
• The Lumia 830 captures high-quality images and videos, day or night, with a 10-megapixel PureView camera with ZEISS optics, Rich Recording and the thinnest optical image stabilization system to date on a Lumia.
• It delivers the best of Microsoft with pre-loaded Microsoft Office Mobile; the latest version of Windows Phone 8.1 with Lumia Denim; and OneDrive with 15 GB of free storage, allowing content to be synced and shared easily.
• It comes with flagship Lumia innovations such as integrated wireless charging in a sleek and light aluminum and polycarbonate design.
Lumia 830 will begin rolling out globally this month, priced around 330 euros before taxes and
subsidies.
Technically, yes, Microsoft's new Nokia Lumia 830 has a 'PureView' camera, in that the 10MP shooter has OIS - so we're talking the Lumia 920 definition of 'PureView', but the super-fast shooting modes indicate that there's no processor-intensive oversampling going on here. Or indeed the potential for lossless zoom.
Of special note are the new multiple-capture modes built-in - it's not clear which of these will make their way out to other Lumias - I'm guessing just the 1520 and 930:
dynamic flash
rich capture
Both of these use hardware-driven multiple captures, in order to mix and match between flash/no-flash and HDR images in a fast-taken batch.
From the extended promo articles:
Continuing the Lumia design legacy, the stylish Lumia 830 will be available in bright orange, bright green, white and black. At just 8.5mm thin, it’s our thinnest and lightest Lumia to date, with metal and polycarbonate that screams premium design, durability and performance. Powered by a 1.2GHz Snapdragon quad-core processor, prepare yourself for faster and smoother web browsing and gaming action on the sharp five-inch ClearBlack display, which offers readability in sunlight and feels great thanks to super-sensitive touch technology with Curved Gorilla 3.0 glass.
The Lumia 830 comes with Lumia Denim, presumably the packaged and customised Microsoft value-added variant of Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1. Denim follows Cyan and should be available to other devices sometime in Q4, 2014.
Specifications:
Memory: 1 GB RAM, 16 GB internal user memory; 15 GB OneDrive cloud storage, micro SD expandable up to 128 GB
Display: 5” IPS LCD HD (1280 x 720), Corning Gorilla Glass 3, Curved Glass (2.25D), Lumia color profile, wide viewing angle, Nokia Glance screen
Processor: 1.2 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 400
Camera: Main camera : 10 Mpix PureView with ZEISS optics and OIS, 1080p (Full HD, 1920 x 1080) @ 30 fps; Nokia Camera, Nokia Storyteller, Nokia Creative Studio
Size: 139.4 x 70.7 x 8.5 (volumetric) mm, Weight: 150 g
Connectivity: USB 2.0, BT 4.0, WLAN IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n, A-GPS and Glonass, 3.5 mm audio connector
Battery: removable 2200 mAh
Audio: 3 high performance microphones, Nokia Rich Recording with surround sound capture (Dolby 5.1), Uplink noise cancellation for calls, 3.5 mm AV connector
Networks:LTE RoW, GSM 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 1900 MHz, WCDMA 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1900 MHz, 2100 MHz, LTE 1, 3, 7, 8, 20
Nokia Sales Package Accessories:
Charger: AC-60
Cable: CA-190CD
Battery: BV-L4A
Guides: Booklet
Note: there may be differences in country / customer variants
Promo videos
Two from Nokia so far:Tony Markovich
“Thirty-six wins last year has a lot of people underestimating the Nuggets. Danilo Gallinari, Ty Lawson, JaVale McGee, and Wilson Chandler missed a collective 199 games last season, which hampered Brian Shaw's first year as Denver head coach. Much-improved health coupled with more offensive additions like Aaron Afflalo and Gary Harris should put Denver right in the thick of the West playoffs."
Ralph Warner
“The 2014-15 Denver Nuggets could turn into the dark horse of the West. To Tony's point, they have the talent to snag a 6-8 range seed but they need to stay healthy in order to get there. Side note: for fans of hilarious fail compilations, the return of JaVale McGee is as anticipated as Derrick Rose's comeback. TNT needs to win an Emmy for their 'Shaqtin' a Fool' segment this season."
Gus Turner
"Regardless of their health, the ceiling for the Mile High Nuggets is still decidedly low. Even at their peak, Denver's conglomeration of sorta-stars was never enough to break through in the West. As they head into the 2014-15 season, the conditions appear the same for Denver. For all his talents, picking up a guy like Aaron Afflalo isn’t the answer to the glass ceiling hanging over the team’s head. And, as much as I love watching him play, Kenneth Faried doesn’t strike me as a player who can be the no. 1 option for a contender. Denver’s recent history of striking gold on undervalued players such as Andre Miller, Andre Iguodala, and Chris Andersen has kept the team relevant for over a decade, but it’s also yielded little in the way of actual success. The team held down a playoff spot for 10 summers in a row before missing out on the postseason last year. Unfortunately, they made a first round exit in nine of those appearances. I choose Denver to make the playoffs this year, but when the postseason comes around, I think Nuggets fans will be hearing the same old story: one and done."This study provides important insights into hunger in a society characterized by over-consumption of processed food with an excess of calories and deficiency of micronutrients. Such hunger creates a cycle of overeating leading to obesity and is an obstacle for those who attempt to establish a healthy eating pattern and normal BMI. We found highly significant differences in the experience of hunger on the high nutrient density diet compared to the previous usual diet in a large sample of people who had made the shift to a diet high in micronutrients and lower in calories. The uncomfortable physical and emotional symptoms of hunger were much less prevalent after a change to the high nutrient density diet was made. We also observed a "dose response" that was strongly correlated with the degree of adherence to the high nutrient density diet. Our findings reveal that those who are able to make the change to a high nutrient density diet experience uncomfortable sensations of hunger less often than they experienced on their previous usual diet. In this survey of 768 participants, over 75% indicated that they observe the high nutrient density diet most or all of the time. Participants who adhered to the high nutrient density diet overall found hunger to be an uncomfortable experience less often; this may explain the previously reported high levels of compliance and successful weight loss [18] with the high nutrient density diet. Their hunger was less often characterized by classic withdrawal symptoms such as headaches, tremors, stomach cramps, and mood changes. Rather, it was more often felt as a throat sensation that was easily tolerated.
10 As soon as the intake, digestion and assimilation of food is complete, the catabolic utilization of glycogen reserves and fatty acid stores begins. Hunger normally increases in intensity as glycogen stores are diminishing toward the end of glycolysis, and should not occur at the start of the catabolic phase when glycolysis begins (see Figure). It is our contention that uncomfortable symptoms that drive overeating behaviors early in the catabolic phase should be recognized as withdrawal symptoms from a sub-optimal diet and not true hunger. After the completion of digestive activity, during catabolism, the mobilization and elimination of cellular waste products are heightened, thus precipitating symptoms commonly thought to be hunger. In contrast, true hunger occurs much later when glycogen stores near completion, preventing gluconeogenesis. Gluconeogenisis is the utilization of muscle tissue for needed glucose once glycogen stores have been depleted. True hunger protects lean body mass, but does not fuel fat deposition. It exists to protect lean body mass from utilization as an energy source.
Recent research on the physiology of metabolism provides a plausible explanation for our findings. When a diet is low in dietary antioxidants, phytochemicals and other micronutrients, intra-cellular waste products such as free radicals, advanced glycation end products, lipofuscin, lipid A2E, and others accumulate [9, 19]. Other studies have demonstrated an adverse impact of low-micronutrient foods containing higher amounts of simple carbohydrates, fats and animal products on levels of inflammatory markers, metabolic by-products and oxidative stress in the body [20, 21]. It is well established in the scientific literature that these substances contribute to disease [22–25], and can be associated with typical withdrawal symptoms, including headaches [26, 27]. Heightened elimination of these waste products may create symptoms that can be experienced similarly to withdrawal from drug addiction [28]. In the absence of an adequate intake of phytochemicals and other micronutrients, cellular detoxification is impaired [29] which elevates cellular free radical activity, priming the body with more substrate to induce withdrawal symptoms when digestion ceases. Our theory is that these uncomfortable symptoms, relieved by eating which halts catabolism and arrests the detoxification process, are widely misperceived as hunger. In a society with an abundance of fast food and high rates of obesity, commonly experienced sensations of hunger may actually be symptoms of withdrawal from a diet that is inadequate in micronutrients. Such a diet creates an excess of pro-inflammatory metabolic waste products as well as an addiction syndrome. There is growing evidence that food addiction is a clinical pathological condition [30–43]. Our hypothesis, supported by this pilot study, is that this addiction is caused by withdrawal symptoms misread as hunger from pro-inflammatory foods and can be mitigated by consumption of a diet high in anti-inflammatory micronutrients found in vegetables and other micronutrient-rich plant foods.
Evidence suggests that overweight individuals build up more inflammatory markers and oxidative stress when fed a low nutrient meal compared to normal weight individuals [20, 21]. The heightened inflammatory potential in those with a tendency for obesity is marked by increasing levels of lipid peroxidase and malondialdehyde and reduced activation of hepatic detoxification enzymes [44]. This is supportive of our experience that people prone to obesity get more withdrawal/hunger symptoms, preventing them from being comfortable in the non-digestive (catabolic) stage where breakdown and mobilization of toxins is enhanced. The resulting uncomfortable symptoms drive them to eat again and over-consume calories. It is a vicious cycle promoting continuous (anabolic) digestion, frequent feedings and increased intake of calories. Chronically overweight people in the typical American food environment feel "normal" only by eating too frequently or by eating a heavy meal, so that the anabolic process of digestion and assimilation continues right up to the beginning of the next meal. In both cases, as our overweight patients report, excess calories are needed in order to feel normal. A review of research on companion animals suggested that the introduction of specific micronutrients positively influenced the health status of animals whose natural detoxification systems were compromised, and reduced the accumulation of inflammatory markers [29]. This may explain why those on the high nutrient density diet were able to go for longer periods without feeling "hunger" symptoms.
There exists only a small body of previous research exploring the relationship between the type of foods ingested and the intensity and/or frequency of hunger. One theory that has been investigated is the glucostatic theory which links dynamic changes in blood glucose with appetitive sensations [45–48]. Several studies have explored the relation between the glycemic index or fiber content of food and satiety, whereas others have examined whether the type or amount of fatty acids, sugars or protein in the diet affect the sense of hunger [49–62]. Results have been inconsistent. This may be due to the unknown variable of micronutrient intake in these studies. Some studies have documented a decrease in appetite with ingestion of greater amounts of fiber and/or micronutrients [49, 52, 56]. Recently, a Canadian study found that fasting and postprandial appetite ratings were reduced in women who were supplemented with multivitamins and minerals [63].
The findings of this study are particularly significant given the nature of the diet we studied. Highly significant reductions in blood pressure, LDL cholesterol, fasting glucose and body weight have been reported in persons who have made the change to a high micronutrient diet [18]. Further, there is a vast body of research documenting the protective benefit of a micronutrient-rich diet against cancer and cardiovascular disease [1, 8, 10, 24, 25, 64–77]. If clinicians can assure their patients with confidence that they will not experience uncomfortable sensations of hunger after the "detoxification" stage is over, they can keep their patients motivated to withstand the withdrawal symptoms they experience early in the dietary transition. The outcome will be not only substantial and sustainable weight loss, but prevention of many major chronic diseases in our patients. Our hypothesis clearly requires further study and testing, but this preliminary study justifies additional investigations into this interesting and significant issue.
We must acknowledge the limitations of this study, including the fact that this was a retrospective, non-controlled study. The instrument we used has not been validated on large or diverse populations, although we did establish preliminary internal consistency and content validity. We recognize that participants were self-selected and may have been biased in their responses by exposure to the information on the website and resources to which they all subscribed. There are discussions of "toxic hunger" versus "true hunger" in the written and web-based materials that participants had access to. Participants were, however, assured of the anonymity of their responses in the introduction to the survey, and the survey responses were received from the Survey Monkey website without any identifying information, including no inclusion of email addresses of those who completed the surveys. It will be important to see if this dramatic shift in hunger perception would be found in populations not exposed to "leading" messages in future studies. We also did not assess the actual diet that each participant typically maintained prior to changing to the high nutrient density diet, nor did we validate the self reports of degree of compliance to the high nutrient density diet. Future studies should include food diaries and measures of biomarkers to quantify these variables more precisely.
However, given these limitations, the number of participants and highly significant test statistics provide leads for future studies that are better controlled and prospective in design and some important clinical insights. Further studies should explore the physiological and neurohormonal correlates of "toxic hunger" and of "true hunger", including measures of oxidative stress and ghrelin levels in people who adhere to the high nutrient density diet and the previous usual diet. It would also be helpful to examine how long the typical "withdrawal phase" from the previous usual diet lasts as people shift to the high nutrient density diet. This information would be valuable in our clinical efforts to support those who are making the change to healthier eating patterns.Have a pond question? No problem. We’re here to help. BIG or Small, We can help!
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Later, things started acting wonky so I uninstalled it. Unfortunately, their uninstaller didn't so much "uninstall" the program as it "uninstalled the uninstaller then left everything around chilling." This left my system in a really weird state with half-connected phantom network adapters and I was getting some weird hangs. Each time I uninstalled these 7 (!) phantom network adapters, they'd be back on a reboot. Clearing removing them with the Device Manager UI wasn't working for me.
At this point it was either time for a repave of the machine (basically a complete reinstall since I got it into a bad state) or running around in the registry and deleting these phantom adapters. Since I'm supposed to be technical, and since I was ready to reinstall it wouldn't hurt if I messed up the system, I fired up regedit.exe. I ran it as Administrator so I could have (I thought) the ability to delete anything.
I searched for the brand of the adapter I was wanting to delete, and when I started deleting stuff I was getting smacked with
"Access Denied." What?!? I'm the all powerful Administrator! sudo make me a sandwich!
Administrator isn't all powerful. There are other, deeper users like SYSTEM that have access to things Administrator (rightfully) doesn't. Considering that I am trying to removing low level network stuff it was good that I was being stopped.
That said, what's the best way to motivate an engineer? Tell him something isn't possible. I hate getting Access Denied. Deny this, I say! So I turned to the SysInternals Tools, specifically PsExec.
If there was one tool that really "takes the safety off the gun," it's PsExec. You can hurt yourself and your system with PsExec in ways where you'll not realize until it's too late. There aren't enough words with big enough fonts and scary enough evocative stock photography to fully express how dangerous this tool is.
That said, here's cheerfully how to use it! Woohoo!
psexec -s -i regedit.exe
This has to be run as an Administrator. It This line says, "run this command as the SYSTEM account and let the process interact with the desktop." If I look at the Task Manager after running this command, check out regedit.exe:
At this point, I was able to delete basically anything in the registry. One other way I could possibly delete keys that I couldn't as regular Administrator would be to launch Windows into Safe Mode and try editing from there.
Other awesome things you can do with PsExec include running processes remotely (which is kind what it's doing when I run it as SYSTEM, just all on on machine.) with a Service that gets automatically installed remotely and then runs the processes.
Here's how they do it (it's not a secret):
PsExec allows redirects of the input and output of a remotely started executable through the use of SMB and the hidden $ADMIN share on the remote system. With this share, PsExec uses the Windows Service control Manager API to start the PsExecsvc service on the remote system which creates a named pipe that PsExec communicates with. This named pipe is what allows for input/output redirection back to the system that launched PsExec.
For example:
psexec.exe \\REMOTECOMPUTER –i –u DOMAIN\username –p Password –d yourexe.exe
It's useful to remotely execute things, but it's even more useful to "terminal" (not quite like ssh) into systems like this:
psexec \\remotecomputer cmd.exe
Which means you can run commands on that remote computer as if you were there, in a SSHy way.
C:\>hostname
HANSELMANLAPTOP
C:\>psexec \\REMOTECOMPUTER -u DOMAIN\Administrator cmd.exe
C:\>hostname
REMOTECOMPUTER
Powerful but really useful stuff for when you really don't feel like RDP'ing (Remote Desktop'ing) into a machine to simply run a command.
Be careful out there!The head of Russia’s Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov has denied reports alleging the existence of “death lists” of locals identified as radical separatists.
GROZNY, May 21(RIA Novosti) – The head of Russia’s Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov has denied reports alleging the existence of “death lists” of locals identified as radical separatists.
This is not the first time that Kadyrov has denied accusations that he is seeking to crack down on people the Chechen authorities identify as current or former supporters of the unrecognized, self-proclaimed Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.
Many fled after the conflict in the volatile North Caucasus republic during the 1990s-2000s.
“Talk about the existence of some kind of 'execution lists' of former Ichkeria supporters is absurd and a vile lie,” Kadyrov said during a government meeting on Monday.
“Those who left for the West at the sound of the first shot and call themselves politicians have long been forgotten here,” Kadyrov was quoted as saying in an official statement by the republic's government.
In March 2012, the Sunday Telegraph reported British security services as saying that they had issued a warning saying they suspected an assassination plot targeting Akhmed Zakayev, Kadyrov’s rival and self-exiled Chechen separatist leader. Kadyrov denied any involvement.
Foreign media reports have, in the past, speculated that the Chechen official keeps lists of people to be executed.
Lists of hundreds of Chechen names have been circulated online, but these lists have not been independently verified or officially recognized.BEIJING – A pregnant woman who was dragged to a hospital by authorities and forced to have an abortion has enraged Chinese and sparked an online flurry of debate over whether it is time to end China's draconian one-child family planning policy.
"Our country is the inventor of family planning committees, how couldn't we have accumulated enough experience after so many years? Must they kill people? Cold-blooded scum!" television director Liu Kang said in an online posting.
The scandal erupted when photos were posted online showing mother Feng Jianmei lying on a hospital bed with the corpse of her daughter. Feng, who was in her seventh month of pregnancy, said she was dragged into a vehicle, her head covered and her legs beaten, then taken to a hospital for the injections that killed and induced delivery of her unborn child.
Feng said she was forced to have an abortion because she could not pay the $6,300 fine for a second child.
In years past, Feng's forced abortion would have happened with little public reaction, but Internet-based social media tools allow individual Chinese to take their stories directly to the people and are forcing the government to address complaints.
As of Thursday, comments on Feng's abortion neared 1 million on the Twitter-like microblog site Sina Weibo. Many of the comments were calls to relax the restrictions on births that have been enforced for over three decades.
Many couples are barred from having a second child in China, the world's most populous country, where the ruling Communist Party enforces the ban through a vast birth control bureaucracy, heavy fines and the threat of violence.
The government's first reaction to the outcry over Feng was that the abortion was merely routine law enforcement. A statement posted Monday on the government website of Zhenping County in Shaanxi province stated that officials, "according to the law, carried out the termination of the out-of-policy second pregnancy of Feng Jianmei" on June 2.
As the fury grew, a preliminary investigation was conducted, after which the government admitted Thursday that it was wrong. The late-term abortion was a "serious violation" of national policies, "damaged the image of family planning work and caused extremely harmful social impact," said a statement by the Shaanxi Population and Family Planning Commission.
Three officials were suspended Thursday, the China News Service reported. The city mayor delivered $785 as compensation for the loss to Feng's husband, Deng Jiyuan. It may take much more to calm the storm.
"I am not satisfied with the result," Deng said. "I want the real killer responsible to be punished."
On their newly opened microblogs, Feng and Deng, who have a 5-year-old daughter, have been conversing with Chinese who expressed their anger at authorities and support for the couple.
"I wish this case could be the turning point in China's family planning policy, to comfort the spirit of this child in heaven," wrote Zheng Haitao, a financial magazine editor.
He Yafu, an independent demographer, said any hope of change must await the party leadership transition this fall and a new Cabinet next spring. He advocates abolition of the policy and says doing so would have minimal effect on China's birthrate. A major obstacle is that authorities have come to rely on the fines they can levy, He said.
Ignoring threats warning him not to get involved, lawyer Zhang Kai said he was traveling to Shaanxi to assist the couple.
"I think governments shouldn't 'plan' family planning, it's the citizen's right," Zhang said. "God won't allow humans to do forced abortions, and he's unhappy to see it."
Contributing: Sunny YangIrish international joins from Fulham
Reading Football Club are delighted to announce the signing of full-back Stephen Kelly from Fulham.
The 29-year-old Republic of Ireland international first came through the youth ranks at Tottenham, breaking into the Spurs first team nine years ago and has since impressed on the Premier League stage with Birmingham City, Stoke City on loan, and most recently at Craven Cottage.
Comfortable on either the right or the left side of defence, the Dubliner made 34 appearances for Fulham last season and joins us on a two-and-a-half year contract to become our third signing of the January transfer window, following moves for midfielders Daniel Carrico and Hope Akpan earlier this month.
“I’m delighted to have Stephen here,” manager Brian McDermott said. “He has played a lot of games in the Premier League and more than 30 times for his country. He’s the kind of player I’ve been talking about – someone with great experience, but at 29 still young in football terms and at a really good stage in his career.
“I’ve always liked him as a player, and the first time I met him was at Kevin Doyle’s wedding a while ago now and I thought he was a top guy. I know he’s going to fit into the dressing room here really well. He’s up for the fight, up for the battle, he’s hungry, he wants to do well and I know he’ll be successful for us.”
Chairman Sir John Madejski added, “It’s a great signing for Reading Football Club. He’s a proven international and Premier League player and he seems like a lovely guy as well. We’ve had some great success stories with players from Ireland in recent years and I’m sure the signing of Stephen will be no different. I’m delighted he has signed and we all wish him very well during his career at Reading.”
Kelly has made 125 Premier League appearances to date and becomes our fourth most experienced top flight player at the club, behind only Ian Harte, Jason Roberts and Nicky Shorey.
At Fulham last season, Stephen made Europa League starts against the likes of Danish runners-up Odense, Polish champions Wisla Krakow and Dutch high-flyers FC Twente. But, more notably, Kelly helped Roy Hodgson’s side finish as runners-up in the same competition during his first season as a Fulham player, playing a part in a 4-1 win over Juventus en route to a Hamburg final against Atletico Madrid back in 2010.
A regular in the Republic of Ireland team, Kelly led the side out against Uruguay at the Aviva Stadium back in March 2011, captaining his country for the first time.
He was part of Giovanni Trapattoni’s squad who took part in the European Championships in Poland and the Ukraine last summer – and his most recent international appearance came in a friendly against Oman in September, in which he lined up in defence alongside Republic of Ireland debutant Alex Pearce.
Kelly played in the same team as striker Pavel Pogrebnyak under Martin Jol last season and also started alongside Nicky Shorey in his first campaign at Craven Cottage.
The move is still subject to final ratification of all paperwork from the football authorities but we expect this to be a formality. He will take squad number 27 and, although not signed in time to be in contention for a place in the squad this weekend, Kelly will be at Madejski Stadium to watch his |
placed in a new role, Waiters is still fighting old habits.
Cleveland needs Waiters to become a catch-and-shoot off guard, something that he has been putting work in after practice to become. Despite this, he had an eye-opening exchange with Jason Lloyd of the Akron Beacon Journal:
So when Waiters stayed behind after the team’s morning shootaround Tuesday and worked out for another 40 minutes, after the bus and rest of the players were long gone, it wasn’t surprising to watch him working primarily on catch-and-shoot 3-pointers. Yet when I asked him about focusing on that this season, he dismissed it. 'That’s not my game,' he said. 'I can do it, but you know what I’m effective at: pick-and-roll and things like that.'
The problem is, the Cavs can't afford to sit around and wait for Waiters to take his man off the dribble anymore. This may have been OK under Mike Brown last season, but it isn't going to fly with James, Love and Irving standing around watching.
Truly Buying In?
So has Waiters really bought into what the Cavaliers need him to do, or is he just going through the motions?
Consider this: Despite his impressive scoring ability, the Cavs offense has actually been better this season when Waiters is out of the game.
Cleveland is averaging 112.6 points per 100 possessions with Waiters on the bench, compared to 110.7 with him in the game, according to 82games.com. In the only game Waiters missed this season, the Cavaliers scored 118 points in a Nov. 10 win over the New Orleans Pelicans. Rookie Joe Harris and veteran Mike Miller have both stepped up in Waiters' absence.
When it comes to those crucial catch-and-shoot situations the Cavs need, Waiters has disappointed big-time.
Jason Miller/Getty Images
Despite drawing consistent open looks playing next to James, Love and Irving, Waiters is shooting a paltry 25 percent off catch-and-shoot opportunities, per NBA.com/Stats. When launching from behind the three-point line, this success rate drops to 23.1 percent.
When discussing those old habits, it's important to look at how Waiters is taking his shots.
Even though the Cavs want Waiters to become a catch-and-shoot guy, he's still relying on a pull-up game far too often (34.8 percent of shots compared to 26.7 percent).
Cleveland's rotations haven't required Waiters to put up big numbers, either. Coach David Blatt often pulls Irving with a few minutes remaining in the first quarter, putting Waiters on the court with James and Love. When the first quarter ends, Blatt typically pulls both James and Love and brings Irving back from the bench, allowing him to run the offense with Waiters once again being forced to play off the ball.
Waiters and the new-look Cavaliers just aren't meshing like many hoped they would.
Is it finally time to part ways?
Cloudy Future
Waiters' present isn't going too smoothly, but it's his future that's really cause for concern.
The third-year guard is eligible for restricted free agency after next season. The Cavaliers already have $120 million tied up in Irving and Anderson Varejao, with James and Love expected to each sign $100-plus million extensions as well. Tristan Thompson will be a restricted free agent this offseason and could receive around $50 million over four years.
So where does Waiters fit into the salary cap?
Currently, it's tough to tell.
If Waiters was on a rebuilding team like the Philadelphia 76ers, he would likely start and average 17-plus points a game. Such production would bring a healthy payday, easily over $10 million per year.
That being said, how much is he worth with the Cavs?
The going rate for a reserve shooting guard averaging less than 10 points on sub-40 percent shooting surprisingly isn't that high. Los Angeles Clippers' reserve guard Jamal Crawford, a two-time Sixth Man of the Year, is making just $5.5 million this season while averaging 17.7 points.
There's no way, given Waiters' current production, that Cleveland should offer more than $5 million per year, a figure that his camp will certainly not be pleased with. Neither side holds much leverage. The Cavaliers have been better offensively with Waiters on the bench, and the current makeup of the team isn't doing Waiters any favors, either.
If Blatt can't find a better way to work Waiters into the rotation, his potential will be wasted. With sharpshooters like Miller, James Jones and Harris looking for more playing time, could the Cavs actually be better without Waiters in the lineup?
Cleveland has a difficult decision to make. Waiters isn't getting it done in his current role.
A mutual parting may be best for both parties involved.
Greg Swartz has covered the Cleveland Cavaliers for Bleacher Report since 2010.
All stats provided by Basketball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted.Murders in the Windy City have plummeted since the Illinois legislature enacted its concealed weapon carry law, and the state Supreme Court upheld a person’s right to carry firearms outside the home.
The Chicago Police Department posted the city’s 2014 first quarter crime figures Tuesday, indicating the lowest number of homicides since 1958, according to local ABC affiliate Eyewitness 7 News, which reported:
The first three months of the year saw 6 fewer murders than the same time frame in 2013–a 9 percent drop–and 55 fewer murders than 2012, according to a statement from Chicago Police. There were 90 fewer shootings and 119 fewer shooting victims, drops of 26 and 29 percent respectively, according to police statistics. Compared to the first quarter of 2012, there have been 222 fewer shootings and 292 fewer shooting victims.
So what’s changed that could possibly account for such a dramatic fall in a city that was fast becoming known for its homicide rates — especially in its notorious South Side neighborhoods?
In July, the Illinois legislature overrode Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn’s veto to make The Land of Lincoln the final state in the country to have a concealed firearm carry permit law.
Video: Tense moments when two men chase down, take US flag from ‘disrespectful’ protesters
Two months later, the Illinois Supreme Court added an exclamation point to the lawmakers’ action. It unanimously held that the Second Amendment protects one’s right to carry a firearm outside the home.
Independent Journal Review reported:
Gun crime experts John Lott, Jr. and David Mustard made the famous argument in “Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Firearms” that: “When state concealed handgun laws went into effect in a county, murders fell by 8.5 percent, and rapes and aggravated assaults fell by 5 and 7 percent.” More guns mean less crime. Gary Kleck, PhD., also a gun crime expert, found that the crime deterrence effect of firearms possession is significant: sophisticaed statistics suggest three to four crimes are stopped by a handgun than are committed in the United States every year.
Tuesday’s tragic shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, should teach us, if nothing else, “gun-free zones” — whether they be schools, cities or military bases — don’t work. They’re a deterrent to a law-abiding citizen; they’re an invitation to a criminal.A lifetime contract for Adam Gase: The Chicago Bears would love for Gase to stick around permanently after the work he’s done with quarterback Jay Cutler. Gase is the first Chicago offensive coordinator to click with Cutler, who developed the reputation as a coach-killer following strained relationships with ex-playcallers Ron Turner, Mike Martz, Mike Tice, Marc Trestman and Aaron Kromer. Unfortunately, Gase is a strong candidate to land a head coaching gig in 2016. That is, of course, unless the Bears can lock him up forever.
An Oscar-worthy Hollywood script for Aaron Rodgers: The Packers quarterback is the bane of Chicago’s existence. What the Bears need is for Rodgers to follow the career path of Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown, who left football early to pursue a career in acting. With Rodgers out of the picture, the Bears’ chances of winning the NFC North would improve drastically. What better way to entice Rodgers to retire prematurely than to offer him the lead role in a soon-to-be box office smash hit. That’s better than State Farm commercials and semi-regular appearances on "Celebrity Jeopardy." It’s a win-win for Rodgers and the Bears.The obese are already seen as something less than normal humans, so the show-runners thought it would be perfectly acceptable to put us in horse stalls and make us run on a horse track, because hey, maybe that small percentage of personal trainers that believe yelling in your face while you're on a treadmill are right and shame does burn calories. To protest, I simply walked the course, refusing to run until they asked me to at the end, hopefully ruining the competitive spirit of the challenge (and, of course, they called it like a horse race all the while). I felt like maybe I'd be able to preserve a little dignity by not running. But in retaliation, they acted like I was just too fat and exhausted to finish. Later, fans on the Internet threatened me because HOW DARE I NOT RUN FOR THEIR AMUSEMENT? CAESAR OF THE FATTIES IS DISPLEASED.
Jean-Leon Gerome
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I have a great suggestion for what to do with those thumbs.
That happened to other contestants, too. If you didn't act grateful enough, or you had the audacity to demand to be treated like a human being, they made you look like a huge jerk on TV. That is the mighty power of the television editor: With enough time and a copy of Adobe Premiere, you can make Mr. Rogers look like a blood-drinking psychopath. One woman in my season was one of the kindest individuals I have ever met in my life. Five years after the season ended, she even donated a kidney to save a complete stranger's life. That's the kind of nice we're talking about here -- the full Ned Flanders treatment.
But she injured her leg during filming and couldn't run much, so she refused. The people on the show told her, "We don't care -- run," and she said no. Because she didn't comply, they edited the footage to make her look like the biggest bitch in the world. Without the whole "threat of injury" thing, she seemed like a big ol' entitled wussbasket. And guess what? She got death threats. She got so many death threats that NBC had to disable the messaging function on her part of the show's site. All because she had been injured the previous week and physically could not do what they were asking.The signage outside a historic McDonald's restaurant is seen in Downey, California, February 18, 2015. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson McDonald's was a major contributor to Chipotle's success.
The burger chain made an investment in Chipotle in 1998 that helped it grow from 14 locations to nearly 500 within seven years. By 2005, McDonald's had a 90% stake in Chipotle's business.
But one year later, McDonald's divested its stake and parted ways with the fledgling burrito chain.
Now Chipotle has more 1,800 locations and business is booming, while McDonald's is battling declining sales and traffic, a damaged public perception, and a relationship with franchisees that has hit an all-time low.
At McDonald's annual shareholders meeting this week, an attendee grilled the CEO on why the company gave up on Chipotle, according to Entrepreneur.
The chief executive, Steve Easterbrook, said Chipotle was a distraction. (It's worth noting that he was not CEO when McDonald's bailed on Chipotle.)
"At the time Chipotle and other concepts, such as Boston Market, had taken attention away from the core brand," Entrepreneur's Kate Taylor writes, paraphrasing Easterbrook's response. "Company executives wanted everyone to put 100 percent of their efforts into the McDonald's brand, so they sold the company's shares."
Clearly, that wasn't the best strategy.
Chipotle's same-store sales grew more than 16% in 2014, while McDonald's declined 1% during the same period.
Chipotle founder and coCEO Steve Ells has spoken openly about the companies' differences in the past.
Getty Images/Joe Raedle "What we found at the end of the day was that culturally we're very different," Ells told Bloomberg of his company's relationship with McDonald's. "There are two big things that we do differently. One is the way we approach food, and the other is the way we approach our people culture. It's the combination of those things that I think make us successful."
For example, McDonald's wanted Chipotle to add drive-thrus to its restaurants and change its name to Chipotle Fresh Mexican Grill, according to the report.
The company also forced Chipotle to franchise some of its restaurants, which it did reluctantly.
"Bless their hearts, McDonald's had a lot of great suggestions, and we were always polite about it," Chipotle's chief operations officer, Gretchen Selfridge, told Bloomberg. "They really wanted us to do drive-thrus. They really wanted us to do breakfast. But we just really didn't do any of that."Share. Statement coming in "next few days." Statement coming in "next few days."
Allison Road, the first-person horror game from developer Lilith Ltd., has been canceled.
News of the game's cancelation comes by way of the official Allison Road Twitter account, which posted the following message:
Hi all. Sadly Allison Road had to be cancelled. Statement to come in the next few days. Thx for all your support and very sad it came 2 this — Allison Road (@AllisonRoad_HQ) June 5, 2016
Allison Road started off as a Kickstarter project with the aim of creating a spiritual successor to P.T. that would help fill the void left after Konami's cancelation of Silent Hills. Shortly thereafter, the crowdfunding campaign was scrapped and the development team signed a publishing deal with Team17.
For more on the Lilith Ltd.'s canceled horror project, check out IGN's early look at its dark, twisted forest environment.
Exit Theatre Mode
Alex Osborn is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.(Note: although I originally wrote this as a stand-alone post, it may make sense to think of it as Part Two of a series, beginning with The Rise of the Access Economy.)
There’s a classic exercise that we often encounter in business school, or elsewhere in higher education: the professor proposes, “I have two tickets to the Taylor Swift concert this Saturday night. All of you should write down on a piece of paper the maximum amount they’d be willing to pay for these tickets, then turn them in, and we’ll look at the distribution of those prices.” The idea is that from there, a promoter should be able to determine the optimal price (or sets of prices) to charge in order to maximize their sales.
Now, what typically happens is we see a distribution of numbers get passed in. Some are willing to pay lots, others not so much, and a bunch of people lie somewhere in the middle. We often see these numbers form something like a Gaussian distribution, or as it’s known to the general public, a ‘Normal Distribution’. Why do we see this distribution a lot? And why is it called ‘Normal’?
(Editor’s note: I play fast and loose here with what a ‘Normal’ distribution technically means here. If you’re mathematically inclined, kindly replace the words Normal and Gaussian with ‘Unscientific Lumpy Middle’ and the points should still hold just fine.)
We see this distribution all over the place: in nature, in business, in life. If you’ve taken high school biology, you’ve probably encountered this picture:
There’s a good reason why the normal distribution pops up so much: it represents the sum of some number of component factors. If you’ve played the game Settlers of Catan, you’ll be very familiar with this phenomenon: the outcome of the total roll of the dice, which represents the sum of one die plus the other, follows an approximately normal distribution. If you were rolling five dice instead of two (like in Yahtzee), you’d see this distribution more clearly. If you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of factors (like human genes), you see normal distributions arise for things like our height. Even when some of these factor are inter-dependent, as is certainly the case with our genetics, we still reliably encounter these distributions: whenever we encounter the sum of many factors, there they are.
It should make sense that our stated prices for these Taylor Swift tickets should follow a distribution like this: you could think of it as a sum of many factors. How much did you like 1989? How much disposable income do you have? How far would you have to travel? What are your other options? Would you have friends who would go with you? And so forth. We can generalize this example to our preferences and choices generally: the decisions we make whenever we spend something (money, time, opportunity, etc) represent the sum of many factors. Suppose you’re shopping for a new car: the distribution of new car prices aren’t quite symmetrically Gaussian (there’s a long tail towards the high end), but it’s still Normal-ish. If you’re looking for a car as a young person, you’ll have a certain set of factors you consider – cost, value, practicality, style. As you grow up, these factors will change, but the decision will remain multifactorial in nature – many of your preferences will evolve, but along a similar set of variables. Some of us buy luxury cars, others buy the cheapest that they can, and most of us are in the big fat middle – like rolling two dice and landing somewhere between a 4 and a 10. It won’t happen every time, but it’ll happen most of the time.
There’s just one problem with this principle: it’s vanishing.
Consider these three situations:
1. You’re looking to buy a new smartphone. What does your demand distribution look like? Is it normally distributed? Absolutely not. It looks like this:
Chances are good that if you’re in the market for a smartphone, you fall into one of two very clear cut categories. Either: a. you’ve decided that your new phone is a very important item in your life, so you’re going to buy the nicest phone available at whatever price. (Usually this means an iPhone, although some flagship Android phones qualify for this category.) Or, b. you’ve decided that just about every phone out there is ‘good enough’ and is more than adequate for your needs, so you’ll go with whatever one costs $0 with your existing wireless contract.
2. You have twenty minutes of free time to spend reading things on the internet. How will you choose to allocate your attention? Odds are, it looks like this:
Chances are good that your next twenty minutes will fall into one of two categories. Either: a. you go to a very specific destination site that you had in mind, with content that you will not find anywhere else and that you know exactly where to find. This could be a high-end news source like the New York Times; it could also be a small, niche site like Stratechery. But either way they’re a destination site – you’ve chosen explicitly that they, and precisely they, are what you’re going to read. Or, b. you don’t choose anything at all; instead you had to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc and just browse through whatever’s posted there. Often it’s content with broad, mass appeal like Buzzfeed or Vox that no one is looking for directly, but many are happy to click and read.
3. You’re a recent college graduate trying to decide where you’ll live. How will you make this decision? Will your options and preferences be normally distributed? Probably not. Odds are, your decision looks like this:
Chances are good that your decision will fall into one of two categories. Either: a. you’re trying to break into the film industry, so you’re overwhelmingly drawn towards LA. Or you’re trying to join a tech startup, so might be drawn to the Bay area. Or for any number of reasons. you just have to live in New York. And you’re willing to put up with all kinds of horrible side effects in order to live in that exact right place. Or, b. You will move anywhere where you get a job, or get into grad school, or where your girlfriend is moving – it’s effectively a single-variable decision.
These aren’t normal distributions at all. They’re totally different – they’re bifurcated distributions where one factor is dominating over all of the other factors. Either you care about X, or you don’t. Either you care about Y, or you don’t. And what used to be the happy middle – the fat part of the normal distribution, where most of the demand is supposed to lie – is all of a sudden quite sparse.
The world seems to be steadily moving in this direction: from one where our demands and preferences are normally distributed to one dominated by these weird, bifurcated, two-tier balances. Why is this happening?
My hunch is this: The world’s shift from Normal, Gaussian distributions of demand towards bifurcated, two-tiered distributions is a natural consequence of our shift from a world governed by scarcity to one governed by abundance.
In a world governed by scarcity – which is the one we’re used to thinking about, and the one described in our economics textbooks – it makes complete sense for our purchasing and preferences to be multi-factor considerations with normally distributed outcomes. This is because when X is scarce, our default position towards X is ‘potentially interested, if the price / conditions are right’. We consider many factors when determining whether conditions are right, so our preferences and decisions are multifactorial in nature – that’s why we see normal distributions so consistently.
But in a world governed by abundance, it’s all different. When X is abundantly available in many different places and forms, our default position towards any given X is ‘not interested’ unless something specific changes our minds. These aren’t multifactorial decisions – they’re usually dominated by one single factor whose influence trumps everything else. If you care about your smartphone, you’re going to get the nicest one; if you don’t, you’re going to get the cheap one. If you have something specific you want to read, you’re going to read exactly that; otherwise, you’re just going to scroll through Facebook and read whatever. If you care about living in New York, you’re probably ready to make a lot of concessions in order to live there; if you don’t, then there’s no chance. If you’re a Taylor Swift fan, you’re probably willing to pay a lot of money for those tickets; if you aren’t, then there’s a good chance you aren’t willing to pay any money for them because even if they were free, you’d rather do something else on Saturday night anyway. The normal distribution is disappearing: we’re in a new world where either you care about something, or you don’t. The middle ground is vanishing.
So what can we do with this idea?
The first thing to do, in my view, is to look for areas of the world where our preferences are still normally distributed. Then ask: is this because we’re still operating on scarcity-based principles? And if so, are we headed down the road towards abundance-based principles? If so, what can we expect in the future?
Here’s one example: personal banking. Our personal banking requirements are still being served by a big, fat, normally distributed group of companies and services. How come? Is it scarcity-based demand? Well, it certainly isn’t because of actual scarcity. With the birth of online banking and creative partnerships with distribution channels, it’s entirely possible to do your basic banking through any number of online, cheap and functional banking institutions – not to mention the multitude of brick and mortar branches that are all around us, competing for our business.
Some people have genuinely complex banking and credit requirements. Others don’t. And in a world where banking services are abundant – which I believe we’ve entered, at least in the western world – I’m guessing we’re headed towards a similar iOS/Android style bifurcation. At the high end, we’ll see companies and services like American Express – the iOS of cards in my wallet. But what about the low end? Who’s issuing the basic, cheap, functional personal credit – the low-end Android?
Right now it’s other banks. But it doesn’t need to be. Banks are expensive to run (especially those with a big physical presence at brick and mortar branches); they’re built for the normally distributed world with its fat middle. But they’re not built for this new, bifurcated world – many of them can’t compete at the low end or the high end; they’re not sophisticated enough to compete with Chase and Amex, but too operationally expensive to compete with an online-only credit union.
Who could replace them? Maybe someone like Walmart, who already has customer loyalty, the ultimate physical channel, and the resources to make it work? Or maybe, in developing countries whose residents are still unbanked, the wireless carriers? Or maybe emerging payment companies like TenCent, or AliPay, could become effective creditors themselves?
owned by people who care about ownership, whereas the vanilla fleet will be used by people who don’t care about fancy ownership – they just need to get places. Either you care about X, or you don’t. For another example, let’s return to our earlier anecdote about cars. Like I said, automobile production today isn’t a perfect normal distribution – it’s got a bit of a long tail towards the luxury end – but for the most part it’s Gaussian-like. But if we fast forward thirty years, we may see something very different. If the promise of Uber and the driverless car comes true, we could be living in a world where the majority of people do not own their vehicles; they simply use them and enjoy access to them. It’s reasonable to speculate that these vehicles, likely owned in fleets, won’t be fancy – they’ll be vanilla Android cars. But there will probably also be another ‘class’ of vehicles – the iOS cars – for those who still care about owning or using a premium vehicle. These might include luxury cars, special work vehicles, or collectors’ items – the important unifying factor being, these vehicles areby people who, whereas the vanilla fleet will be used by people who don’t care about fancy ownership – they just need to get places. Either you care about X, or you don’t.
do care, and continue to faithfully buy specific artists’ records even while they stream others’.) Or do you listen to her from time to time on Apple Music, and that’s enough? This idea of bifurcated distributions replacing Gaussian distributions maps to the Access Economy idea, which I’ve written about previously, in an interesting way. We may see X Markets of the future that are governed first by a sorting function: Do you really care about X? Do you need your own X, or is access to X enough? Are you a big Taylor Swift fan, and own all her records? (As Taylor wrote in her famous WSJ op-ed last year – part of what makes music special is the contingent of fans whocare, and continue to faithfully buy specific artists’ records even while they stream others’.) Or do you listen to her from time to time on Apple Music, and that’s enough?
Are you sufficiently well off to pay an old-fashioned, prestigious university degree? Or do you simply need access to online course material and learning opportunity? There’s little doubt that our higher education system will see some sort of shakeup in the next few decades, and to me this looks like a potential bifurcation situation: colleges and universities are getting way too expensive across the board; and yet, students who pay top dollar and go to prestigious schools usually do well! And furthermore, the amount of online learning opportunities available are exploding – that’s not the problem either. The issue is the big, fat middle that doesn’t serve anybody particularly well – and is sustainable for the most part because we feel like it’s important. We’ll see how long that lasts. (It could be a while, though.)
Does your company need to lock down a particularly valuable employee to a long-term contract? Or does it simply need access to a steady stream of available talent? For the most part, we don’t get a clear view into how top performing companies structure their compensation from the top all the way down to the bottom – usually we hear about the executive suite and that’s it. But there’s a great exception: professional sports teams, where team salary and cap hit information is usually available. And on these teams, we’ve seen this same thing emerging: either you’re a star, or you’re replacement level. The middle ground is vanishing: either you’re locked up to a multi-year blockbuster deal, or you’re on a one-year, market rate contract that’s pretty indistinguishable from any other. Outside of the sports leagues, where we don’t have such a privileged view, is this happening as well?
We can see, too, that these bifurcations are driven by a shift from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance. Buying an album used to be the only way to listen to your own music – now it streams online, quasi-free, always. Learning material used to be precious and valuable – now it’s abundantly available online, everywhere. Employee retention used to be critical for companies from top to bottom – now freelance and temporary labour is abundant, and only the truly scarce need be locked down. These decisions, which were once multifactorial, are becoming single-variable: either you care about X, or you don’t.
There’s a dark side to this idea: its sinister cousin, economic inequality. We typically celebrate and value an upwardly mobile society with a “healthy middle class”; in other words, a society whose incomes form a Gaussian distribution. But in a world shifting towards one of abundance, where one would hope that rising tides would lift all boats, could this bifurcation be slowly and irreversibly happening as well? Are we heading towards a two-class system: a class of owners and a class of users? I’ll save this question for part three: I still have a lot of personal research to do before I’m able to properly form an opinion here.
In summary, what can we take away from this?
-Normal distributions come from multifactorial situations, where many variables matter.
-In a world governed by scarcity, our decisions and preferences tend to be multifactorial in nature.
-In a world governed by abundance, on the other hand, our decisions are no longer multifactorial. They tend to be dominated by one factor above all others: either X matters to you, or it doesn’t.
-If the world is moving in this direction, we might anticipate other industries and ecosystems that could follow. Education, cars, banking, and employment come to mind as examples; there are many more.
-The fall of the normal distribution maps to the rise of the access economy: ownership and access are not part of the same distribution; they are two halves of a bifurcation.The Matchbox at 14th and T streets NW has room for large parties and up to 250 diners. (Photos by Lavanya Ramanathan/The Washington Post)
The gas lamps are already blazing outside Matchbox at 14th and T streets NW as the fourth local edition of the pizza and sliders emporium prepares to open on Nov. 30.
Housed in a 1907 building that previously hosted Arena Stage rehearsal space (and, before that, a bowling alley, automobile showroom and jazz club), the interior has been transformed into an airy, three-story restaurant, with exposed brick, striking red girders and a ceiling stripped to reveal the original roof. There’s a patio with room for 60 diners and a dedicated takeout entrance facing 14th Street.
But the most exciting news is that the restaurant will seat 250 — including a chef’s table and two ultra-cool second-floor booths with clear walls that offer views of the dining room from above — and has ample seating for parties of six more more.This bike review was originally published in the August 2017 issue of Bike magazine.
The past month of riding on Kona's Honzo ST has been a literal return to my roots.
The original Honzo came out right after I had bought a bike, and I lusted after it all season on my newly disappointing Raleigh. It was everything I wished the bike I'd bought was, but didn't really exist at the time in the form of a mass-market hardtail 29er. The Honzo was long and slack in the front and short in the back. Its geometry was truly progressive, and proved so effective that it eventually made its way to Kona's highly praised full-suspension Process bikes.
A year or two later, I sold the stupid Raleigh and got myself a second-generation Honzo. What ensued was a rapid progression in my riding ability, and eventually the purchase of a full-suspension bike once I'd decided that the Honzo's rear end was holding me back. Then I moved to Southern California, rode a gaggle of carbon superbikes and adopted the linguistic habit of attaching "the" to highway numbers.
Fast forward a few hundred fish tacos and I've moved back to New England, with a new Honzo ST in tow to test on the trails of Western Massachusetts.
While not much has changed around here, a lot has changed with the Honzo. Sure, it's still rockin' 68- and 74.5-degree head and seat tube angles. Its rear center can still adjust (via sliding dropouts) all the way down to a bare-minimum 415 millimeters, and its bottom bracket retains its 65-millimeter drop. But not even steel hardtails have been sheltered from the mountain bike industry's unceasing march toward who-knows-what.
At some point the master became the student, and so this third-gen Honzo had to be lengthened and lowered to make it more like the Process bikes it once inspired. The reach of the size large frame has been bumped up from 451 millimeters to a vast 478 millimeters. The standover has been lowered more than 130 millimeters—from 839 to 710. This makes the Honzo look like an oversized dirt jumper, and allows for nearly as much rider movement.
For buyers, the most significant change is that you can no longer get a complete steel Honzo. We built our frame up with Shimano SLX brakes and an SLX drivetrain, which powers a mid-level Novatec Alpine wheelset. All cable routing on the frame is external, aside from the dropper, which runs externally before feeding into the seat tube. But, since this is a steel frame, we went ahead and drilled a couple extra holes in the downtube for a clean setup. I ran a 130-millimeter fork, so my test bike is actually a touch slacker and taller than the stock geo chart says.
Putting that extra travel to use is no trouble at all on the Honzo. The bike's long reach gives it a stable feel, so I often found myself going fast into rock gardens only to remember at the last second that I was on a hardtail.
And the Honzo's tail is quite hard indeed. The chromoly steel frame is no doubt suppler than most any aluminum frame with comparable strength, and at 7 pounds, it better be. But it's not the most forgiving steel frame I've ridden. In fact, it feels harsher than I remember the previous Honzo being. But that was several years ago, and there's been a lot of full suspension in my life lately.
That stiffness works with the short rear end to make the Honzo adept at digging into tight corners and needling between trail obstacles. It's also more than willing to pop into a manual or hop when the best line is over, not around. And when the best line is through, the Honzo is amply planted. The question is whether your knees are robust enough to handle what the back end doesn't.
Efficiency-wise, the Honzo is a far cry from a carbon or aluminum hardtail with more traditional (read: cross-country) geometry. But riders accustomed to the feel of a mid-travel trail bike or all-mountain rig won't be disappointed by the steel frame's climbing chops.
Defiant of its weight, the frame's stiff rear end makes it feel sportier than most chromoly hardtails, and more precise, too. Switchbacks and rock-and-root-ridden pitches can all be dispatched comfortably from a centered position along the bike's reasonable 1,168-millimeter wheelbase. Mash through or pick your way around; both are effective means aboard this Bellingham-bred beast, with the 310-millimeter-high bottom bracket providing generous clearance for all but the most poorly timed pedal strokes.
Speaking of mashing, the sliding dropouts allow the Honzo to be configured as a singlespeed, if that's your thing. It can also fit at least a 2.8-inch tire in the rear, if that's your thing.
What if neither of those are your thing? Should you consider getting a Honzo?
Yes. With one qualification: You have to be willing to build it. If you've been riding traditional hardtails and want something more confident, the Honzo will help you take your riding up a notch without losing that hardtail feel. Maybe you're a full-suspension devotee looking for a second bike to ride while yours is being overhauled. The Honzo will wait impatiently in your garage for its day in the dirt. Or perhaps you're worried that all this squishy carbon has turned you soft. The Honzo will tough love you back into hardtail-riding shape.
Or maybe you've decided to simplify—strip away the layers of sediment between you and what matters—to, as they say, get back to your roots.
Well, the Honzo likes roots.
Kona's Two Cents: Usually there's something we can add to a review. Honestly—I got nothing. Jonathon, you get it. —Ian Schmitt, Kona Bicycles Product Manager
The Kona Honzo ST – $550
Related:
The 10 Best Hardtails Under $2,000
First Look: Specialized Fuse and Ruze 27.5+ HardtailsIt has been rumoured for weeks now that free agent defensive centre Samme Pahlsson, most recently of the Vancouver Canucks, would retire from NHL hockey and sign with Örnsköldsvik club team Modo of the Elitserien (SEL). According to Swedish sports journalist Jonatan Lindquist of Expressen, that deal looks to have been finalized. Says Lindquist:
Modo will hold a press conference tomorrow at 13:30 Swedish Time (4:30 AM PST). It |
list, which names thousands of individuals. The government refused to acknowledge (PDF) that the manual was leaked.
Trenga hasn't backed down from the government's request for reconsideration and has ordered the Justice Department to provide:
[A]ll documents, and a summary of any testimony, expert or otherwise, that the United States would present at an evidentiary hearing or trial to establish that inclusion on the No Fly List, as applied to United States citizens who are not under indictment or otherwise charged with a crime and who have not been previously convicted of a crime of violence, is necessary, and the least restrictive method available, to ensure the safety of commercial aircraft from threats of terrorism, and that no level of enhanced screening would be adequate for that purpose.
The government is invoking the state secrets privilege and wants Trenga to dismiss a case brought by an Alexandria, Virginia, man who is a naturalized US citizen. The government says its internal policies for placement on a no-fly list could expose state secrets and therefore should be dismissed in the name of national security. The judge, however, said he would read the materials privately.
The government claims that forking over the materials to the judge is "inappropriate."
"The requested submission would not assist the Court in deciding the pending Motion to Dismiss because it is not an appropriate means to test the scope of the assertion of the State Secrets privilege," the government wrote [PDF] Friday.
The last time the Obama administration invoked the state secrets privilege in a no-fly list case was in 2013. US Attorney Eric Holder told a San Francisco federal judge that the assertion was not to conceal "administrative error" or "embarrassment." But the FBI erroneously placed a Stanford University student on the no-fly list because the agent checked the wrong box on a form.
When the government asserts state secrets—a privilege first upheld by the Supreme Court in a McCarthy era lawsuit—judges usually dismiss a lawsuit against the government.
The dispute concerns Gulet Mohamed, who at the age of 19 was detained in Kuwait in 2011. Mohamed, who has no criminal record, said he was beaten and interrogated by the Kuwaiti government at the urging of US agents. He was eventually allowed to return home to Alexandria to litigate his lawsuit, but is now barred from flying.
"The government's response that they shouldn't be forced to provide an explanation for the terrible things they are doing to innocent Americans, this sickens me," said Mohamed's attorney, Gadeir Abbas, in a telephone interview. "The government is upset that the court is asking for an explanation, and the government is interested in not providing an explanation."
Abbas said the real reason her client was detained was to coerce him into becoming an FBI informant against the Muslim community. What's more, she said, the government should never exclude law-abiding citizens from flying.
"If you don't have evidence that somebody is going to harm an airplane, then why should you exclude them from an airplane?" she said in a telephone interview. "The federal government should no longer have the authority to place Americans on the no-fly list who have not been charged or convicted of a crime."
Unless Judge Trenga changes his mind, the Obama administration has until September 7 to comport with the order.Vice President Pence's spokesman said Tuesday that the vice president is not focusing on stories surrounding President Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE's campaign.
His comments come after new details emerged regarding Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting last year with a Russian lawyer.
"The Vice President is working every day to advance the president's agenda, which is what the American people sent us here to do," press secretary Marc Lotter said in a statement.
"The Vice President was not aware of the meeting. He is not focused on stories about the campaign, particularly stories about the time before he joined the ticket."
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President Trump announced in July last year his decision for Pence to serve as his running mate.
The meeting between Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer took place on June 9, 2016.
The statement from Pence's press secretary comes after Trump Jr. on Tuesday released a chain of emails ahead of a New York Times story. The emails reveal his conversations about setting up the meeting with a Russian lawyer offering compromising information on Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails County GOP in Minnesota shares image comparing Sanders to Hitler Holder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' MORE.
The release came after The New York Times reported Trump Jr. was told before the meeting that the harmful information on Clinton was part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s presidential campaign.Under the bright stage lights, Daniel Staddon, 18, a home-schooler from Salem, W.Va., squeezed his eyes shut as he recited verse after verse from the Bible at the inaugural National Bible Bee.
He recited the first 20 verses of the fifth chapter of Ephesians and the 21 verses of Psalm 145 in the tie-breaker round, winning first place and a $100,000 prize.
"Dad suggested closing my eyes," said Staddon, adding that his seven siblings helped him study for months for the contest that ended last week at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in the District.
Spelling and math competitions have long brought young people to national stages to test their skills and prodigious memories. But now the "bee" concept has gone biblical. Culled from more than 17,000 students ages 7 to 18, the National Bible Bee finals grilled 21 children on their knowledge of Scripture. The five-hour finals were preceded by regional competitions in 49 of the 50 states in September, oral contests and SAT-like tests for 300 contestants.
The Bible bee, which required the mastery of six books of the Bible, was inspired by Shelby Kennedy, a Texas woman who died at 23 of a rare form of cancer in 2005. An anonymous benefactor was inspired when he learned at her memorial service of her commitment to Scripture memorization, and he donated money for the Shelby Kennedy Foundation to launch the bee.
"Kids are learning to spell words," Mark Rasche, executive director of the bee, recalled the benefactor saying. "That's great, but there's no eternal value."
Students and parents alike, chatting between breaks in the competition, seemed to agree.
Jacob Manning, 14, a Minneapolis high school student, said he considered his participation in the bee "really an investment in eternity" because he expected the words to remain with him forever.
"The Bible says, 'My word shall never pass away,' " he said. "Jesus says that."
Jacob didn't make the semifinals, so he and his father spent some time touring museums in the nation's capital, but they returned in time to watch in the finals.
"I was just -- and still am -- enamored with how fluid they are with knowing God's word and being able to tell it and proclaim it," said Al Manning, Jacob's father. "My own nephew was in Scripps National Spelling Bee. That was cool, but this is cooler."
Master of ceremonies Joel Belz said he thought the finals had more tension than baseball's World Series, which ended a couple of nights before.11th September 2015
By Carolanne Wright
Contributing Writer for Wake Up World
“Police suspect foul play after 29 delegates at an alternative medicine seminar in Germany started staggering suffering from violent convulsions, delusions and hallucinations.” ~ The Telegraph
Over the past several months, a rash of deaths and mysterious disappearances of health practitioners and holistic physicians have taken place in the United States. And now, a new report has come forward where 29 alternative and homeopathic practitioners have suffered poisoning from a synthetically-produced psychedelic drug during a conference in Handeloh, a small town near Hamburg, Germany. Members of the group were found in the garden staggering, doubled over in pain. A number were experiencing hallucinations, breathing problems and life-threatening conditions. Barely able to speak, they were rushed to the hospital.
“The patients, aged between 24 and 56, were found suffering from delusions, breathing problems, racing hearts and cramps, some in life-threatening conditions, according to the public broadcaster NDR… Some were suffering delusions and even psychoses. Some patients were administered sedatives en route to hospital, said the emergency response physician who headed the rescue operation, Dr. Kai Rathjen.” [source]
The local government said 160 emergency personnel in 15 ambulances and a helicopter responded to the crisis and swiftly took the patients to medical clinics in the Hamburg region.
Fire service spokesman Mathias Köhlbrandt told public broadcaster NDR (Norddeutscher Rundfunk, or Northern German Broadcasting) that he had never experienced this kind of situation. He described “men and women lay with cramps in the garden and in front of the building”, and added that they did not seem to have knowingly taken a drug.
A criminal investigation is underway. “The questioning begins as soon as the persons are coherent and their statements are useable,” a police official told the news agency DPA.
According to the The Telegraph:
“There must have been a multiple overdose,” Torsten Passie, a member of a German government commission on narcotics, told NDR television. “That argues against the people being aware what they were taking.”
2C-E
The drug in question is 2C-E (4-ethyl-2,5-dimethoxyphenethylamine), a psychedelic phenethylamine first noted by chemist Alexander Shulgin in the book “PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story.” Normally administered orally or through a nasal spray, 2C-E is exceptionally dose sensitive — a small increase can trigger negative reactions.
The drug is also known as Aquarust, which Germany outlawed in 2014.
According to Drugs-Forum, the effects of 2C-E include:
General change in consciousness (as with most psychoactives)
Pupil dilation
Visual patterning, closed and open eye visuals
Confusion, difficulty concentrating, and/or scrambled thoughts
Change in perception of time
Slight increase in body temperature
Slight increase in heart rate
Muscle tension and aching
Jaw tension
Increased perspiration
Gastrointestinal discomfort, nausea and vomiting
Dizziness, confusion
Over-awareness & over-sensitization to music and noise
Paranoia, fear
Unwanted life-changing spiritual experiences
Possible difficulty integrating experiences
Doctors Under Attack?
The Handeloh poisoning follows a series of murders, deaths and disappearances this summer of chiropractors, osteopaths and medical doctors, most of whom were practicing holistic medicine. The apparent coincidence of these events has left many asking: Are health practitioners under attack?
A summary of recent deaths, disappearances and poisonings of health practitioners and holistic physicians.
Dr. Jeff Bradstreet, a leading autism researcher and physician, was found dead from a gun shot wound to the chest in late June. Dubbed a “no-vax” doctor, Dr. Bradstreet’s death occurred shortly after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Georgia Drugs and Narcotics Agency raided his clinic.
, a leading autism researcher and physician, was found dead from a gun shot wound to the chest in late June. Dubbed a “no-vax” doctor, Dr. Bradstreet’s death occurred shortly after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Georgia Drugs and Narcotics Agency raided his clinic. Two chiropractors, Dr. Baron Holt and Dr. Bruce Hedendal, died a few days later from “unknown causes.” Dr. Holt, 33 and Dr. Hedendal, 67, were both were reportedly healthy, and both were described by their families as very fit. Both men were chiropractors and fathers, and both were found dead on the East Coast of Florida, both on Father’s Day.
and, died a few days later from “unknown causes.” Dr. Holt, 33 and Dr. Hedendal, 67, were both were reportedly healthy, and both were described by their families as very fit. Both men were chiropractors and fathers, and both were found dead on the East Coast of Florida, both on Father’s Day. The following week, on June 29th, Integrative Medicine practitioner Teresa Sievers MD was murdered in her home. Says Sheriff Mike Scott who is leading the investigation into her homocide, “Based on the evidence we have to this point… [Sievers’ murder] is not a random, arbitrary situation.”
was murdered in her home. Says Sheriff Mike Scott who is leading the investigation into her homocide, “Based on the evidence we have to this point… [Sievers’ murder] is not a random, arbitrary situation.” The same day, Jeffrey Whiteside MD vanished without a trace. Dr. Whiteside was a pulmonologist known for his successful treatment of lung cancer, who reportedly vanishing while vacationing with family in Wisconsin. On July 23rd, authorities found the body of Dr. Jeffrey Whiteside, who at that stage had been missing for over three weeks. The sheriff’s department said that a.22-caliber handgun was found at the scene, however authorities did not release the cause of death following the autopsy.
vanished without a trace. Dr. Whiteside was a pulmonologist known for his successful treatment of lung cancer, who reportedly vanishing while vacationing with family in Wisconsin. On July 23rd, authorities found the body of Dr. Jeffrey Whiteside, who at that stage had been missing for over three weeks. The sheriff’s department said that a.22-caliber handgun was found at the scene, however authorities did not release the cause of death following the autopsy. Four days later, Patrick Fitzpatrick MD also disappeared while travelling from North Dakota to neighboring Montana. His truck and trailer were found on the roadside, however authorities have found no trace of Dr. Fitzpatrick.
also disappeared while travelling from North Dakota to neighboring Montana. His truck and trailer were found on the roadside, however authorities have found no trace of Dr. Fitzpatrick. One week later, Dr. Lisa Riley, a doctor of osteopathic medicine, was found in her home with a gunshot to the head. Authorities have charged Dr. Riley’s husband Yathomas Riley, who reported her death to police, with her murder.
, a doctor of osteopathic medicine, was found in her home with a gunshot to the head. Authorities have charged Dr. Riley’s husband Yathomas Riley, who reported her death to police, with her murder. Dr. Ron Schwartz, an MD and gynecologist who practiced in Jupiter, Florida, was murdered on July 19th. Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Teri Barbera said Schwartz’s death is considered a homicide, and added that the rumor that Schwartz had millions of dollars in his home is not true. Authorities have no firm leads.
, an MD and gynecologist who practiced in Jupiter, Florida, was murdered on July 19th. Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Teri Barbera said Schwartz’s death is considered a homicide, and added that the rumor that Schwartz had millions of dollars in his home is not true. Authorities have no firm leads. Two days afterwards, Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, a renowned holistic medical doctor who specialized in holistic cancer treatment, died suddenly — even though he was in excellent health. Dr. Gonzalez was the author of What Went Wrong: The Truth Behind the Clinical Trial of the Enzyme Treatment of Cancer, in which he described a concerted effort by the cancer industry to suppress evidence of available, low-cost cancer treatments.
, a renowned holistic medical doctor who specialized in holistic cancer treatment, died suddenly — even though he was in excellent health. Dr. Gonzalez was the author of What Went Wrong: The Truth Behind the Clinical Trial of the Enzyme Treatment of Cancer, in which he described a concerted effort by the cancer industry to suppress evidence of available, low-cost cancer treatments. In late July, holistic dentist Dr. Hakeem Abdul-Karim died in North Carolina — where our first Doctor Bradstreet was also found dead on June 19th, just over one month earlier. Although he was in top physical shape, Dr. Abdul-Karim reportedly died suddenly at 41 while training for a half marathon before a passerby found him dead on the side of the road. With extensive training in dental surgery and a focus on “preventative dentistry”, Dr. Abdul-Karim founded a non-profit foundation 2 years ago to treat severely disadvantaged children and mentally ill patients.
died in North Carolina — where our first Doctor Bradstreet was also found dead on June 19th, just over one month earlier. Although he was in top physical shape, Dr. Abdul-Karim reportedly died suddenly at 41 while training for a half marathon before a passerby found him dead on the side of the road. With extensive training in dental surgery and a focus on “preventative dentistry”, Dr. Abdul-Karim founded a non-profit foundation 2 years ago to treat severely disadvantaged children and mentally ill patients. On August 3rd, the “sudden, non-medical death” of Jef Harvey was announced by his colleagues. Harvey was a technologist and healing arts practitioner, homeopathy practitioner and Board Certified in Quorom Nutrition, who until his death was working to deploy emerging technologies in autoimmune disease reversal and accelerated deep tissue wound healing. A 6 year veteran in Naval Intelligence (Electronics Unit), Harvey’s background included advanced software systems as well as military training in remote viewing and neurolinguistic programmming (NLP). He was a vocal advocate for transparency and disclosure on every level, including disclosure of the military-industrial–intelligence complex, ET’s, and the release to the world of the long suppressed technology. (An official cause of Harvey’s death is currently unknown.)
was announced by his colleagues. Harvey was a technologist and healing arts practitioner, homeopathy practitioner and Board Certified in Quorom Nutrition, who until his death was working to deploy emerging technologies in autoimmune disease reversal and accelerated deep tissue wound healing. A 6 year veteran in Naval Intelligence (Electronics Unit), Harvey’s background included advanced software systems as well as military training in remote viewing and neurolinguistic programmming (NLP). He was a vocal advocate for transparency and disclosure on every level, including disclosure of the military-industrial–intelligence complex, ET’s, and the release to the world of the long suppressed technology. (An official cause of Harvey’s death is currently unknown.) Dr. Mary Rene Bovier, an osteopathic physician specializing in behavioral and healthcare counseling, was murdered in her home mid-August. Dr. Bovier, 65, was found stabbed to death in her home in Pennsylvania, in a scene that authorities report to be indicative of homicide.
Except for the poisoning in Germany, all deaths and disappearances took place in eastern U.S. states, with many in the south.
Further details can be found here.
Editor’s note: The two couch potatoes at Snopes.com, who have “no formal background or experience in investigative research”, are claiming to have debunked this story, stating (among other things) that the victims of this poisoning were not holistic doctors.
However, in consultation with German and English speaking media in Germany, Erin from Health Nut News has confirmed the credentials of the victims of this poisoning and the details reported above. Snopes apparently didn’t try very hard to gather the facts they claim to represent.
Article sources
About the author: I’m Carolanne — a writer, chef, traveler and enthusiastic advocate for sustainability, organics and joyful living. It’s good to have you here. If you would like to learn more, connect with me at I’m Carolanne — a writer, chef, traveler and enthusiastic advocate for sustainability, organics and joyful living. It’s good to have you here. If you would like to learn more, connect with me at Thrive-Living.net or visit Twitter.com/Thrive_LivingA man was beaten and robbed while walking on South Michigan Avenue Monday night, at least the fourth attack near Grant Park over the last two weeks, Chicago police said.
The man, 22, told police he was approached by four men around 10:30 p.m. in the 600 block of South Michigan Avenue.
The men grabbed his wallet, and then hit and kicked him, police said. The group ran south on Michigan.
The man suffered minor injuries and declined medical attention.
No one was in custody.
The incident was the latest in a rash of violent robberies in the park this month.
Between Nov. 8 and Nov. 12, police said they responded to three robbery reports around East Balbo Drive and Michigan between around 8 and 9:30 p.m.
In each case, a group targeted people on the sidewalk, grabbed their belongings and punched and kicked them, police said.
One of the robberies was carried out by two men, according to police. The other two were committed by a large group of teenagers.
At least one 16-year-old girl was arrested in the robberies.Thanks for checking out our project! If you missed out, you can get your Elevation Dock at ElevationLab.com, along with updates and future projects. And thanks again to all the backers, these would never have been made without your support. - Casey
Wired: "The Dock Apple should have made in the first place."
John Gruber: "An exquisitely well-crafted, beautiful, useful iPhone dock. I'm in."
New York Times: "...but wow, what a stand. It's exquisitely milled from solid, Appleesque aluminum."
Gizmodo: "I'm tempted to buy an iPhone just so I can use the Elevation Dock"
SlashGear: "Elevation Dock for iPhone blows up on Kickstarter"
UberGizmo: "Dock aims to make undocking your iPhone a piece of cake"
Jason Fried: "Love the thinking that went into the design!"
Marco Arment: "Elevation Dock for iPhone raised $75k in 8 hours"
MJ Siegler: "out Apple'd, Apple."
Cult of Mac: "Elevation Lab Has Designed The Most Gorgeous iPhone Dock Ever Made"
GigaOM: "A dock becomes a darling of the tech world"
Digital Trends: "Great design if you ask us. Why didn’t Apple think of this?"
Electronistra: "Upscale, case-friendly home"
Uncrate: "...you're going to want a dock. But not just any dock. The Elevation Dock."
TNW: "The Elevation Dock for iPhone blows away Apple's crap options"
Cool Material "The Elevation Dock is, to put it bluntly, perfect."
Silicon Florist "I... Yeah. I don't even really know where to begin."
AIGA: "...perfect blend of form and functionality... much like Dyson's fan."
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*Update* Just added Back Multiple Rewards to make it simpler for everyone wanting multiple docks.
There is a growing FAQ section at the bottom of the page to help answer your questions.
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If you have tried using docks for your iPhone, you have probably felt our frustration: Undocking is difficult, many aren't designed to work with cases, they are lightweight, and are generally made as a cheap afterthought accessory.
That's why we designed the Elevation Dock - Simple to use, quick undocking, and it works with or without a case. We didn't stop there - It's beautifully precision machined from solid aluminum and it comes in a gorgeous set of surface finishes, setting a new bar for quality and something that looks really good on your desk. It complements the high-level craftsmanship of the iPhone like no other.
Undocking is a breeze. Just pull up the phone up - no violent shaking or using two hands to hold the dock down required. This is achieved by a special low-friction connection, the heft of its solid metal construction, and tacky rubber feet.
Case, no case, doesn't matter. Again, the Elevation Dock is designed to just work. That's why a clever movable support pad allows you to use the dock with or without a case and in a range of case sizes.
Obsessive attention to quality. Elevation Docks are individually CNC machined from solid billets of aircraft grade aluminum, no expense spared. The result is a level of precision that can't be achieve through molding or casting. They feel heavy, strong, durable and look gorgeous.
We could have easily made them cheaper with injection molded plastic filled with sand or something, but this is something we want for ourselves and we appreciate good craftsmanship - this probably why we're such big fans of Apple hardware (well... except for those damn docks!).
Gorgeous finishes. We worked with a specialized metal finishing company to help achieve the gorgeous finish you find on Apple's unibody Macbook Pro's and iMacs - its hand buffed, glass bead blasted, electro-chemically micropolished, hard anodized and sealed.
Makes FaceTime Better. The dock's acoustics make the iPhone sound great and less tinny than when laid on a desk, so speakerphone and FaceTime calls sound better. And its angled back 8 degrees, so you are perfectly in frame of the video.We all know now that Windows 8 sales have been.... disappointing. You can blame the hardware. You can blame Windows 8's mixed-up interfaces. You can blame the rise of tablets and smartphones. Whatever. The bottom line is Windows 8 PC and laptop sales have been slow. So, what, according to Amazon, in this winter of Windows 8 discontent has been the best selling laptop? It's Samsung's ARM-powered, Linux-based Chromebook.
Shocked? Amazed? Why? The Chromebook has several things going for it.
The Chromebook Gallery
First, it's cheap. The list price for $249. On Amazon, it's currently going for more than that: $317. Why is it selling for more? It appears that retailers are taking advantage of the demand for this lightweight laptop. Even at that price it's cheaper thanany of the other laptops in Amazon's top 20 laptop list.
Second, anyone who can use a Web browser can use a Chromebook. After all its interface is primarily the Chrome Web browser. Who can't use a browser?
True, there is Linux under the hood but you have to go out of your way to find it. Windows 8 PCs, on the other hand, require you to re-learn how you use your desktop. Advantage: Chrome.
Don't think that just because Chromebook works best with the Web that it's helpless without an Internet connection. It's not. For example, you can edit documents even without an Internet connection to Google Docs/Google Drive.
As others are also discovering, the Chromebook works really well for daily work.. To quote ZDNet's own James Kendrick, my " recent purchase of a Chromebook surprised me by proving how well it works for me. After a week of using the Chromebook, that surprise has morphed into total satisfaction."
He's not the only one. Think about your own work. Do you spend 90% of your time working on the Web? Using software-as-a-service or Web apps most of the time? If you do, you might just find, as Amazon buyers have, that a Linux-powered Chromebook is all the laptop you need.
Related Stories:This this was not a fun, attractive, or well-played NBA game. The Pacers, turnover-prone all season and barely able to handle the ball without George Hill, committed 19 turnovers and seemed to be on the verge of losing the ball on every possession. The Knicks committed 30 fouls, about 10 more than the average team commits in a game, and at one point in the third quarter, I think every player had at least four fouls. It was truly awful. There were so many low points that the entire game transformed during some third-quarter nadir into a 48-minute-long low point.
It happened around the 4:45 mark of the third quarter, where my meticulous notes about X’s and O’s and crowd tomfoolery abruptly stop and transition into a single harrowing sentence: “I have no idea what is going on right now.”
I reviewed the sequence in question on film after the game. Here is what happened: J.R. Smith drove and threw a jump pass to the Pacers. He does not play for the Pacers. David West recovered the ball and threw ahead to D.J. Augustin, starting in Hill’s place and streaking at this very moment down the left wing in a perfect two-on-one, Paul George trailing him at the foul line (not an ideal position) and only Chris Copeland between them. But Copeland is at least eight inches taller than Augustin and sort of spooked him. So Augustin tried a ridiculous airborne lefty behind-the-back pass to George, only he threw it way behind George, and the ball rolled toward the opposite sideline.
George picked it up. That’s good! He drove in for a layup, and missed when Kenyon Martin mounted a strong challenge at the rim. That’s bad. The Knicks ran out, and Raymond Felton hit Copeland for a wide-open transition 3-pointer. He missed. Felton, who can barely jump, outleapt Augustin for the rebound, volleyballed it back off the top of the backboard, whacked at it again when it came down, finally grabbed it, and then dished it back out to Smith for a 3-pointer so open I might have been able to get rim.
Smith hit the side of the backboard. Or if he hit rim, he barely grazed the left side of it. West and Ian Mahinmi, a very tall center, were so befuddled by the severity of Smith’s miss, they let Copeland slip in for the rebound and putback basket. The Pacers called a timeout, and Edie Falco was delighted. Fin.
But there was so much more. Augustin threw a laser beam of an entry pass at Roy Hibbert’s feet in the first half. Lance Stephenson just fell down with the ball in crunch time, and we can only hope he’s not injured. Gerald Green, dusted off out of desperation, threw two consecutive post entry passes directly to players wearing the opposing jersey. With the game still within reach, both Hibbert and West tossed amazingly errant passes out of the post as the Knicks, who mostly scrapped hard double-teams tonight, showed hints of some trapping in crunch time. They actually did trap Hibbert on the left block with about eight minutes to go, and Hibbert, pinched toward the sideline, kicked the ball out to a shooter with something that was closer to a roll than a pass. It looked like Hibbert was skipping a stone, and the ball skidded out of bounds along the near sideline.
Another sequence midway through the third quarter went like this: George, under very tight pressure from Iman Shumpert, couldn’t find a clean passing lane to West, who was wrestling underneath with Martin. George gave up and tried the Kevin Durant rip move, only he lost control of the ball and flung it high into the air. Felton caught it on the other side of the floor and passed ahead to Copeland for a fast break, which promptly ended when Copeland simultaneously committed a charging foul and threw a crosscourt pass about 15 feet from his target and out of bounds.
Indiana was still somehow only down by eight with 1:25 left when they entered the ball to West, who struggled in the second half after a strong start. West saw a double-team coming and alertly kicked the ball out to George on the perimeter. Problem: George had just moved from the spot where West threw the ball, and it went into the backcourt for a violation. It was a fitting end to a terrible game — a game in which the Pacers shot 19-of-33 from the foul line. “If we make our free throws,” Indiana coach Frank Vogel said afterward, “it’s a different game.” He added this very apt summary of tonight’s events: “We had a lot of problems. We didn’t play a good basketball game.”
After the game, Hibbert was sitting at his locker, head bowed, lamenting to Danny Granger that “we should have won” over and over. Hibbert played only 31 minutes and spent much of the game in foul trouble, and at least one of his fouls — his fifth — was the sort of straight-up block the referees have generally been allowing him this season. I asked Hibbert if the refs officiated him differently tonight. He wouldn’t take the bait. “What did you think?” he asked. I said the fifth foul was shaky given precedent. “I think I had some dumb fouls, personally. I wasn’t as disciplined as I should have been, and I take responsibility for that.”
More notes from this mess:
• The Blue Man Group performed pregame tonight, and they were rehearsing in the bowels of the arena, where media members walk to get food or enter the court. And let me tell you, there is nothing that prepares you for the moment when you turn the corner in a hallway and suddenly come face-to-face with a blue-headed man holding an orange lightsaber.
• Pablo Prigioni, a.k.a. The Sneak, knocked the ball out of a dribbler’s hands on the sideline and out of bounds twice, just because. That is what The Sneak does.
• The crowd went wild when Prigioni was introduced as a starter, happy at his return to the starting five after Mike Woodson’s failed Game 4 experiment with a big starting lineup. They went wild again when he reentered the game early in the second quarter for Jason Kidd, who is just a very sad person right now. There was a lot of good-natured encouragement, almost pleading, from the MSG crowd tonight — a sure sign the Knicks are trailing, and that a few players have some issues to sort out. They got antsy when Shumpert hesitated on open jumpers the Pacers are increasingly happy to give him, but the antsiness felt very positive. The fans weren’t saying, “Shoot it, you bum!” They were saying, “We know you can make it, Iman!”
They rose in anticipation whenever Smith came open, expressing an excitement that this would be the shot to break his slump. (They were right.) And they shrieked late in the first quarter, when a jump ball ricocheted ahead to Kidd, scoreless since Game 2 of the Boston series, and Kidd had nothing but clear space between himself and the basket. The shriek turned into a horrific gasp as Kidd’s layup rolled around and off the rim, and save for a token second of playing time on the last possession of the half, we never saw Kidd again.
• Hill’s absence because of a concussion was all over this game and changes the entire series. Augustin hit some 3s, and that’s nice, but he’s been inconsistent on offense all season, and he’s a disaster defending the pick-and-roll. The Knicks finally got some traction on pick-and-rolls Thursday night, and they deserve credit for running some creative stuff, confusing the Pacers, and working their way into the middle of the floor against Indiana’s wishes — something they were not able to do in most of the four prior games. That left Hibbert in the uncomfortable position of having to cover a bit too much ground in monitoring both the New York ball handler driving at him and his own man, a looming threat for a lob pass. “There were a lot of two-on-one situations myself and Ian [Mahinmi] had to deal with,” Hibbert told me after the game. “And we didn’t take care of it. They put us in tough situations on the pick-and-roll, and they finished a lot of those plays they haven’t in the past.”
Augustin is obviously much smaller than Hill, who stands 6-foot-2 with long arms that can bother pick-and-roll ball handlers from behind. But he’s also less steady and less disciplined, and opposing ball handlers can confuse him and cross him up with small fakes — little jukes that end with Augustin a fatal beat behind the play, or smushed against a pick. Every bit of ground the point guard loses in defending the pick-and-roll means the other four defenders have to extend their help defense that much further, and that creates holes all over the place.
• Carmelo Anthony made some damn tough shots. He was only 12-of-28, which isn’t great, but it was good enough — especially considering the degree of difficulty.
• Hibbert praised Mahinmi after the game, and Mahinmi deserves it. He’s giving Indiana good minutes on both ends of the floor in this series, but mostly as the agile rim protector the team was missing last season.
• Hill’s injury also creates some painful trickle-down effects for the Pacers. They played about nine minutes tonight without a traditional point guard, with George and Stephenson combining to fill that role. That almost literally never happened in the regular season. No lineup lacking both Hill and Augustin logged more than 21 minutes all season, per NBA.com, and that lineup included Ben Hansbrough — a true point guard who briefly stole Augustin’s job. Hansbrough was in every non-Hill/Augustin five-man group that logged more than a couple of minutes all season.
With a wing player filling the point guard slot for those nine minutes, Vogel turned to a few other seldom-used groupings — including the Sam Young–Green combination of death, and the Stephenson-Young-Green trio. It can’t feel good to reach like that in an closeout game.
• Pitbull and Ne-Yo, “Give Me Everything” count: Just one appearance, but it was as horrible as ever.
• The Knicks, as mentioned, mixed up some of their pick-and-roll sets in interesting ways. Early in the third quarter, they began three consecutive possessions by entering the ball to Anthony at the left elbow, clearly setting up for him to run a pick-and-roll with Tyson Chandler at the other elbow:
On the first possession, that’s exactly what they did, and Anthony missed a very tough midrange jumper over George. They set up the same way on the next possession, and the Pacers likely expected the same play. But instead, Anthony pitched the ball to Felton on the left wing, and Anthony and Chandler combined to set a monster double screen for Felton — a pick that freed Felton to dribble into the middle of the floor and hit a floater:
They ran another variation on the next possession, with Felton driving away from the double screen, getting into the paint, and skipping the ball to Prigioni for an open 3-pointer. Good stuff.
New York found similar success in the fourth quarter running all kinds of variations on a similar setup, only with Copeland and Martin at the elbows, and Anthony in the left corner:
We look for grand adjustments — lineup changes, etc. — in playoff series, but it’s often the nitty-gritty stuff like this that moves the needle on a game-to-game basis. “We changed some things a little bit tonight,” Woodson said at his postgame presser after I asked |
result was that in 2014, it won two-thirds of the parliamentary seats with 45 percent of the vote.
In 2015, the Polish Law and Justice Party did not need a constitutional amendment in order to remake the judiciary in its image. It simply refused to seat judges that had been appointed to Poland’s highest court by the outgoing party. The Law and Justice Party declared those appointments unconstitutional, then named its own slate. The party also raised the voting threshold for the court to strike a law (to two-thirds), but this change was declared unconstitutional by the constitutional court itself. The government then refused to publish this and other rulings of the constitutional court, creating legal confusion and leading the outgoing chair of the court to say that Poland was “on the road to autocracy.”
Hungary and Poland are hardly unique. In Turkey, President Erdoǧan leveraged the 2016 coup attempt to deepen his massive purge of almost every state institution, leaving regime loyalists firmly in control. As of this writing, more than 135,000 soldiers, judges, police, university deans, and teachers have lost their jobs, in some cases without due process. His AK party has also suspended and manipulated media licenses, and arrested journalists on national security grounds.
In Venezuela, the Chávez regime has notoriously aggregated executive power, limited political opposition, attacked academia, and stifled independent media — a classic example of “de-democratization” under the color of law. Some moves have been especially creative. When a political opponent won at the municipal level, the Chávez regime responded by gutting the powers wielded by the new mayor.
Many of these examples of democratic backsliding proceeded through formally constitutional legislation or administrative processes. Alarm in response to each of them can thus be condemned as excessive or histrionic. But the cumulative effect of many small weakening steps is to dismantle the possibility of democratic competition, leaving only its facade. It is a death by a thousand cuts, rather than the clean slice of the coup maker.
This is what makes the slow road from democracy so alluring to seekers of power, and so dangerous for the rest of us. Because it can be masked with a veneer of legality, it can be cloaked with plausible deniability. It is always possible to justify each incremental step.
Can we rely on the Constitution?
So could it happen here? Looking to these recent examples suggests that the US Constitution may be good at checking coups or the anti-democratic deployment of emergency powers, but it isn’t well-suited to stall the slow decay of democracy. Our 18th-century Constitution lacks provisions necessary to slow down a would-be autocrat bent on the slow dismantling of the republic.
To be sure, the cumbersome American process of constitutional amendment shuts off one avenue for a president who wishes to amass power — say, by ending term limits. But other much-cited checks and balances have been overrated.
James Madison thought the divergent “ambitions” of the legislative and executive branches would cause those institutions to balance one another. But he failed to anticipate the rise of parties, and how they would reshape incentives. Congress members today may have little reason to investigate or otherwise rein in an aggressive president of their own party, as we are now witnessing. That Republicans are not eager to investigate President Trump’s financial dealings, or his contacts with Russia, is entirely predictable, from an institutional standpoint.
Other constitutions give minority parties rights to demand information and make inquiries, but the US Constitution does not.
Where other nations have independent election officials, too many of our election rules depend on the good faith of the party in power. As the omnipresence of gerrymandering shows, good faith may not be enough. After the 2010 redistricting in Wisconsin, the GOP was able to win 60 of 99 seats in the state legislature, despite winning less than half of the statewide vote. (A case challenging Wisconsin’s gerrymandering will be heard by the Supreme Court.)
North Carolina Republicans tried a strategy that was straight out of the Chávez playbook when their party’s candidate lost the governor’s race: They cut the governor’s staff by 80 percent, eliminated his ability to name trustees of the state university, and required that cabinet appointees be approved by the legislature. They also restructured the elections board so that they would hold the chairmanship during all statewide elections. These moves remain tied up in court.
The courts are critical in upholding the rule of law. But there is a growing acceptance in American jurisprudence of “deference” to the political branches. That ideology, in combination with aggressively partisan appointments — Trump is in a position to fill 112 federal judicial vacancies, out of 870 seats — could erode public confidence in judges’ ability to stand up to government overreach, and thus lead to democratic retrogression.
The independence of even of the Supreme Court is dependent on “norms,” not constitutional rules — and norms can change. In a less polarized time, the US Senate would have held confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, President Obama’s last Supreme Court nominee, yet by playing hardball, Republicans may end up reshaping how laws are interpreted for decades to come.
Similarly, in the United States, the civil service, which scholars understand as a bulwark against autocracy, is protected largely by tradition. That is why the Republican move to lay off federal workers and reduce the benefits of those who remain is so significant, as is a gratuitous revival of a rule that lets them punish individual bureaucrats by slashing their pay. US attorneys also serve “at the pleasure” of the president; it is largely self-restraint (not always exercised) that prevents presidents from punishing them or rewarding them for partisan legal attacks.
Yet other constitutions create independent ombudsmen offices to monitor corruption or human rights compliance. Not so ours.
While the First Amendment (currently) limits the misuse of libel law, it does not hedge the risk of partisan media regulation by the Federal Communications Commission or other agencies. Media companies seeking to keep regulators’ favor have now lots of reasons to trim the sails of their political coverage. And the First Amendment, for good or ill, arguably protects sources of outright propaganda — sites spreading lies about politicians, for example — which could in tandem with presidential attacks on the media as an “enemy of the American people” lead citizens to distrust all news sources.
There is, in short, nothing particularly exceptional about the American Constitution — at least in any positive sense. Because of its age, the Constitution doesn’t reflect the learning from recent generations of constitutional designers. If anything, it is more vulnerable to backsliding than the regimes that failed in Poland, Hungary, Venezuela, Turkey, and elsewhere.
What will prevent backsliding from occurring here?
Whether or not the United States moves away from its best democratic traditions doesn’t rest on the Constitution or on simple fidelity to constitutional institutions. Those won’t be enough. Nor will it be enough to belabor the technical legal merits or demerits of specific executive actions, or their opponents’ responses. To do so misses the forest for the trees.
Rather, the degree to which democratic norms and practices are lost in the United States over the next four years will depend on how both politicians and citizens react. The quality of our democracy will depend on what happens on the streets, what happens in legislative backrooms (especially on the Republican side), and, most importantly, what happens at the polls. But it won’t depend, in any simple way, on the Constitution. And at least in this regard, there is nothing exceptional about our current predicament.
Surveying democratic backsliding around the world, the clear lesson is: Not every wolf threatening democracy howls and bares its teeth. Many threats are stealthy. The founders certainly knew that. They did not devise autocrat-proof institutions, but they were keenly aware of politicians’ autocratic tendencies, and felt a great trepidation about whether American democracy should endure.
We would do well to reject feel-good talk about American exceptionalism and embrace some of the founders’ trepidation.
Aziz Huq is the Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School. Tom Ginsburg is the Leo Spitz professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School and is on Twitter @tomginsburg. They are the co-editors of Assessing Constitutional Performance.
The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart, often scholarly excursions into the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically written by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.FCA is planning a mic drop ahead of the New York Auto Show when it comes to American muscle cars. That is when the automaker will stage the world debut of the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon, a Hellcat on steroids, and what is expected to be the fastest muscle car in the world.
That is saying something, given that the supercharged 6.2-liter Hemi Hellcat engine already puts out 707 hp and 650 lb-ft of torque, inducing ridiculous power-fuelled grins for those who drive it in a Challenger SRT Hellcat coupe or the Charger SRT Hellcat sedan. They are currently offered with a choice of a six-speed manual transmission or an eight-speed automatic. Dodge also surprised the industry by introducing the 2015 Challenger SRT Hellcat for less than $60,000.
View 3 Photos
A Charger Hellcat's 6.2-liter supercharged HEMI V-8
"Most cars attempt to be everything to everybody. Then there are the rare few that revel in a single objective, rendering them totally irresistible to a subculture," said Tim Kuniskis, head of Dodge, SRT, Chrysler and Fiat passenger car brands for FCA North America, in a release. "The Dodge Challenger SRT Demon is conceived, designed and engineered for a subculture of enthusiasts who know that a tenth is a car and a half second is your reputation."
We don't have details or specs yet. Dodge has begun a series of pre-reveal videos that will run from today until the car is revealed in April ahead of the auto show. They will roll out weekly at www.ifyouknowyouknow.com.
For the engineers who worked on the Hellcat, the original target was to get 600 hp from the engine. Then the goal crept up to 675, then 700. In the end, the team engineered it for 707 hp.OTTAWA -- Canada's budget watchdog released fiscal predictions Tuesday that suggest the federal government has been overly prudent in its projections.
A new report by the parliamentary budget office said the federal books are on track to add a total of $90.8 billion to the public debt over the next half-decade -- lower than the federal government's projection of $113.2 billion over the same period.
The analysis also challenges the Liberal government's estimate of a shortfall for 2015-16, saying Ottawa will instead have a $700-million surplus in 2015-16, rather than the projected $5.4-billion deficit.
Critics say the Liberals have deliberately lowered their fiscal outlook by including larger-than-usual risk adjustments of $6 billion per year in order to help the government beat expectations down the road.
Earlier this month, the parliamentary budget office called the Liberals' adjustment "excessive" and said it eroded the independence of government's traditional practice of basing its projections on an average of private-sector economic forecasts.
On Tuesday, the PBO again questioned the need for the government to use such a big cushion in its predictions.
"PBO's forecast of the budgetary balance is $4.5 billion higher than budget 2016, on average, over the outlook," the document said.
"The average difference is roughly in line with the budget 2016 planning adjustment."
For example, the budget office is expecting Ottawa to show a $20.5-billion deficit this year, $8.9 billion smaller than the Liberal government's $29.4-billion prediction.
Conservative interim leader Rona Ambrose crowed about the report during question period, citing it as evidence that Liberal claims of an inherited Conservative deficit are little more than political fiction.
"Today, (the parliamentary budget officer) confirmed two more things: first, the Liberal budget does not add up, and second, good news -- Conservatives did leave a surplus," Ambrose said as the Tory benches hollered their approval.
Finance Minister Bill Morneau defended his budgetary prudence as a necessary hedge against forecasters, who have been known to be wrong in recent years.
"We want to make sure that Canadians understand that we're being prudent as we come up with estimates of how the economy will do -- that's the starting point," Morneau said Tuesday when asked about the criticism.
"We were pleased that the parliamentary budget officer concluded that our investments are going to make a difference in growth to the economy."
The report also estimated the cost of a Liberal commitment to cancel a Conservative policy that, starting in 2023, would have gradually increased the eligibility age for old age security to 67 from 65.
In introducing the change, the Tories argued the system was unsustainable; the Liberals promised during the campaign to reverse the move.
The PBO says the Liberal reversal will cost the public treasury $11.2 billion in 2029-30 -- the first full year after the Tory plan would have been completely phased in.
"Had the age of eligibility change not been reversed, federal debt would be eliminated by 2057-58 -- seven years earlier than under the current policy," said the report, which predicted the debt to be completely paid off by 2064-65.
The budget office said the federal fiscal structure is sustainable over the long term and the debt-to-GDP ratio expected to begin falling in 2017-18.
The office also projected Canada's real gross domestic product -- a common measure of economic growth -- to expand 1.8 per cent this year, 2.5 per cent in 2017 and average 1.6 per cent between 2018 and 2020.
By comparison, the federal budget predicted real GDP to grow 1.4 per cent in 2016 and 2.2 per cent in 2017 -- numbers based on an average of private-sector forecasts.
Last week, the Bank of Canada projected real GDP to expand by 1.7 per cent in 2016, up from its January expectation of 1.4 per cent. The central bank said the rosier prediction was due in part to billions of dollars in fiscal measures announced by Ottawa for projects like infrastructure.
It also projected growth of 2.3 per cent for 2017.Moving enterprise IT software to the cloud isn't just a technology issue, it's software support entitlement issue as well. Red Hat Cloud Access extends Linux subscription model for cloud computing deployments on Amazon EC2.
Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) today is unveiling a new program dubbed Red Hat Cloud Access through which current Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers can leverage their existing support subscriptions for cloud deployments.
With Red Hat Cloud Access, enterprises that have Red Hat Enterprise Linux premium subscriptions can move them to Amazon's EC2 cloud. As a result, Red Hat is enabling its customers to migrate to the cloud with their existing subscriptions. Red Hat is also now set to ensure that the Amazon images of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux are consistent with the version updates that enterprises deploy on-premises.
"This goes a long way to making it clear how customers work with Red Hat in public clouds," Mike Ferris, director of product strategy for Red Hat's cloud solutions, told InternetNews.com.
Management of the public cloud deployment can also be enabled via Red Hat's Network Satellite provisioning and management tool.
Moving subscriptions to the cloud isn't just a one-way migration, either. Ferris said he expects that enterprises taking advantage of Red Hat Cloud Access will move current on-premises RHEL subscriptions up to the cloud while also may move subscriptions back from the cloud to on-site as needed.
The move to simplify the way Red Hat works with its customers on the cloud comes as rival vendor Ubuntu ramps up its own cloud strategy.
Red Hat has been offering its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Amazon for several years. Ferris noted that to date the Amazon instances of RHEL have been in beta with limited support. He added that Red Hat used the beta to help determine what customers wanted and how they'd use the public cloud with RHEL.
"Now we're making sure that customers have a consistent relationship with Red Hat," whether it's on-site or in the cloud, Ferris said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
Follow ServerWatch on TwitterJapan-based OEM Freetel revealed plans to enter the Windows Phone market later this summer. The company will showcase the phone as part of its 2015 Mobile World Congress announcements next week in Barcelona, Spain.
The phone, which doesn't have a formal name yet, will have a 5-inch 1080p display. Inside there will be an unnamed 64-bit processor (likely the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 410), along with 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage, an 8MP rear camera and a 2MP front-facing camera. It will also have a 2500 mAh battery and will be sold SIM-free.
The render of the Freetel phone looks a lot like the Kazam Thunder Windows Phone devices that were revealed just a few days ago, so it's likely that Freetel is simply using the same case design for its product.
Although the hardware looks mediocre, itself a recycled design from Kazam, the bigger story here is Windows Phone returning to Japan. The Japanese market was all but dropped from the Windows Phone 8 launch with the Toshiba-Fujitsu IS12T from 2012 being the last big seller. Needless to say, this return could be interesting.
Hopefully, we will learn more at MWC 2015 next week as the same phone model should be shown for European carriers. Stay tuned for our coverage starting on Sunday!
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Dramatic footage captured for National Geographic shows a dying and emaciated polar bear struggling to find food in a land devoid of ice and snow.
The poor creature can be seen dragging its bony frame across rough land and scavenging for food in a bin.
Paul Nicklen, the photographer who shot the heart-wrenching footage, says the sight reduced him to tears.
"We stood there crying - filming with tears rolling down our cheeks," he said.
They found the dying creature on Canada's Baffin Island - and area that has seen a dramatic reduction in sea ice because of global warming.
Nicklen says that had he intervened, it would only have prolonged the inevitable and broken Canada's laws in the process. Instead, he filmed the bear's slow, painful death and posted it to social media to serve as visual proof of the impact of climate change.
"When scientists say bears are going extinct, I want people to realize what it looks like. Bears are going to starve to death," said Nicklen.
"This is what a starving bear looks like."
Polar bears are only native to the Arctic region and are one of the many casualties of climate change. They rely on the Arctic ice for hunting seals and are becoming increasingly threatened as the ice melts away.
(Image: Caters News Agency)
(Image: Caters News Agency)
The World Wildlife Fund predicted back in 2002 that polar bears may face extinction through a loss of habitat and that prediction shows strong signs of coming true.
"My entire Sea Legacy team was pushing through their tears and emotions while documenting this dying polar bear," said Nicklen.
"It's a soul-crushing scene that still haunts me, but I know we need to share both the beautiful and the heartbreaking if we are going to break down the walls of apathy."
(Image: Caters News Agency)
(Image: Caters News Agency)
There are an estimated 25,000 bears left in the wild and most experts agree that unless climate change is halted, they will all be dead within the next 100 years.
"The simple truth is this — if the Earth continues to warm, we will lose bears and entire polar ecosystems. This large male bear was not old, and he certainly died within hours or days of this moment," Nicklen wrote on Instagram.
"But there are solutions. We must reduce our carbon footprint, eat the right food, stop cutting down our forests, and begin putting the Earth — our home — first."In the wake of the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, over a Confederate monument, an organizer for the Louisville chapter of Black Lives Matter penned an article last week laying out 10 "requests" for "white people."
Chanelle Helm got off to a rousing start in her piece for Leo Weekly by telling white people with no descendants to "will your property to a black or brown family. Preferably one that lives in generational poverty."
Not one to leave a stone unturned, Helm added that whites who inherit property they intend to sell should instead "give it to a black or brown family. You’re bound to make that money in some other white privileged way."
She's building her fan base fast. Can you feel it?
It gets better. Helm said white people who can afford to downsize should "give up the home you own to a black or brown family. Preferably a family from generational poverty."
Then she got specific with white people's wills, saying that "if any of the people you intend to leave your property to are racists [sic] a**holes, change the will, and will your property to a black or brown family. Preferably a family from generational poverty."
Yes, there's more. She also encouraged white people, "especially white women (because this is yaw specialty — Nosey Jenny and Meddling Kathy)" to "get a racist fired... You are complicit when you ignore them. Get your boss fired cause they [sic] racist too."
Helm presumably penned her piece just after the events in Charlottesville, as she suggests to her white fans that "if any white person at your work, or as you enter in spaces and you overhear a white person praising the actions from yesterday, first, get a pic. Get their name and more info. Hell, find out where they work — Get Them Fired. But certainly address them, and, if you need to, you got hands: use them."
She ends her piece with a series of hashtags: #RunUsOurLand #Reparations #YouGonLearnToday #RunUsOurMoney.
Helm's piece drew a ton of comments. At least one individual wondered if she was being satirical. But most folks unsurprisingly weren't exactly giving Helm a standing ovation.
"As a 'white' woman who has always stood up to racism and taught my children to as well, I find the slamming of all white people in this article as bad as anyone who stereotypically labels anyone," one commenter wrote. "This idea that's 'this was done to us and now it's your turn' does not make it justified or OK. It's never OK, never."
"Hold the f*** up here you paint chip eating window licker," another commenter said. "If you want a house, land, luxuries, and so on. Teach your children to study, work hard and get the required skills to get a good career not just a job but a career. If you want it earn it."
This guy puts it succinctly: "When you're at the park it has a sign that says don't feed the ducks because they will become dependent on humans and may not survive. I ain't feeding no damn ducks."
(H/T: IJR)A Home Office advertising campaign that highlights one of Labour's key election policies on crime and policing is to be banned by the advertising industry watchdog, the Guardian has learned.
The Advertising Standards Authority has told the Home Office that its television adverts highlighting the government's "policing pledge" that neighbourhood officers can now be expected to spend 80% of their time on the beat is to be banned with immediate effect.
The ASA says in an adjudication to be published next week that the television ad breaches its "legal, decent, honest, truthful" code because it is misleading on at least three counts.
"The ad must not be broadcast again in its current form. We told the Home Office to ensure the basis of claims was made clear in future. We also told them to ensure they held adequate substantiation for future claims," says the final ASA adjudication, leaked to the Guardian.
The decision is embarrassing to Gordon Brown and the home secretary, Alan Johnson, who highlighted the neighbourhood policing pledge this month which was central to Labour's crime and justice policy in the coming election campaign. Labour has already issued a campaign video in effect accusing the Tories of being the "burglar's friend" for opposing the retention of DNA profiles of innocent people and the extension of CCTV coverage.
The ASA said the ad was misleading because while it said that 80% of officers' time would be spent "on the beat", it did not make it clear this included duties other than patrolling the streets.
It also said the ad did not make it sufficiently clear that the pledge doesn't apply to all 140,000 police officers in England and Wales, but only the 13,500 neighbourhood constables and 16,000 community support officers in neighbourhood policing teams.
The watchdog is also concerned that the advertised standard for time on the beat is not actually being met and "[the advert] does not make clear the commitment would not necessarily be delivered".
The ban follows a decision by the UK Statistics Authority to censure the Conservatives for their "misleading" use of violent crime statistics, raising the prospect that law and order will become one of the most disputed battlegrounds in the coming campaign.
The banned film is part of a Home Office campaign of TV, radio, press and online adverts launched last November to highlight the policing pledge, which makes clear what the public can expect from the police. The offending promise was also included in a leaflet delivered to more than 6 million households in 60 areas across the country.
Chief constables across England and Wales signed up to the pledge in December 2008 which committed them to a national minimum standard of policing for the first time, including the promise that neighbourhood police officers would spend 80% of their time on the beat.
The watchdog launched its investigation after two viewers made official complaints, challenging whether the 80% claim could be substantiated and claiming it was misleading. The Home Office told them that the pledge actually committed neighbourhood policing teams, but not all frontline police officers, to spending 80% of their time "visibly working in neighbourhoods. That included, for example, public meetings and school visits as well as patrolling the streets."
Although all 43 forces in England and Wales signed up more than 15 months ago to the pledge, the latest report by Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary, published five months ago, showed that 35 were falling short of the required standard. Some forces are not even monitoring the amount of time officers spend "working visibly" in their neighbourhoods.
The policing pledge was billed as the most radical reform from the government's shake-up of policing, and is supposed to entitle the public to a consistent national minimum standard of service from the police – including response times to 999 calls. The ad campaign also focused on a promise that the public can make an appointment to see the local police at a time that suits them within 48 hours about a non-emergency problem.
The Home Office has stated that "as of January 2009 is being delivered by all 43 police forces".
Polling published at the same time that the advertising campaign was launched showed that only 3% of people think that their local police spend 75% of their time on the beat in their area.
Gordon Brown, in his crime speech earlier this month, set out what he described as "new neighbourhood policing strategy" which includes the pledge for neighbourhood police to spend 80% of their time on the beat, a response to non-emergency issues within 24 hours and a public right to monthly beat meetings to discuss priorities.
A Home Office spokesperson said: "We are extremely disappointed by the ASA's decision as the advert was approved by the recognised body prior to its broadcast. We believe that 'on the beat' is a recognised term for what the police do whilst working in neighbourhoods and engaging with communities. This can be patrolling, talking to the public in the street, attending a residents' meeting, challenging people's actions and of course, where necessary, making arrests. We also believe that the adverts made it explicitly clear in the voiceover that it was neighbourhood policing teams who would be on the beat."
"We believe it is important to inform the public that they have a right to expect these national minimum standards, which is why we launched an advertising campaign to highlight these promises. Unless the public know what they have been promised, they cannot then hold their local forces to account if they fail to achieve the standard."Following are 20 figures and facts highlighted in a government work report distributed to media ahead of the annual session of the National People's Congress (NPC) on Saturday morning. [Special coverage]
MAJOR TARGETS & POLICIES FOR 2016
-- Increase gross domestic product (GDP) by a rate between 6.5 and 7 percent;
-- Keep the growth of consumer price index (CPI) at around 3 percent;
-- Pursue a more proactive fiscal policy with a deficit of 2.18 trillion yuan (335.38 billion U.S. dollars), 560 billion more than that of last year and accounting for 3 percent of GDP;
-- Add more than 10 million urban jobs with a registered urban unemployment rate at no more than 4.5 percent;
-- Pursue a prudent monetary policy that is flexible and appropriate while the growth of the broad money supply (M2) being set at about 13 percent;
-- Reduce energy intensity by at least 3.4 percent;
-- Chemical oxygen demand and ammonia nitrogen emissions down by 2 percent, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions down by 3 percent, and the density of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in key areas down;
-- Help more than 10 million rural residents lift themselves out of poverty, including over 2 million poor residents to be relocated from inhospitable areas;
-- Increase central government funds for poverty alleviation by 43.4 percent;
-- Increase central government budgetary investment to 500 billion yuan.
MAIN GOALS FOR NEXT FIVE YEARS
-- Double the 2010 GDP and per capita personal income by 2020;
-- Annual economic growth of at least 6.5 percent in next five years;
-- Aggregate economic output exceeding 90 trillion yuan;
-- Permanent urban residents accounting for 60 percent of China's population;
-- Registered permanent urban residents accounting for 45 percent of China's population;
-- Expansion of high-speed railways in service to 30,000 kilometers while the network linking more than 80 percent of big cities;
-- Water consumption, energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP down by 23 percent, 15 percent and 18 percent respectively;
-- Poverty relief of all rural residents falling below the current poverty line, and poverty alleviation in all poor counties and areas;
-- 50 million new urban jobs;
-- One-year increase in average life expectancy.This spring, David and Gia Kullgren have been on both sides of the city's hottest neighborhood for home sales, selling their condo in Avondale and buying a bungalow a mile away.
Their unit on Central Park Avenue sold in a week for almost 18 percent more than they were asking, and their offer on the Fletcher Street bungalow was accepted after just nine days on the market. They paid $305,000, or more than 98 percent of what the sellers wanted.
"It is insane in Avondale this year," David Kullgren said.
Sales in the Northwest Side neighborhood this spring are running way ahead of 2014, with 95 homes sold in in the first four months of 2015, up 72 percent from the year-ago period, according to data from the Chicago Association of Realtors and Midwest Real Estate Data. That's the biggest jump of any of the city's 77 neighborhoods. For Chicago overall, sales rose 7.1 percent.
Avondale, whose boundaries are roughly Addison and Diversey on the north and south and Western and Pulaski on the east and west, is a place where "people are still finding reasonable housing prices, which don't exist anymore in Logan Square," its super-hip southern neighbor, said Shay Hata, an agent with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices KoenigRubloff Realty Group.
The median price for a single-family home in Logan Square is running 33 percent ahead of last year and was $748,000 in April, according to the CAR data. The median in Avondale was $429,000.
Not that a price spike is shutting down Logan Square's market. Sales there are up almost 33 percent, according to the data, holding its place as a pulsing hub of home sales. Together with five other mid-North and Northwest neighborhoods on the list, Avondale and Logan Square make up a mostly contiguous swath of hot spots.
'KNOCK-ON EFFECT'
"Avondale absolutely gets a knock-on effect from Logan Square," said Kullgren, who said he and his wife thought they might buy there until prices turned them back to their neighborhood of the past six years.
Most of Avondale's sales this year have been townhouses and condos. They include multiple sales of condominiums in a former Florsheim shoe factory on Belmont with prices in the high $100,000s and low $200,000s, and a townhouse development on Newport Avenue where prices range from the high $400,000s to the mid-$500,000s.
Morgan Park, on the far Southwest Side, notched the second-highest sales increase in the first four months of the year, up more than 62 percent to 78 sales.
In that neighborhood, "there has been a lot of opportunity for investors to buy a distressed property and fix it up," said Marcella Garson, principal of real estate investment firm Saphira. Garson said her firm, which buys distressed properties to rehab and then rent them out or resell, had done several projects in the south suburbs before turning to its first property in Morgan Park this year.
Morgan Park "is a desirable location," said Garson, who grew up in the next neighborhood north, Beverly. "There's a tight-knit community, good schools and transportation, all the historical houses."
In March her firm paid $141,000 for a house on 110th Street built in 1900. "It didn't have a kitchen" and needed extensive other repairs, Garson said, although she declined to say how much she spent on the rehab. She listed the 2,200-square-foot house for $319,900 last week.
FINANCIAL OR PHYSICAL DISTRESS
About 46 percent of home sales in Morgan Park in the past 12 months have been distressed, according to MRED. It's not possible to determine how many were bought by rehabbers and flippers and how many by end-users. No other neighborhood with the 10 biggest sales gains had distressed homes account for more than 19 percent of sales.
Several of Morgan Park's recently sold homes that weren't in financial distress may have been in physical distress, said Susan Romano, an agent with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Biros Real Estate. A Tudor-style house built in 1940 overlooking Longwood Drive that sold in April for $383,000 was an example: Longtime owners had let it decline.
"It was a fabulous house in its day," she said, "but it needs major renovations."
Whether for fixer-uppers or for distressed properties, buyers go to Morgan Park "to get value," Romano said.
Back north in Avondale, Hata recently represented buyers who successfully offered $389,500, the asking price, for a four-bedroom house on Troy Street less than six hours after it went on the market.
"There were eight or nine other people looking" at the property the same day, she said. "We were lucky I had a mobile hot spot on my phone so we could write up the offer in my car."This is a guest post from Julia Pistell. Julia is a writer in Hartford, Connecticut. She is the host of the podcast Literary Disco, the Director of Writing Programs at the Mark Twain House, the co-founder of Sea Tea Improv, and an occasional radio producer and guest for WNPR. Check out more of her work on www.juliapistell.com. Follow her on Twitter @echochorus.
____________________
It was a brutal goal, really. Running 26.2 miles that fall. In high school I was always the last one to finish the mile in the presidential fitness test. I have a memory of some dumb guy making fun of my heavy breathing as I rounded lap three, and slowing to a walk so he wouldn’t hear me struggle any more. I was the book nerd, dammit, athletics weren’t my thing.
But more than a decade had passed and everything had changed: I became obsessed with meeting this goal. 26.2 seemed possible in a big race, with friends and loved ones and water stations along the way. The only problem was the training. Physically, it was tough, but mentally it was tougher. It was boring. There were only so many times I could listen to my 90’s mixes, and the whole time I kept thinking about how much other work I had to do. There were books to read out there, back in my warm, inviting house.
It all changed when I once forgot to load my music and instead clicked on Gone Girl, a book I’d received as a free download for trying out Audible. Until that moment I didn’t care for audiobooks; I wanted the real paper thing in my hands. But now my hands were busy clutching water bottles. I put on Gone Girl and started running, and I kept going for over an hour.
Who was this guy? Who was this woman? What was even happening with this story? I had to know. I made a rule: no audiobooks unless I was running. I was not allowed to sit in my house and finish a chapter. Every time I couldn’t stand not knowing what would happen, I put on my sneakers and ran out the door, chasing Amy.
I ran my way through Gone Girl. I ran my way through In the Woods and The Likeness. I ran through Stephen King’s Maine, Agatha Christie’s trains, Sherlock Holmes’s London. I even interval-trained my way through the entirety of The Pillars of the Earth— a more than 30-hours-long audiobook.
Rules emerged: for a book to be worth running through, it had to drive me. Instead of turning the page I had to put one foot in from of the other, an act that took so much effort, the story had to be worth it. Mysteries worked better than quiet, contemplative books; tangled plots worked better than re |
was stunned that musicians couldn’t keep track of the fans that bring in the most cash and retarget them. So Page worked with Google’s Corp Dev leader David Drummond, a former radio DJ, to invest all the cash UnitedMasters needed.
The Google family is quite gung-ho about upending the recording industry. The first investment of GV (Google Ventures) was Kobalt, a music distribution and rights service. It’s raised over $200 million to track to publish artists’ work and track down royalties, while subsidiary Kobalt Capitol is a platform for investors to buy music copyrights. But Kobalt stops short of helping performers market their tours and t-shirts.
Musicians trust him unlike some technologists. Born in Queens, NY, he used to manage local heroes Nas and Mary J. Blige, turning them into icons. Talking to him, you get the distinct sense that he’s fed up with seeing other musicians get screwed over. He refers to UnitedMasters more like a movement than a mere software company.
Music Tech Is Inevitable, Not The Enemy
The first iteration of UnitedMasters is now live allowing artists to connect their YouTube or SoundCloud accounts to the site and in return receive “personalized guidance on how you can grow your career”. That could include insights into fan demographics or where to route tours.
UnitedMasters is now actively recruiting both tech talent in product, design, and engineering; and its first wave of independent musicians. The team of around 40 features ex-Facebook and Dropboxers. Meanwhile, it’s already working with around 1,000 acts, focusing first on emerging artists who want to be digital natives in how they run their business. “Being able to operationalize independence was the goal of UnitedMasters. There needs to be 250,000 Chance The Rappers” Stoute says, pointing to the fiercely indie hip-hop upstart who won a Grammy as a role model.
Eventually, it could sign established artists who want to ditch their label deals, bet on their long-term potential, and retain control of their original recordings. Instead of a cash advance, a leash, and a sliver of the revenue, UnitedMasters acts as a partner.
Now labels often want a cut of all of the artists’ revenue streams. “Label started doing 360 deals because they margins were drying up [as CD sales declined], but they weren’t providing a 360 service” Stoute chides. “I’m not making the records labels the ‘bad guy'” he qualifies, but declares “The models have to change.” Artists often complain that streaming doesn’t pay enough, but companies like Spotify pay out almost 70 percent of their revenue. It’s the labels withholding more than they deserve.
There are already services like TuneCore for pushing music to the streaming services, and each of them is trying to woo musicians by providing more analytics. Spotify just launched a whole insights app for artists. There are also plenty of merchandise platforms and ticket partners to choose from. But UnitedMasters wants to be the missing data layer for the music business. That could allow it to find a huge fan of an artist on Pandora earning them just fractions of a cent per stream, retarget them with ads on Facebook, and get them to buy a signed poster or VIP ticket package.
Educating artists that there’s another path could be UnitedMasters‘ biggest challenge. Many musicians still think of streaming as the enemy, cannibalizing their album sales, rather than as the inevitable progression of music distribution that can serve as marketing for their band as a brand. But once artists see that they’re not much different from Nike and their songs are like commercials, they realize they need help getting listeners to convert, and turn their passion into a purchase.
There’s room for both the old school labels and startups like Kobalt and UnitedMasters. But artists are beginning to see themselves more as founders building a team of marketing and product specialists, rather than able to get all the diverse servies they need from one company or label. That could make UnitedMasters’ partner model increasingly attractive compared to giving control to an outdated, centralized owner.
“It’s very important that an artist’s jobs is to be a great artist” Stoute concludes. “The infrastructure around them should be helping them get more money at efficient rates, not owning their masters and taking from them.”Out of curiosity and the difficulty in finding a decent Arduino IDE sketch for measuring the internal temperature sensor in the ATmega32U4, I decided to post it here. Pretty much the same behavior on the measurement as the ATmega328, just a little different in implementation based on the datasheet section 24.6.
The sketch below has three measurements; the internal ATmega32U4 sensor, the LM35DZ with a Ring Buffer smoothing and the same LM35DZ with no smoothing.
//Internal and External Temperature Sensor Sketch for ATmega32U4
int sample_count;
float val;
const int BUF_SIZE = 8;
int lm35_values[BUF_SIZE]; // Ring buffer
int lm35_index = 0; // Buffer location
int sample_total = 0;
float temp;
float temp2;
void setup()
{
Serial.begin(9600);
Serial.println(F(“Internal Temperature Sensor”));
analogReference(INTERNAL);
}
void loop()
{
// Show the temperature in degrees Celcius.
Serial.print(GetTemp(),1);
Serial.print(F(” “));
Serial.print(GetLM35(),1);
Serial.print(F(” “));
Serial.println(GetLM35raw(),1);
delay(1000);
}
double GetTemp(void)
{
double t;
// Set the internal reference and mux for the ATmega32U4.
ADMUX = 0b11000111;
ADCSRB |= (1 << MUX5); // enable the ADC
delay(5); // wait for voltages to become stable.
ADCSRA |= _BV(ADSC); // Start the ADC
// Detect end-of-conversion
while (bit_is_set(ADCSRA,ADSC));
delay(5);
ADCSRA |= _BV(ADSC); // Start the ADC
// Detect end-of-conversion
while (bit_is_set(ADCSRA,ADSC));
byte low = ADCL;
byte high = ADCH;
t = (high << 8) | low;
t = (t – 273 + 5) / 1.00; //Convert from Kelvin to Celcius plus Offset
return (t);
}
double GetLM35(void)
{
val = analogRead(0);
// Moving total of samples in buffer
sample_total = sample_total + val;
sample_total = sample_total – lm35_values[lm35_index];
lm35_values[lm35_index] = val;
// Increment index
lm35_index++;
if (lm35_index >= BUF_SIZE)
{
lm35_index = 0;
}
temp=(2.56 * sample_total * 100.0) / (1024.0 * BUF_SIZE);
return (temp);
}
double GetLM35raw(void)
{
val = analogRead(0);
temp2=(val * 2.56 * 100.0) / 1024.0;
return (temp2);
}
And the results:
Some tuning of the gain and offset should adjust to match, but my Arduino Leonardo has a severe dislike of my Windows 8 serial connections, so I will retire from this project for now.
AdvertisementsWebStorm is my favorite choice when it comes to develop web applications especially with Angular 2. Most of the time I have a fullscreen WebStorm on my primary and Chrome on my secondary screen. When it comes to debugging, I spin up my Chrome Developer Tools and debug along. But sometimes there are cases, where I want to use WebStorm for debugging. Most of the time, all necessary files are already open in my IDE, since I'm currently working on them. I've got a "debug stack" in my head which is visually presented by all open files in WebStorm making it much more easy to jump around in the source code.
Prerequirements
To start using WebStorm as your debugger, you need to install a Chrome extension called JetBrains IDE Support. After installing, you get a fancy new icon within Chrome.
Right click it and click Options. Alternatively go to chrome://extensions, scroll to JetBrains IDE Support and click Options there. A new page will open, showing you Host and Port. Especially the port should be noted (which defaults to 63342).
A left click on the fancy JetBrains icon will switch to your IDE, if it is open.
WebStorm settings
Now switch to your beloved WebStorm and open the project you want to debug. Since we want to debug Angular 2, which uses TypeScript, we need to create source maps, too. So if the build process of your web app does not create source maps yet, you need to do this first.
For this demo I'm using the BoardZ! Cross Platform Sample Application which fortunately already creates source maps. Within WebStorm, go to Run -> Edit configurations... A new dialog will open, where you click on the little plus icon at the top left and select JavaScript Debug.
At next you need to set some settings on the newly opened right side. Choose whatever name you like. In my case it's BoardZ. In URL you put in the URL where you web application is hosted. Per default, BoardZ! is hosted on http://localhost:8000/, so I put http://localhost:8000/ into the URL field. If everything is running smoothly, as it should, WebStorm automatically populates the list of Remote URLs of local files. There should now be an entry pointing to your project.
Now click OK. Start all the scripts you need to run your web application. For BoardZ that's a simple npm run watch. If done, click on that little Bug icon in WebStorm (and be sure, that the correct configuration is selected). WebStorm will now attach itself to the installed Chrome extension (or opens a browser at first, if it is not open yet). If WebStorm complains that it cannot find a running JetBrains IDE Support then the port it tries to reach is wrong. WebStorm will tell you which port it uses for the connection to the extension. You need to go to the extension and change the port to whatever WebStorm wants.
If everything works, Chrome shows a little note at the top of the page, that JetBrains IDE Support is debugging this browser. You can now add a breakpoint in your TypeScript files and start debugging! Cool, eh? ;-)
In case your WebStorm/Chrome does not stop at your set breakpoint, your source root of your source maps points to the wrong folder. If you use gulp-sourcemaps you can use the sourceRoot attribute to set the correct folder, like we did in BoardZ.
This approach is not only working for Angular 2, but for other JavaScript applications, too. Happy debugging!IOWA CITY, Iowa -- Connor Cook threw for a career-high 277 yards and two touchdowns and Michigan State opened Big Ten play with a 26-14 win over Iowa on Saturday.
Darqueze Dennard had a pair of interceptions for the Spartans (4-1, 1-0 Big Ten), who held the Hawkeyes (4-2, 1-1) scoreless in the second half.
Cook put Michigan State ahead to stay with a 37-yard TD pass to Bennie Fowler early in the third quarter. Freshman Michael Geiger added three field goals in the second half for the Spartans, who held Iowa to 23 yards rushing.
Mark Weisman ran for just nine yards on seven carries for the Hawkeyes, who lost for the first time since its season opener.
Michigan State was again led by its standout defense.
But the Spartans also came up huge on special teams.
Up 6 early in the fourth quarter, Michigan State pulled off a crucial fake punt. Mike Sadler ran for 25 yards, setting up a 49-yard field goal by Geiger that put the Spartans up 23-14 with 13:28 left.
Jake Rudock threw for 241 yards and two touchdowns for the Hawkeyes. But Dennard picked him off twice, including an interception with 5:09 left that largely ended the suspense.
Michigan State's defense entered play as the only one in the country allowing fewer than than 200 yards a game.
After about a quarter and a half, it looked like the Hawkeyes might not even reach 100.
But Iowa found some life in the passing game and quickly turned that 10-point deficit into a 14-10 halftime lead.
Rudock completed his last 11 passes of the first half for 138 yards and two touchdowns -- by far the best stretch of his young career.
Rudock beat a Michigan State blitz by finding Damon Bullock in the flat for a 47-yard touchdown, and he hit C.J. Fiedorowicz for a 10-yard touchdown pass just before the half.
That would be it for the Hawkeyes.
Cook -- who had hooked up with Macgarrett Kings on a 46-yard TD pass in the second quarter -- opened the second half with a long touchdown pass to Fowler that gave Michigan State a 17-14 lead.
The Spartans made it 20-14 on a 35-yarder late in the third quarter by Geiger -- who finished with a career-high four field goals.
Kevonte Martin-Manley, Iowa's leading receiver, missed most of the game with an undisclosed leg injury.
Kings had 94 yards receiving and Fowler had 92 for the Spartans.
Follow Luke Meredith on Twitter: www.twitter.com/LukeMeredithAP(www.conservo.wordpress.com)
Von Thomas Böhm *)
Tourists welcome!
Fälschlicherweise wollen uns Politiker und Journalisten immer noch die vielen Millionen Menschen, die jeden Tag seit Monaten aus aller Welt in unser Land strömen, als „Flüchtlinge“ verkaufen. Viele glauben an diesen Schwindel, aber immer mehr Bürger sind hellhörig geworden, weil sie noch dazu in der Lage sind, Nachrichten zu lesen und richtig zu interpretieren.
„Flüchtlinge“, das wissen wir eigentlich alle, sind Menschen, die vor etwas Bösem fliehen, die Angst um ihr Leben und das der Familie haben, die so schnell wie möglich einen Zufluchtsort aufsuchen, an dem sie vorerst in Sicherheit sind.
Für einen „Flüchtling“ gibt also keine Anspruchshaltung, kein Forderungskatalog und keinen garantierten Luxus, er gibt sich bescheiden und ist dankbar für Gastfreundschaft und Sicherheit, die ihm großzügigerweise an seinem Zufluchtsort gewährt wird.Wenn man diesbezüglich die täglichen Meldungen aus den Lokalblättern durchliest, kommt man bei klarem Verstand allerdings unweigerlich zu dem Ergebnis, dass wir es überwiegend gar nicht mit „Flüchtlingen“ zu tun haben, sondern mit Touristen, die sich hier fernab der Heimat, ein paar schöne Wochen, Monate, oder Jahre machen wollen.
Hier einige Beispiele:
Julia Klöckner: „Wir haben Flüchtlinge, die sich weigern, sich von Frauen das Essen anreichen zu lassen.“ (http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/julia-kloeckner-wir-haben-fluechtlinge-die-sich-weigern.694.de.html?dram:article_id=332406)
Bottrop – Die Wogen müssen hoch gegangen sein an jenem Sonntagmittag vor zwei Wochen im Saalbau, der seit Januar als Flüchtlingsunterkunft genutzt wird. „Ja, es hat hier eine Auseinandersetzung zwischen zwei jungen Männern gegeben“, bestätigt Uwe Rettkowski, Geschäftsführer des DRK, kursierende Gerüchte. Er sei an jenem Sonntag persönlich vor Ort gewesen, um die Wogen wieder zu glätten. Das DRK hat im Auftrag der Stadt die Rund-um-die-Uhr-Betreuung der Flüchtlinge im Saalbau übernommen.
Den beiden Streithähnen sei es bei ihrer Auseinandersetzung gelungen, ein „halbes Dutzend“ weiterer junger Bewohner auf ihre Seite zu ziehen, erzählt Rettkowski. Da sei eine schnelle Deeskalation gefragt gewesen. Anlass für die Proteste war offenbar das Essen.
Man habe sich über Schweinefleisch auf dem Speiseplan beschwert. „Den Gästen wird aber überhaupt kein Schweinefleisch serviert“, betont Rettkowski. Auch der Behauptung, das Essen würde nicht schmecken, habe Rettkowski entschieden widersprochen: „Ich habe das Essen dort selber probiert.“ Schließlich hätten die protestierenden Flüchtlinge noch vehement gefordert, das Fleisch müsse „halāl“ sein, also nach islamischen Vorstellungen behandelt. (http://www.derwesten.de/staedte/bottrop/fluechtlinge-in-bottrop-beschweren-sich-uebers-essen-id11577495.html)
In einer Flüchtlingsunterkunft in Schwedt ist es am Dienstag zu Ausschreitungen gekommen. Es gab zwei Schlägereien, ein Mann musste im Krankenhaus behandelt werden. Nur kurz zuvor hatte es in der Unterkunft einen Hungerstreik gegeben. Ein Kritikpunkt: fehlende Privatsphäre in der Notunterkunft. (https://www.rbb-online.de/politik/thema/fluechtlinge/brandenburg/2016/02/schwedt-turnhalle-fluechtlinge-schlaegerei-nach-hungerstreik.html)
„Wir leiden hier“, „Alle Kinder sind krank“, „Behandelt uns als Menschen“ – Mit handgemalten Plakaten hat der Protest begonnen, nun wollen sie das Essen verweigern: Im Stuttgarter Osten haben rund 100 syrische Flüchtlinge einen Hungerstreik angedroht. Sie klagen über Versorgungsmängel und schlechte Hygiene in ihrer Notunterkunft.
„Es gibt keine Seife, häufig auch kein Toilettenpapier, weil nur alle zehn Tage aufgefüllt wird“, sagte eine Bewohnerin den „Stuttgarter Nachrichten“. Ein Familienvater klagte gegenüber der Zeitung: „Unsere Kinder müssen sich vom Essen übergeben, sind alle krank. Es ist auch viel zu kalt.“ (http://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/stadt-will-reagieren-unzumutbare-hygienische-zustaende-fluechtlinge-treten-in-hungerstreik_id_5274288.html)
Siebzehn Flüchtlinge haben mit einem zweitägigen Hungerstreik gegen die schlechte Unterbringung in der Turnhalle an der Pestalozzistraße protestiert. Das teilte der Bochumer Kreisverband Die Linke mit. Die Betroffenen müssten monatelang ohne Informationen ausharren. Viel zu viele von ihnen müssten auf engstem Raum leben. Die Linke fordert die Unterbringung der Flüchtlinge in von der Stadt angekauften Wohnungen. (http://www.radiobochum.de/bochum/lokalnachrichten/lokalnachrichten/archive/2016/01/29/article/-2d50d2bc06.html)
Weit ab von jeder Zivilisation wollte die schwedische Einwanderungsbehörde Flüchtlinge unterbringen. Für die Neuankömmlinge war die neue Umgebung ein Schock: Sie wollten zum Teil zurück nach Deutschland. (http://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article148108167/Fluechtlinge-lehnen-schwedische-Einoede-ab.html)
So weigern sich seit Sonntag mehrere Syrer und Iraker, ihren Bus zu verlassen, der sie nach Limedsforsen nahe der Grenze zu Norwegen brachte. Wegen kalter Temperaturen und langer Nächte wollen sie dort nicht bleiben. Einer der Flüchtlinge erklärte den Sitzstreik mit der fehlenden Schule für die Kinder und dem nicht vorhandenen Arzt für seine schwangere Frau. Zudem gebe es keine Geschäfte, die zu Fuß erreicht werden könnten. (http://www.shz.de/deutschland-welt/panorama/zu-kalt-zu-dunkel-fluechtlinge-wollen-zurueck-nach-deutschland-id11072351.html)
In Friemar im Kreis Gotha verweigerten Flüchtlinge aus Syrien derweil teilweise ihre geplante Unterbringung in einer Sporthalle. Nach Informationen von MDR THÜRINGEN seien sie davon ausgegangen, dass sie in Wohnungen untergebracht werden. Zuvor hatten sie in Mühlhausen in einer Kaserne geschlafen. Dort hatten sie in kleineren Gruppen in Zimmern gewohnt. (http://www.mdr.de/thueringen/mitte-west-thueringen/fluechtlinge-ankunft-erfurt100.html)
Die Flüchtlinge weigerten sich, in die Halle einzuziehen.
Polizei, Demonstranten und Mitarbeiter standen ratlos auf der Straße. Die Flüchtlinge hatten Angst, in Markersdorf zu bleiben, Angst vor Übergriffen. Nicht nur das. Die Syrerin Mai (20) sagte es klar: „Das ist nicht komfortabel genug, das ist nur eine Turnhalle!“ (https://mopo24.de/nachrichten/chemnitz-fluechtlinge-wollen-nicht-in-turnhalle-einziehen-18379)
Klötze. Helle Aufregung gestern Morgen in der Wasserfahrt in Klötze: Ein Bulli des Altmarkkreises fuhr vor dem Neubaublock Nummer 18 vor. Die beiden Hausmeister der Notunterkunft in Salzwedel brachten insgesamt sechs Personen aus Afghanistan, ein Ehepaar mit zwei Kindern sowie den Bruder mit seiner Frau. Sie sollten in Klötze eine vorübergehende Unterbringung finden. Doch die Afghanen weigerten sich, aus dem Bus zu steigen. Sie blieben einfach sitzen. Der Grund: Ihnen wurde in einem der Aufnahmelager, in denen sie während ihrer Flucht untergebracht waren, ein Haus versprochen. Darauf bestanden sie und verweigerten den Einzug in die Wohnung im Neubaublock. (http://www.az-online.de/altmark/kloetze/afghanen-wollten-nicht-aussteigen-6118644.html)
Haben die Urlaubskataloge, die noch vor der Abreise durch die Schleuser verteilt wurden, etwa gelogen?
Auf jeden Fall verhalten sich „echte“ Flüchtlinge definitiv nicht so. Diejenigen, die das Schlaraffenland betreten haben, benehmen sich eher wie verwöhnte Urlauber, die glauben, sie könnt in der Touristenklasse auf dem Luxusdampfer Deutschland alles bekommen. All inclusive natürlich.
Warum Deutschland trotz all dieser Mängelberichte weiterhin eine so hohe Anziehungskraft für die Muslime aus aller Welt hat und warum es darunter leidet, erfahren wir hier:
Massentourismus verschärft nicht nur quantitativ-proportional die allgemein mit dem Tourismus verbundenen negativen Auswirkungen, sondern bringt für das Gastland auch qualitativ neue Beeinträchtigungen mit sich, insbesondere in Form einer Verdrängung oder Überlagerung der autochthonen Kultur und einer Verschiebung der Bevölkerungsstruktur in den Tourismusgebieten. So verschob sich z.B. die Bevölkerungsstruktur von Mallorca dramatisch. Während die Insel vor 1960 ein Abwanderungsgebiet war, wurde sie danach zum Zuwanderungsgebiet. 1991 bestand die Bevölkerung Mallorcas zu 25 % aus Einwanderern von außerhalb der Balearen und zu 4 % aus Ausländern.
In Großstädten wie z.B. Prag verdrängen die für die Tourismusinfrastruktur nötigen Hotels, Gaststätten usw. die Bürger, da viele Mietshäuser aufgekauft werden, um sie entsprechend umzubauen.
Die Verdrängung der lokalen Kultur hängt insbesondere mit dem spezifischen Interessen- und Bedürfnisspektrum der Massentouristen zusammen, die reisesoziologisch häufig dem sog. Integrations-, Aktions- oder Harmoniemilieu zuzurechnen sind (vgl. hierzu Reisemotivation). Die Betreffenden sind primär weniger an der Kultur und Eigenart des Gastlands interessiert, sondern am Vorfinden von Zuhause vertrauter Strukturen. Dementsprechend bieten die Restaurants an Orten des Massentourismus verstärkt Speisen aus den Herkunftsländern der Gäste an; das Personal spricht deren Sprache; an den Kiosken sind fremdsprachige Zeitungen erhältlich. Bisweilen lassen sich sogar Ärzte, Anwälte und andere Dienstleister aus der Heimat der Touristen nieder. Auf die Spitze getrieben wird diese Entwicklung in so genannten Resorts, Ferienanlagen, in denen den Gästen oft eine geschlossene, vom Gastland separierte Parallelwelt geboten wird… (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massentourismus)
Es gibt nur einen, aber alles entscheidenden Unterschied zum Massentourismus, wie ihn Wikipedia beschrieben hat: In Deutschland kommt der Gastgeber für Kost, Logis und Heimreise auf, und kaum einer der Reisenden will, trotz der vielen Handicaps und Beschwerden, freiwillig seinen Urlaub beenden und zurück nach Hause fahren.
Tourists welcome!
Hat Ihnen dieser Beitrag gefallen? Dann würden wir uns freuen, wenn Sie JouWatch eine kleine Spende zukommen lassen würden! Hier der Link: http://journalistenwatch.com/
*) Der Berufsjournalist Thomas Böhm ist Chefredakteur des Mediendienstes „Journalistenwatch“ und ständiger Kolumnist bei conservo
http://www.conservo.wordpress.com
21.02.2016Announcing Grok the Docs¶
Are my docs working? Are folks getting what they need?
I’ve asked myself these questions a lot. Historically I have put Google Analytics on my doc pages, and called it good. I would browse over the data every once in a while, gleaning basically zero information out of it.
Read the Docs hosts a lot of documentation, and I want to help these folks understand how their docs are being used. So I have been working on a project for the last month called Grok the Docs.
Grok the Docs is a bit different, with the main difference being it embeds the information in the page for you. This is interesting because it adds context to the data. I believe that context is the first step from turning data into information. The main interface to Grok the Docs are keyboard shortcuts within the documentation page. So you can access information about the current page you’re on, while you’re browsing. Check out the Example below to see it in action.
Surfacing analytic data in the page is great for the maintainer and user alike. The maintainer can see what parts of their docs are being heavily used, and which parts aren’t being used as much. Users can see where other people are ending up, which is probably where they want to go too.
This is very much just a tech demo currently. I would love feedback from folks about how I could improve the display of the data. Currently it’s something that you need to enable.
It would be great if you have ideas for other additoinal functionality that could be added. This is very much an experiment currently, so I’d love to hear any thoughts you have. Please email or tweet me if you have feedback or ideas.
Once the code is more baked and solid, the plan is to turn it on for all Read the Docs users. After I do a full rollout across Read the Docs, I’ll consider opening it to other people. The code is currently closed source, and will likely remain so. The idea is that this might become a product that can suppliment my Gittip income. If it fails as a product, I will then open source it. That said, it will always be free for documentation on Read the Docs.
This project was done as part of my ongoing work to improve documentation. If you think this work is important, you should support me on Gittip.Google and Bing's camera cars passed each other on a Minnesota road in 2014 and the image that ended up on Bing's Streetside map feature ended up censoring the Google car with a white block. Screenshot: Bing Maps
Dec. 22 (UPI) -- An eagle-eyed Internet user discovered the moment Google Maps and Bing Maps camera cars spotted one another -- and one site censored the other.
A Tumbr user revealed this week that the vehicles met on a Minnesota road in July of 2014 and ended up with photos of each other for Google's Street View and Bing's Streetside map features.
The Google photo shows the passing Bing car, while Bing's version features a white box over the Google car -- but it's camera remains visible.
Another shot from the exchange shows the uncensored Google driver giving a friendly wave to the Bing car.Q and A June 18, 2011
Q: Is it more difficult for female wrestlers to hit the ropes, since they're smaller?
A: They are not going to get as much spring out of the ropes because they are lighter, but for the most part they should be able to hit them the same.
Q: Would you ever consider coming back for one last run if it culminated in you having a match at WrestleMania? Not necessarily a storyline built around you never competing at 'Mania, just a feud that had its blow off match there.
A: I would consider it, but don’t hold your breath.
Q: Have you had any interaction with Steve Corino? What are your impressions of him?
A: I haven’t talked to him in several years but I know the guy, and got along well with him last we spoke.
Q: Jeff Jarrett seemed to have a major push in WCW at the tail end of his time there, but he never seemed to "draw a dime" (as the Rise and Fall of WCW DVD put it). Do you think he could be a big-time player, or is he missing something?
A: He’s 44, Jeff is what he is, if you consider him a big time player now he is, if you don’t he’s not; it’s not like he is still on his way up. It all comes down to what you consider a “Big Time Player”. He didn’t have the Rock, Austin, Hogan change the business factor but who did?
Q: Did you have a WWF/E tryout when they decided to bring you over from WCW? How did the whole process happen from a business side of things?
A: I did not have a try out. They bought my WCW contract and I started working for them.
Q: I often hear the phrase WWE Main event style. What does that mean or is it just something the internet has made up? Forgive me if you have already addressed this question.
A: I’ve always thought this was a silly term. To me “WWE Main Event Style” is just pro wrestling style. Working a match to draw emotion and make money. For the most part it’s just the psychology based style that this business was founded on.
Q: I was at WCW new blood rising in Vancouver. Me and my friends were so excited to see you live and were expecting a heck of a match since you and Mike Awesome had a great one on nitro that month. Then we witnessed what winded up being you losing 3 times and then getting the help of Bret Hart to win in a match which was so hard to understand and get into since the losses took any possible rhythm out of it. I understand WCW wanted to play to the TV audience but did you not have reservations when they thought of this? I mean I get that you were a heel but what was there reasoning in this?
A: It was Jacques Rougeau that assisted me in the win; Bret came out after the match. The booking of the match was idiotic at best. Had we not been in Canada the concept could have worked but even with that it was over booked. To make matters worse all that nonsense was to make Mike look strong and they just turned him into a comedy character a week or two later as That 70’s guy.
Q: What percentage of wrestlers in the companies you worked with follow the writings of guys such as Dave Meltzer?
A: It is impossible to answer this question. How would I know who does and doesn’t read what? It’s not like we sit around the locker room and say, “ Wow, did you see what Meltzer said about the PPV last night?”
Q: Who was your favorite Referee to work with during your time in the WWE?
A: There were several good ones; I don’t think I had a favourite. I was likely closer friends with Charles Robinson but that was more because I liked the guy than because he was a better ref than any of the others.
Q: On the previous Commentary, someone asked about Little Guido being taken seriously taking ref bumps. I think he meant something more like 'Would it seem strange for you to see Little Guido, the wrestler who seems to take huge bumps in matches and still fight back, take a ref bump, such as an accidental shove, and be "knocked out" for a few minutes?' But if that's not what they meant, it is still a question that I'm interested in your opinion on.
A: It would be dumb if he just goes down from a shove, but as a skilled worker he should be able to take a great looking bump that is more than believable enough if he needs to stay down.
Q: In your wrestling career traveling the world, have you ever experienced xenophobic or racist encounters from local people aimed towards you and/or one of your traveling companions?
A: No. Every where I went people were fans and thrilled to see us.
Q: Do you care to elaborate on the last q and a when you said "I am not selfish enough to be a great baby face"? What did you mean?
A: Baby Faces are the Heroes, they need to appear very strong, and need to be sure they are always presented strong enough in matches. They have to be more selfish in order to appear stronger than their heel counter part. I was always more comfortable making my opponent look stronger than me, and then focusing on getting heat. Good heels have to be very selfless.
Q: Does the bounce of a wrestling ring help a wrestler perform a dropkick, or are wrestlers required to have a huge vertical leap to perform one?
A: I think the give in the floor makes it a little harder to jump but much easier to land. I would describe the floor as having give not having bounce.
Q: In a previous commentary someone asked you about why people don't use the "Gorilla Press/Big Splash" anymore as a finisher. You answered with "As a combo I think everyone would think, “Warrior, wanna be” which is not the reaction people want." I agree that it's probably not the best thing to be compared to the Warrior but I've heard that people don't want to do that because if it's their finisher and they're not doing 2 minute squash matches, they'll be blown up by the time they get to the finish and, much like Warrior, will struggle to hit it all the time. I also noticed that not until Ezekiel Jackson recently started using it, the torture rack had been out of commission. Do you tell your students to think about stuff like that? About being 15 minutes into a match and not having enough wind to pull off a power move or some sort of high flying maneuver.
A: I advice everyone when considering “a finisher” to think of something you can hit consistently and on all or at least the vast majority of potential opponents.
Q: When you would do house shows in the WWE, who were the people in charge? Would Vince be there, were all of the agents there, was it something where the agents would rotate and have one week off then other agents would be there and such. I've always heard that Vince flies back home on Air McMahon right after TV tapings.
A: There was always an agent or two in charge of the event. Vince seldom does house shows.
Q: When you find a book not very interesting in the first few chapters do you still finish the book or is that enough for you to give up on it?
A: Depends how bad it is. I generally finish a book but I have stopped reading a few.
Q: Do you think Impact Wrestling is doing as bad as the internet wrestling community wants to think it is? Technically they only have to produce 3 live shows a month (1ppv 2 TV tapings for four weeks worth of TV). Even if they only sell 15,000 PPVs at $30 each. That's still $450,000 aka Hogans salary. Other than a few high profile acquisitions, They don't seem to be going crazy with their spending. Show is still barely watchable but it still seems like it's a strong enough brand to stick around on TV for a while.
A: What the hell is the Internet Wrestling Community? God I hate that term. The Internet is just where you get the most of your feedback because it is the most available medium. If you read a negative news article online about Apple, does Apple try to write that off as just their Internet Community? I talk to people in the WRESTLING BUSINESSS all the time and every one of them thinks TNA |
were reimbursable. The GAO estimated that between 1997 and 2003, the Defense Department bought at least $100 million in tickets that were not used or used only partially by a passenger who did not complete all legs of a flight. The waste went undetected because the department relied on individuals to report the unused tickets. They did not do so. "The millions of dollars wasted on unused airline tickets provides another example of why DOD financial management is one of our high-risk areas, with DOD highly vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse," the GAO said. Two of the three lawmakers who asked for the study were Republicans, and both were highly critical of the Pentagon's lack of financial control. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said, "It's outrageous that the Defense Department would be sending additional federal tax dollars to the airlines by way of unused passenger tickets." While one GAO report focused on the unused tickets, the second investigation found potential fraud. It said the department paid travelers for tickets the department already bought and reimbursed employees for tickets that had not been authorized. It is a crime for a government employee knowingly to request reimbursement for goods and services he or she did not buy. To demonstrate how easy it was to have the Pentagon pay for airline travel, the investigators posed as Defense employees, had the department generate a ticket and showed up at the ticket counter to pick up a boarding pass.
Note: Isn't it interesting how both the New York Times and the Washington Post omitted the above statement in bold from their reports of this Associated Press article?
Military waste under fire: $1 trillion missing
May 18, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/05/18/MN251738.DTL
The Department of Defense, already infamous for spending $640 for a toilet seat... couldn't account for more than a trillion dollars in financial transactions, not to mention dozens of tanks, missiles and planes. The nonpartisan General Accounting Office has raised the volume of its perennial complaints about the financial woes at Defense, which recently failed its seventh audit in as many years. "Overhauling DOD's financial management operations represent a challenge that goes far beyond financial accounting," GAO chief David Walker told lawmakers. Recent government reports suggest the Pentagon's money management woes have reached astronomical proportions. A GAO report found Defense inventory systems so lax that the U.S. Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units. When military leaders were scrambling to find enough chemical and biological warfare suits to protect U.S. troops, the department was caught selling these suits as surplus on the Internet "for pennies on the dollar," a GAO official said. "We are overhauling our financial management system," said Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon's chief financial officer. "The Pentagon has failed to address financial problems that dwarf those of Enron," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles. Gregory Kutz, director of GAO's financial management division [said] "I've been to Wal-Mart. They were able to tell me how many tubes of toothpaste were in Fairfax, Va. And DOD can't find its chem-bio suits." Opposition to defense spending is portrayed as unpatriotic. Legislators are often more concerned about winning Pentagon pork than controlling defense waste.
Note: For an intriguing Online Journal article exposing possible deep corruption on the part of the Pentagon's former CFO (Chief Financial Officer) Dov Zakheim, click here. And for a couple striking examples of major corruption not adequately covered by the media from highly respected sources, see this link.
In Conclusion: Why didn't the above reports become major headline news? Why isn't anyone seriously investigating these continually unresolved issues and reporting to the public that the most powerful country in the world can't track its own finances? For an answer to these questions by award-winning journalists, see this excellent webpage. And for the deeper reasons behind these issues, a top U.S. general's revealing explanation is available here.
You can help to build a better world by sharing this vital information with your friends and colleagues and contacting members of the media and your government representatives asking them to address this pervasive problem. Thanks for caring. Together, we can and will build a brighter future.
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The Islamic State's affiliate in Egypt has released a video purporting to show the beheading of eight Bedouin men it accused of working for the Egyptian and Israeli armies.
The video, posted on the group's Twitter account late on Monday, also showed what it said were victims of Egyptian military operations in the restive Sinai Peninsula.
An insurgency there has killed scores of policemen and soldiers.
The Islamic State's affiliate in Egypt Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis has released a video purporting to show the beheading of eight men it accused of working for the Egyptian and Israeli armies. The group last year posted a similar video (above) in which four men, accused of being Israeli Mossad spies, were executed
The jihadist group, known as Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis before pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group last November, has released footage in the past showing the execution of alleged informants.
In the latest video, masked militants in camouflage behead eight men, some of them in broad daylight at a major thoroughfare in north Sinai.
The men were first made to confess they worked for the armies of Egypt and Israel, which borders the Sinai and have been attacked by militants from the peninsula several times over the past three years.
It came as suspected Islamist militants set off five bombs in Egypt's second city Alexandria today and air raids afterwards in the Sinai Peninsula killed 15 suspected extremists.
It was not clear if the air raids in Sinai were in retaliation for the Alexandria blasts. Military officials could not be immediately reached for comment.
Three blasts near police stations in eastern Alexandria wounded 10 people, while two other bombs went off in the area without casualties, said Major General Amin Ezz al-Din, an assistant interior minister for Alexandria.
Egyptian security personnel check cars at a checkpoint near the site, where separate attacks on security forces in North Sinai on Thursday killed 30 people, in Arish, North Sinai, Egypt on January 31
Later on Tuesday, 15 suspected militants were killed and eight others wounded in air raids in the Sinai town of Sheikh Zuweid, security sources said.
Security sources also said a two-year-old boy was in critical condition after being wounded in clashes between militants and the army south of the border town of Rafah near the Gaza Strip.
Frequent small-scale attacks such as the bombings in Alexandria have hurt Egypt's efforts to project an image of stability after four years of turmoil triggered by the 2011 Arab Spring uprising.
Egypt hosts an investment conference next month in the resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh in the southern Sinai Peninsula, and hopes to attract funds to turn around an economy battered by instability.
The Egyptian affiliate of Islamic State, the militant group controlling large parts of Syria and Iraq, claimed responsibility for attacks on security forces in Sinai late last month that killed at least 30 people.
Sinai's Islamist militants have stepped up their attacks on security forces since the army toppled president Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013 after protests against his rule.
Egypt has launched a crackdown in Sinai in response and systematically repressed Muslim Brotherhood supporters and other political opponents across the country.
The Brotherhood, which says it is committed to peaceful activism, has accused the military of staging a coup and curbing freedoms won in the 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak.Monday’s game against the Sacramento Kings got ugly. Not only did the team lose a seventh straight game, commit 20 turnovers, and continue struggling on defense, but Luke Walton was ejected for the first time as head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers.
— Get 15% off everything in the Lakers Nation Store right now by using the promo code ‘Lakers’ —
Walton took exception to the fact no call was made on DeMarcus Cousins in a little scuffle with Julius Randle. The first-year head coach was irate at the referees for the no call and made sure that be known resulting in his ejection.
After the loss to the Kings, Randle talked about respecting Walton for sticking up for him and his teammates on Spectrum SportsNet, via Lakers Nation reporter Serena Winters:
Randle on Luke backing him up: "I love coach man that's my guy, backs me up w/ everything & has all of our backs 100%."
(On @SpectrumSN) — Serena Winters (@SerenaWinters) December 13, 2016
Although the Lakers are in a slump and the narrative of a playoff berth at season’s end is subsiding, Randle and his teammates have nothing but respect for their new head coach. This performance not withstanding, teams who believe in and have respect for their coach tend to buy in to everything and play hard every night.
Walton has a lot of work to do in order to turn this team around, but he’s already done arguably the toughest job in earning the respect of his players in Los Angeles.
With the loss to the Kings now in the past, the Lakers will try to get back on the winning side of things against the Brooklyn Nets on Wednesday night at the Barclays Center. It will be the second game of a seven-game road trip that will test the Lakers’ resolve after being humbled by losing seven straight and battling through injuries.I have been using Octopress for a couple of years now. I don’t blog that frequently and Octopress somehow just feels right for my work style. I run 4 websites using it and have learned a few tricks over the last few years. Fyi, I used to use an Ubuntu VM locally for my Octopress stuff but have shifted to Windows for everything over the last year. For hosting purposes, I use Heroku.
Use ConEmu on Windows
I am a big fan of ConEmu and have created a task inside it to setup my local blog environment with a single click. It launches 2 split console windows in a tab with rake preview running in one, and my git status in the other one. I compose the blog posts in a standalone gvim intance.
2. Use LiveReload
I launch LiveReload and have it watch the public folder for my blog. This automatically refreshes my browser as I am editing and working on a blog post. In my experience, LiveReload seems to play nicer with Firefox (than Chrome).
3. Speed up site generation using Isolate task If you have a lot of posts in your blog, the HTML output generation can take a few seconds. To speed it up when you are focusing on one or more blog posts, use the rake isolate task. Doing this puts all the posts except the ones you are working on in the source/_stash folder. For example, while working on this post, I ran rake isolate[octopress]. When you are done, just run rake integrate and you’ll be back to normal.
4. Use 3rd Party Octopress themes If you want to change the look and feel of your octopress site, there are several other options.
5. Schedule posts with Windows Tasks I don’t remember the original source for this ruby code, but I found a bunch of rake tasks on the interwebs that check for the published flag on all posts. If it is set to false and the current date is greater than the date on the blog post, it sets the published flag to true and regenerates and pushes the blog updates. I have a Windows task that runs a batch file with this rake task once a day. This lets me write blog posts in advance and schedule them for specific days.
task :update_blog => [:find_drafts, :update_drafts, :regenerate_blog, :push] desc "Push all changes back to source control." task :push do abort("No changes to push") unless updated log << "#{Time.now} Pushing updates to #{git_remote}/#{git_branch}." Dir.chdir blog_dir system "git add --all" system "git commit -m \"publishing drafts with Rakefile\"" system push_command log << "#{Time.now} Done.
" end desc "Find all files marked as 'published: false'. Save them in an array." task :find_drafts do Dir.chdir "#{source_dir}/#{posts_dir}" files = Dir.glob "*.*" log << "#{Time.now} Found #{files.length} files in #{posts_dir}.
" files.each do |file| yaml_block = 0 File.readlines(file).each do |line| next if yaml_block >= 2 line.chomp! yaml_block += 1 if line =~ /^---/ if line =~ /^published:\s?false/ drafts.push file next end end end log << "#{Time.now} Found #{drafts.length} drafts in #{posts_dir}.
" end desc "If the draft is scheduled to publish, then change the appropriate yaml line to 'published: true'." task :update_drafts do if drafts.empty? log << "#{Time.now} No drafts found. Quitting.
" abort end drafts.each do |draft| yaml_block = 0 File.readlines(draft).each do |line| next if yaml_block >= 2 line.chomp! yaml_block += 1 if line =~ /^---/ if line =~ /^date:(.*)/ publish_at = DateTime.parse $1 log << "#{Time.now} Draft #{draft} is scheduled to be published #{publish_at}.
" should_publish = DateTime.now >= publish_at if should_publish publish_draft draft if should_publish updated = true end end end end end desc "Generate blog by running the rake task 'generate' built into Octopress." task :regenerate_blog do abort("No changes to regenerate") unless updated Dir.chdir blog_dir log << "#{Time.now} Regenerating blog.
" system "rake generate" end def publish_draft(file) text = "" yaml_block = 0 File.readlines(file).each do |line| yaml_block += 1 if line =~ /^---/ if yaml_block < 2 and line =~ /^published: false/ text << "published: true
" next end text << line end #puts text File.open(file, "w") do |file| file.write(text) end end
If you have any other tips, please do mention them in the comments below.Many people are familiar with the “Show Framerate and Profile” option in the BGE and the mess of text it displays on their screen. However, not as many people truly know what the different statistics mean. This article aims to help improve people’s understanding of the profile stats and how to change your game to get those numbers down (less time spent is better for performance). Aside from the FPS, the profile shows nine stats: Physics, Logic, Animations (only in newer versions of Blender), Network, Scenegraph, Rasterizer, Services, Overhead, Outside, GPU Latency (only in newer versions of Blender). To get the most accurate readings, I recommend turning off “Use Frame Rate” and using your graphics card drivers (or the UI option in the render properties on newer versions of Blender) to force vsync off.
Physics
This represents the time spent on physics code. These days the BGE only uses Bullet for physics, so this stat mostly represents the time spent in Bullet. To reduce the time, you’ll need to simplify your physics so Bullet doesn’t have to do as much work. This can include using simpler physics shapes for objects. For example, if you have a complicated mesh for a character and you set the physics type to Convex Hull or Triangle Mesh (the default if no other bound type is explicitly set), Bullet has to do physics calculations with the complicated mesh, which is just a waste of time. Instead, try to see if something simpler like a sphere or box can do the trick. If not, at least setup a “proxy” by creating a simple version of your mesh that is invisible and is used for calculations instead of the complicated mesh that is used for rendering.
Logic
Time spent on logic is time that is spent on logic bricks and Python code (excluding code run through KX_Scene.pre_draw and KX_Scene.post_draw; those times show up under the Rasterizer). If you want to reduce this, you’ll need to simplify/optimize your logic bricks and Python code. I’m not going to give a tutorial on optimizing Python code, but this talk by Mike Fletcher (known for PyOpenGL) describes profiling Python code and some tips for optimizing. Remember, always profile your code before attempting to optimize it! As a last resort, you can also try moving some of your Python code to C/C++.
Animations
Under animations you have the time spent in Blender’s animation code, which the BGE makes use of. This includes things such as looking up pose data and interpolating key frames. However, be warned that sometimes things like calculating IK can show up under the scenegraph when calculating bone parents. Also, this category does not include the time spent to do the actual mesh deformation, this time is recorded under the Rasterizer category. To reduce the time spent on animation try to reduce the bone count in your armatures. You can also try switching your armatures over to iTaSC (set to simulation) for IK solving instead of the Legacy solver. iTaSC can be faster than the Legacy solver. In my tests I’ve seen 1.25~1.5x speed improvements when using iTaSC, but I’ve heard that 4x is not unreasonable.
Network
This might come as a surprise to some, but the BGE actually has some networking code. However, this feature was never really developed, so now it is mostly a stub that can send messages over a loopback interface. This is how Message actuators and sensors (and the corresponding Python API features) work. It’s doubtful that this category will ever be a time sink, but if you’re having problems, take a look at the number of messages you’re sending and see if you can reduce them.
Scenegraph
The scenegraph keeps track of objects’ position, orientation and scale (and probably a few other things I’m not thinking of at the moment). This also includes updating parent-child relation ships (e.g., bone parents). As mentioned earlier, the time for bone parents can include getting updated pose data, which possibly means calculating IK. If the scenegraph is really high, try reducing the number of objects in your scene. You can also try using iTaSC (mentioned under Animations). The scenegraph also handles culling (frustum and occlusion) calculations.
Rasterizer
The rasterizer is responsible for actually rendering the game. This includes rendering geometry, shaders, and 2D filters. Since the BGE makes use of double buffering, the rasterizer also has to swap the buffers, which can give really high readings if vsync is enabled (SwapBuffers() blocks while waiting for a screen refresh). This time is now represented in the GPU Latency category. To reduce the time spent in the rasterizer (or the GPU latency), you can try to simplify your geometry and materials. Also make sure you don’t have too many lights casting dynamic shadows. Each shadow cast requires the scene to be rendered. So, if you have three spot lights casting shadows, the scene is rendered four times (three for shadows and once for the actual scene)! 2D filters can also suck up some time, so even if that bloom, depth of field and SSAO look nice, you might want to consider removing them or trying to reduce the number of samples they use.
Services
This is the time spent processing various system devices (keyboard, mouse, etc). You shouldn’t have a problem with this category taking up time.
Overhead
This is probably one of the most mis-leading category names. The “overhead” is all the text drawn on top of the game screen in the top left corner. This includes the framerate, profile, and debug properties. So, the time spent on this category should be reclaimed when running your game in a more “release” configuration (i.e., you’re not drawing all that debug/profiling text to the screen). If you want to reduce the time spent here while profiling, try reducing the number of debug properties you display.
Outside
This is time spent outside of the BGE’s main loop. In other words, something is taking time away from the BGE. You really have no control over this area. If you have a lot of other programs running, you can try to close some.
GPU Latency
This category is new to r59097, and will be in Blender 2.69. This category represents the time spent waiting on the GPU. This category used to be entirely within the Rasterizer category, so the same tips from there apply to this category. However, time spent waiting for vsync will show up here now instead of in the Rasterizer category. Also, this category is a bit different from other categories in that it is idle time (the CPU is just waiting on the GPU). This means this is time that can be used by the CPU (e.g., physics, animations, logic, etc.) without affecting the framerate. This also means that if the GPU Latency is high, trying to optimize CPU time is pointless as it will, also, not affect the framerate. If this value is low, it is still possible to be GPU bound. Various OpenGL calls (usually some form of glGet) can cause a sync event in which the CPU has to wait on the GPU. These sync events can cause odd profiler readings depending on which part of the codebase they occur in. For example, if overhead is suddenly taking up a large amount of time, odds are that the font rendering triggered a sync.
I hope people find this useful.
Cheers,
Moguri
AdvertisementsWe were late, we were late for a very important date. The march began at 3 o’ clock but Paris was blocked at every turn. So we took the highway and whizzed around the city with a little encouragement from the traffic regulators…
We jumped in with the march, though more of a pleasant stroll I would say– a march à la Française.
Reading the messages on the backs of our fellow citizens, joining in with the wave of clapping that swept through the crowd every few minutes, taking in the peaceful but determined mood…
Nationalities from all corners of the world were represented, standing side by side.
“Not even afraid”.
The benches were a good place to make new friends.
Even the folks from Anonymous took a break from hacking into Twitter accounts of the bad guys.
No one was left at home that day, not even le dog.
We came upon a group of Syrians proudly chanting, “We are Syrian, We are Charlie.”
I think they were my favourite people to see at the march.
As we approached Place de la Nation, the endpoint of the march, the human traffic jam began, but oddly, it wasn’t unpleasant, or claustrophobic. It felt more like being in a warm and calming cocoon, surrounded by people we had never met but who were nevertheless, our brothers and sisters. I’ve never quite had a feeling like it.
I decided to climb my own personal crane to get a better idea of just how many we were.
And with a head above the rest, I started to really understand that I was a small part of a very historic day.
As the sky turned pink, Marianne watched over her crowd and not a single person on this day could not have felt humbled by the will of humanity to stand up for what is right.
Thanks to my march buddy @girlmeetswhirl for taking snaps after I ran out of battery.Participation, Our culture encourages consumption of passive entertainment. Even when we escape the home, we attend events where everything is guided for us — we are either audience or performer, spectator or creator. We pay money to passively watch music events, theater, movies, and so on, always knowing the limits of our role. At other festivals, paid entertainers play while others consume, not only limiting the creativity of most attendees but also setting a value on involvement, whereby some people are ‘official’ or ‘professional’ and others strictly amateur.
When speaking of an attendee of an event in the Burn community, one does not refer to a visitor, ticket holder, viewer, audience or spectator but of a Participant. A Burn is part concert, part dance party, part fashion show, and part art gallery but these things happen because of the efforts of those who attend. A Burner fashion show typically consists not of outside models, but of individual Burners showing off their finest outfits, often acquired freely through the gift economy. Though there are art grants, they often require addirtional fundraising by artists and the creations themselves are often participatory, encouraging viewers to push buttons, turn levers, write, draw or otherwise interact. Musicians perform not because they are paid, but because they made their own way to the event (or were paid to come by the fundraising efforts of other participants).
Though That Thing in the Desert has a limited number of year-round, paid employees, all events are almost entirely run by volunteer labor. Though the BMORG (or its local equivalent) may deal with the hurdles of ticketing and permitting, it is participants who build the temporary city, from its airport and post office to its nightclubs and pancake camps. Participation breaks through the filters that keep people separate and plunges the one into the many and the immediacy of the experience. Participants look at Burn events as a chance to push boundaries, try new things, and expand personal horizons through experience.
Greeters often ask new arrivals what they plan to give; No Spectators is one of the community’s rallying cries. Many have experienced the rush of looking around at the wild debauchery of Burn Night and realizing they helped create that moment through their hard work. Some can afford to volunteer year-round for their community, others give much less. The Burnier-than-thou often judge other Burners on the degree of their involvement, overlooking the many kinds of participation — a concert is just a private jam session without an audience and a DJ is pointless without people to listen or dance.With the end of the year comes the end to our countdown of the winners of the Top 10 Open Access Fossil Taxa of 2017. We appreciate everyone that took the time to read all of the contenders this year and to vote in the contest!
At Number 1 is the armored trumpetfish Eekaulostomus cuevasae from the Paleocene of Chiapas, Mexico! Published in the Open Access journal Palaeontologia Electronica by authors Kleyton Magno Cantalice and Jesús Alvarado-Ortega, this unusual fish is related to modern-day trumpetfishes and represents the oldest-known representative of the acanthomorph fish superfamily Aulostomoidea.
I asked the lead author of this study, Dr. Kleyton Magno a few questions about this remarkable fish. Dr. Magno is currently a postdoctoral researchers at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).
PLOS Paleo: Tell me about the discovery of this fossil!
KM: In reality, this species was collected by Mr. Alberto Montejo, a local quarry worker and owner of the Belisario Dominguez paleontological site. In the annual expedition to Chiapas in 2010, he gave this specimen to Drs. Jesús Alvarado and Martha Cuevas, as a donation to the Paleontological National Collection (housed into the Instituto de Geología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). This single specimen was found just at the end of a hard fieldwork day, when a tropical storm was about to start. Then, Mr. Montejo noted a shining small part of this specimen on a place away from the work area, where the unwanted flagstones are accumulated; it was almost covered by the fallen leaves of the rainforest jungle in Chiapas. A desperate search was undertaken to find the counterpart of this specimen; however, the force of rain and the night denied such a possibility.
At first glance, Dr. Alvarado though that this fish was an extinct representative of the seahorses or pipefishes due the armored trunk. He was ready to prepare and describe this fossil when I entered the scene. My involvement in this discovery began in 2016, when I joined the Instituto de Geología of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México as postdoctoral researcher. The aim of my work is to describe the spiny fishes of different Mexican localities, manly those from the Paleocene outcrops near Palenque City. When I first saw this specimen I immediately identified some characteristics that could resemble a syngnathid, however, by its body shape and configuration of the unpaired fins it seemed more likely to be a member of the group that includes cornetfishes and trumpetfishes (Superfamily Aulostomoidea). During this study, we began to discover the remarkable features of this fish, some of them never been seen in this group, such as two stout, paired spines on the dorsal and anal fins, few soft rays on fins, and the body and snout covered by rigid star-like scales.
As we went deeper into the study I felt very excited; this was my fist fossil fish described, and it was already revealing itself to be an important clue to understanding the natural history of the aulostomoids, as it extends the fossil record of the group up to the Paleocene. Extant aulostomoids members are easily distinguished from their relatives (i.e., shrimpfishes, pipefishes, and seahorses) by the absence of rigid dermal scutes on the external surface of the body, as well as other features, such as a long body with parallel dorsal and anal fins, and a somewhat deep caudal peduncle. However, our aulostomid fossil was entirely covered with stout scutes. The inclusion the new species Eekaulostomus cuevasae in a morphological phylogenetic analysis, previously proposed by Keivany and Nelson (2006) for extant groups corroborates our hypothesis that this species is the oldest member of the Superfamily Aulostomoidea. This evidence and the comparison of E. cuevasae with other fossil aulostomoid allow us to infer new insights about the evolutionary history of the Superfamily Aulostomoidea.
What does this fish tell us about the evolutionary history of Aulostomoidea?
Firstly, the Paleocene age of Eekaulostomus cuevasae represent an increment around 15 Ma on the origin and early diversification of aulostomoids, since the oldest forms were found in the middle Eocene of Europe (Pesciara of Monte Bolca, Italy). Furthermore, its geographical position is the first evidence of the Caribbean origin of aulostomoids with posterior diversification and currently worldwide distribution on tropical seas that still needs to better understood.
Eekaulostomus cuevasae is in the stem-group of aulostomoids. This allow us to say that the loss of dermal scutes, as well as stretching and tapering body, and the increment in the numbers of dorsal and anal soft rays are important morphological changes through the aulostomoid evolutionary history. We believed that these changes are morphological improvements on locomotion, buoyancy and adaptations to peculiar predatory behaviors present on extant aulostomoid species. The living species Aulostomus chinensis, for example, has the strategy to make reverse movements or maintain its body statically on the horizontal position, camouflaging between corals to opportunistically catch the prey.
What was the habitat and lifestyle of these fish? With their unusual heads, what did they feed on?
Unfortunately, little can be inferred about the habitat and lifestyle of this fish. Other fossils from the same locality of Eekaulostomus cuevasae are crabs, coprolites, fragments of turtles, carbonized plants, and a singular fauna of fishes that indicates a marine environment with some freshwater influence; however, more details about the paleoenvironment are still required. For now, what we can say is that E. cuevasae probably was a bad swimming, marine species that lived on marine shallow water, feeding on some crustaceans and small fishes using the peculiar method of prey suction through its feeding apparatus composed by small jaws and extreme elongated snout, like as in living aulostomoids forms.
The scales/scutes if this fish are really bizarre, and don’t look like fish scales at all! How did you recognize what you had? Do any other fish have scales like these?
As I mentioned previously, although living aulostomoid species do not have rigid body coverage, all close relatives have them. Nevertheless, the body coverage on these groups are composed of parallels bony plates that are quite distinct from the star-like scutes present on Eekaulostomuscuevasae. Its generic name is based on the shape of the scutes on this species. The prefix “Eek”, is a Mayan word that means “star” and, together with the word “aulos” (a kind if flute in Greek) and “stoma” (mouth in Latin) composes Eekaulostomus, in reference to a flute mouth fish with star-like scales.
Anything else you’d like to share with us about this fish?
We decided to honor our colleague Dr. Martha Cuevas Garcia naming this fish as Eekaulostomus cuevasae because of her initial impulse that allowed us to perform several of the paleontological projects that are currently developing in Chiapas. Although she is an archaeologist who has spent years of work on different archaeological themes related to the Palenque Maya site, after work together in the paleontological prospection works in the southeastern part of Mexico, now she claims her love for fossils.
Congratulations to the UNAM team on this fantastic discovery of this fantastic fish Eekaulostomus and being chosen as the #1 Open Access Fossil Taxa of 2017!
Reference:
Cantalice KM and Alvarado-Ortega J (2017) Eekaulostomus cuevasae gen. and sp. nov., an ancient armored trumpetfish (Aulostomoidea) from Danian (Paleocene) marine deposits of Belisario Domínguez, Chiapas, southeastern Mexico. Palaeontologia Electronica 19.3.53A: 1-24.
doi:10.26879/682Accused: Ryen William Wilson has been accused of having sex with two students and pursuing two others at Wayne High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana
A male science teacher has been suspended after allegations that he had a threesome with two of his high school students in his classroom.
Court documents have claimed that Ryen William Wilson also attempted to seduce two other pupils at Wayne High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana, via text message.
Wilson is accused of having sex with two students and pursuing two others.
The 30-year-old is now facing two counts of child seduction.
It has been claimed that 'Student One' told her friend 'Student Two' that she had been sleeping with Wilson in the academic year of 2013/14.
The pair then claim they had a threesome with him, and 'Student One' later told police she had slept with Wilson a total of five times.
It is understood the threesome happened only once.
On March 13, police then spoke with a third student who said she was good friends with 'Student One' and let her her phone to text with Wilson until she got her own mobile phone.
But 'Student Three' then said that Wilson continued to text her separately with comments such as “You know you want this".
She also told told police that she was then receiving so many texts from Wilson that she eventually had to change her phone number.
According to court documents, the boyfriend of 'Student Three' later spotted the messages, got jealous and confronted Wilson via text.
Police then spoke with a fourth student who told police she had also received texts from Wilson where he was regularly complimenting her looks.
She said the flattery started after she sent him a question about homework on social media, and he responded saying she should text him on his private number with any further questions.
Location: Wayne High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where the alleged threesome and attempted seductions took place
In Indiana, a teen 16 or older can consent to engaging in sexual behavior unless it’s with a person in a position of power like a teacher, adoptive parent/grandparent or military recruiter.
Earlier this week, Fort Wayne Community Schools sent out a letter informing parents that two members of staff had been removed from classrooms at Wayne High School due to two separate incidents.
It remains unclear why the second member of staff was suspended.By Joseph Pepper (long-time TTT subscriber). Note from PT: this is TTT’s longest-ever piece, but it’s well worth going to the trouble to read. Print it out and voilà! – you have (almost) a book. (Hell, Joe has already split it into chapters for you.) Part 1. Pascal’s Triangle. “In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth.” ― Baruch Spinoza, The Letters The above image is of Pascal’s triangle, named after French mathematician Blaise Pascal. It |
the lead concentration in the Geneva soil as “highly elevated.”
He called for a study of airborne releases from the foundry and mapping of the entire neighborhood.
This soil findings raised concerns about ingestion of lead, particularly by small children, Hawley wrote in the memo, a copy of which is included in a cache of documents at the Geneva Public Library. He said studies had shown that children routinely swallow and inhale lead while playing in contaminated soil and eating food grown there.
“Young children with daily access to non-vegetated areas of the (neighbor’s) yard may be subject to increased blood levels,” he wrote.
Buy Photo Maira Aguilera has a large garden of peppers and tomatoes behind her home on Jackson Street in Geneva Friday, Oct. 21, 2016. (Photo: SHAWN DOWD/@sdowdphoto/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)
The property owner eventually was told her green beans were safe to eat, but Hawley stressed that uptake of toxic metals by garden vegetables was an ongoing concern.
Hawley recommended that other people living near the foundry who had children or who grew vegetables be alerted to the metals' presence in the soil. State health officials told the Democrat and Chronicle they believe these neighbors were warned, though they acknowledged they have no proof that that happened. Three people who lived near the foundry at the time told a reporter they remember no such warning in 1987.
Hawley has retired from the state Health Department and could not be located.
In a recent written statement, state health officials said the amount of lead in the Geneva soil lead "could result in an increased possibility for lead exposure, but any such exposure is likely to be small."
Contaminated soil poses risk along with water and paint
Most experts, however, believe that any lead is too much. Even in very small doses, lead can cause a dizzying array of problems in children — slowed development and physical growth; learning disabilities; problems with speech, memory and behavior; and more. Despite years of effort to reduce exposure, federal authorities say a half-million American children have blood-lead levels above the current action point.
Lead paint, banned in 1978, is considered the most common source of childhood lead. But Laidlaw and other researchers have found that soil, which can contain lead from gasoline-engine emissions, paint chips or industrial sources like foundries, is a significant contributor.
To date, state health officials say they have found “no unusual patterns” in the blood-lead levels of children who live in the Geneva neighborhood. Health officials say they reviewed blood-lead data in 2008 and again in recent weeks.
There is no easy way to tell whether any particular child in the Geneva neighborhood might have ingested enough to suffer ill effects, said Katrina Korfmacher, a founding board member of Rochester’s Coalition to Prevent Lead Poisoning.
Buy Photo Maira Aguilera holds one of her 4-month-old twins, Lionel, in the living room at their home on Jackson Street in Geneva Friday, Oct. 21, 2016. (Photo: SHAWN DOWD/@sdowdphoto/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)
“Of course it’s possible," said Korfmacher, who also is director of community outreach and engagement in the University of Rochester Medical Center’s environmental medicine department. "It depends on how much lead is in that yard, and how much they’re getting into their mouths."
In 1998, a decade after the foundry had shut down and 11 years after Hawley issued his warning about childhood lead poisoning, the city of Geneva began steps to acquire the derelict property. Using a state grant, the city hired consultants to conduct an environmental assessment of the 2.5-acre foundry site.
The DEC issued a fact sheet in October 1998 informing people of the work that was beginning. It made no mention of any plans to assess contamination on residential property in the neighborhood — yet within days, technicians were gathering soil from residential yards near the foundry.
Four off-site properties were sampled that fall. In 1999, sampling was done in 13 off-site properties.
Residents never informed of results despite years of sampling
Nearly all the dozens of homes sampled in both rounds of testing contained elevated lead or arsenic, according to data included in a report that can be found in the Geneva library. The report, presented to the DEC and the city in 2000, concluded that the contamination likely was due to airborne deposition of metals from the foundry, and said a cleanup plan would be prepared that included replacing tainted neighborhood soil.
But the DEC agreed to place only the city-owned foundry property into a state remediation program, which provided funds to demolish the foundry buildings in 2005. Nothing was done in the off-site neighborhood, and residents weren't informed of the testing results.
"No remedial action could have or would have been taken based on those results and it was determined further investigation was needed," the agency said in its written statement.
Another decade would pass until the DEC finally finished that further investigation. In 2015, using a hand-held device that can produce reliable, near-instantaneous lead measurements in soil, technicians tested nearly 700 samples in the near-north neighborhood. The dispersal pattern they found, plus laboratory analysis of samples, finally satisfied officials that the foundry was indeed the source of much of the lead and arsenic.
That’s small solace to residents, who now face years of remedial work in their neighborhood and who complain they were left in the dark far too long.
Suzanne Rago, for instance, has lived across the street from the foundry site for nearly all of her 73 years. When the factory was open, Rago said neighbors complained frequently about the noxious odors, smoke and soot released from the plant. But she, like others, said she was never told that metals were building up in her soil.
That soil was sampled in 2005 and 2006, with elevated lead levels found both times. Rago said she vaguely recalls giving permission for technicians to collect the samples.
“I figured if it was something I should be concerned about, they would tell me. I never heard anything back,” Rago said. “I’ve always been a little too trusting. Maybe I should have followed it up … but I never did.”
SORR@Gannett.com
Lead contamination of soil a growing issue
Depew, Erie County; Elevated levels of lead in soil have triggered studies and cleanup actions around the country. In most cases, the contamination is linked to lead smelters, foundries or other industrial activity. Examples can be found in Buffalo East Chicago, Indiana; and Indianapolis
A site in the city of Corning contaminated with lead is under active remediation. The contamination was discovered in 2012, leading to immediate intervention by the state Department of Environmental Conservation. The lead came from waste disposal by nearby Corning Inc., which is paying for the work.
About 75 waste sites containing lead await final remediation in New York state, according to DEC data. Lead appears to be a primary concern in a third of those sites.
Some of the increased attention on lead-soil contamination can be attributed to Ghost Factories, a widely praised 2012 investigation by USA Today that found environmental agencies had overlooked lead hazards from old smelters and foundries in countless American neighborhoods.
Read or Share this story: http://on.rocne.ws/2fnZWtiTrials Fusion is out now, and it apparently has a collection of hidden minigames, including a first-person maze, and Trials versions of Marble Madness, Angry Birds, and... Tennis. Here's how to find 5 of them.
Reverse into a wormhole on the Stormtrooper level, and you'll be on a 3D version of Angry Birds
On Park and Ride, land inside the tennis court instead of jumping over it to play a game of tennis against a penguin.
On Cliffhanger, you can back up into what looks like an underground base for an appropriately claustrophobic 3D maze
On Observatory, you're presented with the chance to set yourself on fire and take off through flaming rings in the sky
On Around The Oasis, you can back up into another wormhole to unlock the Marble Madness-style minigame
Trials Fusion: The 5 Weirdest Secret Challenges [YouTube]Michael Zehaf-Bibeau sat in the front seat of his car minutes before his shooting rampage on Oct. 22, 2014, and spoke to the camera.
He spoke just long enough to talk about the actions he was soon to take, and put them into the context of “jihad,” the Arabic word for struggle that is associated — moderate Muslims argue wrongly — with a struggle against non-believers. He took aim at Canada’s foreign policy, threatened the Canadian military and invoked “Allah.”
Those words, captured on a cellphone video less than a minute long, have been in the hands of the RCMP since the day of the shooting, and every frame of the short video has been examined as part of a criminal investigation.
Zehaf-Bibeau left the video on a cellphone in the car he used to drive up to the National War Memorial and to the foot of Parliament Hill.
The cellphone was unlocked and unencrypted; investigators were left with the impression that Zehaf-Bibeau wanted them to find the video.
The details of how the video came to be, and how it fell into the hands of the RCMP, have been largely shrouded in mystery. The Citizen has pieced together the details from multiple sources with knowledge of the video that has yet to be shown publicly.
On Friday, a more than four-month wait to see the video will come to an end when RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson walks into a House of Commons committee room and briefs MPs and Canadians about Zehaf-Bibeau’s final message, and the Mounties’ criminal investigation into the Oct. 22 shootings in Ottawa.
The video could answer lingering questions about Zehaf-Bibeau’s actions that day, when he killed Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial, then stormed Parliament Hill before dying in a shootout inside the Centre Block, including whether he acted alone, or had any help planning or carrying out the shootings.
The video could also answer a central question: Whether Zehaf-Bibeau’s actions could be considered an act of terrorism.
The testimony and public viewing of the video comes as Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government presses ahead with a plan, through Bill C-51, to broaden anti-terrorist powers for CSIS and the RCMP.
The bill grants new power to Canadian spies to disrupt suspected threats to the nation, in many instances without the need for judicial warrants.
It also establishes a new category of crime, making it illegal to promote terrorism, and gives authorities the power to seize “terrorist propaganda.” It lowers the legal threshold required for police to arrest and detain suspected extremists without charge and to impose conditions on their release.
Next week, the Commons’ public safety committee will begin hearing public testimony on that bill – the same committee that will see the video Friday.
Harper said Wednesday he hadn’t seen the video, but believed that incident and other global events have already taught Canadians they are facing a real threat of “violent jihadism.”
At an event in Toronto, Harper said he had nothing to do with the decision to release the video.
“It’s not my decision, one way or the other. The video is in possession of the RCMP. It’s part of a police investigation,” he said.
“I have not seen the video, but I think that Canadians are well aware – not just because of the Oct. 22 attacks but because of what they can see around the world — that unfortunately the threat of terrorism, violent jihadism, is very real.”
Harper suggested his government isn’t in the mood to adopt any amendments before the bill is passed: “We do always listen but I should be very clear: that the government deliberated long and hard over these changes.”
But critics have said the government is moving too fast, providing new powers that are too broad and lack proper oversight. Moreover, they say there has never been publicly released evidence that Zehaf-Bibeau was part of a terrorist plot.
NDP critic Randall Garrison, whose party will vote against the bill, said Canadians need to see the full police investigative report into the Oct. 22 shooting, as well as into an attack two days earlier in Quebec on a soldier who was killed when he was run down by a vehicle.
“We had the two incidents in October and we are moving ahead with very sweeping changes in our legislation without having a final report on either incident,” said Garrison.
“It would be helpful not just to have the video, but to have the complete reports on the investigation if these are going to be used as the justification for such sweeping changes.”
Garrison said the “central question” about Zehaf-Bibeau’s actions is whether or not he was part of a wider terrorist plot, adding the video is just one part of the overall investigation.
Liberal MP Wayne Easter said he hopes the video to resolve some key questions: “How much of a terrorist was this guy? There’s no question it was a terrorist act. What motivated this individual to be radicalized to do what he did?”
Easter urged Harper to lessen the “fear factor” amidst public debate on the matter.
“There is no reason for people to be afraid. Yes, there is the possibility of an incident. There always was the possibility of an incident. And we need to be looking cool, calm and collectively at how we can enhance Canadians’ public safety while at the same time balancing it reasonably well with civil liberties.”
Paulson is unlikely to be grilled by MPs during the hour-long appearance Friday morning, the committee chairman said Wednesday. Conservative MP Daryl Kramp said Paulson’s appearance was “not a hardcore Q-and-A event.”
“This is primarily (just) a showing of the video,” Kramp said.
The RCMP declined Wednesday to say whether it has shown the video, or described it in any way, to Zehaf-Bibeau’s mother, Susan Bibeau, or other members of his family.
However, the Citizen confirmed that Susan Bibeau had not seen the video or been contacted by the RCMP as of Wednesday morning.
Five days after the Oct. 22 shooting, Paulson said Zehaf-Bibeau’s words were “quite deliberate,” and that Zehaf-Bibeau himself was “quite lucid and … purposeful in articulating the basis for his actions.
“And they were in respect, broadly, to Canada’s foreign policy, and also in respect of his religious beliefs,” Paulson said at the time.
While Paulson committed to showing the video at a future date, the RCMP appeared to backtrack on the promise weeks later when Paulson said he would like to one day release a transcript.
Last month, MPs asked the Mounties to publicly air the video. The Senate’s national security committee submitted a similar request, asking the RCMP to air an unedited version of the video.
This week, Paulson contacted the Commons committee to respond to the MPs’ request. Kramp said Paulson asked to meet with MPs on Friday.
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Michael Zehaf-Bibeau timeline
Oct. 16, 1982: Joseph Paul Michael Bibeau is born in Laval, Que. to Susan Bibeau and Bulgasem Zehaf.
June 21, 1995: His name is changed to Michael Joseph Paul Abdallah Bulgasem Zehaf-Bibeau.
Oct. 2: Zehaf-Bibeau arrives in Ottawa. He tries to renew his Libyan passport but is rebuffed by Libyan officials.
Oct. 4: Zehaf-Bibeau takes a tour of the Centre Block and is captured on security cameras inside the building.
Oct. 12-18: He is spotted by mall staff at the Meadowlands Drive Passport Canada office. He has lunch with his mother.
Oct. 20: Zehaf-Bibeau calls car rental companies and dealerships. He is also seen at the Ottawa Mission computer lab searching Kijiji for used cars and calls someone about a 1995 Toyota Corolla listed online.
Oct. 21: Zehaf-Bibeau is rebuffed twice in a bid to legally register the car he wants to buy. He convinces the seller to sell the car for cash and minus licence plates. He drives to Mont-Tremblant, has dinner with his aunt and stays the night.
Oct. 22, 2014 Around 7 a.m.: Zehaf-Bibeau leaves Mont-Tremblant.
8:25: He is seen leaving the Ottawa Mission after a fire alarm was accidentally set off.
9:52: Zehaf-Bibeau arrives at the National War Memorial in purchased Toyota. He shoots at two ceremonial sentries, killing Cpl. Nathan Cirillo. He drives to the East Gate, exits the car and runs onto Parliament Hill.
9:53 a.m.: He hijacks a ministerial sedan, drives it to Centre Block and runs in. He wrestles with House of Commons Const. Samearn Son, shooting him in the leg, then runs down the Hall of Honour. He is shot dead outside of the Library of Parliament.
November: Zehaf-Bibeau’s body is flown to Libya and receives a Muslim burial in Zawiya, west of the Libyan capital of Tripoli.“If anyone wants to have the Church changed, he must make himself the starting-point of renewal. For the critic himself is part of what the Church is suffering from. For usually his own life is not much of a recommendation for Christianity.”?...Well, nobody bit in the combox, except for an appreciative response from Lisa Graas. A number of people guessed on my Facebook page, including Steven Greydanus of DecentFilms.com and NCRegister who correctly guessed that the quote sounded translated; Veronica Ambuul of the Colorado Catholic Herald who made a good guess of St. John Vianney; Sherry Weddell of the invaluable Catherine of Siena Institute who made the same guess I did when I was presented the quote by our own Jude Huntz, - Pope Benedict; and, again, our own Santiago Ramos, who came up with a fairly close answer in time and space - Fr. Hans Kung.But the correct answer is Fr. Karl Rahner, SJ from. (1964, Sheed and Ward)The quote struck me for two reasons when Jude read it to me:1. It was an instance of a famous academic theologian indicating a humility necessary to the job which is sorely missing today 2. It is a direct indictment of me, and an appropriate corrective for my lent.Tony Parker: 2013 FIBA Europe Player of the Year
With a EuroBasket gold medal around his neck, Tony Parker was overwhelmingly voted as the 2013 FIBA Europe Men's Player of the Year.
In the minds of fans and experts alike, there was very little doubt as to who was the most deserving man for the award in 2013, with Parker holding out Vassilis Spanoulis and Marc Gasol from the top spot on the podium
Indeed, it was a stellar domestic and international season for the Frenchman with, perhaps the only slight smudge on an otherwise perfect report card, the heartbreak of falling short of adding an NBA Finals ring to a Western Conference title and a EuroBasket gold medal.
Much like he did for club, the 31-year-old Parker led from the front for Les Bleus, with his off-the-court demeanour proving just as significant as that on it, becoming the centre-point around which France revolved.
The French playmaker completed his time at EuroBasket as the tournament's leading scorer, averaging 19 points a game, including a decisive 32 in his team's 75-72 semi-final victory over old rivals Spain, deservedly earning the personal achievement of being named Tournament MVP.
"For many years, Tony Parker has been a great ambassador for the sport of basketball, both in Europe and abroad," said FIBA Europe Acting President Cyriel Coomans. "It is therefore fitting to see a player of his fine calibre rewarded in this manner for what was indeed a magical 2013."
"Every year I look forward with anticipation to seeing Tony Parker take to the court wearing a French jersey," claimed FIBA Europe Secretary General Kamil Novak. "He is one of the greatest European players of his generation, as this award confirms, and I consider it an honour to get to see him play."
FIBA Europe will announce in due course when and where the award will be presented.
The announcement of Parker as the 2013 FIBA Europe Men's Player of the Year rounds out the awards with Astou Ndour winning Young Women's Player of the Year, Dario Saric winning Young Men's Player of the Year and Sancho Lyttle winning Women's Player of the Year.
2013 FIBA EUROPE MEN'S PLAYER OF THE YEAR FINAL RESULT
*The accumulated ranking reflects a combination of the fan and expert voting.https://www.buscemi.com/unolow-white.html?___store=default 7677 UNO LOW | WHITE https://www.buscemi.com/media/catalog/product/1/1/117su053lc010a-0001-1.jpg 675.00 USD InStock /Shop/Sale/Men's Sale/Low Tops/50MM /Shop/Women/Low Tops/50MM /Shop/Men/Low Tops /Shop/Women/Low Tops Hand crafted in Italy, the instantly classic UNO low-top sneaker is presented in full-grain pebbled Italian calf leather, the finest part of the calf. Artfully constructed with hand painted edges, galvinized gold alloy lace grommets and heel hardware. EVA sole developed exclusively for BUSCEMI. 50 millimeters in height. Hand crafted in Italy, the instantly classic UNO low-top sneaker is presented in full-grain pebbled Italian calf leather, the finest part of the calf. Artfully constructed with hand painted edges, galvinized gold alloy lace grommets and heel hardware. EVA sole developed exclusively for BUSCEMI. 50 millimeters in height. Italian Leather upper Vachetta calf skin footbed and liner Made in Italy Unisex Shoe - Please consult size our size chart 0.00
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UNO LOW Hand crafted in Italy, the instantly classic UNO low-top sneaker is presented in full-grain pebbled Italian calf leather, the finest part of the calf. Artfully constructed with hand painted edges, galvinized gold alloy lace grommets and heel hardware. EVA sole developed exclusively for BUSCEMI. 50 millimeters in height. Italian Leather upper
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Made in Italy
Unisex Shoe - Please consult size our size chartThe boulder that rolled over Ryan Titchener, shattering 14 ribs and breaking his spine, had likely sat motionless in the mountains of southeastern British Columbia for thousands of years before he rested his hand on it.
That light touch was enough to dislodge the 300-kilogram hunk of granite from its perch below Pigeon Spire in Bugaboo Provincial Park, as the 32-year-old apprentice mountain guide from Jasper, Alta., made his way down a notch on the approach to the final peak.
"It was about the size of a washing machine — it was a big boulder," Titchener said. "I never thought it was going to fall or slip."
Incredibly, though, the rock shifted when he put just some of his weight on it as he made his way toward his girlfriend, Tereza Turecka, who was acting as his "client" that day.
The pair had set out in the early-morning hours of July 15 to summit Pigeon Spire as an exercise before Titchener's full-certification exam with the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides, a designation that takes years to achieve and would set him on a career path he had dreamed of all his life.
But that dream was shattered in an instant, when the rock gave way.
"I started tumbling for about 10 metres and I smashed my head into the depression down below very violently," he said.
"At the same exact time, that boulder — that huge boulder — rolled over me and continued on down the mountain.
"I was paralyzed. I knew right away."
Titchener is an Alberta-based apprentice alpine guide who was out practising for his final guiding exam when a boulder gave way and rolled over him, breaking his spine in two places and leaving him a paraplegic, for now. (Mike Symington/CBC)
Seconds earlier, Turecka had been taking a moment to drink in the mountain vistas of the Bugaboos: the sharp spires, the rolling ridge lines and the cascading glaciers.
"I just remember being overwhelmed by the surreal views of that place," she said. "I was just really happy to be there and it was one of those perfect moments.
"And then I remember turning around and looking over at where Ryan was, and what I could see was just that fraction of a second where Ryan was being rolled by the boulder.
"I saw the awkward angle of his head, the massive boulder crushing him against the rock, and at that moment I didn't believe he was going to live. I just expected his dead body to roll down to the ledge with me."
Pigeon Spire is a 3,156-metre summit in Bugaboo Provincial Park in southeastern British Columbia. (CBC)
Titchener was surprised, himself, to be alive.
He came to a stop, upside down, with one foot wedged in a crevice and his climbing harness hooked around a horn of rock.
The boulder had shattered 14 of his ribs and broken two vertebrae. One of his lungs had collapsed and was rapidly filling with blood.
His climbing helmet was fractured in the fall, but his head came out relatively unscathed. He was alert and conscious as Turecka — an experienced alpinist herself — ran him through basic tests for brain injury.
"Ski patrol mode kicked in for me immediately," she said. "Even though it was my loved one, panic wouldn't help in that moment.
"I needed to stay calm and I needed to keep it together for him."
'Mayday! Mayday! Pigeon Spire'
If the loose boulder was a spot of bad luck, Titchener credits the next 13 hours as a series of fortunate events that helped save his life.
He said the fact he didn't fall farther down the mountain, alone, was lucky.
The radio in his backpack also survived the fall, giving Turecka a chance to call for help.
"She started yelling, 'Mayday! Mayday! Pigeon Spire,'" he said.
That radio signal reached a custodian at a nearby Alpine Club of Canada hut who happened to be listening at the time.
The Conrad Kain Hut stands at an elevation of 2,230 metres in Bugaboo Provincial Park in southeastern British Columbia. (Alpine Club of Canada)
The distress call then made its way to a search-and-rescue team out of Golden, B.C., that was out on a practice exercise of their own, only eight kilometres away.
"Within a minute or two they got back to us and said, 'Hey yeah, we've got a helicopter and we're going to load up and we're going to be there soon — ETA half an hour to an hour,'" Titchener said.
"And I remember thinking in my head, it's not fast enough. I needed help right away... but I've been a rescuer before and helped out in several situations and I know these things take time. I knew I just needed to concentrate and control my breathing and relax."
In the meantime, Turecka had wrapped him in a tarp and as many jackets as they had. Keeping him warm was especially important, as a snow storm had started to roll in.
"Minutes after the accident, toonie-sized hail chunks were coming down, pounding down on us, all around us," Titchener said.
"It was getting cold. It was getting windy. It was going to make the rescue a lot more difficult, because if you're going to fly in that sort of weather, you've got to be a good pilot. You've got to really know what you're doing."
'I didn't want to die in front of my girlfriend'
He admits the worst-case scenario crossed his mind, from time to time.
"I can't lie. There was that feeling that I was going to die. But I didn't let that overwhelm me," he said.
"I didn't want to die in front of my girlfriend. I didn't want that. I wasn't going to let that happen."
Tereza Turecka and her boyfriend, Titchener, on one of their many, earlier mountain outings. (Submitted by Ryan Titchener)
Eventually, the thumping sound of helicopter blades could be heard in the distance, and Titchener said it felt like his "guardian angel" had arrived.
The aircraft flew past at first, looking to set up a staging area from which rescuers could climb to Titchener, because the conditions were too challenging to fly directly to him.
"But the weather seemed to have a bit of a break in it at that moment and the helicopter pilot made that decision to go for it," he said. "Next thing you know, we heard those blades come back."
The helicopter flew directly overhead and two rescue technicians dangled on a long line as it descended.
"They landed down right next to us," Titchener said. "That helicopter pilot had that precision to drop those guys perfectly next to us — it was unbelievable — despite the bad weather."
With a sudden break in the weather, a rescue helicopter was able to deliver two rescue technicians directly to Titchener via a long line. (Golden and District Search and Rescue)
The team flew Titchener to the valley below, where a larger helicopter was waiting to take him to hospital in Golden.
"At this point I had not received any pain relief at all," he said.
"I was fully conscious and I could feel every little bit of pain. Every ounce of it was running through my body. It was excruciating. And I definitely was holding on for life, the whole time."
At the hospital, Titchener said, doctors pushed a tube into his collapsed lung and drained nearly 1.5 litres of blood from it, right in front of his eyes.
They then prepped him for transport to a more advanced trauma unit in Calgary, but with lingering bad weather, a helicopter was unable to fly him there.
"They told me they were going to drive me and it was going to get bumpy," he said. "It wasn't going to be comfortable."
He eventually arrived at the Foothills Medical Centre at 10 p.m. that night.
The boulder had dislodged at 8:45 a.m.
Diagnosis and prognosis
After numerous tests, Titchener said he was diagnosed with a cracked T2 vertebra and a vertebra lower down in his spine that was in much worse shape.
"My L3 in my lumbar had actually exploded," he said. "They needed to piece it back together and fuse my L2 and L4 together with my L3 as one, large, solid mass now, to protect my spine, to make it one large vertebra, essentially."
His spinal cord had been badly injured, but not severed, giving him hope.
Titchener gives the thumbs-up from his hospital bed. He suffered two broken vertebrae but his spinal cord was not severed. (Facebook)
"The prognosis is that I'm a paraplegic with a very long road ahead of me," he said.
"If I want to walk again — or even have the use of ankle braces and a cane — that's going to be a mountain in its own to climb. I'm going to have to work hard in order to get that. As of right now, I lie in my bed every night and every day and think about that."
And while he has long-term plans to walk — and climb — again, Titchener has a more short-term goal in mind, too.
He's set to be the best man in a close friend's wedding in Jasper, where he lives, in late August.
"I plan on making that wedding and honouring my promise," he said.
"I may be in a wheelchair, obviously, for most of it, but I will do my best to stand next to him in that suit that he bought me and honour my friend and honour his fiancée and watch those two get married."
'He's an incredibly strong man'
A GoFundMe page has been set up by Titchener's friends to help him through the next phase of his life. Within the first week, it had raised $10,000, which "blew his mind." (After 16 days, it was up to $14,370 of the $25,000 goal, according to the total on Tuesday.)
"I was like, man, what am I going to do with $10,000? I don't need that money," Titchener said. "But then I started to realize afterwards the financial burden that becoming paralyzed will have on not just myself, but on my family and on my loved ones."
Titchener has already begun physiotherapy, and Turecka said she's amazed by his rapid progress — he has already managed to stand on his legs, with help from others — and by his relentlessly positive attitude.
"I've always known he's an incredibly strong man," she said. "I've always looked up to him as a guide, as a person, as an extremely positive person who can inspire others in whatever they're doing in their lives.
Turecka administered first aid to Titchener after he sustained the life-threatening injuries from the falling boulder. (Mike Symington/CBC)
"My breath is taken away by how strong he is now. Most people would have just broken down and fallen into a deep depression and wouldn't know how to deal with this," Turecka added.
"As much I've tried to support him in the hospital, it's mutual. We're there for one for another. He's just stayed incredibly strong."
For his part, Titchener said he sees little choice but to stay positive and work as hard at his recovery as he was working toward his full certification as a mountain guide.
He keeps his crushed helmet by his bedside as a reminder of how differently things could have turned out.
"I'm pretty damn lucky that I didn't end up with a traumatic brain injury and all I have is a broken back and no feeling below my knees," he said. "It could have been a lot worse than that."
Titchener holds the broken climbing helmet that he keeps by his hospital bed as a reminder of how lucky he was to avoid a serious brain injury when the boulder rolled over him. (Mike Symington/CBC)
"It's essentially the worst thing that's ever happened to me in my life — by far — but I want to turn it into the best thing that's ever happened to me, to inspire others that have had the same kinds of traumatic injuries to think positive and understand that this isn't the end. This is just a new beginning."
As for those longer-term goals, Titchener said he hopes to return to the spot where the boulder gave way, and finish the ascent.
"I want to reach the summit of Pigeon Spire one day," he said. "It's not by any means the hardest mountain in the world to climb, but now, it is for me.
"This is now my Everest."New York/Philly’s For Everest and New Zealand’s Carb On Carb met how most bands from opposite ends of the world end up meeting: on the road. The bands felt a kinship with each other and, after a few more chance encounters at venues around the States, they decided to put out a split together. And despite their geographic distance from one another, they share much of the same ethos and draw from the same influences. The songs on their upcoming split are both of their first since their debut albums came out — For Everest’s excellent 2016 LP We Are At Home In The Body and Carb On Carb’s great 2015 self-titled release — and they’re both effective in hinting at where both bands could head next. The highlight on For Everest’s side is “Turnpike,” which builds to an anthemic chorus that’s characteristic for the group and sounds as bleary-eyed and frantic as a late-night drive down the highway. And Carb On Carb’s “Ma,” which closes out the split, is a tender ode to a grandmother that’s filled with admiration and remorse: “I’ll hope that I’ll be able to laugh as proudly and deliberately as her,” Nicole Gaffney sings on the hook. Listen to the entire split below.
For Everest / Carb on Carb split by Square of Opposition Records
For Everest and Carb On Carb’s split is available to pre-order through Square Of Opposition Records.Its my Friday lay day blog which is designed to divert my attention elsewhere. I have now had a chance to read the 170-page – Intergenerational Myth Report 2015, issued by the Australian Treasury yesterday. The whole nation has become caught up in the doom and gloom that the conservatives are putting out about the projected deficits for the next 40 years. Not a fiscal surplus in sight. But at the same time, all this is based (using their own logic) that we will be back in a steady inflation, full employment Australia within 5 years and sustain that state for the projection period out to 2054-55. Question: What would be so wrong with that? Of course, that statement just assumes their own logic. The projections however are not mutually consistent and there is insufficient information about net export trends for us to understand whether a fiscal deficit of 6 per cent of GDP in 2054-55 (on current legislation) is suitable or not. But again, if that size deficit is producing full employment and price stability why all the ‘sky is about to fall in’ unless we produce fiscal surpluses as quickly as possible? Answer: this is a nonsensical political exercise and has little to do with economics.
Given I like numbers and relationships between aggregates etc and as a Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) proponent I am trained to see things in stock-flow consistent terms rather than make up projections without checking them for internal consistency or sense, I did some calculations this morning based on the assumptions in the IGR 2015. Just to see as they say!
First, the IGR just assumes away the problem of unemployment and says:
As a result of the constant unemployment assumption, employment growth from 2020-21 onwards (where the economy is projected to return to full employment) reflects growth in the labour force.
What is this constant unemployment assumption?
The unemployment projections in the IGR are based on the flawed NAIRU concept:
While employment growth depends on the dynamics |
against him and the Social Impact Team.
“Don’t believe EVERYTHING you read, but: I’m proud to be part of an expert team telling the truth on tech diversity,” wrote Campos in another tweet featuring a link to the article. “All right, now I’m gonna get baked and watch the pilot of the West Wing because I am living my best life,” he added a few hours later.
Campos wasn’t the only employee to respond to the situation, with Sanchez making her Twitter account private; a tactic commonly used by figures of controversy in order to temporarily hide and delete statements which may be used against them.
Diversifying the workplace is not uncommon in today’s technology landscape, with leading giants such as Twitter, Dropbox, and Yahoo engaging in a variety of diversity programmes, but GitHub seems to have taken the mantle for most racially controversial. Many users on social media, including regular users of GitHub, have expressed outrage.
https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/696176186490114048
It looks like @github has new rules for corporate diversity:
1) Diversity = not hiring white people
2) Discrimination = hiring white people — Rev. Boof (@1LogicalMan) February 7, 2016
https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/696180096865071104
GitHub has not yet publicly responded to the situation.
Charlie Nash is a libertarian writer, memeologist, and child prodigy. When he is not writing, he can usually be found chilling at the Korova Milk Bar, mingling with the infamous. You can follow him on Twitter at @MrNashington.Associated Press
2015
No. 1: Jameis Winston, Tampa Bay Buccaneers
No. 2: Marcus Mariota, Tennessee Titans
Aftermath: After one season in the NFL, Winston and Mariota showed enough promise to suggest that their combined career arc will not follow the same paths of many of the quarterback 1-2 draft duos. In 2015, Mariota became the first rookie QB with two games with at least four touchdown passes, and also became the only player in NFL history to pass for at least 250 yards with three touchdowns and rush for more than 100 yards in the same game. Winston, meanwhile, threw for 4,042 yards, which is the third-most by a rookie in NFL history. Winston's 22 touchdown passes are tied for the fourth-most by a rookie in NFL history. In a Week 11 win over the Eagles, Winston threw five touchdowns with no interceptions and joined Ray Buivid (Dec. 5, 1937) as the only rookie quarterbacks in NFL history to accomplish the feat.For just $20, your run-of-the-mill floormat does a marginally good job at cleaning the bottom of your shoes. But if you're willing to spend a little more, like $6,000, you can upgrade to this vacuum-powered mat that sucks every last bit of dirt off your soles.
The mat was developed by Paionia Furyokuki and its surface is perforated with valves that are only opened as they're stepped on. So as someone walks across the mat, it activates what are essentially a series of little vacuums that suck the dirt and debris off the sole of the shoe, and then into an external unit where it can be later disposed of. It's a little over-the-top as far as floor mats go (ok, a LOT over-the-top) but it ensures the surface doesn't get caked with dirt over time that's going to be carried into a building. Oh, and it goes without saying, but you never have to clean it. [DigInfo TV via Ubergizmo]Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is my favorite book—and movie—in J.K. Rowling’s series. That means there’s a lot I love about the third Harry Potter installment, including the moment when Remus Lupin and Sirius Black are reunited in the Shrieking Shack.
The scene reveals a history that adds so much to the franchise and made Harry Potter feel like an even bigger, richer world. It quickly changes from Professor Lupin seemingly rescuing Harry, Ron, and Hermione from alleged murderer Sirius Black to a reunion between two old best friends. Like the trio, the reader at first might not understand the questions Lupin asks Black in the beginning but as the conversation unfolds their history, and by extension Harry’s parents’ history, is explained. We learn it wasn’t Black who betrayed them, but Peter Pettigrew. With Pettigrew and James, Black and Lupin made up the Marauders who created the map and the other three became Anamagi to help Lupin whenever he transformed into a werewolf. They all fought Voldemort, until one of them betrayed the rest.
It’s the little moments between Black and Lupin scattered within this sudden deluge of new information that always captivated me. The moments where they said just enough and yet left so much more unsaid! Things like Black silently confirming Lupin’s realization that they switched who was Secret Keeper without telling him and it clearly dawning on Lupin that for 12 years everything he thought about what happened with his friends was wrong. Black explaining what happened after over a decade with the anger of knowing his suspicions were incorrect and his choice led to his friends’ deaths as well as his imprisonment. The two asking each other for forgiveness for thinking the other was Voldemort’s spy.
Learning about all this built on what little we knew at this point about the first war with Voldemort and in doing so shifted how you thought about that time. It wasn’t just a clear-cut good versus evil conflict. Friends suspected friends, friends betrayed friends, and a group as close as Harry, Hermione, and Ron was torn apart trying to make the world a better place. I always felt this was the start of the series really opening up into a more complicated story where things get just that much darker than we’d seen before, leading the way for things to get darker for Harry and the others.
It was a great small bit of world building that would continue to be expanded on as the series continued and leaves you wishing Rowling would just write a Marauders book already! The scene isn’t as emotional in the movie and doesn’t go into quite as much detail as the book, but it’s still worth a watch as it manages to convey the core of the scene. Just promise me you’ll also check out the book version after watching it!Reviving the humanitarian spirit in the gaming community
23 November 2007: Desert Bus for Hope is hosted for the first time. A tradition of playing the tedious game is started, raising over $1.8 million for Child's Play to date.
6 January 2010: Awesome Games Done Quick raisees $53,379 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Future events see over $25k raised for Doctors Without Borders snd $21k for the Organization for Autism Research
4 May 2010: The Humble Indie Bundle makes its debut. It's a success, and subsequent bundles quickly follow suit. Today, the Humble Bundle s synonymous with charitable giving, being extended to a Book, Comic,and Music bundle as well.
11 March 2011: A twin earthquake and tsunami strikes Tohoku Japan. The American Red Cross offers assistance and welcomes donations. Valve responds with the Japan Charity Bundle, 3 hats and 2 noisemakers sold with all proceeds benefiting the Red Cross. Over $430,000 is raised.
31 July 2011: The Cenurion Hatchling in World of Warcraft cocludes its period for sale, having raised over $1.9 million dollars for the tsunamit relief effort.
These events and more make very clear one thing: The gaming community is very generous.
Let's rekindle that philanthropic spirit.
On the ground in rural Africa, charity:water helps end the 1,400-a-day death toll that dehydration causes here. But this statistic can drop. Indeed, it already has these past 15 years, and is projected to sink even lower in the next 15 if donors continue their support.
That's where you come in.
Every little bit helps. Just $1.00 can finance the beginning of a well. $30 can supply a person with clean water to last their lifetime.
Please make a donation today. You'll be doing good for the whole world.It would only make sense, after seeing what a kitchen strainer and aluminum foil can do, that a metal kitchen pot would provide a significant signal boost for a mobile broadband modem, or "dongle." The homemade video evidence tells all.
Advertisement
The video is edited in a rather stuttered style for reasons unknown, but the segments where a USB broadband modem is placed into, and pulled out of, a large saucepan, with a signal strength meter running, seem to be fairly steady. A YouTube commenter suggests a more parabolic shape, like a wok, might do even better in capturing and honing the broadband signal.
If you're ever stuck at a friend's house with weak mobile broadband reception, it might pay off to dig into their cookware. At the least, it's an instant conversation starter.
The Best (and Funniest) 3G Mobile Broadband Signal Booster [The Mobile Broadband Blog via Slashdot]NEUTRAL | Washington Post | Richard Arenberg Save the Filibuster, Harry Reid
Quick Hits: "The Senate is headed for a showdown over the filibuster. Democrats and Republicans are locked in a struggle that brings to mind the Cold War deterrence strategy of mutually assured destruction.
This theory held that the nuclear arsenals of the Soviet Union and the United States could each annihilate the other, so neither would dare launch an attack. Under Senate Rule 22, a two-thirds majority is needed to end debate and change the rules. Democrats are threatening to invoke the unprecedented claim that only a simple majority is required. They used to say the simple majority, or the 'nuclear option,' could be used only on the first day of a new Congress."
This theory held that the nuclear arsenals of the Soviet Union and the United States could each annihilate the other, so neither would dare launch an attack. Under Senate Rule 22, a two-thirds majority is needed to end debate and change the rules. Democrats are threatening to invoke the unprecedented claim that only a simple majority is required. They used to say the simple majority, or the 'nuclear option,' could be used only on the first day of a new Congress." "In short, Democrats’ frustration is well justified. But neither side is 'right' or would 'win' should Senate procedure be changed in this way."
"The stakes here are far higher than tit-for-tat legislative warfare. Although the nuclear option would, at this time, be limited to nominations, its use would establish a precedent leading to majority control of the Senate. This would be true even if the ploy were limited to use on the first day of a new Congress; the outcome is exacerbated if any majority can change the rules at any time. The use of majority control would prove irresistible and the Senate would soon operate much like the House of Representatives, where the majority controls, the minority is seldom consulted, debate is limited and floor amendments often are not permitted." >> click here to read moreMy birthday is coming up at the end of the month, but instead of asking for presents, I’m giving away presents!! Totes CRaZy!
GRAND PRIZE
ANY mechanical keyboard of your choice from the KeyChatter mechanical keyboard buyer’s guide. Plus, you’ll get a custom, handmade in the USA soft keyboard carrying case to go with it – even pick one of our new special edition designs!
2ND, 3RD, 4TH, AND 5TH PLACE PRIZES
A soft keyboard carrying case of your choice, including any special edition design!
LAST PLACE CONSOLATION PRIZE
1 Kleenex tissue
FAQ
Man this is legit cray-cray How win??//
I know it is. No purchase is necessary to win. Just three steps: 1) Follow KeyChatter on Twitter, 2) retweet this tweet, and 3) tweet me your dream keyboard with hashtag #DreamKeyboard.
This giveaway is single-entry. Do not try to game the system or you will be completely disqualified. 🙁
Follow @keychatter
How long is the giveaway?
It will close sometime during the day on 2/28/2015, whenever I feel like it, so don’t wait until the last minute.
How will the winner be picked?
The TL;DR is randomly, but here are the details:
Sometime on 2/28 I’ll announce the contest is closed, and create a list of everyone who correctly entered the contest by following the 3 easy steps above.
I’ll randomize the rows in the list using Excel, and post the list publicly. People who made it into rows 1-59 will be finalists. Everyone else will be out!
When the Powerball numbers come out that night, the five white balls will be first through fifth place, left to right. The red Powerball will win the tissue. If there are duplicate numbers, some people will win more than one prize!
Don’t delay, enter now: 1) click the button below to follow KeyChatter now, 2) retweet this tweet, and 3) tweet at me with your dream mechanical keyboard with hashtag #DreamKeyboard! Yolo! ^______^
Good luck.
Follow @keychatterIntelligence briefings, classified memos, speech edits—President Obama clearly can’t share the details of his daily Oval Office reading list. But Obama, one of the great orators of modern politics, was influenced by great authors long before he got national security clearance. In our November issue, the president gave WIRED a crash course in the books that shaped him.
Like all diligent overachievers, we take our homework seriously. So we calculated how much time you’d need to read everything on Professor Obama’s syllabus. You’re looking at 89 hours with great minds like Abraham Lincoln, James Baldwin, and Elizabeth Kolbert. Obama appreciates an excellent novel like John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, but doesn’t shy away from hard-hitting nonfiction, like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. And he’s got a soft spot for biographies of great American forces of change, from Andy Grove to Martin Luther King Jr.
Of course, you could space that reading out over a manageable amount of time. But you also could work on your taxes for an hour a week and have them done by March. So next time you’ve got a week to spare, kick up your feet and cram for your freshman lit seminar in the Oval Office. There’s never been such a good excuse for avoiding conversation with extended family over the holidays; let the binge-reading begin!There are plenty of great things about the XBOX One, but not being able to stuff it into a backpack and take it with you on a road trip is definitely a downer. If you've got $1,500 to spare, however, you might just be able to snag an Xbook One: a portable chassis with the guts of the XBOX one and a 22-inch screen.
The Xbook One was developed by hardware modder Ed Zarick using a couple of Makerbot Replicator 2 3D printers, lasers, and lots of time. Since XBOX Live rules don't allow for modifying the the actual hardware, Zarick's acrylic chassis contains the real deal inside. However, it also has a new, low-profile cooling shroud and a built-in 22-inch 1080p display with a slot-loading Blu-ray drive on the front.
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The overall effect does resemble a (rather large) gaming laptop, but the Xbook One doesn't include batteries since the XBOX isn't really designed to run on batteries. You'll still need to find an AC power outlet if you want to lug this baby around. And, I presume, an oversized backpack.
If you'd like to order one of these for just $1,500, head over to Zarick's website. [Ed Zarick via SlashGear]Today I had the pleasure of talking to Selfless Gaming owner and coach Steve “Ryu” Rattacasa. We talked today about the state of the NA CS scene, how CS is evolving itself and we also spoke a bit about Selfless and himself.
Selfless Gaming is based out of North America and has Overwatch, Rocket League, Killer Instinct and Super Smash Bros alongside, CS:GO teams for both Males and Females.
Reece: First of all, let’s talk a bit about the American CS scene. The American CS scene has always been a big scene, but now more teams are growing who were formerly unknown to the casual fan with the help of big competitions like ELeague and ESL Pro League: NA. Do you think the NA scene could grow bigger than the EU scene in the future?
Ryu: Yes because that’s what the math is going to show—and Americans love competition, love competitive sports/activities, and having things like ELEAGUE showcasing our games on TV will continue to push it into the mainstream (which it’s still not a part of).
People say there are issues with the American CS scene, for example, they say players have no passion and are just there for the big salaries. From both a business view and a player’s view, do you think there are any major issues with the American CS scene right now, and what do you think could be done to solve these issues?
It’s definitely disappointing to see the average work ethic of some of the teams/players that “make it” to the pro level—but I’ve always said the entire “system” for a player to go through to get recognized was flawed. It rewarded individual stats and overly aggressive styles of play which never emphasized the most important things, like teamwork, communication, etc. That’s slowly begun to change, but it’s still a few seasons out before we see what kind of impact some of those changes will have.
There have been a lot of organizations who have come and gone and have only survived a short period of time. In your opinion, what makes a successful and sustainable esports organization?
Generating revenue, super passionate fans, and great, long-term partnerships—and it’s real, really hard to do. Right now the scene is flooded with big name investor money, and none of those orgs have the real incentive to be profitable or sustainable, and that’s extremely risky. That’s how bubbles grow…
What do you think is different with the EU scene and the NA scene? Do you think the NA scene could become bigger than the EU scene? Why?
There’s almost too much to list, but I’d say overall the NA scene focuses on individual aim, and EU plays good, consistent team-based CS:GO. We certainly have the talent for it, but it’ll take time. C9 (Cloud 9) is an example of what a team would need to look like to beat EU teams regularly.
Onto a bit about Selfless now. Recently we saw some roster changes with Michael “Mainline” Jaber being dropped and Vincent “Brehze” Cayonte being added. Was there any big reason behind this change or was it just the right player popping up at the right time?
Mainline lost his love of the game—the fire, the drive, the passion. He was lethargic in practices, he was late frequently, and we just weren’t “feeling it” with him anymore. It was obvious we had to move on, and once we started to shift the in-game leadership role away from him, he either had to step it up with his work ethic and grind himself into being a top player, or move on. He decided to move on. I loved playing with him and wish that wasn’t the case, but I think a bit of a break for him from the top competitive scene will be really good for him in the long run. He’s not hanging up the mouse just yet.
You are the owner of Selfless Gaming, you write the articles for the site, but you also coach the team and do analyst elements for the ESL Pro League North American scrims. Do you prefer the business side of things or the pundit side of things, or even the player side of things as you used to be a player? Why?
I love all of it. Being an owner allows me the opportunity to move my focus around to different elements any given day of the week. So in addition to the coaching stuff, the analyst work, and the “general CS:GO” activities, I also get to work on marketing, social media, recruiting talent (for CS:GO and other games), finding and securing partnerships, and so on. My previous career in technology was very successful but got very, very boring for me quickly. This variety is really the spice of my life right now, and I love it all.
Valve have made a few big changes to CS:GO recently. For example, the coaching ban. As a coach yourself, what do you think about the coaching ban?
Classic Valve—not listening to what the players want, and operating as an obstacle to the growth and progression of the game instead of a catalyst for it. It’s ridiculous and will result in lower quality CS:GO.
They’ve made some other pretty big changes recently like the gambling ban and of course, new gun sounds. People are even saying CS:GO is dying. What do you think about the gambling ban? Do you think CS:GO is heading up or down? Is it “dying” like people say?
I don’t care about the gambling ban—and I think it’s only a short-term thing anyways. Esports betting will be MASSIVE—way bigger than people think or realize right now—but it’ll take the time to follow the appropriate legal avenues. I don’t think the game is dying anytime soon, despite the 12-year-olds who lost skins and issued death threats via anonymous social media accounts not being able to wager skins anymore.
Dota 2 has “The Invitational,” an annual tournament with a massive prize pool which determines the best team in the world. With Counter Strike, we usually have 3 major tournaments per year. Which format do you think is better, the one big tournament style or the 3 tournament style?
I love what Valve has done with the International, but I prefer at least 2 MAJOR events per year, so I’m not a huge fan of the single gigantic event per year.
Now a bit about yourself. You transitioned from being an IGL to a coach due to a busy work schedule. How hard was it to stop playing and start coaching? Do you think you might follow the steps of Immortal’s Zews and return to being a player at some point in the future?
It wasn’t too hard—I was able to do the things I was truly good at, I was able to bring in young talent and help players develop and play the right way. The only hard part about it was WATCHING instead of playing, and knowing that my impact on the game was less “direct”. As much as I think my value could be at an all-time high as a player right now (due to the ridiculous coaching rule change), I have no plans to return to playing. I truly believe that if I did, with my work ethic, I could be back in form quickly, though.
Finally, what can you say to help people who are trying to break through to the professional scene?
Recognize what you are naturally good at (because yes, TALENT EXISTS), and go all in on that. Hard work should be a part of your equation for success regardless of what you do in life, so figure out the strengths you have, work really hard, and always be a great teammate. And as a relevant side note, I’d encourage all younger players that want to go pro in one way or another to focus on building their individual following/brand. That’ll be more and more important as Esports grows.
Thank you very much for your time, Steve. Any last things to say? Any shoutouts?
Thank you to every single fan of any/all of our teams, all of our supporters, all the haters who keep fanning the flames, and a huge shutout to ClutchChairz for making the best gaming chairs we’ve ever been fortunate to game in. As I write this, Kaboose is lounging hardcore in his chair and loving it.SirVandeKamp Profile Blog Joined May 2014 United States 40 Posts #1
Do not only play video games at a video game convention: This sounds counter-intuitive, does it not? Yet we can all agree that if you wanted to play Starcraft 2 for an entire weekend, you could just stay home and save your ticket money. Go out and watch the pro-gamers play. Browse the vendors and see if there is something you may want to pick up for purchase. Participate in some of the special events like musical performances, panel discussions, meet and greets, and prize competitions. Make your trip memorable, not just another weekend where you played video games.
Wear clothes you would not mind getting dirty: Gamers are not known for their cleanliness or personal hygiene, and Dreamhack reinforced that hard. Despite volunteers constantly sweeping, there was food wrappers and electronics packaging everywhere. I would not recommend wearing anything put tennis shoes, jeans/cargo shorts, and a t-shirt. Regardless, do your part to keep the event clean by picking up after yourself, reporting spills to volunteers, and keeping your hygiene in tip-top shape.
If you there are seats for 18+ and 21+, grab them if you can: My biggest regret this weekend was buying a desk ticket in the main hall and not in the 21+ area. Although there are many people who are over 18 at big video game conventions, you must remember that it is children who play the most video games every week. They also flock to these major events, and usually get their parents to buy tickets closest to the action. You always want to get tickets for the older people area because 1) middle schoolers are a pain, and 2) there really aren’t a bunch of weird 40 year olds like your parents want you to believe you will become.
Respect the crew members: Most people working at conventions, video game or otherwise, do not get paid. They do their work because they love the event and want it to succeed, but having difficult revelers diminishes their willpower and makes them unhappy. The less happy they are, the worse the convention runs. Please, be respectful and do what they ask of you.
If you are reading this blog, you also probably go to huge gaming conventions to meet the big names in video gaming. Perhaps these are pro-gamers, famous streamers, cosplayers, or even developers. Everyone wants to get those few moments with a famous star to get a picture and, most importantly, get an autograph. Here are a few tips and tricks for getting autographs.
Ask at opportune moments: There are good times and bad times to ask autographs, and your chances of getting an autograph vary greatly during these times. Obviously, a bad time to ask is during a match. Other bad times are right before a match, after a match when the player loses, in the bathroom or other more private spaces. Good times are after the players wins a match/set, when they are in transit from place to place, and when they are just browsing the internet in between games. Also, be sure to attend the times designated for players to sign autographs. It is almost a guaranteed signature, and the players are usually happier.
Signing a t-shirt can be quiet tricky: This is something I had to learn the hard way. Shirts do not often stay still even when placed on a flat surface. What’s more, there are two layers of fabric when you put a T-shirt on a flat surface, leading to a lot of sliding. It is very difficult to autograph a t-shirt when it is like this, and oftentimes the signatures come out sloppy and barely legible. You will want to either be wearing the shirt when it is autographed, or to place something hard inside the shirt when it is being signed (like a piece of cardboard or a book). Trust me, I learned this the hard way
Less famous people always give better autograph experiences: You are not going to get an amazing conversation from Jaedong when you ask for an autograph. The reason is because he is always being asked for autographs, so much that it has become more of a nuisance than an honor. A less accomplished player, on the other hand, is more likely to feel happy about being asked and will gladly spend a minute or two to talk if they have the time. For the most part they can answer your burning questions just as well as a more famous player can, so the interaction is equally as valuable. Plus, they tend to be nicer to the average fan. Never overlook an autograph just because a player is “bad” or “so-so.”
People from different countries react differently to autographs: This can also be read as “Koreans as a whole seem more melancholy when asked for an autograph”. I do not know why that is, but it seemed to be consistent. Europeans as a whole tended to be much more open to autographs than Koreans, though I was only rejected once out of 50 signatures. Do not be bother by this; it can easily be explained by the cultural barrier between people from different countries and continents.
Be prepared for the occasional no: I do not know why niche celebrities would decline to sign an autograph. Pro-gamers are not widely recognized outside of conventions and tournaments, do not have the paparazzi after them, and can for the most part live a normal life. That being said, it is well within their right to deny an autograph. Sometimes they are having a bad day, and no one likes to be bothered on a bad day. It’s not a rejection of you as much as it is an indication of their mood. You can always try again later.
As for my experiences at Dreamhack Summer, the nicest pro gamers by far and away were Zanster, Harstem, Mana, Demuslim, and San. In particular, San was the best Korean to get a signature from by far. I'll upload some photos when I can!
Also, please note that this post is modified from a post I do for a League of Legends blog (though I am more into the professional SC2 scene myself). You can see the original here:
https://leagueoflcs.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/how-to-dreamhack/
If you are nerdy enough to read a blog about esports (not a bad thing, I do too!), then you will probably go to a huge video game convention at some point in your life. For me, my first major event was this past weekend at Dreamhack Summer, the largest and most famous LAN party in the world. After attending, I came back with a greater understanding on how to get the most out of your experience. With MLG Anaheim right around the corner, I thought it would be timely to take a break from Fantasy LCS and post these ideas for everyone to see. Here are my major tips on how to Dreamhack:This sounds counter-intuitive, does it not? Yet we can all agree that if you wanted to play Starcraft 2 for an entire weekend, you could just stay home and save your ticket money. Go out and watch the pro-gamers play. Browse the vendors and see if there is something you may want to pick up for purchase. Participate in some of the special events like musical performances, panel discussions, meet and greets, and prize competitions. Make your trip memorable, not just another weekend where you played video games.Gamers are not known for their cleanliness or personal hygiene, and Dreamhack reinforced that hard. Despite volunteers constantly sweeping, there was food wrappers and electronics packaging everywhere. I would not recommend wearing anything put tennis shoes, jeans/cargo shorts, and a t-shirt. Regardless, do your part to keep the event clean by picking up after yourself, reporting spills to volunteers, and keeping your hygiene in tip-top shape.My biggest regret this weekend was buying a desk ticket in the main hall and not in the 21+ area. Although there are many people who are over 18 at big video game conventions, you must remember that it is children who play the most video games every week. They also flock to these major events, and usually get their parents to buy tickets closest to the action. You always want to get tickets for the older people area because 1) middle schoolers are a pain, and 2) there really aren’t a bunch of weird 40 year olds like your parents want you to believe you will become.Most people working at conventions, video game or otherwise, do not get paid. They do their work because they love the event and want it to succeed, but having difficult revelers diminishes their willpower and makes them unhappy. The less happy they are, the worse the convention runs. Please, be respectful and do what they ask of you.If you are reading this blog, you also probably go to huge gaming conventions to meet the big names in video gaming. Perhaps these are pro-gamers, famous streamers, cosplayers, or even developers. Everyone wants to get those few moments with a famous star to get a picture and, most importantly, get an autograph. Here are a few tips and tricks for getting autographs.There are good times and bad times to ask autographs, and your chances of getting an autograph vary greatly during these times. Obviously, a bad time to ask is during a match. Other bad times are right before a match, after a match when the player loses, in the bathroom or other more private spaces. Good times are after the players wins a match/set, when they are in transit from place to place, and when they are just browsing the internet in between games. Also, be sure to attend the times designated for players to sign autographs. It is almost a guaranteed signature, and the players are usually happier.This is something I had to learn the hard way. Shirts do not often stay still even when placed on a flat surface. What’s more, there are two layers of fabric when you put a T-shirt on a flat surface, leading to a lot of sliding. It is very difficult to autograph a t-shirt when it is like this, and oftentimes the signatures come out sloppy and barely legible. You will want to either be wearing the shirt when it is autographed, or to place something hard inside the shirt when it is being signed (like a piece of cardboard or a book). Trust me, I learned this the hard way You are not going to get an amazing conversation from Jaedong when you ask for an autograph. The reason is because he is always being asked for autographs, so much that it has become more of a nuisance than an honor. A less accomplished player, on the other hand, is more likely to feel happy about being asked and will gladly spend a minute or two to talk if they have the time. For the most part they can answer your burning questions just as well as a more famous player can, so the interaction is equally as valuable. Plus, they tend to be nicer to the average fan. Never overlook an autograph just because a player is “bad” or “so-so.”This can also be read as “Koreans as a whole seem more melancholy when asked for an autograph”. I do not know why that is, but it seemed to be consistent. Europeans as a whole tended to be much more open to autographs than Koreans, though I was only rejected once out of 50 signatures. Do not be bother by this; it can easily be explained by the cultural barrier between people from different countries and continents.I do not know why niche celebrities would decline to sign an autograph. Pro-gamers are not widely recognized outside of conventions and tournaments, do not have the paparazzi after them, and can for the most part live a normal life. That being said, it is well within their right to deny an autograph. Sometimes they are having a bad day, and no one likes to be bothered on a bad day. It’s not a rejection of you as much as it is an indication of their mood. You can always try again later.As for my experiences at Dreamhack Summer, the nicest pro gamers by far and away were Zanster, Harstem, Mana, Demuslim, and San. In particular, San was the best Korean to get a signature from by far. I'll upload some photos when I can!Also, please note that this post is modified from a post I do for a League of Legends blog (though I am more into the professional SC2 scene myself). You can see the original here:
Fighter Profile Joined August 2010 Korea (South) 1506 Posts #2 So uhh... who's the one that rejected you? For Aiur???
y0su Profile Blog Joined September 2011 Finland 7868 Posts #3
Good advice all around! On June 20 2014 22:08 SirVandeKamp wrote:
As for my experiences at Dreamhack Summer, the nicest pro gamers by far and away were Zanster, Harstem, Mana, Demuslim, and San. In particular, San was the best Korean to get a signature from by far. I'll upload some photos when I can!
I can confirm that Harstem and Mana are awesome in person! I can confirm that Harstem and Mana are awesome in person! Past 2 Blizzcon winners were 14th seed... next year only top 8 will qualify!! twitch.tv/y0su @y0su_
SirVandeKamp Profile Blog Joined May 2014 United States 40 Posts #4 On June 20 2014 22:18 Fighter wrote:
So uhh... who's the one that rejected you?
MMA. His exact words were "not right now." While he wasn't in game or even on the client, I expect he was moping about his poor performance at DH Summer. I felt a bit bad for him, but I still thought it was an appropriate time to get his autograph. He also wasn't around very much beyond when he needed his games, unlike most of the other pros (Koreans included).
I also forgot to add Niroxs on the cool list. He was pretty cool. MMA. His exact words were "not right now." While he wasn't in game or even on the client, I expect he was moping about his poor performance at DH Summer. I felt a bit bad for him, but I still thought it was an appropriate time to get his autograph. He also wasn't around very much beyond when he needed his games, unlike most of the other pros (Koreans included).I also forgot to add Niroxs on the cool list. He was pretty cool.
BisuDagger Profile Blog Joined October 2009 Bisutopia 16636 Posts #5 There are always a lot of B-List players that are still well known hanging out and not being bothered. I always go and hang out with them. Most of the ones I hung out with became |
are really two metrics. One is uniques. We cracked 17 million uniques last month. This is unique viewers watching video on Twtich.tv, which is up from 2 when we started. That’s huge. We’re just reaching so many more people.
But for me, the one thing I look at that makes me know we’re doing something right is that when we reach those people, we reach them in a really deep and engaged way. They’re not coming by and watching a two-minute clip and leaving. They’re coming by on average for more than 70 minutes a day.
When someone comes to the website, they do about three views. Those three views last over an hour, like 70-something minutes. That, to me, says, “Okay, we’re producing something that is almost live TV in the level of entertainment it provides.” It’s something you’ve turned on and you leave it on and you really engage with it for long periods of time.
I think for me that’s the concurrent stat, the amount of video watched. We looked a video watched as our primary thing. We’re at about three billion minutes now a month. That’s really cool to me because you start to do the math on that and you realize this is something that’s a cultural phenomenon the way TV is. It’s something that people spend hours and hours and really get into. So, I think that’s the number that I keep my eye on. How much are people actually watching?
Andrew: 17 million people a month on average are watching 70 minutes a day.
Emmett: Uh-huh.
Andrew: Wow. I don’t watch 70 minutes of everything a day. Hulu and Netflix-nothing. That’s impressive. I wonder what CNN’s minutes per month are.
Emmett: Yeah. That’s really interesting. I don’t know.
Andrew: I’ve got to believe you’ve blown past that.
Emmett: People watch four hours of TV a day on average, which is truly absurd. I think a lot of it’s passive viewing, but still. So, I feel what we’re doing is we’re part of the cord-cutting phenomenon, where we’re starting to take a piece of-just like Hulu or Netflix. You were watching this amount of television and now you’re using this internet service instead. I think that’s a big thing that’s going on.
Andrew: And the business launched 2011, right?
Emmett: Uh-huh.
Andrew: Okay.
Emmett: So, our birthday is E3 every year. So, we launched in June last year, almost exactly a year ago.
Andrew: So, almost exactly a year ago. You get to 17 million users, 17 million a month. We should also say that you did have some users coming in from Justin.tv. You didn’t start from scratch.
Emmett: We did. We had about 2.5 million when we launched. But having those 2.5 million was great. Getting those first few million people showing up is hard because in the beginning, you don’t have any content. That meant when we were starting, we already had the engine turning, to some degree. So, we didn’t have to build that starter motor, which is one of the hardest things about starting a new company.
Andrew: You built that with Justin. Justin.tv didn’t start with millions of users. You guys built it, each one, one at a time, got them to come to the site. Let me say this and then I want to ask you a closing question.
First of all, guys, if you’re watching this and you’re saying, “I learned a lot about how to ask questions here of my audience. I want to know even more. I really want to put this into action.” If you’re a Mixergy Premium member, we have the step-by-step for you. Just go to MixergyPremium.com. It’s all right there for you in one of our courses.
We do dozens of courses on how to get PR, how to get traffic, how to monetize it, how to get assistance to come in and help you, how to delegate properly, all those things that you need as an entrepreneur. This is just one of many courses, the one where we teach you how to ask the right questions and how to figure out who to even ask when you’re doing this process.
You just got to MixergyPremium.com. If you’re already a member, all of those courses are part of your membership. If you’re not a member, I promise that it’s going to be worth every dime you spend. In fact, it’s going to be worth thousands of dollars to you. If it’s not, come back and I’ll give you a refund.
So, go to MixergyPremium.com and find out why thousands of members are happy to be members. I’m looking forward to having you in there.
Before I ask you that final question, who else should I be interviewing? You are now at the top of our industry. Who do you admire and know well that you say, “I think he should do an interview. I think Andrew should have him on?”
Emmett: That’s a good question. Have you interviewed Steve Huffman?
Andrew: Yes.
Emmett: If you’ve interviewed him, he definitely comes to mind as someone who has a lot to say about startups that I really respect. Let’s see… Who else would I pick? You know who I would bring on, actually, that you probably haven’t had on? Jamie Quint.
Andrew: Jamie Quint-who is that?
Emmett: He did a YC company a while ago. I think he’s starting another company now. He’s in the middle of that. I just had dinner with him last night. He’s worked at Swipely. He’s worked at a number of other startups. In each place, he’s been doing a lot of user acquisition work. When I have a question about, “How do I make this email campaign more effective?” or, “How often should I send a retention campaign?” or any question about activating, retaining, reaching out to users, that kind of stuff, “How should I think about running my SEM campaign?” I go to him. So, I think you should talk to him.
Andrew: Can I hit you up for an intro.
Emmett: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. Adam from Hipmunk will be on tomorrow. I’m going to record an interview with him. What should I be asking him? Steve’s co-founder, right.
Emmett: I would ask Adam about how do you negotiate? More than, “How do you negotiate,” how do you work with a big company to create agreements that are beneficial for both of you? Because that is one of the hardest things startups face when they try to do business development-doing business development with big companies. Adam is really good at it.
Andrew: Alright.
Emmett: So, that’s what I would say to ask him.
Andrew: Alright. Final question is this-what’s one piece of advice out of all of this? Some of this feels overwhelming. For someone who is listening who is saying, “I really buy in to Emmett’s world view, but I need an easy way to get started,” where do you recommend that they get started?
Emmett: So, it sort of depends on where your startup is and what you’re doing. What I would say is just try it for one feature. Don’t try and do it for your whole company at once. It’s too big. It’s too complicated. It’s really hard. It’s a lot of work. The first few times I tried it, I failed. We tried to call people and it hadn’t worked.
I would say pick one improvement you want to make to the website. And then back out of that, “Okay, which users on our website do we think this is actually going to help?” And then go call them on the phone and talk to them. Get them on Skype. Don’t tell them about the feature you’re building. Ask them about the problem you think that feature is going to solve.
More generally, “What problems do you have? Do you have this problem? If you could make one change to the website, what would it be?” Ask them those questions and see if it lines up with the feature you’re going to build.
Andrew: Ah, okay, fish out their problems and then see if it connects.
Emmett: Don’t try to run a huge, big process. Talk to five people and do validation first. Validate that some feature you’re about to build is what you should actually build.
Andrew: I’m sorry, Emmett. I’ve got to ask one other question. You said that you failed at this before?
Emmett: Oh, yeah.
Andrew: What did you do that you failed? I want to learn from that.
Emmett: So, we tried to do this for Justin.tv a couple of times with social broadcasters, for example. We call them social broadcasters, people who would show up in broadcasts with their webcams of their friends. We didn’t ask the right questions and we didn’t talk to the right people. I would say the fundamental problem is we spent a lot of time walking them through mockups and user testing and trying to validate that our flows worked. We did a great job of that. Our flows were excellent. We had very low drop-off. People could get to the webcam broadcasting step no problem.
But we spent zero time trying to figure out if that was actually important. If the issue was it’s too hard to broadcast with a webcam, if the issue wasn’t, “I don’t even want to broadcast with a webcam or when I do, no one comes and watches me.” We didn’t talk to them. So, I didn’t even know what their problems where. I’m making things up right now that could be their problem.
Andrew: That makes so much sense. You’re saying, “Look, we said we’re going to start talking to our customers because we hear that works well.”
Emmett: “We hear that’s important.”
Andrew: “We know it’s important. SO, what we’re going to do is we’re going to say here’s what we’re going to build. Is this right? Does this make sense? Does it flow properly? When you press this button, do you understand what this button does?” And they said, “Yeah, we do.” What you didn’t ask them was, “Hey, do you even have the problem that you think this is the solution to? Do you even have a pain that we’re solving here?”
Emmett: Right.
Andrew: I see.
Emmett: It’s really easy when you’re doing user development to prompt them with, “We’re building this. How do you feel about it?” It’s like, “No, no.” You don’t go to people with features or what you’re doing until you’ve already talked to them like twice. So, you’ve already gone through all of the primary work on the problem.
The preliminary work is more important. It’s good to go back. But the first part is the important part, not getting the user testing for flows. Once you have a product that’s working great, there’s obviously infinite work to be done on final analysis and optimization on those fronts. Zynga is a company that’s amazing at that, for example. But before you get to that, you have to actually have a product that’s working that you know people actually have the pain you’re solving.
Andrew: All right. This is one of the best interviews that I’ve ever done. I love the process here. So much of this feels like magic. When you’re watching from the outside, you think, “Boy, Emmett just understands people. He knows the video game space. He can predict what people want.” Now I understand how you predict what people want.
It’s not easy. You really have to live in their world, talk to them, really get in their heads, understand, care, connect with them. To have people pop in on Skype in the middle of the day with you, it’s work. It means you have to stop everything else, but I can see the payoff here. Thank you for walking me through all this.
Emmett: Yeah. It was a pleasure.
Andrew: Cool. All right. Thank you all for watching. Bye.Here are the top 15 soccer stories we’re following today.
1. LATEST RUMORS FROM TORONTO FC
Remember when news out of Toronto last week indicated that MLSE boss Tim Leiweke was after the biggest signing in MLS history? Two names have since emerged as possible contenders for TFC's newest Designated Players next season, including a report in The Mirror that says Tottenham's Jermain Defoe could be joining the team in January. While the Daily Mail echoes the reports and some US outlets picked up on the news, the club asserted Tuesday that the reports are inaccurate. The other name linked to TFC in recent days is Serie A striker Alberto Gilardino, who could be on his way to MLS for a reported $9.5 million transfer fee. Toronto FC have also asserted that report is inaccurate, but SI.com reports that that the club is actually using rap star and Toronto native Drake to lure talent to the club.
2. FC DALLAS AFTER SCHELOTTO?
Great news and notes on Wednesday from SoccerByIves.net, who has an interesting scoop on the coaching search at FC Dallas. It appears the club has contacted former MLS MVP and current Lanús head coach Guillermo Barros Schelotto about the gig after he was passed over for the job with his former club, the Columbus Crew. Don't forget: different team, same owner. Scroll halfway down on the link to read the Schelotto news.
3. PEARCE AND ESPINDOLA OUT FOR RBNY?
The same SBI report also has the latest rumors on former US national team defender and handyman Heath Pearce, who is out of contract with the club after an injury-plagued season. It appears the two sides have agreed to part ways, and Pearce will go into the MLS Re-Entry Draft next month. There's also news on Empire of Soccer that the Red Bulls will decline the option on striker Fabian Espindola after one season with the club.
4. DEMPSEY AND EJ NEWS
It seems like two Seattle Sounders players will be on the move this winter, one for a couple of months and the other on a potentially permanent basis. Everton FC are apparently now the frontrunners to land Clint Dempsey on loan, but American Soccer Now breaks down each of the four main contenders chances of landing Deuce. Eddie Johnson, meanwhile is likely in need of a new club, but who would be a good fit?
5. VANCOUVER COACHING OPTIONS
Real Salt Lake head coach Jason Kreis has emerged on the holiday wish list for yet another team, if you're following the news up in Vancouver. According to Marc Weber at The Province, it appears that Kreis is one of the final two candidates -- along with assistant Carl Robinson -- to replace deposed head coach Martin Rennie. There's also news in Chicago, where it looks like former Crew technical director and interim head coach Brian Bliss could be joining Frank Yallop's staff in a player personnel role.
6. SO KLOSE, BUT SO FAR
The LA Galaxy were linked with a sensational move for Miroslav Klose on Tuesday, but the Galaxy were quick to put an end to such talk by stating “There is no truth to the report that the LA Galaxy are close to signing Klose.” This would seem to make sense as the Galaxy already have three Designated Players. So, what’s happening with those three players? Robbie Keane is to undergo surgery for his Achilles' problem, while defender Omar Gonzales says a January loan is not for him. And Landon Donovan is settling into TV punditry nicely and does a mean impression of Jermaine Jones.
7. SMALL MARKET MLS CUP?
This year’s MLS Cup final will be the first one competed for by two “small-market” MLS clubs. However, as MLSsoccer.com's Simon Borg argues, that label isn’t a put-down, it’s a badge of honor for both the league and its supporters. We’re still a week-and-a-half away from the final and that extra time allows Sporting Kansas City to be optimistic about Lawrence Olum’s fitness.
8. SECOND CHANCES
Benny Feilhaber had probably his best game of 2013 in the second leg of the Eastern Conference Championship and it looks like the playmaker may finally be finding his form in Kansas City. If he can keep this up, could he make it back into the USMNT fold? If so, it seems Feilhaber will approach it like he has his time with SKC: “If I do get another opportunity, it will be a time to try and prove my worth.”
9. HOUSTON DYNAMO PARTNER UP
The Houston Dynamo have officially formed a USL PRO affiliation with the Pittsburgh Riverhounds. Amongst other things, it means that, from 2014, a minimum of four Dynamo players will be with the Riverhounds all season and that the Pittsburgh-based team can use Houston’s facilities for winter training. The Riverhounds took another big step forward on Tuesday as they also announced they would be fielding a PDL team in 2014. Are Houston close to announcing an extra franchise as well? With U.S. Soccer on board, the decision on a NWSL team is now up to the Dynamo.
10. SOLID DEFENSE
Jose Gonçalves has been named MLS Defender of the Year and the New England Revolution star is honored to have been recognized for his hard work. However, having just signed his new, permanent contract with the club, Gonçalves has his eye on winning other trophies. In other awards news, referee Hilario Grajeda completed a great couple of days by not only being awarded the MLS Cup final but also winning Referee of the Year. Meanwhile, Matt Reis picked up MLS Humanitarian of the Year for his brave actions during the Boston bombings.
11. SUPER POWERS
Dillon Powers was named Rookie of the Year on Monday and the Colorado Rapids midfielder credits his time in the NCAA for helping make him the player he is today. “I really learned how to be the guy on that team and be under pressure for big games," he says. "I think that … helped me jump to the next level.”
12. BUILDING FROM THE BACK
After announcing their cuts on Friday, the Columbus Crew have been busy refilling their roster for 2014. The Crew announced the signing of Costa Rican left back Waylon Francis on Tuesday, along with re-signing defender Josh Williams and adding Matt Wiet, another defender, as the club's sixth Homegrown player. Head coach Gregg Berhalter said of the signings, “All three players are strong additions to the club.”
13. TAKING PAUSE IN CHICAGO
Could the Chicago Fire be on the brink of losing their longest-tenured player? It appears the club is prepared to decline the option for leage veteran Logan Pause for 2014, hoping instead to sign him to a new contract if he escapes unscathed in the Re-Entry Draft. If Pause is to return though, it will likely need to be at a reduced rate.
14. SETTLING ON A SITE?
It looks as though David Beckham and his team of investors may have settled on a site for their future MLS franchise, with the Port of Miami seemingly now the preferred destination. “They kind of elevated this site," said Miami deputy mayor Chip Iglesias. "We said yes, we’d take a look at it.” But Beckham's billionaire business partner, Marcelo Claure, has pointed out that their investment group is still currently considering over 30 potential sites for the stadium.
15. ROCK THE VOTE
Voting is still open for the finals of the MLS Goal of the Year and Save of the Year contests, and you can now also vote for a number of categories in the first ever CONCACAF awards. Check them out.
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In Brigham Young's Words - Gerrit Dirkmaat and LaJean Carruth
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In our first doubleheader, we present an episode covering the discrepancies between the shorthand versions of speeches of early LDS Church leaders in Utah and their published versions. First, Russell Stevenson interviews Gerrit Dirkmaat about the research he and LaJean Carruth did comparing the shorthand notes of George Watt to some of the speeches in the Journal of Discourses.
In their research, they examined hundreds of sermons, and sometimes the sermons and original transcriptions varied by hundreds of words. Dirkmaat points out that when one is talking about doctrine, words matter. While the essence of these speeches are similar in the shorthand and published versions, the words used vary greatly.
The Journal of Discourses have historical and religious value, but Dirkmaat urges members to be careful quoting specific passages and to realize that in most cases, there is no way to know the specific words used.
LaJean Purcell Carruth has an unusual skill: she can read the shorthand of George Watt, the transcriber of the speeches contained in the Journal of Discourses, his private printing venture.
Over the past thirty years, she has learned his distinctive style–the unique upturns and curves he made in his notations. As she transcribed his notes, she noticed that they varied — sometimes greatly — from the printed versions of the same speeches. She wrote a poem about what she noticed:
There was a man named George Watt,
Who could improve Brigham Young, so he thought.
So he took out words here,
And he added words there,
And his accuracy was not what it ought.
LaJean Purcell Carruth©
LaJean expounds on what she has learned about the speaking styles of early religious leaders. They spoke extemporaneously and without notes and were more prone to engage in speculative theology than current leaders.
She emphasizes that Brigham Young was a powerful speaker. He cared about the people, and they knew that he cared about them. When George Watt changed Brigham Young’s words, he changed what Brigham Young said about himself. She feels the real Brigham Young has been lost to us as we view him through his discourses printed in the Journal of Discourses.
In her research, she discovered that the “one drop” phrase attributed to Brigham Young by Wilford Woodruff did not exist in the original shorthand transcription of George Watt on a speech relating to the priesthood and temple ban.
LaJean shares with Laura Harris Hales what she has learned about Brigham Young from the words left out of the Journal of Discourses and other important speeches.
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LDS Perspectives Podcast
Episode 22: “In Brigham Young’s Words,” Part 1, with Gerrit Dirkmatt
Russell Stevenson: Recording church history does not happen on its own. It demands a process, a technique, and real and diligent labor. Today we have historian Gerrit Dirkmaat to discuss with us the famous, and at times infamous Journal of Discourses, a widely cited compilation of speeches by early church leaders. What did the prophets say? How did they say it? What does it mean for our understanding of the 19th century church? Thanks for being here.
Gerrit Dirkmaat: It’s good to be here.
Russell Stevenson: For those of us who have not had the opportunity to learn about this thing that we call the Journal of Discourses, give us a little bit of background about dictionary level, what is it?
Gerrit Dirkmaat: The Journal of Discourses is a huge source. Actually, it’s hard to wrap your hands around what all of it is, but on the most basic level, this is a 26-volume set that was produced throughout the mid- to late 19th-century of sermons that were recorded. Most of these sermons being given by prophets and apostles, although there are other people that are recorded in these sermons. These sermons were recorded at the time, and they were eventually published in these volumes that were produced roughly every year beginning in 1854 and on up into the late 1870s. There are thousands of words and hundreds of speeches. Primarily, they’re given in a religious setting. It’s a talk that Brigham Young gives at the Tabernacle. It may not be general conference. It might just be a July 4th celebration, and he’s giving a talk, or they’re up Cottonwood Canyon, and they record it or something like that.
The Journal of Discourses is this compilation, this collection of these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sermons that speak to various different religious topics. Really what they are is they’re just the printed form of these extemporaneous speeches that were given by various church leaders in the 19th century.
Russell Stevenson: These kinds of compilations don’t just pop up on their own, right? Somebody needs to sit down and decide, “I’m going to put together these speeches.” Who made that decision?
Gerrit Dirkmaat: That’s a good question. From our understanding of the creation of the Journal of Discourses, there is still a lot of questions that go unanswered in the sense of we don’t know exactly why George Watt included them, who is the primary compiler of at least the initial phases of the Journal of Discourses. It’s hard to understand exactly why he includes some sermons and not others. Part of what we found with our research is that Watt recorded dozens and dozens and dozens of sermons that were never included in the Journal of Discourses. That’s a question that unfortunately no one ever really asked Watt like, “Why did you put this Brigham Young sermon in here, but not this one? Why didn’t you put this one in?” Really we don’t have a whole lot of answers for that.
Watt seems to be selecting … This was a private endeavor, the publication. Let me go back a little bit on the history of that. Watt is trained in Pitman shorthand. The best way to talk about it today would be like a court stenographer. He’s going to record what the witness testimony is, but not actually every word. He uses symbols.
Russell Stevenson: Back in the ‘60s, secretaries were trained in Pitman shorthand, right?
Gerrit Dirkmaat: Exactly. Right. There was also a Taylor shorthand. Watt is trained in this shorthand, and the point of this is to capture as much as you can in real time — what a speaker is saying. The problem, of course, is that once you’re capturing it in the shorthand, you have to then turn it into readable text. We’ll talk about that in a minute. Watt was already occasionally employed to record sermons. He was initially employed by Willard Richards and the Deseret News to go to certain sermons, record them in shorthand, and then provide them to the paper. Richards would publish them in the paper.
Watt and Richards often had conflicts with one another. I think Watt always felt that he wasn’t getting paid enough for what he was doing. He eventually approaches Brigham Young and asks if he can, as essentially a private endeavor, make compilations of these sermons that he’s recording and then publish them in these larger bound volumes, which is where the Journal of Discourses originates in 1854.
Russell Stevenson: As I understand it, one of the reasons he wanted to make a little extra money was to help his ailing wife.
Gerrit Dirkmaat: His wife is ill. I think the problem for all journalists is that you’re never quite paid what it seems to be worth, whether it’s media or not. The reality is that Watt is trying his best to make a living off of this. As I said, I think he thought he would be able to do it just by getting paid for newspaper publications of it or being paid for bit pieces on the side for recording things like conference. The reality is that it’s just not making it. Brigham Young is amenable to his request, “What I’d like to do is I’d like to take your sermons and the sermons of other apostles, and I’d like to record them as you’re giving them. I’d like to publish them in books. He publishes them in England. They’re published at the Millennial Star office. They’re not published in the United States.
The other argument for Watt aside from, “Hey, I’d like to make a little extra money,” is, of course, these sermons aren’t being recognized by anyone anywhere even when they’re published in the Deseret News. The people in Utah territory maybe will read them, but the argument Watt could make is, “If I publish them in England, they can have this wider reach, saints in England, saints in Europe, saints on the East Coast.” They’re actually going to have better access to them on the East Coast if they’re coming from England than if they’re coming from Deseret. I think that’s the other thing that’s at play here that Brigham Young sees that this allows some of the messages of the apostles and the church to be spread, and, of course, it helps Watt make some money on the side. At least that’s the intention. I don’t know how much he actually makes.
Russell Stevenson: It’s interesting. From what I understand, it didn’t do all that well, at least in England. I was looking at one early report. One of the people in the publishing office said, “I would think it better to sell them to the saints, those disposed to buy our works at the price of wastepaper or even give them away than to have them lie year after year rotting on shelves or on boxes doing no good to anybody.
Gerrit Dirkmaat: I would think that it’s a relatively disappointing venture as a money- making venture for Watt and especially for the Millennial Star office. Not that they don’t sell any. I just think that Mormon history has a tendency … There’s a history in Mormonism, we would say, a tendency of overproduction when it comes to books. The reality of even the publication of the Book of Mormon, the original plan with the Doctrine and Covenants to publish 100,000 copies. Wow, that’s —
Russell Stevenson: That’s ambitious. That’s hopeful.
Gerrit Dirkmaat: You have faith obviously. That’s why you’re doing it. I think that’s similar, too. In some ways, you can understand the overproduction because they only have the ability to publish it once. The costs are so prohibitive of doing a reprint that you’re going to go big or go home, but I would say that’s probably a fairly good representation that certainly people buy it and certainly people use it, but like many things that are produced, its real value to members of the church is something that grows later.
Even the Pearl of Great Price is a good example of this. You have the Pearl of Great Price being published in the early 1850s — in 1851, but it’s not canonized and considered essential and being published everywhere until well into the 1880s. You have this decades-long period. That is a little different because it eventually gets canonized and the Journal of Discourses aren’t, but by the late 1880s and 1890s, you can see them using the Journal of Discourses almost like it’s quasi-scripture. Even in some church meetings and in conference meetings, they will reference speeches from the Journal of Discourses.
Russell Stevenson: Like John A. Widtsoe’s compilation, Discourses of Brigham Young.
Gerrit Dirkmaat: Exactly.
Russell Stevenson: On the Journal of Discourses.
Gerrit Dirkmaat: That’s not saying that … There was at one point … George Q. Cannon in one of the volumes does suggest that the Journal of Discourses is a standard of work of the church. That’s his one statement. That’s as it’s being published. I think it’s in 1868. It is filling this realm between scripture and not scripture. It’s often being used as scripture. Of course, the reason why is it’s primarily speeches of prophets and apostles. The same way we do today. If a prophet says something in general conference, people are not going to say that’s scripture, although some might, but they’ll certainly say it’s the doctrine of the church. “Well, what President Monson said is the doctrine of the church.”
Russell Stevenson: That’s why we believe in prophets, right?
Gerrit Dirkmaat: Right. I think that that’s one of the reasons it occupies a hazy area. It’s a private endeavor of a private journalist or recorder essentially to sell these. What he’s doing is taking public pronouncements of the prophets and apostles for his private endeavor. Especially, like I said, as you get to the 1880s and 1890s, you see pretty regularly people quoting from it and using it in church meetings not exactly the same way they use the scriptures, but certainly as though they’re saying this is an authoritative thing that I’m saying.
Russell Stevenson: Let’s talk about Watt’s approach as a recorder. Maybe even before we do that, let’s talk about the practices of recording speeches and about the practice of record keeping in the mid-19th century. Was there a strict sense of a journalistic ethos that, “When so and so says something, I have a journalistic responsibility to quote them faithfully”?
Gerrit Dirkmaat: I don’t think that they have one. You could even argue whether or not that journalistic ethos is alive today, but they certainly don’t have the same level of, “I need to get this verbatim,” although you do see people who are recording discourses or seem to be trying. Just taking the multiple accounts of the King Follett sermon, for instance. You have the Bullock transcription, and the Woodruff transcription, and the Clayton transcription. There are discrepancies and differences among all of them, but they are not the kind of discrepancies where you’re like, “Here is clearly where Wilford Woodruff just went off the rails and didn’t even pay attention.
Russell Stevenson: Where he just made something up. You don’t see anything like that.
Gerrit Dirkmaat: You have some things: “Oh, here’s a sentence that this person missed, but these two people got. Here’s someone phrasing it like this, and someone like this.” I do think that the people that are recording it feel like they’re trying to be faithful to what the person is saying. They obviously aren’t able to record it and play it back. For what? This is where the really interesting aspect of the research that LaJean Carruth, and I have done on the Journal of Discourses.
Russell Stevenson: Before we go there, let’s get some intro. Let’s talk about LaJean Carruth a little. She has what we would call a very particular set of skills.
Gerrit Dirkmaat: Yeah, they are skills she’s acquired over a lifetime. LaJean is an employee of the church history department, who has mastered not just the art of being able to read Pitman shorthand, which is a dead shorthand. No one knows how to read it. Well, she does, but no one knows how to read it just generally. It’s not taught anymore in business schools or anything like that or journalistic schools. She has essentially educated herself to really become a master at reading it and more than just a master at reading it. Every shorthand note taker has their own idiosyncrasies. I could pull out my phonograph manual I have over there, and I could look at it. I could have a general idea of what this should be trying to say. The problem is, like every shorthand note taker, he’s the one who is going to be transcribing his own notes. Like any student in any college class, you might put an abbreviation down there, and no one on earth would ever have any idea what you mean, but you do.
Russell Stevenson: It’s the language of George Watt. It’s not necessarily Pitman shorthand.
Gerrit Dirkmaat: Exactly. It’s shorthand adapted to how George Watt is using it. That’s the real particular blessing, the skill that LaJean has is that she hasn’t just mastered shorthand. She’s mastered George Watt’s shorthand. That allows her to read these in a way that really is unparalleled and to back up again a little bit is that Watt recorded. As he was doing this, he recorded literally hundreds of sermons. He’s not the only one who records sermons, but Watt, of course, is the initial instigator of the Journal of Discourses. He’s the one that records many of the early ones. That was where our research focused.
What you found was that. We have no way of knowing how well Watt’s shorthand comports to the original. In almost no cases do you have someone who is doing their own word-for-word transcription, trying to capture it like you do with the King Follett sermon. In any case, Watt was the one that had to take his own notes and turn them into a readable transcript that he would then either send to the Deseret News or publish in the Journal of Discourses. The real question becomes, is Watt improving or changing the transcript that he actually took?
As we did our research, that’s what we found. It appears that Watt is being pretty faithful to what is actually being spoken on from the pulpit when he’s taking his notes. The transition from notes to published draft is where there are many more changes, some that a historian, a documentary editor would say are very substantial.
Russell Stevenson: They would say this is unacceptable if you’re going by modern standards of documentary editors.
Gerrit Dirkmaat: By documentary editing standards, working with the Joseph Smith Papers, it was a big deal to us if we had four versions of a revelation and one of them had two words that were different. That was a big deal. Why are these two words that are different? In the Watt shorthand transcriptions, as opposed to what was then published in the Journal of Discourses, there are sometimes hundreds of differences, sometimes thousands of differences. If you’re just talking words, there are some sermons there that have 1,000 words left out. There are some sermons where there’s 400 |
26 Prankanrattana U
Prapaitrakool S Efficacy of risperidone for prevention of postoperative delirium in cardiac surgery., 27 Devlin JW
Roberts RJ
Fong JJ
et al. Efficacy and safety of quetiapine in critically ill patients with delirium: a prospective, multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot study., 28 Wang W
Li HL
Wang DX
et al. Haloperidol prophylaxis decreases delirium incidence in elderly patients after noncardiac surgery: a randomized controlled trial., 29 Girard TD
Pandharipande PP
Carson SS
et al. Feasibility, efficacy and safety of antipsychotics for intensive care unit delirium: the MIND randomized, placebo-controlled trial., 30 Barr J
Fraser GL
Puntillo K
et al. Clinical practice guidelines for the management of pain, agitation, and delirium in adult patients in the intensive care unit., 31 Young J
Murthy L
Westby M
Akunne A
O'Mahony R JYoungLMurthyMWestbyAAkunneRO'Mahony Guideline Development Group Diagnosis, prevention, and management of delirium: summary of NICE guidance. 30 Barr J
Fraser GL
Puntillo K
et al. Clinical practice guidelines for the management of pain, agitation, and delirium in adult patients in the intensive care unit. 28 Wang W
Li HL
Wang DX
et al. Haloperidol prophylaxis decreases delirium incidence in elderly patients after noncardiac surgery: a randomized controlled trial. 29 Girard TD
Pandharipande PP
Carson SS
et al. Feasibility, efficacy and safety of antipsychotics for intensive care unit delirium: the MIND randomized, placebo-controlled trial. 14 van den Boogaard M
Schoonhoven L
van Achterberg T
van der Hoeven JG
Pickkers P Haloperidol prophylaxis in critically ill patients with a high risk for delirium. Panel Research in context Systematic review 23 Candy B
Jackson KC
Jones L
Leurent B
Tookman A
King M Drug therapy for delirium in terminally ill adult patients., 24 Lonergan E
Britton AM
Luxenberg J Antipsychotics for delirium., 25 Siddiqi N
Holt R
Britton AM
Holmes J Interventions for preventing delirium in hospitalised patients. 26 Prankanrattana U
Prapaitrakool S Efficacy of risperidone for prevention of postoperative delirium in cardiac surgery., 27 Devlin JW
Roberts RJ
Fong JJ
et al. Efficacy and safety of quetiapine in critically ill patients with delirium: a prospective, multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot study., 28 Wang W
Li HL
Wang DX
et al. Haloperidol prophylaxis decreases delirium incidence in elderly patients after noncardiac surgery: a randomized controlled trial., 29 Girard TD
Pandharipande PP
Carson SS
et al. Feasibility, efficacy and safety of antipsychotics for intensive care unit delirium: the MIND randomized, placebo-controlled trial. We searched PubMed with the key words “intensive care”, “critical care”, “delirium”, and “antipsychotics”, for studies reported in English up to April 18, 2013. We included only studies in adult patients. There are three relevant Cochrane reviews.They concluded that although low dose haloperidol might be effective in postoperative patients, there was a scarcity of robust information on delirium prevention and that in terminally ill patients there was little evidence for the role of drug therapy in management of delirium. Four placebo-controlled randomised trialshave been done in intensive-care unit (ICU) patients, with variable results, from small effects to no benefit. However, two of these trials were small. There are some reports of harm with the use of antipsychotics in elderly patients. 30 Barr J
Fraser GL
Puntillo K
et al. Clinical practice guidelines for the management of pain, agitation, and delirium in adult patients in the intensive care unit. Clinical practice guidelinesfor the sustained use of sedatives and analgesics in the critically ill adult were reported in January, 2013, based on a review of evidence identified from a systematic review, guided by key words provided by four subcommittees of experts. With regard to delirium the subcommittee identified no double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trials of adequate power to establish the efficacy or safety of any antipsychotic agent in the management of delirium in ICU patients. They also concluded that robust data for haloperidol in non-ICU patients, which could potentially be applied to the ICU setting, are absent. Interpretation 31 Young J
Murthy L
Westby M
Akunne A
O'Mahony R JYoungLMurthyMWestbyAAkunneRO'Mahony Guideline Development Group Diagnosis, prevention, and management of delirium: summary of NICE guidance. As far as we are aware, our study is the first double-blind, randomised, controlled efficacy trial designed and powered to establish whether haloperidol will modify delirium in critically ill patients. We identified no difference between the haloperidol and placebo groups. This finding supports UK National Institution of Clinical Excellence guidelines,based on expert opinion, that antipsychotics should only be used when non-pharmacological methods have not worked and a patient is distressed or a danger to themselves or others. Only four placebo-controlled efficacy trials of antipsychotics in critical care patients have been reported, all with limitations either in type or number of patients or study design ( panel ).Studies in critically ill patients using haloperidol are limited in quality, such that the recent pain, agitation, and delirium clinical practice guidelines from the American College of Critical Care Medicine concluded that no recommendation could be made regarding the use of haloperidol to prevent or treat delirium in adult ICU patients.One trialin 457 post-operative, mainly elective, patients admitted to ICUs in Beijing did show a reduction in the incidence of delirium using prophylactic, low dose haloperidol (0·5 mg bolus injection followed by an infusion of 0·1 mg/h for 12 h) compared with placebo. The study population was not critically ill, with a mean APACHE score of less than nine and a median ICU stay of less than 24 h. Only 35 patients (15·3%) in the haloperidol group and 53 patients (23·2%) in the placebo group developed delirium. A smaller pilot studydone in the USA did not show a reduction in ICU delirium using enteral haloperidol or ziprasidone, but was designed to assess feasibility, not powered for clinical outcomes. A before-and-after study seemed to show that low dose haloperidol prophylaxis in higher risk critically ill patients might have beneficial effects, although this study design had limitations.
32 Yang L
Yu W
Cao Y
Gong B
Chang Q
Yang G Potential inhibition of cytochrome P4503A4 by propofol in human primary hepatocytes., 33 Kudo S
Ishizaki T Pharmacokinetics of haloperidol: an update. 34 McKillop M
Wild M
Butters C
Simcock C Effects of propofol on human hepatic microsomal cytochrome P450 activities. 35 Skrobik Y
Leger C
Cossette M
Michaud V
Turgeon J Factors predisposing to coma and delirium: fentanyl and midazolam exposure; CYP3A5, ABCB1 and ABCG2 genetic polymorphisms and inflammatory factors. Although our study was not powered to show a difference between the use of individual psychotropic or opioid drugs between groups, our results suggest that haloperidol might reduce the need for sedatives. Propofol is mainly metabolised by cytochrome P450, isoform CYP2B6, and it has been shown in vitro to inhibit CYP3A4, an isoform involved in the biotransformation of haloperidol in human beings.Data suggest the degree of inhibition of CYP3A4 by propofol would be unlikely to have any pronounced clinical significance.This was not a mechanistic study and the pharmacokinetic and genetic factors affecting individual patient CYP activity and different drugs are complex. Since there was no difference in delirium or coma with the use of haloperidol it is unlikely any pharmacokinetic interaction had any significant effect on the primary outcome. The decreased exposure to sedative drugs in the haloperidol group did not translate into more delirium-free, coma-free days, which is consistent with the results of a studycomparing biological and drug treatment characteristics in 99 ICU patients with coma or delirium, or both, which showed that unlike coma, delirium was unrelated to sedative exposure. Agitation remains the most common motivation for use of haloperidol in critically ill patients and a lower proportion of patients had a RASS of +2 or more in the group who received haloperidol compared with those who received placebo. Thus, haloperidol is a useful agent for management of agitation despite having no effect on delirium.
36 Shehabi Y
Bellomo R
Reade MC
et al. Early intensive care sedation predicts long-term mortality in ventilated critically ill patients. The strengths of this study include the study design as a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Patients were started on the study drug early irrespective of whether they had screened positive for delirium or were in coma. The power calculations on which this study is based support that the number of patients included would show a difference of alive, delirium-free, coma-free days if any existed. As a randomised controlled trial any confounding variables would be expected to be present equally between the two groups, and there was no indication of imbalance in baseline variables measured. The low median number of days patients spent in coma in the first 14 days (0 days [IQR 0–2] in the haloperidol group vs 0·5 days [0–2] in the placebo group) suggests that patients were managed in keeping with a RASS range of 0 to −2, ie, not deep sedation.
The study has several limitations. This was a single site study, although the population of patients was broadly representative of the general ICU population in the UK and internationally. As with most critical care research, the patients' admission diagnoses were wide ranging and the number of surgical patients and those with an admission diagnosis of sepsis were much the same in both groups. There might have been an imbalance of risk factors for which data were not collected; however, we would not expect such an imbalance in a randomised trial. It might be that a subset of critically ill patients (eg, those with established delirium) would benefit from routine haloperidol, although in view of the results of this study the benefit would probably be small, and a much larger study would be needed to show it.
Defining normal cognitive function as the absence of delirium and coma in a patient is an inevitable constraint because it is not possible to be confident in delineating the cause of coma as disorder or drugs in many ICU patients. Hence we used a clinical diagnosis based on the absence of symptoms, using a valid instrument but without attempting to claim causality, then collected observations as to the persistence or not of symptoms. An intervention to reduce days with delirium could achieve its goal not by increasing days without delirium, but by increasing days with coma. We used the combination of delirium-free and coma-free to ensure that a reduction in delirium was indicative of a patient's brain recovering towards a normal state, rather than moving into coma.
22 Schoenfeld DA
Bernard GR Statistical evaluation of ventilator-free days as an efficacy measure in clinical trials of treatments for acute respiratory distress syndrome. Patients who died within 14 days were assessed with zero delirium-free, coma-free days to manage the possible conflicting effects of haloperidol on delirium and survival in the same way that days alive and free from mechanical ventilation are used as an outcome measure in treatments for adult respiratory distress syndrome.If haloperidol was associated with increased mortality in the first 14 days, then haloperidol might be reported to improve delirium, even though this effect might be attributable to patients dying earlier, which is clearly not beneficial. The number of days in delirium and days in coma in all patients are presented in table 3, which when considered with the secondary outcome of mortality, show the groups do not differ. Thus in patients who died of an unrelated cause, haloperidol did not modulate delirium.
37 Kapur S
Zipursky R
Roy P
et al. The relationship between D2 occupancy and plasma levels on low dose oral haloperidol: a PET study. 38 Medsafe Haloperidol—dose recommendations. Although we cannot confidently exclude an effect with a much higher dose of haloperidol, PET scan studies show that doses of 2–5 mg per day, giving plasma concentrations of 1–2 ng/mL, induce 60–80% dopamine D2 receptor occupancy; 70% is deemed adequate for typical neuroleptic response.Furthermore Medsafe, the New Zealand medicines safety authority, have reviewed available data and recommend that doses greater than 10 mg per day are unlikely to provide further efficacy, but might lead to increased adverse effects.
39 Chang WH
Jann MW
Chiang TS
Lin HN
Hu WH
Chien CP Plasma haloperidol and reduced haloperidol concentrations in a geriatric population. 7 Salluh JI
Soares M
Teles JM
et al. Delirium epidemiology in critical care (DECCA): an international study., 40 Devlin JW
Bhat S
Roberts RJ
Skrobik Y Current perceptions and practices surrounding the recognition and treatment of delirium in the intensive care unit: a survey of 250 critical care pharmacists from eight states. The dose of haloperidol might be considered large outside of the critical care setting. The British Geriatric Society guidelines recommend 0·5 mg orally up to every 2 h. In patients taking oral haloperidol 2 mg daily, mean plasma haloperidol concentrations were about twice as high in elderly patients compared with adult patients with schizophrenia.However, a US survey of 250 critical care pharmacists from eight states confirmed that more than 50% use a scheduled daily dose of 5–10 mg intravenously, in keeping with this study dose which was informed by the UK Intensive Care Foundation survey of current practice.
8 Page VJ
Navarange S
Gama S
McAuley DF Routine delirium monitoring in a UK critical care unit. 36 Shehabi Y
Bellomo R
Reade MC
et al. Early intensive care sedation predicts long-term mortality in ventilated critically ill patients. Our group of patients had a high prevalence of coma (deep sedation) or delirium in the first 48 h. Our previous data suggested that at least 65% would have delirium.However, since we included patients who were assessed as RASS −3 in the present study, we expected the prevalence to be higher. This expectation was in keeping with data from the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society (ANZICS), which showed that more than 75% of patients had a RASS of −3 or worse early in the course of ICU stay.The low numbers of patients assessed as free of delirium and coma could also be due to the frequency and timing of RASS and CAM-ICU assessments; study patients were assessed four times daily and only needed to have one assessment of RASS −3 or less, or screen positive once for delirium for that day, to count as not delirium-free or coma-free. Additionally, according to the ANZICS data, patients were more likely to be assessed as not being delirium or coma free when an assessment was done soon after the patient was sedated and ventilated.
The use of open label antipsychotics when clinically indicated meant that some placebo patients received antipsychotics and therefore were not truly receiving placebo alone. However, the amounts used were minimal and there was no difference between the overall doses of open label haloperidol used (mean 1·0 mg [SD 4·05] in haloperidol group vs 1·71 mg [4·41] in the placebo group). Currently, the belief in the efficacy of haloperidol in delirium is such that it was not possible to obtain ethical approval to undertake a placebo-controlled trial without allowing the option of rescue haloperidol.
30 Barr J
Fraser GL
Puntillo K
et al. Clinical practice guidelines for the management of pain, agitation, and delirium in adult patients in the intensive care unit., 41 Gusmao-Flores D
Figueira Salluh J
Chalhub R
Quarantini L The confusion assessment method for the intensive care unit (CAM-ICU) and the intensive care delirium screening checklist (ICDSC) for the diagnosis of delirium: as systematic review and meta-analysis of clinical studies. 42 Neufeld KJ
Hayat MJ
Coughlin JM
et al. Evaluation of two intensive care delirium screening tools for non-critically ill hospitalized patients. 43 Zhang Z
Pan L
Ni H Impact of delirium on clinical outcome in critically ill patients: a meta-analysis. Abruptly stopping haloperidol after a patient screened negative for 2 days might have resulted in the loss of a sustained preventive effect. Since intravenous haloperidol is not generally used outside of critical care and being delirium free would suggest clinical improvement such that discharge from critical care would be anticipated, we believed that stopping the study drug after 2 days would be most practically and clinically relevant. In fact, ten patients needed to restart the study drug for new delirium, seven patients receiving haloperidol and three receiving placebo. The assumption that once a patient had been discharged from the ICU, they were free of delirium is also a limitation of this study. We used the CAM-ICU as a relevant instrument to detect delirium in this ICU study population. It has been endorsed by the American College of Critical Care Medicine as a valid and reliable non-verbal instrument and this notion has been confirmed by a meta-analysis.However, the CAM-ICU has not been shown to be a valid delirium-screening instrument outside of the critical care environment.Episodes of delirium would be expected to negatively affect clinical progress of patients once discharged from the ICU, potentially leading to longer hospital stays.However, since length of hospital stay did not differ between the two groups, it is unlikely that undocumented episodes of delirium after ICU discharge, within the 14 day study period, would change the result of the primary outcome.
28 Wang W
Li HL
Wang DX
et al. Haloperidol prophylaxis decreases delirium incidence in elderly patients after noncardiac surgery: a randomized controlled trial. Despite a limited evidence base, increasing numbers of patients are being exposed to haloperidol for the management of delirium. Our results suggest a commonly used haloperidol dose regimen does not decrease delirium in an unselected population of critically ill patients requiring mechanical ventilation, when commenced early during ICU stay. Identification of a pharmacological intervention to prevent or reduce delirium and improve adverse outcomes, including in the ICU setting, remains a high priority within delirium research.London's decision to deny Uber a license has produced howls of protest from jilted fans and wild cheers from critics.
Twitter (TWTR) and Facebook (FB) were flooded with comments after the decision was announced on Friday. Text messages flew between friends and tabloid editors prepared to blast the news across their front pages.
"UBER AND OUT!" read the headline on London's Evening Standard.
Transport for London sent shock waves through the capital city Friday morning, announcing that it would not renew Uber's license because of concerns over its approach to reporting serious crimes and other issues.
Uber, which has 21 days to appeal the ruling, quickly blasted an email to users asking them to sign an online petition that pleads with London's mayor to "save" the app. It received over 181,000 signatures in about four hours.
"I don't believe black cabs should run London like a cartel," wrote Uber fan James Pace, who posted his message alongside the petition. "If Uber has problems, let's resolve them not just ban them."
Related: London says it won't renew Uber's license
Uber, which has been used by 3.5 million Londoners, has developed a loyal fan base by offering convenience and lower prices than traditional "Black Cabs." It has 40,000 licensed drivers in the city.
Londoners acknowledge there are problems at Uber, but many were panic stricken at the idea of the service shutting down. Some argued that cutting off Uber would even be dangerous.
"Losing #Uber makes London more unsafe for young people, especially students who can't afford the ridiculous rates of Black Cabs," wrote Twitter user Lauren Powell, who lives in a commuter town on the outskirts of London.
Anger was also directed at mayor Sadiq Khan, who said he "fully supports" the move by Transport for London.
"[This] decision is a bombshell for Uber drivers," said Twitter user Duncan Scott. "Sadiq Khan doesn't even acknowledge the jeopardy they're now in."
One Uber driver, Papy Bola, told CNNMoney that he wasn't sure what he'd do for work if the app was shut down.
"There's nothing wrong with Uber. You work, no stress, you get your fee, they get their commission. That's it," he said, adding that he feels safe in an Uber because thieves know users typically pay with credit cards instead of cash.
Related: How free self-driving car rides could change everything
But not everyone took Uber's side. Critics added to the online conversation by arguing that Uber should live up to British business standards.
"It's perfectly possible to run a taxi company without treating drivers poorly or cutting corners on safety. Uber's fate is of its own making," tweeted Frances O'Grady, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress.
It's perfectly possible to run a taxi company without treating drivers poorly or cutting corners on safety. Uber's fate is of its own making — Frances O'Grady (@FrancesOGrady) September 22, 2017
Steve Garelick, a union official who represents Black Cabs, had been campaigning to halt Uber's advances in London. But he described the victory as "bittersweet," saying he worried about Uber drivers losing their jobs.
"I sympathize that people won't be getting cheap journeys in the future," he said. "But the reality is that [customers] have got to pay the price. It's as simple as that."
-- Susie East and Muhammad Darwish contributed to this report.Donald Trump in Manchester, N.H., on Monday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Going into Monday, Hillary Clinton suffered from the perception that she was too squeamish about identifying the Islamic fundamentalism at the root of the mass killing in Orlando and numerous other terrorist attacks. She went a long way toward solving that with one of the toughest anti-jihadist speeches delivered by a Democrat in years:
Whatever we learn about this killer, his motives in the days ahead, we know already the barbarity we face from radical jihadists is profound. In the Middle East, ISIS is attempting a genocide of religious and ethnic minorities, they are slaughtering Muslims who refuse to accept their medieval ways, they are beheading civilians, including executing LGBT people, they are murdering Americans and Europeans, enslaving, torturing, and raping women and girls. In speeches like this one after Paris, Brussels, and San Bernardino, I have laid out a plan to defeat ISIS and the other radical jihadist groups in the region and beyond.
Donald Trump’s issue going into Monday was that voters perceive him as an opportunistic hate-monger and ignoramus on national security. He doubled down, insisting he’d enact a Muslim ban by executive edict until screening was “perfect.”
While speaking in Manchester, N.H., on June 13, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said, if elected, he would ban immigration from "areas of the world where there's a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies, until we fully understand how to end these threats." (Reuters)
He seemed to hint at his own cluelessness, saying he’d find people who knew what to do. (“I will have an Attorney General, a Director of National Intelligence, and a Secretary of Defense who will know how to fight the war on Radical Islamic Terrorism — and who will have the support they require to get the job done.”)
In one breath, he paints all Muslims as a threat, and in the other, he chides Clinton for hindering “our ability to work in partnership with our Muslim allies in the region.” He would do well to look in the mirror and listen to Muslim leaders who have excoriated his demonization of all Muslims.
Trump is delusional in his insistence he alone got everyone talking about terrorism. Not knowing that NATO led the war in Afghanistan, he proclaims, “I’ve said NATO needs to change its focus to stopping terrorism. Since I’ve raised that criticism, NATO has since announced a new initiative focused on just that.” Does he have no one around him with a clue as to what has been going on for the last dozen years or so?
It would be bad enough if Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric were merely a moral disaster — a reflection of his penchant for bigotry and determination to incite Americans. However, his ideas risk a frightful geopolitical and national-security disaster. By suggesting we consider all Muslims to be terrorist threats, he undermines the domestic and international cooperation we need to win the war. (“We need to know if he was affiliated with any radical Mosques or radical activists and what, if any, is their immigration status,” he insists. That of course requires not simply law enforcement but community involvement.) On some level, he knows we need peaceful Muslims’ assistance here and abroad, but he is totally at a loss as to how to garner that assistance. So he spews hate.
Compare Trump’s anti-immigrant rant with what Clinton had to say about enlisting the help of Muslim communities:
Since 9/11, law enforcement agencies have worked hard to build relationships with Muslim-American communities. Millions of peace-loving Muslims live, work, and raise their families across America. They are the most likely to recognize the insidious effects of radicalization before it’s too late, and the best positioned to help us block it. We should be intensifying contacts in those communities, not scapegoating or isolating them.... As the Director of the FBI has pointed out, we should avoid eroding trust in the community, which will only make law enforcement’s job more difficult. Inflammatory, anti-Muslim rhetoric — and threatening to ban the families and friends of Muslim Americans, as well as millions of Muslim business people and tourists from entering our country – hurts the vast majority of Muslims who love freedom and hate terror. So does saying that we have to start special surveillance on our fellow Americans because of their religion. That’s wrong and it’s also dangerous. It plays right into the terrorists’ hands.
She could have easily said, Trump’s wrong and also dangerous. He plays right into the terrorists’ hands. For Clinton, unity and coordination are critical to advancing our security; for Trump, whipping up divisions and suspicions is the key to advancing his ambitions. As Eli Lake put it, “The best way to stop these terrorists is to enlist as many Muslims as possible in a fight against them. The last two American presidents grasped this lesson. Unfortunately, the presumptive Republican nominee has not.”
Republicans such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) have already repudiated the ban. Ryan, who struggles to insist his views are compatible with Trump’s, did not comment on either the Trump speech or his bizarre insinuations about the president. Ryan’s office did not respond to requests for comment. No wonder.
By the end of the day, voters could be somewhat assuaged that Clinton, much more so than President Obama, understands the threat and the urgency of confronting it. (Unlike Obama, she doesn’t think it is all in our heads. “The threat is metastasizing. We saw this in Paris and we saw it in Brussels.”) Meanwhile, voters should be more certain than ever that Trump’s hysterical, uninformed and divisive approach cannot be relied upon to keep the country safe.Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
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With a nod to Dickens, are these the best of times or the worst of times in the battle to prevent climate chaos? There’s plenty of evidence both ways, starting with the potential game changer that humanity’s greenhouse-gas emissions may have peaked, at least in the all-important energy sector. And who can doubt that revolutionary changes are afoot when even Saudi Arabia declares that it will wean its economy from oil over the next 20 years? The kingdom is establishing a $2 trillion sovereign-investment fund, much of which seems destined to finance solar energy. Meanwhile, however, global temperatures are increasing at record speed, threatening a gargantuan sea-level rise within the lifetimes of children born today and causing normally reticent scientists to employ words like “alarming,” “emergency,” and even “insane.” Ad Policy
Welcome to the post-Paris era of climate change. Now, everything depends on how quickly activists, investors, and the rest of global civil society can turn the lofty rhetoric of last December’s Paris Agreement into concrete actions that will, as the activists demand regarding fossil fuels, “Keep It in the Ground.” Governments pledged in Paris to limit the global-temperature rise to “well below 2 degrees” Celsius and to “pursue” a target of 1.5°C—an astonishing diplomatic breakthrough that heartened the representatives of low-lying and other particularly vulnerable countries. But the “national plans” submitted for cutting emissions fell far short of these goals. Thus, the challenge now is to push governments to bring their actual policies—in energy, agriculture, forestry, and more—into line with the Paris Agreement’s temperature limits. “We will give our blood and our lives—but not the Sundarbans.”
This will provoke titanic political struggles, as it requires choosing not to burn most of the planet’s remaining oil, coal, and natural gas. Such a choice amounts to heresy for many entrenched interests—the Koch brothers and ExxonMobils of the world, but also oil workers in Louisiana and coal miners in China. But other economic interests—centered around solar, wind, energy efficiency, and other climate-friendly technologies—are challenging the status quo, and they too have money and popular support. The question now is whether these ascendant clean-energy interests will prevail over their fossil-fuel rivals—and prevail soon enough to avert climate catastrophe. The news from Saudi Arabia gives cause for hope.
Civil-society pressure has already moved “Keep It in the Ground” from the margins of mainstream discourse to the contested center. And global elites are responding, though there’s still a long way to go. The Obama administration has announced a three-year moratorium on new coal mining on public lands and a five-year ban on oil drilling off the Atlantic coast. Activists are now pushing the administration to rule out drilling in the Arctic and Gulf of Mexico as well. “We’ve come so far,” Anna Aurilio, director of the Washington office of the NGO Environment America, told The Nation. “The president has gone from ‘all of the above’ to ‘keep some of it in the ground.’ Now we have to convince him to keep all of it in the ground.”
One hugely encouraging tipping point may already be behind us. The International Energy Agency (IEA) calculated that global emissions from the energy and transport sectors peaked in 2014 and 2015, even as economic growth continued. Mainstream and progressive US media alike missed the implications of this news: In effect, it means that the 1.5°C target is still within reach.
An all-star panel of climate scientists at the Paris summit said that total global emissions had to peak by 2020 to keep the temperature rise to 1.5°C. Thus, if the current emissions peak is validated by further data—and followed by rapid, continuing reductions—a 1.5°C rise might still be achieved, which could prevent millions of deaths and related suffering in vulnerable communities the world over. There are caveats: Official data from China may prove unreliable, and the IEA may have overlooked the sizable boost in methane emissions associated with fracking, as Bill McKibben recently argued [see “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry,” April 11/18]. Still, the overall trend seems positive.
More good news: This apparent emissions peak was led by the world’s two climate superpowers, suggesting that other nations will follow suit. The United States and China both appear to have reached a peak in energy-related emissions in recent years, largely by scaling back coal in favor of renewable energy. (Again, the mainstream media missed the significance of this development; some even wondered whether it was entirely positive. After all, if China was already peaking in 2015, wasn’t the 2030 target it had promised in Paris misleading—giving Beijing a license to keep polluting, and gain a competitive advantage, for 15 years longer than it should?)
Now the bad news: The latest temperature data indicate that we may already have hit the 1.5°C limit. The data are provisional, and El Niño is partly to blame. But it is undeniable that 2016 has already witnessed the hottest January and February on record—and February registered the single-largest temperature increase in history, thereby nudging the global temperature slightly above 1.5°C. That will decline later this year as El Niño wanes, which in theory leaves the 1.5°C goal still attainable. Nevertheless, the challenge is steep. “This is the true climate emergency: It is getting more difficult with each passing year for humanity to prevent temperatures from rising above 2°C,” warned two climate scientists, Steve Sherwood of Australia and Stefan Rahmstorf of Germany.
The momentum of Earth’s climate system means that at least 10 feet of eventual sea-level rise are already locked in. The big question now is how soon this occurs—over centuries, which could be manageable, or over decades, which would be catastrophic. New studies have warned that sea levels could rise six to nine feet by 2100—or even sooner, according to retired NASA climate scientist James Hansen. This would inundate hundreds of coastal communities throughout the world, including New York City, Miami, and Washington, DC, as well as London, Hamburg, Lagos, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. In theory, protective barriers could be erected, and wealthier locations will surely attempt this. But it will be financially impossible to protect all of the endangered areas—which is one more reason to accelerate emission reductions, as well as to prioritize efforts to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by shifting to cover crops, biochar, and other organic methods in agriculture and forestry. LIKE THIS? GET MORE OF OUR BEST REPORTING AND ANALYSIS
A final encouraging note: These mega-trends are unfolding as the global climate-justice movement is increasingly mobilized, winning local and international battles and launching a new round of militant activism. This spring, a series of worldwide actions called “Break Free” is focusing on specific fossil-fuel infrastructure projects that must be stopped to honor the Paris temperature goals.
One action in particular symbolizes what’s at stake. Bangladesh, with its low-lying topography, vulnerability to cyclones, and pervasive poverty, is perhaps the most climate-threatened major nation on Earth. But Bangladesh boasts an active civil society that is increasingly focused on the climate challenge. Recently, NGOs organized thousands of people to march over 100 miles, from the capital, Dhaka, to the Sundarbans tidal forest on the coast, a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose mangroves provide crucial protection against cyclones. The marchers were protesting an absurd relic of 20th-century thinking: plans to build two giant coal plants, which would not only make climate change worse but would occupy land certain to be flooded by the rising seas.
“We will give our blood and our lives,” chanted the Bangladeshi marchers, “but not the Sundarbans”—a motto for all of us in the post-Paris era.Former Ghibli president and current producer Toshio Suzuki revealed at Hayao Miyazaki's retirement press conference on Friday that the next film from Studio Ghibli (after Isao Takahata's Kaguya-hime no Monogatari) will open next summer in Japan. Suzuki told reporters that he could not reveal any details about the film, but it is still in production.
At the press conference, Miyazaki spoke about his recently announced retirement from feature films. |
, Remer told me, they had to keep up the facade that they were there for the old warrant. "I don’t know what they were hoping to find," Remer said. "It definitely felt like they’d found an excuse to come and give the impression that 'we’ll be watching.'”
This tactic, Gawker's Adrian Chen noted, is something the Bloomberg administration has done in the past, and gotten sued for, during and up to the 2004 Republican convention.
-Sexual harassment, plucking protesters from the crowd: Tuesday's demonstrations saw even worse police activity than the early morning break-ins, including the now-infamous "snatching and grabbing" of random protesters from the crowd for arrest, a fear-based approach that has replaced the less media-friendly "kettling." There's another linked tactic at work here: David Graber has written a harrowing piece about "the apparently systematic use of sexual assault against women protesters."
-Overly large police presence, unnecessary corralling of march: At Gothamist, Christopher Robbins noted that "police forced the protesters to backtrack down Union Square West and only permitted participants to leave from two exits. The crush of the crowd combined with the heat made the waiting unbearable." During my exit from Union Square, a cop told complaining protesters that if they let the "50,000" people through more than two exits at once it would be "chaos." But there was more chaos caused by people, including children and the elderly, being unable to cross into and out of the area. This was a tactic used to intimidate and frustrate those attending the peaceful mass rally in the afternoon.
Overriding all these tactics was a huge police presence, completely outsized based on the number of demonstrators. Natasha Lennard summed up my feelings when she wrote, "The NYPD is the seventh largest standing army in the world, and on the evening of May 1, New York felt was a city under military siege - it was terrifying."
All of these tactics are not about keeping the peace: they are about demoralization, fear, intimidation and inconveniencing protesters exercising their First Amendment rights.
Story #3: Historic coalition between labor, students and immigrants.
To me, the seemingly disparate groups that came together comprised the big, unreported story of the day - a Left that looks different from its past.
Anyone who follows Occupy knows that there have been big disagreements at public meetings, and people who have walked away from the movement since its inception. Yet through it all, all winter, the hard work of coalition-building took place. In previous iterations of the Left, working-class labor unions have been unallied, if not outright hostile to radical students and young people. And similarly, racism and competition over jobs has divided organized labor from immigrants, documented and undocumented alike.
But on Tuesday in New York City, organizers from OWS, racial justice, immigrants' rights groups, labor and elsewhere made one of the most concerted efforts I've ever seen to not step on each others' toes and embrace each others' issues. As Julianne Escobedo Shepherd noted in her report for AlterNet, in Union Square, organized labor and immigrants' rights group shouted each other out from the stage, warmly and genuinely.
This atmosphere extended to the streets."I was marching alongside a group of anarchists, and a few feet ahead of us was an immigrant rights group. Everyone was feeling the same sort of energy," said Russell. Molly Knefel, who co-hosts a political podcast with her brother John, and spent the whole day live-tweeting, had the same impression: the day offered something for everyone. "Certain actions were meant to calm, safe, family-friendly, immigrant friendly," she said.
Story #4: Organizing peacefully without hierarchy is not easy.
If you've ever tried to organize a big event for your workplace, school, charity or religious institution, you know it's not easy. Now try imagining doing that - except organizing hundreds of events on the same day with a loose group of people who refuse to appoint leaders, don't have a hierarchy, and let everyone speak his or her mind. I've often thought that journalists don't understand the hard work of grassroots organizing, and the number of forces that have to triumph for it to be successful.
To both Molly Knefel and Kathleen Russell, the story of the day was that the OWS organizers and their allies pulled it off and managed to stay fairly respectful while sticking to their own organizing model and working with established groups.
"There were multiple actions all over the city, all of which were quite-well attended and well-organized. There was Williamsburg bridge march, there was a high-school walkout, there were teach-ins in Madison Square Park and all of the actions in and around Bryant park," says Knefel. "It was a day full of many diverse actions that also had a variety of targets and a variety of appeal to different groups.”
Russell, who has participated in Women Occupying Wall Street all winter, was equally impressed with how "smoothly" the day went. "It was one of the first actions that I’ve been involved in in which all the people working to make the action work on the ground were really happy with how it went off," she said, noting that the safe spaces created for immigrants' rights groups and families were by and large respected. "There was just a lot of coordination, communication and solidarity."
The peaceful outcome of the day certainly makes the pre-dawn NYPD raids seem absurd.
Both Russell and Knefel were unsurprised, but disappointed in the media coverage they saw when they woke up sore and exhausted on May 2. Russell, for one, is eager for activists to work harder at creating their own media and messaging - with the same energy and intensity they focus on direct actions.
Perhaps that's the best approach in the face of an indifferent media. Knefel said, "I keep joking that it’s going to be June and people are still going to be saying 'it’s going to be cold soon and they’ll go away.'”
Sarah Seltzer is an associate editor at AlterNet and a freelance writer based in New York City. Her work has been published at the Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, Jezebel and the Washington Post. Follow her on Twitter at @fellowette and find her work at sarahmseltzer.com.A woman in Clymer, Pennsylvania was convicted of downloading child pornography in a misguided attempt to frame her husband, The Indiana Gazette reports.
Meri Woods went to police last year claiming she had evidence that her husband, Matthew, had downloaded child pornography. Police computer forensic investigators quickly determined that Matthew Woods could not have downloaded the images, as he had been compelled to leave the family home on a protection-from-abuse order at the time they were downloaded.
According to District Attorney Patrick Dougherty, “she download in excess of 40 images of different acts of child pornography to the family computer, took it to the state police and said, ‘My husband downloaded all this porn.”
The six-man, six-woman jury did not believe Meri Woods story, and took less than two hours to find her guilty of one felony count of sexual abuse of children, one count of possession of child pornography, and a misdemeanor count of lying to law enforcement. That last charge can be punished by up to two years in jail, and the felony charges could net Woods seven years and a $15,000 fine.
She may also be forced to register as a sex offender in the state of Pennsylvania for 15 years.
[“Angry woman at computer” via Shutterstock]An Alberta human rights adjudicator, facing criticism for ruling in favour of a Czech immigrant who claimed discrimination after failing his Canadian engineering qualification exams, is now under scrutiny for his social media comments on East African politics.
Susan Coombes, a spokeswoman for the Alberta Human Rights Commission, said the chief commissioner will examine adjudicator Moosa Jiwaji’s Twitter remarks after the organization received a complaint this week.
“If there was something that was of concern, we might have a new policy about what needs to happen with social media,” she said. “We walk a fine line between freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and also the reputation of someone who is an adjudicator.”
We walk a fine line
In September, in the wake of the Westgate mall attack in Nairobi, Kenya, in which Al-Shabaab terrorists killed at least 67 people, Mr. Jiwaji seemed to attribute the violence to immigration.
“Go into eastleigh [a Nairobi suburb] and get rid of all those individuals whoa re [sic] living in Kenya on fake papers. Do DNA test on all of them,” he tweeted.
On Nov. 29, he wrote: “Kenya in reverse gear. Another 50 years I guess. I will be dead by then. Good luck. A Constitution means DICK!!”
The Twitter account was deleted shortly after Mr. Jiwaji was criticized by host Ezra Levant on his Sun News Network show.
“Really it is a good opportunity for us to look at our policies and procedures and all the things we need to be doing to show transparency and due diligence,” Ms. Coombes said of the commission’s response to the complaint.
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Last week, Mr. Jiwaji ordered the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA) to pay $10,000 to Czech immigrant Ladislav Mihaly. Mr. Mihaly has been trying, unsuccessfully, to obtain accreditation to work as an engineer in Alberta since 1999.
He failed the National Professional Practice Exam, a test of engineers’ understanding of professional conduct, law and ethics, three times. Mr. Mihaly was told he would be required to pass either a Fundamentals of Engineering exam or a series of confirmatory exams to ensure he was technically competent.
Mr. Mihaly argued he should not be subject to the tests, and took the case to the Alberta Human Rights Commission, alleging the regulatory body discriminated against him due to his country of origin.
APEGA was ordered to assign Mr. Mihaly a mentor, and to conduct a thorough review of his credentials to see if he might be exempt from certain aspects of the requirements. The association is seeking to appeal the ruling, arguing lowering its accreditation standards to accommodate Mr. Mihaly could put the public at risk.
“Having people come in who have different experience, different training, different thought processes, it’s valuable and we’re doing everything we can to welcome those people into the profession,” said Carol Moen, APEGA’s registrar. “But we have a duty to make sure all of those individuals are qualified.”
Ms. Moen said the organization would file for appeal next week, along with a request for a stay of the AHRC’s ruling.
Requests for comment from Mr. Jiwaji were not returned.
National Post
• Email: jgerson@nationalpost.com | Twitter: jengersonA teenager has been arrested after reports a man was raped in the toilets of a major Manchester department store.
Police were called shortly after 11.30am on Friday after receiving reports of the alleged attack in the toilets of the Next store in the Arndale Centre.
It is understood a man in his fifties complained he was attacked in the toilets of the store which was busy with customers at the time.
The alleged victim was using the toilets at the Next store in the Arndale Centre in Manchester when attacked
Police arrested a 19-year-old suspect in connection with the alleged rape of a man in his 50s at the Arndale Centre in Manchester yesterday morning. The victim claims he was attacked in the toilets of the Next store
According to reports, the suspect had been detained by security staff who held him until police arrived at the scene.
The 19 year-old man was then arrested on suspicion of rape and was taken into custody where he is currently being questioning by detectives.
The alleged victim is currently receiving support from specialist officers.
Greater Manchester Police have described it as'shocking' but thanked staff for their swift response.
Detective Sergeant Chris Maddocks from GMP's Serious Sexual Crimes Unit said: 'This was an incredibly shocking incident which happened in a busy store.
Scene: The alleged attack took place in this toilet and staff have since closed the area while police investigate
'Our specialist officers are with the victim and will ensure he has all the support he needs.Members Only The Democrats’ Assault on Free Speech
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is the Senate Majority Leader.
Throughout August, senators had the opportunity to travel around their states and listen to the concerns of their constituents. The American people have a lot on their minds these days — important issues they expect the Democrat-run Senate to address: things like high unemployment, threats of terrorism, rising health care costs and the ongoing crisis at the border.
Unfortunately, hardly any of those things will be on the Senate’s agenda when it returns Monday.
Story Continued Below
That’s because the Democrats who control the Senate say they’re more interested in repealing the free speech protections the First Amendment guarantees to all Americans. Their goal is to shut down the voices of their critics at a moment when they fear the loss of their fragile Senate majority. And to achieve it, they’re willing to devote roughly half of the remaining legislative days before November to this quixotic anti-speech gambit.
The proposal they want to consider would empower incumbent politicians to write the rules on who gets to speak and who doesn’t. And while no one likes to be criticized, the way for Senate Democrats to avoid it is to make better arguments, or even better, to come up with better ideas — not shut up their constituents.
Not surprisingly, a proposal as bad as the one Senate Democrats are pushing won’t even come close to garnering the votes it would need to pass. But to many Democrats, that’s just the point. They want this proposal to fail because they think that somehow would help them on Election Day — they think it will help drive to the polls more left-wing voters who don’t like having to defend their ideas.
If all this seems like an object lesson in why most Americans are so disgusted with Washington right now, that’s because it is. With legislative priorities like this, it’s no wonder a recent Quinnipiac poll found that just 14 percent of respondents say they think the government in Washington can be counted on to do what’s right most or all of the time.
A more sensible approach would be for the Democrats who run the Senate to take up the slew of job-creation bills the Republican-controlled House already has passed, some with overwhelming bipartisan support. But Senate Democrats prefer to spend their time on bizarre sideshows like trying to take an eraser to the First Amendment.
None of this should be surprising to even the most casual observer of the Senate these days. Earlier this year, the Democratic leadership rolled out a partisan playbook drafted by campaign staffers that spelled out just how they planned to run the Senate in the run-up to November. It was filled with partisan proposals designed specifically to fail so Democrats could campaign on the failure of that legislation, blaming Republicans for what wasn’t done.a rwby telephone game featuring
i took the burden of coming up with the starting image, i chose the theme Snow Ruby (like snow miku only ruby) we started before christmas so it explains the accidental christmas theme oops, (please right click idk what tumblr did but the quality died on some of them)
i made a lil story out of it:
Ruby purchases dolls of her teammates and plays with it before wrapping them up to give as a gift and weiss doll is having NONE of it and went rogue and probably breaks out blake doll and yang doll too and ruby is now telling weiss the story of how she acquired the dolls, weiss somehow not believing her tale and complains why is it her doll that went rogue and in the last scene u see the dolls showing signs of sentience. Also they changed outfits a lot, ruby likes to play dress up with the dolls
anway this was super fun and thank you everyone who joined!!China Remix looks at African immigrant communities in China's "Chocolate City," celebrating the power of rap music to bring communities together.
The first nonstop flight from Africa to China took off in 2008. It would be reasonable to expect that it was bound for Beijing, the cultural and political capital of China. Or to Shanghai, its financial behemoth. But the flight touched down in lesser-known Guangzhou, China's third-most populated city, along the southern coast. Dubbed "The Promised Land," by the New Yorker in 2009, Guangzhou has become the land of milk and honey for China's growing population of African immigrants. African businessmen and women ply their crafts along bustling streets. Some own restaurants. Many others work the export-import markets day and night, negotiating deals between Guangzhou and their home cities in Africa. In one neighborhood, Dengfeng, the African community is so dense that it's commonly referred to as "The Chocolate City." This is how Evan Osnos, writing for the New Yorker, described a local market called Canaan: Lining the sidewalks are passport-photo booths, mobile-phone venders, and shops crammed with jeans and T-shirts, alligator-skin cap-toe shoes and made-to-measure suits, soccer jerseys and bulletproof vests (four hundred and ten dollars for blue nylon; five hundred and fifty-six dollars for camouflage). But the real business goes on inside, where merchants cut deals for bogus and factory-reject Prada and Lacoste and Polo. The Canaan economy is all cash and unhindered by borders: “one hundred per cent human hair” extensions are clipped from heads in India, braided by hand in China, and packed for sale in West Africa. This scene of buzzing economic activity captures the perception that many residents, both Chinese and from elsewhere, have of Guangzhou's African population: Foreigners in an ardent pursuit of economic gain.
"Existing research has tended to represent these Africans as a mass of traders," Roberto Castillo, a Guangzhou-based researcher who studies Africans in China, explained in a YouTube videocast. Castillo adds that, "the overarching trading narrative reinforces notions of Africans in the city as merely profit-seeking exporters.” This characterization of an immigrant community strictly guided by Guangzhou's commercial sector is pretty reductive. A more nuanced representation of Guangzhou's African population is found in the upcoming documentary China Remix. The film follows three African hip-hop artists, two from Nigeria and one from Uganda, as they pursue a music career in China—some dodging residency restrictions and cultural challenges along the way. It demonstrates that, in China's "Chocolate City," the entrepreneurial spirit of African residents is more complicated than simply hawking items on the curb. The three musicians represent an African generation that is global, and increasingly taking on the world's cities with a determination to forge their own careers, including those in the arts. Moreover, as one African resident tells the filmmakers, "music is a global language that can bind us together." Hip-hop has become an unlikely opportunity to cast a brighter light on the African community and its contributions to Guangzhou's culture. "Africans basically have an image problem in China," says Dorian Carli-Jones, a co-producer of China Remix. "So [hip-hop] is a way for them to rectify that."
“What we’re trying to show in this documentary is that there is a[n] [African] community that’s pretty established, and now an entertainment industry is actually popping up to supplement that community,” adds Melissa Lefkowitz, also a co-producer of the film. The ambassadorship of Guangzhou's African musicians is growing. In 2013, state-run newspaper China Daily said the hip-hop artists were "creating new types of harmony between the two lands." Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter. The best way to follow issues you care about. Subscribe Loading... Even so, Lefkowitz and Carli-Jones acknowledge that more Chinese need to be drawn into interaction with African residents through alternative ways, like hip-hop, to create a lasting cultural acceptance. The same article conceded that "most Chinese still know little about Guangzhou's African community." “We know that they need so many more Chinese to attend their shows and to hang with them before this [perception] will change," Lefkowitz tells CityLab. "So we’re just capturing the very beginning." In the years to come, as more African entrepreneurs head for China's cities in search of businesses opportunities, music and the arts may serve as the ultimate bridge between the two cultures. China Remix is expected to be released in the Spring of 2015. It will run just under 30 minutes. Learn more about the film here.Anthony Tipungwuti and Sam Tagliabue have been given permission to train with the club over the course of the pre-season in the lead up to the national and rookie draft.
The pair has been an integral part of the club’s VFL side over the last two seasons.
Tipungwuti is an exciting livewire who has shown an ability to play anywhere across the field having worked on his endurance over the last few seasons.
Standing 206cm, Tagliabue played 14 games for the club’s VFL side this season having previously played in Sydney’s local competition.
The following unlisted players currently have permission to train with AFL clubs:
Carlton: Jason Tutt (Western Bulldogs)
Collingwood: Tony Armstrong (Collingwood)
Essendon: Anthony Tipunwuti (Essendon VFL), Sam Tagliabue (Essendon VFL).
Gold Coast: Greg Broughton (Gold Coast), Andrew Raines (Brisbane Lions).
Melbourne: Mitchell Gent (Casey Scorpions), Edward Morris (Casey Scorpions), James Munro (Casey Scorpions), Bruce Rutherford (Casey Scorpions), Luke Tapscott (Melbourne).
North Melbourne: Cameron Delaney (North Melbourne), Max Warren (North Melbourne).
St Kilda: Cameron Banfield (Sandringham), Elliot le Grice (Sandringham), Shaun McKernan (Adelaide Crows), Jack Noone (Sandringham), Kenny Ong (Sandringham), Jared Petrenko (Adelaide Crows), Adam Schneider (St Kilda), Jeremy Taylor (Gold Coast).
Western Bulldogs: Brett Goodes (Western Bulldogs), Alex Greenwood (Western Bulldogs), Daniel Pearce (Western Bulldogs)With exit polls predicting a Narendra Modi-led government, experts are anticipating a spurt in the job market on the expectation that the BJP leader would revive the economy, particularly the manufacturing sector.
HR consultancy firm Unison International estimated the job market to grow by at least 30 per cent under Mr Modi's rule. According to the firm, as many as 15-20 million jobs may be created and which could further get a boost if the BJP comes at the Centre on its own.
Echoing similar sentiments, CareerBuilder India projected that at India's current GDP (gross domestic product) growth rate, there are about 2 million jobs on hold which will be rolled out in case Mr Modi is able to form a stable government at the Centre
"Apart from these 2 million jobs, over the next 12 to 24 months, GDP growth is expected to get in the range of 5.5 to 6 per cent which should further boost job creation in excess of 20 per cent," CareerBuilder India managing director Premlesh Machama said.
Meanwhile, experts also feel hiring in the manufacturing would surge as Mr Modi is believed to give more focus to this sector. Besides, the job market in IT, infrastructure, banking, tourism and healthcare are also likely to get a push.
"Manufacturing sector will revive as Modi believe in giving impetus to the manufacturing sector. Things like single point clearance, good infrastructure and easy availability of land are expected on his agenda," Unison International managing director Udit Mittal said.
"Over the last 10 years, India has majorly goofed up on manufacturing sector despite abundant demographic dividend available," Mr Machama said.
"Modi in his speeches and manifesto has clearly laid focus on reviving manufacturing sector which automatically will ensure there would be huge number of jobs created."
Noting that employment for over 12 million youth need to be created every year, Randstad India chief executive Moorthy Uppaluri said it was "imperative for a government to focus on sectors like manufacturing and infrastructure that are important for the growth of other sectors and creation of jobs".
The HR firm's findings show that the manufacturing and infrastructure sectors would create 30-40 million jobs over the next decade.According to MeraJob India founder and CEO Pallav Sinha the manufacturing sector has the potential to have a high impact on job creation and "signaling intent and policy stability would be a huge sentiment booster and will attract investors and entrepreneurs to the sector".However, the HR analysts also feel that a government led by Mr Modi should refrain from rolling back FDI in multi-brand retail as it could severely impact employment opportunities in the sector."In case as stated, Modi withdraws FDI in multi brand retail, it is going to severely impact the investment sentiment for retail sector in the country which may impact not only multi brand retail, but e-commerce and single brand retail investments thus immensely impacting employment opportunities," Mr Machama said.Besides, Mr Sinha said that "since stability is a big driver in creating business confidence, any reversal in FDI in multi brand retail will have some negative impact on investments in the sector and hiring"."However, this can be more than made up via structured implementation of other policies and opening investment avenues in other areas." Based on an analysis of Mr Modi's Gujarat-model, law firm Vipra Legal's managing partner, Himanshu Shekhar, said that the "overall framework (under Modi's rule) will shift from just managing the employees to creation and development and give rise to strategic and result oriented HR Policies".Tokyo (CNN) A missing 7-year-old boy was found unharmed after searchers spent nearly a week combing dense forest in the northern Japan island of Hokkaido, Japanese officials said Friday.
Japan's Self-Defense Forces personnel found Yamato Tanooka in a building on the premises of the military's Kamagatame exercise field Friday morning, said Satoshi Saito, a spokesperson for the local fire department.
Yamato was found 6 kilometers from the spot where his parents left him as punishment for throwing stones, according to local media. Yamato told police he reached the building that first night, local media said.
He appeared to be in good condition for someone who had spent seven days without food, Dr. Yoshiyuki Sakai, the doctor who examined Yamato, told Asahi TV. He spoke coherently and showed signs of mild dehydration and malnutrition; he had a light rash on his arms and legs, the doctor said.
An SDF member who found the boy said he was hungry. The member gave him water and a rice ball. The member said the boy was fine and talking normally.
JUST WATCHED Search for missing Japanese boy tightens Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Search for missing Japanese boy tightens 01:06
Read Morekey operation inc.: house taishido
‘house taishido’ by key operation inc. in setagaya, tokyo, japan all images courtesy key operation inc. (above) image by key operation inc.
japanese studio key operation inc. (akira koyama) has sent us images of ‘house taishido’, a three-storey private dwelling in a dense residential area of tokyo, japan. flanked by neighbouring structures on three sides, the design manipulates its proportions both horizontally and vertically to achieve interior spaces that are both spacious and effective.
street facade image by key operation inc.
standing on a plot measuring 7 x 12m, the house is stepped back from the site line by 1.5m to set it apart from the public street and alleyway. the entrance and garage is read as an extruded volume with a square face while the rest of the structure – stepped back another two meters – features bold angles and an asymmetrically pitched roof to create a dynamic profile. singularly finished in mortar, the facade provides a prominent contrast with the carport, which is executed in a shade of bright red.
garage image by keizo shibasaki
the main communal spaces – kitchen, living, dining – are hosted on the second level, which is fronted by a generous outdoor terrace on top of the garage unit. the kitchen is connected to the rest of the area by a kiosk-like opening, which can be fully extended and integrated. the large stretch of wall is studded with a series of platforms which was provided for the house cat.
interior view image by key operation inc.
dining room image by key operation inc.
image by key operation inc.
(left) common space (right) kitchen images by key operation inc.
the house’s core circulation is hosted is hosted in the north-west corner of the layout in a series of winding staircases. in order to efficiently and appropriately utilize all available space, this route serves a dual-purpose as the dwelling’s library. providing a bench to sit and read, the landing is transformed into a functional platform.
image by key operation inc.
washroom image by key operation inc.
(left) view of study from stairs image by keizo shibasaki (right) library image by key operation inc.
image by key operation inc.
from inside the study image by key operation inc.
image by keizo shibasaki
loft space image by key operation inc.
image by key operation inc.
image by key operation inc.
entrance image by keizo shibasaki
night view image by key operation inc.
in context
site plan
floor plan / level 0 (1) stairs (2) WC (3) washroom (4) bath (5) parking (6) entrance (7) spare room (8) kitchen (9) living / dining (10) balcony (11) corridor (12) study (13) WC (14) bedroom (15) bedroom
floor plan / level +1
floor plan / level +2
project info:
site area: 99.63 m2 constructed area: 58.76 m2 gross floor area: 148.24 m2 storeys: 3“I may look confusing, but I have a clear message,” says Eddie Izzard to an audience of around 200 people at Staffordshire University’s Leek Road assembly hall. The 54 year-old comedian and actor struts the stage in a pair of black stilettos, a “Stand up for Europe” T-shirt, and a shocking pink beret with matching lipstick. It’s Izzard’s chosen uniform for a whistle-stop tour of universities, on which he is imploring students across the UK to vote “remain” in this month’s referendum. The crowd gives a generous laugh. He’s on a roll today. “It’s not a rosy, dreamy vision of Europe that I have; I am a realist,” he goes on. “I think I can prove that to you by saying, look at me.” Izzard came out as transgender 31 years ago and these days is as likely to be wearing a frock as a shirt and tie. “I thought, people in the UK will be OK about this. And generally, they have been. We gradually move forwards, not backwards. That above all is my argument for remaining in Europe: is this not the story of humanity?”
The room seems to hang on Izzard’s every word, applauding at all the right moments – but then he’s preaching to the converted. The vast majority of the Stoke-on-Trent audience is in favour of remaining in the EU, and it’s not only students who have shown up today. Representing each wing of Izzard fandom are comedy buffs, Labour members (Izzard has been one himself since 1995), and one or two cross-country enthusiasts (he’s recently become something of a marathon-running legend after completing 27 of them in as many days).
Izzard has become a marathon runner’s idol after running 27 of them in as many days. Photograph: Alfie Packham
And why a university tour? According to Izzard, young people have the most to lose in the event of a Brexit. “The EU referendum is a no-brainer for them,” he says. He enjoys chatting to students, although he dropped out of his own degree in accounting and finance at Sheffield in the early eighties to follow his acting dreams. He says he’d much rather have been a student of 2016: universities are more inclusive of LGBT people nowadays – and they offer more European exchange schemes.
As he travels from campus to campus, he has been met with a mixed response. Not everyone has taken to this less familiar version of Eddie Izzard: the earnest, political campaigner making lofty, unrehearsed speeches. Following a panel appearance at the University of Reading earlier this month, a student tweeted: “It’s like he’s writing an essay and trying his hardest to make the word count.”
They have a point. As I interview Izzard backstage, he isn’t always easy to follow. He speaks quickly, and passionately, lurching from one subject to another, unleashing a stream of abstract nouns. “I think that people want real people to be in politics,” he tells me. “Politicians are real people, but they’ve spent their lives in politics. I’ve looked for the edges of life. I’ve looked to see where can we go, what can we do, what can we see, what can I analyse about the direction forward. I’ve come up with this worldview which I think is the worldview that we have to do, which is we have to be heading towards a world where there are fair chances. Because otherwise, people are going to be despairing. Despair is the fuel of terrorism, and hope is the fuel of civilisation.”
Few in the mainstream “Stronger In” campaign bother to grapple with such existential themes. But his philosophical approach might also explain why Izzard hasn’t fared so well in panel debates. “Humanity” was his watchword during BBC Question Time last Thursday night, and this clearly grated with some in the audience.
It was a memorable broadcast: the seating plan placed Izzard beside Ukip leader Nigel Farage, resulting almost inevitably in a series of shouting matches. Izzard was visibly frustrated throughout the programme, while the real low point came when he was told to “shut up” by an exasperated heckler. A damning editorial by the Independent would say his appearance was “one of the best adverts for Brexit we have seen in a long time”.
Izzard shrugs. “It was a split in the audience. If someone shouts something negative, it sounds like everyone’s negative.”
Izzard is no fan of negative campaigning and scaremongering. Photograph: Mark Scott
There is a certain novelty to Izzard’s idealistic campaign, amid all the scaremongering on both sides of the EU debate. “I live and breathe positive campaigning,” he says often. His upbeat approach is going down well with the kind of young people who admire the idealism of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.
At Staffordshire, Bal Deol, 23, tells me: “I’m voting remain. I’m impressed by how Eddie carries himself; there must be a lot of pressure on him.”
Darren Clark, 22, agrees: “He’s very passionate, and you can really tell that when you’re in the room with him – even if it does hide some of the holes in his arguments.”
It is true that attention to detail may not be his greatest strength, though Izzard insists he can talk about “the nitty-gritty” of the European Union. He reels off a few examples of what could immediately be at stake for students if the UK leaves: the European health insurance card (Ehic), the Erasmus scheme, low-cost flights – which he claims would all be under threat if Britain votes to leave. But he doesn’t dwell on this stuff. “Right now it’s open season for making up whatever facts and figures you want: the entire population of Turkey is moving into your house and sitting in your garden...”
Recent YouGov polling data suggests that most students are already on Izzard’s side: 73% of people aged 18 to 29 are in favour of remaining in the EU. Yet now that the deadline for registration has passed, the battle may already be won or lost. Izzard appears confident, though. “I think the students who registered will go all the way and turn out,” he says. “What young people really want is a vision for the future. Brexit has no vision besides downsizing, pulling apart, and separating off. I’m trying to give a vision that will make the entire world work.”
Multilingual comedian, actor, runner, activist... and uniter of nations? Izzard has a week left to add an impressive new line to his CV.
Keep up with the latest on Guardian Students: follow us on Twitter at @GdnStudents – and become a member to receive exclusive benefits and our weekly newsletter.File this under possible bug, or perhaps something more interesting, but for those running Windows 10 build 10558, which leaked onto the internet yesterday, you may find the OS installing the Phone app from Windows 10 Mobile. Indeed, we were tipped off about it and when checking our Store for an update Phone app build 1.9.30000.0 installed to our PC running the leaked beta OS.
So what does it do? Truth be told, not too much yet. The app can call people but simply routes itself to the new Skype Video app. You can also have favorites selected. Trying to call them any other way, of course, does nothing as the OS – to our knowledge – does not have telephony built in. However, since Windows 10 Mobile and Windows 10 for PC share so much of the source code, anything is quite possible.If the sprout is not sliced at least once, the ratio of surface area to volume is not at all conducive to holding sauce. Additionally, the leaves form an almost impermeable barrier that repels sauce or dressing like water off a freshly waxed car. The sauce has no access to the sphere's inner folds, and can only wait helplessly on the sidelines while a flavor foul is committed in your mouth. Unless, of course, you like the taste of full-on, unadulterated Brussels sprouts. But raw sprouts are too strong for most palates, so they generally need to be cooked before you toss them in a greasy pan or a salad bowl.
My two favorite ways of cooking Brussels sprouts are roasting and steaming. Roasting gives them a weathered taste and feel. The dry heat cultivates extra flavor as the outer leaves develop a brown crisp. Steaming sprouts preserves a certain clean, bright innocence in them, the better to deflower with bacon grease; ranch dressing; or a light mix of olive oil, salt, and vinegar.
However great they are to eat, growing Brussels sprouts is a grind. They take a long time to mature, and don't produce much poundage per plant. That's why they're expensive, and why each sprout should |
polls have shifted sharply toward the Democratic incumbents, Sherrod Brown and Bill Nelson, in recent weeks.
Mr. Brown and Mr. Nelson each lead by seven to eight points in the average of recent polls, an advantage that is much more difficult to overcome with 50 days left in the race. Historically, candidates trailing by that margin come back to win the race only about 10 percent of the time.
It is the Republican candidate in Ohio, Josh Mandel, the state treasurer, who probably has a better chance of beating those odds. He has raised a considerable amount of money, and Mr. Brown’s positions are quite left-leaning for moderate Ohio. On the other hand, Mr. Mandel’s ideology rates as being strongly right-leaning — this race features perhaps the largest ideological gulf of any major contest this year — and Mr. Brown has also raised a significant amount of money.
In Florida, however, it is harder to see the Republican case for victory. Their candidate, Representative Connie Mack, has a strong family name, but he has raised only about $3 million, an inadequate sum in a state as large as Florida. And Mr. Nelson won re-election easily in 2006 and his approval ratings remain decent. This race, like Ohio, is one that Republicans might win in a wave election year like 2010, but it will probably not come together for them this year.
Republicans have strong candidates in two open-seat races, in the form of former Gov. Linda Lingle of Hawaii and former Representative Heather Wilson of New Mexico. Both rate as being more moderate than most Republicans who are running this year. Ms. Wilson has raised about as much money as her Democratic opponent, Representative Martin Heinrich, while Ms. Lingle has raised more than hers, Representative Mazie K. Hirono.
But the Democrats, Mr. Heinrich and Ms. Hirono, have built up leads in the polls, and they have the partisan tide at their back, since New Mexico has become quite blue-leaning in recent years, and Hawaii will be overwhelmingly so with its native son, Mr. Obama, on the ballot. The chances of a Republican pickup in each state is now only about 10 percent, according to the forecast.
In other cases, Republicans have a candidate who either campaigned poorly, like Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, or a candidate who has underwhelming credentials, like the businessman Tom Smith in Pennsylvania. The Democratic incumbents in those states, Senators Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, are clear favorites, each with about a 95 percent chance of keeping their seats.
Republicans also fielded weak candidates in Washington, West Virginia, and California. Instead, their long-shot hopes might rest on New Jersey, where the approval ratings are tepid for the Democratic incumbent, Senator Robert Menendez, and where Republicans have a relatively moderate candidate in Joe Kyrillos, a state senator. However, Mr. Kyrillos has yet to make much of a move forward in the polls. A true long shot might be Rhode Island, where the Democratic incumbent Sheldon Whitehouse’s fund-raising has been poor and where Republicans have an interesting and unorthodox candidate in the libertarian-leaning Barry Hinckley. But Rhode Island is strongly Democratic and Mr. Hinckley has received little support from the national party.
Republican Seats Where a Democratic Takeover Is Favored
One problem Republicans are having is simply that Mr. Obama is now favored to win the presidency, meaning that Democrats would control the Senate in the event of a 50-50 tie. The Senate model incorporates the current FiveThirtyEight presidential forecast in order to resolve these cases, which now gives Mr. Obama a 75 percent chance to win another term.
Still, even if Republicans required four Democratic pickups rather than three, their odds would not be too bad. As I mentioned, the model has Republicans favored in four Democratic-held seats, and they have a decent opportunity in a few others, even if other states like Florida seem to be increasingly off the table.
However, Republicans are not purely playing offense. They are now likely to lose two of their own seats, and three others are quite vulnerable. Thus, they will probably need at least five Democratic pickups, and possibly as many as eight.
The seat that Republicans are most likely to lose is Maine, where an independent candidate, former Gov. Angus King, has an overwhelming lead in the polls and is a 95 percent favorite to win, according to the model. He would replace the retiring Republican incumbent, Olympia Snowe.
Mr. King has not said which party he would caucus with in the Senate. However, the statistical measures of his ideology that the model uses rates him as being reasonably liberal — more so than about one-third of current Democratic senators. And Mr. King has endorsed Mr. Obama for president.
Still, there is no hard and fast way to estimate the chances of Mr. King caucusing with either party. So last week, I asked my Twitter followers to provide their best guesses. The consensus estimate was that Mr. King had a 75 percent chance of caucusing with the Democrats, a 10 percent chance of doing so with the Republicans, and a 15 percent chance of caucusing with neither party, which would effectively be the same as his caucusing with the majority since it would give the control of the Senate to whichever party had a 50 to 49 lead in the other races.
The forecast model randomly assigns Mr. King a party in each simulation based on these probabilities, meaning that Maine is likely to be a de facto Democratic pickup.
A more straightforward case is Massachusetts. In this race, the momentum has shifted numerous times — but the latest shift is toward Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate who has made gains in three polls published on Sunday and Monday to take the lead over the incumbent Republican senator, Scott P. Brown.
The model also estimates that the fundamentals slightly favor Ms. Warren. She has some weaknesses as a candidate — her ideology rates as being very liberal, even by Massachusetts standards, and she has never held elected office before. However, her fund-raising has been prodigious, as she has already brought in more than $27 million, and it is simply very difficult for a Republican to win in Massachusetts under most circumstances. The model lists Ms. Warren as about a 65 percent favorite. But this is a very rare case in today’s politics where both candidates are actually quite popular.
Republican Seats Where a Democratic Takeover Is Possible
A race of underrated importance is Indiana, which has been sparsely polled. But the polls that have been published have shown a near tie between the Democrat, Representative Joe Donnelly, and the Republican, Richard Mourdock, the state treasurer who defeated longtime incumbent Senator Richard G. Lugar in the primary earlier this year.
The model’s view is that a tie is a reasonable estimate of the state of the race. Mr. Donnelly’s voting record is quite moderate, whereas Mr. Mourdock’s policy views are very conservative. The difference is enough to counteract Indiana’s Republican lean and make the race close to a tossup, although the model gives Mr. Mourdock an incremental edge, with about a 55 percent chance of victory.
Republicans also have a 55 percent chance of retaining Nevada, where their candidate is the appointed incumbent Dean Heller. The model treats states with appointed incumbents as tantamount to open-seat races, as the historical evidence suggests that they do not enjoy much of the traditional incumbent advantage until they win an elected term for themselves. In Nevada, this may be evidenced by the fact that the Democrat, Representative Shelley Berkley, has raised more in individual contributions ($5.3 million) than Mr. Heller has ($3.6 million). And Nevada has increasingly become blue-leaning. Still, Ms. Berkley’s candidacy has been clouded by ethics accusations and she is at a slight deficit in the polls there.
The final realistic pickup opportunity for the Democrats is in Arizona, where polls have shown a tight race between their candidate, the former United States surgeon general, Richard H. Carmona, and the Republican, Representative Jeff Flake. In this case, however — unlike in Indiana — the model calculates that the fundamentals favor Mr. Flake, since he has raised about twice as much money and since Mr. Carmona has never held elected office before. Mr. Carmona has about a 25 percent chance of winning, according to the model.
The model also gives an outside chance for an upset, about 8 percent, to the Democrat in Texas, Paul Sadler, although that is mostly because his race against Ted Cruz, the Republican candidate, has not been polled adequately, meaning that the model treats the race as having more uncertainty. This upset is highly unlikely to come to fruition in practice unless there is a large and unexpected Democratic wave.
But while a large wave toward either party is hard to conceive of at this stage, Democrats do seem to have a gentle tide favoring them. They have gained ground on the generic Congressional ballot in recent weeks and now lead it by about two percentage points on a likely-voter basis, according to our estimates, meaning that they might have a slight edge in races that might otherwise be split 50-50. And with Mitt Romney having penetrated little into traditionally blue-leaning states, Democrats should have a clearer edge in those.
Between those factors, and subpar Republican candidates in some purple and red-leaning states, the Democrats are in the best shape they’ve been in all year in the Senate. The model now gives them the equivalent of a one-seat advantage, meaning that the most likely composition of the new Senate is 51 Democrats and 49 Republicans, although some seats are almost certain to change hands on both sides.
Republicans still have a multitude of paths toward 51 seats, but they risk being overextended, having poured party committee funds and independent expenditures into races like Florida and Ohio where the polls have shifted against them.
Their decision may be whether to wait out any potential effects from the convention bounce and see if Democratic momentum fades at all, or target a narrower set of races.
One sign that may indicate that Republicans recognize their predicament is if they quietly provide more financial backing to Mr. Akin, who still has a shot in Missouri. It isn’t an ideal circumstance for Republicans, but the battle for Senate control could run through the state. The model estimates that Missouri has an 8 percent chance of being the tipping-point state in the Senate, meaning that race determines the majority. It ranks third by this measure, just behind Virginia and Massachusetts.It's not the end of an era yet, but it may be the beginning of the end.
The Federal Reserve will start trimming a balance sheet next month that ballooned to $4.5 trillion as it invested in capital markets to buoy the U.S. economy after the 2008 financial crisis. But slowly, very slowly.
Rather than sell any of the government debt and mortgage-backed securities purchased to bolster the effects of near-zero interest rates as unemployment surged to 10% and stock markets tumbled, the Fed is paring the amount of proceeds from maturing securities that it reinvests each month.
The rolloff will be capped at $10 billion a month initially, and the limit will be raised by the same amount every three months until it reaches $50 billion, the central bank said on Wednesday, Sept. 20.
The reversal of so-called quantitative easing, carefully forecast by the members of the Fed's monetary policy committee, had become a foregone conclusion on Wall Street in recent weeks. Coupled with the gradual rise of interest rates, which the committee only began to raise in 2015, it's designed to start reining in easy-money policies that lasted nearly a decade, giving the Fed more latitude to respond to future downturns without alarming financial markets.
Now that the reduction has begun, even if economic conditions weakened, "we would really only consider resuming reinvestment if it were what what we refer to as a material deterioration," Chair Janet Yellen said in a news conference after the announcement.
If the Fed were forced to trim interest rates to nearly zero again, "we recognize that we might be unable to pursue our objectives just by adjusting" the benchmark federal funds rate, she added. Barring such a circumstance, however, the Fed prefers to use rate adjustments -- a traditional tool that's better understood -- to steer the economy while letting its securities portfolio grow smaller.
Still, private economists aren't looking for a huge decrease.
"We expect the balance sheet to shrink from 24% of gross domestic product -- $4.5 trillion today -- to 13.4% of gross domestic product -- $3.0 trillion -- in 2021," Jan Hatzius, an economist with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), said in a note to clients.
Goldman and Barclays Plcs have both projected the Fed will ultimately trim its balance sheet by only about $1 trillion, a view shared by Bank of America (BAC).
That, of course, depends on the U.S. economy avoiding any significant shocks in the interim, Joseph Song, an economist with Bank of America, said in a telephone interview.
And simply starting the reduction may be enough to shift the economic landscape.
"When the Fed bought bonds it helped bring long-term rates lower, drive the stock market and home prices higher, and gave a boost to economic growth," Greg McBride, chief financial analyst with Bankrate.com, said in an e-mailed statement. "As the Fed downsizes their portfolio, we risk the opposite on each of those fronts -- higher rates, a sharp stock market correction, and a headwind to already slow economic growth."
While the Fed declined to let the potential that such risks would compound the challenge of tightening inflation delay its balance-sheet reduction, the pace of rate hikes may still be curbed.
Such changes are an important consideration for banks from JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) to Citigroup Inc. (C), which typically boost margins by passing increases on to borrowers more quickly than depositors, whose money is used to fund loans.
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The lenders' revenue has benefited over the past two years as the Fed approved four hikes, taking rates to a range of 1% to 1.25%. And although rates were left unchanged on Wednesday, the central bank has projected a third increase this year, as many as three each in 2018 and 2019 and a chance of moving above 3% in 2020.
None of those are locked in, Yellen said on Wednesday, noting that the 2% inflation the Fed equates with stable economic growth has been elusive.
Indeed, growth in core personal expenditures -- one of the Fed's preferred inflation gauges -- has narrowed 20 basis points in the past few months to 1.4% despite low unemployment, sparking concern that policymakers might be moving too fast.
"Once balance-sheet normalization is under way, I will be looking closely at the evolution of inflation before making a determination about further adjustments" to interest rates, Fed Governor Lael Brainard, a member of the monetary policy panel, said earlier this month.
Her colleagues, however, remain fairly supportive of at least one more 25 basis-point bump this year, which would take rates to a range of 1.25% to 1.5%.
"There seems to be a clear consensus brewing around a December hike," Song said. Trading in interest-rate futures now indicates a 62% chance that rates will increase then, a nine-point jump from the day before.
The number of monetary policymakers supporting three hikes next year also increased, he noted: "The committee is kind of circling the wagons around those projections."
Updated from 2:04 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2017.Story highlights "Let me be clear: I do not want, nor will I accept the nomination for our party," Ryan said
Ryan aides believe even a late entry would not have been feasible
Washington (CNN) House Speaker Paul Ryan, facing increasing questions about his 2016 plans, sought to end speculation Tuesday that he may be a late entrant into the messy Republican race for president.
"Let me be clear: I do not want, nor will I accept the nomination for our party," Ryan said in remarks from the Republican National Committee's headquarters in Washington.
In a plea to delegates, Ryan added: "I believe you should only choose from a person who has actually participated in the primary. Count me out."
With his conservative credentials and appeal to the party establishment, a growing number of Republicans had publicly and privately floated Ryan as the lone candidate who could unite a party in disarray as it heads into a possible contested convention in Cleveland.
But Ryan, who also has the job as chairman of the convention, wanted to dispel any notions that he's plotting his own presidential bid. Behind the scenes, Ryan is making clear that his biggest goal in 2016 is now helping save an increasingly endangered House GOP majority. Ryan now will begin a furious fundraising push for his colleagues and to bolster his own coffers. According to a list obtained by CNN, Ryan will hold nearly 20 fundraising events over the next eight weeks, capping off with a June money event in Hot Springs, Virginia.
Read MoreElixir GenServer call vs cast
adam mokan Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 24, 2017
GenServer.call is not just for returning a response
I have been working on a side project using Elixir with a friend who is new to the language. He has some functional programming experience, but none using the Erlang/Elixir actor model. It was tricky at times to explain the fact that a single actor in this world can do only one thing at a given time even though you often hear about the BEAM VM and its abilities to handle concurrency. The reality is that multiple actors are often needed to get things done.
Somewhat related to this are the concepts of cast and call in a GenServer. At first glance when building a system with OTP fundamentals it is easy to think the following:
It says in the docs that cast is asynchronous. Since I do not need a reply in this situation, the cast will be better than a call. Asynchronous code seems cool. Synchronous code doesn’t seem cool. I want to be cool.
Unfortunately, the idea that a cast is superior or gives you an advantage can potentially become a nasty problem as you scale out. I’ve found it much safer to always start with a call which allows me to process heavy workloads at a much more consistent rate without worrying about overloading portions of my systems. Having said that, a cast is perfectly fine to use in the right scenario. However, if your workload is capable of fluctuating heavily and can spike at times, it may be best to keep things under control using a call or some other form of backpressure to keep clients from overloading portions of your system.
The official learning guide on the elixir-lang website has a small section on the same topic which can be found here. Regarding the usage of a call that documentation says:
This (call) should be the default choice as waiting for the server reply is a useful backpressure mechanism.A Japanese patient with severe eye disease is set to become the first person to be treated with induced pluripotent stem cells, Nature News reports. Cells of this type have been considered promising for future treatments since their creation eight years ago, which was itself a milestone. This human test is set to be a historic moment in biotechnology.
It's also an anxious one. Stem cell therapies carry the risk of creating tumors, although Nature News reports the scientists in charge of the Japanese trial found their treatment did not cause tumors in mice and monkeys. In addition, there might be other risks to the treatment that scientists aren't yet aware of; stem cell therapies of all types are only just being tried in humans.
Induced pluripotent stem cells are special because they're not made from embryos. Instead, they come from harvesting skin cells from people, then treating those cells with genes that reverse the cell's life stage back to its stem cell state. That means scientists are able to make induced pluripotent stem cells from cells taken from a patient's own body. The resulting cells should be well matched to the patient's own genetics, although it's possible the "induction" part of the process introduces genetic aberrations into the cells.
The patient in this Japanese trial has macular degeneration, a progressive disease in which people lose the light-detecting cells in the retinas in their eyes. Scientists have also tried embryonic stem cells as a treatment for the disease. (Here's an update on that effort.)
The induced pluripotent stem cell trial will test a treatment developed by Masayo Takahashi, an opthamologist with a Japanese research institute called RIKEN. Takahashi has been making induced pluripotent stem cells and growing those cells into a sheet of replacement retinal cells. She then surgically attaches the sheet onto the retina. She and her colleagues have previously demonstrated that this treatment works in monkeys.
Nature NewsGiving no sense of respite to telecom giants such as Vodafone India and Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio is going to let subscribers make international calls for as less as Rs 3 per minute, according to the company's website.
This would be facilitated after you make a recharge of Rs 501 as part of its ISD rate cutter plan.
Calls to locations including US, UK, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan, will be charged at Rs 3 per minute.
Calls to locations such as France, Pakistan, Israel, Japan, Argentina, Denmark and South Korea will be charged at Rs 4.8 per minute.
However, subscribers will have to first apply to the ISD rate cutter plan to avail this offer. The validity of this plan is 28 days.
This comes merely days after Reliance Industries' telecom arm, Jio, introduced the Dhan Dhana Dhan offer for those who had not already signed up for the Jio Summer Surprise, which was revoked following a Trai order.
The Dhan Dhana Dhan offer will give you 1 GB of 4G data per day for 84 days, at a price of Rs 309. You can also get 2 GB per day if you pay Rs 509. Unlimited voice and SMS will continue.
Disclosure: Reliance Industries, which owns Reliance Jio, also owns Network18, which publishes Moneycontrol.comIt seems even Amazon's not holding out hope that Christmas will make up for dwindling consumer spending. In its third quarter earnings yesterday, the online retailer predicted fourth quarter revenue would only be $6-7 billion, lower than Wall Street's $7 billion forecast and operating income would only reach $145-305 million.
FT: Tom Szkutak, chief financial officer, said the forecast reflected “appropriately conservative assumptions” and followed slower sales at the end of the quarter in September as consumers reacted to the turmoil on world financial markets.
The slowdown included a fall-off in the number of online purchases worth more than $1,000.
This is down from Amazon's previous Q4 estimate of $7.2 billion. Predictably, the market responded calmly, sending Amazon's shares down 14 percent in after-hours trading.
Meanwhile, even the National Retail Federation is forecasting a smaller increase in holiday sales.
The National Retail Federation is predicting Christmas sales growth of 2.2 per cent, the lowest level since 2002.
So much for those hopes that Christmas will save the economy. Indeed, the BBC notes that across the board, retail's indicating it won't be immune to the economic downturn.
BBC: The firm's warning of weaker trading conditions in the key festive period follows after similar announcements by Apple and eBay.
Taken together it is a growing sign that the crisis in the financial sector is spreading to a wider economic downturn.
"Amazon is definitely signalling much worse returns in the fourth quarter," said analyst Jeffrey Lindsay of Sanford Bernstein.
"This is further confirmation that the economic downturn is much more pervasive than was earlier thought.
"Online retailers were thought to be immune to it, but this is an indication that that is far from true."
We guess it's up to Halloween and Hollywood to save the economy now. So stock up on candy, in and out of the theater.Obama administration to allow further US media consolidation
By David Maynard
5 December 2012
Five years ago, widespread public outcry halted a plan by the Bush administration to allow corporations to own multiple media outlets in a single market. Now, the Obama administration is quietly planning to pass the same changes and permit even greater media consolidation.
Reports surfaced last week in industry newspapers that US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) head Julius Genachowski would be proposing changes to relax regulations for companies that owned newspapers and television stations in the same market, and would eliminate the current ban on cross-ownership of either radio and TV stations or radio stations and newspapers.
The new rules are being introduced under the guise of helping the Tribune Company, which currently has a waiver from the FCC allowing it to own both the Chicago Tribune and WGN television network, to emerge from bankruptcy. The five members of the FCC, three Democrats—including Chairman Genachowski—and two Republicans, are not required to hold public meetings or solicit any input on the changes, and there are no such meetings currently planned.
Josh Stearns speculates on FreePress.net that the rules are being changed to accommodate the purchase of the Tribune or the Los Angeles Times by Rupert Murdoch, who already owns several news stations in the Chicago and LA markets.
American media is already highly concentrated among small number of corporations, but under the current rules ownership is, hypothetically, restricted by type of media. Thus, at its height, Clear Channel Communications owned over 1,200 radio stations nationwide and is permitted to own up to eight stations in a single market. Clear Channel was compelled to sell off its local broadcast TV stations to avoid regulatory conflicts.
Loosening the cross-ownership rules could unleash a wave of mergers and acquisitions within the media industry, as companies seek to control newspapers, television stations, and radio stations. These combined enterprises would likely consolidate their news departments, reducing the already severely limited options for most people to get information about their communities.
The prospect of cross-ownership of newspapers with radio or TV is particularly troublesome, since all but the largest cities are served by only one newspaper. The owner of both the single local newspaper and an associated TV station would have undue influence in setting the agenda of news coverage and investigative reporting across media.
Former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin advanced similar plans in 2007, but a bill co-sponsored by then-Senator Obama blocked the changes, building his reputation as a pro-regulation liberal. With President Obama now safely reelected, his administration is fast-tracking the same rules in an effort to “streamline and modernize” ownership regulation. In the last few days, some Senate Democrats have complained to Chairman Genachowski, but have limited their objections to calls for greater public debate of the changes, rather than opposing media consolidation itself.
A number of civil rights groups, including the National Organization of Women, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and Asian and Hispanic interest groups, voiced their opposition to the proposed changes at a press conference on November 28. Predictably, they focused on issues of identity politics, especially the relatively small number of minority-owned newspapers and stations. The argument that media would automatically be improved by having more African-American or female CEOs leading for-profit media companies sidesteps the central question of whether those companies cover issues that affect the local population. At no point does the identity politics lobby concern itself with the democratic issue of a free and independent press, only the superficial characteristics of the multi-millionaires who are to oversee news production.
The advocacy group Free Press has built its campaign against the rules changes by stoking fears among its liberal supporters that right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch would be able to further expand his media empire. Murdoch’s FOX News cable station and local broadcast stations are seen as advancing Republican candidates and causes, but there is little substantive difference between the coverage by his networks and others on critical issues affecting the working class population, such as US military operations, austerity, and the so-called “fiscal cliff”
According to the Radio & Television Business Report, the industry expects that the FCC proposal will see little serious opposition like that which it encountered under the Bush administration. In part, this has been attributed to the ongoing decline in the print newspaper industry and sell-offs across the local television industry.
In October, the FCC passed a little publicized order changing a requirement of cable companies to allow free access to local channels. The FCC previously required cable providers to follow a “must-carry” rule, providing access to local broadcast stations. This has prevented cable companies from encrypting the local channels. The new rule (FCC 12-126) allows digital-only carriers to encrypt everything. Industry news site ecommercetimes.com states that the new rule cuts the cost of “truck-rolls… improves security and stops theft of certain non-must-carry channels.” Companies can simply activate services remotely with fewer staff.ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — The United States risks major damage to its relationship with NATO ally Turkey if the US includes Kurdish forces in the fight to retake Raqqa, the Islamic State group’s de-facto capital, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Thursday.
Turkey and the US are locked in a heated dispute about US plans to liberate Raqqa, with Turkey insisting its own military and allied forces in Syria should mount the fight and that US-backed Syrian Kurds should be excluded.
Though the US has been hoping to include both Turkey and the battle-hardened Kurdish forces, Yildirim insisted Turkey wouldn’t be part of any operation including the Syrian Kurdish force known as the YPG, considered by Ankara to be terrorists who threaten Turkey’s security.
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“If the US were to prefer terrorist organizations over Turkey in the fight against IS, that would be their own decision, but that wouldn’t be something we would consent” to, Yildirim told The Associated Press.
The prime minister also took issue with President Donald Trump’s use of the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” and said “we would be actually happy if our friends were to be a bit more cautious about this issue.”
In an earlier exchange with visiting foreign journalists, Yildirim said ties between the two countries would be significantly undermined, though he declined to name any specific steps Turkey — a member of the US-led coalition fighting IS — might take in response. In the past, Turkey has hinted it could cut off access to Incirlik air base, home to coalition warplanes.
Though no decision has been formally announced, the US has been sending signals that it is inclined to rely on the Kurdish forces, who have proven the most effective local force at battling IS. US officials have said that Turkey, which has troops in Syria and is aiding other Syrian opposition fighters, has thus far failed to show that it has a force sufficiently large and capable to liberate Raqqa, the largest remaining IS stronghold.
Yildirim insisted Turkey has proven its mettle, pointing to victories by its Operation Euphrates Shield in liberating northern Syrian towns of Jarabulus and al-Bab. Yet in al-Bab, in particular, Turkish troops and allied Syrian fighters suffered heavy casualties in a grueling three-month fight to liberate the city from IS.
“They know what our capabilities are,” Yildirim said. “We’ve exchanged military info, and diplomatically speaking this message was also passed along.”
Turkey views the main Kurdish force — the People’s Protection Units, or YPG — to be terrorists because of their ties to Turkey’s outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which the US also considers to be a terrorist group. But the top American commander for the fight against IS has said he’s seen “zero evidence” the YPG has posed a recent threat to Turkey.
Yildirim said Turkey is still awaiting a US decision on Raqqa, and there are signs such a decision could come soon. The top US, Russian and Turkish generals met this week to discuss Syria, and the US disclosed Wednesday it has deployed a couple hundred Marines into Syria with heavy artillery in preparation for the Raqqa operation.
Frustrated by former president Barack Obama’s approach in the final years of his term, Turkey has been cautious in its approach to the new Trump administration while voicing optimism that relations with the US will improve. Yildirim declined to criticize Trump’s revised order temporarily banning immigration from six majority-Muslim nations — Turkey is not one of them — but did suggest Trump should cease linking Islam to terrorism in his public comments.
He suggested that when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has his first meeting with Trump, he would raise objections to Trump’s use of phrases like “radical Islamic terrorism.”
“This is simply divisive language,” Yildirim said. “Because if you mention one particular religion in the same sentence as terrorism, then the followers of that faith — which in this case is 2 billion people — they will be disturbed, and this is not the right thing to do.”
Copyright 2017 The Associated PressSAN FRANCISCO -- Ben Revere stood in the on-deck circle waiting for his second at-bat of the first inning and watched as pitcher Carl Pavano went for a major league-record ninth straight hit to start the game.
"He tried to break it," Revere said, chuckling. "He was hacking. I loved it."
Pavano struck out swinging.
That was about the only pitch from Madison Bumgarner they missed.
Revere had two hits and two RBIs to highlight an eight-run first inning, and the surging Twins tied a major league record by opening with eight consecutive hits in a 9-2 victory over the San Francisco Giants on Tuesday night.
"We got hits. We got plenty of hits. And they kept coming," Twins manager Ron Gardenhire said.
Luke Hughes had a two-run single and four others drove in at least one run in the first to chase Bumgarner (3-9) before some fans even found their seats at cozy AT&T Park. The left-hander recorded just one out.
Pavano (5-5) scattered nine hits in eight innings to help Minnesota win its eighth straight. The Giants have lost five in a row and fell a half-game behind Arizona for first in the NL West.
Minnesota's blazing start was as swift as it was stunning.
In the first eight batters, each single was followed by a double. The hard-hit pitches came early in the count -- 22 of Bumgarner's 25 pitches were for strikes -- and were sprayed in every direction.
Joe Mauer, Michael Cuddyer, Delmon Young and Danny Valencia also had run-scoring hits in the opening inning. If not for Pavano batting in the NL park, Minnesota's streak might have continued.
After Revere followed Pavano with a double, Bumgarner was replaced by Guillermo Mota, who tossed 4 2/3 scoreless innings and hit a double. Bumgarner's night lasted all of about 15 minutes.
"It was pretty pathetic," he said.
About the only bright spots for the defending World Series champions came far too late: Eli Whiteside homered in the seventh and Emmanuel Burriss hit an RBI single in the eighth to snap San Francisco's 0-for-31 skid with runners in scoring position.
Pavano admitted he didn't have his best stuff -- but he didn't need it.
"They were a little anxious," he said. "They're trying to get the lead back. Eight runs is a big deficit. You tend to try to do too much, which worked in my favor."
Bumgarner's ERA for what was by far the worst start of his career was 216.00, and his season ERA went from 3.21 to 4.06 after starting the game with the third-worst run support in the NL. No matter who starts, the Giants have scored eight runs or more in only five games all season.
So it was basically over before a Giants player came to the plate.
Alexi Casilla also homered in the ninth for the Twins. Not that they needed any extra support.
The last major league team to start a game with eight straight hits was the Chicago Cubs against Pittsburgh on Sept. 8, 2009, according to information the Elias Sports Bureau provided to the Giants. The Twins also were the first American League team to open with eight straight hits since the New York Yankees did it against Baltimore on Sept. 25, 1990.
"That's a first for me to see it quite go like that," Giants manager Bruce Bochy said. "That's hard to do. Madison's been throwing the ball so well, and even though he's off it's still hard to do. I don't care if you're throwing batting practice out there.
"We just couldn't stop it."
Game notes
Giants LHP Barry Zito threw a two-hit shutout in a rehab start for Triple-A Fresno against Salt Lake.... Bochy and Gardenhire have been friends since they were teammates for the New York Mets' former Triple-A affiliate in Tidewater, Va., from 1981-82. Bochy even rented Gardenhire's house in the summer of 1992 while managing Double-A Wichita. "He overcharged me," Bochy said, chuckling. "He still won't pay me back."... Twins 1B Justin Morneau will have a cast removed from his left wrist on Friday or Saturday.... Twins closer Joe Nathan was scheduled to throw one inning on Tuesday and Wednesday for Triple-A Rochester.Samsung appears to be readying a new Windows 10 tablet. While recent leaks have suggested we’ll see a successor to the Windows-powered Galaxy TabPro, Samsung released a “Book Settings” app in the Windows Store at the weekend which includes references to a separate unannounced Samsung Galaxy Book. The app is designed to provide additional settings for a stylus, the AMOLED display, the ability to add a pattern unlock (like Android), and a battery life extender.
MSPoweruser spotted the Windows 10 app, and notes that Samsung also holds a 2012 trademark for Galaxy Book that covers smartphones and tablets. The presence of a stylus and the book branding could indicate this particular Windows 10 device is more of a regular tablet than the company’s Surface-like TabPro convertible. Samsung is holding a press event at Mobile World Congress next Sunday, and we’re expecting to hear more about the company’s Galaxy plans for 2017.On the second day of the Miami Open quarterfinals, fans were treated to two three-set epics. In the first match, we saw Tomas Berdych struggle valiantly to overcome his extremely lopsided head to head record against Roger Federer, only to succumb with a gut-wrenching double fault. In the second, which pitted Nick Kyrgios vs Alexander Zverev, both players were gloriously free of mental scar tissue. The match, won by Kyrgios 6-4 6-7(9) 6-3, was fresh and uninhibited. We observed shifts in strategy, mental meltdowns and come-ups, and coruscating winners. While the match was full of growing pains — smashed rackets, abused line judges — this was must-watch tennis. In |
25,000 pages of material.
Australian Federal Police (AFP) Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan said the arrest came after a tip off from the FBI.
"The search warrants were the culmination of an eight month investigation which began following information provided by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation," he said.
The Assistant Commissioner said they had acted because there was concern the man was about to make another transaction to the man in Syria.
Police said they believed the man was acting alone.
There is no information or intelligence to indicate that this man was involved in planning an attack. AFP Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan
The AFP said it had conducted seven search warrants in Seabrook, Kealba, Meadow Heights, Broadmeadows and Flemington, in raids that began at 6:45 am (AEST).
The police also said the raids were not related to last week's stabbing of two police officers and subsequent shooting of Numan Haider, and no firearms or explosives had been seized.
"There is no information or intelligence to indicate that this man was involved in planning an attack, nor there are any known links to the 18-year-old man involved in last week's Endeavour Hills incident," the Assistant Commissioner said.
"There can be no doubt that law enforcement and security agencies are currently operating in a complex environment and there has been heightened operational activity in the last 12 months."
Assistant Commissioner Gaughan said police had confiscated electronic evidence as part of the raids.
"There was a large amount of electronic evidence seized during the search warrants and that will be analysed by our investigators in the coming months to get more evidence in relation to the commission of this offence," he said.
"For privacy reasons we won't go into the details of the background of the gentleman involved this morning."
The Assistant Commissioner said this was the first time police were aware "someone has sponsored someone to go and fight".
The raids came less than three weeks after Australia's terrorism alert level was raised to high, meaning an attack is likely, though authorities said they did not know of a specific threat.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott said security agencies had recommended the increased threat level because of the number of Australians "fighting with and supporting" terrorist groups in the Middle East.
Earlier this month more than 800 police conducted synchronised raids of houses and vehicles in Sydney and Brisbane.
About eight plain and uniformed officers, mainly from the AFP, as well as a sniffer dog, were involved in Tuesday's operation at Seabrook.
Death threats sent to terror suspect's family
Forensic officers arrived at the Seabrook property, on Point Cook Road, just before 11:00 am (AEST).
Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner Graham Ashton said the latest raids were conducted in a low-key manner to reassure the public there was no risk to community safety.
"I want to reinforce the fact that there was no direct threat to any community safety from this operation conducted this morning," he said.
This is not about any religion. This is about criminals undertaking criminal acts. Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner Graham Ashton
"This relates to the funding of overseas terrorist activity where we will be alleging that this individual in Melbourne has been orchestrating a process to fund and contribute funds to the overseas organisations that are prescribed terrorism organisations."
He said the family of Numan Haider had received death threats following his death last week.
"That was particularly disconcerting to us and certainly very disconcerting to the family involved," he said.
"This is an innocent family, they weren't involved in this investigation.
"They are in the process of grieving and they need to be left alone to grieve."
Deputy commissioner Ashton urged the community to act responsibly regarding the terror threat.
"We have also had examples of some racially motivated crimes occurring in the days since last week," he said.
"I want to reinforce what I reinforced last week, that this is not about any religion.
"This is about criminals undertaking criminal acts."
Topics: terrorism, police, flemington-3031, kealba-3021, meadow-heights-3048, broadmeadows-3047
First postedHarvard students often compete in the classroom, but for at least a few hours this weekend, only one thing helped them make the grade—their looks.
Just over a month after two Harvard alums competed in the Miss America Pageant, a website created by Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06 gave students a chance to rate their peers using ID photos taken from online House facebooks.
“Were we let in for our looks? No. Will we be judged on them? Yes,” proclaimed the site, which Zuckerberg has now taken offline.
Zuckerberg, a computer science concentratror, said he created the site—www.facemash.com—by hacking into House online facebooks and compiling ID photos onto his website, allowing viewers to vote for the “hotter” of two randomly chosen photos or rate the looks of students in a particular House against fellow-residents.
A link to the site was forwarded on many House and student group e-mail lists over the weekend—including the Institute of Politics (IOP), Fuerza Latina and the Association of Black Harvard Women (ABHW)—prompting both praise and criticism across campus.
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But by Sunday night, outrage from individuals and student groups led Zuckerberg, who said he never expected such widespread publicity, to shut down the site for good.
By that time, Zuckerberg said, there had been 450 visitors to the site who had voted on their peers’ photos at least 22,000 times.
“I don’t see how it can go back online. Issues about violating people’s privacy don’t seem to be surmountable. The primary concern is hurting people’s feelings,” Zuckerberg said. “I’m not willing to risk insulting anyone.”
Leyla R. Bravo ’05, president of Fuerza Latina, said she sent a link to the website out over the group’s e-mail list to let people know about what she viewed as a problem.
“I heard from a friend and I was kind of outraged,” she said. “I thought people should be aware.”
Both Fuerza Latina and ABHW received apology e-mails from Zuckerberg yesterday.
In the letter, Zuckerberg wrote that he was mainly interested in the computer science behind the venture.
“I understood that some parts were still a little sketchy and I wanted some more time to think about whether or not this was really appropriate to release to the Harvard community,” he wrote.
According to Zuckerberg, it was his intention to only show a few friends to get their opinion on the site, but someone forwarded the link to a friend and the chain of e-mails continued from there.
“When I returned from a meeting at around 10 p.m.,” he wrote in the letter, “traffic was out of hand, and after thinking about the best course of action, I shut down the site around 10:30.”25 Easter Eggs and References You Might Have Missed In The Season 3 Premiere Of 'Sherlock'
By Joanna Robinson | Lists | January 19, 2014 |
Here are 25 facts, easter eggs and allusions for the BBC Sherlock episode "The Empty Hearse" which was based (loosely) on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's story "The Empty House." This article only contains spoilers for and discussion of this, the first episode of season/series three. Be a lamb and refrain from spoiling the next two episodes in the comments. By the by, if you already know all of these facts, well hark at you. A regular Sherlock Holmes you are.
1. It's All In The Family: Those handsome folks playing Sherlock and Mycroft's parents? Those are Benedict Cumberbatch's actual parents.
2. Should We Make "Mumberbatch" A Thing? No, Right? Right.: Benedict's mom, Wanda Ventham, was an actress on a sci-fi series in the 1970s. Get a load of this.
3. You'd Be Disappointed No Matter What: In the books, Holmes explains to Watson how he survived. In the show, we don't get a satisfactory and concrete explanation. You mean Moffat and Gatiss didnt want to commit themselves to one scenario? I wonder why...
4. They Should Put That On A T-Shirt: They did. You can buy an "I Don't Shave For Sherlock Holmes" shirt over at the BBC shop. Because of course you can.
5. Sure, Let's Call It Japanese: In the original Doyle stories, Sherlock kills Moriarty by hurling him over the Reichenbach Falls using a made up Doyle-ian martial art: "Bartitsu." In this episode, when explaining the 13 scenarios available to him on the roof, Sherlock starts to tell about one featuring "Japanese wrestling moves."
6. MONKEY GLANDS!!!: This amazing non sequitur is a reference to the Holmes story "The Adventure of the Creeping Man."
7. Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad?: Our Big Bad this week was rather wimpy (though the end of the episode hints at something bigger). Lord Moran is an allusion to Sebastian Moran, who is a famous Holmes antagonist in the books and is, weirdly, played by Vinnie Jones over on Elementary. You can see the similarities, right?
8. The Giant Rat Of Sumatra: There's a famous Holmes adventure (alluded to, never written out) called The Giant Rat Of Sumatra. Holmes calls Moran "The Big Rat," and his lost tube carriage? Why it's waiting to explode at the half-finished Sumatra station (a real thing), making Moran The Giant Rat Of Sumatra.
9. Calm Down Mrs Hudson: Actually, though Una Stubb's performance here may have seemed a bit camp, the book described Mrs. Hudson's reaction to seeing Sherlock Holmes alive as "violent hysterics." And that, my friends, is why we were treated to Una's Uvula.
10. Eliminate The Impossible: "Elementary, my dear Watson" is not something the fictional Sherlock Holmes ever said. His most famous phrase from the books is actually a bit lengthier: "When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." For whatever reason, Cumberbatch sort of rushed through the show's version.
11. Speaking Of Keeping It In The Family: The lovely Mary Morstan is played by Amanda Abbington, who is Martin Freeman's real-life partner. Please read this adorable story about how they met.
12. Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her: And while we're on the subject of Mary, here's everything Sherlock deduced about her: Cat lover, Clever, Liar, Bakes own bread, Size 12 (cheeky), Disillusioned Lib Dem, Only child, Shortsighted, Linguist, Guardian, Part time, Nurse, Romantic, Secret tattoo (cheekier), Appendix scar.
13. Get it? BIRDS?!: In the book, rather than disguise himself as a waiter, Holmes dresses as an elderly collector who has on his person books about tree worship, birding and the Holy War. Compare that with Dr. Watson's patient, who had porn that dealt with tree worship, the Holy War and, oh yes, British birds.
14. It Ages You: Could Watson's lovely mustache...
... be a reference to the famous TV Watsons who came before him? Or (more likely) a reference to the original Sidney Paget drawings?
15. What's In A Name?: The cryptic text that Mary gets refers to "John Or James?" In the books, Mary once refers to John Watson as James. This was an error on Doyle's part.
16. What's In A Name? Part Deux: Sherlock is constantly getting Lestrade's name wrong. In the books, Lestrade is only ever referred to as G. Lestrade. Moffat and Gatiss chose to call him Greg, but Sherlock has other ideas.
17. The Missing Carriage: Though not strictly a Sherlock Holmes story, there is a Doyle story called "The Lost Special" about a train that goes missing. And, if you haven't yet, do yourself a favor and listen to these Sherlock Holmes train stories (not written by Doyle) read by Benedict Cumberbatch. Eargasm, I promise you.
18. The Moving Finger: Could this be a reference to Martin Freeman's fondness for flipping the bird?
19. Who Was In On It?: In the books, Sherlock's only accomplice is Mycroft. In the show, his network of accomplices is much larger... and dirtier. This doesn't make a ton of sense to me. Why is it important to keep only Watson in the dark? Is he really that terrible at keeping a secret?
20. The Speckled Blonde: Close inspection of the blog post Mary is reading reveals it to be an adaptation of the famous Holmes case "The Adventure of the Speckled Band." You can read the BBC's version online here as "The Speckled Blonde." However, the bit she reads aloud to Watson is from "The Sign of the Four," the story that first introduced the character of Mary Morstan.
21. Piss Pot: The case Molly and Sherlock crack about a man posing as his daughter's online boyfriend is from "The Case of Identity."
22. Wait Is This A Doctor Who Joke?: The scenario Holmes and Mycroft eventually carry out is called "Lazarus." This, of course, is a biblical allusion, but is it also a reference to the Doctor Who episode "The Lazarus Experiment"? Mark Gatiss not only wrote that episode, he starred as Dr. Lazarus.
23. Okay This Is DEFINITELY A Doctor Who Joke: That's a TARDIS and you'll never convince me otherwise.
24. The Best And The Wisest Man?: When he thinks they are about to die, Watson tearfully tells Holmes he's "the best and the wisest man I have ever known," which is a famous line from the Doyle story "The Final Problem." Of course, in this instance, Holmes is being the biggest asshole any of us have ever known.
25. Metro: Sherlock's trip to his "mind palace" when trying to suss out the problem of the missing tube carriage is an allusion to the original (and sadly lost) version of Berlin's music video for their smash 1983 hit "The Metro."*
*This is not true, but WTF was that sequence?
← Seriously Creepy List: 9 Posters Scarier Than the Movies They Are Advertising
Seth Meyers Sets 'SNL' Quit Date, Plus More 'SNL,' Leno, and Fallon Updates →The world's largest food and beverage companies may be profitable, but according to Oxfam International their practices are helping to destroy not only the natural resources that support a global food system but the lives of the people they depend on most: their employees and their customers.
In a new effort called Behind the Brand, part of their ongoing GROW campaign to fix the broken food system, Oxfam has singled out the ten largest food processing companies—Associated British Foods (ABF), Coca Cola, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, Pepsico and Unilever—to make a singular statement about the failure of these behemoths to fulfill their social and environmental responsibilities.
According to Oxfam, these “Big 10”—that together generate $1 billion-a-day in profit—are failing millions of people in developing countries who supply land, labor, water and commodities needed to make their products.
“It’s time these companies take more responsibility for their immense influence on poor people’s lives,” said Jeremy Hobbs, Executive Director for Oxfam International. “Eighty percent of the world’s hungry people work in food production and these companies employ millions of people in developing countries to grow their ingredients. They control hundreds of the world’s most popular brands and have the economic, social and political clout to make a real and lasting difference to the world’s poor and hungry.”
As The Guardian reports:
The charity's Behind the Brands report compiled a scorecard, rating the "big 10" food companies in seven categories: the transparency of their supply chains and operations, how they ensure the rights of workers, how they protect women's rights, the management of water and land use, their policies to reduce the impacts of climate change and how they ensure the rights of the farmers who grow their ingredients. SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Help Keep Common Dreams Alive Our progressive news model only survives if those informed and inspired by this work support our efforts
The company with the lowest score – just 13 out of 70 – was ABF. It scored just one mark out of 10 in its treatment of land, women and climate change, while the highest scores it managed to achieve was three out of 10, in relation to workers and transparency. In joint second-lowest place were Kellogg's and General Mills, which owns Old El Paso, Häagen-Dazs and Nature Valley, with both scoring 16 out of 70.
In the campaign's first targeted action, Oxfam will target Nestle, Mondelez and Mars for their failure to address inequality faced by women who grow cocoa for their chocolate products. As part of that effort, the group released a series with first-hand accounts which explore the inequality that women cocoa growers face. And the campaign is urging people to use their own voices and social networks to speak out against the food giants.
“No brand is too big to listen to its customers,” said Hobbs. “If enough people urge the big food companies to do what is right, they have no choice but to listen. By contacting companies on Twitter and Facebook, or signing a petition to their CEO, consumers can do their part to help bring lasting change in our broken food system by showing companies their customers expect them to operate responsibly.”
The ‘Behind the Brands’ campaign also released this list of ways that the "Big 10" fail to meet their commitments:
While some of the “Big 10” have publicly committed to women's rights, none have committed to eliminating discrimination against women throughout their supply chains.
, none have committed to eliminating discrimination against women throughout their supply chains. None of the companies have adequate policies to protect local communities from land and water grabs, despite all of them sourcing commodities plagued by land rights violations, such as palm oil, soy and sugar. Not one company has declared ‘zero tolerance’ against land grabs in their supply chains.
, despite all of them sourcing commodities plagued by land rights violations, such as palm oil, soy and sugar. Not one company has declared ‘zero tolerance’ against land grabs in their supply chains. All ten companies are overly secretive about their agricultural supply chains, making their claims of ‘sustainability’ and ‘social responsibility’ difficult to verify. Nestle and Unilever are most open about the countries they source from, but no company is providing enough information about their suppliers.
, making their claims of ‘sustainability’ and ‘social responsibility’ difficult to verify. Nestle and Unilever are most open about the countries they source from, but no company is providing enough information about their suppliers. Companies are generally increasing their overall water efficiency but most have failed to put policies in place to limit their impact on local water sources. Only Pepsi has publicly recognized water as a human right and committed to consult local communities. Nestle has developed guidelines for its suppliers to manage water and was ranked top for policies on water.
. Only Pepsi has publicly recognized water as a human right and committed to consult local communities. Nestle has developed guidelines for its suppliers to manage water and was ranked top for policies on water. All of the companies have taken steps to reduce direct emissions, but only five – Mondelez, Danone, Unilever, Coca-Cola and Mars – publicly report on agricultural emissions associated with their products. Unilever alone has committed to halve its greenhouse gas footprint by 2020. None have yet developed policies to help farmers in their supply chains to build resilience to climate change.
, but only five – Mondelez, Danone, Unilever, Coca-Cola and Mars – publicly report on agricultural emissions associated with their products. Unilever alone has committed to halve its greenhouse gas footprint by 2020. None have yet developed policies to help farmers in their supply chains to build resilience to climate change. None have publicly committed to pay a fair price to farmers or fair business arrangements with them across all agricultural operations. Only Unilever – which is top-ranked for its dealings with small-scale farmers – has specific supplier guidelines to address some key issues faced by farmers.
___________________________________________It’s that time of year again when you get annoyed by the sight of bell-ringers representing an organization that hates you. Yes, it’s the annual appearance of the Salvation Army, and they’re hoping to trick you into thinking that they’ve turned over a new leaf. Well, they haven’t.
The S.A. has a page on their site right now called “Debunking the Myth of LGBT Discrimination,” which is all about how awesome they are and always have been to gays. “The Salvation Army believes that all people are equal, regardless of sexual orientation or any other factor, including race, gender and ethnicity,” the page says. They point out that they serve, hire, and happily accept money from LGBT people.
Yeah, that’s great. Here are some facts that they conveniently omit:
So if you’re wondering whether it’s okay to support the Salvation Army, let us make it clear for you:
IT IS NEVER OKAY TO SUPPORT THE SALVATION ARMY.
There are plenty of other organizations that need your money. Here’s a list. If you see Salvation Army employees, report them.Fandom | Subscribe Posted by Michael Pinto on Aug 28, 2012 in Anime
Recently a friend dropped an interest factoid onto my Facebook page: Thirty years ago today on August 28th, 1982 as part of the Creation Summer Expo*NY comic book con there was a mini-convention held inside which was called the Star Blazers Mini Con. Up until that point there were gatherings of anime fans in New York City thanks to the local chapter of the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization, but this was the first time that anime fandom found a place inside of a larger convention. My memory is fuzzy but the event lasted two full days, had about 100 people hanging around at any time and featured a mix of videotapes being played along with panel discussions.
The thing I remember the most is being shocked at how many anime fans could gather in one location. Most of us kept in touch by writing letters and publishing fanzines, but it was a very isolated life for an anime fan back at the dawn of the 80s. Star Blazers was the most popular show at that moment and brought in quite a few fans who joined their older peers who grew up with the likes of Speed Racer and Astroboy. Keep in mind that when this convention took place the breakthrough show Robotech was still three years away in the future. And most fans got their anime via videotapes from friends of friends of friends who had pen-pals in Japan.
The video highlight of the convention was a showing of the film Arrivederci Yamato in Japanese (people would cheer each time a character was killed since you couldn’t see that on American TV). So you may ask how did we understand what was going on in the film? Well there was one fan who had the job of standing by the television set and giving a description of the critical dialog. But the thing I remember the most was seeing so many friends in person who I had only known by letters and phone calls. I didn’t realize it at the time but it was a real magical moment for me.
And whenever I go to an anime convention today, even a very small one — I’m always amazed that off to the side or hanging out in the lobby you’ll see at least hundred anime fans hanging out together as if that were nothing special. I have to tell you that if I had a time machine and any of us anime otaku from the early 80s could have seen anime fandom today we would have had our mind’s blown away.
My special thanks to James Kaposztas who reminded me of this anniversary. And not enough anime fans know this, but he is the guy who would go on to invent the anime music video just a few short years after Star Blazers Mini Con.
For more samples of The Star Blazers Fandom Report please visit this page at starblazers.com.By Edward McAllister
NEW YORK (Reuters) - It gives users super human strength, makes them impervious to pain and can be bought for as little as $2 across New York. It can also kill, police say.
Illegal synthetic marijuana, or "weaponised" marijuana as police are calling it, is spreading across New York, particularly the city's homeless population in search of a cheap high but who often wind up hospitalized or dead.
Little is understood about the drug, also known as "K-2" or "spice." A spike in hospitalizations this year, some deaths, and camera footage of crazed and violent users have prompted police to act.
"The synthetic marijuana issue has been one of great and growing concern here in New York," said NYPD Commissioner William Bratton at a press conference on Tuesday in which he also released monthly crime statistics. "You are going to see a lot more of it in the short term."
Synthetic marijuana refers to herbal mixtures sold in small packets that often contain shredded plants and chemicals that when smoked can cause hallucinations, paranoia and even cardiac arrest. A federal ban on compounds found in synthetic marijuana products was enacted in 2012 and it is illegal to sell it in New York State.
One video streamed at Tuesday's press conference showed a naked man, who police say was high on synthetic marijuana, ranting and smashing a hole in a wooden fence with his fist before being pepper sprayed and wrestled to the ground by a group of officers. In another video a man, also unclothed, crouched in the middle of a street, delirious, screaming at the ground.
Between April 1 and July 31, more than 1,900 people were admitted to hospitals in New York State after taking the substance, the NYPD said. One man high on the drug used his hands to stop an electric saw being used by police to open a door, Bratton said, leaving him covered in blood.
Police are building a picture of how the substance is sold and who is using.
Raids on corner stores and other outlets, which have been illegally selling synthetic marijuana in packages for $2 to $5, have helped slow use.
Police in New York and elsewhere have been issued with information about the drug and how to deal with users, including calling for extra backup.
(Reporting by Edward McAllister; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)Steve Watson & Paul Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, May 19, 2008
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) plans to build three new internment camps on both coasts and on the Southwestern border, each of which will house up to 50 men and women in addition to 150 children involved in immigration cases.
The federal government is accepting bids on the contracts from county governments or private companies to build and run the "family detention centers".
The LA Times reports:
The agency calls for minimum-security residential facilities that would provide a "least restrictive, nonsecure setting" and provide schooling for children, recreational activities and access to religious services. The proposal… says the contractor should structure programs "designed to prevent escapes" and should provide a plan that "monitors resident movement and physically counts residents."
The ICE already runs two of the camps, one of which hit the headlines at the end of 2006 after residents in Taylor Texas held protests outside the facility.
The T. Don Hutto detention center, which is privately run by a company called Corrections Corp. of America, currently interns political asylum seekers who came to the U.S. on legal visas. Most of them are families including pregnant women and children who have never been accused of any wrongdoing but are forced to endure squalid conditions inside literal internment camps.
In 2004 the facility was on the verge of being shutdown due to lack of occupancy but new immigration policies, allied to the burgeoning growth of the prison industry and future plans to detain American citizens on masse, have revived the potential scope of the camp, and a new contract to intern 600 individuals was finalized with immigration authorities in December 2005.
Fury was sparked and charges of overcrowding and poor conditions leveled when it was revealed that an estimated 645 people were being held in the facility which has only 500 or so beds.
Other residents were horrified to witness children playing behind giant mesh barbed wire fences in the camp "playground". When the center opened, children were given hospital scrubs to wear, forced to use communal bathrooms, forbidden to have toys and allowed only one hour of recreation per day, attorneys involved in a legal challenge said.
However, while some residents held vigil protests, locals said that other residents of the town were completely oblivious to the fact that the camp even existed, never mind its function and purpose.
The protests have since died down yet Hutto remains open. A court settlement decreed that children be allowed to wear pajamas, move freely around the center and bring toys into their rooms. Individual bathrooms have also been installed and metal doors have been turned into murals. A swathe of cosmetic alterations that do nothing to counter the facility’s status as a fully fledged internment camp in America.
Watch the following short film on the internment center by Matt Gossage and Lily Keber, one of the only public reports on a subject that has otherwise been entirely censored by the corporate news media.
"After the horrible conditions that were revealed at the Hutto facility, it is very disappointing that the government appears to want to produce more immigration prisons for families and children," Ahilan Arulanantham, a staff attorney at the Southern California office of the ACLU told the LA Times.
Suspicions will undoubtedly be cast as to whether the new facilities are part of a wider agenda to set up a network of internment camps that will be used to forcibly detain American citizens under emergency provisions. The pretext for this was set in the summer of 2004, when thousands of protesters in New York for the Republican National Convention were forcibly detained, some for over 24 hours, without charge in an asbestos infested disused bus facility known as Pier 57, or "Guantanamo on the Hudson" as other labeled it.
During the Iran Contra hearings in the 80’s, previously classified information came to light about Continuity of Government (CoG) procedures in times of national crisis. The masterminds behind these programs were Oliver North, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and the Rex-84 ‘readiness exercise’ discussed the plan to round up immigrants and detain them in internment camps in the context of uncontrolled population movements across the Mexican border.
The real agenda was to use the cover of rounding up immigrants and illegal aliens as a smokescreen for targeting political dissidents and American citizens. From 1967 to 1971 the FBI kept a list of persons to be rounded up as subversive, dubbed the "ADEX" list.
Since 9/11 shadow government and CoG programs that were outlined in Rex-84 have been activated, including mass warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. The internment camp program is being readied for execution following the announcement on January 24th that Halliburton subsidiary KBR (formerly Brown and Root) had been awarded a $385 million contingency contract by the Department of Homeland Security to build detention camps.
A much discussed and circulated report, the Pentagon’s Civilian Inmate Labor Program, has recently been updated and the revision details a "template for developing agreements" between the Army and corrections facilities for the use of civilian inmate labor on Army installations."
The pretext given for which the camps would be used as reported by the New York Times was stated as, "an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space."
Following the news first given wide attention by this website, that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root had been awarded a $385 million dollar contract by Homeland Security to construct detention and processing facilities in the event of a national emergency, the Alternet website put together an alarming report that collated all the latest information on plans to initiate internment of political subversives and Muslims after the next major terror attack in the U.S.
The article highlighted the disturbing comments of Sen. Lindsey Graham, who encouraged torture supporting Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to target, "Fifth Columnists" Americans who show disloyalty and sympathize with "the enemy," whoever that enemy may be.
Respected author Peter Dale Scott speculated that the "detention centers could be used to detain American citizens if the Bush administration were to declare martial law."
Daniel Ellsberg, former Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense, called the plan, "preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters. They’ve already done this on a smaller scale, with the ‘special registration’ detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo."
George Bush has declared himself to be dictator and to have supreme power over and above the limitations of the US Constitution. Bush administration officials like Alberto Gonzales have declared Bush to be "above the law." White House advisors are openly discussing the legality of crushing a child’s testicles as part of the war on terror. Preparation for the internment of thousands of Americans who are ‘disloyal’ in times of emergency are afoot.
Under the enemy combatant designation anyone at the behest of the US government, even if they are a US citizen, can be kidnapped and placed in an internment facility forever without trial. Jose Padilla, an American citizen, spent over four years in a Navy brig before being brought to trial.
One of the last acts of Congress in 2006 was to send President Bush a bill that establishes a $38 million program of National Park Service grants to preserve Japanese POW internment camps in Hawaii, California, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Idaho. Is this really in the name of historical interest or does it dovetail with programs on the books to intern hundreds of thousands of dissidents in a time of crisis?One of the most exciting things about training camp is watching for surprises. Even for a team like the Dallas Cowboys, where outside the defensive line the starters are mostly known, there always seem to be a few players that rise up and exceed expectations to make the roster. But for every one of them, there is usually another player that most predicted would make the team that has to leave.
A few days ago, OCC took a look at three different roster projections for Dallas, from two very experienced beat reporters and one non-professional (but devilishly charming) blogger. It was noticeable that there was not a lot of variation between the three. However, it is highly unlikely that these are going to hold up through the end of training camp. That is not how things usually work. Injuries can always play a role, but we are all hoping those are minimal. Despite that, there are almost certainly going to be a few names that get cut from the team that will be at least somewhat surprising. Here are a few that may be the unlucky ones this season. (Note: This is not meant to be a prediction that any of these players will actually fail to make the team, just a list of some at least plausible scenarios that might lead to that happening.)
This is maybe not that big a surprise to many, since he was left off one of the projections, but given that he was taken in the second round and is still on his rookie contract, many would be surprised to see him lose out, especially given that there is not a lot of really strong competition at the position outside the obvious top two of Jason Witten and James Hanna. The problem is that he has never come close to living up to his draft pedigree. It seems to be a combination of the inability of the coaching staff to find a really good way to use him and his own failure to capitalize on some of the opportunities he does get. Whatever the cause, this may be the year the team decides to move on from him. There is additional pressure in that the team may not want to keep four tight ends so as to use a roster spot elsewhere. If Escobar would be cut, it might be done as an injury settlement, since he is still recovering, but that would largely be a bit of camouflage.
Hitchens would be the bigger surprise given how well he performed his rookie year, but he seemed to regress last season. Further, if one linebacker would not make the team from the projections, most would expect it to be Andrew Gachkar or Mark Nzeocha. But here the risk is clearly someone breaking out in preseason combined with Hitchens or Wilson not having a good showing. An underrated threat may be Deon King, a small school player who is described as a tackling machine. If he beats the odds and pushes someone with experience off the roster, then Hitchens and Wilson better be putting their best on the field to make sure it isn’t one of them. The team hates to give up on fourth round picks so early, but the team is really focused on going as far as they can this year, and drastic measures may be called for.
If there is one position where the Cowboys seem to find unheralded players to keep almost yearly, it is wide receiver. Two of the wideouts from last season, Whitehead and Cole Beasley, both started as UDFAs, and Butler was a seventh round pick by the Oakland Raiders. A little further back, Miles Austin had a successful run with Dallas as another UDFA find before the curse of the hamstrings caught up with him.
There are many who think either or both Butler or Whitehead are near locks to make the team. Butler is thought to be capable of challenging Terrance Williams for the WR2 spot on the depth chart, and Whitehead is the incumbent return man. However, fortunes can change quickly once camp gets started. Andy Jones has already gotten some favorable notices during the OTAs and minicamp. And Whitehead could face some serious competition as a returner, given his history of problems with ball security. In a post on the return job, the staff at the mothership mentioned Chris Brown and Ed Eagan as rookies that could mount a challenge. And running backs Lance Dunbar and Darren McFadden (assuming either or both are healthy) were also mentioned as options. That return job may be one of the more wide-open competitions in camp, and if someone takes that away from Whitehead, he could really be in jeopardy.
Of all these names, seeing Morris not make the team would be the biggest surprise, but there are some things that could make it happen. First is the health of Dunbar and McFadden. The latter is expected to recover from his elbow surgery and be ready at or very near the start of camp, and if he is in the mix as a kick returner, that and his performance last year would give him a leg up. Dunbar is certainly less certain, but if he is healthy, then suddenly the running back room is a bit crowded, and Dunbar has a very specific role as the COP back. Morris’ biggest competition as the RB2 could become Darius Jackson, and it is expected that Jackson is going to get a lot of |
of others, from Native Americans to Blacks. Democracy and basic rights for white males was not contradictory with violent extremism being committed to groups external to this norm. In an odd juxtaposition, the history of the US until this day has been a combination of advanced progressivism and ugly backwardness. Furthermore, throughout US history perfectly centrist political actors supported, enacted and legitimated forms of violent exclusion. It was simply part of the centrist common sense of the day. Just because violent exclusion is common sense, however, does not make it any less extreme. Centrist extremists just as well dehumanize and brutalize excluded others.
In Europe this centrist brutality mainly manifested itself through colonialism. A history which European countries refuse to face to this day, for example in the form of the French laws that force schools to teach the positive aspects of French colonialism, the ex-Belgian foreign minister and MEP Louis Michel who called Leopold II a “hero and a visionary”, or the still very common glorification of the Empire in the United Kingdom. Both the past colonial atrocities and their current glorification were and are designed by centrists. As such it was perfectly possible for a regime from the far-right of the political spectrum, such as Nazi-Germany, to find inspiration for its racial policies and atrocities with the colonial regimes that were established, and are still glorified, by centrist politicians.
This simple observation, that centrists can just as well be extremist, is, however, often obscured in contemporary political discourse. The task of the radical left should be to re-define the term, and drag it away from centrist consensus.
This re-definition of the term extremist is of course no acquittal of the radical-left. We are just as capable of arguing in favour of excluding entire swathes of the population from basic rights, arguing for their violent exclusion from politics and public life. A true left-wing politics should argue for the stability of basic rights, and should be consequently anti-extremist. That the far-left generally is far removed from power does not exclude us from taking measures to limit the opportunity of an extremist attitude arising. Our position at the edges of the political debate easily causes an alienated political culture that sometimes descends into cultism, or blindness to our own extremism. An open political culture, wary of us-versus-them mentalities, and that respects basic rights for all, needs to be the core of any left practice.
What of the right?
And what then with the far-right? Does this redefinition of extremism not give this group a free pass? Should their politics then only be described by radical- or far-? In a sense they should, far-right is a much more precise term to describe this group on the political spectrum. Although it could be debated how radical they really are, as their politics generally revolve around a rollback of rights rather than their expansion.
And precisely this last argument is what makes the far-right almost inherently extreme. Because they mostly argue for the exclusion of certain population groups from basic rights, the far-right is almost by definition extremist. The far-right’s political programme directly legitimates extremist action, whereas in the case of centre and radical-left politics this tendency is only present indirectly.
The far-right argues almost by definition for the exclusion of population groups from basic rights. It is a key prerequisite for bringing their ideas of mono-ethnic and mono-cultural nations into practice. Centrist and far-leftists on the other hand generally only come to extremism indirectly. Through a (perceived) crisis of stability of their regime, through colonialism, through the realities of their class interests, or through underlying biases they have towards certain population groups. The far-right is inherently extremist, centrists and far-leftists are only pragmatically extremist.
Centrist and far-left political actors can suppress their tendency towards extremism. Centrists can be pressured to limit racism and other forms of exclusion. If not, attempts to reform the status-quo would be pointless. Combating extremism within the far-right, however, is to touch on the fundamental aspects of their political thinking. While it was possible for centrist regimes to forego their colonies and take action to limit racism in their societies. It would have been virtually impossible to make Nazi-Germany do these things. Although different from interwar fascism, it is equally doubtful the current far-right can be pushed to respect the fundamental rights of all population groups once in power. Their politics are based on exclusion, forcing them to abandon exclusion forces them to abandon their politics. If they cease to be extremist they cease to be far-right.Toronto billionaire and philanthropist Barry Sherman and his wife were found dead in their mansion Friday, and police said they were investigating the deaths as suspicious.
“We’ve been informed of the tragic news that Barry and Honey Sherman have unexpectedly passed away,” Apotex said in a statement on Twitter.
“All of us at Apotex are deeply shocked and saddened by this news and our thoughts and prayers are with the family at this time.”
Toronto police said they got a 911 call around 11:45 a.m. about a medical incident at a house on Old Colony Road, near Highway 401 and Bayview Avenue, and found the bodies there.
Const. David Hopkinson said police are treating the deaths as suspicious until they learn more from the pathologist and coroner. He said homicide detectives are not yet involved.
Hopkinson didn’t reveal any details about the time or cause of death and whether there was any trauma.
“There may be suspicious circumstances. It’s an investigative tool,” he said. “Until we know exactly how they died, we treat it as suspicious. Once a determination has been made by the pathologist and the coroner, then we move forward from there.”
Police said later Friday evening that they are not currently seeking any suspects but are keeping an open mind on all possibilities.
“We did not observe any signs of forced entry into the building and so at this point indications are that we have no outstanding suspect to be going after,”‘ Det. Brandon Price told reporters.
“We will be getting a lot more answers tomorrow (Saturday) following the post-mortem examinations.”
Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins sent a tweet expressing shock at the death of his “dear friends,” who he described as “wonderful human beings.”
I am beyond words right now. My dear friends Barry and Honey Sherman have been found dead. Wonderful human beings, incredible philanthropists, great leaders in health care. A very, very sad day. Barry, Honey, rest in peace. — Dr. Eric Hoskins (@DrEricHoskins) December 15, 2017
In a statement Friday night, Hoskins added that the Shermans will be deeply missed.
“They were generous philanthropists, kind and compassionate individuals, devoted to their family, their friends, their community, this province and this country,” he said. “Their leadership and investments in health care leave a legacy we are all better for.”
Sophie and I are saddened by news of the sudden passing of Barry and Honey Sherman. Our condolences to their family & friends, and to everyone touched by their vision & spirit. — Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) December 16, 2017
“It’s heartbreaking — It’s shocking, just knowing who they were,” said Sarah Alvi, who has lived across from the Shermans for five years. “It wouldn’t come to your mind at all. You would never think something like this is going to happen there.”
The house, where the Shermans live, was recently put on the market for just shy of $7 million.
“We just saw them about two weeks ago,” Alvi said. “They had an open house, lovely couple … They were very courteous. Honey is a sweetheart … She was just a lovely person. It’s so sad that something like this has happened.”
Sherman, 75, founded the generic drugmaker Apotex in 1974 with two employees after buying the company — previously Empire Laboratories — from his uncle. It went on to become the largest Canadian-owned pharmaceutical company.
Along the way he amassed a vast fortune, which Canadian Business magazine estimated at $4.77 billion to make him the 15th richest Canadian, and was the target of lawsuits from family members who alleged they got cut out of a share of the company.
As a producer of more than 300 generic pharmaceutical products that exports to over 115 countries, Apotex has itself seen a fair number of litigation issues, as companies have pushed back on its efforts to sell cheaper no-name options.
Two weeks ago it gave me immense joy to present a Senate medal to one of the kindest and most beloved members of Canada’s Jewish community. Today I am gutted by the loss of Honey and Barry Sherman. Our community is steeped in grief. I am heartbroken. pic.twitter.com/B8VANUiNbW — Senator Linda Frum (@LindaFrum) December 15, 2017
One of the most high-profile of those clashes occurred when pharma giant Bristol-Myers Squibb sued Apotex in 2006 to try and stop it from selling the first generic form of the heart-disease treatment Plavix.
Today, the company has more than 10,000 people in research, development, manufacturing and distribution facilities world-wide, with more than 6,000 employees at its Canadian operations. The company’s Canadian operations include manufacturing and research facilities concentrated in the Toronto area as well as in Winnipeg.
Filling more than 89 million prescriptions in a year, the privately held company says its worldwide sales exceed $2 billion a year.
Sherman has also been an active philanthropist, including donating $50 million to the United Jewish Appeal. He had also become an active fundraiser for the Liberal party in recent years, but was criticized for holding a pay-for-access fundraiser in August 2015 that included Prime Minister Justin Trudeau while being registered as a lobbyist.
Sherman’s wife, Honey, was a member of the board of the Baycrest Foundation and the York University Foundation. She also served on the boards of Mount Sinai’s Women’s Auxiliary, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the International American Joint Distribution Committee.
With files from The Canadian Press
Apotex Chairman and CEO Barry Sherman. GETTY IMAGES/The Toronto Star/Dick LoekThe Philippines and Peru are among emerging economies that would become much more prominent in the next few decades, helped by demographics and rising education standards, with the Philippines set to leapfrog 27 places to become the 16th largest economy by 2050, according to a prediction of international bank HSBC.
The bank expected China to overtake the United States as the world’s biggest economy by 2050, and said strong growth rates in other developing countries would help drive the global economy.
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“Plenty of places in the world look set to deliver very strong rates of growth. But they are not in the developed world, which faces both structural and cyclical head winds. They are in the emerging world,” the bank said in a report “The World in 2050.”
HSBC based its forecasts on fundamentals such as current income per capita, rule of law, democracy, education levels and demographic change.
The bank said the Philippines would become a “star performer” in terms of its economic leap in the global rankings.
HSBC said the Philippines was likely to post an average growth of 7 percent in the next 40 years.
Breaking down the average growth forecast, the bank said the country would likely grow by 8.4 percent from 2010 to 2020, by 7.3 percent from 2020 to 2030, and by 6.6 percent from 2030 to 2040, and by
5.8 percent from 2040 to 2050.
It said the advantage of the Philippines was its favorable macroeconomic fundamentals and improving governance.
Economic officials of the government often harp on what they call the country’s positive macroeconomic fundamentals that include stable inflation, sustained growth over the years (it grew even when the global economy shrank in 2009), stable banking and financial system, and improving fiscal position.
Growing population a plus
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HSBC said the Philippines was also put at an advantageous position by its growing population, which, if properly educated and trained, should help the economy generate more income over the next decades.
The fact that the Philippines has relatively low income gives it much room for growth, and that its favorable fundamentals will help the country maximize that room, the bank said.
“The most potent recipe for growth is a country that scores highly on the fundamentals discussed but currently has low income per capita. These economies should deliver the highest growth in income per capita as they ‘catch up’ with those with similar fundamentals,” HSBC said.
Top 20
According to HSBC’s forecast, the Top 20 largest economies by 2050 will be China, United States, India, Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, Brazil, Mexico, France, Canada, Italy, Turkey, South Korea, Spain, Russia, Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, Argentina and Egypt.
The Philippines’ 16th rank by 2050 in terms of economic size marks a 27-notch improvement from its performance in 2010, said HSBC.
The bank thus said that the Philippines was expected to post the biggest leap in terms of economic ranking over the next four decades. “The Philippines looks set for a multidecade run of strong growth.”
HSBC said Peru should average annual growth of 5.5 percent over the same period.
The sheer pace of population growth in countries such as Nigeria and Pakistan means that these economies will swell in size to be included among the 100 biggest economies even if their incomes on a per-capita basis remain low.
HSBC said lower scores for rule of law in Latin America constrained its per capita income projections for the region though it noted that Brazil was making headway in this aspect.
Losers
“The losers are the small population, aging economies of Europe,” added the bank, which said the demographics in much of Europe underscored concerns about the debt problems faced by many of the continent’s governments.
If sufficiently open to modern technology, developing countries could enjoy many years of robust GDP growth although they could struggle for growth drivers once they have adapted to technological advances,
HSBC said.
“The initial years of development could be described as ‘copy-and-paste’ growth, as countries open themselves up and adapt to the world’s existing technologies. Once the ‘copy-and-paste’ growth is complete … many economies struggle and get stuck in what is often known as the middle-income trap.”
“But many of the countries we are considering are still at such an extremely low level of development that there are years of this ‘copy-and-paste’ growth ahead,” it added.
China
It was here that many of the pessimism about China was misplaced, the bank argued.
“One of the most commonly cited reasons for concern about China is the high rate of investment as a percentage of GDP … (But) we believe the strong rate of investment is entirely justified—providing China with much needed basic infrastructure,” it said.
The bank said high levels of education in Central and Eastern Europe meant that the regions could enjoy strong income per capita growth in the coming years before weak demographics eventually sap economic growth.
“While education rates are similar (to the West), the average income per capita in the central and eastern Europe block is just one fifth that of the developed world. For this reason … economies have great scope to catch up in income per capita,” HSBC said.
“Some of the smaller Eastern European countries—Romania, the Czech Republic and Serbia—(should) all do extremely well, particularly in the coming decade, before demographics prove to be more of a drag.” With a report from Reuters
Originally posted at 09:02 pm | Thursday, January 12, 2012
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MOST READMotorola's latest is the best cheap Android phone you can buy, by a surprisingly wide margin Outside of Google's Nexus line of products, good, inexpensive Android phones have been hard to come by. Instead, the word "cheap" has frequently gone hand in hand with "nasty" when describing handsets in the £100-150 (or $160-200) price range. That's outright, with no contract signed. But with its new budget phone, the Moto G, Motorola is seeking to change this. In its recent presentation from Brazil, the new, fully Googlified Motorola took aim at both the low-cost competition and rival Android device manufacturers in general. The former, it said, typically consisted of compromised, out-of-date hardware that in turn delivered a lackluster user experience. And the latter had a wrongheaded approach to smartphone design, according to Moto VP Punit Soni, loading Android down with unnecessary bloat and features that compete with Google's ecosystem. Instead the manufacturer insists its entry-level plan makes more sense by focusing resources on key specs like the display and CPU — and building apps, not intricate new UIs atop Google's OS. Moto G is the result — a budget Android phone unlike any other in its price range, and one that looks set to shake up the low-cost Android space. Let’s see how it shapes up, as we give the Moto G the full review treatment.
Pros Comfortable, ergonomic design with great build quality. Fantastic display. Speedy performance for the price. Superb value for money. Cons No LTE. Back covers can mark easily. 8GB of fixed storage leaves little breathing room. The Bottom Line You can easily point to a lot of things that aren’t on the Moto G. But even so, it’s the best phone at this price point by far. Go buy one. Hell, buy two.
The Moto G video walkthrough
Moto G hardware and build quality With a mostly featureless front, flattish sides and a curved back, the Moto G isn't the most head-turning smartphone design it there. But what it lacks in pizzazz it makes up for in ergonomics and understated class. Much like the Moto X, it fits in the hand very comfortably, with smooth curves on all sides and no unwelcome sharp edges. Power and volume keys sit on the right edge within easy thumb (or middle finger) reach. And the back is the spitting image of Moto's larger flagship too, from the stylized lip at the top to the dimple under the camera where you'll find the only branding on the device, a single Motorola logo. The design is simple, but it works — it's comfortable and unthreatening, but stylish. The phone ships with a standard matte plastic back shell — removable to access the microSIM slot — and Motorola will be selling aftermarket shells in a variety of colors. We've been using the bright lime-yellow back with our review unit and we've noticed it has a more premium finish than the bundled black one. Both backs seem more than a little susceptible to wear and tear, however. The standard black picked up visible wear around its edges in the first week of use, while the yellow one sported blue stains around its corners after a couple of days of being pulled in and out of a jeans pocket. Fortunately in the case of the yellow back, we were able to clean these marks off easily enough with a damp cloth. (After removing it from the phone, of course.)
The display looks absolutely fantastic, and is all the more impressive considering the phone's price point There's really not a whole lot to say about the front of the Moto G — it's 100 percent screen, save for an earpiece, notification LED and the usual sensors, including a front-facing camera. As the G uses software keys, there's nothing to see when the phone is powered off. Switch it on and you'll reveal the Moto G's most powerful asset, the 4.5-inch 720p LCD display which looks absolutely fantastic, and is all the more impressive considering the phone's price point. It's bright and clear with colors that are vivid, but not over-saturated. What's more, viewing angles impressed with almost no discoloration when viewed off-angle. Clearly this high-quality panel is where most of your £135 is going — and rightly so, as its the thing you're going to be fixated on every time you pick up the device.
The CPU is designed with energy efficiency in mind, and that's reflected in the Moto G's excellent battery life On the inside, the Moto G rocks a Snapdragon 400 CPU — a quad-core variant that's a little different to the Snapdragon 400 we're used to seeing in recent Samsung and HTC phones. It's got four Cortex A7 cores clocked at 1.2GHz, paired with an Adreno 305 GPU. The Cortex A7 is designed primarily with energy efficiency in mind, and that's reflected in the excellent battery life we've witnessed during our time with the Moto G. But its also no slouch in terms of general day-to-day performance. You'll certainly notice a difference if you use the Moto G side by side with any of the current crop of high-end Androids, mainly in terms of touch response. But at the same time its far from sluggish. There's also 1GB of RAM — about as much as we'd expect for this class of device — and enough to keep things running smoothly most of the time. We did notice a couple of instances of the home screen launcher being dropped from memory, leading to redraws when we pressed the home button. However this was mostly after relatively long browsing sessions with multiple Google Chrome tabs open, and the launcher was pretty quick to spring back to life upon pressing the home key.
There's a choice of 8 or 16 gigabytes of built-in storage available — the former for £135, the latter for £160. The 16GB model isn't easy to track down online at the time of writing, but our 8GB review unit leaves 5.52GB free for your own apps, photos and other stuff. That's not a lot of breathing space, but not unexpected for a phone so cheap. Naturally, as a device that follows Google's design guidelines for Android, there's no microSD slot. Connectivity-wise, the Moto G tops out at 21Mbps HSPA+, so there's no LTE or DC-HSDPA on offer here. You do at least get pentaband coverage, which means you'll get support for most HSPA networks around the world, including AT&T and T-Mobile in the states. (Update: The original Moto G spec sheet specified five HSPA bands on a single model. It has since emerged that there will be two GSM Moto G models, a global version with quad-band HSPA support and a US-only model with tri-band support.) Besides that there's WiFi b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0, but no NFC — another completely understandable omission. Overall the Moto G hardware tale is one of sensible, measured components wrapped in solid build quality that puts much of the plastic competition to shame, particularly in the entry-level space. It's not a great gaming platform — the processor sees to that as much as the limited storage space. Motorola's various compromises make sense, and the device's spec sheet tells the story of a hardware budget cleverly spent, most significantly when it comes to the display and CPU. Moto G specs
Full Moto G spec sheet Moto G software, OS and features On the surface, there's not a whole lot about the Moto G's software that stands out. It's running near-stock Android 4.3 Jelly Bean (with a KitKat update promised for January 2014) and the only major visual distinction is the transparent background of the software keys in the home screen launcher. Besides that it’s almost identical to Android 4.3 running on a Nexus device.
99 percent of what you see is the work of the Android design team in Mountain View The decision to go with vanilla Android is a very deliberate one for Motorola. Of course it makes sense now that it's owned by Google (and since earlier this year, very publicly so). But its also part of Moto's war on bloat and inefficiency — the company wants to emphasize performance and responsiveness over flashy graphics. And in any case, you could certainly do a lot worse than the look and feel of stock Android 4.3. So 99 percent of what you see is the work of the Android design team in Mountain View, with the main additions from Motorola coming in the form of apps and features. These include Motorola Assist, which allows you to toggle certain settings based on where you are or what you’re doing. For instance you can silence the device and and auto-reply to certain contacts while you’re in a meeting (based on your Google Calendar events), or keep things quiet at night by telling the app to mute notifications between certain hours. Assist is a neat, useful feature, but it's nowhere near as capable as similar offerings from some rivals, such as Sony’s endlessly customizable Smart Connect app. You also get Motorola Migrate, a new app to help you automatically import your own content — contacts, texts, call history, media and other stuff — from an older phone. But perhaps more useful on a day-to-day basis is the trusted Bluetooth feature, which lets you disable lock screen security if paired to a “trusted” device. As we’ve found using the Moto X, this feature works great if you use your phone with a smartwatch or some other wearable device. What you don’t get is any of the fancier features from the Moto X, such as active notifications, the shake gesture to load the camera app, or touchless controls (wherein you can say “OK Google Now” anywhere, at anytime, to launch a search). Motorola tells us that’s a limitation of the phone’s hardware, mainly to do with the fact that it’s using an off-the-shelf Snapdragon 400 as opposed to a custom creation with low-power processors to handle sensor input. But our disappointment is more than offset by the Moto G’s low price, and it’s entirely understandable that these advanced features are currently outside the reach of a budget product. Moto G official accessories
Motorola has launched a full complement of accessories alongside the Moto G. There’s a wide range of brightly-colored, replaceable back panels to add a splash of color to the device, as well as more traditional bumpers in various colors to protect the phone from knocks and scrapes. And if you’re carrying the Moto G loose in a bag there’s an official flip cover to keep the screen protected. These come with a built-in magnet to automatically power the screen on when opened. In the UK, the flip shell will cost a respectable £18.99, while the bumper is a mere £9.99. Moto also offers wired earphones for £34.99, and USB battery packs in various sizes will apparently vary in price depending on region. To learn when the latest accessories come into stock, hit up the ShopAndroid newsletter. Hands-on with Moto G accessories Moto G camera review
The camera's not amazingly good, but it's also not terrible In addition to its fairly basic 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, the Moto G packs a 5-megapixel rear shooter with LED flash which can record 720p HD video. As you might expect from a budget smartphone, it’s not an amazingly good camera. However it’s also not terrible, mainly due to Motorola’s camera software. The Moto G shares the Moto X’s camera app, which looks similar to the stock Android camera app, but it’s different — and better — in quite a few ways. Photos are taken by tapping anywhere on the screen and other features are activated by swiping gestures — swipe to the left to view the photos you’ve just taken in the Gallery app, or swipe inwards from the left edge to bring up a wheel of options including flash, HDR, focus modes and panorama. This is not a camera for the impatient By default the device is set to “Auto HDR” mode, which automatically senses scenes with wider dynamic range and takes an HDR shot instead of a standard exposure. That’s a good thing considering the sensor’s relatively narrow dynamic range, and it’s also the main reason we were able to capture so many decent-looking pictures on the Moto G. But that also means it’s typically slow to capture images, an issue compounded by the fact that it’s also pretty slow to focus. This is not a camera for the impatient. The Moto G can capture 5-megapixel images in 4:3 orientation or 3.8-megapixel shots in 16:9 mode, which crops out the top and bottom. Viewed at full-size, it’s clear there’s a good deal of noise reduction, compression and sharpening going on to make the camera’s output presentable. That means a lot of fine detail gets scrubbed away, even in bright conditions. In turn, nighttime and indoor shots quickly become smudgy and blotchy — and blurry, too, if anything happens to be moving. And despite the best efforts of Moto’s software post-processing, quite a bit of chroma noise remained in darker areas of many shots.
One particularly useful software feature is the ability to manually control focus and exposure by dragging a bracket around the screen. This allowed us to capture a few great-looking macro images, such as the shot of the berries in our sample gallery. But again, it’s something that requires patience and a little skill to use. All in all, it felt like many of the Motorola camera app's fancier features were wasted on the Moto G's very basic imaging hardware. Nevertheless, with patience you can coax good-looking outdoor images out of it. Just don't expect any miracles.
Video performance followed a similar pattern of fairly soft images, narrow dynamic range and noticeable chroma noise — though the frame rate was at least consistent. There's also a slow-motion video capture mode, though this too is limited by the Moto G's relatively low-end optics. But let's face it — if you're buying a Moto G, it's probably not for the camera. The fact that it can take good photos some of the time is a bonus, but realistically it makes more sense to prioritize the display and processor over cameras on a budget handset, just as Motorola has done here. Moto G battery life
With a 2070 mAh battery and an energy-efficient Cortex A7-based CPU inside, is not surprising to find that the Moto G delivers excellent battery life. We had real difficulty depleting the battery in under 24 hours with our day-to-day usage patterns — and when we did it was with a healthy six hours of screen-on time behind us. When idle, the the device uses almost no power at all, even with accounts syncing in the background. And even relatively strenuous tasks didn’t seem to impact available charge too drastically. Music playback and web browsing over HSPA, for instance, didn’t produce the rapid increase in battery usage we’re accustomed to seeing on other Android phones. The Moto G was also unfazed by hostile radio environments during our testing. For example, busy stations in central London which quickly sap the batteries of many other devices had no such effect on the Moto G — or at the very least, this characteristic battery drain was significantly reduced. Of course it's still wise to plan on a nightly charge, but if you do you shouldn't have to worry about battery life at all. And it’s refreshing to say that about any Android phone, let alone one at this price point. The bottom lineManila (CNN Philippines Life) — Mario Cornejo’s “Apocalypse Child” couldn’t have opened more aptly.
Tales are told over soothing images of waves and toy figures arranged carefully on seaside rocks. Centuries ago, natives survived a catastrophic typhoon. During the revolution against Spain, troops trapped inside the town’s cathedral received news from the outside from their Filipino girlfriends. Sometime in the 70s, the surfing scenes of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” was shot in the very same town. The crew left behind a surfboard, which was then picked up by locals. With a surfboard in hand, they learned how to surf, eventually turning them into surfing champs.
They are all lovely tales, whose truths hardly matter. The value of the stories lies in their ability to grant Baler — the rather unspectacular beach town whose indistinct look might have been the reason why Coppola chose it as a location for a movie that is supposedly set elsewhere in Asia — a very distinct flavor, an almost mythical quality that would favor its image as a place for both cultural immersion, as well as the right spot to practice a sport, whose main allure is connected to its aim of achieving perfect grace amidst nature’s unpredictable chaos.
From there, the film shifts its attention to a man and a woman who seem to be in love. They flirt in the beach. They ride home together on the man’s motor bike. They make love with the playfulness that is quite enviable. The woman is Fiona (Annicka Dolonius), a girl who is only in town to keep her dying grandmother company while learning how to surf on the side.
The man is Ford (Sid Lucero), her surfing instructor and sometimes lover. Aside from the reasons why she’s in town, not a lot is known about Fiona except that she is quite young at 19, and that she is very much into Ford. Ford’s life however is a treasure trove of stories. He owes his name to a story perpetuated by his mother Chona (Ana Abad Santos) that he was actually sired by Coppola while he was shooting in town and she was 14, innocent, and vulnerable to the ways of romance. He is also a champion surfer who lost three years ago, presumably because he wanted to surf without a surfboard, or he was lured by a mermaid. The stories around him are all bigger than him, because he is essentially a boy unwilling to grow up. He is as trapped in the past as the town that is also full of stories that he lives in.
“Apocalypse Child” is a film about tales, tall and true. It is also about relationships, both straightforward and complicated.
The film’s characters are connected to each other by definable links. Chona is the imperfect mother to Ford, Ford is lover to Fiona, and so on. Characters are introduced. Rich (RK Bagatsing), the young congressman who used to be Ford’s childhood friend, had just arrived in town to introduce to everybody his engagement to Serena (Gwen Zamora). Rich’s arrival inevitably opens up both wounds and passions that have been buried in the past. Serena’s appearance becomes an avenue to get even.
The tenuous emotions that the characters have for each other dominate the atmosphere of the film. Each of the many scenes depicting the characters getting wasted with weed and alcohol is very telling of the great need to repress louder feelings, to keep things within a certain level of fake calm lest things go awry. The characters’ other drug is the stories they tell, of the first time they smoked together, of easier times where they are actually happy and are not just feigning it. When a character finally explodes, the disruption to all the restraint resonates and lingers.
The film never paints its characters as people who are to be judged by social norms and morality. They talk, act, and ache like the rest of us, capable of deceit, revenge, and whim, not because they are following some grand plan, but only because it is convenient and human beings are creatures of convenience.
“Apocalypse Child” is a master class in purposeful restraint in filmmaking.
The film, right from the start, is a balancing act where each word, each gesture, each beautifully composed shot and each relevant cut are meticulously placed and measured to give away just enough to carve a story about the intricate web of stories that have engulfed the characters.
However, to exalt the film simply on the deftness of its crafting and storytelling would be a disservice to its innate understanding as to how humans work, which is really where the film stands out. It could have been a film about serial liars, of despicable characters whose despicable acts against each other could have been the film’s engrossing but shallow conceit. Yet the film is more profound than that. The film never paints its characters as people who are to be judged by social norms and morality. They talk, act, and ache like the rest of us, capable of deceit, revenge, and whim, not because they are following some grand plan, but only because it is convenient and human beings are creatures of convenience. Fabricating stories is the cheapest way to bury the past. Stories will eventually evolve into legends, and legends, into truth. Yet the film details the pained and stunted lives of its characters. There are repercussions to living a seemingly charmed life full of legends and half-truths.
Simply put, “Apocalypse Child” is a wonder. It unfolds gracefully, with nary a false note in its elegant progression of pitch-perfect moods and nuances.
***
"Apocalypse Child" is now screening in selected theaters. For the list of cinemas and schedules, click here.North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Reuters/KCNA South Korea's defense minister is publicly boasting that it will create a new "decapitation unit" called the Spartan 3000 with the express intent of taking out North Korean leadership, The New York Times reports.
The brigade-sized unit of between 2,000 and 4,000 soldiers will be established by year's end, The Times reported the defense minister, Song Young-moo, as saying, adding that the military was already "retooling" helicopters and transporting planes to be able to penetrate North Korean airspace at night.
It's out of the ordinary for a senior government leader to publicly say they are working on a plan to assassinate a foreign head of state. But there's an interesting reason behind it: The South is trying to freak out its northern neighbor and get it to the negotiating table instead of further developing nuclear weapons.
"The best deterrence we can have, next to having our own nukes, is to make Kim Jong Un fear for his life," retired South Korean Lt. Gen. Shin Won-sik told The Times.
Earlier this month, North Korea conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear test, which it claimed was a hydrogen bomb. The claim has not yet been independently confirmed, but some experts think North Korea may have detonated such a device or is very close to achieving it, according to Reuters.
While a "decapitation unit" — if created — may give Kim pause, it's unlikely that such a force would be able to carry out cross-border raids without a deadly retaliation from Pyongyang. Part of the reason many of the US's military options against North Korea range from bad to worse is that Seoul, a metro area with more than 25 million people, is within artillery range of the North.
Most experts think that a preemptive strike against North Korea would be perceived as an attempt at regime change and that its military leadership would most likely lash out at South Korea with artillery and chemical weapons.
"It will be a war more serious in terms of human suffering than anything we've seen since 1953," US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in June of potential hostilities. "It will involve the massive shelling of an ally's capital, which is one of the most densely packed cities on earth."CLOSE Steven Church and Don Cross say the recent court rulings in Indiana and Kentucky illustrate a larger trend of LGBT acceptance, yet there is still progress to be made. For the couple, attaining the legal rights that accompany marriage is key. Matthew Glowicki, The Courier-Journal
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as “National Geographic quality” by her photography teacher, Shelly Wayne. Wayne teaches Tse Yaato High School students photographic composition and emphasizes camera settings to achieve superior results over software manipulation of photographs.
Aguero first took photographs of Page Animal Adoption animals for their website to learn more about photographic techniques. Then she took the camera home, returning with fifteen photos of her great-grandmother including the featured photo. When the photo was transformed from color to black and white, the true quality of the photo was apparent to everyone.
Wayne, a professional photographer with her own company, Amazed Photography, was very impressed with the progress Aguero has made in her photography class this semester. Wayne uploaded the photograph and paid for it to be printed on aluminum and shipped back to the school for display.
The sentiment of the portrait is captured in the quote, “Do your best in school, my children.”
Aguero, nineteen years old, attends the TAP program at Tse Yaato High School with her two-year old daughter, Kadence, and hopes to graduate in December or at Spring Break.
She attended Tse Yaato High School last year and is making excellent progress this year by bringing her daughter to school with her. Aguero hopes to pursue a nursing degree after graduation and is investigating a variety of options for gaining her nursing education.
The photo unveiling is an opportunity for community members to see an outstanding young woman who has captured an outstanding photograph.Go is Great, So Why Aren't We Using It?
Jordan Sherer / April 13, 2017
Anybody who has spent time chatting with me at one of our Zapier retreats or listening to one of my Friday lightning talks can attest that I think Go is a great programming language. In this post I’ll share why I think it's great, some cons of using it, and why it’s not yet part of our stack at Zapier.
Go is a programming language developed at Google to help large teams of developers successfully build and maintain high performance software projects. It was open sourced in 2009 and reached Go 1.0 in 2012. Since then, many organizations, including dev-focused companies like Docker and Hashicorp, have started using the language in their projects to great success.
My First Go at Go
I wrote my first line of code in Go about four years ago. At first, I didn't "get it." The language seemed interesting, programmers were touting all of the great things about Go, but I wasn't able to conceptualize the benefits. That is, until I started porting a real project from Python to Go. With a real world need I was able to appreciate what Go offered.
The project I ported was a very small REST API that interfaced with Redis. It was the basis for a straightforward caching system that moved "cold" keys to the disk, but kept "hot" data in Redis. What I needed was a simple way to distribute this API to be collocated with the Redis servers that did not consume much memory and was very fast. Enter Go, which–spoiler alert–fits into those requirements nicely.
Why is Go Great?
There are a lot of reasons that I think Go is a great programming language. With a real world need, I was able to prototype, test, and deploy a production system in days with minimal CPU and memory overhead all while handling 5x more requests per second.
This is because Go is a simple language with a very small (but complete) standard library. I was able to grasp most of the language concepts, built-in packages, and common idioms in just a few hours.
Other than this, Go has a few other things going for it:
Statically typed
Compiled
Single binary for distribution
Garbage collected
Concurrency and Parallelism primitives are built-in
Can link against popular C libraries
Great documentation
Has a vibrant and growing community
Zapier is primarily a Python shop. While some of the above is true for Python, getting that whole list with Go is pretty appealing. And as we work with thousands of API calls per hour, performance is important to us. So, why haven’t we jumped at adopting Go?
Why is Go not so great?
No programming language is perfect; all make very explicit trade-offs. Go optimizes for compilation speed and application performance at the expense of programmer productivity.
The most controversial of these trade offs is that Go provides a statically typed system, but does not offer generics. This means container data structures outside of lists and hash tables cannot be written generically without typecasts to and from anonymous pointers (the interface{} type).
A few other downsides to programming in Go:
Dependencies can be difficult to manage, opting for vendoring third-party code in your repository.
The type system, while simple, is very different than a classical object orientation and inheritance model. It is very C-like. Structs + Interfaces. No classes. No inheritance.
There are no formal exceptions or try/catch. This could can be framed as a positive, but Go often trips up developers with its panic/recover system.
Some argue that garbage collection isn't suited for a systems programming language like Go. I for one welcome our garbage collection overlords.
Go! What is it Good For?
Go is well suited for systems programming. It’s touted as middle ground between lower-level languages like C and high-level programming languages like Python. These are some of the best types of applications built in Go:
Command line apps
Network Servers
Daemons
Databases
But, some are even using it for:
Embedded Development
Lightweight Microservices
Infrastructure
Go is flexible enough to solve most problems, albeit some better than others. And the list of companies using Go is impressive, including Docker, Cloudflare, Dropbox, Intel, Hashicorp, and, of course, Google.
So… Why Isn't Zapier Using It Yet?
Zapier is a monolithic application built on Python and Django. There’s a lot of momentum with Python and it is very difficult changing course to another programming language while the service is running. It’s not impossible, though!
We're at the very (very!) early stages of a breaking apart our monolith into a microservices architecture. These services are currently implemented as needed. However, once we hit critical mass on one of these systems where a high-performance rewrite might be necessary, I could see Go being an option. We’d follow a process of:
Measure the current system and determine bottlenecks. Spike a solution addressing bottlenecks in Go. Measure the solution as a canary service in Production. Engineer all the things. (Repeal and) Replace
Adopting a programming language is a difficult decision and Go is not the only language we must consider. Some others on the table, with equal pros/cons:
Elixir (on the Erlang VM)
Rust
Python 3 (crazy, I know!)
PyPy
Cython
All of this is to say: Go is a great programming language that I’ve used to build highly performant systems. While it makes trade-offs like most programming languages, most are either warranted or easy to work around. Go is easy to learn and most programmers can be highly productive with it in a matter of weeks.
Maybe one day you'll read another post about how we replaced XYZ with a custom ZYX built in Go. If you’d like to be part of the team that gets to think about potential new languages and improves our existing application, check out our open positions.Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
A £23 million scheme intended to transform cycling in Birmingham has been blasted as discriminatory and only benefiting "white, young men".
The Department for Transport has given Birmingham £17 million to become a "Cycle City" which will create a network of safe new routes aimed at tempting commuters out of their cars.
The council will also put £6.3 million into the project which will see an upgrade to some of the busiest routes in the city including Hagley Road and Bristol Road, with dedicated cycle lanes and safety improvements at junctions to encourage more cycling.
After the views were published in the Post, there was a strong backlash on social media.
But at the Edgbaston District committee Coun Deirdre Alden (Con, Edgbaston) said she was concerned that such a large amount of effort and investment was being spent on a mode of transport predominantly used by young men.
"The vast majority of cyclists on our roads are young, white men," she said.
She added that, while there were exceptions, "most elderly people are not going to cycle, and it would be dangerous for them to start on our streets now".
The councillor said disabled people did not benefit from cycling and that "women of any ethnic group who wish to wear modest clothing, and I count myself in that category, are not going to cycle. It is a discriminatory form of transport".
Read more: Off-road cycle routes ideal for the whole family
Other councillors said the money would be better spent repairing potholes to improve cycle safety while Coun Caroline Badley (Lab, Quinton) suggested improving the grade of road surface around drains as this was a major concern for cyclists.
And Coun John Alden (Con, Harborne) argued cyclists should be licensed and insured like motorists are if they wished to use the road.
Under the cycle revolution, cash will be used to buy 5,000 bikes and set up cycle hubs from which they can be rented or used for training.
Councillors were stunned to find out that 2,000 of them would be given away.
They were told that those being given cycles, which would have Birmingham Cycle branding, would be vetted, be asked to sign and have both a bike serial number and their details recorded.
But they admitted it might be difficult to stop people breaking the agreement or selling the bike.
(Image: Pic: Tim Ireland/PA Wire)
Coun Matthew Gregson (Lab, Quinton) said: "My concern is that we are giving these bikes away to people who are not going to use them. This would be a waste of public money."
He suggested they just used the lease scheme to test public demand and only give them away to those who demonstrated a commitment to cycling.
Coun Gregson added: "Otherwise, it's a massive waste at a time when we've got very few resources. We should send back a message to the Department for Transport that this part of the scheme is an absolute nonsense.”
Paul Simpkins, one of the officials running the Cycle Revolution scheme said one of the conditions of the grant was the investment was made by September 2015 - otherwise the Government might claim the money back.
He said the investment was going into routes, including major roads, canals and parks within a 20-minute cycle commute of the city centre - starting with routes to the south and west.
As well as bike loan and free bikes, there will also be a training courses to give people the confidence to take up cycling.
The aim of the policy is to double the number of trips made by bike from five per cent to ten per cent of the total in the city by 2033 – with the aim of making the city greener, healthier and safer.
Proposals are currently out for public consultation.
Coun James McKay (Lab, Harborne), a cyclist, defended the investment, saying: "Everyone accepts the model of us all getting around in single occupancy cars is broken. With a rising population, this will lead to gridlock so we have to change our way of doing things."
He said that government had recognised this in issuing the grant.
His colleague Coun Caroline Badley (Lab, Quinton) added: "We are going to have to move to a position where we have more people using bikes and we know that many people do not use bikes because they do not feel safe.
"While there are some reservations, this investment is generally a good thing."A meteorite trail is seen above an apartment block in Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, 2013. Photo by Oleg Kargopolov/AFP/Getty Images
Your odds of dying in an asteroid impact are about one in 700,000.
Surprising, isn’t it? That’s about the same chance you have of dying in a flood or a fireworks accident over your lifetime. It may be even more surprising when you consider that there has never even been a confirmed human death resulting from an impact. But this number involves something of a trick: A big enough impact will kill everyone on Earth. A smaller impact might devastate a local region on Earth, but a big one can wipe out entire species. Just ask the dinosaurs …
For a global event, you get these odds roughly by dividing the time between impacts by the average human lifespan. But it’s still a little misleading because it’s similar to the lottery: The chance is 100 percent that someone will win the lottery, but the chances are extremely low that you specifically will. Your odds of dying in an impact event are pretty low, but the odds of some random person somewhere getting killed are higher.
Of course, asteroid impacts are a lottery you get to play whether you want to or not.
Today is a good day to think about all this: It’s the first anniversary of the Chelyabinsk impact over Russia. On Feb. 15, 2013 (it was still Feb. 14 in U.S. time), a rock the size of a house came screaming in from space. In a single moment, its huge energy of motion was converted into light and heat. The resulting explosion was the equivalent of a half-million tons of TNT detonating all at once. Even though it exploded dozens of kilometers above the Earth’s surface, the shock wave shook the ground, set off car alarms, and shattered windows. More than 1,000 people were injured, some seriously, by flying glass.
Amazingly, no one was killed, but it shows quite vividly that the threat of asteroid impacts is quite real.
So when will the Earth get hit again? And what can we do about it?
* * *
The Earth gets hit by about 100 tons of material every day, but that’s in the form of tiny pebbles that burn up high in the atmosphere and produce shooting stars.
Big impacts are rare. The Chelyabinsk asteroid was 19 meters (62 feet) in diameter, and, on average, we should expect an impact from an object that size somewhere on Earth about once every 25 years. (Because most of the planet is covered in water, many of these go unnoticed.)
A small chunk of Chelyabinsk meteorite, given to me by a friend. Photo by Phil Plait
Bigger impacts are more rare. In 1908 an object 30 meters or so in diameter came across the Earth, exploding high over a swampy region of the Russian countryside near the Tunguska River. The yield was equivalent to a 15 megaton nuclear bomb! Something like this Tunguska event (as it’s now called) happens every few centuries on average.
You probably know that the dinosaurs were taken out by an asteroid or comet about 10 kilometers wide. Happily, those events are extremely rare, occurring on a timescale of tens of millions of years. As it happens, we’re pretty sure there’s no dinosaur-killer on its way to Earth for the next few centuries. But the lesson of Chelyabinsk and Tunguska is that it doesn’t take a flying mountain to ruin your whole day. A hill will do nicely.
A hole in the Lake Chebarkul made by meteor fragments from the Chelyabinsk meteor shower on Feb. 15, 2013. Photo ITAR-TASS Itar-Tass Photos/Newscom
If we want to prevent asteroid impacts from happening, the first thing we need to do is spot these threats. And we’re working pretty hard on that.
Astronomers have built quite a few observatories dedicated to patiently scanning the heavens looking for blips of light. Thousands of near-Earth asteroids have been found this way, their orbits meticulously calculated, projected into the future, and determined to be potentially threatening or not.
As things stand now, we don’t have the capability to find them all. But we will, soon. The huge Pan-STARRS telescope is looking deep for threats and is already producing data. LSST is a planned monster 8-meter telescope specifically designed to look for near-Earth objects and is expected to catalog hundreds of thousands of them.
A chunk of the asteroid that exploded over Russia on Feb. 15, 2013, was extracted from the bottom of Lake Chebarkul. Photo by Anton Melnikov/Reuters
To extend our vision, two spacecraft are currently in the works, too. They’ll have a better view above our turbulent atmosphere, and by using infrared detectors they can more easily spot the warm glow of rocks orbiting the Sun.
Even with all these eyes on the sky, there are roughly a million such rocks that could potentially, someday, impact the Earth. Eventually, it’s bound to happen: We’ll spot one with our name on it. What then?
* * *
You won’t like this answer much, but: nothing. As things currently stand, even if we had a few years’ warning, there’s little we could do to stop an impact. It takes time to plan a mission, build it, launch it, travel to the rock, and then do whatever it is you plan to do.
But let’s say we did have a rocket waiting to launch. What do we do with it?
If you watch movies, the answer is easy: Nuke it! But that might not be the best option. For one thing, it’s a bit ham-fisted and hard to control. You might hit the asteroid and shatter it, turning one big rock into a bunch of slightly smaller, still-dangerous (and radioactive!) ones. Also, timing is a problem; remember, these asteroids are moving at high speed, so detonating the bomb at just the right exact moment might prove tricky.
It helps to remember the goal: You want to make the asteroid not hit the Earth. When you think of it that way, a better solution is to change its velocity—speed it up or slow it down—so it’ll whiz past us without an impact.
For this, you don’t need a bomb, just the rocket itself. Literally aim the rocket directly at the asteroid and hit it as hard as you can! The purpose would be to use the momentum of the rocket to change the momentum of the rock enough to do the job.
The key to this trick is time. The Earth is 8,000 miles across, so at most you have to move the asteroid 4,000 miles to make it miss. If you have, say, two years of advance warning you need only change the velocity of the rock by one-fifth of a mile per hour to make it miss. That’s far less than walking speed! And the longer lead time you have, the less the change needs to be. For big rocks that’s still a problem, but again, finding them farther in advance is our best bet.
The B612 Foundation has made it its mission to do just this. The group includes scientists and engineers who investigate how best to stop an incoming asteroid or comet, and they have found this impactor method to be feasible. But they found a subtle problem: You might push the rock into an orbit that’ll just make it hit us at some other time. You’ve prevented an impact in two years, but now you’ve forced one to happen in, say, five years!
You could hit it again, but then the same problem might occur, and rockets are expensive. This is where the B612 folks came up with a fantastic idea: a gravity tractor.
Instead of a single payload to whack the asteroid, you also send along a probe that has a lot of a mass, maybe a ton or so. It has some small amount of gravity that can be used to literally tow the asteroid into a safe orbit once the impactor has done its job. That way, you can ensure no impact from that rock will occur, ever.
I love this idea. It’s right out of Star Trek! And it has the added bonus of being actually doable.
Mind you, we could build such a mission right now, since much of the tech is off-the-shelf. But it’s never been tested together in this way, and I think this should be a priority. Hitting a rock only a few hundred meters across at multiple times the speed of a rifle bullet is something I think we should test before it counts for the final grade. A mission like that might cost a billion or so dollars, but it’s worth it.
Think of it this way: It costs a fraction of a percent of the total price of a car to add seat belts. The cost of a mission to prevent an asteroid impact would be far less than that percentage of our national annual budget; it would be less than one percent of just NASA’s budget over the 10 years it would take to build and test it. You can drive your whole life and never need a seat belt, but given enough time there will be an asteroid impact big enough to cause major damage.
That sounds like a good investment to me.
The science-fiction author Larry Niven once said that the difference between us and the dinosaurs is that we have a space program.
I would add that while we do have a space program, we still haven’t made the choice to use it this way. The cost to do so is small, but the price to not do so is unthinkable.
So, we can now answer our original question: When will the Earth suffer its next big impact?
If we make the right choice, then the answer to our question is: never.LG today introduced the 34UC89G-B, a 34-inch curved ultra-wide gaming monitor. Featuring an aspect-ratio of 21:9, the monitor features a curved IPS panel with a native resolution of 2560 x 1080 pixels. Boosting its gaming credentials are its 144 Hz refresh-rate, a Dynamic Action Stabilizer feature for games, which reduces shaky-cam in games, an OSD crosshair, and support for NVIDIA G-SYNC technology. Other panel specs include 5 ms (GTG) response-time, 178°/178° viewing angles, 300 cd/m² maximum brightness, and dynamic mega-contrast. The monitor takes input from DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 1.4a connectors. Other features include a 2-port USB 3.0 hub. The monitor will start selling by mid-July.
20 Comments on LG Intros the 34UC89G-B 34-inch Curved Ultra Wide Gaming Monitor
#1 qubit
Overclocked quantum bit That Dynamic Action Stabilizer feature sounds like the kind of "enhancement" I'd turn off straight away.
The 144Hz refresh is good though. Posted on Jun 23rd 2017, 3:57 Reply
#2 The Quim Reaper
1080p ultra wide needs to die as a format. Posted on Jun 23rd 2017, 6:51 Reply
#3 Solidstate89
2560 x 1080 Stop this right now manufacturers. Just stop it. It's awful and pointless. 3440x1440 is the bare minimum useful resolution for 21:9. Stop this right now manufacturers. Just stop it. It's awful and pointless. 3440x1440 is the bare minimum useful resolution for 21:9. Posted on Jun 23rd 2017, 7:28 Reply
#4 natr0n
I can't tell if the pic is of a satanic ritual or assassin creedish...why not both. Posted on Jun 23rd 2017, 7:42 Reply
#5 qubit
Overclocked quantum bit natr0n said: I can't tell if the pic is of a satanic ritual or assassin creedish...why not both. I'd hazard that it's an Assassin's Creed generic "like brand". I'd hazard that it's an Assassin's Creed generic "like brand". Posted on Jun 23rd 2017, 8:05 Reply
#6 atomicus
Apart from the fact that 34" is too big for 1080p, the $999.99 price tag makes this the most ridiculously pointless monitor I've ever seen. Seriously, at that price who would even consider this?? It literally makes no sense. $500 perhaps, but you can get a 34" 1440p with G-Sync for this money!!! I'm just utterly stumped by the existence of this monitor at this price. Whoever buys this needs their head examined. Posted on Jun 23rd 2017, 9:03 Reply
#7 Octavean
The Quim Reaper said: 1080p ultra wide needs to die as a format. With respect to 1080p, people have been saying that for a while and not just for Ultra-wide formats.
However, its worth pointing out that many people chided the AMD RyZen platform for its 1080p gaming performance and presumably a large segment of gamers are unable or unwilling to leave 1080p behind.
So it becomes a "which is it because you can't have it both ways" type of situation. With respect to 1080p, people have been saying that for a while and not just for Ultra-wide formats.However, its worth pointing out that many people chided the AMD RyZen platform for its 1080p gaming performance and presumably a large segment of gamers are unable or unwilling to leave 1080p behind.So it becomes a "which is it because you can't have it both ways" type of situation. Posted on Jun 23rd 2017, 9:03 Reply
#8 BumbleBee
it would be nice if the I/O panel was on the side. not sure why LG keeps bothering with these curved panels. Posted on Jun 23rd 2017, 9:35 Reply
#9 atomicus
BumbleBee said: it would be nice if the I/O panel was on the side. not sure why LG keeps bothering with these curved panels. Have you used one? It does help. I have an X34 and having sat in front of a flat screen, it almost has the effect of the screen going away from you. The subtle curve really helps and after a while you're not aware of it. I don't know if the stronger curve of some models is so great though... the X34 is perfect IMO, it doesn't need any more, but a totally flat screen at this size, given the distance you sit from it, is not such a good thing. Have you used one? It does help. I have an X34 and having sat in front of a flat screen, it almost has the effect of the screen going away from you. The subtle curve really helps and after a while you're not aware of it. I don't know if the stronger curve of some models is so great though... the X34 is perfect IMO, it doesn't need any more, but a totally flat screen at this size, given the distance you sit from it, is not such a good thing. Posted on Jun 23rd 2017, 10:04 Reply
#10 BumbleBee
atomicus said: Have you used one? It does help. I have an X34 and having sat in front of a flat screen, it almost has the effect of the screen going away from you. The subtle curve really helps and after a while you're not aware of it. I don't know if the stronger curve of some models is so great though... the X34 is perfect IMO, it doesn't need any more, but a totally flat screen at this size, given the distance you sit from it, is not such a good thing. no. I haven't seen any curved monitors in person but I have seen curved televisions at TAVES and at my local HiFi store in Toronto. I'm not a fan of curved panels. too many cons and not enough pros :P no. I haven't seen any curved monitors in person but I have seen curved televisions at TAVES and at my local HiFi store in Toronto. I'm not a fan of curved panels. too many cons and not enough pros :P Posted on Jun 23rd 2017, 10:18 Reply
#11 ERazer
BumbleBee said: no. I haven't seen any curved monitors in person but I have seen curved televisions at TAVES and at my local HiFi store in Toronto. I'm not a fan of curved panels. too many cons and not enough pros :p imo curved best viewed if the person is seating in the middle like 34" monitor, curved TV's are horrible viewing angle for the person seating on the side. imo curved best viewed if the person is seating in the middle like 34" monitor, curved TV's are horrible viewing angle for the person seating on the side. Posted on Jun 23rd 2017, 10:42 Reply
#12 Prima.Vera
1080p at 34"....
<div class="youtube-embed" data-id="H07zYvkNYL8"><img src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/H07zYvkNYL8/hqdefault.jpg" /><div class="youtube-play"></div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H07zYvkNYL8" target="_blank" class="youtube-title"></a></div> Posted on Jun 23rd 2017, 10:58 Reply
#13 Agony
for casual gamers it's perfect 1080p 144hz ultrawide. For devs pros and people that care about quality they will go at 1440p 60hz and for people that want everything and have the money then 3440x1440 100hz ips it is. Posted on Jun 23rd 2017, 17:26 Reply
#14 Agony
atomicus said: Have you used one? It does help. I have an X34 and having sat in front of a flat screen, it almost has the effect of the screen going away from you. The subtle curve really helps and after a while you're not aware of it. I don't know if the stronger curve of some models is so great though... the X34 is perfect IMO, it doesn't need any more, but a totally flat screen at this size, given the distance you sit from it, is not such a good thing. curved panel is way better for personal use and 1800r with bigger curve is the best. trust me it's great... but on tv's in my opinion it's not it's all about seeing it upfront. side view it's not nice for me if it's far away. curved panel is way better for personal use and 1800r with bigger curve is the best. trust me it's great... but on tv's in my opinion it's not it's all about seeing it upfront. side view it's not nice for me if it's far away. Posted on Jun 23rd 2017, 17:29 Reply
#15 Vayra86
Price is too high, but curved monitors really are a good idea.
But, I've said this before and I'll say it again.
Curved- VA. It eliminates the bad qualities of VA almost entirely (tone shift towards edges) and it is super immersive. Posted on Jun 24th 2017, 7:53 Reply
#16 Caring1
Make it V-sync and VESA mountable, cut the G-sync crap. Posted on Jun 24th 2017, 7:57 Reply
#17 Black Haru
Agony said: for casual gamers it's perfect 1080p 144hz ultrawide. For devs pros and people that care about quality they will go at 1440p 60hz and for people that want everything and have the money then 3440x1440 100hz ips it is. Except you can get a 1440p 100hz ultrawide VA with gsync fir 100$ cheaper right now. That price is crazy. Except you can get a 1440p 100hz ultrawide VA with gsync fir 100$ cheaper right now. That price is crazy. Posted on Jun 24th 2017, 10:17 Reply
#18 Benjamin Hamm
Sorry but I tried a ASUS PG348Q with the 3440x1440 resolution. My current monitor will change from LGs 34UC79G-B to 34UC89G-B only for the G-Sync feature. I returned my ASUS because
a) My GeForce 1080 TI wasn't able to keep fps above 70 fps at all time at maxed out games
b) The iconsize is way too small in my opinion. It ist unnecessary hard to read the lines in NvControl Panel
I am so glad LG offers a 1080p 34" curved gaming monitor where I always can play between 90 fps and 166 fps while using G-Sync. I got 2 meters between my head and the monitor, which is a fully acceptable distance for 1080p at 34". Of course the images are less sharp and has a bit washed out curves but this is acceptable when I can play with smooth 100+ fps at all time with G-Sync and maxed out graphics. Posted on Jun 28th 2017, 1:27 Reply
#19 Prima.Vera
Benjamin Hamm said: I returned my ASUS because
a) My GeForce 1080 TI wasn't able to keep fps above 70 fps at all time at maxed out games
b) The iconsize is way too small in my opinion. It ist unnecessary hard to read the lines in NvControl Panel Sorry mate, but let me call it a B.S. from my point of view since I am owning also an Acer with the same size, resolution adn G-Sync.
a) I have a crappier card, an GF 1080 and I can keep arround 60 fps in ALL games, even the most demanding ones. If it goes lower, that's OK, since that's why there is G-Sync to keep everything nice and smooth.
b) definitely the size of icons and DPI is PERFECT imo. This is the best resolution by far to have on a monitor. Perfect size, no visible pixels and 100Hz makes the scroll very smooth.
Sorry... ;) Sorry mate, but let me call it a B.S. from my point of view since I am owning also an Acer with the same size, resolution adn G-Sync.a) I have a crappier card, an GF 1080 and I can keep arround 60 fps in ALL games, even the most demanding ones. If it goes lower, that's OK, since that's why there is G-Sync to keep everything nice and smooth.b) definitely the size of icons and DPI is PERFECT imo. This is the best resolution by far to have on a monitor. Perfect size, no visible pixels and 100Hz makes the scroll very smooth.Sorry... ;) Posted on Jun 28th 2017, 7:45 ReplyWalt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger is finally planning his exit from the company.
Speaking at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit on Tuesday, Iger said that he plans to actually step down as CEO of Disney in mid 2019.
“This time I mean it,” Iger said during the summit. “It’s time.”
There has been speculation that the Disney DIS, -0.08% chief might consider a political career following his departure, but when asked about it he said, “let’s not go there,” according to Variety.
Earlier this year Disney’s board of directors extended Iger’s contract through July 2, 2019. That move came after the man widely expected to succeed him, former Chief Operating Officer Tom Skaggs, left the company after it became clear he would not get the job.
Also read: Disney CEO Bob Iger on why ESPN’s Jemele Hill wasn’t punished for Trump tweets
Iger had planned to step down in 2018, but only after an earlier planned exit in 2016 was pushed back. It’s unclear if the company has a suitable internal candidate as successor or will have to look outside.
Iger said that talk last year that Disney was interested in buying Twitter was accurate. Instead, however, the company opted to buy an additional 42% stake in BAMTech, spending $1.58 billion for majority ownership.
Disney now has plans to launch a long-awaited stand alone streaming service for ESPN.
Don’t miss: Disney’s plan for ESPN is shrouded in uncertainty
Also see: What the ESPN streaming service will offer
Iger also spoke out against gun violence in the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas late Sunday that killed 59 people, including a Disney employee, and injured more than 515, including another Disney employee.
A senseless, horrific, act, and a terrible loss for so many. We mourn a wonderful member of the Disney family: Carrie Barnette. Tragic. — Robert Iger (@RobertIger) October 3, 2017
“These are incidents that touch everybody,” Iger said. “Where is the outrage here? This is a huge crisis for our country. We should be demanding a dialogue about this from our politicians.”
Shares of Disney have declined more than 3% in the year to date, while the S&P 500 index SPX, -0.08% has gained more than 13% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.13% is up nearly 15%.compLexityGaming Profile Joined January 2011 United States 98 Posts Last Edited: 2011-07-23 05:16:52 #1 Global Press Release
compLexity Gaming and Team MVP establish an exclusive joint partnership named “coL.MVP.”
Houston, Texas & Seoul, South Korea
July 22, 2011
complexity Gaming and Team MVP are proud to announce that we have agreed to form an exclusive joint partnership which will see the formation of a jointly controlled StarCraft 2 division, currently consisting of two players: Park Soo Ho (“DongRaeGu”) and Jung Min Soo (“Genius”).
The arrangement is believed to be a first of its kind and will witness joint promotions and cooperation on a global level. DongRaeGu and Genius will represent compLexity and MVP both inside Korea and at international events. While playing inside Korea the players will wear a MVP jersey with a compLexity logo. While participating outside Korea they will sport a compLexity jersey with a MVP logo. compLexity will provide the global travel support. The players will also be available to join compLexity’s StarCraft 2 division during online team play. compLexity players who wish to train in Korea will be hosted at the MVP House for training purposes.
DongRaeGu’s first international appearance will be at MLG Anaheim. Genius is expected to return to Blizzcon |
_t(len(private_key)), unsafe.Pointer(&public_key[0]), C.size_t(len(public_key)), unsafe.Pointer(&message[0]), C.size_t(len(message)), output, output_length)))){ return nil, errors.New("Failed to wrap message") } return m, nil }
In this piece of code, according to our current understanding of the way cgo works, themis_secure_message_unwrap function allocates memory for output pointer, which is then never freed.
When we've initially started building Themis for Go, dominant was Go 1.3, which had mechanisms to detect memory blocks allocated inside used libraries and all such blocks were to be freed by GC. Go 1.6 significantly improved its memory management, however as part of those improvements memory allocated by external libraries was no longer garbage collected by the runtime. The easiest method to avoid such leaks is to fully perform all memory management by the used third party library itself.
In new version all Themis interface functions (and some internal Themis functions) were rewritten with get-size/write-to-buffer:
C part ( message.go ):
/* #cgo LDFLAGS: -lthemis -lsoter #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <stdint.h> #include <stdbool.h> #include <themis/error.h> #include <themis/secure_message.h> static bool get_unwrapped_message_size(const void *priv, size_t priv_len, const void *public, size_t pub_len, const void *message, size_t message_len, bool is_wrap, size_t *out_len) { themis_status_t res = themis_secure_message_unwrap(priv, priv_len, public, pub_len, message, message_len, NULL, out_len); return THEMIS_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL == res; } static bool message_unwrap(const void *priv, size_t priv_len, const void *public, size_t pub_len, const void *message, size_t message_len, bool is_wrap, void *out, size_t out_len) { themis_status_t res = themis_secure_message_unwrap(priv, priv_len, public, pub_len, message, message_len, out, &out_len); return THEMIS_SUCCESS == res; }
In this snippet, themis_secure_message_unwrap does not allocate the memory itself, it requires previously allocated block of memory to put decrypted data into it.
Go part ( message.go ):
*/ import "C"... func messageUnwrap(private []byte, peerPublic []byte, message []byte) ([]byte, error) { var output_length C.size_t if!bool(C.get_message_size(unsafe.Pointer(&private[0]), C.size_t(len(private)), unsafe.Pointer(&peerPublic[0]), C.size_t(len(peerPublic)), unsafe.Pointer(&message[0]), C.size_t(len(message)), &output_length)){ return nil, errors.New("Failed to get output size") } output := make([]byte, int(output_length), int(output_length)) if!bool(C.message_unwrap(unsafe.Pointer(&private[0]), C.size_t(len(private)), unsafe.Pointer(&peerPublic[0]), C.size_t(len(peerPublic)), unsafe.Pointer(&message[0]), C.size_t(len(message)), unsafe.Pointer(&output[0]), output_length)){ return nil, errors.New("Failed to wrap message") } return output, nil }
By changing output allocation to output := make([]byte, int(output_length), int(output_length)), we make Go explicitly manage this block, and make this pointer visible to Go's GC for further deallocation.
Profiling the results
The first test was completely unscientific - let's just leave Acra for a few days crunching the numbers and see if it leaks. Result: nope, it doesn't. Time to run `valgrind`/`pprof` pair of tests on our initial setup:
valgrind output: ==15592== LEAK SUMMARY: ==15592== definitely lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks ==15592== indirectly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks ==15592== possibly lost: 1,152 bytes in 4 blocks ==15592== still reachable: 2,080 bytes in 16 blocks ==15592== suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.
Things are fairly simple to fix when you know exactly where to look!
Total memory occupied by the process now is just pprof -visible part (and Go's internal runtime memory, which is out of scope of current article). Zero leaks in the system.
Conclusions, lessons learned
Whenever a new engineering challenge gets solved, it feels like all the reasons and solutions are extremely obvious, and should've been known beforehand. As useful as feeling a bit dumb sometimes is, it actually is hindsight is 20/20 rule (broader understood as particular case of retrospective predictability) and happens all the time. Still, the obvious lessons learned:
New languages are that volatile
When we wrote the first version of Acra, which used Go 1.3, nobody could have guessed that porting it to a more modern version of Go would introduce such drastic changes under the hood. Turning off automated memory management for external components is a serious move: it's not a change in syntactic sugar, which can be fixed with grep then sed incursion on your codebase. It's well grounded and understandable, though: pointer arithmetic is a tricky game, and if you can simplify things - you should.
It is worth mentioning that reading release notes to 1.6 left us bepuzzled and took a long road to understand that
The major change is the definition of rules for sharing Go pointers with C code, to ensure that such C code can coexist with Go's garbage collector.
actually means fix your pointer allocation because we have finally made garbage collector to ignore implicit CGo allocations.
Memory leaks could've leaked the sensitive data.
When developing for security, there is another significant consideration when taking care of memory management. Leak memory and you might leak something sensitive. Mismanage memory, and you might end up nullifying all your efforts in cryptographically protecting the data. Having luckily avoided AcraBleed this time, we always keep an eye on memory leaks, and so should you.
There is no silver bullet for non-transparent things.
We are routinely running GoFuzz against Acra as part of testing. We are also frequently using PProf to see what's going on with the memory under load. However, there are always things that slip undetected, which leads us to the next conclusion...
Extreme performance testing is a must.
One thing many of us learned before: automatic memory managed languages require extra attention in quality assurance. Unit tests and functional tests give some answers to the "does it work the way we anticipate it to work" question, but never quite answer the "will it work in production properly?" one. At that point in time, the only deployment of Acra with significant load ran on Go 1.3, and nobody had realistic production data of 1.6 version.
Memory management still dictates a lot of technical choices.
Even modern, GC-driven languages like Go still simetimes require a lot of precision in memory management. It feels like one of the reasons of absence in Go of many OOP/highly abstract primitives is that these things will dramatically increase complexity of memory management mechanisms, and degrade performance. Even without using all of these niceties, if you try hard enough, you can still cause mayhem.
And, you will have to fix mayhem, just like we did.
- Go world needs automagic pprof beautifier, based on number of people on the web wondering what do all these boxes and percents mean. It took us a few moments of confusion, too"Cask" redirects here. For other uses, see Cask (disambiguation)
Traditional oak barrels made by Chilean cooperage Tonelería Nacional
Wooden wine barrel at an exhibition in Croatia
A barrel, cask, or tun is a hollow cylindrical container, traditionally made of wooden staves bound by wooden or metal hoops. Traditionally, the barrel was a standard size of measure referring to a set capacity or weight of a given commodity. For example, in the UK a barrel of beer refers to a quantity of 36 imperial gallons (160 L; 43 US gal). Wine was shipped in barrels of 119 litres (31 US gal; 26 imp gal).
Modern wooden barrels for wine-making are either made of French common oak (Quercus robur) and white oak (Quercus petraea) or from American white oak (Quercus alba) and typically have standard sizes: "Bordeaux type" 225 litres (59 US gal; 49 imp gal), "Burgundy type" 228 litres (60 US gal; 50 imp gal) and "Cognac type" 300 litres (79 US gal; 66 imp gal). Modern barrels and casks can also be made of aluminum, stainless steel, and different types of plastic, such as HDPE.
Someone who makes barrels is called a "barrel maker" or cooper. Barrels are only one type of cooperage. Other types include, but are not limited to: buckets, tubs, butter churns, hogsheads, firkins, kegs, kilderkins, tierces, rundlets, puncheons, pipes, tuns, butts, pins, and breakers.
Barrels have a variety of uses, including storage of liquids such as water and oil, fermenting wine, arrack, and sake, and maturing beverages such as wine, cognac, armagnac, sherry, port, whiskey, and beer. The term can also refer to roughly cylindrical containers made of modern materials like plastic.
Uses today [ edit ]
Beverage maturing [ edit ]
Wine barrels in Napa Valley, California
An "aging barrel" is used to age wine; distilled spirits such as whiskey, brandy, or rum; beer; tabasco sauce; or (in smaller sizes) traditional balsamic vinegar. When a wine or spirit ages in a barrel, small amounts of oxygen are introduced as the barrel lets some air in (compare to microoxygenation where oxygen is deliberately added). Oxygen enters a barrel when water or alcohol is lost due to evaporation, a portion known as the "angels' share". In an environment with 100% relative humidity, very little water evaporates and so most of the loss is alcohol, a useful trick if one has a wine with very high proof. Most beverages are topped up from other barrels to prevent significant oxidation, although others such as vin jaune and sherry are not.
Beverages aged in wooden barrels take on some of the compounds in the barrel, such as vanillin and wood tannins. The presence of these compounds depends on many factors, including the place of origin, how the staves were cut and dried, and the degree of "toast" applied during manufacture. Barrels used for aging are typically made of French or American oak, but chestnut and redwood are also used. Some Asian beverages (e.g., Japanese sake) use Japanese cedar, which imparts an unusual, minty-piney flavor. In Peru and Chile, a grape distillate named pisco is either aged in oak or in earthenware.
Wine [ edit ]
Some wines are fermented "on barrel", as opposed to in a neutral container like steel or wine-grade HDPE (high-density polyethylene) tanks. Wine can also be fermented in large wooden tanks, which—when open to the atmosphere—are called "open-tops". Other wooden cooperage for storing wine or spirits range from smaller barriques to huge casks, with either elliptical or round heads.
The tastes yielded by French and American species of oak are slightly different, with French oak being subtler, while American oak gives stronger aromas.[1] To retain the desired measure of oak influence, a winery will replace a certain percentage of its barrels every year, although this can vary from 5 to 100%. Some winemakers use "200% new oak", where the wine is put into new oak barrels twice during the aging process. Bulk wines are sometimes more cheaply flavored by soaking in oak chips or added commercial oak flavoring instead of being aged in a barrel because of the much lower cost.
Sherry [ edit ]
Sherry barrel made with glass barrel head to show the layer of flor floating on top of the aging wine
Sherry is stored in 600-litre (130 imp gal; 160 US gal) casks made of North American oak, which is slightly more porous than French or Spanish oak. The casks, or butts, are filled five-sixths full, leaving "the space of two fists" empty at the top to allow flor to develop on top of the wine. Sherry is also commonly swapped between barrels of different ages, a process that is known as Solera.
Whiskey [ edit ]
Charred white oak barrels are filled with new bourbon whiskey and resting in a rack house for a period of typically 4 to 9 years (for good-quality bourbon), with the char giving the bourbon its characteristic copper color.
Laws in several jurisdictions require that whiskey be aged in wooden barrels (note that the spelling "whiskey" is used in the US and Ireland, but "whisky" is used in Canada, Scotland, New Zealand, and Japan[2]). The law in the United States requires that "straight whiskey" (with the exception of corn whiskey) must be stored for at least two years in new, charred oak containers.[3] Other forms of whiskey aged in used barrels cannot be called "straight".[3]
International laws require any whisky bearing the label "Scotch" to be distilled and matured in Scotland for a minimum of three years and one day in oak casks.[4]
By Canadian law,[5] Canadian whiskies must "be aged in small wood for not less than three years", and "small wood" is defined as a wood barrel not exceeding 700 litres (150 imp gal; 180 US gal) capacity.
Since the U.S. law requires the use of new barrels for several popular types of whiskey, which is not typically considered necessary elsewhere, whiskey made elsewhere is usually aged in used barrels that previously contained American whiskey (usually bourbon whiskey). The typical bourbon barrel is 53 US gallons (200 l; 44 imp gal) in size, which is thus the de facto standard whiskey barrel size worldwide.[6][7] Some distillers transfer their whiskey into different barrels to "finish" or add qualities to the final product. These finishing barrels frequently aged a different spirit (such as rum) or wine. Other distillers, particularly those producing Scotch, often disassemble five used bourbon barrels and reassemble them into four casks with different barrel ends for aging Scotch, creating a type of cask referred to as a hogshead.[8]
Brandy [ edit ]
Maturing is very important for a good brandy, which is typically aged in oak casks. The wood used for those barrels is selected because of its ability to transfer certain aromas to the spirit. Cognac is aged only in oak casks made from wood from the Forest of Tronçais and more often from the Limousin forests.
Tequila [ edit ]
Some types of tequila are aged in oak barrels to mellow its flavor. "Reposado" tequila is aged for up to one year, "Añejo" tequila is aged for up to three years, and "Extra Añejo" tequila is aged for at least three years. Like with other spirits, longer aging results in a more pronounced flavor.
Balsamic vinegar [ edit ]
Traditional balsamic vinegar is aged in a series of wooden barrels.
Tabasco sauce [ edit ]
Since its invention in 1868, the pepper mash used to make Tabasco sauce is aged for three years in previously used oak whiskey barrels.
Beer [ edit ]
Beer barrels at the Munich Oktoberfest
Beers are sometimes aged in barrels which were previously used for maturing wines or spirits. This is most common in darker beers such as stout, which is sometimes aged in oak barrels identical to those used for whiskey. Whisky distiller Jameson notably purchases barrels used by Franciscan Well brewery for their Shandon Stout to produce a whisky branded as "Jameson Caskmates". Cask ale is aged in the barrel (usually steel) for a short time before serving. Extensive barrel aging is required of many sour beers.
Soft drinks [ edit ]
Vernors ginger ale is marketed as having a "barrel-aged" flavor, and the syrup used to produce the beverage was originally aged in oak barrels when first manufactured in the 19th century.[9] Whether the syrup continues to be aged in oak is unclear.[9]
Absorption by wood barrels [ edit ]
Some of the liquid stored in a barrel is absorbed into the wood. The barrels can be more or less porous, depending on the wood; more porous woods allow more of the product to be absorbed. Humid conditions tend to make the barrel absorb that humidity, allowing less product to be absorbed. If an aging barrel is repurposed and used to store or age another product, the residue in the wood will then be leached into the new product. In some cases this can provide finishing characteristics that are desired by the barrel user.
Some of the liquid that has been absorbed into the wood may also be reclaimed, e.g., by rinsing or steaming the barrels.[10][11][12]
Angels' share [ edit ]
The angels' share in the sherry aging produces fungus on the walls.
Baudoinia compniacensis on bark, top, with an unaffected sample below The angels' share fungus,on bark, top, with an unaffected sample below
"Angels' share" is a term for the portion (share) of a wine or distilled spirit's volume that is lost to evaporation during aging in oak barrels. The ambient humidity tends to affect the composition of this share. Drier conditions tend to make the barrels evaporate more water, strengthening the spirit. However, in higher humidities, more alcohol than water will evaporate, therefore reducing the alcoholic strength of the product. This alcoholic evaporate encourages the growth of a darkly colored fungus, the angels' share fungus, Baudoinia compniacensis, which tends to appear on the exterior surfaces of most things in the immediate area.[13][14]
Water storage [ edit ]
Water barrels are often used to collect the rainwater from dwellings (so that it may be used for irrigation or other purposes). This usage, known as rainwater harvesting, requires (besides a large rainwater barrel or water butt) adequate (waterproof) roof-covering and an adequate rain pipe.
Oil storage [ edit ]
The standard barrel of crude oil or other petroleum product (abbreviated bbl) is 42 US gallons (35.0 imp gal; 159.0 L). This measurement originated in the early Pennsylvania oil fields, and permitted both British and American merchants to refer to the same unit, based on the old English wine measure, the tierce.
Earlier, another size of whiskey barrel was the most common size; this was the 40 US gallons (33.3 imp gal; 151.4 L) barrel for proof spirits, which was of the same volume as five US bushels. However, by 1866, the oil barrel was standardized at 42 US gallons.
Oil has not been shipped in barrels[15] since the introduction of oil tankers, but the 42 US gallon size is still used as a unit for measurement, pricing, and in tax and regulatory codes. Each barrel is refined into about 20 US gallons (17 imp gal; 76 L) of gasoline,[16] the rest becoming other products such as jet fuel and heating oil, using fractional distillation.[17]
Barrel shape, construction and parts [ edit ]
Wine barrel parts Shaping barrel staves
Barrels have a convex shape and bulge at their center, called bilge. This facilitates rolling a well-built wooden barrel on its side and allows the roller to change directions with little friction, compared to a cylinder. It also helps to distribute stress evenly in the material by making the container more curved[citation needed]. Barrels have reinforced edges to enable safe displacement by rolling them at an angle (in addition to rolling on their sides as described).
A half-completed beer barrel; in wine barrel cooperage this set up is called "mise en rose"
Casks used for ale or beer have shives and keystones in their openings. Before serving the beer, a spile is hammered into the shive and a tap into the keystone.
The wooden parts that make up a barrel are called staves, while the rings that hold them together are called hoops. The latter are generally made of galvanized iron, though historically they were made of flexible bits of wood called withies. While wooden hoops could require barrels to be "fully hooped", with hoops stacked tightly together along the entire top and bottom third of a barrel, iron-hooped barrels only require a few hoops on each end.
Wine barrels typically come in two hoop configurations. An American barrel features 6 hoops, from top to center: head- or chime hoop, quarter hoop and bilge hoop (times two), while a French barrel features 8, including a so-called French hoop, located between the quarter- and bilge hoops (see "wine barrel parts" illustration). The opening at the center of a barrel is called bung hole and the stopper used to seal it is a bung. The latter is generally made of white silicone.
Sizes [ edit ]
A barrel is one of several units of volume, with dry barrels, fluid barrels (UK beer barrel, US beer barrel), oil barrel, etc. The volume of some barrel units is double others, with various volumes in the range of about 100–200 litres (22–44 imp gal; 26–53 US gal).
English wine casks [ edit ]
English wine cask units[18] gallon rundlet barrel tierce hogshead puncheon, tertian pipe, butt tun 1 tun 1 2 pipes, butts 1 1 1⁄ 2 3 puncheons, tertians 1 1 1⁄ 3 2 4 hogsheads 1 1 1⁄ 2 2 3 6 tierces 1 1 1⁄ 3 2 2 2⁄ 3 4 8 barrels 1 1 3⁄ 4 2 1⁄ 3 3 1⁄ 2 4 2⁄ 3 7 14 rundlets 1 18 31 1⁄ 2 42 63 84 126 252 gallons (wine) 3.785 68.14 119.24 158.99 238.48 317.97 476.96 953.92 litres 1 15 26 1⁄ 4 35 52 1⁄ 2 70 105 210 gallons (imperial) 4.546 68.19 119.3 159.1 238.7 318.2 477.3 954.7 litres
Pre-1824 definitions continued to be used in the US, the wine gallon of 231 cubic inches being the standard gallon for liquids (the corn gallon of 268.8 cubic inches for solids). In Britain, the wine gallon was replaced by the imperial gallon. The tierce later became the petrol barrel. The tun was originally 256 gallons, which explains from where the quarter, 8 bushels or 64 (wine) gallons, comes.
Brewery casks [ edit ]
English brewery cask units[19] gallon firkin kilderkin barrel hogshead Year designated 1 hogsheads 1 1 1⁄ 2 barrels 1 2 3 kilderkins 1 2 4 6 firkins 1 8 16 32 48 ale gallons (1454) = 4.621 L = 36.97 L = 73.94 L = 147.9 L = 221.8 L 1 9 18 36 54 beer gallons = 4.621 L = 41.59 L = 83.18 L = 166.4 L = 249.5 L 1 8 1⁄ 2 17 34 51 ale gallons 1688 = 4.621 L = 39.28 L = 78.56 L = 157.1 L = 235.7 L 1 9 18 36 54 ale gallons 1803 = 4.621 L = 41.59 L = 83.18 L = 166.4 L = 249.5 L 1 9 18 36 54 imperial gallons 1824 = 4.546 L = 40.91 L = 81.83 L = 163.7 L = 245.5 L
Although it is common to refer to draught beer containers of any size as barrels, in the UK this is strictly correct only if the container holds 36 imperial gallons. The terms "keg" and "cask" refer to containers of any size, the distinction being that kegs are used for beers intended to be served using external gas cylinders. Cask ales undergo part of their fermentation process in their containers, called casks.
Casks are available in several sizes, and it is common to refer to "a firkin" or "a kil" (kilderkin) instead of a cask.
The modern US beer barrel is 31 US gallons (117.34777 L), half a gallon less than the traditional wine barrel. (26 U.S.C. §5051[20])
Dry goods [ edit ]
Barrels are also used as a unit of measurement for dry goods (dry groceries), such as flour or produce. Traditionally, a barrel is 196 pounds (89 kg) of flour (wheat or rye), with other substances such as pork subject to more local variation. In modern times, produce barrels for all dry goods, excepting cranberries, contain 7,056 cubic inches, about 115.627 L.[21]
See also [ edit ]In this post, I explore the differences between the unittest boolean assert methods assertTrue and assertFalse and the assertIs identity assertion.
Definitions Here’s what the unittest module documentation currently notes about assertTrue and assertFalse, with the appropriate code highlighted: assertTrue(expr, msg=None) assertFalse(expr, msg=None) Test that expr is true (or false). Note that this is equivalent to bool ( expr ) is True and not to expr is True (use assertIs(expr, True) for the latter). Mozilla Developer Network defines truthy as: A value that translates to true when evaluated in a Boolean context. In Python this is equivalent to: bool ( expr ) is True Which exactly matches what assertTrue is testing for. Therefore the documentation already indicates assertTrue is truthy and assertFalse is falsy. These assertion methods are creating a bool from the received value and then evaluating it. It also suggests that we really shouldn’t use assertTrue or assertFalse for very much at all.
What does this mean in practice? Let’s use a very simple example - a function called always_true that returns True. We’ll write the tests for it and then make changes to the code and see how the tests perform. Starting with the tests, we’ll have two tests. One is “loose”, using assertTrue to test for a truthy value. The other is “strict” using assertIs as recommended by the documentation: import unittest from func import always_true class TestAlwaysTrue ( unittest. TestCase ): def test_assertTrue ( self ): """ always_true returns a truthy value """ result = always_true () self. assertTrue ( result ) def test_assertIs ( self ): """ always_true returns True """ result = always_true () self. assertIs ( result, True ) Here’s the code for our simple function in func.py : def always_true (): """ I'm always True. Returns: bool: True """ return True When run, everything passes: always_true returns True... ok always_true returns a truthy value... ok ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 2 tests in 0.004s OK Happy days! Now, “someone” changes always_true to the following: def always_true (): """ I'm always True. Returns: bool: True """ return 'True' Instead of returning True (boolean), it’s now returning string 'True'. (Of course this “someone” hasn’t updated the docstring - we’ll raise a ticket later.) This time the result is not so happy: always_true returns True... FAIL always_true returns a truthy value... ok ====================================================================== FAIL: always_true returns True ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/tmp/assertttt/test.py", line 22, in test_is_true self.assertIs(result, True) AssertionError: 'True' is not True ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 2 tests in 0.004s FAILED (failures=1) Only one test failed! This means assertTrue gave us a false-positive. It passed when it shouldn’t have. It’s lucky we wrote the second test with assertIs. Therefore, just as we learned from the manual, to keep the functionality of always_true pinned tightly the stricter assertIs should be used rather than assertTrue.
Use assertion helpers Writing out assertIs to test for True and False values is not too lengthy. However, if you have a project in which you often need to check that values are exactly True or exactly False, then you can make yourself the assertIsTrue and assertIsFalse assertion helpers. This doesn’t save a particularly large amount of code, but it does improve readability in my opinion. def assertIsTrue ( self, value ): self. assertIs ( value, True ) def assertIsFalse ( self, value ): self. assertIs ( value, False )Share. A controlled burn of brilliance A controlled burn of brilliance
These days I tend to enjoy games that are similar to a good book: a solitary, escapist experience I can get completely lost in without any interruptions from the outside world. Firewatch, then – on the strength of its gripping story, brilliant branching script, wholly convincing voice-acting performances, and stunning art direction – is easily one of my favorite and most memorable game experiences of this decade.
Firewatch quickly lets you know that it’s not going to pull any emotional punches over its four to five–hour runtime, opening with a series of text-based choices that call back to adventure genre forebears like Zork. I dare not spoil this potent sequence, but I will say that it masterfully bounces between being funny and heart-wrenching and plausibly establishes just why protagonist Henry ends up in the Wyoming woods as a solitary fire lookout.
Morning Glory
Exit Theatre Mode
Above: Firewatch Day 1 gameplay video (SPOILER WARNING)
“ The Two Forks Woods sticks in my mind like a real place.
Once you arrive there, Firewatch’s powerful ambiance takes hold. The story takes place over the course of an entire summer, with different “days” – which are treated as chapters of the story – playing out at different hours of the day and night. That allows bold reds, yellows, and oranges to color this fictional Wyoming forest’s beautifully painted scenery (a contribution by renowned illustrator Olly Moss) – all in a comfortable and immersive first-person perspective. It is a testament to both Moss and Firewatch’s level designers that, even despite the stylized look, the Two Forks Woods sticks in my mind like a real place: the narrow passage through Thunder Canyon, the serene calm of Jonesy Lake, the comically small size of Pork Pond, and the unexplained mystery of the Medicine Wheel. In fact, only the strange absence of almost any wildlife whatsoever betrays the convincing setting.
Firewatch sounds as good as it looks, thanks to a world-class script acted to perfection by its two leads. Rookie lookout Henry is given a playful vulnerability; you can choose to play him serious or funny, and the performance is up to the task either way. Henry’s boss – and primary point of human contact for the entire summer – is Delilah. Her emotional armor is thick, and she shows the cracks in her personality we’re allowed to see as we play without resorting to being overdramatic.
He Said, She Said
Exit Theatre Mode
Above: Firewatch Day 2 gameplay video (SPOILER WARNING)
“ It’s tense, scary, and funny – sometimes all within a few minutes of each other
Right from the jump, their relationship feels real, despite the fact that they’re communicating entirely via radio, with no faces on screen to lend emotional cues. Henry – or Hank, as she sometimes defiantly calls him – comes across as a good man at heart, but a flawed one – a man not sure about whether or not to go back to the life he left behind in Boulder, Colorado. He is fully capable of matching wits with Delilah, who uses humor as a shield for the personal life she doesn’t like discussing as they get to know each other over the course of the summer.
It’s a pair of firework-launching teenage girls that set Firewatch’s story in motion, and you can choose to talk to Delilah at almost any time by bringing up your two-way radio. She’s got something to say about almost everything, whether you need advice on how to handle a given situation or you’re just reporting your progress on a task she’s given you, and she’s so engaging that I found myself eager to call about every little thing I came across. Things get darker – in a figurative as well as a sometimes literal sense – when the teens go missing, and you and Delilah try to piece together the puzzle of their whereabouts while making your own critical (sometimes difficult) decisions. The writing here is simply head and shoulders above nearly every other game I’ve ever played. In fact, Firewatch’s script, unlike most video games, would also make a fantastic novella that’s every bit as gripping as the game is. It’s tense, scary, and funny – sometimes all within a few minutes of each other. Not a lot of games can successfully claim that.
Woods You Kindly...
Exit Theatre Mode
Above: 17 minutes of Firewatch gameplay (SPOILER WARNING)
“ There were points where I was afraid to turn around in the vast, lonely woods.
Like other so-called “walking simulators,” the gameplay in Firewatch is the story, though at least there’s more to actually do here than in most games within the genre. A substantial swath of Two Forks Woods is explorable, with supply caches, unique sights, and even a hidden turtle you can adopt (you’re gonna live with me now, Shelly Duvall!). You’ll rappel down cliffsides, climb up rock formations, explore the lookout tower that doubles as your home for the summer, and more. And yet, these same simple actions that are a delightful exploration of your new surroundings at the beginning of the game become almost terrifying as the plot progresses, leading to points where, playing in Henry’s first-person perspective, I was afraid to turn around in the vast, lonely woods.
Speaking of navigation: though I’m thankful there’s no giant arrow at the top of the screen pointing me exactly to where I need to go at any given moment, I did find getting around the Two Forks Woods a bit cumbersome at times, particularly near the end. While I was never hung up for too long, translating the map to the actual trail in front of you had me occasionally taking a wrong fork in the path. Henry’s compass helps a lot, however, so I was never hung up for too long.
As for the ending, it’s the only other part of Firewatch I wasn’t crazy about. I want to be very careful not to spoil anything, so I’ll just say that I didn’t quite find the revelation I had hoped for when I reached the end of what the story had been building up to. At the same time, however, I didn’t dislike the ending either. In fact, I find myself still thinking about it, trying to think of missed clues or other small cues that might yet give me the “Ah-ha!” moment I’m after. I’ll be very interested to hear other people’s take on the conclusion – this is the kind of game where the discussions that will arise afterwards are an important extension of the experience itself.
Xbox One Version and Fall 2016 Updates
Firewatch is now available for Xbox One, and it brings with it a couple of new features that are also being added into the existing PC and PS4 versions. Developer commentary – accessed as a separate mode – is integrated brilliantly as a series of national park listening stations, complete with period-appropriate cassette tapes. You'll hear from most of the Campo Santo team, and the kiosks are placed liberally enough where there's a lot of fun behind-the-scenes information to be gleaned at all times. I wish more games did this. The other new mode is a free-roam mode that lets you continue to wander the Wyoming wilderness even after completing the storyline.The iMBD is known for being astoundingly inaccurate when it comes to forthcoming projects, which is why I went directly to the source to get information on the alleged new Re-Animator sequel.
First, and most importantly, Re-Animator: Evolution is real; it’s an active project that’s currently in development.
Serge Levin has confirmed to us that he is in fact directing from a screenplay he wrote with growing horror icon Johnathon Schaech, who can be seen in Prom Night, The Doom Generation, Flight 7500, 8MM 2, Quarantine, Laid to Rest and Dark Circles, as well as the upcoming Day of the Dead remake.
“Our adaptation is a modern rendition of Herbert West – ‘Reanimator’ by H.P. Lovecraft,” Levin tells Bloody Disgusting. “Moreover, we’re making sure that the spirit and the story elements are more loyal to the original written material of H.P. Lovecraft. “It’s much darker, more thought provoking, and definitely more grounded in science than the first adaptation,” he continued. “It will be a true horror film with some neat sic-fi layers.”
Yes, it sounds as if Re-Animator: Evolution is a remake of sorts. Here’s the confirmed logline: “Pursued by the police, an ambitious neuroscientist uses a neutrino impulse to bring his dead wife back to life, unintentionally unlocking within her dormant powers that threaten the existence of everyone he knows.”
Levin adds: “Staying more true to the short story, we will have Major Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, as one of the characters from the original written material. Many other story and character elements that I don’t want to reveal yet…resonate with the H.P. Lovecraft’s original vision.”
The biggest news, however, is that Schaech is set to play Herbert West (played by Jeffrey Combs in the original franchise), while Levin will be playing his assistant. Insidious‘ Lin Shaye is confirmed |
United’s forwards were easily taken out of the game and City enjoyed large space behind United’s front line.
However when United appeared to have good coverage of the passing options in the first two lines Silva would often drop and the reaction of Fellaini would have big implications for the actions of City’s ball carrier.
If Silva was followed into deep positions City could play longer towards the forwards to target a defence exposed without the support of the midfield line. This would give the forwards the chance to attack the back line directly if they could control the destiny of the second balls.
Alternately if he was not followed Silva would be able to act as a free man and allow City to break past United’s pressing structure.
Another area of their build-up that Bravo had a strong influence on was in connecting their possession from wide areas back into the centre. When City appeared to be trapped on the wings without viable passing options they used Bravo as a route to switch the ball back to the opposite half space.
In order to maintain coverage of the nearby passing options; United in particular the front two, had to shift over to the ball. In these situations City used Bravo to switch the ball to a centre back in the opposite half space. Due to the long distances they had to make up United could not create access against these half space switches and the recipient could drive forwards aggressively into midfield.
This would have a similar effect as the use of Bravo. United’s midfielders were put in situations where they were required to create access to the ball in front of them but also maintain coverage of their direct opponents behind them. At times they did neither and in moving forwards to press they only opened large spaces for their direct opponent to receive passes behind them.
City’s rotating back 3
In order to make these switches and connect their possession from wide areas back into the half spaces, Fernandinho and the centre backs demonstrated strong staggering. In these situations where the ball was seemingly trapped on the flanks Fernandinho often moved higher into midfield. This was done to drag Rooney forwards with him and reduce United’s presence in the front line which would in turn give the centre backs more time and space on the ball.
However this movement was at times done by the centre backs. In some situations the ball-near centre back would pass out to the full back and move forwards, if Ibrahimovic chose to follow then the pass back into Bravo was open. If he did not follow then City would be able to connect their play back into the centre through the ball-near centre back.
These simple movements were done with the intentions of maximising the potential passing options for each receiver which was particularly important to prevent them being trapped in wide areas. With Stones, Fernandinho and Otamendi making slight movements to occupy different positions and Bravo in deeper areas offering an easy route to make switches, City were able to make connections when they seemed to be trapped. This was particularly important and advantageous against a United defence that struggled to create access upon these switches, particularly in the half spaces.
Issues in breaking through
Despite their dominance Manchester City were not able to break through United’s defence regularly and were not able to create several chances. Part of the reason for this was their intentions, they made rather sporadic attempts to break through and seemed to be quite focused on building stability with their possession.
Furthermore they often lacked depth particularly when Iheanacho dropped deeper. Although his position was usually taken up by Silva, his skill set did not facilitate creating a threat in behind.
Furthermore the timing of the reactions from Nolito and Sterling was sub optimal. At times they reacted by moving higher, more central and at times making runs in behind but these were often made too early or not at all.
United’s pressing issues
Despite the strength and press resistance the away side showed there were some clear issues in United’s pressing that made City’s life easier.
Firstly they lacked a certain intensity in their actions and it was at times too easy for City to break past them with individual dribbles. This lack of intensity transferred to shifting moments where they were often too slow to prevent City from escaping their pressing by switching to the far side.
Mourinho’s men also experienced issues in pressing particularly on their right side. When City were building in the left half space Mkhitaryan was visibly unsure whether to close down aggressively due to the risk of leaving Valencia against Kolarov and Nolito. He therefore chose to approach gradually whilst attempting to cover the pass into Kolarov. However Otamendi used his time on the ball to drive forwards with the ball where Nolito could move infield and receive passes, De Bruyne could move off Fellaini’s blind side or Silva could be accessed.
Another issues was due to the man-oriented nature of their defending. Whilst their man-orientations allowed them to press every pass, the individualistic nature prevented them from making cohesive and collective attempts to press the ball. With each defender being at least slightly occupied with a direct opponent they were often unable to lend each other adequate defensive support. At times this exposed the likes of Fellaini and Pogba to the individual qualities of Silva and De Bruyne in particular who was able to create havoc with his strong blind side movement.
With this man-oriented nature, United experienced some compactness issues as their reactive nature was capitalised on through intelligent movement from Guardiola’s men. One area this was particularly evident in was the lack of support from the midfield in pressing. De Bruyne and Silva at times dragged Pogba and Fellaini into deep positions simply by remaining advanced which created large vertical disconnects in United’s pressing.
This was also used in the opposite way, with the opening goal being an example of this. With Silva dropping into a deep position and Fellaini following cautiously, United lacked his aerial presence in front of the defence to defend against Kolarov’s long ball.
United’s offensive struggles
When United recovered the ball in deep areas their man-oriented nature meant they lacked separation from their opponents to make passes and avoid City’s counter pressing. Thus they were easily forced into hasty clearances which partly explains their low possession rate for much of the first half. In other situations where they recovered the ball in midfield areas they were unable to combine out of pressure with City’s focus on guarding passing lanes before moving into them leading to a number of interceptions.
In non-transitional phases they were often reluctant to build-up from deep areas with Mourinho citing after the game his wariness of City’s desire to press. On the occasions that they attempted to build attacks from deep they experienced issues with poor support from the midfield. This was mainly an issue stemming from a poor dynamic in the midfield.
In some instances Fellaini and Pogba were simply too static and were thus easily covered with simple man-orientations. On other occasions the dynamic was simply not co-ordinated with the pair moving into high and wide positions where they could not be accessed with short passes. However it is important to note that this was possibly an instruction from Mourinho to bypass City’s pressing with direct balls. Furthermore press resistance is not one of Fellaini’s finest qualities and his selection at the base of midfield was not conducive to a short build-up.
Towards the end of the first half they built a foothold in the game and took advantage of the lowered height and intensity of City’s pressing. An error from Stones and Bravo allowed them to claw one back and set up an interesting 2nd half.
2nd half
United’s changes
Immediately after half time Mourinho brought on Rashford and Herrera for Lingard and Mkhitaryan as United switched to something of a 4-3-3. With Herrera now behind them, Pogba and Fellaini in particular could move high and use their height as targets for long balls.
Their final 3rd dynamic was very wing-oriented as they aimed to take advantage of their height advantage with crosses. While United’s right side was rather predictable with Rooney and Valencia aiming to cross whenever they had the chance, the direct dribbling of Rashford on the left was more problematic.
The direct approach did generate quite a few shots meaning City had more goal kick situations where United could force them to play longer with their man-oriented approach. Due to the rules of a goal kick Bravo could not be used as a free man and the coverage of all passes in the first line meant they were forced into longer kicks from these situations.
Generally United’s direct approach failed to create quality chances and this was partly due to a smart change from Guardiola.
Pep reacts
After around 7 minutes of the second half when United’s approach was evident Guardiola brought on Fernando to the 6 position with Fernandinho acting as an 8 and De Bruyne moving up front.
In addition to the increased height Fernando brought he often dropped into the defensive line to protect against both long balls and crosses and City defended in a 5-4-1. With three centre backs they had more security against flick ons and the full backs could press more aggressively in wide areas to prevent crosses. This would assist in reducing the frequency and quality of crosses.
With their opponents becoming increasingly desperate City had a number of transition situations which they split between winding down the clock with possession or going directly for goal. Their profligacy prevented them from adding to their lead and making the last few minutes more comfortable.
Conclusion
8 wins from 17 games and still just the 3 defeats is now the record as Guardiola kept up his dominance in meetings with Jose Mourinho. Although there is a long season ahead, victory at Old Trafford without Aguero and Gundogan should give City’s fans confidence. Klopp’s Liverpool and Conte’s Chelsea will likely be tougher opponents from a strategic perspective and it will be interesting to see how City deal with those opponents.
As for United, Mourinho’s strategy will be strong enough to beat most opponents in the league. However their attempts to press City were not intense or co-ordinated enough and this will need to be improved for their February clash at the Etihad.Dear Neighbor,
The ballots are cast, the votes are counted, and the people have spoken. Below are the detailed results of the Fall 2017 Participatory Budgeting Election in the 49th Ward:
PB49 Election Results Fall 2017
This the second “PB49” election held this year. The Mayor’s Office of Budget and Management has moved from May to January the deadline for aldermen to submit their infrastructure requests. So from this point forward, PB elections will be held in the autumn.
Over 2,200 residents of our community cast ballots in the election. This marks the third PB49 election in a row where turnout exceeded 2,000 voters.
The voters this cycle decided that 67% of the $1 million allocated for PB should be devoted to street and alley resurfacing and repairs to sidewalks and alley aprons (the area located at the mouth of the alley between the sidewalk and the street). As a result, four blocks of streets and seven alleys will be resurfaced and approximately $125,000 will be devoted to repairs to sidewalks and alley aprons.
For the remaining portion of the budget, the voters selected the following:
Park benches to replace seven old benches at Loyola, Touhy and Pottawattomie Parks and add a new bench at Sherwin Beach;
to replace seven old benches at Loyola, Touhy and Pottawattomie Parks and add a new bench at Sherwin Beach; Extension of the Pratt bike lane, to include the portion of Pratt between Clark and Ridge. This will allow for an uninterrupted bike lane on Pratt from Sheridan to Kedzie;
, to include the portion of Pratt between Clark and Ridge. This will allow for an uninterrupted bike lane on Pratt from Sheridan to Kedzie; New streetlights on the 6700 and 6800 blocks of Greenview adjacent to Kilmer Elementary and Sullivan High Schools; and
adjacent to Kilmer Elementary and Sullivan High Schools; and A countdown crosswalk sign at Jarvis and Clark to help pedestrians cross the street safely.
When I launched the 49th Ward Participatory Budgeting process eight years ago, I had high expectations for our amazing neighborhood. The 49th Ward has a proud history of civic engagement, and I knew my constituents would embrace this process.
But the participatory budgeting elections have exceeded even my wildest dreams. They are more than elections. They are community celebrations and an affirmation that people will participate in the civic affairs of their community if given real power to make real decisions.
At a time when our governments in Washington and Springfield are failing us, we in Chicago’s 49th Ward have shown the world what true democracy looks like.
I’m proud to represent this amazing community!
Sincerely,
Joe MooreFarewell to Jack English, A True Craftsman Who Built a Good Life in the Wilderness ‘Ventana Jack’ was a remarkable carpenter, father, husband, hunter, and fisherman who thrived in the backwoods of California. We honor his passing by publishing here this story from our book. Steven Leckart Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 7, 2016
Located on a 5-acre plot of private land in the middle of a national forest, this cabin is only accessible by hiking a 6-mile footpath.
In September 1976, Jack and Mary English were hunting with their 14 year-old son Dennis in the woods behind Big Sur, California. A 260-square-mile section of national forest with rugged peaks, hidden valleys, and hot springs, the Ventana Wilderness is located in a region known for having California’s largest density of mountain lion, and abundant wild hogs, turkeys and deer. While Jack and Dennis were off tracking a deer, Mary encountered a small group of 20-something hikers who were holding a map and looking around curiously. They said they’d read a classified ad in the local newspaper: someone was auctioning off a 5-acre plot somewhere in the middle of this national forest in a place called Pine Valley. The hikers had found the right spot. Later, after they’d left and Jack and Dennis returned, Mary relayed the news. “Somebody is gonna get this land,” she said, “It’s gonna be us.” Since 1930, when Jack was eleven, he had been frequenting Pine Valley to hike, camp, hunt and fish for rainbow trout. His family lived on a farm about 50 miles north, as the crow flies. Surrounded by a forest of ponderosa pine, Pine Valley is only accessible on foot or on horseback via a pair of dusty trails that descend and meander 6 miles through the rocky Santa Lucia Mountains. Around 1880, after the passage of the Homestead Act, settlers began staking claims on 160 acres in and around Pine Valley. Over the years, families continued trading back their undeveloped parcels to the Forest Service. Jack had come to know one 15-acre plot well. It was situated right along a stream, near a sunny pasture, below a massive sandstone formation that glows in the moonlight. There were dilapidated remains of an old cabin, but no one had lived there in years. So in 1936, when Jack was seventeen, he contacted the owner. She wouldn’t take less than $1,000 per acre (For all 15 acres, that translates to roughly $257,000 today). Oh, well, Jack figured.
Jack English began building his off-grid cabin in the Ventana Wilderness in 1976.
After serving in WWII, Jack returned home and found work as a carpenter. He met and married Mary, a feisty pig farmer’s daughter who was a descendent of Abraham Lincoln. “She was a cute one,” Jack recalls. “Five-foot two, 105 pounds, and never varied much.” He nicknamed her “Scrumptious.” Together, the couple traveled to the backwoods of Alaska and Canada on hunting trips. Jack built them a house in Soquel, a two-hour drive from Pine Valley. Jack and Mary made the trek frequently. When Dennis was 6 months old, they brought along their son. By the time he was a teenager, the family had spent countless days on the trails and nights camping. So in 1976, when the opportunity presented itself for Jack and Mary to claim a small piece of Pine Valley, they didn’t hesitate. After dressing and packing up the deer Jack had shot, the family hiked 6 miles back to their 1966 forest-green Volkswagen Beatle and drove back into town. They picked up the local paper and found the ad. Sometime after 1936, when Jack had tried to buy that 15-acre plot, the land had been whittled down to 5 acres. The owner had recently died, and the family was liquidating assets. At the auction, there were four bidders. Jack and his brother, Phil, offered $11,000 — more than three times the next closest bid. A month later, Jack set out to build his family a proper cabin on his new acreage. Phil couldn’t understand why his brother wouldn’t settle for a campsite with tents. The land was 6 miles from anywhere where you could park a truck. All the lumber would need to be gathered and milled on site, which meant hauling in all the tools, equipment and other materials by horseback and backpack. Jack picked out a site right below the sandstone formation. Phil warned him their cabin would eventually be pummeled with boulders. The brothers argued. Jack couldn’t be dissuaded. He sat down and drafted a standard house plan for a rustic colonial-style cabin with one big room and a tiny bathroom.
Lumber was cut and milled on site. All of the tools were packed in, hand carried, or carted by wheelbarrow.
In October 1976, Jack and Dennis began transporting supplies into Pine Valley. They set up a big, WWI-era canvas tent with sleeping bags and pads, and lanterns and flashlights, and not much else. The water source was a natural spring by a creek 300 yards away. Food was packed in and cooked by campfire. They’d catch fish and occasionally hunt deer. On Fridays after work, Jack would load up his pickup and drive with Dennis to the nearest campground parking lot, arriving by 830 p.m. They would start hiking and would get to Pine Valley around 1030 p.m. Each trip was meticulously planned out so they could avoid hiking back and forth more than once. With a handmade sifter he’d fashioned out of a redwood frame and wire screen, Jack started creating two separate piles of gravel and sand by the creek. Gradually, they hand-carried the sand and gravel in five-gallon buckets back to their site. Whenever Jack came across a larger stone he liked the look of, he’d grab it and put it on a pile by their tent. On the trail, if he spotted a handsome stone, he’d toss it into his pack and bring it to Pine Valley.
When he was a teenager, Dennis English helped his father build the small cabin on the valley floor below.
Each weekend, father and son packed in more tools and materials: Jack carried a 25-pound Alaskan chainsaw mill on his back, while Dennis carried the mill’s two 22-pound Husqvarna powerheads in one trip. When something was too big or cumbersome to carry or strap onto their backs, such as a gas-powered generator, they used a wheelbarrow or a makeshift cart. Over the course of many trips, Jack and Dennis hand-carried several hundred feet of 1/2-inch-thick rebar in bundles that weighed 80 pounds each. They’d wrap each end of a 12-foot-long bundle in foam, then each of them would shoulder an end and head out onto the trail. “It bounced and would beat you up,” recalls Dennis, who was a lanky teenager, “Your shoulder started aching pretty soon, and then you’d switch to the other shoulder and go back and forth.” At the site, as piles of rebar grew, so did bucketloads of sand and gravel. “I knew all the heavy work was making me stronger,” says Dennis. In 1976, Jack and Dennis felled mature ponderosa pine trees that were newly dead or dying from infestations of pine beetle. The following spring, they milled the lumber. To dry the wood, they built racks using rebar, and piled up the boards with sticks in between each one to ensure air could pass between them. While they waited for the lumber to dry, they continued multitasking. Jack’s collection of eye-catching stones continued to grow. Once they’d collected enough gravel and sand, Jack and Dennis began to haul in a substantial supply of Portland cement. One one occasion, they led a train of at least ten mules and horses, each carrying two bags of cement. Jack used the cement to hand-mix his own mortar. He cast the cabin’s foundation wall and footing for the fireplace in solid concrete and rebar. The foundation was finished in the spring of 1977. That summer, they finished the framing, outside sheeting and siding, and roofing.
The wisteria plant growing across the front porch was planted in the 1990s. The flowers bloomed for the first time in the spring of 2013.
For the next three years, the family spent most of their weekends in Pine Valley. Mary planted a garden with grapes, blackberries, raspberries, and various fruit trees. Jack labored on the cabin’s interior. Once, when he stumbled across a felled black oak tree a quarter mile away from the cabin, Jack convinced Phil to help him lug the mill over to the tree. Jack knew the wood would be both beautiful and durable, so he used it for the floorboards. One larger piece became the fireplace mantle. To do away with the chainsaw marks on the wood, Jack resurfaced the wood using a broadaxe and adze. The technique involves first striking the beam with the axe to create a series of parallel crosscuts on the surface. Next, the adze is used to smooth out those cuts. The mantle took Jack two or three hours to finish. He used that same technique on the ceiling beams, which took even longer. After the four bunks were built and the kitchen was set up and the windows were in place, Jack began the stonework on the chimney, foundation, and fireplace. He would work a little bit at a time. By then he’d gathered stones from riverbeds and trails all over the valley. The stonework was purely cosmetic. But it helped give the cabin a detailed level of craftsmanship deserving of the area’s natural beauty. Over the years, the five-acre plot had become Jack’s favorite spot in the entire valley. He placed the final stone in 1980. The exterior boards were never planed, so the patterned cuts from the chain saw blade are still visible. That same year, Jack and Mary began extending their stays out at the cabin. Sometimes they’d hike in and spend up to a month at a time, just the two of them. Having retired, Jack had no obligation to be elsewhere. He took up crafting bows for violins, cellos, violas, and basses. Out in the woods, time seemed to stand still. Ever since the 1950s, Jack had grown increasingly disenchanted with modern society. With the rise of commercialism, people were turning away from farming and building and making things. He believed that products were getting cheaper in quality. The wood-burning stove was helicoptered to the cabin for $250. “I don’t care for progress. I’d rather go back. My wife was the same way,” Jack says, “When I lost her, it’s not been the same since.” In 2001, Mary died at the age of seventy-eight. Soon after, Jack moved to the cabin and began to live there almost all the time. Their home in Soquel reminded him too much of Mary. He couldn’t stand to be anywhere outside Pine Valley. He’d hike in alone and stay for a month, then head back into town to gather supplies, pay his bills, and visit Dennis and the grandkids. Jack kept Mary’s ashes in a small cardboard box. He carried her with him. “He didn’t want an urn of any kind,” Dennis says, “Because it would just be too heavy to be packing everywhere.” A portrait of Jack English’s wife Mary, who was nicknamed Scrumptious, sits on a mantel cut from black oak. The mantel’s hand-hewn finish was achieved by scoring the wood with a broadaxe, then smoothing those cuts with an adze. Around this time, Jack became a local legend among hikers and backpackers. Although there are two fences near the property, Jack always left the gate open. He welcomed all visitors. On one Thanksgiving, a camper caught in a rainstorm took shelter with Jack in his cabin. Jack fed the man and kept him warm. For the next eight years, the man returned to Pine Valley every Thanksgiving to hand-deliver Jack’s dinner. As the years passed, Jack remained physically strong, but he started to develop arrhythmia. So Dennis began accompanying his father whenever he’d hike in or out of Pine Valley. The last time Jack hiked the trail was in 2012, the days before his ninety-third birthday. He made the hike in three hours and fifteen minutes, which is still faster than most novice backpackers.
The trailhead to the cabin begins at the bottom of a meandering dirt road.
Jack English completed the five-hour hike the day before his ninety-third birthday. Months later, Jack suffered a heart attack. Once he was released from the hospital, Dennis made the decision for Jack to move into his home in Soquel. But every month, Dennis makes arrangements for his father to visit the cabin in Pine Valley. A local helicopter pilot volunteers to fly Jack roughly 20 minutes from a nearby airport to his cabin so he can stay over for a couple nights. Dennis, now fifty-three, set up a makeshift heliport in a meadow less than 100 yards behind the cabin. A local helicopter pilot volunteers to drop off Jack English near his cabin whenever he asks. In May 2014, after his helicopter landed, Jack walked slowly toward the cabin he built four decades ago, on the land he first explored eight decades ago. He sat down behind the cabin, near the workshop where he had handcrafted dozens of violin bows. “It’s a good place to die,” ninety-four-year-old Jack said, exhaling, “I think my days are about done. But I’ve had a good life. I can’t complain.” He took a moment to look around the land, before heading inside. Around the cabin, not much has changed. In 2011, a few sandstone boulders had tumbled down a hillside a five-minute walk from the cabin. As of 2014, not one boulder had touched the cabin that Jack and Dennis built.Bowing to popular pressure, the Union Government has ordered a CBI probe to conclusively settle the issue of whether Rohit Sharma is really talented and if so, where is this talent. The tipping point for the probe came after Indian skipper Virat Kohli defended his soulmate Rohit Sharma after the Galle debacle, saying, “Form is temporary, TALENT is permanent! You guys BC MC @$##$ don’t know how much TALENT is hidden in him!’
As soon as these comments went viral, the Supreme Court directed the government to order a CBI probe to investigate the matter and find out the TALENT in Rohit. A 15 member CBI team was air-dashed to Sri Lanka to interrogate the Mumbai Indians skipper.
Upon arrival, the CBI took Rohit’s blood and stool samples and immediately sent it for forensics analysis. The results came out in the morning and it was surprising to say the least that they found traces of an unknown metal in Rohit’s stool and blood samples, clearly suggestive of some metal poisoning. The Mumbaikar reportedly gulped down twenty packets of Maggi ever since he landed in the emerald isle which could have LEAD to this discovery.
However, special tests were undertaken in laboratory to find out more about this metal and it is said to be a new structural form of Plumbum (LEAD). Confirming as much, the chief of CBI’s laboratory department, Dr. Salunkhe, said, ”We found this new structural form of PLUMBUM while searching for TALENT in Rohit’s body so we are planning to name it ‘TALENTUM’ in his honour!! I hope this conclusively answers the question: ‘Is Rohit Sharma talented?’”
(Reported by Devashish Palkar)We've watched Alex Dunphy grow up over the past six years, and she's about to hit a major milestone – or two?
On Modern Family Season 6 Episode 22, Alex is called into the principal's office along with her parents, and she assumes that means she is going to be named valedictorian. However, it looks like her rival is also called in, and they are being named co-valedictorians. That sounds pretty good, but not for the overly competitive Alex Dunphy.
Naturally, at the very end of her high school career, there's a reason for Alex to compete once again over grades. In fact, I think I'd be devastated otherwise. Alex and her rival, Sunjay, convince the principal to let them try for one last grade they hadn't yet earned – for gym class.
Oh, the irony. If there were ever a grade it was okay for these two to do badly on, this would be it. But instead, they train painstakingly to race one another in hopes of being number one.
Side note: I never really understood getting a grade for physical ability in gym class. Though maybe I'm biased since I did so poorly on my high school physical fitness test... I'll spare you all those details.
When Sunjay arrives to Alex's house to thank her for pushing him all these years, and to also tell her he as feelings for her. she's flustered and surprised. Leave it to her family to immediately assume it's a trick so that Sunjay can somehow distract her and win the race. Claire and Phil have never really taken any sort of love interest for Alex seriously.
Except, it isn't. Sunjay forfeits the race and declares his love for Alex as their parents look on. And then, we are given what is perhaps the most adorable kiss scene on television all year. Alex stands on her tiptoes to kiss him, then they argue over who is better at kissing. Claire seems a little proud as she watches from the bleachers, and Phil has a classic dad moment where he says they could probably bring it down a notch.
So, the two will end up being co-valedictorians after all, but I don't think that's the takeaway. Instead, the takeaway is a love interest for Alex, and I hope it goes somewhere further than this episode. It should, actually, complicate matters as the two head off to college. We'll see what happens.
Other Thoughts:
I appreciate the protesting storyline for Cam and Mitchell on several levels. I love to see when they get involved (or don't) with issues like this.
Gloria's fake southern accent is amazing. She had me literally laughing out loud.
Jay's confession to Gloria about why he really wants her to be a citizen is sweet and endearing, and it also makes a lot of sense. It's a nice moment.
What did you think of this episode of Modern Family? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Need to catch up on past episodes? You can always watch Modern Family online right here via TV Fanatic!
Patriot Games Review Editor Rating: 4.5 / 5.0 4.5 / 5.0
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Rating: 4.7 / 5.0 ( 17 Votes) 4.5 / 5.0
Ashley Bissette Sumerel was a staff writer for TV Fanatic. She retired in September 2017. Follow her on Twitter and on Google+.Attorney General Jeff Sessions will hold a news briefing Tuesday morning at the Department of Justice to discuss the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, an Obama-era executive action that protects young undocumented immigrants from deportation. Trump is reportedly planning to shutter the program after a six-month delay.
President Donald Trump, an obsessive television viewer and master of the medium, is not scheduled to face the cameras. In fact, the only public event on the president’s schedule on Tuesday is a photo op before a meeting with GOP congressional leaders on tax reform.
“Big week coming up!” Trump said in a Twitter post on Monday evening.
Many unanswered questions remain about the administration’s plans for the program, such as whether any of the approximately 800,000 current DACA recipients can continue renewing their permits, or whether young undocumented immigrants can still apply for a permit within the next six months.
Then there is the matter of a legislative fix ― will Republicans in Congress pass a bill to shield so-called Dreamers from deportation? Will the president sign it into law? Or will Trump use the six-month delay to buy time and ultimately not follow through on shuttering DACA?
Don’t expect too many of those questions answered by your public officials on Tuesday, however. Sessions will “not be taking questions” after his briefing with reporters, per a DOJ advisory sent Monday.
*The Attorney General will not be taking questions following the briefing.* #DACA pic.twitter.com/n995gVUrxx — Michael A. Scarcella (@MikeScarcella) September 5, 2017Illustration by Marium Ali
A patriotic song blares through speakers placed on either side of the stage. The Urdu ditty that talks down terrorists was produced and released by the army’s public relations department in response to the 2014 Army Public School attack in Peshawar. The audience, a chirpy mix of men, women and children, is gathered for the Qaumi Nifaz-e-Urdu Conference. They all await the guest of honour inside Aiwan-e-Quaid at Islamabad’s Fatima Jinnah Park on the morning of July 24, 2016.
The atmosphere within the venue is gregarious. Outside, it is oppressively hot and humid even though it rained the previous night and drizzled the same morning. A wrinkled banner on a sidewall asks: “If we are a nation then where is the national language?” Another reads: “Mohsin-e-Urdu Justice Jawwad S Khawaja ki jura’at ko salaam (salute to the courage of Urdu’s benefactor Justice Jawwad S Khawaja).”
The event, put together to call for the adoption of Urdu as Pakistan’s official language, morphs into a prolonged standing ovation as atomic scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan enters the venue. Speakers later emphasise that Urdu strengthens Pakistan’s ideological foundations (even when it is the mother tongue of approximately eight per cent of the people in a country of nearly 200 million). It is also the language of Islam, most argue.
At one point, a female teacher rises from the audience and says that Arabic should be compulsory in schools. At this, some people at the back start shouting “Urdu ko band karo (shut down Urdu)”. While some speakers, too, advocate making Arabic the medium of instruction, others skirt around the topic. None of them, however, disowns Arabic.
When Abdul Qadeer Khan makes his speech, he admits he could not have made the atomic bomb had he not learnt English. He nevertheless insists that Urdu unites people and it is imperative that we become “proactive in its implementation”.
He is joined on stage by Irfan Siddiqui, adviser to the prime minister on national history and literary heritage. A veteran Urdu columnist, he is known to have the ear of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. “I have a spiritual connection with Urdu. I have studied, taught and written Urdu,” he says to highlight his affinity with the language. But, he adds, he cannot implement Urdu as the official language because “it is not part of my job”.
Abdullah Gul, son of the late pro-Taliban spymaster General Hamid Gul, apologises for being late. He was held back by a delegation that came to see him on behalf of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani without prior notice, he deems it necessary to tell the audience. Then he mentions a television interview of his. “I told Al Jazeera that Urdu is the second most spoken language in the world. You should start a channel in it.”
Once food is announced, the crowd bursts out of the hall. Chicken pulao and shami kebabs in styrofoam boxes are hastily distributed by volunteers as people find a suitable spot to consume their meal in the oppressive heat.
A lawyer writes an application at the Lahore High Court | Murtaza Ali, White Star
The 1973 Constitution recognises Urdu as Pakistan’s only national language. It also promises to make it the official language of the state. Article 251 of the Constitution says “arrangements shall be made for [Urdu] being used for official and other purposes within [next] fifteen years”. A subclause allows the use of English until those arrangements are made; another subclause permits provinces to promote “provincial languages” alongside Urdu.
Dutch anthropologist Oskar Verkaaik calls this recognition of Urdu part of the “ashrafization” of the language that began long before Partition. In his 2004 book Migrants and Militants: Fun and Violence in Urban Pakistan, he defines ashrafization as a “long-term process of making Urdu the language of cosmopolitanism and distinction”. A necessary corollary of ashrafization, according to him, has been that regional languages including Sindhi and Bengali were deemed “inferior” in Pakistan.
Since the adoption of the Constitution about 44 years ago, the process of Urdu’s implementation is still far from complete. In many areas, it has not even started. The 15-year time frame given in the Constitution has passed almost thrice but English remains an administrative, economic and social necessity. As regional languages experience an unprecedented revival in the age of smartphones and social media, where these technologies have democratised activism, Urdu’s status as the “language of cosmopolitanism and distinction” seem to have fallen by the wayside.
Nothing reflects this more than a 2015 Supreme Court decision. A three-member bench led by then chief justice Jawwad S Khawaja combined different petitions – that came up for hearing 18 times in 2015 alone – over the violation of Article 251. One was filed in 2003, by lawyer Kaukab Iqbal, and the other by Syed Mehmood Akhtar Naqvi, known for being a serial petitioner, in 2012. The case received immediate public attention. In proceedings spread over seven months, the judges observed they were “not informed of satisfactory arrangements by the government” for Urdu’s adoption as the official language.
The court issued its verdict on September 8, 2015, directing the federal and provincial governments to make Urdu the official language within three months. “In the |
’s no character or personality. I don’t like the idea of making music without personality, without rough edges. Something we actively try to do is to blur that line. With that comes aggression and the roughness. We’re channeling our own tastes and our own personalities.” Even so, the recent tilt toward an acceptance of pop in critical and independent circles dubbed “poptimism” is part of the reason the band felt free enough to embrace that proclivity in itself. “I think there’s been a kind of sea change about the legitimacy of pop music globally,” Cook says. “I think it’s symptomatic of the internet and the way people are consuming music. It’s a great thing, and maybe something that subconsciously spurred us to do this in the first place. Like holy shit, it’s okay to like Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Britney Spears.” If pop has been defined by vapidity, Chvrches continue to puzzle at the edges of that unraveling preconception. The synth explosions, warped keyboard blasts, and crisp flitting of Mayberry’s looped alto — these are the elements that make Chvrches pop. The slight minimalism, compact melodies. And then, the lyrics. Innocence, conflict, loss, stubbornness, conversations unfurling over the course of a chorus, shame and regret, guilt and desire, anger and joy. Their music reflects the complex and complicated world of an adult rendered in a sparkle of universal pleasure. Like most songs by the Glaswegian trio, their new single “Leave A Trace” is a sharp-tongued kiss-off coated in sugary, crackling synths and massive, airy beats. “Take care to tell it just how it was / Take care to tell on me for the cause,” Mayberry urges. Harmonies thrum electric through the words like a swarm of bees, arching toward epiphany: “I know I need to feel released.” The entire ethos of this band leans, yearns toward that moment. I know I need to feel released. It’s a desire for freedom, and a shared sense of defiance, that united them. There’s been a kind of sea change about the legitimacy of pop music globally. Like holy shit, it’s okay to like Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Britney Spears. Instead of feeling like compromise, the move toward pop felt more like an act of courage, an act of release. “I think all of us are strong enough personalities to have done this, but only because we eventually found the right people,” Doherty says of the transition. “Especially in your late teens and early twenties, your musical path often just happens to you. Before you know it, you’re five years into a band and a dynamic, whether you like it or not. And we were just lucky to find people who had the same level of confidence and shared the same passions at the right time.” Bones was built on that confidence, and the excitement in pursuing something new; Every Open Eye refines those impulses. They opted to record their second album in the exact same fashion as before, working alone in Cook’s basement studio. After two years away from the studio, the group came to the new songs quickly, without any of the ennui or fear that can bog down sophomore releases. “I was thinking about why people are always worried about their second album,” Doherty continues. “I think it’s because the first album comes too early for a lot of people. You have people who have never tasted failure in music, they don’t know what it feels like to fail. They’re so terrified. I’ve failed so badly before and it was fucking horrible, I never want to go there again. So instead of wallowing in that, I took every negative experience and made it a lesson. By the time we made this second album — or even the first album never felt like we were making a debut record — it felt like we were drawing on all that experience already.”
Credit: Ryan Muir
Every Open Eye. Say it to yourself under your breath like a spell. It’s the garbage compactor of fame smashed into three small words, or, it’s a steely creed of resolve. Chvrches’ second album title could be read as a sigh of unwanted pressure, as wry determination, or, something halfway in between. There’s something rebellious about it, something all-encompassing. It’s an unflinching work that stares down indie disdain for music that sounds candy-sweet catchy. Pop is often looked at as the lowest common denominator in music, an appeal to a baser part of the human experience. But nothing about this band bows at the final, trite altar of polished-to-banality pop itself. These are lush, complex songs flecked with anger, wonder, and fierce imagery. They erupt like volcanic euphoria.
Credit: Ryan Muir
When Bones was released in 2013, such a strict juxtaposition of emotionally intelligent lyrics and bombastic, addictive melodies felt new. Since then, countless other synth-pop acts have worked out the formula Chvrches helped introduce on Bones and adhere to on Every Open Eye. Maybe it’s self-control and self-determination that stands as the final distinction between “indie pop” and “pop stars” in our fractured genre marketplace. It’s hard to imagine Mayberry — or Cook and Doherty for that matter — with a handler. In fact, Chvrches might be the most obvious example in contemporary culture of the gaping divide between insular expectations of indie and alternative scenes, and the shiny smooth world of mainstream pop. Naturally, the ideologies behind each of those factions are often in direct conflict. “I think there’s something perversely pleasurable about confounding people’s expectations about us,” Cook says. “We aren’t able to fit into a box. We don’t really conform to any other types of bands. That’s a good thing, though.” Even if defying expectations can be enjoyable, and fulfilling, the brunt of these expectations fall on Mayberry. “We come from a more alternative rock band background, and it’s interesting to see the things that people think we should or shouldn’t do since our music is a little bit poppier,” she says. “They think we’re an indie rock band, so we should be a certain way. People have said it’s hypocritical for me to call myself a feminist, and make the kind of music we are making, because we signed to a major in the UK and that system objectifies women. Or people have complained that I don’t dance. But I like the idea that I can stomp around the stage if I want. Some of the most powerful female performers I’ve seen balance the feminine and the masculine and are incredibly strong. Like I think Hayley Williams is one of the best rock performers. She struts up and down that stage, and she can play mostly male-fronted bands right off the stage, but she does it without any dancing or choreography. If she wanted to — cool! But she doesn’t. It’s great to see someone being really individual.” Upon the release of Chvrches’ “Leave A Trace” video last month, Mayberry’s insistence on her individuality came under fire. The notoriously vile online community 4chan began a thread about her attire in the clip and tweeted it at her. Again, in the face of misogynists trying simultaneously objectify and slut-shame her, she didn’t flinch. Instead, she shared the link on Twitter, writing: “Dear anyone who thinks misogyny isn’t real. It is and this is what it looks like.” In one of her previous posts, Mayberry shared a rape threat on Instagram along with this message: “Bring it on motherfuckers. Let’s see who blinks first.” That same courage inhabits Every Open Eye. It’s this element that makes the band such a fascinating part of the current music scene, and by extension, the cultural climate. But these recent comments are by no means the start of the conversation about feminism for Mayberry, who worked as a journalist before Chvrches became her full-time career. In October of 2012 she founded a feminist collective called Tuck Your Cunt In, TYCI, which is a phrase that she characterizes as subversively akin to “man up.” She started TYCI to support female musicians and artists, and describes it as a platform that serves to help women “break down misguided notions of feminism and gender boundaries.” TYCI is still active today, and mostly run by a team of women handpicked by Mayberry. That background helps provide context for her more widely-publicized Guardian piece, which catapulted those kinds of conversations to an international stage by asking: Why is it the status quo for women in the spotlight to face violent, sexually explicit messages from men? And why does the fact that they come via the internet diminish our urgency about protecting women from them? Mayberry’s decision to present her unflinching feminism as just as relevant to the conversation as the band’s music is nearly unprecedented. As her roots in TYCI indicate, Mayberry’s feminism is a core part of her musical persona, and has been from the beginning, unlike many pop stars who invoked feminism as a buzzword. Still, the fact that Beyoncé performed in front of a giant screen bearing the word “FEMINIST” is important to her due to the power of who that message will reach. “All those fucking thinkpieces about whether it’s a big deal that Beyoncé had a feminist sign behind her are just hot air at a certain point,” Mayberry says. “Because it is a big deal. She’s one of the highest earning musicians in the world and she is a black woman — that is a massive deal. And the fact that she’s talking about those things in that context, whether or not she’s your ideal definition of what a feminist is, it’s still a big deal. She’s reaching loads of young girls that other artists can’t. If you were 12 and Beyoncé was up onstage saying to you, ‘You get to do exactly whatever you want to do’ that would be awesome. I wish she said it to me when I was 12.” People have said it’s hypocritical for me to call myself a feminist, and make the kind of music we are making. While incidents like newly-declared feminist Taylor Swift inserting herself into a conversation started by Nicki Minaj about race and the VMAs have hinted at some of the underlying issues with white feminism, Mayberry is adamant in her stance as an intersectional feminist. “I’m very lucky — and you’re very lucky — that people listen to us when we talk about feminist issues,” Mayberry says. “But also, I’m a straight white girl so it’s easier for a lot of people to swallow what I say. Generally speaking, from what I can tell and from listening to people that I know — listening to women of color, listening to queer and trans people — this has to be a conversation that we all have. It can’t be separate and segregated in the way that feminism was in the past.” This is an obstacle that the conversation about feminism seems to butt up against repeatedly, and one that concerns anyone with a vested interest in the core tenets of equality and respect. Outlets like Twitter have helped proliferate the voices of non-white women who have been marginalized or shut down, and a recent focus on transgender, female-identifying, and gender nonconforming communities has also helped widen the scope of the movement. Certainly, the openness and dedication of figures like Mayberry plays a crucial role in this process as well. And as the tide begins to shift against outdated sexist notions about the role of women in society, Mayberry welcomes the inclusion of any and all voices that are attempting to further the cause she cares about so passionately. “I feel positive about it,” she says of the accelerating emphasis on intersectional feminism that encompasses all women regardless of race, gender identity or sexual orientation. “Change is always partial, and it always starts in small degrees. But I feel like the fact that even in the last few years there’s way more talk about it in the world is really important. Start small, as you say. Consider if someone read something Taylor Swift said about feminism and thought ‘Oh I wonder what that is,’ and started thinking about it, and saw it in their own life, and started thinking about how they treat other women. That stuff has kind of a snowball effect. Maybe between all of us we can change it.”
Credit: Andrew St. ClairSpecial Report: Light Rail What Does Hamilton Know that Waterloo Region Does Not? The Province offers to pay the capital cost for a transportation investment that will concentrate new development within the already built-up area and increase the city's property tax revenue per unit of area. By Ryan McGreal
Published February 10, 2015
this article has been updated
There is an urban express transit corridor running through the middle of a large, diverse municipality of over half a million residents, comprising multiple downtowns and a variety of local interests.
The region is characterized by under-performing urbanized areas, extensive suburbs and a large rural area, comprising some of the best farmland in Ontario.
Ridership on the urban transit corridor has been growing steadily for years and now sits at around 20,000 rides per day - almost half the total ridership for the entire system.
Some years ago, the local government started planning and design work on a light rail transit (LRT) system for the corridor. The LRT system as planned will cost over $800 million to build, a large and frightening number.
However, the goals of this investment are to shape new development around the line, increase the density of the already-urbanized area and the productivity of already-existing infrastructure, reduce pressure to keep expanding suburban sprawl into the rural area, and reduce the need to spend money on new expensive suburban infrastructure - roads, water and sewer systems to service a far-flung, low-density population.
The planners determined that, despite the high price tag, it would ultimately cost the government less to invest in LRT than it would cost to continue with the status quo of suburban sprawl across the farmland.
Waterloo and Hamilton
I could be talking about the amalgamated City of Hamilton, of course, but in this case I'm talking about Waterloo Region. Here is how the two cities compare by the numbers:
Population, Area, Ridership, Hamilton and Waterloo Hamilton Waterloo * The Province increased Waterloo Region's 2031 population projection based in part on completion of the LRT system. Population - 2011 520,000 507,096 Population - 2031 683,000 742,000 * Area 1,117 1,369 Urban Area 231 202 Total Annual Ridership 21,000,000 22,000,000 Daily Ridership - LRT Corridor 20,000 20,000 Bus Fleet 221 251 Total Service Hours 650,000 640,000 LRT Capital Cost $811 million $818 million
Hamilton's LRT plan has been drifting along since early 2013, when Council approved it and then dismantled the city's Rapid Transit Office.
Waterloo's LRT system was approved in 2011 and is scheduled to open for operation in 2017.
Are you squirming yet?
Backpedaling
In Hamilton, our capricious local government has recently been backpedaling away from investment in higher-order transit along our B-Line corridor, just two years after Council unanimously approved an LRT plan.
One of the excuses, onto which some councillors have latched the way a drowning man latches onto a nearby piece of flotsam, is that our current ridership numbers are not already at a level that makes rapid transit necessary just to meet existing demand.
But Waterloo's ridership numbers are the same as Hamilton's. In fact, Waterloo has been growing its transit ridership rapidly over the past decade or so as it prepares to launch its LRT system. Since 2000, when regional transit was amalgamated under the Grand River Transit (GRT) umbrella, annual ridership has doubled from 10 million to 20 million.
Waterloo's local government is taking the lead in designing, planning and investing for the ridership they want, instead of reacting to the ridership they have.
In fact, if Waterloo had sat back and just planned for the ridership they had instead of being proacive, the system would likely still be stagnating in the vicinity of 10 million rides a year.
Amazingly for anyone in Hamilton who is paying attention, all of this is despite the fact that Waterloo's LRT capital funding strategy, negotiated outside the envelope of the Metrolinx funding model for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, requires the local government to contribute $253 million, or 31 percent of the total cost.
For LRT in Hamilton, the Province has already agreed to pay 100 percent of the capital cost.
Shape City Growth
Waterloo is not alone in choosing to invest in LRT before the existing bus system crushes its lower-order transit capacity. According to Hamilton's Rapid Ready LRT plan, which our Council approved unanimously in February 2013:
A comparison of the proposed B-Line LRT with other systems in Canada and the United States showed that system performance as it relates to ridership would be mid-range as compared to the other successful LRT systems on opening day and be one of the top-performing systems in 2031. [emphasis added]
Are all these other cities crazy to build LRT before their bus systems are maxed out?
Maybe not. Waterloo is investing in LRT primarily to direct new developments into the existing build-up area and make more cost-effective use of the infrastructure that already exists. As their Rapid Transit project explains:
Without ION, the Region would need to build 500 new land kilometres of roads over the next 20 years to accommodate expected growth. These new roads - the equivalent of 25 [seven-lane arterials] - would cost approximately $1.4 billion and would need to be built through existing neighbourhoods.
The reason large Canadian cities like Hamilton are in an infrastructure deficit crisis is that they have spent the past several decades growing via the kind of low-density suburban buildout that costs more to build and maintain than it will ever generate in development charges and property tax revenues.
Cost of Not Building LRT
Waterloo Region planning staff have calculated that each one-percent mode shift away from driving trips to walking, cycling or transit will save the region $30 million in infrastructure costs. As far as I can tell, no one at the City of Hamilton has made such a calculation here.
Likewise, no one at the City of Hamilton has calculated the cost of not investing in LRT. For a city whose local leaders are driven by fear more than vision, we don't know how much it will cost us to abandon LRT and keep doing what we've been doing.
What we do know is that the city's unfunded infrastructure lifecycle deficit increases by $195 million a year and currently stands at a staggering $3 billion, out of a total infrastructure value of around $15 billion. Every year, our roads lifecycle deficit alone increases by $110 million or more than half the total deficit.
Each lane-kilometre of roadway costs $10,000 a year just to maintain, so a four-lane road costs $40,000 per kilometre per year.
The Province offers to pay 100 percent of the capital cost for a transportation investment that will concentrate new development within the already built-up area, increasing the city's property tax revenue per unit of area without having to build expensive new roads we can't afford.
What Councillor in their right mind would even consider turning this down? Could they actually not understand what is at stake?
Why, then, did they vote unanimously to approve Rapid Ready just two years ago? Have they forgotten why they voted for it? Nothing has changed since then - except that the Province has signaled more clearly that they will pay the full capital cost if Hamilton can get its act together.
Can we? Can we get our act together? Council? Is anyone listening?
Update: here is yet another transportation comparison between Hamilton and Waterloo Region, courtesy of this Statistics Canada table:
Proportion of commuters by mode, 2011 Census metropolitan area Car, truck or van (total) Car, truck or van (driver) Car, truck or van (passenger) Public transit Walking Bicycle Hamilton 84.4 77.8 6.7 9.3 4.5 0.7 Kitchener - Cambridge - Waterloo 88.2 81.4 6.7 5.4 4.3 1.1
h/t to the RTH reader who sent this in.
Ryan McGreal, the editor of Raise the Hammer, lives in Hamilton with his family and works as a programmer, writer and consultant. Ryan volunteers with Hamilton Light Rail, a citizen group dedicated to bringing light rail transit to Hamilton. Ryan writes a city affairs column in Hamilton Magazine, and several of his articles have been published in the Hamilton Spectator. He also maintains a personal website, has been known to share passing thoughts on Twitter and Facebook, and posts the occasional cat photo on Instagram.
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You must be logged in to comment.Amanda Staveley has registered an interest in buying Newcastle United - but is also reportedly keen in acquiring Liverpool.
The leading financier attended the Magpies’ 1-1 draw against the Reds at St James’ Park earlier this month.
After the match, as well as meeting with Newcastle manager Rafa Benitez, Staveley held informal talks with United club officials including managing director Lee Charnley and Mike Ashley’s lawyer Justin Barnes.
Staveley is believed to be considering acquiring a Premier League club - she is said to be considering up to five as prospective purchases - and Newcastle is one of them, given Mike Ashley’s willingness to sell.
Podcast: Chris Waugh on when Ashley could sell Newcastle
However, The Sunday Mirror claims that Staveley also spent time with Liverpool club officials after the game at St James’ Park and “made initial soundings about the club’s availability”.
PCP Capital Partners, Staveley’s firm, has global assets of more than £28billion and she is keen to buy a elite Premier League club such as Liverpool - or one like Newcastle who she believes have the potential to become an English top-flight force.
Staveley is believed to be a Reds fan and she has twice attempted to purchase the Anfield club, initially with Dubai-based investors in 2007, and then with Chinese company Everbright Limited last year.
Fenway Sports Group, Liverpool’s current owners, bought the club for £300million seven years ago and are reportedly looking to make a “major return on their investment”.
It is claimed that, should Staveley’s interest be followed up, Fenway would demand around £1bn for Liverpool.BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- A Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli forces after driving a truck into a group of uniformed Israeli soldiers, killing four soldiers and injuring at least 13 other people Saturday afternoon, at a bus stop in the illegal Israeli settlement of East Talpiyyot in occupied East Jerusalem.
An Israeli police spokesperson confirmed in a statement that the "terrorist" was shot and killed after carrying out what she called a deliberate attack.
Sources identified the slain driver as 28-year-old Fadi Ahmad Hamdan al-Qunbar from the nearby East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabal al-Mukabbir.
Israel's emergency medical service Magen David Adom (MDA) said that the slain Israeli soldiers were in their 20s.
MDA added that 13 others were wounded -- three severely, one moderately to severely, and nine lightly. They were all evacuated to Israel's Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem.
Israeli police said a truck with Israeli license plates veered from its course and rammed into people getting off of a bus -- later revealed to be a group of uniformed Israeli soldiers who were reportedly on an "educational trip" along with several other groups of soldiers -- at a promenade in the settlement, which overlooks the Old City of East Jerusalem.
A number of people were initially trapped under the truck, and three of the wounded reportedly had to be extracted from under the track using a crane.
Israeli police said they imposed heightened security measures in the Jerusalem area, and that investigations were ongoing. Israeli police chief Roni Alsheich told reporters that there was no advance warning for the attack.
Israeli police later announced a gag-order for Israeli media on all further details of the case, including the identities of suspects. The four slain soldiers were identified in Israeli media as 20-year-old Yael Yekutiel from the Israeli city of Givataiym, 22-year-old Shir Hajaj from the illegal Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, 20-year-old Shira Tzur from Haifa in northern Israel, and 20-year-old Erez Orbach from the illegal Alon Shvut settlement.
The illegal East Talpiyyot settlement is also known as Armon Hanatziv, and is located just west of Jabal al-Mukabbir.
Since a wave of unrest began in October 2015-- largely marked by small-scale attacks by Palestinians targeting uniformed Israeli soldiers and police with knives or similar weapons -- a number of deliberate car ramming attacks have occurred. However, Israeli authorities' version of events have been challenged in a number of incidents, with officials in some cases later admitting so-called "terror attacks" were actually traffic accidents.
However, Israeli news site Ynet quoted a witness as saying that after the truck rammed into the group of soldiers, Israeli forces fired at the driver who then reversed the truck and ran over the soldiers again. A video later released on Israeli media purported to show the moment the truck rammed into the soldiers.Last weekend, LGBT alumni from Saint Mary’s and Notre Dame walked around campus for the GALA-ND/SMC reunion and were greeted with a show of support that many of them had not experienced when they were students at Notre Dame: Rainbow pride flags hung out of windows across campus, ranging from dorms to Geddes Hall, Nieuwland Hall of Science and Hesburgh Library.
This show of support for the LGBT community of Notre Dame was partly out of protest of the choice of Vice President Mike Pence as the 2017 Commencement speaker.
“Students and alumni came together and said ‘we’re frustrated with the invitation of Mike Pence as the Commencement speaker on many fronts certainly,” Bryan Ricketts, a fifth-year student who was involved in the flag distribution, said. “Dealing with LGBT issues dealing with funding for conversion therapy, his passage of a restrictive [law] that didn’t include a civil rights exemption when it was first written [and] at one point his professed intent to enshrine marriage between one man and one woman as a constitutional amendment.”
Last week, the student group We Stand For distributed almost 500 flags to students and faculty. Funded in part by student and alumni donations, the group bought a second round of pride flags after more alumni heard about the event on social media or read about it in an article published April 21 and wanted to help, Ricketts said.
“[The LGBT alumni wished] there could have been this overt expression of support of LGBT students when they were here,” Ricketts said. “Now that they have the opportunity to do that and show that … there is a community in the Notre Dame family who cares very deeply about the LGBT student body population.”
Ricketts, who distributed some of the flags, said allies, as well as LGBT students and faculty, took flags to fly in support of a friend, roommate or family member back home.
Given the number of flags currently displayed on campus, as well as the existence of student organizations such as We Stand For and PRISM, it is tempting to assume that Notre Dame is and has always been extremely accepting, when in fact, PRISM was only formed four years ago, Ricketts said.
“This perception of ND as LGBT friendly has arisen in some cases so we forget that there are still large pockets of people on campus who don’t see things that way,” Ricketts said. “We’ve come a long way, certainly, but we’re still not by any means a campus that’s uniformly welcoming and inclusive towards LGBT students.”
This was made clear by some negative responses both students and faculty received for flying pride flags.
Junior Nicholas Furnari helped distribute flags out of the College Democrats office last week. Since then, five students who were told by either their rectors or hall staff to remove the flags from their windows have contacted Furnari to seek advice.
“I talked to five different students that represent three different dorms all [on] North Quad, that just happens to be where they live,” Furnari said. “Two were told by their hall staff, by their RAs, to take them down … and the rest were told by their rectors to take them out of the window.
“I don’t think it was anyone in student affairs who told them to do that. I think it was just their own personal political ideology which is upsetting because when you’re working a job with residential life, as a person with some authority, you have a responsibility to try to separate your personal beliefs from the work that you’re doing with students. Student affairs and the administrative office have always been supportive to the extent that they can be.”
Furnari told the students to do nothing, and to his knowledge, none of the flags have been removed.
“Very few places and buildings and dorms have actually taken them down, but it’s a little disappointing [that] in the face of what has been mostly viewed as good student organization that there’s been some animosity,” he said. “I feel like that’s not the appropriate response. When you see students rallying around a cause, you should let them do that because that’s their right as individual students.”
Additionally, two graduate physics students, Devin Whitten and Kaitlin Rasmussen, were recently contacted by the secretary of Nieuland Hall of Science and told to remove the pride flag that was hanging from the window of their third floor office.
“We put this flag up for Ally week and left it up during the weekend,” Rasmussen said. “I think we both got an email from someone in the main office that said ‘we got a complaint about this flag, you need to take it down.’”
The email told them that it was urgent they take the flag down, as it violated University policy. This seemed strange to the graduate students who had seen flags all over campus, Rasmussen and Whitten said.
“The department secretary had been told that someone who was not associated with our department, but apparently works on campus, was walking outside, saw the flag and was apparently offended enough that they felt like they needed to go inside and inform the office that it was against University policy to have a flag up in general,” Whitten said. “Supposedly it wasn’t a reaction to the fact that it was an LGBT flag, just flags in general, although I’m not sold on that.”
About a week after they had taken their flag down, Whitten and Rasmussen said that they noticed flags appearing in the windows of tenured faculty of Nieuland for the flag drop.
Jessica Baron, the outreach and communications coordinator for the Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values, whose office is located in Geddes Hall, decided to participate in the flag drop as an ally to show support for a student. A few days after hanging the flag, Baron was contacted with a complaint.
“I was informed that a faculty member from theology who works on the fourth floor was personally offended by it because he thought it presumed to speak on behalf of the whole building. That didn’t seem like a compelling reason to take it down, considering our spirit of inclusion statement,” Baron said.
Baron contacted human resources to ask if she should take it down, and they told her she did not have to. Despite this, the faculty member is still calling for the flag’s removal, Baron said.
“I appreciate that I work for a private, Catholic institution and that I won’t be in agreement on social issues 100 percent of the time, but it seems to me that we’ve made great strides to make our LGBTQ community feel safe and accepted,” Barons said.“The flag hanging from my office window has nothing to do with anyone else on our floor or with Geddes in general. It’s merely a signal that that person whose window this is supports our LGBTQ students along with the rest of the student body.
“That this is a problem is disturbing to me — a symbol of love and acceptance is offensive and misleading?”
Despite these negative responses, Ricketts, Furnari and the rest of the organizers of the flag drop have said due to the large number of pride flags around campus, it was a positive experience that they hope will become an annual tradition.
“I was happy in particular with the support we received from faculty and grad students,” Furnari said. “Beyond that, I think we have every dorm on campus with at least one flag … to be able to do that has been awesome. I think the vibe on campus is changing a little bit, but there’s still some tension. Small improvements add up to big improvements. I have definitely seen a change since I’ve been a student here. Every year seems to get better.”Villagers dumps dead pigs into a decontamination storage built on a farmland in a town in Jiaxing municipality, east China's Zhejiang province on March 13, 2013. (AFP/AFP/Getty Images)
In China, Your Pork May Be Fished out of a River
Chinese farmers dump pigs—dead from disease—into rivers by the thousands. But the rotting flesh doesn’t always stay there. Some have made a business of fishing out the contaminated meat, which then ends up on the market.
It is a trade defined by lax quality controls and bribery. On April 8, Chinese media outlet Sina reported that a slaughterhouse in Fujian Province was being repurposed for processing contaminated pork—the provincial high court found that a total of 2,000 tons had been sold for about $7 million.
Two other cases, also in Fujian, concerned those who got dead, discarded pigs from rivers. Two men, Lin Shen and Lai Jianhua, had sold about $2 million worth of substandard pork using this method.
A man surnamed Ling procures the animals directly from farmers for between $16 and $80.
“I buy handicapped pigs, pigs with stunted growth owing to health issues, sick pigs, and pigs that died recently,” Ling told Sina.
Ling worked for Zhang Zhiqiang, who ran the Fujian slaughterhouse. They spent about a dollar per pound in their procurement.
“We simply buy everything,” Ling said.
The Supply Side
Pig farmers, lacking sufficient means to dispose of their sick and deformed livestock, provide the materials for people like Ling and Zhang.
Related Coverage Looking for Used Clothes in China? Check out the Morgue
Wu Shengrong, a farmer from Fujian’s Xinhuo District, has over 2,000 pigs. With about 30 animals felled by sickness monthly, it is a hassle for him to dispose of them properly.
There is incentive to sell the dead pigs or discard of them in rivers. Some farmers told Sina that they had to pay about $30 to safely process a dead pig, while the local government subsidy is only $12 per animal.
Lax Regulation
Pervasive corruption in China means that industry regulations need not always be followed.
Every month, slaughterhouse inspector Zhang Shuihua received bribes from people like Lin and Lai. Zhang had such a close relationship with Lin that he even allowed him direct access to the inspection site.
“Pigs from Lin never come with certificates showing their origin or inspection reports,” Zhang told Sina. “Nonetheless, I give Lin certificates showing that his pigs have passed the standards, because I accept a monthly 2,100-yuan [$340] fee from him.”
“It’s an open secret that Zhang Zhiqiang [slaughterhouse owner] often bribes inspection officials,” a worker at the inspection site said. “We all turn a blind eye to it.”
A worker at Zhang Zhiqiang’s slaughterhouse said that neither he nor his colleagues would eat the meat processed there.
Beyond Fujian
A frozen food distributor in Fuzhou, provincial capital of Fujian, said that his company spent $480,000 on meat from Zhang Zhiqiang, since his certificates were in order.
A noodle shop owner in the city of Zhanping, Fujian Province, said that he had purchased about $10,000 worth of meat from Zhang’s slaughterhouse since 2010.
“Some of the meat came with dark red or black dots,” the shop owner said.
Contaminated meat processed by Zhang Zhiqiang and Lin Shen was sold in a string of cities in multiple provinces across China, with sales reaching nearly $9 million.
The Fujian cases do not seem to be isolated incidents.
Related Coverage Residents Storm Chinese Police Station to Protest Garbage Incinerator
In Hebei province, a company was reported to have purchased live pigs with foot-and-mouth disease from local farmers. The on-site quality inspector failed to produce certificates showing the pigs had been properly examined. The animals were nevertheless sent to the slaughterhouse.
One farmer said that the official inspector at a local slaughterhouse judged pigs just by looking, without performing any other examination.
Food industry regulations in Shandong Province were called into question when authorities discovered an animal whose actual condition did not match what was recorded on its certificate.
“You can make your own official certificate” a driver involved in transporting pigs said.
‘Divine Fertilizer’
Contaminated pork is just one dimension of the long-term corruption in China’s food industry.
The People’s Net, the online version of the state-run People’s Daily, reported in May 2013 the case of 65-year-old farmer Zhang Chunxin, who has grown vegetables for 40 years.
“Phorate and ‘divine fertilizer’ work the best,” Zhang said. “Buying and using these products is illegal, but the stores sell them anyway.”
The World Health Organization considers phorate as an “extremely hazardous” chemical. Small amounts can cause nausea and dizziness, while high exposure can lead to respiratory paralysis and death, according to environmental groups.
“Divine fertilizer”, named for Shen Nong, the legendary Chinese farmer god, vastly increases agricultural yield. Zhang Chunxin reported that the substance doubled his watermelon harvest and tripled his celery harvest.
“Who wouldn’t use it?” Zhang said.
Most of Zhang’s vegetables are sold to wholesale markets and local supermarkets. He reported no inspection prior to sale.
One of the active ingredients in “divine fertilizer” is aldicarb, an insecticide banned in 2010. by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Zhang’s son was wary of his father’s produce.
“Seeing all those bottles of toxic chemicals my father buys, there’s no way I’m eating the things he grows.”Quick background
The web development community has been in love forever with the idea of writing code that can be shared across the server and the client. Or maybe that’s just me? Nope, not just me.
We’ve flirted with technology for a while now that we’ve hoped will achieve this holy grail, but recently between node |
The score line was close until well into the second quarter, before Washington went through the gears to dispatch Cal in a 66-27 victory. The Huskies were only the second team this season to hold Cal QB Davis Webb below 300 yards passing, and did so with some fine play from cornerbacks Sidney Jones and Kevin King. Between them, Jones and King were targeted 22 times, allowing just eight completions, zero touchdowns and making two picks and three further pass breakups. Jones finished with a game-high 91.0 overall grade and an outstanding 91.9 coverage grade. Next up for the Huskies is a visit from a dangerous USC team.
5. Ohio State
Ohio State finally found their groove on offense, overcoming Nebraska 62-3 in a one-sided encounter. It’s certainly true that the injury to QB Tommy Armstrong hurt the Cornhuskers, but they were already 24-3 down at that point. Quarterback J.T. Barrett was on song, with a 79.1 overall grade. While his favorite target, running back/receiver Curtis Samuel, earned a terrific 97.4 receiving grade. The Buckeyes now face back-to-back road games, against Maryland and Michigan State, before a potentially pivotal edition of The Game.
6. Louisville
Perhaps spurred on by criticism of some recent performances, Louisville left little room for doubt against Boston College, with an emphatic 52-7 victory. Quarterback Lamar Jackson dazzled once again with his legs, rushing for 176 yards and three touchdowns on just nine designed runs. Defensively, linebackers Stacy Thomas and Keith Kelsey were the standouts, notching up four defensive stops apiece, and earning overall grades of 94.0 and 85.5, respectively. Louisville’s playoff chances are wholly reliant on teams above them faltering, which is a distinct possibility, until then they just need to keep winning, and winning well.
7. Auburn
It wasn’t the emphatic victory that they might have hoped for, but Auburn did get a win, overcoming Vanderbilt 23-16. Linebacker Darrell Williams led the team with nine tackles, four of which were defensive stops (wins for the defense), earning an 84.3 overall grade. Results elsewhere fell out perfectly for the Tigers, should they win out they would find be in the playoff, but they will need to play better than this if they are to take full advantage.
8. Wisconsin
Wisconsin took another step towards winning the Big Ten West and probably a rematch against either Ohio State or Michigan, the two teams to have beaten them this season, narrowly. As has become the norm, this victory was built on playing excellent defense, and then simply outlasting the opponent. The Badgers’ two-quarterback rotation has yet to pay dividends, with neither Alex Hornibrook (63.4 overall grade for the season) nor Bart Houston (67.4) emerging as a true starter.
9. Oklahoma
Could the Big 12 still produce a playoff contender? Probably not, but Oklahoma represents their best chance of doing so, not least because in quarterback Baker Mayfield they have the player with the highest-overall grade in the nation at 93.9. The ideal scenario for the conference would have the Sooners winning the next two (against Baylor and West Virginia) and Oklahoma State doing the same, which would make the Bedlam game a de facto championship game, and a clash between two highly-rated teams. There are a lot of if’s in that scenario, and even if it comes to pass, they would need teams from at least two other conferences to stumble.
10. Texas A&M
Texas A&M fell to a shocking 35-28 defeat in Starkville, a result that will not be easily forgotten by Aggies fans as it likely leaves them on the outside looking in at the end of the season. It would be disingenuous to blame this defeat entirely on the loss of quarterback Trevor Knight to injury, as the Aggies were already behind when Knight was injured, however, it was definitely a significant factor. Backup QB Jake Hubenak lacks Knight’s threat as a runner, and in his absence, the Aggies run game ground to a halt. With Knight in the game, Texas A&M averaged 5.7 yards per carry, without Knight they averaged 2.1 yards per carry, and Knight himself accounted for the Aggies three longest runs.
11. Washington State
The Cougars season continues to be haunted by their poor start, but they have been playing well with their offense as dangerous as usual, and are now 6-0 in Pac-12 play, and hurtling towards a rather interesting final two games, on the road against Colorado before taking on the Huskies for the Apple Cup. Quarterback Luke Falk had a terrific game against Arizona, earning an 85.2 passing grade. He was only truly inaccurate on one of his 35 targeted passes, in addition to the 32 completions, one other was dropped and one was batted down at the line of scrimmage.
12. Oklahoma State
Oklahoma State followed up their victory over ranked West Virginia, with a 43-37 road win against a solid Kansas State team. It certainly wasn’t easy, the Cowboys were behind for much of the game, and could not stop the Wildcats rushing attack, giving up 345 yards and four touchdowns on the ground at 6.2 yards per carry. The Cowboys are very much in the thick of the Big 12 title race, which could well come down to the Bedlam game. They cannot afford to look ahead to that however, as their next two opponents, Texas Tech and TCU, are dangerous teams.
13. Utah
Utah enjoyed a well-timed bye week, giving them a chance to get healthier, and to get over their loss to Washington. The season is still set up well for the Utes, they already have a win over resurgent USC, so if they win out (which would include victory over Colorado), they would win the Pac-12 South, and play one of the Washington schools in the championship game.
14. Virginia Tech
Virginia Tech moved a little closer to winning the ACC Coastal with a 24-21 victory at Duke. They hold a head-to-head advantage over North Carolina, so as long as they can beat Georgia Tech and Virginia, both in Blacksburg, they’ll get their shot at Clemson for the ACC crown. This wasn’t a pretty win, a touchdown return from a blocked field goal was effectively the difference between winning and losing, but they all count the same.
15. Penn State
The Nittany Lions continued their recent run with a comfortable 41-14 victory over Iowa. Nowhere was the difference between the teams more pronounced than on the ground. Iowa totalled 30 rushing yards, Penn State 359. Naturally Penn State RB Saquon Barkley had a good game, rushing for 167 yards and a touchdown, while averaging 4.6 yards after contact. The offensive line also deserves some praise, with left guard Ryan Bates, and center Brian Gaia earning run block grades of 84.1 and 81.1 respectively.
16. West Virginia
West Virginia got the Oklahoma State loss out of their system with a 48-21 victory over Kansas. Despite losing last week, the Mountaineers still have everything to play for, they host both Oklahoma and Baylor and could still put themselves firmly in contention for the Big 12 title.
17. North Carolina
North Carolina kept their ACC Coastal challenge alive with a 48-20 victory over Georgia Tech. They could yet return to the ACC Championship game to face off against Clemson, just like last season, but they need Virginia Tech to slip up first. The Tar Heels cannot afford to pay too much attention to the Hokies however, their final two ACC games come against rival teams, Duke and NC State, either of whom would enjoy playing spoiler.
18. Western Michigan
The 9-0 Broncos continue to set the pace among the teams outside the Power-5. This week’s 52-20 victory over Ball State featured an outstanding performance from star receiver Corey Davis. Davis had 12 receptions for 272 yards and three touchdowns, he also forced four missed tackles and averaged 8.0 yards per route run. Such production helped him to a 91.9 overall grade.
19. USC
A 45-20 win over Oregon moves USC to 6-3, and 5-2 in Pac-12 play, the resurgence continues apace. If teams were ranked on their form right now, the Trojans would be considerably higher, but that form is about to get a severe test, with a trip to Seattle to face undefeated Washington. As a dual-sport athlete, and playing in all three phases of the game, corner Adoree’ Jackson hasn’t had the ideal amount of time to focus on simply playing corner, but that didn’t show here as he earned a 91.2 grade. Jackson was targeted six times, allowing three completions for 14 yards, on two of which he made tackles regarded as defensive stops, and braking up one pass.
20. Boise State
Boise State got their season back on track with a 45-31 win over San Jose State, thanks in part to another big game from running back Jeremy McNichols. McNichols earned a 79.8 overall grade after rushing for 158 yards and two touchdowns on 28 carries. He averaged 4.0 yards after contact, and forced a ridiculous 12 missed tackles on 29 total touches.
21. Colorado
Colorado scrapped out a win for the second straight game, this one a 20-10 victory over UCLA in Boulder. They say winning ugly is the hallmark of good teams, but the Buffaloes need to get back to their best and fast. This week’s game against 2-7 Arizona gives them a chance to work things out, but they finish the season against Washington State and Utah, nothing but their best will do then.
22. Arkansas
The Razorbacks found life difficult against the leading lights of the SEC East, but had no such problem with the frontrunner in the SEC East, dispatching Florida 31-10. Arkansas center Frank Ragnow was again prominent, earning an 89.8 overall grade, and 90.1 in the run game. That raises Ragnow’s grade to 89.2 for the season, the best mark among centers in the nation.
23. LSU
The dream is over for LSU. Whatever hope there was that a win over Alabama could propel Ed Orgeron’s Tigers team toward the playoff, has been completely extinguished. The offense simply couldn’t move the ball against a great defense. It wasn’t all doom and gloom, the Tigers defense was excellent, and linebacker Dwayne Thomas had himself a game, earning a 90.2 overall grade. While their playoff hopes are dashed, the season need not be a write-off for LSU, they have a home game against Florida, and trips to Arkansas and Texas A&M to come, giving coach Orgeron ample opportunity to prove he deserves the job on a permanent basis.
24. Nebraska
Nebraska entered this weekend knowing that a big game would keep them as the frontrunners in the Big Ten West, and put them a Big Ten Championship win away from a playoff place, that was before disaster stuck. One QB injury and a 62-3 defeat later, and the Cornhuskers season is dangling by a thread. The only real positive that Nebraska can take from that game is that Tommy Armstrong’s injury isn’t as bad as it looked.
25. San Diego State
The Aztecs must desperately rue their 42-24 defeat at the hands of South Alabama. Without that they’d be challenging Western Michigan to be the highest-ranked team from outside of the Power-5, and looking at landing a New Year’s Six bowl invite. As it is they are 5-0 in the Mountain West and coming off a 55-0 win over Hawaii. While running back Donnel Pumphrey has been the star this season, against Hawaii it was Aztecs corner Damontae Kazee who deserved the plaudits. Kazee had two interceptions (one of which he took to the house) and a further pass breakup, which helped him to a game-high 90.4 overall grade.Earth's industrial carbon dioxide emissions are on pace to plateau this year, according to new projections, and they might even decline. On top of 2014's relatively small increase in CO2 output, this surprising shift is raising hopes that an explosive era of greenhouse gas emissions may finally be winding down.
For most of the past 15 years, CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels increased by an average of 2.4 percent annually. But researchers from the University of East Anglia and the Global Carbon Project report that CO2 output grew by just 0.6 percent in 2014. And, more importantly, they say it may actually decline 0.6 percent in 2015.
PHOTO BREAK: Meet the winners and losers of climate change
Until now, global CO2 emissions have only fallen during economic downturns, like the collapse of the Soviet Union or the 2008 financial crisis. But if these new forecasts hold true, 2015 would mark the first modern dip in CO2 emissions while the global economy is growing. It may not represent a true "carbon peak" — even the study's authors say emissions will likely rise again — but it does offer timely evidence that economic prosperity and ecological responsibility aren't mutually exclusive.
World leaders and diplomats are currently in Paris for major U.N. climate talks, which are meant to produce a new worldwide treaty for reining in CO2 emissions. The summit was already expected to succeed where many others have failed, but this kind of reminder about the economics of CO2 cuts can only help matters.
"We have broken the old arguments for inaction," U.S. President Barack Obama said in a speech on the summit's opening day on Nov. 30. "We have proved that strong economic growth and a safer environment no longer have to conflict with one another; they can work in concert with one another."
A worker installs solar panels at a new power plant in China, the world's largest solar market. (Photo: Getty Images)
Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the new findings are attributed largely to China, whose ranking as the No. 1 net emitter of CO2 puts it in a unique position to influence global emissions trends. "China is trying to deal massively with its air pollution problem," study co-author Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, tells Nature News. "And its renewables are growing very fast."
There are still uncertainties about China's self-reported CO2 data, highlighted last month by news that China has been burning up to 17 percent more coal per year than its government had previously stated. Le Quéré says her research team factored China's revised data into their new analysis, but she acknowledges that more transparency is needed in reporting of national CO2 emissions.
"We don't have the capacity to check the energy reports of the countries," she says. "We have to rely on the countries to tell us what types of coal they use and how clean it is. If the reporting was systematic, it would be wonderful."
That kind of transparency is one goal of the Paris talks — formally known as COP21, short for "Conference of Parties" — where diplomats are working on ways to track and verify each country's emissions. But in the meantime, based on China's own data plus ongoing economic trends, the new study projects Chinese CO2 emissions alone will decrease by nearly 4 percent in 2015. After long resisting the idea of CO2 limits, China recently pledged that its emissions will peak by 2030.
Drought and deforestation have fueled historic peat fires in Indonesia this year. (Photo: Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images)
Some have suggested the 2015 data may mean global CO2 emissions have already peaked, thus kicking off a new, downward trend in the main gas responsible for man-made climate change. But many experts doubt that, pointing out not only that Chinese emissions could rise again, but also that emissions from India and other developing countries will likely offset China's progress at some point.
"Emissions in India are at the same level as China in the 1990s," climate analyst Glen P. Peters tells the New York Times, adding that India "could actually dominate the global growth in the way that China has done in the past."
The new study also doesn't fully account for some man-made sources of CO2, namely those from deforestation — an especially big problem this year due to huge peat fires linked to land clearing in Indonesia. But in the long-running, often-gridlocked effort to curb climate change, any sign that humans are cutting back industrial CO2 emissions without sacrificing economic growth is reason for optimism, the researchers argue.
"Time will tell whether this surprising interruption in emissions growth is transitory or a first step toward emissions stabilization," they write. "In either case, the trend is a welcome change from the historical coupling of CO2 emissions with economic growth and should be strengthened through efforts at the Paris COP and beyond."
CO2 emissions stall, even as economy grows
For the first time, global CO2 emissions are expected to dip in 2015 despite economic growth.President Barack Obama said Friday that he spoke by telephone with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, in what was the first communication between the leaders of the two countries since the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
The call came after U.S. officials said earlier this week that the two would not meet at the U.N. General Assembly. The officials said that a meeting would be too "complicated" for the Iranians given the country's internal politics.
"The two of us discussed our ongoing efforts to reach an agreement over Iran's nuclear program," said Obama. "I reiterated to President Rouhani what I said in New York: while there were surely be important obstacles to moving forward and success is by no means guaranteed, I believe we can reach a comprehensive solution."
"Resolving this issue could serve as a major step forward in a new relationship between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect," he said.
Rouhani took to Twitter to relay details of the call:
@BarackObama to @HassanRouhani: I express my respect for you and ppl of #Iran. I'm convinced that relations between Iran and US.. 1/3 — Hassan Rouhani (@HassanRouhani) September 27, 2013
will greatly affect region. If we can make progress on #nuclear file, other issues such as #Syria will certainly be positively affected 2/3 — Hassan Rouhani (@HassanRouhani) September 27, 2013
I wish you a safe and pleasant journey and apologize if you're experiencing the [horrendous] traffic in #NYC 3/3 — Hassan Rouhani (@HassanRouhani) September 27, 2013
[See UPDATE below.]
A senior Obama administration official told reporters later Friday that the call was initiated by Rouhani's team, and that the Iranian president had expressed a desire to speak with Obama before he boarded a flight home to Tehran Friday afternoon.
The request came as a surprise, the White House said, especially after Iran had declined the U.S.' invitation to meet at the General Assembly. Nonetheless, the invitation to connect directly with Obama had remained "open."
The fifteen minute call took place around 2:30PM, said the official, who spoke on background in order to discuss ongoing negotiations.
Rouhani speaks fluent English, but the two leaders spoke through an interpreter, as is common practice for high-level diplomatic calls.
The White House released the below photo of Obama on the phone with Rouhani:
The official said that leaders in Congress were notified that the call would take place ahead of time, as was the government of Israel, a longtime U.S. ally that has hostile relations with Iran.
Obama opened the call by congratulating Rouhani on his election victory earlier this year. Both leaders went on to express their determination to resolve the issue of Iran's nuclear program peacefully and expeditiously, said the official. Overall, "the call was quite cordial in tone."
But some contentious issues were raised, including the whereabouts of three American citizens: Amir Hekmati and Saeed Abedini, both of whom are currently in Iranian custody, and Robert Levinson, who went missing in Iran in 2007. Obama urged Rouhani and the Iranian government to help the Americans get home to their families.
Going forward, the official said, it's unlikely that Obama and Rouhani will maintain regular phone contact, because the substance of any nuclear negotiations must occur within the international framework known as the P5+1. "There's a lot of technical discussion that needs to take place."
Both Rouhani and Obama have delegated future nuclear talks to their foreign ministers: Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
UPDATE: 8:30 p.m. -- The six tweets describing Rouhani's call with Obama appeared to have been deleted from his Twitter account Friday evening. A spokesman for Iran's mission to the United Nations didn't immediately respond to an email inquiry from the Huffington Post about the deletions.
Earlier in the day, U.S. officials praised Rouhani's use of Twitter, and said they hoped his use of the social media site would help prompt Iran to end strict Twitter censorship inside the country. "We've noticed Rouhani's Twitter feed, and it's a welcome development," said one official.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 said early Sunday that individuals who lost money in the stock market due to an incorrect report about the special counsel investigation should consider suing ABC News.
"People who lost money when the Stock Market went down 350 points based on the False and Dishonest reporting of Brian Ross of @ABC News (he has been suspended), should consider hiring a lawyer and suing ABC for the damages this bad reporting has caused - many millions of dollars!” Trump wrote on Twitter.
People who lost money when the Stock Market went down 350 points based on the False and Dishonest reporting of Brian Ross of @ABC News (he has been suspended), should consider hiring a lawyer and suing ABC for the damages this bad reporting has caused - many millions of dollars! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
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ABC News on Saturday announced that it had suspended Brian Ross over the report, which originally said that former national security adviser Michael Flynn would testify that Trump told him to contact Russian officials during the campaign.
The news network later corrected the story to say Trump asked Flynn during the campaign “to find ways to repair relations with Russia and other hot spots,” and directed him to make contact shortly after the election.
But U.S. stocks had already plunged as a result of the original report on Friday, which came the same day Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.Actor Paul Iacono, star of MTV’s The Hard Times of RJ Berger, has come out of the closet in an interview with the Village Voice‘s Michael Musto.
Musto asks the 23-year-old actor if he’s openly gay now, and he responds:
“Yes. I’m rolling with the punches here. I was asked if I was comfortable doing gay press. I said, ‘Of course.’ I didn’t think I’d be coming out. But why not now? I think it’s the right time to say something. It’s not about me, it’s about change and the work.”
Iacono also discusses his MTV show Kenzie’s Scale (a play on the Kinsey Scale, we assume), in which he plays gay. He says:
I play Cole, Kenzie’s boyfriend. It’s about a high school sweetheart couple who move to New York for college. He has this gay awakening when they get there. So they continue living together more as friends than lovers. It’s like a radical young Will & Grace. It explores the sexual spectrum from a millennial, ambiguous generation [point of view]. I believe that in 100 years, none of us will be having to identify ourselves as gay, straight, bi, or otherwise. Sexuality will be a more fluid thing. The show is a progressive outlet of that idea… The whole reason we came up with Kenzie’s Scale is to give young gays characters to look up to. It’s great that we have Chris Colfer, but we need more characters. I was so moved by your comment on Facebook that ‘If I’d grown up with gay TV icons that were out, I’d have been so much better off.’ I didn’t have much to look up to as a kid. I had to search to find like-minded images. I’m happy to be that person so kids won’t have to grow up and be afraid of their sexuality and this won’t be an issue.
RJ Berger—from out co-producer Seth Grahame-Smith—was cancelled last year, but we’re looking forward to Kenzie’s Scale. Its placement on MTV, along with Dan Savage’s new Savage U, begs the question: now that Logo is not featuring all-gay programming, will the LGBT-interest stuff become more visible on its corporate sisters, MTV and VH1?
Photo: Kgarrett, MTV> Fort Lee > Filmmakers Went All-in with Fort Lee
John KampfeFort Lee, Home, Movie History, New Jersey Movies
Part 2 of a 5-Part Series
Fort Lee and its surrounding areas in northern New Jersey had been popular shooting locations for filmmakers for several years during the early years of the film industry. But they began to establish permanent roots in the then-rural Bergen County community in 1910.
The first one to put down stakes in Fort Lee was Mark Dintenfass. The former herring salesman operated a nickelodeon in Philadelphia that failed and then opened the Actophone Studios in New York City, according to a 1935 Bergen Evening Record article reprinted in Richard Koszarski’s anthology Fort Lee: The Film Town. After shooting exterior locations in Fort Lee for several years, DIntenfass moved his entire operation to the borough’s Coytesville section under the company name Champion Studio.
“Fort Lee’s first studio wasn’t an impressive structure when compared with the giant studios of today,” wrote the Record’s Edmund J. McCormick. “But its 150 feet of shingled building with small glass studio was significant then for it marked the beginning of a period when producing companies were about to band together in settlements.”
Fort Lee certainly wasn’t the only place where there were movie studios during the silent film era and it wasn’t the first. New York City had a smattering of them. There were some located in Hollywood, and also in cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia. Even on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, the footprint of movie studios extended south all the way to Jersey City. But, beginning in 1910, Fort Lee would have the largest concentration of them.
“We had 17 studios up here employing everyone in town,” said Tom Meyers, Executive Director of the Fort Lee Film Commission.
Joining Champion in providing job opportunities for Fort Lee area residents were studios such as William Fox’s Fox Film Corporation (now 21st Century Fox), Carl Laemmle’s Universal Studio and Samuel Goldwyn’s Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, all of which are still in business today. There also were Peerless Film Corporation-World Film Corporation, Paragon Films, Inc., Herbert Brenon Film Corporation-Ideal Studios and Laboratories, Lewis J. Selznick Enterprises and Triangle Film Corporation to name a few. But Universal and Fox were among the most noteworthy.
Universal was formed as the Universal Film Manufacturing Company in 1912 as a consortium of several independent movie studios. They banded together to fight the inventor Thomas Edison and his attempts to control the industry through patents he held for movie camera components. Laemmle, who operated the IMP Studio in New York City, was treasurer of the group until eventually winning a power struggle among the principals to gain full control of the venture, according to Koszarski’s book. Much of the early production work under the Universal banner took place at IMP.
“Universal prospered under Laemmle and took on the distribution of additional independents …,” Koszarski wrote. “But as it grew larger and began to centralize its bureaucracy, Universal realized that it needed a large new studio of its own — two studios, in fact.
“On 18 June 1914, ground was broken for such a studio in North Hollywood, still known today as Universal City. On 5 August, Universal purchased the estate of John Marx on Main Street in Fort Lee and began work on what was for a time the largest motion picture studio under one roof in the country.”
The Fort Lee Film Commission website indicates that the Fort Lee studio opened its doors in 1916 but within a year the space was leased to Goldwyn with Universal shifting its operations to the Champion Studio.
Many of the production companies leased studio space rather build their own facilities. Fox was a prominent example.
“The first Fox studio was rented from C.A. “Doc” Willat in Fort Lee,” according to the Fort Lee Film Commission. “It had two large shooting stage areas resembling gigantic twin glass barns. This remained Fox’s principal studio for the next several years until production was shifted to New York City and Los Angeles in 1919.”
Fox, who was inducted posthumously into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2015, was prolific during his time in Fort Lee. He made 40 films alone starring Theda Bara, whose sultry, dark looks propelled her to stardom and brought a new persona to the silver screen — the “vamp.”
“Fox had massive back lots behind the studios where they created European sets for the Theda Bara blockbusters,” Meyers said.
The French also got involved in Fort Lee in a big way. France had been a hotbed of film making for several years. French producers began establishing operations in the United States to tap into the growing popularity of movies on this side of the Atlantic.
Although its studios were in Jersey City, Pathé frequently used Fort Lee as a shooting location for its “cliffhangers,” so named because the film heroes inevitably were exposed to all types of calamities by the villains at the edge of the Palisades. The granddaddy of all cliffhangers, The Perils of Pauline starring Pearl White, was shot by Pathé along the Palisades in Fort Lee.
Other French film companies established their beachheads in Fort Lee.
“The Société Francaise des Films et Cinématographs Éclair was a French manufacturer of films and film apparatus,” Koszarski wrote in Fort Lee: The Film Town. “In a move to increase their share of the lucrative American market, then dominated by Pathé, they began construction of a studio and laboratory in Fort Lee in February 1911.”
The Fort Lee Film Commission’s website notes that Éclair produced mostly short films in a studio featuring the latest designs that “combined glass-covered shooting stages with administrative offices, photographic laboratory, dressing rooms, scenery storage, and workshops all in one plant.”
Éclair didn’t last long as an independent. It became a part of the consortium of studios that formed the Universal Film Manufacturing Company in 1912.
The Solax Company followed Éclair into Fort Lee in 1912. It was a groundbreaking venture because of its pioneering founder, Alice Guy Blaché. She and her husband Herbert built their studio on the east side of town adjacent to where Fort Lee High School stands today.
“Alice Guy was probably the most significant filmmaker to work and live in Fort Lee,” the Fort Lee Film Commission’s Meyers noted. “She to date is the only woman to build and operate a movie studio, and she is the first woman to produce, write and direct films. She likely was the first person to create narrative film making.”
Koszarski related in his book that Blaché and her husband Herbert arrived in America from France in 1907 to promote the Gaumont Chronophone talking film system. Blaché had directed films for Gaumont since 1896 but didn’t make any films in the U.S. until 1910 although she and her husband had established a branch of the Gaumont studio in the Flushing section of Queens, NY.
They parted with Gaumont and went out on their own first in Flushing and then with their Fort Lee venture. According to the Fort Lee Film Commission, among the more notable films that Blaché made at Solax were Dublin Dan (1912), Rogues of Paris (1913), Shadows of the Moulin Rouge (1914), and The Pit and the Pendulum (1916).
Blaché and her husband separated in 1918 and the Solax Company was dissolved soon after. Filmmakers continued to lease space at the Solax studio until fire destroyed the complex in 1929. It was razed the following year. Blaché also was inducted posthumously into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2013.
Next: Where stars were born
Click here to read Part 1: Hollywood? Fort Lee Once was Heart of Movie IndustryMod note: Best of Eddie, this was originally posted on 10/16/12.
We're all familiar with the Friend Zone and what a drag it can be to find yourself there, but today I'm going to share with you a far worse fate and why you must avoid it at all costs: The Marriage Zone. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to TheKing for tipping me off to this hilarious (and searingly accurate) analysis. Consider the following a Public Service Announcement.
What is The Marriage Zone? I'm glad you asked. It's no secret that young women have far greater access to sexual opportunities than their male peers. Young men have to work hard to get laid; young women merely bear the indignity of free drinks while deciding with whom to bump uglies. As both age, however, the dynamic shifts. And at the point where men and women have equal access to sex (his access increasing while hers is decreasing) you find The Marriage Zone.
Most men - average men - can only begin enjoying life at age 29 the way women do at age 19 because it takes them that long to gain the resources women find attractive. The point in life where men's and women's access intersect is the marriage zone. She has to get him to commit in that zone before he realizes that his life is really just starting. My recommendation: she's enjoyed her "wild and free" days, so avoid marriage and go enjoy yours.
As illustrated by the nifty chart, on either side of the Marriage Zone is the Slut Zone and the Player Zone. As you can see, the Player Zone extends at least twice as long as the Slut Zone. The Player Zone is essentially unfettered access to poon as you advance in your career and grow more distinguished in appearance.
So the smart money says to avoid marriage at all costs in your twenties - you'll almost certainly be undervaluing your greatest asset (your freedom). I wish someone had explained this to me when I was that age. I was clueless and got married for the first time at 20. And no, she wasn't that blackest of black swans: the deaf-mute nymphomaniac lingerie model who owns a liquor store.
I can already hear some of you saying, "But Eddie, what if I want to have kids?". Well, first of all, here's what having kids is like on a good day:
Second, what's the rush? As a male you can have kids into your sixties and seventies. And that's probably the best time to do it. You'll probably be dead before you ever have to post bail for one of them.
In summary: if you're in your 20's things are only going to get better for you sex-wise. Not to put it as indelicately as one of the commenters to that post, but men age like wine while women age like milk. You have so few advantages in the battle of the sexes, you'd be a fool to take your greatest advantage and throw it away before you've even enjoyed it.
Just sayin' is all.If you have lived in South Korea for some time and you see two men holding hands while walking down the street, you won’t think that is strange at all, but if you are new to Korean culture and you don’t know a thing about friendship between or among males in South Korea, you will most probably think that those two men “holding hands” are gay lovers. This is exactly what happened to my brother-in-law and his best buddy when they spent a week in Boracay. A couple of times, they were spotted holding hands or with their arms around each other. Some people were staring at them; some were whispering behind their backs. My brother-in-law had lived in the Philippines for five years and he can understand some words and phrases in Filipino. He remembers hearing the “whisperers” say Bakla yan! (They’re gay!) Being gay is NOT a crime in the Philippines. In fact, it has become socially acceptable, but we rarely see “gays” holding hands or doing PDA (public display of affection).
My brother-in-law and his best friend aren’t gay lovers. They are just very close friends, and in South Korea, it is normal for male friends to hold hands or have their arms around each other while walking. Oh, you should see my husband when he’s with his buddies! When he and his friends are drunk or they are just being silly, they even grab one another’s balls! Not in a sexual way, or course. ^^
Sometimes my husband and his best friend go to the 목욕탕 (mogyogtang: public bath) together to bathe or relax in the sauna, and to scrub each other’s backs. This is a give-and-take act of friendship or sign of closeness, not only between men, but also between women. When I came to Korea for the first time, my female friend and her mom took me to the 목욕탕. It was embarrassing being totally naked in front of other women, but what embarrassed me the most was having my back scrubbed by my friend’s mother. I told her she didn’t have to do that, but she said friends or family members of the same sex in Korea do that a lot in the 목욕탕.
Hubby is very close to my sister’s husband and he has been trying to convince him to go to the 목욕탕 with him. Yes, we have 목욕탕 in the Philippines, but only Koreans go there. It’s in Korean Town. At first, my brother-in-law wanted to go, but when he found out what 목욕탕 is, he changed his mind. My husband is very persistent. He brings it up every time we go to the Philippines. He knows that Filipinos aren’t familiar with the culture of public bathing, but he wants to build a closer relationship with |
through action-packed gameplay that also requires you to be cerebral.
IGN: What's the story setup for Generals 2, and does it tie into the first one at all?
Jon Van Caneghem: Generals 2 takes place ten years after the events in Generals. At the beginning the world is actually at peace. There's a huge conference where a landmark peace treaty is about to be signed. But moments before that happens, a terrorist attack takes away all of the leaders in attendance. The only leaders who are left are the generals and that's where you come in. We have three factions in the game, the GLA, the EU and one more we aren't revealing – yet!
IGN: What does this project mean for the BioWare brand? Will there be role-playing elements incorporated into the single-player campaign? Or is BioWare now a brand for all kinds of different genres, not just role-playing games both online and off?
Ray Muzyka: Our vision at BioWare is to create, deliver and evolve the most emotionally engaging games in the world – this works across multiple genres. We can achieve that vision in different genres and on different platforms, whether they be PC games like Command and Conquer: Generals 2, HD console or PC titles like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, traditional MMOs like Star Wars: The Old Republic, on social networks, or play-for-free MMOs like Warhammer: Wrath of Heroes on PC, or on mobile phones and tablets. For Generals 2, we're definitely going to apply that vision in a way that makes sense for this genre and for the C&C series and not necessarily like anything we've done before.
IGN: How big is BioWare Victory? How long has Generals 2 been in development and why is there no console version?
Jon Van Caneghem: Our studio was founded earlier this year and we became part of the BioWare label this summer. We are located in multiple studios, but the core team is based in Los Angeles and comprised of team members who have worked on previous C&C games, shooters, action games, and RPGs. We are also huge fans of the strategy genre.
The reason we are focusing on the PC for Generals 2 is that we really wanted to re-establish C&C as one of the premier properties in the genre. It felt right to start back where it all began.
IGN: What does building the game using Frostbite 2 allow for in gameplay terms?
Jon Van Caneghem: Frostbite 2 is an incredibly powerful piece of technology. Not only are we going to be able to raise the bar in terms of the level of fidelity for the genre, it's also going to allow us to make the whole experience more intense. Players are going to command massive armies on a battleground that is fully destructible.
Ray Muzyka: The Frostbite 2 technology also allows us to create high quality, in-engine cinematics that flow seamlessly with the gameplay, to help increase the immersion and emotional engagement for the player as they experience the story.
IGN: Would you say Generals 2 is more of a multiplayer game or more of a single-player game? Are you building it to be an e-sports style of title?
Jon Van Caneghem: We're focusing equal efforts on both single player and multiplayer. You definitely need both to be competitive in the genre. On the single player side, we're building a campaign that allows you to experience this new war from multiple perspectives. We've got some great plans for multiplayer but aren't going into any details at this time. I'll just say there's going to be a lot more variety than you typically see.
IGN: What are some of the strengths of the real-time strategy genre in your mind, and what are some of the weaknesses you're hoping to address with Generals 2? What do you think you can bring to the franchise that is uniquely BioWare?
Ray Muzyka: There have been a lot of amazing games in the strategy genre over the years – I'm personally a huge fan of the genre. I think the best games have been the ones that have been accessible, which helped bring in a much larger audience, but also challenging to master, which helped create a lot of retention, passion and core community-building around different franchises. Over the years we've seen different attempts to move the genre in different directions and I think that may have caused things to drift from that core gameplay philosophy of driving gameplay that's fun and fast paced, yet always strategic. That's ultimately the foundation we're working off of for Generals 2, while also innovating in new areas and adding some of the things BioWare is known for with interactive storytelling (delivered in an appropriate way for the genre, which is critical) and always driving for high quality.
We know there are a lot of Command & Conquer fans out there and we're looking forward to bringing them back to the Generals universe.
IGN: Thanks for your time.Apple has just released iOS 8.1 beta 2 (build number 12B407) to registered developers of the iOS developer program.
iOS 8 was publicly released on September 17th, followed by iOS 8.0.1 which was pulled following “No Service” reports. Apple later released iOS 8.0.2 on September 26th, followed by iOS 8.1 beta 1 on September 29th.
iOS 8.1 is compatible with iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPhone 5c, iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPad 2, iPad (third-generation), iPad (fourth-generation), iPad Air, iPad mini, iPad mini with Retina display and iPod touch (fifth-generation). The latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system is much more open, featuring third-party keyboards, interactive notifications, widgets and more.
Direct download links for iOS 8.1 beta 2 (Note that you need to be a registered developer to download these files):
Like this post? Share it!Shots were fired by a masked man in San Francisco’s Mission District this afternoon, but no one was hit by the gunfire, a police spokesman said.
The shooting was reported at 1:56 p.m. near 24th and Alabama streets.
The suspect, a male wearing a black mask, sunglasses and black clothing, was last seen running toward 25th and Harrison streets. He had not been found as of 2:45 p.m., police spokesman Officer Albie Esparza said.
No one was injured in the shooting, which remains under investigation.
Anyone with information about the case is encouraged to call the Police Department’s anonymous tip line at (415) 575-4444 or send a tip by text message to TIP411.
Dan McMenamin, Bay City News
Want more news, sent to your inbox every day? Then how about subscribing to our email newsletter? Here’s why we think you should. Come on, give it a try.As the Chicago Fire continue to sit at the bottom of the Major League Soccer standings, the team’s run in the U.S. Open Cup takes more and more focus.
The Fire take on the Ft. Lauderdale Strikers at Toyota Park in a quarterfinal in the competition on Wednesday. Coach Veljko Paunovic talked about how important the U.S. Open Cup has become.
“This is our must-win game,” Paunovic said during a conference call with reporters on Monday. “We are truly motivated and very optimistic about this competition. It becomes our priority and this is how we are working.”
That statement certainly lines up with the lineup Paunovic played in the 3-1 loss at FC Dallas on Saturday. David Accam, Jonathan Campbell and Sean Johnson didn’t even travel for the game and Matt Polster was subbed off at halftime.
[MORE: Fire GM Nelson Rodriguez hints at potential summer moves]
The Fire are in the middle of a stretch that includes five matches in 15 days. The squad rotation was decided well in advance of the trip to Dallas.
“We shared the plan with all the players before this stretch of the game started, before even the game against Sporting Kansas City (on July 13),” Paunovic said. “Everyone knows how much they’re going to participate and what the plan is from the fitness standpoint. I think we have to manage the load. July is a very hard month for us.”
That includes the goalkeeper switch with Matt Lampson playing between the posts in an MLS match for the first time since the May 14 loss at New England. Paunovic said he told Johnson and Lampson of the plan before the Sporting KC match that Johnson started.
“We want Matt Lampson to play also in the Open Cup game on Wednesday so we believe that for him it was very important for him to have a game before that,” Paunovic said.
[SHOP: Grab your own Fire jersey here]
With the U.S. Open Cup seemingly taking priority, at least ahead of the match at Dallas, does this mean Paunovic is giving up hope on making the playoffs? The Fire have 17 points with 16 matches remaining. Last season, the first year that six teams made the playoffs from each conference, the cut off to make the playoffs in the East was 49 points. Even if that drops to 45 points considering the East appears even weaker this season, that would require the Fire to average 1.75 points per match the rest of the way. That would be the third best record in MLS this season.
In other words, the Fire would have to go from the worst team in the league to one of the best starting now just to be on the bubble to make the playoffs. Even Paunovic admitted it would take something special.
“Listen we never give up,” Paunovic said. “We will play all our games to win and that’s what we are doing. We are trying our best of course… We don’t give up on playoffs this year. I actually believe in miracles. I’ve seen them happen in soccer many times to me and even against me.”Last week while we were discussing coaching, I received some questions about ways to improve the effectiveness of your team’s practice time when you aren’t all able to commit pro-levels of scrim time as a team. Maybe someone has a job with weird hours, or someone gets sick so you can’t play as a full unit. Maybe you’ve got a chair league match next week, but the full squad can’t get together until that night because of everyone’s real life commitments. With that in mind, here are a few things that you can do either alone or as a smaller group to make your time more productive when you can’t all be together.
1. Play the Game
There’s just no substitute for it. Every pro in every MOBA complains about solo queue and how awful it is, but want to know what all the elite players do? They play. They play hours and hours of solo queue. Think of it like how a linebacker will just practice tackling a dummy for hours. Playing solo queue keeps your mechanics sharp, and commits more details of your play into muscle memory. The less you have to think about how to play a hero, the more your mind can focus on what the enemy is doing, where your allies are, and other game factors. Every game you play is a point of positive practice time, no matter how bad the matchmaking might be, or how stupid the team composition seems. Just play the game a lot.
2. Watch the Game
Maybe your computer crashed, or you are stuck on a family trip without access to your setup, but you have lots of down time. Get out your phone, go to YouTube, and watch some pro matches. Don’t just watch them for entertainment–get out a pen and some paper. Look at the draft and think about why certain picks were chosen, or where they went in the order. Think about who on your team would play each hero in that comp and why. Pause the vod every 5 minutes and note the levels, structures, kills, etc. How does that compare to your team? How does Khroen’s hero damage on Li Ming compare to yours at the same time in your last Chair League match?
When watching the game, it is immensely important to focus on your own personal growth. If you are the team captain or main drafter, look at how you can adopt certain strategies, but otherwise you should be exclusively focused on comparing their play to your own. If you’re the warrior for your team, focus on watching where Fury positions, not on what Jun’s doing. Take notes! watch three pro matches, and write down two takeaways that you want to try to focus on the next time you play with your team.
3. Team Bonding
It cannot be understated how important team synergy is in a MOBA. Being good friends with your teammates actually does matter. You shouldn’t only be talking about the game, or only communicating during practice time. Set up a discord and chat! Talk about your favorite anime, sports, whatever. Get to know each other. Challenge yourself to know the answers to the following questions for all your teammates:
How many siblings do they have?
How old are they?
What’s their favorite Disney movie?
Who is their favorite Dragonball Z character?
Who’s their favorite hero to play?
Who’s their favorite pro team?
As a little kid, what did they want to be when they grew up?
If just randomly asking deep personal questions feels awkward, do some stuff together out of game. Watch some pro matches together and chat. Play Rocket League together. Schedule a practice night to just play ARAM or brawl all night. Set up an inter-team Hearthstone tournament. Do something to make everyone have more fun spending time together.
4. Spreadsheets!
Google Docs is the greatest strategic tool in any HOTS team’s toolbelt. Plus, you can access it from anywhere! If you are bored at work and can’t play tonight, get on your team’s drafting doc and theorycraft some drafts. Adjust your hero priority lists. Send an email out to the team and have everyone create a tierlist for their role based on the current meta. Work on your map priority chart, and organize your map-specific comps.
If you don’t have any of these things, get to work! This is the first step for me every time I consult for a team–it’s that important. I can’t do anything until I can see on paper how highly your flex player prioritizes the Lost Vikings. I’m not going to spend a bunch of time prepping drafts around Stitches if your warrior player thinks he’s the ninth best tank. If you want, I have a template drafting spreadsheet that I use for every consultation. Shoot me a DM on Twitter and I’ll give you a copy.
5. Play Battlerite
If only two or three of you can play, you have a limited amount of time, and you are just burnt out on grinding hero league, go install Battlerite. There is no better tool for improving your teamfighting mechanics anywhere in the world. The game’s resource system educates you on how to stay conscious of your own health, how to be constantly creating value during fights, and how to land skillshots.
It’s literally nothing but teamfights and the session length is very short, so you can grind out fights way more effectively than you could in HOTS or another MOBA. Plus, there’s a giant owl who’s a time wizard!
Obviously, playing the game as a group of five is the best practice you can possibly get. If people want, we can dive into ways to make that time more productive in another blog. These ideas are primarily for that time when you’d like to be improving, or feeling productive, but simply cannot get the time to play together.
AdvertisementsThe test will mark the 22-year-old Austrian's first run in Formula 1 machinery.
"Really exciting news - the most beautiful moment of my life," said Auer, who is the nephew of grand prix winner Gerhard Berger.
"For me, it's a childhood dream come true to drive an F1 car for the first time. I'm particularly proud that this will happen with Sahara Force India - a top Formula 1 team."
Auer, in his third season of DTM competition with Mercedes, currently sits in second place eight races into the 2017 campaign, as he trails championship leader Mattias Ekstrom by just two points.
He had moved to the German touring car championship back at the start of 2015, after three years in Formula 3 racing – during which he became runner-up in German F3 and finished fourth twice in European F3.
During his DTM career so far, the Austrian's car has carried the colours of the Best Water Technology Group, a company that also now acts as the livery sponsor for Force India.
Joining Auer for the two-day event will be Force India development driver Nikita Mazepin, who took part in the post-British GP test with the team last year.
The 18-year-old, who was formerly runner-up in the karting world championship, currently sits 15th in the standings in his second campaign in European F3.
Mazepin and Auer will drive the VJM10 for half a day each on both days of the August 1-2 test.
"We are pleased to be running two talented youngsters at the Budapest test," said team owner Vijay Mallya.
"We already know Nikita well and giving him time in the VJM10 is the next stage in his development programme with us.
"I'm delighted to welcome Lucas to the team and will follow his progress closely. It's always a special moment when a driver gets to experience an F1 car for the first time and I'm pleased Lucas can make his debut in one of our cars."Analysis
The Supreme Court, leaving a clear impression that foes of abortion have at least a limited constitutional right to succeed in having close, one-on-one encounters with patients seeking that medical service, struck down on Thursday a seven-year-old Massachusetts law that created a “buffer-zone” around every abortion clinic in the state. The law, the Court said, went too far to silence the messages of abortion opponents outside clinics even when those messages are quiet, intended to be courteous attempts to dissuade patients.
One potentially wider implication of the ruling is that it may also imperil “bubble zones” near clinics — invisible no-entry zones that float around individual patients as they approach a clinic. That seemed to be at least hinted by a potential future line-up of Justices, different from Thursday’s array, should a new “bubble-zone” test case arise.
The lead opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in McCullen v. Coakley went to considerable lengths to suggest ways that cities or states could pass new laws to protect patients’ access to abortion facilities. But all of those approaches, it appeared, would be to thwart actual obstruction, physical intrusion, or actual intimidation of patients, not the kind of “counseling” that the Court found threatened by the Massachusetts law.
What the First Amendment does protect, the Roberts opinion made clear, is gentle persuasion, at least when that is carried out on the public sidewalks and roadways next to an abortion facility. Citing data by abortion foes who insist they engage only in benign counseling, the Chief Justice said they have had “far less frequent and far less success” in getting even to talk to patients personally or hand them literature since the buffer zone was imposed.
“It is no answer,” the Chief Justice wrote, “to say that [abortion counselors] can be seen and heard by women within the buffer zones. If all that the women can see and hear are vociferous opponents of abortion, then the buffer zones have effectively stifled [the] message [of counseling].”
Concluding that sidewalk counselors working the sidewalks around abortion clinics are “not protestors,” the Court’s main opinion said that “they seek only to inform women of various alternatives and to provide help in pursing them. [They] believe that they can accomplish this objective only through personal, caring, consensual conversations.”
The opinion thus put state and city governments on notice that, while they may act to ensure public safety around and abortion patients’ access to medical facilities providing such services, they cannot do so by making entirely off limits to counselors the areas closest to the clinics that include public sidewalks and roadways.
This, then, was a ruling about “buffer zones.” The Court’s main opinion did not consider the continuing validity of a prior case about anti-abortion protests, dealing with the somewhat separate issue of “bubble zones.” In its decision in 2000 in Hill v. Colorado, the Court had upheld a state law that limited close contact with persons entering or leaving an abortion clinic, by setting up a “buffer zone” and, within that zone, making it illegal to approach a person closer than eight feet (a “bubble zone”) without that person’s consent, to engage in counseling or literature distribution.
After this new ruling, it appeared that even a “bubble zone” might be vulnerable to challenge, at least when the patient was shielded from counseling on a public sidewalk or roadway near the clinic. The Chief Justice’s approving remarks about the First Amendment right to engage in counseling in public arenas appeared to contradict some of the reasoning of the 2000 decision.
In a future test case on “bubble zones,” it would appear that four Justices who on Thursday wanted to strike down the Massachusetts law on broader grounds than those used by the Chief Justice might well be prepared to vote to strike down a “bubble zone.” In fact, three of those four Justices called specifically on Thursday for overruling of the Hill v. Colorado precedent. Those three were Justice Antonin Scalia, the author of a separate opinion, joined by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.
Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., did not call for an overruling of the Hill precedent, but did object in an opinion for himself that the Chief Justice’s opinion in the Massachusetts case did not go far enough.
The Chief Justice’s opinion was joined in full by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. That opinion did not discuss the Hill precedent — presumably because some of the Justices joining it would have objected.
Thus, whether that precedent might be in jeopardy in a future case could depend upon whether the Chief Justice could be persuaded to join the four Justices who did not join his Massachusetts opinion but who might seek to enlist his support in an effort to protect close encounters in the “bubble zone” context, too — an extension of the new decision beyond the “buffer zone” context.
Recommended Citation: Lyle Denniston, Opinion analysis: A broader right to oppose abortion, SCOTUSblog (Jun. 26, 2014, 3:39 PM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2014/06/opinion-analysis-a-broader-right-to-oppose-abortion/What are the roads not taken because students must take out loans for college? A collection of studies shows that the burden of student debt may well cause people to make different decisions than they would otherwise — affecting not just individual lives but also the entire economy.
For one thing, it appears that people with student loans are less likely to start businesses of their own. A new study has found that areas with higher relative growth in student debt show lower growth in the formation of small businesses (in this case, firms with one to four employees).
The correlation makes sense. People normally have only a certain amount of “debt capacity,” said Brent W. Ambrose, a professor of risk management at Pennsylvania State University and a co-author of a preliminary paper on the research along with Larry Cordell and Shuwei Ma of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
When students use up their debt capacity on student loans, they can’t commit it elsewhere. “Given the importance of an entrepreneur’s personal debt capacity in financing a start-up business, student loan debt, which cannot be discharged via bankruptcy, can have lasting effects later in life and may impact the ability of future small-business owners to raise capital,” the study says.Social protests took place throughout Israel on Saturday, with demonstrators turning out en masse in Haifa, Be’er Sheva and Afula. This was the first time since the start of the social protests nearly a month ago that Tel Aviv did not hold a march.
Protests also took place in Eilat, Rosh Pina, Nahariya, Dimona, Modi'in, Petah Tikva, Ramat Hasharon, Hod Hasharon, Netanya, Beit She’an as well as other cities throughout Israel.
Protesters in Haifa, August 13, 2011 Hagai Fried
Tens of thousands of protesters marched in Haifa from Meirhoff Square in Kiryat Eliezer to Hameginim Square at Ben-Gurion Junction, and then to the Bahai Gardens. Roughly 30,000 protesters are estimated to have taken part in the demonstration. Chemi Rodner, Daniel Solomon and Monica Sex performed in solidarity with the protesters.
Yossi Baruch, the representative for the largest tent city in Haifa, addressed the crowd, saying “they tell us we don’t have focus, but we are super focused and know exactly what we want.”
The social activist continued, saying, “we want there to be a welfare state here, and a welfare state is not just a slogan. It means free education for every boy and girl, from the moment their mother finishes her maternity leave until they finish their doctorate. A welfare state is a place where its citizens receive fair wages.”
Over 20,000 demonstrators turned out in Be’er Sheva on Rager Boulevard near the tent city. Achinoam Nini, Kobi Oz, the rap group Hadag Nachash and Margalit Tzan’ani all gave performances.
Margalit Tzan’ani said before the protest on Saturday, “I never opposed the protest, I myself am from the periphery,” adding, “I am coming to support the people here.. Be’er Sheva is not the periphery.”
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Roughly 15,000 people demonstrated at Independence Square in Afula. The protest was held for residents from the Galilee and northern valley area, who call themselves the “northern front”. Israeli singers Muki, Yuval Banai, Keren Peles, Shiri Maimon and Shimon Buskila all performed.
An amalgam of speakers were invited to address the northern protesters, meant to represent the different sectors of northern Israeli society, including students, farmers, Arabs, workers, youth and residents of development towns.
Thousands of protesters took to the streets in other cities throughout Israel, with 8,000 demonstrating in Modi'in, 7,000 in Netanya, 5,000 in Petah Tikva, 3,500 in Hod Hasharon, 2,500 in Ramat Hasharon, 2,000 in Rosh Pina, 1,500 in Rishon Letzion, 1,500 in Eilat, 1,500 in Dimona and 1,500 in Nahariya.A private company is turning a profit by surveilling people online and then selling valuable information to law enforcement and government agencies.
According to The Washington Post, the company, Babel Street, offers “a subscription called Babel X” which trawls through “some 40 online sources, scooping up data from popular sites such as Instagram and a Korean social media platform as well as inside ‘dark Web’ forums where cybercriminals lurk.”
The Pentagon was the subscription’s first customer, and some users pay more than $20,000 a year to use the service.
“Police departments investigating a crime might use the service to scan posts linked to a certain neighborhood over a specified period of time. Stadium managers use it to hunt for security threats based on electronic chatter,” they explained. “The Department of Homeland Security, county governments, law enforcement agencies and the FBI use it to keep tabs on dangerous individuals, even when they are communicating in one of more than 200 languages, including emoji.”
Babel Street, which is comprised of around 100 employees, including former government intelligence workers, is reportedly profitable in its third year and “recently took on $2.25 million from investors, bringing its total capital raised from investors to just over $5 million.”
The practice, however, has prompted privacy concerns, including from organizations such as the ACLU.
“These products can provide a very detailed picture of a person’s private life,” claimed ACLU Lawyer Matt Cagle. Babel Street reportedly “does not access individuals’ people’s Facebook profiles, though the company’s executives say they have ‘a close relationship with Facebook.'”
Privacy standards are used at the company, according to the report, and Jeff Chapman, Babel Street’s founder and a former Navy intelligence officer, claimed, “If someone has arrest powers, they get less access to the data than other customers.”
“We are seeing emoji increasingly used to get around text analysis,” continued Chapman. “Guys that want to be nefarious in their activities will use things like emoji to communicate with each other.”
Recent uses of the company’s service included training “its Web crawlers to look for people stranded in Houston’s floodwaters or waiting out Hurricane Irma in Florida.”
“They are tracking online scammers that might try to profit from the disaster,” The Washington Post added, before Chapman claimed their service “will one day be just as important to first responders as 9-1-1 phone lines.”
“There are billions of smartphones on the planet,” he concluded. “All you have to do is listen to them.”
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington and Gab @Nash, or like his page at Facebook.“I think the people of Iran would long for a new regime,” John Bolton said. | Getty Bolton calls regime change the 'only long-term solution' in Iran
John Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations and a contender to be the next secretary of state, argued Thursday that the United States should support a push for regime change in Iran, calling it the “only long-term solution” to threats the country poses in the Middle East.
“The ayatollahs are the principal threat to international peace and security in the Middle East,” Bolton told Breitbart News Daily, a radio program run by the hard-right website with close ties to Donald Trump. “Now, their ouster won’t bring sweetness and light to the region, that’s for sure, but it will eliminate the principal threat.”
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Bolton, whose aggressive foreign policy impulses stand in stark contrast to Donald Trump’s repeated criticism of the Iraq war, ripped into the Iran nuclear deal negotiated under President Barack Obama and argued that it will only help leaders in Tehran.
“I think the people of Iran would long for a new regime,” Bolton continued, later suggesting that the U.S. should support opposition groups looking to overthrow it. “I don’t think the regime is popular, but I think it has the guns. And I think there are ways of supporting the opposition that does not involve the use of American military force, that does involve helping the opposition to get a different kind of government.”
“A new government may not be filled with Jeffersonian Democrats, either,” Bolton acknowledged.
The president-elect’s transition team has reportedly been considering a range of candidates for secretary of state, from the hawkish Bolton, who served under President George W. Bush, to former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Many other names have been floated for the position, including South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and even Mitt Romney, the former Republican presidential nominee and harsh Trump critic.So which one do you prefer? As it happens, this particular match-up was completely one-sided. Indeed, Samsung's Note 4 appears to have won itself a place in the hearts of many of you, and that shows – it gathered the vast majority of votes. In the design section, for example, the iPhone 6 Plus netted just 1634 votes (27.14%) versus the 4387 (72.85%) for the Note 4. Samsung's phablet's advantage is even more pronounced in our readers' minds, at least when it comes to the display: a whopping 82.29% of poll-takers thought so, at least.
Moving onto the interface section, it would appear that the many, many (many) extra features Samsung bundled together with the Note 4 are paying off, for 70.74% of votes went to its darling, leaving Apple's first phablet with a third of the votes. Even in the camera department, the Note 4 reigned supreme, at least according to you – 76.86% of votes went to its name, while the iPhone 6 Plus ended up with just 23.14%.
But, hey, don't just take our word for it – take a look for yourself!
As of recently, we've gotten into the habit of giving you folks the opportunity to voice oit your own opinion on smartphones and how they measure up against their rivals – we just plug the essential, technical info for your reference. The rest is up to you.Publication history Edit
The poem was first published without sections[2] as the first of twelve untitled poems in the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The first edition was published by Whitman at his own expense. In the second (1856) edition, Whitman used the title "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American," which was shortened to "Walt Whitman" for the third (1860) edition.[1] The poem was divided into fifty-two numbered sections for the fourth (1867) edition and finally took on the title "Song of Myself" in the last edition (1891–2).[1] The number of sections is generally thought to mirror the number of weeks in the year.[3]
Reception Edit
Following its 1855 publication, "Song of Myself" was immediately singled out by critics and readers for particular attention, and the work remains among the most acclaimed and influential in American poetry.[4] In 2011, writer and academic Jay Parini named it the greatest American poem ever written.[5] In 1855, the Christian Spiritualist gave a long, glowing review of "Song of Myself", praising Whitman for representing "a new poetic mediumship," which through active imagination sensed the "influx of spirit and the divine breath."[6] Ralph Waldo Emerson also wrote a letter to Whitman, praising his work for its "wit and wisdom".[1] Public acceptance was slow in coming, however. Social conservatives denounced the poem as flouting accepted norms of morality due to its blatant depictions of human sexuality. In 1882, Boston's district attorney threatened action against Leaves of Grass for violating the state’s obscenity laws and demanded that changes be made to several passages from "Song of Myself".[1]
Literary style Edit
"Song of Myself" includes passages about the unsavory realities of America before the Civil War, including one about a multi-racial slave The poem is written in Whitman's signature free verse style. Whitman, who praises words "as simple as grass" (section 39) forgoes standard verse and stanza patterns in favor of a simple, legible style that can appeal to a mass audience.[7] Critics have noted a strong Transcendentalist influence on the poem. In section 32, for instance, Whitman expresses a desire to "live amongst the animals" and to find divinity in the insects. In addition to this romanticism, the poem seems to anticipate a kind of realism that would only become important in United States literature after the American Civil War. In the following 1855 passage, for example, we can see Whitman's inclusion of the gritty details of everyday life: The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm'd case,
(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's bed-room;)
The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,
He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manuscript;
The malform'd limbs are tied to the surgeon's table,
What is removed drops horribly in a pail;
The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove,... (section 15)
In the poem, Whitman emphasizes an all-powerful "I" which serves as narrator, who should not be limited to or confused with the person of the historical Walt Whitman. The persona described has transcended the conventional boundaries of self: "I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-washed babe.... and am not contained between my hat and boots" (section 7). There are several other quotes from the poem that makes it apparent that Whitman does not consider the narrator to represent a single individual. Rather, he seems to be narrating for all: "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." (Section 1)
"In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less/and the good or bad I say of myself I say of them" (Section 20)
"It is you talking just as much as myself... I act as the tongue of you" (Section 47)
"I am large, I contain multitudes." (Section 51) Alice L. Cook and John B. Mason offer representative interpretations of the "self" as well as its importance in the poem. Cook writes that the key to understanding the poem lies in the "concept of self" (typified by Whitman) as "both individual and universal,"[8] while Mason discusses "the reader’s involvement in the poet’s movement from the singular to the cosmic".[9] The "self" serves as a human ideal; in contrast to the archetypal self in epic poetry, this self is one of the common people rather than a hero.[10] Nevertheless, Whitman locates heroism in every individual as an expression of the whole (the "leaf" among the "grass").
Uses in other media Edit
Canadian doctor and long-time Whitman friend Richard Maurice Bucke analyzed the poem in his influential and widely read 1898 book Cosmic Consciousness, as part of his investigation of the development of man's mystic relation to the infinite. The poem figures in the plot of the 2008 young adult novel Paper Towns by John Green. "Song of Myself" and other Whitman poems are frequently referenced in the 2013 young adult fiction novel Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets by Evan Roskos.[11] The line "I am large, I contain multitudes" is referenced in the music video to Jill Scott's Golden.[12] A documentary project, Whitman Alabama, featured residents of Alabama reading Whitman verses on camera.[13][14] The poem is central to the plot of the play "I and You" by Lauren Gunderson.Saint Urho is a fictional saint of |
the church’s commitment to transparency.” Except that as Washington Post reporter Jason Horowitz explains, the reporters present “didn’t hear everything.” Under the rules of the Vatican tribunal which conducted the trial, Gabriele’s testimony would be severely restricted.
Fr. Lombardi is still director of the Vatican Press Office and has augmented his “media team” by adding two priests, the English-speaking Canadian, Tom Rosica, and the Spanish speaker, Gil Tamayo, with Burke nowhere to be seen.
So perhaps Opus Dei has been discredited enough that they will no longer be able to dictate who the next pope will be. Of course we don’t know what other sources of money the cardinals have to pay for their exquisite lace and brocades and that will ultimately decide the matterDANVILLE, Calif. (KTVU) - Many of us know what it's like to shop at a cavernous warehouse store such as Costco, where a person can feel mighty small. But at the Costco in Danville, there's an employee who makes everyone feel important.
Now that man is facing serious physical challenges.
As shoppers ebb and flow at the store, one of the first and last people they see is 45-year-old Arlie Smith.
"He's always at the door, he's always giving receipts, he's always smiling, always happy. And people refer to him as the Costco guy," said customer Steve Maurer.
Arlie has worked at the store for 21 years, but not without challenges. "He was diagnosed with primary progressive MS (Multiple Sclerosis)," said his wife, Shari.
Then last September, his body threw him an even bigger curve ball. He has terminal bone cancer, now with maybe two years to live.
"Since the time he was told that, he's been enthusiastic, and happy, and I'm not kidding," said Shari Smith.
Arlie is such a beloved figure that some customers heard about the cancer and decided to do something nice for him. At 1 p.m. on Tuesday, they invaded the store.
"We're all here today because we love you so much," said customer Bridgette Loughnane to Arlie.
They raised some $2,500 to send Arlie and his wife on a vacation.
"We got people donating $10, $20, up to $500 so you'll go and have four nights at your favorite place in Laguna Beach," added Loughnane.
Arlie, who grew up in San Ramon, was overwhelmed.
"They're priceless, they're irreplaceable," he said about his customers. And his humility was obvious. "Everything that's done for me and the love that's shown for me, every day, it's astounding. I mean, people don't have this great of a life, really," he said.
Despite living with M.S. and terminal cancer, Arlie couldn't be more positive about life.
"It's in your face all the time," he said. "So how can you possibly be ungrateful in my situation? How can you possibly take this for granted?"
Arlie's customers are amazed by his remarkable outlook on life.
"I don't think I ever saw him grapple with the ‘why me?' I mean he went immediately to finding a bigger purpose for what he can do," said Lee Loughnane.
His purpose now is to raise as much money as possible during a store-wide fundraiser in May for Children's Hospital, a fundraiser in which he has previously finished in the top ten in North America.
A Greek philosopher once said, "It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters." Arlie is clearly a personification of that ideal.This is the point where you just tip your cap to the Braves, and acknowledge that they won. Even at a time when politicians and taxpayers are getting wary about publicly funding stadiums, the Braves just walked away with nearly $400 million from Cobb County, Ga., for a new ballpark, and did so without the nasty business of opposition.
Cobb Commissioners voted last night, 5-0, to devote $392 million to building a new Braves stadium to open in 2017, with the operating agreement allowing the county to borrow up to $397 million. The Braves will chip in $230 million.
If you attended the vote, you might've gotten the impression that everyone was for it. Twelve attendees spoke, and all 12 spoke in favor of the ballpark. That's because Commissioners allowed only 12 speaking slots, and pro-ballpark people—the business interests—had supporters lining up to nab the speaking slots more than five hours before the meeting.
Several critics of the deal made their way toward the front of the commission meeting room and asked to be given an opportunity to speak. For a minute, the scene turned tense when they would not relent the floor. They were critical of the process of limiting the floor to a dozen public speakers for such an important vote. One of those critics, Ben Williams, with the Cobb chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, afterward accused the commission of "ignoring the voice of the people." Another critic, Rich Pellegrino, said the process was stacked against people who couldn't leave work early and spend hours in line waiting to speak. Pellegrino, with the group Citizens for Governmental Transparency, said he arrived at about an hour before the meeting but it was too late to get on the list to speak. "We're working people," Pellegrino said. "We're not on corporate welfare. It's a slap in the face." Cobb County Commission Chairman Tim Lee said its rules were followed "in the best interest" of everyone in attendance.
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Some of those against the stadium deal were forcibly removed from the room. The meeting was over within two hours, the commissioners approving everything without debating or taking questions.
The Braves have been masters at brokering no dissent:
• When Atlanta balked at replacing the nearly 20-year-old Turner Field, team executives approached Cobb County—secretly, because as the team president said, if people knew about it, they would have said no.
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• The funding was secured through some creative taxation, specifically chosen to avoid requiring a public referendum; Cobb County residents were never allowed to vote on giving $397 million to a baseball team.
• The actual vote on the operating agreement was only announced after 6 p.m. on the Friday before Memorial Day—concerned parties had just a long weekend to examine the details of a massive deal.
And the deal still contains questions and landmines. Cobb County has committed just $14 million to transportation improvements that are likely to cost at least 10 times that. The bond measures, released for the first time on Friday night, reveal that the Braves do not actually guarantee the $400 million in private development around the stadium that they had touted, rendering one of the project's biggest selling points imaginary long before ground is even broken.
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This is going to cost Cobb County taxpayers well more than $400 million. But will the new ballpark provide an economic benefit in return? Well, there's a first time for everything.
[Atlanta Journal-Constitution ]Our new #ikeahack #familybed in our #familybedroom #cosleeping #naturalparenting #bigfamily A photo posted by Elizabeth Boyce (@wanderingtheworldbelow) on
Oct 3, 2015 at 1:17am PDT
A Texas couple - frustrated over the nightly bedtime struggle with their five kids - designed a bed so that the whole family could sleep together.
Elizabeth Boyce displayed the unusual bed in a now-viral Instagram, and she says that it's been a welcome addition for the family.
Boyce said she and her husband, Tom, bought two IKEA beds and turned it into one big family bed.
"I wanted to make sure each kid had a little space of their own," Boyce told ABC News. "We hung a little curtain and did little mood lighting, you know, just made it fun."
Boyce said she and her husband just go to another room when the kids, ages 1 to 11, are asleep and they want alone time.
The couple told People magazine that the idea arose out of the family doing a lot of traveling, and often having to sleep all together in a camper or small hotel room.
Tom said that he doesn't see the bed as a "long-term solution," but that he and his wife are going to use it for as long as it works.
What are your thoughts on this unique parenting strategy?
This Instagram Account Totally Nails the Ridiculous Moments That Come with Raising Kids
This New Kia Ad Nails How Many Americans Feel About 'Participation Trophies'
Watching This Man Learn His Wife Is Pregnant - After 17 Years - Will Make Your DayAs an intern at Gimlet Media’s Science Vs, I’ve learned a lot about making podcasts. The process of making a podcast can seem mysterious, if not impossible. And when it comes to tasks like finding the overall structuring of a story or selecting the very best audio from three-hour-long interviews, if you’re like me, you may be unsure where to even begin.
I have good news, it’s not magic, there is a method. Radio producers have been been making shows under the constraint of the hardest of deadlines (dead air, gasp!), so skilled producers have systematized the process of creating audio and written how-to guides, one even in comic book form! (And while learning that some of my co-workers had been immortalized in a graphic novel was probably not the best for my already shy interactions with them, I learned a ton from that book!)
Anyways, here’s my unofficial Gimlet reading lists: one of books the Gimlet office keeps on hand for newbies like me and then a second of books on nonfiction writing and journalism that Gimlet colleagues recommended to me.
Books about audio storytelling / Books about making podcasts and radio stories:
Out one the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio by Jessica Abel (with a foreword by Ira Glass)
Comic-book writer and illustrator Jessica Abel extends and updates her classic, Radio an Illustrated Guide, interviewing the hosts and staff that create the hits This American Life, The Moth, Radiolab, Planet Money, Snap Judgement, Serial, Invisibilia, and other narrative radio shows. This book starts from the very beginning, and teaches you every step of the process of creating a story from start to finish, what sorts of big picture questions and details producers think about, and all of the weird jargon like ‘bounces,’ ‘logging,’ and ‘selects.’ And abel shows as well as telling–using the same techniques that are described in this book to make it feel more like a narrative than a dry how-to guide. Plus, it’s funny, cheap, and you’ll learn a bit about the idiosyncratic personalities who create the shows you love. Sound Reporting: the NPR guide to audio Journalism and Production – by Jonathon Kern
What Out on the Wire does for Gimlet-style narrative stories, Sound Reporting does for more tradional NPR journalism. (Though, unfortunately, more traditional also means no pictures.) However, Sound Reporting is an audio journalism textbook written in clear conversational language by the Executive Producer for Training at NPR, and as such explains every step of making an audio news story. Not only reporting, producing, and editing, but also the ethical considerations of journalism–including examples of journalism gone terribly wrong! (For example, did you know some journalists erred and published in the 1980s that 2 million children were abducted each year, probably contributing to the long-lasting ‘stranger danger’ that still worries people today?) Sound Reporting is full of interesting, concrete examples like this, that illustrate Kern’s points and make it easy to read and understand. Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound – Edited by John Biewen and Alexa Dilworth
Reality Radio is a collection of 24 essays. The second edition is hot of the press (Feb., 2017) and includes up to date information about the rapidly changing world of radio: the ascendance of the podcast; greater cultural, racial, and topical variety; and the changing economics of radio itself.
Contributors include many of the familiar faces from Out on the Wire, and a wider group including radio-makers from Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The contributers are: Jad Abumrad, Daniel Alarcon, Jay Allison, damali ayo, John Biewen, Emily Botein, Chris Brookes, Scott Carrier, Katie Davis, Sherre DeLys, Ira Glass, Alan Hall, Dave Isay, Natalie Kestecher, Starlee Kine, The Kitchen Sisters, Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder, Maria Martin, Karen Michel, Joe Richman, Dmae Roberts, Stephen Smith, Alix Spiegel, Sandy Tolan, and Glynn Washington.
Books about nonfiction writing and journalism more broadly:
Follow the story : How to Write Successful Nonfiction – by James B Stewart
I took the fact that Follow the Story’s Amazon page recommends it alongside my favorite style guide Zinsser’s On Writing Well as a very good omen. Stewart is a former editor of the Wall Street Journal’s front page, and draws heavily on examples from his own writing. This may irk some, but hey, write what you know, right? As much as this is a step-by-step guide for researching and writing a story, it is a philosophy about how to following your curiosity, and then leading the reader/listener down that same journey.
I’m looking over the amazon reviews for this book and I don’t get them:
“ Read this book if you want to be a journalist,” says Jen. Four Stars. I would have sworn a 5-star rating was coming after that unequivocal endorsement. Naked in Baghdad: The Iraq War and the Aftermath as Seen by NPR’s Correspondent Anne Garrels
A lot of times in radio and journalism there is no script–no one can tell you what you should be doing and that can be terrifying, and that’s without putting your life in danger. Naked in Baghdad is an example, of a journalist rising above the call of duty, who “as one of only sixteen non-embedded journalists who stayed in the now legendary Palestine Hotel throughout the American invasion she managed to deliver the most immediate, insightful and independent reports with unparalleled vividness and immediacy,” and the madness of Iraq are juxtaposed against e-mails from her husband.
Naked in Baghdad is an inspiring piece of work that illustrates the types of dramatic and impactful work you can do if you learn the skills of creating radio. As Ron Franscell points out in an Amazon Review, audio journalists can get access where others can’t: “She had no cameras… no bulky notebooks to mark her as a reporter in a crowd. Only a tape recorder the size of a cigarette pack … and the sounds of war. She traveled lightly and discreetly, just under the radar of the gatekeepers.”
So there’s the start of a reading list for the aspiring radio journalist, podcaster, or audio storyteller. What books have helped or inspired you that I’m missing from the list? Leave them in a comment below or tweet me @neuroamer. And let me know if you have other questions about making podcasts or working at Gimlet.Gedhun Choekyi Nyima was just 6 years old when he was recognized by His Holiness the Dalai Lama as the 11th Panchen Lama, one of Tibet’s most important religious leaders. Just after Gedhun Choekyi Nyima and his family were taken into custody by the Chinese authorities and he has not been seen since.
Where is the Panchen Lama?: Take Action
Tibetans, Tibet supporters, human rights organisations and world governments have consistently urged China to release Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, but these appeals continue to go unheeded.
For two decades the Chinese authorities have denied requests from governments and the United Nations for access to Gedhun Choekyi Nyima and his family, claiming that he was leading a normal life and does not wish to be disturbed.
Join us now and help us demand “Where is the Panchen Lama?”
Support this campaign by adding to your profile picture or Facebook cover via TwibbonThe British are a lost tribe – disoriented, brooding and suspicious. They have lived through the biggest bank bail-out in history and the deepest recession since the 1930s, and they are now being warned that they face a decade of unparalleled public and private austerity. Yet only a few years earlier their political and business leaders were congratulating themselves on creating a new economic alchemy of unbroken growth based on financial services, open markets and a seemingly unending credit and property boom. As we know now, that was a false prospectus. All that had been created was a bubble economy and society. Yet while the country is now exhorted to tighten its belt and pay off its debts, those who created the crisis — the country's CEOs and bankers, still living on Planet Extravagance, not to mention mainstream politicians — all want to get back to "business as usual": the world of 1997 to 2007.
This is an affront to Britain's deep sense of fairness – a belief that one should receive one's due deserts in proportion to whatever good or bad one has contributed. This country waits in orderly queues, tries to abide by the rules and profoundly believes in fair play and the rule of law. Yet what is happening at the moment offends every canon of fairness. Most of the working population do not deserve the degree of austerity and lost opportunity that lies ahead of them. It was not their behaviour that created the biggest peacetime public deficit in history, the credit crunch and the business models built on the fiction that it could all continue for ever. Yet while they suffer, those who did cause the crisis have got away largely scot-free. They have exploited their luck and avoided any significant contribution to repairing the calamity they have wrought. No substantive reform has ever been suggested. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has suggested that an essential precondition for social closure is that politicians and bankers acknowledge and apologise for the mistakes they made. So far, any apologies and acknowledgements have been mealy-mouthed or half-hearted. There has been nothing to match the scale of the disaster.
Even if such repentance were forthcoming, the mistakes of the recent past, and the disfiguring unfairness that has so surrounded both the recession and the recovery, cannot be quickly forgotten. If the lessons are not learned, they will surely be repeated. The next financial crisis will be even larger, it might even overwhelm the state, and the public anger will be rightly awesome. Nor can any healthy economy and society in future be constructed on provenly rotten foundations. There must be change. It has fallen to the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in coalition to attempt some, if not all, of the necessary initiatives that might change British capitalism – notably banking and political reform – but it is an open question how determined it will be before well-organised defence of entrenched and privileged positions by the financial, media and bureaucratic elites. Worse, its repudiation of Keynesian economic policies in circumstances that demand more Keynesianism than at any time since the 1930s threatens to overwhelm its best intentions. The consequences are a potential national calamity.
The unbalanced structure of economic growth over the past decade has fed straight through to a disastrous social geography, bypassing the least advantaged and rewarding the wealthy. Throughout the country the poor and disadvantaged live in ever more concentrated wards that are blighted by run-down social housing and over-stretched schools. Within a single regional health authority, those in the most well-off ward can typically expect to live for 14 years longer than those in the most deprived ward. The roll-call of the deprived is bitterly familiar: east London's Hackney and Tower Hamlets, Liverpool's Knowsley, parts of Manchester, Middlesbrough and Rochdale continue to reel from deprivation, while local authorities like Richmond upon Thames, Kensington and Chelsea and Forest Heath in east Suffolk power on. The New Labour government attempted to alleviate this polarisation through interventions such as Sure Start – a national network of children's centres to support young families – investing in social housing, incentivising work, developing apprenticeship and trying to improve failing schools. At best, it achieved small gains and held the line; at worst, its initiatives were overwhelmed by the way in which the economy has developed.
Everywhere there is pressure to control and repress the social consequences of a two-nation Britain. Ever more sophisticated CCTV policing the fortresses of the rich and the desolate housing estates of the disadvantaged has become the iconic social intervention of the age. Hysterical tabloid campaigns create mob justice around incidents of child neglect and sexual abuse. Of course, Haringey social services were terrifyingly ineffectual in the terrible case of "Baby P"; and the Soham murder case revealed the hopeless inadequacy of paedophile-checking procedures. But the atmosphere during both made the Salem witch trials look calm. Consequently, the results – a national system for monitoring millions of adults who are in regular contact with children and a crisis in recruitment for social services– are self-defeating and even irrational. The new coalition government promises to be more liberal. But liberalism surrounded by this capacity for hysteria is likely to be hard to sustain.
It has been the same story with respect to immigration, Europe and the early release of prisoners. Terrified of media censure, the Labour government became ever more authoritarian in response to newspaper campaigns against supposedly antisocial or deviant conduct. So there were populist clampdowns against drug-users and ever-longer prison sentences for offenders, while anyone who dared to question the effectiveness of such policies was shouted down or ignored. For instance, the Drugs Advisory Panel was crippled by resignations as one scientist after another became disillusioned that drugs policy was not being driven by evidence but by the prejudices of the tabloids. Conservative politicians are even more susceptible to the same forces and offer few principled, well-thought-through alternatives. The open question is how long their new partners in government, the Liberal Democrats, will be able to resist these pressures.
The economic bubble, which created a new class of super-rich, fostered social polarisation in other profound ways – the increasing value of skills, the importance of self-presentation and differential access to the wired world of the internet. Britain boasts a burgeoning super-rich sector: there are 47,000 people in this country with an average pre-tax income of £780,000 a year. Another 420,000 have pre-tax incomes of between £100,000 and £350,000. Nearly all of them are male, white and live in the south-east. There is a growing class of "knowledge workers", who reflect the fact that the dynamic parts of the knowledge economy – hi-tech manufacturing, the creative industries, health, business services, education and ICT – need well-qualified and skilled people. But below them are 10 million adults who earn less than £15,000 a year. Few are knowledge workers, and their chance of self-improvement is minimal. Two million children live in low-income working families. Those at the top have enjoyed a world of excess. Financier- cum-retailer Sir Philip Green set the gold standard for conspicuous extravagance when he spent £4m on his son's bar mitzvah in a specially built temporary synagogue on the French Riviera and £5m on his own 50th birthday party in Cyprus. His wife, Tina, got into the spirit of the occasion when she gave her husband a gold Monopoly set, complete with diamond-studded dice. Of course, the properties on the board represented those owned by Green himself. Financier Joe Lewis paid £1.4m for a single round of golf with Tiger Woods. Venture capitalist Ronald Cohen, adviser to Gordon Brown, excavated under his garden in London's Notting Hill to build a £1m private underground swimming pool for his £15m mansion. The Financial Times's "How to Spend It" section provides a window into incredible opulence: the December 2009 edition featured such "über-complex" watches as the Jaeger-LeCoultre Hybris Mechanica Grand Sonnerie (yours for 1.8 million euros) as well as a silk-brocade coat for £7,170. In September 2007 the sale of Damien Hirst's extraordinary platinum skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless pavé diamonds – titled For the Love of God? – to an investment consortium for $100m defined the top of the boom and the character of the age. The purpose of art had become the celebration of astronomical wealth as a luminously decadent death mask, corrupting both the artist – who was reduced to playing the money game – and any buyer who fell for the ruse. Money ruled everything.
Yet the knowledge that such ostentatious consumption is possible has a shadow effect on every British citizen. Individual human beings instinctively compare themselves and are sensitive to what the whole of society values. Anxiety follows when we cannot compete with others to achieve whatever confers status. Today, philanthropy or living according to a particular moral code does not confer status. Only money is able to do that. People start to question whether vocational career choices – in farming, teaching, medicine or science – make any sense when society rewards them so lowly while rewarding finance so highly. Material values start to crowd out altruism, philanthropy and restraint. Two incidents in September 2007 highlighted the new values. Lance Bombardier Ben Parkinson, who lost both legs after a landmine exploded in Afghanistan, was offered £152,000 compensation by the Ministry of Defence. The very same week, Eric Nicoli left his job as CEO of EMI – having failed to turn around the company – with a pay-off of £3m.
Members of the upper middle class increasingly live in gated communities or neighbourhoods where the price of houses is so high that ownership is available only to the very rich. It is a form of social apartheid. Social mobility has stagnated. The next generation of professional men and women will have been educated in ever-richer families. Private education as a passport to the upper echelons of British society has become more important: 55% of top journalists, 70% of finance directors and 45% of top civil servants were privately educated. Yet private schools educate only 7% of the total school population.
The political system and principal parties intensify the problem rather than relieve it because the latter are in thrall to populism and the 24/7 news agenda. Policy is driven by populist initiatives or managerial solutions, with the parties competing over who will be most effective at reducing the deficit, eliminating waste or coming up with the latest wheeze to tackle some social problem or other. Their decline as mass-membership organisations commanding strong identification and affiliation certainly predates the bubble, but that process has accelerated during it.
The interaction between diminished parties trying to appeal to the centre, a powerful populist media and Britain's highly centralised constitution has been toxic to good government. Blair and Brown completed what Thatcher began – the concentration of power at the centre in order to control the news agenda. No 10 has grown into a new royal court, complete with courtiers and factions. Government press officers have grown by 10 times and now number 3,200, a total that the coalition government, for all its rhetoric, will struggle significantly to reduce. The spinning of a media that itself spins is inevitable, but it progressively undermines the legitimacy of politics. For its part, the House of Commons is now more in thrall to the party leaderships than ever before. MPs' expenses claims for moat-cleaning, duck-houses and clock-towers – not to mention the occasional pornographic video – underlined the loss of democratic purpose and vocation among the foot soldiers of the political class. Tony Blair's disregard for the House of Commons was complete: he dropped in for only 5% of the votes, and did not even stay to listen to the Iraq debates. Many laws are barely scrutinised before receiving the royal assent. Political reform has not so much invigorated British democracy as redistributed power from central to local elites in Cardiff and Edinburgh, and sideways to life peers in the House of Lords and judges. The opportunity for more ambitious reform has been squandered. All this is placing core British values in flux. If Britishness once meant a combination of kindness, instinctive liberalism, deference before well-understood social values, belief in fairness, respect for parliamentary democracy, inquisitive internationalism and an understated sense of national purpose, it is dissolving before our eyes. If anything, kindness and liberalism have become objects of scorn. The public domain is now dominated by the tabloid bully, the professional mocker, the seeker of celebrity and the xenophobe.
Worry and concern have replaced pride and faith in Britain and its institutions. One local politician captures the mood: "We don't make anything any more, we don't own anything any more. It's an absolute disgrace. The country's just knackered. People have given up hope. They don't believe in anything, not in themselves, not in their neighbours, not in their history." The speaker is Bob Bailey, former leader of the BNP on Barking council. His party's policies may be a repulsive anathema based on the rank prejudice that alien foreigners are to blame for everything that is wrong with British society – and if they were ever implemented they would be a racist, fascist disaster. But the prejudice behind his sentiments speaks for a growing body of working-class opinion. British society may not yet be broken, as not only the BNP but the Conservative Party has claimed, in the hyperbole of the age. But it is certainly very wounded.
All three principal parties have begun to search for a moral voice, and "fairness" crops up increasingly in the language of all of them. Nick Clegg wants to hard-wire it into Britain's DNA. The coalition agreement purports to promote it. Labour campaigned for a future that is "fair for all". The political class has read the runes: fairness is the new moral mantra. So, at a minimum, we now need our economies and our societies to be fair. But what do we even mean by fairness?
We need a shared understanding of what constitutes fairness in order to restore our society. At present, there is none. The rich argue that it is fair for them to be so wealthy, in much the same way as Athenian noblemen believed that their riches were signifiers of their worth. They believe they owe little or nothing to society, government or public institutions. They accept no limit or proportionality to their wealth, benchmarking themselves only against their fellow rich. Philanthropic giving is declining; tax avoidance is rising; and executive pay is rising exponentially. All three are justified by the doctrine that the rich simply deserve to be rich. Meanwhile, the poor, in their view – and that of a virulent right-wing media – largely deserve their plight because they could have chosen otherwise. The mockery of chavs is premised on the assumption that they could be different if they wanted to be. The poor could work, save and show some initiative. So why should we indulge them by giving them state handouts?
This lies behind the arrogance with which bankers still defend their bonuses, in spite of everything that has happened over the past few years. They are private contracts, insists Sir George Mathewson, former chair of RBS, in which the state has no right to interfere. They are necessary to retain the best, and thus the health of an industry from which the entire country benefits, argues Standard Chartered's CEO Peter Sands. Their wealth is only fair.
When the Labour government announced a one-off tax on bank bonuses in December 2009, City and bank spokesmen warned of a mass exodus. The threat was that they would leave the country rather than pay a tax to contribute to clearing up the mess they had created. Such a tax was not fair, they said. There is no better example of the principle of fairness being grotesquely distorted. The bankers were using it simply as a rhetorical device to justify their unwarranted position as an overpaid financial elite.
This moral edifice must be challenged before any reform can be attempted. The principle of "just deserts" is a key part of our culture. We are not flat-earth egalitarians. But nor do we share the view held by the private-equity or hedge-fund partner in Mayfair that wealth is a signifier of personal worth in its own right. We believe it has to be earned, and we believe the rewards should be commensurate with the discretionary effort. Proportionality is a key value. Its trashing by those at the top of the financial and business community risks an angry populist backlash fuelled not by envy, as they airily claim, but by a visceral human instinct.
This definition of fairness is a radical idea. It is not egalitarian; it is demanding. It challenges the economic and moral questions that have been ignored over the last two decades – the tolerance of towering disparities in wealth and power and the blind faith in individualism and markets. It is why we now need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for British capitalism – to examine what happened over the last 10 years, apportion blame, demand atonement and use the lessons learned to build something better in the future. Open competitive markets that deny monopoly and offer proportional returns to productive entrepreneurs are the handmaidens of genuine wealth creation; monopoly and market rigging that reward the incumbent and unproductive are its enemies. Britain has too little of the former "good" capitalism and too much of the latter " bad capitalism", one of the reasons it incubated the forces that created the financial crisis. To repeat: fairness is the indispensable value that underpins good economy and society, and it will be the foundation stone of any sustainable new order.
Britain in 2010 is at a crossroads. It has to devise a new way of making its living in the world because the big bet on big finance, property and construction didn't pay off. A wave of new possibilities driven by science and technology is creating fantastic opportunities, but if we do not seize the moment we risk becoming an economic backwater. Britain has to create a national innovation system by increasing investment in research, disseminating new technologies, building great young companies, promoting open access and competition, mobilising finance and revolutionising its approach to education, training and learning. In other words, it has to do nothing less than rethink its whole approach to capitalism in order to unleash a flood of productive entrepreneurship.
This will mean rethinking how ownership is discharged and companies innovate and grow. The City of London must be recast from top to bottom. It will mean creating a pool of workers who are prepared to accept more risk and actively manage their careers in an era of churn and change. The knowledge economy is the future, but this is not just about science, technology, digitalisation and the onward march of creativity. It is about helping the British to become authors of their own lives. It is a revolution of the mind.
The growth of public debt must be capped and Britain's budget deficit reduced. This must be done quickly enough to reassure the financial markets that they are not financing a banana republic but not so fast that it devastates the economy by withdrawing public demand when private demand is already crippled (and when banks are nervous about accepting new risks).
Revenue must be raised – with the baby boomers contributing disproportionately – and the state reshaped so that the universal services as well as welfare provision for the disadvantaged can be maintained. Public sector managers and workers will have to contemplate change, inventiveness and responsiveness on an unprecedented level. The essential "publicness" and universality of services cannot be compromised, but everything from the armed forces to the NHS will have to devise ingenious ways to do more with less. In this respect, the early economic pronouncements of the coalition government were disheartening: too much emphasis on deficit-cutting, too few ideas about how to encourage growth and a lack of subtlety about how to manage an economy in the wake of a credit crunch.
Social polarisation must be halted and reversed. Britain cannot confront its challenges if great swaths of its society are disenfranchised and marginalised. Potential talent cannot be allowed to stand idle; potential opportunity cannot be squandered. Our ailing cities and neighbourhoods must be given their chance. We need to educate the mass of our people to a new level, teach them to use their brains in ways that their 20th-century predecessors never thought possible. This will then trump, or at least mitigate, the familiar cultural icons of class.
Fairness is the value that must saturate and animate the reinvention of British capitalism, our society and the reshaping of the British state. The current British political system and the British media are both in urgent need of reform. If British citizens are to become the authors of their own lives and the drivers of a national renaissance, they need reliable sources of information, genuine opportunities to participate in the political life of the country, and politics itself to possess the power to make a difference. Herd-like, populist, conservative media that disregard the impartiality of fact, do not hold the powerful to account, trivialise the quest for objectivity and, above all, trash plurality – the vital precondition for democratic deliberation – lets down the whole country.
Britain needs to embrace democracy rather than simulate it. Too much power is concentrated at the centre while there are too few checks and balances, too little fair representation of plural strands of opinion and not enough national deliberation and debate. National rejuvenation demands a vibrant democracy that empowers the government of the day to take on incumbent elites and monopolists and build a powerful, legitimate national narrative. Fortunately, the new coalition government seems to appreciate this, and has already outlined its commitment to political reform.
The rest of the world is confronting multiple challenges too. Growth must be progressively decarbonised to limit atmospheric concentrations of "CO2 equivalent" to 450 parts per million, a level that is believed to be consistent with a global average temperature increase of about two degrees centigrade. During the 2010s the foundations will be laid of an economy and society that must burn less fossil fuels and generate a lower carbon footprint. A start must be made on transforming the civilisation that was built on the car, the suburb and cheap individual mobility.
Britain needs to get its house in order, both for itself and because the decades ahead are going to be more turbulent than any since the end of the second world war. There are new centres of global economic and political power; new risks; and new, dangerous ideologies. Britain cannot be inward-looking, nationalist, Eurosceptic or conservative in this emerging environment. However, little of this registers in the popular consciousness.
If the 2010s are not to trump the 1970s as the bleakest most paranoid decade since the war, then there needs to be both a frank acknowledgement of what went wrong in the 2000s and an articulation of where the country must go next in terms of necessary investment, reform and change. Crucially, there also needs to be an appreciation of the values that must underpin all this. This old country, part of an old continent, has to the find the energy to remake itself. Denial and avoidance of unpleasant realities are fundamental human emotions, as common among armies after defeats as they are among bankers after a credit crunch. |
angles, workaday materials and, yes, a continuity (and fragmentation) of space, objects, concepts and art.
“We were told there were ghosts in the house”, Gehry told Arch Daily. “I decided they were ghosts of Cubism. The windows... I wanted to make them look like they were crawling out of this thing. At night, because this glass is tipped it mirrors the light in... so when you’re sitting at this table you see all these cars going by, you see the moon in the wrong place... the moon is over there but it reflects here... and you think it’s up there and you don’t know where the hell you are.”
Frederick Kiesler would have enjoyed visiting Frank Gehry in this house that doubles as a work of enjoyably unsettling art. When asked to build a full-scale mock-up of the Endless House in MoMa’s courtyard for the museum’s 1960 show Visionary Architecture, Kiesler talked about floors of pebbles, sand, grass, planks, of rivulets of water and heated terracotta tiles. It was never built.
Nor was the Wing House by Asymptote Architecture, a New York practice founded by Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture. This was one of Three Houses for the Sub-Conscious shown in the form of exquisite scale models at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale. MoMA has a paper, cardboard, acrylic and polystyrene model of the Wing House revealing an interior as smooth flowing and as adventurous as Kiesler’s Endless House. Perhaps, not surprisingly, Aysmptote are among winners of the Frederick Kiesler Prize.
Natural habitat
Such designs are explorations of ideas connecting art and science to architecture. In 2006, Gillian Lambert, a London architectural student, brought weather into the mix. Her beautiful drawings for a “studio house for a weather-obsessed architect” were, she told me, inspired by JMW Turner’s sensational painting Snow Storm – Steam-Boat Off a Harbour’s Mouth,from 1842. Ideally set by the River Thames, “the spaces within the house are blurred as rain falls from the ceiling into a well below; the breeze in the air is filtered through the walls, through pockets of bright daylight and areas hidden within dark shadows. The interiors reflect the unpredictable and dynamic nature of external conditions.”
If very different from Gehry’s “ghost of Cubism”, Lambert’s project exhibited a haunting presence as did Edo Architecture’s tantalising Ghost of Water Row, a house made of pale Scottish spruce with white cotton roof and walls that stood, lit translucently, on the banks of the Clyde in Glasgow for one night only in November 2012. Created by Edo Architecture (Andy McAvoy and Ann Nisbet), it was an ethereal evocation of one of the row of weavers’ houses that stood here from 1790 to 1929 before weaving gave way to shipbuilding that, in turn, is a ghost of its former self today.
The Turner Prize winning artist Rachel Whiteread did something similar in the 1990s, first with Ghost (1990), a plaster cast of the interior of a Victorian house and then with House (1993), an ambitious and compelling concrete cast of the inside of an entire three-storey East London house, damaged during the Blitz. Although only meant to be temporary, House wowed critics and won Whiteread the Turner Prize. On display in a public park, the local council demolished the cast with uncontained glee.
Modern architects, meanwhile, notably Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, had created houses as artworks that brought Palladio and Paolo Almerico’s ideal into the 20th Century and beyond. Whether experimental, conceptual and ghostly or architecturally formal and correct, key buildings and artworks reflecting on the nature of the house have tried hard over the centuries to lift our minds and focus our eyes on something so very much higher than the rash of artless new housing blighting the world today.
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The Whitney Wildcats played the Robinson Rockets at home Friday night.
The game was tied 50-50 with just 1.3 seconds to play.
As the Rockets inbounded the ball, a player was immediately fouled as time ran out.
The Robinson player went to the free throw line to shoot the foul shots.
He made one giving Robinson the win, 51-50.
What happened next shocked many in the gymnasium.
Whitney Head Coach Troy Doyle was caught on camera kicking the ball toward the Rockets team and immediately tempers flared.
Several players moved toward the coach and the coach moved towards them.
Rockets Center Kayne Follender said the coach even used profanity.
"I've been a varsity player for three years. I'm graduating early and I've started every year of my high school career. I've never seen a coach act this way before. "
Monday, Whitney ISD Superintendent Gene Solis said he couldn't comment on what kind of discipline if any Coach Doyle would face and that the district is handling the situation "in house."
Solis did confirm Doyle would not be coaching the Wildcats when they play at McGregor Tuesday night.By Rebecca Levene
Posted on July 1, 2015 in Books with tags Fantasy, Rebecca Levene
Making magic isn’t as simple as waving your hand over a hat and shouting ‘abracadabra’ in the hopes that a rabbit will appear. There are – or, at least, should be – some rules. (Be sure you shout ‘abracadabra’ two minutes past midnight on your grandmother’s birthday.) Rebecca Levene, author of Smiler’s Fair and The Hunter’s Kind, joins us today to discuss the whys, hows and wherefore-art-thous of creating a sustainable system of magic for her world.
Do fantasy books need magic? I’m not sure. I do believe that they need to be magical, to depict a world that isn’t fully rational, in which shadows hold more than darkness and the gods may take an active hand. The Hollow Gods series takes place in that kind of world, so I probably didn’t need to add magic itself into the mix, but because I’m a glutton for punishment, I did.
I always knew the basics of my magical system, even before I started writing Smiler’s Fair. But for that book I didn’t need to know the details and I blithely assumed that sorting them out would be a breeze come the second book.
Yeah, I’m an idiot. The thing is, working out magical rules is pretty easy, or at least doable. But there are bigger questions beyond ones like which runes relate to which parts of the world and what kind of ceremony might be required to activate them. For a start, there’s the question of whether magic should have rules at all. If magic can be fully enumerated and explained, is it magic at all? Isn’t it just science by another name, possibly one with lots of unnecessary apostrophes?
But magic can’t be rule-free either, because if anything is possible, nothing is at stake. Heroes stuck in an impossible situation? No worries – magic can free them somehow. Lacking a way to end that final battle? Magic is clearly the answer. Need to bring someone back to life? Magic. Why would readers ever worry or care about the fates of characters who can be saved at any moment by an almost literal deus ex machina.
OK then. How about if I know the rules but I don’t tell them to my readers? Well, that’s a little better, except how will they know when I’m cheating, or when I’ve just pulled a magical solution out of my arse? How can they try to second-guess the characters, to figure out what they’d do in those people’s situation, which is half the fun of reading a book?
The answer, I think, lies in a phrase much loved by my favourite terrible TV show, Once Upon A Time: all magic comes with a price. Readers probably don’t need to know exactly how a book’s magical system functions, but they definitel y need to know what it will cost the characters to use it. If they know what the characters are losing or risking every time they reach for a spell, they can stay engaged in the action.
But that just begs the question, what cost? Make it too one-on-one a transaction – energy in for energy out – and you’re back where you started, with something that feels more like science. If magic wears out its users like more physical exertion, well… Actually, that’s not too bad, but still not entirely satisfying. Something as extraordinary as magic feels as if it should exact an extraordinary price.
There probably isn’t an easy solution; there certainly isn’t a correct answer to this sort of question. But I looked at books I believed did it well for guidance. Ursula K Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea very vividly demonstrates what happens when a mage’s reach exceeds his grasp. And in The Tombs of Atuan we see a far more alien and strange magic, unexplained and haunting. Geraldine Harris’s Seven Citadels series – which I will never stop banging on about – springs from the premise that a group of sorcerers used their power to gain immortality, and then spends its time very movingly showing us what they lost in that transaction. And more recently, Django Wexler’s The Thousand Names limits its magic to one spell – of sorts – per user, with intriguing consequences and a truly novel backstory.
I’m not sure I’ve come up with an answer as elegant as those. But my magical system makes sense, at least to me – it reflects the central themes of my books and I hope will seem coherent to readers as well. There is a price, and the characters of The Hunter’s Kind all have to decide if they’re willing or able to pay it.The 36-year-old's current deal expires at the end of the season and he is unlikely to continue his career if a new offer is not forthcoming
AC Milan goalkeeper Christian Abbiati has revealed he will retire if the Serie A club does not decide to renew his contract.
Abbiati, who joined the club in 1998, has made over 300 appearances for Milan, winning three Serie A titles and one Champions League crown during his time at San Siro.
The 36-year-old's deal expires at the end of the season and Abbiati admitted that the current campaign could be his last in professional football.
"Will I stay another season? It's normal at the age of 37 that some injury problems will catch up with you," he said. "We train every day and even the younger players have problems. I'm available though and it's not written that I always have be the first choice.
"I'm available like I said. Obviously if the club says enough is enough, then that's it. I'd say that if I don't a sign a new contract here, it's 90 percent sure that I'll quit playing."
Milan goes into Sunday's derby with city rival Inter nine points adrift of its neighbor and 24 behind Serie A leader Juventus.
And Abbiati believes Milan's lowly league position makes it even more vital that Massimiliano Allegri's men take all three points as the 18-time champions attempt to recover from a dismal start to the season.
"The derby is always a spectacular match and we probably need this win a bit more than them (Inter) at the moment," Abbiati added. "We've been doing alright recently. We got the draw on Monday (against Roma) and there was some disappointment because at the end we could have even won it but a draw was probably the right result."I saw something yesterday, and it kind of struck a nerve.
We’re now through with a third of the 2016-17 NHL season. The Columbus Blue Jackets are still one of the better teams in the league. This is still confounding. It still makes my brain hurt.
This quote, from this article on the SB Nation NHL mainpage, kind of irritated me probably more than it should have. The article, as I’m sure some of you saw, goes on to discuss whether the Blue Jackets are good, lucky, or playing at an unsustainable rate and doomed to fall back into the “same old Jackets” history.
The article seems to lean toward “doomed,” citing a number of statistics that cannot possible be kept up. Or something. I’m basically here to nitpick them to death because, let’s face it, I’ve boughti into this team success, they’re never going to lose another game, and Bobrovsky is going to win the Vezina again this year.
POINT ONE: THE POWER PLAY IS POTENTIALLY UNSUSTAINABLE
Sure, I guess. That’s possible. It’s entirely likely, in fact, that the power play doesn’t hover around 25% for much of the year. The last team to do that featured some guy named Alex Ovechkin. But, what I believe most people are overlooking when it comes to the power play, is a two fold addition of Zach Werenski and Sam Gagner. Werenski, the 19 year old stud rookie, is already one of the two or three best puck moving defensemen this club has ever iced (the only other that comes to immediate mind is James Wisniewski), and he has the potential to get even better. He has allowed the team to set up in the 4 forwards and 1 defenseman setup that Torts favors, and has shown an ability to make expert passes and be a threat to score from the blue line. The other addition, Sam Gagner, has fit perfectly into the slot on the power play. He is not only a danger to score, but is an expert and picking out passes. Watch his assist on Cam Atkinson’s power play goal against Edmonton again. Those are dimensions we haven’t had before.
Those additions have allowed us to have the most structure we’ve ever shown as a club on the power play. Look at this organization!
POINT TWO: SERGEI BOBROVSKY WILL REGRESS
Bob has, to put it mildly, been playing out of his mind this year. He showed up to camp slimmer, more flexible, and absolutely ready to put the past few injury seasons behind him. All he’s done this year is run out to an NHL leading 17 wins, a.934 SV%, and a 1.94 GAA. Is this unsustainable? Maybe not. Remember the Vezina year? Bob went 21-11-6, with a 2.00 GAA and a.932 SV%. We have seen him do this for extended periods of time before. If he can stay healthy (and, according to Coach Tortorella, he feels great and isn’t tired at all), there’s absolutely no reason to think that he can’t keep this up, especially considering he has the best defensive group he’s ever had in front of him.
POINT THREE: THE PDO IS TOO DARN HIGH
The Columbus Blue Jackets currently boast a PDO of 1.036, according to the article cited above. Apparently, because it is so high, the Blue Jackets are due to regress in the near future. But let’s take a look at that chart again.
See some of the other teams around Columbus? Like, oh, Montreal, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York? They must be good, but we can’t be? What gives? This isn’t the “same old Blue Jackets” team that just automatically sucks. Either all of these teams are playing at an unsustainable pace, or Columbus maybe, just maybe, has what it takes to keep this up.
POINT FOUR: THEY’RE VULNERABLE WHEN THEY DON’T HAVE A LEAD
Is this true? Possibly. But, as I cited the other day, good luck jumping out on them. Columbus is outscoring teams 27-13 in the first period, and are 10-2-1 when leading after the first period. In the third period, they’re outscoring teams at nearly the same clip, by a mark of 32-17. The Blue Jackets start strong, and finish just as strong. Unlike in years past, nothing phases them, and this team doesn’t quit. The Blue Jackets score in bunches, and frustrate the hell out of opposing teams in the neutral zone. Edmonton was mentally out of their game on Tuesday night, even Jack Johnson noticed it in the most recent CBJ 30 in 30.
POINT FI-
I’m interrupting myself. I’ve made my points, but I want to touch on something here. I am sick and tired of people shredding this team because of their history. This is a new group, with new additions, with a new coach and new style. These aren’t the same old Jackets. I don’t expect the league to look at us as a threat. We haven’t earned that. What I do want is to see articles that aren’t damning with faint praise. Through 27 games, this team is the feel good story of the NHL. Who couldn’t be happy for these guys? And yet, every damn article is about how this won’t last, how Columbus will go back to being a bottom feeder, generally citing team history. Sure, we sucked for a long time. Thanks for that Dougie Mac, I still hate your guts. But that has no bearing on THIS TEAM. On these guys here. There are fun things to pay attention do- a Calder candidate, a revival and a Vezina caliber netminder, a captain who’s found his game after a down year. Torts has clearly learned when to push the right buttons and not work teams to death - hell, he’s cancelled morning skates more than he’s had them! The team had to ASK to have one in Edmonton so they could get used to the new ice!
A little respect would be nice. A little recognition for the culture change that’s gone on here would be appreciated. And damn, 27 games in to this season? This team has EARNED that.
Maybe it’ll come when they kick Pittsburgh’s ass on Thursday.A new government report published late last year from the Federal Office of Intellectual Property confirmed that current Swiss law with respect to downloading copyrighted material should stay as it is. Unlike in most other countries, downloading copyrighted material for personal use in Switzerland is legal. In most countries, authorized downloads of music, films or software are often prosecuted. Often, entertainment industry groups decry digital piracy as theft and argue that they are losing money. However, the new Swiss report argued that this may not, in fact, be the case - as that revenue has simply moved to other areas.
To learn more, Deutsche Welle contacted Denis Simonet, the president of the Pirate Party Switzerland.
Denis Simonet is the president of the Pirate Party Switzerland
Deutsche Welle: What does this ruling mean exactly?
Denis Simonet: Well, actually it's not a new ruling, it's just a confirmation that it's still the same in Switzerland, or it's the conclusion that it should stay as it is today. This is the reaction to a request by Geraldine Savary, she's a [member of the Swiss parliament], and she asked the Federal Council if the country needs new laws for downloading and uploading of MP3 files and music and films and so on. It took a while, but they did a request at the Swiss Federal Institute for Intellectual Property and this institute answered to the Federal Council that we don't need to change anything, which is that you can download music but you can't offer it.
If you can download music but can't offer it, how does that work with protocols like BitTorrent, which requires you to upload while you download?
That's a big question. There are lawyers that looked at this and said that if you download music, and the client doesn't allow you to disable what you're uploading, but if you're really offering music after you've downloaded it, then that should be illegal. But then there are other opinions that say that peer-to-peer networks can't be legal, and so you must use RapidShare [a download-only site], if you download music in Switzerland.
RapidShare is a Swiss site, isn't it?
Yes, but its servers are not based in Switzerland.
The Swiss study found that one in three people download unauthorized copies of digital files
The government undertook this study to re-evaluate if the Swiss laws regarding intellectual property needed changing and they said that they don't. One of the surprising statistics that came out of the study was that one in three people in Switzerland download unauthorized music, movies and games from the Internet. Did that surprise you?
No, it didn't surprise me. Yes, one-third is a big number. But there is another result that I found interesting. The amount of money didn't change, only the way that they earn money has changed. People don't buy CDs anymore but they go to concerts, and the concerts got more expensive and merchandising increased and so on.
What has been the reaction from the Swiss entertainment industry and the Swiss public at large?
Well, not too surprisisingly, they don't like this answer. There was also an answer by Geraldine Savary and she didn't agree with the opinion of the Federal Council and she got into the board of the organization that deals with royalties, [and expressed her disagreement].
Pirate Parties worldwide have called for a major intellectual property law reform
What does this mean in terms of you and the Pirate Party? It seems that this would be an outcome that the Pirate Party Switzerland and its affiliates around the world would be in favor of?
Yes, it's a good thing that downloading stays legal, but in our opinion offering music should be legal too. Because we think that culture is for everyone and if you're not earning money from it, you should be free to share movies music and so on with the public. We think that only the commercial use of music, movies and so on should be restricted for a limited period of time. In the Pirate Party Switzerland's white paper, we think that 14 years should be enough.
Do you hope or does the Pirate Party Switzerland hope that this type of ‘non-policy' as you call it should be exported around the world?
Of course. We even hope that countries will change the opinion that downloading music is a crime. It's not a crime, it's a need for many people - that's why so many do it. We want to listen to music, and we want to buy music to support bands, but many times we just want to listen to one song and try out a band, and we probably don't want to listen to them more than once. It's understandable that people don't want to just buy a CD, listen to it once, and throw it away. The Internet changed the way we consume music, movies and culture in general and laws should reflect that change throughout the world.
Interview: Cyrus Farivar
Editor: Nicole GoebelClose
The U.S. military is currently employing a sensing technique to remotely monitor the air, in order to detect potentially life-threatening chemicals, pathogens and toxins. The idea was recently used as a source of inspiration, and turned into an instrument that could help probes "sniff" for extraterrestrial life on Mars and possibly everywhere else in our solar system.
The instrument is called the Bio-Indicator Lidar Instrument, or BILI. The NASA technologist in charge of the project formerly worked for a company developing the sensor; he had the idea from there, then turned it into a prototype at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Through his project, the scientist proved that the same principles used in identifying bio-hazards can be employed in spotting organic bio-signatures on other planets.
This is how Branimir Blagojevic came up with BILI, a fluorescence-based lidar, which is essentially a remote-sensing instrument using the principles of radars; however, instead of being operated through radio waves, the instruments use light to analyze the particles' composition in the atmosphere.
In the process of detecting chemicals in the Earth's atmosphere, NASA has utilized fluorescence instruments, but the technique hasn't yet been tested in planetary studies.
However, the team of scientists on the project is quite excited by the possibilities this instrument opens. The reason why it will be unique, aside from not being used anywhere else in the world, is that the small levels of complex organic materials will be instantly detected from a distance of a few hundred miles away.
The manner this instrument is built implies that it will autonomously look for bio-signatures in plumes, and it will manage to reach areas that can hardly be reached by a normal rover, the level of its analysis being both very precise in nature and very wide in practicality.
Moreover, due to the fact that the analysis will be carried out from a distance, the instrument will less likely contaminate the samples with other substances or materials that could influence the results and impair the analysis. Due to these qualities, the instrument represents a perfect complementary instrument. Used with point sensor-type spectrometers, which cannot measure the same amount of material as BILI.
The possibility of finding bio-signatures will significantly increase once this instrument will be out "sniffing" for extraterrestrial life forms, as it not only complements the other instruments already employed, but it also has a different detection mechanism, which will add plurality and perspective to the procedure of inspecting other planets for bio-signatures.
ⓒ 2018 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Following Thursday’s GOP debates, CEO of the Trump Organization Donald Trump and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina walked away winners over their respective challengers. (Fox News split the top 10 candidates and the other seven running into two debates.)
The Washington Post and Slate have called Fiorina “the clear winner” of what many deemed “the kids’ table,” while the later debate saw Trump dominate his competitors, the conversation, and even the moderators.
Their respective victories and, for Trump, success in the polls is less a statement on their individual strengths and more a strong rebuke of career politicians. When it comes to public opinion, politicians essentially rank with lawyers and SeaWorld executives. Many people from the business world know this fact and find it easy to exploit in their own quest to reach political office, painting themselves as outsiders who can bring business sense to the closed world of Washington politics.
However, as many former executives who achieved this dream have found, the transition from the board room to legislative or executive bodies is often a difficult one.
What all of them, and Trump and Fiorina, have succeeded at doing is convincing a segment of the electorate that their absence of governing experience actually makes them more qualified for a job where the central function is governance. Fiorina spent much of Thursday’s debate convincing primary voters she is a “true conservative” stating “I am not a member of the political class.” Trump has famously put himself outside the party, functionally running on the idea that he’s so rich he can’t be bought by the lobbyists and special interests behind his competitors.
As John Harvey writes in Forbes, many tend to flock to these messages based on the false belief business people have to be more efficient out of fear of failure. “This must be the case,” says Harvey, “or the entity in question would lose market share and go bankrupt.” The Atlantic‘s Eric Schnurer makes the counter argument, writing that many of the problems facing government today mirror those facing most businesses, including the threat of failure (many municipalities declare bankruptcy) and takeover (by conservative interests attempting to close government agencies).
While Schnurer’s assessment might be true, the tools an executive have are not readily available to a president. CEOs are trained for a world where they are the central power, able to make large-scale changes with little notice and only fearing the backlash of a board of directors the CEO likely hired.
The presidency, or even a governorship, is far from that. While the president at any given time is typically called “the most powerful man in the world,” it’s a job reliant on compromise and the functioning of two other branches. The executive in a company can be stopped but with great force by his detractors within the company. A president requires massive support just to get the basic things done.
Few know this transition more than Jon Corzine, former CEO of Goldman Sachs who served one term as governor of New Jersey. In a post-mortem interview of his political life for Newsweek, he cited eBay CEO Meg Whitman’s 2010 campaign to be governor of California as a victim of this folly. “The idea that you’re accountable to a bottom line and to a payroll in managing a business—it gives voters the confidence that you have the right skills [to govern],” Corzine told the magazine. “But it’s 20,000 people versus nine million. I don’t think candidates get the scale and scope of what governing is. You don’t have the flexibility you imagined. There’s no exact translation.”
Whitman, who was cited in 2008 by the New York Times as one of most likely candidates to be the first female president, lost that battle. Like many executives before her, Whitman was attractive to the Republican Party because business leaders often bring large swaths of money and interest within the party’s reach. But that outsider status that executive candidates so often like to cite also means they lack the experience to run a campaign well and the connections to build a campaign infrastructure—among the reasons for Whitman’s loss was her inability to convince Californians she was prepared for the job.
Aside from being ill-prepared by their private-sector experience for the actual job, executive experience can also be a downside for many voters wary of fat-cat business types who can’t relate to the problems of the everyman. While Whitman was certainly painted by her opponents as rich and privileged, few candidates in recent memory have been more hurt by being rich than Mitt Romney. The 2012 presidential candidate often had to flee his experience as CEO and founder of Bain Capital, as well as his very wealthy upbringing.
Despite these well-known fallbacks, executives like Trump and Fiorina still feel their credentials appeal to voters. And they aren’t always wrong, as Trump’s position in the polls proves. Voters have a deep mistrust of politicians and welcome any outside voice seen as speaking a simple truth—hence the “other” phenomenon of the showbiz candidate.
But as much as we reject career politicians as too embroiled in the inner game of Washington, hiring a baker to do a carpenter’s work is not a better alternative.
Gillian Branstetter is a social commentator with a focus on the intersection of technology, security, and politics. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Business Insider, Salon, the Week, and xoJane. She attended Pennsylvania State University. Follow her on Twitter @GillBranstetter.
Photo via Gage Skidmore/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Max FleishmanUpcoming guest star Ashley Walters has told The Radio Times that filming on his episode of Doctor Who finished two weeks ago, though to be honest, that doesn’t really help me pin down exactly which slot on the running order it will take. This could be one of Mark Gatiss’ episodes, one of Neil Cross’ episodes, maybe Stephen Thompson’s one. Neil Gaiman’s new episode, we believe, has yet to be filmed – but we could have been misled. It might have been Gaiman’s, I just wouldn’t bet on it.
According to the report the episode in question will be called Journey to the Centre of the Tardis. The Radio Times could be citing Walters, hanging on some rumour we haven’t heard or, being an ancillary part of the BBC, actually have inside knowledge.
Either way, it sounds like the title fits the scant details Walters will share:
In our episode it’ll be the first time people get to see so much of the Tardis.
Will this include the swimming pool?
Also mentioned in the report is that Walters tweeted an image of himself on set at the start of filming and was promptly told to delete it.
So Walters removed the Instagram image pretty quickly and there’s no obvious trace of it online but… well, Bleeding Cool employ some world class hackers,* and we managed to get two separate pieces of it and put it back together. This is it below, scout’s honour.
It’s apparently Walters’ costume for the episode and the BBC didn’t want it going too wide…
It’s not at the best resolution, but can you work out what the badge says? Something about Van Halen? Or the Van Allen belt? I think it says Van Gaalen Bros. Any advance on that?
* Sort of.
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None foundCollection GratefulDead
Set 1
Morning Dew, Me & My Uncle, Doin' That Rag, He Was A Friend Of Mine, Hard To Handle, Cosmic Charlie, Cryptical Envelopement-> Drums-> The Other One-> Cryptical Envelopement
Set 2
China Cat Sunflower-> Sitting On Top Of The World-> Dark Star -> St Stephen -> The Eleven -> Lovelight
Other artist(s): GD; Jr. Walker & The All Stars; The Glass Family
Notes
Notes:
-- A few spots have the same tape squeal as 6/7/69
Patch Info:
SBD -> Cassette Master -> Cassette -> Dat -> CD (shnid=15204) supplies:
Morning Dew (0:00 - 0:10)
That's It For The Other One (0:00 - 3:54)
China Cat Sunflower (0:00 - 0:02)
Dark Star (12:59 - end of track)
St. Stephen (complete track)
The Eleven (complete track)
Turn On Your Lovelight (complete track)
Identifier gd1969-06-05.135483.sbd.miller.flac16 Lineage Dat (Tascam DA-20) -> Sound Devices 744T -> Samplitude Professional 11.2.1 -> FLAC Location San Francisco, CA Run time 140:58.13 Source SBD -> Master Reel -> Dat (48k) Transferred by Charlie Miller Type sound Venue Fillmore West Year 1969Russian President Vladimir Putin describes the situation in Ukraine as “civil war” and says Kyiv is abusing its position as a gas transit country, which puts Europe’s gas supply at risk.
“Russia always valued its reputation as a reliable energy supplier to Europe. Today’s risks – as they appear, the risks around gas supplies to Europe – it’s not us who are to blame,” Putin told global business leaders gathered at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
“We should say unequivocally – everyone understands who we are talking about – it’s the transiting country, Ukraine, who is to blame. This country abuses its status of gas transit country for Europe,” Putin added.
“Last year we granted, as you know, a huge loan – three billion dollars. We’ve granted a discount for this year. The question is: where’s our money? How has our multibillion assistance been spent?
‘We’ve supplied Ukraine with ten billion cubic meters of gas – for free. That’s the same amount we sell to Poland every year. Who would supply so much for free for so long?,” asked the president.
Meanwhile Russia’s top military general Valery Gerasimov said Moscow will retaliate against increased NATO activity near its border.
Since Crimea joined Russia in March, NATO has stepped up military exercises in the region to reassure nervous eastern European allies.Islamabad requested Turkish firm to keep details of demeaning award under wraps
ISLAMABAD: The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) has awarded $700 million to Karkey Karadeniz Elektrik Uretim AS, a Turkish company that constructs and operates rental power plants (RPPs), in a damages suit it had brought out against Pakistan.
According to the ICSID website, the award was announced on August 22, but sources told The Express Tribune the centre had given its verdict in March 2016 and now the tribunal has determined the quantum of the award, which is around Rs74 billion.
Government looks to renegotiate with RPPs
Sources revealed the award was kept secret by the Pakistan government. Not just that, the Turkish firm was also requested to keep details of the demeaning award under wraps.
Karkey had filed the damages suit against Pakistan at the ICSID in February 2013 after the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Rental Power Projects case in 2012.
Karkey was awarded a $560 million contract for power ship operations in Pakistan to overcome a spiralling power crisis in the country. The initial contract was for five years. However, PPP-Patriots leader Faisal Saleh Hayat and the current foreign minister Khawaja Asif approached the top court against the contract awarded by the then PPP government.
In 2012-13, then NAB prosecutor general KK Agha attempted to settle the issue with Karkey but the then chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry stopped his efforts and warned NAB officials of strict action in case a settlement was reached with the Turkish firm.
At present, accountability courts are adjudicating corruption references filed over the RPP issue against several senior officials, including former prime minister Raja Pervez Ashraf. A senior official feared the ICSID verdict might affect NAB’s proceedings in these cases.
Karkey’s case is not the only one where Pakistan had to bite the dust. In the Reko Diq case, the ICSID dismissed Pakistan’s allegations of corruption against the Tethyan Copper Company Pty Ltd (TCC). Later, the TCC made a claim of $11.5 billion but Pakistan’s rejected it. Now the quantum stage has started, with both federal and Balochistan governments involved, and the TCC may agree to an out-of-court settlement.
RPPs case: NAB ‘discreetly’ ends probe without informing SC
Sources said the quantum phase of the arbitration is a prolonged, self-contained phase in itself, in which the office of the attorney general for Pakistan is actively participating in defence of the country.
At present, AGP Ashtar Ausaf is abroad to deal with several issues, as Pakistan faced international litigations in a number of cases, including Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav’s case at the International Court of Justice.
Last week, Pakistan requested the World Bank to establish a court of arbitration to decide on Pakistan’s objection over two dam projects of India. It is leant that Pakistan has spent more than Rs1.3 billion on lawyers’ fees to contest the cases which are recently being adjudicated before the ICJ.
Raheel Kamran Sheikh, an executive member of the Pakistan Bar Council, said it was a matter of concern that Pakistan’s success rate in international arbitration cases was 2 per cent, while India’s success rate was 60 |
the plan was unknown at press time.
Speaking prior to the plans being submitted, Januszkiewicz says the provincial ministry is asking for detailed information from Covanta on how it expects to get the boiler back online and running as it should be.
“The Ministry (of Environment and Climate Change) is now getting involved in the approval of the abatement plan as well. They will be the one that will give the final approval, and they specified several items they want to see in the abatement plan,” she tells The Oshawa Express, later adding that the provincial body is looking for detailed plans of how Covanta, the site’s operator, is going to search for and fix the problem causing the exceedance.
“I expect the plan is going to come for my approval in the middle of this week, then it will go to the ministry and then the ministry is going to make the decision of whether the plan is sufficient…or if Covanta has to include more information.”
Boiler No. 1 at the Clarington incinerator was shut down late last month after testing confirmed that it had far exceeded its limits for dioxins and furans. According to the test, the first boiler emitted 818 picograms per reference cubic metre of dioxins and furans, more than 13 times higher the mandated level of 60.
According to Health Canada, dioxins and furans are a byproduct of the incineration processes, and can accumulate in biological tissues. The federal entity also says that while humans and animals are all exposed to the two compounds, exposure in higher concentrations can lead to serious health problems.
According to a news release from the region, Covanta is set to test the boiler’s auxiliary burners using natural gas in the mean time, but only to verify their functionality, adding the short tests are needed before any further investigations.
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PrintWASHINGTON — The Obama administration is facing accusations it snubbed Canada in its quest for a United Nations Security Council seat by failing to campaign on behalf of its neighbour.
Richard Grenell, a former American spokesman at the UN, said U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice "not only didn't campaign for Canada's election but instructed American diplomats to not get involved" prior to Tuesday's voting.
Writing on the Fox News website, Grenell claimed Canada's bid to win one of the rotating Security Council seats collapsed in part, because the Harper government "had no American support."
Grenell, who worked for four U.S. ambassadors at the UN during the Bush administration, cited U.S. State Department insiders as his sources for the information.
He argued Rice "could have had her team work to Canada's benefit. Instead, she instructed colleagues to steer clear, effectively abandoning Canada."
P.J. Crowley, spokesman for U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on Thursday declined to directly address the claims made by Grenell.
Asked whether the U.S. did anything to support Canada's bid, Crowley responded: "For that particular seat there was a contested election, and we were present. We voted. And beyond that, I'm not going to comment."
A spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon also had no comment on Grenell's claims.
Canada withdrew its Security Council bid following the second round of balloting, failing to win the two-thirds majority necessary to secure a seat.
Germany won a seat during a first round of balloting. Canada earned just 78 votes on the second ballot, compared to 113 for Portugal, which will assume the second rotating Security Council seat reserved for Western European and other powers.
The loss came despite promises of support from 135 countries — marking the first time Canada has failed to win a Security Council campaign in more than 50 years.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper dismissed the historic loss Thursday as the result of "secret votes," stressing that Canada was not in a popularity contest.
"As I've said before, our engagement internationally is based on the principles that this country holds dear," Harper told reporters in eastern Quebec. "It is not based on popularity."
He added the government's decisions are based on shared Canadian values — freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law, justice, development, and humanitarian assistance for those who need it.
"Those are the things we're pursuing, and that does not change regardless of what the outcome of a secret votes is," he said.
Meanwhile, Crowley, when pressed for more information on the U.S. government's position about the Security Council campaign, offered nothing but praise.
"We love Canada. We support Canada," he said. "We have the opportunity to work with Canada in many contexts, bilaterally, multilaterally."
While the vote in the 192-member UN General Assembly is secret, broad opposition by members of the Islamic bloc appears to have scuttled Canada's chances of returning to the council for the 2011-12 term.
The United Arab Emirates were among the Arab nations that opposed Canada's bid, according a government official quoted Tuesday by The Associated Press.
Lobbying against Canada for the seat "was not the stance" of the United Arab Emirates government, Ambassador Mohamed Abdulla Al Ghafi said through an aide.
The Harper government has been embroiled in a bitter dispute with the Arab state over a refusal to allow more flights from UAE-based Emirates and Etihad airlines to land at Canadian airports.
In the wake of the Security Council defeat, Cannon and other government officials blamed the result on Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, who earlier had said Canada had not earned a spot.
But UN officials have told Postmedia News that the Conservative government's staunch support for Israel had alienated it among members of the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference.In his presser, Harry Reid said very little about what kind of an “opt-out” he’ll put in the final bill.
The good news: Pressure on Reid from progressives when his poll numbers are flagging made him defy the White House. More importantly, he ratted them out to the press. Rahm thought he could continue to push for triggers in the background and satisfy the base by mouthing gibberish about “the President supports a public option” until it was too late. It didn’t work out so well.
The bad news: Having a state opt-out that will make corporatist Democrats happy is quite likely not to be “available nationwide from day one,” and thus does not meet the the definition of a “robust public option” by anyone’s terms.
Depending on how an opt-out was written, it could potentially disenfranchise large parts of the population:
State legislature and governor’s approval required for opt-out The following ten state legislatures are fully controlled by Republicans and the state also has a Republican governor: AZ, FL, GA, ID, NE, ND, SC, SD, TX, UT. If the opt out required approval by both the legislature and governor roughly 71 million people (23% of the population) live in state where they would be denied the public option. State legislature’s approval required for opt-out Fourteen states legislatures (AZ, FL, GA, ID, NE, ND, SC, SD, TX, UT, WY, OK, MO, KS) are fully controlled by Republicans. If the opt out only required an act of the legislature, roughly 84 million people (28% of the population) would be in a state without the choice of a public option. Governor’s decree required for opt-out There are 22 states with Republicans governors (AL, AK, AZ, CA, CT, FL, GA, HI, ID, IN, LA, MN, MS, NE, NV, ND, RI, SC, SD, TX, UT, VT). One hundred and forty-one million people (46% of the population) live in states where the Republican governor could opt the state out by decree. Either state legislature or governor can opt-out the state A combined total of 154 million people (51% of the population) live in states where Republicans control the governor’s mansion or the state legislature.
Providing health care for the nation is a moral issue, it’s not about getting a “political win.” And Reid has many procedural moves at his disposal to make the opt-out easy to accomplish, or even drag triggers back into the picture.
Anyone remember the time Reid had the Seargent-at-Arms set up cots for the all-nighter on forcing troop withdrawal in Iraq? It was very theatrical, but ultimately accomplished nothing.
Short answer: no chicken counting going on here yet.The mother of a 14-year-old girl who committed suicide after being cyber bullied said she will be unable to rest until the trolls who she believed caused her daughter's death are brought to justice.
Two years after Izzy Dix killed herself, her mother Gabbi, from Brixham, Devon, has accused local police of not fully investigating the circumstances, and said they did not carry out checks on social media.
Gabbi said online bullies made Izzy's life 'hell' and robbed her of her 'intelligent, funny and beautiful' daughter.
Izzy Dix committed suicide in 2012 and has become synonymous with the dangers of cyberbullying
At the inquest of Izzy, 14, police said there was no concrete evidence trolls were to blame
Speaking to BBC Newsbeat, Gabbi said: ‘If the inquest had been presented with the correct evidence that we now have in writing, then from that inquest the coroner could have made really strong recommendations to make a change to prevent this happening to other families.
'Izzy did what she did because there was a huge issue at school and online, and I won't rest until a form of truth and justice is established.’
Izzy committed suicide in September 2013. A post-mortem confirmed the cause of death was hanging.
At Izzy's inquest in December 2013, Gabbi said her daugher's death was caused by online bullies.
Izzy became an example of the dangers of cyberbullying and at the time, Prime Minister David Cameron wrote to Gabbi promising to put pressure on website owners to solve the problem.
Gabbi said bullies had made Izzy’s life ‘hell’ because she was academically ambitious, achieved an A* in English, and refused to wear short skirts like other girls.
Mum Gabbi is continuing her fight for justice and vows to prove Izzy did receive abusive messages online
The inquest heard Izzy sent a text message to her mother on the day of her death asking if they could have a long chat when she got home from school.
Gabbi said at the inquest: ‘She said one particular person had made her life hell in a lesson and it wasn’t noticed by the supply teacher in the class.
‘I tried to reassure her that it would get better and I gave her a hug.’
The inquest in 2013 did not find any evidence that online trolls were the cause of Izzy's suicide.
Gabbi said she had seen messages her daughter received calling her a 'w****' and 'ugly'
But Gabbi still maintains that trolls were at the root of her daughter's actions.
She told Newsbeat: 'I don't just believe that she received it online, I saw them with my own eyes.
'Izzy showed me some particularly disturbing messages she'd been sent calling her ugly, freak, w****.
At the 2013 inquest the coroner confirmed it was suicide and said Izzy had attempted suicide before
'She became very guarded about her internet use.'
Gabbi also criticised police for not checking Izzy's Facebook or Ask FM profile and lodged a formal complaint.
In response she received a 16-page report which she claims shows officers did not check her daughter's social media profiles as they were unable to obtain Izzy's passwords and she said they claimed the Ask FM profile had been deleted.
Gabbi said she has been able to find the Ask FM profile herself, which although many messages have been deleted possibly by other users, the mother said there were conversations remaining that implied Izzy was being cyberbullied.
Devon and Cornwall police told Newsbeat they had fully complied with the complaints procedure process following Gabbi's complaint and subsequent appeal.
They said, 'The complaint was fully investigated, which found the police investigation into her daughter's death had been carried out thoroughly and meticulously.
'Her appeal was not upheld.'
Police combed through the teenager’s diary and discovered she had made several previous attempts to kill herself.
Police looked at Izzy's diary and said it showed emotional turmoil but not proof of trolls
Gabbi set up the Izzy Dix Memorial Group, which also helps others who are suffering from bullying online
Detective Constable Diane Brugge of Devon and Cornwall Police said at the inquest: ‘There was no suicide note left, though her diary revealed it was her third attempt to take her life.’
Torbay Coroner Ian Arrow concluded the teenager had killed herself.
He said: ‘I’m clear from the diary entries she had significant emotional turmoil.’
But Gabbi is still convinced her daughter's death was because of bullying.
She set up the Izzy Dix Memorial Group following her death and is still working to eradicate cyberbullying.
In 2014, Gabbi was trolled online by posters who targeted her following her anti-bullying campaign.
Trolls also created a fake profile for Gabbi, complete with a stolen Facebook photograph, and posted hateful comments in her name.Activist Post
Government continues to grow, while the amount of data they amass about the lives of citizens grows exponentially. We have seen major corporations in the areas of advertising, social media, defense contracting, and computing form partnerships with government agencies to compile virtual dossiers on all humans.
The fact that we are tracked, traced and databased is indisputable, but even many privacy advocates seem to believe that the sheer amount of data being collected is itself the Achilles Heel of the surveillance-industrial complex; that it is a sort of protection, as who or what could ever sift through it all?
John P. Holdren, Obama’s science czar, and author of the controversial eugenics tome, Ecoscience, is one of those directing the solution to the data overload problem. Enter “Big Data.”
It was recently announced that the NSA is constructing a massive new $2 billion data center that aims to expand its spy activities.
At this facility the NSA will be spying on every single form of communication, ranging from the entirety of private emails, cell phone calls, Google searches and other Internet activity, to data on travel, parking receipts, purchases at bookstores, and anything and everything they can get their hands on. (Source)
This data collection initiative is one taking place across the board in our largest federal agencies and departments such as the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the U.S. Geological survey, and DARPA. As government data collection ramps up, the Obama administration through the Office of Science and Technology Policy has announced a $200 million investment in taking this information “from data to decisions.”
This scientific and national defense endeavor is all-encompassing as it seeks data input and sharing between government and private companies, such as Amazon, as well as public universities. The overall goals are stated as follows:
Advance state-of-the art core technologies needed to collect, store, preserve, manage, analyze, and share huge quantities of data.
Harness these technologies to accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering, strengthen our national security, and transform teaching and learning; and
Expand the workforce needed to develop and use Big Data technologies. (Source PDF)
Survival Solar Battery Charger - Free Today! The initiative is heavily focused on education and workforce training, and serves to establish a framework where the next generation will be acclimated to data mining and distribution. This will be done by: Encouraging interdisciplinary graduate programs.
Turning data into information — machine learning, cloud computing, and crowd sourcing;
Support for “EarthCube” a system that will allow geoscientists to access, analyze and share information about our planet;
Support for a focused research group of statisticians and biologists to determine biological pathways. The Department of Defense is merged with the overall initiative, and goes a step further by investing $250 million annually across military departments in support of “truly autonomous systems that can maneuver and make decisions on their own.” DARPA is listed as essentially continuing its research into areas of human-computer interaction. We are witnessing nothing short of the next stage of evolution for the scientific dictatorship, as it moves from total surveillance and information awareness toward implementing its permanence through autonomous systems that will collectivize all human experience into data sets that can be tracked, analyzed and immediately acted upon to affect social structures, economies, war, science, health and education. Read other articles by Activist Post here.Hey, Girl!
Yes I’m talking to you. The one who’s given up on dating because you don’t have time for games. The one who has somberly declared defeat because there are no good men left. The “Erykah Badu in a world full of Beyoncé.” The girl who “can’t twerk, roll a blunt, or get 100 likes,” but you “can clean a house, cook a meal, and make [your own] money.” The one who’s convinced she remains single and unchosen because thots of the world are winning.
You’re single because you’re not as valuable as you think you are.
This was my crude retort to another woman in the course of an online discussion. I wasn’t addressing a side chick or a woman with whom I had beef. I simply recognized a person who had been lulled to sleep by the notion that men view the permanence of sex in the same way as women. Although women constantly swear to the heavens that they know sex won’t keep a man, they still do things that reflect the contrary. Even right down to how we talk about other women.
Consider how we treat Blac Chyna and Erykah Badu. When Blac Chyna began to date Rob Kardashian, we watched as he began to shift from depressed recluse back to the vibrancy of his former self. You know how most of the internet water cooler responded? That Blac Chyna must have some good a** p**sy. The idea that that her good character was making marked impact on this man was not entertained. No, she was solely reduced to her sexual prowess by both men and women who’d already previously reduced her to nothing but a stripper hoe.
Even Erykah Badu, Patron Saint of Hotep, is not exempt. Every man she’s dated or procreated with has been transformed and impacted by her. And the credit for that is always assessed to her love pocket rather than her character.
We as women are just as guilty of rushing to call another woman a hoe. This is in part due to competition for partnership but it’s mostly a way to project our insecurities onto another person. The social definition of a hoe is only consistent in two ways:
That it varies from person to person and; The body count value will always be high enough to exclude the person defining what makes a hoe.
What you really care about, though, is why someone who has been deemed to be valueless due to her promiscuity is being chosen over women who are less promiscuous and thus more valuable. Allow me to help out by debunking the “Power of P**sy” and expose how your value chain has you losing.
1. You Think Withholding Sex Increases Value
All the self-help books, your favorite blogs, and anecdotes of all the other good women who remain single agree on one thing: if you want your mate to respect you, you’ll make them wait at least 90 days for sex. You believe that 90 days, roughly 3 months, will allow you to get to know the depths of your new partner beyond the stage of infatuation and lust. You believe, as Steve Harvey has preached, that waiting 90 days “signals to a man that you are not a plaything – someone to be used and discarded. It tells him that what you have – your benefits – are special, and that you need time to get to know him and his ways to decide if he deserves them.” Only hoes give it up quick, making it hard for good women to get the good men.
You’re losing because you’ve bought into the notion that withholding sex gives you power.
Congratulations, you lost. You’re losing because you’ve bought into the notion that withholding sex gives you power. Do you think men are living under a rock that keeps them from knowing about the 90-Day Rule game? Even if he agrees to abide by your rules, does it guarantee that he’s not getting sex elsewhere?
Without a commitment and title, he is not obligated to be faithful to you. Girl, he KNOWS how to play the role of what you want him to be and do in those 90 days. That’s not to say that all men play games, it is to say that you’re going to need something deeper than a sex clock to gauge his intent.
Too often, women believe that controlling sex will force the man to quicken his pace in assigning a title and commitment to a relationship. Have you considered that withholding sex purely for the purpose of getting a title (committed monogamous relationship) could be seen as a character defect?
Consider this: if you haven’t taken a vow of abstinence (as I have for nearly five years) and you’re solely withholding sex to control when a man defines your connection to him, a man may question what else you choose to withhold to control his actions. Will you withhold emotional support when you’re angry with him for not doing what you want? Will you withhold financial support if the money isn’t going where you want it to go? If you’re willing to forego supplying your partner’s needs based on how you feel, does that still make you a good, high-value woman?
2. You Value Silence as Letting a Man Lead
Even if you’re sexually liberated enough to know that a timeline doesn’t define your value as a partner, you still find yourself popping the same question soon after sex: “So, what are we?” He tells you everything else besides “you’re my girlfriend” and you silently acquiesce, hoping that it’ll eventually circle around to what you want out of the situation. You continue to use sex and other subtle cues to read into what he “really” feels. Instead of having a second conversation about it for fear of getting curved, you assume your silence allows him to lead the two of you.
Choosing silence over the hard questions leads to situationships, not relationships.
Yeah girl, you lost. You’re losing because you’re using sex to communicate your desires instead of just speaking up honestly about what you want. Many women view sex as an impermeable bond between two people and, therefore, believe that a man should know that she wants commitment the moment she slides her panties to the side for him. Problem with that is men don’t view sex in the same way. Men don’t place an immediate value on sex, it’s just something to do. Women see sex as an emotional investment, men don’t view sex as anything until they’re emotionally invested. Yep, you guessed it: your sex isn’t gonna be what makes him emotionally invest. Open up that Michael Kors trick bag and dig a lil’ deeper, girl. The “hoes” are beating you here because they recognize their value is not in their sex, unlike so many so-called good women.
3. You Value Speaking Everything except What’s on Your Mind
You think sex is powerful enough to drive a man to commitment and to keep him committed, but you can’t even own your sexuality. You’re too afraid to speak up about what does and doesn’t please you sexually. You won’t speak of your sexual fantasies because you don’t want him to think you’re a freak hoe. You won’t perform certain bed tricks because you don’t want him to wonder about the number of men you’ve done it with, labeling you a nasty hoe. You’re quick to speak on everything and everyone else except what makes you happy. This is why you continue to lose out on both happiness in a committed relationship and sexual pleasure.
Not only have they not wrapped their supreme value in what lies between their thighs, they’re not afraid to be vocal about what they want out of a man. Be it finance or sexual pleasure, the hoe isn’t afraid to voice her needs. Good women believe in the scarcity of good men. The “hoe” knows if this one won’t comply, there will be others who will.
Good women believe in the scarcity of good men. The “hoe” knows if this one won’t comply, there will be others who will.
The man that you’re longing after has been with enough women to know that your inability to voice your desires is merely a manifestation of emotional insecurity. Who knowingly wants an overly insecure partner for the long-term? You want to be “committed” but you aren’t secure enough in yourself or him as a man to be open and honest about YOUR own needs. So how can you possibly be valuable to him and help actualize his needs outside of the bedroom? So now because society has taught you that your power is sex, men now use your thoughts and behaviors about sex to assess your behavior about a multitude of other things. Stop believing that men aren’t that deep so that you underestimate his knowledge of how to deal with women.
4. You Value Low Mileage as Marriage Material
You pride yourself on the fact that you’re a choosy lover. You brag on the fact that you can count your sexual partners on one hand or that you’re well below 2 digit numbers. You know your body is harder to gain entrance to than Fort Knox. You also know that this is what makes you a virtuous woman and qualifies you as marriage material. After all, no man wants what everyone else has had.
There’s only one small flaw to your logic: you forgot that promiscuous women get married too. Karrine Steffans literally has books and scores of interviews detailing numerous sexual exploits with multiple men. Yet, she’s been married THREE times. Why? Because her character, not her body, was perceived as added value to her husbands and the men who dated her long term. The hoes you lament so much are curled up with the man of your dreams as you sit home watching Oprah’s Lifeclass while planning your imaginary wedding on Pinterest.
You’re losing because you’ve failed to realize that a woman must add value to her partner’s life outside the bedroom in order to be chosen as a long-term emotional, spiritual, and financial investment. Karrine’s value may not be much to you, but to the men who chose her she added something that couldn’t be replicated with another woman. Even if all that woman’s value to him is a boost of confidence to his ego to enable him to be his best self, it is value added.
Honestly ask yourself: “what value do I add?”
Honestly ask yourself: “what value do I add?” Do you provide honest opinions in conversation with him? Do you give the same emotional vulnerability that you demand in the relationship? Do you offer support to his dreams, bringing to the forefront obstacles that only a wise woman is intuitive enough to see? Or are you a dream killer, dismissing every idea he presents for your opinion regardless of its feasibility. Are you the woman who demands more than she’s willing to give in partnership? If you’re a broken person with nothing to offer, you’re still not getting chose whether you’ve got the body mileage of a 2017 Aston Martin Vanquish or a 1985 Ford Yugo.
5. You Value Yourself as “Different” than Other Women
You’re not like those other girls. You know, the superficial ones who only care about having the latest purse or shoes. You’re not the typical girl spending more time on hair, makeup, and Instagram filters than on her hustle. Oh no, you’re the girl who would only needs lip gloss. You’d rather focus on your grind at the corporate job you landed after finishing your Master’s degree. Won’t catch you out at a club, no! Any man who’s going to find you will have to catch you at Starbucks or brunch with your single home girls. You’re the perfect girl for a real man. Loyal, sweet, and not in these streets. Hell, you’re such a prize catch that you never believe that you are even partially responsible for failures in your relationships. He didn’t know a good thing when he had it. He didn’t know your value or your worth. It’s his loss and he’s simply moving out of the way for a real man to step in.
Except you’re about as different as the next special snowflake girl who thinks the same stuff about herself. You’re as different as the next insecure woman labeling every other woman a thot or basic bitch because she puts more time into her appearance than you do. You’re losing because you’re spending so much time trying not to be like “those” women that you don’t even know how to be yourself.
Tired of Hoes Winning? Get the Scoop Straight to Your Inbox in “Hoes Ain’t Won 2: The Fix”What Does Vegan Italian Food Look Like? Look at These 50 Photos to See!
We only spent about 12 days in Italy, but we managed to visit four different cities including Rome, Florence, Pisa, and Milan, and along the way we discovered what vegan Italian food is all about!
Most of our vegan meals in Italy included lots and lots of bread! Luckily we walked about eight miles a day while we were there to help work off some of those carbs. Our favorite were the calzones, and of course the desserts, which seemed to be on every corner. (Scroll to the bottom to see them!)
Here’s what our iPhone captured as we ate our way through the country.
Want more? Check out our article on Happy Cow: A Perfect (Vegan) Day In Rome
Also…
– Vegan Food in Vietnam
– Vegan Food in Bali
– Vegan Food in Thailand
35 Photos of Vegan Italian Food
15 Photos of Italian Vegan DessertsRobin van Persie insists David Moyes needs time - but says Manchester United in 'lousy' position
Robin van Persie: Feels Man United have to stick with David Moyes
United's season went from bad to worse on Tuesday when they went down 2-0 to Greek champions Olympiakos in the last 16 of the Champions League.
Moyes shouldered the blame afterwards for their reversal in Athens, but with this being United's last chance of silverware this term - the loss still came as a major blow to the club.
Given United are currently 11 points off a top-four finish, it has been suggested Moyes is under pressure at Old Trafford - but the Dutchman backed his boss.
"He is new and needs time. He's working hard and so are we," van Persie is quoted by The Sun.
"It's easy to point at the manager but that's not who I am. We need to do it on the pitch."
But the former Arsenal man refused to pull any punches on their current plight.
"We are lousy - in a lousy position in the league, out of the cups and this looks a difficult one also," he said.
"We are very disappointed. It's a tough season.
"Sometimes we play good but not always. And we are not lucky. That's no excuse, though. We need to turn it around.
"We are able to play in a high tempo with massive power but in Greece it was all too slow.
"Olympiakos didn't create a lot either. The first goal was lucky, the second goal was a great one and for the rest of the game they didn't have any good chances."
Van Persie insists that United can still go through against Olympiakos, but concedes things won't be easy.
"It is possible to beat them at home with 2-0 or 3-0, but it won't be easy," he concluded.
It was a frustrating night for the Dutchman as he struggled to make an impact in Greece, but he claimed after the match that his cause was not helped by the positioning of some of his team-mates.
"It was quite difficult because my team-mates are often in the area where I want to play," he said.
"That's why I have to change my tactics. Unfortunately, they are often in my area.
"It was much too slow and we only had one shot on target in the whole match against Olympiakos, which is far too little. Everyone is very disappointed."The Reverend Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979 to counter what he considered to be both the creeping socialism of the welfare state and the moral decline evidenced in the excesses of the youth revolt. Americans, he insisted, "are s and tired of the way amoral liberals are trying to corrupt our nation." Coupling fundamentalist Christianity with conservative Republicanism, the Moral Majority emerged as a major political and social force in the 1980sand a major ally of Ronald Reagan. We must reverse the trend America finds herself in today. Young people between the ages of twenty-five and forty have been born and reared in a different world than Americans of years past. The television set has been their primary baby-sitter. From the television set they have learned situation ethics and immoralitythey have learned a loss of respect for human life. They have learned to disrespect the family as God has established it. They have been educated in a public-school system that is permeated with secular humanism. They have been taught that the Bible is just another book of literature. They have been taught that there are no absolutes in our world today. They have been introduced to the drug culture. They have been reared by the family and the public school in a society that is greatly void of discipline and character-building. These same young people have been reared under the influence of a government that has taught them socialism and welfarism. They have been taught to believe that the world owes them a living whether they work or not. I believe that America was built on integrity, on faith in God, and on hard work. I do not believe that anyone has ever been successful in life without being willing to add that last ingredientdiligence or hard work. We now have second-and third-generation welfare recipients. Welfare is not always wrong. There are those who do need welfare, but we have reared a generation that understands neither the dignity nor the importance of work. Every American who looks at the facts must share a deep concern and burden for our country. We are not unduly concerned when we say that there are some very dark clouds on America's horizon. I am not a pessimist, but it is indeed a time for truth. If Americans will face the truth, our nation can be turned around and can be saved from the evils and the destruction that have fallen upon every other nation that has turned its back on God. There is no excuse for what is happening in our country. We must, from the highest office in the land right down to the shoe shine boy in the airport, have a return to biblical basics. If the Congress of our United States will take its stand on that which is right and wrong, and if our President, our judiciary system, and our state and local leaders will take their stand on holy living, we can turn this country around. I personally feel that the home and the family are still held in reverence by the vast majority of the American public. I believe there is still a vast number of Americans who love their country, are patriotic, and are willing to sacrifice for her. I remember the time when it was positive to be patriotic, and as far as I am concerned, it still is. I remember as a boy, when the flag was raised, everyone stood proudly and put his hand upon his heart and pledged allegiance with gratitude. I remember when the band struck up "The Stars and Stripes Forever," we stood and goose pimples would run all over me. I remember when I was in elementary school during World War II, when every report from the other shores meant something to us. We were not out demonstrating against our boys who were dying in Europe and Asia. We were praying for them and thanking God for them and buying war bonds to help pay for the materials and artillery they needed to fight and win and come back. I believe that Americans want to see this country come back to basics, back to values, back to biblical morality, back to sensibility, and back to patriotism. Americans are looking for leadership and guidance. It is fair to ask the question, "If 84 per cent of the American people still believe in morality, why is America having such internal problems?" We must look for the answer to the highest places in every level of government. We have a lack of leadership in America. But Americans have been lax in voting in and out of office the right and the wrong people. My responsibility as a preacher of the Gospel is one of influence, not of control, and that is the responsibility of each individual citizen. Through the ballot box Americans must provide for strong moral leadership at every level. If our country will get back on the track in sensibility and moral sanity, the crises that I have herein mentioned will work out in the course of time and with God's blessings. It is now time to take a stand on certain moral issues, and we can only stand if we have leaders. We must stand against the Equal Rights Amendment, the feminist revolution, and the homosexual revolution. We must have a revival in this country.... As a preacher of the Gospel, I not only believe in prayer and preaching, I also believe in good citizenship. If a labor union in America has the right to organize and improve its working conditions, then I believe that the churches and the pastors, the priests, and the rabbis of America have a responsibility, not just the right, to see to it that the moral climate and conscience of Americans is such that this nation can be healed inwardly. If it is healed inwardly, then it will heal itself outwardly.... Americans have been silent much too long. We have stood by and watched as American power and influence have been systematically weakened in every sphere of the world. We are not a perfect nation, but we are still a free nation because we have the blessing of God upon us. We must continue to follow in a path that will ensure that blessing.... Let us never forget that as our Constitution declares, we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. It is only as we abide by those laws established by our Creator that He will continue to bless us with these rights. We are endowed our rights to freedom and liberty and the pursuit of happiness by the God who created man to be free and equal. The hope of reversing the trends of decay in our republic now lies with the Christian public in America. We cannot expect help from the liberals. They certainly are not going to call our nation back to righteousness and neither are the pornographers, the smut peddlers, and those who are corrupting our youth. Moral Americans must be willing to put their reputations, their fortunes, and their very lives on the line for this great nation of ours. Would that we had the courage of our forefathers who knew the great responsibility that freedom carries with it.... Our Founding Fathers separated church and state in function, but never intended to establish a government void of God. As is |
mers using your app. In case many assertions fail in a row, the user will prefer using the "Ignore All" option. Also, testers can use "Ignore All" to speed up testing because they know assertions will be logged.
You can define your own handling strategies. For example, John's own complete implementation [3] defines a two-way persistence mechanism that makes "Ignore Always" and "Ignore All" work throughout consecutive runs of your program, which is quite neat.
What About the Release Mode?
The traditional way of using ASSERT is as a debugging tool. The strength of ASSERT s stems from their no-cost promise -- they are not present in the released build (in release mode, it's like they've never been there -- no overhead whatsoever).
However, this is not always the best approach. Sometimes the customer wants a release version of your program (due to efficiency issues). In release mode, all asserts are gone, so bugs are very difficult to track. In the early stages of development, you'll want to keep assertions in release as well. Heck, even Windows NT had a Debug version to make it easier for programmers.
You should also note that in debug mode, it is not necessarily the ASSERT s that bring down the speed of the program, but rather the compiler flags instructing it not to optimize the code. So, keeping ASSERT s in release (optimized) mode might not slow it down much in many cases.
Using SMART_ASSERT, it is very easy to turn on/off SMART_ASSERT s by using the SMART_ASSERT_DEBUG_MODE macro. In case you don't define it, defaults are: SMART_ASSERT s are present in debug mode, and gone in release mode.
If you choose to define it, here is what you need to do:
#define SMART_ASSERT_DEBUG_MODE 0 // SMART_ASSERTs are off (gone) #define SMART_ASSERT_DEBUG_MODE 1 // SMART_ASSERTs are on (present)
Finally, there are some asserts that you will want present in release mode, even though they might incur some (small) overhead. These are usually the most critical parts of your code. SMART_VERIFY acts like SMART_ASSERT, with two differences: - SMART_VERIFY works in both debug and release modes - SMART_VERIFY's default level is error ( lvl_error ), while SMART_ASSERT's default level is debug ( lvl_debug ). This is expectable, since if a SMART_VERIFY fails, it's most likely that the program could crash if it continues on its normal path (therefore, an exception will be thrown). Here's an example:
Widget *p = get_nth_widget( n); SMART_VERIFY( p) (n).msg( "Widget does not exist"); // if p were null, and we reached this point, the program would most likely crash. p->print_widget_info();
Conclusion
John's work constructs a full-featured, industrial-strength assertion facility. It remains as true as ever that using assertions is a key ingredient of successful programs (and programmers, for that matter). Now things just got better with a tool that makes it easy for you to define, use, and analyze invariants for your applications. Happy asserting!
Acknowledgements
Many thanks are due to Pavel Vozenilek, who has encouraged John from the beginning to write this library. Thanks to Paul Mensonides for providing the code that allows "chaining" macros. Also, the Boost community deserves credit for testing John's code and giving a lot of positive feedback.
Bibliography and Notes
[1] Andrei Alexandrescu. "Assertions."
[2] Andrei Alexandrescu and Petru Marginean. "Enforcements."
[3] http://www.torjo.com/smart_assert.zip
About the AuthorsThe pictures circulating online show young pale skin covered with red, blotchy pustules. The diagnoses reported by state media range from bronchitis and dermatitis to lymphoma and leukemia. The reactions on social media included blind fury as well as, somewhat typically for a Chinese public-health scandal, fatalistic resignation.
Late Sunday, China’s state broadcaster CCTV reported that almost 500 teenagers at an affluent high school near Shanghai had been diagnosed with a litany of serious ailments, with the institution’s new campus located close to three former chemical plants that produced pesticides the presumed culprit.
Angry parents brandishing signs bearing skulls and “Save the Children” slogans gathered outside the local government offices in Jiangsu province to demand answers to the questions they had been asking for several months, ever since serious symptoms — such as rashes, coughs and headaches — were first reported. The outrage mushroomed online, where a forum on the scandal had garnered more than 40 million views and 100,000 comments on China’s Twitter-like microblog Weibo by time of publication.
“Again and again I tell people our country is very good, and to grow to this level in just a few decades is not easy, and when there is a problem we should work together to overcome it,” wrote one Weibo user. “But now I feel it is too late to do anything. Those people have killed our country.”
Read More: China Vaccine Probe Nets 130 Arrests as Public Anger Builds
According to the CCTV investigation, 641 of the 2,451 students at Changzhou Foreign Language School’s were examined by doctors, of whom 493 were diagnosed with myriad debilitating conditions. On Tuesday, though, school officials began to refute allegations of cancer and leukemia initially reported by the powerful state broadcaster — somewhat curiously, considering the high-profile exposé must at some level have been sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party.
The CCTV broadcast described how the school relocated to new 153-acre premises in September, though permission for building work was granted seven months before a safety assessment was completed. That document did not find anything particularly untoward, other than the ground water was unfit for use — the case in 80% of Chinese wells. However, a separate survey in 2012 found dangerous amounts of toxic substances, including chlorobenzene levels that were 78,899 times safe levels in soil and 94,799 times those permitted in groundwater, as well as a cocktail of heavy metals such as mercury, cadmium and lead.
In January, the school ended the semester early after pupils repeatedly fell ill, and tests found toxic soil in the vicinity. That soil was ordered to be buried and the school reopened the next month after another probe gave the all clear. But the health problems continued.
Read More: China’s Food-Safety Problems Go Deeper Than Pet Treats
Former employees at the closed factories have since admitted to discharging untreated waste into waterways, according to CCTV, including a now dried canal only 100 m from the current school, and burying toxic chemicals nearby to save time and money.
According to Ada Kong, toxics campaign manager for Greenpeace East Asia, that the school had already claimed to have solved the pollution problem points to gaping holes in China’s treatment and disposal of toxic substances. “The tragedy that has occurred in Changzhou shows just how dangerously lax China’s hazardous chemical management is,” she said in a statement.
In a nation inured to public-health scandals, special opprobrium is reserved for those where children are the primary victims, perhaps unsurprisingly for a society that until recently was bound by the one-child policy. In May 2008, an earthquake in Sichuan province claimed almost 70,000 lives, according to official figures, though headlines were dominated by the 5,335 students buried in so-called “tofu schools,” which parents alleged were built shoddily owing to corner-cutting by venal officials. Last month’s revelations that $90 million worth of tainted vaccines had been distributed across two-thirds of China was the nation’s biggest public-health scandal since 2008, when contaminated infant milk formula caused at least six babies to die and 300,000 to become ill.
“Despite its ongoing health care reforms, the [Changzhou] issue highlights China’s desperate need for greater oversight of health and environmental regulations,” Sophie Cairns, senior life-sciences analyst for the IHS analysis firm, tells TIME. “Having a school on a toxic waste site is literally treating young children like garbage.”
On Tuesday, maps of the Changzhou area showing public schools also nearby the shuttered chemical plants caused further panic. But for many, the fact that this was an affluent school affected was a chilling double blow. Parents pay around $9,300 — an exorbitant amount for many Chinese — per year for children to attend Changzhou and hopefully get an education that will lead to a place in higher education abroad. The scandal was a stark reminder that China’s public-health woes penetrate the entire society, and even those who purchase bottled water, eat only imported food and live with the constant hum of an air purifier can only cosset themselves so much.
“Our children are born to be poisoned by tainted milk, the smell of excessive pollution in the air, eating we don’t know what in synthetic food,” posted one Weibo user. “Because our hearts are patriotic, we love every inch of land here, but [the government] does nothing.”
Write to Charlie Campbell at charlie.campbell@time.com.Feb. 15, 2017, will be remembered as a day that many top officials of the Chinese space establishment may want to forget.
Just a month-and-a-half ago, in December 2016, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) had issued an ambitious white paper highlighting its achievements and future programmes.
But here they were, congratulating India on the successful launch of a record 104 satellites—101 of them foreign—in a single mission and even acknowledging that China could learn a few things from its south Asian neighbour.
On that day, Chinese space officials gathered to discuss the Indian achievement and analysed what China must do to make its own space missions commercially viable.
China could learn a few things from its south Asian neighbour.
They saw this Indian success as a clear signal that it will beat China in the space launch business. In other words, China viewed India as an arch rival in space tech.
Having said that, the Indian side isn’t bereft of this competitive spirit either. Officials at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) publicly maintain that China is never viewed as a rival. ISRO would even like to collaborate with the CNSA, they say. Significantly, the December 2016 Chinese white paper even mentions a few projects in which India is involved. In private conversations, though, at least some Indian officials declare that China must be beaten.
“A new space race is under way in Asia, with China and India duelling for dominance while other countries make leaps of their own. National pride and defence are major motivators, but so are practical considerations,” the Financial Times reported in January 2017.
The rivalry
There are both similarities and dissimilarities in the two countries’ space programmes.
While the Chinese stepped into the field in the late 1950s, India entered in 1962. China’s annual space spending stood at $6.1 billion in 2013 while that of India’s was $1.2 billion, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The CNSA’s vice-administrator, Wu Yanhua, has declared that his organisation’s aim “is to rank among the world top-three by around 2030,” alongside the US and Russia, and build China into a space power in all respects. The white paper said “the Chinese government takes the space industry as an important part of the nation’s overall development strategy.”
However, India, the world’s sixth biggest space power, has not yet professed to any such global ambitions or suggested an overarching doctrine.
Meanwhile, India has launched 180 satellites from 23 countries till now. While exact figures for China are unavailable, it is generally presumed in space-tech circles that it is lower than India’s. In 2016, when China launched satellites for Spain, Uruguay and Belarus, Indian rockets carried payloads from Canada, Germany, Indonesia, the US, and Algeria.
While both countries’ activities in this field have been eyed with suspicion by other major space powers, and subjected to crippling restrictions for decades, India and China have developed their specific areas of expertise to circumvent western pressure on their programs.
India, for instance, took to frugal economics and modest goals while China has been more ambitious. Yet, at some point their courses were bound to intersect or clash. In fact, pointing at this budding rivalry, American space expert and professor at the US Naval War College, Joan Johnson Freese, said that the real space race was in Asia.
The low-cost game
Nowhere was China’s alarm and admiration of ISRO’s Feb. 15 feat more evident than in its prestigious English-language daily, The Global Times, published by the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece, the People’s Daily. In a Feb. 20, 2017, op-ed piece, it said ISRO’s success could serve as a wake-up call for China, which was losing in the commercial space market mainly because of its inability to obtain components from the US. “Its independent research and indigenous manufacturing of parts and components for satellites will help China bypass restrictions imposed by the US,” it said, adding that China must reduce its launch costs.
China Daily via Reuters A step ahead.
The Global Times said India’s achievements are largely driven by the low-price advantage, a weak point in China’s commercial space sector. In fact, Indian strategic affairs expert C Uday Bhaskar, director of the New Delhi-based think-tank Society for Policy Studies, has been quoted by other media outlets as saying that India can put satellites into orbit at between 60% and 70% less cost than other countries.
The CNSA, too, has for long been looking at ways and means to economise its own operations. China “will conduct research into the technologies for low-cost launch vehicles and a reusable space transportation system,” the white paper said.
Interestingly, ISRO successfully tested its reusable launch vehicle (RLV) on May 23, 2016. Some more test flights have been planned after which the RLV could be declared operational, potentially bringing down costs further and attracting more global customers. Of course, this worries China which is yet to fly such a rocket.
In another article, the Global Times erroneously claimed that India had not acquired the capability, like China, to launch satellites in multiple orbits. On Sept. 26, 2016, ISRO’s workhorse, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), placed eight satellites in two different orbits in a single flight.
Yet, frugality is just a ground-level quest. Both countries are racing for the planets, too.
The race to Mars
India and China have planned interplanetary missions. The question is who will get where first. Jupiter is certainly on the radar and so is Venus. But the Red Planet is where all the action is aimed at right now.
According to Freese, the main aim of India’s Mangalyaan mission, the country’s ground-breaking maiden flight to Mars on Nov. 05, 2013, was to surpass China, a theory emphatically denied by ISRO officials.
Whatever the reason, the fact is that India did overtake China in its very first attempt and at a meagre $71 million. The Chinese Mars programme began in 2009 in collaboration with Russia. However, the Russian spacecraft Phobos-Grunt, carrying the Chinese Mars orbiter, Yinghuo-1, crashed on Nov. 09, 2011, causing a serious setback to China. The failed project cost $117 million, the Wall Street Journal (paywall) reported.
Now China has decided to do it alone and is working towards placing a lander and rover on Earth’s closest neighbour by 2020. This is around the same time that India plans its second mission to Mars. However, unlike China, India will only send an orbiter, shelving its earlier plans for a lander and rover. ISRO officials say the second mission will be scientifically more sophisticated. Yet, without a lander and rover, China could be the winner this time around.
Man in space
Chinese president Xi Jinping did not mince words when he declared in December 2016 that China is striving to become a “great space power.” He had announced that a Chinese space station will become operational in 2022. In April 2017, China will launch a Tianzhou-1 cargo spacecraft, which will be a stepping stone towards transporting supplies to the space station.
The setting up of the Chinese space station emphasises the importance China is according to its human space flight programme, which India has not done.
China is the third nation after the US and Russia to develop a manned space programme. Its taikonauts (Chinese term for astronauts) have mastered the technology required for spacewalks.
It is the government of India that is to blame for letting China surge ahead.
However, India has put its much-publicised human space flight programme in cold storage for several reasons. On Feb. 15, 2017, ISRO chief AS Kiran Kumar told the media at Sriharikota, India’s vast spaceport near Chennai, that the human spaceflight project was no more a priority.
And it is the government of India that is to blame for letting China surge ahead in this area.
New Delhi is not convinced about the merits of this complex project that could cost nearly Rs14,000 crore, despite being warned that India may lose out to other countries.
Interestingly, while the government has not cleared the human spaceflight programme, ISRO successfully tested an unmanned crew module in the maiden flight of the new rocket called Launch Vehicle Mark-3 (LMV-3) on Dec. 18, 2014.
The crew module was a part of ISRO’s manned flight project and officials were hoping its success will convince the government to clear the programme. At the Make In India exposition, Mumbai, in February 2016, even the space suit to be worn by Indian astronauts was on display.
Two-and-a-half years later, it still remains only a dream. All that happened was a congratulatory tweet from prime minister Narendra Modi at the LMV-3’s launch.
Top CNSA officials have said that once the Chinese space station becomes operational, it will be thrown open to all countries. Space experts in India are now asking what if one of the earliest occupants of the Chinese space station is from India’s arch rival Pakistan?
Meanwhile, ISRO’s Kumar told a gathering of nuclear scientists at the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology, Indore, on Feb. 20, 2017, that India has the capability to build a space station. Kumar’s statement is being read in many circles as a response to China’s plans. “The day the country takes the decision, we will okay the project. Just draw a policy and provide us necessary funds and time,” Kumar said, adding “the sooner the better.”
Over the moon
On Dec. 27, 2013, an Indian television channel reported that the country was planning a mission to put an Indian on the moon. However, ISRO dismissed the report.
Meanwhile, the Chinese lunar mission is likely to outpace India’s. Its first mission to the moon in 2007, Chang’e-1, mapped the lunar surface. Two more followed—in 2010 (Chang’e -2) and 2013 (Chang’e-3), the third even involved a rover called Yutu.
This year, China has planned a complex sample return mission. Chang’e-5 will bring back a moon rock for analysis. The mission will have a lander, a lunar surface patrol device, and other equipment like a drilling machine.
India’s Chandrayaan-1, launched in October 2008, was cut short on account of a technical problem. However, in scientific terms, it was more successful than any of the three Chinese missions: for the first time, it confirmed the presence of water on the moon. Its second lunar mission, Chandrayaan-2, is scheduled for 2018 and will include a lander and rover.
With the rise of both India and China in the field of space technology, it is apparent that the western dominance over the last frontier may be finally ending, but the competition between these two nations itself has opened up new avenues for some high-tech drama. Fasten your seat-belts and get set for the race of a lifetime.
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My Twitter feed is full of people telling me about mysterious data usage over cellular networks after installing iOS 6 or acquiring an iPhone 5. Adam Engst already penned an article explaining potential causes and solutions for fast battery draining in iOS 6 (see “Solving iOS 6 Battery Drain Problems,” 28 September 2012). This may have some bearing on the unexpected cell data consumption, too, especially given that he tracked his problems to corrupted Safari bookmarks syncing constantly through iCloud, which could happen while away from a Wi-Fi network.
But many of the reports I’ve received are from people whose iPhones are set to use Wi-Fi, and the phones show a Wi-Fi network connection item when woken from sleep. One Twitter buddy, Anthony Hecht, says AT&T told him that when his iPhone is in “idle mode” (standby), it always reverts to cellular, which is wrong. AT&T customer service also told him to turn cellular data off (Settings > General > Cellular Data) whenever it’s idle, which is crazy making. He has seen 9 GB in unexpected mobile use, largely while at home based on his online charge breakdown, in just a week.
Many people attributed this problem to usage by Apple’s Podcasts app, which has been documented to exhibit bad behavior when downloading and streaming over cellular (see “Does Apple’s Podcasts App Suck Cellular Data?,” 17 September 2012). It can download the same podcast file repeatedly. Even after Apple added a switch in Podcasts 1.1 to restrict data use to Wi-Fi, my colleagues can still track cellular downloads with the app, especially if a download or streaming was already in progress when walking away from a Wi-Fi connection.
But several people have also eliminated Podcasts and other podcasting apps as culprits. They can see from their online data usage and from iOS’s tracking of cellular data (or by using DataMan) that the device chews through hundreds of megabytes of cell data over short periods of time, and they don’t know why. Josh Centers is in the middle of a quest to figure this out, and I expect others are as well.
John Herbert seems to have found one particular bad use case when iTunes Match will download over a mobile broadband network even when all the switches to use cellular data with Music and iTunes Match are flipped to Off. His entry on the topic explains how these settings are currently ignored when you start to download items from the cloud or have music downloads in queue.
Verizon has released a “carrier settings update”, which is supposed to deal with technical issues of connecting an iPhone to a given mobile network, and it apparently has to do with an iPhone 5 using the cellular data network instead of Wi-Fi even when connected to a Wi-Fi network. This doesn’t explain AT&T users’ problems nor those of people with earlier iPhone models experiencing the same data consumption.
Over at the Economist’s Babbage blog, I suggested that it’s hard to pin down blame when one can’t currently measure per-app use and thus figure out what’s going on. That was possible with DataMan Pro, which Adam Engst started testing for review before Apple pulled it from the App Store, but for most people trying to figure out what’s happening is completely frustrating — and expensive! This isn’t “CellularDataGate,” but it’s clearly affecting more than just a handful of people, and could involve folks paying tens or even hundreds of dollars in excess data usage because of what might be a bug in iOS 6 or Apple-provided apps.To boldly go where no bundle has gone before. These are the Star Trek comics of IDW Publishing. Engage with Star Trek: Discovery: Succession, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Star Trek: The Next Generation: Through the Mirror, and more. Plus, your purchase will support the Challenger Learning Center for Space Science Education!
Pay $1 or more. Normally, the total cost for the comics in this bundle is as much as $173. Here at Humble Bundle, you choose the price and increase your contribution to upgrade your bundle! This bundle has a minimum $1 purchase.
Read them anywhere. The comics in this bundle are available in CBZ, PDF, and ePub formats, so they work on your computer, e-readers, iPads, cell phones, and a wide array of mobile devices! Instructions and a list of recommended reading programs can be found here.
Support charity. Choose where the money goes – between the publisher and Challenger Learning Center for Space Science Education via the PayPal Giving Fund. If you like what we do, you can leave us a Humble Tip too!======================================================================== OTHER WORLDS: OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCES AND LUCID DREAMS by Lynne Levitan and Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. ======================================================================== "Out of body" experiences (OBEs) are personal experiences during which people feel as if they are perceiving the physical world from a location outside of their physical bodies. At least 5 and perhaps as many as 35 of every 100 people have had an OBE at least once in their lives (Blackmore, 1982). OBEs are highly arousing; they can be either deeply disturbing or profoundly moving. Understanding the nature of this widespread and potent experience would no doubt help us better understand the experience of being alive and human. The simplest explanation is that OBEs are exactly what they seem: the human consciousness separating from the human body and traveling in a discorporate form in the physical world. Another idea is that they are hallucinations, but this requires an explanation of why so many people have the same delusion. Some of our experiments have led us to consider the OBE as a natural phenomenon arising out of normal brain processes. Thus, we believe that the OBE is a mental event that happens to healthy people. In support of this, psychologists Gabbard and Twemlow (1984) have concluded from surveys and psychological tests that the typical OBE experient is "a close approximation of the 'average healthy American.'" (p. 40) Our conception, also proposed by the English psychologist Susan Blackmore, is that an OBE begins when a person loses contact with sensory input from the body while remaining conscious (Blackmore, 1988; LaBerge - Lucidity Letter; Levitan - Lucidity Letter). The person retains the feeling of having a body, but that feeling is no longer derived from data provided by the senses. The "out-of-body" person also perceives a world that resembles the world he or she generally inhabits while awake, but this perception does not come from the senses either. The vivid body and world of the OBE is made possible by our brain's marvelous ability to create fully convincing images of the world, even in the absence of sensory information. This process is witnessed by each of us every night in our dreams. Indeed, all dreams could be called OBEs in that in them we experience events and places quite apart from the real location and activity of our bodies. WHAT ARE OBES LIKE? So, we are saying that OBEs may be a kind of dream. But, even so, they are extraordinary experiences. The great majority of people who have had OBEs say they are more real than dreams. Common aspects of the experience include being in an "out-of- body" body much like the physical one, feeling a sense of energy, feeling vibrations, and hearing strange loud noises (Gabbard & Twemlow, 1984). Sometimes a sensation of bodily paralysis precedes the OBE (Salley, 1982; Irwin, 1988; Muldoon & Carrington, 1974; Fox, 1962). To the sleep researcher, these strange phenomena are remarkably reminiscent of another curious experience, called sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis occurs sometimes when a person is waking from or falling into REM sleep, the state in which most vivid dreams occur. During REM sleep, the muscles of the body, excluding the eye muscles and those responsible for circulation and respiration, are immobilized by orders from a nerve center in the lower brain. This prevents us from acting out our dreams. Occasionally, this paralysis turns on or remains active while the person's mind is fully awake and aware of the world. Some of the experiences people have reported during sleep paralysis are: "I feel completely removed from myself," "feeling of being separated from my body," "eerie, rushing experiences," and hearing "hissing in the ears," and "roaring in the head." These events appear to be much like the OBE sensations of vibrations, strange noises, and drifting away from the physical body (Everett, 1983). Fear has also been described as a common component of sleep paralysis (see the "Question and Answer" in NightLight, Vol. 2, No. 1 for a discussion of overcoming fear in sleep paralysis.) WHEN DO OBES HAPPEN? So, it seems possible that at least some OBEs arise from the same conditions as sleep paralysis, and that these two terms may actually be naming two aspects of the same phenomenon. As a first test of this idea, we should ask how many OBEs actually occur at times when people are likely to experience sleep paralysis -- that is, do OBEs happen when people are lying down, asleep, resting, or while awake and active? Researchers have approached the question of the timing of OBEs by asking people who claim to have had OBEs to describe when they happened. In one of these, over 85 percent of those surveyed said they had had OBEs while they were resting, sleeping or dreaming. (Blackmore, 1984) Other surveys also show that the majority of OBEs occur when people are in bed, ill, or resting, with a smaller percentage coming while the person is drugged or medicated. (Green, 1968; Poynton, 1975; Blackmore, 1983 ) Survey evidence favors the theory that OBEs could arise out of the same conditions as sleep paralysis. There is also considerable evidence that people who tend to have OBEs also tend to have lucid dreams, flying and falling dreams, and the ability to control their dreams (Blackmore, 1983, 1984; Glicksohn, 1989; Irwin, 1988). Because of the strong connection between OBEs and lucid dreaming, some researchers in the area have suggested that OBEs are a type of lucid dream (Faraday, 1976; Honegger, 1979; Salley, 1982). One problem with this argument is that although people who have OBEs are also likely to have lucid dreams, OBEs are far less frequent, and can happen to people who have never had lucid dreams. Furthermore, OBEs are quite plainly different from lucid dreams in that during a typical OBE the experient is convinced that the OBE is a real event happening in the physical world and not a dream, unlike a lucid dream, in which by definition the dreamer is certain that the event is a dream. There is an exception that connects the two experiences -- when we feel ourselves leaving the body, but also know that we are dreaming. In our studies of the physiology of the initiation of lucidity in the dream state, we observed that quite of few of the lucid dreams we collected contained experiences like OBEs. The dreamers described lying in bed, feeling strange bodily sensations, often vibrations, hearing loud humming noises, and then rising out of body and floating above the bed. Those studies revealed that lucid dreams have two ways of starting. In the much more common variety, the "dream-initiated lucid dream" (DILD), the dreamer acquires awareness of being in a dream while fully involved in it. DILDs occur when dreamers are right in the middle of REM sleep, showing lots of the characteristic rapid eye movements. We know this is true because our dreamers give a deliberate prearranged eye-movement signal when they realize they are dreaming. These signals show up on our physiology record, so that we can pinpoint the times when lucidity begins and see what kind of brain state the dreamers were in at those times. DILDs account for about four out of every five lucid dreams that our dreamers have had in the laboratory. In the other 20 percent, the dreamers report awakening from a dream and then returning to the dream state with unbroken awareness -- one moment they are aware that they are awake in bed in the sleep laboratory, and the next moment, they are aware that they have entered a dream and are no longer perceiving the room around them. We call these "wake initiated lucid dreams" (WILDs). A casual look at the dream reports and physiological records led us to think that the OBE-type dream content was happening mostly in WILDs. So, we analyzed the data scientifically in the experiment described below. THE LABORATORY STUDY The data we studied consisted of 107 lucid dreams from a total of 14 different people. The physiological information that we collected in conjunction with each lucid dream always included brain waves, eye-movements, and chin muscle activity. These measurements are necessary for determining if a person in awake, asleep, and in REM sleep or not. In all cases, the dreamer signaled the beginning of the lucid dream by making a distinct pattern of eye movements that was identifiable by someone not involved with the experiment. After verifying that all the lucid dreams had eye signals showing that they had happened in REM sleep, we classified them into DILDs and WILDs, based on how long the dreamers had been in REM sleep without awakening before becoming lucid (two minutes or more for DILDs, less that two minutes for WILDs), and on their report of either having realized they were dreaming while involved in a dream (DILD) or having entered the dream directly from waking while retaining lucidity (WILD). Alongside the physiological analysis we scored each dream report for the presence of various events that are typical of OBEs, such as feelings of body distortion (including paralysis and vibrations), floating or flying, references to being aware of being in bed, being asleep or lying down, and the sensation of leaving the body (for instance, "I was floating out-of-body"). RESULTS: MORE OBE-LIKE EVENTS IN WILDS Ten of the 107 lucid dreams qualified as OBEs, because the dreamers reported feeling like they had left their bodies in the dream. Twenty of the lucid dreams were WILDs, and 87 were DILDs. Five of the OBEs were WILDs (28%) and five were DILDs (6%). Thus, OBEs were more than four times more likely in WILDs than in DILDs. The three OBE-related events we looked for also all occurred more often in WILDs than in DILDs. Almost one third of WILDs contained body distortions, and over a half of them included floating or flying or awareness of being in bed. This is in comparison to DILDs, of which less than one fifth involved body distortions, only one third included floating or flying, and one fifth contained awareness of bed. The reports from the five DILDs that we classified as OBEs were actually much like those from the WILD-OBEs. In both the dreamers felt themselves lying in bed and experiencing strange sensations including paralysis and floating out-of-body. Although these lucid dreams sound like WILDs, we had classified them as DILDS because the physiological records showed no awakenings preceding lucidity. However, it is possible that these people could have momentarily become aware of their environments (and hence been "awake") while continuing to show the brainwaves normally associated with REM sleep. The science of the EEG is not sufficiently advanced that we can tell what people are experiencing by looking at their brainwaves. Anecdotes from dream reports indicate that people sometimes become aware of sensations from their sleeping bodies while dreaming -- for example, the dream in which you are trying to run while your legs become heavier and heavier, perhaps because you are feeling their true immobile condition. OBES AND WILDS OUTSIDE THE LABORATORY Our laboratory studies showed us that when OBEs happen in lucid dreams they happen either when a person reenters REM sleep right after an awakening, or right after having become aware of being in bed. However, we wondered if this relationship would apply to OBEs and lucid dreams that people experience at home, in the "real world." Not being able to take the sleep lab to the homes of hundreds of people (the DreamLight may soon give us this capacity!), we took a survey about OBEs and other dream-related experiences, somewhat like the past studies referred to earlier. The difference between our survey and previous ones is that in addition to asking if people had had OBEs, we asked specifically about certain events that we know to be associated with WILDs, namely, lucid dreaming, returning directly to a dream after awakening from it, and sleep paralysis. A total of 572 people filled out our questionnaire. They were either students in an introductory psychology course or readers of the NightLight. About a third of the group reported having had at least one OBE. Just over 80 percent had had lucid dreams. Sleep paralysis was reported by 37 percent and 85 percent had been able to return to t a dream after awakening. People who reported more dream-related experiences also reported more OBEs. For example, of the 452 people claiming to have had lucid dreams, 39 percent also reported OBEs, whereas only 15 percent of those who did not claim lucid dreams said they had had OBEs. The group with the most people reporting OBEs (51%) were those who said they had experienced lucid dreams, dream return, and sleep paralysis. We would expect people who can return directly to dreams after an awakening to be prone to having WILDs, and therefore also to have frequent lucid dreams. Indeed, in this survey, people reporting frequent dream return also tended to report frequent lucid dreams. Thus, we believe that the fact that dream return frequency was linked with OBE frequency in this study gives further support to our laboratory research finding that WILDs were associated with OBEs. WHAT DO WE KNOW NOW? Our two studies have compared the frequency of OBEs in the two types of lucid dream, and surveyed the relative frequency of OBEs and dream-related events in a large number of people. We have thereby learned that when OBEs happen during lucid dreams, they generally happen in lucid dreams that arise from brief awakenings in REM sleep, and that people who have certain special dream experiences are more likely to have OBEs that people who do not. These dream experiences include returning to the dream state after an awakening, lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis. Above we described our operating theory that OBEs occur when people lose input from their sense organs, as happens at the onset of sleep, while retaining consciousness. This combination of events is |
. Probably not.And before anyone mentions it, yeah, I saw the Doctor and Rose in "It Ain't Easy Being Breezy". While it's really freaking cool, I can't say that it makes up for the rest of the episode. BlechMy Little Pony belongs to Hasbro, Doctor Who belongs to BBC, Clockwise Whooves was conceived and brought to beautiful life by Also, Tumblr. citrusking.tumblr.com/post/788…A solution to Muni’s 1,400 locked — and now unusable — seats may soon be at hand.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is testing a new vertical handlebar which may allow the agency to lower those seats, which have been locked upright since early 2014.
Right now, about 700 buses in Muni’s fleet have a specific set of two chairs, permanently locked in an upright position which were slapped with a sticker reading “This seat has been disabled for safety reasons.”
The seats weren’t the problem, however, but the lack of hand rails were. Without rails, some riders (in similarly designed buses, in other cities) were flying forward when buses came to a sudden stop.
The manufacturer, New Flyer, sent out a warning to transit agencies requesting the seats be locked.
Now about 20 Muni buses are outfitted with new poles which the SFMTA is testing. The locked seats themselves are now potentially a safety risk.
“Since the time the manufacturer requested that we take this safety measure, we noticed that passengers sit on the locked seats,” said Paul Rose, a spokesman for the SFMTA.
Indeed, even riding on the 38-Geary on Tuesday night, the San Francisco Examiner spotted a headphone-wearing rider leaning against the seat, precariously perched on the tip of the locked portion. To everyday Muni riders, the sight is common.
Now that may change. Of the new handles, Rose said, “In an effort to keep our riders as safe as possible, we installed these prototypes to study their effectiveness and convenience for nearby patrons.”
Officially, SFMTA said previously the problematic seats were locked upright for safety reasons. But bus insurance company CalTIP warned other transit agencies of lawsuits, which were filed after passengers flew out of seats in similarly designed buses — leading to the necessity of locking them upright, so they would not be used.
Now, at least, there may finally be a solution.
Rose said, “If we move forward,” the poles would be installed on about 500 buses.
The cost would run between $500 to $1,000 per installation, he said, but SFMTA is still “working out specific costs.”RoboSpock - Behavior Driven Development (BDD) for Android
Wojtek Erbetowski http://erbetowski.pl
Polidea Sp. z o.o. http://polidea.pl
Introduction
This article describes RoboSpock, a test framework for Android that provides an easy way of writing Behavior Driven Development (BDD) specifications with Groovy language and supports the Google Guice library. It combines two main solutions in the area: Robolectric and Spock framework.
Web Site: https://github.com/Polidea/RoboSpock
System requirements: Java SE 6
License & Pricing: Open Source under Apache2 licence
Motivation
Java development has come a long way to be where it is right now. Getting through the problems of early enterprise beans, fighting the hangover of heavy, stateful services and getting out of the clutches of xml-configuration-over-all corporate patterns was quite an adventure. Nowadays, playing nicely with alternative languages and modern frameworks to provide the pleasure of automated testing, writing pure business logic without a plethora of boilerplate code, you can look back at the Android platform with pity, as you can see many of these mistakes repeated.
I believe the lack of very important tools (e.g. Aspects Oriented Programming, BDD frameworks) is temporary and developed a way to bring one of the most powerful BDD frameworks, together with the mighty Groovy language [1] to the testing of Android applications. And this means testing with the greatest pleasure: writing blazing-fast, expressive unit tests.
This article brings to you two solutions at once: Robolectric [2], a testing library enabling running Android code on Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and Spock [3], a superb expressive test framework for Groovy. It presents, RoboSpock [4], the tool to glue them together. Enjoy the journey.
From writing tests to creating specification
Test Driven Development (TDD) is easy to learn, but hard to master [5]. There are many promises of TDD, like making fast, fearless changes, or building better architecture. But you have no chance of getting them or mastering the practice if you simply don’t like writing tests. And if your environment is causing you mostly troubles you will hardly ever like it. And you should. This is why useful tools make the difference.
Spock framework is the new era BDD [6] framework. It provides handy tools for writing tests in given-when-then format, integrated mocking and parameterization. Since there is no better way to present a test framework than with examples, let’s jump right into the middle of a sample specification.
def login activity initializes with non-null fields’() { given: def activity = new LoginActivity() expect: activity.onCreate(null) activity.$field"!= null where: field << [‘displayName, ‘loginView] }
As you can see, Spock provides labels to separate different parts of your specification. This is a small thing that makes a huge difference: readable specifications with clean logical flow. The second thing is parameterization, the way you may specify parameters for independent test runs in Spock is the DRYest option you can get.
When you actually run this specification for LoginActivity class, that extends Android Activity base class it fails - java.lang.Exception: Stub! is what’s every Android developers knows too well. This is how far we can get into testing Android on JVM. Not far enough, is it?
Classloaders for help
Why can’t we run a single Android class locally? Because android.jar - a library provided to enable compilation with Java compiler - contains all of the interfaces, classes and statics, but not one implementation. The proper classes are provided by Android OS at runtime.
Since we are not able to run a single Android class outside of an Android device, because of failing static initialization blocks, we need to trick the runtime to use the implementation classes instead of the default stubs. The mechanism that allows us do that is called Classloader and is a part of Java since it’s early times.
When running the test we may switch the system classloader to serve our classes instead of the original ones. To do that we need to provide an implementation class, a so-called shadow class that would shadow the stub and return a proper result.
Robolectric
Robolectric is a library that does exactly what’s described above. It provides lots of reasonable implementation for Android classes (mostly moved from Android sources) in shadow classes. In addition it provides a classloader (built on top of Javassist library) to switch the classes at the time of class loading. Finally the embedded JUnit test runner encapsulates all that functionality into a test case.
The following JUnit test represents usage of Robolectric support to test the same thing as before, checking whether Activity properties were initialized with non-null values.
@RunWith(RobolectricTestRunner) class LoginActivityTest { @Test public void construstorShouldInitializeAllProperties() { // given LoginActivity activity = new LoginActivity(); activity.onCreate(null); // expect assertNotNull(activity.getMode()); assertNotNull(activity.getDisplayName()); assertNotNull(activity.getLoginView()); } }
Not so effective as before, but this allowed us to see the green bar! Now we might say that’s enough. Robolectric doesn’t provide any option to use Spock framework, but finally we are able to run a simple test on a JVM, which is fast enough to satisfy a regular TDD red-green-refactor lifecycle [7].
Meet RoboSpock
As you can see Spock is definitely an interesting tool. I believe there are not many people who choose to get back to the tools used before using Spock. Unfortunately it was unavailable for Android developers. Our need for such a tool led us to create Robolectric integration for Spock. This is how RoboSpock was born as a powerful tool, that lets you run simple specifications against your mobile application code and executes fast using IDE’s support for JUnit tests (works on every modern IDE).
RoboSpock is available through Central Maven Repository and sources (with examples) are available on GitHub.
Capabilities
RoboSpock lets you work with Views, Activities, Async tasks, database and lots of other Android specific libraries. In addition of the tens of Robolectric built-in shadow classes, you can provide your own shadows to fill missing implementations or to simply adjust to your needs.
On the other hand RoboSpock gives you full access to Spock mechanisms, that means simple extension API, built in mocking support, descriptive parameterizations, readable structure and more.
RoboGuice and RoboSpock
There is no better partner for unit testing than the dependency injection design pattern. It lets you separate object under tests from the rest of the environment and focus on testing single module. Currently the most popular solution for Android development is RoboGuice [8], which is an Android mod of Google Guice [9] DI framework. That’s the main reason why we decided to provide basic support for Guice tests in RoboSpock.
This code example presents the usage of creating Guice injector to provide Guice managed objects into the test.
class TaskActivitySpecification extends RoboSpecification { @Inject WebInterface webInterface def setup() { inject { install new TestTaskExecutorModule() bind(WebInterface).toInstance Mock(WebInterface) } } def "should display text from web"() { given: webInterface.execute(_) >> "Hi!" def taskActivity = new TaskActivity() when: taskActivity.onCreate(null) then: taskActivity.webTv.text == "Hi!" } }
Summary
The young RoboSpock library lets you work with beautiful Groovy specifications on a daily basis with you Android applications. Thanks to the glue work between Robolectric and Spock framework you are able to take advantage of both these tools and test your application without slightest complexes. I hope you find it helpful.
References
[1] http://groovy.codehaus.org/
[2] http://pivotal.github.com/robolectric/
[3] http://code.google.com/p/spock/
[4] https://github.com/Polidea/RoboSpock
[5] http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/testdrivendevelopmenttraps.php
[6] http://dannorth.net/introducing-bdd/
[7] http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/Red-Green-Refactor.html
[8] http://code.google.com/p/roboguice/
[9] http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/
More Software Testing Resources
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This article was originally published in the Spring 2013 issue of Methods & Toolsby William Henry from WilliamHenry Website Spanish version
Surfing the Net one night last fall, a few days after publication of my latest Atlantis Rising article, “ Secrets of the Cathars ” (Num. 36, November/December 2002), my pulse suddenly quickened. My article connected the genocide of the Cathars or Pure Ones of Southern France, the secret teachings of Jesus and the supernatural blue stones of the Sumerian creator god Enki or E.A that open stargates and cause enlightenment. Evidence flashed before my eyes that, in addition to Iraq and France, E.A. also operated a blue stone-based “stargate mystery school” at the Hill of Tara in Ireland. Conor Newman, an archaeology lecturer at the National University of Ireland at Galway announced that he had located a massive subterranean temple at Tara. Since 1992, Newman has been working on the Hill of Tara preparing a survey of the area for the state-funded Discovery Program. He found the Tara monument using an underground radar device. What they uncovered eventually at the crown of the hill was a huge, oval-shaped monument measuring about 170 meters at its widest point. Around it are 300 postholes measuring two meters wide. Evidence indicates this ‘Crown’ (tiara) jewel of Irish archaeology was constructed through an enormous effort. 300 towering oak posts once surrounded the hill. Newman thinks it probably dates from 2500 to 2300 BC and still had a big physical presence even after the posts were taken out or rotted. While the site is home to many known archaeological treasures, this latest discovery reveals that the real treasure exists underneath the sacred hill and may soon be revived. With its revival will come important new information about Enki. Tara is the prehistoric home of the magical Tuatha Dé Danaan, who are considered to be direct descendents or reincarnations of the biblical Shining Ones ( Elohim ), the creator gods. W.Y.Evans-Wentz notes that they are described as a race of majestic appearance and marvelous beauty, in form human, yet in nature divine. They are divided into two classes: those which are shining
those which are opalescent and seem lit up by a light within themselves The Sumerians called them Anunnaki (literally NUN, ‘fish’, of AKI, ‘light’), which explains why the Irish called them the ‘Lords of Light’ or Illi. They were led by E.A. and brought with them four treasures or power tools: the (S)tone of Destiny
the (S)word of Destiny
the Cup of Destiny
the Staff or Spear of Destiny These treasures were housed in the so-called Cave of Treasures, inside the Mountain of God, where burns a perpetual flame. Tara was considered the Mountain of God, as well as the Illi’s gateway or Ish-Tar Gate to the etheric Otherworld. Passage tombs dot the surrounding countryside. The passage tombs or mounds are called Sidhe (pronounced ‘she’), a pun on the She People or Shining Ones (the She-Ning Ones) who adored Ana, the Great Mother of All Living. From the earliest dawn of Irish mythology Keltic rites were performed here. The Stone of Ana or ‘light’ at Tara Hill is believed to be the same as the stone of Luz (‘light’) upon which Jacob laid his head and subsequently saw a ladder reaching into heaven. The mythology of the Danaan indicates they had the ability to control the light of the sun through the power of a magical blue stone of miraculous powers. This stone forms the basis for Irish mythology. E.A. IN IRELAND E.A. I learned, presided over the Tara assembly as the sun god Fin, a Druid in strangely flowered garments, and with a double-pointed headdress and bearing in his hand a book. Fin’s two-headed miter of fishy form (a play on ‘fin’), his upright rod, spotted or checkered garment and basket in hand, are symbols that are easily recognizable in the Sumerian depiction of E.A. presented here. His column ( i, eye) or pillar of Tara (‘enlightenment’) is remembered as the Tree of the Wisdom of Life of numerous traditions. E.A. is typified as both the pupil in the eye, with wings and a tail, and as the wisdom-bearing serpent who dwelled within the Tree. Priests of E.A., wearing fish suits tend his ipillar. E.A. led the Anunnaki in search of the “blue stones that cause ill,” meaning illumination, luminescence, enlightenment. He found them at a place called Arili (Ireland?). Sumerian myth romanticized by Zecharia Sitchin says Enki was a genetic scientist who came from the mysterious, and presently controversial, Planet X. The blue stones symbolize the exotic ‘missing’ or ‘hidden’ (‘black’) matter of the universe known as the Philosopher’s Stone or the Black Stone. Crystallized into Earth density this black stone shifts its vibration into blue stones (actually tones). The cluster of three orbs symbolize them, just as they do the Word or Life Force of God. When a human places themselves in resonance with the blue stone’s Life Force it transforms them from a human into a god. Correspondingly, the Irish root word Ea means fire or the light which lightens all, and raises us out of earth life. To the Irish E.A. also signifies: a cause
matter in course of change
a compact
a confederacy
the learned
a vocation
learning
science
wise
a flock
knowledge
discipline
instruction
honor
respect
a country
an island
a tribe E.A. founded civilization in ancient Sumeria (modern Iraq). But first, he apparently settled Ireland. As Laurence Gardner notes, Irish mythology of the Anunnaki predates Sumerian civilization by a thousand years or more. Like E.A.’s Sumeria, Ireland comes into history as a full-fledged kingdom, and its sudden origin has perplexed many an historian. Sumerian culture coincides with, the early Irish. It’s as if one culture is the continuation of the other. Both Irish and Iraqi mythology revolve around the secret teachings of the blue stones of E.A. In ancient Irish religion and mythology Tara was the sacred home for the Ari (later the Ari-ish or Irish) who ranked below the Illi gods, yet above the people. Ireland (Ari-Land) takes its name from the Aris or Arians. Ireland is considered the Great Motherland of the Aryan race, otherwise known as Atlantis, Thule or Tula.
Aryan or Ari-an is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘noble’. The concept of the Aryan race has been wildly misinterpreted. The root of the misunderstanding is in the Sumerian claim that E.A. and the Pure Lady Ninhursag (Mari) cloned the first model of human as a slave race. Into the blood of a second ‘advanced’ human, the Ari or Illi, they put sacred knowledge. He then separated this new human from the others, taking them to an island home, Poseidon/Atlantis, of which he was the Pa-Tara (father) and founder, the Potei-don or ‘Lord of Wisdom’. His half-brother Enlil, who sought to keep humanity at the level of dim-bulb, Earth-bound slaves, opposed him. Tara is, conceivably, one of E.A.’s laboratories of enlightenment and the place where he brought ‘the Children of Atlantis’, the lost tribe of Enki, after their banishment by Enlil. Irish mythology insists the secrets of E.A. and his lost tribe remain hidden beneath the soil of Tara. The Irish make clear that post-cataclysm Atlantean mythology, including that of the blue stones, originated in Ireland and spread to Sumeria, Egypt and India… and Southern France. Among other uses the blue stones, called Blue Apples in Southern France, were used to open gateways or passages to other realms. Gnostic Christians maintain they were present at the Crucifixion. Afterwards, they were in the possession of the Cathars who were taught the secrets of the blue stones by Jesus. According to Irish belief, E.A. is the root for Iessa, the Holy Spirit, or Jesus. The Dark Age Church stuck out its velvet-wrapped iron fist and attempted to disarm the Cathars of this strange secret fruit. Jesus (called Pan-Tara, ‘god of Tara’) is known in ancient Irish history as Iessa, a name derived from I.A. or E.A. His arrest, shown in the Irish Book of Kells, features the three orbs.
Cathar Cross with the serpent (E.A.) spitting the three orbs. The three orbs appear as the triple spiral in Ireland. That’s why light burned through my veins as I shuttled between Sumerian, Irish and Cathar histories, pouring over currents of symbols and myths that criss-crossed these cultures. Enlightenment in Ireland, as in Southern France, carried a terrible price. As it would do with the extermination of the Cath-Ari and their Church of Amor or Love (1208-1244), in 1169 the Church of Rome launched a horrifying campaign of terror that shattered the Irish religion and the Mother Church of Tara (‘love’). After English shock troops operating on behalf of Rome conquered this land, which natives called the Skilly or Blessed Isles for having survived the cataclysm of Atlantis, English priests rewrote its history, performing a full-scale perimeter mythic wipe-down of Tara that left it a sunken wreck - physically intact, spiritually destroyed. Book of Kells The Illi were banished to the interior world. The Church of Rome transformed them into devils. As Bruce Rux notes, their stature was considerably shrunk in size, too. This is evidenced by the term henceforth applied to them, fairy folk. The Tuatha Dé Danaan were described as tall, blond and fair-skinned. By adding a ‘y’ suffix to their name, a demonic or diminutive image was created. The Church transformed E.A., the Potei-Don (Poseidon in Atlantis) or King of Tara, into Potei, Patti, Patty or Saint Patrick, a Church hero who is probably a fabrication of priests who said that, instead of bringing enlightenment, he came to Tara to confront the ancient religion of the gateway at its most powerful site. Patrick and his followers prided themselves on burning three hundred volumes of Irish histories and Druidical writings. The destruction of the teaching of E.A. (the King of Tara) has never been completed. The investigations to be made at the Hill of Tara will have far-ranging implications on our understanding of ancient Irish history and the story of E.A. This understanding will enlighten the origins of Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well. They will reveal their common roots. Today, civilization threatens the temple at Tara. Mr. Newman is concerned about a planned extension of the N3 motorway from Clonee to just north of Kells. One of the sections from Dunshaughlin to Navan runs along the east side of the Hill of Tara. Newman has absolutely no doubt that they will be destroying dozens of monuments connected to Tara (and E.A.). This flickering lantern cannot be allowed to fade. Hill of Tara in Ireland THE ARK AT TARA There is a fascinating and powerful connection between the blue stones of E.A., Ireland, and the Ark of the Covenant, the golden vessel through which the bright Divine Light presence of God appeared to the Jews. According to Irish lore, the ‘lost’ Ark of the Covenant is hidden at Tara. Early in the 20th century a group of Israelites, connecting tara with Torah, came to Tara with the conviction that the Ark of the Covenant was buried at the famous hill. They dug the Mound of the Synods in search of the Ark but found only some Roman coins. Official excavation in the 1950s revealed the circles of postholes, indicating the construction of substantial buildings here. In several of my books and in the aforementioned AR article, I have deduced that the Anunnaki operated a ‘Tara gate’ at a place called Eschol (translated as ‘stone’). Called the ‘valley of the cluster’ (as in grapes), the Bible locates Eschol in Canaan, the ‘Promised Land’. The Book of Numbers (13) tells us Joshua stole these blue stones, symbolized by a cluster of enormously heavy grapes, from the Anunnaki at the valley of Eschol and returned them to Moses along with a warning, “the land there eateth the people up”. I have interpreted this cryptic phrase as meaning the Anunnaki were operating a gateway that caused people to vanish. The blue stones symbolized this gateway.
The Bible is mute concerning what Moses did with the blue stones of the Anunnaki. This is strange considering they potentially represent the core secrets of the universe. These blue stones are believed to be sapphire crystals containing cosmic secrets ‘etched by the hand of God’. Talmudic-Mishraic sources say they were transparent, flexible, blue and, like the grapes of Eschol, very heavy. Graham Hancock mentions these stones in The Sign and the Seal, speculating that Moses knew they were hidden on Mount Sinai and that they are meteorites possessing a supernatural power source. Further, he suggests they are a cipher for the Holy Grail. The cluster of grapes, or blue stones, symbolize the Grail. Most Ark researchers sidestep the blue stones for lack of readily available information, and for the fact that they were smashed by Moses and replaced by a second set of tablets containing the Ten Commandments. An enormous wealth of understanding emerges when we connect the blue stones of E.A. with the Ark of the Covenant. As I wrote in Ark of the Christos, the connection between E.A. and the Ark is easily made. The blue stones were given to Moses by a God of light on the glowing or smoking mountain of light, Sinai, which is considered a metaphor for the Tree of Wisdom and the gate to God. Apart from the Sinai/Tree of Life metaphor, a smoking mountain is either a mountain on fire or a volcano. The god most closely associated with the volcano is the god of alchemy Vulcan or Hephaestus, the gold/soul smith whom the Sumerians called E.A. E.A. appeared before the Sumerians as the Aryan god Ahura had appeared when seen in his glowing ark on top of Mount Hara, the mountain of Is-Tara, as a being of light. God appeared above the Ark and Mount Sinai in exactly the same way, i.e. in fire and a cloud of vapor and, furthermore, in the form of his ‘Glory’. Ahura
Ahura Mazda floating on a cloud above an Ark- like box This deduction that E.A. is the God of light of the Ark brings up another. There were two teachings of Moses. The first is the blue stone-based enlightenment teaching of E.A. The second, the Ten Commandments, a penal code for the Israelite slaves, is Enlil’s, whose editors removed the mention of the enlightening blue stones from the biblical story. For some reason God lost interest in the Ark by Jeremiah’s time (580 BC); telling the Israelites not to think of it, remember it or magnify it any more. This is probably because the Israelites lost the Ark, probably to Nebuchadnezzar. Jeremiah was instructed by God to hide the secret stones of Israel in the face of the threat from Nebuchadnezzar, the priest-king of Marduk, the ‘Bright’, ‘Shining’ god of Planet X and son of E.A., who had assembled a gateway in Babylon through which the Son of God appeared. The Irish claim Jeremiah brought the stones to Ireland along with the Princess of Tara, founding a Druid school of wisdom based upon the stones. They say a great prophet will arise in the West who will miraculously cause E.A.’s tree of Tara to bud and blossom. Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein believes he is the reincarnated Nebuchadnezzar. The race to recover the blue stones of Atlantis continues.
Return to Sumer and The Anunnaki Return to The Tuatha de Danaan Return to William Henry Return to La AtlantidaBALLO KE, India — In this sleepy Punjabi village, no one was surprised to see a seven-foot-tall Sikh farmer striding the narrow lanes toward the local Sikh temple on June 25. The farmer, Balbir Singh Bamrah, is a familiar presence in Ballo Ke, and something of a local curiosity.
But the other worshipers at the temple, known as a gurudwara, were a bit perplexed by the prayer the guru offered for Balbir Singh’s household. He stood over the farmer, his wife and his daughter, and prayed for peace, prosperity, health — and that Balbir Singh’s son would be drafted.
“They didn’t understand what the N.B.A. draft was,” said Sarabjot Kaur, Balbir Singh’s 23-year-old daughter. “They only realized later.”
Image Satnam Singh, second from right, in an N.B.A. summer league game in which the Dallas Mavericks played the Atlanta Hawks. Credit John Locher/Associated Press
On the night of June 25 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn — which, some 7,000 miles away in Ballo Ke, was the next morning — the Dallas Mavericks selected Satnam Singh Bhamara in the second and final round, making him the first Indian-born player ever to be drafted by a team in the National Basketball Association. It was reported that the 19-year-old athlete, who is two inches taller than his father, would start out with the Mavericks’ Development League team, the Texas Legends.Story makes omissions
Re: "Questions add up over fund reports — Old filings raise issue about donations from developer to Griggs," Feb. 7 news story.
Your recent story regarding my campaign finance reports has me concerned and I am alarmed by the omissions you've made in presenting the facts.
I first ran for office in 2010 and have accepted hundreds of contributions since then. I have never accepted an illegal campaign contribution. I accept full responsibility for the 10 clerical errors you discovered. I have amended my reports and I am correcting the mistakes.
I have never knowingly accepted contributions from minor children because, while legal, they don't meet my ethical standards. I returned four contributions from minor children on the day I verified that these contributions were accepted. I returned two more contributions from minor children on Feb. 5, immediately upon finding them and before they were reported. Your piece insinuates that I must have known that these contributions came from children. This is false and you present only conjecture to support this opinion.
Implying otherwise is beneath the high standards of The DMN. I acted quickly. This is where I take issue with your story. It takes 10 paragraphs before you mention all I did. Even then, you mischaracterize my actions as a "vague Facebook post." Setting aside that subjective judgment is out of place in a news item, there is nothing vague. I am clear: I found money donated by minors and I returned it.
If this article was intended to reflect a genuine concern for transparency in campaign finance reporting, my swift and decisive response would have been highlighted. Instead, it is buried suggesting that this is an opportunistic attempt to raise questions about my character. When judging my character, I would hope both you and Dallas voters would weigh my proven record of service as a council member more heavily than a few scattered examples of honest mistakes which I quickly addressed.
Scott Griggs, Dallas
Miller nixed Cowboys stadium
Re: "Miller will run against Gates — Former mayor to face 3-term incumbent in race for District 13," Saturday news story.
Laura Miller's claim to represent Dallas is a sham as she runs for a City Council seat. Remember as mayor she ran off the Cowboys' proposal to build a stadium at Fair Park, which would have revitalized that whole area and generated millions in income for the city of Dallas. Miller does not understand how to build city government as she only knows how to be an obstructionist.
Elmer Corbin Powell Jr., Oak Cliff
Miller opposes change
Laura Miller, in her quest to unseat Jennifer Staubach Gates in District 13 claims, "The homeowners in our area are under siege by developers, who are fully supported by our councilwoman without regard to traffic, pedestrian and parking problems. And the homeowners need an advocate, and I'm happy to be their advocate."
Miller is not an expert on development, but she is an expert on opposing change. Recall her mistake opposing the Dallas Cowboys stadium in downtown Dallas. She is the ideal example of "Not In My Backyard."
I live in the near vicinity of Preston Center and anyone familiar with this area knows it desperately needs redevelopment. Except of course Miller. Let's hope the citizens of Dallas don't make a second mistake and vote for her. Laura, go home!
Guy Mercurio, Dallas
No way is Trump serious
Re: "Trump declares emergency — Trump's wall move splits Republicans," Saturday news story.
There is no way that any serious CEO, general or other leader would declare a national emergency, then board a plane to go play golf. Unbelievable!
Michael Smith, Denton
Texas senators fail Constitution
Our senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, have been notably silent on President Donald Trump's declaration of a national emergency after having failed to obtain funding for a border wall through the appropriations process. This is particularly evident in the case of Cruz, who has made his reputation through a self-proclaimed commitment to protection of the Constitution and in particular its separation of powers. Cruz has been quick to call out perceived violations of the constitutional order when Democrats have been his targets, yet claims that he stands for a position independent of partisan politics.
I ask that both senators act swiftly to make their opposition to the president's actions clear and unequivocal. This is a clear infringement of the executive upon the legislative power and neither would stand for it if the president were a Democrat. Failure to speak up and take action at this critical moment means, I think, that we should not listen to either on constitutional matters in the future, for they apparently only care about the Constitution as a means to criticize their opponents, not to protect our liberties. I hope I am wrong.
Daniel Wickberg, North Oak Cliff
Proof it's a bogus 'emergency'
Oh my gosh! A national emergency! Where is our president? Vacationing with his wife and billionaire friends at his golf course in West Palm Beach to golf, have fun and spend taxpayer money! Such a bogus "emergency!"
Sandy Elkins, Plano
Guns are the real emergency
The president claims we have a national emergency at our southern border, and to that end we need drastic measures to fulfill his campaign promise of building a wall. But we have an even greater emergency in gun violence in this country, so where is the president's outcry on this public health issue? That is truly a national emergency. Right up there with public health insurance.
We need a leader who is less concerned about his image and more concerned with the real safety of our country.
John Crawley, Dallas, M StreetsLIMA (Reuters) - India and Peru plan to start negotiations on a bilateral free trade agreement covering goods, services and investments sometime in the first quarter, Peru said on Wednesday.
The Cabinet of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved a feasibility study on the proposed deal on Wednesday, clearing the way for the start of formal talks, Peru’s Trade Ministry said in a statement.
Peru said an initial technical meeting in the first quarter would mark the first time that India, one of the world’s biggest and fastest-growing economies, negotiated a comprehensive trade deal with a Latin American country.
Peru is a leading producer of copper, gold and fishmeal and was one of 12 signatories of the U.S.-proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to scrap.
After last year’s U.S. presidential election, Peru said it hoped to join the rival Beijing-backed trade deal, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, that several TPP economies as well as India have been negotiating.
Peru, with a population of 30 million, is one of Latin America’s most open and fastest-growing economies.
Peru’s exports to India would likely rise 12 percent if the two countries passed a free trade deal, with clothes, fruits and vegetables, and chemical products poised to benefit the most, the ministry said.Welcome to my blog, Economics in the Rear-View Mirror. If you find this posting interesting, here is the list of “artifacts” from the history of economics I have already assembled for you to sample or click on the search icon in the upper right to explore by name, university, or category. You can subscribe to my blog below. There is also an opportunity to comment below….
______________________
…Regular vistors to this blog have seen that an economics course on socialist thought and movements was a regular part of the curriculum at Harvard during the first half of the twentieth century. Up to this posting I have included material from the following courses: Thomas Nixon Carver’s SINGLE TAX, SOCIALISM, ANARCHISM (1919-20), Edward Mason and Paul Sweezy’s ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM (1938), and Paul Sweezy’s ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM (1940).
This course became part of Joseph Schumpeter’s teaching portfolio in the 1940s. His course outline and exam for the winter semester of 1943-44 has been posted as well.
______________________
[Course Announcement]
Economics 11b. Economics of Socialism
Half-course (spring term). Mon., Wed., and (at the pleasure of the instructor) Fri., at 10. Professor Schumpeter.
Source: Announcement of the Courses of Instruction Offered by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences During 1945-46. Official Register of Harvard University, Vol. 42, No. 8 (March 31, 1945), p. 36.
______________________
[Enrollment]
[Economics] 11b (spring term) Professor Schumpeter. –Economics of Socialism.
5 Graduates, 18 Seniors, 21 Juniors, 15 Sophomores, 1 Freshman, 8 Radcliffe, 9 Other.
Source: Harvard University. Report of the President of Harvard College and Reports of Departments for 1945-46, p. 58.
______________________
ECONOMICS 11b
1945-46
OUTLINE AND ASSIGNMENTS
[Joseph A. Schumpeter]
I. FIRST TWO WEEKS: The Socialist Issue.
Socialist ideas and socialist parties. Socialism and the labor movement. Laborite and intellectualist socialism. The definition of socialism.
*H. W. Laidler, Social-Economic Movements, 1944, esp. Parts V and VI.
Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, article on Socialist and Labor Parties.
II. THIRD TO FIFTH WEEK: The Theory of Centralist Socialism., 1938
*O. Lange and F. M. Taylor, The Economic Theory of Socialism, 1938.
[A. P. Lerner, The Economics of Control, 1944.]
III. SIXTH TO NINTH WEEK: The Economic Interpretation of History. The Class Struggle, and the Marxist Theory of Capitalism.
*Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, chs. I, IV, V, VI.
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
*Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, 1942, chs. I-VI
(pp. 1-108).
IV. TENTH TO TWELFTH WEEK: The Socialist Theory of the State and of the Proletarian Revolution, Imperialism, |
has stated that the Russian president will consider Roberts’s appeal if he files a request, Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said on Nov. 30.
“To obtain Russian citizenship, one must complete the relevant application. If the request is submitted, it will be considered,” Peskov explained to RIA Novosti news agency.
All rights reserved by Rossiyskaya Gazeta.By Shauna Johnson in News | January 26, 2017 at 12:05PM
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A Logan County delegate is changing his political affiliation.
On Thursday, Delegate Rupert “Rupie” Phillips, Jr. officially switched from Democrat to independent. As a self-described conservative Democrat, he said he saw no other choice.
“The liberal Democrat Party has hijacked the conservative people of my district and they’re not representing the values that we have down home,” Phillips (I-Logan, 24) said on Thursday’s MetroNews “Talkline” before filing for the change.
Of more liberal Democrats he said this: “They’re not for coal. They’re not for guns. They’re not for God.”
Phillips is a supporter of President Donald Trump.
“He’s been fighting for coal. He stands for our guns rights and everything. He stands for God,” he said. “In my district, I have a lot of life, longtime Democrats and they need a voice in Charleston to represent their choices and, I feel being independent, I can do that.”
According to Phillips, he’s not attended Democratic House caucuses for the past two years.
“I’m not going to go in there and play the games that they’ve played since we’ve been in the minority, just trying to stall progress and causing more chaos in the state,” Phillips said.
“I want to focus on the people, not the party politics.”
Phillips has represented House District 24, which is made up of parts of Boone County, Logan County and Wyoming County, since first being elected as a Democrat in 2010.
As of Thursday, Phillips was the only delegate registered independent within the state House of Delegates.
The change took the House numbers to 63 Republicans, 36 Democrats and Phillips.
West Virginia has four recognized political parties: Democratic, Libertarian, Mountain and Republican.
Belinda Biafore, chair of the state Democratic Party, issued the following statement on Phillips’ decision:
“Delegate Phillips said he didn’t want to ‘play politics’, yet this is nothing put political posturing for his own aspirations and media attention. He said so himself that his district is full of ‘lifelong Democrats’, a lot of them conservative Democrats that need a voice in Charleston, yet he chose to abandon them for media attention,” Biafore said.
“Demeaning the people of our Party and calling them ungodly was completely uncalled for and unnecessary. It is not his place nor anyone’s place to speak on behalf of anyone else’s religious beliefs.”
She continued, “His comments on the Party’s stance on coal and guns was also untrue and it shows by the volume of conservative Democrats that we represent. We have said time and time again that West Virginia Democrats are a big tent because we represent real people.”
West Virginia Republican Party Chairman Conrad Lucas also issued a news release:
“Our thoughts are with Delegate Phillips as he today makes the choice thousands of West Virginians have made in the last decade. Liberal Democrats in Washington and Charleston have ruined the once dominant Party in West Virginia.
We welcome them all to join the Trump Team, and Make West Virginia Great Again,”
Lucas said.Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson Plays Not My Job
Tyson plays a game called, "The Album's OK, but $5 Million Will Make It Even Better:" Three questions about the long-awaited, and long-delayed Guns N' Roses album, "Chinese Democracy."
CARL KASELL: From NPR and WBEZ-Chicago, this is WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!, the NPR News quiz. I'm Carl Kasell, and here again is your host, at the Chase Bank Auditorium in downtown Chicago, Peter Sagal.
PETER SAGAL, HOST:
Thank you, Carl.
(APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: Thank you everybody. This week, it's nothing, nothing but gear heads, nerds and Pinsetters. It's an all-science show, because we figure there's nothing you guys like more than realizing you're not as smart as you thought. Am I right?
(LAUGHTER)
KASELL: We began with Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and head of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, who joined us, along with Kyrie O'Connor, Charlie Pierce and P.J. O'Rourke.
SAGAL: And we started by asking him about his vendetta against what was our ninth planet.
(APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: We're so glad to have you. Among other things, we immediately want to get right to this. We want to take you to task. You were one of the eminent astronomers who decided that Pluto wasn't a planet anymore, aren't you?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, it wasn't quite...
(SOUNDBITE OF BOOING)
SAGAL: Oh.
TYSON: I hear the Pluto lovers out there.
SAGAL: Yeah.
KYRIE O'CONNOR: It's a big Pluto crowd.
SAGAL: Yeah.
TYSON: I bet most of that crowd does not know that there are six moons in the solar system bigger than Pluto. That takes out half the crowd right there.
SAGAL: Oh, they're looking sheepish and embarrassed now. Let me tell you.
O'CONNOR: I think if any crowd would know that, this crowd would.
P.J. O'ROURKE: Mickey's dog is still pissed.
(LAUGHTER)
TYSON: I got to tell you something about the dog that bothered me.
SAGAL: Yeah.
TYSON: Why is it that Pluto is Mickey's dog but Mickey is not Pluto's mouse?
O'ROURKE: Yeah.
SAGAL: That is...
O'ROURKE: And where does Goofy fit in, right?
TYSON: I called Disney; I got the answer. You ready for this?
O'ROURKE: Oh, okay, yeah, all right.
SAGAL: Yeah.
TYSON: If you went around butt-naked, then you could be owned by someone who wears clothes.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Is that the real answer?
TYSON: That's the answer. And so Mickey wears that bowtie.
SAGAL: That's it? The entire social hierarchy is based on the bowtie?
TYSON: Otherwise, you don't speak. So Pluto doesn't speak. But Goofy wears clothes and he speaks. So there it is.
O'ROURKE: I am so glad I wear clothes.
SAGAL: Yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: You got a fair amount of hate mail, though, when you made this decision about Pluto.
TYSON: Yeah, in fact, it was so bad, there was like hate mail from third graders, you know.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Oh, that's harsh, dude.
TYSON: In fact...
O'CONNOR: Hate mail in crayon.
TYSON: In crayon. It would have said...
O'ROURKE: I hat you.
(LAUGHTER)
TYSON: It was like, Dr. Tyson, you did - what did you do to our favorite planet, and they would draw crayon pictures of it so I knew what it looked like, so we could put the exhibit back together.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: One of the things we keep hearing about - and we're so glad you're here because we were worried. We heard this latest iteration of this was just this week. We hear that there's this asteroid. It has a 1 in 45,000 chance of smashing into the earth in about 20 years or so.
TYSON: Yeah, that's right.
SAGAL: Is this like a worry? Should we be building ships like on the movie "When Worlds Collide?"
TYSON: Yes.
SAGAL: Okay.
(LAUGHTER)
TYSON: But message end item...
SAGAL: Should we be sending Bruce Willis into space in slow motion?
O'ROURKE: Definitely.
TYSON: Not Bruce Willis, but I'll get you somebody else. No, so, the asteroid is called Apophis. It's named for the Egyptian god of death and darkness.
SAGAL: Now, you see, that's the problem right there. You give it a name like that, you're just encouraging it.
(LAUGHTER)
CHARLIE PIERCE: What do you want to call it? Tiffany?
SAGAL: Yeah, exactly.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Tiffany...
PIERCE: Ariel, I mean...
TYSON: Yeah, we didn't name that one Bambi.
SAGAL: No. All right, but tell us about this asteroid.
TYSON: We found it was headed for earth before we named it, let me clarify that point. But it'll have a close approach on Friday the 13th in April of 2029. And this thing is the size of the Rose Bowl, and it'll come closer to earth than our orbiting communications satellites. It'll be the biggest closest thing ever to come to earth.
And depending on its trajectory in that passage, it will tell us whether it will hit us seven years later, in 2036.
SAGAL: Oh, wait a minute.
O'ROURKE: I'm doing some arithmetic here.
SAGAL: All right.
(LAUGHTER)
O'ROURKE: I'll be 89. I'm out of here, you know.
(LAUGHTER)
TYSON: Well, here's what you do...
PIERCE: I've got an idea, how about we predict a way to blow up the asteroid?
TYSON: Well, you blow it up; all it does is blow it into more pieces that then hit in more places on earth. So another way is to deflect it from harm's way, and we've got top people working on that problem right now.
But if the thing hits, and its center target would be the Pacific Ocean, 500 kilometers west of Santa Monica, it would create a trillion dollars worth of damage. So you have to ask what is that worth to you to not simply insure you against rebuilding your house, but to prevent the damn thing in the first place.
PIERCE: Well, or how much is it worth to invest in seafront property in Utah?
TYSON: Well, there you go.
(LAUGHTER)
TYSON: And we would know when it would hit, so nobody has to die, except for, like, the stupid people, like the surfer who wants that last tsunami wave.
(LAUGHTER)
O'ROURKE: The really big one.
(APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: Well, Neil deGrassse Tyson, we are delighted to have you with us. We have asked you here to play a game we're calling?
KASELL: The album's sounding okay, but I think another three years and $5 million will make it even better.
SAGAL: For nearly 15 years, fans of the rock band Guns N' Roses have been waiting for lead singer Axl Rose to finish and release their new album "Chinese Democracy." As Spin Magazine said, "If you purchased a kitten on the day that Guns N' Roses last album arrived in stores, it's probably dead by now."
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: We're going to ask you three questions about this now legendary recording, reputed to have cost over $13 million to produce.
TYSON: Wait, this is a recording that's not yet out?
SAGAL: Not yet out. In fact, it's supposed to come out, after 13 years of delays and promises, next week. It might get here before that asteroid. Now, if you answer to out of three of these questions correctly, you'll win our prize for one of our listeners: Carl Kasell singing "Welcome to the Jungle" on their answering machine.
(LAUGHTER)
(APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: Carl, who is astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson playing for?
KASELL: He is playing or Julie Sevig of Chicago.
SAGAL: You ready to go?
TYSON: I'm ready.
SAGAL: All right. The lineup of the band has changed through the years in preparing this record. Among those who have called themselves members of Guns N' Roses during the last decade are? A: former congressman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough? B: a guitarist named "Buckethead," called that because he wears a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on his head? Or C: an 11-year-old girl playing a toy piano?
TYSON: What?
(LAUGHTER)
TYSON: It sounds like A.
SAGAL: So your choice is Joe Scarborough.
TYSON: Yeah.
SAGAL: Actually, it was Buckethead, the guy with the bucket on his head.
TYSON: Buckethead, wow.
SAGAL: Yeah, his name at birth was Brian Carroll, but he calls himself Buckethead. He always wears a white mask and a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on his head. And despite this, he's considered one of the great guitarists in the world of rock music, although, Ozzie Osbourne refused to work with him because he seemed mentally unstable.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: All right, sir. Now, on occasion, Axl Rose generously let other people take over lead singing duties - normally his - including which of these people? A: NBA star Shaquille O'Neal, who does a rap? B: the woman Axl Rose found in his bed one morning, who sings "Happy Birthday" because it's only lyrics she could remember? Or C: opera legend Placido Domingo?
TYSON: What?
(LAUGHTER)
TYSON: I'm going to have to say B.
SAGAL: You're going to go B, Axl Rose, just the anonymous woman?
TYSON: Yeah.
SAGAL: No, I'm afraid it's Shaquille O'Neal.
TYSON: Oh, man.
SAGAL: Yeah.
TYSON: Shaquille O'Neal and Axl Rose?
SAGAL: Shaquille O'Neal was...
TYSON: Now you know something's wrong with the universe.
SAGAL: Don't you think so?
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: You have one more question here. Let's see if you can maintain the honor...
TYSON: I feel so stupid.
SAGAL: Well...
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Ah, the tables have turned now, Mr. Tyson.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: It has become apparent that years of isolation living in his mansion has had an effect on Mr. Rose, as exhibited by which of these behaviors?
A: he has refused to allow anyone into the studio who was wearing the color green? B: anyone working on the record had to submit a photo which he would give to his guru for, quote, "psychic inspection?" Or C: he would only work on the recording if he said the voices in his head were singing in tune?
(LAUGHTER)
TYSON: Oh, man that sounds like it's got to be C.
SAGAL: Got to be C, that the voices in his head were singing in tune.
TYSON: Yeah.
SAGAL: In nice close harmony. No, it was the psychic inspection.
TYSON: Oh, man.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Yes.
TYSON: I'm like O for 3.
SAGAL: You are, in fact. But the psychic inspection, you see, would reveal the person's true motives. It was reportedly required for everyone from band members to cooks.
TYSON: Wow.
SAGAL: So Carl, how...
TYSON: I feel so inadequate.
PIERCE: That's okay; people on Pluto are laughing their heads off.
SAGAL: I was about to say.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Now you know what it's like, big guy, taken down a peg. Carl, how did Neil deGrasse Tyson do on our quiz?
KASELL: He was consistent.
SAGAL: Yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
(APPLAUSE)
KASELL: No correct answers, so no prize this time for Julie Sevig.
SAGAL: Oh. Astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. He is the author of the New York Times best-selling book "Death by Black Hole."
TYSON: My first time on the bestseller list.
SAGAL: It's very exciting for you.
TYSON: I'm like totally jazzed.
SAGAL: As well you should be.
TYSON: Thank you.
SAGAL: Congratulations.
TYSON: Thank you.
(APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: The book is called "Death by Black Hole." It's in bookstores now. Neil deGrasse Tyson, thank you so much for being with us.
TYSON: Well, a pleasure to be stupid in front of you.
SAGAL: A pleasure to have you.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Bye-bye.
TYSON: All right, thanks.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
Copyright © 2012 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.Image copyright Wales News Service Image caption Sadie Jenkins' trial is being held at Cardiff Crown Court
A Newport woman who allegedly tried to kill two children was suffering from delusions and believed they were in danger from the mafia, a court heard.
Jurors heard Sadie Jenkins, 28, was psychotic and out of touch with reality when she attacked the children with a six-inch (15 cm) kitchen knife on 7 May 2014.
An expert said she was suffering from delusions and defective reasoning.
She denies two counts of attempted murder at Cardiff Crown Court.
Consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Phillip Joseph told the court defective reasoning meant that while Ms Jenkins knew what she was doing, she did not know it was wrong.
Both children were found with wounds to their throats, which required urgent surgery at the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport.
Amphetamine
The jury was told Ms Jenkins had "smoked cannabis on a regular basis since her teenage years", but her "main drug" had been amphetamine.
Dr Joseph told the court prolonged abuse of amphetamine could lead to a psychotic state.
He read an extract of an interview he had completed with the defendant in which she said she "picked up the sharpest knife because I wanted it to be quick and easy".
"I thought, they're coming," she said.
The trial continues.A CARDIGAN brewery can proudly raise a glass to itself for producing one of the top beers in the country after winning a prestigious award.
Mantle Brewery, based at the Pentood Industrial Estate in the town, has just added two more awards to its growing collection during the regional Society of Independent Brewers’ Association (SIBA) competition in Ludlow.
The brewery won gold in class for their cask porter Dark Heart, a rich, dark 5.2 per cent beer brewed with 100 per cent British hops. The same beer won the bronze award in the same category in the 2014 competition.
To add to this, their bottled 5 per cent lager, Hoodwinked won a silver award in its category to make it a double celebration.
The competition, held on Friday May 12 and featuring 170 cask beers and 132 bottled beers, is a significant event in the regional brewing calendar and the gold award ensures a passage to the national competition which will be held in Sheffield in March, 2018.
SIBA is the independent brewers’ trade association and it represents more than 800 breweries based in the UK.
Mantle Brewery started production in 2013 and has since achieved a growing presence in the area with a reputation for high-quality, flavoursome craft beers from its 3.8 per cent golden session ale Rock Steady to its 5.8 per cent strong amber ale Dis-Mantle.
The brewery’s Ian Kimber said: “A growing number of pubs, clubs, restaurants, shops and bars that stock real ales are starting to realise the benefits to stocking a local product. It’s a full flavoured, fresh product that supports the local economy.
“We were up against some fantastic beers and it was great to come away with a gold and silver award.”. Bihar: India’s third-most-populous state, with the country’s poorest people - has a crime rate lower than more prosperous states with fewer people such as Gujarat, Kerala, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, an IndiaSpend analysis of national crime data reveals. India’s third-most-populous state, with the country’s poorest people - has a crime rate lower than more prosperous states with fewer people such as Gujarat, Kerala, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, an IndiaSpend analysis of national crime data reveals.
If this is an analysis that is hard to believe - especially after a slaying in a road rage and a journalist’s murder sparked debates of Bihar’s “jungle-raj”, a reference to anecdotal evidence of impunity over growing crime - that is because the data are not what they appear.
As we disassembled the data, it became evident that some crimes, such as rape and assault, could be hidden or not reported, but others that result in a body - such as murder or dowry deaths - were harder to hide. A state of 104 million people, Bihar appears to be fighting crime by manipulating data, much like its neighbour and India’s most-populous state, Uttar Pradesh, whose methods of holding down crime - by not reporting it - were revealed in an IndiaSpend investigation last year.
Claims and data: How Bihar outperforms better governed, richer states
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has previously claimed that his state does much better on crime than states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), such as Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. Other defenders of the regime have claimed that crime has fallen under the regime of Bitish Kumar and his alliance partner, Lalu Prasad.
The brazen manner of recent crimes finds echo in a 68 percent decline in convictions over five years, as IndiaSpend reported last week.
Growing public fear over crime is not reflected in the state’s crime data. In 2014, the latest year for which data is available, Bihar reported 177,595 cognizable crimes - those that can be investigated by the police without judicial oversight - while the Hindi-belt states of Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Rajasthan recorded 272,423 and 210,418 such crimes, respectively.
However, Bihar has a population of 104 million while MP and Rajasthan have 72.6 million and 68.5 million, respectively, according to Census 2011.
This means that Bihar, with a population 44 percent higher, has 35 percent fewer crimes than MP. Bihar reports 174 cognizable offences per 100,000 population, while MP reports 358.5 - twice as many.
Similarly, Bihar outperforms Madhya Pradesh and a host of higher-income states, such as Rajasthan, Gujarat and Kerala; all report a far higher rate of cognizable offences.
Bihar’s low crime rate is striking because it is a poor state with India’s lowest per capita income and is third from the bottom on the Human Development Index (HDI) of Indian states. The HDI is an index that includes life expectancy, education and income. Kerala tops India’s HDI index.
As we check Bihar’s other crime data, explanations emerge for these inconsistencies.
The bodies that Bihar cannot hide - murders and dowry deaths
Bihar recorded 3,593 murders in 2014; MP reported 2,310 and Rajasthan reported 1,688. This data appears to better correlate with population and development.
Bihar’s murder rate - or murders per 100,000 people - is higher than either MP, Rajasthan, Gujarat or Kerala. One possible explanation is that Bihar is generally low on crime but, for some reason, is more prone to murder.
The other explanation is that crime in Bihar is under-reported - a process called burking - except for murder, where there is a body that cannot be ignored without some form of due process. Bihar’s murder rate is substantially worse than other larger states and above the national average.
A similar trend is evident with crimes against women. For instance, in 2014, Bihar reported 574 assaults on women “with intent to outrage modesty”, to use legal parlance; MP reported 9,618 such cases while Rajasthan had 6,015. Kerala, with one-third the population of Bihar, and a better place for women, reported 4,412 assaults, about eight times as many.
Bihar also reported substantially fewer rapes than Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan or even Kerala.
Does this mean Bihar is a better place to be a woman, despite lower incomes and living standards? Again, the data do not suggest that.
Bihar reports more dowry deaths than Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Kerala and Gujarat combined. This statistic doesn’t appear to indicate social respect for women. One explanation is that women are indeed a target of violence, but crimes against them are not reported. However, as with general murders, a dowry death produces a body, a situation hard to hide.
By Amit Bhandari
(In arrangement with IndiaSpend.org, a data-driven, non-profit, public interest journalism platform. Amit Bhandari is a media, research and finance professional. The views expressed are those of IndiaSpend. The author can be contacted at respond@indiaspend.org)Looking for news you can trust?
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During a 2005 sermon, a fundamentalist pastor whom Senator John McCain has praised and campaigned with called Islam “the greatest religious enemy of our civilization and the world,” claiming that the historic mission of America is to see “this false religion destroyed.” In this taped sermon, currently sold by his megachurch, the Reverend Rod Parsley reiterates and amplifies harsh and derogatory comments about Islam he made in his book, Silent No More, published the same year he delivered these remarks. Meanwhile, McCain has stuck to his stance of not criticizing Parsley, an important political ally in a crucial swing state.
In March 2008—two weeks after McCain appeared with Parsley at a Cincinnati campaign rally, hailing him as “one of the truly great leaders in America, a moral compass, a spiritual guide”—Mother Jones reported that Parsley had urged Christians to wage a “war” to eradicate Islam in his 2005 book. McCain’s campaign refused to respond to questions about Parsley, and the presumptive Republican presidential nominee declined to denounce Parsley’s anti-Islam remarks or renounce his endorsement. At a time when Barack Obama was mired in a searing controversy involving Reverend Jeremiah Wright, McCain escaped any trouble for his political alliance with Parsley, who leads the World Harvest Church, a supersized Pentecostal institution in Columbus, Ohio. Parsley, whose sermons are broadcast around the world, has been credited with helping George W. Bush win Ohio in 2004 by registering social conservatives and encouraging them to vote. McCain certainly would like to see Parsley do the same for him—which could explain his reluctance to do any harm to his relationship with this anti-Islam extremist.
Here’s a video—produced by Mother Jones and Brave New films—highlighting Parsley’s remarks and McCain’s praise of the pastor:
In the 2005 sermon, Parsley repeatedly blasts Islam. “It is not a God of love that is presented to those of the Islamic faith,” he tells his parishioners. He notes that 9/11 was not “anything new,” describing the terrorist attack as merely the latest battle in “a war between Islam and Christian civilization…raging for centuries.” Speaking from the pulpit, and wiping sweat from his brow, Parsley exclaims,
I can’t begin to tell you how important it is that we understand the true nature of Islam. That we see it for what it really is. In fact…I do not believe that our nation can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam…I know that this statement sounds extreme. But I am not shrinking back from its implications. The fact is that…America was founded in part with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed. And I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we no longer can afford to ignore.
Parsley approvingly quotes Christian theologian Jonathan Edwards’ reference to Islam as “Satan’s Mohammedan kingdom.” He points out that the United States’ first war—the battle against the Barbary Coast pirates—was “waged against Muslim pirates who took our people captive because they believed in a Jesus crucified by the Jews.” (With that one statement, Parsley slams both Islam and Judaism.) He repeatedly refers to the United States’ “historic conflict with Islam,” and adds, “We have no choice. The time has come. In fact, we may be already losing the battle. As I scan the world, I find that Islam at this moment is responsible for more pain, more bloodshed, more devastation than nearly any other force on Earth.”
With the crowd in the pews listening intently, Parsley continues to denigrate Islam, claiming that the religion itself was responsible for 9/11 and that hostility and violence is “the spirit that has come to fill Islam or perhaps that Islam encompassed from the very beginning.” He tries to frighten his followers:
This is about to freak you out…Since September 11, 2001, 34,000 Americans have become Muslims…This means that thousands of Americans have embraced the very religion that inspired the worst assault upon their nation in a generation. Did you know that there are some 1,209 mosques in America? Twenty-five percent of which have been built since 1994. Did you know that there are nearly a billion and a half Muslims in the world…But how would you know it? After all, it’s not in People magazine.
According to Parsley, there’s no coexisitng with Muslims. He tells the tale of a Christian man who once dared to sell land to a mosque rather than to a church—an ominous sign that Christianity is losing the struggle against Islam. “You need to understand today” who was responsible for 9/11, Parsley nearly shouts. “Muslim Islamic fundamentalists and extremists are what did that, and your government and politicians and preachers want you to snuggle up next door to them and allow them to build a mosque next door to your church, while you sing hallelujah.”
The preacher paints a dark picture:
Islam is growing rapidly and is becoming more violent. America has historically understood herself to be a bastion against Islam in the world…History is crashing in upon us…Americans need to wake up…We can tell you…Britney Spears’ lyrics to her latest CD. But we don’t know anything about other religions…’We ought to just all get along’…’We shouldn’t say anything about other faiths.’ Excuse me. Excuse me. The fact is that Americans are woefully ignorant of other faiths. This is not only tragic. But when it comes to Islam, now the greatest religious enemy of our civilization and the world, it’s dangerous.
The problem, Parsley insists, is not radical Muslims who have hijacked a faith, but the religion itself:
I must state three important truths…No. 1, the God of Christianity and the God of Islam are two separate beings…Mr. Bush, I support you. You need to stop saying that the God of Islam and the God of Christianity are the same God…No. 2, Muhammad received revelations from demon spirits, not from the living God. No. 3, Islam is an anti-Christ religion that intends, through violence, to conquer the world. Did you get those three truths?
In a long riff, Parsley maintains that Muhammad was tricked by a demon into believing that he had heard the word of God. Thus, he asserts, the entire religion of Islam is based upon a satanic deception: “Muhammad was tragically beset by a demon which he mistook for the living God. He thus became a mouthpiece of a conspiracy of spiritual evil…There are so few who will talk about [this].”
But Parsley is willing. And he also readily offered McCain his endorsement during that February 26, 2008, campaign rally in Cincinnati. At the event, McCain extolled Parsley for his “leadership” and “guidance.” Since then, McCain aides have said that the senator’s acceptance of Parsley’s endorsement was not an endorsement of Parsley’s views. And they have dismissed any comparison between Reverend Wright and Reverend Parsley, noting that McCain has never attended a service conducted by Parsley. But imagine if Barack Obama had campaigned with an imam who had called for destroying Christianity. A media and political uproar would ensue—with wide-ranging calls for Obama to condemn the imam.
McCain has also refused to reject the endorsement he received from the Reverend John Hagee, a Texas-based televangelist who referred to the Catholic Church as “the great whore” and a “false cult system” and who called Hurricane Katrina retribution from God for the sins of New Orleans’ homosexual residents. But Parsley may be the more politically crucial pastor for McCain. McCain probably cannot win Ohio in November without the support of large numbers of social conservative voters. In 2004, Parsley, whose megachurch boasts thousands of members, led so-called values voters to the polls, where they helped propel George W. Bush to victory over John Kerry. If McCain were to repudiate Parsley, he would risk losing Parsley as a surrogate and, perhaps worse, alienate his flock. So McCain has ducked, keeping quiet about an anti-Islam extremist who repeatedly proclaims in sermons, “I will be silent no more.”Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24657
New speakers of Minderico: Dynamics and tensions in the revitalization process
File Size Format ferreira_2016.pdf 1.01 MB Adobe PDF View/Open
Item Summary
Title: New speakers of Minderico: Dynamics and tensions in the revitalization process
Authors: Ferreira, Vera
Date Issued: Feb 2016
Publisher: University of Hawai'i Press
Citation: Ferreira, Vera. 2016. New speakers of Minderico: Dynamics and tensions in the revitalization process. In Vera Ferreira and Peter Bouda (eds.). Language Documentation and Conservation in Europe. 26-37. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
Series: LD&C Special Publication
Abstract: From the sixteenth century on, the blankets of Minde, a small village in the center of Portugal, became famous all over the country. The wool combers, blanket producers, and traders of Minde began to use Minderico in order to protect their business from “intruders”. Later, this secret language extended to all social and professional groups and became the main means of communication in the village. During this process, Minderico turned into a full-fledged language with a very characteristic intonation and a complex morphosyntax, differentiating itself from Portuguese. However, the number of speakers declined drastically during the last 50 years. Minderico is now actively spoken by 150 speakers, but only 23 of them are fluent speakers. More than half of the fluent speakers are new speakers of the language. New speakerness is a relatively new phenomenon in the Minderico speaking community and a direct result of the revitalization process which was initiated in 2009. This paper examines the role of the new speakers in the revitalization of Minderico, considering issues of authenticity and socio-linguistic legitimacy.
URI/DOI: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24657
ISBN: 978-0-9856211-5-5
Rights: Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License
Appears in Collections: LD&C Special Publication No. 9: Language Documentation and Conservation in Europe
Please email libraryada-l@lists.hawaii.edu if you need this content in ADA-compliant format.
Items in ScholarSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.Photo: Nissan
Photo: Nissan
Nearly 22,000 people in North-America have contacted Nissan since the company unveiled the car in August. Because of this strong positive demand, Nissan is now announcing that it will begin taking reservations for the Leaf EV in the Spring of 2010. "Of those who have contacted Nissan, about half report that they want to obtain LEAF as soon as it's available, and another 45 percent indicate interest in owning an electric vehicle within the next two to three years."
Looks like the range of the Leaf (100 miles) won't be too much of a problem, at least at first: "More than 90 percent of the people who have contacted Nissan indicate that they drive less than 100 miles daily, which is the range of LEAF when fully charged. Meanwhile, 75 percent indicate that they are members of two-car households - prime candidates for an efficient commuter car like the all-electric, zero-emission LEAF."
The reservation system will allow people to receive updates on the Leaf, and it will let them know when the electric car is available either for a test drive or to buy.
Photo: Nissan
Via Nissan
More Nissan Leaf Electric Car
Nissan Unveils the All-Electric LEAF to the World (Exclusive Photos)
Nissan Leaf Electric Car to Emit Sound Similar to Blade Runner's Flying CarsIn the year since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency, earnings have crept upward, employers have added 1.8 million jobs, and the stock market has soared by 22%. That’s enough to boost Trump’s grade on the economy to A- in the latest installment of the Yahoo Finance Trumponomics Report Card.
Trump’s initial grade was a B when we launched the report card in May. Strong job growth — including the manufacturing sector |
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Submited: 2016-04-01 06:42 Front page replaced with fake paywall16-year-old James Doyle was shot in the chest by 14-year-old Daniel Nadler on June 27, 2010. Doyle was an Atheist, Nadler a Christian. They were arguing about religion at the time of the murder. Apparently, Christian + hormonal teen + argument about religion + shotgun = murder, but does not equal a hate crime. The case has been under reported in the press. Plus, it was not an accident.
“The kids were up all night messing around with the gun and then there were some angry words and the victim was shot,” said Indianola Police Chief Steve Bonnett. The killing was motivated, Bonnett said, but he declined to release specific details: “This wasn’t a case of kids playing with a gun and it accidentally went off.”
Nadler’s motivation should be examined. If he killed Doyle because he was an Atheist, this crime becomes a hate crime and should be handed differently. They way it is going Doyle will walk out of jail when he turns 18. How is that justice?
The family wants justice, but it looks like Daniel Nadler will not be held accountable.
The family of an Indianola teen who was shot to death last summer says the boy charged with the crime is getting off scott free. Fourteen year-old Daniel Nadler was originally charged with first degree murder for the shooting death of 16-year old James Doyle. The charge has since been lowered to second degree murder, and a plea agreement could lower it even further. That possibility isn't sitting well with Doyle's family.
Read the comment thread – it will break your heart.
You can help. Tell the people who are in charge of the case what you think.
A boy was murdered because he was an Atheist. The Christian who murdered him will escape justice. The case is under reported in the press. Please help by contacting the people prosecuting the case:
Judge Richard B. Clogg richard.clogg@iowacourts.gov
Prosecuting attorney: Brian Tingle attorney@co.warren.ia.us
You can also help by spreading the word.
Hat tip: justice_for_doyleBy Christian Jarrett
For millennia, humans have enjoyed using alcohol as a social lubricant. The reasons seem obvious at first. Most of us have had a drink or two that’s put us at ease, helped us lose our inhibitions, lifted our mood. And yet, literally for decades through the last century, psychologists and other scientists struggled to find evidence for what they termed the “tension reduction theory” that proposed alcohol was rewarding because of its relaxing, mood-enhancing effects. In the lab, alcohol often had no effect or even made people feel worse.
A new review in Behaviour Research and Therapy helps make sense of this mismatch between real life and the lab. Too much of the early research presumed alcohol’s effects are straightforward, that if you give a dose of alcohol to a person sat alone in a psych lab, that its pharmacological effects will kick in and make them feel jollier and less anxious.
The reality, as Michael Sayette of the University of Pittsburgh explains in his review, is that alcohol’s rewarding effects interact in complex ways with our thoughts and emotions and the social situations we find ourselves in. To uncover why social drinking is so rewarding, researchers have had to develop more sophisticated, realistic experiments. Here I’ve pulled out five of the key insights from Sayette’s review that help explain why so many of us find alcohol the perfect companion when we’re socialising.
Alcohol makes us stay in the moment
With moderate doses of alcohol we seem less affected by past experiences, our mood is more connected to the immediate moment. One study to show this involved researchers filming small groups of strangers interacting. Comparing the changing facial emotions of those participants who’d drunk modest amounts of alcohol with those who’d drunk a non-alcoholic beverage or placebo (they thought it was alcohol but it wasn’t) showed that alcohol seemed to reduce “emotional inertia” – that is, the intoxicated participants’ current emotions were less affected by their earlier emotions. As Sayette writes in his review, alcohol “increases the ability to experience the present moment unbound by past experience”.
Alcohol reduces anxiety, but not fear
Moderate intoxication doesn’t seem to help reduce our fear of a threat that we know is definitely coming, but it does reduce our anxiety about unpredictable threats, which could help explain its appeal in social situations. An unpredictable threat is more analogous to the challenge of a social situation where you never know when you might next suffer a snub or awkward exchange. Researchers demonstrated this effect of alcohol by measuring participants’ startle response to loud noises during a task in which they knew they were definitely going to receive mild electric shocks, or another in which there was uncertainty about whether they would receive a shock or not. Drinking alcohol reduced participants’ startle reaction and their subjective feelings of anxiety only when the shock threat was uncertain. “This experiment provides clear evidence that the magnitude of alcohol stress reduction is greater when there is uncertainty about the severity of the upcoming threat than when the threat is well defined,” the researchers said.
Alcohol narrows our attentional focus making it easier to ignore worries and threats
When we’re mildly intoxicated we seem to have less spare mental capacity which means that as long as we’re currently distracted by a pleasant or non-threatening task – such as chatting with friends – our minds are less likely to have the resources left over to worry about other things. For a study published in 1988, participants were either mildly intoxicated or sober, and either looked at art slides or sat quietly, after being told that they would soon have to give a speech. Being intoxicated and looking at art slides helped reduced the anxiety about the upcoming speech consistent with the “attention-allocation” model of alcohol’s effects – that is, presumably the tipsy participants were unable to fret about the upcoming speech because the artwork occupied their diminished powers of attention. Alcohol or artwork on their own did not have the same benefit.
Alcohol boosts social bonding and the catchiness of positive emotions
It’s little wonder that early research struggled to pin down the rewarding effects of alcohol: so many of these studies involved testing participants on their own when some of alcohol’s most relevant effects seem to manifest specifically in social situations. Recent research has begun to capture these social effects. For example, when psychologists filmed small groups of strangers getting to know each other, they found that those groups who were mildly intoxicated reported increased feelings of closeness with their new acquaintances and they displayed more genuine “Duchenne” smiles, as compared with sober groups or groups drinking placebo. What’s more, alcohol increased the frequency of “golden moments” when all three members of the group were showing Duchenne smiles at once.
Men and extraverts are especially likely to experience the social benefits of moderate drinking
Other research that’s used the same format, of filming groups of strangers getting to know each other, has found that extraverts are especially likely to report mood-enhancing and social bonding effects of alcohol, which might partly help explain why extraverts are more likely to develop problems with drinking to excess. Similarly, men seem especially receptive to alcohol’s social effects. For instance, other research that’s used conversation volume to gauge the merriment of social gatherings has found that small groups of sober women seem merrier than small groups of sober men, but this gender difference disappears when participants have had an alcoholic drink. The researchers said this shows “greater alcohol reward for male groups and thus identifies a mechanism that may support heavy drinking in male drinking contexts.”
–
Concluding his review, Michael Sayette says that that there is still a lot more we need to know about social drinking: for example, a lot of the social group research has so far involved strangers, but of course much of the time we drink socially with friends in which case the precise effects of alcohol might be quite different. He also notes that these findings on social drinking could help inform new ways to help people who have problems with controlling their alcohol consumption. For instance, by better understanding the rewarding psychological effects of alcohol, clinicians might be better placed to help clients find different, potentially healthier ways to increase their enjoyment of socialising.
—The effects of alcohol on emotion in social drinkers
Image via Gettyimages.co.uk
Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research DigestA regulation to be posted in the Federal Register this week will mandate that transgender people in thousands of federally operated facilities — whether they are employees or visitors — must be granted access to restrooms consistent with their gender identity.
BuzzFeed News obtained a draft notice circulated to federal agencies outlining the rule, which will apply to roughly 9,200 properties operated by the General Services Administration.
In addition to the estimated 1 million federal civilian workers employed in those spaces, GSA spokesperson Ashley Nash-Hahn told BuzzFeed News, the rule will cover anyone who enters the facilities — from people visiting courthouses to those stopping in at Social Security offices.
"This includes all kinds of Americans," Nash-Hahn said. "We wanted to make clear that a person can use facilities that match their gender identity, and we think that's a good thing."
A bulletin about the rule, which was circulated to agency heads on Aug. 8 by GSA Administrator Denise Turner Roth, states, “Federal agencies occupying space under the jurisdiction, custody, or control of GSA must allow individuals to use restroom facilities and related areas consistent with their gender identity."
Chai Feldblum, a member of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, told BuzzFeed News the rule is of “great significance.” She added, “This type of requirement can change the default for what life is like for those federal employees and people who enter federal buildings.”
The regulation builds on and reinforces a growing body of interpretations by the Obama administration to protect transgender people under longstanding civil rights laws. Several agencies in recent years have found that bans on sex discrimination — under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 — ban transgender discrimination as a form of sex discrimination.
Among them, the Office of Personnel Management issued guidance on accommodating transgender federal workers in restrooms. Further, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has made clear that transgender employees facing discrimination have a legal cause of action if they are blocked from restrooms that match their gender. The Justice Department announced it was backing the EEOC’s view of Title VII.
Still, as Feldblum pointed out, the rule being announced this week establishes a “proactive requirement — this is a rule that federal agencies say, this is how will we will operate.”
Transgender people do not need to complete any medical procedure to qualify to use the restroom that aligns with their gender, nor can they be required to show proof of surgery, the bulletin states. They also cannot be restricted to single-occupancy restrooms.
Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said that the move is “not a big surprise” given the trends toward federal protections for transgender people. But, she said, it does provide “more evidence that the Obama administration is serious about enforcing the law.”
But that enforcement is not without resistance. More than 20 states have sued the federal government in recent months for using legal interpretations to clarify protections for transgender people in schools and workplaces. Two lawsuits, one led by Texas and another by Nebraska, challenge guidance documents and argue that bans on sex discrimination do not cover transgender discrimination.
Not all federal properties are covered by the GSA's upcoming regulation, Nash-Hahn said. The White House, Capitol building, and national parks are outside the agency's jurisdiction, for example. However, the federal government has made clear that such rules already apply to federal workers and students as a general matter.The TSA : Keeping America safe one Family Guy joke at a time.
LAST MONDAY, Leigh Van Bryan and Emily Bunting landed at LAX ready for a nice vacation. Instead, they were detained by armed guards, handcuffed, and kept in separate holding cells for 12 hours.
Why? A few tweets they sent prior to the trip resulted in them being flagged by the Department of Homeland Security. The offending tweets:
“Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?” “3 weeks today, we’re totally in LA p****** people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up!”
As Van Bryan attempted to explain to the TSA, “destroy America” in this case meant “party in America” — fairly common slang. And the Marilyn Monroe quote is apparently from the (American) show Family Guy. But even if it wasn’t — really? We’re taking that tweet seriously?
It would seem so. Federal agents reportedly searched their luggage for spades and shovels, stating that they believed Bunting was going to act as Van Bryan’s lookout during the tomb raiding.
According to The New York Times, the Department of Homeland Security announced earlier this month that they were taking steps to improve how they monitor social media. The FBI stated that a newly developed application would have the “ability to instantly search and monitor key words and strings” on publicly available sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Their misinterpretation of Van Bryan’s use of “destroy” makes me wonder about Twitter’s recent announcement that they’re giving themselves the right to censor tweets in “specific countries.” Based on this Homeland Security fail, I can’t help but wonder how Twitter plans on choosing which tweets to block, taking things like slang and having a sense of humor into consideration. Is there really any way to scan all the ridiculous, uneducated, goofy things millions of people say online every day and find those that pose a real threat without arresting innocent people in the process?
Probably not. But at least I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that the US is safe from British twenty-somethings out to pull a Weekend at Bernie’s with Marilyn Monroe’s corpse.I’ve been listening to teachers tell me not to use Wikipedia since fourth grade. Yesterday, looking at a slide that advised using podcasts and blogs for research but warned against the evils of Wikipedia, something inside me snapped. I have had enough.
Wikipedia is imperfect. Everybody knows about its flaws. Anyone can edit it anonymously. There are unquestionable factual inaccuracies. Not every Wikipedia page is amazing. High school teachers and college professors love to note these truisms to students as if they’re breaking new ground and imparting wisdom. In point of fact, they sound silly.
I’m here to defend Wikipedia, which has been unfairly cast off by much of an academic community that tends to focus more on the “wiki” than the “pedia.” The truth of the matter is there are few, if any, resources that represent better jumping off points for research. The website contains an unbelievable amount of information, is easily accessible and, more often than not, is sourced comprehensively. The page on the Vietnam War, for example, has more than 400 references. Wikipedia covers a far broader assembly of subjects than any encyclopedia you could find in a library. It covers those subjects in far greater depth than any print encyclopedia. Further, it is usually more up-to-date than any print encyclopedia. In short, the most popular encyclopedia on the web is better than any other competitor.
The very existence of Wikipedia has allowed humans to learn more, and more quickly, than would ever be possible prior to the digital age. When you want to find out who the 22nd president was, you open up Wikipedia (It’s Grover Cleveland; I just checked). When you want to find out what the tallest building in North America is, you open up Wikipedia. Why? Because Wikipedia combines expediency with an incredible accuracy rate.
When I stumble across factually incorrect information (and I say this as someone who spends copious amounts of time on Wikipedia), the errors are usually immaterial and minor. Additionally, these errors are usually on pages that probably should not even exist because they receive so little traffic. Try messing up President Obama’s Wikipedia page. I’m sure you can. Anyone can edit Wikipedia. But the error will be fixed in moments.
Wikipedia has an incredibly active community of folks all over the world constantly editing, adding to and fixing its pages. It’s not always perfect. But it’s pretty close.
To clarify, I am not advocating that research papers should suddenly be littered with citations of Wikipedia. If there is any question about a “fact” that you find on Wikipedia, it should be corroborated with other sources. But I would argue that is true of any fact from any website. There’s misinformation all over the web. You can find it on Wikipedia. You can find it in blogs. You can even find it on the websites of major newspapers. I’m not equating Wikipedia to The New York Times, but I am saying Wikipedia is an outstanding resource.
Wikipedia should never be where academic research ends. As a place to start, though, it is hard to top.
Tim Balk is a Medill freshman. He can be contacted at timothybalk2018@u.northwestern.edu. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to opinion@dailynorthwestern.com.
CommentsDisney-Lucasfilm’s “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” and Disney-Pixar’s “The Incredibles 2” dominated social media again last week, according to media-measurement firm comScore and its PreAct service.
The ninth “Star Wars” movie generated 121,000 new conversations last week after airing a TV spot on Nov. 20 and releasing several new images throughout the week. “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” has pulled in more than 4.12 million new conversations three weeks before its Dec. 15 launch. Early tracking released on Nov. 21 showed the tentpole could open in the $200 million range at the domestic box office.
Directed by Rian Johnson, the movie picks up where 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” left off. It stars returning cast members Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, and Andy Serkis. The new cast members include Kelly Marie Tran, Laura Dern, and Benicio del Toro. It’s the final film role for Fisher, who died last December.
“The Incredibles 2” earned 117,000 new conversations last week following the Nov. 18 release of its first teaser trailer. The animated comedy is the sequel to the 2004 original with Holly Hunter, Craig T. Nelson, Sarah Vowell, and Samuel L. Jackson reprising their roles. The film is scheduled to be released on June 15.
Related Chadwick Boseman Explains That 'SNL' Potato Salad Joke Machine Learning Saves 'Avengers' VFX Artists Time
Fox’s “Maze Runner: The Death Cure” produced 30,000 new conversations last week, two months before the Jan. 26 opening of the film — the finale of the “Maze Runner” sci-fi trilogy. The movie’s original release date has been delayed for nearly a year in order to allow star Dylan O’Brien to recover from injuries sustained during shooting.
Disney-Marvel’s “Avengers: Infinity War” drew 19,000 new conversations last week as anticipation begins to build for the May release of the tentpole, in which the Avengers team up with the “Guardians of the Galaxy” superheroes. The film, directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, was featured in four Vanity Fair covers on Nov. 26.
Universal’s “Pitch Perfect 3” produced nearly 17,000 new conversations last week, thanks to the Nov. 22 release of a musical mash-up with contestants of “The Voice.” The film, which hits theaters on Dec. 22, stars Anna Kendrick, Anna Camp, Rebel Wilson, Brittany Snow, Hailee Steinfeld, Alexis Knapp, Ester Dean, and Elizabeth Banks.The new San Jose Earthquakes stadium is coming – just not quite as soon as they’d originally hoped.
Due to what the team termed “unforeseen conditions at the stadium site,” the opening date of the new stadium has been pushed back to the second half of the 2014 season. That means the Quakes will play eight games in 2014 at Buck Shaw Stadium, one game – presumably on or around July 4 – at Stanford Stadium and nine games at the new stadium.
“Due to the extraordinary conditions at the stadium site the opening date has been pushed back,” Earthquakes president Dave Kaval said in a press release. “Our ownership group and organization is committed to building a world-class venue for our fans and to creating the true epicenter of soccer in the Bay Area. We feel that a second-half opening ensures that we accomplish that goal, while giving our team a strong home schedule for the best situation competitively.
During the demolition phase, the construction team uncovered obstacles ranging from concrete vaults to used munitions from the FMC factory to steel beams and hundreds of concrete pilings. The vaults presented perhaps the most significant problem, specifically related to drainage issues.
“We have encountered incredibly difficult unforeseen conditions at the stadium site,” said Devcon Construction Vice President Peter Copriviza. “With foundations over 10 feet deep, drilled piers, unexpected underground chambers, complicated with a relatively high water table, we have been presented with a series of challenges during both the demolition and grading process.”
Nonetheless, the Quakes are still confident that 2014 will see their new 18,000-seat stadium unveiled.
“We would like to commend our construction partners for all their efforts despite facing numerous complex conditions at the site,” said Kaval. “They have navigated through some difficult situations and kept us on track for a 2014 opening.”Yesterday, conservative group Turning Point USA (TPUSA) launched a website, Professor Watchlist, “to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values, and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Visitors, the website states, may use the Watchlist to “see if any of [their] professors have records of opposing freedom of speech on campus.” They may also submit new names to the list.
Some free speech advocates and professors whose names are on the list have voiced concerns about the website. FIRE will be watching closely for adverse action against the professors. We want to make two things clear at the outset: First, TPUSA does have the right to draw up such a list, but, second, professors who may be facing discipline or punishment due to their constitutionally protected speech should contact FIRE right away.
TPUSA’s Watchlist appears to have multiple goals, including promoting free expression and pushing back against “leftist” views. The former is, of course, consistent with FIRE’s mission; the latter is outside the scope of FIRE’s work. We encourage any student who is censored or punished by campus authorities because of his or her beliefs—conservative, liberal, or otherwise—to submit a case to FIRE. To the extent that any group encourages students to fight back against viewpoint-based censorship and punishment, we commend it.
While a public college or university cannot punish a professor simply for his or her viewpoints, groups like TPUSA are free to publicize professors’ stances with which they disagree and to promote their own opinions about those professors. FIRE does not take positions on issues outside our mission, but we stand ready to defend the expressive rights of other parties who wish to discuss any subject. (We make an exception and step into the conversation when speakers opine on the topic of free expression itself, due process, or other topics within FIRE’s mission.)
Because the Watchlist specifies reasons for professors’ inclusion on the list, website users can decide for themselves whether TPUSA is objecting to a professor for his or her suppression of speech or whether TPUSA simply disagrees with the professor’s viewpoints. Users can also conduct their own fact-checking; as Inside Higher Ed reported today, some entries on the list “include alleged errors of fact or interpretation.” Listees are already speaking out in their own defense, and the public conversations about each professor’s circumstances are likely to be ongoing. Critics of the list are even taking to Twitter with the hashtag #trollprofwatchlist, naming names like Dr. John Hammond of Jurassic Park and Gilderoy Lockhart of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Free speech advocates are right to be on the lookout. Historically, creating a list of disfavored viewpoints or of people who hold them has often been a first step towards official sanction. The American Association of University Professors also expressed concern about the Watchlist; in a 1985 statement regarding a similar effort, it said that such “[e]xternal monitoring of in-class statements” is “likely to have a chilling effect and result in self-censorship.” FIRE hopes neither of these results come to pass, but if any college or university takes action or attempts to restrict expression based on the Watchlist—or any similar list—we will employ all of the resources at our disposal in response. (Indeed, FIRE has already taken action to defend the free speech rights of a few of the individuals on the Watchlist, such as University of Kansas professor David Guth.)
FIRE took the same position back in 2008 in response to the National Association of Scholars’ “Argus Project,” which, like the Watchlist, had multiple goals. As FIRE’s Robert Shibley wrote:
To be clear: If NAS’ project encourages universities to punish professors for their opinions, FIRE will oppose it in those cases, as we would anyone else with a similar agenda. If, however, the project serves merely to criticize professors for their scholarship, while that would certainly not be a FIRE issue, it is NAS’ right to do so.
If you are a student or professor who has been punished or censored because of your viewpoint, contact FIRE. If you disagree with the views espoused by your professors, by TPUSA, or by any other person or group, speak up and make your voice heard.After decades of rum dominance Bacardi is no longer the best selling rum, having been deposed by United Spirits’ McDowell’s no.1 Celebration, according to The Millionaires’ Club 2015.
Bacardi’s volumes dropped 5% in 2014 to 18.2 million 9-litre cases – its third successive year of sales decline – while the Indian rum brand’s slide was slower, at -4%, enabling it to reach the top of the category for the first time, by just 0.1m cases.
It was a reverse of 2013 when Bacardi edged out McDowell’s by 0.1m cases.
Though Bacardi has diversified its portfolio in recent years, it has struggled to find growth against the backdrop of an ailing white rum category.
There has been a three-way tussle for rum leadership since 2012, with Philippine brand Tanduay taking Bacardi close in 2012.
Tanduay recovered volumes lost in the wake of typhoon Haiyan in 2013, to grow to 17m cases in 2014 and take third place in the category.
For the full report on rum The Millionaires’ Club 2015 is published as a supplement to the July edition of Drinks International.Dear EarthTalk : How far along are we on efforts to support large numbers of people on [ Mars ] or other planets if our population gets too big or we ruin the environment here on Earth?
— Barbara Christie, Hull, MA
As the human population swells and global warming compounds other environmental problems here on Earth, the notion of colonizing other planets is more appealing than ever. While we are far from being able to support human communities elsewhere in the solar system and beyond, environmentalists are increasingly interested in space exploration as one potential solution to our own earthly woes.
Mars is by far the most promising planet in the solar system on which we could support substantial human life. Currently, Mars is a desolate desert, but the so-called “red planet” once contained liquid water and perhaps harbored life. Many of the elements we depend upon to support life here on Earth, including carbon, silicon, iron and even frozen water, are present on Mars, giving researchers hope that one day some of us could hopscotch through space and set up shop there.
The first challenge of colonizing Mars is transportation. The furthest a manned mission has ever gone to date is the moon, and Mars is 140 times further away. Currently the biggest hurdle is the cost of spaceflight. But a new breed of private companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin have invested in making launching more efficient by streamlining manufacturing and even reusing rockets. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, claims he can reduce the cost of spaceflight 100-fold.
The best concrete plan for landing humans on Mars is called Mars Direct. Designed by aerospace engineer and Mars Society founder Bob Zubrin, this plan was rejected by NASA because it failed to fully utilize new technologies such as the International Space Station. Zubrin thinks we could get ourselves to Mars for only $55 billion, which seems like a bargain compared to the $250 billion figure suggested for a Mars landing back in 1969 after our first moon landing.
The most immediate problem for human habitation on Mars is the severe temperature. The average temperature on the surface of the red planet is -67° Fahrenheit compared to the balmy 61° here on Earth. Elon Musk suggests there are two ways to overcome this obstacle. The fast way would be by dropping nuclear weapons on Mars’ poles, while a slower solution would entail emitting huge amounts of carbon into the Martian atmosphere much as we are doing on Earth but to a larger extent. In theory, this carbon seeding plan would cause the atmosphere to grow and eventually shield much of the radiation that would otherwise be harmful to Martians. Since carbon dioxide is the main gaseous nutrient consumed by plants, it’s possible that many plants could thrive on Mars. Without competition, plants could take over the planet and put oxygen into the atmosphere, eventually making it possible for humans and other animals to populate Mars without oxygen masks.
There are still problems with colonizing Mars, however. Its low gravity would corrode human bones and giant storms rage across the currently barren planet. In sharp contrast, Earth is rich in resources and water, making it naturally habitable for plants and animals. Addressing the problems here on Earth will likely be easier than escaping them by fleeing to Mars or other planets.
CONTACTS: NASA, www.nasa.gov; Blue Origin, www.blueorigin.com; SpaceX, www.spacex.com; The Mars Society, www.marssociety.org.
EarthTalk® is produced by Roddy Scheer & Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of the nonprofit Earth Action Network. To donate, visit www.earthtalk.org. Send questions to: question@earthtalk.org.IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT:
Some adjustments have been made to early chapters, Neo is no longer involved in the story, Emerald has sort of half replaced he since we hear early on in season 3 about her complaining of having to socialise with team RWBY. This has little to no impact on this story as a whole with the exception of Ruby not getting some shipping with Neo.
Sorry for yet another really short chapter, I'm doing my best here with he time I have but writers block feels really difficult to get past at this point. Anyway hope you enjoy despite the chapter length.
Please leave a review.
A blessing Conceded.
Coco sighed deeply, blowing steam from the top of the styrofoam cup wrapped in her well manicured hands. It was difficult to see how much fluid remained in the cup in the near twilight of the moonlit night. Coco could take her sunglasses off but the last thing she wanted her team to see were her bloodshot eyes. She had to be the strong one. Yatsuhashi was in pieces, wracked with guilt over not being there to protect Velvet. Fox was conflicted, he still hated CRDL for their past transgressions but had to acknowledge that without Cardin or Russell, Velvet would likely have died. Coco could sympathise with both, her heart was riddled with the same guilt that ate away at Yatsuhashi. She'd already experienced what Fox was going through, but she'd reached her conclusion. The moment she'd witnessed Cardin's refusal to leave Velvet behind (thanks to Rod's semblance) Coco had made her mind up.
She took her eyes off of Velvet and turned to look at her slumbering teammates. Fox had fallen asleep, slumped in an armchair around half an hour after he'd swallowed a couple of mild pain killers. His functioning arm was curled protectively around the sling which encompassed his other limb. Yatsuhashi sat cross legged on the tiled floor, his back against the wall beneath the room's sole window. He'd been meditating for a while, berating himself internally despite the silent and still exterior the stoic swordsman displayed. By the time Coco had resolved to speak to him, she'd found his chin resting on his chest as he lost his battle against exhaustion. That was two hours ago, since then Coco had had only her guilt and the constant beep of the machines for company. Sleep would have claimed her long ago but the coffee machine behind the reception desk had supplied her with the nectar of the gods, or as other people called it: 'caffeine'. She drained her cup of its lukewarm contents and wiped her mouth with her forearm. "Thank fuck for coffee." She sighed contentedly as she slid the polystyrene container into the stack of fifteen similarly empty cups at her feet. She sat back in her chair armchair and propped her feet up on the foot of Velvet's bed.
"Oh what I wouldn't give for a coffee right now." a tired and pained voice wheezed.
Coco craned her neck over the headrest of her armchair to look at her two teammates who were both still sound asleep. Her head snapped back round to face Cardin. His silhouette lay propped up on one elbow, facing in her direction. "How long have you been awake?"
Cardin's silhouette shrugged stiffly. "Only a couple of minutes." He replied. "Is Velvet ok?"
"She will be, hasn't woken up yet but Peach says you should both make a full recovery within a week."
"I would have thought it'd take longer. How long was I out?" He added.
"About three hours. How're you feeling?"
"Like hammered shit, you?." Cardin answered, his white teeth flashing in the darkened room.
"That makes two of us." Coco. Said, smiling back, pushing herself out of the arm chair as her joints made audible popping sounds, she cracked her neck for good measure. "I find that coffee helps, you want one?"
"Please."
Coco left without another word and soon returned with a pair of steaming cups. In her absence Cardin had found the remote for his hospital bed and adjusted it to a more upright setting. He took the proffered cup from her outstretched hand. "Thanks."
Coco sat on the bottom corner of his bed facing Velvet, her hands cradling her sixteenth cup. "I saw what you did." She said without turning.
"What do you mean?"
"You didn't leave her behind. You could have, but you didn't. I saw you fight off the Grimm. I saw you pull her out of the wreckage. I saw you carry her to safety even when Velvet told you to save yourself." She paused to take a frugal sip of her coffee. Cardin's own cup was almost too hot to hold, so he couldn't fathom how she was able to drink hers yet. "You were there to protect her, even when her team, even when I, wasn't… " She tailed off, saying those words out loud allowed the pool of guilt and self loathing to finally swallow her.
"You were there. If you hadn't arrived when you did Velvet would have died, I would have died, Russell too. None of what I did would have mattered if you didn't fight your way through to us." He soothed.
Coco turned his way and gave him a sad smile, her shining eyes hidden behind the impassive dark lenses of her sunglasses. "You know, if you carry on not being an asshole… I might actually start to feel bad about shooting you."
"I feel like that's the nicest thing you're ever going to say to me."
Coco looked back at her unconscious teammate and gave an almost imperceptible shrug. She sighed and removed her sunglasses. Coco turned her head to face him, her bloodshot stare boring into his indigo orbs. "I think its time we were honest with each other." There was no animosity in those brown eyes, only exhaustion.
"I thought we already were?" Cardin responded neutrally
"You know what I mean Cardin." She countered sternly. "Before the sparring incident, you were an asshole. You and your team. You didn't give a damn who you hurt…"
Cardin took a sip of his coffee, burning his tongue but buying himself time to think. He knew she was right, agreeing was the best option. "I know."
"...But you aren't that person anymore. You put your life on the line for her. You care about her, love her even..."
This was getting far too honest for Cardin's liking. "I-"
"-Which is why I'm giving you a chance."
"What?" Cardin blurted in complete disbelief.
"One. Chance." Coco said in a low voice. Her expression hardened, as a glare so threatening it could make an alpha Beowolf piss its pants formed on her face. "If you fuck up, if you hurt Velvet in any way, I'll rip you into pieces so small they'll have to bury what's left of you in a bucket."
Cardin swallowed, hard. "I won't hurt her but that sounds fair." He drained a third of his cup. "Hey Coco, thanks for giving me a chance."
"Don't mention it, thanks for saving my friend."
"Have we both gone soft or what?" Cardin joked.
"Pfft, speak for yourself. I eat Nevermores for breakfast… without any milk." she said with a smile.
Cardin returned |
foreign policy adviser to Clinton, told Jewish Insider on Friday. “I believe that everybody is in strong support for Israel’s security and I think that Secretary Clinton's views about the importance of Israel’s security and the unbreakable bond between the U.S. and Israel is something that is held by all Democrats.”
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Sign up for Jewish Insider's curated Daily Kickoff newsletter here.When Elon Musk first revealed plans for a new kind of high-speed transport, the plans arrived like a lightning bolt. The new invention, called the Hyperloop, would ferry passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in less than 30 minutes, thanks to an ultralight design and an innovative combination of air blades and a semi-evacuated tube. It was a world-changer, assuming anyone succeeded in actually building it.
Then...we waited. For more than a year, nothing happened. Musk made the plans public and referred to preliminary tests in Texas, but it's unclear if he ever followed through on building a test model. Instead, he made the plans public, promising not to enforce his trademark on the idea and hoping others would pick up the idea and run with it.
Now, one of the first projects is finally finding its legs. First formed last September, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Inc. has announced a new stage of the project, together with new research into the finance and engineering of the system set to arrive later this week. The company works on an unusual model, drawing from a network of over a hundred professionals with experience from Boeing, Tesla, and SpaceX. Under the JumpStartFund model, each employee is compensated through a share of the company's eventual profits. If the system works, the profits will be shared far more broadly than a traditional corporation — but until that time, they're all volunteers.
The group is still a long way from actually producing a working Hyperloop, but it's already made serious progress on how an eventual system might look. The group envisions three classes — economy, business and freight — with dozens of possible routes across the US. The group is also looking into improvements on the initial design. "In the initial white paper, air has the advantage that it's cheap, but it also has problems with control," says CEO Dirk Ahlborn. If another medium performs better in testing, it will be easy to switch. After initial financial projections, the cost for the trans-California route is expected to fall between $7 and $16 billion — a good deal higher than Musk's initial estimate of $6 billion, but still a bargain compared to existing rail projects. "The biggest thing for me is the price," says Ahlborn. "We know it's not going to cost $50 billion — we know we're in a range that works."Image caption Sir John Dermot Turing looks at Stephen Kettle's sculpture of his uncle Alan Turing at the exhibition
There is something quite fitting that a single tweet sparked off a campaign to save the work of a man who helped to develop the world's first modern computer.
This, in turn, led to the development of an exhibition devoted to his life and work.
Rare mathematical papers written by Alan Turing are now part of a new display at the World War II codebreaking centre Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.
Turing, who took his own life in 1954 at the age of 41, helped to create the Bombe machine which was used to crack the Enigma code at Bletchley Park and later created one of the first designs for a stored-program computer.
During his life he only published 18 papers and gave offprints of 15 of them to his friend Prof Max Newman.
But after Newman's death, they changed hands a number of times and could have been lost to a private collector had it not been for the actions of a member of the Bletchley Park staff.
'Desolate tweet'
Director of museum operations Kelsey Griffin spotted they had come up for sale at Christie's auction house, and took matters into her own hands, turning to the social media network Twitter.
What started off as just one tweet had become almost the mission of a determined nation Kelsey Griffin, Director of museum operations, Bletchley Park
Disappointed to realise that the cost of this "very valuable cache of Turing's works" was way out of the reach of the Bletchley Park Trust, she posted what she called "a desolate tweet".
"The guide price of £300,000 and £500,000 meant that there was absolutely no way the Bletchley Park Trust could afford to buy them," she explained.
"I sent out a desolate tweet saying 'If only the trust could afford to buy these for the museum and its visitors'."
The call for help was spotted by Bletchley supporter and IT journalist Gareth Halfacree, who promptly launched a campaign to save the papers for the nation, which became viral across the Internet.
"Incredibly he raised £28,500 within 11 days," said Ms Griffin.
Search engine Google then pledged $100,000 (£63,800) and together with a "significant sum" from a private donor, the trust had £100,000 to spend on auction day.
"Sadly, it was a huge anti-climax because bidding started at £200,000, they failed to reach their reserve price and bidding stopped at £240,000," explained Ms Griffin.
Personal artefacts
With the papers still in danger of being sold overseas, "never to be seen or heard of again", Simon Greenish, then chief executive officer of the trust, entered into talks with Christie's and the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF).
The campaign also received the backing of Prime Minister David Cameron.
Then, in February 2011, the papers were finally saved when the NHMF stepped in to provide the final piece of funding of nearly £213,500.
"What started off as just one tweet had become almost the mission of a determined nation to bring this collection here to Bletchley Park," said Ms Griffin.
After the papers went on display, people began to offer items to the museum, which eventually became The Life and Works of Alan Turing exhibition.
It has now been longlisted for the Art Fund Prize 2012, the UK's annual museum of the year award.
Turing's family then stepped forward with some of his personal artefacts, which are now on show to the public for the first time.
Image caption Alan Turing used to practise his lectures on teddy bear Porgy
These include a teddy bear called Porgy, a biography of the scientist written by his mother, prize books awarded at school and his wristwatch, all of which provide a personal insight into the man.
William Newman, son of Cambridge professor Max Newman, then provided a hand-drawn Monopoly board on which the young William had played and beaten Turing.
Ms Griffin said they now not only had his papers, "but the most comprehensive exhibition of the life and works of Alan Turing in the world. The personal artefacts have added a very human dimension and we're very proud to have this open."
She said she was "thrilled" that her actions had led to the development of the exhibition and was proud that the tweet linked the story back to its origins.
"I'm absolutely delighted and almost still in a state of disbelief that all of this has come together," she said.
"One of the very poignant things in the exhibition is a letter to Alan Turing's mother written 20 years after his death when she was told for the very first time what a huge contribution he'd made to the outcome of World War II and also the vital contribution he'd made to the modern computer.
"So the fact that this astonishing collection of his life and works has been brought here by the very act of a tweet on a computer is rather fitting in itself - it rounds off the story."The 2003 Hamilton Tiger-Cats season was the 46th season for the team in the Canadian Football League and their 54th overall. The Tiger-Cats finished in 4th place in the East Division with a 1–17–0 record, which set the record for most regular season losses in professional Canadian football history. With a.059 record, the Tiger-Cats set a CFL record for worst winning percentage and are only second to the 1949 Hamilton Wildcats in Canadian football history who went winless in 1949. They also tied the 1961 BC Lions and 1959 Saskatchewan Roughriders for fewest wins in CFL history.
Offseason [ edit ]
CFL Draft [ edit ]
Rd Pick Player Position School 1 3 Julian Radlein RB British Columbia 3 21 Kevin Scott LB California PA 4 30 Agustin Barrenechea LB Calgary 5 38 David Kasouf WR Holy Cross 6 47 Erico-Olivier Hakim FB Saint Mary's
Preseason [ edit ]
Week Date Opponent Score Result Attendance Record B June 5 at Toronto Argonauts 26–18 Loss 8,201 0–1 C June 10 Toronto Argonauts 23–5 Loss 20,481 0–2
Regular season [ edit ]
Season standings [ edit ]
East Division Team GP W L T PF PA Pts Montreal Alouettes 18 13 5 0 562 409 26 Toronto Argonauts 18 9 9 0 473 433 18 Ottawa Renegades 18 7 11 0 467 581 14 Hamilton Tiger-Cats 18 1 17 0 293 583 2
[1]
Season schedule [ edit ]
Week Date Opponent Score Result Attendance Record 1 June 20 vs. Ottawa Renegades 27–17 Loss 15,318 0–1 2 June 30 at Toronto Argonauts 49–8 Loss 14,842 0–2 3 July 5 vs. Edmonton Eskimos 37–20 Loss 12,492 0–3 4 July 11 vs. Calgary Stampeders 17–11 Loss 15,193 0–4 5 July 16 at Edmonton Eskimos 52–15 Loss 33,785 0–5 6 July 20 at Saskatchewan Roughriders 42–9 Loss 23,510 0–6 7 Bye 8 Aug 2 vs. Winnipeg Blue Bombers 37–20 Loss 13,809 0–7 9 Aug 8 at Montreal Alouettes 30–17 Loss 20,202 0–8 10 Aug 16 vs. Montreal Alouettes 28–10 Loss 14,169 0–9 11 Aug 22 at BC Lions 47–25 Loss 23,010 0–10 12 Sept 1 vs. Toronto Argonauts 19–11 Loss 21,323 0–11 13 Sept 6 at Ottawa Renegades 45–28 Loss 26,588 0–12 14 Sept 12 vs. Saskatchewan Roughriders 27–24 (OT) Win 14,313 1–12 14 Sept 16 at Toronto Argonauts 24–14 Loss 15,472 1–13 15 Sept 27 vs. Montreal Alouettes 30–17 Loss 14,048 1–14 16 Oct 3 at Calgary Stampeders 32–12 Loss 32,052 1–15 17 Oct 10 at Winnipeg Blue Bombers 14–9 Loss 25,526 1–16 18 Oct 18 vs. BC Lions 29–23 Loss 13,106 1–17 19 Bye
[2][3]
Awards and records [ edit ]
2003 CFL All Stars [ edit ]
Eastern Division All-Star selections [ edit ]The University of Iowa is currently facing a lawsuit for its blatant disregard for the constitutional provisions of freedom of religion and association. Business Leaders in Christ (BLinC), a small Christian students group, was recently kicked off campus because it required the leaders of the organization to be Christian. Who would have thought that a Christian organization would want Christians to be in its leadership? It seems pretty self-evident but apparently, this was a problem for meddling University of Iowa bureaucrats.
BLinC seems to have been singled out, other campus organizations are not subject to this same level of scrutiny in their leadership selection. Would sororities be expected to allow men to lead them, or would the College Democrats be kicked off campus for not letting a Republican lead them? Of course not, that would be sheer insanity. BLinC does not even discriminate in its membership, which sororities and fraternities are able to do, they only require that leaders share its missions and beliefs. The president of BLinC at University of Iowa, Jacob Estell, had some harsh words for the administration:
“This is 2017, not 1984, our beliefs weren’t made by us, and they can’t be changed by us either—certainly not just to satisfy Orwellian government rules.”
Thankfully, there has been support for the group to be reinstated on campus, and The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is helping make the legal case for the club. One would hope that justice will be administered swiftly, as it is quite clear that the University is violating the club members most fundamental rights.
This isn’t the first such case in which a Christian organization was removed from campus because it wanted Christian leaders. The Christian group, Chi Alpha Campus Ministries, was kicked off campus at California State University back in 2015 for violating “discrimination policies” in which they required leaders to be Christian. The chapter was later reinstated. These cases represent a clear violation of religious liberties and of freedom of association. If you needed evidence that there was a war on Christianity going on in our increasingly anti-Christian leftist universities, here it is.BERKELEY, Calif. -- An anti-hate rally was disrupted when scores of anarchists wearing black clothing and masks stormed the demonstration in Berkeley and attacked several supporters of President Trump. But police were able to head off any wider violence.
Thousands gathered Sunday in response to a planned anti-Marxism protest that was canceled amid concerns demonstrators might be attacked. The counter-demonstration was largely peaceful for several hours until the antifa, or anti-fascists, overran police barricades around the protest area. The violence was swift but brief, and among those targeted was Joey Gibson, leader of the right-wing organization Patriot Prayer that had called off a demonstration a day earlier in San Francisco.
Berkeley Police Chief Andrew Greenwood said officers were told not to actively confront the anarchists. He applauded officers' restraint, saying it forestalled greater violence. Six people suffered injuries, including two who were hospitalized, and one officer was injured while making an arrest and several others were hit with paint.
There were 13 arrests on various charges including, assault with a deadly weapon.
"The potential use of force became very problematic" given the thousands of peaceful protesters in the park, Greenwood said. Once anarchists arrived, it was clear there would not be dueling protests between left and right so he ordered his officers out of the park and allowed the anarchists to march in.
There was "no need for a confrontation over a grass patch," Greenwood said.
Several hours later, the demonstration broke up without any further incidents.
Officials in Berkeley and San Francisco had been girding for the possibility of violent clashes at right-wing demonstrations. But Saturday's in San Francisco by Patriot Prayer was called off, and police blocked access to a public square where Gibson had planned to hold a news conference. He instead held it outside the city and criticized police for not doing enough to ensure supporters' safety at the originally scheduled location of Crissy Field.
Still, hundreds of counter-protesters marched through the city. San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said Saturday that police made a single arrest, for public intoxication, during demonstrations organized by left-wing groups.
The anti-Marxist rally in Berkeley was organized by Amber Cummings, a transsexual Trump supporter. Citing the potential for violence, she canceled the event but said she would show up on her own. She was not seen there, though Gibson vowed to come and when he did, anarchists set upon him.
They pepper-sprayed him and chased him as he backed away with his hands held in the air. Gibson rushed behind a line of police wearing riot gear, who set off a smoke bomb to drive away the attackers.
Separately, groups of hooded, black-clad protesters attacked at least four other men in or near the park, kicking and punching them until the assaults were stopped by police. The assaults were witnessed by an Associated Press reporter.
At one point, an anti-rally protester denounced a Latino man holding a "God Bless Donald Trump" sign.
"You are an immigrant," Karla Fonseca said. "You should be ashamed of yourself."
Several other people also yelled at the man, who said he was born in Mexico but supports Trump's proposal to build a wall along the border.
Groups that planned the counter-demonstrations were concerned that white nationalists might show up and there would violence like the kind two weeks ago in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a woman was killed. No white nationalists showed up, and only a handful of pro-Trump demonstrators were visible in the crowd.
Police pulled one Trump backer out of the park over a wall by his shirt as a crowd of about two dozen counter-demonstrators surrounded him and chanted "Nazi go home!" and pushed him toward the edge of the park. At least two people were detained by officers for wearing bandannas covering their faces.
Anti-rally protesters chanted slogans "No Trump. No KKK. No fascist USA" and carried signs that said: "Berkeley Stands United Against Hate."
Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin issued a statement early Sunday evening praising the majority of protesters who remained peaceful during Sunday's events, reports CBS San Francisco.
"I applaud the more than 7,000 people who came out today to peacefully oppose bigotry, hatred and racism that we saw on display in Charlottesville. They gave impassioned speeches, they played music and they showed that Berkeley and the Bay Area will always stand for tolerance, diversity and justice," the statement read.
"Faced by extremists who were intent to fight, the Berkeley Police Department made the right call to deescalate the situation," the statement continued. "In the end, 13 people were arrested and two taken to the hospital. I regret that people were injured, but am glad that serious violence was averted."
In the days leading up to the planned events, Cummings and Gibson, who is Japanese-American, consistently denounced racism. In a video he posted on Patriot Prayer's Facebook page, Gibson said he is a person of color and so if he were in favor of white nationalism "I'd have to punch myself in the face."
Gibson said Saturday he was planning to organize a rally Sept. 10 in Portland, Oregon.
Meantime, newly appointed University of California, Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ said the campus was "working very hard on the security arrangements" for the Sept. 14 appearance of conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.
Campus officials will add more police to the event than were present for the scheduled appearance of another conservative, Milo Yiannopoulos, Christ said. That planned talk was canceled when demonstrations turned violent in February.
Student activism was born during the 1960s free-speech movement at Berkeley, when thousands of students at the university mobilized to demand that the school drop its ban on political activism.GENEVA (Reuters) - The earth is on track for its hottest year on record and warming at a faster rate than expected, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Thursday.
A man walks through a dried-up Sarkhej lake on a hot summer day in Ahmedabad, India, April 21, 2016. REUTERS/Amit Dave/File Photo
Temperatures recorded mainly in the northern hemisphere in the first six months of the year, coupled with an early and fast Arctic sea ice melt and “new highs” in heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels, point to quickening climate change, it said.
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June marked the 14th straight month of record heat, the United Nations agency said. It called for speedy implementation of a global pact reached in Paris last December to limit climate change by shifting from fossil fuels to green energy by 2100.
“What we’ve seen so far for the first six months of 2016 is really quite alarming,” David Carlson, director of the WMO’s Climate Research Program, told a news briefing.
“This year suggests that the planet can warm up faster than we expected in a much shorter time... We don’t have as much time as we thought.”
The average temperature in the first six months of 2016 was 1.3° Celsius (2.4° Fahrenheit) warmer than the pre-industrial era of the late 19th Century, according to space agency NASA.
Under the Paris Agreement, nearly 200 governments agreed to limit global warming to well below 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels, while “pursuing efforts” for a ceiling of 1.5°C - a lower limit already close to being reached.
The last month with global temperatures below the 20th century average was December 1984, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
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“EXTRAORDINARY YEAR”
“There’s almost no plausible scenario at this point that is going to get us anything other than an extraordinary year in terms of ice (melt), CO2, temperature - all the things that we track,” Carlson said.
“If we got this much surprise this year, how many more surprises are ahead of us?”
A strong El Nino weather event from 2015/2016 in the Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon associated with extreme droughts, storms and floods, contributed to the record temperatures in the first half of 2016 before disappearing in May, WMO said.
“Climate change, caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases, will not (disappear). This means we face more heatwaves, more extreme rainfall and potential for higher impact tropical cyclones,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.
White canvas covers protect parts of the Rhone glacier against melting as visitors enter an ice cave near the Furka mountain pass at 2429 metres (7969 ft) altitude in the Swiss Alps, Switzerland August 6, 2015. Switzerland's national flag is pictured in the foreground. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann/File Photo
Repeated extremes, such as heatwaves, downpours or droughts, could encourage more action to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
“Research shows that for the general public extremes make climate change more tangible, more understandable,” said Joeri Rogelj, a climate expert at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna.
“It could help to motivate people to engage in climate action, and do something.”A strange and sketchy story out of Minnesota as a 40-year-old Australian woman named Justine Damond called police for a disturbance behind her home. She met the police around 11:30pm in her pajamas. While talking to the two responding officers one of them, Mohamed Noor, a 31-year-old officer from Somalia, shot and killed her. Details sketchy.
(New York Post) […] Three sources with knowledge of the incident said that when they arrived, the officers pulled around back and were immediately confronted by Damond, who was in her pajamas. As she attempted to speak to the cop in the driver’s seat, the other officer apparently unholstered his gun and started blasting — striking her through the driver’s-side door, the sources said.
No weapons were found at the scene or on Damond, and neighbors claim the area is well-lit at night, thanks to an array of telephone poles and motion-activated garage lights. Local police have released very few details about the shooting — only revealing that the cops’ body cameras were not switched on at the time of the incident. The dashcam in their squad car did not capture the events, either. (read more)
♦ Original StarTribune article is HERE
♦ Update to include the identification of the Shooting Officer is HERE.
FTA: Noor, 31, joined the department in March 2015 as the first Somali police officer to patrol the 5th Precinct in southwest Minneapolis, according to a city newsletter. He holds a degree in Economics and Business Administration from Augsburg College. Before joining the department, he worked in property management in commercial and residential properties in Minneapolis and St. Louis, Mo. (read more)
AdvertisementsPart of the fun of exploring Super Mario Odyssey is finding all of the different Easter eggs. It really shows just how much Nintendo has crammed into this game. The best part is that they aren’t as obnoxiously shoved in your face as they are in other Mario games. Because of that, there are a lot of Easter eggs that may have passed you by.
So let’s take a look at some of the more obscure Easter eggs and other secrets in Super Mario Odyssey.
Warning! Spoilers ahead.
1. Bowser’s Musical Theme Throwbacks
Even the music features fun callbacks.
The theme that plays whenever Bowser is in his airship is the same theme that plays during the airship levels of Super Mario Maker with the Super Mario Bros. theme.
Also, the ending theme song has a section towards the one minute mark that closely resembles the Bowser boss theme in Super Mario 64. Pretty fitting considering what happens during the finale.
2. Mario’s Mechanic Suit
Mario dons tons of outfits that are direct copies of ones he wears in his various other game appearances. The Mechanic Outfit Mario can buy from the Crazy Cap store is one of the most obscure. Both him and his brother Luigi can be seen dressed in the same outfit for the promotional art and instruction manual for Famicom Grand Prix II: 3D Hot Rally, a racing game released only for the Family Computer Disk System in Japan.
But that’s not all. The sleeves of the outfit also contain sponsors like Bowser Oil – the same sponsors whose banners appeared along the tracks of Mario Kart 8.
3. Secrets of the Odyssey
The ship you fly around in has some secrets of its own. Normally you enter the ship through the front door and fly it to other kingdoms by throwing your hat on the globe outside. But if you enter the pipe sticking out of the back as if it were a warp pipe, you can enter the Odyssey that way as well. You can also ground pound a hatch at the top of the ship.
The globe outside the Odyssey has a pretty hidden detail as well. If you repeatedly jump on the globe, you will play music box versions of either Jump Up, Super Star or the Fossil Falls theme depending on which kingdom you’re in.
4. Cat Mario & Peach
In some of the more obscure corners of the kingdoms, you may find a sprite of Mario or Peach dressed as cats. Hitting the Mario sprite with Cappy will grant you 10 coins and hitting Peach will grant you a life heart.
Cat Mario & Peach come from the cat power up in Super Mario 3D World on the Wii U. Not only that, but the sprites are modeled directly after the unlockable costumes in Super Mario Maker.
5. New Donk City’s Donkey Kong References
The references to Donkey Kong in New Donk City go well beyond its name, its mayor, and its festival. The licence plates on the taxis read 1981-ND, a reference to the release date for the original arcade game. The street signs are all named after Donkey Kong Country characters such as Cranky Kong and King K. Rool.
But a more hidden reference comes after the end of the game. If you talk to Pauline and answer her quiz correctly, you can give her a birthday gift. The gift, a pink purse, is hidden in between city hall and the skyscraper to the right of it. But it’s not just any purse, it’s the same pink purse that gave you extra points in Donkey Kong. It even plays the corresponding sound effect when you pick it up.
6. Mario Party References
Mario’s Cowboy Outfit is almost identical to his Cowboy Outfit in Mario Party 2, which is most prominent on the box art for the game.
The Goombas wearing hats in the Seaside Kingdom look very similar to Captain Goomba in the Goomba’s Booty Boardwalk map in Mario Party 8. Not even the Mario Party games are safe from callbacks.
7. The Moai Statues
In the game, you can find a Moai head wearing sunglasses. Capturing it allows you to see invisible platforms by putting on its sunglasses.
This character may be a reference to the Tokotoko from Super Mario Land, stone moai heads found in the Easton Kingdom. They appear as regular enemies while their boss, Hiyoihoi, appears as the third boss in the game. They even wear sunglasses just like their Odyssey counterparts.
Also, when their shades are down, they can occasionally hum along to the music.
8. Final Boss Secret Dialogue
According to GameXplain, the final boss’ dialogue changes depending on what outfit you’re wearing. He could comment on you wearing a historical costume like the Pirate Outfit, comment on you wearing a familiar costume such as those based on other Mario games, try his hardest not to appear afraid if wearing a spooky costume like the Clown costume (or just boxers), and more.
9. Pause Menu Music Secret
DPadGamer discovered a neat musical trick you can do in the pause menu. Each option in the pause menu plays a different sound when you highlight it. If you press pause, options, choose mode, and then go back, you get a jingle strikingly similar to the theme of the Comet Observatory in Super Mario Galaxy.
10. Sleepy Doggo
So you may already know that Mario can fall asleep if you leave the controller alone for a bit. You may even know that he talks in his sleep and that a bird can fly on his nose. You also may know that you can play fetch with a fedora-wearing dog in some of the kingdoms. But what you may not know is what happens when you combine the two. If Mario falls asleep while the dog is following you around, the dog will join you for a nap. Awww.
11. World 1-1
In New Donk City, you can find a line of people stretching into a movie theater. If you cut in line like a jerk and enter the theater, you’ll see that the movie is the intro screen to the original Super Mario Bros. And if you enter the warp pipe to the left, you can play through a recreation of the first level of the game. It even has the same secret area, this time containing a hidden Power Moon.
12. Mario’s Outfits Are Based Off a Desk Calendar
Mario’s Swimwear, Japanese Noble, and Samurai outfits are identical to the pieces of artwork featured in a 2016 desk calendar offered as one of the last rewards for Club Nintendo.
Speaking of the Samurai Outfit, it also made an appearance on Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s T-Shirt during the Nintendo Switch debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
While we’re on the subject of Japanese inspirations…
13. Mario’s Tanooki Statue Form
Mario’s tanooki statue form from Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario 3D Land makes an appearance in the game. All you need to do is capture one of the statues in Bowser’s Kingdom.
The tanooki form itself is inspired by the tanuki, or Japanese raccoon dog, who are said to have magical powers according to Japanese folklore. Statues of tanuki are fairly common around Japan according to Nintendo Life.
14. Yoshi!
The Mushroom Kingdom is just one big Super Mario 64 reference. You can even turn into your low poly counterpart by purchasing the outfit in the Crazy Cap store. You can even find paintings hidden in the level that warp you to remixed boss battles by jumping into them. Even the Purple Coins are modeled after the coins found in the game. But it’s biggest throwback is on top of Peach’s castle.
That’s right, Yoshi is on top of the castle just like in Super Mario 64. This time you don’t have to collect all of the collectibles to reach him; you just need to activate the scarecrow on the left side of the castle. And instead of granting you tons of extra lives, you are able to control Yoshi complete with his flutter jump and tongue.
But the references go even deeper than that. The fruit you can eat with Yoshi around the Mushroom Kingdom are modeled after the ones found in Super Mario World. He also disappears when touching water just like he does in Super Mario Sunshine (though it’s not as horrific as it doesn’t show Yoshi disintegrating like in that game).
Bonus Easter Egg: You can find a boom box near the plaza in front of Peach’s Castle that plays the Japanese version of Jump Up, Super Star.
15. The Reference to Super Mario 64’s Urban Legend
After purchasing the unique outfit for the Mushroom Kingdom, you can head to a door locked by a Toad to get to a recreation of the back courtyard of Peach’s castle. If you throw your cap at the star statue in the middle, you get a Power Moon whose achievement title is “Totally Classic!”
Kotaku writes that the Power Moon hidden in the star statue may be a reference to an old urban legend surrounding Super Mario 64. Players claimed that the inscription on the statue read either “Eternal Star” or “L Is Real 2401,” with the latter interpretation implying that Luigi is playable in the game. This caused many a fan theory to rise on how to unlock him, with all of them being untrue.
Now if only Luigi was playable in Super Mario Odyssey for real. Oh well, at least you can unlock his costume.Diablo III patch 2.0.2 is now live in the Americas. Check out the full patch notes below to learn all about the latest changes.
Important: Please note that you will not be prompted to download patch 2.0.2 until the patch is live in your home region. If you are logging in from a European or Asian client, you will need to wait for this patch to release in that region before it can be installed. Additionally, if your home region is in the Americas, you will be unable to log into Europe or Asia using Global Play after patch 2.0.2 is live until those regions have also patched.
Diablo III Patch 2.0.2 - v2.0.2.22274
Visit our Bug Report forum for a list of known issues.
To learn about recent hotfixes, click here.
Table of Contents
General
Bug Fixes
Experience requirements for Paragon 500 and above have been increased
Disabled sound notifications for Clan and Community chat
Bug Fixes Gold can once again be purchased and sold on the Real Money Auction House Level 60 Crafted Amulets now properly require Fiery Brimstone to craft Sokahr the Keywarden now reflects a more reasonable amount of damage with his whirlwind attack The portal leading from the second Hell Rift to the Gardens of Hope 2nd Tier now functions properly The experience bar has been removed from the Followers UI The Siegebreaker Assault Beast no longer performs other actions during his grab attack animation
If you are experiencing technical issues with the patching process, connecting to Battle.net after installing the patch, or errors while playing a newly-patched game, please visit our support site or post in the Technical Support forum for assistance.The scout heard the reports and panicked. Rosey Gilhousen was in the midst of evaluating the talent at the College World Series that day in June 1965 when he saw news on the wire that the Angels had just used the 11th overall pick in the amateur Draft on the mysterious Glen Burnie.
The scout heard the reports and panicked. Rosey Gilhousen was in the midst of evaluating the talent at the College World Series that day in June 1965 when he saw news on the wire that the Angels had just used the 11th overall pick in the amateur Draft on the mysterious Glen Burnie.
Gilhousen immediately phoned scouting director Roland Hemond.
"Hey Roland," Gilhousen said in a huff. "Who the heck did we draft? We never talked about this Glen Burnie guy!"
Hemond laughed.
"Take it easy," he responded. "It's Jim Spencer … from Glen Burnie, Md.!"
Yes, the MLB Draft, which begins on Thursday at 6 p.m. ET with live coverage on MLB Network and MLB.com, has come a long way from the grainy, hazy days in which a first-round pick could be so erroneously reported.
• 2016 Draft: Order | Top 200 | Complete coverage
Heck, in just the past decade, the Draft has gone from a behind-the-curtains conference call to a televised event. And the increased exposure has combined with the progression of Draft rules and the evolution of the amateur market to alter the way teams prepare for and approach the event from a scouting perspective.
"You can't even compare," Red Sox president Dave Dombrowski said. "It's so different. There's so much more information that gives you the ability to be much more accurate."
Added longtime Twins general manager Terry Ryan: "Some of it is the showcases. A lot of the area scouts don't even know the players as well as the supervisors because of the showcases. There was a day when there were no showcases. Sometimes you'd see a guy in April for the first time in your life."
That's what happened to then-Brewers scout and current Orioles GM Dan Duquette in the spring of 1987.
Duquette attended a California high school game with the intent of watching a shortstop named Tom Redington. But Duquette found himself distracted by the right fielder for the opposing team. In the span of just a few innings, the kid hit a double his first time up, caught a ball off the fence and made an outfield assist. Duquette and a fellow scout went to the team's bench to find out the kid's name.
It was Troy O'Leary, who, Duquette soon learned, had a football scholarship at Oregon State. Duquette convinced the Brewers to take a shot on him, and O'Leary wound up playing parts of 11 seasons in the big leagues. (The best of those years came in Boston, where he ended up when Duquette, then general manager of the Red Sox, claimed O'Leary off waivers in 1995.)
Redington was taken by the Braves in the third round and never set foot in the Majors.
"So Troy O'Leary was drafted by a team that didn't know anything about |
that this is not a concern, and the cladding remains intact for the life of the rod.
Evolution [ edit ]
Early concepts [ edit ]
The BWR concept was developed slightly later than the PWR concept. Development of the BWR started in the early 1950s, and was a collaboration between General Electric (GE) and several US national laboratories.
Research into nuclear power in the US was led by the 3 military services. The Navy, seeing the possibility of turning submarines into full-time underwater vehicles, and ships that could steam around the world without refueling, sent their man in engineering, Captain Hyman Rickover to run their nuclear power program. Rickover decided on the PWR route for the Navy, as the early researchers in the field of nuclear power feared that the direct production of steam within a reactor would cause instability, while they knew that the use of pressurized water would definitively work as a means of heat transfer. This concern led to the US's first research effort in nuclear power being devoted to the PWR, which was highly suited for naval vessels (submarines, especially), as space was at a premium, and PWRs could be made compact and high-power enough to fit in such, in any event.
But other researchers wanted to investigate whether the supposed instability caused by boiling water in a reactor core would really cause instability. During early reactor development, a small group of engineers accidentally increased the reactor power level on an experimental reactor to such an extent that the water quickly boiled, this shut down the reactor, indicating the useful self-moderating property in emergency circumstances. In particular, Samuel Untermyer II, a researcher at Argonne National Laboratory, proposed and oversaw a series of experiments: the BORAX experiments—to see if a boiling water reactor would be feasible for use in energy production. He found that it was, after subjecting his reactors to quite strenuous tests, proving the safety principles of the BWR.[4]
Following this series of tests, GE got involved and collaborated with ANL[5] to bring this technology to market. Larger-scale tests were conducted through the late 1950s/early/mid-1960s that only partially used directly-generated (primary) nuclear boiler system steam to feed the turbine and incorporated heat exchangers for the generation of secondary steam to drive separate parts of the turbines. The literature does not indicate why this was the case, but it was eliminated on production models of the BWR.
First series of production [ edit ]
Cross-section sketch of a typical BWR Mark I containment
The first generation of production boiling water reactors saw the incremental development of the unique and distinctive features of the BWR: the torus (used to quench steam in the event of a transient requiring the quenching of steam), as well as the drywell, the elimination of the heat exchanger, the steam dryer, the distinctive general layout of the reactor building, and the standardization of reactor control and safety systems. The first, General Electric (GE), series of production BWRs evolved through 6 iterative design phases, each termed BWR/1 through BWR/6. (BWR/4s, BWR/5s, and BWR/6s are the most common types in service today.) The vast majority of BWRs in service throughout the world belong to one of these design phases.
1st generation BWR: BWR/1 with Mark I containment.
2nd generation BWRs: BWR/2, BWR/3 and some BWR/4 with Mark I containment. Other BWR/4, and BWR/5 with Mark-II containment.
3rd generation BWRs: BWR/6 with Mark-III containment.
Browns Ferry Unit 1 drywell and wetwell under construction, a BWR/4 using the Mark I containment
Containment variants were constructed using either concrete or steel for the Primary Containment, Drywell and Wetwell in various combinations.[6]
Apart from the GE designs there were others by ABB, MITSU, Toshiba and KWU. See List of boiling water reactors.
Advanced boiling water reactor [ edit ]
A newer design of BWR is known as the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR). The ABWR was developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and has been further improved to the present day. The ABWR incorporates advanced technologies in the design, including computer control, plant automation, control rod removal, motion, and insertion, in-core pumping, and nuclear safety to deliver improvements over the original series of production BWRs, with a high power output (1350 MWe per reactor), and a significantly lowered probability of core damage. Most significantly, the ABWR was a completely standardized design, that could be made for series production.[citation needed]
The ABWR was approved by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission for production as a standardized design in the early 1990s. Subsequently, numerous ABWRs were built in Japan. One development spurred by the success of the ABWR in Japan is that General Electric's nuclear energy division merged with Hitachi Corporation's nuclear energy division, forming GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, which is now the major worldwide developer of the BWR design.
Simplified boiling water reactor [ edit ]
Parallel to the development of the ABWR, General Electric also developed a different concept, known as the simplified boiling water reactor (SBWR). This smaller 600 megawatt electrical reactor was notable for its incorporation—for the first time ever in a light water reactor[citation needed]—of "passive safety" design principles. The concept of passive safety means that the reactor, rather than requiring the intervention of active systems, such as emergency injection pumps, to keep the reactor within safety margins, was instead designed to return to a safe state solely through operation of natural forces if a safety-related contingency developed.
For example, if the reactor got too hot, it would trigger a system that would release soluble neutron absorbers (generally a solution of borated materials, or a solution of borax), or materials that greatly hamper a chain reaction by absorbing neutrons, into the reactor core. The tank containing the soluble neutron absorbers would be located above the reactor, and the absorption solution, once the system was triggered, would flow into the core through force of gravity, and bring the reaction to a near-complete stop. Another example was the Isolation Condenser system, which relied on the principle of hot water/steam rising to bring hot coolant into large heat exchangers located above the reactor in very deep tanks of water, thus accomplishing residual heat removal. Yet another example was the omission of recirculation pumps within the core; these pumps were used in other BWR designs to keep cooling water moving; they were expensive, hard to reach to repair, and could occasionally fail; so as to improve reliability, the ABWR incorporated no less than 10 of these recirculation pumps, so that even if several failed, a sufficient number would remain serviceable so that an unscheduled shutdown would not be necessary, and the pumps could be repaired during the next refueling outage. Instead, the designers of the simplified boiling water reactor used thermal analysis to design the reactor core such that natural circulation (cold water falls, hot water rises) would bring water to the center of the core to be boiled.
The ultimate result of the passive safety features of the SBWR would be a reactor that would not require human intervention in the event of a major safety contingency for at least 48 hours following the safety contingency; thence, it would only require periodic refilling of cooling water tanks located completely outside of the reactor, isolated from the cooling system, and designed to remove reactor waste heat through evaporation. The simplified boiling water reactor was submitted to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, however, it was withdrawn prior to approval; still, the concept remained intriguing to General Electric's designers, and served as the basis of future developments.
Economic simplified boiling water reactor [ edit ]
During a period beginning in the late 1990s, GE engineers proposed to combine the features of the advanced boiling water reactor design with the distinctive safety features of the simplified boiling water reactor design, along with scaling up the resulting design to a larger size of 1,600 MWe (4,500 MWth). This Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) design was submitted to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission for approval in April 2005, and design certification was granted by the NRC in September 2014.[7]
Reportedly, this design has been advertised as having a core damage probability of only 3×10−8 core damage events per reactor-year.[citation needed] That is, there would need to be 3 million ESBWRs operating before one would expect a single core-damaging event during their 100-year lifetimes. Earlier designs of the BWR, the BWR/4, had core damage probabilities as high as 1×10−5 core-damage events per reactor-year.[8] This extraordinarily low CDP for the ESBWR far exceeds the other large LWRs on the market.
Advantages [ edit ]
The reactor vessel and associated components operate at a substantially lower pressure of about 70–75 bars (1,020–1,090 psi) compared to about 155 bars (2,250 psi) in a PWR.
Pressure vessel is subject to significantly less irradiation compared to a PWR, and so does not become as brittle with age.
Operates at a lower nuclear fuel temperature.
Fewer components due to no steam generators and no pressurizer vessel. (Older BWRs have external recirculation loops, but even this piping is eliminated in modern BWRs, such as the ABWR.) This also makes BWRs simpler to operate.
Lower risk (probability) of a rupture causing loss of coolant compared to a PWR, and lower risk of core damage should such a rupture occur. This is due to fewer pipes, fewer large diameter pipes, fewer welds and no steam generator tubes.
NRC assessments of limiting fault potentials indicate if such a fault occurred, the average BWR would be less likely to sustain core damage than the average PWR due to the robustness and redundancy of the Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS).
Measuring the water level in the pressure vessel is the same for both normal and emergency operations, which results in easy and intuitive assessment of emergency conditions.
Can operate at lower core power density levels using natural circulation without forced flow.
A BWR may be designed to operate using only natural circulation so that recirculation pumps are eliminated entirely. (The new ESBWR design uses natural circulation.)
BWRs do not use boric acid to control fission burn-up to avoid the production of tritium (contamination of the turbines), [2] leading to less possibility of corrosion within the reactor vessel and piping. (Corrosion from boric acid must be carefully monitored in PWRs; it has been demonstrated that reactor vessel head corrosion can occur if the reactor vessel head is not properly maintained. See Davis-Besse. Since BWRs do not utilize boric acid, these contingencies are eliminated.)
leading to less possibility of corrosion within the reactor vessel and piping. (Corrosion from boric acid must be carefully monitored in PWRs; it has been demonstrated that reactor vessel head corrosion can occur if the reactor vessel head is not properly maintained. See Davis-Besse. Since BWRs do not utilize boric acid, these contingencies are eliminated.) The power control by reduction of the moderator density (vapour bubbles in the water) instead of by addition of neutron absorbers (boric acid in PWR) leads to breeding of U-238 by fast neutrons, producing fissile Pu-239. [2] This effect is amplified in reduced moderation boiling water reactors, resulting in a light water reactor with improved fuel utilization and reduced long-lived radioactive waste more characteristic of sodium breeder reactors.
BWRs generally have N -2 redundancy on their major safety-related systems, which normally consist of four "trains" of components. This generally means that up to two of the four components of a safety system can fail and the system will still perform if called upon.
-2 redundancy on their major safety-related systems, which normally consist of four "trains" of components. This generally means that up to two of the four components of a safety system can fail and the system will still perform if called upon. Due to their single major vendor (GE/Hitachi), the current fleet of BWRs have predictable, uniform designs that, while not completely standardized, generally are very similar to one another. The ABWR/ESBWR designs are completely standardized. Lack of standardization remains a problem with PWRs, as, at least in the United States, there are three design families represented among the current PWR fleet (Combustion Engineering, Westinghouse, and Babcock & Wilcox), within these families, there are quite divergent designs. Still, some countries could reach a high level of standardisation with PWRs, like France. Additional families of PWRs are being introduced. For example, Mitsubishi's APWR, Areva's US-EPR, and Westinghouse's AP1000/AP600 will add diversity and complexity to an already diverse crowd, and possibly cause customers seeking stability and predictability to seek other designs, such as the BWR.
BWRs are overrepresented in imports, when the importing nation does not have a nuclear navy (PWRs are favored by nuclear naval states due to their compact, high-power design used on nuclear-powered vessels; since naval reactors are generally not exported, they cause national skill to be developed in PWR design, construction, and operation). This may be due to the fact that BWRs are ideally suited for peaceful uses like power generation, process/industrial/district heating, and desalinization, due to low cost, simplicity, and safety focus, which come at the expense of larger size and slightly lower thermal efficiency. Sweden is standardized mainly on BWRs. Mexico's two reactors are BWRs. Japan experimented with both PWRs and BWRs, but most builds as of late have been of BWRs, specifically ABWRs. In the CEGB open competition in the early 1960s for a standard design for UK 2nd-generation power reactors, the PWR didn't even make it to the final round, which was a showdown between the BWR (preferred for its easily understood design as well as for being predictable and "boring") and the AGR, a uniquely British design; the indigenous design won, possibly on technical merits, possibly due to the proximity of a general election. In the 1980s the CEGB built a PWR, Sizewell B.
Disadvantages [ edit ]
BWRs require more complex calculations for managing consumption of nuclear fuel during operation due to "two phase (water and steam) fluid flow" in the upper part of the core. This also requires more instrumentation in the reactor core.
Larger pressure vessel than for a PWR of similar power, with correspondingly higher cost, in particular for older models that still use a main steam generator and associated piping.
Contamination of the turbine by short-lived activation products. This means that shielding and access control around the steam turbine are required during normal operations due to the radiation levels arising from the steam entering directly from the reactor core. This is a moderately minor concern, as most of the radiation flux is due to Nitrogen-16 (activation of oxygen in the water), which has a half-life of 7 seconds, allowing the turbine chamber to be entered into within minutes of shutdown.
Though the present fleet of BWRs is said to be less likely to suffer core damage from the "1 in 100,000 reactor-year" limiting fault than the present fleet of PWRs (due to increased ECCS robustness and redundancy), there have been concerns raised about the pressure containment ability of the as-built, unmodified Mark I containment – that such may be insufficient to contain pressures generated by a limiting fault combined with complete ECCS failure that results in extremely severe core damage. In this double failure scenario, assumed to be extremely unlikely prior to the Fukushima I nuclear accidents, an unmodified Mark I containment can allow some degree of radioactive release to occur. This is supposed to be mitigated by the modification of the Mark I containment; namely, the addition of an outgas stack system that, if containment pressure exceeds critical setpoints, is supposed to allow the orderly discharge of pressurizing gases after the gases pass through activated carbon filters designed to trap radionuclides. [9]
Control rods are inserted from below for current BWR designs. There are two available hydraulic power sources that can drive the control rods into the core for a BWR under emergency conditions. There is a dedicated high pressure hydraulic accumulator and also the pressure inside of the reactor pressure vessel available to each control rod. Either the dedicated accumulator (one per rod) or reactor pressure is capable of fully inserting each rod. Most other reactor types use top entry control rods that are held up in the withdrawn position by electromagnets, causing them to fall into the reactor by gravity if power is lost.
Technical and background information [ edit ]
Reactor start up (criticality) is achieved by withdrawing control rods from the core to raise core reactivity to a level where it is evident that the nuclear chain reaction is self-sustaining. This is known as "going critical". Control rod withdrawal is performed slowly, as to carefully monitor core conditions as the reactor approaches criticality. When the reactor is observed to become slightly super-critical, that is, reactor power is increasing on its own, the reactor is declared critical.
Rod motion is performed using rod drive control systems. Newer BWRs such as the ABWR and ESBWR as well as all German and Swedish BWRs use the Fine Motion Control Rod Drive system, which allows multiple rods to be controlled with very smooth motions. This allows a reactor operator to evenly increase the core's reactivity until the reactor is critical. Older BWR designs use a manual control system, which is usually limited to controlling one or four control rods at a time, and only through a series of notched positions with fixed intervals between these positions. Due to the limitations of the manual control system it is possible while starting-up that the core can be placed into a condition where a single control rod can cause a large uneven reactivity change which can potentially challenge the fuel's thermal design margins. As a result, GE developed a set of rules in 1977 called BPWS (Banked Position Withdrawal Sequence) which help minimize the worth of any single control rod and prevent fuel damage in the case of a control rod drop accident. BPWS separates control rods into four groups, A1, A2, B1, and B2. Then, either all of the A control rods or B control rods are pulled full out in a defined sequence to create a "checkboard" pattern. Next the opposing group (B or A) is pulled in a defined sequence to positions 02, then 04, 08, 16, and finally full out (48), until the reactor enters the power operation range where thermal limits are no longer bounding. By following a BPWS compliant start-up sequence, the manual control system can be used to evenly and safely raise the entire core to critical, and prevent any fuel rods from exceeding 280 cal/gm energy release during any postulated event which could potentially damage the fuel.[10]
Thermal margins [ edit ]
Several calculated/measured quantities are tracked while operating a BWR:
Maximum Fraction Limiting Critical Power Ratio, or MFLCPR;
Fraction Limiting Linear Heat Generation Rate, or FLLHGR;
Average Planar Linear Heat Generation Rate, or APLHGR;
Pre-Conditioning Interim Operating Management Recommendation, or PCIOMR;
MFLCPR, FLLHGR, and APLHGR must be kept less than 1.0 during normal operation; administrative controls are in place to assure some margin of error and margin of safety to these licensed limits. Typical computer simulations divide the reactor core into 24–25 axial planes; relevant quantities (margins, burnup, power, void history) are tracked for each "node" in the reactor core (764 fuel assemblies x 25 nodes/assembly = 19100 nodal calculations/quantity).
Maximum fraction limiting critical power ratio (MFLCPR)
Specifically, MFLCPR represents how close the leading fuel bundle is to "dry-out" (or "departure from nucleate boiling" for a PWR). Transition boiling is the unstable transient region where nucleate boiling tends toward film boiling. A water drop dancing on a hot frying pan is an example of film boiling. During film boiling a volume of insulating vapor separates the heated surface from the cooling fluid; this causes the temperature of the heated surface to increase drastically to once again reach equilibrium heat transfer with the cooling fluid. In other words, steam semi-insulates the heated surface and surface temperature rises to allow heat to get to the cooling fluid (through convection and radiative heat transfer).
MFLCPR is monitored with an empirical correlation that is formulated by vendors of BWR fuel (GE, Westinghouse, AREVA-NP). The vendors have test rigs where they simulate nuclear heat with resistive heating and determine experimentally what conditions of coolant flow, fuel assembly power, and reactor pressure will be in/out of the transition boiling region for a particular fuel design. In essence, the vendors make a model of the fuel assembly but power it with resistive heaters. These mock fuel assemblies are put into a test stand where data points are taken at specific powers, flows, pressures. Nuclear fuel could be damaged by film boiling; this would cause the fuel cladding to overheat and fail. Experimental data is conservatively applied to BWR fuel to ensure that the transition to film boiling does not occur during normal or transient operation. Typical SLMCPR/MCPRSL (Safety Limit MCPR) licensing limit for a BWR core is substantiated by a calculation that proves that 99.9% of fuel rods in a BWR core will not enter the transition to film boiling during normal operation or anticipated operational occurrences.[11] Since the BWR is boiling water, and steam does not transfer heat as well as liquid water, MFLCPR typically occurs at the top of a fuel assembly, where steam volume is the highest.
Fraction limiting linear heat generation rate (FLLHGR)
FLLHGR (FDLRX, MFLPD) is a limit on fuel rod power in the reactor core. For new fuel, this limit is typically around 13 kW/ft (43 kW/m) of fuel rod. This limit ensures that the centerline temperature of the fuel pellets in the rods will not exceed the melting point of the fuel material (uranium/gadolinium oxides) in the event of the worst possible plant transient/scram anticipated to occur. To illustrate the response of LHGR in transient imagine the rapid closure of the valves that admit steam to the turbines at full power. This causes the immediate cessation of steam flow and an immediate rise in BWR pressure. This rise in pressure effectively subcools the reactor coolant instantaneously; the voids (vapor) collapse into solid water. When the voids collapse in the reactor, the fission reaction is encouraged (more thermal neutrons); power increases drastically (120%) until it is terminated by the automatic insertion of the control rods. So, when the reactor is isolated from the turbine rapidly, pressure in the vessel rises rapidly, which collapses the water vapor, which causes a power excursion which is terminated by the Reactor Protection System. If a fuel pin was operating at 13.0 kW/ft prior to the transient, the void collapse would cause its power to rise. The FLLHGR limit is in place to ensure that the highest powered fuel rod will not melt if its power was rapidly increased following a pressurization transient. Abiding by the LHGR limit precludes melting of fuel in a pressurization transient.
Average planar linear heat generation rate (APLHGR)
APLHGR, being an average of the Linear Heat Generation Rate (LHGR), a measure of the decay heat present in the fuel bundles, is a margin of safety associated with the potential for fuel failure to occur during a LBLOCA (large-break loss-of-coolant accident – a massive pipe rupture leading to catastrophic loss of coolant pressure within the reactor, considered the most threatening "design basis accident" in probabilistic risk assessment and nuclear safety and security), which is anticipated to lead to the temporary exposure of the core; this core drying-out event is termed core "uncovery", for the core loses its heat-removing cover of coolant, in the case of a BWR, light water. If the core is uncovered for too long, fuel failure can occur; for the purpose of design, fuel failure is assumed to occur when the temperature of the uncovered fuel reaches a critical temperature (1100 °C, 2200 °F). BWR designs incorporate failsafe protection systems to rapidly cool and make safe the uncovered fuel prior to it reaching this temperature; these failsafe systems are known as the Emergency Core Cooling System. The ECCS is designed to rapidly flood the reactor pressure vessel, spray water on the core itself, and sufficiently cool the reactor fuel in this event. However, like any system, the ECCS has limits, in this case, to its cooling capacity, and there is a possibility that fuel could be designed that produces so much decay heat that the ECCS would be overwhelmed and could not cool it down successfully.
So as to prevent this from happening, it is required that the decay heat stored in the fuel assemblies at any one time does not overwhelm the ECCS. As such, the measure of decay heat generation known as LHGR was developed by GE's engineers, and from this measure, APLHGR is derived. APLHGR is monitored to ensure that the reactor is not operated at an average power level that would defeat the primary containment systems. When a refueled core is licensed to operate, the fuel vendor/licensee simulate events with computer models. Their approach is to simulate worst case events when the reactor is in its most vulnerable state.
APLHGR is commonly pronounced as "Apple Hugger" in the industry.
Pre-Conditioning Interim Operating Management Recommendation (PCIOMR)
PCIOMR is a set of rules and limits to prevent cladding damage due to pellet-clad interaction. During the first nuclear heatup, nuclear fuel pellets can crack. The jagged edges of the pellet can rub and interact with the inner cladding wall. During power increases in the fuel pellet, the ceramic fuel material expands faster than the fuel cladding, and the jagged edges of the fuel pellet begin to press into the cladding, potentially causing a perforation. To prevent this from occurring, two corrective actions were taken. The first is the inclusion of a thin barrier layer against the inner walls of the fuel cladding which are resistant to perforation due to pellet-clad interactions, and the second is a set of rules created under PCIOMR.
The PCIOMR rules require initial "conditioning" of new fuel. This means, for the first nuclear heatup of each fuel element, that local bundle power must be ramped very slowly to prevent cracking of the fuel pellets and limit the differences in the rates of thermal expansion of the fuel. PCIOMR rules also limit the maximum local power change (in kW/ft*hr), prevent pulling control rods below the tips of adjacent control rods, and require control rod sequences to be analyzed against core modelling software to prevent pellet-clad interactions. PCIOMR analysis look at local power peaks and xenon transients which could be caused by control rod position changes or rapid power changes to ensure that local power rates never exceed maximum ratings.
List of BWRs [ edit ]
For a list of operational and decommissioned BWRs, see List of BWRs.
Experimental and other types [ edit ]
Experimental and other non-commercial BWRs include:
BORAX experiments
EBWR (Experimental Boiling Water Reactor)
SL-1 (destroyed during accident in 1961)
Next-generation designs [ edit ]
Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR)
Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR)
Areva Kerena (Based on Siemens SWR 1000, Siemens sold its nuclear business to Areva)
Toshiba ABWR (Not related to GE-Hitachi ABWR, Based on Asea (now part of ABB) BWR 90+ design, ABB exited the nuclear business and the design is now owned by Toshiba via a series of mergers and divestment of nuclear business. Asea→ABB→Westinghouse→Toshiba)
See also [ edit ]UK Government ‘Fully Confident’ On Hinkley Point
(NucNet) The UK secretary of state for energy and climate change Amber Rudd said this week the government has “full confidence” in the future of the Hinkley Point C nuclear project. In a letter to Angus Brendan MacNeil, the chairman of the UK Parliament’s energy and climate change committee, Ms Rudd wrote that the UK government has “every confidence the deal will go ahead.”
Ms Rudd also said any delays could put at risk the UK’s CO2 reduction targets, which are “one of the key reasons” for the government’s support to Hinkley Point C. EDF is planning to build two Areva 1,600-megawatt EPR units at Hinkley Point C in southwest England.
France’s Economy Minister Says Hinkley Point C Will Go Ahead
(NucNet) France will go ahead with construction of the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in the UK and will begin agreeing technical details in the coming weeks, Emmanuel Macron the French economy minister told the BBC.
“We back the Hinkley Point project, it’s very important for France, it’s very important for the nuclear sector and [France’s state-owned utility company] EDF. Now we have to finalize the work, and especially the technical and industrial work, very closely with EDF, with the British government, to be in a situation to sign in the coming week or month.”
Pressed on whether he thought the deal would go ahead, Mr Macron added: “That’s my view, and that’s our perspective, because I think it’s very important for our commitment to nuclear energy.”
First concrete for the project is scheduled for 2019, according to earlier statements by Jean-Bernard Lévy, chairman and chief executive of EDF.
Vincent de Rivaz, chief executive officer of EDF’s UK subsidiary EDF Energy, told a conference in London last week that “categorically Hinkley Point C will go ahead and will go ahead very soon.” He said EDF is in constructive talks with the UK government on electricity market reforms which he feels are a key to the project;s success.
Reuters reported that French power utility EDF named Xavier Griffe as its new finance director, replacing Thomas Piquemal, who quit in March over concerns the Hinkley Point nuclear project in the UK would collapse the company’s balance sheet.
Numbers don’t add up for Hinkley Point Project
(Power Engineering) The industry trade press publication has a dour outlook about the project.
* The project as it stands costs more than the fair market value of owner EDF. Construction of the EPRs are expected to cost 23.3 billion euros ($25.6 billion). EDF’s value, as of mid-March 2016, is at 22.8 billion euros ($25.2 billion).
* Areva is in financial trouble. Not only has the French government, which also owns 85 percent of EDF, bailed it out, but EDF bought Areva’s troubled nuclear reactor unit. How deep are the French government’s pockets? EPRs under construction in France and Finland are behind schedule and over budget. Who will pay for the delays?
EDF is having trouble securing investors for Hinkley Point. China’s nuclear development arm CGN only bought a one-third stake in the project, leaving EDF to foot the remainder unless, again, they can bring in other investors.
* According to Bloomberg, the Cour des Comptes, considered the French equivalent of the UK’s National Audit Office, said the project and the financing is potentially risky for EDF, given the company’s cash flow and debt limit its capacity to invest abroad. RBC Capital Markets also said the project is “uninvestible.”
FP&L Turkey Point 5 & plans setback by Florida state court ruling
(AP) A state appeals court has ruled that the planned expansion of the Turkey Point plant adding two 1150 MW Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear reactors, as proposed by Florida’s largest utility, must be redone to meet environmental concerns.
The 3rd District Court of Appeal in Miami reversed a 2014 decision by Gov. Rick Scott and the Cabinet to approve construction of two nuclear reactors by Florida Power & Light at its Turkey Point plant.
The judges ruling went into great detail in describing the ways that the governor and Cabinet had failed to account for environmental regulations meant to protect the Everglades and endangered birds.
The court concluded the state of Florida’s environmental rules would require a long list of mitigation measures including that new power lines are to be buried and service roads would need ways to allow water flow in the Everglades.
Takahama-1 And -2 Comply With New Standards, Says Japan’s Regulator
(NucNet) Three reactors at Japan’s Takahama and Ikata nuclear plants moved closer to restarting as the Nuclear Regulation Authority approved their operational safety programs. Takahama Units 1 and 2 joined Ikata Unit 3 in receiving approval, although final inspections are still required before a restart can take place.
The Takahama-1 and -2 nuclear units in Japan both comply with revised regulatory standards introduced after the March 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi accident. The Japan Atomic Industrial Forum (Jaif) said this is the first time units that have been in operation for more than 40 years have been cleared by the Nuclear Regulatory Authority as complying with the standards.
The two 780-MW pressurized water reactor units, owned and operated by Kansai Electric Power Company, or Kepco, have been in commercial operation since November 1974 and November 1975 respectively.
Russia Announces Progress At Beloyarsk-4 Fast Neutron Reactor
(NucNet) Full equipment testing of the Beloyarsk-4 nuclear unit in Sverdlovsk Oblast has been completed at 85% of the plant’s design capacity. Operators have started the gradual increase of the reactor’s power levels with the aim of reaching 100% of the unit’s design capacity.
Beloyarsk-4, also known as the BN-800, is a 789-MW sodium-cooled fast neutron reactor of the BN-800 design. It burns a mixed uranium-plutonium fuel also known as MOX. There is one commercially operational reactor at the Beloyarsk station, the Beloyarsk-3 BN-600 fast neutron unit, a smaller version of the BN-800. Beloyarsk-4 was connected to the grid on 10 December 2015 and Rosenergoatom said commercial operation is scheduled for the autumn of 2016.
Senate bill introduced to reform NRC fees, speed up licensing of advanced nukes
(SNL) Bipartisan legislation aimed at accelerating the licensing of advanced nuclear reactors by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and reforming the agency’s fee recovery structure has been introduced in the U.S. Senate.
Sens. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., Cory Booker, D-N.J., Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, on April 13 introduced the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, S. 2795, which seeks to establish a transparent fee recovery framework for the NRC.
The bill directs the NRC to develop by 2018 a licensing process for advanced nuclear reactors that uses the existing regulatory framework, and to complete by 2023 a “technology-inclusive licensing framework” for advanced reactor designs.
The call for a shorter, phased-in design and licensing process for advanced nuclear developers to encourage investment and commercial development has been voiced by many within the industry, including former NRC commissioner Jeffrey Merrifield who has proposed a series of intermediate milestones leading toward a design certification, an early licensing determination, and the waiving of review fees.
At a hearing before the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, Dr. Christina Back, Vice President, Nuclear Technologies and Materials for General Atomics and lead physicist responsible for the Energy Multiplier Module (EM2), an advanced reactor concept, testified on the efforts to modernize the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to best jumpstart research into advanced nuclear reactors.
“The following four core principles should guide the design of an ‘advanced reactor’ to ensure commercial success.
It must produce cost-competitive clean electricity, be safer, produce significantly less waste, and reduce proliferation risk,” Dr. Back testified.
“We believe every worthy advanced reactor concept must address these four core principles jointly. It is not sufficient to excel at one with disregard to the others,” Back said.
In addition, the House of Representatives on Feb. 29 unanimously approved legislation that supports federal research, private investment in, and development of advanced nuclear reactors.
SMR industry leaders say 2016 is milestone year for US, Asia deployment
(Nuclear Energy Insider) Global support for SMR development is accelerating and 2016 will see developers take major steps towards deployment in U.S. and Asia, industry leaders said at Nuclear Energy Insider’s 6th Annual International SMR and Advanced Reactor Summit.
Global competition is increasing as China fast-tracks the development of new SMR plants, while North American companies submit permit applications towards the first commercial plants in the early 2020’s. The UK has also launched a competition to identify the best-value SMR design.
Attendees also gained insight into China National Nuclear Corporation’s (CNNC) ambitious deployment timeline for its ACP100 SMR design.
CNNC aims to receive state approval this year to build the ACP100 in China and Danrong Song, Chief Designer– SMR at CNNC, said the company plans to pour first concrete for the reactor as early as 2017.
“In 20 years there could be 100 units in China,” Song said.
# # #Julia Herz, program director of the Brewers Association, is one of a growing number of women involved in the beer industry
Photo © Brewers Association.
Ask someone to imagine a brewmaster and the image that may come to mind is a barrel-chested fellow in overalls, maybe even lederhosen. Brewing is currently seen as a male field, but it wasn’t always this way. What’s believed to be the world’s oldest written recipe is for beer, and it celebrates a female brewmaster. Four-thousand-year-old Mesopotamian clay tablets describe the brewing process in a hymn to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer. From ancient Sumeria through medieval Europe, women ruled the kettles. Beer can be described as liquid bread, so there was nothing unusual about women using their baking ingredients to brew in home kitchens. It wasn’t until entrepreneurial women began to sell their beer that men really moved in, restricting the creation |
metaphor, a metaphorical story told with cruel realism. It’s beyond weird, and beyond good.
The People of Forever are Not Afraid, Shani Boianjiu
We’ve described this explosive debut (literally and figuratively!) as The Things They Carried meets How Should a Person Be?, and we’re sticking to that. But beyond the flash of the subject matter — teenage girls in the Israeli Defense Forces, with all the violence, sex and soul-searching that implies — this is a novel that’s lingered in our minds for months.
City of Bohane, Kevin Barry
An extraordinary debut, Barry’s City of Bohane is a brutal, hilarious, inventive romp set in 2053 Ireland, where the scariest gang in the city is called the Fancy and Gant is on a mission to get his girl back. Irvine Welsh called this “the best novel to come out of Ireland since Ulysses,” and while we couldn’t definitively say the same (we’ve read woefully few, we fear), we’re willing to believe.
Shine Shine Shine, Lydia Netzer
A love story set between here and the moon, between “normal” and “real,” between head coverings of various kinds, Netzer’s debut is quirky but grounded, a winning combination. And a little expert storytelling doesn’t hurt at all.
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, Ayana Mathis
This novel, an impressive decades-spanning page-turner about a young woman and her family enduring hardships and turbulent times in the early half of the 20th century, should have been on next year’s list of best debuts, but had its publication date moved abruptly forward when Oprah chose it as the second pick for her Book Club 2.0. Anything that Oprah “really, really, really loves” is a pretty solid pick, but we think this accomplished debut would have made it even without her accolades.Russian Protest Band ‘Penis Riot’ Angering Putin
RUSSIA – A new protest punk band from Russia has caused an even greater stir than the popular band Pussy Riot in Russia. The new band Penis Riot, featuring five blatantly gay musicians, is reportedly causing President Putin to experience many negative feelings including anger, fury, and suppressed homoerotic confusion.
The band is known for their songs “Putin is Hot,” “Putin Looks Like a Great Gay Lover,” and “Putin without a Shirt is Getting Me Hard.” The band plans to play their songs in all sorts of sacred and historical landmarks before they will certainly be put to death.
“Putin’s going to kill us for this, but we wanted to do this for the music,” said openly gay lead singer Zami Zharkhov. “We know we will certainly die for this, but it will be worth it to see the look on Putin’s face.”
Oddly enough, Putin said he believes the band “actually has some good songs,” and may delay his execution of the super gay punk band. “I believe their music has great hooks, and they do say I’m sexy in some of their songs. I will let that sink in to the public for a bit before ordering a fire squad to kill Penis Riot.”
No word on whether or not Penis Riot will ever tour outside Russia.
AdvertisementsJeter is unarguably one of the best hitting shortstops of all time, but when he’s inducted, he might very well be the worst fielder at the position in the Hall — much of his case is actually tied up in things other than his on-field production. We can have that conversation when it rears its predictable head. Jeter’s positioning as an avatar for everything good about today’s baseball is neither novel nor remarkable now, and it certainly won’t be in five years, either.
That doesn’t mean we are done with Derek Jeter, New York Yankee, of course. Now, we settle in for multi-year reprieve, The Captain lurking in the background, until late fall of 2019, when he’ll be a unanimous-but-for-the-Pete-Rose-crazies first ballot selection to the Baseball Hall of Fame. That honor will be deserved, even if Jeter’s not the inner-circle Hall of Famer that fans and columnists alike will insist he is.
The farewell tour is almost over. The end of a seemingly endless procession of pre-game ceremonies is finally in sight. In less than two weeks, we will be finished with Derek Jeter, New York Yankee Everyday Shortstop, forever — and about a year too late.
When Jeter re-signed with the Yankees in December 2010, he negotiated a three-year deal with a $9.5 million player option for 2014. And like any other Major Leaguer under contract, he is certainly is entitled to every year and every cent his team agreed to give him. Likewise, the Yankees surely knew that absent the unthinkable, Jeter’s option would be picked up, and made their roster decisions accordingly.
It was a bit absurd for New York to then replace that $9.5 million option with a one-year, $12 million contract last offseason, especially after Jeter spent almost all of 2013 on the disabled list except for 73 late, putrid plate appearances, but $2.5 million is not make-or-break money for the New York Yankees. They were already committed to Jeter taking up that roster spot; once that decision was made, the exact price point was immaterial.
What Jeter’s option (and eventual new contract) did do, though, was effectively prohibit General Manager Brian Cashman from any substantial engagement in last winter’s shortstop market. There was speculation that the team might go after Jhonny Peralta to play a year at third base and then move over to short in 2015, but the Yankees never expressed any public interest in that route. Peralta ultimately went to St. Louis to become the everyday shortstop there, and is putting up perhaps his best all-around season for the Cardinals as they march toward another NL Central crown.
Instead, the Yankees signed a bevy of uninspiring middle infielders to complement Jeter — utilityman and defensive whiz Brendan Ryan’s return on a two-year deal being the most notable of that bunch — and decided to make do with what they had, hoping Jeter had one more good season left in the tank.
He didn’t.
Through Sunday’s action, Jeter was hitting.254/.302/.308 in 608 PA for an OPS of.609 (74 OPS+), per baseball-reference.com. He remains a statue in the field, which is nothing new. Jeter has been a terrible defender for at least a decade now — save a brief reprieve just after Girardi took over in 2008 and 2009 when, for the first time in years, Jeter was asked to work with the coaching staff on proper defensive positioning. Age and injury, however, quickly eroded even those small gains, and what the Yankees had this season was a barely-above-replacement-level shortstop hitting second in the lineup and hurting them every day in the field.
The only two regular shortstops worse than Jeter at the plate this season — Cincinnati’s Zack Cozart and Milwaukee’s Jean Segura — at least have some excuse; Cozart just turned 29 but was a late-bloomer out of college and is a plus defensive player, while Segura is only 24 and had a strong rookie campaign last season. Jeter was bad and hurt when he was 39, and it’s not exactly a shock that he’s bad when healthy now that he’s 40.
But none of this matters in the scheme of Jeter’s full participation this season. The man could’ve hit.100/.200/.200 from Spring Training up through this weekend’s games, racking up 600 plate appearances of just the foulest, most unappealing baseball possible, and he’d still be plodding steadily onward toward 650. At most, he’d have been dropped in the batting order, if that. This season has been marketed relentlessly as Jeter’s Final Year; benching him would have been undignified, but more importantly, it would be bad for the brand.Sexy teenage witches or nature-worshipping environmentalists, not Republican politicians, serve as our popular images of contemporary Pagans. But as fall campaigns for New York City’s City Council heat up, a Republican candidate from Queens has been forced “out of the broom closet.” Given that Republicans are typically linked with conservative Christianity, both the Neopagan community and some Republicans are a bit puzzled by Dan Halloran, who is running on Republican, Libertarian, Conservative, and Independence lines for City Council.
Halloran’s campaign Web site counters the assumption that Neopagans dress and act differently from other Americans. Photos on his official site show a clean-cut and conservatively dressed Halloran speaking out against “Obamacare,” supporting youth baseball programs and the Boy Scouts, and presenting a Police Officer of the Month Award. In contrast, the Queens Tribune story played up his alter identity as Pagan priest by running a photo from his page on the “Paganspace” Web site that shows a blue-robed Halloran kneeling before his ritual tools.
“So, who do you think is going to win that City Council race between ‘Democratic Victor’ Kevin Kim and ‘Pagan Lord’ Dan Halloran?” asked Reid Pillifant in his story in the New York Observer on September 18, 2009. A day earlier, a news story identifying Halloran as a King (priest) of Theodism, a form of Norse Paganism, ran in the Queens Tribune and attracted attention to Halloran’s unorthodox religious identity.
Theodism is a branch of Heathenism (also known as Norse religion and sometimes referred to as Àsatrù), one of the many religious traditions under the broad umbrella of Neopaganism, a religious movement that includes Wicca, Druidism, and other religions that recreate and reconstruct ancient pre-Christian traditions. Halloran’s identity may have surprised some New Yorkers, but local Republican party officials already knew about his involvement with Neopaganism before he was outed in the news.
In the media and in popular imagination, contemporary Pagans are often linked with progressive politics, sexual liberalism, environmentalism, the anti-war movement, gay rights, and other causes associated with the political left. But in fact, Neopagans fall everywhere on the political spectrum, serve in the military and as police officers, and work in other professions that do not seem to fit their countercultural image. For this reason, they appear in news headlines when their presence in certain realms of American life (conservative politics In Halloran’s case) comes as a surprise. In 1999, Congressman Bob Barr’s (R-Texas) highly publicized attempts to oust a Wiccan circle from a military base alerted the news-reading public to the fact that Neopagans were serving throughout the military. More recently in 2006, a group of Wiccans sued the US Department of Veterans Affairs in order to get Wicca’s symbol, the pentacle, listed as an approved symbol for VA memorials. For the past couple of decades, Neopagans have advocated publicly and vocally for religious freedom. Conservative politics is just the latest foray in their ongoing campaign to be taken seriously as full participants in American religious, cultural, and political life.
“I believe in God,” said Halloran in an October 1 story in the Queens Chronicle: “Faith is a cornerstone of my life.” Responding to his critics, he described his Catholic upbringing and avoided discussing his Pagan identity, calling for his opponent “to disavow the Queens Tribune’s attack on religion. I am running a campaign on the issues.” But Halloran has another history that seemingly contrasts to his current political campaign: an earlier stint in the New York Police Department, and his career as an attorney. He received his BA from the City University of New York in History and Anthropology, and conducted archaeological field research in Ireland on the Norman and Viking periods. Like many Neopagans, who tend to read more and have higher levels of education than the average American, Halloran was drawn to the mythology and lore of ancient cultures that exposed him to an entirely different religious world than the one in which he was raised. Halloran’s particular fascination with ancient Germanic culture led him to Heathenism, a branch of contemporary Paganism devoted to the beliefs and practices of Northern European cultures.
Like other Neopagans, Heathens usually interact with a pantheon of deities and celebrate the changing seasons. Many forms of Heathenism are also linked to ethnic European identities and draw from ancient Northern European texts for inspiration. Adherents of Theodism worship deities, the land, and ancestors and value honor, oath-taking, family, and tribe. Common ritual practices in Theodism include feasting, seasonal celebrations, and animal sacrifice; all done as closely as possible to the reconstructed traditions of ancient Normans. If feminist Witchcraft with its emphasis on egalitarianism and individual spirituality is at one end of the Neopagan spectrum, then Theodism’s hierarchy and tribalism is at the other. According to the Pagan Census (2003), conducted by sociologist Helen Berger and her colleagues, followers of Norse religion tend to be slightly less politically liberal and slightly less supportive of women’s issues than the general Neopagan population.
On Neopagan blogs, Halloran’s political identity and representation of his faith have been debated since he made the headlines. Some praised him for running as a Pagan in a party typically linked with conservative Christianity, while others criticized him for going on the defensive and asserting his belief in “God” instead of “gods.” In a letter to The Wild Hunt, a popular Neopagan blog, Halloran clarified his response to the media: “I honor my Ancestors and cling to my Hiberno-Norse Culture’s Worldview. I revere my God (Tiw)- and henotheistically I may add… I have never hidden my religion—it’s on my Facebook, in courts—judges and counsels in the Courts I practice are aware, I’ve been the corporate counsel for a variety of pagan groups—and have lectured and discussed theology all over the U.S.”
It would have been impossible to find a Neopagan like Halloran running for political office twenty years ago, when most Neopagans kept their identities carefully guarded for fear of losing jobs or child custody battles. In neighborhoods all over the country, Neopagan communities have been treated suspiciously and outright persecuted by some Christian neighbors, law enforcement, and government agencies. Since for many Americans, the Republican Party is inseparable from conservative Christianity, Neopagans were surprised that the party stood by Halloran, and took it as a sign that not only is the makeup of the religious left and the religious right shifting, but that the country as a whole is becoming more receptive toward their religion.One of the alleged victims in the Rotherham child sexual exploitation trial recognised "an MP or councillor" at a house run like a brothel, prosecutors have said.
Michelle Colborne QC, prosecuting, said the girl, who is now 33 years old was taken to a house in the Masborough area of the town when she was between 17 and 19 years old.
Other girls were also in the property.
Ms Colborne said: "The house was run like a brothel. They had sex with lots of men. There was a constant traffic of people coming into the house.
"No-one was ever introduced by a real name, but she spent her time stoned on drink and drugs, having sex with whoever was next."
Photo: Alamy
Ms Colborne said: "One man she recognised as either an MP or councillor from Rotherham.
"He was related to the defendants, she believed.
"She recalls waking up in a room naked, not knowing how she had gotten there and noting that there were used condoms in the room."
• A Rotherham abuse survivor speaks out
The prosecutor said the same complainant said she was sometimes assaulted by defendant Arshid Hussain and one of his brothers, known as Bono.
"They would strike her arms, legs, back and stomach but would avoid her face.
"Bono would take his time and would methodically strike her with a pool cue but Ash would use his fists."
Earlier the court heard teenage girls in Rotherham were repeatedly raped, beaten, passed between abusers and used as prostitutes.
"He passed her to his brother and friends and, over time, gave her as a payment to men for debts he owed." Prosecutor Michelle Colborne QC
A jury was told one girl was locked in a house in the South Yorkshire town for weeks as she was forced to have sex with a succession of Asian men.
She sometimes had sex with men three times a day fearing she would be hurt if she did not comply, prosecutors told Sheffield Crown Court.
Jurors were also told how a 12-year-old girl was forced to perform sex acts with a group of men in a car after she was picked up from a children's home, and how another girl was called a "white bitch and trash" after she was forced to have oral sex.
Prosecutor Michelle Colborne QC outlined these alleged incidents in the opening of the trial of five men and two women accused of roles in the sexual exploitation of children in the South Yorkshire town over a period of more than 10 years.
Photo: PA
Ms Colborne said 12 women will tell the jury they were "targeted, sexualised and in some instances subjected to acts of a degrading and violent nature".
She said a number of these girls got pregnant during the abuse.
Arshid Hussain, 40, Qurban Ali, 53, Majid Bostan, 37, Sajid Bostan, 38, Basharat Hussain, 39, Karen MacGregor, 58, and Shelley Davies, 40, all deny a total of 63 charges between them.
Ms Colborne said Arshid Hussain - known as Mad Ash - played a key role.
She said: "He used them for his own gratification, then often prostituted them or passed them on to his brothers or associates of his.
"He was assisted in differing ways by the other defendants, each willingly engaged in exploitative behaviour and using the girls to their own ends."
One alleged victim, who is now 36, was subjected to regular sex attacks by Arshid Hussain when she was in the care of the local authority, Ms Colborne said.
The prosecutor told the jury: "His exploitation of (her) was violent and protracted.
"Initially she attempted to say no but was always beaten if she refused and quickly learned to give in to his demands."
Photo: PA
Ms Colborne said: "He passed her to his brother and friends and, over time, gave her as a payment to men for debts he owed.
"She was beaten, had a cigarette stubbed out on her chest, she was tied up, she was raped orally, vaginally and anally from a very young age, often by numerous men, one after the other, at the say-so of Arshid Hussain."
She told the court: "Her recollection is that the violence became a regular thing when she lived at the children's home and seemingly no-one was interested in whether she returned in a bloodied state."
The prosecutor said the girl told children's home staff what was happening but they accused her of "covering up for running away".
Photo: PA
Ms Colborne said: "Throughout these years in the care system, before (the girl) turned 16, she had to have sex with different Asian men on a daily basis.
"They were older than her. Some were in their 30s and sometimes there were up to three a day.
"Arshid Hussain would put pressure on her to do it and leave her with no choice - if she loved him, she would do it, if she didn't then he would hurt her."
• Rotherham: In the face of such evil, who is the racist now?
Ms Colborne told the jury how, at one point, this girl stayed at MacGregor's house for a number of weeks and "she wasn't permitted to leave".
The prosecutor said another victim, who is now 43, was plied with alcohol and sexually assaulted by an unknown man at MacGregor's house.
She told the jury of six men and six women: "The prosecution say she deliberately set out to make girls available for sexual encounters with older men."
Turning to another of the alleged victims, Ms Colborne said Basharat Hussain - Arshid Hussain's brother - picked this girl up from a children's home when she was 12.
Photo: PA
She said a staff member said it was okay to take her and bring her back by 11pm.
Despite telling Basharat Hussain - known as Bash - her age and that she was a virgin, she was forced to have oral sex with him and other men in a car, the prosecutor said.
Another alleged victim ended up in prison after handling drugs and guns for the Hussain brothers, Ms Colborne said.
She said the complainant said the brothers "owned Rotherham" and she did what they told her to do.
The prosecutor said that during one sexual assault, when the girl was 14, Arshid Hussain called her a "a white bitch and trash".
The trial continues.Ken Winter is former editor and publisher of the Petoskey News-Review, which also owned the Charlevoix Courier when it covered the PBB crisis and received the National Newspaper Association’s National Journalism Award for Investigative Reporting. Ken Winter is former editor and publisher of the Petoskey News-Review, which also owned the Charlevoix Courier when it covered the PBB crisis and received the National Newspaper Association’s National Journalism Award for Investigative Reporting.
One of Michigan’s worst agricultural disasters continues to make headlines some 40 years after it decimated 500 Michigan dairy and cattle farms, one Michigan city, and blemished an otherwise nearly spotless career of former Gov. William G. Milliken, Michigan’s longest serving governor. And even today, no one is sure what the effect has been on millions of Michiganders who consumed poison-laced milk, beef and poultry after the accidental statewide distribution of the fire retardant polybrominated biphenyl, or PBB, during 1973.
The disaster started in the early 1970s, when a man-made chemical fire retardant, Firemaster BP-6, produced by the Michigan Chemical Company of St. Louis, Mich. was accidentally mis-bagged and distributed by the Michigan Farm Bureau as livestock feed. The product was then unknowingly distributed to farms across the state and Midwest.
Some 1.5 million chickens, 30,000 cattle, 5,900 pigs and 1,470 sheep consumed the feed and became contaminated with PBBs. More than 500 farms had to be quarantined across Michigan. Additionally, 1.5 million chickens were destroyed, along with over 800 tons of animal feed, 18,000 pounds of cheese, 2,500 pounds of butter, 5 million eggs, and 34,000 pounds of dried milk products. Over 9 million Michiganders consumed potentially tainted meat and milk for a year after the mistake was discovered.
The disaster pitted the popular governor against one of the state’s strongest lobbies, the Michigan Farm Bureau, and eventually led to the downfall of the directors of the state’s Department of Agriculture and Department of Health.
University researchers now suggest lingering health effects remain in countless Michiganders, who may still carry high levels of PBB in their bodies. The Detroit Free Press reports the study will appear this month in the environmental sciences journal, Chemosphere.
“To see the lab reports are both chilling and confirming,” Mason resident Pat Bayer recently told the Free Press. She is one of those whose PBB levels are about 10 times the national average.
One study suggests PBB may be linked to a newborn’s health (showing lower Apgar scores – the first measure of a baby’s health) and possible disruption of human endocrine systems, as well as liver, kidneys and thyroid gland. Research stills falls short of proving the link. However, these studies are ongoing and adverse reproductive-system effects continue to be found in the grandchildren of those who consumed tainted farm products, according to recent reports.
Cattle quickly withered to mere skeletons, died and were buried in specially lined landfills throughout Michigan; some were shipped to Nevada for burial.
A 40-acre Gratiot County landfill had received 269,000 pounds of wastes containing 60 to 70 percent PBBs between 1971 and 1973. Recently drilled test wells show traces of PBBs in the aquifer in all directions. Since 1998, the EPA and state Department of Environmental Quality have been working on the cleanup of the Pine River in St. Louis, which has required over $100 million in funding, including installation of sheet piling, dewatering and dredging operations. Restoration work continues as a fishing ban also remains in place.
At first, state agriculture and health officials denied reports of any mishap. Some farmers had agents of the Department of Agriculture come out to their farms to investigate their suddenly failing herds. The agents would brush the farmers off, telling them it was because of "bad husbandry." The Michigan Milk Messenger, a trade publication, blasted the weekly Charlevoix Courier for its extensive 1973-74 coverage of a neighboring dairy farmer’s dying herd. Meanwhile, other farmers were beginning to report mysterious deformities of their cattle, who were having grotesquely deformed and stillborn calves.
Charlevoix and Antrim County dairy farmers joined together, protesting the newspaper’s coverage and telling the public their milk was safe to drink. They boycoted the newspaper, canceled subscriptions and encouraged retailers and businesses to quit advertising because the stories hurt the local economy and their dairy and meat business.
The Courier eventually uncovered a secret study being conducted on afflicted PBB farm families by the Michigan Departments of Health and Agriculture. State officials, who eventually confirmed the study, told the Courier they didn’t want to influence the study by making it public.
The news made the front page of the Charlevoix Courier and was reprinted in the Grand Rapids Press and other Michigan Booth Newspapers, catching Milliken off-guard and forcing him to hold a hastily called press conference to deal with the issue. As one blogger recently wrote, “The state of Michigan realized there was a problem and they quickly realized the monstrosity of it all. They didn't know how to properly handle the situation as nothing like this had happened before in the United States.”
Politically powerful Farm Bureau president Elton Smith, a Caledonia dairy farmer, called upon the media to report the other side of the farmer’s story on PBB. He also took on Milliken over the acceptable tolerance level of PBB in milk.
“Many of Michigan Farm Bureau's usual allies have seen fit to oppose our positions,” he opined in the bureau’s newspaper, Michigan Farmer, in April 1977.
“The governor supports lower PBB tolerance levels for what we believe are political reasons,” Smith wrote. “The news media, because of its very nature, dwells on the emotional and sensational rather than the scientific and logical. The Legislature also fails to utilize available data to make its decisions, bending instead to the pressure of emotion and politics.”
Smith said he “was disappointed Governor Milliken, who has a long and admirable record of support for Michigan agriculture, disregarded the scientific testimony presented at the PBB tolerance level hearing...”
He was referring to testimony given by the federal Food and Drug Administration’s Dr. Albert Kolbye to the House Committee on Public Health, that evidence showed the present Michigan food supply did not present a risk to public health. The farm leader claimed that Milliken, instead of using the testimony to restore consumer confidence in Michigan farm products, urged U.S. Sen. Donald Riegle to persuade the FDA to lower tolerance levels.
Research continues at Emory University in Atlanta with the Michigan Department of Community Health from funding that comes partially from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
The Detroit Free Press reports “researchers hope that their latest findings – high levels of PBB remain in Michiganders’ bodies and the link between PBB levels and newborns’ Apgar scores – will trigger to continue the work.”
Mason’s Pat Bayer says they can’t stop looking at the PBB issue as it’s too important.While police organizations and Quebec’s opposition parties supported the Liberal government’s pledge to create a $30-million gun registry on Friday, a brother of one of the victims of the École Polytechnique massacre is spearheading the Quebec movement to have it quashed.
Claude Colgan is the director of the Quebec branch of the National Firearms Association gun owners lobby group, which has 75,000 members across Canada. He is also the co-administrator of the Tous contre un régistre Québécois des armes à feu (All against a Quebec gun registry) Facebook page, which has 9,000 followers. He is the brother of Hélène Colgan, a third-year mechanical engineering student who was among 14 women shot to death in December 1989.
It was a sick individual, not a gun, that was responsible for the death of his sister, Colgan said. His family has a long history of gun ownership, he added, and he is tired of gun owners being treated like criminals.
“The registry is useless,” Colgan said. “There is already a system of gun permits in Canada, and all police services have access to it. … To have another system in order to register serial numbers is just a waste of public funds.”
Whether guns are registered or not, criminals won’t respect the law. That’s why they’re criminals. — Claude Colgan, director of the Quebec branch of the National Firearms Association gun owners lobby group
Quebec and Canada has already paid enough for the failed federal long-gun registry, he said.
“Whether guns are registered or not, criminals won’t respect the law. That’s why they’re criminals.”
Colgan’s comments were echoed by the National Firearms Association, which said on its website it was “delighted” with the Supreme Court decision, calling the registry “expensive, inefficient and invasive.”
“As proud and happy as we are of today’s victory, we must acknowledge that many battles remain to be fought,” NFA president Sheldon Clare said. “We may have another one looming in Quebec, in view of yesterday’s announcement, although we are skeptical of Quebec’s ability and resolve to move in that direction.”
We do not understand why the federal government wants to destroy records already compiled and paid for at great cost by the taxpayers of Quebec. — Nathalie Roy of opposition party Coalition Avenir Québec
The NFA is holding its annual general meeting in Quebec City in May, the first time the event has been held in the province.
Nathalie Roy of opposition party Coalition Avenir Québec said the party was disappointed in the Supreme Court’s decision and supports a provincial registry.
“We do not understand why the federal government wants to destroy records already compiled and paid for at great cost by the taxpayers of Quebec,” Roy said. Françoise David of Québec solidare said Premier Philippe Couillard promised in December to create a gun registry as the province commemorated the 25th anniversary of the École Polytechnique massacre.
The Montreal Police Brotherhood told CTV News the court ruling will make it more difficult for police to conduct their investigations, because they “check the registry 300 times a day.”
rbruemmer@montrealgazette.com
twitter.com/renebruemmerA picture of the offending USBs. Image: Victoria Police
Some people just can't resist the urge to plug random USB sticks into their computers. Now, someone in Australia is taking full advantage of the public's naivety when it comes to cybersecurity.
On Wednesday, police from Victoria warned of malicious USB sticks being placed in citizens' mailboxes.
"The USB drives are believed to be extremely harmful and members of the public are urged to avoid plugging them into their computers or other devices," the announcement reads.
Those who plug the devices into their PCs are presented with "fraudulent media streaming service offers, as well as other serious issues," the announcement adds.
According to a recent study, 48 percent of people will pick up a random USB stick
It's probably not the first time someone has done this, judging by several posts on social media from the last few months.
"Received a #USB #key in my #mailbox. Never EVER plug in such present," one Twitter user apparently from France wrote in July.
"Someone put a USB in my mailbox. No note, no nothing, just the USB… So tempted to see whats on it," wrote another user in April, before quickly following up: "would rather not have another broken device due to stupidity. So sorry usb, you're probably going to into the garbage [sic]."
But some people aren't that careful. According to a recent study from researchers at the University of Illinois, 48 percent of people will pick up a random USB stick, plug it into their computer, and open files contained on it.
Even if it comes in your mail, using an unsolicited USB stick is never a great idea.Just when you think that the world has had enough nonsense about climate change up comes an idea even more absurd. People and companies in the UK are now being urged to start using diesel generators, a horribly inefficient method of electricity generation, in order to beat climate change. Seriously, where do they get the people who come up with these ideas?
NHS hospitals are being asked to cut their power demand from the National Grid as part of a government attempt to stave off power blackouts, which the energy watchdog Ofgem warns could arrive as early as 2015. According to one energy company, four hospitals have already signed up to a deal under which they will reduce demand at peak times by using diesel-fired generators.
The background problem is reasonably simple. As we add more and more renewables to the grid that grid itself becomes more unreliable. For the supply of electricity by most renewables is in itself unreliable. The wind doesn't always blow and the Sun doesn't always shine (well, actually, it does, but clouds can get in the way).
Further, we don't actually need there to be blackouts for this to cause problems: just minor variations in voltage being supplied can cause problems for more delicate equipment. Like much of that used in hospitals for example and also, unfortunately, much of that used in large industry. Indeed, we're seeing this problem in Germany currently (both in the news and from my own personal experience). Companies are installing their own, local, generating capacity as the fluctuations on the grid make it too expensive to rely upon it. Machinery is indeed being damaged by fluctuations in the power available.
And of course they're not installing renewables to do this: if renewables were reliable enough then there wouldn't be the basic problem in the first place. So they're installing diesel generators: which, in terms of their carbon emissions, are vastly more polluting than the coal fired power stations we're all being told we cannot use any more.
Which leads us to the awful possibility that by increasing the use of renewables we're actually increasing emissions, not reducing them. Which really isn't the point at all, is it?
What really gets me though is that this installation of inefficient plant, these diesel generators, is being proposed as a sensible solution to our climate change problems. When in fact, it's highly likely that these installations will make the problem worse.The next president of the United States needs to answer this question: When, and under what conditions, will the U.S. government stop using drones to bomb suspected terrorists around the world?
The drone program — assuming the media and think-tank coverage of it is basically true, and this piece should not be construed as confirming the existence of the program — is a tactical and technological innovation that has been invaluable in the war against al-Qaeda. Cost-effective, increasingly precise and surgical, it is almost the archetype of sterile, risk-free, push-button warfare, which the U.S. military has dreamed of for a generation.
But bombing by drone is also an act of war that kills people. And wars are supposed to end. They have to have an end. Endless war is unacceptable and dangerous. The U.S. government simply cannot arrogate the right to wage an endless, global war against anyone it deems a threat to national security. The prospect of such a war should trouble anyone who has the least acquaintance with history or political philosophy.
The writer Randolph Bourne warned that “War is the health of the state,”and endless, global war is dangerous for proponents of limited government.
After U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in a September drone attack, the ACLU’s deputy legal director rightly said, “It is a mistake to invest the President — any President — with the unreviewable power to kill any American whom he deems to present a threat to the country.”
The point is simple: That power will corrupt those who would wield it.
I do not believe President George W. Bush misused this power or that President Obama has misused it so far. It is clear that drones need to be in the skies for some years yet. But that does not mean we should automatically extend the same trust to every future president.
The best argument for allowing the U.S. government to kill its citizens without charge or trial is that, as was the case during the Civil War, the president is authorized to defend this country against rebellion, which means he may wage war against rebels. Abraham Lincoln killed more Americans than did Bush or Obama — or al-Qaeda — and he was right to do so. He did not deploy the Union Army to arrest the Confederacy but to destroy it. It was his duty to do so.
Similarly, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress authorized the president to use “all necessary and proper force” against the perpetrators of what were rightly deemed acts of war.
But the comparison of the war against terrorism and the Civil War only underscores the difference between them: Eventually, the Civil War ended and the U.S. government stopped trying to kill its own citizens. Upon termination of hostilities, the president’s authority to kill rebels lapsed, and the normal responsibility to respect due process resumed.
Brought forward to today’s situation, that means the president must explain the precise conditions we are working toward that will constitute the end of the war against al-Qaeda and, upon meeting them, will halt the government’s efforts to kill people, including U.S. citizens. The president’s authority to kill should be exceptional, not routine.
Simply put, when is this war over?
The answer cannot be “once we’ve killed them all,” because we will never know whether or when that has been achieved. Using the killing of every active or potential member of al-Qaeda as the metric for victory is simply a recipe for extending the war for as long as the government deems convenient. Nor is the metric “after al-Qaeda surrenders” useful, because there will be no surrender ceremony.
The answer is likely to be murky: when U.S. intelligence no longer judges al-Qaeda to be a clear and present danger to national security. The government should clarify what that looks like |
Issacs).
During his stay, Lockhart starts to suspect that something sinister is happening to the patients being treated with “the cure.” He also befriends a young patient, Hannah (Mia Goth), the subject of a strange obsession by Dr. Volmer.
Director Gore Verbinski, famous for “Pirates of the Caribbean,” takes an ambitious direction making for one of the most visually striking films in the horror genre since Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” Every shot in the film is masterfully crafted with precise staging to give the visual tone an unnerving cerebral and surreal atmosphere. Verbinski and cinematographer Bojan Bazelli also make interesting attempts at using visual and narrative motifs, such as the use of water and phallic imagery with eels. While not always subtle, these attempts are worth mentioning as it’s something that most filmmakers don’t try anymore.
With all that, the film is fantastic on a technical level. However, the lengthy runtime and dark tone will polarize audiences. The film takes a lot of risks with its attempts at shock value and slower pace that will be frustrating to mainstream viewers. Verbinski doesn’t shy away from showing weird and disturbing imagery pushing the limits of what viewers are willing to watch. Without giving too much away, the plot gets too convoluted — a common trait for Verbinski’s films — and borrows heavily from “The Shining” and “Shutter Island.”
To the film’s credit however, it is refreshing to see a film try to do things that are rare in the current state of the horror genre. It doesn’t rely on jump scares for few cheap thrills. Rather it creates tension by taking advantage of the setting by making a character out of the maze-like layout of the wellness center. The film was also shot, to great effect, at the Hohenzollern Castle for exterior views of the wellness center.
The three leads of the film also provide strong performances. DeHaan as Lockhart is purposefully unlikable in the beginning, as a selfish young man. His stubbornness is consistent throughout the film, even when he starts to question his surroundings and sanity. Issacs gives his most villainous performance of his career. Goth shows a lot of range in her performance and has great potential as a character actress.
“A Cure for Wellness” is a rare film to come out the Hollywood system that will be a breath of fresh air for some, and a frustrating experience to others. In a day and age of seemingly constant remakes, sequels and adaptations, it is nice to see something that resembles an original film. Regardless if viewers like the film or not, they’ll have a unique experience with it that will stay with them. It wouldn’t be surprising to see this film become a cult classic amongst genre fans within the next decade.GETTY Steven Gerrard is excited about Liverpool's future under Jurgen Klopp
One of his initial sessions back at Liverpool had finished and for all his desire to show Jurgen Klopp he could “still do a bit,” the biggest impression would be left on the former captain himself. “I found myself straight away after training wanting to keep what he said, why he did it and the point he made to individuals,” said Gerrard, over breakfast at his restaurant, The Vincent, in Liverpool city centre this week. “I just couldn’t get enough. “I was a big fan of Klopp before he came but having been around him for a couple of weeks and seeing how he is with individual players, his tactics and how he goes about the job, I think with a bit of patience and time to add to the XI, and the squad, you can get excited. “I was a bit wary about whether to take the invitation or not because I didn’t want to take any attention away from players or the newness of Klopp. But I’m absolutely delighted I did it now. I enjoyed it.
Steven Gerrard's life at Liverpool Sat, May 16, 2015 England captain Steven Gerrard is set to play his last match at Liverpool's home ground Anfield on Saturday 16th May 2015. Here's a look at his football career in pictures. Play slideshow Liverpool FC via Getty Images 1 of 16 Steven Gerrard marked his 400th league match by scoring a hat trick against Everton during the Premier League in 2012
“I have had a chat with Klopp,” said Gerrard. “The club have let me know they are keen for me to come back but there hasn’t been a conversation or an offer as such where they have said, ‘We want you to do this, we want you to do that’. “I’m always going to be biased towards Liverpool and the FA. “What’s interesting for me is I know what is going to happen until November but beyond that I don’t know. I have my BT work, but I am basically available for whatever is out there. “Everyone in the football world will know I am available and hopefully I will be 75pc into my coaching badges.” Could he see himself at another club? “I’m available, available,” he says.
Steven Gerrard returns to Melwood to train with Liverpool Mon, November 30, 2015 Liverpool icon Steven Gerrard has returned to Melwood to train with the Reds during his off season with LA Galaxy Play slideshow Liverpool FC via Getty Images 1 of 37
Gerrard is relaxed as he tucks into scrambled eggs and mushrooms on toast, the first Christmas of his professional career spent with his family and friends rather than juggling the demands of a punishing Premier League schedule. He was at the Stadium of Light for the win over Sunderland on Wednesday night, but this time as a fan, rather than midfield hub, having driven up that afternoon. That sense of freedom appeals and is one of the reasons why he opted to broaden his horizons a year ago and try something new. Gerrard takes a split-second to consider the question of whether he could still play in the Premier League. “Yes,” he answers back. But the decision to step out of the bubble after 18-years during which he carried the hopes of every Liverpool supporter – the fears were often etched across his brow – has been liberating. “When you come out of playing for Liverpool every week and you’re the captain and have been playing for England, of course there is a big weight been lifted off your shoulders,” he said.
“It is about enjoyment now and enjoying the remainder of my playing contract. You can’t describe that pressure you’re under when you’re playing for Liverpool every week, you’re the local lad and you’re the captain. “There was a huge, huge responsibility on my shoulders and I felt that release as soon as I came out of it. “It was different going back to Melwood this time because I’m not a player there anymore. I wasn’t getting judged like I used to get judged. There wasn’t a game at the weekend for me to be worried about, preparing for or to get focused on. I was going in to train and stay fit. “I was just trying to be myself around the players and hopefully they enjoyed having me around as well. “I did feel I had something to prove, yes. To the coaches but also to my mates who had been my teammates for years and years. I wanted to impress them and show them I could still do a bit. “Most of the sessions I did were warm-up sessions and then going into 6 v 6 games which were trying to give players who weren’t in the 11 some fitness and stuff. “I just enjoyed being in Melwood again and around the staff and my teammates. If I didn’t have that I would have been at home training alone, so it was great for me to go back in, see everyone and see that.”
GETTY Gerrard has been back training at Melwood this month
Though Gerrard is not “100 per cent sure,” he thinks 2016 will be his last as a player. Does that scare him? “It does a bit, yeah, because I love playing,” he said. “If I didn’t still love it I would probably call it a day now. I’m actually quite excited looking forward to this next season. “I enjoyed the last two weeks training with Liverpool, I loved it. I actually felt in them two weeks that I was new and young. That tells me to carry on playing and just assess it as the season goes on.” It will be to Galaxy’s gain. Bruce Arena’s side fell short last term with Gerrard admitting the challenges in the MLS surprised him after he joined in July. One week he could play at altitude, the next on a plastic pitch or in searing heat. “I’m looking forward to it because of the experience I’ve had before,” he said. “I’ll be less shocked and surprised because there were quite a few hurdles, shocks and surprises in the first three or four months, just because it’s a lot different to what I’m used to. “In the Premier League and playing over here you know what you’re going to get. Even if you go on the road in the Premier League and Europe, you know what you’re in for. You’ve got a good idea of the atmosphere, temperature, the pitch.
GETTY Gerrard thinks 2016 might be his last year as a playerIf I’m being totally honest, I don’t really care that much about most of Lucas’s alterations. Most were cosmetic anyways. The only thing I will never be okay with is the Han / Greedo controversy. The reasoning behind it is so backwards and insane, and its like Lucas brings it up and makes the excuse for it just to get attention haha
I mean, I would not consider Han a “bad guy” for shooting Greedo cold blood. Look who Greedo is. A slimy criminal POS who made a living murdering other people, many of whom I’m sure were innocent of any real wrong doing and only made the mistake of living on the same planet as Jabba the Hutt and refusing to be bullied by him. You’re going to tell me Han is a bad guy for killing such a person? Even in cold blood? No. In fact that only made him more badass.
The only head canon I can accept that makes that whole thing tolerable is the theory that Han Solo was actually force sensitive all along and this allowed Han the reflexes to dodge a blaster bolt, and he just blissfully assumed this was a normal thing.Ash has had Pikachu follow him around for twenty years now on TV, but is he escaping into other mediums? How many other promotional forms of Pikachu can be found in the wake of the release for the I Choose You movie?
Over the past few weeks players of Pokemon Sun and Moon have been able to acquire special versions of Pikachu that are wearing one of Ash’s hats from the cartoon series. Now the promotion is expanding into other forms of Poke-merch. Beginning on November 8, 2017, anyone who purchases at least $25 worth of products relating to the Pokemon Trading Card Game will receive a pack containing three of six special cards depicting “Ash’s Pikachu,” wearing one of the hats.
Like the video game giveaway, six variations will exist in all, but not everyone can have all of them. You can get a pack of special Pikachu cards by buying TGC cards online at Pokemncenter.com, Target.com. ToysRUs.com, ToysRUs.ca, Walmart.com and Walmart.ca. They’ll also be available via brick and mortar at Gamestop, and EB stores in Canada and Australia.
And there’s more: Ask’s Pikachu will also exist in plushie form! Officially referred to as the Pikachu Wearing Trainer Hat Poké Plush, this 16-inch-long electric rodent comes with a detatchable version of Ash’s original anime hat (there appears to be only one variation, but it’s the one most people want). You can find the new Pikachu plushie at Nintendo New York, Toys R Us, Gamestop and EB Australia, as well as online at Pokemoncenter.com and Target.com.
Ash’s Pikachu, in all its forms, will only be available for a limited time.
The thread view count isGetty Images
While not as widely anticipated or potentially as notorious as the Ted Wells report regarding the harassment on Jonathan Martin in Miami, another investigative report arising from a complaint made by an NFL player is coming soon.
And Mike Freeman of Bleacher Report reports that the report will be “favorable” to Kluwe. Reportedly.
That means the report likely will be unfavorable to Vikings special-teams coordinator Mike Priefer, who was retained by new coach Mike Zimmer after the termination of Leslie Frazier.
Kluwe claims that Priefer made homophobic comments in Kluwe’s presence, and that the Vikings ultimately cut Kluwe in retaliation for his gay-rights activism.
The Vikings hired outside lawyers to conduct the investigation, and Kluwe has from time to time expressed concern that the investigation would sweep the situation under the rug. If the report about the report is correct, that won’t be the case.The Alabama billboard, which looms above a knot of trees about 15 miles north of Birmingham on I-59, says “Diversity Means Chasing Down The Last White Person.”
The group – the so-called White Genocide Project – said on its website today that the Springville sign is “the second White Genocide billboard to go up in Alabama.” The first billboard appeared near Leeds in the spring of 2013 and repeated the white nationalist mantra, “Anti-Racist is a code word for Anti-White.”
After complaining that the media “love to call us ‘supremacist’ because it conjures up images of street gangs with swastikas tattooed on their foreheads” – the group asked for money.
“If you’re tired of tripping over your stacks of cash, how about donating to the ‘Diversity is a codeword [sic] for White Genocide’ billboard project? To get this billboard up in the Northern US they need another $3,500.”
It is unclear who is behind the group or who paid for the billboard. Robert Whitaker, the curmudgeonly segregationist who wrote the 221-word white nationalist mantra that has recently become incredibly popular, today told Hatewatch that he does not know who is responsible for putting up the Springville sign, but that he “is happy and proud” that he has had an influence on spreading the alarm about “white genocide.”
“People are afraid to say anything,” Whitaker said. “Everybody but me has to be anonymous.”
The racially charged billboard near Leeds was the idea of a member of the League of the South (LOS), a neo-Confederate group that advocates for a second Southern secession, the group’s president, Michael Hill told an Alabama radio station this fall.
“I guess even racist idiots have freedom of speech,” the mayor of Leeds, David Miller, told Hatewatch. “As soon as the sign went up, we hopped on it and condemned it.”
The sign, the mayor said, stayed up for about a month.
For anyone who might be a white genocide skeptic, the group includes a list of what it looks like, including, “Moving millions of non-White immigrants into a traditionally White countries over a period of years” and “Legally chasing down and forcing White areas to accept ‘diversity.’ This is known as ‘Forced Assimilation.”
“Society is widely aware,” the group adds, “that White people are becoming a minority in several countries, but anti-Whites don’t want us to bring an end to the policies which are turning us into a minority everywhere.”
In a statement about the new billboard, the mayor of Springville, William Isley, said that the city of about 4,000 residents has been working to promote “racial harmony for many years,” adding, “Any message which cuts against such harmony is very disturbing to the City and is inconsistent with the desires and intent of the City government.
“The City,” the mayor’s statement continued, “has no connection or control over the sign at issue and denounces the message thereon as being racially offensive.”Sevil Shhaideh, in Bucharest in 2015 | Alex Micsik/EPA Romania’s Social Democrats propose Muslim woman as PM Sevil Shhaideh is close to Social Democrat leader Liviu Dragnea, who was barred from the job for legal reasons.
Romania's Social Democrats (PSD) and their liberal coalition partners ALDE proposed on Wednesday to make Sevil Shhaideh, a Muslim woman from the ethnic Tatar minority, the country's next prime minister following the PSD's landslide election victory earlier this month.
If her nomination is approved by President Klaus Iohannis and parliament, Shhaideh would be the first woman and the first Muslim to occupy the job in a country where the majority of the population are Orthodox Christians. The PSD's election campaign was partly based on promoting Orthodox values.
Shhaideh, 51, worked closely with PSD party leader Liviu Dragnea when he was minister for regional development and succeeded him in that post in the PSD-led government of Victor Ponta, who resigned amid public protest in November 2015. The pair have known each other for 15 years and Dragnea was a witness at Shhaideh's marriage in 2011.
Despite her cabinet experience, Shhaideh doesn't have a high profile in Bucharest, having spent most of her career in local politics in the coastal city of Constanţa, according to the media outlet Digi24. Her latest declaration of financial interests, from July 2015, shows she owns three buildings in Syria with her Syrian husband.
As leader of the party that won most seats in parliament, Dragnea wanted the post himself but Iohannis had pledged not to appoint anyone with a criminal record. Dragnea got a suspended jail sentence this year for trying to rig a referendum in 2012, making him ineligible under a 2001 law.
Dragnea maintains his innocence but said he didn't want to create a "useless conflict" with the president by insisting on becoming prime minister. Instead, he was elected head of the Chamber of Deputies on Wednesday, with 216 votes for and 101 votes against. Dragnea was the only candidate.
Nicușor Dan, leader of the anti-corruption movement Union Save Romania which came third in the elections, said Shhaideh lacks experience for the prime ministership and was only nominated because of her loyalty to Dragnea.
This article has been corrected to clarify that Shhaideh belongs to the Tatar minority in Romania.Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
A UKIP parliamentary candidate has been photographed with a far-right Polish leader described by Nigel Farage as “utterly reprehensible.”
The party’s PPC in Tooting, Przemek Skwirczynski, was photographed earlier this year with Janusz Korwin-Mikke, who leads the fringe Kongres Nowej Prawicy (Congress of the New Right) party.
Mr Korwin-Mikke has attracted notoriety for claiming women are too dumb to vote – while his party is strongly opposed to the recognition of same-sex marriage, and pledges to “recognize the family, understood as a union between a woman and a man, as the basis of social life”.
Even Nigel Farage has repeatedly condemned Mr Korwin-Mikke, calling him “utterly reprehensible” while relying on his party to rescue UKIP’s European Parliament grouping earlier this year.
Labour MP John Healey told the Mirror: “It is very worrying a UKIP politician is associating with a group pushing such vile views – and not for the first time. UKIP deliberately courts these far-right parties to secure more cash for its coffers.
“UKIP must explain why it has chosen a candidate who keeps this unsavoury company.”
Mr Skwirczynski declined to comment to the newspaper.
Mr Farage previously said he has never personally met Mr Korwin-Mikke – despite the far-right party helping UKIP rescue more than £1 million in European Parliament funding.of reports on Twitter that the Brooklyn Nets set Wednesday as a deadline for their trade talks with the Orlando Magic over All-Star center Dwight Howard. One reason for the timing, he said, is that the Nets felt the Portland Trail Blazers might make an offer to restricted free agent center Brook Lopez, who is needed to complete a sign-and-trade for Howard. ------------------------------------ Among Nets' reasons to push for Dwight finality today, sources say, is fear Blazers will sign RFA Brook Lopez after Indiana matched on Hibbert Source close to process says Portland & Charlotte have indeed told Brook Lopez they're ready to sign him today to four-year max offer sheet ------------------------------------ Lopez will command a max offer, according toof. Wojnarowski adds on Twitter that Brooklyn is prepared to forego their Howard pursuit to keep Lopez. ------------------------------------ Brooklyn's fully guaranteed the first 4 years, $58M of a max deal offer for Brook Lopez, sources tell Y! Sides still discussing 5th year. To keep alive chances to get Howard, Billy King can't let Lopez sign sheet. Nor can he let him walk if Nets don't get DH. Has to pay Lopez. There's a window Nets can still deal Lopez in sign-and-trade to Magic today, but it's closing fast. Doubt they'll drag this into Thursday. ------------------------------------ Lopez, 24, holds career averages of 17.4 points and 7.5 rebounds per game. The Blazers agreed to make a 4-year, $58 million offer to Indiana Pacers restricted free agent center Roy Hibbert last week but moved on after the Pacers agreed to give Hibbert the same deal in order to retain him. Blazers GM Neil Olshey said on Monday that his team didn't have any other major free agency targets at the moment. -- Ben Golliver | benjamin.golliver@gmail.com | TwitterIsraelis mourn during the funeral of Aryeh Kopinsky, Calman Levine and Avraham Shmuel Goldberg in Jerusalem on Nov. 18. Two Palestinians armed with a meat cleaver and a gun killed four worshippers, including Kopinsky, Levine and Goldberg, in a Jerusalem synagogue Nov. 18 before being fatally shot by police. (Finbarr O’Reilly/Reuters)
More visible European anti-Semitism, increased anger towards Israel and a rise in Islamist extremism have led to the expansion of the security infrastructure around U.S. Jewish institutions, with thousands of synagogues, student centers and other places seeking equipment and training to defend themselves against potential attacks.
Last month’s attack on a Jerusalem synagogue popular with Americans is the kind of thing that spurs U.S. institutions to look at their security. Since 2004, a primary clearinghouse for information and training on how to handle potential threats has been the Secure Community Network – a nonprofit created that year to beef up security at U.S. Jewish institutions.
The group, founded by several major Jewish institutions, also created an information-sharing network meant to connect Christian, Muslim and other faith groups to help one another if they learn something about a hate group that could potentially threaten others. It trains people on things including how to know whether to hire private security if you are attending or participating in a demonstration.
This month, the Network created and distributed a guide for Jewish groups on college campuses – including Hillel student centers and Jewish fraternities – that Network co-founder Paul Goldenberg said was a response to more intense anti-Israel activism on campuses.
“Why should Jewish students having a Sabbath dinner on a Friday night at a Hillel be in fear? These are American kids,” Goldenberg said Thursday in an interview about the new guide. “In the last couple years, Jewish centers that are part of the American fabric, houses of worship that are 100 years old are becoming lightning rods for people inspired by what happens or doesn’t happen in the state of Israel. And U.S. synagogues are becoming targets because of alleged association with what’s going on 3,000 miles away.”
The most recent FBI hate crime data is for 2013, and shows – as has been true for years – that the overwhelming majority of religious hate crimes reported to law enforcement agencies target Jews and Muslims. The 2013 data say 60 percent of the 1,166 offenses reported targeted Jews, while 13 percent targeted Muslims. The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks anti-Semitism, said in April 2013 that the total number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States was one of the lowest levels since the group started keeping records in 1979 — but that there was a significant increase in violent attacks from the previous year.
The Network often partners with the Department of Homeland Security but is privately funded, Goldenberg said, through two major Jewish organizations: the Jewish Federations of North America and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Goldenberg was recently named chair of the DHS’ Foreign Fighter Security Task Force and also sits on the DHS Faith-Based Security and Communications Advisory Committee.
Salam Al-Marayati is president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which is part of the information-sharing network. He said Muslim organizations since Sept. 11 are also hiring more security staff and installing more cameras.
Muslim groups have been very interested in government-run training sessions, he said. However, “not a single mosque” has received government funding available to individual houses of worship to beef up their security. The U.S. Muslim community, he said, is “still in the conceptual phase” when it comes to fundraising and organizing on the topic of security, and is still building systems.
“The world is so much more polarized even than five years ago that now houses of worship are more concerned about their security,” he said Thursday.
The Anti-Defamation League has for decades also been publishing material on security and encouraging Jewish institutions to form bonds with law enforcement.
ADL’s director of civil rights, Deborah Lauter, said that the concept isn’t new but that “we’re all doing a more effective job.” Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, she said, law enforcement has been more committed to working on hate crime issues and the Jewish community has been more organized as well.
Asked about the increase in security even as incidents have been decreasing for years, she said: “Well, it’s not clear. Are incidents down because we’ve been doing a better job?”
The name of Secure Community Network co-founder Paul Goldenberg was misspelled in an earlier version of this post. The post has been updated.There are two tests I'd apply to any job when deciding whether it's what anthropologist David Graeber terms a Bullshit Job.
Test (a): Is it good for you (the worker)?
Test (b): Is it good for other people?
A job can pass (a) but not (b) — for example a con man may enjoy milking the wallets of his victims, but their opinion of his work is going to be much less charitable. And a job can pass (b) but not (a) if it's extremely stressful to the worker, but helps others—a medic in a busy emergency room, for example.
The best jobs pass both (a) and (b). I'm privileged. I have a "job" that used to be my hobby, many years ago, and if Scrooge McDuck left me £100M in his legacy (thereby taking care of my physical needs for the foreseeable future) I would simply re-arrange my life to allow me to carry on writing fiction. ( I might change the rate of my output, or the content, due to no longer being under pressure to be commercially popular in order to earn a living—I could afford to take greater risks—but the core activity would continue.)
On the other hand, many of us are trapped in jobs that pass neither test (a) nor test (b). If Scrooge McDuck left you £100M, would you stay in your job? If the answer is "yes", you're one of the few, the privileged: most people would run a mile. I've had jobs like that in the past. We let ourselves get trapped in these jobs because our society is organized around the principle that we are required to work in order to receive the money we require in order to eat. On a higher level (among the monied classes) the principle is different: work is performed for social status, financial income may be a side-effect of receiving rent. But people are still supposed to do something. People are, in fact, defined by what they do, not by who they are.
Now for a diversion.
As John Maynard Keynes observed in the 1930s, we produce material goods more efficiently today than during previous eras of history: our economic growth is predicated on this. Why should we not divert some of our growth into growing our leisure time, rather than growing our physical wealth? We ought to be able to make ends meet perfectly well with an average 15 hour working week—or, alternatively, a 40 hour week for 20 weeks a year, or a 40 hour week for 48 weeks a year for a ten year working lifetime.
And indeed in some cultures and countries this happens, to some extent. Here are some handy graphs of European working hours and productivity per week. Workers in Germany average a little over 35 hours a week, compared to the 42 hours worked in the UK. Want vacation days? German law guarantees 30 working days of vacation per year (and I am told medical leave for attending a spa resort on top of that). But it's all pretty paltry compared to the 15 hour target.
It's also quite scary when you consider that we're entering an era of technological unemployment. More and more jobs are being automated: they aren't going to provide money, social validation, or occupation for anyone any longer. We saw this first with agriculture and the internal combustion engine and artificial fertilizers, which reduced the rural workforce from around 90% of the population in the 17th-18th century to around 1% today in the developed world. We've seen it in steel, coal, and the other 19th century smokestack industries, which at their peak employed 30-50% of the population in factories—an inconceivable statistic today, even though our net output in these areas has increased. We're now seeing it in mind-worker fields from law (less bodies needed to search law libraries) through architecture (3D printers and CAD software mean less time spent fiddling with cardboard models or poring over drafting tables). Service jobs are also being automated: from lights-out warehousing to self-service checkouts, the number of bodies needed is diminishing.
We can still produce enough food and stuff to feed and house and clothe everybody. We can still run a growth economy. But we don't seem to know how to allocate resources to people for whom there are no jobs. There's a pervasive cultural assumption that people who don't work are shirkers or failures, rather than victims of technological change, and this is an enabler for populist politicians who campaign for support from the frightened (because embattled) working majority by punishing the unlucky, rather than admitting that the core assumption—that we must starve if we can't find work—is simply invalid.
I tend to evaluate the things around me using a number of rules of thumb, one of which is that the success of a social system can be measured by how well it supports those at the bottom of the pile—the poor, the unlucky, the non-neurotypical—rather than by how it pampers its billionaires and aristocrats. By that rule of thumb, western capitalism did really well throughout the middle of the 20th century, especially in the hybrid social democratic form: but it's now failing, increasingly clearly, as the focus of the large capital aggregates at the top (mostly corporate hive entities rather than individuals) becomes wealth concentration rather than wealth production. And a huge part of the reason it's failing is because our social system is set up to provide validation and rewards on the basis of an extrinsic attribute (what people do) which is subject to external pressures and manipulation: and for the winners it creates incentives to perpetuate and extend this system rather than to dismantle it and replace it with something more humane.
Meanwhile, jobs: the likes of George Osborne (mentioned above), the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer, don't have "jobs". Osborne is a multi-millionaire trust-fund kid, a graduate of Eton College and Oxford, heir to a Baronetcy, and in his entire career spent a few working weeks in McJobs between university and full-time employment in politics. I'm fairly sure that George Osborne has no fucking idea what "work" means to most people, because it's glaringly obvious that he's got exactly where he wanted to be: right to the top of his nation's political culture, at an early enough age to make the most of it. Like me, he has the privilege of a job that passes test (a): it's good for him. Unlike me... well, when SF writers get it wrong, they don't cause human misery and suffering on an epic scale; people don't starve to death or kill themselves if I emit a novel that isn't very good.
When he prescribes full employment for the population, what he's actually asking for is that the proles get out of his hair; that one of his peers' corporations finds a use for idle hands that would otherwise be subsisting on Jobseekers Allowance but which can now be coopted, via the miracle of workfare, into producing something for very little at all. And by using the threat of workfare, real world wages can be negotiated down and down and down, until labour is cheap enough that any taskmaster who cares to crack the whip can afford as much as they need. These aren't jobs that past test (a); for the most part they don't pass test (b) either. But until we come up with a better way of allocating resources so that all may eat, or until we throw off the shackles of Orwellian Crimestop and teach ourselves to think directly about the implications of wasting a third of our waking lives on occupations that harm ourselves and others, this is what we're stuck with...Well...yep. This is my first Rarijack piece. Please don't hate me.I've always been a sucker for sunset images, and it's about time I made one myself, featuring my two favourite ponies! The colours were mainly inspired by a picture of the Great Ocean Road, Australia that I've had in my phone for quite some time now, and no doubt I like to think these two actually made it to Oatstralia somehow! Of course, you can always come up with your own ideas, like maybe [insert beach name here].And in any case, should you not approve of this pairing, just think of them as two friends trying to mess with each other. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that...right?My Little Pony © HasbroEDIT:1000+ faves again? YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME (":The family of a man who was shot to death by Brooklyn Center, Minnesota police in August have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against one of the officers involved in the shooting.
According to KSTP’s Steven Tellier, Elizabeth Fair claims that her son, Edmond, was shot by Officer Ryan Soliday after he had been handcuffed during what began as a routine traffic stop.
What happened after Officer Soliday pulled over the van Edmond Fair was driving is disputed. Michael Padden, a lawyer for the Fair family, claims that Edmond was among a group of people who willingly left a Motel 6 room after a security guard requested they do so. As they were driving away, Officer Soliday pulled the van over.
Padden claims that Edmond told the officer he had an outstanding warrant on kidnapping and rape charges and that he didn’t want to return to jail. Soliday ordered him out of the van, and he was handcuffed and ordered to sit on the ground.
Witnesses in the van say that Edmond was then put in a headlock and forced to the ground by another officer. Officer Soliday’s lawyer, Paul Rogosheske, claims that the handcuffed Edmond attempted to fight the arresting officers, stole one’s Taser and was trying to steal one of their guns.
It was “a life or death situation,” Rogosheske said. “The officers acted within their authority, and used force that was necessary in this case.”
But lawyers for the Fair family dispute that. According to the lawsuit filed on Wednesday, “during a routine traffic stop, and without any justification or defense, Defendant Ryan Soliday shot and killed a defenseless and handcuffed Edmond Fair.”
Police claim to have dashboard camera video of the incident, and that it corroborates Officer Soliday’s version of events, but the family’s attorney notes that he has four witnesses of his own — none of whom were called during the grand jury investigation into the shooting that decided charges against Soliday weren’t warranted.
Watch a report on the shooting from 12 News in Minneapolis below.Why aren’t we using thorium in nuclear reactors, given the possibility of a meltdown is nearly zero and the waste cannot be used to make bombs?
— Dennis Dorando, Concord, Calif.
In a word: precedent.
It’s certainly possible to base nuclear reactors around thorium, as opposed to the most commonly used element, uranium. And thorium reactors likely would be somewhat safer because of thorium-based fuel’s greater stability versus uranium-based fuel, with the added benefit of not producing as much nuclear bomb fuel.
Of course, they’re still not perfect. Even though a conventional meltdown would be unlikely, thorium still produces harmful radiation that needs to be contained, and something could always go wrong.
But the real reason we use uranium over thorium is a result of wartime politics. Cold War-era governments (including ours) backed uranium-based reactors because they produced plutonium — handy for making nuclear weapons.
With some modifications, today’s commercial nuclear reactors could switch to thorium-based fuels, but at great cost. Thorium nuclear power might well be the answer for some countries, though; India and China are investing heavily in its development.
Have a question for Ask Discover? Email Ask@DiscoverMagazine.comRepublican strategist Karl Rove asserted on Sunday that New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) handling of the George Washington Bridge Scandal showed he had the right qualities to be president of the United States.
During a panel segment on Fox News Sunday, host John Roberts pointed out that many Republicans were praising Christie for firing one of his top aides after a newspaper exposed his administration’s role in closing part of the busiest bridge in the world as part of political retribution plot, but President Barack Obama had not fired anyone over the health care reform law.
“I think he did himself a lot of good,” Rove said of Christie’s reaction to the scandal. “I think he did himself some good by contrasting with the normal, routine way of handing these things, which is to be evasive, to sort of trim on the edges.”
“You’ll notice we haven’t been hearing a lot from the Clinton camp about this,” he added. “Contrast both with Bill Clinton and Secretary Hillary Clinton’s handling of Benghazi.”
Later in the segment, Roberts asked the panel: “Where was this media coverage on Benghazi, the NSA or the |
I will Never understand how someone could do that.”
and:
“I don’t agree with the reason that Ukrainians are protesting (they want to be included in the corrupt EU), but this is a DAMN good idea. I hope it spreads”
Watch the video below:In Malaysia, a 36-year-old odd-job worker was sentenced to death, and a 31-year-old former college student had his death sentence appeal dismissed in two separate cannabis trafficking cases.
Odd-Job Worker Gets Death For Cannabis Trafficking
SEREMBAN: A 36-year-old man was sentenced to death for trafficking 381.8gm of cannabis at an industrial estate near here nearly five years ago.
Odd-job worker Mohd Azman Ahmad from Taman Bukti in Ampangan committed the offence at 6.30pm at the Taman Tasek Jaya Industrial Park on April 12, 2004.
High Court judge Datuk Azhar Ma’ah said yesterday the prosecution had proven their case beyond reasonable doubt.
Mohd Azman was sitting in the front passenger seat of a car that had stopped near a workshop at the industrial estate. Policemen who ambushed the vehicle found the drugs in a pouch worn by the accused and a plastic bag which was hidden under his left thigh.
To an argument by defence counsel R. Ledchumiah that the policeman who took the report at the Paroi station had stated that the seized drug was not cannabis but heroin, Azhar said the officer concerned made a mistake in the report.
“The mistake was corrected later and this was also supported by a report from the Chemist Department,” he said.
Ledchumiah said his client would appeal the decision.
– Article from The Star Online.
Ex-College Student Emotionless After Death Sentence Appeal Dismissed
A 31-year-old former college student showed no emotion when the Federal Court dismissed his appeal against a death sentence imposed by the lower court for trafficking in drugs 10 years ago.
After the court reaffirmed the death sentence on Teng Howe Sing imposed by the Sibu High Court and reaffirmed by the Court of Appeal, Teng was seen conversing with his parents before he was whisked away to the prison.
“We do not wish to disturb the findings of the lower court,” Federal Court judge Datuk Zulkefli Ahmad Makinudin said in a written judgment today.
The High Court and the Court of Appeal had come to the same conclusion that Teng had knowledge of the drugs when he was caught by the police.
Zulkefli agreed that this was a case of actual possession and that Teng had failed to raise a reasonable doubt on the prosecution’s case and rebut the presumption of trafficking.
Teng was charged with trafficking in 371.12 grammes of cannabis in front of WWW Chat Cafe, Jalan Kai Peng, Off Jalan Tuanku Osman in Sibu about 7.50pm on March 17, 1999.
Teng and another man, identified as Moh Yong Ming, were arrested by police in an ambush. They were seen coming down the staircase that led to the offices of Skynet Worldwide Courier Services on the second floor of a shophouse block, and were walking toward a motorcycle parked outside.
They ran away when the police shouted “Polis, jangan lari”. Teng was seen throwing away a package, containing the drugs. He and Moh, who turned a prosecution witness, were taken to the Sibu Central Police Station for investigation.
The police seized a Skynet Consignment Note, a wallet and a handphone from Teng. He had collected the package from Skynet office by signing himself as Ling Hang Wei.
The package, from a person known as Ah Mui in Selangor written on the reverse side, was addressed to “Jeffrey Wong, Sibu”.
The chemist confirmed that the dried leaves inside the package were cannabis.
– Article from the New Straits Times.3050 words
Why are men attracted to low waist-to-hip ratios (WHR)? Like with a lot of our preferences, there is an evolutionary reason why men are attracted to low WHR. I came across a paper the other day by M.D. William Lassek, “Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Research Associate in the department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara” and co-author P.h.D. Steven Gaulin, Professor of Anthropology with specific research interests in “evolutionary psychology, cognitive adaptations, the human voice, sexual selection, evolution of sex differences, lipid metabolism and brain evolution.” This paper fascinates me because it talks about the evolution of human intelligence through a lens of nutrition and micronutrients, something that I’m well-read on due to my career. First, I will discuss the benefits of fish oil and the main reason for taking them: omega-3 fatty acids and DHA. Then I will discuss the WHR/intelligence theory.
Fish Oils, DPA/EPA, and Omega-3 Fatty Acids
Misinformation about fish oils is rampant, specifically in the HBD-sphere, specifically with Steve Sailer’s article HBD and Diet Advice. The study he cites (with no reference) I assume is this study by Yano et al (1978) in which they found that Japanese men who ate more carbohydrates had less of a chance to die of cardiovascular heart disease (CHD). He says that the first generation ate mostly rice and no fat while the second generation “ate cheeseburgers and had higher rates of coronary disease than their parents.” He then says that these diet recommendations (low-fat, high-carb) were put onto all populations with no proven efficacy for all ethnies/racial groups. These diet recommendations began around two decades before the 80s, however.
He then quotes an article by the NYT science write, Carl Zimmer, talking about how the Inuit study has “added a new twist to the omega-3 fatty acid story”. Now, I read papers on nutrition every day due to my career, I don’t know what kind of literature they read on the subject, but fish oil, more specifically DPA/EPA and omega-3s are hugely important for optimal brain growth, health, and function.
Controlled studies clearly show that omega-3 consumption had a positive influence on n-3 (fatty acid) intake. N-3 has also been recognized as a modulator of inflammation as well as the fact that omega-3 fatty acids down-regulate genes involved in chronic inflammation, which show that n-3 is may be good for atherosclerosis.
An increase in omega-3 consumption leads to decreased damage from heart attacks.
Omega-3 may also reduce damage after a stroke.
Dietary epidemiology has also shown a link between n-3 and mental disorders such as Alzheimers and depression. N-3 intake is also linked to intelligence, vision and mood. Infants who don’t get enough n-3 prenatally are at risk for developing vision and nerve problems. Other studies have shown n-3’s effects on tumors, in particular, breast, colon and prostate cancer.
Omega-3’s are also great for muscle growth. Omega-3 intake in obese individuals along with exercise show a speed up in fat-loss for that individual.
Where do these people get their information from? Not only are omega-3’s good for damage reduction after a stroke and a heart attack, they’re also good for muscle growth, breast, colon and prostate tumor reduction, infants deficient in omega-3 prenatally are at risk for developing nerve and vision problems. Increase in omega-3 consumption is also linked to increases in cognition, reduces chronic inflammation and is linked to lower instances of depression.
Clearly, fish oils have a place in everyone’s diet, not only Inuits’.
This also reminds me of The Alternative Hypothesis’s argument that there are differing CHO metabolisms based on geographic origin (not true, to the best of my knowledge).
WHR and Intelligence
Most of the theories of the increase in brain size and intelligence have to do with climate, in one way or another, along with sexual selection. Though recently, I’ve been rethinking my position on cold winters having that big of an effect on intelligence due to some new information I’ve come across. The paper titled Waist-hip ratio and cognitive ability: is gluteofemoral fat a privileged store of neurodevelopmental resources? by Lassek and Gaudin (2008) posits a very sensible theory about the evolution of human intelligence: mainly that men prefer hour-glass figures due to an evolutionary adaptation.
Why may this be the case? One of the most important reasons I can think of is that women with high WHR have a higher chance of rate of death. The Nurses Health Study followed 44,000 women for 16 years and found that women who had waists bigger than 35 inches had a two times higher risk of dying from heart disease when compared to women with the lowest waist size of less than 28 inches. Clearly, men prefer women with low WHR since they will live longer, conceive more children and be around longer to take care of said children. So while a low WHR is not correlated with fertility per se, it is correlated with longevity, so the woman can have more children to spread more of her genes.
Lassek and Gaulin also bring up the ‘thrifty gene hypothesis’, which states that these genes evolved in populations that experienced nutritional stress, i.e., famines. I’ve read a lot of books on nutrition and human evolution (I highly recommend The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease) over the years and most of them discredit the idea of the thrifty gene hypothesis. However, recent research has shown the existence of these ‘thrifty genes’ in populations such as the Samoans and ‘Native’ Americans. It’s simple, really. Stop eating carbohydrates and the problems will fade away. (Hunter-gatherers don’t have these disease rates that we do in the West; it’s clear that the only difference is our diet and lifestyle. I will cover this in a future post titled “Diseases of Civilization”.)
Lassek and Gaulin pursued the hypothesis that gluteofemoral fat (fat stored in the thighs and buttocks) was the cause for the difference in the availability of neurodevelopmental nutrients available to a fetus. If correct, this could show why men prefer women with a low WHR and could show why we underwent such rapid brain growth: due to the availability of neurodevelopmental nutrients in the mother’s fat stores. Gluteofemoral body fat is the main source of long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LPUFA) for children, along with another pertinent nutrient for fetal development: DHA. Lassek and Gaulin also state that 10 to 20 percent of the fat stored by a young woman during puberty is gluteofemoral fat, obviously priming her for childbearing. Even with caloric restriction, the gluteofemoral fat is not tapped utilized until late pregnancy/lactation when the baby needs nutrients such as DPA/EPA and omega-3s.
Further, 10 to 20 percent of the dry weight of the brain is made up of LCPUFA, which shows how important this one nutrient is for proper brain development in-vitro as well as the first few years of life. Lassek and Gaulin state:
A recent meta-analysis estimates that a child’s IQ increases by 0.13 point for every 100-mg increase in daily maternal prenatal intake of DHA (Cohen, Bellinger, Connor, & Shaywitz, 2005), and a recent study in England shows a similar positive relationship between a mother’s prenatal consumption of seafood (high in DHA) and her child’s verbal IQ (Hibbeln et al., 2007).
Along with what I cited above about these nutrients and their effects on our bodies while we’re in our adolescence and even adulthood, this is yet another huge reason WHY we should be consuming more fish oils, not only for the future intelligence of our offspring, but for our own brain health as a whole. Lassek and Gaulin state on pg. 3:
Each cycle of pregnancy and lactation draws down the gluteofemoral fat store deposited in early life; in many poorly nourished populations, this fat is not replaced, and women become progressively thinner with each pregnancy, which is termed “maternal depletion” (Lassek & Gaulin, 2006). We have recently shown that even well-nourished American women experience a relative loss of gluteofemoral fat with parity (Lassek & Gaulin, 2006). In parallel, parity is inversely related to the amount of DHA in the blood of mothers and neonates (Al, van Houwelingen, & Hornstra, 1997). That critical fatty acids are depleted with parity is also consistent with studies showing that cognitive functioning is impaired with parity. IQ is negatively correlated with birth order (Downey, 2001), and twins have decreased DHA (McFadyen, Farquharson, & Cockburn, 2001) and compromised neurodevelopment compared to singletons (Ronalds, De Stavola, & Leon, 2005). The mother’s brain also typically decreases in size during pregnancy (Oatridge et al., 2002).
This also could explain why first born children are more intelligent than their siblings: because they have first dibs on the neurodevelopmental nutrients from the gluteofemoral fat, which aids in their brain growth and intelligence. What also lends credence to the theory is how the mother’s brain size typically decreases during pregnancy, due to the neurodevelopmental nutrients going to the child. (I also can’t help but wonder if this has any effect on Chinese IQ, since they had a nice increase in intelligence due to the Flynn Effect from 1982 to 2012. I will cover that in the future.)
“This hypothesis,” the authors write, “thus unites two derived (evolutionarily novel) features of Homo sapiens: sexually dimorphic fat distributions and large brains. On this view, a low WHR signals the availability of critical brain-building resources and should therefore have consequences for cognitive performance.”
The authors put forth three predictions for their study: 1) that a woman’s WHR should be negatively correlated with the cognitive ability of her offspring, 2) a woman’s WHR should be negatively correlated with her own intelligence since a woman passes on DPA as well as her own genes for low WHR to female offspring and 3) “cognitive development should be impaired in women whose first birth occurred early as well as in her future offspring, but lower WHRs, which indicate large stores of LCPUFA should be significantly protective for both” the mother and the child.
Lassek and Gaulin used data from the NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) III which included over 16,000 females with a mean age of 29.9 years. Measurements were taken on waist and hip circumference, WHR, BMI, and body fat as measured from bioelectrical impedance.*
For 752 “nulligravidas” (medical term for a woman who has never been pregnant), WHR explained 23 percent of the variance in total body fat estimated from the bioelectrical impedance (ugh, such a horrible measure). Moreover, “controlling for age and race/ethnicity” showed an increase of “0.01 in WHR increases total body fat by.83 kg” (1.82 pounds in freedom units). They also discovered that WHR explains 28 percent of the variance in BMI, with an increase of.47 kg per square meter, increasing the WHR by 0.01. BMI also explained 89 percent of the variance in body fat (garbage ‘body fat measuring instrument’ aside) with an increase of 1 kg per square meter increasing fat by 1.8 kg (close to 4 pounds in freedom units), but when added to the regression model, WHR made no additional contribution.
Lassek and Gaulin’s first hypothesis was corroborated when they found that the mother’s WHR was negatively correlated with the child’s intelligence on 4 cognitive tests. WHR accounted for 2.7 percent of the variation in test scores, “with a decrease of 0.01 in the mother’s current WHR increasing the child’s mean cognitive score by 0.061 points”. In the first subsample, they controlled for mother’s age, parental education, family income and race/ethnicity. Even when these variables were controlled for, WHR was still negatively correlated with the cognitive score. When these variables were controlled for, a decrease of 0.01 in WHR increased the average score by 0.024 points.
Their second hypothesis was also confirmed: that women with lower WHR would be more intelligent than women with higher WHRs. In girls aged 14-16, the WHR accounted for 3.6 percent of the variance in the average of the four cognitive tests. Also discovered was that in women aged 18 to 49, WHR accounted for 7 percent of the variance in years of education and 6 percent of the variance in two tests of cognitive ability. Even when controlling for age, parity, family income, age at first birth, and race/ethnicity, the negative correlation was still seen in 14 to 16-year-old girls.
There is also competition neurodevelopmental resources between mother and child. As I showed earlier in this article, a woman’s brain size decreases during pregnancy. This decrease in brain size during pregnancy is due to the babe getting more of the neurodevelopmental nutrients for brain growth from the mother. Clearly, as the mother’s stores of brain-growing nutrients become depleted, so does her brain size as te nutrients from her stored fat goes to developing the fetuses’ brain.
Lassek and Gaulin confirmed their hypothesis that a woman with a lower WHR would be more intelligent as well as have more intelligent children. WHR predicts the cognitive ability of the offspring while BMI does not. However, controlling for family income and parental education decreases the effect of WHR on the child’s intelligence, the effect still remains giving strong support to the hypothesis that women with low WHR pass on genes for low WHR as well as nutrients needed for neurodevelopment. Further, controlling for parental cognitive ability may mask the effects of the WHR. It’s well known that the mother’s intelligence is the best predictor for her offspring’s intelligence, which is due to the mother and grandmother passing on genes that augment the effect of LCPUFAs, along with the genes for lower WHR.
Women with a lower WHR were found to be more intelligent, and a lower WHR helps to protect cognitive resources (neurodevelopmental nutrients) for the mother and child. The mother’s body has a dilemma, though: it has to store nutrients for the mother’s own cognition; store resources for future pregnancies; and provide nutrients for their growing fetus. Obviously, especially in young mothers, this poses a problem as there is a conflict for what the brain should do with the nutrients the mother ingests. Children born to teenaged mothers have lower cognitive test scores, but, they are protected from this fate if the mother has a low WHR. This shows, definitively, that young mothers who are still growing will show no negative effects on their growth when pregnant if they have a low WHR which signals they have a large amount of LCPUFAs and other essential neurodevelopmental nutrients for the baby’s brain growth.
LCPUFAs are scarce in human diets. Thusly, an evolutionary preference for low WHR evolved for men so their children can have optimal nutrients while growing in the mother’s womb. The study confirmed that large brains, and along with it higher intelligence, and sexually dimorphic fat distribution have a strong link. Clearly, if a mother doesn’t have adequate levels of LCPUFAs, neurodevelopment will be impeded since the babe will not be getting the optimal nutrients for brain growth. Moreover, diets low in omega-3s should have consequences for intelligence and brain size of a baby, since when a baby is in the womb that is the most important time for it to get optimal brain nutrients. Is there any type of environment we can make ourselves and lifestyle choices we can take for ourselves, spouses and children to foster higher intelligence in them? I will cover that in the future.
Men love hour-glass figures, a low WHR. As I’ve shown in this article, there is an evolutionary reason for this. Men were asked to rate women who had surgery to move fat to their buttocks. Body weight stayed the same, but the fat was redistributed. It was found in brain scans of the men that the same parts of the brain related to reward lit up, including regions associated with drugs and alcohol. (more information here)
Conclusion
I’ve long known of the tons of positive benefits of omega-3 fatty acids and fish oil on human brain development. Fish oils and the nutrients in them are imperative for a healthy and growing brain. Without it, brain development will suffer. As a man, I can say firsthand that a low WHR is the most attractive. Now I understand the evolutionary reason behind it: fostering high intelligence due to the mothers lower-body fat stores. Omega-3s and LCPUFA are extremely important for optimal fetal brain growth. Moreover, the current American diet is low in omega-3s, while high in omega-6s. There is evidence of high omega-6 intake being related to obesity, metabolic syndromes, a progressive increase in body fat over the generations. The omega-6 and -3 ratios in the body also play a role in obesity, with a lower omega-3 ratio and higher omega-6 ratio being related to obesity. This is due to adipogenesis, browning of the fat tissue, lipid homeostasis, and systemic inflammation. Clearly, as shown in this article, it’s imperative to have a balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. This could also have to do with the hyperactivity of the cannabinoid system (which we all know what that’s involved with: eating more) and that could also be a cause for obesity with out-of-whack omega-6 to -3 fatty acid levels in the body. That’s for another day, though.
The totality of evidence is clear. If you want healthy children, choose a mate with a low WHR. She and her offspring will be more likely to be more intelligent. Clearly, if you’re reading this, you’re interested in intelligence as well as having the best possible life and life outcomes for your children. Well, choose a woman with a low WHR and you’ll be more likely to have more intelligent children!
* I have one problem with this study. They assessed body fat with bioelectrical impedance. The machine sends a light electrical current through the body and measures the degree of resistance to the flow of the current, which body fat can then be estimated. Problems with measuring body fat this way are as follows: it depends on how hydrated you are, whether you exercised that day, when you last ate, even whether your feet are calloused. Most importantly, they vary depending on the machine as well. Two differing machines will give two differing estimates. This is my only problem with the study. I would like if, in a follow-up study, they would use the DXA scan or hydrostatic weighing. These two techniques would be much better than using bioelectrical impedance, as the variables that prevent bioelectrical impedance from being a good way to measure body fat don’t exist with the DXA scan or hydrostatic weighing.
(Also see Eternal Curves by the Lassek and Gaulin and their book Why Women Need Fat for more information.)
AdvertisementsAs Portland becomes more and more impossible for renters, the Portland Solidarity Network and Portland Tenants United are marching on a landlord to support tenant power.
Portland has become unlivable.
With the fastest growing rents in the nation, the city of Portland, Oregon and its surrounding suburbs and inlets has skated into the national consciousness as a bastion of great food, pop music, kitschy coffee shops, and progressive politics. Out of that mix developers have created a brand so potent that they have used it to displace the city’s working class base. Today, landlords wield incredible power, especially over low-income and undocumented tenants looking to raise their families without the impending threat of retaliatory evictions.
It is in this climate that Ernestine has held tightly to her home of six years in Beaverton, a working class area on the outskirts of the city limits. With limited mobility and multiple medical issues, she has barely been able to stay afloat as her landlord refuses repairs that would keep her health and quality of life up to a reasonable standard. When she and her caretaker finally requested these repairs, Ernestine says that she was threatened with eviction from her home, as well as physically intimidated.
The issue in her home, as with many in the area, is mold. Black mold can cause serious health problems for people with asthma, allergies, and immune compromised conditions, and Ernestine is desperate to keep her home livable as the apartment management’s negligence further worsen the condition of the unit. On top of this, she says that the landlord did not make ADA accommodations a priority and instead forced her to go out of pocket for all of the changes. They even denied her request for an ADA accessible parking space, something that is taken for granted in almost all apartment complexes.
As time went on she reports that her landlord went from indifference to hostility. In June, he was arrested when a different tenant reported an assault during a disagreement. Later, that landlord allegedly challenged Ernestine and her husband both to a fight before the police finally arrived and intervened.
Ernestine and her husband finally got an eviction notice, which shows what happens to many when they demand dignity and legally mandated repairs in their buildings.
While this story may seem horrendous, it is not entirely uncommon for residents trying to find an affordable space to call their own in this city. This climate of fear and retaliation against renters is what has helped to foster an unprecedented tenant movement to grow in the city.
A campaign is now being announced to support Ernestine to stay in her home and to receive all of the necessary repairs to keep her unit safe. The Portland Solidarity Network and Portland Tenants United are coming together to jointly announce a demand delivery, which will confront Ernestine’s landlord and show that the power of tenants can be even more profound than the money that landlords use to shield themselves from responsibility.
The Portland Solidarity Network (PDXSol) has been around since 2010, using direct action escalation campaigns to confront incidents of wage-theft and tenant exploitation around the city. Inspired by the fights of the Seattle Solidarity Network, PDXSol has led the SolNet movement as more than 35 organizations have formed in cities around the world.
Portland Tenants United (PTU) came together during the Portland Renters Assemblies, a project that brought Portland renters together with organizers confronting the growing tenant crisis. The group came together as a citywide tenants union, working on projects that have stopped impending evictions, confronted city officials and landlord lobbyists, and have changed the conversation in Portland around rising rents.
The two organizations have come together in large public actions like the Housing for All march, and will be using the power of the community to march on the landlord on Saturday, July 30th. Ernestine and community supporters will march to her apartment complex to deliver a demand letter to her landlord, stating that she expects to stay in her apartment and receive the mandated repairs. If the landlord refuses to accommodate this, then the community will rally together in solidarity to show that they will refuse to stand by while the most vulnerable people are further exploited.
The power to change the situation in Portland and in cities across the country is not in the pockets of the powerful, but in the hearts and spirit of those fighting back. We rent the apartments, work in the buildings, and are the core of the urban landscapes that have become playgrounds for investors. The only thing that will change this situation is a total reversal of the power imbalance, and that can only happen through tenants rising up and using their strength as tenants. What we are seeing in Portland and other heavily gentrified areas like San Francisco and Brooklyn are people refusing to bend to the whims of landlords.
There is power in solidarity, and when the community comes together they can pressure landlords to do what is right.
If you are in Portland, come to 10765 SE Canyon Rd, Beaverton, OR 97005-1822, in the parking lot of Antoni’s Diner. From there the crowd will march to Ernestine’s apartment complex to deliver the demand letter in person.
RSVP to the event here!Americans are a forgiving and forgetting people. That’s all that can explain the rise in George W. Bush’s approval ratings since he left office in 2009. Back then, he had the lowest approval rating of any departing president since Richard Nixon (who departed in a helicopter after resigning in disgrace) with a 33 percent overall approval rating. Only 24 percent of Americans approved of his handling of the recession-bound economy. As recently as last November’s election, more voters blamed Bush than President Obama for the country’s ongoing economic woes.
Now, on the eve of the opening of his presidential library and an apparent Bush-rehabilitation tour, starting with a Diane Sawyer interview Wednesday night, Bush faces a kinder, gentler American public. According to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, Americans are now split on the former president, with 47 percent approving of his performance and 50 percent disapproving. He’s still underwater, as the pollsters say, but that’s not a bad jump in four years. He’s even climbed on the economy, with 43 percent now approving of the job he did, while 57 percent stayed tethered to the reality-based community, and still disapprove.
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Bush has even climbed among Democrats: 25 percent approve of the job he did, up from only 6 percent when he left office. (Who says Democrats are haters?)
What’s going on? And will Bush’s comeback tour bump his numbers up even more, which would be some rare good news for the broken, embattled Republican Party?
A few things are clear: This campaign is as much about cleaning up the mess he made for his brother Jeb, who clearly wants to claim his rightful place in the White House, as it is about refurbishing his legacy. Last week Bush told Parade magazine he hopes his brother runs. "I would hope that people would judge [him], if Jeb were to run, on his merits and his track record.…So I hope he will run." The Bush rehabilitation project is something the entire Republican Party needs – as evidenced by the breathless reaction of the party’s top cheerleader, Jennifer Rubin. (I mean no sexism by calling Rubin a cheerleader; her hero Bush was a cheerleader in prep school.)
“Bush is back!” her dopey Washington Post column declared Tuesday. Here’s a snippet:
It took less than 4 1/2 years of the Obama presidency for President George W. Bush to mount his comeback…Why the shift? Aside from the “memories fade” point, many of his supposed failures are mild compared to the current president (e.g. spending, debt). Unlike Obama’s tenure, there was no successful attack on the homeland after 9/11. People do remember the big stuff — rallying the country after the Twin Towers attack, 7 1/2 years of job growth and prosperity, millions of people saved from AIDS in Africa, a good faith try for immigration reform, education reform and a clear moral compass.
I warn you, it gets worse. This might be Rubin’s most craven and dishonest column since her countless craven and dishonest columns flacking for Mitt Romney.
But Rubin’s spin won’t work, and neither will Bush’s rehab tour. He is the worst president in modern history, by any measure. Americans don’t like disliking their presidents, so his recovery was predictable, but Bush’s media tour is likely to provoke a backlash, or at least closer media scrutiny to his record. Or at least it should.
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I’ve always felt a tiny bit sorry for Bush. The self-described “black sheep” of his privileged family of compulsive, competitive overachievers, he was never supposed to be president: The honor was meant to go to his smarter, smoother brother Jeb. His favorite job ever, he told us in his autobiography, was being a sporting goods salesman at Sears.
I blamed the worst of his presidency on Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the worst people in the world. I thought his low profile since he left office (compared with Cheney’s brazen attacks on Obama) might reflect self-awareness that he’d been a screw-up, just like his days at his family-funded Arbusto Energy. I even saw an attempt at expiation in his oddly vulnerable self-portraits, several of them in the bathroom or shower no less, at least one featuring his reflection in the mirror. Maybe he was examining his failures and trying to wash away his sins?
No way. Bush is unapologetic in his new round of interviews, telling USA Today, “There's no need to defend myself. I did what I did and ultimately history will judge.” A few years ago, Bush told Bob Woodward he didn’t care about history. “History,” he replied. “We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” Now he’s counting on his presidential library to shape history’s verdict, calling it “a place to lay out the facts.” (Oh, and don’t read anything into his painting. "It's mellowing, and there's nothing wrong, particularly for a Type A personality, to mellow out," he also told USA Today.)
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The most fascinating feature of Bush’s library may be an interactive exhibit called “Decision Points Theater,” that includes everything from the 2003 Iraq War to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to the 2008 financial meltdown. It lets visitors assess "the decisions that I had to make and the recommendations I received," he says, and then make their own decisions.
What an oddly passive thing to say, to put the emphasis on “the recommendations I received.” It lets Bush pass the buck, again.
Here are some decision points that belong in "Decision Points Theater," but probably won’t be there.
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When he got the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing, warning, “Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S.,” he told the briefer, “All right. You’ve covered your ass,” and then went fishing at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. (That “Type A personality,” by the way, took more vacation than any president in modern history.) Is that what the average Bush Library visitor would have done with such a warning?
After 9/11, he did not tell Americans to go shopping, contrary to popular myth. But he did tell us, “Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” He squandered national and international goodwill in the aftermath of the attack, and told us to go to Disney World, while he went ahead with budget-busting tax cuts and put two wars on a credit card, along with a pricey but popular prescription drug benefit for seniors. I’m not sure how “Decision Points Theater” is going to depict that sequence of decision-making.
I wonder if the Hurricane Katrina exhibit will feature the "recommendations" and advice that led him to praise failed FEMA director Michael Brown with his memorable “Heck of a job, Brownie.” Will Bush finally reveal that while he claimed he thought New Orleans had “dodged a bullet” the day after the storm, the White House had actually been informed that the levies had failed and there was massive flooding the night before? Any American visitor to "Decision Points Theater" presented with that information might second-guess the sluggishness of the administration's response to a great city's drowning.
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Jennifer Rubin’s crowing about "7 1/2 years of growth and prosperity" under Bush might be the most deluded passage of her delusionary piece. Under Bush, the U.S. experienced the slowest overall rate of economic growth since World War II. Although wages had declined for many groups since the '70s, household income had remained steady, mostly because families sent a second earner into the workplace. But under Bush, household income declined, too, for the first time since the Census Bureau tracked that data in 1967. Almost 22 million jobs were created under the Clinton administration; only 3 million net new jobs were added under Bush, fewer jobs than in any president's two-terms since World War II.
Labor force participation had reached an all-time high in 2000 under Clinton; it dropped steadily under Bush. Unemployment jumped from 3.9 percent when Clinton left office to 7.2 percent at the end of 2008. And despite the supply-side notion that tax cuts would lead to more entrepreneurialism, in fact, the rate at which start-up companies created jobs actually fell between 2000 and 2010. Clinton left Bush a $236 billion budget surplus; Bush would leave his successor saddled with a $1.2 trillion deficit.
I don't know how "Decision Points Theater" will tackle any of that.
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The bottom line on the Bush presidency is this: After losing the popular vote to Vice President Al Gore, the man who’d run as a “compassionate conservative” known in Texas for reaching out to Democrats ran a hard-right, divisive administration instead. The guy who inveighed against “nation-building” let his neocon advisers push two deadly and impossible nation-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving almost 7,000 Americans dead, more than 50,000 wounded at an ultimate cost of $4 trillion-$6 trillion, according to a recent Harvard study. His tax cuts blew out the budget, his economic policies favored the rich and the economy cratered on his watch.
It’s going to take more than a series of softball network interviews to rehabilitate Bush's legacy. But Republicans need him to come out of hiding if his brother is going to have any chance of being president. So watch for not only flacks like Jennifer Rubin but leading party figures to act like the Bush rehab tour is a great success. They should face the truth: Bush’s ratings only improved because he went away. His comeback campaign is likely to remind people of the disaster he left in his wake, and backfire on him, his brother and his party.
Still, getting it out of the way now at least prevents charges that the GOP is hiding its last president, which let's face it, has looked so dodgy given Bill Clinton's prominence in his party. I'd predict Bush's re-emergence will be a short-term media go-round, designed to erase the idea he's been hidden away. Then he'll be hidden away again, painting dog pictures. "I'm happy to be out of the limelight. I truly am," he told USA Today. "I am happy."
UPDATE: The PR blitz continues, with this ode to Bush from former press secretary Dana Perino, and innumerable Tweets from Karl Rove.As the fall semester ends, I’m brooding once again over the contradictions |
another testament to their dedication to the craft. Then, our interview subject, Mr. Taichi Ishidate, flanked by a couple of junior production associates, bounded into the room. He was a lanky, handsome man with a ready grin, excited to talk about his next project. He'd made his debut as a series director on Beyond the Boundary for the studio, and spent the months leading up to our meeting working on several episodes of their latest hit, Myriad Colors Phantom World. Soon enough, it was time for us to start talking.
Mike: What was your favorite anime as a kid? Why did you like it so much?
Ishidate: I was influenced by Ghibli as a kid. I repeatedly watched them, especially “ Laputa: Castle in the Sky ” to the extent that the videotape was almost worn out.
Why did you particularly love Laputa so much?
Theatrical animation has long been compared favorably with television animation, but I wasn't aware of the heightened animation quality as a kid. I was amused simply by the moving images – I could sense the quality of the animation by Miyazaki-san, Takahata-san, and Studio Ghibli. I had fun simply watching them. I was attracted to it.
What was it that attracted you to animation as a career? How did your career get going?
It might be a long story. (laughing) I originally liked animation. But as I grew into adolescence, I was trapped inside this atmosphere, which was rooted in this commonly-held belief that animation was mostly for children, so I gradually stopped watching animation. Even so, I still liked movies overall. I hoped that I would get a job at a company which produced live-action TV and film. I applied for many companies, but failed those interviews, which made me think that the live action field did not suit me. Then, it occurred to me that an animation production company could be an option, where I could take advantage of my skill at drawing, which I had developed since childhood. Not only that, but I'd still be making films, which I was hoping to do. The decision has led me here.
What was it that attracted you to Kyoto Animation specifically? Was it really just because it was near your house?
There were various reasons, but indeed, I am from Kansai area. Kyoto Animation was near my house. That was the biggest reason. (laughing)
If you lived closer to Tokyo, would you just have gone to someone else?
As a matter of fact, I applied at only one animation studio in Tokyo at the time. As I told you, when the course of my job hunting changed its direction along the way, I found out that there were few companies left which still recruited, except only two companies. One was Kyoto Animation, and the other was a production in Tokyo. I applied for the production in Tokyo first, but, abruptly changing my course in job hunting left me awfully ignorant. My knowledge couldn't bear the scrutiny I was under during the interview. I didn't have even a slight chance. I thought “This ain't right” and then, came here.
I've read that your first project with Kyoto Animation was Munto. What was working on Munto like - do any memories of it stand out to you?
It was “ Munto ” in which I participated as a key animator for the first time. The series and episode director for the title was a super veteran, Mr. Yoshiji Kigami at Kyoto Animation, who has 30 years in this field. As a rookie key animator, I put the key frame materials into the envelope called “cut bag” and handed it to Kigami-san. But, he stapled all the key frames that I drew. He corrected all the drawings in my key frames, which means that the final film features almost nothing I worked on. However, it taught me a kind of professional spirit where your work absolutely must be up to a very particular standard or you can't call it “animation”. I learned Kigami-san's attitude toward maintaining a high standard for the work. I was really glad that I could work with Kigami-san as a rookie.
What do you mean by “stapling the key frames”?
Ishidate:
It's a quality check performed by an episode director or a (series) director. When I handed my key frames to Kigami-san, he said, “Good work!” with a smile. Some while later, when he started to check the cut bags, I happened to be sitting right next to him and heard a stapler. Looking at him, he was stapling my key frames!
KyoAni PR person:
The key frames to be used for the animation are left unstapled, while the ones not to be used will be stapled.
Ishidate:
Those stapled key frames are recorded as unused ones.
When was the first time you advanced from key animator to episode director? Can you talk about that experience a little bit? Was it stressful, or did it feel natural to you?
It was in 2005, my third year since entering Kyoto Animation in 2002. I had been a key animator for the first two years since I started with Munto. It was the third year (when I got advanced to episode director). I didn't volunteer for the job – my sempai offered me a role directing an episode and I thought it was a great opportunity, so I took it.
When you started out as a young animator, did you think that someday you want to be a director?
No, I didn't think that way at first. I found it pleasant to simply draw the key frames on Munto, I kept thinking about getting better at drawing key frames. Then, I got an opportunity to direct an episode. It was only after I started to work as an episode director that I came to think that I would want to work as a series director, in the role of taking the lead in the project.
Break down your typical day at the office. Do you come in early? Are there a lot of different little projects to do, or can you focus on the animation most of the time? What needs to happen for you to think "Wow, that was a good day's work!"?
Though it is anime production, Kyoto Animation is not too different from some other general companies in the sense that our work hours are set. All staff, including me, come and leave the company as the work hours are scheduled.
I usually come to the office about 30 minutes before the beginning time and start with doing clean-up, such as vacuuming, cleaning and wiping the desks, etc. At 12:30PM, I will eat lunch. At 1:30PM, the lunch break ends and the work resumes. At 6PM, we go home. Basically, no extra hours. It's just kind of a pattern. Sorry, that isn't very interesting for your article! (laughing)
Then, back to the other question. A good work day for me always involves animation production itself, creating the things I think are good. I guess that some other people involved with the same kind of work could feel the same way. When I end the day's work having only done a bunch of clerical stuff, when I didn't have time to actually work on production, draw some key frames, I get frustrated, like “I want to create! I want to draw!” As long as I can draw, I usually have some fun.
When you direct, how close are you to day-to-day production? Do you still do a lot of your own drawings, or as a director do you need to stick to checking the work of your animators?
Because of my origins as an animator, even if I am working as a series director, I want to draw what I can draw by myself. So, I guess that I draw a lot more than the average series director. But, there is a location problem. While I can work on "cutting", a rough editing of the frames, here in Kyoto, I have to go to Tokyo for post-production, such as after-recording, dubbing, and what is called, "v [video] editing", the final editing to finish up the episode. When I am working as a series director, I have more trips to take, which doesn't allow me to take much time to sit working at the studio here in Kyoto. While I am away, it makes me irritated that I can't draw.
What's your favorite thing to draw? Like, recently.
I like to draw, but it seems like my favorite thing to draw would be different from what some others might say. I feel myself a minority in that sense. Most people love drawing faces – I'm terrible at faces. Rather, I prefer to draw bodies and the landscapes. If I'm animating movement, I prefer to draw natural phenomena like smoke and the water.
All of your work seems to be contemporary stories, rooted in the present day. Could you see yourself directing historical fantasy, something like that?
Yes, I like the history genre very much. That would be good. If you ask me whether or not I can see myself making a show like that, that's another matter. But I have strong feelings about trying it. As a Japanese man, I'm interested in Japan's history as a setting, but honestly I'm interested in world history too. Researching the historical background for a show regardless of its location can be difficult.
A lot of your projects at KyoAni are based on light novels or manga - for example, Beyond the Boundary is based on light novels. Is there any collaboration between you and the creator?
With " Beyond the Boundary ", I met with the creator, Torii-san ( Nagomu Torii ), only once in the beginning. We had discussions about how film was very different from a light novel, in terms of the way it tells a story, and we agreed that everything would be left to me with this adaptation. It doesn't always happen that way.
In contrast, on another show, I was working as an assistant director before I had become a series director. On that show, the manga creator participated in every screenplay meeting. We exchanged materials and ideas, and created the script together through discussion. It was a show that favored this way of doing things. However, Torii-san's stance is “I leave it all to you, and basically, will not express an opinion on the anime”. So, the extent of the creator's commitment depends on how the both sides (the creator and the production side) want to proceed. It doesn't always work out the same way – every show is different and we find the best production solution for every one.
© Nagomu Torii ・ Kyoto Animation /ProjectBB
When you direct, what's your relationship with the scriptwriter - is that someone you work with every day, or only from time to time?
Since my experience as a series director is only “ Beyond the Boundary ” so far, I have not known many cases, so, let me talk just from my own experience. Beyond the Boundary had the script writer Mr. Jukki Hanada. I think his basic stance is that he develops the scripts through face-to-face discussions with other directors and staff at the screenplay meeting, and then, takes them back, expanding on those ideas and materials to further upgrade his draft script. Hanada-san is the type of script writer who proactively tries to make opportunities to talk with the director face to face. Though it is not the only way of doing it, I admire his way of doing it, and want to use that style.
However, most of the time, the script writer lives in Tokyo area. We have no chance to talk but once a week at the screenplay meeting. So, we tried to take advantage of my trips to Tokyo and to make sure we see each other as much as possible.
Do you read a lot of manga and light novels yourself? Any favorites?
I do not read so many light novels, but I think that I've read no small amount of manga. I simply like the medium of manga.
Your debut as a series director was Beyond the Boundary. What did you have to do to prepare for that role?
I came to realize what I have to do as a series director only after I started doing it on. Though I did try to prep, it wasn't that I had to prepare for the role – I had to start doing it to really learn.
Most recently, you've directed episodes of Myriad Colors Phantom World. What's your favorite aspect of that series?
If you got a chance to see “ Myriad Colors Phantom World ”, you will find that each episode stands alone, with its own unique qualities. When I was reading the scripts for several episodes before directing, I had some thoughts. To put it one way, it felt like while all these individual episodes shared common DNA when it came to the stories they were telling, tonally they all felt like they had come from different series. The “flavor” of each episode felt a little too different. However, after seeing the completed series, I felt they came together well in the end. This may be different from many recent titles where the stories are so continuously plotted across the episodes that if you miss one episode, you will be lost in the story. As for Myriad Colors Phantom World, you can start with any episode of the series without having any trouble understanding the story. There's something in there for every type of fan out there.
©Hatano Souichirou/ Kyoto Animation /The Myriad Colors Production Committee
Do the subjects and characters of the shows you work on interest you? For example, Beyond the Boundary and Phantom World have elements of the weird, the supernatural. Do you like these kinds of stories?
I'm omnivorous – I'm interested in most any genre, save horror. Honestly, genre might not matter to me. Characters can be really weird – talking dogs and unicorns – and so long as people connect with their personalities it doesn't matter. People are interested in human personalities. What they expect to see from a film is self-projection; human qualities they recognize in themselves. I think it may actually be easier to empathize with non-human characters, but that doesn't work unless we properly develop those characters. So yes, I find those kinds of stories interesting.
I was really taken with one of the Phantom World episodes you directed, episode 4, "Mozou Kazoku." How much of the episode's images - for example, the notion of Reina's "perfect family" being rabbits - came from you?
" Myriad Colors Phantom World " presents a subtopic in each episode's subtitle, be it Jung or quantum mechanics. It may be easier to understand something like "Schrödinger's cat" in episode 7, but with episode 4, those rabbit parents were already there in the script. I wondered why they were rabbits, but just rolled with it. Tsuruoka-san and the Sound Director said to me, "her family are rabbits, and there are rabbits in relation to quantum mechanics, isn't that deep?"
But I'd rather ask “why are this human girl's parents rabbits?” Well, you may not be satisfied with my answer. So, I would (dare to) say that the rabbits are Reina's ideal family. She chose the rabbits which symbolized the world she thought was ideal.
Do you know the Sylvanian Family? The adorable images that Reina found of the Sylvanian Family doll world, they created such a world for her. When I talked with the series director (Ishihara-san), he advised me to direct the episode with a “Sylvanian Family-like” world view. I said that I understood.
Do you draw inspiration from non-anime sources, like books or films?
Yes, I do. I suppose that I may not be the only person who draws inspiration from non-anime sources. Looking at other staff at Kyoto Animation, I feel more than ever that they have more inspiration from non-anime sources, anything that we can draw inspiration from. I try to keep in mind that it's important to experience all kinds of human expression, be it film, music, art, or plays.
Do you have any example like favorite film directors?
I have many favorite directors. I watch a lot of Japanese films, but as the number of films produced is larger in the United States, naturally, I have more chances to see Western films and have more favorite directors from Western films. David Fincher and Christopher Nolan always amaze me.
Are there any musical composers you like? When you're planning and handling direction, do you think about music?
I only ever think about music when I'm asked this question. I do not think about music when I am planning, and drawing the storyboards. I have a personal belief that basically, the story is literature, which is composed of and propelled by the lines. When I see images and words together, that's when I can start thinking about how the score might come together. That is the way I think about music.
Though I am not that familiar with composers, in connection with Christopher Nolan, my favorite composer is Hans (Florian) Zimmer.
As you progressed as an animator and grew into the role of director, did you have an idol or a mentor, without whom your style would definitely be different?
Among Kyoto Animation staff, Kigami-san, as I mentioned before, is a master-like figure to me.
Based on the manga “A SILENT VOICE" by Yoshitoki Oima originally serialized in the weekly SHONEN MAGAZINE published by KODANSHA Ltd.
©Yoshitoki Oima, KODANSHA/A SILENT VOICE The Movie Production Committee. All Rights Reserved.
Would you say you're still learning about the craft, even as you've become an accomplished director?
I have been working as an animator for 13 or 14 years, but, while my ability as an animator has not been decreasing, I feel it's getting harder to see my growth clearly at the same speed as I did before. So if I give up learning about the craft, we can't create entertaining animation. Animation is a part of the entertainment industry, which means I need to not only keep up with advancements in the craft of animation, I also need to keep thinking about what sort of animation we should create to satisfy the audience's ever-changing preferences, rather than just chasing the fashions.
I mentioned before my master was Kigami-san. The reason I think that way is because regardless of his thirty-year career in animation, he's still wondering if he's holding the pencil the best way. The way he holds the pencil! Looking at his attitude makes me feel that I have a long way to go. In that sense, I have to work harder.
What do you think you'll be doing ten years from now? Will you be a savvy producer, an accomplished and sophisticated director... or still sneaking away to draw keyframes whenever you can?
Ten years from now, I will turn 46 years old. “Producer” is the job which I can imagine myself becoming the least. Because my origin is as an animator and my original motivation is to create films and to draw pictures, even if it's a situation where I might wind up directing and not animating or animating and not directing, I hope I'm still an episode director and an animator who can create more entertaining works even ten years from now. I will try to be the one!
You explain about directing, making a distinction between “ Kantoku ”(“series director”) and “Enshutsu” (“episode director”). Are they that different?
“ Kantoku ”(“series director”) and “Enshutsu” (“episode director”) are different. While “Enshutsu” (an episode director) means directing an episode, “ Kantoku ” (series director) is rather a role of supervising and commanding the staff's operations, which does not allow him to draw or create by himself. If I want to keep one cut, one scene, or one episode completely under my control, “Enshutsu” (an episode director) makes more sense. I enjoy the roles of both “series director” and “episode director”, but I hope that I can continue to work at least as an episode director.
Is it too soon to ask about what your current and upcoming projects are? Tell us a little bit about what you're working on right now!
It has not been determined yet whether we will make it a TV series or theatrical anime, but there is one project that we hope to develop. It's a project by our studio that I'm spearheading. It is based on the novel “ Violet Evergarden ” already published under KA Esuma Bunko, the label that Kyoto Animation owns. The title was the prize winner of the 5th Kyoto Animation Awards. We are creating a commercial video based on the bunko (pocket book), which we hope will lead to some future development. When we have released the video, I hope you will watch and like it.Featured image above courtesy Mario Quiñones Faúndez
May has been a spectacularly busy month. And a lot of awesome research was recently published on PLOS ONE and other open access journals (check out our Fossil Friday Roundup feature for lists of the latest publications and news) while I was out traversing across the state of Utah (looking at fish fossils and dinosaur tracks – more on that later!). But now that I’ve returned from traveling (for now), and Fossil Friday Roundup is successfully off and running, I’m back and ready to share with you the latest paper, published today in PLOS ONE.
The study, by authors Alessandra Boos, Christian Kammerer, Cesar Schultz, Marina Soares, and Ana Ilha, examines a beautifully preserved dicynodont skull from the Permian of Brazil, and with this skull comes a lot of new information and implications regarding the evolutionary relationships of these herbivorous therapsids that existed globally from the Middle Permian through the end of the Triassic. The richest record with regard to abundance and diversity of these organisms is recorded from the Beaufort Group of South Africa, but the record from Brazil has been less extensive, with only one Permian-age specimen (Endothiodon) previously recorded from the Paraná Basin, and three genera from the Triassic.
This new species, dubbed Rastodon procurvidens by the authors, is now the second known taxon from the Permian of Brazil. The description is based on a single specimen, but a beautiful one at that, with an almost complete skull and lower jaws. It was collected on a private farm in Rio Grande do Sul, from the Guadalupian/Lopingian Rio de Rasto Formation. The skull is slightly crushed dorsoventrally, but is still so well preserved that it is easy to distinguish characteristics that define it as a dicynodont.
What makes Rastodon unusual, however, is it’s unique arrangement of the tusks. Unlike other dicynodonts, the tusks of Rastodon are extremely small and curved forwards, with the tip of each tusk directed towards the front of the snout. The authors note that this is not due to pathological or taphonomical deformation because this morphology is present on both sides of the skull and fits nicely into an embayment that is present on the caniniform process of Rastodon, and each tooth displays fine striations that match the curvature of the tooth, with no cracks that would suggest deformation of the teeth.
Procurved teeth are present in one other taxon, the study notes. Abajudon, a dicynondont from Tanzania, possesses procurved postcanines, not tusks like Rastodon. In both instances, however, the function or purpose of these teeth remains unclear. Boos et al (2016) does note that these unusual tusks must have played a role when chewing because they inner (lingual) surface would have contacted the lower jaw during mastication.
The phylogenetic study of Boos et al (2016) recovered Rastodon as being a member of the dicynodont sublcade Bidentalia. The skull of Rastodon is very generalized when compared to other members of Bidentialia, but nevertheless is united with this group based on some shared derived characters outlined in the paper. More importantly what this study suggests is that Bidentalia must have split by the middle Permian, but this split must have occurred outside of Africa, as members of this group are absent in Guadalupian-age rocks of Africa. Rastodon represents the first basal bidentalian from the Middle Permian, as all other basal bidentalian dicynondonts are late Permian in age.
This beautiful specimen illustrates the need to examine more middle Permian deposits from South America, Asia, and African basins outside of South Africa. The origin of this diverse clade is still a larger mystery, and as the discovery of Rastodon shows, there is still much to learn about the origin and evolution of these unusual herbivorous tetrapods.
Read the original paper, published today in PLOS ONE:
Boos ADS, Kammerer CF, Schultz CL, Soares MB, Ilha ALR (2016) A New Dicynodont (Therapsida: Anomodontia) from the Permian of Southern Brazil and Its Implications for Bidentalian Origins. PLoS ONE 11(5): e0155000. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0155000
Have you signed up for our monthly PLOS Paleo Community newsletter? Click here to receive PLOS Paleo straight to your inbox!Since the late 1920s, the Soviet Union, through its GRU, OGPU and NKVD intelligence services, used Russian and foreign-born nationals as well as Communist, and people of American origin to perform espionage activities in the United States.[1][2][3] These various espionage networks had contact with various U.S. government agencies, transmitting to Moscow information that would have been deemed confidential.[1][2][3]
First efforts [ edit ]
During the 1920s Soviet intelligence focused on military and industrial espionage in the United States, specifically in the aircraft and munitions industries, and penetrating the mainline federal government bureaucracies, such as the United States Department of State and War Department.[citation needed] These efforts had mixed results.
Browder and Golos networks [ edit ]
One chief aim was the infiltration, placement, and subversion of American political life at all levels of society. Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), served as an agent recruiter himself on behalf of Soviet intelligence.[1][4]
Browder later stated that "by the mid-thirties, the Party was not putting its principal emphasis on recruiting members." Left unstated was his intent to use party members for espionage work, where suitable. Browder advocated the use of a United Front involving other members of the left, both to strengthen advocacy of pro-Soviet policy and to enlarge the pool of potential recruits for espionage work. The illegal residency of NKVD in the US was established in 1934 by the former Berlin resident Boris Bazarov.[5] In 1935, NKVD agent Iskhak Akhmerov entered the US with false identity papers to assist Bazarov in the collection of useful intelligence, and operated without interruption until 1939, when he left the US. Akhmerov's wife, an American who worked for Soviet intelligence, was Helen Lowry (Elza Akhmerova), the niece of CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder. Recent information from Soviet archives has revealed that Browder's younger sister Marguerite worked until 1938 as an NKVD operative in Europe. She discontinued this work only when Browder himself requested her release from duty, fearful that her work would compromise his position as General Secretary.[1]
In the 1930s, the chief Soviet espionage organization operating in the U.S. became the GRU. J. Peters headed the secret apparatus that supplied internal government documents from the Ware group to the GRU. Browder assisted Peters in building a network of operatives in the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This group included Alger Hiss, John Abt, and Lee Pressman. Courier for the group at the time was Whittaker Chambers. Browder oversaw the efforts of Jacob Golos and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Bentley, whose network of agents and sources included two key figures at the Department of Treasury, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster and Harry Dexter White.
One early Soviet spy ring was headed by Jacob Golos. Jake Golos (birth name Jacob Golosenko, Tasin, Rasin or Raisen) was a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet secret police (NKVD) operative in the USSR. He was also a longtime senior official of the CPUSA involved in covert work and cooperation with Soviet intelligence agencies. He took over an existing network of agents and intelligence sources from Earl Browder. Golos' controller was the head of the NKVD's American desk, Gaik Ovakimian, also known as "The Puppetmaster", who would later serve a key role in the assassination of Leon Trotsky.[6] Golos was the "main pillar" of the NKVD intelligence network. He had worked with Soviet intelligence from the mid-1930s, and probably earlier. He was not merely a CPUSA official assisting the NKVD (an agent or "probationer" in Soviet intelligence parlance) but held official rank in the NKVD, and claimed to be an oldtime Chekist.
Golos established a company called World Tourists with money from Earl Browder, the General Secretary. The firm, which posed as a travel agency, was used to facilitate international travel to and from the United States by Soviet agents and CPUSA members. World Tourists was also involved in manufacturing fake passports, as Browder used such a false passport on covert trips to the Soviet Union in 1936.[2] At World Tourist, Golos frequently met Bernard Schuster, an NKVD agent (code name ECHO and DICK) and Communist Party functionary who carried out background investigations for Golos as part of the vetting process of agent candidates.[7] In March 1940, Golos pleaded guilty to being an unregistered foreign agent, paid a $500 fine (equivalent to $9,000 today), and served probation in lieu of a four-month prison sentence.
Soviet intelligence did not like Golos' refusal to allow Soviet contact with his sources (a measure implemented by Golos to protect himself and to ensure his continued retention by the NKVD). The NKVD suspected Golos of Trotskyism and tried to lure him to Moscow, where he could be arrested, but the US government got to him first. But even then, he did not reveal his agent network. After Browder went to prison in 1940, Golos took over running Browder's agents. In 1941, Golos set up a commercial forwarding enterprise, called the US Shipping and Service Corporation, with Elizabeth Bentley, his lover, as one of its officers.[1][2]
Sometime in November 1943, Golos met in New York City with key figures of the Perlo group, a group working in several government departments and agencies in Washington, D.C. The group was already in the service of Browder. Later that same month, after a series of heart attacks over the previous two years, Golos died in bed in Bentley's arms. Bentley then took over his operations (thus the reference in the decrypts to him as a "former" colleague).[citation needed]
Secret apparatus [ edit ]
By the end of 1936 at least four mid-level State Department officials were delivering information to Soviet intelligence: Alger Hiss, assistant to Assistant Secretary of State Francis Sayre; Julian Wadleigh, economist in the Trade Agreements Section; Laurence Duggan, Latin American division; and Noel Field, West European division. Whittaker Chambers later testified that the plans for a tank design with a revolutionary new suspension invented by J. Walter Christie (then being tested in the U.S.A.) were procured and put into production in the Soviet Union as the Mark BT, later developed into the famous Soviet T-34 tank.[8][9][10]
In 1993, experts from the Library of Congress traveled to Moscow to copy previously secret archives of Communist Party USA (CPUSA) records, sent to the Soviet Union for safekeeping by party organizers. The records provide an irrefutable record of Soviet intelligence and cooperation provided by those in the radical left in the United States from the 1920s through the 1940s. Some documents revealed that the CPUSA was actively involved in secretly recruiting party members from African-American groups and rural farm workers. The records contained further evidence that Soviet sympathizers had indeed infiltrated the State Department, beginning in the 1930s. Included were letters from two U.S. ambassadors in Europe to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a senior State Department official. Thanks to an official in the State department sympathetic to the Party, the confidential correspondence, concerning political and economic matters in Europe, ended up in the hands of Soviet intelligence.[11]
In the late 1930s and 1940 the OGPU, known as the Political Directorate, used the U.S. as one of several staging areas for multiple OGPU plots to murder exiled Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, then living in Mexico City. It was American Communists who infiltrated Trotsky's killer, the Catalan Ramón Mercader, into his own household. They were also central to the NKVD's unsuccessful efforts to free the killer from a Mexican prison.[citation needed]
Soble spy ring [ edit ]
Jacob Albam and the Sobles (Jack and Myra) were indicted on espionage charges by the FBI in 1957, all three were later convicted and served prison terms. The Zlatovskis remained in Paris, France, where the laws did not allow their extradition to the United States for espionage. Robert Soblen was sentenced to life in prison for his espionage work at Sandia National Laboratories, but jumped bail and escaped to Israel. After being expelled from that country, he later committed suicide in Great Britain while awaiting extradition back to the United States.[1][12]
Wartime espionage [ edit ]
During the Second World War, Soviet espionage agents obtained classified reports on electronic advances in radio-beacon artillery fuses by Emerson Radio, including a complete proximity fuse (reportedly the same fuse design that was later installed on Soviet anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down Francis Gary Powers's U-2 in 1960).[citation needed] Thousands of documents from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) were photocopied or stolen, including a complete set of design and production drawings for Lockheed Aircraft's new P-80 Shooting Star fighter jet.[13]
Atomic bomb secrets [ edit ]
Joseph Stalin directed Soviet intelligence officers to collect information in four main areas. Pavel Fitin, the 34-year-old chief of the KGB First Directorate, was directed to seek American intelligence concerning Hitler's plans for the war in Russia; secret war aims of London and Washington, particularly with regard to planning for Operation Overlord, the second front in Europe; any indications the Western Allies might be willing to make a separate peace with Hitler; and American scientific and technological progress, particularly in the development of an atomic weapon.
The Silvermaster spy ring [ edit ]
The United States Treasury Department was successfully penetrated by nearly a dozen Soviet agents or information sources, including Harold Glasser and his superior, Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the treasury and the second most influential official in the department.[1][2] In late May 1941, Vitaly Pavlov, a 25-year-old NKVD officer, approached White and attempted to secure his assistance to influence U.S. policy towards Japan. White agreed to assist Soviet intelligence in any way he could. The principal function of White was to aid in the infiltration and placement of Soviet operatives within the government, and protecting sources.[citation needed] When security concerns arose around Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, White protected him in his sensitive position at the Board of Economic Warfare. White likewise was a purveyor of information and resources to assist Soviet aims, and agreed to press for the release of German occupation currency plates to the Soviet Union. The Soviets later used the plates to print unrestricted sums of money to exchange for U.S. and Allied hard goods.[14]
In August 1945, Elizabeth Bentley, fearful of assassination by the Soviet MGB, turned herself in to the government. She implicated many agents and sources in the Golos and Silvermaster spy networks, and was the first to accuse Harry Dexter White of acting on behalf of Soviet interests in releasing occupation plates to Moscow, later confirmed by Soviet archives and former KGB officers.[4][14]
Aftermath [ edit ]
President Harry S. Truman's Executive Order 9835 of 22 March 1947 tightened protections against subversive infiltration of the US Government, defining disloyalty as membership on a list of subversive organizations maintained by the Attorney General. Truman, however, was opposed to the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, calling it a "Mockery of the Bill of Rights" and a "long step towards totalitarianism".[15]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]0 18-month-old dies after being shot in McDonough home
HENRY COUNTY, Ga. - A McDonough family is grieving after an 18-month-old boy was shot and killed in their home Saturday afternoon. Investigators are still trying to find out who pulled the trigger.
Police say around 3 p.m., two brothers, ages 18 months and 3 years, were inside a bedroom with a couple of family members.
One of the adults set a loaded.45-caliber handgun down, police say.
Investigators say that's when one of the brothers picked up the gun and pulled the trigger. The 18-month-old brother was shot in the head.
"There were adults in the room at the time, but the adults were not paying attention to what was going on. They did not actually see the incident occur," Henry County police Lt. Mike Ireland said.
The family called 911 and tried to administer first aid. The child was pronounced dead at Piedmont Henry Hospital.
Investigators are working to determine if this was an accidental shooting by a 3-year-old or a self-inflicted shooting by the 18-month-old victim.
Police say they are giving the family time to mourn the loss of the toddler before considering possible criminal charges.
"It's a tragic time for all the family members, so we're allowing everybody to grieve at this time," Ireland said.
A family friend has set up a GoFundMe page to help with funeral arrangements for the baby.
Moments after toddler was shot, Henry Co Police say family administered first aid, called 911. What a lieutenant says happened after that... pic.twitter.com/vjc90xp3XS — Rikki Klaus (@RikkiKlausWSB) October 2, 2016
Henry County Police lieutenant says 1.5-y/o boy shot on King Mill Road in McDonough has died. pic.twitter.com/02YHdqzAJJ — Rikki Klaus (@RikkiKlausWSB) October 1, 2016
Henry Police trying to figure out whether 1.5-y/o boy shot himself or |
“a significant commitment to investing in the research infrastructure,” Savitz said. The University broke ground on the new $88 million engineering building Thursday as part of the campaign kickoff festivities.
“In order to be able to do certain kinds of research, you need certain kinds of core facilities,” Savitz said. “There is now an investment and a plan that we’re developing where there would be fundraising toward supporting those kinds of laboratories.”
The proposed $400 million in fundraising for the Annual Fund will add to the University’s “pool of unrestricted giving” that offers the flexibility to invest in various programs of study, research and student support, Paxson said.
On the whole, the campaign is a “chance to move up even further in some of the areas where we really want to make a mark,” McLaughlin said. “We don’t have the financial resources that our peers do, and if we can get closer to them, we will be able to really take off the table some of the financial advantages that our peers have.”
“People are very on board with a lot of the priorities of the campaign,” Gourley said. But with regard to components of the campaign that affect the undergraduate experience, “it’s important that student voices be prioritized in shaping those implementation strategies,” he said.First off, yes, this edition has a significant amount of cut content compared to the Japanese version - and for this reason, that edition will always be the definitive one. However, if you are like me and just have a casual appreciation for the style and presentation of Persona 5, this can still be a fantastic item for you.
Just a brief review of the physical book itself before I return to this topic. Even in this neutered form, this is still quite a hefty tome, with all pieces of artwork reprinted in crisp high definition. My only real complaint is the thin stock of the cover, which is honestly closer to a sleeve. That said, I have few complaints with the product itself.
Back to the actual content, and more specifically, what was cut - a number of pages focusing on fonts, messages, loading screens, battle portraits, and various other minor pieces of artwork are missing from this edition. I personally don't really miss them; they would be nice to have, but they don't add a whole lot to the experience either. The REAL items that people should miss are the short interview with the artist and the storyboard for the opening cinematic. This is a shame, but without the language skills required to interpret them, I can't say I begrudge their exclusion too much. The same goes for the lack of artist's notes on the concept sketches; while they took away a touch of the artist, the artwork itself has been cleaned up.
That's all I really have to say for this edition. As previously stated, the Japanese version will always be the definitive version, but don't let that keep from enjoying this book in a convenient English format.PCI Express bus has been evolving for over ten years now. So far the technology has tripled its initial data rate, but the next step is taking a longer time. PCI SIG claims that the fourth generation PCI Express specification will be finalized in 2017 and will materialize this decade. The new tech will use a new connector and will be the last copper version of PCI Express.
The PCI SIG [special interest group] has been developing PCI Express 4.0 since late 2011. The target data rate of the new bus is 16GT/s [gigatransfers per second] per lane and the organization has consistently set this target even though many did not believe that it was viable using a wide bus with copper interconnects. The standard is still not finalized because participants have to agree on a number of parameters, including interconnect attributes, fabric management as well as programming interface required to design and build systems and peripherals that are compliant with the PCI Express 4.0 specification.
For example, so far the PCI SIG has not agreed on the maximum length of PCIe 4.0 traces without retimers. Many applications, such as servers and communications equipment, need longer interconnections.
“We are getting 16GT/s, something no one thought was possible a few years ago,” said Al Yanes, president of the PCI SIG, in an interview with EE Times. “The base distance is still being validated but it’s typically 7 inches or so. Longer channels of 15 inches or so with two connectors will have retimers, but Gen 3 has used retimers – now we will need to use them for shorter long channels.”
PCI Express 4.0 will utilize a new connector, but the specification will be backward compatible mechanically and electrically with PCI Express 3.0, which means that it will be possible to use today’s add-in-cards in PCIe 4.0-based systems, but future AICs will not work with PCIe 3.0.
“We’ve done a lot of analysis on the connector – we tried everything possible,” said Mr. Yanes. “We have some top engineers in our electrical work group and they’ve come through – its exciting to see the amount of activity and participation.”
16GT/s base transfer rate will allow PCI Express 4.0 x1 interconnection to transfer up to 2GB of data per second, whereas the PCIe 4.0 x16 slots used for graphics cards and ultra-high-end solid-state drives will provide up to 32GB/s of bandwidth. Higher transfer rates will also let mobile devices to save power since it will take less time to transfer data.
At present Al Yanes believes that fifth-generation PCI Express will have to rely on optical, not copper links. This means a major change, which will happen sometimes in the next decade. Keeping in mind that bandwidth is a major factor that limits performance of supercomputers, PCI Express standard featuring optical links could emerge rather sooner than later.
“I got to believe engineers will find way to make [optics] cost effective by the time they are needed – even four years ago there was a big push on it,” said the head of the PCI SIG.
Developers at the PCI SIG hope to release PCI Express 4 version 0.7 specification this year, but the technology will be finalized only by 2017.
Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.
KitGuru Says: The evolution of PCI Express is an incredible tale. After a decade on the market, the technology is looking forward another decade, an unbelievable thing for the high-tech world.We have a new episode title!
The people have spoken. And the winner is…
“Episode 30: All The Time In The World”
Thanks to everyone who voted. You’ll get another say in another episode-naming poll next week!
Today marked Bubba’s first day since starting the Palladia treatment and we’re not sure if it’s drug, the cancer, or some other influence but he seemed off today. Slower to eat, reluctant to walk, and, perhaps most alarmingly, no longer interested in his treats. We’re going to monitor him these next couple of days and, if these presumed side effects persist, we’re going to discontinue the Palladia. In the end, we’d rather back 2-3 good months with him than 3-5 medium to bad ones.
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Like this: Like Loading...It is the evening of October 8, 2016 in the Manchester Arena. The UFC 204 audience is still breathless from a fight card that saw the likes of Michael Bisping, Dan Henderson, Jimi Manuwa, and Iuri Alcantara shine inside the Octagon, earning each fighter a USD 50,000 Performance of the Night bonus.
But someone else has enthralled mixed martial arts fans: the Octagon interpreter, who deftly handled translations in English, Polish, and Portuguese. His name, Dariusz Kruczek. He is Polish and has worked as an interpreter since May 2014, “when my first MMA event happened,” he told Slator.
Darek (as Kruczek likes to be called) is active from start to finish. He interprets into English for the broadcast during the breaks between rounds when the coaches enter the Octagon to speak to their fighters in their native language. According to him, it is “extremely difficult as they often say stuff really fast.”
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The producer gives Darek a sign (“translator blue corner” or “translator red corner” depending on where Darek’s fighter is) and then he starts consecutive interpreting. When the break is over, the stools are taken out of the Octagon and Darek sits cage-side with mic muted. After the bout, Darek enters the Octagon to interpret for the post-fight interview.
Performance of the night bonus for the UFC translator—Chamatkar Sandhu, USA Today
He is also active across the entire fight week (“from Tuesday till Sunday”), interpreting for fighters during their daily obligations (e.g., photo shoots, press cons, translating the menu at a restaurant, airport check-in).
Plaudits for the Interpreter
Darek seemed unaware of all the adulation thrown his way on social media; until we showed him one online article that described his performance as “magical.”
“I didn’t know there was an article about me. I was really surprised and flattered,” Darek said. On the night, his admirers included well known names in the MMA community. “How about the fact that the same guy who translated Stasiak’s Polish is now translating Alcantara’s Portuguese?! What a night.” tweeted reporter Ariel Helwani.
“Performance of the night bonus for the UFC translator,” tweeted USA Today journalist Chamatkar Sandhu.
Even current UFC Lightweight Champion Eddie Alvarez weighed in: “Ufc hires celebrity Guest Translator ‘Harry Potter’.. big $$$$”—about which Darek said, “Eddie Alvarez was simply hilarious. I was laughing so hard when I saw his tweet.”
He added it was “absolutely fantastic” to read the likes of Helwani and Sandhu praising his work. “Being appreciated is one of the most beautiful feelings any person could experience,” he said.
Asked about one tweet that was critical of his Portuguese, Darek replied, “Well, I can’t please everybody.” He explained his Portuguese was “influenced by Portugal,” and, because he was translating for Brazilians, “some malcontents found it easy to attack.”
His biggest challenge as a UFC interpreter? The breaks between rounds when the coaches enter the Octagon, talk to their fighters, and Darek has to interpret it all live. “I think my and the fighter’s adrenaline levels come very close at that time,” he said.
Other than that, Darek thrives on the supercharged atmosphere inside the Octagon and said, “It definitely helps me. I love the adrenaline rushing in when I hear ‘translator blue corner,’ and the moment it goes away as the coaches take the stools out of the Octagon and my mic is muted.”
Darek said he looks at the commentators immediately after to see if they liked his interpretation. “I will never forget how, after my first ever translation, [former MMA Welterweight] Dan Hardy gave me a thumbs up. That was a fantastic feeling.”
Whenever an event in Europe appears in the calendar, I pray for a Brazilian and a Pole on the card—Darek Kruczek
Path to the Octagon
Darek, who has never worked for any language service provider and has never come close to practising MMA (“I am a tennis player”), came to the Octagon—the UFC’s moniker and its trademark—in what he refers to as a simple way.
According to Darek, “My friend wrote on her Facebook page: Is there anybody here who speaks Portuguese? I replied and it turned out there was a Brazilian fighter coming to Warsaw for an interview and she needed somebody to translate for him.”
Thus did he come to both the interpretation and the MMA world. And Darek endured despite having no formal training because “hours of studying gave me the credentials to continue doing what I truly enjoy.”
He studied European Science at the University of Warsaw in Poland and spent four months in Brazil learning Portuguese. English, on the other hand, Darek has been learning his entire life.
When the UFC organized its first event in Poland in April 2015, Darek said he “reached out and offered my services. Fortunately, they accepted me; and, since then, whenever an event in Europe appears in the calendar, I pray for a Brazilian and a Pole on the card, so my skills can be useful again.”
To this day, Darek finds the moment he gets his flight details “simply exhilarating.” He said he interprets full-time but just enters the Octagon whenever “they call me when there is an event where my skills will be needed—every European event so far,” he smiles.
He said having a day job will simply not cut it for him. “I freelance mostly because I have so many ideas that a full-time job wouldn’t allow me to realize them. This summer, for example, I opened a bar by the lake near Warsaw and it was an amazing experience.”
And when the next idea comes, Darek said he will be totally devoted to the new project as well.
During his downtime, Darek travels “as much as possible.” He said he loves Portugal and visits Lisbon whenever he can.
Asked what he would be doing if he were not an MMA interpreter today, Darek replied, “I would be watching it. I love it all the way! Every event is a dream come true.”
Center Image: In Rotterdam with Polish MMA fighter Karolina Kowalkiewicz, MMA head coach Łukasz Zaborowski, and journalist Dominik Durniat. All photos courtesy of Dariusz Kruczek and taken by Michal Biel.December 23, 2014 - TF2 Team
An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:
Fixed a bug related to the Demoman's charge meter
Fixed a bug related to the Loose Cannon's Double Donk damage calculation
Mannpower update Fixed disguised Spies using the incorrect grapple color Fixed the grapple still being connected to players after they die and respawn Fixed the Regen powerup preventing players from picking up health kits and ammo packs Fixed the Resist powerup shield drawing for Spies while they are invisible Fixed the Resist powerup shield using the wrong color for disguised Spies Fixed not seeing the powerup icons for disguised Spies Updated ctf_gorge to fix lighting issues Updated ctf_foundry to fix lighting issues and to prevent players from getting outside the playable area of the map When hud_fastswitch is disabled, pressing the ACTION key will select the grappling hook in the weapon selection menu
Added LBTF2 and FBTF tournament medals
Reduced the amount of self-damage received from the Loose Cannon
Notes missed from the previous update:A Seattle woman has been arrested for allegedly breaking into a man's home and raping him while he slept.
According to The Smoking Gun, 28-year-old Chantae Gilman somehow accessed the victim's apartment one night in June 2013. The 31-year-old told police that he had attended a birthday party for a neighbor, who Gilman also knows. He awoke to find Gilman on top of him, pinning his hands behind his head.
Gilman ignored his orders to get off of him, yet he somehow managed to free himself and force her out of his apartment. During questioning, Gilman told authorities that she did not know the man, nor did she remember forcing herself on him. The Smoking Gun notes that Detective Roger Ishimitsu said Gilman told them that she suffers from both psychosis and bi-polar disorder.
Gilman's DNA matched what was discovered during the man's sexual assault examination, and she was charged with second-degree rape on Monday.
[via The Smoking Gun]
Send tips, photos and news developments to cityguidetips@complex.com.Poetry Flash, a Berkeley poetry review and newsletter that has been publishing for more than 40 years, may close before the end of the year because of a 27 percent increase in its rent.
Founded in 1972, the newsletter is currently operating out of a live-work space on Fourth Street, where the newsletter’s office doubles as a home for Joyce Jenkins, editor in chief and publisher since 1978. Since the complex is multiple use, it does not fall under the purview of rent control, allowing landlords the freedom to impose their own rates. The rent increase compounds organizational issues that emerged late last year after the death of Mark Baldridge, Jenkins’ business partner and husband.
Members of the literary community are contemplating how to remedy the situation before Poetry Flash is forced to end its publication. According to Poetry Flash contributing editor Dawn-Michelle Baude, there are many potential solutions for rescuing the newsletter, including fundraising, moving locations or finding a poetry patron who can help in keeping it afloat.
Baude said a solution would be turning film critic Pauline Kael’s Berkeley home into a Berkeley community poet center, where Poetry Flash could house its archives of American poetry and continue its work.
“The arts add so much to our community and economy,” said Sharon Coleman, contributing editor to the newsletter, in an email. “We need to change the law or policy and put live/work art spaces under rent control or provide special low-income spaces within new developments and renovated multi-space developments.”
Thomas Richardson, who said increased rent has compromised his five-year tenure at the live-work complex, said the “flavor of the complex has really changed in the last year” because of the increases in rent. Many tenants moved in with the promise of a community for artists, he said.
In 2010, Poetry Flash stopped printing for a circulation of 22,000 and became exclusively online, according to Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin. Beyond including book reviews, poetry and a calendar of literary events, Poetry Flash is responsible for organizing a weekly reading series at Moe’s Books and Diesel, A Bookstore, and for organizing and sponsoring the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival and the Northern California Book Awards, respectively.
According to Ulin, the “creative middle class” is being affected by landlords who are trying to gain a greater profit, especially at a time when the tech industry has caused increased housing costs in the Bay Area.
“(Poetry Flash) has been a vital contributor to the Bay Area’s intellectual ecosystem without being cliquish or exclusive or academic,” said Stephen Kessler, a poet recently published in the newsletter, in an email. “Its absence would be a devastating loss to the cultural and literary life of Berkeley and well beyond.”
Contact Jamie Nguyen at [email protected].A new Tesla accident is being blamed on the car’s smarts going wrong. This time around, a Model X accelerated into a building while the owner was parking it. Driverless cars gone rogue, or the owner struggling with left pedal vs right pedal?
Update 4:45: According to Tesla’s logs, the accident was entirely the fault of the driver, who pressed the accelerator and drove into the building. Full statement below.
DON’T MISS: You can listen to Kanye West’s new ‘Champion’ single right here
“Our 5 day old Tesla X today while entering a parking stall suddenly and unexpectedly accelerated at high speed on its own climbing over 39 feet of planters and crashing into a building,” Puzant Ozbag wrote on the Tesla forum over the weekend.
“The airbags deployed and my wife’s arms have burn marks as a consequence,” he continued. “This could have easily been a fatal accident if the car’s wheels were not turned slightly to the left. If they were straight, it would have gone over the planters and crashed into the store in front of the parking stall and injured or killed the patrons.”
“The acceleration was uncontrollable, seemed maximum, and the car only stopped because it hit the building and caused massive damage to the building.”
He later added that “the car was being driven and slowly being parked when it uncontrollably accelerated.”
Tesla keeps detailed logs of each car that can be valuable in such incidents, as a recent accident revealed, so it’s likely the company will be able to explain what went wrong. It’s unclear at this time what caused the accident, and whether it was human error. The driver clearly believes that the car misbehaved. Either way, Tesla should explain these types of accidents when they occur. Otherwise, it’ll have a huge problem on its hands.
Update: Electrek has a statement from Tesla, which claims to have examined the logs and found the driver to be at fault:
“We analyzed the vehicle logs which confirm that this Model X was operating correctly under manual control and was never in Autopilot or cruise control at the time of the incident or in the minutes before. Data shows that the vehicle was traveling at 6 mph when the accelerator pedal was abruptly increased to 100%. Consistent with the driver’s actions, the vehicle applied torque and accelerated as instructed. Safety is the top priority at Tesla and we engineer and build our cars with this foremost in mind. We are pleased that the driver is ok and ask our customers to exercise safe behavior when using our vehicles.”
More images showing the crash below.(Image: © Richard E. Aaron/Getty Images)
According to multiple news sources, Lana Rae Meisner, 63, the wife of Randy Meisner, a founding member of the Eagles, was found shot to death at the couple’s home in Studio City, California, Sunday (March 6).
It is still unclear how Lana Rae was killed.
According to RadarOnline, Randy Meisner told police his wife was shot by accident as she searched for something in a closet at their home.
“Randy seemed to be in shock,” Page Six adds, “and wasn’t even able to acknowledge that Lana Rae was dead from a gunshot wound.”
Law enforcement had been to the Meisner home earlier that evening; Lana Rae allegedly called 911 to report a domestic-violence incident, according to TMZ, which adds that she accused the founding Eagles bassist of “acting erratically.” About an hour and a half later, Randy Meisner called to say his wife had gone into another room when he heard a shot, according to multiple sources.
RadarOnline also has quoted an unnamed law-enforcement source. According to him/her, Meisner told the police his wife “was stumbling around, looking for something in a closet where there were two guns. She was looking for something in the hall closet, and Randy told cops one of the guns was falling and in the process, Lana Rae caught it and it ended up blowing her head apart.”
UPDATE: TMZ reports that Meiser has been cleared in the shooting death of his wife.
FROM TMZ:LAPD detectives have concluded she accidentally shot herself. It seems weird, because police say she was "moving a rifle that was stored inside the closet" when it accidentally went off. It's odd as to why she'd be "moving" a rifle less than two hours after calling 911, reporting domestic violence. Law enforcement sources say the gun discharged inside the soft gun case, and the trajectory of the bullet was enough for cops to conclude Randy was not involved.
Meisner quit the Eagles in 1977. He was known for his incredibly high singing voice, which graces several Eagles tracks, including "Take It to the Limit." Meisner wrote the song with Don Henley and Glenn Frey, who died in January at age 67. Meisner was replaced in the Eagles by Timothy B. Schmit.A Winnipeg lawyer says she's still a little numb after being told to "go back to my own country" during a night out at a downtown restaurant on Saturday.
Priti Shah was at the Palm Lounge in the Fort Garry Hotel on Saturday night to have a bite to eat and see a musical group.
There was an issue with her meal and she was having trouble conversing with the server over the music so she got up from her table and made arrangements in the servers' area before going back to her seat.
That's when a pair of women seated at the table beside hers began motioning to her, waving their hands and saying something she couldn't quite make out — "telling me that I needed to chill, or take a pill, or something," she said.
"At first I thought maybe I knew them," Shah said. "So I went closer to the table, and one of the women put her hand up and shook it and said that I should go back to my own country."
Shah is Canadian-born and of Indian descent. Shah, who is also on the board of the Winnipeg Football Club, said she doesn't remember exactly what she said to the woman, but she feels like she didn't have a good response.
"I was completely shocked by the statement. It's something that I've heard before but not directed at me, and I love this country," she said.
"I'm as Canadian as it comes and I'm Canadian-born."
'Nobody did anything'
Shah said she went straight back to the server to tell him what happened and ask to speak to a manager.
"He responded that he was appalled by what was said and that he would make sure the manager came to speak to me," Shah said. "And I waited about 35 to 40 minutes before anybody came."
In the meantime, Shah returned to her table. While she waited, a woman who had been sitting with the two who spoke to her came over and apologized for her companion's behaviour.
Priti Shah says she told a manager at the Hotel Fort Garry's Palm Room that the restaurant didn't feel like a safe and hospitable environment. (Priti Shah/Facebook)
Shah said she accepted the apology and asked the woman if she'd like to join her but the woman declined, saying she wasn't comfortable.
"The bigger concern for me was the sense that, aside from this woman, nobody did anything," Shah said. "And despite her apology, I felt as if I needed to comfort her.
"I felt completely alone and isolated, and the longer I waited, the more shocked I was that this was happening."
When the manager arrived, Shah said she told him what happened and said the restaurant didn't feel like a safe and hospitable environment.
She said he didn't ask her what she needed or felt, or what he could do to help.
After that, the manager spoke to the other table and came back.
Shah said he told her he had asked the group if they wanted to sit somewhere else, and they declined, and that was all he could do.
"I think it was a completely inadequate response," she said.
She left her contact information and requested another manager call her as soon as possible.
Paralysis to respond
On Sunday afternoon, Shah said she received a call from the owner of the hotel and told her what happened.
Shah said the owner told her the hotel will consider whether a reprimand is warranted and whether further training or policy changes are required.
CBC's request for comment from the hotel's management has not yet been returned.
Shah said she thinks the entire affair should have been handled differently.
"What's really important to me is the paralysis of people to be able to respond," she said.
"I think everyone's in agreement that no one should be told to go back to their own country, but there's a lack of knowledge, awareness and action when these types of incidents arise. And that has me quite concerned."
Shah said she thinks it's essential for people to talk about racism and discrimination when they witness it, and feel empowered to do something about it.
She said it's important to take a stand against the behaviour and ask the victim how to make the environment feel safe.
If she were face-to-face with the woman in the restaurant again, Shah said, this time she'd say something else.
"I probably would say to her that I am a proud Canadian, born and raised, and that I love my country desperately, and that I am ashamed that a fellow Canadian does not honour who we are as Canadians by putting forth that kind of garbage."It was the loneliness of the 12-year-old that first drew me to Helga Goebbels. She was the oldest of the six children taken by their parents, Joseph and Magda Goebbels, into Hitler's Berlin bunker on April 22 1945. Their tale had barely been written about and had never been the subject of a book. I decided to tell their story from Helga's point of view. My breakthrough was the discovery of an untranslated memoir of their governess, Kathe Hubner, who worked for the Goebbels family for the last two years of the Second World War.
Faced with the inevitability of defeat, Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, had determined to await defeat and death alongside the Fuhrer. Other leading Nazis had protected their children by sending them into the mountains or out of the country, but Magda Goebbels decided that she and the children would join her husband to bring their lives to what she called "the only possible and honourable conclusion".
Inside the bunker Magda could hardly bear to see her children, bursting into tears after every encounter with them. She played patience compulsively, and took to her bed. It was left to Traudl Junge, one of Hitler's secretaries, to look after them. Junge survived the war, and later recalled that the children were "happy and cheerful… They knew nothing of the fate awaiting them, and the adults did all they could to keep them unaware of it… Only the oldest, Helga, sometimes had a sad knowing expression in her big, brown eyes… Sometimes I think with horror that in her heart the child saw through the pretence of the grown-ups."
I was horrified by the thought of this young girl, sensing the danger of the situation, sensing the dishonesty, the untrustworthiness of her parents and the other adults, but unable to share her fears with her unsuspecting younger siblings. I wanted to build up a picture of Helga's life before the family entered the bunker. I turned first to the private diaries which Joseph Goebbels wrote almost every day of his adult life. His focus is his own importance in public events and his children feature rarely. When they do, he shows a chillingly distant delight in them: "I speak to the children on the telephone. They are all so sweet. How attached one can become to such tiny, insignificant beings!"
Kathe Hubner's story, recorded in Die Kinder des Reichministers, gives a much more vivid and intimate picture of the Goebbels family life during the war. Hubner confirms the view that Helga alone saw through the lies of the adults and, unlike her younger siblings, "would not let herself be comforted by her mother's words when she said that Hitler would defeat his enemies".
For a bright 12-year-old the signs of the desperation of the situation must have been obvious. Women and children who were fleeing from the advancing Russian army streamed past their home, bringing stories of atrocities. Hubner also recalls Joseph Goebbels' insensitivity about his children's feelings and how this could undermine their mother's attempts to reassure them.
At the end of 1944 he commissioned a propaganda film about his two oldest girls, Helga and Hilde, visiting a military hospital, and giving the soldiers flowers. The girls were so visibly horrified by the mutilated patients that the project had to be abandoned.
From 1944-45 the children lived with Hubner, a nanny and their grandmothers in the Goebbels' rural residence of Waldhof am Bogensee. Joseph was mostly in Berlin, Magda often with him. Hubner describes the excitement of the children when he came home, but also how he "liked to tease the children", particularly the only boy, nine-year-old Helmut.
Both grandmothers lived in log cabins on the Bogensee estate. Magda's mother Auguste, who avoided all contact with Joseph, whom she hated, was suicidal and alarmed Hubner, and presumably the children, with her constant wailing. Every Sunday the children would visit their Goebbels grandmother and sing to her. Katherina Goebbels was very critical of her son the Reich Minister, always asking in her strong Rhineland accent, '"What has that boy done now?"
According to Hubner, Magda Goebbels attempted to hide her worries from her children whenever she was there. Only Helga "sensed it a bit". Despite her efforts to keep cheerful, Magda, like many of the leading Nazis, succumbed to nervous ailments and depression. She had always had problems with her heart, but now, Hubner recalls, the right side of her face became paralysed. She spent weeks on end away from the children in a Dresden sanatorium. When at home, Hubner remembers her walking through the great hall listening to Gluck's tragic opera, Orpheus and Eurydice, which echoed throughout the house, "I wish I had never been born/ Alas that I am on earth."
Hubner's memoir contains a number of personal photographs of the family. We see Helga, just before her 12th birthday, with her dark plaits and smocked dress, picnicking with her brother and sisters, cuddling a doll. She looks very young for her age. In another picture she is sitting on a wall beside Hubi, as they called her, holding a tiny puppy on her lap. Her long, thin legs dangle down, legs which are recognisable in the terrible autopsy photographs taken by the Russians.
The pictures give the impression of a hesitant, sensitive girl – the very opposite of the feisty child of earlier photographs, one of which we chose for the cover of Chocolate Cake with Hitler. Here Helga, aged three, is sitting on a bench beside the sea. Next to her is Hitler. He is leaning right over her, his hands clasped tightly between his legs. Helga stares fiercely at the camera. She has turned right away from him. Her legs are firmly crossed. One hand is clamped down on them, the other clings to the back of the bench. She is having nothing to do with the Fuhrer.
Helga was always said to be Hitler's favourite little girl. Hubner refuses to comment on this, saying only that it is a question which journalists have always pestered her with – she always refused to answer their questions – and that Hitler was friendly to all children.
Whatever Hitler felt about Helga, her feelings about him are evident in another early photograph, also taken when she was three. The occasion is Hitler's birthday. A queue of people are lined up to shake his hand. When Helga gets to the front she backs off. The picture shows her standing with her back to a closed door, her hands tightly clasped together in front of her chest.
There was no sign of such rudeness in the bunker. Traudl Junge stresses how well behaved all the children were during their 10 days there: drinking hot chocolate every day with Hitler, telling him about their school work, apparently taking no notice of his increasingly odd behaviour, his rants against his generals and the reverberating bomb blasts.
It was only at the very end of her life that Helga's rebellious spirit resurfaced. When Magda put the children to bed on May 1 1945, she told them that they needed an inoculation. In fact they were injected with morphine by an army dentist, Dr Kunz. Magda wanted him to help her give the children cyanide once they were asleep, but he refused. She turned instead to one of Hitler's doctors, Ludwig Stumpfegger, who helped her crush cyanide tablets between the children's teeth as they slept.
Magda and Joseph then left the bunker and went up and out to the garden of the Reich Chancellery. She took a cyanide tablet and, to make doubly sure, he then shot her with a pistol, before turning it on himself.
When the first Russians entered the bunker two days later they discovered the children's bodies. They were lying in their beds wearing white nightclothes, completely unmarked, except for Helga. According to the autopsy the Russians carried out, bruising on her face indicated that force had been needed to administer the cyanide to her. At the very end, this powerless, isolated child had rediscovered her spirit of resistance.
Buy Chocolate Cake with Hitler at Telegraph Books Online or call 0844 8711515Arkansas governor Mike Beebe looks on during a Martin Luther King Jr. service in Little Rock, Arkansas in this January 15, 2013 Governor's office handout photo obtained by Reuters March 6, 2013. REUTERS/Arkansas Governor's Office/Handout
(Reuters) - Outgoing Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe said on Wednesday that he will pardon his son for a felony drug conviction, local media reported.
Beebe, who is set to leave office in January due to term limits, said he would pardon his son Kyle, now 34, for his 2003 felony conviction of marijuana possession with intent to deliver, local broadcaster KATV said.
"Kids, when they're young, do stupid stuff. He was no different," Beebe told KATV in an interview published online. "If they've straightened up, to get their life back on track and have a second chance, so this is no different. It's different because it's my son."
Kyle Beebe was sentenced to 3 years supervised probation and fined, KATV reported. The Arkansas Parole Board last month recommended that he be pardoned, records on the agency's website shows.
Governor Beebe said he has pardoned over 700 people, largely for non-violent offenses, KATV said.
(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; editing by Ralph Boulton)UPDATE: 3/5/14 Chipotle spokesman walks back the claim, see below.
Chipotle warns global warming may force it to stop serving guacamole.
Yes, that’s an actual headline. Too bad they didn’t do a little research first.
This story is from the excitable kids at Climate Progress, who are paid to make you worry about these things:
The guacamole operation at Chipotle is massive. The company uses, on average, 97,000 pounds of avocado every day to make its guac — which adds up to 35.4 million pounds of avocados every year. And while the avocado industry is fine at the moment, scientists are anticipating drier conditions due to climate change, which may have negative effects on California’s crop. Scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, for example, predict hotter temps will cause a 40 percent drop in California’s avocado production over the next 32 years. [Climate Progress]
No comment so far from Taco Bell, Chevy’s Fresh Mex, Del Taco, El Toro and many other Mexican food restaurant chains in the USA. (Added: for our overseas readers, this is Chipotle, apparently the news about the Guacamole crisis wasn’t important enough for their press feed)
But if the crisis worsens, expect Guacamole smugglers to fill in the vacuum.
Oh, wait, most avocados don’t come from California:
Mexico accounts for half of world trade
Nearly half |
factory violations, said the smell here made him so sick on a concert tour three years ago that he had to leave town early. When the incident was reported in Rolling Stone magazine, Mayor Sutherland tore up copies of the article at a news conference.
''Most of the stench originates from certain out-of-town writers,'' said Mr. Sutherland.
Mr. Springsteen is due back in Tacoma for two shows in May, and his visit, as well as a recent business study that concluded that the smell was hurting the econony, have rubbed regional pride - in both directions.
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''The smell is 90 percent perception, 10 percent reality,'' said Mayor Sutherland.
But Mr. Stortini said the odor was more than illusory, calling it an ''obstacle to economic growth.'' In order to attract new, nonpolluting companies to the area, the smell must go, he said.
In addition, convention and tourism business has become a key economic factor. This year Tacoma was host to the women's Final Four college basketball tournament and will do the same next year. Last year it was the site of the United States figure skating championships, a time when one of those dread inversions settled on the area. Sportswriters covering that event proved to be the chief carriers of Tacoma aroma jokes.
However the Chamber of Commerce reports that most recent visitors do not find the area so offensive. ''We do these surveys, from hotel visitors,'' said David Graybill, the chamber's director, ''and the most frequent comment on the card was - you're not going to believe this - how much they liked the clean, fresh air.''You may remember that I recently announced the most unique and important light mount to come down the pike in quite some time – the patent pending Thorntail. The Thorntail is a joint venture between Force Recon veteran Travis Haley of Haley Strategic Partners and Impact Weapons Components. This is one of the most anticipated rifle accessories around and I am fortunate to be the first one to have them in hand for review.
The market has lacked a light mount like this for a long, long time. The only thing that came close to offering the same functionality of the Thorntail is the SMC MOUNT-N-SLOT from Impact Weapons Components (IWC). However, the SMC is limited to use only on certain types of slotted handguards like the Magpul MOE Hand Guards. It didn’t take long for Haley Strategic Partners (HSP) and IWC to see the need for a similar mount that works with picatinny rails.
The Problem
The best products solve problems and the Thorntail is certainly a problem solver.
Some weapon configurations allow only limited space to mount one of the most essential items on any rifle – the weapon light. The placement of the weapon light usually dictates where the shooter must place their support hand on the rifle. The support hand must be placed in a location that allows easy access and operation of the light. This can become problematic on weapons with short rails like AR-15s and M4 carbines with the 7″ carbine length gas system and even the 9″ midlength gas system. It can also be an issue with AKs in some configurations and really just about any weapon with rails that are too short.
Shooters know that much of recoil control is really just about leverage. You must be able to control the rifle in a way that minimizes movement at the muzzle from shot to shot. The ability to place your hand closer to the muzzle can greatly enhance leverage which in turn improves shot to shot speed. When a rifle recoils, it wants to move straight back in a line that is opposite of the trajectory of the bullet and that runs straight back through your shoulder. However, the shape of your shoulder, and the way the buttstock engages the shoulder, creates a hinge that converts that straight back movement into muzzle lift.
Think of what happens when you open and close a heavy door. You don’t grab the door near the hinges. You grab the handle that is placed on the opposite side of the door, far from the hinges. This maximizes leverage and makes it easy to open and close the door. Likewise, you want to be able to hold your rifle as far is practical from your shoulder (the hinge) in order to maximize leverage.
If your light dictates where you must place your hand and your rail is short, you will have to place your hand in such a way that you are unable to maximize your leverage.
The Solution
The Thorntail light mount allows shooters to extend the light several inches (the true distance varies according to the light used) beyond the end of their hand guard rail. This clears space on the rail and promotes optimal hand placement. Rail space that was taken up by your light and mount before is now useful gripping surface for your hand. It is that simple.
It accomplishes this with an ingenious design. The Thorntail consists of two main components (along with some screws). There is a piece that serves as a rail grabber and a 3.5″ extension piece. The extension is drilled and tapped on both sides so that the rail grabber component can mounted on either side of the extension which makes the Thorntail completely ambidextrous. It can be mounted on either side of a rail for a total of 8 positions on a typical 4 rail handguard.
This is ideal for users who are stuck with shorter rails. For instance, if your police department issues AR-15s with the carbine length gas system and 7″ rails this is a perfect solution. The current issue M4 carbines are also stuck with 7″ rails for the most part.
Even if you aren’t stuck with a 7″ carbine rail you will love the Thorntail. I am using it on a LaRue 9.0 rail to push my light far enough forward to mimic the light position on an 11-12″ rail. I like to run my hand out as close to the muzzle as possible and the Thorntail allows me to achieve the feel and performance of a 12″ rail on a lighter weight 9″ rail.
In Use
I tested the Thorntail by mounting it on two different weapon configurations – an AR-15 with a 9″ mid-length rail and an AK-47 with an Ultimak railed gas tube. Installation was intuitive, though the flashlight rings can be a little bit tricky to deal with, but I managed to get them mounted with no problems. If you can’t figure it out just by looking at it, I bet you probably have problems loading your magazines, too.
My first concern was that the mount would be fragile since it does extend the light out from the rail quite a bit. I grabbed the Surefire G2L bezel that was mounted on my mid-length carbine and tried to pull it in every direction and it didn’t budge, bend, or loosen. It would take quite a lot of force or a really, really hard hit to damage the Thorntail and that sort of force would likely damage other parts of the rifle at the same time. After actually testing the Thorntail, I have no worries about its durability. Like other IWC products, the Thorntail is CNC Machined from Billet 6061-T6 Aluminum and Black Type III Mil-Spec Anodized for durability.
The Thorntail is shaped very well for the way that it will be used. Most users will likely use this mount to place their light so that it falls directly in front of their thumb in a strong, thumb forward style grip (with or without a handstop/vertical grip). There is a small angled flat spot directly behind the light is makes a perfect index point for your thumb. This index point serves as a tactile reminder that your hand is in the correct position to be able to easily reach your weapon light. I am going to place a small piece of grip tape on this flat to make it even easier to feel with my thumb.
This mount is particularly well suited to the Ultimak railed gas tubes for AKs. One of the best features of the Ultimak rails are how low they sit which allows your to co-witness your sights with an Aimpoint. If you mount an overly large light mount on the Ultimak rail in front of your Aimpoint it can obscure your view through the optic. The Thorntail is very low profile and the rail grabber portion can not even be seen through the Aimpoint.
As I stated before, I found that the Thorntail allowed me to get the same grip that I typically have on a 12″ rail but on a 9″ rail. This configuration weighs less than a 12″ rail but offers most of the same function.
I found this to be a very ergonomic mount. It holds the light in close to the rifle and forward of the rail which allows the tailcap switch to fall directly under your thumb. Once the mount is position properly, operating the light is effortless. Compare this to a typical light mount where the light is placed in such a way that you often have to stretch your thumb back from the vertical grip in order to get to the switch. The Thorntail is a huge improvement these situations.
In addition to the ergonomic considerations, the Thorntail greatly reduces the shadowing caused by the barrel of a weapon. With a typical light mount you might have shadowing from both the barrel and front site tower. The Thorntail allows the light to clear the front sight tower so the shadow is greatly reduced. In fact, when used on a 9″ rail, the bezel of the light is just 2.5-3.5″ (depending on the light, barrel length, and muzzle device) from the muzzle. This nearly completely eliminates the shadow of the barrel in the beam of your weapon light.
I tried the Thorntail with a Surefire M600 Scout and Surefire G2L. It worked perfectly with both and there are additional flashlight rings available that allow the use of most of the best weapon lights on the market including the Surefire C and E series lights and the Streamlight PolyTac. There is also a version in the works that will work with the Surefire Millennium series lights. Shooters will find that lights that use the flashlight rings like the Surefire G2L can be pushed even further forward than those with fixed mounts like the Surefire Scout lights since they can be slid very far forward in their rings.
Conclusion
It is my opinion that this is not merely a unique product. It is an important product that has been missing in the market. It allows the shooter to place their hand closer to the muzzle end of the weapon in order to control recoil and solves the problems that have been plaguing short handguards for as long as they have been around. The Thorntail blurs the distinction between short rails and extended rails. It represents a funtional and ergonomic improvement for the way weapon lights are mounted. I could not be happier with how this mount functions.
The Thorntail is available for pre-order on the Impact Weapons Components’ website (remember to use the code “triggerjerk” at checkout to receive 5% off at IWC).
Note: The finished Thorntail mounts will feature the HSP logo, not the IWC logo as shown.
Disclosure: These mounts were provided to me for review, free of charge, by IWC for whom I am an independent product rep.
Like this: Like Loading...- UPDATE: An anonymous donor plans to buy Kaitlyn a new custom-made bicycle to help with therapy for her cerebral palsy.
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An 11-year-old Richardson girl is the victim of a heartless crime. She suffers from a debilitating condition, and special bike that was made just for her was stolen.
The crime happened Tuesday after the girl, 11-year-old Kaitlyn Padgett, rode it to her cousin's house around 4:30 p.m.
“And she asked, ‘You did ride your bike, correct?’” said Padgett. “And I said, ‘Yes.’ And she’s like, ‘Well, it’s gone.’ And then I looked outside and I kind of panicked.”
It’s not just any bike.
“It has a hand bike, so if she gets tired on her legs, she can propel it with her hands with this kind of motion,” said Lindsday Carry, Padgett’s mom.
Padgett has cerebral palsy, a disorder that affects muscle movement.
“It keeps me balanced and helps me get places faster with my disease in my legs,” said Padgett.
“She tires easy from walking and she can’t ride a regular bike, not even with training wheels,” said Carry, a single mom. “The point of gravity, I guess, is too high."
The family bought the pink bike secondhand for $600. A new one would be beyond Cary’s budget.
"I'm trying to raise her by myself and plan for college, hopefully, and a $1,500 to $3,000 bike just is not going to happen,” said Carry.
For now, exercise on the elliptical will have to be the only therapy for Padgett.
The family says they’ve driven around the neighborhood looking for the bike and even called around to area pawn shops, but so far, nothing.
To whoever took it, they say just drop it off at the police station, no questions asked.Starbucks Starbucks' former CEO and chairman Howard Schultz spoke out against what he calls the current normalization of racist behavior in a company-wide forum.
"The moral fiber, the values, and what we as a country have stood for is literally hanging in the abyss," Schultz said, according to a Starbucks press release published on Wednesday. "We are at a critical juncture in American history. That is not an exaggeration."
According to the coffee giant, the hour-and-a-half forum held in Seattle was a space for employees to share their thoughts following a violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. More than 500 employees attended, with an additional 1,000 people in overflow areas.
"I come to you as an American, as a Jew, as a parent, as a grandparent, as an almost 40-year partner of this company," Schultz said to open the event. "I come to you with profound, profound concern about the lack of character, morality, humanity and what this might mean for young children and young generations."
Starbucks
While Schultz has previously criticized Donald Trump, in this case he said he would allow the president's actions and words to speak for themselves.
According to Starbucks, Schultz then added:
"What we witnessed this past weekend…is against every sense of what is right. My fear is not only that this behavior is being given permission and license, but its conduct is being normalized to the point where people are no longer hiding their face. We've all seen pictures of the KKK in the South … they were hiding because they were afraid to be outed. People are no longer afraid."
Starbucks is known its progressive politics, and has held forums to discuss issues such as race and police brutality in the past.
In January, Starbucks pledged to hire 10,000 refugees after Trump issued an executive order barring refugees from entering the US, sparking conservative boycott threats. Last year, Schultz endorsed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for president.Image courtesy of fazilsay.com
An Istanbul court on Monday slapped world-renowned pianist Fazil Say with a 10-month suspended jail term for blasphemy in what the musician has said was a political case instigated by Turkey’s ruling party.
The court handed down the sentence after finding Say guilty of “insulting religious values of a part of the population” in a series of tweets that critics said insulted Islam and Muslims. The pianist was not present in court during the sentencing.
Say has accused the AKP, the ruling Justice and Development Party, of being behind the case against him.
Say, an atheist, has often criticised the Islamist-rooted party, accusing it of having a secret agenda to promote conservative values in Turkey.
The 43-year-old virtuoso, who has played with the philharmonic orchestras of Berlin, New York, Tokyo and Israel, was charged with inciting religious hatred and insulting Islamic values in a series of tweets.
The charges relate to tweets from April last year, including one where he said: “I am not sure if you have also realised it, but all the pricks, low-lives, buffoons, thieves, jesters, they are all Allahists.”
He had faced a maximum sentence of 18 months.
The case stoked fears of growing restrictions on freedom of expression in a country which has long sought to join the European Union.
[Image courtesy of Fazil Say]Christopher Hitchens is an Anglo-American author, journalist, commentator, critic, contrarian and provocateur. He is considered one of the most influential writers of politics, literature, and popular culture wherever the English language is spoken or read. He is also ranked among its leading essayists and conversationalists and considered one of the world's leading public intellectuals.
But don't let the word intellectual scare you off: you may be infuriated with some of his opinions, but it's not likely you'll be bored. He is an engaging, boozy, bare-knuckled writer who is now waging his biggest fight against stage IV cancer, and as he likes to point out, there is no stage V. But he is still writing for an audience that spans generations and national boundaries.
Segment: Christopher Hitchens
Extra: Hedonism at Oxford
Extra: Defending war in Iraq and Afghanistan
Extra: Hitchens on dying
Extra: Writers reflect on Hitchens
Extra: Hitchens on alcoholism
That broad appeal was never more apparent than one night early last summer when Hitchens was interviewed by his friend Salman Rushdie before a highbrow New York audience, and then later appeared on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" - both appearances to promote his new memoir, Hitch 22.
When Stewart asked how Hitchens was doing, the writer said, "It's a bit early to say."
The audience may have assumed that Hitchens was making a joke about his well-known penchant for staying out late and drinking. In fact, unbeknownst to anyone, he had checked himself out of a hospital earlier that day after having been told that he most likely was suffering from metastasized esophageal cancer.
"I'm a member of a cancer elite. I rather look down on people with lesser cancers," Hitchens told "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft.
Asked if people have survived it, Hitchens said, "Oh, yeah. It can be survived. But the statistics are five percent, in other words, which are not the odds I would have picked."
When we began our conversations with him a few months after he had been diagnosed, he had already cancelled his book tour and begun an intensive protocol of chemotherapy, which had robbed him of much of his energy and all but a few strands of his hair. Now, most of his research and rumination were focused on his own mortality.
"What is your life like right now? I mean in terms of what you're able to do and how you feel physically?" Kroft asked.
"I was very afraid it would stop me writing. And I was really petrified with fear about that because I thought that would, among other things, diminish my will to live because being a writer's what I am rather than what I do," Hitchens said.
It would be impossible here to adequately summarize his output, since it includes 25 books and countless articles, reviews and commentaries pounded out over four decades through a haze of cigarette smoke and filtered through kettles of Johnny Walker Black.
Suffice it to say, he writes with confidence, conviction, certainty, and an air of self satisfaction - using his wits and words as weapons to eviscerate egos and slaughter sacred cows. He has labeled Henry Kissinger a "war criminal," Bill Clinton a "rapist" and a "conman," and the British royal family "a blight upon the reputation of England."
"I mean, you do go over the top occasionally," Kroft pointed out.
"I'm in no position to deny it, but I'm wondering if you had...I'd do better if you said where you thought that was," Hitchens said.
In one instance, he called Mother Teresa a "fanatical, Albanian dwarf."
"Lying, thieving Albanian dwarf," Hitchens told Kroft. "That was, I admit, an exercise in seeing how far I could go."
"But why did you want to do it?" Kroft asked.
"It was about celebrity culture," Hitchens said. "Now, Mother Teresa started with a reputation of being a saint, and so therefore, everything she did had to be reported as saintly. Thus, the fact that she took money from the Duvalier family dictatorship in Haiti, who must've oppressed the poor more than any other dynasty in history, somehow wasn't a fact. 'Cause it couldn't be true, because a saint wouldn't do that."
"What about Princess Diana?" Kroft asked. "I'm trying to remember what you said about Princess Diana....You compared her to a landmine."
"Well, there's a horrible joke about a landmine, yes," Hitchens acknowledged. "She was in Angola on her landmine campaign, and there was a hushed, reverent BBC commentator. And he said, 'The thing about mine fields is that they're very easy to lay, but they're very difficult and dangerous, and even expensive to get rid of' - the perfect description of Prince Charles's first wife."
Hitchens wrote it and told Kroft it was printed.
Hitchens was born 61 years ago into what he calls the gray middle class austerity of postwar England. His father was a naval officer, and his mother was the first real splash of color in an otherwise drab existence. She told him the only unforgivable sin was to be boring, and he has rarely committed it. She aspired for him to go to Oxford and become a proper English gentleman - and one of those wishes came true.
Produced by L. Franklin DevineFrom Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia.
DuArt
DuArt Film & Video is an American dubbing company and voice recording studio that picked up the Pokémon anime, starting with The Rise of Darkrai, taking it over from TAJ Productions. They began handling the series, starting with Tears for Fears!.
They also dubbed the short film Pikachu's Island Adventure, which was included on the DVD of Pokémon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea, which was dubbed by TAJ Productions.
PokéPark Wii: Pikachu's Adventure and PokéPark 2: Wonders Beyond have been dubbed by them.
Starting with Pokémon the Series: XYZ, DuArt Film & Video is the dub producer in Latin America, working in cooperation with MG Studios in Brazil and Jarpa Studio in Mexico.
Trivia
Under DuArt, many voice actors from the 4Kids dub have returned to the series, with such examples being Dan Green and Rachael Lillis.
This anime-related article is a stub. You can help Bulbapedia by.Here's an excerpt from the original description of the box by the first seller, nw-net-trade. All of the events that I am about to set forth in this listing are accurate and may be verified by the winning bidder with the copies of hospital records and sworn affidavits that I am including as part of the sale of the cabinet. The winning bidder will also be able to contact most of the persons mentioned herein for the purposes of verification, corroboration, and to gain insight into the full scope of whatever it is. During September of 2001, I attended an estate sale in Portland Oregon. The items liquidated at this sale were from the estate of a woman who had passed away at the age of 103. A grand-daughter of the woman told me that her grandmother had been born in Poland where she grew up, married, raised a family, and lived until she was sent to a nazi concentration camp during World War II. She was the only member of her family who survived the camp. Her parents, brothers, a sister, husband, and two sons and a daughter were all killed. She survived the camp by escaping with some other prisoners and somehow making her way to Spain where she lived until the end of the war. I was told that she acquired the small wine cabinet listed here in Spain and it was one of only three items that she brought with her when she immigrated to the United States. The other two items were a steamer trunk, and a sewing box.
I purchased the wine cabinet, along with the sewing box and some other furniture at the estate sale. After the sale, I was approached by the woman's granddaughter who said, I see you got the dibbuk box. She was referring to the wine cabinet. I asked her what a dibbuk box was, and she told me that when she was growing up, her grandmother always kept the wine cabinet in her sewing room. It was always shut, and set in a place that was out of reach. The grandmother always called it the dibbuk box. When the girl asked her grandmother what was inside, her grandmother spit three times through her fingers said, A dibbuk, and keselim. The grandmother went on to tell the girl that the wine cabinet was never, ever, to be opened.
The granddaughter told me that her grandmother had asked that the box be buried with her. However, as such a request was contrary to the rules of an orthodox Jewish burial, the grandmothers request had not been honored. I asked the granddaughter what a dibbuk, and keselim were, but she did not know. I asked if she would like to open it with me. She did not want to open it, as her grandmother had been very emphatic and serious when she instructed her not to do so, and, regardless of the reason, she wanted to honor her grandmothers request.
I finally ended up offering to let her keep what seemed to me to be a sentimental keepsake. At that point, she was very insistent and said, No, no you bought it!
I explained that I didnt want my money back, and that it would make me feel better to do what I thought was an act of kindness. She then became somewhat upset. Looking back now, the way she became upset was just plain odd. She raised her voice to me and said, You bought it! You made a deal!
When I tried to speak, she yelled, We don't want it! She began to cry, asked me to leave, and quickly walked away. I wrote the whole episode off to the stress and grief she must have been experiencing. I took my purchases and politely left.
At the time when I bought the cabinet, I owned a small furniture refinishing business. I took the cabinet to my store, and put it in my basement workshop where I intended to refinish it and give it as a gift to my Mother. I didn't think anything more about it. I opened my shop for the day and went to run some errands leaving the young woman who did sales for me in charge.
After about a half-hour, I got a call on my cell phone. The call was from my salesperson. She was absolutely hysterical and screaming that someone was in my workshop breaking glass and swearing. Furthermore, the intruder had locked the iron security gates and the emergency exit and she couldn't get out. As I told her to call the police, my cell phone battery went dead.
I hit speeds of 100 mph getting back to the shop. When I arrived, I found the gates locked. I went inside and found my employee on the floor in a corner of my office sobbing hysterically. I ran to the basement and went downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs, I was hit by an overpowering unmistakable odor of cat urine (there had never been any animals kept or found in my shop). The lights didn't work. As I investigated, I found that the reason the lights didn't work also explained the sounds of glass breaking. All of the light bulbs in the basement were broken. All nine incandescent bulbs had been broken in their sockets, and 10 four-foot fluorescent tubes were lying shattered on the floor. I did not find an intruder, however. I should also add that there was only one entrance to the basement. It would have been impossible for anyone to leave without meeting me head-on. I went back up to speak with my salesperson, but she had left.
She never returned to work (after having been with me for two years). She refuses to discuss the incident to this day. I never thought of relating the events of that day to anything having to do with the cabinet.
Then, things got worse.
As I already indicated, I had decided to give the cabinet to my Mother as a birthday gift. About two weeks after I made the purchase, I decided to get started refinishing it. I was surprised to find that the cabinet has a unique little mechanism. When you open one of the doors, the mechanism causes the opposite door, and the little drawer below, to open at the same time. It is very well made. Inside the cabinet, I found the following items:
1 1928 U.S. Wheat Penny; 1 1925 U.S. Wheat Penny; One small lock of blonde hair (bound with string); One small lock of black/brown hair (bound with string); One small granite statue engraved and gilded with Hebrew letters (I have been told that the letters spell out the word SHALOM); One dried rosebud; One golden wine cup; One very strange black cast iron candlestick holder with octopus legs.
I saved all of the items in a box intending to return them to the estate. The family has refused the items, so they will be included in this sale of the cabinet.
After opening the cabinet, I decided not to refinish it. I cleaned it, and rubbed in some lemon oil. It was at this time that I noticed that there was an inscription in Hebrew carved into the back of the cabinet. I have no idea what it says or if it is significant. I have included a picture of that inscription below. On my mothers birthday, October 28, 2001, my mother called to tell me that she was going out of town with my sister for three days, and we postponed celebrating her birthday together until she returned. On October 31, 2001, my mother came to my shop. We were going to have lunch together, but before we were going to leave, I gave her the wine cabinet. She seemed to like it. While she examined it, I went to make a phone call. I hadn't been out of sight more than 5 minutes when one of my employees came running into my office saying that something was wrong with my mom.
When I went back to see what the matter was, I found my mom sitting in a chair beside the cabinet. Her face had no expression, but tears were streaming down her cheeks. No matter how I tried to get her to respond, she would not. She could not. It turns out that my mother had suffered a stroke. She was taken to the hospital by ambulance. She ended up suffering partial paralysis, and losing her ability to speak and form words (she has since regained the ability to speak). She could understand things being said to her, and could respond by pointing to letters of the alphabet to spell out words she wanted to say. When I asked her the following day how she was doing, she teared up and spelled out the words: N-O G-I-F-T. I assured her that I had given her a gift for her birthday, thinking that she didnt remember, but she became even more upset and spelled out the words: H-A-T-E G-I-F-T. I laughed and told her not to worry. I told her I was sorry she didnt like the cabinet, and that I would get her anything she wanted if she would promise to get well soon.
Still, I didn't associate anything that had happened with the cabinet itself or anything paranormal. Frankly, I dont think I ever even used the term paranormal until this last month.
I'll try to make this short now. I gave the cabinet to my sister. She kept it for a week, then gave it back. She complained that she couldn't get the doors to stay closed and that they kept coming open. There are no springs in the door mechanism and I have never found that the doors come open. I gave it to my brother and his wife who kept it for three days and then gave it back. My brother said it smelled like Jasmine flowers, while his wife insisted that it put out an odor of cat urine. I gave it to my girlfriend who asked me to sell it for her after only two days. I sold it the same day to a nice middle aged couple. Three days later, when I came to open the shop for the day, I found the cabinet sitting at the front doors with a note that read, This has a bad darkness. I had no idea what that meant. Anyway, I ended up taking it home.
Then, things got even worse.
Since the day I brought it home, I began having a strange recurring nightmare. Every time I have the horrible dream it goes something like this: I find myself walking with a friend, usually someone I know well and trust at some point in the dream, I find myself looking into the eyes of the person that I am with. It is then that I realize that there is something different, something evil looking back at me. At that point in my dream, the person I am with changes into what can only be described as the most gruesome, demonic looking Hag that I have ever seen. This Hag proceeds then, to beat the living tar out of me. I have awakened numerous times to find bruises and marks on myself where I had been hit by the old woman during the previous night. Still, I never related the nightmares to the cabinet, nor do I think that I ever would have.
About a month ago, however, my sister, and my brother and his wife came over to my house and spent the night. The following morning, during breakfast, my sister complained that she had had a horrible nightmare. She said that she recalled having had it a couple of times before, and went on to describe my nightmare exactly to the last detail. My brother and his wife froze as they listened, and then chimed in that they had both had had the exact same dreams during the night as well. The hair was standing up on the back of my neck and still is. As we talked, it became clear that the common denominator was that each of us had had the nightmare during the times that the cabinet was in our respective homes. I called my girlfriend and asked if she could recall having any nightmares recently. She described the same nightmare, same Hag, everything. When I asked her if she remembered the date when she had the nightmare, she said she did not. Then I asked if it happened to be the night before she gave me the cabinet back to sell for her. She said, Yeah! Hey, how did you know that?!!!
Now then, since my family discussion, it seems like all hell is breaking loose. For a week afterward I started seeing what I can only describe as shadow things in my peripheral vision. In fact, numerous visitors to my house have claimed that they have seen these shadow things. I put the cabinet in an outside storage unit and was awakened when the smoke alarm in the unit went off in the middle of the night. When I went to see what was burning, I opened the door and didnt see any smoke. However, I did get hit with the smell of cat urine. When I went back inside, the smell was there in my house. I DO NOT OWN A CAT AND I NEVER HAVE. I went back outside and grabbed the cabinet. I brought it back inside and tried to research it on the Internet. While I was surfing the net, I fell asleep and once again had the same freakin nightmare. I woke up at around 4:30am (when it felt and smelled like someone was breathing on my neck) to find that my house now smelled like Jasmine flowers, and just in time to see a HUGE shadow thing go loping down the hall away from me.
I would destroy this thing in a second, except I really dont have any understanding of what I may or may not be dealing with. I am afraid (and I do mean afraid) that if I destroy the cabinet, whatever it is that seems to have come with the cabinet may just stay here with me. I have been told that there are people who shop on EBAY that understand these kinds of things and specifically look for these kinds of items. If you are one of these people, please, please buy this cabinet and do whatever you do with a thing like this. Help me.
You can see that I have no reserve price or minimum bid. If I can make things any easier let me know and I will do everything within my abilities.
One more note. On the same day my Mom had her stroke, the lease to my store was summarily terminated without cause.
The measurements are 12.5" x 7.5" x 16.25"
ALL OF THE ITEMS THAT I ORIGINALLY FOUND INSIDE THE CABINET ARE INCLUDED IN THE SALE AND WILL BE DELIVERED WITH THE CABINET.
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I bought the box from the first sellar above in the Ebay auction around June of 2003, out of curiosity about the 'haunted' box. After receiving a deluge of e-mail about the box, I set up a web site to answer some questions, which I stopped updating in September and haven't updated to this day because I didn't want to talk about it with anyone.
For the sake of information, I found that a dibbuk/dybbuk in Jewish folklore/mythology/teaching/whatever is a misplaced spirit that can neither rise to Heaven nor descend into Hell, essentially stuck in Limbo or purgatory. Here's another definition I found: 1. (Jewish folklore) a demon that enters the body of a living person and controls that body's behavior. Synonyms: dybbuk. 2. Evil Spirits, that cause mental illness, rage and changes of personality. The spirit or soul of a dead person that inhabits the body of a living one, with sometimes evil, sometimes positive results.
If you believe in paranormal phenomena, the box contains or is possessed by at least one dibbuk, possibly two, as the grandmother stated: a dibbuk, and a keslim. Keselim is a term similar to a turkish word that means "priest." This would probably correspond to the pair of wrapped strands of blonde and brown/black hair.
The Hebrew carving on the back, to my knowledge, is a relatively common Jewish prayer: Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. Blessed is the name of his honored kingdom forever. Said frequently at times of fear, death, etc...
I was doubtful of the 'haunted' box, and I still don't believe in the paranormal. What happened in August and Septemember is likely coincidental, so I will relate it as I originally wrote it down in a log.
Sunday, 31 August 2003 Over the last week some interesting, though possibly coincidental, items of note have come up. Firstly, I share a house with six |
Lane was closed at its junction with Bury Road and Roch Valley Way until lunchtime.
Anyone with information can call police on 0161 856 4741.Council Members Exploring Soda Tax in Montgomery County
Proposal could help fund early-childhood education programs
Beverages on sale in a retail store Andrew Metcalf
This story was updated at 1 p.m. on Oct. 30 to correct a reference to pre-kindergarten programs in Philadelphia.
A "soda tax" is being discussed in Montgomery County.
County Council members Tom Hucker and Hans Riemer are exploring the idea to tax sweetened beverages as a way to raise money to fund early-childhood education programs, according to council colleagues.
In an interview Wednesday, Hucker said he’s trying to learn more about a potential beverage tax, although he wouldn’t say whether he supports the idea or whether he’s lobbied other council members to support the idea. He said he has met with advocates to talk about the potential benefits of such a tax, but said the meetings weren’t significant.
One advocate who has met with Montgomery County officials about the idea is Leah Marcus from Bloomberg Philanthropies, which has backed taxes on sugary drinks in several U.S. cities.
Council Vice President Hans Riemer confirmed that he met with Marcus to talk about the idea. He said he also met with opponents of the idea.
“I think we need to explore a variety of options to fund early-childhood and after-school programming,” he said.
However, he didn’t commit to supporting a tax if legislation came before the council.
Hucker said he has also met with sweetened beverage tax advocates and noted other colleagues on the council have as well.
“It’s Montgomery County, there’s a lot of advocates often kicking around ideas of how to raise money for unmet needs,” Hucker said. “From what I know, it’s well documented how much damage sugar does to public health. Whether we want to do anything about it is an open question.”
Jurisdictions such as Berkeley, California, and Philadelphia have approved a tax of 1 cent or more per ounce on beverages sweetened with added sugar.
Hucker said that if any proposal moves past a discussion phase, there would be a robust public process to determine the level of support.
Riemer said his focus is to help young children get access to quality care.
“At the moment, my interest is focused on the county budget and this upcoming budget year,” Riemer said. “I’m trying to get as much funding for early-childhood programs through the normal budget process. I think that’s where should focus our efforts.”
Council member Marc Elrich, who is running for county executive, said he would consider supporting a tax on sugary drinks if all of the revenue went to early-childhood education programs. He said many families, including those in the middle class, struggle to pay for pre-kindergarten child care programs that can cost $12,000 to $18,000 per year for one child.
So far, Elrich hasn’t seen a proposal that shows taxing sugary drinks could generate enough revenue to significantly bring down the cost of early-childhood education in the county, he said.
He added that he wouldn’t move forward with a new tax, unless there was support from the community.
“This is not something you’re going to do over people’s dead bodies,” Elrich said. “There needs to be a really full discussion as to what the benefits are and the intentions. If it’s not tied to early-childhood education, it’s not interesting to me.”
He said the soda industry, which has fought such tax proposals around the country, is “in denial that sugar causes problems.”
“They’re not credible, like the tobacco industry,” Elrich said. “Let’s get away from the make believe and determine, will people endure this extra tax for something worthwhile?”
Elrich said there’s not enough money in the county’s general fund to fund new initiatives such as expanding early-childhood education.
Patrick Lacefield, a spokesman for County Executive Ike Leggett, said Leggett has asked county departments to examine funding cuts and ways to be more efficient as he works on his fiscal 2019 budget proposal.
“We’ll see if that is necessary as we see how tight the budget is,” Lacefield said.
Council member George Leventhal, also a county executive candidate, said he would not support a tax on sweetened beverages.
“I think it would provoke a split within the Democratic Party and broader community,” Leventhal said. “The amount of political controversy it would invoke would probably outweigh the potential. I’m not sure there would be a real public health benefit.”
He said he hasn’t seen evidence that the tax could generate enough revenue for early-childhood education programs in the county. And he believes the county should wait for the Kirwan Commission to finish its evaluation of state education funding before the county considers funding early-childhood education programs. He suggested that the state might try to fund those programs.
“I don’t think we should volunteer to tax ourselves when the state is looking at a major statewide investment,” Leventhal said.
He said the public might perceive an additional tax, on a commonly purchased consumer item, as a nuisance.
Council member Nancy Floreen said she would not support a soda tax or similar policy. However, she said she had not been included in ongoing discussions about whether to propose the measure.
Beverage industry members are already fighting the proposal in Montgomery County.
Seth Goldman, the CEO of Bethesda-based Honest Tea, a subsidiary of Coca-Cola, and Ellen Valentino, the executive vice president of the Maryland-Delaware Beverage Association, have met with council members to discourage them from pursuing any type of tax on sugary beverages.
Goldman, who co-founded Honest Tea to bring more organic, low-sugar drinks to the marketplace 20 years ago, said he would oppose any tax or measure “that would seek to limit access to our products.”
He said he supports efforts to fund early childhood education, but doesn’t believe a sweetened beverage tax is the way to do it.
“This is such a targeted, discriminatory tax. It doesn’t feel like effective government,” Goldman said. “We’re also in an era where people are resentful of government getting involved in personal behavior.”
Valentino said Thursday that her association, which represents non-alcoholic beverage producers and distributors in the region, would strongly oppose a new tax on sugary beverages.
“Working families and small businesses are tired of the tax pile-on that is picking at their pocketbooks and now entering their refrigerator and grocery cart,” Valentino said.
Meanwhile, health advocates are pushing the council to put forth a measure to try to reduce the consumption of sugary drinks.
Stuart Berlow, the senior director of government relations for the American Heart Association in the Washington, D.C., region, said the organization is supporting efforts nationwide to tax sugary beverages that could help reduce consumption of sodas and sports drinks.
“Science tells us that the reduction of added sugar in your diet will have benefits for heart health and other diseases as well,” Berlow said Thursday. “Research shows that with many products, when you increase their price, you’re motivating people to make other choices.”
He noted that places that instituted such a tax—such as Berkeley—have seen a reduction in sugary drink consumption and an increase in water consumption.
Like tobacco use, he said, changing unhealthy consumer habits takes increased education and time.
“Our hope is that people will, for a variety of reasons, reduce the amount of sugary drinks they consume per day and per week,” Berlow said.
Public opposition to similar proposals was recently seen in Cook County, Illinois. The county, which includes Chicago, put in place a tax of 1 cent per ounce on the sale of all sweetened beverages in the county, which went into effect in August. Two months later, the same board that approved the measure repealed it due to public backlash.
The board had approved the tax to generate $200 million in revenue to balance its 2018 budget, according to the Chicago Tribune.
After it was repealed, the paper wrote in an editorial, “At a penny per ounce on beverages laced with sugar or artificial sweeteners, the tax has reached deep into consumers’ pockets. And they understand the tax wasn’t about protecting public health. It was about feeding county government with more revenue.”
Riemer said he followed the Cook County situation closely and understands that a tax on sugary drinks is “a very contentious issue.”
Hucker said he hasn’t followed the Cook County developments “at all.”
Berkeley, the first jurisdiction in the U.S. to pass a soda tax in 2014, saw a 21 percent decrease in sugary beverage consumption in low-income neighborhoods a year after it was approved, according to a study by the University of California at Berkeley.
Philadelphia was the second jurisdiction to pass a soda tax, a 1.5-cent-per-ounce levy. It went into effect at the beginning of this year.
The Philadelphia measure has since drawn the ire of The Wall Street Journal editorial board and in September, the city’s controller’s office announced it would survey businesses to determine the economic impact of the tax on sweetened drinks. A soda industry lawsuit against the tax is pending in Philadelphia Supreme Court.
Until there’s an outcome in the court challenge, the city is holding off on a further expansion of seats for pre-kindergarten programs to be funded with the new tax. The city of Philadelphia added about 2,000 seats to pre-kindergarten programs for low-income families since the tax was approved last year, but is putting off plans to increase that number to 6,500, spokesman Mike Dunn wrote in an email on Monday.Raheem Sterling: Liverpool attacker has opponents on their toes
Brendan Rodgers has praised the increasing maturity of Raheem Sterling and believes opponents are now fearful of the Liverpool teenager.
Sterling blossomed into a key figure for Liverpool last season during the club’s push for the Premier League title and contributed 10 goals in all competitions.
The 19-year-old attacker also featured in all three games during England’s forgettable World Cup campaign in Brazil and Rodgers is expecting Sterling to go from strength to strength.
“Something we said to Raheem when he first broke into the team, and something we’ve reiterated, is that you have to have an identity as a player,” said Rodgers.
“His identity is he has to score goals and create goals. That’s what the job is. He scored 10 goals last year and this kid is only going to get better.
“When you’re so young, it’s important to understand exactly what your role is, not just look good. You have to be efficient and effective.
"His development has gone to a new level. He’s way above the level from when he first came in.
“Tactically, technically, and what has been beautiful to watch with Raheem has been his maturity, he’s turning into a beautiful young man, with all the responsibility.
Tactically, technically, and what has been beautiful to watch with Raheem has been his maturity, he’s turning into a beautiful young man, with all the responsibility. Brendan Rodgers
“He’s taking it all in his stride and now he’s in a good place with every part of his game. It’s just about maintaining that commitment to his work.
“He’s still only 19, but in big games he’s performed and he’s a wonderful talent.
“The great thing with watching him now is that he gets you off your seat. When he gets the ball you think, ‘Something could happen here’.
“For teams to have that fear of him as a young man shows his development. There is still work for him to do, but he knows that and is a really good boy who is developing really well.”On Monday, July 24, at 8 p.m. ET/PT, NBC’s “American Ninja Warrior” moves to the Los Angeles City Finals, featuring several familiar faces, including Sean Bryan, a k a, the Papal Ninja.
This is how Sean, a devout Catholic who lives in the Bay Area, describes himself:
Sean Bryan is an American Ninja Warrior competitor and the Lay Mission Project’s Animating Director. Sean received his Bachelor of Arts at UC Berkeley, where he studied physics and was on the men’s gymnastics team. After graduation, he spent four years in various Salesian ministerial settings while discerning his vocation. In 2015 Sean completed his Master of Arts in Theology with a Salesian Studies concentration at the Dominican School of Philosophy & Theology. His Masters thesis analyzed the ecclesiology inherent to documents of the Second Vatican Council, and proposes the Scriptural notion of liturgy as an interpretive lens that elucidates the relationship between formal ritual worship and its integrated expression in everyday life. His exploration led to practical applications geared toward the animation of the faithful in the Church’s mission, including the Lay Mission Project itself. Sean is also known for his participation in the NBC show American Ninja Warrior, where he has taken on the identity of the Papal Ninja, stealthily using his gifts to help accomplish the mission of the One who sent him into the secular realm.
Oh, yeah, and he also flips and spins and climbs rocks.
Click here for his 2016 American Ninja Warrior submission video, and here to learn more about him, in an extensive email interview.
And, Bryan now has gear inspired by his persona. Click here to dress like a Papal Ninja!
Here’s what NBC had to say about the episode:
LOS ANGELES FINALS- 07/24/17 ‘AMERICAN NINJA WARRIOR’ PRESENTS THE LOS ANGELES FINALS FROM UNIVERSAL STUDIOS “American Ninja Warrior” travels back to Universal Studios’ “New York Street” where the top 30 competitors from the Los Angeles Qualifier tackle the City Finals course. In addition to the obstacles from the City Qualifier, contestants will face the Salmon Ladder, Stair Hopper, and 2 challenging new obstacles: Swinging Peg Board and Elevator Climb. Top competitors Kevin Bull, Grant McCartney, Sean Bryan and Flip Rodriguez will take on the course. Competitors will vie for a chance to compete in the Las Vegas finals, to win a cash prize of $1,000,000 and the title of “American Ninja Warrior.” Matt Iseman and Akbar Gbajabiamila hosts as Kristine Leahy co-hosts.
Bryan’s also become a good friend of Family Theater Productions, the Hollywood-based Catholic production company where I blog and manage social media. Earlier this year, Bryan stopped by and talked to FTP at the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress in Anahem, California. That interview has become three videos, featured on FTP’s Facebook Instagram and Twitter pages.
They’re quick and fun and infused with the Holy Spirit. Take a look.
NBC supplied a preview of Bryan’s run:
He also shared with us a special remembrance of a spiritual encounter he had with FTP’s founder, Servant of God Father Patrick Peyton, C.S.C.
We hope to do more with Sean, who has our prayers to continue in the competition!
Image: Courtesy NBCAbstract:
In frog spawn in a pond, each egg is able to turn itself into a tadpole and eventually a frog, with no help or guidance from a parent frog or from anything else in the pond. The single egg will have no resemblance in any respect to what it will turn into. We now begin to understand how this extraordinary transformation takes place. Eggs of frogs and other animals have another remarkable property. If a single cell from adult skin is transplanted into an egg, the skin cell will be made to go backwards in development to become an embryo cell from which another adult can be formed (repeating the process of normal development). In this way it is now possible to replace aged or diseased cells of an adult with rejuvenated cells from their skin. This is opening the possibility of cell replacement in humans.
Biography
John Gurdon was judged at school to be wholly unsuited to science having come bottom in a class of 250 in Biology. However, he was able to take up science at Oxford University, where he also did a PhD. His work led to the concept that an egg has the ability to rejuvenate the nucleus of an adult cell, and hence to the current prospect of replacing aged and diseased cells in humans with new cells derived from other body cells such as skin. In mid career he moved to Cambridge where he still works in the University. He is an Honorary Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford, and of Magdalene and Churchill Colleges in Cambridge. He served as Master of Magdalene from 1995-2002. He has received a number of awards including the Copley Medal of the Royal Society (2003), the Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (2009), and the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (2012).(October 29, 2014) – The Portland Bureau of Transportation and Portland Police Bureau advise the traveling public that a crosswalk enforcement action is scheduled for Wednesday, November 5, from 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. to raise awareness of pedestrian safety and Oregon traffic laws.
Daylight Savings Time ends on Sunday, November 2nd, which means the clock turns back one hour and darkness arrives earlier in the afternoon. The City is urging all travelers to be visible and look out for each other, especially as people adjust to the time switch and low light conditions of late fall and winter.
Drivers can do their part by driving at or below the posted speed and continuously scanning the environment for pedestrians and people on bicycles and being ready to stop as needed.
Bicyclists, by state law, must have a white front light and rear red reflector or red light at a minimum.
Pedestrians are encouraged to be more visible by wearing retro-reflective wear, carrying a flashlight or blinking strobe, and investing in bright and contrasting outerwear.
Crosswalk enforcement action promotes safety
The City police and transportation bureaus are holding this month’s crosswalk enforcement action during the evening rush hour to reinforce the need for drivers to stop and stay stopped for pedestrians in the crossing at all times.
Each crosswalk enforcement action involves a designated pedestrian crossing at a marked or unmarked crosswalk while police monitor how people who are driving, bicycling and walking adhere to traffic safety laws.
Drivers who fail to stop for pedestrians in the crosswalk and pedestrians who fail to follow Oregon traffic laws may be issued a warning or citation.
The N Lombard Street at N Leavitt Avenue crossing has a marked crosswalk (marked on one leg), curb extensions, and signage to alert drivers to the presence of pedestrians in the crossing.
Crosswalk enforcement actions are an effective way to communicate pedestrian right of way laws to both drivers and pedestrians. The transportation and police bureaus do enforcement actions about once each month in response to requests by community members, city traffic safety engineers, and Portland Police to educate the general public on the rules at marked and unmarked crossings.
Learn more about the Transportation Bureau’s safety work at http://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/40390 and pedestrian rights and responsibilities at http://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/435879.
###
Media Contact: Diane Dulken
503-823-5552, diane.dulken@portlandoregon.govHow I made the Manchester New Year's Eve photo go viral
Image copyright Joel Goodman
It's already been billed as the image of 2016 in some quarters. It's been called art and hailed for its beautiful composition. Others have singled out how it depicts 21st century Britain.
If you have not yet seen the image in question, it shows drunken revellers on a Manchester street and was taken by photographer Joel Goodman on New Year's Eve.
And it's my fault he received all the world's attention on Friday. Sorry, Joel.
Mainstream UK websites chose to lead with the image. Le Monde ran a piece on it. Other websites in France, as well in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, discussed it.
The original post has been retweeted more than 23,000 times.
So what happens when you unexpectedly go viral? So far, I've identified five key stages.
Naivety
The photo was initially buried deep in a gallery posted by the Manchester Evening News.
It immediately jumped out - it had so much drama in one place I couldn't stop staring at it. So I posted it, crediting the newspaper (more on that later).
My starting position whenever I post anything is to assume not many people will read it.
But I underestimated a few things - it was New Year's Day, so people were at home not doing much. There are a lot of art lovers out there. And people really, really like to laugh at other people.
Image copyright @hughesroland
Shock
Within minutes the tweet had gained some momentum - in the Netherlands of all places, thanks to a Dutch follower. At some point, the interest moved over the Channel.
Soon afterwards, one follower pointed out the photo's real aesthetic value - the fact that it complied with the so-called golden ratio rule.
A meme was born.
At that point, it all became a bit overwhelming - comedians reposted the image, major news networks paid attention to it, people spent their time making detailed artistic recreations.
Out of everything happening across the world on Friday, Twitter decided it was the most important "moment".
Was there nothing else going on in the world?
Acceptance
As soon as the disbelief wore off, abnormal became the new normal.
I started getting bombarded by Twitter users pointing out similarities with the paintings of Hogarth, Caravaggio, Gericault and Lowry, as well as the tapestries of Grayson Perry (I now know more about art than I did in school).
Some more creative types went as far as adapting the image in the style of Van Gogh, Georges Seurat and Michelangelo - often adding the reclining man with the beer from the original photo.
Image caption Some used specialist apps to recreate the image
But more interesting was seeing just how proud Mancunians were to see their hometown depicted in this way.
It's fair to say that the scene is one many people in Manchester have seen before, judging by the amount of times people posted it saying, "I love my town".
Guilt
My immediate pang of guilt came from the fact I hadn't credited Joel on the initial tweet, something I tried to quickly rectify.
But it made little difference - my initial tweet didn't say who took it, so he didn't get all the credit he deserved.
From now on, I'll be crediting the photographer wherever I can.
Joel and I have since been in touch - he is thrilled with the attention and it's been good business for him.
But a campaign started to get one of the most prominent retweeters - sci-fi author William Gibson - to acknowledge who took the photo.
And people power worked.
But my guilt also came from knowing that these were people who, although out celebrating New Year, were not in any position to consent to a photo being taken - and they would certainly not have expected to see themselves become a meme.
Image copyright @kapowaz Image caption Others turned the photo into a digital watercolour
A small minority of commentators attacked the image and the debauchery it portrays.
Some thought it was invasive. One man said the initial photo gallery was "irresponsible and voyeuristic" and I would be upset if anyone in the image has taken offence.
It certainly raises issues about how much duty of care you have in posting something - whether it goes viral or not. It's not a question I'm capable of answering here, but it has made me rethink the nature of what is put out there.
On the other hand, I would just love to know who the guy lying on the ground is. Anyone?
Fatigue
I am close to the point of fatigue now.
My family were probably at that point at 16:00 GMT on Friday when I was pointing out in which country I was trending at that time.
And yet the tweets continue.
And the requests to buy Joel's prints continue - the latest from Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia.
While Joel and I might be still shocked at the response, we are also very lucky - that the photo trended for a positive reason.
People, for the most part, liked it. I hate to think what happens to those who find themselves on the end of Twitter hype for all the wrong reasons.By Chris Wright
In scenes reminiscent of the old ‘fouling football’ games you used to play on the park (no? just us?) here’s some brutal footage from a new-ish indoor tournament played in Iceland which sees young lads compete in a hybrid football/Rollerball/pub carpark brawl sport.
The game is essentially 5-a-side football, but it would appear that absolutely anything goes in terms of kicking lumps out of each other. Even the referee disciplines players by slapping them across the face with either his red or yellow-gloved hand!
The Icelandic are usually such a placid people but we guess that paying upwards of £10 for a beer, etc, will make you crack eventually. As we say, ‘brutal’ is definitely the word…
<Insert obligatory Stoke City gag here>
(Video via @Kistengang)Over that last decade and a half weight cutting has become common practice in MMA competition. So much so, that it is now considered incredibly unusual if a fighter doesn't cut at least 10 lbs in the last day or two before a fight. Fighters who compete at their walking weight, or below their divisional limit are something of a rarity. Because of the complex nature of MMA governance (there isn't much in the way of cohesion) there aren't really any firm regulations on how fighters should go about weight cutting. The percentages, dehydration techniques, and re-hydration techniques are very much left to the volition of the fighters themselves. In this climate, it's of little surprise then that a desire for greater consistency of approach exists. Such is the nature of the Association of Ringside Physicians recently released statement on weight cutting in MMA.
Recommendations The ARP recommends standardized weigh-in policies in conjunction with yearround weight management programs. These would include scheduling weigh-instwenty four hours or less before the start of competition. Therefore, establishing a lowest allowed fighting weight (weight class) for competitors through body composition and hydration assessment is essential. Combatants should be assessed and certified at their appropriate weight annually. This assessment should be completed by non-biased examiners, in conjunction with licensure, and stored in an international data bank accessible to athletic regulatory bodies. In this light, the ARP will be establishing a medical database to provide this and other resources. Regulatory bodies should also consider adding additional weight classes in certain sports where needed. Additionally, in order for an athlete to maintain proper weight control and optimal body composition, a continual commitment to proper diet and training is required. Educational programs should be established to inform coaches, athletes, administrators, promoters and sponsors about the adverse consequences of prolonged fasting and dehydration on performance and health. These programs should discourage the use of extreme methods for making weight; i.e., excessive heat methods (such as rubberized suits, steam rooms, hot boxes, saunas), excessive exercise, induced vomiting, laxatives and diuretics. Nutritional programs should also be instituted to emphasize and meet an athlete's individual needs for adequate daily caloric intake from a balanced diet high in healthy carbohydrates, the minimum requirement of fat, and appropriate amounts of protein.
The Association of Ringside Physicians notes that as much as 39% of current MMA fighters may be entering complete dehydration in their weight cutting process. And the process of IV re-hydration used to recover from such a drastic cut is "considered a doping violation with several international organizations." You can check out the entire document here.
In general, it seems like the ARP has a good plan going forward as for how weight cutting in MMA could be better regulated, but unless they can get state athletic commissions and the UFC to voluntarily sign up for a more expensive and time consuming process, I don't see any practical way to put it in to action. And even still, it would be almost entirely impossible to regulate at the international regional level, where oversight is often slim to none. Still, small steps forward are better than no steps at all.Dave Stewart earned a reputation on the mound as one of the most intense pitchers in the game during his 16-year career. That competitive spirit is beginning to reveal itself from inside the Arizona Diamondbacks' front office.
Stewart and his staff grabbed the attention of the baseball world Wednesday, reportedly signing coveted Cuban free agent Yasmany Tomas to a six-year, $68-million contract. The deal, which would represent the richest free-agent contract in franchise history, is said to include an opt-out after the fourth year.
Critics immediately weighed in on both sides of the deal, questioning whether the right-handed hitting outfielder was worthy of such money given his raw potential and limited experience (he's played only 205 games since 2008).
Although the deal falls short of fellow countryman Rusney Castillo's record-breaking contract this past summer, it barely exceeds the figure awarded to Jose Abreu, the eventual 2014 American League Rookie of the Year.
From Stewart's perspective, however, the first-year GM just landed a corner outfielder with middle-of-the-order potential at an annual average value of $11 million per year. Not bad for a team that finished with the worst record in baseball last year and missed the playoffs for a third straight season.
Here's Tomas sending a moon shot into orbit during last year's World Baseball Classic:
Tomas' ZiPS projection calls for a.267/.302/.464 slash line and a value of 1.3 WAR in 2015, conservative yet encouraging numbers for a lineup that ranked 20th in slugging and 25th in home runs in 2014. His plus-power potential gives Arizona a formidable threesome that includes Paul Goldschmidt and Mark Trumbo.
The unexpected signing secures the 24 year old's developing years in Arizona through his age-27 season. If anything, Tomas may have landed one of the most player-friendly deals should he make good on his potential and hit the open market in the middle of his prime.
For now, Stewart and the Diamondbacks' front office - which includes proven World Series architect Tony La Russa - have to be pleased with how their offseason is shaping up.
Last month, Stewart traded for 2011 AL Rookie of the Year Jeremy Hellickson (pictured above), a reclamation project under control for two more years, who at the very least adds depth to a rotation decimated by injuries. Should any of the Diamondbacks' stable of talented injured arms - including All-Star left-hander Patrick Corbin - return to good health in 2015, Stewart could find himself with a wealth of assets.
The club has already been linked to free-agent pitcher James Shields and is reportedly shopping lefty Wade Miley. By acquiring Tomas, Arizona also finds itself with a crowded outfield that it could potentially parlay into filling other holes, such as third base or the middle infield.
Stewart made his living on the mound with an imposing presence and fierce competitive nature. Two months into his career as an executive, one might say he's already striking fear into front offices across baseball.By Adam Taylor
We’re starting the third year of this series. Over the next few blogs, I plant to redo the same AES example we’ve been exploring with Linux using both Free RTOS and the bare-metal SDSoC option. This will ensure that no matter which of the operating systems we use for our application, we will have the topic covered.
As engineers, it is our responsibility to select the correct operating system for the application when we define a system’s architecture. Each project will have different requirements including response times (is an RTOS required?), networking support, file systems etc. We must also remember that for many of these applications, we want to be first to market—so heritage and experience also count.
I am going to start by looking at bare-metal systems. As such, we first need to create a new SDSoC project. We select the standalone option for the OS as shown below:
I copied the same files as for the previous AES example into the source directory of the new project.
With the files stored in the project, the next step is to build the project to run on just one ARM Cortex-A9 core in the Zynq SoC’s PS (processor system). The main reason for doing this is to measure the execution time of the bare-metal version of the algorithm. By definition, there is no operating system on a bare metal system so there is no scheduling or context switching. These tasks impact the performance.
Here’s the result of this experiment:
Running the bare-metal AES algorithm on the Zynq SoC’s PS side takes only 28574 clock cycles compared to the 36662 clock cycles when the same code was executed in the Zynq SoC’s PS running Linux, so Linux adds an overhead of 8088 clock cycles in this example. Remember however, there are many reasons for selecting one OS over another. Execution time will be one of many criteria.
With the bare-metal baseline established, I then told SDSoC to accelerate the AES function using the Zynq SoC’s PL and selected the same parameters I did previously:
Data Motion Network Clock Frequency 200 MHz
Clock frequency 166.67 MHz
The results of accelerating the AES encryption using the Zynq SoC’s PL:
For the Linux version, the result was 16544 clock cycles. We can see that PL acceleration improves performance in the bare-metal example by 75%. The improvement for the Linux version was 55%. But again, we must take into account the simpler software architecture of the bare metal system as opposed to Linux. Bare-metal code is faster because it does less.
Indeed, if we were to add in the 8088 clock cycles difference between the Linux and bare-metal PS execution back into the bare-metal result, treating Linux execution as overhead, we would find that the execution time of the accelerated function is about 54% faster than the bare-metal code running on the Zynq SoC’s PS. That’s very close to the Linux accelerated performance result.
Bare-metal code is one of the three OS options directly provided by SDSoC. The third is Free RTOS, which we will look at next. Once we have looked at the Free RTOS example using SDSoC, we will look at how we can use other operating systems such as Micrium OSiii within the SDSoC environment.
It will be interesting to see the performance results for the same AES example when we use Free RTOS next week.
If you want E book or hardback versions of previous MicroZed chronicle blogs, you can get them below.
First Year E Book here
First Year Hardback here.
Second Year E Book here
Second Year Hardback here
You also can find links to all the previous MicroZed Chronicles blogs on my own Web site, here.Rahmael Sal Holt is considered by police to be armed and dangerous and should not be approached.Anyone seeing Holt should immediately call 911.
As the New Kensington police department mourns the loss of one of its own, Chief Jim Klein assured residents that their police services would not...
Latest developments in arrest of Rahmael Holt, suspect in New Kensington cop killing
As the New Kensington police department mourns the loss of one of its own, Chief Jim Klein assured residents that their police services would not...
The latest on the manhunt for New Kensington police officer’s killer
As the New Kensington police department mourns the loss of one of its own, Chief Jim Klein assured residents that their police services would not stop.
Officers from across Western Pennsylvania have been helping keep that promise, coming in to assist with the day-to-day business of police work that doesn’t stop for grief.
“I’ll stay as long as they need me,” said Amber Noel, a patrol officer from Ligonier Borough, who was volunteering in New Kensington on Sunday, her day off. “It’s an honor to help them.”
No one could say exactly how many officers or how many departments were helping New Kensington in the wake of the killing of Officer Brian Shaw, who died after being shot during a traffic stop on Leishman Avenue on Friday night.
A manhunt continued Sunday for the shooter, identified as Rahmael Sal Holt, 29, whose last known address was along Vine Street in the Natrona section of Harrison. A warrant had been issued for his arrest. He’s considered armed and dangerous.
In the wake of the incident, officers were saying the city was quieter than usual. But there were still things to deal with — like a burglar alarm, or a downed tree, said Washington Township police Chief Scott Slagle.
When the call went out looking for help filling New Kensington’s shifts, Slagle put the word out to his dozen officers. Just about all of them stepped up.
Slagle said his officers started on the midnight shift into Sunday morning. He came in at 7 a.m. Sunday.
While they could get paid, “No one even asked,” Slagle said. “We haven’t discussed that.”
New Kensington Mayor Tom Guzzo said the out-of-town officers were giving Shaw’s comrades the ability to grieve.
“The outpouring of support from the officers from all over Western Pennsylvania has been extraordinary,” he said. “We could not be doing this without them.”
Ohio Township police Officer Kevin Boyd said he’d be relying on “caffeine and good chow” to get him through a shift in his own municipality after working a 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift in New Kensington.
Boyd said his chief called him last night and asked if he could help out.
“They needed guys,” he said. “I couldn’t pass that up.”
Boyd said a constable helped him find his way around the city’s unfamiliar streets. “It’s a bad situation. It’s tough for everybody,” he said. “Everyone’s here to pitch in.”
Brian C. Rittmeyer is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at 724-226-4701, brittmeyer@tribweb.com or via Twitter @BCRittmeyer.U.S. ambassador slashed in Korea The suspect said he is against a joint U.S.-South Korean military training exercise that began this week.
U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Mark Lippert was attacked with a knife before a breakfast event in Seoul on Thursday morning, local time.
South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported that the attacker said he was opposed to a joint U.S.-South Korean military training exercise that began earlier this week.
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The suspect, who has been identified as a 55-year-old man named Kim Ki-jong sliced Lippert’s face and wrist just before 7:40 a.m. local time. According to The Associated Press, he screamed “South and North Korea should be reunified” as he struck.
Kim was taken into police custody.
Lippert, a former White House aide and Pentagon official who was once one of President Barack Obama’s closest advisers on foreign policy, was on his way into Sejong Hall for a breakfast event when he was assaulted.
The joint military training exercise critiqued by Kim was reported to be the Key Resolve and Foal Eagle military drills that started Monday, police told Yonhap News. The exercise is one of the world |
in an unsuccessful lawsuit to overturn New York’s marriage law, and has joined with various other Religious Right groups on anti-gay campaigns.
Yesterday, Leiter appeared on Crosstalk, the flagship program of Vic Eliason’s Voice of Christian Youth America, alongside Neil DiCarlo, a candidate for New York State Senate, to discuss New York’s legalization of same-sex marriage.
Leiter asserted that the “the Great Flood in the time of Noah was triggered by the recognition of same-gender marriages,” adding that there are similar “messages in this particular storm for us.” “The Lord will not bring another flood to destroy the entire world but He could punish particular areas with a flood, and if we look at the same-gender marriage recognition movement that’s occurring, that certainly is a message for us to learn,” he said. “We have to learn that the Lord does watch what we do and if we don’t shape up He will deliver divine justice.” Leiter also suggested that God flooded Lower Manhattan because it is “one of the national centers of homosexuality.”
Listen:
Later in the program, Leiter argued that the “LGBT radical homosexualist movement” threatens the survival of society and religious freedom and will even increase child abuse by giving molesters a “license to victimize” children and even “a certain degree of diplomatic immunity.”
Eliason: Rabbi Leiter, you have been passionately involved in the fight for biblical, moral values, why? Leiter: I think that’s what the Lord wants us to do and if we do not we face an existential threat. There is an issue of the survival of morality being necessary for the survival of society, and that’s not just an issue that’s specific to marriage. In addition there’s an issue of religious liberty. The LGBT radical homosexualist movement is really the Avant-guard of Bible-haters of all different types, not just limited to the left. The advance towards homosexual rights and so-called marriage is not predicated on getting rights, and just thereby stepping on the rights of Bible believers. The purpose is to bash Bible-believers using their so-called rights as a pretext do so and that’s why it is so critical to oppose them because they’re not after something that they think is theirs, they’re after us. … Leiter: There are so many things that people could point out about the negatives aspects of the homosexual lifestyle that is being touted as being this wonderful idea that the media doesn’t talk about. We’re talking about victimization that goes on under the rubric of protecting people’s rights; they’re not interested in protecting people’s rights, they’re interested in giving people a license to victimize, particularly to victimize children, and we pick up the pieces on some of that. We know how hard this is hitting society. The crisis of child molestation is not independent of the intentional proliferation of unfettered homosexuality, they are definitely connected, it doesn’t meant that every molester is homosexual but many of them are, there is a disproportionate number that are homosexual males. They are in some cases being given a certain degree of diplomatic immunity because of their favored status centered around a common vice. That’s something that no state has a right to do.
UPDATE: Gov. Andrew Cuomo condemned the remarks in a statement today:
The comments made by Rabbi Noson Leiter that sought to link the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy to our state’s embrace of marriage equality are as offensive as they are ignorant. This catastrophic storm claimed the lives of more than forty New Yorkers. This kind of hateful rhetoric has no place in our public discourse, and is particularly distasteful in times of tragedy. Our state is proud to offer equal rights to all our citizens, and we will never tolerate the use of a tragedy like Hurricane Sandy to promote a divisive and bigoted agenda. I call on Rabbi Leiter to apologize immediately for his hurtful comments.
Former Gov. George Pataki, a Republican, also took Leiter to task for his comments, while DiCarlo stood by the Rabbi:The Iraqi military deliver aid and evacuate vulnerable residents from the town of Amerli in northern Iraq, which has been besieged by Islamic State militants for the past two months. The U.N.’s representative in Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov, expressed alarm on the situation and warned of a possible massacre should the Islamist militants overrun the town. (Iraqi MOD via YouTube)
The Iraqi military deliver aid and evacuate vulnerable residents from the town of Amerli in northern Iraq, which has been besieged by Islamic State militants for the past two months. The U.N.’s representative in Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov, expressed alarm on the situation and warned of a possible massacre should the Islamist militants overrun the town. (Iraqi MOD via YouTube)
Michael Knights is the Lafer Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
This weekend, the international community appeared to finally wake to the looming humanitarian crisis in Amerli, a town of 12,000 Shiite Turkmen in northern Iraq that has been under attack by the Islamic State for more than 60 days. On Saturday, Nickolay Mladenov, head of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq, urged the international community in a tweet “to relieve the #Amerli siege and ensure the delivery of humanitarian assistance.”
Amerli is the only major Shiite community still behind the Islamic State’s front lines. In nearby towns, Shiite Turkmen families captured by the Islamic State have been split up, men and boys taken to be killed and women and girls bused away to be used as human shields, sold as chattel and sometimes raped and murdered.
Now, the Islamic State seems to be redoubling its efforts to overrun the town. Its outposts are less than a mile away from the makeshift perimeter set up by poorly armed residents, and its rockets make it impossible for Iraqi helicopters to bring supplies and take out the most vulnerable. If the fragile defense fails, we face the risk of another Srebrenica, the July 1995 massacre of more than 8,000 Bosnian civilians under the noses of the U.N.
With a safe haven only four miles away in the Kurdish-controlled area to the north, the international community, particularly the United States, needs to intervene immediately to facilitate the opening of a relief corridor to Amerli. The presence of thousands of Shiite civilians in territory controlled by the Islamic State presents the terrorist movement with the opportunity to undertake a sectarian provocation that would eclipse its previous crimes and plunge Iraq irretrievably into full-scale disintegration. If Iranian-supported Shiite militias liberate Amerli on their own, any relief operation might turn into a sectarian rampage as these forces take revenge on local Sunnis. But if the United States facilitates a joint effort to relieve Amerli, similar to the recent recapture of the Mosul dam, the fight against the Islamic State and efforts to stabilize Iraq could be greatly strengthened by another example of cooperation between the federal government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Relief of the town offers the possibility of an unparalleled win-win-win: Baghdad and Iran would protect an important Shiite community; Kurdistan would show its non-Kurdish minorities that it will protect them; and Turkey, the Turkmen’s historic protector, can live up to its responsibilities, most likely by arranging aerial medical evacuation, as it did when the town was hit by a truck bomb in 2007.
Iraqis have tried repeatedly to relieve Amerli by themselves but failed. On Aug. 8, a column of Iranian-backed Shiite militiamen sought to punch through from the north, but their column was shot to pieces by an Islamic State tank. A single U.S. drone could have dispatched the tank at almost no risk to friendly forces or civilians.
Having worked in Iraq for more than a decade, I would not lightly advocate any use of force by the U.S. military. But Amerli represents an unusually clear-cut opportunity to reduce human suffering, weaken the Islamic State and neutralize a key risk to Iraq’s fundamental stability. It is not the top of a slippery slope to unintended escalation: In fact, Amerli is a uniquely dreadful situation with a simple, achievable solution — coordinated U.S. airstrikes with a joint Baghdad-KRG offensive to open a humanitarian corridor. Flying over Iraq right now is a Predator drone carrying a Hellfire missile, and that missile will probably one day be shot into a tank hulk on a training range when it reaches its expiration date.
Or it could save 12,000 people if it is used today.Chinese Troops Mobilize in Provinces Near Tibet
Chinese authorities issued pictures of the 21 most wanted men in connection with last week's violent riots in Lhasa, Tibet. China says 16 people died in the rioting, while Tibetan exile groups say 99 people have been killed. In Lhasa, intrusive house-to-house searches have been taking place, according to Georg Blume, a German reporter from Die Zeit.
One of the two last western journalists to be expelled from Tibet on Thursday, Blume says, "We saw police are moving around and checking on people. I think all the young Tibetans in Lhasa are very afraid. They said to us that they need to prove that they didn't take part in the demonstrations, otherwise they risk arrest."
The unrest came after five days of peaceful protests and triggered a wave of angry anti-Chinese demonstrations elsewhere. Blume says huge numbers of security forces deployed in the capital, sealing off the major monasteries.
"We saw a very big military convoy on Sunday, where we could easily count a few thousand, if not 6,000 military personnel moving from inside the city outside to the area of the monasteries," he says. "So there were thousands and thousands of these military police in Lhasa at one point."
McClatchy journalist Tim Johnson says he saw three separate large convoys of security forces in Sichuan province, which borders Tibet.
"They would go along in convoys of 25 or 30 vehicles," says Johnson. "Each convoy would have a mobile ambulance, some sort of paddy wagon, armored vehicles for what looked like riot-control purposes, troop carriers. It looked like a whole sort of field expedition to deal with something where they would have to stay out for a long time and deal with injuries, arrests and that sort of thing."
That massive mobilization is flooding other provinces neighboring Tibet, too. An eyewitness in Gansu province Friday said he saw a convoy of around 3,000 troops. Villages had been sealed off, he said, and soldiers armed with AK47s were sitting by the road.
Johnson says in Litang, which neighbors Tibet, government control is "absolute."
"If authorities come in and shut every store in a municipality and tell people to park their cars and walk everywhere so they can't work and can't get transport around the city," he says, "it's pretty close to martial law."
China says the unrest was instigated by exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama, a claim he denies. On Friday, House speaker Nancy Pelosi visited with the Dalai Lama in India, calling for an international investigation to clear his name. As she met him in the Indian town of Dharamsala, she said the world's conscience is now on trial.
"If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China's oppression in China and Tibet," Pelosi said, "we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world."
The question now for the rest of the world is how to respond. In this Olympic year, China had been looking forward to presenting its success story on the international stage. Instead, it's locking down the "Roof of the World," creating a new militarized zone. With its image in tatters, Beijing is now desperate to prevent any more outside eyewitnesses from chronicling either Tibetan discontent or Chinese suppression.by Allen St. Pierre, Former NORML Executive Director
Renowned medical researcher Donald Abrams, MD (and the Positive Health Program of the UCSF Medical Service @ San Francisco General Hospital) is seeking a few more patients for a government-funded study that features patients who consume cannabis.*
Patients accepted into the research program will have travel to San Francisco covered and receive cash payments. This research program is part of a continuum of medical cannabis-related research performed by Dr. Abrams and his staff.
The goal’s study is to assess whether using vaporized marijuana affects the safety of prescribed opioids in patients treated for chronic pain.
*To Join This Study You Must: –Have Ongoing Chronic Pain
–Be 18 or older
–Be on a stable twice-daily dose of sustained-release oxycodone (Oxycontin) for at least 2 weeks before enrollment
–Be willing to give up marijuana for a month prior to entering the study
–Not be a cigarette and/or cigar smoker, or be willing not to smoke for 2 weeks before starting the study
–Meet some additional criteria If You Are Eligible You Will: –Spend 5 days and nights in a clinical research center at San Francisco General Hospital
–Have blood tests and other measurements done
–Inhale vaporized marijuana three times a day
If you’re interested in participating in this important medical research, and qualify for the necessary research protocols, please directly contact 415-476-9554 (x315).
Absent these kinds of well constructed scientific research programs to better understand and determine the medical utility of cannabinoids and cannabis, the federal government will continuously oppose patient access to whole-smoked cannabis, therefore this kind of research takes on an even greater sense of concern and scope than just how a specific therapy interacts with patients.Priscilla Olivas, 19, of Las Vegas, lights a candle Tuesday at a street vigil along the Las Vegas Strip. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The deadly mass public shooting in Las Vegas has reignited the debate about regulating firearms. Advocates of gun rights say that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” while gun control activists argue that “there’s a disconnect between what the American public wants on this issue and what [our] elected officials are doing about it.” And some will wonder whether mass shootings have any effect on public opinion.
They do — but in a very specific way. In our research, we discovered that people who live close to a mass shooting are more likely to support gun control than those who don’t.
On average, support for gun regulation has dropped over the past 25 years.
Years of polling data about Americans’ attitudes toward gun legislation show that — at least in the aggregate — American support for gun regulation has dropped over the past 25 years. In the 1990s, more than 6 out of 10 people favored firearm restrictions. But by the late 2000s, less than half of those surveyed supported gun regulation. Support does spike when there are highly publicized mass shootings, like those in Columbine, Colo., and Newtown, Conn. However, these spikes quickly fall back to the pattern of decline. Overall, even though U.S. mass shootings have increased, American support for gun legislation has declined. Today, only 51 percent support legislation to restrict gun ownership.
These polling results miss important geographic differences in attitudes. The closer you live to the site of a mass shooting, the more likely you are to feel threatened by gun violence — and the more you support regulating firearms.
Here’s how we did our research:
We first identified all known mass public shootings by reviewing the Stanford Geospatial Center’s “Mass Shootings in America” project, USA Today’s “Behind the Bloodshed” mass killing database, and Mother Jones’ “A Guide to Mass Shootings in America.” We combined results from these databases, discarding duplicates and keeping only cases in which three or more members of the general public were injured or killed with a firearm, leaving out targeted murders like family, acquaintance and drug or gang-related killings. This data set allows us to consider incidents where a shooter opened fire in a public place (e.g., school, shopping mall, movie theater, church, etc.) targeting seemingly random members of the public.
From 1966 to 2015, our database contains 210 mass public shootings. Most occurred after 2007, when the Virginia Tech shooting was in the news. Two-thirds occurred after the Columbine shooting in 1999. Mass shootings appear to be increasing over time.
[Lots of Republicans actually support gun control]
The average number killed in these attacks was 4.5 people; the average number not killed but injured by gunshot was five. Before the Las Vegas shooting, the largest number killed was 49, at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016 (although because our data set goes only to 2015, our published research shows it as 33 at Virginia Tech); the largest number injured by gunshot was 58 at the Aurora, Colo., theater shooting in 2012. The figure below shows a map of this data, which marks each event’s location and varies the size of the markers according to the number of people injured or killed.
Locations of mass public shootings in the continental United States, 1966—2015
So how did these mass shootings affect local and regional opinion toward gun regulation? To find out, we paired this shooting data with several large and respected public opinion surveys that measured respondents’ gun policy preferences: the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), the 2010-2012 CCES Panel Study, and the 2010 Pew Political Independents Survey. This data not only measures respondents’ opinions about government regulation of firearms, but also includes essential control variables. The geocoded data also enabled us to locate respondents spatially so that we could test whether reported preferences for gun control are related to how close respondents lived to mass public shootings.
[The U.S. is a violent country]
In all three surveys, living closer to a mass shooting did indeed make a difference, increasing respondents’ support for stricter firearms regulation.
What’s especially interesting is that increased support doesn’t vary by party. Rather, support for regulation increases depending on how many mass shootings have happened near you; how many people were killed; and how recently they occurred.
Our analysis includes controls for relevant demographic factors (e.g., respondents’ race, sex, age and so on) and contextual variables (e.g., population density, number of firearm stores per capita, etc.) that might influence both the location of mass shooting events and respondents’ attitudes toward gun control policy.
Smaller countries pass laws soon after mass shootings.
In other Western nations, after mass shootings, governments quickly pass new gun laws. For example, after the 1996 Dunblane Massacre of 16 British schoolchildren and one teacher, the United Kingdom passed two firearms acts and a permanent ban on private handgun ownership. Similarly, after the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre in Tasmania left 35 dead and 23 wounded, the Australian government introduced the National Firearms Agreement, which outlawed automatic and semiautomatic weapons and pump-action shotguns.
[Why it’s so hard to pass gun control laws — in one graph]
That hasn’t happened in the United States. We think it is not because the public fails to respond. Our research suggests a clear link between those who have lived near a mass shooting and a desire for stricter gun regulation. But most Western countries are smaller — both geographically and in population — than the United States. The nation may not pass gun legislation until there have been enough mass shootings that most Americans feel personally touched by the possibility of being shot at random.
Benjamin J. Newman is associate professor of public policy and political science at the University of California at Riverside. His research focuses on race and ethnic politics, class and income inequality, and urban politics and policy.
Todd K. Hartman is lecturer in quantitative social science at the Sheffield Methods Institute and a statistical ambassador for the Royal Statistical Society. Find him on Twitter @tkhartman.Communication technology tends to develop in a particular direction: more people communicating across larger distances using less effort to do so. Taken to its logical extreme, perfect communication would be anyone being able to talk to anyone, anywhere, using no effort at all. The closest concept we have to this form of communication is something called the hive mind. Everyone would be connected to everyone telepathically, and we could all share our thoughts, memories, and even dreams with one another. Such a system of communication would not only have far-reaching consequences, it would also be hugely controversial. We (Almost) Have the Technology Many have theorized about the hive mind, speculating about everything from what we would need to bring it to fruition to what it would do to society.
Some initiatives, like Princeton’s Global Consciousness Project, assert that we already have a hive mind; it’s just a matter of detecting it. Certain religious groups also espouse the concept of oneness, claiming we are all already connected on a non-physical level. Rather than figuring out how to tap into some inherent ability we already have, however, the most popular theory on how we’ll get a hive mind is through technological innovation. Some brainwave interpreting technology is allowing us to interact with machines through thought. Braingate’s wireless brain implant is currently designed to allow severely disable people to control things like wheelchairs and virtual keyboards using their thoughts, but the technology could serve as a direct conduit to other brains one day. We’re already making strides on that front as well. In 2014, a team of researchers successful conveyed the thoughts of someone from Spain to a person in France using an electroencephalography (EEG) to read their brainwaves and a computer to transport the information. For Better or Worse Few doubt that the technological tools we’d need for a global hive mind are on the way. The bigger question is what we would do once we had the technology. Obviously, being able to effortlessly share our dreams, emotions, and thoughts with one another would have many benefits. We could create our own virtual worlds and interact with others only in those worlds. Formal education would become a days- or weeks-long process as we would have the ability to download knowledge directly into our brains, and the spread of ideas or viral thoughts would be nearly instantaneous.
It would feel like a much smaller world and how we would interact with others within that world would be fundamentally changed. Unfortunately, that change wouldn’t necessarily be for the better. Imagine a hacker controlling “thought databases” or a totalitarian regime going all “1984” on the whole of society. While many claim that privacy is already a lost concept, it would truly become a thing of the past if anyone could hack into your thoughts. Another, more far-out theory is that we would coalesce into a single entity, like the Tyranid Hivemind or the Zerg Overmind situation in the video above. Through our own volition, or as a natural evolution of technology, we would “upload” ourselves into a singular consciousness. Maybe that would actually be the Singularity many have predicted. Despite all these technological connections, at its most basic level, the concept of a hive mind is something found in nature, a means by which the many come together to create something better than the sum of its parts. Studies have already shown that we are better at predicting pretty much everything when we think as a group. Imagine the problems we could solve if everyone in the world could collaborate on solutions just by putting our minds together.The fact of the matter is nearly everyone who watches Penn State football understands the game less than John Donovan. He has years and years of experience, days and weeks spent watching film. It's his life.
And so to suggest that a coach ought to be fired implies some sort of equal footing. That you understand the game better than he does and have solutions to fix the issues that the team faces at any given moment.
I don't.
I don't know how to fix Penn State's offense. i don't know where the line is between a team simply not being good and a team that is underachieving. I don't know if Penn State is getting the most out of what it has and I don't know if the offensive line with this collection of players is only ever going to be so good. I have educated guesses, but I don't know for certain.
So I'm not going to say that I do.
But what I do know is that Penn State and more specifically, James Franklin, has a problem. Slowly but surely the glitz and glamour is wearing off. Slowly but surely fans are less and less interested in the allegedly bright future and more interested in seeing things headed that direction. Franklin isn't losing the fan base but he's learning that he can't take them for granted.
The media, myself included, has subtly beaten around this bush for a while now. But at some point implying things is just an excuse to not commit to saying what you really mean. So I'll say it.
Penn State should fire John Donovan.
Half of the reason is his performance. Whatever hurdles Penn State has to overcome, the Nittany Lions simply look bad making the attempt to overcome them. There is a very reasonable argument to be made that this year and last were going to be the rock bottom during the sanction era. So to simply blame everything on Donovan would be shortsighted.
But again, Penn State just looks bad. It doesn't really matter if I know exactly why or have an alternative option to fix that issue, but I don't need to watch hours of film to know what I'm looking at. There are over 100 teams at the Division I level right now and most of them are capable of functioning on both sides of the ball. Some days it's hard to know if that's true for Penn State.
If Penn State had been a team that was getting better and losing games that felt more competitive, that would have been one thing. There's nothing wrong about losing to teams while you're rebuilding. There's nothing wrong about getting beaten by teams that are simply better.
Even James Franklin's record against ranked teams is an interesting stat but not terribly meaningful. It's when the dysfunction appears at every turn that you raise and eyebrow and wonder what is wrong. Penn State doesn't look better and in some respects looks worse than the year prior and only measurably improved from the start of the season. "You can see it on the film" only gets you so far for so long.
And that leads us to the other half of the equation. I could be completely wrong.
James Franklin and John Donovan could have a great grasp on all of these issues and a solution to fix the problem in the coming years. There truly is only so much they can do and maybe right now they're doing all of those things.
But maybe that doesn't matter.
That's the problem with being a CEO, you get the credit for the good and the blame for the bad. Franklin himself sits in an odd place, Penn State fans loved Joe Paterno more than Penn State football and they love Penn State football more than they like James Franklin. It's not his fault, but he has very little goodwill to work with.
Franklin's greatest strength, recruiting, is only appreciated by a niche section of the fan base and largely ignored by the majority. That leaves fans in some cases paying thousands of dollars to come support a team run by a coach they feel is too expensive for a largely "some day down the road" rhetoric that is often hard to grasp. It may not be entirely fair, but perception is reality.
In turn there are two choices that will set the course for the future of the James Franklin era. Who his next quarterback is and what he does with John Donovan.
Realistically he's running out of time to make those calls. Penn State's 2016 season is a minefield of miss opportunities, a road game at Pitt, hosting three Top 15 teams as well as Temple and Maryland. If the Nittany Lions march out with even a marginally improved offense that might not be enough to make Year 3 the step towards something bigger and better.
Franklin's hands are tied with his quarterback options and fans will have more patience with that position. But for Donovan the book is open and Penn State has proven that so too is the checkbook. Imagine a world where someone comes calling for Bob Shoop and Penn State is left with uncertainty at the defensive coordinator position and underwhelming results on offense. It's not a pretty sight.
So James Franklin has to let John Donovan go. Penn State is facing a fork in the road and very little room for a u-turn. Even if the move doesn't yield immediate results it's time purchased to continue to build. Talent will get to State College, but that's only half the battle.
Only time will tell what happens next. I don't get paid to make decisions, just second guess them.Finance Minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith, in his budget presented in Parliament on Thursday, suggested an increase from the present 3 percent to 5 percent.
The operators began charging the new tariff from Friday morning after informing the subscribers through text messages.
They said they switched to the new tariff plan after getting a statutory regulatory order (SRO) from the National Board of Revenue (NBR).
The operators said the NBR issued the SRO after the finance minister proposed the hike in supplementary duty in the new budget.
Robi, in an SMS to its subscribers, said an increase of the supplementary duty to 5 percent was being reflected in their tariff.
An official of the operator said a subscriber getting this message meant his or her inclusion in the new tariff plan
Grameenphone’s Chief Corporate Affairs Officer Mahmud Hossain told bdnews24.com they, too, had started bringing their subscribers under the new tariff plan following the announcement of the budget proposal.
Robi’s Communications and Corporation Responsibility Vice President Ekram Kabir said they began process from Thursday midnight.
Finance Minister Muhith on Thursday presented his budget proposal of Tk 3.41 trillion.
He told the House that taxes on SIM cards had been ‘significantly’ reduced in the current FY 2015-16 budget, resulting in a drop in revenue from the telecom sector.
“In order to enhance revenue collection from this sector, I am proposing to increase the rate of supplementary duty on SIM card related services from 3 percent to 5 percent.”
The tax for new mobile phone subscriptions was down to Tk 100 from Tk 300 in the last budget.
The highest current call rate is Tk 2 per minute but a caller pays Tk 2.39 after 15 percent VAT and 1 percent surcharge on top of 3 percent supplementary duty.
The price will stand at Tk 2.44 if supplementary duty is raised to 5 percent.
Mobile phone operators say the proposed duty will impede the sector’s growth if implemented.
An official of one of the operators told bdnews24.com that raising the supplementary duty on SIM usage (voice calls, SMS and internet data) would add to the financial burden of mobile users.
Robi’s Ekram Kabir said a duty hike would also reduce revenue earnings from data usage and voice calls.
After the deadline for biometric registration expired on May 31 midnight, Bangladesh’s six operators currently have over 108.1 million active SIMs.
According to telecom regulator BTRC, the number of mobile internet users in Bangladesh was over 58.66 million at the end of April.University endowments and teachers’ pension funds are among big investors in Sallie Mae, the private lender that has been generating enormous profits thanks to soaring student debt and the climbing cost of education, a Huffington Post review of financial documents has revealed.
The previously unreported investments mean that education professionals are able to profit twice off the same student: first by hiking the cost of tuition, then through dividends and higher valuations on their holdings in Sallie Mae, the largest student lender and loan servicer in the country, which profits by charging relatively high interest rates on its loans and not refinancing high-rate loans after students graduate and get well-paying jobs.
Sallie Mae is a former government-sponsored enterprise that was fully privatized in 2004 and now trades publicly as SLM Corp.
“It’s a conflict of interest,” said Barmak Nassirian, a longtime higher education analyst who most recently served as associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars & Admissions Officers. “There is something inherently problematic about benefitting from the financing of the tuition you charge through investments in any lender.”
On average, the annual cost of education at public schools has risen 57 percent since 2005 to nearly $18,000, according to College Board figures Sallie Mae cites in its latest quarterly pitch to investors. Students at private schools are paying more than $39,000, or nearly 44 percent more than they did in 2005.
The so-called “cost of attendance gap”, or the difference between what a four-year degree will cost incoming freshmen versus the amount of government loan money available to them, has risen over the past 10 years by 59 percent to nearly $152,000 for the typical student who started at a private school in 2011, Sallie Mae tells investors. For public school students, the gap has increased 90 percent to about $69,000.
Sallie Mae loans, which are relatively more expensive now than they were before the financial crisis, help “bridge the funding gap,” the company says.
The funds’ investments in Sallie Mae come as Washington policymakers increasingly turn their attention to student debt burdens, weighing stimulative measures that could boost refinancings or increase loan modifications for distressed borrowers, in the face of increasing evidence that student debt is hurting the economy.
The highly profitable company -- it generated a 21 percent return on equity last year -- attributes its earnings in part to the lack of competition in a market in which borrowers’ need for credit is only increasing.
“The margins here are really a function of alternative financing opportunities,” John Remondi, Sallie Mae president and chief operating officer, told investors in January. “And if you think about our products, we're making loans to the parents and students, family education loans. Their alternatives are fairly limited.”
Sallie Mae reported $939 million in net income last year, its highest since 2006. The publicly-traded company, which enjoys a government guarantee on most of its $174 billion in assets, has been profitable in eight of the last 10 years, generating a cumulative $7.3 billion profit.
Its shares have risen 54 percent over the past year, outpacing the 19 percent gain in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, America’s benchmark equity gauge.
The endowments of Furman University, Harvard University, Mount Holyoke College, and University of Michigan all hold stakes in Sallie Mae through their investments in Highfields Capital Management, a hedge fund that manages more than $11 billion and is the second-biggest Sallie Mae shareholder. As of the end of last year, Highfields owned nearly 40 million shares of Sallie Mae, or 8.6 percent of the company’s common stock.
Highfield investors, according to securities filings, primarily consist of charitable foundations, endowments, pension plans, and governmental entities, among others. The hedge fund was founded by two top executives of the Harvard Management Co., the Ivy League university's investment arm, which kicked in $500 million to launch the fund.
Pension funds for teachers and other school employees such as the New York State Teachers’ Retirement System, State Teachers Retirement Board of Ohio, Pennsylvania Public School Employees Retirement System, New Mexico Educational Retirement Board, Teacher Retirement System of Texas and California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS) also own significant chunks of Sallie Mae, as does asset manager TIAA-CREF, which oversees retirement funds for teachers, among others.
Highfields Capital declined to comment. The funds either declined to comment or said their ownership stakes were due to passive investments in index funds. Sallie Mae’s shares form part of the S&P 500 and the Russell 3000 Index.
Still, the funds are enjoying bumper returns thanks to their passive investments, aided by borrowers who may be paying more than they would if the student loan market was functioning properly, policymakers have said.
“The issue becomes whether maximizing returns should be tempered by additional concerns and ethical considerations,” Nassirian said of higher-education professionals who have holdings in Sallie Mae. “This form of ‘double-dipping’ can create a very dangerous loop, where you have incentives beyond what you claim in your public rhetoric -- namely to put students into deeper debt.”
“This is a much more subtle and much less mechanistic dysfunction than we have seen in the past,” he added.
In 2006 -- the last year Sallie Mae reported at least $1 billion in profit and enjoyed a return on equity above 20 percent -- student borrowers who took out private Sallie Mae loans that were then securitized were borrowing at interest rates that were about 4.4 to 5.0 percentage points above a benchmark borrowing rate for financial corporations known as the three-month commercial paper rate, according to a review of the company’s bond documents.
For private loans that were securitized last year, students were paying interest rates about 6.8 to 7.5 percentage points above the benchmark corporate rate.
In all, over the last three years the margin enjoyed by Sallie Mae and its investors on private loans the company securitized on average has been about 2 percentage points higher than it was in 2006 relative to the overall corporate borrowing rate.
“Sallie Mae’s private education loans are designed to help students graduate with less debt and pay off their loans faster than other private loan alternatives,” said spokeswoman Patricia Nash Christel. “In fact, we’ve lowered our interest rates three times in the last four years, eliminated origination fees, added borrower-friendly safeguards, and created variable and fixed rate choices as well as in-school payment options to save families money.”
However, the reduction in interest rates for students has not matched the decline in the cost of borrowing throughout the economy. In other words, students are not fully enjoying the benefits of today’s low-interest rate environment, a source of frustration to some government officials.
Martha Holler, another Sallie Mae spokeswoman, disputed the use of commercial paper rates to measure the company’s margins on private student loans. Holler said it would be more appropriate to use the company’s self-reported funding costs specifically related to its private student loan originations, which in the form of long-term equity and debt is more expensive than commercial paper. By that measure, she argued, the company’s margins have slightly decreased since 2006.
But such a measure would exclude the company’s overall cost of funds, which enables the company to finance a wide range of assets more cheaply, boosting earnings. Sallie Mae's cost of funds is substantially lower now than it was in 2006, the year before the credit crunch is widely acknowledged to have started.
Sallie Mae’s preferred measurement also neglects the relative interest rate paid by student borrowers, whose rates in a normally functioning competitive market would move in tandem with interest rates in the broader economy. The commercial paper rate measures the borrowing costs of financial corporations like Sallie Mae, and influences how they price loans offered to households.
In 2012, the company borrowed funds at an average interest rate of 1.45 percent. In 2006 it was 5.37 percent. Interest rates paid by its student borrowers on all of the company’s loan products have not dropped by a corresponding amount, enabling the company as a whole to record a higher spread between its cost to borrow and what it earns off loans to students.
Sallie Mae’s margins also benefit from its Utah-based bank, which |
stab at what a candidate might sound like if he or she were trying to appeal to the majority of voters in the middle of the electorate who feel both parties are failing us.
My fellow alienated Americans:
How’s this for something different? I want to raise your taxes, cut spending on programs you like, and force you to rethink how we run our schools, banks, armies, hospitals and elections. And I want you to cheer when I’m done. Because if you embrace the “decade of renewal” I’m calling for, we’ll emerge with a more competitive, sustainable and just America — the kind of America we all want to leave to our children.
I’m running for president as an independent because we need to change the debate if we’re going to change the country. Neither of our two major parties has a strategy for solving our biggest problems; they have strategies for winning elections, which isn’t the same thing. Democrats and Republicans will tell you, as I do, that they want to make America competitive again, keep faith with our deepest values of fairness and opportunity, and fix our broken political system. But the Democrats’ timid half-measures and the Republicans’ mindless anti-government creed can’t begin to get us there. Both parties are prisoner to interest groups and ideological litmus tests that prevent them from blending the best of liberal and conservative thinking. And neither party trusts you enough to lay out the facts and explain the steps we need to take to truly fix things — in fact, their pollsters tell them that if they do, you’ll vote them out.
Well, I’m happy to take on that job. I won’t give you the usual pabulum about how we’re going to “save the American Dream” or restore our supremacy as the sole superpower. The loss of our economic dominance was at some point inevitable. We’ve had quite a run since World War II, when we were the only economy left standing, and others were bound to start catching up. The spread of capitalism is helping hundreds of millions of people rise out of poverty in India and China. That’s a fantastic thing for humanity. And if we manage it right, that can also be a positive thing for the United States, because the growing wealth of nations means billions of new customers for the kind of goods and services America ingenuity can produce.
We can make this an era of opportunities, not threats. But only if we think differently. When the changes reshaping the global economy are dramatic, incremental responses won’t suffice. We need a bold agenda equal to the scale of our challenges.
I believe that it will take seven big domestic initiatives to get America back on track. Bear with me if I go a little deep on the details, because that’s the only way for you to see what I mean.
1. Fix the economy. Our economy is working off a massive hangover of debt that makes this recession and recovery different from those we’ve gone through before. That means we need to make major moves to get jobs and growth back to anything like what we think of as normal. It also means that, for a couple years, worries about the budget deficit have to take a backseat to spurring growth. Fix the economy, and it’ll be easier to fix the budget.
To boost jobs and growth, we first need major, permanent tax reform. I propose we slash, and over five years eliminate, our sky-high corporate income and payroll taxes, and, once unemployment comes down to 6 percent again, we replace those job-killing, wage-crushing taxes with new taxes on consumption and dirty energy. This is the way to unleash a new era of entrepreneurial innovation while funding the government we need.
At the same time, to win back the million jobs now lost because China’s currency manipulation artificially raises the price of our exports to that country, I would impose a proportionate tax on imports from China. Let me be clear: China’s rise as an economic power is a good thing for the world and a great thing for the Chinese people. China is not the source of all our economic woes. But we can no longer allow China’s brazen currency manipulation — nor its routine theft of American intellectual property — to tilt the playing field unfairly against American jobs.
Next, until private-sector job growth gets back to where it should be, we should use government funds to create millions of short-term, labor-intensive service jobs in fields like education, elder care, public health and safety, and urban infrastructure maintenance. I would also put Americans to work on the countless roads, bridges, airports, schools and sewer systems across the country that need to be modernized.
Finally, over the longer-term, we need to make sure in-person service-sector work is well compensated. Global economic integration is putting downward pressure on the wages of American jobs that can be performed elsewhere. But in-person service work — jobs ranging from home health care to retail sales to teaching to personal grooming and more, accounting for roughly 30 million jobs in the United States — is immune to these pressures, since it can’t be offshored. If we could find ways to guarantee that this kind of work delivers a middle-class living, it would offer an important measure of security and optimism for millions.
I’ll also develop new “carrots” and “sticks” to get multinational firms to locate more manufacturing and high-value jobs in America.
2. Fix education. We’ve been tinkering at the edges when it comes to school improvement, because we’ve ignored the most important question: Who should teach? While the world’s highest-performing school systems — those in places like Singapore, Finland and South Korea — recruit their teachers from the top third of their graduating class, we recruit ours from the middle and bottom thirds, especially for schools in poor neighborhoods. This “strategy” isn’t working. Up through the 1970s, the quality of our teacher corps was in effect subsidized by discrimination, because women and minorities didn’t have many other job opportunities. All that’s changed, but as career options have multiplied for those who used to become teachers, salaries haven’t kept pace to attract top talent.
I see an America where our most talented young people flock to the classroom, not to Wall Street. They should see teaching as the most exciting profession in the country — with top teachers and principals able to earn $150,000 a year or more. To get there will take federal investment. We’ll need to stop condemning millions of poor children to schools that can never get great teachers and principals because they’ve been shortchanged by a 19th century system of local school finance that’s rigged against them. This investment should also help to fund universal preschool from age 3, and longer school days and years, where we lag our major economic competitors.
3. Fix health care. We need to make sure every person in America has basic health coverage that doesn’t break the bank. To achieve that, Democrats must accept a private insurance industry and Republicans must accept that some people can’t afford decent policies on their own. This “grand bargain” is about liberals agreeing that innovation shouldn’t be regulated out of U.S. health care and conservatives agreeing that justice has to be regulated into it. The 50 million uninsured may seem invisible, but today their ranks are equal to the combined populations of Oklahoma, Connecticut, Iowa, Mississippi, Kansas, Kentucky, Arkansas, Utah, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming. Would America turn its back on these 25 states if they all lacked basic health coverage? That is what we’ve been doing for decades.
Making the system more efficient is the key to access and affordability. But change won’t come easy, because while there’s much to admire in American health care, our Medical-Industrial Complex knows that every dollar of health-care “waste” is somebody’s dollar of income. It’s time to learn from a nation like Singapore, which spends 4 percent of GDP on health care and gets as good or better results than we do spending 17 percent. Singapore’s blend of market forces, public provision and personal responsibility shows it is possible to do more with less. I applaud President Obama for taking on the health-care challenge and for persisting in spite of wrongheaded GOP charges that his extension of Mitt Romney’s reform in Massachusetts is a “socialist takeover.” Repealing President Obama’s legislation would be a terrible step backward. But the law can be dramatically improved before it is fully phased in. We should “mend it, not end it.”
I’d tweak President Obama’s reform so that it aims for less costly catastrophic insurance for every American, which would cap health expenses as a percent of income. I’d then give vouchers, or funded health-savings accounts, to folks who need help buying primary and preventive care via the fitness-club model being pioneered around the country (unlimited care for a flat monthly fee). I’d replace today’s malpractice litigation lottery with a system that protects doctors from liability so long as they’ve followed evidence-based best practices. This would put an end to the “defensive medicine” that runs up costs — a common-sense reform that Democrats shamefully reject as a sop to the trial lawyers who fund their campaigns. It’s also time we got corporations out of the business of running our welfare state — they’ve got enough to do to compete with China and India — and ensure that every American has access to group rates through health reform’s insurance exchanges.
4. Rein in Wall Street. The banking system is now more concentrated than it was before the financial crisis. There are two ways to avoid the “too big to fail” threat that still exists. We can limit the risks these big banks take — though regulators don’t have a great track record of getting this right. The most important thing we can do, therefore, is make sure big banks have enough capital to absorb any conceivable losses. Yet bank lobbyists are now swarming Washington to keep capital requirements low – in part because higher levels of capital reduce what top bankers can pay themselves. Their bonuses are often based on such metrics as a firm’s “return on equity,” which can be goosed by continually piling debt atop a tiny equity base. That’s Wall Street’s plan. Heads, I win; tails, taxpayers lose. Again.
Fixing this is not complicated, it just takes the will to reject the banks’ demands. I would boost capital requirements for our “too big to fail” banks toward 20 percent, as Switzerland has done — well beyond the inadequate 5-percent to 7-percent levels bank lobbyists are counting on. I’ll also ban “naked credit default swaps” – those fancy securities that let traders buy the financial equivalent of insurance on other people’s lives. These instruments serve no social purpose other than to enrich the bankers who peddle them while turning our financial system into the casino that just cost millions of Americans their jobs. The banks will squeal, but does anyone think we should listen to their pleas after their greed, mismanagement and poor judgment nearly brought down the world economy? It’s time for finance to serve our broader society, not the other way around. And it’s past time to prosecute those whose crimes contributed to the crisis.
5. Fix our broken political system. We’ll never get where we need to go unless we deepen our democracy. I have several proposals that go beyond the usual “small ball” in this terrain, so please keep an open mind.
First, let’s enter everyone who votes in a national election into a lottery. Prizes could range from $10 million for a winner to dozens of $1 million runners-up. For a modest cost, this would lift turnout from today’s pathetic 60 percent in presidential years, and one-third in off-years, closer to 100 percent every time. Unorthodox? You bet. But we need to shake things up.
Next, on campaign finance, we should stop deluding ourselves that we can ever get private money out of politics. We can’t. It’s like ants in the kitchen. You plug one hole and they come back somewhere else. Instead, let’s offset this private cash by giving each voter 50 publicly funded “patriot dollars” to contribute to the candidate or cause of her choice in national elections. This would introduce $6 billion each election cycle — more than enough to offset private donations. And it would encourage candidates to appeal to average Americans rather than just grovel before wealthy donors. Pair this publicly funded voucher with instant Web-based disclosure of all donations and we’d have a far more level, transparent playing field.
Finally, let’s lower the voting age to 15. From debt to schools, and climate to pensions, the distinctive feature of public life today is a shocking disregard for the future. Yes, politicians blather on about “our children and grandchildren” all the time – but when it comes to what they do, the future doesn’t have a vote. We should give our elected leaders a reason not simply to praise children but to pander to them. A crusade to amend the constitution to lower the voting age would inspire a generation that’s being robbed by the adults in power to enter the arena and raise its voice.
It’s also time we restored majority rule to America by scrapping the filibuster in the Senate. We can’t govern ourselves if national legislation can be blocked by senators who represent as little as 15 percent of the country.
6. Require national service. The conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. was right: The proper response to the blessings that are every American’s patrimony is gratitude. It’s only right that this be expressed through a period of mandatory service of some kind by every young American, who will not only give back to his country but, in the process, get to know fellow citizens from every race and place and background.
7. Get our fiscal house in order. Finally, I would aim to balance the budget by 2018 and make sure we can sustainably fund the government by enacting measures that would start once the economy has fully recovered and unemployment is back near 6 percent. We’ll need both spending cuts and tax increases borne fairly by every sector of society.
On the spending side, let me mention the three big areas we need to tackle.
First, national security is job one for any president. To make sure that no power can threaten us, I believe we must spend far more than any conceivable rival. But I also believe, in the Eisenhower tradition, that we need to be smart hawks. If Ike were here, he’d say it was crazy that the defense budget is 50 percent higher in real terms than it was throughout the Cold War. That’s why I’d insist we spend seven times more than China – but not nine times more, as our two political parties want; 13 times more than Russia, but not 17 times more; and 26 times more than Iran, North Korea and Syria combined – but not 33 times more. The result would be an annual military budget of $550 billion, not $700 billion.
Second, on Social Security, the path to solvency starts with a fresh look at automatic increases built into the system that few Americans are aware of — increases that no politician dares mention for fear of being attacked for “cutting” Social Security. I’m not talking about the way benefits are hiked each year to keep up with inflation; no problem there. But under today’s formulas, the starting benefits for future retirees are substantially higher than for current retirees. For example, today, medium wage retirees get a starting benefit of about $18,000. Similar retirees in the year 2030 are slated to get roughly $24,000 in today’s dollars; by 2050, the number in today’s dollars rises to $29,000. Doubling the number of retirees on Social Security as the boomers age is a major fiscal challenge. Promising a 60 percent increase in starting benefits on top of this creates a budget hole that is frightening.
Advocates for these built-in increases, which didn’t exist before the late 1970s, say Social Security should always replace the same portion of wages as it does today; since real wages will grow as the economy grows, so should benefits. That’s a worthy objective. But in an era when health care and pensions for seniors are poised to crowd out cash for every other public priority, or else require tax increases beyond what anyone thinks would be good for the economy, that shouldn’t be our only objective.
Halting these automatic benefit escalators a few years from now would make Social Security solvent in one stroke. It would assure that every retiring senior receives slightly higher benefits than new retirees do today. Yet it would leave America the room to address new needs down the road. This is the kind of action a prudent nation takes. If, years from now, we think seniors need additional protection, 76 million baby boomers will be breathing down our politicians’ necks clamoring for it.
Third, it’s the same with Medicare. Given how inefficient our health-care system is, we simply have to establish targets that get growth in health costs in line with the growth rate of our economy, and ideally something well below that. We know this is possible, because every other advanced nation does more with less. And it’s the only way to free up resources to invest in the infrastructure, education, and research and development that fuels long-term growth.
For both Social Security and Medicare, we’ll also need to phase in higher eligibility ages to reflect the longer lifespans Americans now enjoy — with eligibility exceptions for those engaged in physical labor. Higher-income Americans will also need to contribute something more to these programs, and receive a bit less, to make the boomers’ golden years affordable for the country.
Getting our fiscal house in order will also mean higher taxes. New taxes on dirty energy would push markets toward the clean energy solutions that reduce carbon emissions and our dependence on unstable foreign regimes. And we could offset the impact on folks with lower incomes with lower payroll taxes. I would challenge the oil companies to support this vision, as several did when Ross Perot proposed higher gas taxes in 1992. I would also introduce a tiny tax on Wall Street trading transactions and a 50 percent tax bracket for Americans earning more than $5 million a year. This isn’t an attempt to “punish” anyone’s success — it’s about asking the most fortunate among us to help in ways that won’t affect their lifestyle or incentives. Finally, I’d end the Bush tax cuts for all Americans, not just for those earning more than $250,000. Anyone who looks honestly at the numbers knows this is necessary as our population ages.
Some people will say these ideas involve too much tough medicine and too little optimism. But I am optimistic. I believe Americans are ready for the sturdier brand of hope that comes from dealing squarely with the facts. And if we come together for a decade of renewal, we’ll emerge with an America that’s more competitive, sustainable and just. We won’t have to storm the beaches of Normandy or Guadalcanal. We’ll just have to accept slightly higher taxes and some trims in future spending on programs we like, and we’ll have to commit to making our health care and education systems more productive. We’ll need to think creatively about the national interest, not just our own. Isn’t a stronger America worth these modest sacrifices?
As you may have noticed, I haven’t said anything about abortion, the death penalty, guns or gay marriage. These are important issues, but they’re not the most important things a president should address in the years ahead. As a result, I won’t discuss them at all in the campaign. If they’re your top priority, I’m not your candidate.
Can we win with this message and this agenda? That’s up to you. Republicans and Democrats have a longtime lock on things. They’ve rigged the system when it comes to getting on the ballot and raising money.
But two things are clear. First, a third-party movement in 2012 won’t be a “spoiler.” There is little risk of a Ralph Nader-style result that diverts a handful of votes and throws the election to a candidate those voters can’t abide. The terrain this campaign is contesting is very different. Most Americans now tell pollsters they’re open to a third party. The millions of Americans ready to stand behind the banner of pragmatic renewal means we’ll be playing for keeps, not tinkering at the margins.
Plus, we don’t have to win the election to change the country. As historian Richard Hofstadter suggested, the role of third parties in American politics is to sting like a bee and then die. I say, let the stinging begin! If we get 30 percent of the vote, we’ll make more than enough noise to transform the debate. And once we start proving there’s a constituency for honest talk and real answers, there’s no telling where it will lead.
In the end, in a democracy, we get the government we deserve, and I’m wagering most of us think we deserve better. That iron law of politics still holds: Politicians will scramble to lead any parade that forms. Let’s get busy organizing the right parade, and together we might just save the country.
Matt Miller writes a weekly online column for The Post.A €75,000 damages award to a woman who slipped and broke her ankle when walking down a wet grassy slope to leave a Dublin shopping centre car park has been overturned by the Court of Appeal (COA).
A €75,000 damages award to a woman who slipped and broke her ankle when walking down a wet grassy slope to leave a Dublin shopping centre car park has been overturned by the Court of Appeal (COA).
Ms Justice Mary Irvine ruled the companies which own and operate Mountview Shopping Centre, Blanchardstown, Dublin, had not breached their statutory duty to take reasonable care for the safety of Louise Byrne.
A visitor is expected to take reasonable care for their own safety and if they decide to go down a wet grassy slope in unsuitable footwear instead of using a nearby safe tarmacadam surfaced entrance, "they will take responsibility for the consequences of that decision", she said.
If an occupier had to provide the type of preventative measures suggested by Ms Byrne's engineer to meet "reasonable care" obligations under the Occupiers Liability Act, such as installing a step with barriers either side of the slope, that would have "potentially significant adverse repercussions" for all who occupy land open to visitors, such as local authorities responsible for many "wonderful open spaces and parks" here.
Judges should be careful, when interpreting the relevant law, to ensure they do not inadvertently, contrary to the intention of the legislature, end up "denying children the joy of running down a grassy slope in a public park on a dry summer day or the golfer the pleasure of playing to an elevated green surrounded by a grassy bank".
Ardenheath Company and Ardenheath Management Company appealed over the €75,000 award made to Ms Byrne (48), of Parslickstown Avenue, Mulhuddart, Dublin over her fall on December 20, 2012. It happened after she had parked her car and was crossing the slope which she claimed was slippery and dangerous.
The defendants denied liabilty.
In his High Court judgment making the award, Mr Justice Michael Hanna found the defendants had a duty of care and could have taken certain steps to have the embankment made safe or ensure people did not use it.
He awarded €125,000 but reduced that to €75,000 after finding 40 per cent contributory negligence on Ms Byrne's part. He granted a stay pending appeal on condition of payment out of €30,000.
Giving the three judge COA's unanimous judgment, Mr Justice Irvine said an occupier is entitled, when deciding what steps it should take to meet its obligations, to assume visitors will take reasonable care for thir own safety and an adult can normally look after their own welfare.
The company was entitled to expect an adult exercising reasonable care would avoid the wet grassy slope, particularly because of a six inch kerbstone, wearing shoes providing little grip and there being a safe entrance nearby with a tarmacadam surface, she said.
There was nothing to stop a visitor like Ms Byrne deciding to take a short cut down such a slope but, if they did, they cannot be said to have taken reasonable care for their own safety and, if injured, cannot seek to blame the occupier.
In providing visitors to its smaller car park with a safe and proximate entrance, which Ms Byrne could have used, the company had complied with its duty of care to Ms Byrne.
It was "preposterous" to find, as the High Court had, the company was required to install a barrier along the area of grass frontage to the side of the smaller car park to stop people like Ms Byrne going down the grassy slope when there was a safe exit just a short distance away, she said. Such a finding would be tantamount to constituting the company as the insurer of the safety of its customers.
Online EditorsHash table is probably the most commonly used data structure in software industry. Most implementations focus on its speed instead of memory usage, yet small memory footprint has significant impact on large in-memory tables and database hash indexes.
In this post, I”ll provide a step by step guide for writing a modern hash table that optimize for both speed and memory efficiency. I’ll also give some mathematical bounds on how well the hash table could achieve, and shows how close we are to the optimal.
Let me start with a disclaimer. I now work at google, and this project (OPIC including the hash table implementation) is approved by google Invention Assignment Review Committee as my personal project. The work is done only in my spare time with my own machine and does not use and/or reference any of the google internal resources.
Common hash table memory usages
As mentioned earlier, most hash hash table focus on its speed, not memory usage. Consequently there’s not much benchmark compares the memory these hash table implementation consumes. Here is a very basic table for some high performance hash table I found. The input is 8 M key-value pairs; size of each key is 6 bytes and size of each value is 8 bytes. The lower bound memory usage is $(6+8)\cdot 2^{23} =$ 117MB. Memory overhead is computed as memory usage divided by the theoretical lower bound. Currently I only collect 5 hash table implementations. More to be added in future.
Memory Usage Memory Overhead Insertion Time Query Time std::unordered_map 588M 5.03x 2.626 sec 2.134 sec sparse_hash_map 494M 4.22x 7.393 sec 2.112 sec dense_hash_map 1280M 10.94x 1.455 sec 1.436 sec libcuckoo 708M 6.05x 2.026 sec 2.120 sec klib khash 642M 5.48x 4.232 sec 1.647 sec
The metrics above actually surprises me. For example, [sparse hash map][shm] is advertised to use 4-10 bits per entry, but the overhead is actually 4 times the lower bound. If the hash table were implemented as large key-value store index, and you have 1 TB of data, you’ll need at least 4-5TB of space to hold the data. That’s not very space efficient. Can we do better?
Overview of hash table types
There’s two major types of hash table, one is chaining and the other is open addressing. Chaining is quite common in most standard libraries, where the collision is handled by appending items into a linked list headed by the bucket the key is mapped to. Open addressing uses a different mechanism to handle collision: the key (and value) is inserted to another bucket if the bucket it attempt to insert is already occupied.
Open addressing has some clear advantages over chaining. First, it does not require extra memory allocation. This reduces memory allocation overhead and can possibly improve cpu caching. Moreover, in open addressing the developer has more control on memory layout – placing elements in buckets with certain order to make probing (search on alternative location for key) fast. Best of all, open addressing gives us better memory lower bound over chaining.
The hash collision rate affects the chaining memory usage. Given a hash table with $N$ buckets, we insert $M$ elements into the table. The expected collision number in the table is $M(1 - (1 - 1/N)^{M-1})$. For a table with 1000 buckets the expected collisions under high loads ($M/N > 80%$) are:
80% -> 440
90% -> 534
100% -> 632
Accounting the extra payload that chaining requires, we can now compute the lower bound for the overhead under different loads.
load Chaining Open Addressing 100% 1.31x 1.00x 90% 1.37x 1.11x 80% 1.47x 1.25x 70% 1.60x 1.42x 50% 2.09x 2.00x 25% 4.03x 4.00x
Here I assume if the collision rate were 60%, half of it is chained and half of it fits the buckets. The actual number may have some digits off, but it doesn’t change my conclusion on choosing open addressing for hash table implementation.
Probing methods
In open addressing, hash collisions are resolved by probing, a search through alternative buckets until the target record is found, or some failure criteria is met. The following all belongs to some kinds of probing strategies:
Linear Probing
Quadratic Probing
Double Hashing
Hopscotch Hashing
Robin Hood Hashing
Cuckoo Hashing
For each of the probing method, we’re interested in their worst case and average case probing numbers, and is their space bound.
Linear Probing and Quadratic Probing
Linear probing can be represented as a hash function of a key and a probe number $h(k, i) = (h(k) + i) \mod N$. Similarly, quadratic probing is usually written as $h(k, i) = (h(k) + i^2) \mod N$. Both methods has worst case probing count $O(N)$, and are bounded on space usage. In other words, there no condition where we need to increase the bucket count and rehash.
Double hashing
Double hashing can be written as $h(k, i) = (h1(k) + i \cdot h2(k)) \mod N$. Same as linear probing and quadratic probing, it has worst case probing count $O(N)$, and is bounded on space usage.
Hopscotch Hashing
Here is the algorithm copied from wikipedia. This is how the collision is handled
If the empty entry’s index j is within H-1 of entry i, place x there and return. Otherwise, find an item y whose hash value lies between i and j, but within H-1 of j. Displacing y to j creates a new empty slot closer to i. If no such item y exists, or if the bucket i already contains H items, resize and rehash the table.
This mechanism has a good worst case probing number $O(H)$. However, since it could resize the hash table, the hash table size is unbounded.
Robin Hood Hashing
The concept for robin hood hashing is simple and clever. When a collision occur, compare the two items’ probing count, the one with larger probing number stays and the other continue to probe. Repeat until the probing item finds an empty spot. For more detailed analysis checkout the original paper. It’s worth to read.
The expected probing length is
Even under a high load, we still get very good probing numbers. The best thing about robin hood hashing is it does not expand the hash table, which is important because we want to build a hash table with bounded size. This is the probing strategy I chose.
Cuckoo hashing
The following description is also copied from wikipedia.
It uses two or more hash functions, which means any key/value pair could be in two or more locations. For lookup, the first hash function is used; if the key/value is not found, then the second hash function is used, and so on. If a collision happens during insertion, then the key is re-hashed with the second hash function to map it to another bucket.
The expected probing number is below 2. However, the load factor has to be below 50% to achieve good performance. For using 3 hash functions, the load can increase to 91%. Combining linear/quadratic probing with cuckoo, the load factor can go beyond 80%. (All numbers comes from wikipedia).
Optimizing Division for Hash Table Size
I implemented a robin hood hashing prototype a month ago. The prototype satisfy the low memory footprint, but hard to get it fast. The major reason is the modulo operation is very slow on most platforms. For example, on Intel Haswell the div instruction on 64bit integer can take 32-96 cycles. Almost all major hash implementation use power of 2 table size, so that the modulo is just one bitwise and operation. The problem with power of 2 table size is it scales too fast! If our data size is 1 bit above 2GB, the table must be at least 4GB, giving us 50% load. Finding a fast alternative modulo operation is critical for creating a table with high load without loosing much performance.
Professor Lemire is probably the first person that addresses this issue. He wrote a blog post that provides a fast alternative to modulo.
1 2 3 uint32_t reduce ( uint32_t x, uint32_t N ) { return (( uint64_t ) x * ( uint64_t ) N ) >> 32 ; }
He named this method as fast range. Another intuitive way to think about it is scaling. Number $x$ ranges $\lbrack 0, 2^{32}-1\rbrack$, multiplying it by $N$ then divide by $2^{32}$, the range becomes $\lbrack 0, N-1\rbrack$.
There’s one big problem to apply fast range on probing. Probing usually add the probe bias to lower bits of the hashed key. Modulo and bitwise and preserves the lower bits information, but fast range only use the higher bits and the probe would have no effect on the output. The first bits where it can bias the output in fast range is $\frac{2^{32}}{N}$. Hence, writing a linear probing using fast range would be:
1 2 3 4 uint32_t fast_range_probing ( uint32_t hashed_key, uint32_t probe, uint32_t N ) { return (( uint64_t ) hashe_key + (( uint64_t ) probe << 32 ) / N ) * N >> 32 ; }
To make the output correct we used division again, which makes it slow. Is there a better way?
Fast mod and scale
I created an alternative method with a more relaxed condition. Instead of finding a fast modulo replacement for all N, I want to find some N that satisfy fast modulo and can preserve the biases of probing.
The actual algorithm is pretty simple: First, mask the hashed key to the next power of 2 boundary, then multiply it by $\frac{N}{16}, N=8..15$. This is a combination of traditional power of 2 modulo and professor Lemire’s scaling method. The difference is now the scale can only get up to 2 times. In other words, only the least significant bit will get omitted when scaling. The probing implementation can be written as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 static inline uintptr_t hash_with_probe ( RobinHoodHash * rhh, uint64_t key, int probe ) { uintptr_t mask = ( 1ULL << ( 64 - rhh -> capacity_clz )) - 1 ; // linear probing // uint64_t probed_hash = key + probe * 2; // quadratic probing uint64_t probed_hash = key + probe * probe * 2 ; // Fast mod and scale return ( probed_hash & mask ) * rhh -> capacity_ms4b >> 4 ; }
This is the straight copy of my robin hood hash implementation. When the probe is scaled by 2 it is guaranteed to have biases on the output. The mask can be derived from leading zeros of the capacity capacity_clz, the scale is defined by the most significant 4 bits of the capacity capacity_ms4b. The capacity_ms4b is pre-computed on hash table creation or resizing time. It’s a round up of desired capacity with finer granularity compare to power of 2 tables.
I used Intel Architecture Code Analyzer to analyze the instruction throughput of my methods, and the result is very satisfying:
Power of 2 table with quadratic probing Block Throughput: 4.10 Cycles Total Num Of Uops: 9
Fast mod and scale with quadratic probing Block Throughput: 4.15 Cycles Total Num Of Uops: 12
Benchmarks
I hope all these analysis didn’t bored you all! Turns out these analysis are all useful. We now have a hash table with very optimal memory usage but still having great performance.
The most impressive part is the memory usage. Under load 89% we achieve overhead 1.20x ~ 1.50x. The ideal overhead should be 1.12 but we have an extra byte used per bucket to determine whether the bucket is emptied or tumbstoned.
The insertion time is not as good as dense_hash_map under high load. The reason is robin hood hashing moves the buckets around during the insert, but dense_hash_map simply probe and insert it to an empty bucket if found.
Luckily, robin hood hashing gets a faster lookup time compare to dense_hash_map. I think the major reason is robin hood hashing results a great expected probing number, and the overall throughput benefits from it.
The benchmark code is available at hash_bench. My robin hood hashing implementation is available at opic robin hood hashing.
Summary
Hash table implementations has been focused on its speed over memory usages. Turns out we can sacrifice some insertion time to gain way better memory utilization, and also improve the look up time. I believe this can be the new state of the art implementation for hash tables. Let me know what you think in the comments. :)
Many details were omitted in this post, but will be discussed on my next post. Some outlines for the things I’d like to cover would be
Probe distributions under different probing strategies (linear probing, quadratic probing, double hashing, and some probing methods I created).
Optimize probing by using gcc/clang vector extensions
Deletion mechanisms, its performance, and how it affects probe distributions.
Serialization and deserialization performance
Performance with different popular hash functions
Benchmark with other robin hood implementations
Benchmark with other embedded key-value store.
I may not be able to cover all the above in my next post, so please put down your comment and let me know what do you want to read the most.
One more thing…
This robin hood hashing is implemented using my project Object Persistence In C (OPIC). OPIC is a new general serialization framework I just released. Any in-memory object created with OPIC can be serialized without knowing how it was structured. |
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“The purpose of these guidelines is to ensure an atmosphere conducive to learning, the reasonable conduct of public business, unobstructed access to the college for its students, faculty, employees, occupants and the public, and maintenance of the college grounds,” the policy says.
The dean does not take the content of the speech into consideration when reviewing the application, the policy says.
The Turning Point USA chapter, however, has a different view, alleging that the college’s policies are an “unconstitutional prior restraint on speech, discriminate against the content and viewpoint of speakers in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and fail to provide equal protection of the law.”
The group also claims that if a request is approved, students are assigned a small “speech zone” they say “limits students’ ability to communicate effectively.”
cwilliams@detroitnews.com
(313) 222-2311
Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/2tO8D7jMontana’s attorney general penned a letter, signed by 22 other state attorneys general, urging federal regulators to permanently discard an attempted ban on 5.56 “green tip” ammunition.
The possible ban was introduced in February within a proposal by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to change the framework for regulating armor piercing ammo.
Although the ATF put the kibosh on the deal six days before Monday’s deadline for public response, the agency said it will likely revise the proposal after sorting through sum 80,000 comments, which were overwhelmingly critical of the proposed changes.
“We applaud [the ATF’s] recent decision not to issue a final framework on this proposal, at least for now, and we strongly encourage you not to revive it,” reads the letter by Montana’s Attorney General Tim Fox and signed by 22 other attorneys general.
“ATF’s justification for proposing the ban is arbitrary and, if followed to its logical end, could be used to ban a wide range of rifle ammunition. As we are sure you are aware, just about any rifle round could theoretically pierce soft body armor under certain conditions,” the letter argues. “The M855 is not unique in this regard. And although concealable handguns can technically be chambered in these rounds (even if very rarely), that is an insufficient reason to ban ammunition absent actual evidence that it poses a particular threat to law enforcement.”
Rounds made of M855 cartridges and SS109 bullets — identified by its green tip — is standard military issue ammo. While not an explicit ban on the ammo, the ATF said under its current process for regulating armor piercing rounds, it would be prohibited since pistols are available that can fire it.
Green tip ammo has been exempted for sporting purposes since 1986, when the law that defines armor piercing ammo passed for the protection of law enforcement officers.
“The 5.56 M855 cartridge does not pose a particular threat to law enforcement … we are aware of no examples in our states in which this round has been used against law enforcement in a concealed weapon,” the letter reads.
“ATF’s decision to ban it would, simply put, be an abuse of its authority,” it continues and concludes, “We strongly encourage [the ATF] to reject this ill-advised proposal and uphold the Second Amendment rights of our citizens.”
Attorneys general from Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming joined Montana in the letter.On a planet coursing with sound and fury, physicists are listening for the softest possible sound in the universe. Called the quantum phonon, this subatomic acoustical wave can be detected only by intricate instruments that distinguish pure silence from its smallest possible deviation. Recently physicists led by Per Delsing of the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden created such a mechanical ear, which could soon tune in on the phonon’s minuscule notes.
Delsing’s quantum microphone is built on a semiconductor chip two-tenths of an inch long. On the chip’s surface, which is cooled to near absolute zero (–459 degrees Fahrenheit) to eliminate thermal vibrations, two tiny aluminum cones connected by an electric field generate extremely faint sound waves that bounce back and forth. As they go, the waves slightly displace atoms in the semiconductor, shifting positive atomic nuclei off center from their surrounding electrons and subtly altering the electric charge of the atoms. A detector positioned in the path of the waves registers those changes, acting as the microphone. The smaller the signal, the smaller the wave. Although his device cannot yet pick up individual phonons, Delsing says his team is getting close: They can measure sound waves just a few quintillionths of a meter high. “That’s much less than the size of a proton,” he says proudly.
Phonons could contribute to future quantum computers. These powerful machines would rely on the qubit, a unit of information that can represent both 0 and 1 (the building blocks of binary computing), instead of the standard bit, which can be only one or the other. Scientists had assumed quantum computers would process information with light, but a small enough sound wave could work as well.
On a more basic level, no one has ever studied phonons in action, so scientists simply do not know what happens when they travel through a material. As a result, Delsing says, the potential for new discoveries is tremendous: “We can detect things that have not been possible to detect before; we’ll have to see where that takes us.”IT MAY be a show that unravels mysteries, but Lucy Liu's Dr Watson in new drama Elementary is certain to prove one of the series' biggest puzzles.
Eyebrows were raised by diehard fans when CBS's contemporary reboot of the much-loved Sherlock Holmes saw the drama transplanted to modern-day New York, the heavily-tattooed Jonny Lee Miller cast in the title role, and his sidekick, Dr Watson, transformed into a woman.
But with the show one week into its run in Australia, and already extended to a full season in the US (even having an episode programmed to directly follow this week's Super Bowl) the offbeat recipe seems to be working.
For Liu, playing the enigmatic, guarded Dr Joan Watson is a chance to put her action roles aside, and to take a more cerebral approach to acting.
It's a chance she's relishing, and a far cry from her roles on the big screen including Alex Munday in Charlie's Angels and the deadly O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill Vol 1 and 2; or on the small screen as the vicious but hilarious Ling Woo on Ally McBeal, or, more recently, the hard-bitten and street-wise police officer Jessica Tang in television series Southland.
Her Watson is neither as physical nor as glamorous as we're used to seeing Liu, but she delights in just how well Watson can keep Sherlock Holmes off balance.
"This is definitely a very different kind of role for me, which is why I wanted it," Liu says. "There's not much action in this for Watson. It's mental gymnastics for her.
"It's definitely more cerebral. Action isn't subtle, and I'm enjoying the subtleties of Joan Watson for a change. This is a different kind of chaos."
In Elementary, Dr Watson meets Brit Sherlock Holmes in New York. He's as smart as a whip, eccentric, fresh out of rehab, and has just landed in Manhattan, where his rich father has assigned him a sober companion - Dr Watson.
Episode 1 revealed Liu's Watson is no shrinking sidekick to Miller's irrepressible, frenetic and constantly-in-motion Holmes.
Despite Holmes' insistence that Watson's expertise as an addiction specialist is not needed, he's quick to find she comes in handy as he resumes his work as a New York police consultant - albeit a very erratic and unconventional one.
And he discovers Watson is not so easy to dismiss.
"Joan Watson may be a sidekick, but there's no way she's there for laughs, or comic relief, or as a babysitter," Liu says.
While there was criticism of the move to make Dr Watson a woman in Elementary, Liu says it's given the character a new dimension.
"The narration of the original Sherlock Holmes is all through Watson's eyes, and having Watson as a woman gives it another edge in that Sherlock is always uncomfortable with women," she says.
"The fact that Watson is a woman who he has to be around all the time, for him, is kind of like him having to wear this uncomfortable, itchy sweater."
Holmes' growing realisation that he's going to have to take Watson seriously - and therefore he wants to know more about her - reveals Liu's Watson just may be the biggest mystery of all.
As a former surgeon it's obvious she has her own demons to battle - so far we know she was kicked out of medicine because a patient died on her watch, but it's clear there's a lot more to that story.
Liu is enjoying the slow unravelling of the mystery that is Dr Watson, as much as she enjoys Watson's growing appetite for solving crimes.
"We have progressed so much since the pilot. You really do see how she develops and how important she is in his life in the way she is able to deduce and figure out some of these crime scenes," Liu says.
"Her job is to help him through his emotional situations and difficulties, but he's fighting that every step of the way, so it's ironic that once she starts to notice things at crime scenes, he then has to respect her.
"We wanted to make sure he was up against someone that had that intelligence and grounding. He quickly finds that anything she brings to the plate is worthy."
Liu hints that Watson may have as many dark secrets as Holmes. "She has a complex back story," Liu laughs.
"They are two characters that are hard to know. You only get her story in dribs and drabs, because as a character, Watson distracts herself by helping others with problems, so she won't have to look at herself.
"He can be a really tough character and then he has moments when he's really open and vulnerable. That's when she really is able to reach out to him.
"They're both very messy people. They're both damaged. That's the beauty of them."
Flawed on-screen they may be, but when the cameras stop rolling, Liu and co-star Miller delight in a healthier relationship.
"Jonny is hilarious to work with. He has tonnes of jokes and a wicked sense of humour," Liu says.
"And what people might not know is he is also a really great cook. He has made some fantastic meals for me. He makes an absolute killer bolognese. He's very talented." For Liu, messy, flawed and mysterious is proving a successful recipe.
-- Elementary,
Ten, Sunday, 8.30pm
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-- HOLMES IS WHERE THE ART IS FOR SO MANY
LONG OUT OF COPYRIGHT, SHERLOCK HOLMES HAS BEEN PORTRAYED BY MORE ACTORS THAN ANY OTHER ON-SCREEN CHARACTER. HERE IS A SELECTION OF RECENT SHERLOCKS.
* (1984 to 1994)
Jeremy Brett has often been named as the definitive and most faithful screen portrayal of Holmes (at least until Benedict Cumberbatch). Brett played the detective as a neurotic but highly intellectual man in 41 episodes made for Granada Television. His ailing health is noticeable towards the end of the series, which ceased as a result of his death in 1995.
* (2002)
Australian Richard Roxburgh stepped into the role for BBC telemovie The Hound Of The Baskervilles, playing Holmes as a rather cold man who dabbles with drugs even while on a case. The hound was created using animatronics and computer effects. The movie was well received, despite taking a few liberties with the source material.
* (2004)
Rupert Everett took over the role for another BBC telemovie, this time an original story, Sherlock Holmes And The Case Of The Silk Stocking, set in a fog-plagued London. Everett's "elegant and decidedly decadent" portrayal was named the 12th Greatest Sherlock Holmes by The Daily Telegraph (UK).
* (2009 and 2011)
Robert Downey Jr's Holmes is rough and ready, intelligent and charming and rather handy with his fists. Unfortunately, neither of the Guy Ritchie-directed films, Sherlock Holmes or its sequel, A Game Of Shadows, rise to the level of Downey's and Jude Law's fine performances.
* (2010 to present)
Benedict Cumberbatch was born to play Holmes in the BBC's Sherlock. He is by turns aloof and arrogant, confident and funny, dashing and yet socially awkward. Writer Steven Moffat reinvents the original stories using modern technology and settings, bringing them bang up to date. A new series will be broadcast later this year.
- ANDREW FENTONAs part of the Valiant (Re)visions team, it’s clear I’m a fan of what the team over there has going on right now. But there is a lot going on right now, with Valiant First bringing the arrival of two new books in Rai and The Death Defying Doctor Mirage, as well as the epic looking Armor Hunters event AND a crossover between Quantum & Woody and Archer & Armstrong. And that’s just in the next few months!
So to get the lowdown on the epic upcoming schedule they have, I talked with the whole team over at Valiant, namely:
– Hunter Gorinson, Director of Marketing, Communications & Digital Media
– Fred Pierce, Publisher
– Atom! Freeman, Sales Manager
– Dinesh Shamdasani, CEO & Chief Creative Officer
– Warren Simons, Executive Editor
We talked about what Valiant First is exactly, why Armor Hunters is such a huge deal, the world building of Rai, the genius of Clayton Crain, editor Alejandro Arbona’s prodigious karaoke skills, and a lot more. Thanks to everyone at Valiant – including a fantastic intern or two – for the great talk, and truly, check out Valiant. It’s a great time to be a Valiant reader.
Valiant First is what we’re here to talk about, it’s bringing a new #1 every month from May to September. It’s loaded with quality creators and events like Armor Hunters. For all of you guys, what would you say is the biggest goal of this initiative, both from a publishing and a marketing perspective?
Dinesh: Where we derived the name answers that question very well. Everywhere we went we kept hearing from people that they’re buying Marvel books, DC books, independent books, and our books. But the books that they reach for first was a Valiant book, because our book s are the books they were most excited about reading. And it was a great honor for us, and it inspired us to build this program where we can allow more and more people every month to find an entry point. We’re not asking them not to buy other books. We’re saying that you’ll love our books; we’re hoping that we make books good enough that you’re most excited about reading them, and our books are the first books you read.
On top of that, the first year of the company was all about reintroducing these characters, making sure that we were able to build a successful foundation for the company, which I think we did many times over. Year two was about carefully managing the growth of the company, making sure we maintained what we built. And year three is about slowly growing the readership of Valiant. Some of our books are into their second year, their 20’s in numbering; we still know how problematic that can be from a new reader standpoint. We want to get as many new jumping-on points for these characters as possible, and that’s the underlying premise of Valiant First.
Fred: We are a manageable universe. You’re still basically getting in on the ground floor of Valiant. If you want to be able to read a whole universe, we’re 9 books a month. You can do that very easily with us.
Hunter: And we’re staying at 9 books. Just because we’re going to be putting out these 6 new books over the next couple months, doesn’t mean that we’re automatically ramping up the size of the line to 12-16 books. We’re capping it at 9 so fans can keep up with the entire breadth of what we’re putting out, and the retail market can absorb it as well.
Atom!: It’s important to note that when we hear from retailers that a fan buys their first Valiant book and actually reads it, very often the very next step is to read them all. It’s a universe that pulls you in very quickly. So the challenge for us in getting a new fan is just getting them to read the first one. If we can get you to read your first Valiant comic, then chances are good we’re going to hook you.
Continued below
Warren: I’m also excited about having the chance to play with these characters. We’ve had great success with X-O Manowar, Harbinger, Bloodshot, and Archer and Armstrong. We’ve got a really deep bench here at Valiant. And I’m super excited about what we’re doing with Rai. Robert Venditti and the guys are blowing it up with Armor Hunters. Fred (Van Lente) and James (Asmus) are working together on Delinquents. Jen Van Meter’s exploring Doctor Mirage. From a character standpoint, I’m really excited about the stories we have coming up. It’s going to be a lot of fun.
Warren, you and your team have done a phenomenal job of building a cohesive universe. And not with just event books, but also in subtle ways; references to the Vine in Archer and Armstrong and things like that, where you can see the tangential connections building that will eventually lead to bigger things. At the same time you’re bringing on all of these new jumping on points. How do you balance bringing in new readers, but also building that connected universe?
One of the goals we’ve had since we launched was to make accessibility paramount, to make the books as clean and accessible as possible, so that we can enhance the story. When Fred Van Lente touches on the Vine in A&A or Matt Kindt touches on something in the pages of Unity—the narrative story itself feels complete within each issue, within each arc without being wholly dependent on other stuff. But also allowing the characters to speak, and allowing the universe to be enhanced by the other supporting titles. One of the great things about Valiant is that we have this beautiful, robust shared universe.
Like the guys said, once you pick up one book, we hear from fans all the time that they pick up other books because it’s compelling and fun. You want to see how the characters are going to interact with each other. Making it accessible is obviously key to making great stories. You also have to look at the creators that we have. I feel like the guys and girls that we work with, this isn’t the fifth or sixth most important title they’re working on that month. They really love the characters; they really put their back into it. Whether it’s Matt Kindt on Unity, or Venditti on X-O or upcoming Armor Hunters, or Joshua Dysart on Harbinger, all these guys really love this stuff and put their heart into it. No one is on autopilot.
We have pretty close relationships with a lot of creators, and universally everyone loves working with you guys. The acclaim from the creator side is universal. How important is it for you to create an environment of creativity and collaboration at Valiant?
Warren: It’s extremely important. It’s the main thing we started doing when we began working with the guys. I’m hiring them for their voice, to hear what they have to say, to write the way that they write, to draw the way that they draw. We’re a shared universe, so we definitely have to keep all of our ducks in a row; make sure everyone’s playing with the toys that they want to play with, things like that. The creators love the opportunity. It’s easy for us to point to a line on a map and say, “go there”. It’s much more rewarding when the creator comes up with an idea that’s going to take us in a direction that we haven’t even thought of. Just continue to collaborate with them and create an environment where they can collaborate with each other. There’s a support system in place, and that’s a credit to the whole team, including Alejandro Arbona, our Associate Editor, and Josh Johns, our Assistant Editor. We really love working with the team, and that’s great to hear.
Dinesh: Part of it also is that we’re all a bunch of fans. You’ll see a lot of us just enjoying what we’re doing. We create an environment, that isn’t necessarily a corporate environment. We don’t have a corporate parent that’s demanding certain financial thresholds every quarter, or that has a goal for these characters beyond telling great stories. We’re all working as hard as we can because we love the comic book world, we love comics, and we want to tell great stories. That’s why when you go to conventions, you see our publisher, Fred Pierce, handing out free comics. Anyone will pick up any hat, and do any job, and that creates an environment for everyone, executive or creative. We come in and do everything we can, and it’s fun.
Continued below
Fred: Warren’s been very clear from the beginning. You bring in the creators for how they speak. You see that in the variation in our books. As much as our books are a part of one universe, you can feel the different voice in the different book from the different creator.
Warren: The company has taken chances. We didn’t have X-O flying around blasting aliens in issue #1. And that was a big chance. How we rolled out Harbinger, and in Harbinger Wars also, we’ve taken enormous chances creatively, and I think it’s paid off.
Dinesh: It’s the story. We did it because the story determined it and we’re always the story first. Every variant, gimmick, and marketing initiative we’ve put together, when you look at it, it tells the story. Right from the beginning with the QR cover, it was about letting the reader see how the character speaks. It wasn’t about a gimmick, it was about breaking down that fourth wall.
Hunter: We’d always known we were going to bring back Chromium at some point. We talked about it even before soliciting X-O #1, but we were also very conscious about not putting it out there too early. Firstly, we wanted the storytelling let our books stand on their own and be character driven, not nostalgia driven. When the premise of Armor Hunters came up, and once we were able to locate a printer who could do this – because it was sort of a lost art—it took a tremendous amount of time and research to get chromium back on the shelves if you can believe that. It fits with the premise of the book, and they look beautiful. We knew that if we were going to bring chromium back, we were going to bring it back right.
Atom!: Earlier you talked about the energy of the team and that really comes around in this. We in sales, marketing, and publishing, when we look at the stuff that’s being made, that just makes us more excited to come up with new ways to put it in hands. I heard from a retailer today who said that he brought back [chromium] flats we gave him at Comics Pro and showed it to the fans, and everyone is crazy excited about these books.
Hunter: Dinesh you had a great example of cover treatments in comics, and how it has helped new readers get into titles. I remember reading Silver Surfer #50, for instance, which was my first book getting into Silver Surfer.
Dinesh: It’s sampling. One of the things we’re always talking about is how can we get people to read their first Valiant book. The stories are great, we know that, but it’s tough. You’ve got all this great content out there right now. Every publisher is on top of their game and they’re forcing everyone else to be on top of their game, as are we. We brought in a consultant who worked at Marvel during the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s. One of the things we talked to him about was Valiant First. We explained to him our initiative about getting new readers into new books. And he talked about the gimmicks they did back in the 80’s and 90’s, explaining why they did them. I said to him that as a consumer myself I rarely ever picked up a book for the first time that isn’t a number one. Then he asked if I bought Silver Surfer #50. Yes, silver foil cover, great cover. X-Men #25? Yes, that’s the hologram, great cover. Amazing Spider-Man #365? Yup, I bought that one great book. And he asked me, how many of those were the first time you bought that character.
It was interesting to see that the road to hell is laid with good intentions. Not necessarily greed or hubris, but it was an attempt to bring new readers into comics. We’re very cautious about that, we try to be restrictive about the way we use these initiatives, but with Armor Hunters it just checked all the boxes; a story about these anti-heroes coming to Earth to take the armor from X-O and protect the Earth. It was a big #1 for us, a big event, a big crossover, it felt like the right call.
Continued below
Warren: We work in conjunction with the writers. Roberts’s story for the first 17-18 issues of X-O led right into Unity. Matt picked up Unity with the idea that Aric had taken over Romania, with the idea that this super team needed to come together to take X-O down. Stories lead to other stories organically. Armor Hunters is something Rob and I discussed at length a while ago while plotting the next couple months of X-O. It’s the next logical progression and evolution of what we’re doing, within a larger tapestry of what he’s built over the past couple of years.
It’s an interesting one for me as a reader, and I have to admit I was not a big fan of it, but the way Rob has built that book, it’s amazing how my admiration for that book has grown and grown and it’s now one of my favorite books that you guys release.
Warren: Rob’s a real idea machine. I had a long conference call with him and Dysart where we talked a little about Armor Hunters. It’s a lot of to riff with the guys and go back and forth over ideas. It’s one of the best parts of being an editor; helping these guys shape a story, listening to their ideas, trying to create this environment of free-flowing collaboration. We’re just trying to make the best idea possible. It’s something that I really try to make a part of the editorial environment at Valiant; the best idea wins. I don’t care if it comes from an intern, or a writer. We love to try to get into a room to discuss and debate. I feel like that is evident in the books.
What element of Armor Hunters is Bloodshot? Is that a mini-series, or is that a one shot?
Warren: It will be a three-issue miniseries written by Joe Harris with artist Trevor Hairsine. It will ltie directly into the Armor Hunters series. Again, it’s a natural progression from where we started with Bloodshot in Blood and H.A.R.D. Corps #14 where Josh and Christos came up with a three-arc overlapping story, and it will culminate in the last issues of Bloodshot and H.A.R.D. Corps. There’s a reason why we’re boiling down the series, which you’ll see based on the events in the series, then it’ll pick directly up in the pages of Armor Hunters: Bloodshot.
Dinesh: The way Armor Hunters works is that we’ve got Armor Hunters proper. Venditti is writing, and Doug Braithwaite is drawing. That’s #1-4, June-September. That’s all you really have to read if you’re interested in Armor Hunters, but don’t want to get the whole 18 parts. X-O Manowar will tie into that, it’ll expand the story, you’ll get more background into the Armor Hunters and it’ll reflect more onto what you’re seeing in Armor Hunters proper. Armor Hunters: Bloodshot and Armor Hunters: Harbinger, which are three issues each, they’re separate tie-ins to the book. They’ll take place in the world around Armor Hunters, they’ll certainly add to the story; if you read all 18 parts you’ll get the full story. But those are also built as entry points. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I really want to read Bloodshot, but don’t want to jump in on issue #14.” Here’s a place for you. It’s a new #1, we’re building it to be clean. We’ve built all our books to be clean, but this is a very easy entry point for our readers.
Warren: The larger tapestry for all our books after Harbinger Wars, is to make all our books clean entry points. As with Armor Hunters, all you have to read is the core story if you want to check that out; Unity, X-O Manowar, Harbinger and Bloodshot will enhance and tell more of an action-packed story.
Continued below
Hunter: If you’re an X-O fan, you’ll be happy to know that Bloodshot has a very important role to play in Armor Hunters that pertains directly to the agency Aric currently works for, M.E.R.O. He will be running a very specific mission for Colonel Capshaw.
Warren: Bloodshot and H.A.R.D. Corps actually ends very gently. It’s nice, they go see a movie, and then Bloodshot’s going to bring that to Armor Hunters.
Hunter: We’re calling the last arc, A Walk to Remember.
That’s what he’s always really wanted. I always read the subtext that he just wants a nice happy place with a field.
Warren: Finally, someone gets it! I’ve been working this for two years. Bloodshot’s about peace. [laughs]
Dinesh: Have you seen the pages from Rai?
Clayton Crain. I have to admit, I haven’t universally loved his art, but holy crap, his work on Rai is outrageous.
Dinesh: You should see his work from later on in the arc. Each issue just looks better and better.
Atom!: Any review of Rai #1 that doesn’t include the words “holy crap” is just being dishonest. It’s amazing.
Fred: I haven’t seen artwork like that in the industry, ever.
Hunter: There are a lot of notable things about Rai that we thought warranted launching an entire wave of books with it. To a certain extent, it’s almost entirely continuity free. Anyone’s going to be able to pick up this book without any previous knowledge of Eternal Warrior or any other Valiant titles, and just dive into the world Matt and Clayton have built for 4001. It’s a very singular thing in our line and we’re proud of the way things are shaping up.
Dinesh: It’s also a character that fans have been asking for. Literally banging on our door, and Warren’s nice enough to chat with them for a little while. All they want to do was ask, “When’s Rai coming, when’s Rai coming?” We really didn’t have a choice.
One of the things we’ve also tried to do since the start is really wait for the right pitch to come, make sure the right story is there, and not jam something onto the schedule just because it needs to be there. Matt Kindt put together this pitch that’s really one of the most brilliant pitches I’ve ever read my decade of being in the industry. You could mine what feels like 150 comics out of it. It’s just one thing after the other that takes you into this world of Japan in 4001. This world where there is this machine called Father, which keeps society safe and happy as long as the citizens don’t argue with him too much. What puts Rai at the center of it is we discover is there’s the first murder in 1000 years. This takes Rai down the rabbit hole, so to speak. The pitch was just brilliant. I hate to throw the word visionary around, but I feel like it’s quite extraordinary. Clayton’s art has been absolutely magnificent, so we’re super excited about this one.
Dinesh: He’s literally world building. That first pitch didn’t just talk about the story, but everything that was happening in the universe in the year 4000.
Warren: Matt put together this whole world where all of our characters will be. Talking with Clayton earlier today and he was telling me how much fun he’s having. How extraordinary it is to be able to build out this entire universe with all these characters. We’re also doing a Plus Edition of Rai #1.
Dinesh: It’s an experiment. It might be crazy, we’re not sure if it’ll work, but we’re excited about it. It’s Rai #1, but it’s called the Plus Edition. It’s the same book as Rai #1, same story. The cover has a slight color change. It’s got a 16 page section that’s bound in the middle of the book, and the 16 pages are in universe content only available in this edition of the book. It doesn’t affect the core narrative, but it is content that flushes out the world. As Warren was saying, Matt Kindt is putting together this giant awesome map of what the world looks like in 4001. We refer to it in the office as a deep dream. It’s all those teeny little details that everyone who loves comics, loves.
Continued below
Warren: We got a really great pitch in from Jen. Alejandro Arbona has taken point on the project, working with Jan. Jan put together this story that really unlocked a component of the Valiant Universe that delved into who Dr. Mirage was, and what her relationship is with the rest of the universe in Shadowman. We felt like it was a beautiful story. Roberto is killing it over in Shadowman, we’re all huge fans of his art.
Dinesh: Of all the Valiant First titles, this is the one I’m most excited about, and I think it’s because it’s such a small, personal story. Don’t get me wrong, the stakes are massive, but it is the kind of storytelling that is rare in comics, and a book that we built an aim for doing when we launched, following the personal journey of the character. It’s not world building, it’s not a giant alien invasion, it’s about a woman and the loss that she’s felt for her soul mate. The depth to which she’ll go to try and bring him back, and the journey she goes on; the determination she has; how far she can pull her emotions into the forefront. She will literally go off-world into a part of the Valiant universe that we have seen a little bit of, but not too much of. Jan did an amazing job; she found a nugget of genius that unlocked everything, and Alejandro has been doing a great job working with her. It’s a book that I think will look beautiful, but will also be a little of a stark contrast to what’s out in the market today, hopefully in a very exciting way.
It sounds very exciting. Just to give a little bit of props. We did a piece last year where we picked our favorite editor, and we really love Alejandro. There’s something about Alejandro Arbona, where everything that he touches is magic. So we’re excited that he’s working on that book.
Atom!: I think it’s amazing you put him on this list when you haven’t seen him do karaoke.
Hunter: He sings Total Eclipse of the Heart entirely in Spanish, because growing up in Puerto Rico, he learned all of the lyrics in his native tongue. Also a fun fact: Warren and Alejandro worked together for many years at Marvel.
Warren: Alejandro’s great. We’re super happy to have him up here. I had the opportunity to work with Alejandro for 3 or 4 years at Marvel, and as soon as we had the opportunity to hire him he’s the first guy that I wanted to get. We call it the Arbona gold touch, where everything he touches is gold. We should also show some love for Josh Johns, he’s doing a bang-up job as well.
As a reader and a critic, I notice there’s a tendency for a lot of Valiant books to have fill-in artists. Why is that necessary, and what has the Valiant team done to improve the cohesiveness of the art?
Warren: First off, we’ve shipped 140 issues on time. So one of the things we wanted to do during the relaunch was guarantee that we ship on time. We certainly have many discussions at the office about that. We make sure the book comes out the door on time. One of the things we try to do – such as in Bleeding Monk #0 – is use a stylistic choice as an aesthetic. For example in the first arc of Harbinger, Khari Evans is the main artist but we have flashback pages by Lewis LaRosa. We feel like stylistically it makes sense then we’re all for it. We also have a number of artists who do ship on time and do tackle entire arcs by themselves; Doug Braithwaite, Pere Perez, Clayton Crain, Diego on X-O or Clayton Henry on Harbinger. We try to schedule everything effectively.
Continued below
Dinesh: We also should point out that two of our best received books have used that stylistic choice: Harbinger #0 and Shadowman #0. This is something that comes from Warren, even at Marvel working on Immortal Iron Fist, and it used that technique better than anybody. I think it’s something that Warren does better than anybody. I think it’s something that if you do as well as he does, can elevate a book to a level that stands head and shoulders above a lot of what else is coming out.
Last question I have for you guys, as you’ve mentioned, you’re nearly two years in which is pretty amazing. When you look at social media and beyond, Valiant fans are as attached as ever. People are so vocal in their support of you guys. What do you view as the keys to your success so far, and how do you feel about that going forward?
Dinesh: I think it’s because we’re passionate. Great storytelling and passion are two things that differentiate us.
Fred: The fans feel the passion we feel for the product, for the characters. It reverberates back and forth. Don’t forget that Dinesh bought the company because he loves the characters. If you don’t love the characters then you really can’t |
three or so years with the same leadership of this organization, it’s time for a change of the guard. I’m pleased to announce that Emily Ashley (New Orleans), Rachel Stevenson (Boulder), and Omar Ureta (Los Angeles) will be taking over as the new Maptime HQ!
You might be wondering…wait, what’s up with this? Where are Beth, Alan, Lyzi and Camille going? And what’s next for Maptime?!
And whether you’re wondering or not, here are answers to all these questions.
Wait, what’s up with this? Where are Beth, Alan, Lyzi and Camille going?
To make a long story short, all of us started to get pretty burnt out after the 2015 Maptime Summit. I could write more about it here, but my talk from this year’s State of the Map sums it up the best.
If you’re feeling burnt out running your chapter, then take a look at Handing Off a Maptime Chapter for some tips on what to do.
If you’ve still got plenty of gas in the tank, great! But we’re all volunteers, and no one should feel like they have to volunteer indefinitely. If you need to take some time off, do it! If it stops being fun, pass the torch - it’s totally ok when that happens. Keep an eye on your metaphorical fuel guage and let the new HQ know before it hits ‘E’.
My unsolicited advice to the new HQ is to instill rotating leadership on a yearly basis, so that a handoff happens before burnout does. It might be a good idea for chapters to try the same approach as well - but that’s for you to decide :)
Is Maptime still going after 501(c)3 status?
Alan, Lyzi, Camille and I decided to stop putting efforts into this for a few reasons:
It takes money that Maptime doesn’t have to do this, specifically to pay fees for things like business registration and bank accounts. It’s possible to come up with this money, but ultimately we were too burnt out to consider doing that work.
The legal and bank-related paperwork we had in motion were in the state of California. Moving to Oregon, unbeknownst to me, threw a major wrench into the plans, making it nearly impossible to do without starting all over.
Did I mention that we were all burnt out? Because for really real we were all burnt out.
Based on everything I now know about applying for 501(c)3 status, my recommendation to new leadership is to set up a fiscal sponsorship with an organization they trust. I will leave this decision to them.
I’ve updated the Bylaws to reflect these changes, and noted them in the changelog at the end. The new HQ can further update them as needed.
What’s next for Maptime?
That’s a great question – and one that’s for Rachel, Emily, Omar and you to answer. I look really forward to seeing what you come up with!
I couldn’t be more grateful to have been a part of this organization and to see it sprout from a tiny seedling to a global movement.
Let’s see what this next chapter has in store!
*Yes, WIRED Map Lab used this same title to announce the end of their column, but it’s just too good and I couldn’t help myself.
Posted Oct 13 2016
Pizza Time!
Looking back at a long year of Maptimes and mapping fun, one thing has remained true: Pizza and mapping go hand-in-hand. CartoDB’s Maptime pizza donations this past year has ensured that this remains true, and that mappers everywhere, from Chicago to Berlin, didn’t go a mapping evening un-fed.
Over the course of the past year, over 70 meetups across the world ate over 2,500 slices of delicious cheesy pie asa result of this collaboration, and CartoDB has announced they are extending their donation for another whole year! This means that every Maptime everywhere can enjoy delicious pizza courtesy of CartoDB well into 2017. now that’s reason to celebrate!
##How does it work? Same as before, getting pizza for your Maptime meetup is super easy. One week before every meetup, email santiago@cartodb.com with basic information about your event. Here’s what to include:
Maptime chapter
Meetup date
Meetup link
Organizer’s name & email
Any interesting developments in your mapping community
And thats it! CartoDB will follow up with simple information on how to submit for pizza pay-back. In addition, if the pizza fuels some great CartoDB projects, inspires beautiful friendships, or if you just want to say thanks, be sure to tweet them @cartoDB.
Enjoy!
Posted Apr 18 2016
Mayday, mayday!
Earthquakes. Tsunamis. Volcanic eruptions. These natural disasters literally reshape the surface of the earth, and destroy centuries of human infrastructure while they’re at it.
This is a major problem for first responders to crisis, who are trying to get on the ground and help people as fast as possible. What if the street that used to be there isn’t there anymore? What if suddenly water supplies are contaminated? How can you help people get the support that they need when you can’t even navigate the space they’re in or the supplies they need have been destroyed?
This is where making maps can make a huge difference. They can literally make or break first responders’ ability to help.
That’s why, this May, Maptime is teaming up with Missing Maps, a collection of nonprofits devoted to organizing volunteers to map satellite data and get these maps working again. We’re asking all US Maptime chapters to devote one of your sessions in May to mapping satellite data for the Missing Maps mission.
Missing Maps event in Glasgow, Feb. 2016
Never mapped satellite data before? Have no fear! Missing Maps provides tutorials on how to get started with mapping, making it easy for you and your chapter to get up to speed.
What’s better? Participating Maptime chapters will get free pizza, courtesy of Missing Maps!
Want to participate? Sign up here by April 23 to ensure pizza.
Have questions? Email hello [at] maptime [dot] io.
Let’s help out Missing Maps and get some important maps back on the map!
//
Want to read more about the awesomesauce that is Missing Maps? Check out this article by collaborator Drishtie Patel
Posted Apr 07 2016
by Beth
On Saturday Feb. 13, Maptime Organizers got together via Google Hangout to talk about how things are going.
If you want to watch it in full (it’s about 90 minutes!) you can watch this video.
But if you want to just get the highlights (recommended!) read on.
Read full post...
Posted Feb 21 2016The faults of first past the post, the subject of my last two columns, are mirrored in the virtues of the systems that would replace it.
There are any number of alternatives, but broadly speaking they break into two types: proportional, where a party’s share of the seats in Parliament hews closer to its share of the popular vote; and preferential, where voters, rather than simply marking an x beside their choice, rank them in order.
Some proportional systems are also preferential, but a preferential ballot on its own does not imply proportionality. Like first past the post, it’s still a “winner take all” system, only the winning candidate must get a majority of the vote, rather than a mere plurality. Usually this is achieved by combining first choices with the second and third choices of voters of other candidates.
What makes a system proportional is the use, in place of single-member ridings, of multi-member districts: thus, in a district with five members, a party winning 20 per cent of the vote would elect one member, while a party with 40 per cent would get two, and so on — in contrast with first past the post, where only the first-place candidate in a riding is elected, though he might have received 30 per cent of the vote or less.
At one extreme, the whole country might be treated as a single district, as in the Netherlands; rather than representing particular ridings or regions, candidates are elected from party lists. For obvious reasons, no one is likely to propose that for Canada. Rather, the likely contenders are 1: a hybrid system known as “mixed member proportional,” in which some MPs, say half, are elected in single-member ridings, while the rest are elected in multi-member districts (voters mark one x beside their favoured local candidate, and a second beside their party), and 2: the single transferable vote, which combines smaller districts with preferential ballots.
The relative strengths and weaknesses of each of these can be debated at another time. For now, it’s enough to note how they differ from first past the post. Rather than some votes counting for more than others, as under first past the post, under PR every vote counts equally (or nearly so). Rather than focus their efforts on a few “battleground” ridings, then, parties must campaign hard in every part of the country — because every vote (or nearly so) helps to elect someone.
Voters who now trudge to the polls feeling the whole exercise is pointless — because their candidate is unlikely to win — or switch their vote to some other party for fear of “splitting the vote,” can vote for the candidate they actually prefer: either because second and third choices also count (under a preferential ballot) or because they can also vote for their party (as under MMP).
Would this, as commonly claimed, mean “the end of majority governments”? No, it would mean the start. Under first past the post, parties can and do win a majority of the seats with less than 40 per cent of the vote: under proportional representation, a majority means a majority. Only since it is rare for one party to win that much support on its own, governments are typically made up of coalitions of parties.
Would that mean institutionalizing the sort of crisis atmosphere we associate with multi-party governments? No, that’s a function of the system we have now. Under first past the post, relatively small changes in popular vote can produce quite enormous swings in seats. So in a minority parliament whichever party is up in the polls at any given moment will be tempted to force an election. Under PR, there is no such payoff: small changes in votes mean small changes in seats. Coalitions, as a consequence, tend to endure.
Wouldn’t that mean handing disproportionate power to a minority of the electorate, as larger parties courted the support of the smaller? It can. But there’s always the next election to bear in mind: if a small party is seen to overplay its hand, or a large party to be too eager to bargain, it will pay the price at the polls. Besides, that’s as true, in a way, of the present system: parties pay vastly disproportionate attention to a small number of swing voters.
But isn’t the virtue of first past the post, with all its distortions, that it makes it easier for voters to “throw the bums out”? Perhaps — but where’s the evidence? Under first past the post, Canada has had some of the longest-lasting dynasties in the democratic, or indeed the undemocratic world: the 42-year reign of the Conservatives in Ontario, the 43 straight years under their counterparts in Alberta, or the dominance of the federal Liberals for most of the past century.
The more fundamental objection to reform, I suspect, is less practical, more philosophical. Indeed, defenders of the status quo tend to find the criticisms of reformers almost literally incomprehensible. Where reformers complain of the disconnect between a party’s share of the popular vote and its share of the seats, status quo advocates ask why there should be any connection at all. We elect parliaments, they will say, not governments; each riding is a separate election in itself.
Quite so. But why does that require that only only one member should be elected from each riding? Why should only the votes cast for the first-place candidate achieve representation in Parliament, and not others? Certainly, the majority must rule — but it should surely be an actual majority, not a phoney one, drawn from a body that represents all of the people, and not just some of them.Moscow's Likely New Ambassador To U.S.: 'Tough' And 'Not That Easy To Work With'
Enlarge this image toggle caption Ivan Sekretarev/AP Ivan Sekretarev/AP
Washington's most notorious ambassador is going home.
Sergei Kislyak, 66, has been due to return to Russia since last year, after serving throughout the Obama years. But his departure became the subject of fierce speculation when it emerged that Kislyak had communicated with key members of President Trump's team before he took office.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, Kislyak's replacement has been approved by two parliamentary committees and is now awaiting formal appointment by President Vladimir Putin. His name is Anatoly Antonov, a 62-year-old career diplomat known as a shrewd arms control negotiator and hard-liner on America.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Carolyn Kaster/AP Carolyn Kaster/AP
"Antonov was smart, articulate and always well-briefed for meetings. He was a tireless advocate for the Russian position, but would also subtly probe for potential compromise," said James Miller, a former Pentagon official who met with Antonov during the Obama administration.
"Antonov masterfully employed the full range of human emotions, able to shift in a nanosecond from warmly charming to caustically sarcastic," Miller said.
Like Kislyak and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Antonov belongs to a generation of Russian diplomats who started their careers during the Cold War.
A native of Omsk, Siberia, Antonov worked his way through the ranks after graduating from the elite Moscow State Institute of International Relations with a doctorate in political science.
"Off camera, when you're not doing business, he is a very pleasant person to deal with," said Gary Samore, who met Antonov while working on arms control in the Obama White House. "On camera, when you're doing official business, he's a tough Russian negotiator deeply suspicious of the United States."
What's unusual about Antonov is that he also served as a deputy defense minister, which led the European Union to blacklist him for his role in the war in Ukraine, which began in 2014.
Antonov's expertise in arms control was the reason he was picked as Kislyak's replacement even before last November's U.S. presidential election, says Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
"He was meant to be war ambassador because Moscow believed that Hillary Clinton definitely would be the next U.S. president and the approach of the Clinton administration towards Russia would be very hostile and hawkish," Gabuev said.
But Antonov also has a tough reputation in Moscow.
"He has a very hands-on managerial style. Not many colleagues like to work with him because he's a very demanding boss and a very demanding person," said Gabuev. "He is not that easy to work with."
Antonov's formal appointment could be imminent, as Kislyak may return to Russia as early as this month. The controversial Russian envoy is likely to be appointed a senator in Russia's upper house of parliament, Vedomosti newspaper reported this week, citing two sources close to the Putin administration.
One of the results of the Trump-Putin meeting at this month's Group of 20 summit in Germany was an agreement to speed up the process of naming new ambassadors, according to Lavrov's readout.
On Tuesday, the White House announced that Trump is nominating former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman to replace U.S. Ambassador John Tefft, who is expected to leave Moscow by the end of the summer.
Huntsman has yet to face his confirmation hearing in the Senate.
Antonov is already waiting in the wings.The number of times the nation's beaches were closed or posted with warnings because of polluted water jumped last year to its second-highest level in 21 years, in part because of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and heavy rains that swept pollutants into the ocean at an accelerated rate, according to a report released Wednesday.
The Natural Resources Defense Council found that contamination from oil, urban runoff, and human and animal waste continued to take a toll on beaches across the country in 2010, according to the report.
In California, where heavier than normal rainfall greatly increased the amount of water and pollutants being flushed into the ocean, closures and advisories nearly doubled, and the number of beach water tests that exceeded state health standards rose to 11% from 9% the year before.
On the Gulf Coast, oil washed up on about 1,000 miles of shoreline. Since the spill, there have been so many oil-related closures, notices and advisories at beaches throughout the region that adding them all up totals 9,474 days, the report calculated.Alienware vs. Syber. Which one will you get?
Less than a week after opening up for pre-orders of the first Steam Hardware, 35% of the units have already been sold. This according to an email sent to the press, including VG247 and PC Gamer, who were early to report on the story.This is of course not saying much, given that we don't know the number of units available for pre-order. Early adopters will get their units starting 16th October, and it seems likely that Valve, in cooperation with Alienware and Syber, is using this incentive to gauge interest for the hardware prior to launch.There's also no word on how sales are distributed between the units, so we don't know if it's just the cheap Steam Controller and Steam Link that's boosting the sales, or if the third party units are pulling their weight as well. The Alienware and Syber are a bit pricy compared to other current generation consoles, but with a library of well over 1200 games, they might still be very appealing to a console gamer.Pre-orders are only available while stock last. Have you put down cash for a piece of Steam hardware yet?The BBC presenter Jeremy Vine has published video footage showing a driver threatening to knock him out and allegedly assaulting him while he was on his bicycle.
Vine said the incident took place while he was commuting through Kensington, west London, on Friday. The Metropolitan police said it had no record of an incident being reported.
The footage, posted on Facebook on Tuesday, shows Vine coming to a stop as a black car drives close to his bike. He explains to her that he is trying to stay a car’s width away from the parked cars on both sides of the narrow street. But the woman gets out of the car and starts hurling abuse at him.
She says: “Why the fuck would you stop in front of a car. You don’t respect your fucking life. Move your bike, move your bike. I could have hit you and I’d be done for a murder. Get the fuck out of the road. Fucking idiot, now fuck off. You lot piss me off.”
Vine said she began “kicking out” during the tirade, although this cannot be seen on the footage. After shouting at him she gets back in her car and begins tailing him again, at one point nearly hitting a parked vehicle.
The pair clash again in an incident that Vine said took place 30 seconds later. The woman, in front of him at this point, stops her car at a red traffic light at a junction and approaches him again.
As Vine implores her not to hit him – warning her “You’ve already assaulted me” – she says: “If you take a picture of my car I’m going to knock you out because that’s my personal belonging, don’t fucking take a picture.”
She then goes to her vehicle and Vine claims that as he drew up beside her she formed her hand into the shape of a gun which she then pretended to aim and fire at him, although, again, this can not be seen in the footage.
Vine wrote on Facebook: “I hate to overload our hard-working London police with footage from my commute, but I feel the person you see on the tape will at some point hurt someone very badly – either with her car or in a direct personal assault. See what you think.”During Thursday night’s preseason game against the Baltimore Ravens, the Miami Dolphins’ home field was anything but an advantage. The grass itself simply did not work, with huge divots appearing anywhere players were running and repeatedly slips from the guys on the field. It was disappointing, to say the least, to see the renovated Hard Rock Stadium having such a bad night because of the grass.
The Dolphins, however, have a plan to fix it.
According to the Palm Beach Post’s Jason Lieser, the team was already planning to rip out the field this week ahead of the scheduled Coldplay concert. After the concert, the team will then lay an entirely new field, using a different type of grass, in order to get it ready for the University of Miami’s home game on September 2 and the Dolphins’ regular season opener on September 10.
The field has had it rough lately, including the El Classico soccer match, the Dolphins’ first preseason game, and scrimmages by both the Dolphins and the University of Miami. Lieser adds that the heavy rains that have hit the area recently affected the ability for the grass to take hold, allowing for the ease of divots.
Hard Rock Stadium, which opened in 1987 as Joe Robbie Stadium, has never had instances of the grass failing, even when it was being used as both a football and baseball stadium and had a dirt infield in it. The Dolphins feel like they will be able to get it back to those high standards in time for the upcoming games.
Hopefully they are right, because Thursday night’s game was difficult to watch as players slid around.The self-driving car wars are heating up. A few weeks after we learned that Ford and Google are creating a joint venture to develop self-driving cars, General Motors and Lyft have announced a self-driving joint venture of their own.
Lyft is raising $500 million in investment capital from GM along with another $500 million from other investors. Those other investors include two Chinese companies that are huge in Asia, albeit obscure in the United States — Alibaba in e-commerce and Didi Kuaidi in ride-hailing. Together, it amounts to a global alliance to battle Uber, a direct Lyft competitor that is working on its own self-driving technology.
The odds of this new alliance triumphing seem slim, as it doesn't have either the resources or the artificial intelligence expertise of Google, Tesla, Uber, and some of the other companies working in this space. But the deal does tell us a lot about how the global ride-hailing market is evolving — and why competition in the ride-hailing market is really just the prelude to a much bigger fight over dominance of the self-driving car market over the next couple of decades.
Here are four big lessons from GM's deal with Lyft.
1) The future of self-driving cars is rental, not ownership
We're used to thinking about cars as personal property that people own. Taxis and rental cars exist, of course, but they're niche products used in unusual situations or in a handful of central cities. Most households do most of their trips in cars the household owns.
I've argued before that self-driving cars will flip this around. Without the need to pay a driver, self-driving taxis will be so cheap that ordinary middle-class consumers, even in the suburbs and smaller towns, will find them cost-effective for most trips. Indeed, because rental allows several people to effectively share a single vehicle, getting around via self-driving taxi will likely become more affordable — not to mention more convenient and versatile — than owning a dedicated vehicle.
If on-demand rentals are the future of self-driving car technology, then teaming up with an on-demand rental service is a smart strategic move for a carmaker like GM. By the time self-driving cars start showing up in the marketplace — likely sometime in the 2020s — many customers will have grown accustomed to hailing cars using a smartphone-based service like Uber or Lyft. That will give them a lot of influence over consumers' use of self-driving technology, and so it makes sense that GM is acting now to make sure it has an ally in the ride-hailing market.
2) Car companies know self-driving vehicles are an existential threat
New car technologies come along all the time, and it would be easy for car companies to assume that self-driving capabilities will be just another feature to add to their existing vehicles. But there's reason to believe self-driving technology is a much bigger deal, and that car companies that don't adapt quickly won't survive the transition.
Putting software in control of cars is likely to be a lot more than a cosmetic change. Just as the internet is fundamentally transforming industries from music to retail — and threatening incumbents in those industries — so self-driving cars are likely to prompt a fundamental rethink of how cars work. If cars are primarily rented, rather than owned, then they can be optimized for shorter trips and more heavily specialized for different use cases. Short-range, high-efficiency electric vehicles will become more practical. Companies may make cars in a wider variety of sizes and shapes, from hyper-efficient one-seaters to luxury minivans to support family vacations.
And car companies will also face new reliability and security challenges they've never faced before. When cars are controlled by software, they become vulnerable to hacking, and car companies' current manufacturing techniques — which involve delegating most of the work to hundreds of subcontractors — make car software almost impossible to audit. If car companies don't change their software development techniques, companies like Uber, Tesla, Google, and Apple are going to run circles around them.
Forming a joint venture with a prominent software company like Lyft gives GM a chance to start with a fresh slate. It could even be a sign that GM management recognizes that truly radical innovations will only take place if they're insulated from GM's bureaucratic culture.
3) The race to dominate the self-driving car business will be global
GM is Lyft's biggest new investor, but the latest round of funding also includes money from Alibaba (China's answer to Amazon.com) and Didi Kuaidi (Uber's biggest rival in China).
These investments represent a growing recognition that self-driving cars are likely to be a global market. Developing self-driving technology won't be cheap, and so companies that can spread those development costs across multiple big markets will have a distinct advantage. The United States and China are the world's two biggest markets, so it makes sense that companies in these markets would team up. Once GM and Lyft have developed self-driving car technology, they'll be able to turn to Alibaba and Didi Kuaidi to help sell it to Chinese consumers.
4) The new alliance has a lot of catching up to do
Lyft is seeking new allies because it's a huge underdog, as reflected by the terms of this new deal. Lyft sold shares to its new investors on terms that valued the company as a whole at $5.5 billion. A few years ago, that would have been considered a high valuation for a ride-hailing company, but it's tiny compared with the more than $60 billion valuation of Lyft's biggest rival, Uber. Lyft raised $1 billion in its latest fundraising round and $680 million total in 2015. By contrast, Uber has raised nearly $5 billion in the last year.
Uber has been spending all of that cash not only consolidating its lead in US markets but also extending its reach internationally. Its global reach means that if and when Uber's own self-driving car project — which it has been working on for a year — comes to fruition, Uber will be able to deploy the cars in dozens of countries around the world.
The Lyft-GM alliance will also have to play catch-up with other companies that have big head starts in self-driving technology:The Purpose Of The Constitution
What the Constitution Does
The founding fathers established the Constitution to do just two things:
Establish a federal government for the United States of America Delegate to the federal government certain, limited (and enumerated) powers.
The Constitution was written by the thirteen original states. The federal government created by the states, via the Constitution, exists to serve the states. Until the states delegated some powers to the new federal government, those powers belonged to the states. The states, of course, delegated only some of their powers to the federal government while retaining most of their powers for themselves.
It is important to recognize that the states are the "boss" of the federal government! The states "hired" the federal government and set forth the rules as to how it should operate. The Constitution is a list of those rules. Just as a manager is expected to enforce company rules to manage employees, it is the responsibility of the states to enforce the Constitution to manage the federal government. The Supreme Court, being itself part of the federal government, has an obvious conflict of interest. Yes, it pretends to enforce the Constitution against the Executive and Legislative branches, but who will "manage" the Supreme Court? Who will watch the watchers? The states are the rightful and logical enforcers of the Constitution. It helps to keep this in mind in the discussion which follows.
What the Constitution Does Not Do
The Constitution does not give you rights. The founders considered your rights to be "God-given" or "natural rights" — you are born with all your rights. The constitution does, however, protect your rights by:
Limiting the powers of government by granting to it only those specific powers that are listed in the Constitution; (This has not proven to be effective of late.)
of government by granting to it only those specific powers that are listed in the Constitution; (This has not proven to be effective of late.) Enumerating certain, specific rights which you retain. These are listed in the Bill of Rights.
The rights deemed most important by the founders are specifically listed in the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights also says that, even though a particular right is not listed in the Bill of Rights, you still retain that right. Any powers not specifically delegated by the Constitution to the federal government are retained by the states and the people (you).
So, without the Constitution, the states and the people have all the rights and there is no federal government. With the Constitution, the states and the people keep any rights not specifically delegated to the federal government by the Constitution. The Constitution states this very clearly.
Unfortunately, the government today seems to recognize only those rights specifically listed in the Bill of Rights and even these often receive little more than lip service, when your rights interfere with some government objective.
Steiger's Law
Sam Steiger is a former Congressman from Arizona. At a talk given July 31, 1982, at The Nevada Libertarian Party "CANDIDATE'S CONVENTION" in Las Vegas, Nevada, he suggested what he called "Steiger's Law": " People involved in a structure spend more time and energy maintaining that structure than in working toward its goals. "
How is Steiger's Law applicable to the Constitutionality Crisis? The federal government, having been created to serve the states and the people, has degraded to the point that it is more concerned with perpetuating itself than with carrying out its constitutionally delegated duties. Rather than serving you by protecting your rights, as charged by the Constitution, the government has goals and objectives of its own, often in conflict with your rights. While you may have all the rights (the Constitution specifically says so), the government has all the power. When your rights and the government's goals are in conflict, you lose.
We the People created the government of the United States to serve us, not the other way around. Today it would be difficult for an outsider to determine that We the People don't exist to serve the government.
In order to carry out its grandiose plans and achieve its goals, government has to exercise powers well outside those limited powers granted it by the Constitution. The Supreme Court has been a willing accomplice, permitting gradual but continuous expansion of government power. As soon as We the People become accustomed to living with the latest power grab, powers are expanded yet again. The government sees no practical limits on its power. In the rare event that some law or part of a law, is found to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, Congress just reworks the text a little and then passes essentially the same (unconstitutional) law again.
In its practice of Judicial Review, too often the Supreme Court is not asking: "Are this citizen's rights being violated by this law?" Instead the question is: "Is the violation of this citizen's rights justified because of overriding government goals and objectives?" Too often the answer the court delivers is "yes." When your rights get in the way of a government objective, you lose.
Government created to protect your rights should have no goal higher than the protection of those rights. When government's own goals override your rights, government is acting unconstitutionally. Government often states that these violations of citizens' rights are necessary "for the good of society." Society is ill served by laws which violate the rights of the citizens making up that society.
An (imperfect) Analogy
The Constitution (and the federal government it brought into existence) was created by the states to serve the states. It sets forth the rules for how the government must behave and says, in effect (in the tenth amendment) "Any powers that we did not give to you are ours; we're still the boss."
This is like exercising parental control. You tell your child how to act, with whom he (or she) may associate and what time he must be home. You assign household chores and responsibilities. In short, you establish rules of proper conduct.
Suppose that this works fine for a while, but as your child grows, he begins testing the boundaries you had set and breaking the rules, but you do nothing to prevent it. One day you realize that your child is making his own rules, even telling you what to do and what you cannot do. If you object that he is not acting within the rules you set down, he says that he knows better than you what your rules mean. If you try to assert your own rights, you are punished — your child is now bigger and stronger than you are. Your child's allowance demands are ever increasing. If you don't do something to correct the situation soon, you'll be declared incompetent and your child will control all aspects of your life.
It's time to remember who's the boss, time for the states to regain control of a government which thinks the states are subordinate to it. The federal government exists to serve the states, not the other way around. The states have the right and the duty to restrain the federal government. Unfortunately, most state governments don't seem to understand this!The prime minister was latest, but representatives of all parties have used the sensitive term in a moment of parliamentary hyperbole
Tony Abbott is not alone in using the word holocaust to score political points
The prime minister, Tony Abbott, has apologised after accusing Labor of creating a “holocaust” in defence industry jobs, with the use of the word slammed by some as offensive.
However, it isn’t the first time the word has been used in such a way in parliament. Using OpenAustralia’s searchable Hansard, which goes back to 2006, we can count the number of times the word has been used, and how.
In its more common usage, to refer to the Holocaust, it has been used about 109 times, by members of all parties. It has also been used less frequently to refer to a “nuclear holocaust”.
General usage of the term is infrequent, but it has been used by members of all parties:
Bob Katter, in particular, has used the term generally at least four times, referring to an “holocaust of economic rationalism”, and an “environmental holocaust”.
The phrase has also been used generally by the Greens’ Scott Ludlam to describe dangers to the economy and the environment, and by Labor’s Anthony Byrne to refer to bushfires.
It’s not the only contentious hyperbole to get a workout in parliament. For an entirely arbitrary comparison, here’s a look at the use of the word ‘tsunami’:
The word is either used to reference an actual natural disaster, such as the Boxing Day tsunami that devastated southern Asia, or metaphorically.
Metaphorical use of the word undoubtedly reached its peak during an address by Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie, who described the government’s task as “to repair the sea of debris, the oceans of debt and the tsunami of deficits”.Herb Sutter is a bestselling author and consultant on software development topics, and a software architect at Microsoft. He can be contacted at www.gotw.ca.
Race conditions are one of the worst plagues of concurrent code: They can cause disastrous effects all the way up to undefined behavior and random code execution, yet they're hard to discover reliably during testing, hard to reproduce when they do occur, and the icing on the cake is that we have immature and inadequate race detection and prevention tool support available today.
The holy grail of the Consistency pillar is to make a concurrent program race-free and deadlock-free by construction. [1] "By construction" means to write our code in such a way that we can verify with confidence during development and testing that it does not contain races or deadlocks -- not just to rely on doing enough stress testing to get a probabilistic level of confidence, but to really know that there are no or deadlocks at all, at least for the shared data and locks that we control. I've written about some deadlock prevention techniques in "Use Lock Hierarchies to Avoid Deadlock." [2] This time, let's consider race prevention.
This article shows how to achieve the "race-free by construction" grail via sound engineering, with automatic and deterministic race identification at test time based on code coverage alone. Notes: For convenience, from now on I'm going to talk about just locks, but the issues and techniques apply to any kind of mutual exclusion. And although the example code I'll show will happen to be in C++, the techniques we'll discuss apply in any mainstream language, including C/Pthreads, C#, and Java.
The Problem
Let's say you want to use some shared data protected using mutexes:
// use table1 and table2 (both are shared) table1.erase( x ); table2.insert( x );
Quick: What locks should you take to make this code correct?
The answer is usually to look in some documentation or comment, because the connection between a mutex and the data it protects usually exists primarily in the mind of the programmer, and we rely on discipline to remember which lock to take.
Let's say that table1 and table2 are protected by two mutexes mutTable1 and mutTable2, respectively. Then we might write something like this:
lock mutTable1 and mutTable2 table1.erase( x ); table2.insert( x ); release mutTable1 and mutTable2 appropriately (e.g., in finally blocks, or using automatic dispose/destructor methods)
The trouble is that the programmer has to remember that mutTable1 and mutTable2 are the "right" mutexes to take to use table1 and table2. This has two main problems.
The minor problem is productivity |
. With all the finals featuring previous Grand Champions, multiple-time age group winners and legends, a very high level of bodysurfing was on display. Upside down, underwater takeoffs, smooth spinners and long barrel rides kept the judges busy and the crowd cheering.
Positivity surrounded the entire weekend. Many of the competitors have been competing here for 20+ years. Old friends talked story and new friends made introductions. The team competition adds an interesting dynamic. The Wolfpack is always up for a good time especially this year in their flesh-tone speedos that caused many spectator double-takes. The Del Mar Bodysurfing Club “Good Vibes” are exactly that. Chubascos was well represented from Huntington Beach and the young guns from the WOD Crew showed encouraging skill.
When the salt spray finally settled, Calla Allison of Team Pine St. Carlsbad won her 5th Women’s Grand Championship and Brett Templeman of the South City Swells in Ventura took the Men’s Grand Championship. Both exhibited expert wave knowledge, stamina and style throughout the weekend. Congrats to them both! The highly coveted and hotly contested Team Trophy went to Pine St. They are the only name on the trophy, having won it each of the 5 years that it’s been awarded. Hal Handley and Bill Schlidge were awarded the Jack Thill Perpetual Bodysurfing Trophy for service to our beloved lifestyle. Obviously, well deserved!
-KSThe following are excerpts from the Sunday Telegraph column by Nigel Short. The link at the bottom leads you to the full story (with an annotated game). Note that you have to register, free of charge, to read the columns. This entails giving an email address and a password for future logins.
Nigel Short the King's Gambit
Nigel Short, Telegraph chess columnist
Filed: 29/08/2004
If chess is a vast jungle – deep, relatively unexplored and slow to yield its myriad secrets – computers are the chainsaws in a giant environmentally insensitive logging company. If our beloved game is not to be reduced to a glorified noughts and crosses – an arid computational desert – then, like a beautiful and intelligent woman, it must retain an element of mystery.
If I sound uncharacteristically sentimental, it is probably because my wife and I celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary this week and thus, for once, my thoughts are jolted out of their quotidian rut onto matters of the emotions. A little romance does not come amiss in either chess or love, or so I try to remind myself from time to time.
In my opinion perhaps the most romantic of all openings is the King's Gambit (1. e4 e5 2. f4!). A few years ago I sat in a bar with Vladimir Kramnik discussing theory. At that time the future World Champion was contemplating a switch to King's Pawn openings and he wanted to bounce his preliminary ideas off me. He opined that the Evans' Gambit (1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Bc5 4. b4!) was very logical: White sacrifices a fairly unimportant wing pawn to open lines and accelerate his development. This was not necessarily to say that it was Vlad's preferred method of starting the game, but at least he could understand the rationale behind it. In contrast, the King's Gambit, however, was for him totally incomprehensible: it loses a pawn and weakens the kingside, for all he could see.
Of course Vlad was absolutely right; my scientific deductive side had to agree – the King's Gambit has had a somewhat dodgy reputation ever since it was first mentioned in Lucena's manuscript of 1497. And yet my irrational mystical side revolted and still revolts against so cold and sober a judgement. There is something inspiring about voyaging into storm-tossed seas.
Over the years the most successful practitioner of the King's Gambit has been Boris Spassky. His record of 16 victories and no defeats (with some draws) is unsurpassed. His victims include two of the most illustrious names in chess history – Bobby Fischer and Anatoly Karpov – and his famous brilliancy against Bronstein was used as the opening scene of the Bond movie From Russia with Love.
From Leningrad with Love
The movie Nigel mentions, From Russia with Love, was produced in 1963. One of the villains is Kronsteen, played by Vladek Sheybal, master plotter for the terror organisation SPECTRE. Kronsteen is also a world-class chess player who, when asked if his plan would be successful, replies: "It will be. I've anticipated every possible variation of countermove." And Bond's colleague, the Turkish operative Kerim Bey, says of him: "These Russians are great chess players. When they wish to execute a plot, they execute it brilliantly. The game is planned minutely, the gambits of the enemy are provided for."
In the famous chess scene at the beginning of the movie we see Kronsteen playing the Canadian McAdams in an "International Grandmaster Championship". The score is 11½–11½. The position on the board is the following:
Kronsteen – McAdams, From Russia with Love, 1963
Here Kronsteen gives his opponent a long glare and then plays 1.Nxe5+ (as you can see in the picture above). He ominously says "check" while the move is displayed for the audience on a large demonstration board. McAdams nervously plays 1...Kh7, after which Kronsteen smiles and plays 2.Qe4+.
McAdams is horrified and knocks over his king as a sign of resignation, muttering "Congratulations sir, that was a brilliant coup." The audience bursts into applause as Kronsteen leaves the room to get on with his evil plottings. "). And an article entitled James Bond and Chess gives the following fascinating information, which we should have included:
The position on a wallboard in the movie is based on an intruiging King's Gambit won by Boris Spassky against David Bronstein at the USSR Championship in 1960. Here it takes place at the Venice International Tournament where Kronsteen ignores a courier's sealed message ordering him to stop play on the spot. He knows he risks his life if he fails to obey, but how many players can abandon a sure win? At his own peril Kronsteen waits three more minutes to accept his opponent's resignation; but later he must explain to his superior why he did not obey at once. In the book his excuse is accepted reluctanctly: "To the public, Comrade General, I am a professional chess player. If, with only three minutes to go, I had received a message that my wife was being murdered outside the door of the tournament hall, I would not have raised a finger to save her. My public know that. They are dedicated to the game as myself. Tonight, if I had resigned the game and had come immediately upon receipt of that message, 5000 people would have known that it could only be on the orders of such a department as this. There would have been a storm of gossip. My future comings and goings would have been watched for clues. It would have been the end of my cover. In the interests of State Security, I waited three minutes before obeying the order. Even so, my hurried departure will be the subject of much comment."
Finally, for those of you who can't get enough of the subject, there's a deep analysis, in German, of James Bond's psychological relationship to chess in this Meta-Chess site.TWO US men were shot and killed today in Houston, apparently in a dispute over a lost mobile phone.
Police responded to reports of a shooting at an apartment complex at about 2am local time, KHOU-TV said. When officers arrived on the scene, they found one dead body at the front of the complex and another in the rear.
Witnesses told police that the two victims had picked up a dropped mobile phone in a parking lot after leaving a convenience store. The owner of the phone apparently rang the device and told one of the victims to meet him at the apartment complex.
The suspects arrived at the complex and fired on the two victims. One of the victims, who was handicapped, was immediately shot and killed. The other victim attempted to flee the scene on foot with a witness, but was caught by the suspects and also fatally shot.
The suspects fled the scene in a dark-coloured four-door vehicle and were being hunted by police today.
Read more at KHOU-TV.Owned by Condé Nast, Reddit has evolved into one of the least manageable media properties of the Internet era.
In 2006, Condé Nast, the New York-based publisher of Vogue and the New Yorker, bought a promising information-sharing and online-discussion startup called Reddit.
At the time, social media was just taking off and big media conglomerates were scrambling for a piece of the action. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. had recently outfoxed Sumner Redstone’s Viacom to snag Myspace for $580 million.
In a seller’s market, Condé Nast managed to pick up Reddit for a reported $20 million. The site worked out of the same offices in San Francisco as another Condé title, Wired.
reddit a history of the company College buddies Alexis Ohanian, left, and Steve Huffman, right, create site, add comments. Condé Nast buys site for $20 million. Launches subreddits Huffman and Ohanian leave. Moves to the cloud; introduces premium membership Condé Nast spins out, reincorporates Reddit. Holds first presidential “ask me anything” Raises $50 million; Ohanian returns as executive chairman. Interim Chief Executive Ellen Pao quits; Huffman returns as CEO. Source: Reddit Photo credits: Noam Galai / Getty Images for TechCrunch; Jason Henry / The New York Times; Mark Lennihan / The Associated Press, 2014; Andrew Harnik / The Associated Press; Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
Things were chummy. The corporate parent back East was extremely hands-off, and Reddit’s community of users — Redditors — grew to the millions. For a time, as Myspace imploded and Reddit turned into the town hall of the digital era, Condé Nast looked like a genius.
Today, after much executive turnover and countless incidents of questionable Redditor behavior, Condé Nast would prefer you not think of Reddit as theirs. Wired, in a blog post July 28, explained its “complicated” relationship to its onetime officemate: “[W]e want to clear something up: we aren’t related to the site.”
Such family disavowals tend to take place under dramatic circumstances — perhaps after a messy divorce or at the end of a particularly drunken Thanksgiving. Or, in this case, after a nine-year case study in the hazards of absentee management.
On first encounter, Reddit is baffling. The site is a hodgepodge of links, snapshots and news clippings, unspooling in rows of blue text with all the aesthetic seduction of a phone book.
On a recent Friday afternoon, the front page featured a disorienting mix of items. A link to a news story about the effectiveness of an Ebola vaccine in a trial in Guinea appeared above a photo essay about constructing a giant table from discarded wood.
Nothing about the site suggests it’s a popular destination. Yet it is.
According to comScore, Reddit attracted 31.5 million unique visitors in the U.S. in June, putting it on par with Guardian, Dailymotion and ABC Digital. (Reddit’s own figures put the audience at 164 million monthly users.)
Last year, Reddit raised $50 million in a round of funding that valued the company at $500 million.
In the online ecosystem, Reddit plays a vital role. Its thousands of topic-specific message boards, known as subreddits, form a map of the collective interests of the Internet-browsing public.
Reddit history 2005: College buddies Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman create site; adds comments 2006: Condé Nast buys for $20 million 2008: Lauches subreddits 2009: Huffman and Ohanian leave 2010: Moves to the cloud; introduces premium membership plan 2011: Condé Nast spins out, reincorporates Reddit 2012: Holds first presidential ask me anything 2014: Raises $50 million; Ohanian returns as executive chairman 2015: Interim Chief Executive Ellen Pao quits; Huffman returns as CEO Reddit
The site is built on anonymity. No email address is needed to sign up, and Redditors interact using pseudonyms and avatars. Publicly outing another user’s real-life identity is a grave and punishable offense.
Anonymity and the Internet, of course, are a combustible mix, and Reddit has become the primary vortex of Internet rage. There have been subreddits dedicated not only to white supremacy but also to “creepshots” (prurient photos taken of women and girls without their knowledge), “fat shaming,” and graphic images of victims of domestic violence.
Reddit by the numbers 202,818,688 unique visitors in August 10,245 active communities 208 countries 3,742,116 logged in redditors 7,866,189,968 viewing pages 25,214,294 votes Reddit as of Sept. 2, 2015
After the Boston Marathon bombings, Redditors, combing through surveillance photos, publicly identified and wrongly accused multiple young men of being the attackers. On Aug. 5, as part of a stricter content policy, Reddit said it would be “quarantining” certain offensive subreddits, making the communities largely invisible to nonparticipants. It also banned several subreddits, including ones about racism and animated child pornography.
In the past, any effort to rein in the more odious subreddits has been met with fierce Redditor resistance as unwarranted censorship.
In July, Chief Executive Ellen Pao resigned in a firestorm after attempting to impose seemingly minor changes. Pao’s struggles had little to do with her leadership abilities: Reddit has evolved into one of the least manageable media properties of the Internet era.
How that came to be can be traced back to Condé Nast. Over the years, many big media companies have acquired promising startups only to inadvertently throttle their growth through excessive meddling.
Condé Nast’s original policy of noninterference allowed Reddit to flourish, but it also let major problems fester. The company declined to share current financial data. In 2013, it published a chart tracking expenses vs. revenue, which showed the business was still losing money.
Advance Publications, the private company that owns Condé Nast, is still Reddit’s majority owner, but you’d never know it from reading news coverage. “Their strategy,” says Robert Quigley, who teaches new media at the University of Texas at Austin, “appears to be to pretend they don’t own it.”
College buddies
Reddit was founded in 2005 by a pair of new University of Virginia graduates, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman. They envisioned the site as a place where anyone could share links and participate in conversations, “upvoting” submissions to prominence or “downvoting” them into obscurity.
Through a Reddit spokesperson, Ohanian and Huffman declined interviews.
In early 2006, they had a growing audience, a shrinking bank account and no way to generate revenue, according to an account in Ohanian’s 2013 book, “Without Their Permission.” That March, Ohanian got an email from Kourosh Karimkhany, a former Condé Nast executive, who said he’d heard about the site from his wife’s friend.
Seven months later, Condé Nast acquired Reddit, outmaneuvering other potential buyers, including Google.
Reddit and Condé Nast made an odd pairing. Condé is famous for its rarefied class of editors — Anna Wintour at Vogue, David Remnick at The New Yorker, Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair — who lead hierarchical teams that create polished stories alongside lavish advertisements for paying readers.
Reddit is a house of commoners, dedicated to the ideals of open discourse and peer-to-peer learning, and it’s hostile to many of the things Condé Nast represents. Opulence. Exclusivity. Advertisers.
“The Internet is a democratic network where all links are created equal,” Ohanian wrote in his book. “And when such networks get hierarchies forced on them, they break. They start looking a lot more like the gatekeepers and bureaucracies that stifle great ideas and people in the physical world.”
The acquisition was led by Steven Newhouse, scion of the family dynasty that owns privately held Advance Publications and its portfolio of newspapers, local cable-television providers, and food-and-lifestyle websites.
During the courtship of Reddit, a former Condé Nast executive says, the company promised that if the deal went through, it would leave the founders alone with minimal interference. After the acquisition, Reddit’s small team relocated to Wired magazine’s offices in San Francisco, a continent away from Condé Nast’s headquarters in Manhattan.
“We did almost nothing to integrate Reddit into the rest of the company, and we probably should have done even less,” Bob Sauerberg, Condé Nast’s president and a current Reddit board member, told Forbes in 2012. “We left Reddit in San Francisco and let it find its own way. Mostly we wanted to make sure we didn’t screw it up.”
Sauerberg did not respond to an interview request.
On their own
Reddit’s small team enjoyed being left alone.
Ohanian, Huffman and the team took their time figuring out how to make money. Eventually they turned to advertising, albeit with ambivalence.
“We realize users often have animosity toward ads, but they are a fact of life on the web,” Huffman wrote on Reddit’s blog in 2009. He went on to introduce “sponsored links,” ads that would look much like a typical Reddit submission, only shown with a different-colored background and labeled as paid content. Huffman tagged the announcement with several keyword phrases, including “mo money mo problems,” and “sell outs.”
Advertisers could buy the sponsored links using Reddit’s new self-serve ad platform. All you needed was a valid U.S. credit card. The minimum buy-in was $20. In deference to the outsize importance that Redditors place on privacy, the platform gathered little data.
Without demographic information to offer, Reddit told marketers it could still reach particular segments. A shampoo brand couldn’t target, say, 18- to 34-year-old women; but it could post a sponsored link directly in the r/CurlyHair subreddit.
“If you go to a paintball subreddit, paintball companies can advertise to you,” says Sam Altman, a Reddit investor and board member. “The users are anonymous, but they are seeking out the things they are interested in. The nice thing about Reddit is, we don’t have to sell your data or build a profile of you or do stuff that makes people feel uncomfortable.”
Major advertisers were slow to materialize. The community’s generally stickin’-it-to-the-man attitude didn’t help. In 2009, a user figured out how to hack into the Sears website and showed others how to do so. The hackers proceeded to tweak various product descriptions on Sears’ website, changing the description of one item, for example, into a grill “to cook babies.”
Sears was not amused; Condé Nast ordered Reddit’s team to remove the post, says Mike Schiraldi, a former Reddit programmer. Huffman begrudgingly complied.
A few months later, in October 2009, when the founders’ three-year contracts with Condé Nast expired, Huffman and Ohanian walked away. Huffman went on to build a travel website called Hipmunk. Ohanian commandeered John McCain’s former campaign tour bus, the Straight Talk Express.
As the U.S. fell into recession that year, Condé Nast hired McKinsey to help cut costs. Compared with its famously profligate magazine siblings, Reddit ran a lean operation. Its content was generated for free; its staff consisted of a handful of engineers and a few salespeople.
Nevertheless, Reddit soon felt some of the belt-tightening. At one point, amid a companywide hiring freeze, Reddit missed out on a job candidate the team desperately wanted. “That was the final straw,” Schiraldi recalls.
In July 2010, Schiraldi wrote a post on the Reddit company blog under the headline “Reddit Needs Help.” He suggested the site’s stingy corporate overlords were starving Reddit.
He asked users to sign up for a premium membership plan, called Reddit Gold. Redditors wouldn’t get much for their money other than a trophy icon to post on their user pages, he conceded. But the influx of money would help Reddit’s overwhelmed managers keep up with the site’s growth.
Schiraldi says Reddit timed its pledge drive for a Friday afternoon in the summer, when Condé Nast executives head to the upscale Hamptons on Long Island to relax. The subversive spin was perfectly calibrated to the Redditor sensibility. Subscriptions piled in.
“We pulled in more revenue in a weekend than Condé Nast’s sales team did all year for Reddit,” Schiraldi says. These days, Reddit Gold members pay $29.99 a year. A company spokesperson declined to say how many are signed up.
A former Condé Nast executive says that, in retrospect, one flaw with the company’s hands-off approach was an assumption that Reddit’s founders would know when and how to ask for help.
They didn’t.
Business model
As Reddit’s size ballooned, some of the site’s more unsavory aspects started to gain media attention. In 2011, Advance Publications distanced itself even further.
While remaining majority owners, the Newhouses recapitalized Reddit, bringing in a slate of new investors and spinning off Reddit into a reincorporated entity.
After the spinoff, David Carr, the late media columnist for The New York Times, wrote an assessment of Condé Nast’s less-is-more management strategy for raising their enfant terrible. Carr noted that Newhouse was determined “that his company would not be the blob that ate Reddit.” The headline: “Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars.”
Advertisers remain less moonstruck. Today, instead of the site’s original bidding system, advertisers buy space based on a flat fee. For more money, they can target ads to readers in specific U.S. or foreign cities. Even so, Reddit’s offerings are limited compared to other major websites such as Facebook, where advertisers can pinpoint audiences.
Reddit remains cut off from the centralized, automated ad markets that direct ad dollars on the Web.
Sponsored posts also have limited appeal. Unless an advertiser explicitly chooses to turn off the comments, Redditors can respond the same way they do with any other submission. They can applaud it or mock it.
Reddit pitches this idea as a credibility-enhancing opportunity. Advertisers, a former Reddit salesperson says, see it as a chance to get torched by virtual napalm.
Another problem, this person says, is that Reddit’s massive traffic overwhelms its tiny staff. The site has billions of page-view impressions for sale each month. Any advertiser, no matter how small, can pose questions or lodge complaints in a public Reddit forum.
A small team of sales reps is responsible for hopping in and defusing such concerns while also providing the one-on-one service the site offers to its “large-scale advertisers,” defined as anyone spending more than $30,000. In June, Reddit doubled the basic advertising rate on its self-service platform, jumping from 75¢ to $1.50 per thousand impressions. The hike did not go over well.
A handful of advertisers took to Reddit to complain. For several weeks, a company selling a $149 virtual-reality sex toy for men had been advertising on Reddit. “We’re out. Sorry, Reddit,” wrote the brand manager for eJaculator.com. “We’re better off advertising our Adult Sex toy for men on websites with actual targeted traffic.”
Need for grown-ups
Part of Reddit’s way out of its predicament may simply be to heed the concerns of its most dedicated constituency: subreddit moderators. In lieu of powerful, expensive, Condé-type editors, Reddit relies on volunteers to run day-to-day operations. Although unpaid, these moderators tend to be hardworking, highly dedicated, and desperate for help.
For years, they’ve been demanding better tools to do their jobs — such as better search and messaging functions and ways to prevent angry users from spamming moderators’ inboxes.
James Erwin, a Reddit moderator, argues that Reddit’s unwillingness to provide strong, hands-on leadership is at the heart of the company’s lackluster business performance. Without a firm editorial grip, the flourishing of disreputable subreddits opened the door for BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and others, which sift through Reddit content and repackage it to advertisers in more sanitized conditions.
“Reddit is watching other people eat its lunch,” he says.
Last year, Ohanian returned to Reddit as executive chairman. In July, after Pao quit, Huffman returned to be CEO. Erwin, for one, says the founders are at last ready to assume the role they’ve always abhorred: gatekeepers.
“Reddit is very much trying to establish itself as a curator of its own content and take back some of that space from BuzzFeed,” Erwin says.
As for Reddit’s new backers, they seem inclined for now to follow Condé Nast’s example. “We ask that the company make enough money to break even, with plus or minus $5 or $10 million a year,” says Altman, a Reddit board member.
The focus for now, he says, is product development and community growth. “Once we’ve figured out better moderation tools and better policies, and once we have a billion users and a robust mobile offering, then we’ll sit down and talk about monetization,” he says. “But now is not the time to talk about it.”BENGALURU: Time, tide and, evidently, clouds wait for none. The cloud-seeding aircraft, on its inaugural flight on Monday, was left chasing rainclouds after long speeches from ministers overtook the event itself.The cloud-seeding aircraft was to take off at 2.45pm from Jakkur airfield for HAL airport to refuel and then onto the Cauvery basin. Three cabinet ministers - Krishna Byregowda (agriculture), HK Patil (rural development) and M R Seetharam (planning and statistics) - were at Jakkur to flag off the Rs 38-crore project, called Varshadhari. However, one speech followed the other and the ministers overshot the deadline. Finally, the trio boarded the flight for the brief Jakkur-HAL trip at 3.15pm. But that was not the end of it.The B200 Beechcraft plane had just taxied on the runway when the ATC clearance failed. The radio telephony - meant to connect the air traffic controller with the plane - had developed a snag. "We were unable to connect with the plane for communications which delayed the flight takeoff," said the Yelahanka air traffic control. Finally, at 4.15pm, the ATC clearance was given and the plane took off at 4.35pm. By then, the heavens had given up. The cloud formation that was to be seeded over Magadi had moved towards Ramanagara. The plane was, then, redirected. The B200, under Captain Byron Pederson from the US, will be flying for two hours each day in attempts to induce rain over the drought-hit Cauvery basin.O'Reilly's JFK assassination fib The Fox host fabricated a story about hearing a shady associate of Lee Harvey Oswald commit suicide
Bill O'Reilly's bestselling book on the JFK assassination, "Killing Kennedy," partly follows the travails of O'Reilly himself as a young reporter trying to uncover the truth behind the president's death. As author and former Salon politics editor Jefferson Morley highlighted this week, however, O'Reilly's firsthand accounts appear lacking in the truth department.
In an incident detailed in the book (and flagged by media outlets including USA Today) O'Reilly claims he was tracking down an interview with George de Mohrenschildt, a Russian expat with possible CIA connections who was friends with Lee Harvey Oswald. Investigators looking into the JFK assassination were seeking information for de Mohnrenschildt when he reportedly committed suicide in 1977. According to "Killing Kennedy," O'Reilly was on the Russian's doorstep when he heard "the shotgun blast that marked the suicide."
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But as Morley pointed out this week, this was pretty much dramatic baloney:
[O'Reilly's] is a vivid story and well told. It’s also mostly imaginary. In fact, the reporter named Bill O’Reilly was in Dallas, Texas, on that day. The truth can be heard on a cassette tape made by Gaeton Fonzi, a congressional investigator who was O’Reilly’s most reliable source on the JFK story. Fonzi wrote about that day in his 1993 memoir, The Last Investigation: “About 6:30 that evening I received a call from Bill O’Reilly, a friend who was then a television reporter in Dallas,” wrote Fonzi, who died in August 2012. In Fonzi’s account, O’Reilly told him that he had just received a tip that de Mohrenschildt had committed suicide. A recording of three phone conversations between Fonzi and O’Reilly on March 29, 1977, confirms Fonzi’s account. Fonzi’s widow, Marie Fonzi, shared the tape with JFK Facts. “Gaet liked O’Reilly and did lots to help him,” Marie Fonzi said in an email. “He hired him in the early ’70s when editor of Miami Magazine at $25 a month to write movie reviews. He wrote letters of reference for him and was instrumental in getting him his first TV shot.” But she adds, “I knowO’Reilly was in Dallas” on March 29, 1977. “There is no question about it.” O’Reilly is right about one thing. He was indeed pursuing George de Mohrenschildt in March 1977, but he did not reach his doorstep in Palm Beach on March 29, 1977, and he certainly did not hear de Mohrenschildt’s demise with his own ears. When the fatal shot rang out, O’Reilly was in his office at the WFAA studios in Dallas, Texas, more than 1,200 miles away. The confirmation comes from O’Reilly himself as he calls Fonzi to break the news.
Perhaps most bizarrely of all, and a detail not missed by Morley, O'Reilly recounts his fantastical mission to de Mohrenschildt's doorstep entirely in the third person, calling himself "the reporter." But perhaps the linguistic dissonance O'Reilly places between his current self and the young reporter he used to be is appropriate. As Morley notes:NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ — This week is jam-packed with sports, art, politics and fun in New Brunswick. Don’t worry about whether there’s anything to do. Worry about what you’ll be forced to miss.
Check out TAPinto New Brunswick’s weekly roundup of some of the best tickets in the city.
Monday, April 17
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New Brunswick’s Urban Cleanup Week kicks off today, as businesses remove litter and clean sidewalks and streets. The event continues throughout the week, drawing on support from city employees, residents, schoolchildren and more.
Hookah is a fine way to start the week. Rutgers’ Arab Cultural Club hosts a general meeting at 9 p.m. in Scott Hall. Afterward, they plan to visit Bishop Beach on College Avenue for hookah and sisha.
Tuesday, April 18
What’s more spring than a little bit of swing? The six-piece Swingadelic band is set to play outside The Yard at College Avenue from 6 to 8 p.m. A dance instructor will be on hand to help you find your groove.
Wednesday, April 19
Enjoy a song or two with your lunch. A horn, trumpet and piano trio plays music of France and the Americas from 1900 to 1925 at 12:15 p.m. at the First Reformed Church, 9 Bayard St. Admission is free.
Get civic with the New Brunswick City Council meeting at 6:30 p.m. in City Hall. Among the agenda items are an ordinance to approve the redevelopment plan for the former site of the Ferren Mall and several bond ordinances in support of the budget.
Thursday, April 20
Calling all poets and performers: The Artists’ Collective will celebrate National Poetry Month at 8 p.m. at 35 College Ave. The club’s featured poet is Alphonse Burley, but all are welcome to perform. And, yes, there will be cookies.
Friday, April 21
Want to spark a movement? Learn how here, at the Spring 2017 Grassroots Organizing Conference. The event is scheduled for 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Ludwig Global Learning Center on the Douglass Campus. It’s sponsored by NJPIRG Students, the Honors College’s student board, the Douglas Women’s Center Coalition and Action Together NJ. Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, is the keynote speaker.
Saturday, April 22
Hear ye, hear ye, for the Rutgers Renaissance Faire shall be held at 10 a.m. at Skelley Field on Cook Campus. Thy money shan’t be accepted, as admission is free. But merchants and battlers abound. So travel on over for a funky trip back in time.
Celebrate this Earth Day with some tunes at the Hub City Music Festival. A garden workday starts at 10 a.m. and is followed by a concert from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Promise Garden, 1 Oliver St. The event includes tree plantings and kid-friendly programs.
Rutgers women’s lacrosse battles Northwestern at 11 a.m. at High Point Solutions Stadium.
Sunday, April 23
The Fourth Annual Billy McCaw Futsal Cup is set for 11 a.m. at the Sonny Warbling Recreation Center. The tournament—which honors McCaw, a popular former Rutgers student who was killed several years ago in New Brunswick—pits friends against each other on the soccer field and supports a charity called The Ability Experience. For more information, click here.
New Brunswick closes miles of prime-time road to vehicles, letting pedestrians, bicyclists, skaters and dancers take over. The annual Cicolvia event is scheduled for 11 am. to 4 p.m. in the downtown area and beyond.
Rutgers women’s tennis takes on Minnesota at 11 a.m. on the left side of High Point Solutions Stadium.
New Labor holds a Workers’ Memorial Day march and rally at 1 p.m. at Anshe Emeth, 222 Livingston Ave. Demonstrators plan to march in support of worker safety and more.The second edition was mostly prompted by the announcement by Mozilla that they were shutting down Persona in November 2016. Given that it would affect almost all the chapters from 15 thru to 21, it seemed a good excuse to do a full second edition rather than just an update.
Here, in brief, is an outline of the plan:
Chapter rewrites:
Rewrite chapters 15 + 16, replace persona with passwordless auth: first draft done
Update chapters 17+ for persona changes: in progress
Update JavaScript chapter for new version of QUnit: done
Update deployment chapters to use Systemd instead of Upstart: started but only in ansible appendix.
Two new chapters on REST APIs and Ajax: code spiked, but chapters not yet written
Minor updates + changes:
Switch to using a virtualenv from the very beginning
Upgrade to latest Django (1.10?)
Use less HTML ids and more classes
Use more early returns in FTs when refactoring partially finished user stories.
That's it, in very brief. You can read more on the google group, and feel free to join in the discussion there too, or here. Let me know what you think!A human-like figure has been spotted on the surface of Mercury by the orbiting Messenger spacecraft - and scientists point out a startling resemblance to the frozen Han Solo in Return of the Jedi.
“A portion of the terrain surrounding the northern margin of the Caloris basin hosts an elevated block in the shape of a certain carbonite-encased smuggler who can make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs,” the scientists say.
The image was captured by the orbiting Messenger probe in July 2011, and released this week. The image is named “He will not be permanently damaged”, a quote from Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back.
The scientists admit that observing a resemblance to Han Solo is a form of “pareidolia” - the habit of seeing human shapes in space, such as the man in the moon.
[NASA probe hears "shriek" in space]
“If there are two things you should remember, it's not to cross a Hutt, and that Mercury's surface can throw up all kinds of surprises. This block may be part of the original surface that pre-dates the formation of Caloris, which was shaped by material ejected during the basin-forming event,” the researchers say.
Data from the Messenger probe has caused scientists to rethink the history of Mercury, the innermost planet in the solar system - and could lead to a greater understanding of how terrestrial planets like Earth form.
The NASA Messenger probe reached Mercury’s orbit in March 2011, and has collected millions of measurements using instruments designed to operate in hostile conditions near the sun.
“The Messenger spacecraft is the first ever to orbit the planet Mercury, and the spacecraft's seven instruments are unraveling the history and evolution of the Solar System's innermost planet,” the researchers say. “During the first two years of orbital operations, Messenger acquired over 150,000 images and extensive other data sets. It is capable of continuing orbital operations until early 2015.
It was the first probe to visit Mercury since Mariner in 1975.
It took Messenger - an acronym for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging - six years to travel 60 million miles to the solar system's innermost planet.In what has to be the ultimate irony or simply bad timing, the United States is in the midst of revisiting the creation of an internet kill switch to defend against cyber warfare just as Egypt on Friday moved to block internet access to stem free speech.
The legislation, which is being led by US Republican Senator Susan Collins, is ostensibly designed to create presidential powers to shut off the internet to protect against significant cyber crime threats to national security.
It is designed to create a mechanism where the US government can |
kitchen, she employed manufacturers in California, Vermont and New York. Her goal is to build a manufacturing facility in Detroit by 2018, so The Lip Bar can be produced in the city.
“I want to literally bring the beauty back to Detroit,” she says.
A “made in Detroit” label would also create jobs for Detroiters and reduce the company’s carbon footprint, Butler says, adding that she’s planning a fundraising campaign to cover equipment and hiring costs.
Averaging over 900 unit sales a month at TheLipBar.com, Butler already has several employees and interns to keep up with the demand.
Makeup artist Moriah Mierre Martin, who works at En’fusion Beaute’ Salon in Farmington, says she uses the products on herself and clients, including VH1 reality TV star Nicole “Hoopz” Alexander, also known as Shaquille O’Neal’s ex-girlfriend.
Martin’s favorite color? Bawse Lady, hands down.
“It’s so beautiful on every skin tone,” she says. “I’ve tried a lot of lip lines and other big makeup brands, and I honestly think that is the best red I’ve ever tried.”
While some reds can be too orange, or too pink, Butler says Bawse Lady is a “true blue-based red,” which is why it to looks good on light and dark complexions.
Cosmetologist Shakira Kali, based at D’bugatti Salon in Detroit, also uses The Lip Bar on clients and touts the affordable $10.90-$11.90 price.
“Its cost-efficient, and I love the shades,” she says. “I really like that it’s long-lasting and doesn’t dry your lips out.”
So what’s the secret? Butler says her liquid matte products last up to seven hours because they have a sweet almond oil that retains moisture.
“You’re not going to feel like you need to exfoliate at the end of the night,” she says.
Butler shows off a lipstick in front her Lip Bar truck. “Shark Tank” investors panned the idea of a truck, but Butler and her partner had one made anyway. The truck has since traveled to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. and Toronto. (Photo: Max Ortiz)
Sales across the U.S.
When Butler and Spears pitched the idea of a mobile truck to distribute their products on “Shark Tank,” Mark Cuban covered his eyes. Robert Herjavec laughed and called it “a bad idea.”
The ladies ignored the sharks.
“They told us that our Lip Bar mobile was a horrible idea, and it’s literally our best branding tool yet,” Spears says.
To create the truck, Butler contacted Exquisite Customs in Southfield, which builds party buses. She wanted to mix the concept of a food truck with a party bus atmosphere of music, TVs and lights. She envisioned customers buying products from the window and also trying them on inside.
The owner told her he didn’t build “beauty buses.” Butler pointed out, “No one builds beauty buses.” He accepted the challenge.
The truck has since traveled to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Toronto.
“We weren’t ready for a Sephora, but we knew beauty is very intimate, and people want to try on the product. I was like, ‘How do we provide that beauty counter without actually having a beauty counter?’ This is our answer to that,” says Butler, standing outside the black truck emblazoned with red lips.
It’s helped spread brand awareness, she adds, recalling a moment driving on the New Jersey Turnpike.
“The lady at the toll booth was like, ‘Wait, I know this name on this truck. Wait, I have this lipstick in my purse!’ She literally pulled out Purple Rain, and was like, ‘I went on your website, and I ordered this after seeing it on ‘Shark Tank.’ ”
Butler admits she didn’t watch the episode when it aired. It was only until her boyfriend forced her to see it a month later that she found out Mr. Wonderful’s “clown” and “colorful cockroaches” remarks made the cuts.
“In that very moment, it was harsh and it was hurtful,” she says, “but also I think I just stood there because I was like, ‘He doesn’t know. These people are rich, but they don’t know everything.’... While they’re making fun of blue lipstick and green lipstick, I know that literally millions of dollars are being made off of blue and green lipstick.”
In fact, in June, Mac Cosmetics released a Bangin’ Brilliant collection with bright blue, purple and neon shades.
“The bigger guys are going to move a lot slower than the small indie brands,” Butler says, “so we’re on trend.”
At the end of the day, The Lip Bar ladies thank the show with over 7 million viewers for the exposure, but mostly, they thank their fans, which include over 53,000 Instagram followers.
“I’m so grateful that everyone was receptive of our pitch, and they, too, saw our vision,” Spears says, “even when the sharks didn’t.”
ssteinberg@detroitnews.com
(313) 222-2156
Twitter: @Steph_Steinberg
Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/2bdoLqmU.S. President Barack Obama delivers remarks on affordable education at Henninger High School in Syracuse, New York, August 22, 2013. REUTERS/Jason Reed
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama met on Tuesday with a five-member panel he appointed to review the privacy issues involved with U.S. government surveillance programs, the White House said, part of an effort to rebuild public trust after leaks by a former spy agency contractor.
Obama has faced criticism since Edward Snowden, a contractor for the National Security Agency, exposed classified information about U.S. surveillance of telephone calls and emails to journalists, raising concerns about privacy and civil liberties.
The review panel is part of an effort to expand oversight of the programs, which Obama has defended as necessary to protect national security.
Its members are Richard Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser in the Clinton and Bush White Houses; Michael Morell, former deputy director of the CIA; Peter Swire, who worked on technology issues in the Obama and Clinton administrations; Geoffrey Stone, a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, where Obama worked before entering politics; and Cass Sunstein, Obama’s former regulatory czar who is married to Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
The group will present interim findings in 60 days to the director of national intelligence, the White House said. They are expected to give a final report and recommendations to Obama by the end of the year.
Earlier this month, Obama also said he would work with Congress to reform laws that govern the collection of phone records and add scrutiny to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
He also said he wanted to provide more information to the public about the surveillance programs to restore trust.Though choices and moral dilemmas: a visual introduction to the ethics of self-driving cars
This comic was made by Anum Yoon, who kindly allowed us to post it here.
Self-driving cars, autonomous cars, driverless cars – regardless of what you want to call them – are expected to revolutionize the entire automobile industry. For over a century, cars have consisted of a fairly straightforward combination of wheels, steering system, engine, and driver. It’s no wonder that the announcement of this new technology has launched a global race that has automakers and tech companies scrambling to develop the best autonomous vehicle technology. And according to Morgan Stanley, self-driving cars will be commonplace by 2025.
So talks about technology aside, let’s dive into the ethics and philosophy behind these vehicles, which is what this infographic is about.
The Laws of Robotics
In 1942, Isaac Asimov, sci-fi author and professor introduced the three laws of robotics.
The First Law states that a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
The Second Law outlines that a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
The Third Law states that a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
He later added a Fourth Law, also called the Zeroeth Law; a robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
Can the clear rules-based code of a computer handle the nuances of ethical dilemmas?
Let’s take a look at a few hypothetical scenarios:
The Trolley Problem
You are the driver of a trolley that has broken brakes. Fortunately you still have the ability to steer the train from the main track to an alternate track. You can see the two tracks right ahead of you:
The main track has five workers
The alternate track has one worker
Both tracks are in narrow tunnels so whichever direction you choose, anyone on that track will be killed. Which way will you go? Would you let the train continue down the main track and kill five, or will you switch it onto the alternate track to kill one?
Most people respond to the Trolley Problem by saying they would steer the train onto the alternate track because their moral intuition tells them that it’s better to kill only one person rather than five.
Now for a little modification to this hypothetical scenario.
The runaway trolley is speeding down a track about to hit five people. But this time, you’re on a bridge that the train is about to pass under. The only thing that could stop the trolley is a very heavy object. It just so happens that you are standing next to a very large man. Your only hope to save the five people on the tracks would be to push the large man over the bridge and onto the track. How would you proceed?
Most people strongly oppose this version of the problem – even the ones who had previously said they would rather kill one person as opposed to five. These two scenarios reveal the complexity of moral principles.
The Tunnel Problem
You are traveling on a single lane mountain road in a self-driving car that is quickly approaching a narrow tunnel. Right before you enter the tunnel, a child tries to run across the road but trips right in the center of the lane, blocking the entrance to the tunnel. The char only has two options:
To hit and kill the child
Swerve into the wall, thus killing you
How should the car react?
Now that the age of self-driving cars have dawned upon us, this new technological innovation has given ethical dilemmas such as the tunnel and trolley problems a new relevance.
Hypothetical scenarios like the Tunnel Problem present some of the real difficulties of programming ethics into autonomous vehicles. In a survey asking how people would like their car to react in the Tunnel Problem scenario, 64% of respondents would continue straight and kill the child. 36% would swerve and kill the passenger.
But who should get to decide?
44% of those surveyed felt that the passenger should make major ethical decisions. 33% felt that lawmakers should be the ones who decide, 12% felt that the decision should lie with the manufacturers and designers. The remaining 11% responded with “other.”
Ethics is a matter of sharing a world with others, so building ethics into autonomous cars is a lot more complex than just formulating the “correct” response to a set of data inputs.
Here’s one last ethical scenario for driverless cars.
The Infinite Trolley Problem
The Infinite Trolley Problem, introduced by autonomous vehicle advocate Mitch Turck, is where a single person is on the tracks. This person can easily be saved by simply halting the trolley, but that would inconvenience the passengers. So for this variant, the question is not “would you stop to save someone” but rather, “how many people need to be on board the trolley for their inconvenience to be valued more than a single life.” This variant points out to the fact that given the current number of vehicular fatalities, waiting for self-driving cars to be 99% (if not perfectly) safe disregards the fact that many of these accidents could be prevented once the fatality rate for self-driving vehicles merely dips below that of physically-manned vehicles, even if that is still a nonzero statistic.
Is waiting for perfection worth it?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License. Original source: https://blog.cjponyparts.com/2016/01/ethical-dilemma-self-driving-cars-robotics/.I wasn’t initially planning on going to Roger Ebert’s funeral. Like many Chicagoans, I mourned his death and memorialized him in private, sharing my sorrows about his loss amongst friends who counted themselves fellow “Ebert superfans.” My colleague, Leah Pickett, broke the news to me and at first, I was upset with her for suggesting it was even possible. Ebert couldn't die. However, the Chicago Sun-Times confirmed her story. Just as quickly as we had to process the news of his semi-retirement, there was this. Ebert was gone, like someone switching off a light.
I’ve never cried over a celebrity death before, but I burst into hysterical sobs at the news. I rarely cry, and when I do, it looks more like epilepsy than tears, a flurry of gasps and spasms. Instead of crying, I’m known to slowly leak, like a faucet silently pouring water down a drain. On Thursday, I flooded with emotion, rushing out from every pore. I felt like even my hands were crying.
But when details of his funeral broke, I felt like I had no place there. Who was I to go to his memorial? Why was his death my business? Despite the impact he had on my life, I couldn’t look into the face of Chaz Ebert and tell her that the love of her life meant as much to me as he did to her. I couldn’t even begin to compare our sorrow.
However, DNAInfo reported Sunday night that the Westboro Baptist Church planned on picketing Roger Ebert’s funeral as retribution for Ebert’s long-standing criticism of them. Ebert, a noted humanist and former Catholic, referred to the institution as “odious” and testified his ideological disagreement with them by linking to articles critical of WBC in his many tweets. (The man loved to tweet.)
Calling the beloved critic a “f*g enabler,” Westboro promised to show up at 9:15 a.m. as attendees filed in for the 10 o'clock service. The hate group said in a (totally sane sounding) press release:
"This fool sold his soul for some fame & fortune, forgetting that God has made a simple declaration regarding His people: 'Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm.' (Psalms 105:15). Now the famed critic is in a new jurisdiction, where he can see the blessings poured out on God’s humble servants in heaven, from his seat of eternal torment & sorrow in Hell!" Stay up-to-date with the latest news, stories and insider events. Please enter a valid email address Oops, something went wrong! Sign Up Try Again You've signed up to receive emails. Please check your email for a welcome confirmation.
For anyone familiar with WBC, you know this trolling, childish behavior is par for the course. This is what they do. Westboro commonly protests military funerals to punish our dead soldiers for society's sins and mocks the dead to generate publicity. When opponents of the group show up to counterprotest, the group uses this as a way to mobilize the right-wing, presenting themselves as marginalized warriors of God in an America that’s leaving them behind.
Westboro wants to make you angry. It wants you to scream back at it and stoop to its level. It wants to use hate to spread hate.
I knew that going to counterprotest Westboro wouldn’t solve anything, but I needed to be there to defend Ebert's honor. For all of the times that he championed the little guy and worked as an agent of change and social justice, I needed to stand up for him. I needed to be there. I couldn’t be silent.
I woke up at 7:00 a.m. and arrived at State Street’s Holy Name Cathedral early, expecting that Westboro would already be busy setting up. I pictured vans full of identically dressed women with long hair and skirts of modest length and balding, white-haired men with thick glasses, black ties and megaphones. I pictured people who wore hatred like it was a second skin, one they could peel off when the cameras were gone and the crowds parted.
However, I found no one, except for the funeral goers patiently waiting for their opportunity to honor a friend, loved one or stranger. During the funeral, multiple speakers testified that Ebert was a “man of the people” and a critic who represented America, and the service attracted all types: kids coming as funeral tourists, snapping pictures and commenting on how “cool” it was; colleagues like Michael Phillips, Rick Kogan and Richard Roeper; politicians and local celebrities; and character actors whose faces you couldn’t place, the inestimable litany of those his legacy touched.
Even Rahm was there, back from his time vortex.
While I waited for Westboro, I stood with a budding film critic who grew up in Missouri and was glad Ebert’s last review didn’t end up being of The Host, Andrew Niccol’s critically reviled Stephenie Meyer adaptation. His take on To the Wonder, the divisive new Terrence Malick film, was published the morning of his funeral, as a tribute and testament to his own curiosity and imagination. Malick was one of Ebert’s favorite filmmakers and a cinematic poet Roger Ebert had a lot in common with: They came from the same generation, while sharing the same mystical awe of cinema’s power.
As I talked with these people, I found that they were all looking for something: A woman from Los Alimos, Cal., came all the way to hand out pamphlets and inquire about the state of Ebert’s soul. Her name was Tina.
“Was Ebert Catholic?” Tina asked me. I confessed that I did not know. Tina asked about the state of my soul. I confessed that I did not know about that, either. Like Ebert, I was raised Catholic, but as an adult, I’d given myself the space to doubt and explore other traditions that weren’t the one I grew up in. I related the solace I’ve found in Buddhist meditation and Hindu scripture. I keep a copy of the Bhagavad Gita on my desk. I quoted Joseph Campbell: “If you only know one religion, you know none."
Tina smiled and told me that if I ever wanted to come back, the church was waiting. She handed me a card with St. Maria Faustina’s face on it and told me to pray — for my own salvation and for Ebert’s. “You have a beautiful soul,” Tina said, as if she didn’t expect it to stay beautiful. I wanted to ask her what she thought Ebert's soul looked like, but Tina moved on. She had more trading cards to hand out.
The budding film critic looked at me and laughed. “It takes all kinds,” he offered, as a condolence for our conversation. Then, I remembered the way Tina thanked me for talking to her and giving her the time of day, when most people just ignored her. She seemed to need me as much as she thought I needed her. When Tina approached me, she told me that they wouldn't let her stand with anyone else. I looked at the critic, frowned and put my hands in my pockets, just as it started to rain again.
I began to wonder if I needed Westboro as much as they needed me. I wondered if any of us would find what we were looking for — or even if it was to be found amongst Ebert's ashes.
Suddenly, the crowd began to file in. I looked back at the line behind me and out to the sea of reporters setting up to shoot, collecting mourners’ stories on pads of paper. One of the men standing ahead of me in line went back three times to the same AP journalist, because he kept finding more to say. When we would call her up to him, she smiled, “Got another story for me?”
I failed to spot our friendly protesters, so I was faced with a choice: I could stand outside with the critics of Ebert’s soul and the revelers of his eternal torment. I could wallow in the world’s hate and look into its worst face. Or I could join the people who came to be a testament to love, the folks who couldn’t stop remembering Ebert and the ones who refused to be deterred by rain or the gusts of the Chicago morning. I could turn this dark day into an opportunity for hope and transformation, fighting to keep his work and his memory alive.
I wasn’t dressed for a funeral. I came in my plainclothes, my well-worn black jeans, Cubs hat and striped hoodie, backpack slung over one shoulder. But it didn't matter what I was wearing. I was there.
I went inside and stood between two women, one of whom sported dark velour pants and leopard-print sunglasses; she constantly smiled at me to show how fine she was. The other one came from Glenview and talked about Ebert as if he were a friend. Her name was Kathy. She called him “Roger,” just like everyone else did.
Kathy loved "Roger" so much that she had a portrait of Ebert painted in her house, along with pictures of Peter Sellers and other icons she grew up with. In the picture, Ebert sat on a balcony with Oprah, taking notes and enjoying the view. She hung the illustration in her entertainment room, so she could watch movies along with Ebert; they could enjoy the view together. Kathy told me that she got to show it to him once, and Roger loved it. He even asked for a copy.
To her, Ebert wasn’t just a trusted critic. He was a window to the world. Rahm reminded us that "life is too short not to be shared with others," and when Kathy approached Chaz during communion, she thanked her for sharing her husband with us. He was the most wonderful gift.
When the service ended, I wondered aloud whether the Westboro Baptist Church ever came out or if we had just missed them. Kathy and I laughed that a hate group would target a man known and beloved for his deliciously scathing reviews, sad that he couldn’t be around the comment. I asked her what Roger would have said about his hostile guests. She told me, “I don’t know, but if they came, I bet he would have loved it.”
Westboro never showed up, and we never get to laugh with Ebert in the face of hate. We'd never see what that face looked like or figure out what they were looking for — if they were like the rest of the funeral misfits searching for comfort or someone to share his life with. We wanted someone to listen to us or to cry with, realizing we'd never back get the thing we really wanted. Roger Ebert's stepdaughter, Sonia, told us that Ebert "realized that connecting with other people is the main reason we're here." And as Roeper carried his friend and companion away, that consolation of humanity was enough.
It's too bad Westboro missed Ebert's service. They could have learned something from him.
Nico Lang writes about LGBTQ issues in Chicago. You can find Nico on Tumblr, Twitter or Facebook.The U.S. military is shedding so many troops and weapons it is only “marginally able” to defend the nation and falls short of the Obama administration’s national security strategy, according to a new report by The Heritage Foundation on Tuesday.
“The U.S. military itself is aging. It’s shrinking in size,” said Dakota Wood, a Heritage analyst. “And it’s quickly becoming problematic in terms of being able to address more than one major conflict.”
President Obama’s latest strategy is to size the armed forces so that the four military branches have sufficient troops, ships, tanks and aircraft to win a large war, while simultaneously acting to “deny the objectives of — or impose unacceptable costs on — another aggressor in another region.”
In other words, the Quadrennial Defense Review says the military can essentially fight two major conflicts at once. It could defeat an invasion of South Korea by the North, for example, and stop Russia from invading Western Europe or Iran from conquering a Persian Gulf state.
But Heritage’s “2015 Index of U.S. Military Strength” took a look, in detail, at units and weapons, region by region, and came to a different conclusion.
“The U.S. military is rapidly approaching a one-war-capable force,” said Mr. Wood, a former Marine Corps officer and strategic planner. “So [it is] able to handle a major war and then having just a bit of residual capability to handle other minor crises that might pop up. … But it is a far cry from being a two-war force.”
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“The consistent decline in funding and the consequent shrinking of the force are putting it under significant pressure,” the report concluded. “The cumulative effect of such factors has resulted in a U.S. military that is marginally able to meet the demands of defending America’s vital national interests.”
The index report is part scorecard, part research tool.
It grades the Army, which is shrinking from 570,000 soldiers to 440,000 or lower, and the Navy, which is failing to achieve a 300-ship force, as only “marginal” in military power. The Air Force’s fleet of fighters and long-range bombers is judged “strong.”
Heritage says the military cannot fight two wars at once.
The report said the Army historically commits 21 brigade dombat teams to one war. Several years ago, that left just 21 more brigades for a second war and none for strategic reserve.
But the problem is more acute. The Army announced in 2013 it may go as low as 33 brigades, far short of the 50 brigades Heritage says are needed.
The Army has been battered by automatic budget cuts known as “sequestration.” A bipartisan budget deal provided some relief last year, but the slashing could come back in 2016 without another agreement.
Gen. Raymond Odierno, Army chief of staff, has said that if the active force is squeezed down to 420,000 soldiers, it could not carry out all global commitments.
The Navy would need 346 ships to carry out two large campaigns, Heritage said, but its fleet is only 284.
At the report’s release, Rep. J. Randy Forbes, Virginia Republican, talked of all the technological advancements that led to complete air superiority in the 1991 Desert Storm operation over Iraq.
Today, the House Armed Services Committee member said the Air Force “would say we are dangerously close to no longer being able to guarantee that air dominance that we could guarantee in Kuwait.”
“If you listen to the Army, they will give testimony they can no longer guarantee. You talk about two wars — they testified they can’t guarantee that we could win one war,” Mr. Forbes said. “The Navy will tell you if we get to 260 ships, we cease to be a superpower; we become a regional power.”
The Pentagon’s base budget, minus overseas war costs, has decreased under Mr. Obama, from $527 billion in 2010 to about $496 billion in each of the last three budgets. The president is asking for an increase in 2016 to $534 billion.
“The enemies that we have out there, and competitors, are making very smart investments accounting for their strategic objectives and interests,” Mr. Wood said.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.This article is from the archive of our partner.
Rick Santorum is catching heat from Republicans for his latest attack on fellow candidate Mitt Romney and from everyone else for calling a reporter's question "bullshit." The "tantorum" as his opponents on Twitter have dubbed it, came at a Wisconsin rally on Sunday immediately after his big win in Louisiana. During his speech, Santorum attacked Romney over the similarities between Romneycare and Obamacare, adding "Why would we put someone up who is uniquely - pick any other Republican in the country – he is the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama. Why would Wisconsin want to vote for someone like that?"
When asked about it later by Jeffery Zeleny of The New York Times, Santorum may have "lost his cool" a little bit, unleashing some colorful language in his response:
I ask Santorum if Romney is "worst Republican" to run. He says: “Quit distorting my words It's bullshit." He says he was talking health care — Jeff Zeleny (@jeffzeleny) March 26, 2012
His fiery speech and equally fiery response to Zeleny are naturally being spun as an " epic temper tantrum " by the Romney camp who see his attacks as crossing the line of party unity. You can say pretty much whatever you want about your primary opponent — like "unhinged" — as long you don't say that he's worse than the guy in the other party. But with pressure mounting on the non-Romneys to call it a race and start supporting the "nominee", the counter-attacks on Santorum will increasingly paint him as a petulant spoilsport rather than the principled Republican warrior trying to stand up for his beliefs. However, if you want to be seen as the adult in the race, frustrated rants and swearing aren't going to help the cause.
UPDATE (7:30 a.m.): In the last hour, CBS This Morning broadcast a video of the incident with Zeleny. (via In the last hour, CBS This Morning broadcast a video of the incident with Zeleny. (via Business Insider ). Does seem like a bit of a meltdown.
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.I took these two to the top 8 cut in the Austin, TX Regionals yesterday. I finished fourth in the Swiss, going 6-1 through the seven rounds, including a first round buy from my Store Championship win.
Overall Strategy
This is a mid-range deck, hoping to take the game to the fourth/fifth round with tons of dice on the board. Ideally you're looking at a few lightsabers and Force Speed and rerolling 7-9 die for lethal.
Playing this deck comes down to two major decisions. Do I use Qui-Gon's for damage? Or for defense? The answer varies based on the matchup, board-state, and what you (and your opponent) have in hand. You want to survive long enough to build your board state, but sniping a character with a ping should always take precedence.
Second, who gets the upgrades? Only ~75% of my opponents went for Qui-Gon first. While most of the time it is safe to throw a few lightsabers on Kanan, it can really hurt your endgame if he goes down with both Shotos.
Mulligan
You want to start the game with either a Ancient Lightsaber (or Shoto Lightsaber), Force Speed, and Caution. The upgrades enable you to get your engine going and burst ahead in actions.
If you are playing against Villain Blue or Sabine keep a copy of Rend for Sith Holocron and Running Interference, respectively. This can severely choke out Palpatine and Kylo decks.
Opening Moves
Ancient Lightsaber goes on Qui-Gon, no matter what, and Force Speed goes on Kanan. If Qui-Gon gets targeted first then use the ability once you've resolved the die to keep him alive longer. All your other upgrades should go on Kanan. Don't be tempted to throw two Shoto on Qui-Gon hoping for the double ping - if he goes down and you lose both those upgrades the game is most likely over.
There are times, however, where you can bait your opponent into targeting Kanan first. Playing a Force Speed and a lightsaber on him them Cautioning a Qui-Gon die puts your opponent in a tough position. It puts you way ahead if he/she switches targets after dealing a few points of damage.
Second, throw down Force Illusion ASAP. This is another sneaky way of steering aggro. It also could allow you to load up The Ataru Master with two Shotos. Then your opponent is in for a world of hurt.
Kanan's Ability
I've written about this on Reddit before, but I'll call it out here again. You can do so much with his ability and it's important you always consider his die before playing any action.
Kanan, a, and +2 modifier in your pool. You can use his ability to flip the to a black and resolve all the melee in one action. Kanan and another Kanan die in the pool. Now you can use his ability to flip his other die before playing Force Misdirection. This can be a blowout against ranged-heavy decks. Kanan's die is showing a. You can claim the before playing a card that costs one more that what you are showing.
A favorite play of mine is resolving a to play Decisive Blow. No one really expects that card - especially since you only need two. I knocked five off of Palpatine in a match that single hand-idly decided the game.
High Performing Cards
Riposte - You only want to play this once per game, unless mill becomes a big part of the meta. But a surprise three damage out of hand completely messes up your opponent's damage count. Also, sniping Kylo2 before he activates can be huge. Decisive Blow - No one expects this card. And you have enough black to play this at almost any time. Either finish a round with one or use Kanan's ability (mentioned above) to completely blow out an opponent. This card requires careful planning and perhaps an early activation. But is always worth it. Rend - Again, not many people expected this card. Shutting down a Sith Holocron against Villain Blue is huge. Especially when the newer decks rely so heavily on them. Force Misdirection - As mentioned above, playing this once usually leads to a blowout turn. However, don't be afraid to remove a single die with it. Its better to stay alive another turn then to wait for a blowout that never happens.
Low Performing Cards
Heroism - It works great against The Galactic Emperor, but most of the time you're just speeding up your opponent. I would rather just up instead of pulling damage to the other character. Handcrafted Light Bow - In a vacuum this was perfect for the mirror or other heavy builds. However, with only a single it often escaped me. The other sides are strong, but without a good way to chain ala Poe, it becomes harder to hit than you'd expect.
Tested but Dropped Cards
Luke's Protection - Amazing when you get the combo going with Fearless, but often requires too many or Qui-Gon goes down before it comes into place. Also, it feels bad to resolve just for a and not a damage ping. Fearless - Same as above. Also, I never want to play this on Kanan. Most games end with only a few cards left in hand/deck - and this mills us even faster. Keen Instincts - I would rather reroll to get something better than the. Funeral Pyre - Again, in a vacuum sounded awesome. But in practice was only ever triggered once every ten games. Being smart with who gets the upgrades, and timely Redeploy overwrites, gets you around the need for this. It Binds All Things - Some may love it. But I felt that it makes your mulligan entirely dependent on getting that card. Which can severely limit your foresight into the matchup.
Touch MatchupsBEIRUT (Reuters) - An anticipated U.S.-led strike on Syria has not only put government forces on alert, it has also alarmed rebels, in particular Islamist groups linked to al Qaeda who worry they too are targets.
The United States said on Friday it was planning a limited response to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for a “brutal and flagrant” chemical weapons attack it says killed more than 1,400 people in Damascus two weeks ago.
But Islamist rebels are wary, particularly experienced foreign militants who have joined their ranks and may have seen at first-hand U.S. military campaigns and drone strikes on al Qaeda fighters across the region.
Islamist forces have cleared many of their bases of fighters, vehicles and weaponry, according to rebels and sources close to Qaeda-linked fighters.
“Of course we’ve been moving our fighters and equipment. Do you think we trust the Americans?” said a fighter from the moderate Islamist rebel group called Liwa al-Islam, speaking by Skype from a suburb outside the capital Damascus.
“They gave Assad two weeks’ notice to clear his bases. We know we’re the real target.”
Al Qaeda-linked groups such as the Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) appear to be taking even more extensive and secretive measures.
“ISIL has evacuated many of its centers, mainly in northern and eastern Syria. They’ve increased security for the emirs (leaders), changing their locations and their cars - they fear homing chips could have been placed in the cars,” said a source in Lebanon who is close Qaeda-linked groups in Syria.
Charles Lister, an analyst at IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency center, said there was nothing to indicate Western plans for an attack on such groups in Syria right now.
“But they are essentially hedging their bets. There’s too much to lose if no precautions are taken,” he said. “Syria has provided jihadists with an incredibly valuable opportunity to establish a concrete foothold in the heart of the Middle East.”
Syria, which sits on the faultlines of several sectarian and ethnic conflicts in the region, has been mired in 2-1/2 years of conflict that has killed more than 100,000 people.
Foreign powers have been deadlocked over action, and Western forces have grown increasingly hesitant as radical Islamist groups rose to power in an uprising that began as peaceful protests against four decades of Assad family rule.
But U.S. President Barack Obama has said chemical weapons use would cross a “red line” and has vowed to take action.
SHARING TIPS ONLINE
Militants have been trading advice online about going into hiding - from tips about food stockpiling to strategic advice on pre-planning attacks to maintain operations while leaders were in hiding.
Lister said lessons from attacks on militants in Mali, Iraq and Afghanistan were being shared on the Internet.
Abdullah Saqr, linked to the Fateh al-Islam group that has roots in Lebanon, posted some of his advice on Twitter.
“Start changing your locations and finding shelters, do not move in announced or large convoys. Take the mobile phones from all your fighters and distance them from the leadership to maintain a security layer,” he wrote.
“My brothers, the situation is serious, it’s not a joke. The Americans are being tricky in timing the attacks, which |
map that will see nationwide elections by next spring.
"It has so far succeeded in establishing the principles of justice, freedom and democracy as a basis for governance," said Fahmy, who is part of the temporary government established by Egypt's military following Morsy's ouster.
"This will be followed by parliamentary elections, then presidential elections, so that the transitional phase ends by next spring."
Fahmy's statement to the world body comes amid concerns that the military-backed government has been moving to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that rose to power following the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in 2011.
Western nations, including the United States and Britain, have urged Egypt's military-backed government to have an inclusive political process.
All Egyptians may participate in the political process, Fahmy said, "as long as they are committed to the renunciation of violence and terrorism and acts of incitement to them," and follow the rule of law.
The government is also determined to empower women and support its youth, Fahmy said.
Hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters have been killed and thousands more have been injured in clashes with the military and its supporters following the ouster of Morsy.
Each side blames the other for stoking the violence.
Morsy, who was backed the Muslim Brotherhood's political arm, was the country's first democratically elected president.
But critics say he became increasingly authoritarian and forced through a conservative Islamist agenda during his year in power that alienated moderates.
He is also blamed for failing to revive Egypt's economy, which crashed when the 2011 uprising drove tourists away.
Just a year into his presidency, there were mass demonstrations calling for his removal.
After the Morsy ouster, Egypt's military began to crack down on his party, the Muslim Brotherhood. The crackdown led to ferocious clashes in the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities, many of which have led to condemnation from the international community.
Morsy, who was deposed by the military amid widespread protest over his rule, has been held in detention since early July.
Less than a block away from where Fahmy spoke at the United Nations, dueling protests took place between Egyptians who support the government and those who back Morsy.
"Free, free Egypt! Long live Egypt!" shouted the pro-Morsy crowd, some of whom waved pictures of the ousted president. One placard read, "Only in Egypt your vote never counts" and another read, "No to massacre and martial law in Egypt."
Nearby were those who support the current government. As they chanted "We love Egypt," one person raised a sign saying "Egyptians support our government in their war against terrorism."Bloomberg Law: Privacy & Data Security brings you single-source access to the expertise of Bloomberg Law’s privacy and data security editorial team, contributing practitioners,...
April 17 --Kentucky recently became the 47th state with a law requiring companies to provide notice to residents of the commonwealth whose information is breached.
Gov. Steve Beshear (D) signed H.B. 223, which covers unencrypted or unredacted electronic personal information, into law April 10.
The same day, Beshear signed a separate bill (H.B. 5) requiring public agencies and their vendors to provide notice to affected individuals of breaches.
H.R. 223 also includes a student education data security provision.
Risk of Harm Trigger
H.B. 223 requires companies to notify affected individuals of unauthorized access to their personal information if there is actual identity theft or fraud or if the company reasonably believes the breach “has caused or will cause, identity theft or fraud.”
Companies that are subject to the data security and breach notice provisions of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act are exempt from the new law.
If the breach involves 1,000 or more Kentucky residents, the company must also notify the major credit reporting agencies of the breach.
Separate Public Sector Breach Bill
Under the new public sector breach notice law public agencies and their contractors are required to “notify persons impacted by security breaches,” as well as state oversight officials.
Agencies must “establish reasonable security and breach investigation procedures” and “include security and breach investigation procedures in contracts” with vendors.
Under the law, the state Department for Libraries and Archives is directed to establish data disposal and destruction procedures for records containing personal information and “establish procedures to protect against unauthorized access to personal information.”
The state legislative and judicial branches are also covered by the data security requirements.
Three States Don't Have Breach Law
Only Alabama, New Mexico and South Dakota don't have any type of data breach notice law.
As of April 14, no breach notice bill has been filed in Alabama. The South Dakota Legislature adjourned March 31 without a breach notice bill being filed. A bill in New Mexico passed the House (13 PVLR 326, 2/24/14), but the bill wasn't considered by the Senate before the Legislature adjourned in February.
Student Information Protection
H.B. 223 includes a separate provision regarding student information maintained by cloud computing service providers.
Under the new law, cloud computing service providers are prohibited from processing student data for “any purpose other than providing, improving, developing, or maintaining the integrity of its cloud computing services” unless the company gets express parental permission.
H.B. 223 provides that a cloud computing service provider is prohibited under the new law from using or facilitating the use of student data for advertising purposes and from selling student data for any commercial purpose.
Cloud computing service providers may also assist in educational research consistent with the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
Full text of H.B. 223, as amended, is available at http://op.bna.com/pl.nsf/r?Open=dapn-9j9pa4.
Full text of H.B. 5, as amended, is available at http://op.bna.com/pl.nsf/r?Open=dapn-9j6pxg.Bevan French saw the writing on the wall weeks ago. He knew his position at fullback for Parramatta was under threat when he watched Clint Gutherson fire from the back in his absence through injury.
Which is why French was far from shocked when Eels coach Brad Arthur last week informed him he would slot back to the wing to accommodate Gutherson's semi-permanent transition to the No.1 position.
He didn't kick stones. He didn't whinge. It doesn't mean French isn't driven and determined to win back the fullback jersey, but he knows the best thing for Parramatta at this point of the season is to have Gutherson calling the shots from the back as he continues his development as an NRL player.
"I saw it coming to tell you the truth," French said after the Eels' 24-10 win over the Dragons on Sunday.Image caption Anonymous posted messages on the Twitter account belonging to news site Uriminzokkiri
The hacking collective Anonymous has said it has been "hacking" and vandalising social networking profiles linked to North Korea.
The group has issued several warnings since the country's threats have intensified.
Uriminzokkiri, a news site, has been forced offline - while Twitter and Flickr accounts have been breached.
Anonymous also claimed to have accessed 15,000 usernames and passwords from a university database.
As part of action which the loosely organised collective has called "Operation Free Korea", the hackers have called for leader Kim Jong-un to step down, a democratic government to be put in place - and for North Koreans to get uncensored internet access.
Currently, only a select few in the country have access to the "internet" - which is more akin to a closed company intranet with only a select few websites that are government-run.
The country recently allowed foreigners to access mobile internet, but this service has since been shut off.
In a message posted online, members of Anonymous wrote: "To the citizens of North Korea we suggest to rise up and bring [this] oppressive government down!
"We are holding your back and your hand, while you take the journey to freedom, democracy and peace.
"You are not alone. Don't fear us, we are not terrorist, we are the good guys from the internet. AnonKorea and all the other Anons are here to set you free."
'Tango down'
Urminzokkiri's Twitter feed started displaying messages reading "hacked" at around 0700 BST. The account's avatar was changed to a picture of two people dancing, with the words "Tango down".
On Urminzokkiri's Flickr photo page, other images, including a "wanted" poster mocking Kim Jong-un, were also posted.
Anonymous has posted what it said was a sample of the hacked information.
However, some have questioned the reliability of the details as some of the email addresses were in fact Chinese.
Also unreachable on Thursday was the website of Air Koryo, the country's airline, which launched its online booking site late last year.
Like the main Urminzokkiri homepage, it is suspected the Air Koryo site has been hit with a Distributed Denial of Service attacked (DDoS) - a technique which involves flooding a website with too much traffic for it to handle.
Although a highly secretive nation, North Korea puts considerable effort in to having a strong presence online.
Various YouTube accounts attached to the regime post news items and propaganda videos on a regular basis.Excerpt: 'Dying Inside'
Dying Inside
By Robert Silverberg
Paperback, 304 pages
Orb Books
List price: $15.95
There was always the danger of being found out. He knew he had to be on his guard. This was an era of witchhunters, when anyone who departed from community norms was ferreted out and burned at the stake. Spies were everywhere, probing for young Selig's secret, fishing for the awful truth about him. Even Miss Mueller, his biology teacher. She was a pudgy little poodle of a woman, about 40, with a glum face and dark arcs under her eyes; like a cryptodyke of some sort she wore her hair cut brutally short, the back of her neck always showing the stubble of a recent shave, and came to class every day in a gray laboratory smock. Miss Mueller was very deep into the realm of extrasensory and occult phenomena. Of course they didn't use phrases like "very deep into" in 1949, when David Selig was in her class, but let the anachronism stand: she was ahead of her time, a hippie born too soon. She really grooved behind the irrational, the unknown. She knew her way around the high-school bio curriculum in her sleep, which was more or less the way she taught it. What turned her on, really, were things like telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, astrology, the whole parapsychological bag. The most slender provocation was enough to nudge her away from the day's assignment, the study of metabolism or the circulatory system or whatever, and onto one of her hobby horses. She was the first on her block to own the I Ching. She had done time inside orgone boxes. She believed that the Great Pyramid of Gizeh held divine revelations for mankind. She had sought deeper truths by way of Zen, General Semantics, the Bates eyesight exercises, and the readings of Edgar Cayce. (How easily I can extend her quest past the year of my own exposure to her! She must have gone on to dianetics, Velikovsky, Bridey Murphy, and Timothy Leary, and ended up, in her old age, as a lady guru in some Los Angeles eyrie, heavy into psilocybin and peyote. Poor silly gullible pitiful old bitch.)
Naturally she kept up with the research into extrasensory perception that J. B. Rhine was doing down at Duke University. It terrified David whenever she spoke of this. He constantly feared that she was going to give way to the temptation to run some Rhine experiments in class, and would thereby flush him out of hiding. He had read Rhine himself, of course, The Reach of the Mind and New Frontiers of the Mind, had even peered into the opacities of The Journal of Parapsychology, hoping to find something that would explain him to himself, but there was nothing there except statistics and foggy conjecture. Okay, Rhine was no threat to him so long as he went on piddling around in North Carolina. But muddled Miss Mueller might just strip him naked and deliver him to the pyre.
Inevitable, the progression toward disaster. The topic for the week, suddenly, was the human brain, its functions and capabilities. See, this is the cerebrum, this is the cerebellum, this is the medulla oblongata. A child's garden of synapses. Fat-cheeked Norman Heimlich, gunning for a 99, knowing precisely which button to push, put up his hand: "Miss Mueller, do you think it'll ever be possible for people really to read minds, I mean not by tricks or anything but actual mental telepathy?" Oh, the joy of Miss Mueller! Her lumpy face glowing. This was her cue to launch into an animated discussion of ESP, parapsychology, inexplicable phenomena, supernormal modes of communication and perception, the Rhine researches, et cetera, et cetera, a torrent of metaphysical irrelevance. David wanted to hide under his desk. The word "telepathy" made him wince. He already suspected that half the class realized what he was. Now a flash of wild paranoia. Are they looking at me, are they staring and pointing and tapping their heads and nodding? Certainly these were irrational fears. He had surveyed every mind in the class again and again, desperately trying to amuse himself during the arid stretches of boredom, and he knew that his secret was safe. His classmates, plodding young Brooklynites all, would never cotton to the veiled presence of a superman in their midst. They thought he was strange, yes, but had no notion of how strange. Would Miss Mueller now blow his cover, though? She was talking about conducting parapsychology experiments in class to demonstrate the potential reach of the human brain. Oh where can I hide?
No escape. She had her cards with her the next day. "These are known as Zener cards," she explained solemnly, holding them up, fanning them out like Wild Bill Hickok about to deal himself a straight flush. David had never actually seen a set of the cards before, yet they were as familiar to him as the deck his parents used in their interminable canasta games. "They were devised about twenty-five years ago at Duke University by Dr. Karl E. Zener and Dr. J. B. Rhine. Another name for them is 'ESP cards.' Who can tell me what 'ESP' means?"
Norman Heimlich's stubby hand waving in the air. "Extrasensory perception, Miss Mueller!"
"Very good, Norman." Absentmindedly she began to shuffle the cards. Her eyes, normally inexpressive, gleamed with a Las Vegas intensity. She said, "The deck consists of 25 cards, divided into five'suits' or symbols. There are five cards marked with a star, five with a circle, five with a square, five with a pattern of wavy lines, and five with a cross or plus sign. Otherwise they look just like ordinary playing cards." She handed the pack to Barbara Stein, another of her favorites, and told her to copy the five symbols on the blackboard. "The idea is for the subject being examined to look at each card in turn, face down, and try to name the symbol on the other side. The test can be run in many different ways. Sometimes the examiner looks briefly at each card first; that gives the subject a chance to pick the right answer out of the examiner's mind, if he can. Sometimes neither the subject nor the examiner sees the card in advance. Sometimes the subject is allowed to touch the card before he makes his guess. Sometimes he may be blindfolded, and other times he may be permitted to stare at the back of each card. No matter how it's done, though, the basic aim is always the same: for the subject to determine, using extrasensory powers, the design on a card that he can't see. Estelle, suppose the subject has no extrasensory powers at all, but is simply operating on pure guesswork. How many right guesses could we expect him to make, out of the 25 cards?"
Estelle, caught by surprise, reddened and blurted, "Uh-twelve and a half?"
A sour smirk from Miss Mueller, who turned to the brighter, happier twin. "Beverly?"
"Five, Miss Mueller?"
"Correct. You always have one chance out of five of guessing the right suit, so five right calls out of 25 is what luck alone ought to bring. Of course, the results are never that neat. On one run through the deck you might have four correct hits, and then next time six, and then five, and then maybe seven, and then perhaps only three-but the average, over a long series of trials, ought to be about five. That is, if pure chance is the only factor operating. Actually, in the Rhine experiments some groups of subjects have averaged 6 1/2 or 7 hits out of 25 over many tests. Rhine believes that this above-average performance can only be explained as ESP. And certain subjects have done much better. There was a man once who called nine straight cards right, two days in a row. Then a few days later he hit 15 straight cards, 21 out of 25. The odds against that are fantastic. How many of you think it could have been nothing but luck?"
Copyright © 1972 by Agberg Ltd.A rebel fighter stands on a lookout point with his weapon on the forth day of the truce, on al-Rayhan village front near the rebel held besieged city of Douma, in the eastern Damascus suburb of Ghouta, Syria January 2, 2017. REUTERS/Bassam Khabieh
AMMAN (Reuters) - Syrian rebel groups said on Monday they had decided to freeze any talks about their possible participation in Syrian peace negotiations being prepared by Moscow in Kazakhstan unless the Syrian government and its Iran-backed allies end what it said were violations of a ceasefire.
In a statement, the rebel groups also said that any territorial advances by the army and Iran-backed militias that are fighting alongside it would end the fragile ceasefire brokered by Russia and Turkey, which back opposing sides, that came into effect on Friday.
“The regime and its allies have continued firing and committed many and large violations,” said the statement signed by the mainly moderate rebel groups operating under the umbrella of the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA).
The U.N. Security Council on Saturday gave its blessing to the ceasefire deal, which are slated to be followed by peace talks in the Kazakh capital, Astana.
The statement said the main violations were in an area northwest of Damascus in the rebel-held Wadi Barada valley, where government forces and the Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah group have been trying to press advances in an ongoing campaign.
Rebels say the army is seeking to recapture the area, where a major spring provides most of Damascus’s water supplies and which lies on a major supply route from Lebanon to the Syrian capital used by Hezbollah.
Like previous Syria ceasefire deals, it has been shaky from the start, with repeated outbreaks of violence in some areas, but has largely held elsewhere.
The rebel groups questioned Russia’s ability to force the Syrian government and their allies to abide by the terms of the ceasefire deal.On Media Blog Archives Select Date… December, 2015 November, 2015 October, 2015 September, 2015 August, 2015 July, 2015 June, 2015 May, 2015 April, 2015 March, 2015 February, 2015 January, 2015
Mark Zuckerberg said he still wanted to meet with conservative leaders despite Facebook denying the allegations of bias. Conservative figures to meet with Mark Zuckerberg
Conservative media figures will meet Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg this week at Facebook headquarters in California.
The group will include TV and radio host Glenn Beck, RedState, Twitchy, Townhall and HotAir General Manager Jonathan Garthwaite, Mitt Romney's former digital director Zac Moffat, and Republican pollster and Washington Examiner columnist Kristen Soltis Anderson. Donald Trump adviser Barry Bennett, Fox News' Dana Perino and CNN's S.E. Cupp are also attending, according to CNN.
Beck said in a Facebook post a group of about 10 will meet with the founder this Wednesday.
In an interview, Garthwaite said Facebook reached out to him on Friday. Though he didn't want to "prejudge" the meeting, Garthwaite hoped they'd gain some insight and more transparency from Facebook.
Garthwaite said he thought Facebook responded appropriately after Gizmodo published a report that the site's employees responsible for the "Trending Topics" box routinely suppressed conservative news and outlets.
But, "It was just a response. The proof will be what they do in the ensuing months," Garthwaite said.
Facebook denied the allegations in the Gizmodo report and posted the guidelines their employees must follow when posting items to the "Trending Topics" box. But Zuckerberg said he still wanted to meet with conservative leaders.
"We have found no evidence that this report is true. If we find anything against our principles, you have my commitment that we will take additional steps to address it," Zuckerberg wrote. "In the coming weeks, I'll also be inviting leading conservatives and people from across the political spectrum to talk with me about this and share their points of view. I want to have a direct conversation about what Facebook stands for and how we can be sure our platform stays as open as possible."
Not all those who were invited wish to attend though. Conservative site Breitbart said it refuses to be participate in a "Facebook photo-op" and instead challenged Zuckerberg to an interview with Breitbart's Tech editor, Milo Yiannopoulos.
Facebook did not comment beyond confirming the list of attendees.
Tony Romm contributed to this report.Right wing Andrei Svechnikov, a candidate to be the No. 1 pick of the 2018 NHL Draft, will officially sign with Barrie of the Ontario Hockey League prior to the start of training camp next month, according to agent Mark Gandler.
Svechnikov (6-foot-1, 188 pounds), 17, was chosen by Barrie with the first pick of the 2017 Canadian Hockey League Import Draft on June 28.
"I am extremely excited and honored to be chosen first overall in the CHL import Draft and I am very excited to be coming to the OHL and the Barrie Colts," Svechnikov told the Barrie website last month.
He was rookie of the year in the United States Hockey League last season after finishing sixth in the league with 58 points (29 goals, 29 assists) in 48 games for Muskegon. Svechnikov helped Russia win the bronze medal at the 2017 IIHF World Under-18 Championship with a team-best nine points (four goals, five assists) in seven games.
"He was dominant in [the USHL] as a 16-year-old," said David Gregory of NHL Central Scouting. "He just does so many things well from his skating skills, puck skills, hockey sense. He's a candidate to be rated in the discussion as No. 1 next year."
Svechnikov is the younger brother of Detroit Red Wings forward prospect Evgeny Svechnikov, who made his NHL debut in April after being selected with the 19th pick of the 2015 NHL Draft.
He hopes to follow in the footsteps of current NHL players to star for Barrie in their draft-eligible season, including Florida Panthers defenseman Aaron Ekblad (2014 draft, No. 1 pick), Los Angeles Kings left wing Tanner Pearson (2012 draft, No. 30) and Winnipeg Jets center Mark Scheifele (2011, No. 7).
"Andrei is a very skilled hockey player," Barrie coach Dale Hawerchuk said. "He's a natural goal scorer and we're fortunate to have player like that joining the team. He's one of those players that make his teammates on the ice better."Apple had officially removed the 'Hottest Girls' App from its store and seems punished the developer of the pornographic app.
The developer or the app that allows users to download explicit photographs to their iPhones said that Apple had removed their program from its iTunes store without notice.
Apple has now removed all of our apps from the iTunes store without prior warning. We have yet to hear back from them on this issue,” the developer said.
Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr explained yesterday that they had removed the pornographic App because of the developer's violation on the agreement.
The spokesman said that the developer adds inappropriate content directly from their server after the application had been approved and distributed.
Apple has no further comments about the disappearance of all Apps from the pornographic app developer.Save this picture! Les Espaces d'Abraxas, Noisy-le-Grand, 2014. Image © Laurent Kronental
East of Paris, in Seine-Saint-Denis, sits a "Babel-like" housing estate. Its otherworldly atmosphere—existing somewhere between a 'new world' utopian dream and a postmodern, neoclassical housing estate—has set the scene for two Hollywood films including Brazil (1984) and, more recently, the upcoming second instalment of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay (2015). Parisian photographer Laurent Kronental's photo series, Souvenir d'un Futur (Memory of a Future), is an homage to the senior citizens of the French capital's Grand Ensemble region — not only in Noisy-le-Grand but across the Parisian banlieue. His photographs capture a number of places and their people which, in spite of their often megalomaniacal architectural settings, have been comparatively overlooked.
See Laurent Kronental's photo series—the result of four years of visits—after the break.
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Save this picture! Denise, 81 ans, Cité du Parc et cité Maurice-Thorez, Ivry-sur-Seine, 2015. Image © Laurent Kronental
The Espaces Abraxas and Arènes de Picasso in Noisy-le-Grand were designed by Ricardo Bofill (Theatre, Arc and Palacio) and Manuel Nunez-Yanowsky ('The Pie'); both were co-founders of the Taller de Arquitectura. Vast housing estates of this kind were originally built between the 1950s and '80s to house a migrant population of rural and foreign refugees and are today—as is often the preconception of the banlieue—commonly stigmatised in the media and marginalised by resultant public opinion. Bofill's postmodern edifices, constructed between 1978 and 1983, were designed to represent an alternative approach to the modernist estates. In Paris in particular, they sought to directly oppose Le Corbusier's whitewashed visions of the 1950s, which they deemed to be devoid of'style'.
In an interview in 2014, conducted by Elvire Camus of Le Monde, Bofill stated that [paraphrased from French] the general idea behind the Theatre, the Arc, and the Palacio was to build three 'rooms' of a theatrical space. In retrospect, he acknowledges that the complex has suffered from a lack of community spirit (a typical criticism in the banlieue), emphasised by the closed nature of the developments.
Save this picture! José, 89 ans, Les Damiers, Courbevoie, 2012. Image © Laurent Kronental
Save this picture! Paulette, 83 ans, Les Damiers, Courbevoie, 2015. Image © Laurent Kronental
Indeed, for Wael Sghaier, the exterior of the neoclassical, postmodern Palacio resembles a fortress, barracks, an imperial city, or a prison. Inside, however, all is quiet: time stops and people are scarce [vu de l'extérieur, Le Palacio d'Abraxas ressemble une forteresse, une caserne, une cité impériale ou une prison].
In 2006, Noisy-le-Grand sought to demolish parts of the development. After being met by widespread resentment from the population of Espaces Abraxas, the decision was made to keep them standing — for now. Kronental's photographs demonstrate very clearly that in spite of any assumed architectural or urban failings, these houses have been appropriated by their residents. In spite of the atmosphere of emptiness that Kronental has consciously captured, houses have become homes.
Save this picture! Les Tours Aillaud, Cité Pablo Picasso, Nanterre, 2014. Image © Laurent Kronental
Save this picture! Les Tours Aillaud, Cité Pablo Picasso, Nanterre, 2013. Image © Laurent Kronental
Save this picture! Josette, 90 ans, Vision 80, Esplanade de La Défense, 2013. Image © Laurent Kronental
Save this picture! Denise, 81 ans, Cité Spinoza, Ivry-sur-Seine, 2015. Image © Laurent Kronental
Save this picture! Jean-Claude, 82 ans, Les Espaces d'Abraxas, Noisy-le-Grand, 2014. Image © Laurent Kronental
Save this picture! Cité Curial-Cambrai, 19e arrondissement Paris, 2015. Image © Laurent Kronental
Save this picture! Joseph, 88 ans, Les Espaces d'Abraxas, Noisy-le-Grand, 2014. Image © Laurent Kronental
Save this picture! Lucien, 84 ans, Les Espaces d'Abraxas, Noisy-le-Grand, 2014. Image © Laurent Kronental
Save this picture! Alain, 80 ans, Les Damiers, Courbevoie, 2013. Image © Laurent Kronental
Save this picture! Joseph, 88 ans, Les Espaces d'Abraxas, Noisy-le-Grand, 2014. Image © Laurent Kronental
Save this picture! Les Orgues de Flandre, 19e arrondissement Paris, 2014. Image © Laurent Kronental
Save this picture! Le Pavé Neuf, Noisy-le-Grand, 2015. Image © Laurent Kronental
Save this picture! Les Tours Aillaud, Cité Pablo Picasso, Nanterre, 2014. Image © Laurent Kronental
Save this picture! Jacques, 82 ans, Le Viaduc et les Arcades du Lac, Montigny-le-Bretonneux, 2015. Image © Laurent Kronental
These'monuments', living memories of their time, personify the fragile strength of a youth having blindly aged. —Laurent Kronental
As part of this photo-series, Laurent Kronental photographed a number of other large estates across the Parisian Suburbs alongside Les Espaces d'Abraxas and Le Pavé Neuf in Noisy-le-Grand, including: Les Tours Aillaud in Nanterre, Les Damiers in Courbevoie, La Cité du Parc and the Cité Maurice-Thorez in Ivry-sur-Seine, Les Arcades du Lac and Le Viaduc in Montigny-le-Bretonneux, Les Orgues de Flandre and La Cité Curial-Cambrai in the 19th Arrondissement of Paris.
References: francealumni.fr, Ricardo Bofill, Tourisme93, Le Monde
Futher reading: Le Monde: Lost Illusions of an Urban Utopia, Le Parisien, WikipediaColumbus Italian Club (Again)
Attempts World’s Largest Meatball
1,000-Pound Meatball To Break Guinness Record & Raise Money For Scholarships
COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Columbus Italian Club (CIC) will try for the second time to break the record for World’s Largest Meatball on Oct. 7-9 at the St. John’s Italian Festival in Italian Village.
“Despite coming up 94 pounds short to beat the world record last year, we attained the North American Record of 655.5 pounds and raised money for our scholarship fund,” said Chris Beardman, World’s Largest Meatball Chairman and CIC past President. “But this is going to be our year.”
A German organization holds the current world record of 749.5 pounds. The men of CIC vowed not to surrender without a fight, so this year they aim to shatter the record with a 1,000-pound ball of meat. Ingredients of CIC’s meatball will include 1,700 pounds of ground sirloin, onion, and dried spices, and chef Rismo Gualtieri adjusted his secret recipe to maximize his chance of winning.
“Our meatball’s going to make everyone’s mommas proud,” Gualtieri said.
Proceeds from last year’s attempt benefited the Columbus Italian Club’s Education Assistance Scholarship Program, which awards scholarships to deserving Central Ohio high school students of Italian descent. To date, the scholarship program has awarded nearly $200,000 to more than 150 Columbus area students.
CIC members will devote hundreds of hours in preparation for this event. A test run using the new recipe and cooking method will take place in late summer. The decision of whether the world record has been achieved will be announced on the night of Oct. 8, when the center of the meatball reaches 160 degrees.
For more information, please visit cicmeatball.com and columbusitalianfestival.com.
About The Columbus Italian Club
The Columbus Italian Club is a fraternal organization that was founded in 1978 to promote and preserve Italian culture and heritage in the Italian-American community. With more than 260 members, it encourages fellowship and networking through celebration of Italian heritage. The Columbus Italian Club Education Assistance Corporation is a nonprofit entity that assists Columbus area students in furthering their educational endeavors. Visit columbusitalianclub.org for more information.
Facebook: Click Here
Twitter: @CIC_Meatball
www.cicmeatball.com
www.columbusitalianfestival.com
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Contact:
Alexandra Kelley Fox: alexandra477@me.comAn iPad design concept (not affiliated with Apple). DoNews Technology columnist Michael Andrew and his team at The Michael Report say they have obtained photos and illustrations of the second-generation iPad Air from sources within Apple.
The report closely lines up with rumors we've heard about Apple's coming iPad, which is expected to debut on Oct. 16. Andrew didn't publish the pictures, but he did describe some of the design differences in as much detail as possible. Here's an overview of the changes outlined in his post:
The new iPad Air will reportedly come with Touch ID built into the home button, just as rumors have indicated.
It will also come in a gold color option, according to the report.
The new iPad is said to come with an 8-megapixel camera instead of the 5-megapixel camera on the first-generation iPad Air.
As expected, the report says it will run on an Apple A8 processor and will come with 2GB of memory as opposed to the 1GB of memory found in the current iPad.
Apple may get rid of the 16GB option and could instead offer 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB storage variants.
The design is said to be almost identical to the current iPad Air, but the new tablet will be 0.5mm thinner.
Expect to see one-row grill speakers rather than the two-row grill on the current iPad Air.
The mute/vibration switch is said to be completely gone to keep the design super slim. The volume buttons are also more recessed.Singer clashes with George Brandis: ‘This is me as an Aboriginal person telling you how an Aboriginal person feels and you’re telling me I don’t feel that way’
Q&A: Dan Sultan says Australia Day 'is racist' as he calls for date to be changed
Dan Sultan has asked Australian politicians to listen to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on changing the date of Australia Day, saying that 26 January is a date “that started the ongoing genocide of our people”.
Speaking on the ABC’s Q&A program, the Indigenous singer-songwriter, of Arrernte and Gurindji heritage, said Australia could not have a united national celebration on the anniversary of New South Wales being declared a British colony.
ABC Q&A (@QandA).@resourcefultype thinks we should have more monuments. George Brandis agrees. @JacquiLambie says add the truth to plaques #QandA pic.twitter.com/0eHhI0SHKj
“The fact of the matter is that it doesn’t include us, it excludes us.” he said. “It excludes anyone who has any type of sympathy or empathy towards our story, which is a hell of a lot of Australians. To call it Australia Day is wrong.”
Marion council’s push to scrap Australia Day ceremony unlikely to pass, mayor says Read more
Sultan made the comments in response to a question by a D’harawal Saltwater woman, Shannon Foster, in the wake of two Melbourne councils voting to scrap Australia Day celebrations and citizenship ceremonies out of support for the campaign to change the date.
The attorney general George Brandis, whose ministerial colleague Alex Hawke stripped those two councils of their right to perform any citizenship ceremonies in the wake of their Australia Day declarations, said there was a “natural logic” to marking the national day as “the point in time in which the Australia we now recognise, modern Australia, had its beginning”, while still reflecting on “those parts of our history that are dark passages”.
Jada Alberts (@jadaj) What an odd world it is when it's safer for my psychological stability to watch Game of Thrones than QandA.
That’s a problem, Sultan said, because it consigns those problems to history when issues including suicide and an over-representation in deaths in custody remained pressing issues for Indigenous Australians today.
“It’s a complicated issue but also very simple as well,” he said. “Does it include everyone or doesn’t it? No, it doesn’t. Don’t call it Australia Day.”
Sultan is featured on a song by the Indigenous hip-hop outfit AB Original, the “subtext” of which, Q&A’s host, Tony Jones, suggested, was that Australia Day was racist.
There was no subtext, Sultan said. “Australia Day’s always been racist … It’s pretty straight up about it … |
clearly a factor in Roseburg. The shooter was mad at the world because he was a still a virgin. If you are a 26-year-old virgin, you probably shouldn’t be angry at anybody but yourself. This theme parallels last year’s mass shooting in Isla Vista, California (six killed, fourteen injured). Don’t die like a boy, go out “like a man.”
The root behind all of this is the devaluation of the feminine, the hallmark of all patriarchal societies. Females are less than fully human. While this predates the demotion of Eve from the Mother of Humanity to the Original Sinner (that BITCH!) by ancient Hebrew priests, it is not universal. Despite the mythology of the essential nature of male dominance, not all cultures are patriarchal and cultures get less patriarchal the farther you go back in time. Cavemen did not rule cavewomen. Hunting and gathering societies were mostly gathering and evidence relays that men and women shared in both tasks.
There is a lot to be said about patriarchy but here are two quick ways that men can keep power over the women who gave them life.
1. Create a god in your image. For most of our human history, men and women have bowed down to goddesses, the source of life. But early nomadic tribes and their warrior gods invaded goddess cultures, like Crete and Anatolia. Over thousands of years, goddesses were replaced with gods and then just one male God. And as Mary Daly said in 1973’s Beyond God the Father, “If God is man, then man is God.”
I’m going to write more about this important point later, just know if you worship a god who has a penis instead of a vagina, you are part of patriarchy. Also, is your god circumcised and if so, who did it and where is God’s foreskin now? (Sorry, I wonder about these things.)
2. Devalue all things associated with females, whether it’s ovaries or reproductive rights. Women are “girls” and men who you want to rank over are “ladies.” If a guy is being a pain, call him a little bitch (or the weirdly homoerotic “my bitch”) and accuse him of being on the rag. Call him anything to do with feminine anatomy; fallopian face, labial loser and the ever useful “pussy.” (The hatred of vaginas by these guys really makes you wonder.)
There is a right-winger who posts a lot of crap on my Facebook page. This is a guy who thinks Russian dictator Vladmir Putin is a bad ass and Syrian mass murderer Bashar Al-Assad is a hero. When I called him out on his sexist language he posted an image of a woman in t-shirt that said, “Obama is a pussy.” My response was, “You must really hate pussy.” He seemed confused.
This is the weird conflicted psyche of the misogynist. In devaluing the feminine you end up looking kinda, well, gay. You think women and “pussies” suck. So what DO you like? Men and cocks? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Holla!) I’m quite fond of the vagina and find it infinitely fascinating, so if you call me a pussy, I will take it as a great compliment. And when I think of the awesome gay people I know and what they have to go through because of asshole bigots, well, I couldn’t think of a better thing to be called. When I hear, “That’s so gay,” I translate into “Fabulous!!”
But of course, that’s not what the He-Man Woman Haters mean. If you Google “Obama is a pussy,” you also find plenty of images of Obama as a female. That’s the put-down. Female, like your mother/wife/daughter, is the worst thing you can be. Patriarchy makes these boys and men so sexually confused, no wonder so many of them are deathly afraid of cunnilingus. According to the male God bibles, that’s nothing but a dirty devil hole. “She was bleeding from her whatever!”
One more story. Before my neighborhood got the shit gentrified out of it, there was a brothel on my block. A pimp named Freddie hung out there and the license plate on his Caddy just read “TNB.” One day I asked, “Hey Freddie, what does TNB stand for.” He answered, “That’s my street name, Trust No Bitch.” Without thinking of the time Ted punched me in the face, I replied, “Oh, does that include your mother?” That was the day I learned you don’t talk feminism with a pimp.
How anyone with a daughter can hate the feminine so much is beyond me. You have to feel sorry for any woman who is married to a guy who hates pussy and tells other men they are going to be his bitch. Don’t these men know they came into the world through a vagina? (Shout out to my C-Section peeps!) What happened to them that they loathe females so much? Oh, that’s right, they grew up in a patriarchal culture. Eve, that nasty-ass skank biotch.
I have a baby daughter. Besides the fact that keeping her vagina healthy is an important agenda item, I’ve also learned to not wake her when she is blissfully sleeping. Since the bathroom is next to the nursery, one way to achieve this is to pee sitting down. (Trust me on this one.) When you pee sitting down, you can check your email or read a few paragraphs in the latest issue of Men’s Health. It’s kind of a cool thing. (Sitting down is also handy if you are drunk, hungover, really tired, or drunk.) But I also eat quiche, watch Ellen Degeneres, sometimes I wear pink and always call myself a feminist. When I was a boy, I might have been afraid of some of that. (I think a lot of “disco sucks” crap I was into as a teenager was driven by fear of the feminine.) Fortunately, I grew up.
The point of all this is that if boys and men started listening to women instead of hating them or only viewing them as sexual objects to be cum upon, they might learn some important lessons about how to live. All week I’ve been asking people to ask why boys and men go on these shooting sprees. Perhaps the better question would be to ask why girls and women don’t go on shooting sprees. Stop calling people pussies and start really hearing what people with pussies have to offer.
I don’t have all the answers, just this thought. Maybe men should just sit down and shut up and have a nice pee.
Note: Plenty of liberal guys engage in “bro talk.” You don’t have to be a right-winger to fear the power of pussy.
The following book was mentioned in this post and is available at Powell’s Books by clicking on the cover below.
AdvertisementsThat caught Dr. Bada’s attention, because the addition of steam seemed to replicate what might have existed in lagoons and tidal pools around volcanoes.
This spring, Adam P. Johnson, a graduate student at Indiana University who was visiting Dr. Bada’s laboratory on an internship, jumped on the opportunity to work on the vials, although the material did not look remarkable. “They were just brown residue at the bottom of old vials,” Mr. Johnson said.
In his 1953 paper, Dr. Miller had reported that he had detected five amino acids produced by the original apparatus. Mr. Johnson’s work, using modern techniques, revealed small amounts of nine additional amino acids in those samples. In the residues from the apparatus with the steam injector, the scientists detected 22 amino acids, including 10 that had never before been identified from the Miller-Urey experiment.
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“It just opens our eyes,” Dr. Bada said. “It’s still revealing new things. What else is there that we haven’t found out from this experiment?”
The findings by Mr. Johnson, Dr. Bada and other collaborators appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
Although scientists no longer think that the early atmosphere resembled the gases Dr. Miller used, the gases released by volcanic eruptions do have similar properties. The scientists hypothesize that the sparks split apart water molecules in the steam, enabling a wider range of chemical reactions to take place.
In recent years, the Miller-Urey experiment lost importance. The discovery of amino acids in meteorites suggested that the building blocks of life came from space, eliminating the need for finding chemical processes that could produce them on Earth. Some scientists have since suggested places like the ocean bottom as most likely to be where the building blocks first came together as a living organism.
But, Dr. Bada said, the amount of amino acids that could have rained from the skies is still unclear, and the tidal pools would have been a place where the amino acids could have accumulated in concentrations, enabling more complex reactions to occur.
“My take on this is you want to consider everything,” Dr. Bada said. “If you can have a homegrown synthesis, perhaps by this mechanism we’ve described here, complemented by stuff falling from space, well, you’ve got a really rich inventory of compounds to work with and set the stage for the origin of life.”Where can I find a great steak at Disney World? How about a fabulous vegetarian meal? A beer? Live Music? My Lost Dining Reservations?
After years of answering questions from our readers, we at the DFB know the information that you most need to make your Disney Dining worry-free. We’ve been covering frequently asked questions here on DFB for a while, but today we’re answering a few of our favorites!
When you need Disney Dining Details at-a-glance, we’ve got the answers to your questions in a quick and easy format in our The DFB Guide to Walt Disney World® Dining 2013 e-Book so you can find the deets that you need right away. Scroll down to the bottom of this post for details on discounts!
Let’s take a look at a few of our favorite FAQs…
5 Frequently Asked Disney Dining Questions
Here are five frequently asked questions about Disney food that we’ve included in the DFB Guide to lead you to fantastic finds!
1. Where can I find a great steak in Disney World?
We recommend Yachtsman Steakhouse, Le Cellier Steakhouse, Jiko, Shula’s Steak House, and Flying Fish Café. Lesser known spots we also suggest include Teppan Edo and Kona Cafe! Yes, you can find a great steak in Walt Disney World!
2. Where can I find a good beer in Disney World?
Craft beers are becoming more widely available at Disney’s bars, lounges, and restaurants. Just a few of our favorites include featured craft beers in Epcot’s Italy pavilion, The Wave at Disney’s Contemporary Resort, and Raglan Road Pub in Downtown Disney. Beer is made on-premise at Big River Grill and Brewing Works on Disney’s Boardwalk.
Of course, don’t forget to visit Rose and Crown Pub in Epcot for a great British beer list!
If you just need a six-pack for your hotel room fridge, your Disney World resort store will sell them (though they may be outrageously priced).
To save a few bucks, venture to one of the two Hess Stations on Walt Disney World property. One is across from the Boardwalk Resort; the other is across from Downtown Disney and is within easy walking distance.
3. Where can I find a fabulous vegetarian meal in Disney World?
The Animal Kingdom Lodge offers two restaurants with great vegetarian options. At Boma, the buffet has a wide selection of items for vegetarians. Nearby in Kidani Village, the menu at Sanaa has an entire section devoted to vegetarian selections.
There are great counter service options too. Sunshine Seasons and Tangierine Cafe in Epcot offer some unique meals. Look for the pressed vegetable sandwich at several locations in Disney’s Hollywood Studios. It’s delicious!
4. Where can I find live music in Disney World?
Music lovers should head to House of Blues and Raglan Road in Downtown Disney, and Biergarten in Epcot!
For music with comedy, Ye-haa Bob’s piano act at the River Roost Lounge in the Port Orleans Riverside resort is a lot of fun. Jellyrolls at the BoardWalk entertains with live dueling pianos! We recommend checking their entertainment schedules to make sure you don’t miss any of the good stuff.
5. Where can I find my lost dining reservations in Disney World?
It happens. While riding Tower of Terror, lining up for character greetings, and shopping for souvenirs, you suddenly can’t remember what time you booked dinner.
Take a break from the fun and head to the nearest Guest Relations location or visit your Resort’s Front Desk. Not only will they clue you in on your dinner time, they can also print out your entire dining itinerary!
More Great Finds
There are lots more of these FAQs in our DFB Guide, where we have everything you need to know about dining in Walt Disney World. In addition to these tips, we include dozens of frequently asked questions in The DFB Guide to Walt Disney World® Dining 2013 — like where to find character meals for boys, a place to watch a televised game, and more!
Now’s the time to check out The DFB Guide to Walt Disney World® Dining 2013 for answers to your questions about Disney dining.
Our extensive Frequently Asked Questions section will help you make the most of your dining experiences at Walt Disney World! Click here to get your copy of The DFB Guide to Walt Disney World® Dining 2013 E-book — and use code 2013 for an extra $4 discount for a limited time!
What questions do you have about Disney dining? Share your questions in the comments below and we’ll get them answered on the blog or in next year’s E-Book!The only time Justin Trudeau had for an interview on a recent Thursday was over breakfast at his Ottawa hotel. Under his suit jacket, the sleeve buttons on his dress shirt were undone. His necktie was knotted, but left loose over an open top button. His mane of black hair was tousled. Even in genteel disarray, even dressed more or less like a couple hundred of his parliamentary colleagues, the 40-year-old Liberal MP for the Montreal riding of Papineau looked like a million bucks.
I showed up late, slumped into a seat, ordered an omelette. I’ve known Trudeau for nine years, never well. Trudeau wondered why I’d convened this little meeting. “Your first note to me said you’d need three minutes to chat. Now it’s breakfast and your photo department is calling my office looking to take pictures. What’s up?”
There was no point beating around the bush. It’s not as though he hadn’t heard the question before.
“We’re preparing two stories. John Geddes is going to do a reported piece on the current state of the Liberal party. And I’m gonna write a piece wondering why Justin Trudeau isn’t running for the Liberal leadership.”
Trudeau’s eyes rolled and he half-smiled—here we go again. And then his face changed. He stared past the tabletop into the middle distance. His expression darkened. He looked stricken.
“Nobody knows better than I do what the pressures of party leadership can do to a young family,” he said. “It tore mine apart.”
He wasn’t yet six years old when his father and mother separated in 1977. Sacha was just short of four, Michel less than two.
Today Justin Trudeau and his wife, broadcaster Sophie Grégoire, have two children, Xavier, five, and Ella-Grace, three. As it stands, Trudeau’s career has him travelling often to raise money for his beleaguered party. He was in Kingston, Ont., the night before I met him. But at least now he gets to spend weekends in Montreal.
“I want to spend more time with my family” is, of course, the classic exit line for men and women who need to escape a career in politics. Coming from Trudeau, it sounds more definitive than that. “Just the investment in time... ” he said, his voice trailing off.
So it’s definitive then? Well, never say never. As he discusses the challenge facing any Liberal leader over the next few years—“Bob Rae or anyone else”—Trudeau becomes progressively more animated. For a guy who was raised at 24 Sussex Dr., he turns out to be surprisingly attracted to a fixer-upper.
Sure, for three [UPDATE: two, actually. Sorry about that — pw] elections in a row, in 2006, 2008 and 2011, the Liberals have broken their previous record for lowest-ever share of the popular vote. Sure, they’ve never had fewer MPs than the 34 who limped away from the debacle last May 2. (They’re up to 35 since Lise St-Denis defected from the NDP four months ago.) “All the reasons people give me why I shouldn’t be leader”—the long odds, the shattered aura of inevitability, the pressure from Conservatives and New Democrats consciously executing a squeeze play against the Liberals from either side—“those are the very reasons that make the whole idea tremendously exciting to me.”
And on top of everything else, there’s the tantalizing prospect of a chance to do something even his father never accomplished, if only because nobody in his father’s generation ever had to.
“Whatever else he did, Pierre Trudeau was not a re-inventor of the Liberal Party.”
So will he run? Not now. Probably not soon. But maybe not never. In the meantime perhaps some of you are wondering whether I’ve lost my mind for even raising the notion that Justin Trudeau could be cut out for something more than late-night talk radio. Isn’t he just a clothes horse? A legacy pledge?
And yet. Take the name out of things for a second. If this guy’s name was Joe Smith, the notion that Liberals might turn to him would be a no-brainer. He has won and won again in a riding the Bloc Québécois used to hold, in a province where the Liberals have been picked apart by the Bloc and then the NDP. He is effortlessly bilingual. When he stands in a room, conversation stops. In a party whose woes include a punishing inability to raise money commensurate with the challenges it faces, he is a fundraising machine.
As for the name, it binds Trudeau inextricably to an enduringly popular aspect of the Liberal legacy that Stephen Harper and Thomas Mulcair, for their own reasons, won’t touch with a barge pole: the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“People still think there’s sort of a debate around the Charter that politicos go into,” Trudeau said. “And I get wrapped up in it too from time to time. ‘Oh, Justin’s trying to defend his father’s legacy.’ The debate is done on the Charter. It defines Canadians. It defines Canada. People, even in Quebec, are 88 per cent supportive of the Charter, even if they get reminded every now and then, ‘We were left out of the Constitution!’ ” (The number comes from a CROP poll last autumn for Idée Fédérale, a Quebec federalist group.)
As Trudeau’s entire brief career has demonstrated—he was elected for the first time in 2008—everything about him, from his name to his grin, irritates a lot of people. As he has also shown again and again, those people are outnumbered by others who rather like him.
Since our breakfast was turning into a string of blunt questions, I gave him another. Is Justin Trudeau cut out for serious work?
“Listen. There are two groups of people out there. People who know me and who’ve worked with me and people who haven’t. That’s the only distinction that matters. What did people say when I said I would run for a hotly contested nomination in Papineau? ‘Ridiculous. He’ll never win.’
“And then against Vivian Barbot,” the popular Bloc incumbent? “ ‘Are you kidding? It’s impossible. He’s totally full of himself and delusional. He’ll never win.’
“Even in this silly boxing match, people said, ‘He’s so out of his depth, it’s ridiculous. He doesn’t even know what he’s doing.’ Somehow I keep being strangely lucky.”
The silly boxing match, of course, was his nationally televised charity fight against Patrick Brazeau, a young Conservative senator built like a brick wall. Brazeau came at Trudeau determined to take him apart. He left with a bloody nose after Trudeau won a TKO in the third round.
“He hit me with an abandon and a strength in those first moments that honestly I hadn’t felt before. It wasn’t painful. It was just surprising and disconcerting. I was like, ‘Okay. This is not the way it was supposed to go.’ And that was the only moment where I sort of went, ‘Okay. This might not have been as good idea as I thought it was.’ And then as soon as it started it stopped. Suddenly my counters were landing and he was sort of empty.”
And there were still two rounds left to fight. Trudeau’s height and reach advantage did the rest.
The only lesson from all of this for Trudeau’s political future, perhaps, is that he had trained for precisely this sort of confrontation, and that he had taken pains to ensure his confidence was earned. In Montreal he sparred with experienced boxers who were built like Brazeau, small and hard-packed. When Sophie started to think this was a bad idea, he invited her to come watch him prepare.
“My wife couldn’t get past the size of his arms, and just what a scary mofo he was. And that generally delighted me. But I told Sophie, ‘Look, come in and watch me train one time. I’ll take on someone who has the exact same build as Pat, a little more boxing experience, and I’ll show you that I can hold my own.’ No problem. So she eventually came around to trusting me on this.”
Brazeau went away disappointed. So, Trudeau thinks, did some of his own friends. “I think a lot of people close to me figured it was good because it would be a little lesson in humility for me.” No such luck.
But it isn’t aerobic endurance that Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff were lacking when they went to the electoral mat in 2008 and 2011. It’s as though recent Liberal leaders have lost the key that used to unlock the Canadian electorate for generations of Liberal leaders. The current Liberal caucus, led for the moment by Bob Rae, seems barely coherent. Eleven of its MPs are from Ontario, 12 from the four Atlantic provinces. The party’s electorates in its last two strongholds have almost nothing to say to each other. Perhaps the Liberals have noticed this. The Conservatives sure have. The party is essentially defined at one end by the pieties of Cabbagetown sophisticates, at the other by the teetering economics of seasonal employment insurance.
“And a few anglos in Montreal who have no other choice,” Trudeau said with a smirk, extending the harsh analysis before his tone changed and he set about refuting it. “No. There’s more to the Liberal electorate than that, obviously. In our last election we got over 2½ million people across the country to vote for us. But where you fall into the trap of trying to identify the electorate is, if we were to start to focus that way, we’re already beaten.”
The Harper Conservatives are masters at identifying highly motivated slices of the electorate and appealing to them, Trudeau said. “And the choice the NDP made in Thomas Mulcair, while a smart choice in terms of getting someone who can be a counterweight to Stephen Harper, exacerbates that.”
For the Liberals to start sifting for their own highly motivated micro-electorates would be a mug’s game, Trudeau argues. “As I know from 30 years of fighting against sovereignists in Quebec, if you allow them to set the terms of the debate, you’ve already lost. And if the debate becomes about who can better identify the niche groups that are going to vote for you, the Conservatives have us beat. There’s no question about it. They have the information, they have the data, they have the capacity, they have the targeting, they have the networks, they have power. So they can do it.”
The alternative is to appeal to people across their narrow concerns. Trudeau claims to see, in last month’s surprise victory of Alison Redford’s arch-moderate Progressive Conservatives over Danielle Smith’s conservative Wildrose Alliance, the possibility that such an approach could work. “What we saw with the Alberta election is, mainstream Canadians, to use an imperfect word, are deeply worried. They woke up in Alberta. And that’s all it was. People woke up and said, ‘We’re not the lake-of-fire rednecks that people are painting us to be.’ Albertans are not that. Same people who voted for Naheed Nenshi,” the similarly none-too-conservative mayor of Calgary. “That was not an accident. Alberta has got, just like everyone, a tremendously strong set of ideas and values about Canadian diversity and Canadian strength. And the mainstream is just waiting to be not polarized and not made cynical.”
This may sound naive. It probably sounds naive. Trudeau hurried to sound less naive. “Any politician who’s going to overcome that cynicism has a huge job. I used to say in the last election that before we can convince Canadians that we have the best platform, we have to re-convince Canadians that politics should be in the business of shaping the future of Canada. And we didn’t get the first part done. People don’t believe that any politician is any different from any other one.”
So how, precisely, would a weakened and internally incoherent Liberal party do better next time? “My sense is that leaders will not be able to do it alone. It has to be led from a movement, a team that involves more than just the leader. A lot of strong voices that remove the emphasis a little bit on leader.”
So it would involve the Hypothetical Nameless Future Liberal Leader, with Justin Trudeau at his or her side? “Yes. I plan on being extremely visible in the next few years. But almost in a way of de-emphasizing that focus on leadership that we have.”
So the rail-thin, lion-maned clothes horse with dimples like moon craters, a giant-killing right hook and a weapons-grade surname will position himself as the loyal helpmate of a post-leadership-fixation Liberal Party? It’s so crazy it just might work.
“One of the things I said publicly when we first appointed Bob Rae to be interim leader and people said, ‘Oh, do you think he’s going to stick to it?’—I said it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. If we don’t have a leadership candidate who can hold Bob to his promise, or defeat Bob, then we need Bob to be the leader. It’s a self-regulating system.”
By the same logic, of course, if Bob Rae isn’t cut out to be the leader, and it really is a self-regulating system, somebody else should move into the slot. Justin Trudeau is three years younger than Stephen Harper was when Harper became leader of the Canadian Alliance. But he won’t entertain the possibility that his time is near.
What does Sophie think of all this? “She is my toughest critic, no doubt. She holds me in check and keeps me grounded, every step of the way. Pretty much whenever I make the newspapers or I’m trending, and people across the capital are rolling their eyes, saying ‘What did Justin Trudeau do now?’ you know I’m getting an earful from my wife, who is inevitably upset. Or concerned.”
People used to say she should be the one in politics, not him. “She is in politics. She really dislikes politics. Intensely. Her sense of service is as finely tuned as mine is, in the sense of giving to this country and this world that has given so much to us. But most days she’d rather I was running an NGO than sitting in this House. I have to keep telling her and reminding her—and reminding myself—that the biggest NGO, pick whichever one you want, is still at the mercy and whim of sovereign governments and parliaments.”
So the most prominent Liberal in the country remains an admirer of governments’ ability to get things done. His faith in the ability of the Canadian people to rise above difference, to perceive and work toward an agreed-upon notion of the common good, remains. He’s fascinated by the challenges his party faces. He’s genetically connected to the last distinct brand advantage his party has, the Charter of Rights. And he’s shown a knack for surprising victories against long odds.
There’s an obvious solution to all this. But Justin Trudeau says it’s not his time. Yet.Zynga Just Bought OMGPOP for $200 Million
Looks like OMGPOP, the company behind the overnight sensation Draw Something, will end up at Zynga, after all. The game maker had been talking to several suitors over the last few weeks. But as TechCrunch reported earlier, it has been in serious discussions with Mark Pincus and company for the past few days.
Now Zynga has scheduled a call for a “news announcement” for 3 pm ET. I’m going to go out on a short limb and assume it’s to formally acknowledge that they have bought the company.
My sources tell me the purchase price will be in the neighborhood of $200 million, perhaps a bit higher. The company had raised around $16 million over the past five years.
(Update: No limb necessary. It’s a done deal, according to people with firsthand knowledge. Here’s more detail on the price: $180 million, plus another $30 million or so in employee-retention payments, I’m told. Don’t know about cash/stock split.)
No comment from Zynga. I haven’t heard back from OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter.
Zynga will get a New York-based team of about 40 people, and a series of games that OMGPOP has produced over the past few years. But the obvious target here is Draw Something, a sort-of social Pictionary game played on iPhones and Android handsets.
The game is astonishingly popular, and the iPhone app sits atop the iTunes “top paid” and “top free” lists, which is very unusual. Even more unusual: It is also the top-grossing app at iTunes, based in large part on in-app purchases made by players. People familiar with the company tell me it has recently been netting around $250,000 a day from the game — that’s after Apple takes its 30 percent cut.
Zynga is a Facebook games powerhouse, and has been steadily acquiring smaller companies with hits on their hands. Two years ago, it paid $53 million in cash and stock for Newtoy, the company behind Words With Friends. OMGPOP has played with Facebook games itself, but while Draw Something is Facebook’s “most popular” game, it’s not really a Facebook game at all. Intead, users log in with their Facebook credentials, but play the game on standalone apps.
Draw Something’s astonishing success may have made it tempting for the OMGPOP folks and their backers to consider taking a large funding round and keep going on their own, a la Rovio and Angry Birds. On the other hand, just a few months ago, OMGPOP had been thinking about raising money under vastly different circumstances — “things did not look awesome,” says one investor — and then Draw Something hit, out of nowhere.
“No one had any idea that this would take off, and no one knows why it did,” says another OMGPOP backer. Now no one has to figure it out — they’ve taken all the risk off the table.In the season 27 premiere of “The Simpsons,” Homer and Marge go through a trial separation, with Homer finding a new love interest in Candace, a pharmacist voiced by Lena Dunham.
Unlike Marge, Candace isn’t so straight-laced. Midway through the episode, she and Homer have a wild night out on the town, where they mix alcohol with prescription drugs, prompting a trippy scene where Homer mingles with Candace’s tattoos.
Soundtracking this druggy scene is Spacemen 3’s “Big City (Everybody I Know Can be Found Here),” the first song off the influential British psych band’s final 1991 album, “Recurring.” The song choice for that scene came from writer J. Stewart Burns, who recently discovered the band and thought it was a good fit – so he wrote the music direction into the script.A Gamebook, at your Service
By the Crowns of the Seven, we are FUNDED!
Clan-folk, we have locked our shields, and now face the great enemy with confidence, skill and bravery. This is the hour of our victory; this is the hour when our foes fall!
None of this was possible without you. Your great generosity, your courage against adversity and the Dwarves you have recruited to our banners are the reasons you will hold a gamebook like no other this year. We thank those that got into a tavern brawl with Moderation, and won. We thank those that drank Old Boar Spit to the last, bitter dregs. And we thank those that wisely did not do either of those things.
Well done, we say. Very well done.
We are already 30% to the first Stretch Goal, and beyond that we stand ready to craft more story, build a better book and have the artisans illustrate its pages to be fit for Kings. Let us sound the horns: our triumph is at hand!Editor's note: The author is director of the Kayapo Project of the International Conservation Fund of Canada.
The destruction of the Amazon in Brazil can be seen by satellite: Where logging roads have spread their tentacles and ranchers have expanded their grazing, all is brown.
Beginning in the early 1980s, these photos from space lost more and more green, so that by 2004 the destruction seemed unstoppable. Brazil's deforestation rate had reached an alarming 27,000 square kilometers (nearly 17,000 square miles) per year.
But stop it did—not everywhere, but at the borders of what appears from space to be a green island the size of a small country. The brown spreads around this protected zone in the southern Xingu river basin of Brazil, but doesn't penetrate.
These are the borders of the lands of indigenous tribes.
A Lesson for Environmentalists
The massive green island is comprised of ten legally ratified indigenous territories totaling 35 million acres (14 million hectares). The forest is home to roughly 7,000 Kayapo Indians and, to the south, another 5,500 Indians from 14 different groups.
(Read "Kayapo Courage" in National Geographic magazine.)
For those who want to protect the Amazon, there's a lesson here. How do relatively few indigenous people manage to keep the chainsaws and bulldozers at bay over a vast area of pristine forest?
Legal protections are part of the answer: Threatened by ranchers, loggers, and gold miners on their borders, the Kayapo fought for and won official recognition of their lands in the 1980s and 1990s. (Their southern neighbors were already living in a smaller protected area, the Xingu Indigenous Park, established in the 1960s.)
But this region of the southeastern Amazon is like the Wild West, a territory lacking proper governance. Violent conflict over land, illegal logging and gold mining, fraudulent land deals, and other corruption are rampant. Laws are not protection enough.
Understanding the Enemy
Some native tribes have staged protests, pressured the government, and fought on the ground to secure their rights. Some have also formed alliances with environmental and indigenous-rights organizations, which have helped them to form their own nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), enabling them to enlist further outside backing.
One example: Overflights of Kayapo territory in recent years, funded by outside NGOs, spotted gold miners in a remote area. After government inaction, the outside partners equipped a Kayapo expedition with boats, motors, fuel, GPS, and radio.
In July, several dozen Kayapo warriors traveled more than 200 kilometers (124 miles) by boat and on foot to strike at the illegal mining camps. They destroyed the mining equipment and pressured the government to send helicopters to take the captured miners away.
NGOs have also supported initiatives to help the Kayapo become economically more self-sufficient. These include a program to harvest and sell hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of Brazil nuts, giving families needed income and reducing pressure to allow in loggers and miners in return for cash.
New Threats
The Amazon rain forest is the greatest expression of life on Earth. It is home to about a third of our planet's terrestrial life forms, cycles about one-quarter of the Earth's freshwater, and plays a key role in absorbing carbon and moderating climate.
The need to remain vigilant and engaged is constant. Destruction of rain forest continues, and the powerful agriculture, mining, and logging lobbies in Brazil are proposing amendments to the 1988 constitution that would, in effect, remove legal protections from indigenous lands.
More outside assistance and deeper alliances with the indigenous tribes of the Amazon are urgently needed.
Click on the links below to learn more about what you can do to help save Amazon rain forest and indigenous cultures.
NGOs that are dedicated to protecting the Amazon and indigenous rights in Brazil:Obamacare was bad enough – a deplorable rationing scheme to enrich insurers, drug companies and large hospital chains.
Trumpcare makes things far worse. Family subsidies to help low-income households without employer or VA coverage are slashed to $2,000 – $4,000, largely based on age.
Insurers can charge older Americans up to five times more than younger ones – making coverage, or enough of it, unaffordable for millions not eligible for Medicare.
Medicaid as an open-ended entitlement is ended for the nation’s poor. States will receive allotted amounts of federal funding as a lump-sum block grant with few restrictions – giving them the option of aiding their poor residents or restricting it, perhaps diverting some of the funds for other purposes.
Over the next 10 years, Medicaid for the nation’s most vulnerable will be slashed by $880 billion. Millions of poor households will increasingly be denied vital healthcare when they most need it for expensive treatments.
If continuous coverage is interrupted for any reason, insurers can impose a 30% surcharge on premiums to restore it.
States can opt out of federal mandates, prohibiting higher premiums for emergency services, maternity care, and for individuals based on their health status, namely pre-existing conditions.
Insurers cannot |
They also determine which ones are best-placed to grow.Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE on Friday declared that President Obama was born in the United States — but refused to take questions on the issue and blamed Democrat Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails County GOP in Minnesota shares image comparing Sanders to Hitler Holder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' MORE for starting the “birther” controversy.
Trump only spoke about Obama’s birthplace more than 20 minutes into an event at his new hotel in Washington, D.C.
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Cable news networks covered the event live, and broadcast 20 minutes of veterans who support Trump lauding his politics.
When Trump finally spoke about the issue his campaign had promoted, he was brief.
“Hillary Clinton in her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it,” Trump said. “President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.”
With that, Trump left over the shouts of reporters seeking to get him to answer questions.
The crowd sought to drown out the reporters by chanting "U.S.A., U.S.A."
On cable news, reporters and anchors ripped into the Republican presidential nominee for his handling of the event.
CNN anchor Jake Tapper said Trump had “rickrolled” the media, referring to an online joke in which viewers are promised one thing, and then click to see a video of the 1980s British singer Rick Astley.
Other reporters criticized Trump on television for pulling a con job on the event by not answering questions.
“We got played, again, by the Trump campaign, which is what they do,” CNN's John King said on air. “He got a live event broadcast for some 20 minutes.”
Trump had been expected to take questions as he typically engages with the press in these types of settings. And Trump himself had telegraphed that he would address the birther issue after he refused to answer a question on Thursday about whether Obama was born in Hawaii.
Trump repeatedly questioned whether Obama was born in the United States in 2011, which eventually led the president to release a copy of his birth certificate.
At the 2011 White House correspondents’ dinner, Obama ridiculed Trump over the issue as the businessman sat in the audience.
In 2012, Trump tweeted that an “extremely credible source” reached out to tell him the president faked his birth certificate. The next year, he implied the death of a Hawaiian official could be part of a cover up.
The issue simmered up to the surface on a few occasions during his White House bid. During a July 2015 interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Trump said he still did not know where Obama was born.
Trump’s refusal to answer a question on Thursday gave it new life and forced his campaign to issue a statement that Obama was born in the United States.
Trump is now casting himself as the person who proved Obama was born in the U.S. while suggesting Clinton was behind asking the questions.
A leaked 2007 memo from a top Clinton aide noted Obama's "lack of American roots," but there is no record of Clinton or her campaign saying anything to publicly stoke speculation. The Trump campaign's statementon Thursday night cited the memo.
Obama himself weighed into the issue on Friday, saying he was “pretty confident” he was born in the United States and urging the candidates to move on to more important issues.
The talk of whether the first African-American president was really born in the United States has offended many black Americans, and the new controversy comes amid pained efforts by Trump to reach out to African American voters.
He is far behind Clinton in polls of blacks, and fell into an altercation this week with a black pastor in Detroit.
Chatting with reporters before Trump’s remarks, Republican National Committee chief strategist Sean Spicer wouldn’t say whether he thought the issue would become a distraction for the Trump campaign.
Spicer added that Friday’s already-scheduled event would be a good venue to address the comments because he had a “captive audience.”Cities of varying climates, creeds and cultures are beginning to show an interest in urban cycling, prompted by the same all-pervasive global issues that threaten all of civilisation. This is no different in Miami, a city famous for its celebrities and supercars. Cycling in Miami is gaining momentum.
Here an urban renaissance is quietly and slowly emerging, one that recognises the bicycle as the symbol of a future that is both livable and sustainable.
bike planner and proselytizer Mikael Colville-Andersen, purveyor of the myth that Copenhagen is the world’s most bike-friendly city, has recently visited Miami, to advise the city on how to most effectively raise levels of urban cycling.
Colville-Andersen suggests, like most cities, crucial to Miami’s transition will be on-street bike lanes separated from motorized traffic, by a curb, a slight pavement elevation or other barriers, and connected in a network that takes people places they need to go, safely and conveniently.
He claims that ‘If you build it, he said, cyclists will come out of the woodwork because of pent-up demand, as they have in city after city that’s taken the plunge.’
His company, Copenhagenize Design Co. has been tasked with providing plans for a bike network for Detroit and Long Beach, California, and Miami is likely to be next on the agenda.
On the surface, Miami, with its hospitable climate and gentle topography, is most amenable to cycling. But in fact it represents one of the most dangerous cities in which to cycle in the country. The preponderance of cars that has created such a dangerous climate for cyclists is not necessarily permanent. Car culture can be toppled.
Colville-Andersen elaborates his vision by suggesting that as streets and roads are designed solely for the swift conveyance of cars, they encourage speed and endanger pedestrians and cyclists. Instead, what is needed is a change of mindset, a paradigm shift, a reconception of streets as being hospitable spaces for all users.
This he backs up with the stark statistic that whereas a mile of road can move 1,300 people in cars in an hour, a mile of cycle track can move 5,900 cyclists.
From a landscape perspective, if an intricate network of cycle lanes was to be laid out across the city, it could also have significant effects on the urban heat island. Not only would the removal of vehicles lower temperatures, but the addition of trees to demarcate cycle paths would create the shade necessary for cycling in such a climate and absorb water from the tropical rainstorms. Essential in a city that suffers from flooding.
Along with thoughts of a more established network, plans are in place for facilities to encourage recreational cycling. Plan Z consists of a segregated, partially elevated cycle route that connects outdoor spaces to the city. Although this is more of a recreational trail, it will bolster the presence of cycling in Miami.
The important thing is that a dialogue is opening, a conversation is starting, and mindsets are shifting.
Check out Miami’s flourishing bike scene at: www.themiamibikescene.comSorry you have to keep hearing about it (I realise this column adds to the problem). More importantly, sorry it's taxing you $2000 every year even if you live in Gore. READ MORE:
Opinion: Everyone pays when politicians and planners can't work out what to do about the housing crisis.
I'm not exaggerating. Auckland's market costs us all by hiking mortgage rates for everybody.
Every three months the Reserve Bank Governor comes to Parliament and we interrogate him. Each time, Auckland housing comes up and he looks like somebody's cleaned out the Reserve Bank vault and he bears the bad news.
He's advised that Auckland's housing market is 40 per cent overvalued. A 'correction' from that height would be like wiping out the entire New Zealand Stock Exchange. Twice.
This week he confirmed that interest rates won't drop. (Again, he held them steady in April too.) There's no inflation and interest rates worldwide are at record lows. For every other reason he should cut rates. But then Aucklanders would borrow even more, sending house prices into outer orbit.
If mortgage rates were just one percentage point lower, the interest on a $200,000 mortgage that be $2000 a year lower. You would also probably see a lot more building and renovation work going on outside of Auckland. Meaning more jobs and more income generated.
Hopefully fellow Aucklanders will join in my apology because we are wholly responsible. Or, more specifically, Auckland politicians and planners are responsible.
If you had a dollar for every theory on Auckland house prices, you could almost buy one.
But one simple fact undercuts all others. Aucklanders built 50,000 houses in the 1990s. Over the last decade we built 40,000.
The population got much bigger, but we built fewer homes. After that it's simple economics. Demand grew. Supply shrunk. Prices exploded. Labour and National are both responsible.
Then came the blame. It was on foreigners, speculation, the lack of a capital gains tax. But speculation comes from shortage, or the justified belief there'll be one. Nobody speculates in Toyota Corollas because there seems to be an infinite supply of them. Unlike Auckland houses.
Meanwhile I've met a family in West Auckland who, along with their neighbours, own 50 hectares. It's enough for 500 homes but they're not allowed to build on it. They have services and there are no environmental problems except for a horse that would have to move.
The problem is they're on the wrong side of the Metropolitan Urban Limit – the council's line on the map past which thou shalt not build. Economist Arthur Grimes estimates the MUL makes residential land nine times more expensive.
It was a relief to hear Labour finally renounce the MUL. But it's taken years, and will their Green Party allies allow the city to grow? Another interesting thing is the family's daughter lives in a St Lukes leaky apartment. She'd like to build on her parents' land but she's not allowed. The family's situation pretty much sums up the Auckland housing market.
Generation after generation has built out and created new space to live. For no good reason the Auckland Council has decided it's time to stop the process, and it's hurting the whole country.
So, sorry for the trouble we've caused you. We promise we'll get our house in order. Just as soon as we find some political willpower.
Jacinda Ardern:
I agree David. Not only that, I agree vehemently.
The Reserve Bank this week had to make a trade-off between interest rates coming down, and the housing market in Auckland going bananas. They chose Auckland. It's indicative of how bad things have got, and that it's having a knock-on effect in other parts of the country.
But while we agree there's a problem, it's the solutions that we need to start getting in behind.
Yes, the urban growth boundary needs to go, but we need to replace it with a smarter approach to making room for growth. That means allowing more medium density in town centres and on transport routes, protecting areas of special value, and investment bonds to fund infrastructure that will make sure the ratepayer is not subsidising development in places where it is uneconomic.
But even that isn't enough. We need to build, and the scale of the building programme required will only be achieved if the Government steps up and instigates it. We have done it before, and we need to do it again.
And while that responds to our supply issues, we can also do something about demand. Nothing says to me that we have reached a tipping point than three of our major banks announcing that they will no longer lend to offshore buyers. The banks have done what our Government wouldn't.
While we are doing all these things, we also need a determined emergency response that puts a decent roof over the heads of the families who are living in cars and garages. And we need it now.
You call it a basket case, Steven Joyce calls it a "shortage in some areas." Let's call it what it is - a crisis- and deal with it that way. It's time to start rolling out solutions.That's the only way people will know that politicians are truly sorry.
- Sunday Star TimesP.K. Subban played a huge role in the Nashville Predators’ Game 1 win over the St. Louis Blues, with three points in the 4-3 win on Wednesday night.
It was a performance that probably irked some Blues fans, including one who went there.
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But the Blues, via their Twitter feed, shut down this troll rather emphatically.
Here’s the exchange from last night, during Game 1 in St. Louis:
Now, when your favorite team calls you out for lamenting the fact that the “black guy” is beating you in Game 1, you have three options, assuming that “apology” isn’t one for someone dropping a line like this:
1 – Delete and run.
2 – Double-down in it.
3 – Claim it’s a joke.
Our friend went with Door No. 3, and the Blues responded in kind.
Now, this type of thing can be seen on social media on any given game night, in any given sport. What’s notable here is that the Blues addressed it. Like, really addressed it.
And while no one expects the official accounts of NHL teams to police the Internet for racist and sexist and god-awful jokes at all times, it’s nice to see them step up and shut a few down.
—
Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.
MORE FROM YAHOO SPORTSA satellite image shows Hurricane Helene spinning in the Atlantic in 2006. Scientists say we could be entering a quiet era for Atlantic hurricanes. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)
This week is the typical peak of hurricane season, and it's been quiet this year with no big storms on the horizon.
Only two hurricanes — Danny and Fred — formed in the Atlantic basin so far this year, and neither came near the U.S. coast, according to the National Hurricane Center.
The Atlantic basin includes the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the Atlantic Ocean. Five tropical storms also formed, but only two — Ana and Bill — directly affected the U.S.
As forecast, El Niño wind patterns are tearing apart developing hurricanes, AccuWeather reported. El Niño is a natural warming of tropical Pacific Ocean water that affects weather around the world.
But the same El Niño has fueled the most active season on record in the Pacific Ocean with nine hurricanes, but none hit land, said hurricane expert Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University.
Quiet Atlantic hurricane seasons such as this year may become more commonplace, a new study says.
The study in the British journal Nature Geoscience said the Atlantic could be ending a 20-year stretch of unusually active hurricane seasons that began in 1995. This included 2004 and 2005, when Katrina battered the Gulf Coast.
Klotzbach, lead author of the study that came out Monday, said a natural cycle may be responsible for patterns of active or quiet hurricane seasons, and the Atlantic is now entering an off cycle.
The cycles often last 25-35 years, he said, and go back and forth between salty, warm ocean water and less salty, cooler ocean water.
Warmer, saltier water helps spur hurricanes, while chillier, less salty water brings fewer and weaker storms, Klotzbach said.
Weather scientists call it the thermohaline circulation ("thermo" means temperature and "haline" means salty).
Klotzbach said the U.S. could be entering a new, quieter period, similar to the one that lasted from 1970 to 1994. But he said it is too soon to know for certain that one has begun.
Other scientists aren't sure about the study. "I think they're pretty much wrong about this,'' MIT meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel told the Associated Press. "That paper is not backed by a lot of evidence."
Emanuel, who also specializes in hurricane research, thinks the quiet period of hurricanes in the 1970s and '80s is connected to sulfur pollution and the following busy period is a result of cleaner air, the AP reported.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1UFaoXyArt needn’t be strictly visual. That’s how Katsuhiko Hibino sees things.
The artist once again serves as artistic director for this year’s Roppongi Art Night, which begins at 10 a.m. on Saturday and runs straight through until 6 p.m. on Sunday.
Moving beyond the visual, Hibino has decided on “Move Your Body” as the theme for this year’s event, encouraging an artistic approach that is decidedly physical.
“Look, eat, listen, touch, move, sit, think...” Hibino lists the senses and sentiments he has attempted to thread through all of Roppongi Art Night’s events this year. He says these actions should be interpreted as means of expression in and of themselves — turning the act of viewing art into a physically moving experience.
Visitors to Tokyo’s Roppongi district should be able to get a sense of the artistic celebration simply by being there.
The festival was launched in 2009 and began as a way for disparate museums and retail complexes to connect with one another. Now, Roppongi Art Night draws in shops, restaurants, schools and street performers in what is becoming a real boon to community spirit. Last year, around 830,000 people attended the performances, concerts, installations and exhibitions on offer.
“Art Night is about creating the conditions for art to become part of life,” says Fumio Nanjo, chairperson for the Roppongi Art Night Executive Committee. “Its message has become one of people getting to know about art, enjoying it more and building a society for the future where it is celebrated.”
Nanjo adds that Roppongi Art Night, like many other cultural events in the capital, should always be considered in the context of Tokyo’s successful bid for the 2020 Summer Olympics.
“Viewed from the perspective of the city, the presence of art and culture is hugely important,” he says. “These things will inspire many people to visit, and the city will inevitably prosper from that.”
In other words, the added infrastructure needed to host the huge number of visitors for the Olympics should be planned with artistic events also in mind. Roppongi Art Night has yielded positive results so far, creating a communal distraction from the daily monotony of city life and getting people out and about — even if just for the weekend.
Roppongi Art Night will mainly take place across four key sites: Roppongi Hills and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo Midtown, Suntory Museum of Art and The National Art Center, Tokyo.
Central to everything will be several works by Yoshinari Nishio and Kim Itoh, who will utilize material and fabric in their pieces, and address how people interact with them. For example, clothing is being donated to Nishio’s works from the community, and dressing-up is part of a street parade that Itoh will choreograph. Both of these works put visitors, rather than any single object or identifiable art piece, at the center of the weekend.
In Nishio’s “The Body in Connection Project,” the artist combines 2,000 or so pieces of fabric, which he uses to create shelter in the form of an inhabitable structure called the “People House.” The clothing construction will be set up in Roppongi for the duration of Art Night. An installation of buttons will also be hung at the National Art Center, while Tokyo Midtown will host other material-based works with a floral theme and will also be used in performances by other artists. Nishio draws on his experience of living in Kenya, which inspired him to work with exaggerated scale and colors. For Art Night, the fruits of this inspiration will be presented in very different and potentially unstable surroundings.
Itoh’s parade, “Float Flow Connect,” will begin with a send-off performance titled “Bongo Bongo Nageela,” originally written in 1988 by American choreographer William Forsythe as part of his award-winning ballet “Impressing the Czar.” The whole project was made possible thanks to the support of other artists and students from Japan Women’s College of Physical Education.
Originally trained as a dancer, Itoh won the Shuji Terayama Award in 2008 and has recently been working with students at Aoyama Gakuin University as well as lecturing as a visiting professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design.
Some of the other pieces to be featured include Taro Shinoda’s “Moon-reflecting communication technology” and Yu Sato’s “gorogoro Roppongi,” a large bamboo ball that will follow Itoh’s parade as it heads through Tokyo Midtown Courtyard. After Sato rolled the same ball down a hill in the Niigata Prefecture village of Azamihira, it became an annual event there during the Bon holiday season.
Other events taking place differ in scale. Some of the more intimate include “Feed Love” at Hills Cafe Space, where the artists and the public can meet and chat. It is being curated by artist Marije Vogelzang.
The artistic director’s own “Hibino Cup” and “Match Flag Project” herald this summer’s main sporting event, the FIFA World Cup in Brazil, with a Sunday soccer tournament and the creation of a large flag featuring the countries playing in the tournament.
The Roppongi Hills complex will host installations from teamLab, oxoxo [zero by zero] and Nonotak studio, the latter of which is made up of illustrator Noemi Schipfer and architect/musician Takami Nakamoto, who promise to provide some thought-provoking light installations. Staying with the theme of light is “Resuscitation of Light,” a talk session featuring cognitive scientist Kenichiro Mogi and artist Tatsuo Miyajima. The latter’s light installation, “Counter Void,” which was installed on Keyakizaka Street when Roppongi Hills opened in 2003, has been turned off since the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred in 2011.
Come morning, Roppongi Hills Mori Tower will open its roof deck for a sunrise viewing session, while Mori Art Museum will offer an extended viewing of its 10th anniversary exhibition, “Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal.”
Tokyo Midtown will be the place to be for an interesting mix of music and technology, with Atsushi Takahashi from Dragon Ash, Tabu Zombie from Soil & “Pimp” Sessions and Masato Shibata from Tsugaru Shamisen performing together. Guitarist Yuri Miyauchi and artist Akiko Nakayama will demonstrate their improvisational talents during a live-painting session. Media artists Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi will show off their latest works making full use of technology to “hack the human body” and manipulate it — for example, by using myoelectric sensors to turn a person’s face into a human drum machine.
Other highlights include 21_21 Design Sight’s ongoing show “Kome: The Art of Rice,” which will incorporate a Pecha Kucha talk event, and the National Art Center’s image mapping on its outer walls alongside its own show “The Power of Images.”
As with every year, the real challenge will be physically moving everyone from place to place on what is arguably the busiest night of the year in Roppongi. Making sure things go both safely and smoothly for attendees will be a test of the area’s infrastructure, something organizers will no doubt welcome it as a practice run ahead of future major events.
As Roppongi Art Night continues to grow in maturity and ambition, the event will hopefully evolve into Roppongi Art Nights. For now, however, the focus will be on the bustling area’s 32 consecutive hours of people, performances and art.
Roppongi Art Night begins at 10 a.m. on April 19 and runs until 6 p.m. on April 20. For more information on events, visit www.roppongiartnight.com.The first official recreational marijuana purchaser Sean Azzariti of Boston reaches for his first marijuana selection handed over by store owner Toni Fox at the 3D Cannabis Center in Denver on January 1, 2014. UPI/Gary C. Caskey | License Photo
HAMDEN, Conn., April 28 (UPI) -- While almost half of Colorado residents say they have used marijuana, only 15 percent say they have done so since the state legalized it Jan. 1, a new poll finds.
Generally, residents still support legalization, with 67 percent saying it has "not eroded the moral fiber" of Coloradoans, a Quinnipiac poll reported Monday. Only 30 percent said it has.
Half of those polled said they expect legalization to aid the criminal justice system, and 54 percent said that it has not made driving in Colorado more dangerous.
More than half, 53 percent, said legalization "increases personal freedoms in a positive way," and the same percentage expect the change to save the state money.
RELATED Brooklyn DA moves to decriminalize marijuana possession
But 52 percent said they would be less likely to vote for political candidates they know to use marijuana two to three times a week, while only 3 percent would be more likely to support them and 43 percent say it would make no difference.
More than one-third, 38 percent, said they are concerned about at least one friend or relative who appears to be overdoing marijuana.
Colorado became the first state this year to legalize marijuana for recreational use, allowing it to be sold openly -- and taxed.
"Colorado voters are generally good to go on grass, across the spectrum, from personal freedom to its taxpayer benefits to its positive impact on the criminal justice system," said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University poll. "But if you are a politician, think twice before smokin' them if you got 'em."
The polling institute at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., surveyed 1,298 registered voters in Colorado between April 15 and April 21. The margin of error for the entire sample is 2.7 percentage points.Calling out a politician doesn't make you gladiatorial
Updated
Getting to the truth, in the public interest, is a tough job when you're interviewing a politician whose mission is to stick to the script. Being politely aggressive is often the only option, writes Monica Attard.
Kerry O'Brien isn't the first person to claim that political interviewing has become gladiatorial. In fact, it's probably the most unoriginal insult to have been hurled at those who engage in that art.
"I think some people regard gladiatorial interviewing as good interviewing, and I never did," O'Brien told ABC's Home Delivery.
"It's the nature of political interviewing now, certainly with those so-called 'gotcha moments'. I never really consciously went for gotcha moments, but when you did occasionally get one it was, I thought, for the right reasons."
Who but the journalist him or herself can ever speak to motive in going for the gotcha moment?
But if it is the nature of political interviewing to seek to reach beyond what the politician wants to say, then in the course of a legitimate and respectful line of questioning, a gotcha moment is the exact result we should expect.
Lest we forget O'Brien's extraordinary interview with then opposition leader Tony Abbott, who ended up admitting not everything he says is true.
Or Leigh Sales' interview with Mr Abbott, who claimed BHP had suspended a project because of the carbon and mining taxes, not having read the company's actual stated reasons.
In the years I watched O'Brien present Lateline and then 7.30, I would have labelled him the king of the exacting political interview where you might almost hear bets being laid in the green room as to who was going to come off better - KOB or the poor politician in his sights.
And that's a compliment by the way, for who else but a loved and trusted interrogator could or even should bring to heel the politician, generally though not always, pulling one over us? To do so politely and intelligently is a bonus for the viewer.
But there's a bigger issue to prosecute - that gladiatorial interviews are now "in the nature of political interviewing".
Have Australian journalists sacrificed us, whom they represent (or at least should), to the entertainment and sometimes commercial demand for a good old barney with some hapless member of the political class?
Survey the Australian media circa 2016 and the answer is probably "no", with some exceptions.
An interviewer isn't a reporter. A reporter reports facts, unsullied by opinion and interpretation. The interviewer's role is to take facts and interpret them as the public might interpret them, and then test them.
It's by definition an interpretative exercise. The very best political interviewers - amongst whom I would class Leigh Sales, Tony Jones, Sarah Ferguson and David Speers - are a bit like courtroom prosecutors. Their role is to place the subject on the stand and get them to tell the truth by placing on the table their interpretation of what's been presented as fact and testing its veracity.
It is by its very nature adversarial because politicians and journalists are not and shouldn't be on the same side. And like most court room encounters, sometimes it can get a little dramatic. If it looks gladiatorial, it's because the political process is pit against the journalistic demand for accountability.
It's balancing the dramatic moments with the search for the truth, or the all-important moment of political accountability, that gets tricky. And sometimes the balance is lost.
What upsets a lot of people is when that balance gets lost for obvious commercial and/or entertainment reasons, when the interrogator loses authority to speak for the viewer or listener (and in the public interest) because they are so clearly acting in someone else's interest.
Commercial radio is bursting at the seams with shock jock interviewers who think it their duty to rudely tear apart politicians and, in so doing, make a fleeting headline on the Sydney Morning Herald website's front page.
It's good for business with the dubious advantage that it keeps their audience believing the host is on their side, acting in their interest. But few political observers take these encounters all that seriously, unless they produce some evidence of political hypocrisy. They see it for what it is, crass and commercial.
But I'm struggling to think of any examples of this at the ABC or indeed Sky, a commercial outlet.
It was ever thus that politicians try to - and often succeed at - sticking to the script. There's a message, updated daily, and their job is to ensure they and others don't stray from it in the interests of the party to which they belong. Little of that has much to do with the public interest.
Getting to the truth, in the public interest, can be - usually is - a tough job in these circumstances. In fact, being politely aggressive is often the only option, in the public interest. Nothing gladiatorial about that. It's not a contest aimed at producing a winner. It's a contest aimed at producing some truth, just as O'Brien's most memorable political interviews did.
Perhaps the perception that political interviews are gladiatorial by nature is being fed by a hyper competitive media in a landscape overflowing with news outlets, that feeds on otherwise insignificant encounters between political interviewers and politicians.
The latest that comes to mind is the headline that shrieked "Leigh Sales shuts down Malcolm Turnbull in ABC 7.30 interview".
The new Prime Minister was trying to do what politicians do - change the conversation. Sales called him out. If she hadn't, could she legitimately call herself a political interviewer?
I doubt it.
Monica Attard is a Walkley Award-winning journalist and a former broadcaster at the ABC. Follow her @AttardMon.
Topics: journalism, media
First postedIn the biological sciences we seem obsessed with simple solutions and questions directed towards simple answers and neat headlines. However, biological systems are complex. Can we really expect to gain simple solutions and are we as humans even capable of fully understanding them? Here to explore this topic is guest blogger Ferdi L. Hellweger.
Are biological systems too complex for the human brain? Pixabay
The biological sciences are experiencing rapid change, including omics-scale experimental; observational and computational tools; and the migration from a reductionists to a holistic approach (systems biology). However, one thing that remains constant is that we still seek simple explanations of complex systems.
We continue to operate under the assumption that the final product of our work – the understanding of the system behavior – is something our brains can grasp, and we can convey in a paper or discussion. Our inability to make predictions for real systems like lake ecology or human health lays bare the limitation of this approach.
Other people, from car mechanics to climate scientists, have learned to delegate understanding to computers. If the goal is to make predictions of complex system behavior, biologists will have to follow suite.
Why we love simplicity
Simple solutions are elegant and sexy. Just about everyone subscribes to Occam’s Razor and Einstein’s famous notion that explanations or models “should be as simple as possible”. Ecologists are fond of Liebig’s Law of the Minimum, which says that the nutrient in limited supply will control the productivity.
We love questions directed towards simple answers, preferable of the yes/no type.
We love questions directed towards simple answers, preferable of the yes/no type. Is heart disease caused by bad cholesterol or the ratio of bad to good cholesterol? Is this lake nitrogen or phosphorus limited? High-impact papers summarize the main conclusion right in the title, like “Even modest trans fat consumption leads to obesity in teenagers.”
Ironically, even in the field of complex systems science, much of the focus seems to be on simple rules underlying the behavior of systems.
Not so simple
What if there is no simple solution to biological systems? Maybe they are too complex to be understood by a human. A couple of years ago, Toledo had to shut down its drinking water plant because of a massive toxic cyanobacteria bloom in Lake Erie. This is puzzling, because we spent billions on reducing phosphorus input to the lake, which according to the simple model of lake eutrophication, is supposed to make things better.
The common paradigm is that caloric intake relates to obesity, which leads many people to opt for horribly-tasting diet soda. Unfortunately observations now show that this has the opposite effect – it actually leads to weight gain. Many alternative simple explanations are being debated (it’s the nitrogen, the artificial sweeteners make you hungry), but we are not considering the possibility that these system may be too complex for us to understand.
It is possible that there are simple solutions to biological systems, and that the scientific process of debating and testing different hypotheses will eventually lead us to find them. But if the solution is actually complex and all of our hypotheses are simple, then we will never arrive at the answer by this process. For the sake of basic biological science, keeping it simple may not be a problem. We can still generate good insights and educate the next generation of scientists.
Often we are faced with the need to make decisions, like how much phosphorus treatment to mandate in the Lake Erie watershed or which soda to drink. Here the obsession with simple will prevent us from developing the comprehensive understanding required to make predictions.
Delegating understanding to computers
How can we develop a predictive understanding of complex systems? The solution is to delegate the task of understanding the system behavior to computers – we do the same for other complex systems.
We have to accept that not all science is simple.
If my (wishful thinking) modern, high-end Mercedes car has a problem, does a mechanic still try to understand what is happening by doing a test drive and listening to the motor hum? Will he realize that there may be a problem with air-gasoline ratio and adjust the carburetor? No, he hooks it up to a computer and accepts and follows the instructions it spits out.
Climate scientists seem to accept that they cannot understand Earth’s climate and rely on model predictions, without the ability or attempt to provide simple solutions. All the various components of the system sort of interact to produce the system-level emergent behaviour.
Why do we refuse to do the same in the biological sciences? Where is my computer model that tells me what is happening with Lake Erie?
Getting to this point will require fundamental cultural changes. We have to accept that not all science is simple. Presently, complex solutions – even if correct – are utterly useless to academics. Papers with titles like “Model of Lake Erie can predict temporal and spatial patterns of cyanobacteria growth and toxin production – but reason remains unclear” would not be of interest to other scientists and could never be published in a respectable journal. Presently, that’s considered blasphemy. But such science would have a tremendous impact on lake ecology and human health, so we have to support it somehow.This is a horse I’ve pretty much beaten to death, but still worth pointing out – not many Russians want to leave Russia. And not many Russians ever wanted to leave Russia.
Results of the latest Levada polls:
Incidentally, when I was in Saint-Petersburg, the hotel receptionist said that if anything, there has been a substantial increase in repatriates like myself.
Another account to that effect.
I am not going to claim that there is some great repatriation trend, because I am not a dishonest Western hack who constructs a “sixth wave of emigration” meme on the basis of purely anecdotal evidence.
Still, it’s something to think about it.
Incidentally, according to the OECD’s latest PPP benchmarks (2014), actual Russian household consumption is comparable to the rest of East-Central Europe and the Baltics, and is at 50%+ of the German/French/UK level and 42% of the US one.
The OECD countries & partners, with Russia in red.
Russia has also continued gaining relative to the US through to 2014, despite the Great Recession. It must have fallen somewhat during the 2014-2016 recession and devaluation, but only modestly, since Russia produces most of its own consumer goods.
Rule of thumb for Russia: While wages might be 4x lower than in the developed Western countries, prices are likewise 2x lower, so the differential in living standards is far more modest.
So, no particular reason for Russians to want to leave, considering the administrative barriers they face as a non-Schengen European country.
I suppose that if Russia had freedom of movement with the EU (like Poland, Romania), or was truly destitute (like Ukraine, Moldova), then there would surely be more emigration.
But this is not the case. And, hypocritical though it might |
SM. Analyzed the data: AN MDR EC CAS SLS JRI DWG. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: SLS. Wrote the paper: AN MDR EC CAS SLS JRI DWG.The GOP needs to take them on.
Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin will release his House Republican budget next week, and one of its themes will be the fighting against corporate welfare. Mr. Ryan says, “We can’t make the case to the American people that we are the reform party if we won’t reform the giant corporate-welfare state in Washington.” Bravo. Too bad so few of his colleagues agree with him.
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It’s very simple, really: Republicans have to be willing to cut weak claims, not weak claimants, as Reagan budget director David Stockman used to say. But corporate welfare has strong claimants: deep-pocketed business interests that rely on federal largesse to pad their pockets and jack up stock prices. Too many companies in America, from Boeing to AT&T, have come to regard government as a giant customer. They cheerlead for big government because they are among its chief beneficiaries.
So why hasn’t it happened? Why haven’t Republicans pledged to end corporate welfare as we know it? Part of the explanation is that too many politicians have gotten confused about the difference between free-market capitalism and crony capitalism. Democrats love welfare of any kind and seem to relish the idea of making big business government-dependent. President Obama, with his stimulus plans and his green-energy giveaways, has been a master at that.
#ad#The business interests have also gotten away with their taxpayer heist for too long by pretending that business subsidies are just a small, inconsequential part of the budget. Actually, it’s a surprisingly large mountain of cash — even if it is well hidden.
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This week an Illinois-based watchdog group, Open the Books, issued a new report that scrupulously tallies up all federal grants, loans, direct payments, and insurance subsidies flowing to individuals and companies. It examined all accounts from the Department of Commerce to the Department of Transportation and found that corporate-welfare payments from the federal government to the Fortune 100 companies, from 2000 to 2012, amounted to $1.2 trillion. I recommend a visit to the website openthebooks.com, if you can stomach it.
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That $1.2 trillion number does not include the hundreds of billions of dollars in housing, bank, and auto-company bailouts in 2008 and 2009, because those payments are kept mostly invisible in the federal-agency books. It also doesn’t include the asset purchases of the Federal Reserve, indirect subsidies such as the ethanol mandate that enriches large agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland, or special tax breaks for wind and solar manufacturers.
Most of the payments Open the Books uncovered were contracts between government agencies and private firms. The largest of these are military-procurement deals with such firms as Lockheed Martin ($392 billion), General Dynamics ($170 billion), and United Technologies ($73 billion). At least taxpayers get services in exchange for these tax dollars. Still, the overall size of the government-industrial complex makes it all the harder to cut federal spending, because the recipients of all this money become high-roller lobbying forces for higher appropriations.
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Far less defensible is the $21.3 billion that was doled out in the form of outright income-transfer subsidies to corporate America. On average, each
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Fortune 100 company received about $200 million in such handouts. So who are the major corporate-welfare queens? The biggest grant recipients were
General Electric ($380 million), followed by General Motors ($370 million), Boeing ($264 million), Archer Daniels Midland ($174 million), and United Technologies ($160 million).
About $8.5 billion of this largesse came in the form of taxpayer-subsidized loans. The big winners here were Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor Company, and other multibillion-dollar corporations whose franchisees received Small Business Administration loans.
Double- and triple-dipper Archer Daniels Midland got just under $1 billion for USDA farm-program loans, and this doesn’t include ethanol subsidies. Another $10 billion was doled out through federal insurance, often in the form of surety bonds. The No. 1 federal insurance program was the Export-Import Bank, with Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase both receiving more than $3 billion in such aid and Citigroup and Bank of America receiving more than $1.5 billion in taxpayer backstop insurance. (Remember, this doesn’t include TARP money.) Deere, American Express, and even Walmart reeled in federal insurance as well. Amazingly, all but one of the Fortune 100 stood in the federal soup line to take at least some form of corporate-welfare benefit. In other words, as Open the Books founder Adam Andrzejewski puts it: “Mitt Romney had it wrong. When it comes to the Fortune 100, it’s 99 percent, not 47 percent, on some form of the government’s gravy train.”
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Uncle Sam could save billions of dollars a year if it just limited corporate welfare to any firm with profits of $1 million or even $10 million or less and
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prevented double-dipping by prohibiting the Fortune 100 from receiving more than one form of federal assistance at a time.
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Imagine for a moment that you are sitting on your couch watching TV and there is a knock on the door. There in a corporate suit is an employee of General Dynamics with a tin cup and he asks if you would contribute a dollar for a research project. You would slam the door in his face. But somehow when the government collects a dollar from each of us and gives the money to General Dynamics, this is considered in Washington a wise “investment.”
Here’s a pretty safe bet: We’re never going to balance our budget in Washington again until our elected officials get big business off the dole. Paul Ryan wants to do that. So does Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. They are, alas, lonely voices in the GOP. Too many of their colleagues have come to regard farm subsidies to wealthy agribusinesses and Export-Import Bank loans to Boeing as Republican entitlements. And then Republicans wonder why the public holds them in such disdain.
— Stephen Moore is chief economist with the Heritage Foundation.Abstract The presence of numerous complex organic molecules (COMs; defined as those containing six or more atoms) around protostars shows that star formation is accompanied by an increase of molecular complexity. These COMs may be part of the material from which planetesimals and, ultimately, planets formed. Comets represent some of the oldest and most primitive material in the solar system, including ices, and are thus our best window into the volatile composition of the solar protoplanetary disk. Molecules identified to be present in cometary ices include water, simple hydrocarbons, oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen-bearing species, as well as a few COMs, such as ethylene glycol and glycine. We report the detection of 21 molecules in comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy), including the first identification of ethyl alcohol (ethanol, C 2 H 5 OH) and the simplest monosaccharide sugar glycolaldehyde (CH 2 OHCHO) in a comet. The abundances of ethanol and glycolaldehyde, respectively 5 and 0.8% relative to methanol (0.12 and 0.02% relative to water), are somewhat higher than the values measured in solar-type protostars. Overall, the high abundance of COMs in cometary ices supports the formation through grain-surface reactions in the solar system protoplanetary disk.
Keywords
space science
astronomy
comets
complex organic molecules
INTRODUCTION Comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) is a long-period comet originating from the Oort cloud, which passed its perihelion on 30 January 2015, at 1.290 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun. This comet was a naked-eye object in January and February 2015. At perihelion, its water production rate exceeded 20 metric tons/s. It was thus one of the most active comets in the neighborhood of Earth’s orbit since the passage in 1997 of the extraordinarily active comet C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp). Bright comets offer the opportunity to detect numerous species in their atmospheres and to search for new molecules outgassing from the nuclear ices. Using the 30-m telescope of the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique (IRAM), located on Pico Veleta in the Sierra Nevada (Spain), we observed the atmosphere of comet Lovejoy between 13–16 and 23–26 January 2015, when the comet was the brightest and the most productive, at a distance of 0.6 AU from Earth and of 1.3 AU from the Sun. Because of the versatility of the receivers and spectrometers at the IRAM 30m telescope (1), we were able to survey most of the 210–272 GHz (λ ~1 mm) spectral domain with high spectral resolution and sensitivity. The angular resolution is ~9″ to 12″ at these frequencies, corresponding to ~3300 to 5400 km at the distance of the comet. The targeted spectral range covers many molecular rotational lines and has been successfully used to identify complex organic molecules (COMs) in comets (2–8) and in star-forming regions, for example, in the studies of Belloche et al. (9) and Caux et al. (10).
RESULTS In the spectral survey of comet Lovejoy, we detected lines of 21 molecules (Table 1), two of which, ethyl alcohol (ethanol, C 2 H 5 OH) and glycolaldehyde (CH 2 OHCHO), were detected for the first time in a comet. We secured the detection of ethanol and glycolaldehyde by averaging the strongest lines present in the observed spectral domain. Ethanol is detected through lines of both trans and gauche conformers. Most other detected COMs and simple organic molecules, such as ethylene glycol [(CH 2 OH) 2 ], methyl formate (HCOOCH 3 ), formamide (NH 2 CHO), formic acid (HCOOH), and acetaldehyde (CH 3 CHO), were first detected in comet Hale-Bopp and later confirmed in other comets (6–8). Figure 1 shows the spectra of eight organic species detected in comet Lovejoy. Table 1 Abundance of molecules detected in comet Lovejoy. Abundances relative to water of the 21 molecules detected in comet Lovejoy are based on the average of production rate ratios for the 13–16 and 23–25 January periods. The uncertainty on the abundances, taking into account all sources of errors, including uncertainty on the water production rate, is below 20%, except for NS for which it is 30% (4σ detection). View this table: Fig. 1 Spectra of organics in comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy). The observations were obtained with the IRAM 30m radio telescope in the 211–272 GHz band between 13 and 25 January 2015. The velocity scale is in the nucleus rest frame. Intensity is given in the main beam temperature scale. Spectra, from top left, are glycolaldehyde (CH 2 OHCHO, average of two lines), ethyl alcohol (ethanol, C 2 H 5 OH, average of 13 lines), aGg′ ethylene glycol [(CH 2 OH) 2, average of 14 lines], methyl formate (HCOOCH 3, average of two groups of blends of several lines, whose positions are marked by blue arrows), formic acid (HCOOH, average of six lines), acetaldehyde (CH 3 CHO, average of 40 lines), isocyanic acid [HNCO(11 0,11 –10 0,10 ) line at 241.774 GHz], and formamide (NH 2 CHO, average of 10 lines). The signal-to-noise ratio is 6 for glycolaldehyde, 10 for ethanol, and higher than 7 for the other molecules. Relative abundances can be estimated by deriving molecular production rates from the observed line intensities. In this active comet, most molecules within the field of view are close to local thermal equilibrium (LTE). To take into account departures from LTE in the less dense parts of the coma due to radiative decay, the line intensities were analyzed using an excitation model (11, 12). From the numerous detected methanol lines, we derived a rotational temperature of 68.0 ± 0.7 K and a gas temperature of 73 K. Assuming isotropic outgassing, and using the gas velocity of 0.8 km/s derived from the spectrally resolved strong lines, we determined the production rate for all observed molecules (1). Table 1 provides the abundances relative to water, using water production rates of Q H2O = 5 × 1029 and 6 × 1029 molecules s−1 for the periods 13–16 and 23–26 January 2015, respectively. These values were deduced from the observations of the OH radical and H 2 O performed with the Nançay radio telescope and Odin space observatory, respectively, in January 2015. The conformers of ethanol were found to be in the relative proportion trans/gauche of 1.5 ± 0.3. Because of the low energy barrier between the two ethanol conformers (~57 K), trans-to-gauche interconversion was rapid in the collisional region of the comet (less than 1 ps at 73 K), whereas interconversion through radiative decay was expected to be slow (13). The trans/gauche ratio was close to the equilibrium value of 1.1 expected at the temperature of the sampled gas (73 K).
DISCUSSION Production rates relative to water measured in comet Lovejoy are lower by a factor of 2 to 3 than those in comet Hale-Bopp, except for CH 3 OH and HCOOCH 3, which show similar abundances, and for cyanoacetylene (HC 3 N), which is depleted in Lovejoy by a factor of 10 (6). Another notable exception is CO, which is a factor of >10 less abundant in Lovejoy, but Hale-Bopp belongs to the small family of CO-rich comets (14). The depletion remains when comparing with abundances measured in comets other than Hale-Bopp (table S2). Composition diversity is often observed in the comet population, but this is the first time that depletion is observed for such a large number of molecules in a comet. Ethanol and glycolaldehyde, as well as the other COMs observed in comets, are found in warm (≥100 K) regions surrounding newly born stars, at the time when the collapsing envelope feeding the star has not yet dissipated (2). These regions, called hot corinos or cores for low- or high-mass protostars, exhibit a rich molecular inventory dominated by saturated species. COMs may have been synthesized in the cold prestellar core period by grain-surface reactions, when all heavy element–bearing molecules were frozen onto grains (15, 16). The efficiency of surface chemistry is increased during the warm-up phase because of the increased mobility of atoms and radicals on warm grains, producing large molecules (17). It is not clear to what extent these compounds are preserved in the protoplanetary disk. However, chemical models show that COMs are also efficiently formed on grain surfaces in the disk owing to the intense UV illumination from the newly born star (17). The presence of interstellar-like organic compounds in comets suggests that they are preserved materials synthesized in the outskirts of the solar nebula or at earlier stages of solar system formation. In Fig. 2, the abundances (normalized to methanol) of nine organic molecules measured in comets Lovejoy and Hale-Bopp are compared to those measured in two interstellar sources. Orion-KL is the best-studied hot-core source because of its proximity and molecular wealth. Quantitative comparison with comets is restricted to methanol, ethanol (C 2 H 5 OH), ethylene glycol [(CH 2 OH) 2 ], and glycolaldehyde (CH 2 OHCHO) measured at the same position in Orion-KL (18). The ethylene glycol abundance in this source is much lower than those in the four comets, where it has been detected, and this conclusion also applies to the hot-core Sgr B2(N) (8, 18). Glycolaldehyde has not been detected in Orion-KL (18), but the derived abundance upper limit (not shown in the figure) is also much lower than the value measured in comet Lovejoy. IRAS 162293-2422 is the best-studied hot corino. The two components of this solar-type binary protostar exhibit large compositional differences, with sources A and B being richer in nitrogen- and oxygen-bearing molecules, respectively (10). There is an overall agreement between source B and comet organic composition (Fig. 2), although comets are much richer in ethylene glycol (by two orders of magnitude) and ethanol (by a factor of 6), whereas they are depleted in ketene (CH 2 CO). Contrarily to Orion-KL, IRAS 162293-2422(B) (19) is moderately underabundant (by a factor of 2.5) in glycolaldehyde compared to comet Lovejoy. The same properties are observed for other hot corinos (20). Fig. 2 Abundances of complex organics in comets and protostars. The abundances measured in comets Lovejoy (Table 1) and Hale-Bopp (table S2) are compared with those measured in the low-mass protostar IRAS 16293-2422(B) (19, 33) and in the high-mass protostar Orion-KL (18) and with results from chemical modeling in a protoplanetary disk (25). Abundances are given relative to CH 3 OH, the most abundant organic molecule in these sources. H 2 CO values may be less relevant because, for comets, a significant fraction is released from grains (34), whereas for IRAS 16293-2422, the plotted value pertains to the sum of the contributions to the two components A and B of the binary source. For CH 2 CO, the black triangle is a 3σ upper limit obtained in comet Lovejoy. Comparison with protoplanetary disks is more difficult. The molecules observed in protoplanetary disks are mainly small species and associated isotopologs. The most complex identified species are H 2 CO, HC 3 N, CH 3 CN, and c-C 3 H 2 (21–24). The HCN/HC 3 N/CH 3 CN abundances are estimated to be in the 1:0.05–0.2:0.05–0.2 proportion in the MCW 480 disk, at radial distances corresponding to the comet formation zone (24). This compares well with ratios measured in comets, for example, 1:0.02:0.16 and 1:0.08:0.08 in comets Lovejoy and Hale-Bopp, respectively. A comparison with COM abundances in protoplanetary disks expected from chemical models (25) is shown in Fig. 2. In addition to grain-surface reactions, reactive desorption and irradiation of ice mantle material in the mid-plane of the disk are included in the chemical model, and enhance the abundances of the more complex molecules in the disk grains (25). However, ethylene glycol is produced with a negligible abundance in this model, which implies that efficient formation routes must be found to explain its large abundance in comets (25). Whereas ethylene glycol formation is investigated through the addition of two CH 2 OH radicals (25), an alternative grain-surface formation route in protoplanetary disks involves sequential atom-atom additions (26), for which reaction rates and reaction barriers need to be measured for implementation in chemical models. Altogether, the high COM abundances in cometary ices, often higher than the hot-corino abundances (Fig. 2), are in line with their synthesis through grain-surface reactions and ice irradiation in the early solar nebula. Although the possible role of comets in the delivery of terrestrial water has recently been questioned in favor of an asteroidal source (27), the COMs found in comets, which have their origin in the volatile phase of the solar nebula, are likely related to those present in asteroids (28). The identification of biologically important COMs in cometary ices is thus an important step toward our understanding of the origin of life on Earth.
MATERIALS AND METHODS Observations Comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) was observed with the IRAM 30m radio telescope during two periods: on 13.8, 15.8, and 16.8 January 2015 (geocentric distance Δ = 0.496 to 0.528 AU) and on 23.7, 24.7, 25.7, and 26.7 January 2015 (Δ = 0.624 to 0.675 AU) with very good weather conditions. The heliocentric distances were 1.31 and 1.29 AU, respectively. Perihelion was on 30.07 January UT, at 1.290 AU from the Sun. The 13–25 and 26 January observations were obtained with the EMIR 1- and 3-mm receivers, respectively. The main backend we used was a Fourier transform spectrometer, which covers a frequency range of 2 × 8 GHz (two side bands separated by 8 GHz, each in two linear polarizations) in a single setup, with a high spectral resolution of 200 kHz. The spectral resolution (0.3 to 0.2 km s−1 when converted into Doppler velocity) allows the determination of the velocity profile of the narrow cometary lines (~2 km s−1). Using three different tunings, we covered the 210–218, 225–233, and 240–272 GHz frequency ranges. Given the excitation conditions encountered in cometary comae at 1 to 1.5 AU from the Sun, most of the molecules have their strongest lines in this frequency domain. Complex cometary molecules have many lines expected to have similar intensities in this domain, and we obtained secure detections when averaging the signal of the lines expected to be the strongest according to our models (8). The number of lines detected with a signal-to-noise ratio higher than 3 was respectively 2 for CH 2 OHCHO, 8 for C 2 H 5 OH, 2 for HCOOCH 3, 37 for CH 3 CHO, 7 for (CH 2 OH) 2, 9 for HCOOH, 10 for NH 2 CHO, and 4 for HNCO. Seven lines were used for the upper limit on ketene (CH 2 CO). The half-power beamwidth of IRAM 30m at these frequencies ranged from 9.1″ to 11.6″, which corresponded to 3300 to 5400 km at the comet distance. The pointing accuracy, which was regularly checked on reference pointing sources and also on the comet with coarse maps of the strongest lines, was better than 2″. The time variation of the activity of the comet could be monitored because of the presence of several strong CH 3 OH lines in each setup. We did not see any variation greater than ±20% during the observations [Q CH3OH = 1.2 ± 0.2 × 1028 molecules s−1 (13–16 January) and 1.4 ± 0.2 × 1028 molecules s−1 (23–25 January)]. This justifies the averaging of several days of observations to improve the signal-to-noise ratio and to derive production rates that are more precise. Table S1 provides a list of the strongest ethanol and glycolaldehyde lines identified in the spectra and the production rates derived for each line. Several other lines are individually present only at the 1σ to 3σ level but yield a detection when combined together and were used to compute production rates. Excitation models and production rate determination For all molecules, we used the latest spectroscopic data available in the JPL (29) or CDMS (30) database, both for line identification and computation of line strengths. In our model, the population distribution of the ground vibrational state of molecule slowly evolves from LTE at the temperature T gas maintained by collisions with neutrals and electrons close to the nucleus [(11), (12 ), and references therein] to fluorescence equilibrium in less dense parts of the coma. Collisional rates and electron density are based on a water production rate of 5 × 1029 molecules s−1. We derived T gas = 73 K from the relative line intensities of the strong methanol lines (figs. S1 and S2). For the other molecules, the line intensity ratios (or rotational temperature) agree with the model [for example, T rot (CH 3 CHO) = 67 ± 15 K for 68 K predicted]. Except for a few molecules such as methanol or linear molecules, we did not take into account the pumping of the rotational levels by the fluorescence of the infrared vibrational bands, but this process is not expected to play a major role within ~5000 km of the coma sampled here. The local gas density is described with the Haser model, which assumes isotropic radial outgassing at a constant velocity. The mean gas expansion velocity of 0.80 km s−1 has been derived from the shape of the lines with the highest signal-to-noise ratio: for example, the strong CH 3 OH(5 +2 –4 +1 E) line at 266.838 GHz, observed both with the Fourier transform spectrometer and the VESPA autocorrelator (resolution of 40 kHz), has a linewidth of 1.61 ± 0.08 km s−1, suggesting a mean velocity of 0.80 ± 0.04 km s−1. Given the expansion velocity and beam size, the observations sampled relatively “fresh” molecules, which left the nucleus less than 1.8 hours before the observation. We took the molecular lifetimes from previous research (4, 6, 7, 31), but at this heliocentric distance (1.3 AU), the derived production rates are not very sensitive to the photodissociation rate of the molecule, provided that its lifetime at 1 AU is more than 4000 s. The line intensities are computed with our radiative transfer code for a Gaussian beam. Lines are optically thin, implying that the production rates are proportional to the line intensities. When several lines of a molecule are observed, the production rate is computed using a weighted mean of the production rates computed for each individual line because not all the lines have the same noise level. All lines with an expected intensity of ≥1σ and that are within the observed spectral range are taken into account, even if not detected, to avoid biasing the production rate estimate. The spectra shown in Fig. 1 were obtained by averaging only the stronger lines, weighted according to the noise of each individual spectrum. For ketene, we obtain a marginal 3σ value of 4.3 ± 1.4 × 1025 molecules s−1 (0.008% relative to water), but the detection of this molecule needs to be confirmed in a brighter comet. Ethanol is expected to be either in the trans or gauche states, which are treated separately in our model. Trans and gauche lines yield similar production rates for both conformers (Q E-trans = 4.6 ± 0.6 × 1026 molecules s−1, Q E-gauche = 3.0 ± 0.4 × 1026 molecules s−1). The measured ethanol trans/gauche ratio of 1.5 ± 0.3 (1.0 ± 0.2 if we take only the 14 lines with signal-to-noise ratio ≥2 from table S1) corresponds to a conformeric equilibrium temperature of 51+11 −6 K, slightly lower but close to the T gas derived above. Using a cooler temperature for ethanol will not significantly change the derived abundance. The intensity and derived total production rates for the strongest lines of glycolaldehyde and ethanol (assuming 50% in each state for ethanol) are provided in table S1. In the case of the NS radical (Table 1), we have computed the production rate and abundance, assuming a release from close to the nucleus. Water production rate The reference water production rate was primarily derived from observations of the OH radical maser lines at 18 cm carried out with the Nançay radio telescope at the same time. During the 12–17 January period, observations centered on the comet and at 3.0′ offset positions (fig. S3) were used to constrain the quenching of the maser inversion (32) yielding an average water production rate Q H2O = 5.0 ± 0.2 × 1029 molecules s−1. OH observations performed between 18 and 25 January were all centered on the nucleus so the water production rates are less constrained for this period. Observations of H 2 O were performed with the Odin satellite on 30 January to 3 February (fig. S3). Analysis of both centered and offset positions up to 3′ yields an average production rate Q H2O = 7.5 ± 0.3 × 1029 molecules s−1. Because several methanol lines were detected in each observing setup with the IRAM 30m, we also used the methanol production rate as a proxy for the evolution of water outgassing, correcting possible biases due to larger pointing uncertainties during the period 23–25 January (no coarse mapping was available). From the interpolation of the Nançay and Odin measurements, we estimate that during the period of 23–25 January, Q H2O ≈ 6.0 × 1029 molecules s−1. The uncertainty on the water outgassing rate should be less than 10%, but we cannot fully exclude that part of the water vapor observed in the 2′ to 8′ Odin and Nançay beams comes from the sublimation of icy grains conducting to an overestimate of the water outgassing from the nucleus surface. Nevertheless, we do not find clear evidence for a distributed source of gases in the coma of comet Lovejoy: coarse maps of HCN and CH 3 OH up to 20″ from the nucleus show no evidence for a distributed source, and the interpretation of the Odin water maps does not require considering a distributed source of H 2 O beyond 1′.
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS Supplementary material for this article is available at http://advances.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/1/9/e1500863/DC1 Table S1. Observed strongest lines and production rates. Table S2. Abundances relative to water. Fig. S1. Rotational diagram of the methanol lines observed between 248 and 256 GHz. Fig. S2. Rotational diagram of the methanol lines observed around 242 GHz. Fig. S3. Water production rate: OH and H 2 16O observations.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.On Monday January 2nd 2017, the Amateur Radio Experimenters Group launched a test flight of some new telemetry equipment, and trialed the updated Wenet SSDV system being developed by the group. The aim was to validate some new software ready for a dual flight being planned for January 22nd for the Southern Hemisphere Space Studies Program (SHSSP) run by the University of South Australia.
Launch Preparations
The payloads being flown this flight included:
RTTY Telemetry (434.650 MHz 8N1 ASCII 100baud) – The usual RTTY payload as has flown in the past.
(434.650 MHz 8N1 ASCII 100baud) – The usual RTTY payload as has flown in the past. Flight Control payload (TDMA) – we use this for telecommand to terminate the flight at the right altitude
– we use this for telecommand to terminate the flight at the right altitude Secondary Test Flight Control Payload (TDMA) – In-air test of new TDMA software updates.
– In-air test of new TDMA software updates. Wenet Imagery Payload – 441.200 MHz 115Kbit/s Wideband FSK
– 441.200 MHz 115Kbit/s Wideband FSK GoPro HD Hero 3 Video Payload – 25fps 1080p video – to be collected after landing
Wenet had been upgraded this flight to send back 1920×1080 frames and include on each frame some telemetry information too!
Balloon Launch Crew
On the ground, we had a large contingent of members from the Project Horus team. Matt VK5ZM lead the assembly of the balloon payload train while Mark VK5QI tended to the payloads. Grant VK5GR, Josh VK5JO, Gary VK5FGRY and Andrew VK5XFG set about filling the balloon.
Liftoff went flawlessly, which meant the chase and tracking was next.
Flight Ground Tracking Network
As in Flight 39, Peter VK5KX and crew stationed themselves on top of a hill over looking Palmer in the Adelaide Hills. From there, he was able to receive much of the data from the Wenet transmitter carrying the SSDV data.
When the balloon reached 15km altitude and was almost directly overhead, he also reported that using a telescope he was able to get a visual lock on the balloon for a time!
Bob VK5FO and Ray VK5RR operated ground control No.2 from their home near Waikerie in the Riverland. Bob reported:
“We were really trying to run several experiments on our rx capability and do a bit of a shakedown before the Dual launch. Some things worked, some things failed – but we have a much better insight into what is needed.
First off the Good.
Wenet – both of our Wenet RX set ups worked great – well, WinSDR, Pre-Amp and Laptop with software. We again used a dual-band white stick antenna – so about 8db gain on 70cm. We were able to RX images from 1,800M up to 25,000M and then from 25,000 back down to just 900M! Abovr 25,000M we did see some data, but not reliable at all.
Our 2nd Antenna – we used for experimenting with was nothing more than a mobile dual band whip – and we may as well have not bothered from this distance – 4.5db gain does not cut it.
This is very similar to what we experienced the previous flight – but this flight was much closer to us – about 90km v’s the 120-130km of the last one and as a result we had rock-solid +10db WENET signals for most of the flight – except when it was very close to the ground and again once it flew out of the antenna pattern over 25,000M
Except during the extremes, we had almost 100% decode on all images – well over 100Meg of images in the images directory!
…and then the not so good…
We had a lot of trouble even hearing the RTTY telemetry – and it was not until it was about 6,000M that we even heard it! We used our usual set up – of the IC-7100 in the car with a dual-band mobile whip to RX – and this is what we have used in the past without issue – Not so much of an Issue – except that it provides useful information WRT the Az and El of the balloon from your location – which might be needed – especially to be able to track the Payload with a directional array.
I suspect that we were had the car parked behind the shed and it was causing us to sit in the shadow of the flight until it hit the 6,000M mark. This is something easily rectified on the next flight – move the car or put the antenna on the shed roof!
As usual, the RTTY should be able to be decoded by anyone within about 100km with a fairly simple antenna, further with a little bit of gain.
So, while not everything was perfect, we were very happy with the resultant WENET Images we received.”
Flight Data
The end result of all of the ground station work was that the Wenet SSDV image payload worked a treat, Here is a slideshow of the pictures captured:
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
In addition, a GoPro was flown on the flight. The payload container this time suffered from some stability issues and so the images are not fantastic quality, but we did get some excellent frames out of the video at the time of balloon separation due to the tumbling. A number of selfies were taken of the other payloads and the parachute just as decent began. Check out the video here:
Flight Statistics
The flight itself was almost a text book affair. The flight track can be seen in the following animation created by Grant VK5GR from the telemetry raw data.
The vital statistics are:
[table “” not found /]
The final flight tracks can be seen here:
Chase & Telemetry Teams
The chase tracking for this flight was carried out by three teams this flight. Matt VK5ZM formed a team with Grant VK5GR, Josh VK5JO and Andrew VK5XFG, Andy VK5AKH had a team with Will Anthony VK5AHV, Darin VK5IX and his son Cam, and Mark VK5QI had a team with David VK5DGR and Gary VK5FGRY.
The chase teams in particular were using this flight to also get ready for the big dual flight planned on January 22nd.
The team would like to thank all of the following stations for their contribution to the telemetry collection effort:
VK5AKK VK5DF VK5EU VK5FTAZ VK5KJP VK5KX VK5NEX VK5NG VK5QI-1 VK5QI-9 VK5RR VK5ZEA VK5ZM VK5ZRL
Recovering Horus 40
The team had always planned on terminating the |
one more deficit this year will add to the province's overall pile of red ink. Manitoba's net debt will stand at $24.8 billion at the end of the year, up from $23.1 billion this year.
On the other hand, 2,100 more Manitobans won't pay taxes this year as the basic personal exemption is on the rise again. This move will cost the province $23 million.
CBC News is partnering with GoodTalk, a new engagement tool that lets Canadians watch and record video comments on top stories and even get featured on the CBC. Follow the links to try it out.Let’s Talk Promises
If you use Node on a regular basis; the chances are you’ve heard of Promises. There are plenty of resources online that explain them, so you might be wondering why I’m writing another one.
Every developer has a topic that, when learning, was their sticking point; the one that no matter how many times someone explained it just didn’t make sense. Promises were mine.
I finally got my head around them, and we’ve been in a loving relationship for years now.
Last week I released my first Medium article; and received some positive feedback, which is why I’m writing another about a topic I really struggled with.
What this tutorial is not.
I am not going to be talking about the Node.js event loop, web API, or callstack. This is not a tutorial on WHY promises work, or HOW they work, it’s just a simple explanation of WHAT they are.
The analogy
Every article I’ve ever read about promises has a good analogy to start with. Keeping with the same tradition, I’m going to do the same.
You are at home, cooking a Roast dinner (I don’t know much about cooking at all, so don’t fact check this bit of the article). You have everything laid out ready to prepare (roast potatoes, parsnips, stuffing) and then you realise… you forgot to pick up the chicken!
Luckily; your partner is sitting on the sofa, not doing very much, so you send them off to the supermarket to pick up a chicken for you.
What has this got to do with Promises? This analogy is going to help me explain the difference between a synchronous and a asynchronous operation.
Let’s start with the synchronous version of this example…
What is a synchronous operation?
Before we talk about synchronous and asynchronous definitions, let’s first take a quick detour into what happens at programme execution. Node will run your application, starting at the first line and running each line of code sequentially thereafter.
A synchronous operation is one that, when your application is being executed line by line, waits for each operation to complete before moving on.Global timber giant Weyerhaeuser Co. said today it has joined the U.S. Climate Action Partnership group that is lobbying for comprehensive climate and energy legislation on Capitol Hill.
The Federal Way, Wash.-based company becomes the 29th member of the business-NGO lobbying coalition, alongside General Electric Co., General Motors Co. and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
"The forest products industry will play a leading role in reducing dependence on fossil fuels and reducing emissions of carbon dioxide using biomass from forests, a sustainable resource and one of the best at sequestering carbon," Weyerhaeuser CEO Dan Fulton said in a press release. "The role of forest fiber in a low carbon economy will depend on the public policy concepts under debate in Washington, D.C."
"USCAP," Fulton added, "has successfully integrated the expertise of numerous stakeholders, and we believe our membership will help positively position sustainable forestry, biomass and forest products in these important policy discussions."
Membership in U.S. CAP has more than doubled since its inception just prior to then-President George W. Bush's State of the Union speech in January 2008. The group played a critical role in pushing the House toward passage of climate legislation last June.
But the group has also seen some of its power dwindle after recent defections. Two big oil companies, BP America and ConocoPhillips, and Caterpillar Inc., withdrew last month from the $100,000-a-year membership club. And Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) recently questioned GM and Chrysler LLC's participation after they received $17 billion in federal bailout funds. Barton also helped drive insurance giant AIG Inc. out of the group after it got $85 billion from the Treasury.
U.S. CAP officials insist they are still playing a big role in the climate debate on Capitol Hill that has been largely in standby mode in the Senate. The coalition's CEOs are expected to participate today in a conference call with Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a lead author of the Senate proposal to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
In its press release today, U.S. CAP said Weyerhaeuser's arrival "demonstrates that there is ongoing support from the business community for enacting sound climate and energy policy that is economically sustainable and environmentally effective."
Weyerhaeuser owns or manages 21 million acres of timberland and has offices or operations in 10 countries. Yet the company has struggled in the aftermath of the U.S. housing market's collapse, as well as larger global economic trends from the financial crash -- with its revenue dropping 32 percent last year to $5.53 billion, from $8.1 billion in 2008.
Copyright 2010 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.Expected Utility: How to take calculated risks and make decisions under uncertainty
Ray Alez Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 2, 2016
Imagine I offer you a gamble. I will spin the wheel that looks like this:
And you win the amount of money that it will choose. If it hits a negative number you owe me that much. Should you play or not?
This is the kind of problem you are solving every time you are trying to decide whether or not to take any risky action.
It comes down to figuring out whether the action has a positive or negative value to you, so called Expected Utility, whether it’s benefits outweigh the potential risks.
To find out the answer, you need to know the sum of all the potential benefits multiplied by their probability, and compare it to the benefits and probability of the risks.
So first we estimate probabilities of each outcome:
And then we calculate our upside:
$20*0.3 + $15*0.2 + $5*0.2 = $10
And the downside:
-$10*0.2 - $30*0.1 = -$5
So now we can see that the expected utility of playing this game is
$10 - $5 = $5
So now we know that if you play this game many times, on average, you will be making $5 every game, so that’s a good deal.
This is a very useful concept, because when you think like that about every action you take, you end up making much better decisions. You don’t take dumb risks, and you don’t miss great opportunities.
In life, we need to make decisions under uncertainty. When you know your values, and take actions with maximum expected utility, you can take the optimal way towards achieving your goals.Several major banks including JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup have tested blockchain. The results are encouraging as the technology proves to work well in the field of credit-default swaps (CDS).
Keeping track of the multiple over-the-counter (OTC) products is complicated, reads a Dow Jones Business News article. The test showed that the complex processes such as payments, amendments and novations currently done by the banks can be managed through a peer-to-peer network.
Participants of the test included Bank of America Corporation, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Markit, DTCC, and a technology firm Axoni which provided necessary software.
In early March, 85 test cases were conducted to assess lifecycle functionality, integration with external systems, network resiliency, and data privacy, reads the company’s website.
“This collaboration in CDS illustrates how smart contracts can facilitate higher levels of automation in OTC markets. The success of this initiative reinforces our commitment to continued development of blockchain technology in CDS, other asset classes and financial industry processes more generally,” said Brad Levy, managing director and head of Markit’s Processing division.
But it still remains a question when, if ever, the blockchain technology will be implemented in real CDS management. Some think that the disruption of the existing, well-tested system might be harmful, notes the Dow Jones article. Others may fear that blockchain can cut their market share. In addition, besides dramatically reducing costs in the settlement sphere, blockchain is likely to eliminate 2 million jobs in banking, a recent Citigroup report forecasts.
Credit-default swaps are contracts that pay off if a bond goes bad. They involve the transfer of credit risk from one party to another and are in a way similar to insurance because they provide the buyer of the contract with protection in case certain negative “credit events” such as bankruptcy occur.
The banks involved in the test have been keen on blockchain in the recent months. JP Morgan, Citigroup and Bank of America are all members of the R3 consortium aimed at designing blockchain for banking. In an effort to investigate the possible implications of the technology, Citigroup has invented its own cryptocurrency, Citicoin.
Andrew LevichMaybe it was the private nighttime visit to Independence National Historical Park, where the Democrats’ top national official got to touch the Liberty Bell.
Whatever it was that sealed the deal, Democrats on Thursday chose Philadelphia for their 2016 national convention, looking ahead to Independence Hall and other symbols of America’s birth bathing their presidential nominee in a patriotic aura.
“In addition to their commitment to a seamless and safe convention, Philadelphia’s deep-rooted place in American history provides a perfect setting for this special gathering,” Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, who had caressed the Liberty Bell, said in her announcement.
Philadelphia, which beat out New York and Columbus, Ohio, was widely seen as the favorite throughout the selection process, in part because it was a safe pick both financially and politically. It had the individual and corporate backing to fund a convention — it hosted the Republicans in 2000 — and it offered a less risky backdrop than New York, a liberal epicenter and home to a polarizing mayor, Bill de Blasio.Samsung today unveiled a new device that's likely to be the "wild card" in this year's smartphone and tablet wars -- because no one can quite work out which one it is.
The Galaxy Note 2 has a 5.5-inch screen, midway between hit smartphones such as Samsung's Galaxy S3 and tablet computers.
When the original Galaxy Note debuted late last year, its 5.2-inch screen drew both fans and detractors. It became a surprise hit, however, and went on to sell 10 million units. With the Note 2, Samsung is doubling down on its phone-tablet concept.
It's pocket-sized -- just -- but offers the high-end computing power of a tablet, controlled with a stylus that lets users draw onscreen and add written signatures to email.
The device was shown off at a press conference in Berlin before the IFA trade show for the technologies that will define the year's Christmas shopping season. It was one of several new gadgets unveiled by the tech giant, including a smartphone with a camera-style zoom lens and a laptop that turns into a tablet.
The Android device will go on sale in October.
The screen is thinner, taller, and narrower than its predecessor, with a 16:9 screen ratio designed to work well with Hollywood films. It's also equipped with a new rubber-tipped S Pen, which can activate the screen simply by hovering near it -- so that, for instance, users can look inside an email without even clicking.
In the phone's photo gallery, users can "blow up" pictures by waving the pen at the screen. When making a phone call, hovering the pen near the screen brings up an instant notepad which can be used to jot phone numbers and other information.
The pen has 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity so users can sketch onscreen as precisely as they would with a pen.
The Galaxy Note 2 is equipped with high-end processing power more akin to a laptop than a smartphone, with a 1.6GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM. But while it does have a 3G and 4G cellular radio, many people would dispute that the huge gadget actually is a phone at all.
Apps on the phone have been customized to allow the pen to be used to add a personal touch -- such as drawing diagrams or signing your name on emails.
The S Pen can also be used to add handwritten notes "to the back of" digital photos. Photos flip over on the phone's display, so you can add notes on the rear.
Samsung also unveiled a camera with wireless connectivity built in -- another one-of-a-kind device. Called the Galaxy Camera, the gadget is armed with a high-quality zoom lens -- which is impossible in the slim form factor of smartphones and tablets -- which offers 21x zoom and a 16-megapixel sensor.When I arrived at her cottage in Newfane, Vermont, Helen DeWitt was at work in a spacious room on the first floor. On the table in front of her was a page of notes in longhand, an overturned mass-market paperback of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and an ashtray full of Marlboro 100’s butts. On the wall was a photograph of her grandfather, Marine Corps General Ralph DeWitt, in uniform, his chest decorated. DeWitt was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, rumpled work pants, and an old pair of running shoes. There was a daybed in the corner and a cast-iron stove a few feet from the table. “This stove is from 1918 and it’s still working,” she said. “And if you’re a writer, back in the day of Hemingway, you actually could have a typewriter that would see you through your career. It might not last a hundred years, but it would see you through your career, and if laptops had that kind of longevity, look, I would not be broke.”
This was the first of many counterfactuals DeWitt put to me over the course of three days. Many, many writers are chronically broke. Many have a long list of grievances with the publishing industry. Many will tell you about the circumstances that would have allowed them to enjoy the success of Ernest Hemingway or David Foster Wallace. Many have had multiple brushes with suicide, but there’s only one who wrote The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods, two of the finest novels published this century, and she’d recently spilled a glass of iced tea on her MacBook.
The Last Samurai was a sensation even before it appeared. The toast of the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1999, with rights sold to more than a dozen countries, the novel came out in 2000 to wide acclaim, sold in excess of 100,000 copies in English, and was nominated for several prizes. But for DeWitt, this was the beginning of a long phase of turmoil that still hasn’t abated. The book’s success was marred by an epic battle with a copy editor involving large amounts of Wite-Out; typesetting nightmares having to do with the book’s use of foreign scripts; what she describes as “an accounting error” that resulted in her owing the publisher $75,000 when she thought the publisher owed her $80,000; the agonies of obtaining permissions for the many outside works quoted in the novel, including Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai — which was the title of The Last Samurai until it was deemed legally impossible. Her second novel, Lightning Rods, finished in July 1999, was then stuck in limbo after her publisher, Talk Miramax, folded. When it did finally appear, from New Directions in 2011, it garnered a legion of devoted readers too young to have read The Last Samurai before it went out of print. (The best and funniest satire of capitalism I’ve ever read, Lightning Rods concerns a firm that provides corporations with undercover prostitutes for their male employees in order to relieve them of urges that might cause them to commit sexual harassment.)
New Directions has just put out a new edition of The Last Samurai, and DeWitt is coming to New York at the end of July for the rituals of its revival: a collaborative performance with classical composer Timo Andres at National Sawdust in Williamsburg; a film screening and discussion of The Seven Samurai at Metrograph; a book party at Community Bookstorein Park Slope. It will be a busy week for a writer who likes nothing better than to be left alone with her work.
DeWitt’s laptop would now boot up, but the Z key wasn’t working and there’s a Z in her password. So the next day we drove over the New Hampshire border, past the all-night fireworks dealers, to Keene, where she wanted to visit a strip-mall outfit called Diversified Computers, run by tinkerers who had kindly helped her with a hard-drive problem a few years back. Of course, all of DeWitt’s many works in progress are backed up. These include about a dozen novels and dozens more stories that could be novels, some dating back decades. She’s joked that Opus 101 was the first title of The Last Samurai.
You could describe The Last Samurai as the story of a mother’s love for her brilliant young son, or you could describe it as a scathing indictment of the Western system of education and a meditation on heroism and suicide — or, as Socrates might put it, what makes a life worth living. (The former interpretation is popular, the latter more useful.) It is told by a woman named Sibylla, who relays the story of her family and the ways her parents’ lives and her own veered off track from promising beginnings. But she is constantly interrupted by the presence and the obnoxious voice — intruding on the page, often in large type — of her son, Ludo. He’s the product of a one-night stand with a travel writer she refers to as Liberace, for the slick facility of his thoughtless prose. She never told him about her pregnancy and never tells the boy who he is.
Sibylla raises Ludo according to John Stuart Mill’s account of his own education: She teaches him Greek at the age of 4, then other languages, until he’s teaching himself Japanese at the age of 5. (He’s way past algebra, too, and soon doing solid-state physics.) To provide him with male role models, she plays The Seven Samurai over and over for years. It’s worth mentioning that the pair are impoverished, living in a former squat, and Sibylla makes a meager living typing up obscure British magazines for a nascent digital archive. Halfway through the novel, Ludo, now age 11, takes over the narrative. He figures out who his father is, meets him, and to say he’s disappointed would be putting the matter lightly. When his mother knows he knows, he asks her: “Did you ever think of having an abortion?”
I did, said Sib, but it was very late and I had to have counseling, they counseled adoption & I said Yes but how could I be sure your adoptive parents would teach you how to leave life if you did not care for it & they said What and I said — well you know I said what any rational person would say and we had an unprofitable discussion & she said
Oh look! Hugh Carey is back in England.
A lot is happening in these lines. There’s the question of what Sibylla means by “leave life” — the sort of withdrawal from institutions that she and Ludo have already committed or something more final, and what would either of those things mean as forms of motherly love? — and with the introduction of Hugh Carey, an adventurous Oxford-trained linguist, the novel turns toward its final stage and Ludo will seek a father of his own choosing (Carey is the first of six candidates) in a quest structure lifted from The Seven Samurai.
The Last Samurai isn’t autobiographical in any conventional sense. DeWitt is childless and as an adult has never spent much time around children. “I did some babysitting when I was 16,” she told me, “which is a very effective form of contraception.” But the book’s genesis and its themes have roots in DeWitt’s itinerant childhood, her largely accidental education, and her relationship with her father. The DeWitts are a military family, and her father, John, attended the Naval Academy and then joined the Marines, turning down ROTC scholarships to Princeton and Brown. “I think that’s what turned him into an alcoholic,” she said. “He kept going over the wall in Annapolis to the Sportsman’s Bar.” DeWitt was born in Maryland in 1957. Her father joined the Foreign Service and was periodically enrolled in graduate school at the University of Florida, and the family lived between Gainesville and points south: Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador. DeWitt, her mother, and her sister were treated as baggage.
DeWitt had her first sense of real academic or literary possibility after arriving at Smith College in 1975, and even that was a letdown. “The good thing about it was that I started ancient Greek,” she said. “But I had a very ahistorical take on the world. I imagined that the women’s colleges would still have the intellectual focus and dedication that they had when they were founded. That was what I wanted: to go someplace where everybody was focused on the life of the mind, and nobody cared about social life. I was completely naïve.” It didn’t help that the students in the residence she was assigned to had the nickname “Jordan Jocks.” “It was classist, it was racist, it was homophobic,” she said. “I’m not saying that all of Smith was like this, but our residence — it was loathsome.”
Ancient Greek was an exciting discovery until she realized that she was in the wrong place to be serious about it. “Classics was a minority subject, very twee, like in Donna Tartt’s Secret History, and many of the students treated it as a kind of joke. I thought that if I majored in classics here, I’d always be an amateur. So I took a leave of absence and started reading independently, reading Pound and Eliot and Proust in French, and I thought, Now I’m engaging in the life of the mind, but I’m also working as a chambermaid in Provincetown.” DeWitt employs the phrase life of the mind without irony, with reverence really, but from her books, you can imagine she could build an entire dystopia around it.
“While I was away,” she said, “I thought, All right, now I know what the life of the mind is about, so I can go back and make this work. And I went back and I just felt sick. So I ended up attempting suicide with an aspirin overdose. In the days of the internet, nobody would be that stupid, but in those days, it was harder to get an idea of what an effective method would be. I just thought I would pass out if I took too much, but aspirin doesn’t work that way, so I just threw it up, and I felt so defeated. Then I thought, Well, what could I do that would make it a good thing that I didn’t die?The answer was applying to Oxford. I said to myself, with my sketchy grounding in classics, I know this is going to fail, but you have to try first.”
This is what I came to think of as the first of DeWitt’s Socrates moments, the first time when, surrounded by the philistine citizens of Athens, she had the impulse to eat hemlock rather than settle for a crap life. Two decades later, she incorporated the episode into The Last Samurai. Ludo knows that his mother once attempted suicide with paracetamol, as the English call Tylenol, and he tells one of his potential fathers: “You should never try to kill yourself with paracetamol. It’s a horrible way to die. People think you just pass out, but actually you don’t lose consciousness, you think nothing’s happened but then a day later your organs shut down. It destroys the liver. Sometimes people change their minds, but it’s too late.”
Knows a dozen languages and cuts her own wood. Photo: Zora Sicher
At the core of The Last Samurai is the notion that most people don’t meet their potential because the culture teaches them to assume there are things they just can’t do. The central example is Ludo reading Homer in the original Greek. “The Greek alphabet looks more daunting than it really is,” DeWitt said. “I could get anybody reading the Greek script in an hour. I thought that this could be something that I could reveal in the book. People might read the novel and think, Gosh, if somebody had introduced this to me I could have done it. And so now I can have a grievance against our education system, just like the author of this book.”
When I first asked DeWitt about her time at Oxford, she was cheerful and even a bit nostalgic recalling her initial expectations. “I thought everybody at Oxford would be like Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes, all of them. So obviously the idea that I could go there was ludicrous. I just didn’t think it through, because clearly if Britain could fill the ranks of Oxford and Cambridge year after year with the likes of Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes, Britain would rule the world.”
In her fourth year, she won a prestigious classics prize, the Ireland. A fellowship and lectureship followed. But the crucial event in her time there was her encounter — and subsequent relationship — with David Levene, now a professor of classics at NYU. Their marriage ended after seven years, but he remains her best reader. “Meeting David is what made me a writer,” DeWitt said. “David had this entirely different sensibility. He loves grand, mythic works of art. His favorite composer is Wagner. Among tragedians, he likes Aeschylus, whereas I’m a Euripides person. He introduced me to Sergio Leone and Kurosawa and Mel Brooks. The coexistence of these radically different aesthetic possibilities made me see ways that I could be a writer, things that I could do. He introduced me to bridge, to poker, to statistics, things that to other people might seem completely unrelated.” (Statistics and games of chance are crucial elements in some of DeWitt’s works-in-progress.) “Previously I just thought, What’s the point in writing a novel? Everything’s been done. But now I saw, No, there are so many things that have never been done! All these possibilities! This is so great!”
When DeWitt talks about her artistic breakthroughs, she has a way of quickly turning to her travails with the publishing industry. “Of course, at that point I had never talked to an agent, so I had never had the kind of conversation where you have some hotshot agent saying, ‘No publisher will allow that.’ ” DeWitt had earlier compared publishing to the pharmaceutical industry: The way drug companies suppress negative trial results in her view is similar to the way agents’ and editors’ failed deals are never reported, nor the way they stifle literary talent in the cradle. “There could be all these people out there having these ideas and being told, ‘No, no, no, no.’ ”
But the more we talked the more I sensed that DeWitt’s greatest heartbreak had come from the place that had first changed her life: Oxford. After a decade as a student and lecturer with no end to her distinctions and a thesis completed on the concept of propriety in ancient criticism, she had hoped Oxford would give her the sort of freedom that had allowed historians like Ronald Syme to write an epic work like The Roman Revolution. But Oxford had changed: Thatcherization, credentialization, Americanization, i.e., the pursuit of narrow specialties in the name of job-seeking. She realized she wasn’t interested in writing about writers writing about writers writing about Euripides. She wanted to be Euripides.
She left Oxford and spent the next few years writing while taking odd jobs: working on the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, as a copytaker at The Telegraph, and as a night-shift legal secretary. In June 1995, she quit that job to finish what was then a 300-page single-spaced manuscript of a novel based on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. She had only £3,000 in the bank, and her notion was to write until the money ran out. One night, she spoke on the phone to her father. “When you were at rock bottom,” she told me, “he had a way of making things worse. He started getting angry, and then he just started screaming at me. ‘What, you’re not hopeful? You’re not going to be all right?’ My attitude had been, you persevere even if you’re not hopeful and maybe you’ll get somewhere. But now my father’s angry at me. This is the genesis of The Last Samurai. ‘If I had picked a father, I wouldn’t have picked somebody like you.’ ” The quest gave the book its structure, and she saw her way to finishing it.
At Oxford, in 1990. Photo: Courtesy of the subject
The day we went to Keene, the office of Diversified Computers was shuttered. This was too bad because the tinkerers had been cheap and friendly, unlike the “rapacious” tech shop she could reach on bicycle. That night over dinner we discussed some of her other recent troubles. For some time, she had been stalked by a man living in the cottage next door. (This was the subject of an essay she wrote for the London Review of Books, and I worked on it as an editor.) She seemed less traumatized by the months-long saga than regretful that it interrupted her work, and whatever interrupts her work only makes her more broke, which makes it still harder to work. She is making minimum payments on five credit cards and has debts in the low five figures. Her mortgage payments on the Newfane house, which she bought from her uncle with help from her mother, are now $165 a month. DeWitt would rather be living in London, where she wrote The Last Samurai, or Berlin, where she spent most of the last decade and is subletting her apartment. In the spring, she donated $130 to the Bernie Sanders campaign. As he gained momentum, she tried to make another donation, but her credit card was refused.
All writers complain about editors and agents, but with DeWitt it can seem close to mania, not unlike Sibylla and her views on the education system. So it was at dinner that night. She used the word morons a lot, spoke of TPWs (“typical publishing wankers”), and said she has a long blacklist and a short whitelist of editors and agents in New York and London. (She told me I am in a gray zone between the lists.) She mentioned the Wylie Agency, which represented her for a few months between 2000 and 2001. “Those people,” she said, “they are so lucky they never tried to get a job in corporate law, because they’d be out on the street in a week.” DeWitt is the rare chronically impecunious writer who speaks in praise of bankers and Wall Street lawyers. She thinks the publishing industry would improve if it took lessons from Michael Lewis’s Moneyball and imposed a system like sabermetrics on authors. It occurred to me that a singular masterpiece like The Last Samurai, an angry book full of foreign scripts, numbers, prickly characters, and quotations of obscure works, might not slot easily into such a system.
But in some ways DeWitt has the bullshit of the publishing world nailed. “I don’t know,” she said, “how to deal with a world where there’s this language of infatuation that people use. ‘Well, I didn’t fall in love with the book.’ Or: ‘I fell in love with the book!’ ‘Infatuated!’ ‘Besotted!’ ‘Obsessed!’ I’m not sure that that has ever been my attitude toward any text. Throwing around this language is really a way of denying the mechanics of attachment. You hear this all the time: If they don’t fall in love with it the first time, that’s it. Well, that’s a psychological issue. Look, I sometimes think I have Asperger’s syndrome. I’m really bad at people’s emotional investment in things.” She compared editors who don’t respond to rational arguments about a book to Thrasymachus, Callicles, and Gorgias — sophists who sulk whenever Socrates frustrates their conventional arguments.
DeWitt’s entanglement with the publishing industry has resulted in two more Socrates moments for her. Once, after a book deal that she negotiated herself fell apart, she took a sedative and put a plastic bag over her head, but she couldn’t fall asleep. She sent an email to a lawyer asking that she ignore the previous email about disposing of her corpse. She went to Niagara Falls, but by the time she got there Reuters had reported her disappearance and a policeman picked her up on the street and took her to a hospital. Six years later, after the agent Bill Clegg failed to sell Lightning Rods to about a dozen publishers and resigned as her agent, she sent him a suicide email and set out to throw herself off a cliff near Brighton. She halted the plan after her ex-husband wrote saying he was expecting his first child with his second wife.
DeWitt has a keen interest in David Foster Wallace. The two writers have some important things in common: a rigorous academic background, an aesthetic of fracture, suicide as subject matter. She believes that if all had gone as smoothly as it could have with the publication of The Last Samurai, it would have been in the cohort of Infinite Jest. I took this to mean that she would have been considered a rival to Wallace and Jonathan Franzen for the unofficial title of Greatest American Novelist of Her Generation. Instead she sees herself as a writer who hasn’t yet fully emerged. “Plato did not have an editor,” she said. “Plenty of writers that we admire struggled along somehow without the help of Michael Pietsch,” referring to the editor of Infinite Jest. But it seemed to me that for all she had against the publishing world, DeWitt was still looking for a savior to rescue her — not unlike Ludo looking for a father. She disagreed: All she needed was a competent partner to put her books out without screwing them up and to pay her an advance she could survive on. (She had nice things to say about New Directions, but its advances are small.)
There is something else that has all along kept DeWitt going in the face of academic disappointments, publishing fiascoes, and overextended credit cards. DeWitt knows, in descending order of proficiency, Latin, ancient Greek, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese. Throughout her adult life she has taken refuge in these languages, and they were central to The Last Samurai. “The self is a set of linguistic patterns,” she said. “Reading and speaking in another language is like stepping into an alternate history of yourself where all the bad connotations are gone.”
*This article appears in the July 11, 2016 issue of New York Magazine.Syracuse, N.Y. — LSU running back Leonard Fournette's Heisman campaign is rolling along after making a stop here in Syracuse for Saturday's 34-24 victory for the Tigers at the Carrier Dome.
» Box score
Syracuse, of course, has had a few pretty good running backs in its own history, and one made sure to find Fournette on the field after the game for a brief chat.
Here is Floyd Little's account of what he told Fournette after watching him maul SU for 244 yards and two touchdowns.
Two great running backs. pic.twitter.com/VwTvDNV0yH — Shannon Shepherd (@shannshep) September 26, 2015
"Excellent athlete. I had a nice chance to visit with him. I like his style. He's like a 4.3 40, I told him that was the same as me, but I said you look bigger than me," Little said in a quiet moment in the underbelly of the Carrier Dome after the game. "And I told him, I like the way you run. I think you got a great future, and I think you are in position to win the Heisman if you keep up the work that you're doing.
"You played against a great defensive team today, and you did well. I'm proud of you. You play for a great coach in Les Miles. I like him. I respect him. But you have an offensive line that really gets off and you keep the right attitude, you keep the right focus, then you're going to be a hell of a player one day."
Fournette tweeted a photo Friday afternoon of the No. 44 jersey that hangs in the Carrier Dome rafters to honor Little, Jim Brown, Ernie Davis and the tradition of the number.
Earnie Davis, Jim brown, Floyd Little... Thank you guys for paving the way for us running backs to this day GOATS pic.twitter.com/54wQjlc7q6 — 7 (@_fournette) September 25, 2015
"We looked for each other after the game. We had a chance to hug and communicate and visit, and there's mutual respect. He knows who I am. I know who he is," Little said.
"He certainly showed everybody in Syracuse what kind of player he is. I talked to the chaplain of the team. He said he has good character. He's the kind of kid that you want. He's not only a great athlete, he's a great person, and when you talk to kids like that who have a focus and have an understanding of what his role is as a leader, as an athlete, as a team player, he embodies all of those things that it takes to be a great player and a great person.
"I think he's just as good a person as he is a player, and when you have those two things together, you just can't miss. I told him I'll see him in New York for the Heisman."Amazon will close the bidding process for its second headquarters on Thursday.
The bidding, which was announced in early September, has set off a frenzy across the country, drawing interest from a variety of communities — from big cities such as New York and Chicago to small regions such as Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania.
Although we don't know exactly which cities have officially submitted their proposals so far, there are more than 100 cities and counties that have expressed interest in placing a bid, according to previous reports. There could be more, as some cities are |
Mayor de Blasio could find the welcome mat pulled out from under him if he marches in the Columbus Day parade, Kramer reported. Italian Americans are furious with him for not exempting the statue of Christopher Columbus from his review of city statues and monuments.
He was booed, and excoriated.
“Bill de Blasio, who has shamefully sidestepped this issue, the mayor of all people should be defending Columbus Circle, defending the contributions of the Italian American community,” Eric Ulrich (R-Queens) said.
The mayor was also reminded that there could be a political price to being so PC.
Joe Guagliardo, Chairman of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations had a stern warning.
“I represent over 60 organizations, over a million members, and I can promise you this, at the parade this year we will remember who our friends are, and I promise you on Election Day we will remember who is attacking Italian Americans,” he said.
Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito first raised the issue of putting Columbus’ head on the chopping block, but the mayor has refused to pardon him.
“I’m an Italian American, Italian Americans have a long time been taught to be proud of Columbus, there’s a lot to not be proud of as well,” he said.
With the controversy raging, a spokesman for de Blasio would only say it’s “likely he march in the Columbus parade.”
Viverito said that she had never marched.
“Because of my concern about the controversy behind the figure of Christopher Columbus. That’s a personal decision,” she said.
Viverito mentioned that she’s part Italian, but also proudly Puerto Rican — heritage which influences her view of Columbus.
“For many of us that come from the Caribbean islands, we see him as a controversial figure,” she said.
Which some may find interesting, because as CBS2’s Tony Aiello reported, last year the town of Arecibo, Puerto Rico put up the largest statue in the world — it’s Christopher Columbus, 298 feet tall.
When asked about the Puerto Rican statue of Columbus she jumped.
Aiello: “The largest.”
Viverito: “I say it’s wrong.”
Aiello: “In the world.”
Viverito: “I say it’s wrong.”
Aiello: “And it’s of.”
Viverito: “I say it’s wrong.”
Aiello: “They shouldn’t have done that?”
Viverito: “No.”
Aiello: “Why?”
Viverito: “I’ll leave it there.”
A spokesperson said Mark-Viverito also thinks that Grant’s Tomb should be on the review list. Grant has been regarded by some as anti-Semitic.
The mayor has already ordered the removal of a granite marker honoring Henri Philippe Pétain on the Canyon of Heroes on Morris and Broadway in Manhattan. Pétain was convicted of treason in connection with helping the Nazis lead thousands of the Jewish faith to their deaths.
Leaders in the Italian American community fear Viverito will influence the monument review process.
Some New Yorkers have problems with the very idea of a monument review.
“They’ve been here for years and years, so why now. Doesn’t make sense to me, why now,” Grace Charles said.
“I think he should leave them alone. It’s not up to him, it’s up to us,” Steve Dechler said.
“I disagree with him because it’s part of history,” Rocky said.
The controversy swelled beyond Columbus Circle, CBS2’s Andrea Grymes reported. On Cristoforo Colombo Boulevard — or 8th Avenue — in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, she met longtime resident Teresa Maria Criscuola.
“I think all of the politicians, all of them, are sidetracked into this garbage,” she said. “My interest is jobs and the economy. That’s my number one interest.”
“It’s kindergarten baloney and a waste of time,” she added. “It’s disgraceful.”
Others agreed the city should focus on more important issues.
“They should be looking into doing other things, looking at more of the problems we have,” said. Frank Orfano. “Transportation, schools, stuff like that. Not statues.”
“These stupid people with these statues? It’s ridiculous,” Nino LaRocca, of Maspeth, said. “We’re the idiots that let the idiots get away with it.”
“Who’s next? Who they gonna pick on next? George Washington? Abraham Lincoln?” he added.
The mayor expects to name the commission next week.
He’s hoping to avoid political blowback by having the commission wait until after the election to announce the statues and monuments on the endangered species list.Facebook locked out Native Americans from using the social network after deeming their names to be fake.
Users from indigenous tribes have received messages asking them to change their legal names to ones that do not “violate [the company’s] standards”.
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A woman called Lone Hill, whose first name is Dana, had sent three forms of identification to Facebook so the company could “investigate” whether she was a real person, according to a report by Colorline.
Facebook’s “real name” policy states: “We require people to provide the name they use in real life; that way, you always know who you're connecting with.”
But Lone Hill, of the Lakota tribe, is not the only Native American who has been subjected to difficulties by Facebook after using given names.
The company took it upon itself to change the account name of Oglala Lakota Lance Brown Eyes to “Lance Brown” upon receipt of his identification documents.
He was only allowed to use his given name again after he had threatened to sue Facebook, who issued him an apology – wrote Lone Hill on her Last Real Indians website. A petition has also been set up to challenge the decisions.
Brown Eyes, according to Lone Hill, said: “They had no issue with me changing my name to a white man’s name but harassed me and others, forcing us to prove our identity while other people kept whatever they had.”
“Our people need to know they can fight back. The more of us stand up, they will change,” he added.
A man called Shane Creeping Bear had also received messages from Facebook stating that his “name violates [their] name standards.”
The struggle with Native American names comes after the Facebook’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, had to apologise after the company refused to recognise names of some LGBT members.
Their accounts were shut down after they had used stage names that they are known by in communities such as drag circles.
A Facebook spokesperson had said: “Over the last several months, we’ve made some significant improvements in the implementation of this standard, including enhancing the overall experience and expanding the options available for verifying an authentic name.
“We have more work to do, and our teams will continue to prioritize these improvements so everyone can be their authentic self on Facebook.”
Copies of ID are handled by only one employee before they are destroyed, the company claimed.
Facebook did not provide further comment today after being contacted by The IndependentAMD's return to a competitive footing versus Intel in desktop PC processors is quite likely the story of the decade in the computing sector. However, after rushed, day-one reviews of the chips detailed a few soft spots in performance -- specifically lower resolution 1080p gaming -- some have run away with headlines and generalized opinions that don't take into consideration the realities of early release, cutting-edge semiconductor products, especially something as complex as a brand new CPU platform architecture. If there's one thing I've learned in almost two decades of both selling and covering semiconductor platform technologies as a sales engineer and press media, it's that optimization of hardware, firmware and software can make a world of difference after a new product has a few months of maturity under its belt. It's easy to see why many were alarmed about Ryzen's uncharacteristic early shortcomings in gaming. After all, the massive and growing PC gaming industry and its passionate enthusiast following will be the bread and butter market for AMD's hot new 8-core Ryzen processors. However, too few have taken the collective deep breath to view this data point for what it is, currently at least, a "corner case."
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As I spoke with many of my colleagues, both analysts and press media, it was clear that universally everyone was seeing the same lower performance metrics for AMD Ryzen chips. When game benchmarks were dialed back to 1920X1080 resolutions (1080p), Ryzen was uncharacteristically slower than its Intel counterparts, sometimes by as much as 30% - 40%. This shortcoming flies in the face of virtually every other benchmark condition and result we've seen so far with the chips, from heavy-duty workstation number crunching, rendering and content creation, to standard everyday productivity compute tasks that require simple, fast short-burst IO response times. Here, Ryzen goes toe-to-toe with Intel Core and even beats it in spots. And when you dial resolutions back up, Ryzen processors easily keep pace with Intel's core-for-core in gaming. However, in that case, the test condition is essentially a graphics benchmark, since the majority of the processing is being done on the GPU rather than the CPU.
My early thoughts were that getting on and off chip with Ryzen was exhibiting some sort of intrinsic round-trip latency or bug, since when tasked with pure compute workloads Ryzen is so strong versus significantly more expensive Intel chips. Others thought Ryzen was having issues with its power states, dropping into a lower power mode inadvertently under this test condition, indicative perhaps of a BIOS firmware issue. Regardless, the more we kicked this around in the community, along with some of wide swings in performance seen between motherboard vendors and version, the more this began to feel, in my opinion, like typical early silicon architecture growing pains.
In fact, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su underscored in a reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) that gamers "should expect gaming performance to only get better with time as the developers have more time with 'Zen." Dr. Su went on to note that she expects 1080p performance with Ryzen will see measurable gains down the road and in future iterations of Zen2 and Zen3. In addition, AMD Corporate VP of Marketing John Taylor noted that AMD is on track to deliver thousands of developer kits to game devs for Ryzen optimization in 2017, which will help spur Ryzen-optimized game titles.
The bottom line is, it's too early to tell what's causing Ryzen to fall short in 1080p game testing and both ecosystem board partners, game developers and AMD itself are all still ironing out the kinks with the Ryzen platform. We have to remember that Intel's Core series architecture has held such a dominant position for so long, that the vast majority of game engines developed in the last decade have likely been optimized on Intel architecture as a baseline first and foremost. It will take some time for game patches, BIOS and CPU microcode updates to roll out that could very well further optimize Ryzen performance across a number of metrics, including 1080p gaming.
It's entirely possible as well, of course, that there is some sort of errata in the current chips, in terms of memory and/or IO latency, such that certain application use cases will remain a soft spot for Ryzen performance. However, since much of the tech media and developer community has only had Ryzen in their hands for about a week, it seems way too early to say definitively that what we're seeing of AMD Ryzen performance right now is representative of its full capabilities.I sometimes consult with bright colleagues from other departments who do advanced statistical models or simulations. They are from economics, psychology, and so forth. Quite often, their code is slow. As in “it takes weeks to run”. That’s not good.
Given the glacial pace of academic research, you might think that such long delays are nothing to worry about. However, my colleagues are often rightfully concerned. If it takes weeks for you to get the results back, you can only iterate over your ideas a few times a year. This limits drastically how deeply you can investigate issues.
These poor folks are often sent my way. In an ideal world, they would have a budget so that their code can be redesigned for speed… but most research is not well funded. They are often stuck with whatever they put together.
Too often they hope that I have a powerful machine that can run their code much faster. I do have a few fast machines, but it is often not as helpful as they expect.
Powerful computers tend to be really good at parallelism. Maybe counter-intuitively, these same computers can run non-parallel code slower than your ordinary PC. So dumping your code on a supercomputer can even make things slower!
In theory, you would think that software could be “automatically” parallelized so that it can run fast on supercomputers. Sadly, I cannot think of many examples where the software automatically tries to run using all available silicon on your CPU. Programmers still need to tell the code to run in parallel (though, often, it is quite simple). Some software libraries are clever and do this work for you… but if you wrote your code without care for performance, it is likely you did not select these clever libraries.
If you just grabbed code off the Internet, and you do not fully understand what is going on… or you don’t know anything about software performance… it is quite possible that a little bit of engineering can make the code run 10, 100 or 1000 times faster. So messing with a supercomputer could be entirely optional. It probably is. More than a few times, by changing just a single dependency, or just a single function, I have been able to switch someone’s code from “too slow” to “really fast”.
How should you proceed?
I recommend making back-of-the-envelope computations. A processor can do billions of operations a second. How many operations are you doing, roughly? If you are doing a billion simple operations (like a billion multiplications) and it takes minutes, days or weeks, something is wrong and you can do much better. If you genuinely require millions of billions of operations, then you might need a supercomputer. Estimates are important. A student of mine once complained about running out of memory. I stupidly paid for much more RAM. Yet all I had to do to establish that the machine was not at fault was to compare the student code with a standard example found online. The example was much, much faster than the student’s code running on the same machine, and yet the example did much more work with not much more code. That was enough to establish the problem: I encouraged the student to look at the example code.
You often do not need fancy tools to make code run faster. Once you have determined that you could run your algorithm faster, you can often inspect the code and determine at a glance where most of the work is being done. Then you can search for alternatives libraries, or just think about different ways to do the work. In one project, my colleague’s code was generating many random integers, and this was a bottleneck since random number generation is slow in Python by default, so I just proposed a faster random number generation written in C. (See my blog post Ranged random-number generation is slow in Python… for details.) Most times, I do not need to work so hard, I just need to propose trying a different software library. If you do need help finding out the source of the problem, there are nifty tools like line-by-line profilers in Python. There are also profilers in R.
My main insight is that most people do not need supercomputers. Some estimates and common sense are often enough to get code running much faster.The Official DOOM ][ Key FAQ! (Remember, if it doesn't say "The Official DOOM ][ Key Faq", it is probably something else!). Version 1.0.0.0.0.1 (We don't need no stinking ASCII art logos!) Legal crap: This Document is Copyright 1995 by Richard R. Ward <rrward@netcom.com>, and Mike Newton <mik@netcom.com>. Red Key instructions by Mike Newton. Blue and Yellow Key instructions, and other such nonsense by Richard Ward. I have tried to make sure that the information in this document is accurate (well, the factual stuff). I take no responsibility for misuse or inability to properly use the information in this document. So there. DOOM and DOOM ][ are registered trademarks and/or servicemarks of, and are copyrighted by ID software. Index 1: A note from the author(s). 2: What is in this FAQ? 2.1 What is a key? 2.2 Why do I need a key? 2.3.1 What is blue? 2.3.2 What is red? 2.3.3 What is yellow? 2.4.1 Why do I need a Blue Key? 2.4.2 Why do I need a Red Key? 2.4.3 Why do I need a Yellow Key? 2.5 What the hell am I talking about? 2.6 Definition of terms. 3: How to get the Keys on different levels of DOOM ][. Stuff 1: A note from the author(s). This FAQ (and I use the term loosely) is the combination of Richard Ward's <rrward@netcom.com> "The Official DOOM ][ Blue Key FAQ!" and Mike Newton's <mik@netcom.com> "THE OFFICIALLY-UNOFFICIAL DOOM II: RED KEY FAQ" as well as new text for the Yellow Key (no one felt up to the challenge of doing a Yellow Key FAQ, I guess). I have no one to blame ;) thank for this FAQ other than maybe Mike Newton (mik@netcom.com) for letting me steal his idea and his Red Key FAQ. Mike's Red Key FAQ was written after reading one-too-many posts asking "How do I get the Red Key on level 02 of DOOM ][?". I guess it was better than yelling at them. :) Version 1.0.0.0.0.1 of this FAQ corrects a few minor typographical errors, and clears up a few amiguities in the first version of this FAQ (better download a copy, I might have made some big changes!). 2: What is in this FAQ? This FAQ is for people having trouble finding the Keys on different levels of ID software's game; DOOM ][. This document does _not_ cover how to get the Keys in any other version of DOOM nor any of the freely available DOOM pWADs. Nor does it warn you about what kinds of monsters will be trying to deny you possession of the glory of the Blue Key, the utility of the Red Key, or the necessary evil of the Yellow Key, nor of the traps that await you. For each level, the keys are listed in the order that you need to get them. Some levels do not have any keys, and on some levels it does not matter which order you pick up the keys. 2.1: What is a key? Lobster's New Universally Unreadable Dictionary defines "key" as: "Key, n, plural keys, ['kee'], 1. a thingamabob, usually of metal, for moving the whatchamacallit of a lock and thus locking or unlocking something, if it works." In DOOM there are three different keys, (not at all bad) Red, (pathetic and stained) Yellow, and (glorious) Blue. They come in two varieties; key cards (which look like computer add-on cards) and skull keys (which look like skulls). Key cards and skull keys are functionally identical, they just differ in how they look (a blue card key will open the same door as a blue skull key)." 2.2: Why do I need a key? Because some of the doors in DOOM ][ are locked. 2.3.1: What is blue? Lobster's New Universally Unreadable Dictionary defines "blue" as: "Blue, n, [blew], 1. A glorious color somewhere between green and purple. The best darned color in the whole world." 2.3.2: What is red? Lobster's New Universally Unreadable Dictionary defines "red" as: "Red, n, [red], 1. A pretty nice color between orange and purple. Goes well with white or black. Too bad the commies had to use it for so long." 2.3.3: What is yellow? Lobster's New Universally Unreadable Dictionary defines "yellow" as: "Yellow, n, [yell - o] 1. A dingy and soiled color somewhere between green and orange. Of all the colors, this one truly sucks." 2.4.1: Why do I need a Blue Key? Are you nuts?! The Blue Key is the most beautiful thing in the world! Besides, it opens locked doors that need the Blue Key to open them. 2.4.2: Why do I need a Red Key? To open doors locked with red keys. 2.4.3: Why do I need a Yellow Key? I guess you could use them to open doors locked with yellow keys. I usually throw mine in the compost heap before the color rubs off on me. 2.5: What the hell am I talking about? I haven't the faintest idea. 2.6: Definition of terms: "Jump", there is no jumping in DOOM ][. When I use the word "jump" I mean that you should run off the edge of a raised platform (Shift+UpArrow). 3: How to get Keys on different levels of DOOM ][. (Information you might actually _use_ (imagine that)!) LEVEL 01 : "Entryway" Level 01 is completely devoid of any keys at all. :( LEVEL 02 : "Underhalls" RED KEY: As you travel around the river you'll come to a room where you can see the red key in a window of a building surrounded by AstroTurf(TM). Stay on the ledge above the turf and follow it around to the left. You'll see a window. Jump from (or rather, run off of (Shift+UpArrow)) the ledge through the window (over the turf (... to grandmother's house we go...)). Proceed up the stairs to the RED KEY. BLUE KEY: From the RED KEY, go back to start, flip the switch behind the red bars. Take the west river to a room with two holes in the floor. Go down the southern hole. The BLUE KEY will be to the east. YELLOW KEY: Map 02 is not soiled with the YELLOW KEY. LEVEL 03 : "The Gauntlet" BLUE KEY: From start, go to the west until you find the BLUE KEY. RED KEY: The RED KEY is in the grassy area with the demons, spectres, and imps. (near the exit). YELLOW KEY: Map 02 is not tainted with the YELLOW KEY. LEVEL 04 : "The Focus" BLUE KEY: From start, go south and up the stairs until you get to a room with grey bars in the windows. Hit the switch (this will lower the BLUE KEY). Go down the stairs and go through the door to the east. Go south and west to the BLUE KEY. RED KEY: Go through the blue door. You can see the RED KEY just ahead of you up on a ledge. Continue through this room to the next door. Just inside this door, on your left, is a small crate in the corner. Back yourself onto this crate and a larger crate will fall in the middle of the room. Get on this lifting crate and you can now easily get the RED KEY. YELLOW KEY: From the RED KEY turn left, use the teleporter. Go down the stairs and through the red door to the west. Go through the second red door. You couldn't miss that sorry excuse for a YELLOW KEY if you tried. LEVEL 05 : "The Waste Tunnels" RED KEY: From the start, go left and through the door (which really isn't a door, just looks like one). Follow the lights to the right through the door. Go to the final door on the left, open it and flip the switch. Turn around and go through the door directly in front of you. Go left and follow the river until it dead-ends. Turn left and head up the stairs. On your right at the top of the stairs there is a door. Go through the door and turn right. Follow this around to the water and there's the RED KEY. BLUE KEY: From the RED KEY go south then west to the red door. Behind the red door is the BLUE KEY. YELLOW KEY: From the BLUE KEY go west to the blue door. The YELLOW KEY is on the other side of the pillar. LEVEL 06 : "The Crusher" (not Wesley, I hope) BLUE KEY: From start, go west to the huge lift. Wait for lift to rise. Jump through the hole in the south wall of lift to the ledge with a switch. Flip the switch and run like hell to the lift that just lowered. The BLUE KEY awaits the brave. RED KEY: Go through the blue door and up the lift. Follow around to the left and down the stairs, straight past the red door and through the next door. Go down the lift, through yet another door. Follow the stairs all the way up and run across to where the RED KEY is. YELLOW KEY: From the RED KEY go back up the lift and east to the red door. Follow the grassy path to the south and through the next door. The putrid YELLOW KEY is in the southeast corner of the room with the green slime in the trench. LEVEL 07 : "Dead Simple" (not "easy", but "simple") Level 07 has no keys at all. Don't stare, it's not polite. LEVEL 08 : "Tricks and Traps" YELLOW KEY: From start, turn around and go through the south door. _If_ you survive, you will be burdened with the YELLOW KEY. RED KEY: Go through the yellow door (in the starting room) and follow the path (staying to the left). You can't miss the RED KEY! BLUE KEY: Sadly, this level has no BLUE KEY. LEVEL 09 : "The Pit" BLUE KEY: From start, take the north lift. Go as far north as you can. You will run into a lift, hit the switch to the east of the lift. Lower the lift and jump over to the newly raised section. Go around the corner to the south-east (don't fall off) and out into the courtyard. Go back to the newly opened room (just around the corner) and flip the switch. Go north and flip the newly exposed. A door will open to the west. Jump across to the raised ledge. This will lower the platform with the BLUE KEY. Run like hell to the BLUE KEY. YELLOW KEY: From the BLUE KEY, jump off the platform and go north to the blue door behind the switch. Open door and hit switch. Run back (south) to the newly opened hidden door. Flip the switch on the north face of the pillar and go through the (now open) door. Jump into the green muck and run to the left (south), hit the switch in the alcove and run to the YELLOW KEY. RED KEY: There is no RED KEY on this level. LEVEL 10 : "Refueling Base" It does not really matter which key you get first. BLUE KEY: From start, bear east until you get to a long brown courtyard. Take the south door. Go east to a large dark room. Go to smaller to the north. On the south wall of this area is a small room with stairs. Go up the stairs. The BLUE KEY will be behind a hidden door in the southeast corner. YELLOW KEY: From BLUE KEY, go back to the brown courtyard and go to the door at the north end. After the door, take the first right and go to the end of the aisle and the YELLOW KEY will be in the alcove around the corner to the right. RED KEY: Level 10 is devoid of the usefulness of the RED KEY. LEVEL 11 : "'O' of Destruction" BLUE KEY: From start, go east 1/4 the way around the circle. Take the "bridge" to the east and continue east as far as you can go (you will climb two flights of stairs). There will be a small wooden "house". The BLUE KEY is inside. RED KEY: Well, you know *where* the RED KEY is (if you don't, just delete DOOM II and go back to PONG:) There are two ways to get it: 1. Go get the blue key (you don't need it, but you need to go get it). After leaving the blue key area (back to the original path), turn right and then look right. Down in the acid there's a door-like-thing in the wall. Go in it and into the teleporter. From the ledge where you exit, run fast to the RED KEY! 2. <you actually need the blue key for this one> Go through the blue door and flip the switch. Continue on and follow the newly raised path to another switch and flip it. Jump down and go up the stairs and now there's a path raised to the RED KEY! YELLOW KEY: Level 11 is joyfully free of the YELLOW KEY. LEVEL 12 : "The Factory" BLUE KEY: From start, go around the building to the northwest corner. Go up the stairs and bear north (and kinda west). Go through the _first_ door you find. Go to the wooden box with the Soul Sphere on top and turn east. Go to the end and turn north (two lefts) and the BLUE KEY awaits the valiant. YELLOW KEY: From the BLUE KEY turn around and go east to a column with red banners on either side of a door. Behind this door hides the YELLOW KEY like the frightened rabbit it is. RED KEY: While there is no RED KEY on this level, there is a red door. A sneaky trap if ever I saw one. (Something I'd expect the YELLOW KEY to try and get away with.) LEVEL 13 : "Downtown" BLUE KEY: From start, go around the grey wall and follow the dark arrow into the alley and up the stairs. Go through the door and go down a hole in the northwest corner of the room. Use lift at the north end. There will be another hole to the north as you exit the lift, go for it. Open the door at the end and the BLUE KEY will be in front of a teleport in the northwest corner. RED KEY: From the BLUE KEY go through the door at the top of the stairs and head south to the large arrow on the ground. Follow the path to the BLUE KEY, stopping at the top of the lift. Take the teleporter rather than the drop and follow the ledge around to the blue door, to the teleporter up to the RED KEY. YELLOW KEY: From the RED KEY, jump off the building and go to the southeast corner of the map to the red door. Ride the lift to the top and there you will spy the pathetic visage of the YELLOW KEY. LEVEL 14 : "The Inmost Dens" RED KEY: From the start, go right and then right again down the stairs. Follow to second door on right and walk through it and the door behind it. Go to the right and follow to stairs on left, up the stairs and through the door. Directly ahead of you is a diamond-shaped window. Jump through the window to the path dead ahead. Turn left after the second water channel and follow this to the RED KEY. BLUE KEY: From the RED KEY, go back to the double gated "bridge" (with the self opening doors) and go south and west to a the shack next to the bridge blocked by red skull pillars. Open the shack door and hit the switch. Go over the bridge south until you come to a door. On the other side the fearless will be rewarded with the BLUE KEY. YELLOW KEY: Level 14's purity has not been soiled by the YELLOW KEY. LEVEL 15 : "Industrial Zone" RED KEY: From the start, take the lift to ground level. Turn right and follow the outside wall around until you see the building (on your left) surround by a small "red-acid" channel. Follow stairs to the top of the building. Once at the top, look right (at the white teleporter). Back up and jump to the teleporter. From the ledge you exit on run straight to the ledge on the building in from of you and flip the switch. Fall into the room in this building and go in the teleporter. Upon exit, move forward a bit and then back into the teleporter again. Get the RED KEY. YELLOW KEY: (You can get the YELLOW KEY without the RED KEY (you can solve the level without the RED KEY), but I'm not telling you how!) From the RED KEY take the lift down to ground level and go to the grey building with brown buttresses to the east (you can see an Invisibility Sphere in it). Take the lift up to the red door, go through and follow the hall to the teleporter at the end. Use it. From the "warp in" turn around and go to the lift behind you (south). Go east and south and go through a doorway facing west. Go inside. Hidden behind the BFG-9000 is the almost useless YELLOW KEY. BLUE KEY: Flip the switch to raise the stairs and go up and out to the south. Jump off the southwest corner towards the green castle (don't fall in the moat!). Go into the castle. Get the Rad Suit in the northwest corner and then go down the southern most tunnel and flip the switch. Go back to the entrance room and up to the top of the newly formed stairs. Lower the lift at the top and go around the corner to the east and hit the switch. Go back down the stairs. There will be an arrow on the floor pointing to a small hidden door in the wall. Open the door and the hardy adventurer will be blessed with the BLUE KEY. LEVEL 16 : "Suburbs" BLUE KEY: From start, leave the building you start in. Go to a small lake in the southeast corner of the map. In the slime is a small wooden island. The BLUE KEY awaits atop this island (it is obscured by four boxes of rockets, but nothing can hide the glory that is the BLUE KEY). RED KEY: Go to the grey building in the northern area of the map (the one with the funky blue and red firewall inside). Behind the blue door is the RED KEY. You can't miss it. YELLOW KEY: Like all good things, this level is without the YELLOW KEY. LEVEL 17 : "Tenements" RED KEY: From the start, take the first available left. Follow down the jagged path to the RED KEY. (Mike get's all the easy ones.) BLUE KEY: You need the RED KEY, from the RED KEY wait for door to open, go to the intersection north of start (with the door that won't open). Behind the RED Door is a switch, hit it. Go across to the other room (who's door is now open) and ride the lift down. Go to the far end of this lower area and hit the red/green switch. There is a door that will lead you back to the start area. Go out of the now open door and across to the east doorway on the acid pit. Go to the northeast corner of the north acid pit and hit the wall (spacebar, there's a hidden switch on this wall). Go through the door that opened just to the south of you and hit the switch on the eastern end, raising a bridge across the south acid pit. Go across this bridge and fall into the narrow chasm at the far side. Flip the switch. This will raise you out of the acid and raise a bridge across the north acid pit. If your soul is pure, you may now get the BLUE KEY. YELLOW KEY: From the BLUE KEY go back to the courtyard and go through the blue door to the west. Go to the south and go up the stairs. Turn around and run to the (now) exposed Soul Sphere. Go back up the stairs and hit the (now) exposed switch. Go down the stairs and go up the stairs in the northern part of the room. Follow the path to the green pillar with the beating heart. Turn left (east) and hump in the acid. There the YELLOW KEY awaits like some third-place ribbon at the Science Fair. LEVEL 18 : "The Courtyard" YELLOW KEY: (*SPOILER*) _Shoot_ the door to open it and take the first left into the courtyard. (*END SPOILER*) Go to the northwest corner and the YELLOW KEY waits like a discarded cigarette butt. BLUE KEY: From the YELLOW KEY go to the east side of the "pillbox" on the raised ledge to the east of the YELLOW KEY. Open the yellow door and use the teleport within. The BLUE KEY is hidden behind one of the green pillars. RED KEY: Level 18 does not contain a RED KEY (I kinda forgot to mention this in the first version of this FAQ (aren't you glad you downloaded a new copy?)). LEVEL 19 : "The Citadel" You can get the keys in any order, so I'll list them alphabetically. BLUE KEY: From start, get into the castle (you'll figure it out), go west to a room with several doors and a switch. Hit the switch and go through the west door. Hit the north switch and a teleport will open in the wall. Use it. Turn around and take the south passage. Open the hidden door just past the ammo box in the window and lower the lift within (far wall). After the lift raises, _run_ (fast as you can) out of the window and over the moat to the red building. Go in the north entrance and flip the switch in the "guard shack". Go through the west opening and use the _NorthEast_ teleport. Go straight ahead and you will receive the blessings of the BLUE KEY. RED KEY: From the start, follow the path to room with stairs on both sides and 3 doors. Go through the door on the right, flip the switch to raise the stairs, and go through the secret door at the top of these stairs. Run fast up the stairs inside this door veering right toward the teleporter on the ledge in the corner. Upon exit, move forward then back into the teleporter again. In this room, shoot the west wall to raise the floor. Hit the switch on the raised floor, get on lift, and jump to the raised floor. Go through the door and follow path to the RED KEY. YELLOW KEY: From the start, go to the same place |
]
In modern times the idea of making living spaces safe and clean have spread from the civilian population to include prisons, on ethical grounds which honor that unsafe and unsanitary prisons violate constitutional (law) prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment. In recent times prison reform ideas include greater access to legal counsel and family, conjugal visits, proactive security against violence, and implementing house arrest with assistive technology.
History [ edit ]
Prison populations of various countries in 2008
Prisons have only been used as the primary punishment for criminal acts in the last few centuries. Far more common earlier were various types of corporal punishment, public humiliation, penal bondage, and banishment for more severe offences, as well as capital punishment.
Prisons contained both felons and debtors – the latter of which were allowed to bring in wives and children. The jailer made his money by charging the inmates for food and drink and legal services and the whole system was rife with corruption.[citation needed] One reform of the sixteenth century had been the establishment of the London Bridewell as a house of correction for women and children. This was the only place any medical services were provided.
United Kingdom [ edit ]
During the eighteenth century, British justice used a wide variety of measures to punish crime, including fines, the pillory and whipping. Transportation to The United States of America was often offered, until 1776, as an alternative to the death penalty, which could be imposed for many offenses including pilfering. When they ran out of prisons in 1776 they used old sailing vessels which came to be called hulks as places of temporary confinement.
The most notable reformer was John Howard who, having visited several hundred prisons across England and Europe, beginning when he was high sheriff of Bedfordshire, published The State of the Prisons in 1777.[4] He was particularly appalled to discover prisoners who had been acquitted but were still confined because they couldn't pay the jailer's fees. He proposed that each prisoner should be in a separate cell with separate sections for women felons, men felons, young offenders and debtors. The prison reform charity, the Howard League for Penal Reform, takes its name from John Howard.
The Penitentiary Act which passed in 1779 following his agitation introduced solitary confinement, religious instruction and a labor regime and proposed two state penitentiaries, one for men and one for women. These were never built due to disagreements in the committee and pressures from wars with France and jails remained a local responsibility. But other measures passed in the next few years provided magistrates with the powers to implement many of these reforms and eventually in 1815 jail fees were abolished.
Quakers such as Elizabeth Fry continued to publicize the dire state of prisons as did Charles Dickens in his novels David Copperfield and Little Dorrit about the Marshalsea. Samuel Romilly managed to repeal the death penalty for theft in 1806, but repealing it for other similar offences brought in a political element that had previously been absent. The Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline, founded in 1816, supported both the Panopticon for the design of prisons and the use of the treadwheel as a means of hard labor. By 1824, 54 prisons had adopted this means of discipline.[5] Robert Peel's Gaols Act of 1823 attempted to impose uniformity in the country but local prisons remained under the control of magistrates until the Prison Act of 1877.
The American separate system attracted the attention of some reformers and led to the creation of Millbank Prison in 1816 and Pentonville prison in 1842. By now the end of transportation to Australia and the use of hulks was in sight and Joshua Jebb set an ambitious program of prison building with one large prison opening per year. The main principles were separation and hard labour for serious crimes, using treadwheels and cranks. However, by the 1860s public opinion was calling for harsher measures in reaction to an increase in crime which was perceived to come from the 'flood of criminals' released under the penal servitude system. The reaction from the committee set up under the commissioner of prisons, Colonel Edmund Frederick du Cane, was to increase minimum sentences for many offences with deterrent principles of 'hard labour, hard fare, and a hard bed'.[6] In 1877 he encouraged Disraeli's government to remove all prisons from local government and held a firm grip on the prison system till his forced retirement in 1895. He also established a tradition of secrecy which lasted till the 1970s so that even magistrates and investigators were unable to see the insides of prisons.[7] By the 1890s the prison population was over 20,000.
In 1894-5 Herbert Gladstone's Committee on Prisons showed that criminal propensity peaked from the mid-teens to the mid-twenties. He took the view that central government should break the cycle of offending and imprisonment by establishing a new type of reformatory, that was called Borstal after the village in Kent which housed the first one. The movement reached its peak after the first world war when Alexander Paterson became commissioner, delegating authority and encouraging personal responsibility in the fashion of the English Public school: cellblocks were designated as 'houses' by name and had a housemaster. Cross-country walks were encouraged, and no one ran away. Prison populations remained at a low level until after the second world war when Paterson died and the movement was unable to update itself.[8]
Some aspects of Borstal found their way into the main prison system, including open prisons and housemasters, renamed assistant governors and many Borstal-trained prison officers used their experience in the wider service. But in general the prison system in the twentieth century remained in Victorian buildings which steadily became more and more overcrowded with inevitable results.
United States [ edit ]
In colonial America, punishments were severe. The Massachusetts assembly in 1736 ordered that a thief, on first conviction, be fined or whipped. The second time he was to pay treble damages, sit for an hour upon the gallows platform with a noose around his neck and then be carted to the whipping post for thirty stripes. For the third offense he was to be hanged.[9] But the implementation was haphazard as there was no effective police system and judges wouldn't convict if they believed the punishment was excessive. The local jails mainly held men awaiting trial or punishment and those in debt.
In the aftermath of independence most states amended their criminal punishment statutes. Pennsylvania eliminated the death penalty for robbery and burglary in 1786, and in 1794 retained it only for first degree murder. Other states followed and in all cases the answer to what alternative penalties should be imposed was incarceration. Pennsylvania turned its old jail at Walnut Street into a state prison. New York built Newgate state prison in Greenwich Village and other states followed. But by 1820 faith in the efficacy of legal reform had declined as statutory changes had no discernible effect on the level of crime and the prisons, where prisoners shared large rooms and booty including alcohol, had become riotous and prone to escapes.
In response, New York developed the Auburn system in which prisoners were confined in separate cells and prohibited from talking when eating and working together, implementing it at Auburn State Prison and Sing Sing at Ossining. The aim of this was rehabilitative: the reformers talked about the penitentiary serving as a model for the family and the school and almost all the states adopted the plan (though Pennsylvania went even further in separating prisoners). The system's fame spread and visitors to the U.S. to see the prisons included de Tocqueville who wrote Democracy in America as a result of his visit.
However, by the 1860s, overcrowding became the rule of the day, partly because of the long sentences given for violent crimes, despite increasing severity inside the prison and often cruel methods of gagging and restraining prisoners. An increasing proportion of prisoners were new immigrants. As a result of a tour of prisons in 18 states, Enoch Wines and Theodore Dwight produced a monumental report describing the flaws in the existing system and proposing remedies.[10] Their critical finding was that not one of the state prisons in the United States was seeking the reformation of its inmates as a primary goal.[11] They set out an agenda for reform which was endorsed by a National Congress in Cincinnati in 1870. These ideas were put into practice in the Elmira Reformatory in New York in 1876 run by Zebulon Brockway. At the core of the design was an educational program which included general subjects and vocational training for the less capable. Instead of fixed sentences, prisoners who did well could be released early.
But by the 1890s, Elmira had twice as many inmates as it was designed for and they were not only the first offenders between 16 and 31 for which the program was intended. Although it had a number of imitators in different states, it did little to halt the deterioration of the country's prisons which carried on a dreary life of their own. In the southern states, in which blacks made up more than 75% of the inmates, there was ruthless exploitation in which the states leased prisoners as chain gangs to entrepreneurs who treated them worse than slaves. By the 1920s drug use in prisons was also becoming a problem.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, psychiatric interpretations of social deviance were gaining a central role in criminology and policy making. By 1926, 67 prisons employed psychiatrists and 45 had psychologists. The language of medicine was applied in an attempt to "cure" offenders of their criminality. In fact, little was known about the causes of their behaviour and prescriptions were not much different from the earlier reform methods.[12] A system of probation was introduced, but often used simply as an alternative to suspended sentences, and the probation officers appointed had little training, and their caseloads numbered several hundred making assistance or surveillance practically impossible. At the same time they could revoke the probation status without going through another trial or other proper process.[13]
In 1913, Thomas Mott Osborne became chairman of a commission for the reform of the New York prison system and introduced a Mutual Welfare League at Auburn with a committee of 49 prisoners appointed by secret ballot from the 1400 inmates. He also removed the striped dress uniform at Sing Sing and introduced recreation and movies. Progressive reform resulted in the "Big House" by the late twenties – prisons averaging 2,500 men with professional management designed to eliminate the abusive forms of corporal punishment and prison labor prevailing at the time.
The American prison system was shaken by a series of riots in the early 1950s triggered by deficiencies of prison facilities, lack of hygiene or medical care, poor food quality, and guard brutality. In the next decade all these demands were recognized as rights by the courts.[12] In 1954, the American Prison Association changed its name to the American Correctional Association and the rehabilitative emphasis was formalized in the 1955 United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners.
Since the 1960s the prison population in the US has risen steadily, even during periods where the crime rate has fallen. This is partly due to profound changes in sentencing practices due to a denunciation of lenient policies in the late sixties and early seventies and assertions that rehabilitative purposes do not work. As a consequence sentencing commissions started to establish minimum as well as maximum sentencing guidelines, which have reduced the discretion of parole authorities and also reduced parole supervision of released prisoners. Another factor that contributed to the increase of incarcerations was the Reagan administration's "War On Drugs" in the 1980s. This War increased money spent on lowering the number of illegal drugs in the United States. As a result, drug arrests increased and prisons became increasingly more crowded.[14] By 2010, the United States had more prisoners than any other country and a greater percentage of its population was in prison than in any other country in the world. "Mass incarceration" became a serious social and economic problem, as each of the 2.3 million American prisoners costs an average of about $25,000 per year. Recidivism remained high, and useful programs were often cut during the recession of 2009–2010. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Plata upheld the release of thousands of California prisoners due to California's inability to provide constitutionally mandated levels of healthcare.
In 2015 a bipartisan effort was launched by Koch family foundations, the ACLU, the Center for American Progress, Families Against Mandatory Minimums, the Coalition for Public Safety, and the MacArthur Foundation to more seriously address criminal justice reform in the United States.[15][16][17] The Kochs and their partners, are combatting the systemic overcriminalization and overincarceration of citizens from primarily low-income and minority communities.[18][19] The group of reformers is working to reduce recidivism rates and diminish barriers faced by rehabilitated persons seeking new employment in the work force. In addition they have a goal in ending Asset forfeiture practices since law enforcement often deprives individuals of the majority of their private property.[20]
Europe [ edit ]
The first public prison in Europe was Le Stinch in Florence, constructed in 1297, copied in several other cities. The more modern use grew from the prison workhouse (known as the Rasphuis) from 1600 in Holland. The house was normally managed by a married couple, the 'father' and'mother', usually with a work master and discipline master. The inmates, or journeymen, often spent their time on spinning, weaving and fabricating cloths and their output was measured and those who exceeded the minimum received a small sum of money with which they could buy extras from the indoor father.[21]
An exception to the rule of forced labor were those inmates whose families could not look after them and paid for them to be in the workhouse. From the later 17th century private institutions for the insane, called the beterhuis, developed to meet this need.
In Hamburg a different pattern occurred with the spinhaus in 1669, to which only infamous criminals were admitted. This was paid by the public treasury and the pattern spread in eighteenth-century Germany. In France the use of galley servitude was most common until galleys were abolished in 1748. After this the condemned were put to work in naval arsenals doing heavy work. Confinement originated from the hôpitaux généraux which were mostly asylums, though in Paris they included many convicts, and persisted up till the revolution.
The use of capital punishment and judicial torture declined during the eighteenth century and imprisonment came to dominate the system, although reform movements started almost immediately. Many countries were committed to the goal as a financially self-sustaining institution and the organization was often subcontracted to entrepreneurs, though this created its own tensions and abuse. By the mid nineteenth century several countries initiated experiments in allowing the prisoners to choose the trades in which they were to be apprenticed. The growing amount of recidivism in the latter half of the nineteenth century led a number of criminologists to argue that "imprisonment did not, and could not fulfill its original ideal of treatment aimed at reintegrating the offender into the community".[22] Belgium led the way in introducing the suspended sentence for first-time offenders in 1888, followed by France in 1891 and most other countries in the next few years. Parole had been introduced on an experimental basis in France in the 1830s, with laws for juveniles introduced in 1850, and Portugal began to use it for adult criminals from 1861. The parole system introduced in France in 1885 made use of a strong private patronage network. Parole was approved throughout Europe at the International Prison Congress of 1910. As a result of these reforms the prison populations of many European countries halved in the first half of the twentieth century.
Exceptions to this trend included France and Italy between the world wars, when there was a huge increase in the use of imprisonment. The National Socialist state in Germany used it as an important tool to rid itself of its enemies as crime rates rocketed as a consequence of new categories of criminal behavior. Russia, which had only started to reform its penal and judicial system in 1860 by abolishing corporal punishment, continued the use of exile with hard labor as a punishment and this was increased to a new level of brutality under Joseph Stalin, despite early reforms by the Bolsheviks.
Postwar reforms stressed the need for the state to tailor punishment to the individual convicted criminal. In 1965, Sweden enacted a new criminal code emphasizing non-institutional alternatives to punishment including conditional sentences, probation for first-time offenders and the more extensive use of fines. The use of probation caused a dramatic decline in the number women serving long-term sentences: in France the number fell from 5,231 in 1946 to 1,121 in 1980. Probation spread to most European countries though the level of surveillance varies. In the Netherlands, religious and philanthropic groups are responsible for much of the probationary care. The Dutch government invests heavily in correctional personnel, having 3,100 for 4,500 prisoners in 1959.[23]
However, despite these reforms, numbers in prison started to grow again after the 1960s even in countries committed to non-custodial policies.
Theories [ edit ]
Retribution, vengeance and retaliation [ edit ]
This is founded on the "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" incarceration philosophy, which essentially states that if one person harms another, then an equivalent harm should be done to them. One goal here is to prevent vigilantism, gang or clan warfare, and other actions by those who have an unsatisfied need to "get even" for a crime against them, their family, or their group. It is, however, difficult to determine how to equate different types of "harm". A literal case is where a murderer is punished with the death penalty, the argument being "justice demands a life for a life". One criticism of long term prison sentences and other methods for achieving justice is that such "warehousing" of criminals is rather expensive, this argument notwithstanding the fact that the multiple incarceration appeals of a death penalty case often exceed the price of the "warehousing" of the criminal in question. Yet another facet of this debate disregards the financial cost for the most part. The argument regarding warehousing rests, in this case, upon the theory that any punishment considered respectful of human rights should not include caging humans for life without chance of release—that even death is morally and ethically a higher road than no-parole prison sentences.
Deterrence [ edit ]
The criminal is used as a "threat to themselves and others". By subjecting prisoners to harsh conditions, authorities hope to convince them to avoid future criminal behavior and to exemplify for others the rewards for avoiding such behavior; that is, the fear of punishment will win over whatever benefit or pleasure the illegal activity might bring. The deterrence model frequently goes far beyond "an eye for an eye", exacting a more severe punishment than would seem to be indicated by the crime. Torture has been used in the past as a deterrent, as has the public embarrassment and discomfort of stocks, and, in religious communities, excommunication. Executions, particularly gruesome ones (such as hanging or beheading), often for petty offenses, are further examples of attempts at deterrence. One criticism of the deterrence model is that criminals typically have a rather short-term orientation, and the possibility of long-term consequences is of little importance to them. Also, their quality of life may be so horrific that any treatment within the criminal justice system (which is compatible with human rights law) will only be seen as an improvement over their previous situation.There used to be many European Monks who disagreed with the containment of the mentally ill, and their ethics had a strong influence towards Dix's mission to find a proper way to care for the challenged people.
Rehabilitation, reform and correction [ edit ]
("Reform" here refers to reform of the individual, not the reform of the penal system.) The goal is to "repair" the deficiencies in the individual and return them as productive members of society. Education, work skills, deferred gratification, treating others with respect, and self-discipline are stressed. Younger criminals who have committed fewer and less severe crimes are most likely to be successfully reformed. "Reform schools" and "boot camps" are set up according to this model. One criticism of this model is that criminals are rewarded with training and other items which would not have been available to them had they not committed a crime.
Prior to its closing in late 1969, Eastern State Penitentiary, then known as State Correctional Institution, Philadelphia, had established a far reaching program of voluntary group therapy with the goal of having all inmates in the prison involved. From 1967 when the plan was initiated, the program appears to have been successful as many inmates did volunteer for group therapy. An interesting aspect was that the groups were to be led by two therapists, one from the psychology or social work department and a second from one of the officers among the prison guard staff.[24]
Removal from society [ edit ]
The goal here is simply to keep criminals away from potential victims, thus reducing the number of crimes they can commit. The criticism[citation needed] of this model is that others increase the number and severity of crimes they commit to make up for the "vacuum" left by the removed criminal. For example, incarcerating a drug dealer will result in an unmet demand for drugs at that locale, and an existing or new drug dealer will then appear, to fill the void. This new drug dealer may have been innocent of any crimes before this opportunity, or may have been guilty of less serious crimes, such as being a look-out for the previous drug dealer.
Restitution or repayment [ edit ]
Prisoners are forced to repay their "debt" to society. Unpaid or low pay work is common in many prisons, often to the benefit of the community. In some countries prisons operate as labour camps. Critics say that the repayment model gives government an economic incentive to send more people to prison. In corrupt or authoritarian regimes, such as the former Soviet Union under the control of Joseph Stalin, many citizens are sentenced to forced labour for minor breaches of the law, simply because the government requires the labour camps as a source of income. Community service is increasingly being used as an alternative to prison for petty criminals.[25]
Reduction in immediate costs [ edit ]
Government and prison officials also have the goal of minimizing short-term costs.
In wealthy societies: This calls for keeping prisoners placated by providing them with things like television and conjugal visits. Inexpensive measures like these prevent prison assaults and riots which in turn allow the number of guards to be minimized. Providing the quickest possible parole and/or release also reduces immediate costs to the prison system (although these may very well increase long term costs to the prison system and society due to recidivism). The ultimate way to reduce immediate costs is to eliminate prisons entirely and use fines, community service, and other sanctions (like the loss of a driver's license or the right to vote) instead. Executions at first would appear to limit costs, but, in most wealthy societies, the long appeals process for death sentences (and associated legal costs) make them quite expensive. Note that this goal may conflict with a number of goals for criminal justice systems.
In poor societies:
Poor societies, which lack the resources to imprison criminals for years, frequently use execution in place of imprisonment, for severe crimes. Less severe crimes, such as theft, might be dealt with by less severe physical means, such as amputation of the hands. When long term imprisonment is used in such societies, it may be a virtual death sentence, as the lack of food, sanitation, and medical care causes widespread disease and death, in such prisons.
Some of the goals of criminal justice are compatible with one another, while others are in conflict. In the history of prison reform, the harsh treatment, torture, and executions used for deterrence first came under fire as a violation of human rights. The salvation goal, and methods, were later attacked as violations of the individual's freedom of religion. This led to further reforms aimed principally at reform/correction of the individual, removal from society, and reduction of immediate costs. The perception that such reforms sometimes denied victims justice then led to further changes.
Examples [ edit ]
John Howard is now widely regarded as the founding father of prison reform, having travelled extensively visiting prisons across Europe in the 1770s and 1780s. Also, the great social reformer Jonas Hanway promoted "solitude in imprisonment, with proper profitable labor and a spare diet".[26] Indeed, this became the popular model in England for many decades.
United Kingdom [ edit ]
Within Britain, prison reform was spearheaded by the Quakers, and in particular, Elizabeth Fry during the Victorian Age. Elizabeth Fry visited prisons and suggested basic human rights for prisoners, such as privacy and teaching prisoners a trade. Fry was particularly concerned with women's rights. Parliament, coming to realize that a significant portion of prisoners had come to commit crimes as a result of mental illness, passed the County Asylums Act (1808). This made it possible for Justice of the Peace in each county to build and run their own pauper asylums.
"Whereas the practice of confining such lunatics and other insane persons as are chargeable to their respective parishes in Gaols, Houses of Correction, Poor Houses and Houses of Industry, is highly dangerous and inconvenient"[27]
There is contemporary research on the use of volunteers by governments to help ensure the fair and humane detention of prisoners.[28] Research suggests that volunteers can be effective to ensure oversight of state functions and ensure accountability, however, they must be given tasks appropriately and well trained.[28]
United States [ edit ]
In the 1800s, Dorothea Dix toured prisons in the U.S. and all over Europe looking at the conditions of the mentally handicapped. Her ideas led to a mushroom effect of asylums all over the United States in the mid-19th-century. Linda Gilbert established 22 prison libraries of from 1,500 to 2,000 volumes each, in six states.
In the early 1900s Samuel June Barrows was a leader in prison reform. President Cleveland appointed him International Prison Commissioner for the U.S. in 1895, and in 1900 Barrows became Secretary of the Prison Association of New York and held that position until his death on April 21, 1909. A Unitarian pastor, Barrows used his influence as editor of the Unitarian Christian Register to speak at meetings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, the National International Prison Congresses, and the Society for International Law. As the International Prison Commissioner for the U.S., he wrote several of today's most valuable documents of American penological literature, including "Children's Courts in the United States" and "The Criminal Insane in the United States and in Foreign Countries". As a House representative, Barrows was pivotal in the creation of the International Prison Congress and became its president in 1905. In his final role, as Secretary of the Prison Association of New York, he dissolved the association's debt, began issuing annual reports, drafted and ensured passage of New York's first probation law, assisted in the implementation of a federal Parole Law, and promoted civil service for prison employees. Moreover, Barrows advocated improved prison structures and methods, traveling in 1907 around the world to bring back detailed plans of 36 of the best prisons in 14 different countries. In 1910 the National League of Volunteer Workers, nicknamed the "Barrows League" in his memory, formed in New York as a group dedicated to helping released prisoners and petitioning for better prison conditions.
Zebulon Brockway in Fifty Years of Prison Service outlined an ideal prison system: Prisoners should support themselves in prison though industry, in anticipation of supporting themselves outside prison; outside businesses and labor must not interfere; indeterminate sentences were required, making prisoners earn their release with constructive behavior, not just the passage of time; and education and a Christian culture should be imparted. Nevertheless, opposition to prison industries, the prison-industrial complex, and labor increased. Finally, U.S. law prohibited the transport of prison-made goods across state lines. Most prison-made goods today are only for government use—but the state and federal governments are not required to meet their needs from prison industries. Although nearly every prison reformer in history believed prisoners should work usefully, and several prisons in the 1800s were profitable and self-supporting, most American prisoners today do not have productive jobs in prison.[29]
Kim Kardashian-West has fought for prison reform, notably visiting the White House to visit President Donald Trump in on May 30th, 2018.
Musician Johnny Cash performed and recorded at many prisons and fought for prison reform.[30][31][32]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (1995), Oxford History of the Prison, New York, Oxford University Press
Fox, Lionel W. (1952), The English Prison and Borstal Systems, Routledge and Kegan Paul, ISBN 9780415177382Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. A couple have spoken of their shock after their local council spied on them to see if they had been cheating the school catchment system. Tim Joyce and Jenny Paton and their children were put under surveillance by Poole Borough Council for more than two weeks without their knowledge. Miss Paton said this kind of scrutiny was "hugely disproportionate". The council has defended its actions, carried out under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). The council admitted using RIPA laws, which were designed to track criminals and terrorists, on six occasions in total. Miss Paton, from Parkstone, said: "We all know there has to be scrutiny of applications but they could carry it out without resorting to anti-terror legislation and spying. "The fact they are going to continue this is outrageous. "I feel that this kind of scrutiny is hugely disproportionate to the circumstances to being able to scrutinise a school application. We have a duty to make sure... the application is fair
John Nash, Poole Borough Council "They could have come back to us and asked for utility bills, they could have come back to us and asked for telephone bills instead." The couple had applied to have their three-year-old daughter accepted into Lilliput CE First School - described by inspectors as "outstanding" and heavily over-subscribed - which one of their children already attends. The couple has two addresses and they waited until after the council deadline for school applications had passed before moving from one address to the other. But after two weeks of surveillance the couple were exonerated and their daughter was awarded a place. Miss Paton admitted they had played the system. She said: "We had some uncomfortable feelings about that, in that we had two addresses and we were able to do it. Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. "They [the council] produced a very detailed document of our movements. "They weren't forthcoming with that until asked by a direct question and it took us by huge surprise. "However, by the end of the meeting it was clear that the surveillance had shown we weren't lying." Poole council has admitted that it has spied on families three times over suspected fraudulent school place applications. It said two offers of school places were withdrawn as a result. RIPA legislation allows councils to carry out surveillance if it suspects criminal activity. On its website, the Home Office says: "The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) legislates for using methods of surveillance and information gathering to help the prevention of crime, including terrorism." 'Ridiculously disproportionate' Human rights pressure group Liberty called the spying "ridiculously disproportionate" and "intrusive". James Welch, legal director for Liberty, said: "It's one thing to use covert surveillance in operations investigating terrorism and other serious crimes, but it has come to a pretty pass when this kind of intrusive activity is used to police school catchment areas. "This is a ridiculously disproportionate use of RIPA and will undermine public trust in necessary and lawful surveillance." Poole council said surveillance was carried out by a council officer who was fully trained and authorised to exercise RIPA powers, once it had decided it may be a criminal matter. John Nash, the council's strategic director for children's services, said: "Where the main criteria for entry is to live in the catchment area then we have a duty to make sure, where there is a complaint or concern expressed by somebody else, that the application is fair." Mick Brookes, of the National Association of Head Teachers, said the council's actions appear "a little over the top". He added: "I would have thought that if there was a doubt about where parents were living then the school would actually get in touch with them to check their address was right, not least because if there was an emergency."
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StumbleUpon What are these?There are some strong indicators to suggest that Cryptsy are doing an exit scam. Since I personally have 3 BTC worth of coins riding on whether it’s a scam or not, I would be very happy to find out I was wrong.
- Most users aren’t able to withdraw BTC, Ethereum and most other altcoins (the first two are own experience, the latter claim is based on watching complaints for hours in the chat box from different users).
- Support doesn’t ever provide a timeframe for fixing the issue, but they’re always quick to cancel pending withdrawals on request. The user then ends up doing another trade for another altcoin (paying further fees), which also gets stuck.
- My first attempt to withdraw Ethereum failed, I had to ask support to cancel it after days (hoping I could make several smaller withdrawals - as suggested by them).
- I currently have 3 Ethereum withdrawals marked complete, neither of the 3 TXIDs are visible on the network. Sending a transaction out is not a complicated technical task, so the most likely reason for this phenomenon is that they generated a transaction the network didn’t accept (trying to spend coins that aren’t there?).
- My BTC withdrawal has been pending for days.
- It is reported that very small withdrawals go through for some users.
- A mod (JShock) in the chat box made a statement that users openly worried about ever getting their coins back are ‘drama queens’. I estimate 90% of users using the chat box are there seeking advice on coins they can’t withdraw.
- If you mention the words ‘scam site’ (in any context, referring to anything) it gets censored as ‘xxxxxxxx’.
- BigVern posted a tweet days ago about fixing the issues, but more and more people are complaining still. My withdrawal issues haven’t been fixed, either.
- Most importantly: Cryptsy have been aware of withdrawal issues affecting most users for at least a month now. They have been advised multiple times to either disable deposits (stop showing deposit addresses) or at the very least post a warning on the front page about the isues.
They are not doing it.
And this is the part that nails the coffin, so to speak. Being unable to return money to users after weeks - maybe grossly incompetent. Knowingly accepting further deposits when several users have been waiting for weeks is deliberate and in my opinion approaching criminal.
On the few rare occasions that BitBargain had wallet issues that likely delayed withdrawals for over 30 minutes, I always enabled ‘maintenance mode’ - which prevents trading temporarily. There’s nothing more disappointing than a site taking your money and then holding back on coins. Any sane business would rather have customers go to a competitor than give them a bad experience such as this. So why does Cryptsy prefer that users keep depositing money? Why not just disable deposits, fix the problem and then come back online? And let’s be real anyway, how could a withdrawal not be fixed for weeks?
Word of advice: even if withdrawals ever get processed on Cryptsy, do not make the same mistake again. NEVER DEPOSIT COINS ON CRYPTSY. Never trust a site run by the same people. Learn your lesson.
Good thing they’re a FinCEN approved, licenced MSB. That certainly was the necessary barrier of entry to ensure a professional service…
If you just want to convert one coin to another, try ShapeShift.IO instead. I’ve had a very smooth buying experience there. Sure, it’s not an exchange, but we’ll have better exchanges. But first we have to take out the trash…
Update (18th of December 2015): my Ether withdrawals have gone through. I have still lost at least 40% on altcoin conversions, trading fees and withdrawal fees after giving up and rushing to get my money out as soon as possible. Cryptsy: never again.
Update (28th of December 2015): my 0.1 BTC withdrawal has been processed finally. Of course I didn’t get the full 0.1 BTC, even though I ticked ‘use free withdrawal’ I only got 0.09-something.
Update (14th of January 2016): Cryptsy was hacked. They kept it quiet all this time but just made it public. 10k BTC, 100k LTC missing from cold wallets. An altcoin is blamed. The article about withdrawal problems is blamed. Their own incompetence is not. They are kindly asking the hacker to return the coins, threatening with legal action.
http://blog.bitbargain.com/post/137339826192/cryptsy-hacked
(Source: cryptsy.com)The 2014-15 season is almost over and most of the renewal / cancellation decisions are in (with CBS currently dragging its heals). So here is the roundup of how all the sci fi / fantasy shows did from this season along with a scorecard of how successful I was at predicting their fates. Note that this list is for shows that aired most or all of their episodes during the season and the ones that I consider Spring shows (like Syfy’s Olympus, Showtime’s Penny Dreadful, and HBO’s Game of Thrones) are not included. I did include The CW’s The Messengers even though it premiered in late April, but that’s because it was supposed to be a regular season entry and its fate was pretty much predetermined before it had its debut.
For each series below, I give the highest Cancellation Alert level I had for it during the season, my final renewal/cancellation decision, and its final status. Of the twenty nine shows that we have heard word on thus far, I missed on only two of those (as did most of the other entertainment media). Those were ABC’s Galavant and The CW’s The 100, both of which I predicted cancellation but they got renewed, but that still has me at a 93.1% success rate. Both USA’s Dig and A&E The Returned I took a pass on predicting, so they will work as a push either way. The numbers for those seem to suggest cancellation, but it’s hard to determine if they have international financing and syndication deals |
I think taking this job at this point in his career gives him the freedom and the flexibility to be intellectually honest and to be thoughtful.”
In an environment in which everything a Fed governor says is so heavily scrutinized, Fischer does run the risk of making a gaffe.
At a Fed board meeting last month, he disclosed that JPMorgan Chase was the only big bank that would not yet meet new rules the Fed was proposing to strengthen capital — an apparently inadvertent slip of information that Fed staff had not intended to publicize. But even industry officials described the disclosure as a “toe stub”— more a breach of Fed etiquette than a market-moving revelation.
While Fischer is viewed as a close confidant of Yellen, Fed watchers are also careful to note that he is not simply there to rubber-stamp what the chair says.
He’s considered an independent thinker with his own portfolio — including leading a new committee overseeing stability of the financial system — who happens to share Yellen’s views.
“The distinction might be subtle but is important,” said Roberto Perli, head of global policy research for Cornerstone Macro.
One example, Perli said, is Fischer’s focus on how Fed policies that are meant to stimulate the U.S. economy are spilling over onto the rest of the world, and what that means for U.S. policymakers.
“To make coherent policy choices, we have to take these feedback effects into account,” Fischer said in an October speech at the IMF in Washington.
The speech, one of his most significant to date, shows how he is taking on an important behind-the-scenes role as an intermediary between the Fed and the rest of the world.
Fischer has also taken on the mantle of leading the Federal Open Market Committee’s communications subcommittee, which guides the way the central bank broadcasts its future policy actions to the public.
In early December, Fischer signaled that Fed officials were close to removing language from its forward guidance vowing to keep interest rates low “for a considerable period of time,” which they did at their latest meeting. The statement was interpreted as indifference from Fischer toward a central piece of the message crafted under Yellen when she served as vice chairman to Bernanke.
Fischer has also been tasked with leading a new committee monitoring risks to the financial system, a critical responsibility that many view as the Fed’s new “third” mandate, in addition to its traditional dual mandate to promote price stability and full employment.
It’s through this job that Fischer will likely have a big say in how the Fed regulates Wall Street and financial markets — including the growing shadow-banking sector — and he’s made clear that he doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for firms that complain about too much regulation.
“You would think that we didn’t have this banking crisis and everything was going well and then the Fed somehow got involved,” he said. “There was a huge mess that had to be cleaned up.”
For now, Fischer appears to be thoroughly enjoying being the Fed’s No. 2 official.
At an event hosted by The Wall Street Journal in December, a piece of the stage set came crashing down behind Fischer as he was being interviewed about the Fed’s quantitative easing program.
Someone joked that it was a sign about raising interest rates. Fischer — perhaps in a self-deprecating reference to his freewheeling style — had another take.
“Not to embarrass anybody, but Michelle Smith of the Fed told me if I did something, she’s going to press the fire alarm,” Fischer said referring to a top aide to the Fed board. “I guess it’s just happened, Michelle.”
Ben White, Jon Prior and Zachary Warmbrodt contributed to this report.The wife of a husband missing for nine years found him on Facebook, and realized that he has been living a new life without her. According to KGW, Karen Marx, 48, has spent nearly a decade looking for her husband, who went missing in 2005. He reportedly left her without leaving so much as a note, never to be heard from again. Little did Marx know that the man she was married to was still living in the same state — Wisconsin — and had moved on with his life without looking back.
“I just thought, ‘How could he get married again? Am I dead? What did he do with my identity?'” Marx explained.
The wife who’s husband went missing for nine years has somewhat of a strange past when it comes to relationships. Marx actually met Adam L. Marx at the Outagamie County Fair. She hit it off with him, but found out that he was married at the time. However, Mr. Marx had only been married for six weeks, and was willing to walk away from his wife to try things out with Karen. In 2001, he divorced his wife, and married Karen the following Valentine’s Day.
Wife finds hubby — married — 9 years after he vanished; he faces bigamy charge http://t.co/vw0GO3QqYy via @arielfab pic.twitter.com/XLIIuKNqB8 — Linda Dono (@LindaDono) October 30, 2014
Within one year, Mr. Marx left Karen, but he left a note behind. He came back into her life, but things were very shaky. Finally, after years of back and forth, Karen saw Adam in a parking lot, and approached him. She told him that she wanted a divorce, and he said he’d call her. Well, he never did.
Now with a new wife, Karen’s husband has been missing for nine years, and is living yet another lie.
“They said he told people it was his first marriage, and the (clerk) never checked vital statistics. I think people need to start doing their job and doing it thoroughly, especially when it comes to something like this,” said Karen Marx.
According to FCN, Karen still considers herself a married woman, and intends to show up at her husband’s court date. Marx has every intention of filing for divorce, and says that she will not date until her marriage is legally over.
“Adam Marx was charged in Vernon County… with bigamy, fraud, and a making false statement on a marriage license. If convicted of fraud, the most severe charge, he faces up to six years in prison. Bigamy carries a maximum penalty of 3½ years in prison.”
As previously reported by the Inquisitr, something similar happened last year, thanks to social media. A woman found out that her husband had another wife just a couple of weeks after she married him.
[Photo courtesy of Liberal Baptist Rev]It is not an uncommon opinion that Ole Miss should fire its head football coach Hugh Freeze. Need proof? Just Google it. Headlines read that “Ole Miss must move past” Freeze and that “Ole Miss (is) reportedly torn” over whether or not to keep him. The stories there reference impending NCAA sanctions-related doom, which is presented as something hanging over the Rebels’ football program like the sword of Damocles. Hugh Freeze, the logic goes, has erred so grievously and will have brought so much harm to Ole Miss, that it is not a matter of whether or not the university should fire him, but rather a question of why the heck they have not done so already.
But, in answering that question — which is why we’re here — you inadvertently illustrate precisely why Ole Miss, as of the publication of this story, should not yet fire Hugh Freeze. Here are those reasons.
He Wins more football games than he loses
The easiest reason to fire a football coach would be because his football teams are not winning games. Sorta like Houston “Pooston Butt” Nutt in 2010 and 2011. Remember how bad those teams were? They were really bad. They were so bad that nobody since has wanted to hire him as a football coach.
Remember that? How Houston Nutt sucked? Please put this in your lawsuit, Houston.
Well that doesn’t apply here. Ole Miss did indeed have a losing season last year — an awful 5-7 campaign that marked the first losing season in Hugh Freeze’s FBS coaching career. But Ole Miss also went to and handily won the Sugar Bowl two years ago. Ole Miss shouldn’t be in the habit of firing a coach for only winning five games one year removed from a Sugar Bowl victory. That much should be obvious.
So the easy way to fire a coach is out. That means that if Ole Miss is to fire Hugh Freeze, he needs to have done something egregious.
Hugh Freeze hasn’t done something egregious
Unless you are deluded or sanctimonious or stupid enough to believe in the idea of amateurism in NCAA football, nothing revealed in any of the NOAs -- save for academic fraud that predates Hugh Freeze’s tenure — is of any real moral, legal, or ethical consequence. Arguing about the merits of this case and, ultimately, the nature of NCAA athletics in general (one argument begets the next), is tiresome and tedious, so I won’t do it. Climb in the mentions if you’re mad about it, haters.
But, even if I don’t personally give two-and-a-half shits about breaking NCAA rules, the NCAA, rather peskily, does. Even then, Ole Miss should be cautious with firing Hugh Freeze before the case is resolved. There’s a good reason for this thinking.
Firing Freeze is a tacit admission of guilt
Namely, canning Freeze right now makes it absolutely impossible for Ole Miss to defend itself against the charge that the football program exhibited a lack of institutional control. That charge is one the NCAA leverages to justify severe punishment, so it is one that Ole Miss must beat if it hopes to more quickly recover from whatever setbacks it will suffer due to this investigation. Ole Miss can’t reasonably say “we maintained institutional control” after firing the guy in charge of controlling the institution.
Again, haters, whether or not you personally think institutional control was maintained isn’t germane here. Seriously, nobody gives a shit. Your opinions are bad and awful. Get in the mentions if you must. But before you do, step back and consider Ole Miss’ current holding on to Hugh Freeze as a purely strategic move. Maybe you’ll understand why they can’t fire him just yet (but you probably won’t, hater).
Even then, you might think Ole Miss can’t beat these charges at all.
Bad things might happen, but they haven’t yet
If the argument that something bad might happen is a good reason to fire anybody from any job, then none of us would be employed. Ole Miss’ self-imposed penalties are themselves bad, but not bad enough for Freeze to go, particularly given the fact that Ole Miss has yet to meet with the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions.
Things could get much worse than they are -- that much is obvious. But if Ole Miss somehow gets through the NCAA with nothing worse than what they’ve already imposed, then they have no business firing a guy who beat Nick Saban’s Alabama twice in a row (making the haters and losers extremely furious).
But if (when?) things do get worse -- another year or two of bowl bans, more scholarships stripped, a show cause, or actual serious criminal behavior warranting having your facemask replaced with an air intake vent — then Ole Miss would have much more legitimate cause to fire Hugh Freeze.
Until then, their best strategy is to keep him. Sorry, haters.The official website for the television anime of Mimana Orimoto's Bakuon!! manga revealed additional cast and details on the opening and ending themes for the anime on Friday.
The additional cast includes (from left to right):
Unshou Ishizuka as Hayakawa, a super-butler who serves the Minowa family
Yōko Hikasa as Tazuko, the principal of Okanoue Girls High School
Shinichiro Miki as Rin's father, who rides a Yoshimura 1135R Katana
Mitsuo Iwata as Onsa's father, proprietor of Nikoichi Motors
Other cast members, revealed without accompanying visuals of their respective characters, include:
Kazusa Aranami as Saruyama-sensei, the motorcycle club's adviser who has bad luck with men
Azusa Tadokoro as Yume Sakura, Hane's well-composed younger sister
Sayaka Sasaki will perform the opening theme "FEEL×ALIVE," while the four main cast members (Ueda, Tōyama, Yamaguchi, Uchiyama) will perform the ending theme "Buon, buon, Ride On!" The single CD for the opening theme will ship on April 27. The single CD for the ending theme will ship on May 11.
The official website also launched a browser mini-game, and updates and character roster additions are planned for it. Good Riders, a campaign to promote safe and responsible motorcycle riding, is collaborating with the anime.
The story revolves around high school girls who discover the appeal of motorcycles. Hane Sakura is a high school student who looks a little bit like an airhead. On the way to her all-female high school one day, she is worn-out climbing a hilly road with a bicycle, but she sees a girl named Onsa Amano who is riding a motorcycle. Sakura immediately becomes interested in motorcycles, and she and Onsa join the motorcycle club at the school. Then, Sakura sets out to get her license.
The site previously streamed a promotional video revealing the anime's main cast.
The cast is as follows:
Reina Ueda as protagonist Hane Sakura (her bike is a Honda CB400 SF)
Nao Toyama as Rin Suzunoki (her bike is a Suzuki GSX400S Katana)
Yumi Uchiyama as Onsa Amano (her bike is a Yamaha SEROW225W)
Rikako Yamaguchi as Hijiri Minowa (her bike is a Ducati 750SS)
The website revealed the character design for Raimu Kawasaki, but without listed cast (her bike is a Kawasaki ZX-12R):
The website currently features voice samples for the main cast, and also features an exhaustion noise sample for the five main characters' bikes.
Bakuon!! will also have a stage event at AnimeJapan in March, and all four main voice actresses will appear at the event.
Junji Nishimura ( Simoun, Dog Days', GLASSLIP ) is directing the anime at TMS Entertainment, and Kurasumi Sunayama ( Gunslinger Girl, Monster, Romeo × Juliet ) is in charge of the series scripts. Isao Sugimoto ( Sketchbook ~full color'S~, Girls und Panzer, Moonlight Mile ) is designing the characters, while Manabu Nii ( Samurai Flamenco, Karneval ) is credited for sub-character design. Yoshio Mizumura ( Lupin III: Seven Days Rhapsody, Yowamushi Pedal ) and Yasuhiro Moriki ( Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs, Banner of the Stars, Silent Möbius: The Motion Picture ) are credited for design works. Shunichiro Yoshihara ( Yowamushi Pedal, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Garakowa -Restore the World- ) is in charge of art direction. Takeshi Takadera ( Initial D: Second Stage, Yowamushi Pedal ) is handling sound direction, while Ryosuke Nakanishi ( High School DxD, Sakura Trick, Love Stage!! ) is composing the music.
The anime will premiere in April on Tokyo MX, Sun TV, BS11, and other channels.
Aside from the television anime, an original anime DVD (OAD) bundled with the manga's seventh compiled book volume is slated for release on March 18, ahead of the TV anime's premiere. The limited-edition set will retail for 3,880 yen (about US$32).
Orimoto ( Mahou Shoujo Neko X, Maid in Japan ) launched the series in Akita Shoten's Young Champion Retsu magazine in February 2011. Akita Shoten published the manga's sixth compiled book volume last May.
Source: MyNavi(PhysOrg.com) -- Daylight saving time is supposed to reduce energy use, but data gathered from a state in the US suggests it actually does the opposite.
The US state of Indiana has 92 counties, but until 2006 only 15 of them adjusted their clocks for daylight saving time, with the remainder keeping standard time all year, at least partly to appease farmers who did not want the change. Then in 2006 the Indiana Legislature decided the entire state should adopt daylight saving time, beginning that spring.
This unique situation enabled professor of economics Matthew Kotchen and his PhD student Laura E. Grant, both from the University of California at Santa Barbara, to study how the adoption of daylight saving affected energy use. They studied over seven million electricity meter readings in southern Indiana every month for three years, and compared the energy consumption before and after the change. The 15 counties that had adopted daylight saving time much earlier were the control group, which allowed them to adjust for the effects of weather extremes over the period.
The result of the study showed that electricity use went up in the counties adopting daylight saving time in 2006, costing $8.6 million more in household electricity bills. The conclusion reached by Kotchen and Grant was that while the lighting costs were reduced in the afternoons by daylight saving, the greater heating costs in the mornings, and more use of air-conditioners on hot afternoons more than offset these savings. Kotchen said the results were more “clear and unambiguous” than results in any other paper he had presented.
Kotchen and Grant's work reinforces the findings of an Australian study in 2007 by economists Ryan Kellogg and Hendrik Wolff, who studied the extension of daylight saving time for two months in New South Wales and Victoria for the 2000 Summer Olympics. They also found an increase in energy use.
Daylight saving was initially introduced, and has been extended, because it was believed to save energy, but the studies upon which this idea was based were conducted in the 1970s. A big difference between then and the present is the massive increase in the take-up of air conditioning. In hot periods daylight saving time means air conditioners tend to be run more when people arrive home from work, while in cooler periods more heating is used.
Professor Kotchen presented the paper at the March National Bureau of Economic Research conference.
Explore further: Daylight time: Gimmick or good idea?
More information: via WSJTaaS invests 300 ETH in Digital Developers Fund to diversify into domain names
TaaS Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 14, 2017
Kyiv, Ukraine — July 7, 2017 — Token-as-a-Service (TaaS), the first-ever tokenized closed-end fund that allows its investors to capitalize on the rise of blockchain markets, today announced its strategic investment in Digital Developers Fund’s (DDF), a fund focused on high growth of digital assets such as domain names (aka Internet Real Estate). After creating the TaaS — DDF strategic partnership for investing in digital assets on July 7th, TaaS has joined DDF’s Token Allocation Event (TAE) with an investment of 300 ETH.
Established in 2010 as the Domain Developers Fund, DDF currently owns over 1,540 premium domains such as Swords.com, Audits.com, Exhibitions.com or PR.uk. Rebranded in 2017 as the Digital Developers Fund, the company utilizes a structured approach to investments in crypto assets to profit from the extraordinary growth in this space.
In order to expand its operations and asset acquisitions, DDF is now gearing up to raise $90 million via a TAE, which has commenced on July 10th. The DDF token (DDF) serves as “proof-of-membership” in the fund and grants holders access to quarterly profit sharing distributions. DDF has already raised 3,647 ETH (equivalent to $735,684 million) including an investment of 300 ETH from TaaS.
”We are honored to have TaaS as one of our top institutional investors and I am very happy that Ruslan Gavrilyuk, President of TaaS has decided to join DDF’s Advisory Board in order to provide his expertise during DDF’s Token Allocation Event,” said Michael Marcovici, Managing Director of DDF.
The strategic investment partnership between DDF and TaaS allows the highest standards of transparency for money flows into blockchain projects. To provide transparent mapping of the fund’s investment activity post its Token Allocation Event, DDF will use TaaS’ proprietary Crypto Audit technology. This set of monitoring tools lets any member of the public to easily validate the trading history and portfolio balances. This technology is going to be a key component in providing investors the necessary transparency and reassurance that DDF keeps with its investment strategy.
“DDF has a proven and profitable model so it was a fairly easy decision to structure this strategic investment partnership which allows DDF to grow much faster and which provides TaaS a good diversifation,” said Mr. Gavrilyuk, President of TaaS.
Since its month-long TAE on April 27, TaaS made six investments totaling 2500 ETH and 422 BTC. The fund has already invested 500 ETH to Mysterium Network, 70 BTC to Sphre Air, 352 BTC to Bancor, 1000 ETH to TenX, 500 ETH to Dao.Casino and recently 300 ETH to DDF. As of today, TaaS holds the following tokens in its portfolio: 122,400 MYST (Mysterium Network), 293,375 BNT (Bancor Network), 1,059,210 XID (Sphre Air), 420,000 PAY (TenX), 200,000 BET (DAO.Casino) and 300,000 DDF (Digital Developers Fund). Its own TaaS token (TAAS) is currently trading on Liqui, LiveCoin, HitBTC and CoinExchange.io exchanges.
TaaS keeps a close eye on the rapid evolution of crypto assets and invests in the most progressive innovations in this space. Beside its trading activity and long-term investment strategy, TaaS is constantly expanding its cooperation with other members of the crypto community and welcomes new partnerships.For a few weeks, I’ve been procrastinating on publishing this. However, given recent events of MonaVie blackmailing me it seems necessary to put this out there in case Glenn Siesser (or any one else affiliated with MonaVie) tries to make good on his threats.
Glenn Siesser left a comment on my Acavie post of:
“People are watching you, following you and marking you. You game will soon come to an end so hopefully you will be smart enough to drop your curtains before they are dropped for you.”
What most people didn’t see are the private emails he sent to me. The threats continued. Here are some quotes from various emails:
“…why dont you step into the octagon with me yu (sic) pencil neck geek and i show u what a reall man is made of… i’m gonna pay u a vist!”
“I’m coming out to see you….kets (sic) step in the ring u [female genetalia]….yu better run.”
“You like eating your steak with a straw I guess.”
“Get your straws ready”
At least he’s stepped down from the curtains-for-you talk to finding me and beating me up.
Now Glenn Siesser has previously pleaded guilty for penny stock fraud. And just the other day we saw that Glenn “struggled with drug and alcohol addiction for more than 30 years”
Glenn is clearly still committing fraud by telling lies about MonaVie on Facebook:
If he doesn’t understand why it is a lie, I would advise him to read this article.
These are the kind of people who get involved with MonaVie.
Originally posted 2010-08-24 09:25:21. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
The above article is intended to be accurate at the time of its original posting. MonaVie may change its pricing, product, or other policies at any time without notice.
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What do you get when you mix religion and video games? According to a new study released by the University of Missouri earlier this week, you get violence; or specifically, an over-emphasized depiction of violence in connection with religion.
This little controversial cocktail was stirred up by a doctoral student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Greg Perreault. His findings were presented at the Center for Media Religion and Culture (CMRC) Conference on Digital Religion this past January.
The 20-odd page research paper, according to the conference program, is called RPG religion: Depictions of religion in contemporary role-playing games. It examines five recently released video games which Perreault believes to have the heaviest reliance on religion for storyline: Mass Effect 2, Final Fantasy 13, Assassin’s Creed, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Three of the games are fictional religious, while two deal with the Roman Catholic Church. Perreault says he spent somewhere between 30 and 70 hours per game, with the exception of Final Fantasy XIII, which took much longer.
Perreault played through each game, took notes on key themes and visually analyzed the scenes that were heaviest with religious themes; he concluded that the video games were closely tying religion to violence.
“In most of these games there was a heavy emphasis on a ‘Knights of Templar’ and crusader motifs,” the doctoral student said. Not only was the violent side of religion emphasized, but in each of these games religion created a problem that the main character must overcome, whether it is a direct confrontation with religious zealots of being haunted by religious guilt.”
We’ve already seen how touchy a subject like violence in video games can be with the number of legal movements over the years, why throw in another touchy subject like religion with violence? Perreault tells VentureBeat that initially he didn’t expect to stumble across the violent aspect:
“In general, I tend to to think that studies of violence in video games are passe. I set out interested in the depictions of organized religions versus spiritual religions, expecting to find organized religions depicted far more poorly than spiritual [ones].”
So, are video games churning out anti-religious propaganda? On the one hand, Perreault points to Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed title, where the heroes, or Assassins, are depicted as “Enlightment era secularists” who are working to prevent the Roman Catholic Church, with its Knights Templar, from controlling the wills of the masses. On the other hand, there is Thane and Mass Effect 2 where the “spiritual themes” are portrayed in a more positive light. Ultimately, Perreault believes that game developers aren’t intentionally trying to hurt organized religion’s image.
“I believe they are only using religion to create stimulating plot points in their storyline. If you look at video games across the board, most them involve violence in some fashion because violence is conflict and conflict is exciting. Religion appears to get tied in with violence because that makes for a compelling narrative,” he said.
In an interesting rebuttal to the idea of the study, Gamma Squad points out that video games were initially defined by Japanese developers, and Japan’s major religions include Shintoism and Buddhism. As a result, developers treated Western religions as exotic and unusual; overly sensationalizing certain aspects of the history.
Perreault elaborated on his study at Game Politics, saying that religion is an interesting topic for writers because “it is something that is key to people’s motivations, to their lives.” He went on to say that, Western literature, movies and television have already been stipulating religion’s role in society, and video games’ growth as an industry in recent years has allowed more compelling stories which “[tap] into that conversation” on religion. Incidentally, the conclusion isn’t limited to T or M rated video games; Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has also supported Perreault’s findings.AC Milan vice-president Adriano Galliani has stated that the club will return to winning ways with Silvio Berlusconi as club president.
The Rossoneri currently sit in 7th with 38 points, and Milan fan group Curva Sud urged fellow fans to boycott the stadium in Saturday’s 3-1 win over Cagliari, releasing a statement heavily criticising Berlusconi’s management of the club.
“First of all I’d like to say that if Napoli or Fiorentina win the Europa League, then seventh place would guarantee a European spot,” he told Sky Sport before the game.
“Do not forget that only a year ago we were the only Italian team left in the Champions League, every team has it’s difficult moments.
“We know that we’re not playing good enough now, but we must recover from the current situation like we’ve done in the past. After we won the Serie A title in 1995/96 we had two seasons to forget, but we recovered.
“I’m disappointed at the fans’ boycott, as well as the criticism aimed at the president [Silvio Berlsuconi], he transformed Milan.
“We will return stronger than before thanks to Berlsuconi and a project that focuses on Italian players.”
The Rossoneri’s upcoming game will be against Palermo at the Stadio Renzo Barbera on April 4.Here is my annual list of the top weather events in the U.S. this year:
1. El Reno Tornado: Massive tornado cut a track 16 miles long west and southwest of Oklahoma City. The tornado killed eight people including veteran stormchaser Tim Samaras, his son Paul and chase partner Carl Young. The tornado expanded to 2.6 miles making it the widest tornado on record. Originally rated EF5, the tornado was re-rated as an EF3 in a controversial move because there were no appropriate damage indicators for the higher rating.
2. Colorado Flood: A stalled cold front led to Biblical flooding along the Front Range of Colorado in September. The resulting flooding covered a large part of 17 counties. A new record was established when 9.08 inches of rain fell in 24 hours in Boulder on the 11th and 12th. Rainfall records were set on five of seven days in Boulder during the event. The resulting floods across the Front Range washed out over 50 bridges and numerous roads. Damages totaled $1 billion. Eight people were killed and six were missing.
3. Newcastle/Moore Tornado: The first EF5 tornado since May 24, 2011 struck Newcastle and Moore, Oklahoma, killing 24 people. It was the deadliest tornado in the U.S. since Joplin. Seven children were killed at the Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore when a wall fell on them as they sheltered. This led to increased debate about severe weather safety and schools.
4. Firefighters Killed: Nineteen members of an elite firefighter crew from Prescott, Arizona were killed when the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona blew up on June 30th. It was the greatest loss of firefighters in a U.S. wildfire since 1933. It was also the deadliest U.S. wildfire since the 1991 East Bay Hills fire killed 25 people.
5. November Illinois Outbreak: On November 17th, 73 tornadoes struck Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee, killing seven. It was the worst November outbreak in Illinois history. There were two EF4 tornadoes, including one that struck Washington, IL.
6. Back to Back Derechos: On two days in a row, June 12th and 13th, large derechos converged on the Mid-Atlantic States. The June 12 derecho followed a similar path to the June 2012 super-derecho that had knocked out power to millions for 7-10 days. The June 13th derecho had its genesis from southern Ohio and eastern Kentucky into Alabama and Georgia during the morning hours of June 13th. A total of four people died in the two events. Unlike the 2012 event, both 2013 derechos were well forecasted up to three days in advance.
7. Record Streak of Days without Tornado Fatalities Ends: The January 29th and 30th outbreak produced 60 tornadoes across the South, including an EF3 at Adairsville, GA that killed one. It was the first tornado fatality since June 24, 2012, a streak of 219 days that is a record.
8. Low Tornado Count: The SPC’s preliminary tornado count for 2013 will end up at 941. The actual number will probably be pretty close to that. The previous year, 2012, finished with 939 tornadoes, making the two very similar in count, but significantly below the rolling ten year average of 1,342.
9. Tame Hurricane Season: There were thirteen named storms in the Atlantic in 2013, but only two hurricanes. There were no major hurricanes. There have only been 33 such seasons since 1851. The 2013 North Atlantic Hurricane Season will go down as the 14th slowest since 1851 with an Accumulated Cyclone Energy index (ACE) of 30. It is the lowest ACE value since 1983, when a 17 was posted.
10. Record May Snows over the Upper Midwest. An unprecedented spring snowstorm dumped over a foot of snow over Minnesota and Wisconsin. That had never happened in May. The 17.2 inches of snow at Dodge Center, MN may hold up as an all time single storm record for the Gopher State.
Honorable Mentions
…Hattiesburg Tornado (2/10): EF4 tornado injured 60, but good warnings led to no deaths.
…Virginia Fog Chain Reaction (3/31): Easter Sunday fog event on I-77 resulted in 95 vehicle crash that killed 3.
…Powerful October Winter Storm in Upper Midwest (10/4): Second biggest snow ever at Rapid City. Also produced EF4 tornado at Wayne NE.
…New Connecticut State Snow Record (2/9): 36.0″ of snow in Ansonia, CT may be state record.
…Loveland Avalanche (4/20): Colorado’s deadliest avalanche since 1962 killed five people outside the Loveland Ski Resort.
…Plains Drought Eases in Some Areas
FEEDBACK
Please give your feedback below by commenting! It’s been a fun 2013. Looking forward to a great year next year!
Also, I am working on my list of the top ten Alabama weather events. Send your suggestions!
Category: Headlines, Met 101/Weather HistoryThe Cleveland County District Attorney is bringing the full force of the law down on the man accused of beheading a woman and stabbing another in Moore last week.Thursday, Greg Mashburn announced he would be going after the death penalty for Alton Nolen.State filing papers on Nolen.Police accuse Nolen of rampaging through Vaughan Foods. Before he was stopped, he beheaded Colleen Hufford and stabbed Traci Johnson.“The death in itself is something horrible but I think the way that died is even scarier,” neighbor Sofia Marquez said.Nolen ordered without bond.Mashburn explained why he decided to pursue the death penalty in a bill of particulars. He called the beheading of Colleen Hufford “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel.”He also believes Nolen “knowingly created a great risk of death to more than one person,” and that he will most likely “commit criminal acts of violence” that would be a “continuing threat to society.”He then refers back to Nolen’s criminal history as a convicted felon “involving the use or threat of violence.”Neighbors who live near the Hufford family believe punishment should be swift and severe."He deserves it," Marquez said. "I don’t think anybody in their right mind could have any sympathy for him.”Nolen did ask for a Muslim defense attorney, but Mashburn said that is most likely not going to happen.
The Cleveland County District Attorney is bringing the full force of the law down on the man accused of beheading a woman and stabbing another in Moore last week.
Thursday, Greg Mashburn announced he would be going after the death penalty for Alton Nolen.
State filing papers on Nolen.
Police accuse Nolen of rampaging through Vaughan Foods. Before he was stopped, he beheaded Colleen Hufford and stabbed Traci Johnson.
“The death in itself is something horrible but I think the way that [Hufford] died is even scarier,” neighbor Sofia Marquez said.
Nolen ordered without bond.
Mashburn explained why he decided to pursue the death penalty in a bill of particulars. He called the beheading of Colleen Hufford “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel.”
He also believes Nolen “knowingly created a great risk of death to more than one person,” and that he will most likely “commit criminal acts of violence” that would be a “continuing threat to society.”
He then refers back to Nolen’s criminal history as a convicted felon “involving the use or threat of violence.”
Neighbors who live near the Hufford family believe punishment should be swift and severe.
"He deserves it," Marquez said. "I don’t think anybody in their right mind could have any sympathy for him.”
Nolen did ask for a Muslim defense attorney, but Mashburn said that is most likely not going to happen.
AlertMeSo I had some thoughts I just wanted to get on paper about the Abramelin Working and its role in the WMT, its efficacy for practical use, and so on.
another way of stating the above is I have come to raise hell and rustle jimmies and I’m all out of hell
Anyway, I tend to be of the opinion, which I will probably elaborate at length in numerous blog posts (made ya think! 3spoopy5u! &c) that a lot of what we call the Western Mystery Tradition is just stuff Crowley and the Golden Dawn did, with a hint of chaos magick and edgy aesthetic thrown in. We don’t really know why we do it, we do it because it is the thing we do. Moreso in the internet wizard age. It’s Quicksand.
Believe it or not, the Abramelin Working is one of these things.
I SAW THAT COMING YOU’RE SO ORIGINAL
Nah, hear me out. First, let’s look at what it actually does. So you have the six month retreat (yes, there’s an eighteen month version, it’s better, don’t comment unless you’ve done it yourself) in white, plain clothes and with abstinence from sex and also from even more perverse, worldly concerns like grocery shopping and bill paying and leaving the house.
ew normies
See? You’re already vibing with me here. Then you slowly ramp up prayer and devotion, which are all you do all day long, because you stocked up on toilet paper and healthy food at the beginning and your dutiful wife prepares all your own meals. You uh…did do that, didn’t you? She cooks for you because you’re a twelfth century Jewish guy |
On the 19th January 2013, homeless activists and their allies squatted an empty building in the 7th district of Budapest. The squatters demanded the institutionalization of a right to housing and an extensive system of social housing instead of punitive measures and overcrowded shelters. The activists were arrested and now face misdemeanor charges because of disobeying police instructions.
“We do not leave until the government and local authorities do not take seriously mass homelessness and housing poverty” – said Jenő Keresztes, one of the homeless squatters. “We are here to raise awareness about the tens of thousands of empty buildings, where homeless people could find their home. The majority of these empty buildings are in private hands, but local authorities also have great responsibility in leaving buildings such as this one unused for years. Instead of taking care of them, they leave them to dilapidate. This building alone could serve as a home for at least 10 families – said Jutka Lakatosné, another homeless activist.
The squatters were supported by dozens of young activists forming a living chain at the entrance of the building as well as an ever-growing group of protesters on the other side of the street. The supporters were chanting slogans such as “Housing, not jails” and “Right to housing for all!”. The head of the local authority’s real estate office agency visited the house and told the protestors that the local authority has no responsibility whatsoever either about homelessness or about the abandonment of the house. Five hours later the police arrived in great numbers and arrested one by one the activists blocking the entrance of the building. The activists did not cooperate and therefore were carried by the police to the police cars. The supporting protesters first were chanting “We are with you” right by the activists. Later, the police pushed them back where they could not see the arrests anymore – but they stayed until the last one of the activists were taken away from the location and supported them with loud drumming and chanting.
“I do not have housing worthy of human dignity either, I am just temporarily allowed to stay in an otherwise empty building which does not have heating. Nonetheless I do not fight for myself alone: we would like everyone to have access to decent, affordable and healthy housing, and we want the government and the local authorities to take responsibility for this” – said László Dombovári homeless activist. In Hungary there are currently millions of people suffering from various forms of housing poverty. 10 thousand of them are living in the public spaces or shelters of Budapest. Around half million families has arrears that threaten their housing, and every fifth household gets behind with their mortgage payments due to lack of resources.
The City is for All supports the demands of the homeless activists. We have organized several marches to raise awareness about empty buildings and demand their utilization, spelled out our related policy recommendations, and protested for the codification of a right to housing and the establishment of an extensive system of social housing. According to The City is for All, the implementation of a right to housing should include a ban on evictions without the provision of acceptable housing alternative as well as housing policies that ensure access to decent housing for everyone. Right to housing would not mean the provision of free housing by the state, but that the state establishes and maintains a system of housing policies that ensure fair access to housing for all members of the society.
Source
PicturesThis is the difficulty menu for Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus. In a callback to the original games which also showed up in The New Order, the menu’s telling you only babies play the game on easy. It’s funny on the surface, but also an insidious kind of peer pressure. Don’t listen to it.
At first I did, which is why I spent half of Wolfenstein 2 completely miserable. Playing on “Bring ’em on” the game’s normal difficulty, I spent hours dying to Nazis hidden in the far corners of my TV screen or downed ones who I’d previously unloaded on but apparently didn’t register the kill shot. In the middle of these frenzied “game over”-fests I wanted to throw my PS4 out the window. Then I’d inevitably get to a cutscene or new location, like Roswell, and instantly be transfixed again.
Finally, I decided enough was enough, swallowed my pride, and set the difficulty all the way down to “Can I play Daddy” (read: super easy). And you know what? It felt great. Everything immediately seemed to click into place. I was able to run and gun like the game obviously wanted me to and feel like B.J. was the one-man killing machine everyone kept saying he was.
It also made the game’s two dueling personas feel less at odds with one another. Instead of 90s arcade-style shooting galleries punctuated by a diverse cast of grownups debating how best to resist their new fascist overlords, it felt like a historical fever dream about American political ideals and white supremacy wrapped up in the charisma of a tightly wound action movie.
When Wolfenstein rebooted the first time in the early 90s, it came out of the same mold as Doom: a first-person splatterfest where the drama of dispatching enemies in concise and economical maneuvers superseded the the premise or plot. By design, that’s less the case in Wolfenstein 2. In case you missed the marketing, the game wants to be more than just another adolescent adrenaline-fest.
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Part of the allure of Wolfenstein 2, and what helped it to stand out to everyone who wasn’t already a fan of the series and didn’t pay its 2014 predecessor much attention, are its characters and setting. Rosewell, New Orleans, and even B.J.’s farm house where he grew up are beautiful places to explore. Hundreds of collectibles scattered throughout the game’s levels offer interesting backstory and insight into the events going on outside of the player’s immediate purview. Strolling through the game’s home base, an old German U-boat, and hearing what the varied cast of broken but hopeful revolutionaries has to say is even more interesting than a lot of the game’s set pieces.
The story itself begins with the loss of a close friend and the body count only grows from there. At its most subversive the game suggests Nazism isn’t a cult of foreign invaders but a homegrown ideology cultivated over centurie. B.J. isn’t just there to blow away bad dudes, he’s fighting for a future his unborn children don’t have to resent living in and to shed the phantoms of his brutal, patriarchal upbringing. Goading players by renewing the shorthand of B.J. with a binky in his mouth feels like an especially odd carry over in that context.
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This land was made for you and me. Fuck your racist, domestic abuser of a father. But also don’t be wuss.
It’s that kind of guilt that racked me early on. I spend a lot of time playing games. What’s the point if I can’t hack it at the more masochism end of the difficulty ladder? I was also plagued with the anxiety over whether the Wolfenstein 2 I experienced would be the “real” one or not. Despite the number of times people pay lip service to “there’s no right way to play,” how difficulty options are crafted and displayed often tells a different story.
Sticking a bonnet on B.J. and infantilizing the player by analogy isn’t exactly an invitation to explore playing Wolfenstein 2 differently. Even just calling one difficulty setting “normal” implies the others are deviant. When you’re fighting to liberate the country from people who believe in eugenics in a game that celebrates difference and diversity, moralizing the difficulty around the struggle (easy equals lazy/bad, hard equals virtuous/good) feels archaic.
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In a broader sense, the way difficulty has come to define various people’s preferred play-styles feels counter-productive. There should be more ways to slice a game than just damage sliders. In Wolfenstein 2 difficulty affects how quickly things die, including you. Sometimes it also changes how many enemies there are and where they’re placed. Story beats and how environments are constructed remain the same though. Rather than offer different modes that emphasize different ways of playing the game, like focusing on stealth or limited combat exploration, the settings are just a knob waiting to be cranked up to 11.
Assassin’s Creed Origins’ combat-free setting, on the other hand, takes a more imaginative approach to what difficulty settings could be. Rather than a binary scale based on loaded terms like “easy” and “hard,” it suggests creating modes based around what particular players want to do in a game. Some will want to fight, loot, and take on the game’s most challenging combat scenarios. Assassin is in the title, after all. Others though will no doubt be more interested in exploring the game’s beautiful looking world and the stories taking place there free from other concerns.
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The game designer behind Gritfish, John Kane, recently offered some examples of other ways to do game difficulties:
I’m here for the story I’m here for challenge I’m here for a second & harder playthrough I’m here to take photos I want to play with the settings and I’m okay if that breaks things
As more AAA games focus on open world design, the idea of needing to “earn” the exploration parts by completing familiar repetitive tasks like “go kill some dude” or “collect a bunch of random stuff feels” almost criminal. People spend years of their lives creating different parts of a game that most people, even the ones who buy it, will probably never see, especially if it’s toward the end. Being beholden to game modes tied strictly to difficulty settings just puts up more barriers.
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We’ve seen games try thinking outside this box in the past. Mass Effect 3 offered a narrative-first mode that streamlined combat and exploration to let players focus on dialogue trees and character relationships. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided did something similar. While the difficulty options didn’t dramatically change that game, they were geared toward what the player was after (story, the old-school Deus Ex feel, etc.) rather than a hierarchy of perceived gameplay purity.
It might seem like a radical rethinking of how games treat players, but these kinds of quality of life tweaks have been happening for years. Breath of Fire on the SNES let you buy items to manipulate the enemy encounter rate while modern JRPGs like Bravely Default let you do that on the fly for free. Even things like adding options to skip dialogue or entire cutscenes are a concession that not everyone playing a game is after the same thing. Kane’s suggested category of a mode specific to second playthroughs is a good reminder that not even the same person wants the same thing from a game depending on how much time they’ve already spent with it. Who hasn’t wished they could skip the tedious do-overs in a game and go right to the branching story-line they missed the first or second time through?
At the end of the day, life’s too short to worry about whether you’re playing something the right way. And if you’re just starting Wolfenstein 2, for the love of god don’t feel bad about turning the difficulty down.Poverty and intimidation drove women to Kermit Gosnell’s allegedly macabre practice
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
The allegedly murderous abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, who was operating illegally in Philadelphia, has been on trial since mid-March for killing seven babies and one woman in his clinic, which has rightly been described as a house of horrors. (I covered the case here at XX Factor when it first broke two years ago.) The case, which has been going on for weeks now, received a flurry of media attention late last week and over the weekend, driven by a conservative press eager to use the existence of a clinic offering illegal abortions to score points against supporters of legal abortion by dishonestly conflating the two.
The trial has made it clear that the prosecution has a strong case against Gosnell. He appears to have run an operation staffed by people with no real medical training and to have told women they weren’t as far along as they were so that he could lure them into delivering live babies, which he then killed with scissors to the neck. We’ll leave it to the true crime writers in the years to come to make sense of his motivations. The question we have to grapple with right now is why patients were willing to go into a clinic that feminist journalist Tara Murtha of Philadelphia Weekly describes as a hellhole: “Blood was splattered all over the dirty floor. It stank of urine, cat feces and the fetid turtle tank kept in the waiting room.” Why go to Gosnell when Philadelphia has other reputable clinics that offer quality care?
The reason is simple: poverty, plus lack of access due to anti-choice activism. One of Gosnell’s patient-victims told reporters that she had scheduled an abortion at Planned Parenthood but balked when she approached the clinic: “The picketers out there, they just scared me half to death.” Gosnell didn’t pay real nurses, have real equipment, or bother with the expense of cleaning up very much, making it easy for him to undercut the prices of reputable providers, as Carole Joffe reported for RH Reality Check in 2011.
As numerous abortion clinic managers have told me over the years, for very poor women—who are way over-represented among abortion patients—differences of even five or ten dollars can be the deciding factor of where to go. The price list at Women’s Medical Society, listed in the Grand jury report, shows that in 2005, a first trimester procedure was $330.00, while the average price nationally then was about one hundred dollars higher. For a 23-24 week procedure, Gosnell charged $1,625.00, while the relatively few other facilities in the Northeast offering such abortions would have charged at least one thousand more.
In addition, Gosnell is alleged to have done abortions much later than legal providers will do under circumstances that don’t threaten the mother’s health or indicate a problem with fetal development. Poor women are far more likely to seek later abortions, because it takes so much time to save the money to get an abortion.
Jeff Deeney, a social worker in Philadelphia, published a piece in the Atlantic Monday morning about the kinds of women that Gosnell exploited: women who needed abortions to escape poverty but didn’t have the money to afford them. He described one young woman he counseled, who was on food stamps, TANF, and WIC—and who knew that carrying another baby to term would ruin her plans to complete her education and secure a real middle-class job:
What’s worse is that the cost of the abortion, $300, would break Ashley’s budget. There was no such thing as an extra $300 in Ashley’s world. If she was going to go through with it, could she raise the money, and could she do it in time? I was concerned that if she paid for the abortion she would get behind on rent, and wind up back on the streets. If welfare medical assistance provided funds for women to have abortions, she could have very quickly and safely had the procedure done. Instead, the clock was quickly ticking as she explored every avenue for getting the money together. The longer it ticked, the more expensive the procedure would become, until ultimately it would become illegal and she would have to bring the baby to term. Or, if she was that desperate, she might have turned to Kermit Gosnell, who allegedly exploited exactly this scenario of poor women past the term limit for a legal abortion, maybe because while they were struggling to get the money together for it the clock ticked too long, maybe because they were ignorant of other, better resources for the service.”
What makes this all so frustrating is that it would be easy enough to prevent. If there was no Hyde Amendment blocking women from using Medicaid to fund abortions, they could get timely, safe abortions and not resort to desperate measures. If low-income women had better access to contraception, it would reduce the need for abortion. Unfortunately, the trend lines are running in the opposite direction, with safe abortion clinics disappearing under a flurry of irrelevant regulations aimed at depriving women of safe care rather than ensuring health and safety standards. (Pro-choicers support relevant regulations, as I explain here.) Unintended pregnancy rates are going up for low-income women, a trend that could get worse in states where Republicans are trying to slash contraception subsidies. This means the demand for abortion for those who can least afford it is going up, too, making it all the more lucrative for men like Gosnell to offer black-market abortions that don’t meet any of the legal standards for safe medical care. The government has nabbed this particular butcher, but nothing is being done to prevent future Gosnells from exploiting poor women’s inability to get safe, legal abortions.Detective Tanner in 719
Here, the writers were speaking to us fans, through the character of Tanner. The writers are warning us that they like their mystery simple. We are not getting answers in the finale, other than who is AD. There are just too many loose ends over the years which they placed simply to keep us watching week after week. The finale will only reveal the big picture (who is AD) while forgetting all our theories for the loose ends which can never be proven.
(via thebestplltheories)
I honestly don’t think this is going to be the case. We’ve heard on numerous occasions that all of our questions will be answered, questions we’ve had for 7 years. The promo even shows Mona in Radley talking to a black hooded figure, which means the Uber A reveal probably goes all the way back to Season 3.
I’m confident in saying that the finale will be more then a reveal that does not go back and answer all our questions and doesn’t tie up loose ends.
(via prettylittleheada)
I think Mona gets admitted to an institution since they called Dr Sullivan and she’ll still be there in the time jump which is about a year I heard? So it’s prob AD talking to her not a flashback0 of 32
Week 1 of the NFL preseason is almost in the books (Dallas vs. Oakland is tonight) and injuries have already reared their ugly head. Across the NFL, teams are missing vital players at key positions. This makes evaluating talent difficult and getting any rhythm on offense or defense consistently hard.
While some teams choose to get their starts a series or two, teams like the Chicago Bears made some of their first team play into the fourth quarter. Rookies like Andrew Luck, Quinton Couples and Ryan Tannehill had success; others struggled in their first live action.
Even teams that lost in Week 1, like the Atlanta Falcons and Detroit Lions, showed flashes of brilliance, while some teams that won may not be all they are cracked up to be. Here is a list of how teams stack up after Week 1 of the 2012 NFL preseason.ORLANDO, Fla. -- A diversity report shows the NBA "significantly ahead" again in professional sports in racial and gender hiring practices.
The league received an A for racial hiring and a B for gender hiring practices for the 2016-17 season. The NBA drew an overall grade of A-minus, continuing its run of A grades since the start of the 2000s.
Editor's Picks NBA continues positive track record for hiring practices When it comes to inclusion and diversity, the strong example the NBA continues to set can give us hope for the future.
The report card was released Thursday by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. The report was written by Richard Lapchick.
The NBA sets the pace, with people of color making up 30 percent of the head coaches and 45 percent of the assistants. The NBA is also the first major sports league to have three owners of color.
Report cards are also issued for the NFL, MLB, WNBA, MLS and college sports.
"They have been significantly ahead of the other leagues from the time we started it in the 1980s," said Lapchick, the chair of University of Central Florida's sports business management program. "Other leagues have closed the gap and improved a little bit but the NBA has continued to improve as well to stay the industry leader."
The league, however, did receive an F for race representation this season at the levels of team president/CEO and general manager. There are just four people of color at the top tier of team management and three general managers of color.
The NBA also received a D for gender hiring for team vice presidents, with women making up 24 percent of the workforce in that area. Although women in team senior administrative positions jumped from 24 percent in 2015-16 to 29 percent this past season, the league earned a C-minus for gender hiring at the team level.
"There are obviously areas in there that need improvement," Lapchick said. "This is the second year in a row that we've talked to about the lack of women in senior leadership positions at the team level."
Still, the NBA receives overall high marks for hiring practices at the team and league offices. In the NBA league office, 35 percent of the professional staff positions were held by people of color at the beginning of this season, with women at nearly 39 percent.
Deputy commissioner Mark Tatum is the highest-ranking African-American of any of the professional American sports leagues.
Lapchick attributes the NBA's strong marks to its past two commissioners, David Stern and Adam Silver. Months after he became commissioner in 2014, Silver led the way in ousting Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling after it was discovered he made racist remarks.
"That kind of out-front posturing is important," Lapchick said. "It sends a signal to the teams and obviously to the league office that diversity and inclusiveness is very important. I think all commissioners feel that way but I think the NBA has made its stamp even more powerful."Bruce Rauner is a failed governor.
Fifteen months after the wealthy Republican private equity investor was sworn in to his first elected office, the state he was elected to lead is in worse shape by nearly every measure than the state he inherited from his Democratic predecessor.
The backlog of unpaid bills is higher, as is the unemployment rate and the largest-in-the-nation unfunded public pension liability. We were one of just six states that showed a net loss in private sector jobs last year. Accordingly, our credit rating has continued to fall, meaning it will cost us even more than anticipated to dig out of a financial hole that's growing at an estimated rate of $33 million every day.
Illinois still doesn't have — and at this rate probably never will have — a budget for the fiscal year that began last July, which has put many human service providers and public colleges and universities into a financial crisis.
Now, yes, it's quite true that Rauner didn't create the underlying economic problems facing Illinois — those came about due to decades of irresponsible governance, some of it bipartisan, much of it Democratic.
But he's made those problems worse.
He campaigned for office promising to "shake up Springfield." Instead he has cold-cocked it.
By refusing to negotiate on the budget until the Democrats who control the General Assembly enact key provisions of his pro-business, anti-union agenda, he's not only generated an unending number of heart-tugging stories of disadvantaged and disabled people suffering from a loss of state funding, he's also created a climate of uncertainty that makes employers and credit-rating agencies wary.
Calling him a failure may sound harsh, but it's fittingly Rauneresque.
After all, he bashed away at Democratic incumbent Gov. Pat Quinn during the 2014 campaign, branding him a "complete failure," "a massive failure" and so on, even though, under Quinn, the unemployment rate, discretionary spending, and the number of state employees had fallen, and even though Illinois was at last making the required contributions to the state's pension funds and whittling down the backlog of bills.
Earlier this year, Rauner whacked his wine-drinking buddy, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, by charging that Emanuel has "failed on public safety, he's failed on schools, he's failed on jobs in the neighborhoods, he's failed on taxes, he's failed on reforms."
By the governor's own standards, he's failed on jobs, on human services, on pensions, on the debt and on the deficit.
He has failed to build consensus and bipartisan trust, failed to build political momentum with incremental victories and failed to show any talent for leadership over a divided government.
Sure, Democratic legislative leaders have stood squarely in his way, as they sometimes stood in Quinn's way, refusing to OK even the most popular items, such as legislative term limits, on Rauner's so-called turnaround agenda.
Who didn't see that coming? The Democrats, predictably, hung on to strong majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly in the 2014 election as Rauner was beating Quinn with 50.3 percent of the vote.
Yet the new governor swaggered into office as though he'd won a mandate that would force veteran Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan and his caucus to enact a Republican wish list of structural changes. He used his bully pulpit to brand Madigan and Democratic Senate President John Cullerton as failures and to insinuate that they're crooked.
Swagger and insult work when you're a CEO taking over a troubled company or, sometimes, when you're an elected official with legislative winds at your back. But not when you're a rookie governor holding a weak political hand.
He failed when he tried to go city-by-city throughout the state shortly after his inauguration to build local support for his agenda. He failed last year when he paid "superstar" budget consultant Donna Arduin $165,000 for eight months of work in which she did little but help him craft a spending plan for this fiscal year that relied on $2 billion in phantom savings. He failed in February when he put forth a budget for next year with a $3.5 billion hole in it. He failed last month in the primary elections when he tried to unseat a Republican state senator who'd cast pro-union votes and tried to retain a Democratic state representative who'd supported him at key moments.
And he's failing every day that he doubles down on the idea that if the state's economic woes just get bad enough, if unfortunate people just suffer enough, Democratic lawmakers will break down and vote as Republicans.
Can he turn things around? Stop overreaching and picking unnecessary fights and start practicing the art of the possible?
Sure. He has 33 months left in this term to show himself as a statesman and visionary tactician, the author of the Illinois Miracle, instead of the foundering ideologue he has so far appeared to be.
But for now and until further notice, call him "Failed Gov. Bruce Rauner" and hope that, somehow, the title doesn't stick.
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Friday's follow up column deals with the "What about Mike Madigan?" complaint seen so frequently in the comment thread.
Twitter @ericzornOn his first day on the new job, Willie Janeway said he has no big changes in mind at the Adirondack Council—at least, not right away.
Janeway, who is forty-nine, resigned this year as a regional director for the state Department of Environmental Conservation to become executive director of the council.
“I get to be an ambassador for the Adirondack Park. What a great thing to sell—the Adirondacks,” Janeway said Wednesday in an interview with the Adirondack Explorer and Adirondack Daily Enterprise.
Janeway describes himself as a “pragmatic optimist.” As a former state employee, he believes government can play a positive role in the Park, but he understands that it operates under political and financial constraints.
The council, too, must be willing to engage in dialogue with various stakeholders and at times give something to get something.
“Some would criticize that as compromising, but I don’t see it as that. I see it as realistic,” he said.
Asked how he differs from his predecessor, Brian Houseal, Janeway replied, “We may be more similar than different.”
He praised Houseal for helping to found the Common Ground Alliance, which seeks to bridge the differences between environmental and local leaders.
Janeway said the council has a fourfold mission:
Fighting for clean air and clean water and against climate change.
Preserving large wild landscapes and the diversity of plants and animals.
Encouraging good stewardship of the Park’s private lands.
Helping to make the Park’s communities economically vibrant.
Janeway, who plans to live in Keene Valley, has deep roots in the Adirondacks. His ancestors were among the founders of the Ausable Club and Adirondack Mountain Reserve. His family has a summer home at the club and a cabin on Upper Ausable Lake.
He attended St. Lawrence University in part so he could be close to the Adirondacks. He has climbed all forty-six of the High Peaks and is an avid backcountry skier. He also is a fly-fisherman. Not surprisingly, he is excited to be living full time in the Adirondacks.
“I intend to get out and enjoy the Park,” he said. “It recharges me.”
Photo by Phil Brown: Adirondack Council spokesman John Sheehan, left, and Willie Janeway in the Adirondack Explorer offices.Image caption George Wright took Portuguese citizenship after marrying in 1991
Portugal's Supreme Court has rejected another attempt by the US to extradite fugitive killer and plane hijacker, George Wright.
The US was appealing against an earlier ruling which barred extradition on the grounds that Wright had taken Portuguese citizenship in 1991.
He escaped from prison in 1970. He was captured in September after more than 40 years on the run.
The US want him to be returned to finish serving his sentence for murder.
He took legal action to fight the US extradition order and in November, a Lisbon court denied the request.
Late on Thursday, Wright's lawyer, Manuel Luis Ferreira, said that after a closed hearing, the Supreme Court had notified him that they were rejecting the US appeal.
Mr Ferreira had argued Wright should serve any prison term in Portugal, where he is now a citizen and where his wife and two grown children live.
The US government could now appeal to Portugal's Constitutional Court.
Marriage and citizenship
Wright served seven years at Bayside State Prison in Leesburg, New Jersey, before breaking out with three other inmates.
In 1972, the FBI says he hijacked a US Delta airlines plane to Algeria as part of the militant Black Liberation Army group.
He is said to have disguised himself as a priest and produced a gun from a hollowed-out Bible which he held to a flight attendant's head.
At Miami airport, he and his accomplices secured a $1m ransom before freeing the passenger.
While the other hijackers were later caught, Wright remained at large for more than four decades until the FBI tracked him down in rural Portugal.
He had married a Portuguese woman in 1991, becoming a Portuguese citizen under the name of Jose Luis Jorge dos Santos.
This new identity was given to him by Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony in West Africa, but was recognised by Portugal when Wright was granted political asylum there in the 1980s.TEHRAN (Reuters) - A senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander said on Thursday the United States was not in a position to tell Tehran “what to do in the Strait of Hormuz,” state television reported, after the U.S. said it would preserve oil shipments in the Gulf.
Tehran’s threat to block traffic through the crucial passage for Middle Eastern crude suppliers followed the European Union’s decision to tighten sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program, as well as accompanying moves by the United States to tighten unilateral sanctions.
Iran’s English-language Press TV quoted Hossein Salami as saying: “Any threat will be responded by threat... We will not relinquish our strategic moves if Iran’s vital interests are undermined by any means.”
Separately, Salami was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency: “Americans are not in a position whether to allow Iran to close off the Strait of Hormuz.”
The U.S. Fifth Fleet said on Wednesday it would not allow any disruption to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, a strip of water separating Oman and Iran.
At loggerheads with the West over its nuclear program, Iran said earlier it would stop the flow of oil through the strait if sanctions were imposed on its crude exports.
The Iranian threat pushed up international oil prices on Tuesday although they slipped back on Wednesday in thin trade.
Analysts say that Iran could potentially cause havoc in the Strait of Hormuz which connects the biggest Gulf oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, with the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. At its narrowest point, it is 21 miles across.
But its navy would be no match for the firepower of the Fifth Fleet which consists of 20-plus ships supported by combat aircraft, with 15,000 people afloat and another 1,000 ashore.
This is not the first time the Iranians have threatened to disrupt the oil flow in the Gulf, including in 2008 and 2010 when Iran talked about shutting the Strait as retaliation for any military strike on the country’s nuclear sites.
Neither the United States nor Israel have ruled out military action if diplomacy fails to resolve a long-running dispute over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
Israel, widely believed to have the Middle East’s only atomic arsenal, has described Iran’s nuclear program as a threat to its existence. Iran refuses to recognize Israel.
Tehran says it needs nuclear technology to generate electricity. Iran has been hit by foreign sanctions, including four rounds of U.N. sanctions, over its refusal to halt its sensitive nuclear work.
A military personnel participates in the Velayat-90 war game on Sea of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz in southern Iran December 28, 2011. REUTERS/Fars News/Hamed Jafarnejad
To show off its military capabilities, Iran launched a 10-day large-scale naval wargames in the Gulf on Saturday.
Iran’s state television reported on Thursday the country’s surveillance plane filmed a U.S. aircraft carrier during the drill.
“We have filmed and photographed a U.S. aircraft carrier as it was entering the Gulf of Oman,” said Iran’s Navy Chief Habibollah Sayyari. “The area is under our full control.”Photo by: Dennis Van Tine/STAR MAX/IPx 2/6/16 Hillary Clinton at "The Get Out The Vote" Event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Searching for campaign infractions real and imagined, the media's etiquette police have been busy writing up Hillary Clinton for numerous violations lately.
"She shouts," complained Washington Post editor Bob Woodward last week on MSNBC, deducting points for Clinton's speaking style. "There is something unrelaxed about the way she is communicating, and I think that just jumps off the television screen."
"Has nobody told her that the microphone works?" quipped Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough, who led a lengthy discussion about Clinton's voice (the "tone issue"). Scarborough and his guests dissected Clinton's "screaming," and how she is supposedly being "feisty" and acting "not natural."
Over on Fox, Geraldo Rivera suggested Clinton "scream[s]" because she "may be hard of hearing." CNBC's Larry Kudlow bemoaned her "shrieking."
During last week's debate, Bob Cusack, editor of The Hill, tweeted, "When Hillary Clinton raises her voice, she loses." (Cusack later deleted the tweet and apologized.) During a discussion on CNN about Clinton's volume, David Gergen stressed, "Hillary was so angry compared to Sanders."
The New York Times' debate coverage pushed the same "angry" narrative, detailing "The ferocity of Mrs. Clinton's remarks," and how she appeared "tense and even angry at times," "particularly sensitive," and was "going on the offensive." (By contrast, her opponent "largely kept his cool.")
Media message received: Clinton is loud and cantankerous!
But it's not just awkward gender stereotypes that are in play these days. It's a much larger pattern of thumb-on-the-scale coverage and commentary. Just look at what seemed to be the press' insatiable appetite to frame Clinton's Iowa caucus win last week as an unnerving loss. Pundits also inaccurately claimed that she had to rely on a series of coin tosses to secure a victory.
As I've noted before, these anti-Clinton guttural roars from the press have become predictable, cyclical events, where pundits and reporters wind themselves up with righteous indignation and shift into pile-on mode regardless of the facts on the ground. (And the GOP cheers.) The angry eruptions now arrive like clockwork, but that doesn't make them any less baffling. Nor does that make it any easier to figure out why the political press corps has decided to wage war on the Democratic frontrunner. (And publicly admit that they're doing it.)
Sure, the usual nutty anti-Clinton stuff is tumbling off the right-wing media branches, with Fox News suggesting her campaign was nothing more than "bra burning," while other conservatives mocked her "grating" voice.
But what's happening inside the confines of the mainstream media is more troubling. Rush Limbaugh advertising his insecurities about powerful women isn't exactly breaking news. Watching Beltway reporters and pundits reveal their creeping contempt for Clinton and wrapping it in condescension during a heated primary season is disturbing. And for some, it might trigger bouts of déjà vu.
It was fitting that the extended examination of Clinton's "tone" last week unfolded on Morning Joe. As Think Progress noted, that show served as a hotbed for weird gender discussions when Clinton ran for president in 2008: "Scarborough often referenced the 'Clinton cackle' and another panelist cracked a joke that Clinton reminded everyone of their 'first wife in probate court.'" (The crack about probate court got lots of laughs from Scarborough's all-male panel at the time.)
The toxic put-downs during the heated Democratic primary in 2008 were everywhere (i.e. Candidate Clinton was a "hellish housewife"). At the time, Salon's Rebecca Traister detected among male pundits "a nearly pornographic investment in Clinton's demise."
And that was not an understatement. From Dr. Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University:
She was referred to as a "white bitch" on MSNBC and CNN; a blood-sucking "vampire" on Fox; the "wicked witch of the west" on CNN; and "everyone's first wife standing outside of probate court," a "she devil" and the castrating Lorena Bobbitt, all on MSNBC.
That Clinton was unfairly roughed up by the press in 2008 isn't really a question for debate anymore. Even the man who campaigned against her, President Obama, recently noted that "there were times where I think the media probably was a little unfair to her" during their Democratic primary battle.
I wonder if Obama thinks the press is once again being unfair with its primary coverage.
For example, as the press continues to focus on the issue of Clinton's speaking fees as |
he says that the government has been a disaster, then that it did everything it could. I hope voters are less confused then me," Mr Monti said.
Mr Berlusconi countered by said Mr Monti was "no longer credible", claiming he "broke his word" by entering the race after promising he would not when he took over in November 2011.
Last year, Mr Monti, a 69-year-old economics professor, pushed through austerity reforms as Mr Berlusconi sat on the sidelines.
Though the spread is down and markets calm, lending is still tight, Italians are not spending and joblessness keeps rising. A new wave of taxes takes effect in 2013 on everything from utilities to gas and postage stamps.
But Mr Monti insisted better times lie ahead, saying he would cut labour taxes to spur growth and redistribute wealth to help struggling Italians "catch their breath." "The light at the end of the tunnel is closer than before and I am far more optimistic that the tunnel will not collapse and destroy us as it threatened to do," he said.
Mr Monti's coalition is in a three-way race with the leading Democratic Party (PD) on the left and Mr Berlusconi's People of Freedom (PDL) on the right.WASHINGTON (AP) Short-term exposure to smog, or ozone, is clearly linked to premature deaths that should be taken into account when measuring the health benefits of reducing air pollution, a National Academy of Sciences review concludes. The findings contradict arguments made by some White House officials that the connection between smog and premature death has not been shown sufficiently, and that the number of saved lives should not be calculated in determining clean air benefits. The report released Tuesday by a panel of the Academy's National Research Council says government agencies "should give little or no weight" to such arguments. WHAT'S 'SMOGGY'?: USA TODAY analyzes EPA's rules UNLIKELY LOCATIONS: Unsuspecting counties are smog centers "The committee has concluded from its review of health-based evidence that short-term exposure to ambient ozone is likely to contribute to premature deaths," the 13-member panel said. It added that "studies have yielded strong evidence that short-term exposure to ozone can exacerbate lung conditions, causing illness and hospitalization and can potentially lead to death." The panel examined short-term exposure — up to 24 hours — to high levels of ozone, but said more studies also were needed on long-term chronic exposure where the risk of premature death "may be larger than those observed in acute effects studies alone." Ground-level ozone is formed from nitrogen oxide and organic compounds created by burning fossil fuels and is demonstrated often by the yellow haze or smog that lingers in the air. Ozone exposure is a leading cause of respiratory illnesses and especially affects the elderly, those with respiratory problems and children. While premature deaths from ozone exposure is greater among individuals with lung and heart disease, the report said such deaths are not restricted to people who are at a high risk of death within a few days. The scientists said they could not determine, based on a review of health studies, whether there is a threshold below which no fatalities can be assured from ozone exposure. If there is such a point, it is below the ozone levels allowed for public health. Environmentalists and health advocates have argued that a string of health studies and surveys show that exposure to smoggy air not only aggravates respiratory problems, but annually causes thousands of deaths. But in a number of instances the EPA and the White House Office of Management and Budget, which reviews regulations, have been at odds over the certainty of a link between smog levels and deaths. The Academy's report "could have important consequences" on such future disputes, said attorney Vicky Patton of the advocacy group Environmental Defense. She said the OMB in a number of air pollution regulations has sought to minimize the relationship of pollution and premature deaths, resulting in a lower calculation of health benefits from pollution reductions. "This has been used by industry to try to attack health standards by minimizing the societal benefits," said Patton. One such case involves the EPA's decision last month to toughen the ozone health standard, reducing the allowable concentration in the air. When the cost-benefit analysis was being prepared in connection with the rulemaking, the OMB argued there is "considerable uncertainty" in the association between ozone levels and deaths. As a result, the EPA issued a wide cost-benefit range from an annual net societal cost of $20 billion to a savings of $23 billion, depending largely on whether one takes into account lives saved from ozone-related premature deaths. OMB officials also have objected to the EPA quantifying ozone-related mortality benefits in new emissions standards for lawn mowers and other small engines that release large amounts of ozone-forming pollution. In response, the EPA removed "all references to quantified ozone benefits" in the proposed rule, according to an e-mail sent by EPA to the OMB. The small engine regulation is awaiting final action. Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read moreIt’s becoming hard to obtain a licensed copy of Windows XP. Yet, many IT professionals, including malware analysts, like having Windows XP in their virtualized labs. After all, Windows XP is still running on numerous personal and business systems. Fortunately, you can download a virtualized instance of Windows XP from Microsoft for free if you are running Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate on your base system. (A variation of this approach seems to work on Windows 8.1, too.)
Microsoft calls this virtualized instance of Windows XP “Windows XP Mode,” and distributes it in the Windows Virtual PC format. If you prefer to use VMware Workstation or VMware Player instead of Virtual PC, follow instructions below.
First, download Windows XP Mode from Microsoft. You’ll need to go through the Windows validation wizard to confirm you’re running a licensed copy of the appropriate version of Windows 7. You’ll have the option of downloading and installing Windows Virtual PC software, but you don’t need it if you’ll be using VMware.
Next, install the downloaded Windows XP Mode executable. The installation wizard will give you a chance to specify where the files installed, placing them in “C:Program FilesWindows XP Mode” by default. This folder will contain, among other files, the 1GB+ file “Windows XP Mode base.vhd” representing the hard drive of the Windows XP virtual machine.
Then, launch VMware Workstation or Player. Go to the File > Import Windows XP Mode VM menu.
VMware will launch the wizard that will automatically create the Windows XP VMware virtual machine using the Windows XP Mode files you installed in the previous step.
Using VMware Workstation or Player, power on the Windows XP Mode virtual machine that VMware created.
Lastly, go through the Windows XP setup wizard within the new virtual machine the same way you would do it for a regular Windows XP system.
At this point, you should have a VMware virtual machine running Windows XP. It will be connected to the network using the VMWare “NAT” mode, so if your base system has Internet access, so would the virtual machine.
If using VMware Workstation, take a snapshot of your newly setup Windows XP virtual machine, in case something goes wrong later.
There two other ways of obtaining Windows virtual machines, both using Windows Virtual PC. In both cases, you can download Windows Virtual PC files and convert them into the VMware format by using VMware vCenter Converter or by using File > Import or Export… in VMware Workstation. You can download Windows XP, Vista and 7 virtual machines from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image page. You can also download Windows XP and Vista VMs from the NIST Federal Desktop Core Configuration FDCC page. You’ll need to supply valid Windows licenses to activate these OS instances; you may be able to use them for some time period in a limited manner without activation.
If this topic is interesting to you, take a look at my Reverse-Engineering Malware course. Other related items:Swedish app developers! I love you all, I really do. But as an English editor and language militant, I’m about to deliver some tough love here, so you may want to sit down for this. It’s time we have ourselves a fireside chat.
You’re at a cocktail party or a tech event or some minglefest and someone hands you a business card. Sweet! You networking networker, you. Look at you go.
The card is impressive. It says ‘Founder and CEO’ in raised lettering. And look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Brimming with social media handles and contact info. Oh my gosh…it has an email address ending in….@hotmail.com.
The lounge music screeches to a halt. Guests gasp in unison. Someone faints. The business card slips from your trembling fingers and withers away like the wilting optimism of your expectations. Your champagne flute falls to the ground and shatters like the broken dreams of your entrepreneurial spirit.
This. This is the reaction I get when I see swenglish in your apps.
Am I being melodramatic? Absolutely. However, as a prolific app user, I can’t emphasize enough how essential it is to use proper English, especially if you’re looking to curate a professional and respectable image for your app and company, internationally.
Priorities, you say? I sympathize. I get it. You’re bootstrapped and cash-strapped. Maybe your budget is already spread too thin. Maybe your investors think flawless English is an unnecessary luxury. Maybe your office is your parents’ basement and the word ‘budget’ isn’t in your dictionary at all. Maybe you haven’t started coding yet and this issue had not even crossed your mind.
Well consider your mind crossed. Now you have no excuse.
To get you started, here are three common issues to watch out for (besides general spelling, grammatical, and syntactical issues):
Compound words (sammansatta ord) – We know that särskrivning is frowned upon in Swedish. In English, combining words that shouldn’t be combined is equally frowned upon. This not only looks like you missed a space, but can actually create ambiguity depending on the words you’ve decided to smush together. Lowercase/uppercase letters – In English, most key words in headers are capitalized. Pro-tip: if you aren’t going to write it entirely in capitalized letters, Then Your Title Should Look Like This. Matching the subject and the verb / plural and singular forms – “In this menus, these feature will allows you to sends us suggestion and ideas.” (…where to begin.) Pro-tip: if you can’t refine this on your own, a native English-speaking colleague or friend can help. Offer beer. Preferably afterwards. Bonus pro- tip #1: Conviviality [kuhn-viv-ee-al–uh-tee] – ‘the quality of being friendly and lively’— a lack of which does not signify a typo or mistake per se, but if you’re going to let engineers write text for your front-end, have them adopt a more cordial voice (even if slightly), and avoid being too clinical (read: robotic) in their tone. I’m aware that cold hard plain English is the best way to reach those who are not fluent, but a little warmth can go a long way. Apps shouldn’t read like a list of medicine contraindications (unless your app is about medicine contraindications). Bonus pro-tip #2: Enlist the services of an översättningsbyrå or a professional språkgranskare. It’s their job to debug your text. (For those interested, I can recommend an excellent översättningsbyrå in Stockholm, which specializes in apps and websites).
In your defense, I have the programming acumen of a hamster, so perhaps I shouldn’t be giving orders to you and your tech start-up. However, I can’t imagine that challenges like development, testing, funding, or marketing belong to the same order of magnitude as general language services issues. If your language issues aren’t minor, find a way to make them so, then find a way to omit them entirely.
Perfect English is an unsung hero of the user interface. When it’s perfect, nobody notices. When it’s flawed, it stick out like a sorethumb. (See what I did there? If you didn’t, then you need to take two språkkonsulter and call me in the morning.) Language errors are bugs. Treat them accordingly.DreamWorks Animation produced the third outing in the popular animated franchise with the China Film Group.
In a first for a studio Hollywood release, moviegoers in the U.S. will be able to see a Mandarin-language version of Kung Fu Panda 3 in select U.S. theaters.
AMC Entertainment — owned by China's Dalian Wanda Group — is partnering with DreamWorks Animation and Fox to show a dubbed or subtitled version of the movie in markets where there is a significant Chinese population. The seven theaters are in Los Angeles (with three); Boston; Chicago; Columbus, Ohio; and the Bay Area in Northern California.
Also, Regal Entertainment will play the Mandarin version in one location in Canada, and Cineplex will carry it in two theaters in Vancouver.
A Spanish-language version of Kung Fu Panda 3, which opens Friday, also will be shown in select AMC locations. AMC and other circuits often offer a Spanish-language version of animated films, whether subtitled or dubbed, in the U.S., but Kung Fu Panda 3 marks the first time a theater circuit has partnered with a major Hollywood studio to make a title available in Mandarin.
"The audience for the Kung Fu Panda franchise is very broad and includes those whose first language may not be English," said AMC executive vp and chief content officer Elizabeth Frank. "As an extension of our targeted programming, AMC is excited to provide our diverse audience with the opportunity to experience Kung Fu Panda 3 in their preferred format and language."
The DWA movie is a co-production with the state-run China Film Group. English- and Mandarin-language versions will both be shown in China.
The seven theaters in the U.S. playing the Mandarin version are: AMC Loews Boston Common 19; AMC River East 21 in Chicago; AMC Lennox Town Center 24 in Columbus; AMC Cupertino Square 16 in the Bay Area; and Los Angeles' AMC Puente Hills 20, AMC Atlantic Times Square 14 and AMC Tustin 14.There's a subreddit called Monks Looking At Beer dedicated to, appropriately, monks looking at beer
Turns out if there's one things those brothers and sisters of the cloth like just as much as the good lord upstairs, it's looking at beer
They really, really like looking at it
To the point one imagines they get pioused off their tiny tonsured nuts just looking at
Occasionally drinking it, too
But looking remains the primary mode of veneration
We spoke to the subreddit's moderators, u/DannyDinglehart and u/Respectfullyyours, to find out just why the hell monks love looking at beer...
What prompted you to set up the subreddit?
DannyDinglehart: One fateful night over a bottle of doppelbrock I started searching 'alcoholism' on Google Images. I noticed there was an unusual amount of pictures depicting monks looking at beer. Over the next few days I searched for and collected nearly hundreds of these pictures, and knew that I had to somehow share them with the world.
Respectfullyyours: I'm just his faithful servant.
What do you think it is about the monastic lifestyle that seems to lend itself so much to beer, and viewing it reverentially through the act of 'looking'?
Respectfullyyours: I think after a day of studying religious texts, painstakingly reproducing manuscripts, or chanting, there needs to be something to take off the edge. Looking, contemplating and appreciating have such a large role in monastic life, as well as moderation and abstention, that it makes perfect sense a tradition like this would arise.
DannyDinglehart: Abstinence from luxuries is one of the most profound ideas circulated through the monastic circles. Beer, however, was one exception as monks were traditionally allowed to drink beer in place of food during lent. Often times it was too indulgent to simply drink the beer, so monks invented the art of simply looking at beer instead. It is estimated that the first monk to brew Trappist beer did so in the early 1600s, signifying the start of the modern era.
Respectfullyyours: Also beer making as a hobby takes skills, time, experimentation and this environment lends itself particularly well to passing down secrets from generation to generation.
Do you have a favourite beer-looking monk?
DannyDinglehart: Choosing a favorite trappist monk is like choosing a favorite child, each one is special to me in their own way.
Respectfullyyours: I love how mischievous Saint Bobo looks. He's found within the letter of an illuminated manuscript, caught in the act of swigging some beer and filling up another pitcher full for later.
Do you have a favourite monk-looking beer?
Respectfullyyours: I feel like in this painting you can almost taste the beer.
DannyDinglehart: This picture of a monk from the second dimension looking at beer from the third dimension.
If you could share a pint with any monk from history, living or dead (or still living in heaven), who would you choose?
Respectfullyyours: Is it cheating if I pick a nun? I'd love to share a beer with Hildegard von Bingen. She wrote, she composed music, she was a philosopher and she had crazy visions that she'd draw in her manuscripts. I feel like she'd have a lot of interesting things to say.
DannyDinglehart: The first monk, brother Jesus. He was gifted by the Lord with the ability to turn wine into grape-beer.
Have you thought about converting to the cloth since starting the subreddit?
Respectfullyyours: As tempting as this subreddit makes it look, I probably have more freedom to indulge in beer without converting. Especially as I don't think I could pull off a nun's habit as well as the next gal.
DannyDinglehart: I fight the urge every day.
What are your biggest monastic tunes to get yourselves pumped for an evening of steady drinking?
DannyDinglehart: There are so many choices, but I personally prefer songs from the Burgundian school of music.
Respectfullyyours: Basically anything on r/medievalmusic. I just set up a playlist with the top posts and then start looking at/drinking my beers.
DannyDinglehart: I just found a new favorite subreddit.
And finally, if you could decree one Monks Looking At Beer commandment onto your followers, what would it be?
DannyDinglehart: I think I would choose the commandment to "do not question the will of the Lord, for he works in mysterious ways", as it is profoundly wholesome and acts as a catch all for any posts I feel should be added to the wall of shame.
Respectfullyyours: Thou shalt enjoy and savour your beer as you drink it and thou shalt not rush it.(AFP) — Following is a list of attacks on Western targets claimed by or blamed on the Islamic State jihadist group after Saturday’s assault on two policewomen in southern Belgium:
– August 6: Machete attack in Belgium –
A machete-wielding man shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) attacks two policewomen in Charleroi, southern Belgium, badly injuring one in the face before being shot dead by a third officer.
Investigators give the initials of the assailant as K.B., describing him as a 33-year-old Algerian who had been living in Belgium since 2012.
The following day, IS says the attacker acted “in response to (its) calls to target citizens” of countries in the US-led coalition bombing IS in Syria and Iraq.
– July 26: French priest killed –
Attackers slit an elderly priest’s throat in a hostage-taking at his church in the Normandy town of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray.
French President Francois Hollande says the two attackers, killed by police, claimed to be from IS, while the group says they were its “soldiers”.
– July 24: German suicide blast –
A failed Syrian asylum-seeker blows himself up outside a music festival in the German city of Ansbach, wounding 15 others. The Bavarian interior minister says the man “pledged allegiance” to IS, while the jihadist-linked Amaq news agency said he was a “soldier” of the group.
– July 18: German train attack –
A 17-year-old asylum-seeker, believed to have been Afghan or Pakistani, attacks passengers on a Bavarian train with an axe, injuring five people, two of them critically. He is shot dead by police.
IS releases a video the following day purportedly featuring the attacker announcing he would carry out an “operation” in Germany.
– July 14: Nice lorry attack –
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian, rams a 19-tonne truck into people celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing 84 people and wounding more than 300.
IS said Bouhlel staged the attack “in response to calls to target nations of coalition states” fighting the jihadist group.
– June 28: Istanbul airport attack –
A triple suicide attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport kills 47 people. Authorities blame IS, though there is no claim of responsibility.
– June 13: French police couple killed –
A man claiming allegiance to IS stabs a police officer to death before slitting his partner’s throat in front of their young son at their home in Magnanville, west of Paris.
– June 12: Orlando gay bar shooting –
A gunman claiming allegiance to IS opens fire inside a gay bar in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people in the deadliest mass shooting in US history.
– March 22: Brussels attacks –
Suicide attacks claimed by IS kill 32 people and wound more than 340 at Brussels airport and Maelbeek metro station, near the European Union headquarters.
The attackers have links to the cell that carried out the November 2015 jihadist attacks in Paris.
– January 12: Tourists die in Istanbul –
Twelve German tourists are killed in a suicide attack in central Istanbul. On March 19, three Israeli tourists and an Iranian are killed by a suicide bomber at an Istanbul shopping centre. Turkish authorities attribute both attacks to IS.
– December 2, 2015: San Bernardino shooting –
Syed Farook and his Pakistani wife Tashfeen Malik open fire at a Christmas party in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people. IS hails the attack, but does not claim direct responsibility.
– November 13, 2015: Paris attacks –
Coordinated suicide attacks in Paris kill 130 people and wound more than 350 at a concert hall, cafes and the national stadium. IS claims responsibility.
– October 31, 2015: Russian jet bombed –
An Airbus passenger jet owned by a Russian company crashes in the Sinai desert after a bomb rips a hole in the plane, killing all 224 people on board. IS claims responsibility.
– June 26, 2015: Tunisia beach attack –
Gunmen kill 38 people, including 30 British tourists, at a beach hotel in Sousse, a little more than three months after a similar attack at the Bardo museum in Tunis kills 22 people, including 21 foreign tourists. IS claims both attacks.
– January 7-8, 2015: Paris shootings –
Gunman Amedy Coulibaly, claiming allegiance to IS, kills a policewoman in a Paris suburb before attacking a Jewish supermarket the next day, where he kills four more people. He is killed in a police assault.
On January 7, the Al-Qaeda-linked Kouachi brothers had killed 12 people at the headquarters of the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly in Paris.Nigella's Tips For A Frugal Yet Festive Holiday
Nigella Christmas Food Family Friends Festivities by Nigella Lawson Hardcover, 277 pages | purchase close overlay Buy Featured Book Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How?
Just because you don't want to spend a lot over the holidays doesn't mean you don't want to enjoy yourself. In her book Nigella Christmas, chef Nigella Lawson has plenty of tricks for making food festive yet frugal.
"At key times of the year like the holidays, what one really wants are the simpler, more traditional foods," Lawson tells NPR's Steve Inskeep. "I don't know that I want anything giddyingly fancy."
When you're cooking for a family of all ages, it's hard to please everyone. Lawson says that when you're feeding both a 7-year-old and a 70-year-old, keep it simple and "multigenerational."
For an appetizer, Lawson suggests "fully loaded" potato skins — with sour cream, grated cheese, scallions, Worcestershire sauce and bacon bits. "I think you need a lot of carbohydrates. [It] may be unfashionable, but it's cold, and maybe you're drinking a lot," Lawson says.
For a main dish, Lawson offers the recipe for a crowd-pleasing pumpkin and goat cheese lasagna (recipe below). There's no meat, which will please the vegetarians at your table, and will also cut back on costs. It's inexpensive, but it still looks pretty on the table.
"A huge tray of lasagna always is pretty festive," Lawson says. "... It's very basic, the sweet and the sharp... there's the tangy sauce and then of course that incredible comforting smoothness of a lasagna."
Frugal holidays don't have to mean sober holidays either. Lawson recommends the "Poinsettia" — a straightforward drink that won't force you to go out and buy half a dozen different liqueurs. All you need is a bottle of Prosecco (or any fizzy dry wine), a half cup of any orange liqueur and two cups of cranberry juice.
If you dust a bit of powdered sugar through a sieve on top of anything, it suddenly looks more expensive.
"With the orange liqueur in it, not only is it fantastic, but the dangerous thing is it doesn't taste alcoholic," Lawson says. "I'm just warning everyone now."
No holiday dinner is complete without dessert — Lawson suggests trying a sticky gingerbread (see recipe below.) It's very easy to make. ("You just put all the relevant ingredients into a saucepan, you heat it, and then stir everything together," Lawson says.) And it's OK to bake ahead of time — leaving it sitting for a day or two will just make it stickier. "It's so wonderful just with a cup of tea or coffee," Lawson says, and it's easy to bring over as a gift if you're visiting friends.
If you're serving the gingerbread at a dinner party, Lawson suggests classing it up a little with "a taste of the tropics." Cube some mangos and sprinkle a little powdered sugar on top of the gingerbread.
And here's a little secret: "If you dust a bit of powdered sugar through a sieve on top of anything, it suddenly looks more expensive," Lawson says.
There you go. Merry Christmas.
Lis Parsons/
Recipe: Pumpkin and Goat's Cheese Lasagne
Serves 12-15
For the pumpkin filling:
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
8 sage leaves
2 onions, peeled and finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
12 cups cubed pumpkin flesh (this is from a 5 lb pumpkin or about half a decent-sized pumpkin, a proper eating one not the Halloween king, peeled, seeded and cut to 1-inch rough cubes)
1/3 cup dry vermouth or white wine
1/4 cup water
1 x 14 oz can diced tomatoes
salt and pepper
Heat the oil and butter in a shallow Dutch oven or cast-iron braiser and fry the sage leaves over a gentle heat for about 2 minutes.
Add the chopped onion and minced garlic to the pan and fry gently for another 10 minutes or so.
Add the pumpkin pieces, turn well in the oniony oil and, after about 5 minutes, add the vermouth (or wine), the water and diced tomatoes. Simmer, covered, for an hour, stirring occasionally so the pumpkin cooks evenly. Taste for seasoning – I tend to add quite a bit of salt here – and leave to cool.
For the tomato sauce:
3 cups canned or bottled tomato sauce, pref. organic with no added salt
2 cups water
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons kosher salt or 1 tablespoon table salt
good grinding of pepper
Simply pour the tomato sauce and water into a large jug or bowl, and stir in the sugar, salt and pepper, whisking it all together.
For the cheese layer:
1lb soft fresh goat's cheese (chevre)
13/4 cups whole milk ricotta cheese
3 eggs
good grating of fresh nutmeg
12 fresh lasagne sheets (approx. 1 1/4 lbs)
1/2 lb fresh mozzarella cheese
1 cup pine nuts, toasted in a hot dry pan
salt and pepper
In a separate bowl beat the goat's cheese and ricotta with the eggs, nutmeg, and salt and pepper to taste.
Preheat the oven to 400F, slipping in a large cookie sheet as you do.
To assemble the lasagne, begin by putting 2 cups of the cold tomato sauce in the bottom of a roasting pan (measuring approx. 14x10x2 1/2 inches).
Then layer with a third of the lasagne sheets, overlapping them well (Italians do it with the pan horizontal but the pasta vertical, if that makes sense, but I don't know that it truly matters...). Leave the rest of the tomato sauce aside for the time being.
Layer a third of the pumpkin filling over the lasagne, and dollop on a third of the cheese mixture, coaxing with a rubber spatula. It won't cover completely; think more of spreading blobs about. Then start again with a layer of lasagne, followed by pumpkin, then the cheese. Repeat once more – lasagne, pumpkin, and the last of the cheese mixture.
Pour the remaining cold tomato sauce over, letting it sink down and be absorbed in the layers.
Slice and chop the mozzarella and dot over the top.
Bake in the oven, on the cookie sheet, for 1 hour. Once baked, take it out of the oven and let it stand for 15-30 minutes to make cutting and serving easier. (I love this when it's stood for an hour or so, too.) As you cut and slice, you will notice a shallow tomatoey cheesey pool at the bottom of the pan; bread dunked into this is gorgeous.
Sprinkle the toasted pine nuts over the lasagne, and cut into squares to serve.
Side Bar: I use a soft goat's cheese log, often sold as chèvre, that has no skin and a texture more like that of a goat's curd cheese.
Make ahead tip:
Up to 2 days ahead, make the pumpkin filling, leave to cool and keep, covered, in the refrigerator. Make the cheese layer and keep, covered, in the refrigerator. When ready to use, assemble the lasagne and cook as directed.
Freeze ahead tip:
Cook, cool and freeze the cooked pumpkin for up to 1 week. Thaw overnight in the refrigerator. When ready to use, assemble the lasagne and cook as directed.
Lis Parsons/
Recipe: Sticky Gingerbread
Makes 20 squares
1 stick plus 3 tablespoons butter
3/4 cup dark corn syrup
3/4 cup molasses
2/3 cup packed soft dark brown sugar
2 teaspoons finely grated ginger
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon baking soda, dissolved in 2 teaspoons warm water
1 cup whole milk
2 eggs, beaten to mix
2 cups all-purpose flour
Preheat the oven to 350F and line a roasting pan or ovenproof dish (approx. 12 x 8 x 2-inches) with aluminum foil or parchment paper (if using foil, grease it too).
In a saucepan, melt the butter over a lowish heat along with the sugar, syrup, molasses, fresh and ground gingers, cinnamon and cloves.
Take off the heat, and add the milk, eggs and dissolved baking soda in its water.
Measure the flour into a bowl and pour in the liquid ingredients, beating until well mixed. It will be a very liquid batter, so don't worry. This is part of what makes it sticky later.
Pour it into the prepared pan and bake for 45-60 minutes until risen and firm on top. Try not to overcook, as it is nicer a little stickier, and anyway will carry on cooking as it cools.
Transfer the pan to a wire rack and let the gingerbread cool in the pan before cutting into 20 squares, or however you wish to slice it.
Make ahead tip:
Make the gingerbread up to 2 weeks ahead, wrap loosely in parchment paper and store in an airtight container. Cut into squares as required.
Freeze ahead tip:
Make the gingerbread, wrap in parchment paper and a layer of aluminum foil then freeze for up to 3 months. Thaw at room temperature for 3-4 hours and cut into squares.
Recipes reprinted from the book Nigella Christmas by Nigella Lawson. Copyright 2011 by Nigella Lawson. Published by Hyperion Books.Letter from USU President Albrecht and Provost Cockett
Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2014
Dear Students, Staff and Faculty,
As you are aware, several USU staff members received a threatening email at 10:15 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 13 regarding Anita Sarkeesian’s talk scheduled for Wednesday, Oct. 15. As you probably have read, this email threatened both Ms. Sarkeesian and those who attended her event.
The safety of our students, staff and USU community is paramount to us. USU police were contacted immediately, as were state and federal agencies, including the Utah Statewide Information and Analysis Center, the FBI Cyber Terrorism Task Force, and the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit.
Prior to the threat, USU police were already making preparations for security as Ms. Sarkeesian had received threats in the past. After receiving the email, USU police added heightened security measures, including securing the Taggart Student Center auditorium far in advance, ensuring her safety to and from the event, and bringing in additional uniformed and plain-clothed police officers.
Throughout the day, Tuesday, Oct. 14, USU police and administrators worked with state and federal law enforcement agencies to assess the threat to our USU community and Ms. Sarkeesian. Together, we determined that there was no credible threat to students, staff or the speaker, and that this letter was intended to frighten the university into cancelling the event.
The safety and protection of students and those who attend our events is our foremost priority at Utah State. But we are also an institution of higher learning. In this case, the Center for Women and Gender had invited a nationally known speaker to bring her perspective about an important topic to USU. After a full assessment of the situation, the USU administration, in consultation with law enforcement, chose to continue with the event.
When our law enforcement personnel spoke about security measures, she was concerned that state law prevented the university from keeping people with legal concealed firearm permits from entering the event, and chose to cancel. As a Utah public institution, we follow state law. The Utah law provides that people who legally possess a concealed firearm permit are allowed to carry a firearm on public property, like the USU campus.
We are disappointed that students and other community members did not benefit from her presentation. While we will always prioritize the safety of our community, no threat changes Utah State University’s unwavering advocacy of academic freedom and free speech rights of everyone.
Sincerely,
Stan L. Albrecht, President
Noelle Cockett, Vice-President and ProvostFirst off, I've been having a really bad couple of days. I feel like I just can't win at anything, that I should just give up all the efforts I've put in to some projects at work and in my personal life, and I'm just overall discouraged.
This morning when I got to work, I stopped by the mail room to pick up a package for my boyfriend, who also works where I do, and to my surprise, I was told that a package was waiting for me, too. I hadn't gotten a notification, so it's possible that the package had been there for a few days. Did my mum send me something? She didn't mention anything.
And then I saw the outside of the package. It had my Reddit username.
When I got back to my desk, I opened the box and found out that my gifter had not only set me six gifts, almost all of the gifts were wrapped with bicycle wrapping paper.
The unwrapped gift was a set of cork coasters. I purchased a set of these two years ago and loved them so much, but I lost them when I moved in with my boyfriend. Thank you so much!
I unwrapped the littlest package next, and inside was a beautiful necklace—a pendant with a picture of an old-timey bicycle. And that's when the tears started.
Gifter, you have no idea how much I needed this generosity. Perhaps you didn't mean it this way, but right now it's nice to feel like I matter.
Next, I opened the package that wasn't wrapped in bicycle paper, and inside was a set of beautiful notecards. I love writing letters, and these are perfect!
Then I opened the pasta—bicycle pasta. Can you believe it? This will be perfect for the night before a big ride!
Inside the next package: bicycle sticky notes! I'm going to use these at work!
I almost don't want to open the last package until later in the day, but I know that you, gifter, have probably been waiting eagerly for my reaction.
Real-time reaction: holy shit! A copy of Bicycling Middle Tennessee: A Guide to Scenic Bicycle Rides in Nashville's Countryside
How did you know that I'm planning a bicycle ride through Kentucky and Tennessee for this fall? Seriously? This book is amazing! It even has cue sheets!
Gifter, you have really hit the mark. You've helped my mood lift significantly. I'm so grateful for your kindness and awes |
to verify that each gamer purchased their own copy. Many people turned to burning CDs, and online piracy became a huge problem for video game developers.
The only alternative to this at the time was split-screen gaming like Mario and GoldenEye when Nintendo took the throne. The important thing was that gaming was done as a group. This was also hurting company profits. One thing led to another and now everyone is holed up playing by themselves – and sadly, video gaming became frowned upon as being an “anti-social”, “nerdy” or “loser” thing to do. How could we be living in ever-more connected world but be shifting away from the social aspect of gaming? Whatever happened to trash talking your buddy after you fragged him right across from you?As recently as last week, senior administration officials were in Beijing trying to flesh out the agreement between the two presidents. Participants say that among the points of discussion was how to set up a hotline through which the two countries can alert each other to malicious software they have detected in global networks, with the expectation that Chinese and American investigators would work to find its source.
Establishing such norms of behavior is far more likely to be effective than attempting to negotiate a treaty, according to outside experts who have been trying to devise the cyberequivalent of arms-control agreements.
“Treaties are not verifiable in the cyberarena,” said Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor known for his studies of how nations use “soft power,” who in recent years has turned to the problem of regulating activity in cyberspace. “The same code can be benign or a weapon depending on the user’s intent,” he said. For example, a six-digit code that unlocks a cellphone is a protection for the user — and a potential weapon for a hacker.
“So instead of focusing on the weapons, you have to focus on targets,” Mr. Nye said. “You start by saying that you don’t target something that has a clearly civilian use, like a power grid.”
Mr. Nye and Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security during the Bush administration, who now runs a private firm that is deeply involved in cybersecurity, were among the lead authors of a report to be published on Tuesday by the Global Commission on Internet Governance that will describe those norms to the United Nations and other groups.
Just how fundamentally the Chinese are changing is a matter of debate. There is some evidence, American intelligence officials say, that while the People’s Liberation Army is not stealing as much on behalf of Chinese state-owned firms, much of the hacking activity has been shifted to the intelligence agencies, which can make the case that they are stealing national security secrets, not commercial information. Often, the difference is blurry, especially when the target is, say, the design of a satellite or a ship.
Even after Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi announced their agreement last fall, American officials have said they have discovered malware in power grids, cellphone networks and other purely civilian targets. But it is unclear whether that malicious software is intended to collect information about users, shut the system down or both.Shdha Elias, 54, was a Chaldean teacher. Her body was found by police. Church source tells AsiaNews that she joins a long list of Christian martyrs in the city. Tensions between Sunnis and Shias are on the rise as no real solution for peace and national reconciliation appears possible.
Mosul (AsiaNews) - Police in Mosul found the body of a Christian woman with her throat cut. The gruesome discovery was made today in an area where attacks have been perpetrated in the past against members of the city's Christian minority, some, like abducted Bishop Faraj Rahho and Fr Ragheed Ganni, murdered.
Sources told AsiaNews that the victim is Shdha Elias, a 54-year-old Chaldean, who worked as a teacher "in a school in the al Bath neighbourhood." She "lived however in Bar Nirgal, near the university". With her death, she joins "the long list of Christian martyrs in Mosul."
For the source, "Tensions between Sunnis and Shias are running high across Iraq, not only in the North. And peace and national reconciliation appear far off."
Mosul is a stronghold of Sunni Wahhabism, which is closely tied to Saudi Arabia. For experts on Iraqi politics, the aim is "to set up a state based on Sharia," with the Qur'an and the Sunnah as the basis of legislation and "Islam as the only state religion". In such a system, members of other religions can choose between conversion, flight or paying taxes for non-Muslims.
In northern Iraq, Christians have been targeted for murder and kidnapping for the purpose of extortion. They have also been caught in the crossfire between Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds vying for power and control of the area's rich oil resources.
In ten years of conflict, the Christian community has lost more than half of its members in an exodus of 'Biblical' proportions following a series of murders.
A Christian official in Mosul Governatorate, anonymous for security reasons, acknowledged that "many Christian families" have fled. "They have lost confidence in everything," he said. "The government is incapable of doing anything to protect them. What future do non-Muslims have in countries where violence reins!"Scientists working together on Kelp Watch 2014 announced today that the West Coast shoreline shows no signs of ocean-borne radiation from Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, following their analysis of the first collection of kelp samples along the western U.S. coastline.
Kelp Watch 2014 is a project that uses coastal kelp beds as detectors of radioactive seawater arriving from Fukushima via the North Pacific Current. It is a collaborative effort led by Steven Manley, marine biology professor at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), and Kai Vetter, head of applied nuclear physics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and a nuclear engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
The new results are from samples primarily collected from Feb. 24 through March 14.
During the first phase of the project, samples were taken from 38 of the 44 sites originally identified, and the data being presented comes from an analysis of 28 of the 38 sample sites represented.
"Our data does not show the presence of Fukushima radioisotopes in West Coast Giant Kelp or Bull Kelp," Manley said. "These results should reassure the public that our coastline is safe, and that we are monitoring it for these materials. At the same time, these results provide us with a baseline for which we can compare samples gathered later in the year."
DSC_7309The samples analyzed to date were gathered from as far north as Kodiak Island, Alaska, to as far south as Baja California. Two sites in the tropics -- Hawaii and Guam, where non-kelp brown algae were sampled (kelps are not found in the tropics) -- were also negative for Fukushima radiation.
"The samples of greatest concern were those from the north, Alaska to Washington State, where it is thought the radioactive water will first make contact with North America," Manley continued. "The tell-tale isotopic signature of Fukushima, Cs-134, was not seen, even at the incredibly low detection limits provided by Dr. Vetter's group at the Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley."
Vetter added, "We will also publish results of naturally occurring radiation sources, such as those associated with the decay of uranium and thorium, to help provide context to our findings on radioisotopes Cs-134 and Cs-137 from Fukushima."
Although initiated as a California-centric endeavor with 30 sites, Kelp Watch 2014 has steadily grown to include many sites along the west coast of North America and beyond. Manley noted that the project also has Giant Kelp from Chile in South America that will serve as a reference site, far removed from any potential influence from Fukushima.
Information about the procedures and results, including the results of the first samples' analyses, are available to the public at kelpwatch.berkeley.edu. The researchers will continually update the website for public viewing as more samples arrive and are analyzed, including samples from Canada.
"Because the Pacific Northwest may be ground zero for its arrival, we will be receiving monthly samples from the west and southern coastline of Vancouver Island (Canada)," Manley explained. "One of the goals of Kelp Watch 2014 is to keep the public informed, to let them know we are on top of this event, and to document the amount of Fukushima radiation that enters our kelp forest ecosystem."
The second of the three 2014 sampling periods is scheduled to begin in early July.
For more photos, and videos of the project, go to: http://www2.csulb.edu/misc/video/kelpwatch.htmlMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Theresa May is asked if Boris Johnson has undermined her
Theresa May says she has not been undermined by Boris Johnson's recent interventions on Brexit, saying she does not want a cabinet of "yes men".
The prime minister said the foreign secretary's vision of Brexit reflected the government's approach.
"This isn't about an individual personality, it's about how we can deliver for people," she added.
Mr Johnson has delivered his party conference speech, saying it is time to "let the British lion roar".
But his recent comments on Brexit - including setting out "red lines" in a newspaper article - have triggered calls for him to be sacked.
Asked what it would take for him to be fired, Mrs May told BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg that strong leadership involved "having a range of voices sitting around the table".
Responding to some Tory figures' concerns she was being undermined by the foreign secretary, she said: "It doesn't undermine what I'm doing at all."
She was speaking on day three of the Tory conference in Manchester, as:
Mr Johnson set out his Brexit "red lines" at the weekend, triggering anger from some colleagues and accusations that he was targeting Mrs May's job.
But the PM played down any differences with the government's position.
"If you look at the issues Boris has been talking about they reflect the position we've taken in the Florence speech, setting out a vision of what this country can be doing in terms of its partnership with Europe in the future," she said.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Boris Johnson: "It is up to us now... to let that lion roar."
Asked whether his interventions made her "cross", she replied: "Crucially, there's a lot of talk about Boris's job or this job or that job inside the cabinet.
"Actually what people are concerned about - they don't want us to be thinking about our jobs they want us to be thinking about their jobs and their futures.
"What government is for is about delivering for the public. That's where our focus must be."
In his much-anticipated speech in Manchester, Mr Johnson called for Brexit to be a moment of national renewal.
The foreign secretary told Tory activists the UK "can win the future" and should stop treating the referendum result as if it were "plague of boils".
He also praised Theresa May's "steadfast" leadership over Europe and insisted the whole cabinet was united behind her aim of getting a "great Brexit deal".
May's'mission'
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption In full: Theresa May speaks to Laura Kuenssberg
Mrs May has faced repeated questions about her leadership during the conference, having seen the Conservatives lose their Commons majority in June's general election.
She insisted she had the authority and ideas to improve the Tories' standing - and that her party was still setting the political agenda, adding that she had "listened" to voters' concerns on tuition fees and home ownership.
And she repeatedly stressed her "mission" in government, as set out when she took office, "to ensure that we no longer see people in this country that feel left behind".
Earlier during a round of media interviews the PM was asked by BBC Breakfast whether there were any "red lines" which Mr Johnson himself should not cross.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The prime minister Theresa May rejects accusations of weak leadership on Radio 4's Today
"I don't set red lines. Everybody uses this phrase'red lines'. I don't set those sort of red lines," she told BBC Breakfast.
"All I would say is actually I think leadership is about ensuring you have a team of people who aren't yes men, but a team of people of different voices around the table, so you can discuss matters, come to an agreement and then put that government view forward, and that's exactly what we've done."
On BBC Radio 4's Today, Mrs May said the foreign secretary and the rest of the cabinet were united behind her Brexit strategy, insisting that European leaders knew what the UK wanted and that her Florence speech had "changed the dial".
"What I am very clear about is of course the prime minister is in charge," she said.
'Troublemaker'
She acknowledged that her message "did not come across in the general election" as she would have wanted and it was apparent the concerns of the British people were "more keenly felt" than people had thought.
Mrs May said the election had shown that many people felt "left behind and ignored" but she insisted that change would not happen overnight and no "great phrase" would transform things.
In the run-up to Mr Johnson's speech, pro-Remain Tory MP and former business minister Anna Soubry told Channel 4 News that she had asked the foreign secretary to resign over the weekend, describing him a "troublemaker".
Speaking ahead of his own conference speech, in which he called for greater optimism about Brexit, International Trade Secretary Liam Fox told BBC Radio 4's The World at One: "I think it's easier if we are all on a very strict script, it's very clear that the prime minister is in charge of this process."
Also on the third day of the Conservative conference in Manchester, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt promised 5,000 new training places for nurses while International Development Secretary Priti Patel announced new conditions on foreign aid spending to prevent "fat cats" from monopolising contracts.
And a proposed ban on the sale of acids to under-18s was outlined by Home Secretary Amber Rudd.SUNNY ISLES, FL — With all eyes on Russia's alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, it may come as a surprise that there would be a paper trail connecting a Russian government official with a Trump-branded condominium in the Miami area. But that's what The Miami Herald detailed recently. The paper found that Igor Zorin at one time owned three condos worth about $5.4 million in the Trump Palace along Collins Avenue and still owns two of them.
Zorin, who runs the state-owned Russian broadcasting company that is responsible for the sound system at the country's annual military parade in Red Square, spent around $8 million in total on Miami area properties, including $3.3 million on a nearby Bal Harbour home plus his Trump-branded condominiums. The condos are in Trump Palace, which is located in a beachfront area that boasts several other Trump-branded buildings. (Sign up for our free Daily Newsletters and Breaking News Alerts for the Miami Patch.)
The area is sometimes referred to as "Little Moscow" by locals because of the large numbers of Russians who live there. The paper reported that none of the properties were listed on public disclosure forms that Zorin would have been required to file in Russia as a government official. The identified Zorin's local business associate was identified as Svyatoslav Mangushev, a former Russian intelligence officer, who the paper said helped found a Miami area biker club called Spetsnaz M.C. The Russian name refers to elite special forces in that country.
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Read the full report at The Miami Herald.
Photo courtesy of Realtor.comFor the first 3 years, IIM Nagpur will operate from the campus of Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT) Nagpur and will then move to its permanent campus at MIHAN in Nagpur.
Nagpur: The first batch of 60 students at IIM Nagpur will now get all the teaching and learning from faculty of IIM Ahmedabad for few years commencing academic session 2015 16. The classes will be conducted at VNIT Campus initially for the first three years. The IIMN will then move to its permanent campus at MIHAN in Nagpur.
Director of IIM Ahmedabad Dr Ashish Nanda in consultation with all stake holders has devised the plans to provide complete mentorship to IIM Nagpur. The first batch of 60 students at IIM Nagpur will now get all the teaching and learning from faculty of IIM Ahmedabad for few years commencing academic session 2015-16.
It is going to be great benefit for the students of first few batches at IIM-N as they will be taught and mentored by the faculty of India’s top ranked B school, IIM Ahmedabad. Now the students of IIM Nagpur do not need to repent on having not received call from IIM Ahmedabad. First academic session of IIM Nagpur is proposed to begin in July 2015.
IIM Ahmedabad has appointed Lt Col (Retd) Makarand Alur as ‘project administrator’ for IIM Nagpur. IIM Ahmedabad is also going to launch a full-fledged website for IIM Nagpur shortly with all the relevant details. Appointing the nodal officer to set-up and begin operations of IIM Nagpur with effect from academic session 2015-16 in the VNIT campus by IIM Ahmedabad is a clear indication that the mentor IIMA has completed its homework and is ready to start the academic session at IIM Nagpur without any delay.
IIM Ahmedabad to bear all expenses:
IIM Ahmedabad, the mentor IIM for IIM Nagpur, will bear expenses on establishing and beginning the academic session of IIM Nagpur. According to MHRD “The proposed cost of first three years of operationalisation should be forwarded to MHRD along with the name of nodal professor to facilitate mentoring role in setting up a registered society for the new institution.”
VNIT to accommodate IIMN for 3 years:
For the first 3 years IIM Nagpur will operate from the campus of Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT) Nagpur and will then move to its permanent campus at MIHAN in Nagpur. MHRD in consultation with Maharashtra State Government as well as mentor IIM Ahmedabad proposes to complete the construction of permanent campus of IIM Nagpur within 3 years. The funds to IIM Nagpur will be allotted afterwards by MHRD and out of the said funds expenses incurred by IIM Ahmedabad on establishing IIM Nagpur will be adjusted.
IIMN 1st among 6 proposed IIMs:
With the mentoring by IIM Ahmedabad it is expected that IIM Nagpur would become one of the top rated B schools in the country. Candidates who have scored 90 to 95 percentile in CAT 2014 and have appeared in the admission process for proposed new IIMs can find the admission opportunity in IIM Nagpur for the academic session commencing 2015.
IIMN students to benefit by IIMA teaching:
With IIM Ahmedabad at the helm of affairs students seeking admission opportunity in IIM Nagpur can be assured of a very good learning experience. IIM Ahmedabad has already clarified that for the first few years its faculty will teach at IIM Nagpur.
The pedagogy, case study pattern, project work and all other ingredients of academics for which IIM Ahmedabad is known, will impart a better learning environment at IIM Nagpur. Students, despite studying at IIM Nagpur may expect to be groomed on the study pattern of IIM Ahmedabad.
VNIT would allow IIM Nagpur students to utilize VNIT facilities like library, laboratories and canteen. 2 blocks of VNIT would be used as IIM Nagpur campus. One will be for residential purposes meant for faculty, students and non-teaching staff and the other would accommodate classrooms and labs. In fact for the few years IIM-Nagpur would remain as sub-centre of IIM Ahmedabad till its permanent campus at MIHAN is ready.Once ‘Written Off,’ Wave of Investment Has Transformed Bangor’s Downtown
Maine’s third largest city is in the midst of a transformation.
As the major service center hub for northern and eastern parts of the state, Bangor has become attractive to developers who want to take advantage of prime retail space downtown. They’re also adding residential housing to the mix, which is changing the city’s vibe.
Five years ago, Bangor Community and Economic Development Director Tanya Emery says there were a dozen empty buildings in the heart of the city’s downtown that hadn’t welcomed a customer in years. Many were built after a 1911 fire devastated Bangor’s downtown and were in varying states of deterioration.
And downtown traffic? It was increasingly moving toward the outskirts of the city, in the direction of the Bangor Mall.
“They were a lot of loyalists who stayed true to downtown, but it really was something that people had written off for a number of years,” Emery says.
But over the last five years, there has been a wave of new investment in many of the old buildings. Last year, the city completed a $975,000 upgrade to the West Market Square area, which now features new restaurants and outdoor bistro seating.
Emery says redevelopment interest can be traced back to 2002, when Bangor first hosted the National Folk Festival.
“The folk festival was really something that helped people think about Bangor differently, just sort of universally,” Emery said. “People from all across the country all of a sudden were seeing Bangor as a destination for arts and culture, entertainment, and it made Bangor think a little bit differently about what Bangor was capable of pulling off.”
Emery says young professionals and retiring baby boomers are attracted to the city’s proximity to the great outdoors. And developers are responding by building new apartments over storefronts in the buildings they’re renovating.
Bari Newport lives above a Main Street burrito restaurant, where she says she feels right at home. She is only a few footsteps away from her job at the Penobscot Theater Co., where she works as the venue’s producing artistic director. She says likes the convenience of living downtown, but what she really appreciates are the tin walls and ceilings and spacious skylights.
Those were all features that convinced Abe and Heather Furth to buy the building as the site of their second restaurant. The Bangor couple also own Orono Brewing Co. During recent renovations they discovered that the building was the former home of the Bangor Cigar Manufacturing Co. that went out of business more than 50 years ago.
Abe Furth says Bangor’s old buildings are brimming with charm, like the gigantic cigar humidors that he was able to reincorporate in the apartments above 26 State St. He says young entrepreneurs see the value of combining commercial and residential space.
“There’s a lot of people who have the same goal, which is take these buildings that are fire dangers, that are totally unused and breathe new life into them, and that’s a combination of city government, the state and the local developers and the local folks that are doing all of the plumbing, electrical and build-out,” he says. “It’s a combination of talents that lets it happen.”
Adam Moskovitz is one of the major talent scouts in Bangor’s new wave of redevelopment. He recently purchased an entire six-building block downtown. Once a major commerce center in Bangor, the buildings are anchored by two unique properties: a bank with numerous vaults, carved woodwork and marble floors and walls and the 1892 Nichols Building, one of the few buildings to survive the fire, featuring a 3,000-square-foot third-floor ballroom, with carved balconies and a performance stage.
The block was on the market last fall with a price tag of nearly $2 million. Moskovitz competed with other bidders to purchase the property, and he included an essay that he thinks closed the deal for him. His subject? Why he’s uniquely qualified to deliver a development project that fits in Bangor.
“I just believe that I definitely have an affinity toward Bangor and I’ve done other projects in the past that have given back to the city, and basically I want to help grow or regrow or advance Bangor into the next century really,” he says.
With new living and commercial downtown spaces now available, all the developers need now are tenants. City officials such as Tanya Emery say hopes are high for the new downtown retail and apartments, but she also says it may take time for landlords to find the right tenants.Latest Lowden tale worse than chickens-for-checkups?
Forget chickens-for-checkups. There's another tale unfolding around Sue Lowden that could prove to be a lot dicier -- the tale of the spiffy campaign bus she accepted from a contributor, in potential violation of campaign finance law.
And there's been a new development in the case -- one that the Harry Reid campaign insists could constitute an acknowledgment of guilt.
Let me catch you up on this story, which is all over the Nevada news. Lowden has been traveling around the state in a fancy bus that bears a giant picture of the candidate herself. Which in and of itself is par for the course.
But the trouble started when she said in a recent interview that the bus had been "donated" to her campaign. The bus is reportedly worth $100,000 -- far more than the $2,400 limit on "in kind contributions."
Dems filed a complaint with the FEC. Then Lowden subsequently said she'd "misspoke" by saying the bus was donated to her. Even though her name is on the title, she said she was merely leasing the vehicle. But that's not the end of the story.
After this, the Nevada DMV publicly said that if her name's on the title, she owns the vehicle. "You can't be on the title without being an owner," the DMV said, seemingly making this a contribution after all. Dems pounced again.
Now Lowden spokesperson Robert Uithoven sends over a statement confirming that her name has been removed from the title. Uithoven's statement details the reasons the campaign says the RV has been, and always was, in compliance with FEC rules.
But the Reid campaign argues that the fact that she removed her name from the title is an admission of guilt and an acknowledgment that she had been in violation.
The FEC will eventually sort this one out. But for now, Lowden is embroiled in another mess. And there are no signs her campaign will shut this one down anytime soon, either.
UPDATE, 3:53 p.m.: The Lowden campaign says that the bus was appraised at far less than $100,000, though they don't have an exact figure. The campaign also sends over a lease agreement to prove that the bus was always leased.The USA Basketball Men’s National Team will play an exhibition game against China on Tuesday, July 26, at Oracle Arena.
2016 USA Basketball Showcase USA vs. China
Tuesday, July 26 @ 7:00 p.m.
Oracle Arena
FIND TICKETS USA vs. ChinaTuesday, July 26 @ 7:00 p.m.Oracle Arena
The 2015 NBA Champion Golden State Warriors announced today that the 2016 USA Basketball Showcase presented by Verizon featuring the USA Basketball Men’s National Team will make a stop at Oracle Arena for one of their exhibition games on Tuesday, July 26 against the 2015 FIBA Asia zone champ China. The 2016 USA Basketball Showcase presented by Verizon will feature a total of five exhibition games throughout the United States including Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago and Houston.
Kevin Durant, Draymond Green, and Klay Thompson are representing the Warriors on the USA Men’s Olympic Team. The 2016 Olympic Games men’s basketball competition will feature national teams from 12 countries, including the United States, competing Aug. 6-21 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Tickets for the 2016 USA Basketball Showcase presented by Verizon at Oracle Arena are on sale now.Ducati may have opted not to retain Nicky Hayden within its factory MotoGP team next year, but the Italian factory is still trying to keep the American 'in the family'.
The 2006 world champion for Honda, Hayden has raced for Ducati since 2009, claiming three podiums and a best of seventh in the world championship.
However, Casey Stoner aside, Hayden's results have been similar to his other Ducati team-mates and the 'Kentucky Kid' could yet remain with the brand in a non-factory MotoGP team or by switching to World Superbikes.
Ducati MotoGP Project Director Paolo Ciabatti told the official MotoGP website: "We are trying to see if Nicky can stay with us in a different role, maybe in MotoGP or maybe in Superbikes. We are working with him to try and keep him in the Ducati family."
Ducati sells more motorcycles in the USA than any other country, while MotoGP currently has three American-based events. Hayden's 2014 factory replacement, who will ride alongside Andrea Dovizioso, is yet to be announced.
Hayden is one of three MotoGP champions on the 2013 grid, alongside former team-mate Valentino Rossi and Yamaha's reigning title holder Jorge Lorenzo.
Be there! CLICK HERE to see ticket prices for the remaining rounds of the 2013 MotoGP World Championship from the Official MotoGP Ticket Store.Devnote Tuesdays: The “Everyone’s Busy” Edition
Felipe (HarvesteR): Planning out the task assignments and new UI features for the next batch of features for 0.24. Sketching out designs for the currency ‘gauges’ right now.
Alex (aLeXmOrA): Almost done with the test environment of vBulletin 5.1 for the upgrade of the KSP Forums. Also, I’m working on another project with Bob and Miguel that will be announced later, hopefully.
Daniel (danRosas): I have kept on working on the animatic, in order to have a more clear schematic of how the characters are going to move. Since it’s the first one that is going to be done collaboratively, the more information in there, the better. It’s kind of an experiment in its own way.
Jim (Romfarer): Just finished up bugfixing and tweaking all the new gui stuff for 0.24. Getting ready to add more, contracts archives is up first.
Miguel (Maxmaps): Contacted a bunch of cool people about playing KSP and maybe making videos about it as well.
Ted (Ted): The Experimental Team and I have spent the past week testing 0.24, sorting out and reporting bugs we’ve found, making the build server sweat, and providing feedback on it. Now the QA Team and I are gearing up to test the 0.24 revisions and improvements the Developers are working hard on, while the Experimental Team get a breather between rounds. These past few months of testing are really illustrating just how important each step in the Testing Process is, and hopefully communicating why each step is so necessary to all of you.
Anthony (Rowsdower): Want announcements written? I’m your guy! vBulletin and the Italian subforum (open now) are two things that will be officially announced soon. I’m also looking for a few good forum moderators. If you have the skills, patience and offbeat sense of humor needed for the task, PM me on the forum.
Rogelio (Roger): I’ve been modeling the stage for the next video since last week. Im working on the uv sets and the textures for all the assets in the set so it will take a little more time to get pretty nice results and to have a better storytelling.If there was one moment during the London Olympics which betrayed the lie that female sporting endeavour is necessarily less compelling than that of men, it was Great Britain's Lizzie Armitstead and Marianne Vos of the Netherlands Battle Royale on The Mall.
Two spectral shapes appearing through a thick curtain of rain, tossing violently from side to side. Sinews strained, teeth bared, no quarter given. Crowd losing control, Vos breaking British hearts by pipping Armitstead on the line.
A day earlier, viewers were baffled by the goings on in the men's equivalent, which they were told home favourite Mark Cavendish was supposed to win, not finish 29th in.
Those who knew a bit about cycling were aware Cavendish was never nailed on for victory, which made the result of a tactical race only slightly less disappointing. It didn't help that it was won by a former drug cheat.
"It was an epic and heroic race in London," says Dutch legend Vos, who faces Armitstead again in Manchester on Saturday, this time on the track in the second round of cycling's innovative Revolution Series.
How the Revolution Series works Teams made up of two elite endurance riders race for league points. Teams score points for each Championship race at each event, which accrue across the season Read more
"The pressure was really on because I wanted that gold medal so badly and my country expected me to win. But it was better than I could have dreamed of: an open race, with a breakaway and a chasing peloton; the crowds, the rain, battling against a rider chasing her country's first medal in her home Games.
"We showed how beautiful cycling can be if you race clean and race with passion. We don't have that big platform every year and you have to take the opportunity when you have it. I'm really happy people were able to see that."
Vos's use of the word "beautiful" is deliberate, for the image of men's cycling in the aftermath of the Lance Armstrong affair is as ugly as a king of the mountain's backside.
But while you might expect Vos to be angry with the boys for letting her sport down, she believes the very public battering men's cycling has taken could have residual benefits for the girls.
"Of course I'm not happy with where the sport is now but the women can help show the whole of cycling a different sport to the world," says the 25-year-old.
"The last few years the UCI (cycling's governing body) wasn't really interested in putting any effort into women's cycling. But men's cycling is having a hard time while women's cycling is running smoothly. So now the UCI can do a lot.
"The traditional view of cycling as a men's sport is a hard thing to change but now it is the moment. The UCI can help us with asking the media to give us more coverage, the organisers of men's races to put on more women's races and the biggest men's teams to add women's squads."
Marianne Vos won the Elite Women's Road Race at the Road World Championships in September
In Vos, the UCI has a ready-made poster girl. Perhaps the most versatile sportsperson, male or female, in the world, Vos is a two-time Olympic champion - once on the track, once on the road - a two-time world champion on the track, a two-time world champion on the road, a two-time winner of the Giro d'Italia Femminile and a five-time world champion in cyclo-cross.
Telling, therefore, that they can't find a place for her in the Cycling Hall of Fame, which is "dedicated to preserving the history of cycling's greatest races and the riders who rode them".
If you happen to be a bloke.
Armitstead and British team-mate Emma Pooley are vocal about the inequality in their sport, with Pooley threatening to retire over the yawning disparity in prize money, sponsorship and media interest between men and women's cycling. Bradley Wiggins labelled women cyclists "the forgotten ones".
The UCI is taking steps to reduce the gap, promising to bring women's track cycling events into line with the men's programme and create a new tier of "hors categorie" road races for elite riders.
And Vos is cheerfully optimistic, despite Rabobank ending its sponsorship of professional cycling in the wake of Lance-gate and potentially leaving her without a team to ride for from 2014.
"I don't feel like a victim of sexism, we are working on that and it is getting better," says Vos. "I want to be motivational and inspirational for everybody, my big aim is more women on bicycles.
"We're at the level where we take ourselves seriously and the next step is that the world takes us seriously as well."
Vos roll of honour Olympic champion: 2008 (points race), 2012 (road race)
2008 (points race), 2012 (road race) World Road Race Champion: 2006, 2012
2006, 2012 World Cyclo-Cross Champion: 2006, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012
2006, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Road World Cup champion: 2007, 2012
2007, 2012 Track world champion: 2008 (points race), 2011 (scratch race)
When I ask Vos if she is envious of the profile of women tennis players and their subsequent earning potential, she replies: "I'm not in cycling for the money, I don't want to be rich, although I'm really happy I can earn money in cycling now.
"I'm kind of well-known in Holland, which is nice. But in Holland we're down to earth, there are no paparazzi in my garden and no autograph hunters at the door. We have Strictly Come Dancing but I've not been asked. Maybe because I can't dance, but also because I'm still an athlete."
That's bad news for women on bicycles, including female mountain bikers. "I've fulfilled my biggest dreams, where do I get my motivation from now?" says Vos. "So after London, I got on the mountain bike. If I only did road racing, I don't know if I could continue for more than a few years."
Women BMXers, however, can sleep easy. "It's not really something for me, I like to keep my wheels on the ground," she says. "And if I do something, I want to do it well." Usually the words of a specialist, not a multi-disciplinarian.
But this might not just be the greatest sportswoman you've vaguely heard of; this might just be the greatest sportswoman full stop.
So tune in for Saturday's race in Manchester or get on your bike and turn up. Perhaps you will discover what those who witnessed Vos v Armitstead part one already knew: that women's sport can be every bit as compelling as men's. And that it's time they received their due.Editor’s Note: This article originally was published in 2011 in Los Angeles Magazine.
As Arnold Schwarzenegger steps down this month, California voters can only marvel that a leader of such apparent strength is |
"People always bang on about there being so much wealth and luxury here alongside poverty. But that isn't true. I mean, I don't see any poverty."
Her friend agreed: "It's true that construction workers in Dubai used to have to sleep in shipping containers. But that doesn't happen now."
Well perhaps, but labourers here do still work long hours in temperatures of up to 50 degrees, and then go back to crammed hostels, often with no windows or air conditioning.
I was considering how best to explain this, but then another bottle of vodka arrived, amid much cheering.
It somehow did not feel like the right moment to discuss migrant worker housing conditions.
Image caption Economic growth in the United Arab Emirates hit 4.4% last year
Instead, I found myself being questioned about my life back home in London.
"Do you go to Hakkasan?" I was asked, by a Dutch woman sat at the end of the table. "It's in Mayfair."
She then named several other places I hadn't heard of, let alone frequented.
I might have been tempted to bluff my way through this, to pretend that I was in fact a regular at Fluffs, and Yo-Yo's, or whatever they were called.
But I did not even know what kind of establishments they were - other restaurants perhaps, a nightclub? Or maybe just a particularly up-market chiropodist?
"No," I said. "I've never been to any of them."
The Dutch woman looked at me, as though I had just confessed that I never went to school, or had never actually owned a pair of underpants.
And it struck me then that she had no sense her questions might be considered intimidating.
On the contrary, she was feeling intimidated - because if she could not talk about Hakkasan, or other restaurants, or how much she adored eating carpaccio of guava, what on earth could she talk about?
There was an awkward silence, a gaping black-hole of conversational failure. But then the former air-hostess piped up to remind me of her request.
"You won't forget, will you?" she asked. "You'll write something about Dubai, about all of us?"
I promised her that I would certainly consider it.
How to listen to From Our Own Correspondent:
BBC Radio 4: Saturdays at 11:30 and some Thursdays at 11:00
Listen online or download the podcast.
BBC World Service: Short editions Monday-Friday - see World Service programme schedule.
You can follow the Magazine on Twitter and on FacebookSyria's War (The Official Version) Plays Out On TV
YouTube
Over the past decade, productions of Syrian TV series have become popular across the Arab world, becoming a multimillion-dollar business. Most of the shows have focused on the glorious past. One of the most popular, Bab al-Hara, or Gate of the Neighborhood, takes place in a neighborhood in Damascus, the Syrian capital, during the French Mandate in the first half of the 20th century.
But these days, several TV programs are trying to talk about the present — which is no easy task.
Wilada min al-Khasira, roughly translated as Birth From the Loins, is one of them. The series tackles difficult subjects like torture and the detention of protesters, for example, but its ultimate message toes the government line.
The trailer for the third season of Wilada min al-Khasira opens with images of demonstrations and security forces opening fire on peaceful participants. You can also see the word "freedom" written on a street wall.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of Clacket Productions Courtesy of Clacket Productions
The title of the third episode is "Dais of the Dead" ("Manbar al-Mawta"), and it talks about the killings of Syrians from both sides — but also about the torture and detention of protesters, and explosions and car bombs, which have become increasingly common in Damascus.
The season begins this week, when Ramadan falls. The show still follows the government line: that Syria is the last country standing against imperial powers. It criticizes the opposition-in-exile as living comfortably abroad as it drives people on the streets in Syria to their deaths. It portrays rebels as thugs and hooligans.
The message is clear: You better stay with the government or chaos will unfold.
"Of course, it will show in the beginning that the regime committed a few mistakes, but the encoded message is that because of the chaos that followed, it is better to stay under regime control despite all its flaws," says Mutasem Abou Al Shamat, a 30-year-old human resources specialist based in Doha, Qatar.
"It is the first time a TV series is addressing what has been happening in the country, so of course I have to watch it," he says.
The show's scriptwriter, Samer Radwan, was detained last month on his way back to Damascus from Beirut. But a friend of Radwan who asked not to be named says the detention most likely was not related to the show.
"The script was approved by censors, but Radwan, who is an Alawite, would often write Facebook statuses critical of the government," the friend says. "I think that is more likely the reason behind his detention."
Lebanon Spillover
The series was shot entirely in Lebanon; filming for many other Syrian TV shows also takes place, at least partly, in Lebanon.
Television production has been a lucrative business, so it's no wonder producers want to continue their work despite upheaval at home.
"For security reasons, the TV and art production is moving to Lebanon," says Raafat Al-Zakout, a Syrian actor and director. "Because of clashes, there are no safe locations to shoot in Syria."
Clacket Productions, the company behind Wilada min al-Khasira, is thinking of opening an office in Beirut, says Oula Mohammad, a managing producer at Clacket, who adds that the company's main office will remain in Damascus.
Clacket also produces another TV series, Sanaoud Baada Qalil — We Will Return Soon — which focuses on the Syrian middle class leaving Damascus; it's also partly shot in Lebanon.
Some remain optimistic, like Haytham Chamass, a Lebanese film director and producer.
"[Syrian TV series'] strength was always a good script, good actors, and that they tackled social issues close to the Arab street," says Chamass. "I think the production moving here will actually raise the level of Lebanese productions."
But not everyone is happy.
"At the end of the day, people want jobs, and Syrians want to continue working," says one Lebanese producer, who asked to remain anonymous. "Syrian directors are bringing their cameramen, their actors and staff. Not everyone is happy about that in Lebanon."
It seems tensions are high even in the field of art.The 1992 and 1993 cabinet papers released on Sunday reveal the Keating government juggling with the desire to reform the economy through changes to industrial relations, superannuation and privatisation, while also providing stimulus in the midst of high unemployment and a sluggish exit from a deep recession.
At the end of 1991, the Australian economy was floundering. The national accounts released in December, just two weeks before Paul Keating took over from Bob Hawke, showed the economy had shrunk for five consecutive quarters. And while these figures were later revised to show the economy had already begun its tepid recovery, with unemployment at 10.4% and the Liberal opposition led by Dr John Hewson proposing a massive economic package in its Fightback! program, the onus was on Keating to deliver something quickly.
On 7 January 1992 the cabinet agreed on a statement focusing on economic recovery and industry development.
The statement, which Keating’s speechwriter, Don Watson, named One Nation, was designed with the intention of getting “beyond the economy and instilling in the country a sense of pride and common purpose independent of sporting conquests and foreign military endeavours”, as Watson wrote in his memoirs, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart.
Keating himself was no less grandiose. He told the media on its launch on 26 February that it was “a statement which I think will lead to a turning point in our economic history and our social history”.
Mostly it focused on infrastructure spending and efforts to lift economic growth and productivity, designed to create 800,000 jobs in four years, a return to surplus and a drop in the unemployment rate of three percentage points.
On 28 January cabinet discussed 43 proposals to be included in the statement. On the same day ministers were informed that the budget picture was deteriorating sharply. The mid-year review provided to cabinet estimated the 1991-92 budget deficit at $5.44bn – 15% larger than estimated in the previous year’s budget.
But such bad news was very much the norm. By May the estimate was up to $9.25bn and by the time the 1991-92 figures were fully tabulated, the deficit would be $12.63bn.
Among the measures introduced in the One Nation statement were $816m in infrastructure spending under the building better cities program over five years. Among the specific measures that were announced was construction of Sydney’s Glebe Island bridge – now known as the Anzac Bridge.
Keating also promised two lots of tax cuts – the first in 1994 and the second in 1996.
The drive to reform the industrial relations system continued throughout 1992 and 1993
But the large spend on infrastructure, tax cuts, the jobs programs Jobstart and a one-off payment to families worth $300m did nothing to allay concerns about the state of the budget or curb the desire to continue reforms undertaken during the 1980s.
Even while agreeing to large infrastructure spends, the cabinet expressed concern at “the potential threat to the structural integrity of the budget if expectations are raised of a continuing boost to infrastructure spending”.
The cabinet was careful to ensure any spending measures were matched by commitments from states towards reform, especially of public enterprises.
The cabinet considered offering assistance to the textiles, clothing and footwear industry as it was one of the sectors most heavily affected by tariff reductions, but in the end rejected a $160m assistance package in favour of a more modest $41m “restructure” package. It noted that were they to have approved the larger amount “we may only succeed in perpetuating the tradition of high levels of protection for these industries under a different guise”.
The drive to reform the industrial relations system continued throughout 1992 and 1993. In the One Nation statement Keating argued that the government would move “quickly towards a bargaining system in which higher wages will come from increased efficiency”. In July 1992 the cabinet agreed to a submission by Peter Cook, the industrial relations minister, that would introduce an industrial relations system with the emphasis “on workplace and single enterprise agreements”.
That led to the introduction of the industrial relations reform bill in October 1993 by Laurie Brereton, which legislated the full introduction of enterprise bargaining and a limited “right to strike”, leading to a sharp drop in the level of industrial disputes.
The Keating government also focused its attention on women’s work participation. In September 1992 the cabinet agreed to amend the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 to enable complaints relating to direct discrimination against women in employment to be made directly to the sex discrimination commissioner.
In April 1993 the cabinet agreed to a childcare cash rebate scheme of up to $28.50 a week for one child and $61.20 a week for two or more children, to be “introduced from 1 July 1994” and endorsed “a commitment to meet full demand for work-related formal childcare by 2000-01”.
Changing the industrial relations system was also behind the introduction in July 1992 of the superannuation guarantee. Intriguingly, in February that year, the treasurer, John Dawkins, sought to delay its introduction owing to the increase of labour costs and a “desire to provide more time for consultation with industry on implementation details”. But his proposal was defeated in cabinet.
The government also remained committed to privatisation. In June 1992 the cabinet agreed to the sale of Qantas and Australian Airlines and in August to $1bn worth of asset sales. It also discussed the possibility of selling the Commonwealth Bank. The cabinet was told “there is no economic reason for the government to continue to own 70%, as opposed to a majority of the shares”, and that “sale down to just over 50% could be expected to yield about $1,000m” – in fact by the time the government’s share was sold down to 50% the following year, it yielded closer to $1.5bn.
But despite the One Nation spend, the growth projections continued to falter. After Labor won the March 1993 election on the back of the GST scare campaign the signs were not good. Dawkins informed the cabinet in his April 1993 economic outlook that “it is very difficult not to see Australian growth continuing to be constrained by the international economy”. The cabinet was warned that the next budget would have to include “significant savings in the medium term”.
Dawkins then told cabinet on 29 June that owing to weaker GDP growth, weaker employment growth and lower inflation, “in the absence of fiscal policy changes, revenue to GDP is unlikely to recover as it did after the economic downturn in the early 1980s”.
Publicly, Keating remained his defiant self.
Asked by a journalist on 10 July if the unemployment rate of 10.8% meant he had to admit his economic policies had failed, he responded: “Do you mean the ones that have taken Australia from an industrial museum to give it a future, or do you mean the cyclical ones?”
But the lack of growth meant cuts were needed, and among the biggest were the tax cuts promised in the One Nation statement.
In February 1993 Keating had told the National Press Club the tax cuts were “not a promise, they are law – L-A-W”. But on 22 July he was again at the press club, this time to announce that the government would bring forward the first half of the tax cuts but that the second part would be postponed until “probably in 1998”.
He again spelled it out, saying “They will be L-A-W law. And what is more, they are R-E-S-P-O-N-S-I-B-L-E, responsible law.”
But the postponement of the tax cuts severely damaged the government’s economic credibility and the 1993 budget made the wound fatal, with an increase in petrol excise and the wholesale sales tax, the removal of optometry from Medicare and the cancellation of promised childcare benefits.
Watson recalled that “old ladies jammed the office phones at night; the faxes clogged with hostile message from optometrists and builders and women’s groups”.
How Paul Keating became the modern day hero for left and right alike | Jason Wilson Read more
Dawkins quit politics in December but one of his final acts was to have cabinet agree to a change in the timing of the budget. On 30 November, the cabinet agreed it would subsequently be brought down on the second Tuesday in May rather than in August.
And while the economy grew about 4% throughout 1993, unemployment remained high – hitting 11% in August.
As a result the government initiated a green paper released in December called Restoring Full Employment, which culminated in the Working Nation policy in May 1994, by which time unemployment finally began to fall.
The One Nation program promised 800,000 jobs in four years but achieved only 660,000. The unemployment rate fell just two percentage points, rather than the promised three. The budget remained in deficit, and the promised second round of tax cuts had been dropped.
On 2 March 1996, almost exactly four years after the release of the One Nation program, the Keating government was defeated in a landslide.
• Cabinet records for 1992 and 1993 held by the National Archives of Australia reach the open access period on 1 January 2017. Information about the cabinet records, copies of key cabinet documents, including selected submissions and decisions, are available on the archives’ websiteAn alleged terror plot to bring down a passenger plane jetting out of Sydney Airport involved blowing up an Etihad jet 20 minutes into a flight to Abu Dhabi – causing the burning wreckage to rain down on Dubbo.
Anti-terror units foiled the plot after an alleged terrorist repeatedly used the same excuse as to why he was flying to the Middle East, Lebanese authorities say.
Amer Khayet allegedly told security he was flying to his hometown of Tripoli, not far from the Syrian border, for his wedding.
But authorities foiled a plot to destroy the A380 airliner as it travelled over NSW using a Barbie doll and a meat mincer filled with explosives, the Australian reports.
Scroll down for video
Amer is currently being held in Roumieh prison near Beirut. Brothers Khaled (pictured), 49, and Mahmoud, 32, were charged following terror raids in Sydney on July 29
The plan was to detonate the bomb 20 minutes into Etihad flight EY455 from Sydney to Abu Dhabi, meaning the explosion would occur near Dubbo in central New South Wales.
The attack was scheduled to occur at 9.40pm.
All 400 passengers aboard the flight would have been killed, and potentially further chaos on the ground as the debris from the exploded aircraft would scatter from 33,000 feet.
Amer is currently being held in Roumieh prison near Beirut.
Alleged conversations between Amer, his older brother and ISIS Commander Tarek, and two brothers back in Sydney Mahmoud and Khaled, were being monitored for a year leading up to the arrests
Amer allegedly informed them the barbie doll was a back-up to the larger meat mincer in case the bomb didn't deploy (stock image)
Brothers Khaled, 49, and Mahmoud, 32, were charged following terror raids in Sydney on July 29.
Lebanese officials discovered a pattern in the Sydney-based man's reasons for travel, learning he had made the same claims of flying home for his wedding several times before, The Australian claimed.
Forces reportedly found that Amer would marry, then soon after get divorced.
This process was allegedly repeated multiple times before he was questioned at Beirut Airport in July, when the plot was unearthed.
Australian Federal Police and NSW Police officers are seen during counter-terrorism raids in Surry Hills, Sydney, on July 29
Conversations between Amer, his older brother and ISIS Commander Tarek, and two brothers back in Sydney Mahmoud and Khaled, were reportedly being monitored for a year leading up to the arrests.
Lebanese intelligence claim they discovered the bomb plot while questioning Amer, who allegedly told them it had only failed because the explosives packed into a Barbie doll and meat mincer had weighed 7kg too much to be checked in.
Amer allegedly informed them the Barbie doll was a back-up to the larger meat mincer in case the bomb didn't deploy.Islamic State: Gold Coast man helping Kurdish forces fight against militants killed in Syria, family says
Updated
The family of a Gold Coast man has been told he was killed at the weekend when he stepped on a landmine while helping Kurdish forces fight against Islamic State in Syria.
The father of Reece Harding told the ABC his son left Australia in May, saying he needed to take a break.
Keith Harding said a few days after the 23-year-old departed, he received a message that Reece was doing "humanitarian" work but the family now understands that he had joined Kurdish forces in their fight against Islamic State (IS).
Mr Harding said he was trying to comprehend the situation.
"Numbness, disbelief that it's happening," he said.
"You're scouting the internet trying to look for things, watching every news [story], every article to see anything... that's going on.
"It's been consuming our lives."
Mr Harding said he received a message on Monday telling him to call an overseas number.
When he did so, the man on the other line explained: "I'm sorry mate that Reece is gone... he's stepped on a landmine. He's dead."
Mr Harding expressed shock that his son had gone to Syria, saying Reece wanted to "do the right thing" and to help stop the atrocities that were being committed by IS.
"With all the information that's spread about on the internet with people beheading people, killing children, raping and beating women, I think it really did get to him in the end," he said.
"He felt that he wanted to do the right thing and try and stop it in his small way that he could.
"I'm sure that's the driving force of him going to do this."
Mr Harding was still waiting for official confirmation of his son's death.
"They at the moment haven't officially classed him as dead if I'm correct, but I spoke to the Federal Police and they are working with I presume Turkey or Syria to confirm his death," he said.
"My friends in the Kurdish community have contacted theirs so we're waiting."
Reece Harding's 17-year-old brother Jordan is now grieving with his parents.
"He was just someone who always had your back," he said.
"He's that kind of person you can never replace and [he will] always [be] somewhere in our hearts.
"He'll just be missed."
Jordan Harding said he had been struggling with conflicting emotions since his brother left Australia.
"You're caught between two ideas that you don't want him to be over there, then you understand why he's over there and why's he's doing what he was doing," he said.
"I can say I'm proud of him being over there and I understand his thought process... but then again from a brother's point of view I just want him back here."
Tributes have flowed on a Lions of Rojava Facebook page, which has been set up by a group of Kurdish sympathisers that recruit for the Kurdish-Syrian armed forces, the YPG.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said it was difficult to confirm the reports because Australia did not have a consular presence in Syria.
"If true, it does highlight the significant dangers that await any Australian citizen who wants to take part in the conflict in Syria or Iraq," she told Sky News.
Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, terrorism, qld, syrian-arab-republic, southport-4215
First postedIf you listen to the growing chorus of online chatter about the company, Google’s now-infamous “Don’t be evil” slogan is becoming increasingly inaccurate by the day. The company’s most recent move--a sweeping change that consolidated most of its privacy policies under a single umbrella--immediately drew umbrage from critics who felt that Google was on its way to taking all the data it has collected from its users through its dozens of services and building an exhaustive dossier on each of us that would be used mercilessly in efforts to sell us things.
Google wants you to keep using Search, Docs, and Google+, so it’s trying to play nice, and last June Google introduced a service designed to let you see, in part at least, what Google knows about you with a single click.
Called Google Takeout, the service is so simple that it is completely undocumented when you visit the site. You sign in, and then see an offer to “Download an archive of your data from” a variety of services (outlined below), and that’s it. You can grab it all in one click, or choose specific services from which to download, but unless your usage of these services is exhaustive (think thousands of Google Docs or Picasa photos), the one-click approach is easiest.
Getting It To Go
Here’s what Takeout currently offers:
A list of URLs to all the +1s you’ve handed out.
Your Google Buzz history, presuming you have one.
A list of contacts from your Circles in Google+.
A list of the contacts you have saved in Gmail. (These are kept separate from your Circles contacts.)
Copies of all the Google Docs you’ve uploaded.
Copies of any photos you’ve uploaded to Picasa. (These may include photos uploaded for use on a Blogger site, if you’ve ever had one.)
Some basic information about the personal data you include in your Google+ Profile
Links to each entry you’ve personally shared on your Google+ Stream. (Other people’s streams that show up in your feed are not included.)
Your full Google Voice log, including a list of all attempted and completed calls and texts, MP3s of each voice mail, and Google’s transcript of each message.
Everything arrives in a single zipped file that you unpack, revealing a separate folder for each Google service. The formatting of this material can be inconsistent. Google Voice messages are saved as individual HTML and MP3 files, but your +1 bookmarks are amalgamated into a single file. Picasa photos are well organized into folders, but Google Docs are delivered en masse regardless of how you use Collections on the site.
Circles and Contacts information comes in the form of several VCF files, each containing information for contacts split into each of the default categories for Google+. These are easiest to open with Windows Contacts (right-click on a file and you’ll see the option; no, I didn’t know this application existed either). Information on my Circles contacts was limited to a name and a malformed link to their Google+ profile.
Finally, your Profile info is delivered as a JSON file, coded in a type of Google-centric JavaScript that is not readily openable, but you can get the gist of it by opening the file with Firefox.
What Your Takeout Order Does Not Include
What’s most surprising about Takeout isn’t how exhaustive this data is, but rather how much of your Google life it completely excludes. Although Google has said that it will continue to add services to Takeout, here’s a (partial) list of what you don’t get now with the Takeout system.
Your Google Search history.
Your Google Talk chat history.
Google Wallet and Google Checkout details, including credit card information and a history of purchases.
YouTube materials, including videos you liked, shared, or uploaded.
Posts created with Blogger, or comments you’ve left on Blogger sites.
Google Calendar entries.
Google Health data.
Bookmarks stored or synced with Chrome or the Google Toolbar.
Google Latitude location information.
Anything related to your Android phone, including your account or your Android Market downloads.
Anything involving Orkut, AdWords, Google Finance, and more.
That list surprised me, not just because it’s so long, but also because Google does retain data for most (if not all) of those services. Your Google Search history can be accessed here, for example. Why doesn’t Takeout let you download this information instead of shipping you off to another site?
If you want to get an offline copy of any of this information, your best bet is to check out the comprehensive list of how-tos at the Data Liberation Front, managed by the group of Google engineers that coded the Google Takeout service. Here you’ll find detailed instructions on how to manually get your data out of another two dozen Google-operated services not covered by Takeout.
Liberation vs. Deletion
It’s important to remember that with Google Takeout you are getting a copy of the information stored on Google’s servers, and are not removing the originals from Google’s clutches. There’s no way to delete anything at all via Google Takeout.
If you want to delete information from Google, you’ll need to visit each service you use and delete the data or the account manually. In Blogger, for example, that means visiting the blog administration tool and using the “Delete blog” link to remove it from the Web. (There’s a “nuclear option,” too, available at the bottom of your Settings page.)
One of the most popular subjects for deletion is your Google web search history. You can turn history recording off or on here, remove specific history entries, or delete your entire history. Most of Google’s services offer ways to delete accounts, and Google’s Privacy Policy offers more detail on what exactly this means and entails:
Whenever you use our services, we aim to provide you with access to your personal information. If that information is wrong, we strive to give you ways to update it quickly or to delete it – unless we have to keep that information for legitimate business or legal purposes. We may reject requests that are unreasonably repetitive, require disproportionate technical effort (for example, developing a new system or fundamentally changing an existing practice), risk the privacy of others, or would be extremely impractical (for instance, requests concerning information residing on backup tapes). Where we can provide information access and correction, we will do so for free, except where it would require a disproportionate effort. We aim to maintain our services in a manner that protects information from accidental or malicious destruction. Because of this, after you delete information from our services, we may not immediately delete residual copies from our active servers and may not remove information from our backup systems.
Those concerned with Google’s ability to keep tabs on you may want to pay special attention to a few of those clauses: Notably that Google can reject requests to delete information that “require disproportionate technical effort” and, more importantly, that backup copies of your data are not likely to be deleted promptly, if ever.
Takeout: Still Too Limited
So what does all of this really mean?
To date, user commentary has been surprisingly muted about Takeout. Those who have written about it mainly seem thrilled to have one-click access to their Google Voice records, their Google Docs, and their online contacts. In these respects, Takeout is actually a useful tool: Downloading this information piecemeal is a pain, and Google Takeout makes it considerably easier. Painless, even.
But even at a year old, Takeout is still a long way from offering users a legitimate way to get a handle on how exhaustive the information Google has about them really is. The number of services included in Takeout is paltry compared to the vast number of offerings that Google has available, particularly given that those services typically make this information available directly to the user. If Google can figure out a way to consolidate its myriad privacy policies, surely it can figure out a way to consolidate the downloading of collected user information, too. As engineering challenges go, this doesn’t seem like a toughie.
Ultimately, Takeout is a good first step toward giving users more transparency about what the company does with their data, but if Google wants to prove it is serious about privacy, Takeout needs to be radically expanded--and to imbue users with the ability to delete materials they don’t want Google to be sitting on.Low water levels at the Cambridge Reservoir were common during September.
The Cambridge Water Department on Monday will ask the City Council for an appropriation so it can buy water from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, because water levels in the the city’s reservoirs have fallen to a 10-year low amid the state’s continuing drought.
The city will pay $1.2 million per month for about 320 million gallons of water, said Sam Corda, managing director of the Water Department. The amount could change, depending on actual water usage.
Cambridge joins Worcester, the Cherry Valley and Rochdale water districts in Leicester, and Ashland in buying water from the MWRA, spokeswoman Ria Convery said. Burlington also has approval to start taking water and may start as soon as Tuesday.
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“It is unusual to have these communities all taking water at once, but it is a direct result of the drought conditions,” Convery said.
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The MWRA gets its water from Quabbin Reservoir, a man-made, 412 billion-gallon supply that provides water to Boston and 50 other municipalities in Central and Eastern Massachusetts, Convery said.
The Quabbin is currently 81.3 percent full, within normal range, Convery said.
Corda said Cambridge would buy water quarterly, and the appropriation would extend for three months. He acknowledged the city might buy MWRA water until next fall, given current drought forecasts.
Cambridge’s reservoir system is at about 25 percent of usable capacity, Corda said. The city began supplementing its system with MWRA water last week.
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Cambridge is a full member of the MWRA, despite having its own water system, and will pay the wholesale price for water, Corda said.
Cambridge’s system includes Hobbs Brook Reservoir (also known as Cambridge Reservoir), which can be seen from Route 128 in the Waltham area, Stony Brook Reservoir, Fresh Pond, and the covered Payson Park Reservoir.
Dylan McGuinness can be reached at dylan.mcguinness@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DylMcGuinnessChief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno cautioned the judges identified by President Rodrigo Duterte as those with links to the illegal drug trade not to surrender to any police officers in the absence of a warrant of arrest.
In her letter to Duterte, she asked the source and basis of any allegation against the seven judges.
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“We abhor its ability to even destroy public institutions, thus our proactive investigation of any report that judges and court personnel abet drug trade,” Sereno said.
However, she said “a premature announcement of an informal investigation on allegation of involvement with the drug trade will have the unwarranted effect of rendering the judge veritably useless in discharging his adjudicative role.”
“Thus, this Court has been careful, all too aware that more often than not, a good reputation is the primary badge of credibility and the only legacy that many of our judges can leave behind,” she said.
The Chief Justice added that Duterte’s announcement may have endangered the lives of the six judges given the extrajudicial killings of those suspected to be involved in the narcotics trade.
“Our judges may have been rendered vulnerable and veritable targets for any of those persons and groups who may consider judges as acceptable collateral damage in the ‘war on drugs,’” Sereno said as she noted that many judges have been assassinated since 1999, a large portion of whom was upon the orders of crime lords, more specifically drug lords.
She also urged Duterte to allow the judges to carry defensive firearms “because we do not have the personnel to protect our judges.”
“We request that you reconsider your reported order that the judges you named, with the above clarification on who these are, continue to bear these licensed self-defense weapons, if any, until a proper investigation concludes that formal criminal charges should be brought against them,” Sereno said.
Sereno said the high court has an administrative mechanism in investigating, suspending or disciplining judges.
In fact, she said they are currently investigating a judge with links to illegal drugs.
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“We are currently investigating a report on a judge who may be so involved. He is not on the list [you have mentioned],” Sereno said.
Sereno, in her letter described each of the judges that Duterte has identified:
Judge Lorenda Mupas was dismissed in 2007 as Municipal Trial Court Judge of Dasmariñas, Cavite for gross ignorance of the law.
“We request that her dishonorable discharge be duly considered and that she be not referred to as part of the judiciary as of nine years ago,” Sereno said.
Judge Roberto Navidad, formerly of the Calbayog City, Samar Regional Trial Court was killed on Jan. 14, 2008 at age 69.
Judge Rene Gonzales, formerly of the Municipal Trial Court in Cities (MTCC) Branch 7, Iloilo City compulsorily retired last June 20, 2016.
Judge Exequil Dagala of the MTC, Dapa-Socorro, Surigao, does not have jurisdiction over drugs cases, the same way that Judge Gonzales does not.
“It would be very helpful if the investigators who included the names of Judges Dagala and Gonzales inform the Court how these MTC judges can be considered as influencing the drug trade,” Sereno said.
Judge Adriano Savillo, RTC, Branch 30, Iloilo City is a family court judge who does not have jurisdiction over drugs cases except in cases where a minor is a respondent.
Judge Domingo Casiple, RTC, Branch 7, Kalibo, Aklan is the judge of a court of general jurisdiction without jurisdiction over drugs cases, that is, until our recent decision to make all RTCs as drugs courts is implemented with the appropriate administrative circular.
“It would be helpful to know the specifics on how judges without jurisdiction over drugs cases influence the drug trade in their localities,” Sereno said.
* Judge Antonio Reyes, RTC, Branch 61, Baguio City, Benguet presides over the designated drugs court in that multi-sala court.
Sereno admitted that they were caught unprepared by Duterte’s announcement.
“As it appears now, the announcement of the names of some judges is expected to cause problems with the scheduled hearings and conferences in their salas,” Sereno said.
Sereno still lauded the President for his zeal in cleaning the judiciary but reminded Duterte to follow constitutional order.
“It would matter greatly to our sense of constitutional order, if we were given the chance to administer the appropriate preventive measures without the complications of a premature public announcement,” Sereno said. RAM/rga
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MOST READA reader writes:
The reason Obama is winning and will win is so simple. Americans want to believe in themselves again.
And that's why, I think, the criticism of Obama as a messiah figure is misplaced. It's not about believing in him. It's about believing in our own capacity to act as newly reasonable democratic participants in an age of extreme danger. I don't think of him as a messiah. Mine has already come. I don't believe this world will ever be heaven on earth. I don't need or want another person to give my life meaning.
But I have been deeply, deeply demoralized about this country for the past few years.
McCain goes part of the way - these primaries have ensured that the U.S. will not be torturing after the Bush-Cheney years. His election is a defeat for the insular, toxic forces that have taken over conservatism. But Obama is a deeper solvent for the Bush stain. His election would be a statement not about him, but about Americans themselves. About how they do not recognize themselves any more. And want to again.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.The Bramble Cay melomys, a creature once found at the northern tip of Australia, will never enter the popular lexicon in the way of the dodo. But like the infamous fate to befall the flightless birds, this small rodent distinguished by a mosaic tail has now been declared extinct. The Bramble Cay melomys also has the dubious honour of being the first mammal wiped out by global warming.
Pause for a moment to think on the consequences of a group of words that appeared this week in the federal government's State of the Environment report. Climate. Mammals. Extinction. Now.
Bramble cay melomys. RIP. Credit:Queensland government
You can be forgiven for never |
free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC4880 (also known as PGP). GnuPG allows you to encrypt and sign your data and communications; it features a versatile key management system, along with access modules for all kinds of public key directories. GnuPG, also known as GPG, is a command line tool with features for easy integration with other applications. A wealth of frontend applications and libraries are available. GnuPG also provides support for S/MIME and Secure Shell (ssh).
Since its introduction in 1997, GnuPG is Free Software (meaning that it respects your freedom). It can be freely used, modified and distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
The current version of GnuPG is 2.2.13. See the download page for other maintained versions.
Gpg4win is a Windows version of GnuPG featuring a context menu tool, a crypto manager, and an Outlook plugin to send and receive standard PGP/MIME mails. The current version of Gpg4win is 3.1.5.Ask a gamer about Nintendo these days, and they'll likely give you a quip about the Wii U being dead in the water in the face of more powerful, more buzzed about consoles from Sony and Microsoft. But investors see things a different way, and perhaps have been paying closer to recent events that say things aren't all doom and gloom for Nintendo. They've actually been pretty great in recent days and weeks.
Nintendo stock has seen a huge surge lately, rising 26% this month, 14% this week, and 4% yesterday alone. The stock is at its highest value in two years, and though it hasn't reached the highs of 2011, it's quite a turnaround for the company who saw shares lag after lackluster Wii U performance.
So, what's going on here? There are likely a few explanations for this.
1."Nintendo sold 225,000 3DS hardware units in the month of June, giving it the number one spot in US video game system sales for the second month in a row," Erik Kain reported last week, and the upward trend continues worldwide. While the Wii U might still be struggling in sales, the 3DS is not. And despite the forecast of mobile devices killing games-only handhelds, no such thing has happened as the sales of the 3DS continue to rise.
2. And the reason 3DS sales are rising? That would be on the backs of big-selling titles like Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Games drive sales, and the 3DS finally has a few to be truly excited about. And of course, Pokemon X and Y are coming in October, and sales of that series should demolish everything that's come before it on the system.
3. This trend with the 3DS could also say to investors that something similar could happen with the Wii U, once better titles are released for the console. The 3DS started out viewed as an overpriced gimmick, but after a price cut, people getting used to the 3D (or realizing they could turn it off) and the release of better games, sales climbed. There's no reason to think that the Wii U couldn't see a turnaround once Nintendo's first party line-up kicks in, and it's already starting with the recent release of Pikmin 3. No, it will likely never match sales of the original Wii, but it doesn't need to in order to be considered a success.
4. Also on the minds of investors is the fact that China is indeed moving forward with lifting the ban on sales of video game consoles in the country. This means that Nintendo (and Sony, and Microsoft) could start assembling 3DS handhelds and Wii Us in Shanghai, and selling them to a potentially huge Chinese market. It's going to require a lot of ramp-up time, and they have to contend with a Chinese market that's used to free-to-play online games or free-to-play bootleg console games due to the black market and rampant piracy. Still, it could end up being an opportunity for Nintendo, and whichever companies get their Chinese operations up and running quickly. And Japanese companies like Sony and Nintendo have an geographic advantage over say, Microsoft, in setting up shop.
5. It's important to note that Japan's stock market has risen about 40% as a whole this year, and Nintendo could just be benefiting from the long-term upswing. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's currency and export policies have contributed to the increase, and a rising tide lifts all ships.
But I do believe that this isn't just Nintendo getting completely swept up in a headwind created by someone else. The 3DS really has proven to be an important device, and has stepped up to cover for the slow launch of the Wii U. Great games will always keep Nintendo afloat, and hopefully in a year's time we'll have must-have titles for both their handheld systems and living room consoles.
Follow me on Twitter, subscribe to my Forbes blog, and pick up a copy of my debut sci-fi novel, The Last Exodus.A Stephen King film set to the Benny Hill theme tune: that’s Britain’s current political plight. It feels like a horror show without end yet it is simultaneously preposterous and absurd. For the last two years, Britain has been held hostage by the Tories’ disastrous scheming, plotting and manoeuvring: the EU referendum campaign, the chaotic aftermath, the snap general election. Boris Johnson – and goodness knows what we all did in a past life to deserve him – opportunistically backed Brexit as a career move. Despite his demonstrable buffoonery, he is astute enough to realise that Tory Brexit is spiralling into disaster. He risks going down in the history books as one of the principal architects of a national catastrophe. So now he plots and schemes, helping to plunge an already politically crippled Tory administration into further turmoil as Britain navigates through its postwar greatest crisis.
As Ken Clarke notes, in normal times Johnson would have been sacked. But these are not normal times, because the prime minister has no authority and heads a zombie administration united only by panic at the prospect of a Corbyn-led Labour government. It is speculated that Johnson wishes to be sacked, so then he can be a martyr rather than a deserter who can claim that Brexit went wrong because of May’s wrongheadedness, rather than by design. The Tory Brexiteers have already devised their alibis, the traditional “stab-in-the-back” myth of rightwing populists and nationalists, that betrayal and sabotage by opponents – “enemies of the people”, if you will – will be responsible for the process unravelling. The key Brexit strategist Dominic Cummings attempts to absolve himself of blame, too, claiming a premature triggering of Article 50 was like “putting a gun in mouth and kaboom” and the government was being “led like lambs to slaughter”.
Tory lies and disastrous Tory scheming: that’s what has driven Britain into chaos. The only time the “£350m a week extra for the NHS” pledge should ever leave a Brexiteer’s lips is when they are grovelling for forgiveness. They knew the figure was a lie, a con, a deceit, a travesty, given Britain’s rebate, and given a portion of the money would still be spent on essential projects. According to Cummings, Britain would probably not have voted for Brexit without that figure. And still Johnson shamelessly parades this falsehood around, leading to a humiliating slapdown by the UK Statistics Authority. Indeed, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Brexit has led to a downgrading of the public finances by about £300m a week. Johnson is an insult to our collective intelligence, and his continued presence as foreign secretary is an insult to the nation.
It is worth noting that the Tory acrimony is erupting so swiftly. That’s before Brexit negotiations really do start floundering. What then? The Tories know they are in a hole, but they are so delusional they are addicted to digging. They know that younger people are abandoning them, so Boris Johnson denounces them for having “split allegiances”, while the party toys with making party leader a caricature from the 18th century who opposes equal marriage and abortion in all cases, including for rape and incest.
Tory plotting and scheming landed us in this mess. It stands to reason that more of it will not wrest the country from the mire. As their panic increases, so will the plots and the schemes. This is a party that has thrown one of the major western powers into turmoil because of repeated misjudged attempts at gaining partisan advantage. The longer this party is allowed to pretend to govern, the worse the country’s plight will be.
• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnistIsrael moved the residents to the plot of land they lives on today. Decades later, the state wants to displace them again — to build a Jewish town on the ruins of their homes.
Israeli police detained five people Sunday protesting the impending displacement of Umm el-Hiran, an “unrecognized” Bedouin village in southern Israel on top of which authorities plan to build a Jewish town, named Hiran.
Among the detainees were youths from the village, and former Rabbis for Human Rights president Rabbi Arik Ascherman. All of the detainees were released late Sunday night. Another woman was hospitalized for injuries she sustained from police.
Police arrived with a tractor and several surveyors to the village on Sunday in order to start building a fence adjacent to the Bedouin villagers’ homes, presumably in order to begin construction of the Jewish town meant to replace them.
Umm el-Hiran is one of dozens of so-called “unrecognized villages,” in which approximately 100,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel live without electricity, water, and other basic services the state refuses to provide.
Here is a quick summary of this history of Umm el-Hiran: Long before the establishment of the State of Israel, members of the Abu Qi’an family lived in an area called Khirbet Zubaleh.
In 1956, the Israeli military government forcibly moved the Qi’an family to the location where they live today. (Their former land was given to Kibbutz Shoval as agricultural land.)
This forced land “swap” is well documented in state archives, but despite the fact that the Qi’an family was settled in its current location by the state itself, its homes have never been connected to the electricity or water grids.
Last year Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled that the state can change its mind and take back the land it gave to the al-Qi’an family. In place of their current village, Umm el-Hiran, from which they are to be expelled, a new township for religious Jews will be established.
For the past few years, Jewish Hiran’s future residents have been waiting for their new homes at an encampment in the adjacent forest of Yatir.
“The government has no problem with Jewish citizens living on this property – so why should they have a problem with us?” Raed Abu al-Qi’an, a resident and activist from the village, told +972 last year. “They allow rural communities to be built for Jews across the Negev – why not us?”
“We have always said, and continue to say, that we have no objections to Jewish families living here or nearby us – but not in place of us. That is racism and injustice,” he added.
Noam Rotem contributed to this report.It is getting more and more likely that your next conversation with a police officer will be recorded on a camera.
And not just any camera -- an official, department-issued one on the officer's glasses, collar or lapel.
Several makers of police body cameras say their orders have grown in recent months, particularly since a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., shot 18-year-old Michael Brown. A grand jury decided Monday there is not enough evidence to charge the officer, Darren Wilson, with a crime.
Taser (TASR), best known for the line of stun guns bearing its name, said sales of its body cameras were up 30% in the third quarter, which included the Aug. 9 shooting of Brown.
Last week, the company said the San Francisco police department had ordered 160 cameras. The Los Angeles police department recently decided it would arm officers with Taser-brand cameras as well.
In all, over 1,200 police agencies are now using Taser cameras, said Sydney Siegmeth, and the company has sold over 100,000 of them, including cameras mounted on the stun guns themselves.
Related: Crowdfunding helps digital bakery
Similarly, Digital Ally (DGLY) said inquiries about its on-body cameras have increased six- or seven-fold, and sales are up three or four times the average.
"What we've seen is a tremendous amount of increased interest in the body cameras, and now in the fourth quarter we're seeing that interest turn into orders," CEO Stanton Ross told CNNMoney.
In deciding whether to use such cameras, departments have a lot to consider, such as objections from some police unions and privacy concerns from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union.
There's also the cost. Several camera models cost at least $500 apiece, and storing all that footage can cost upwards of $20,000 per year. Plus, purchases like these must be budgeted in advance.
Related: Media in spotlight during Ferguson announcement
But there are benefits, too.
"There's no cost to replacing an officer, but if we can have a [body] camera that shows a point of view other than the in-car camera that helps us in a lawsuit, this is a big savings," said Lt. Bryan Hunter of the Byron Police Department in Georgia.
He tested a system that uses Google Glass -- probably the best-known wearable camera -- to automatically upload the hours of footage.
The body cameras help resolve complaints about officer conduct and assist prosecutors, he said.
And someday, they might be just as prevalent and accepted as dash-cams.
"When I started doing this 25 years ago, video cameras just started showing up in patrol cars," said Hunter. "It's just part of everyday life now."For today's edition of Former College Hoops Sweathearts: Where Are They Now?, we're checking in with former Gonzaga star and former No. 3 overall pick Adam Morrison. Again.
Last time we paid attention to him, Morrison was playing pretty decent basketball for a Serbian team, KK Crvena Zvezda (Red Star Belgrade), and he'd just gotten all fired up and thrown out of a game, to the delight of Red Star's home crowd. (He also looked like a burnt-out rock star, but that's to be expected.)
Today's check-in is a happier one, though, for Morrison is homeward-bound. His agreement with Red Star Belgrade didn't include an opt-out clause, but with the end of the NBA lockout, the team has chosen to release him from his one-year, $350,000 deal on a "good faith" gesture. The 27-year-old was averaging 15.5 points a game, and Sam Amick reports that he's "received significant interest from some Euroleague teams and is even confident he could return to the NBA."
Morrison plans to return to the States tomorrow and hopes to play "somewhere in the Western Hemisphere." Good for him—but according to the Official Deadspin Translator, Google.com, manager Davor Ristović and the rest of the Red Star community are having a sad:
We are very sorry that Morrison left the club, because it is an extraordinary man and top athletes. We thank him for his hard work, dedication and support he provided to our young team for the three months. All wish him much success later in his career.
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Hopefully by our next edition of Where Are They Now?, Morrison will once again be on the Lakers sideline, comfortably pumping his fist all the way to his third NBA championship.
Morrison let out of Serbian deal, may join NBA free-agent class [Sports Illustrated]
Farewell Star and Morrison [KKCrvenaZvezda.rs]Back when Barack Obama was president, congressional Republicans could frequently be heard arguing that both short-term budget deficits and the long-term accumulation of national debt were acute economic problems that needed to be addressed immediately. Debt aversion was a key reason not to stimulate the economy, not even with tax cuts like the payroll tax holiday that expired in 2012 due to GOP opposition.
Today, though, Republican leaders are lining up behind a tax plan that looks sure to increase the deficit, with the money largely flowing to unpopular tax cuts for big business and the rich.
To some critics, it smacks of partisan hypocrisy. But to congressional Republicans themselves, it’s, well, partisan hypocrisy. Via the Hill:
“It’s a great talking point when you have an administration that’s Democrat-led,” said Representative Mark Walker, Republican of North Carolina and the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group of about 150 conservative House members. “It’s a little different now that Republicans have both houses and the administration.”
A spokesperson for Walker clarifies to me that he isn’t saying personally that he believes the deficit is just a talking point that should be ditched now that Donald Trump is in the White House, but he does fear that some of his colleagues see it that way — citing the bipartisan debt ceiling deal as an example of insufficient debt fervor.
In truth, even though the national debt is large in absolute terms and projected to grow in future years, there’s little reason to believe it’s a big problem currently. Interest rates remain fairly low, and to the extent that they’re not super-duper low it’s because the Federal Reserve is slowly but surely trying to raise them, even though there’s no sign of inflation. Taking on more debt to finance a tax cut for the rich may not be a good idea, but it’s also probably not going to cause any big problems.
But the benign nature of the debt situation was even more true two or five or eight years ago when interest rates were rock-bottom, unemployment was sky-high, and putting people back to work with new spending or low payroll taxes was absolutely vital.IAF commissions 'desi' video game to attract wannabe fighter pilots
Video games starring the air forces of foreign countries could soon lose favour with Indian youngsters, as the IAF has decided to launch its own 'desi' version of such aerial combat games to attract those who want to be fighter pilots.
The Indian Air Force recently issued a request for expressions of interest from mobile app developers to bring out new video games that will be compatible with both Android and iOS operating systems.
These games will allow gamers to upgrade to multi-player and play station versions. Besides these features, the air force wants these games to be integrated with social media.
The IAF hopes the game will help attract would-be fighter pilots
The IAF seeks to bring video games featuring Indian mock bases, aircraft, weapons and people, among other aspects. The games will have multiple aircraft and can be played at multi-levels.
The target is to attract youngsters above the age of 13 years, who comprise the bulk of gaming enthusiasts.
Defence officials said video games currently feature foreign characters and settings. The air force, therefore, decided to come up with its own set of video games through which it plans to reach out to the youth to inspire them to join the big league, they said.
Video games have emerged as a big industry abroad, but they are yet to come up in a big way in India.In the midst of re-creating the controversial New Yorker cover illustration of Barack and Michelle Obama for the cover photo that graces this week's print edition of Entertainment Weekly, Jon Stewart stops briefly to pose a taste question. As he stands by the catering table in ''secret Muslim'' garb, he ponders, ''Would it be weird to be dressed like this and have a bagel, salmon, and a schmear?'' Pseudo-blowhard Stephen Colbert has his own worries. Striking his best Michelle-as-Black-Panther pose, he glances at the original cartoon and realizes that he's ''hippier'' than the potential First Lady. Gesturing at his own waist, he moans, ''I could drop a baby like a peasant.''
Other than that, though, their worries are few. Both of their Comedy Central shows just received an Emmy (The Daily Show won best Variety, Music, or Comedy Series, while The Colbert Report took home a best writing trophy), and they have five more weeks of an election battle starring three men and an Alaskan moose-skinner that has given the satirists more fodder than an infinite number of Dick Cheneys shooting an infinite number of friends in the face. We sat down with the comedians for a provocative talk about the political landscape, the way they (and other, more traditional media outlets) cover it, and whether or not we'll ever see the alleged ''change'' we've been promised by every candidate. ''Do you mean change we need, or change we can believe in?'' asks Stewart. ''Any change is as good as a vacation at this point,'' says Colbert, who set his conservative TV pundit character aside for the chat. ''I don't know if you've paid much attention to the past eight years, but it has been a s---burger supreme. If somebody gives me an empty burger, it's better than eating s---.''(John Kemp is a Reuters market analyst. The views expressed are his own)
* Diesel sales to U.S. oil industry: tmsnrt.rs/1l2UAT6
By John Kemp
LONDON, Jan 12 (Reuters) - El Nino and the warm winter weather are being blamed for the weak demand for distillate fuel oil in the United States, but the slump in oil production is probably having a bigger impact.
The oil industry was the fastest-growing customer for middle distillates like diesel between 2009 and 2014, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
The oil industry itself accounted for 20 percent of all the increase in diesel consumption during the five-year drilling boom.
Businesses engaged in oil drilling, pipelines and refining consumed 2.1 billion gallons of diesel in 2014, the most recent data available, up from just 760 million gallons in 2009.
By 2014, oil producers accounted for 3.5 percent of all distillate fuel oil sales in the United States, up from 1.4 percent in 2009.
Drilling rigs and the massive pumps employed for hydraulic fracturing all use high-horsepower engines which run 24 hours per day and consume prodigious quantities of fuel.
The heavy trucks used to haul drill pipe, frac sand and water to well sites, and carry away crude before the well is hooked up to gathering pipelines, are all diesel powered.
And since many oil fields are in remote rural areas with little or no electricity supply from the main power grid, most of the electricity used for heating and lighting also comes from diesel generators.
So as the number of active drilling rigs and crews rose five-fold from around 300 in 2009 to more than 1500 in 2014, diesel consumption surged as well.
Direct diesel sales to customers in the oil industry rose from 50,000 barrels per day to almost 140,000 barrels per day (bpd).
For comparison, in 2014, around 2.5 million bpd of distillate was were sold as road fuel, while 250,000 bpd were sold to residential customers, 240,000 bpd to the railroads and 200,000 bpd to farms.
But as drilling activity has plummeted in 2015, the big increase in diesel consumption in the oil fields has unwound.
Nationwide distillate consumption was flat in the first ten months of 2015, after growing by more than 5 percent in 2014. The slowdown started long before unusually warm weather arrived in the autumn and winter.
The slump in oil and gas drilling, as well as a general slowdown in freight shipments, some of which is linked to the drilling slowdown, likely explains much of the weakness in diesel consumption in 2015.
With no end in sight to the drilling slump, weak diesel demand looks set to continue through at least the first half of 2016, which will continue to depress refining margins in the middle of the barrel. (Editing by William Hardy)Audio has surfaced of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s controversial comments about getting “guns out of the hands” of minorities” during a Feb. 6 event at the Aspen Institute. Bloomberg’s represenatives reportedly www.summitdaily.com/news/15052127-113/story.html?utm_source= ;amp;utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss-referrals&utm_section=News of footage of his remarks at the event.“It’s controversial, but first thing is all of your — 95 percent of your murders and murderers, and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all of the cops. They are male, minorities, 15 to 25. That’s true in New York, it’s true in virtually every city in America,” Bloomberg is heard saying in the newly released audio.“That’s where the real crime is,” he added. “You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed. First thing you can do to help that group is to keep them alive.”Bloomberg would later make even more candid comments, defending New York’s “stop-and-frisk” policy and even admitting that the city of New York does arrest mostly minorities.“So one of the unintended consequences is, people say ‘Oh, my God you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.’ Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods,” he said. “Yes that’s true, why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the first thing you can do for people is to stop them getting killed.”X-rays transformed medicine a century ago by providing a noninvasive way to detect internal structures in the body. Still, they have limitations: X-rays cannot image the body’s soft tissues, except with the use of contrast-enhancing agents that must be swallowed or injected, and their resolution is limited.
But a new approach developed by researchers at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) could dramatically change that, enabling the most detailed images ever — including clear views of soft tissue without any need for contrast agents.
The work will be presented by MIT postdoc Shuo Cheng at the 13th International Workshop on Micro and Nanotechnology for Power Generation and Energy Conversion Applications (PowerMEMS 2013), being held Dec. 3 to 6 in London.
The new technology “could make X-rays ubiquitous, because of its higher resolution, the fact that the dose would be smaller and the hardware smaller, cheaper, and more capable than current X-rays,” says Luis Velásquez-García, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories and senior author of the PowerMEMS paper.
Velásquez-García says that while conventional X-ray systems show little or no structure in most soft tissues — including all of the body’s major organ systems — the new system would show these in great detail. A test the team performed with an eye from a cadaver using X-rays from a particle accelerator clearly shows “all the structures, the lens and the cornea,” he says. “In time we are confident our system will be able to achieve such resolution with a far simpler and cheaper device.”
The key is to produce coherent beams of X-rays from an array of micron-sized point sources, instead of a spread from a single, large point as in conventional systems, Velásquez-García explains. The team’s approach includes developing hardware that is an innovative application of batch microfabrication processes used to make microchips for computers and electronic devices.
Using these methods — alternating between depositing layers of material and selectively etching the material away — the MIT researchers have produced a nanostructured surface with an array of tiny tips, each of which can emit a beam of electrons. These, in turn, pass through a microstructured plate that emits a beam of X-rays.
Using the first version of the cathode, the team was able to capture high-resolution absorption images of samples where fine soft-tissue structures are clearly visible. “This is very exciting,” Velásquez-García says. “We just started, but we are confident we are on the right path.”
The resulting coherent beam of X-rays from the optimized cathode chip would be equivalent to something that can now be produced only by “incredibly expensive” systems at linear particle accelerators, Velásquez-García says. But those facilities have demonstrated the diagnostic power of the images they can produce — for example, clearly revealing the presence of a cancerous tumor by showing the details of the blood vessels supplying it. Similarly, an image of a knee reveals all the ligaments, muscle attachments, and fine details of the bone structures that cannot be seen at all on conventional X-rays.
“You can’t have a linear accelerator in every hospital,” Velásquez-García says. But the new system could potentially improve the resolution of X-ray imagery by a factor of 100 with hardware that costs orders of magnitude less, he says.
Even when soft tissue can be imaged conventionally by adding contrast agents such as barium, the use of those agents takes extra time, and the agents themselves can pose risks, he says. And because the new system is electronic — today’s thermionic systems take time to heat up — it can be switched on and off much faster, resulting in a much lower dose of radiation to the patient, Velásquez-García says.
He says the technology could also have applications beyond the medical field. For example, X-rays are used to check for defects in composite materials; the portability of the new system could allow more widespread use of such safety measures. The new system could also be useful in airport screening of baggage, where its ability to distinguish among liquids could make it much easier for agents to differentiate a harmless bottle of shampoo from a container of explosive material or a hazardous chemical.
The test device the team built, working with Rajiv Gupta of MGH, is housed in an 8-inch metal cube, about the size of a shoebox. The team expects to spend two to three years refining and improving the design, Velásquez-García says; commercial versions could be available within a few years after that.
Christopher Holland, a principal scientist at Micro Science Engineering Laboratories in Menlo Park, Calif., who was not involved in this work, says, “The approach being pursued by the authors of this article and others on the MIT team is novel and has significant potential for imaging soft tissue using X-rays.” He cautions, “The demonstration in this paper is only a laboratory demonstration and not yet portable,” but says it is “a steppingstone on that path.”
The research, which also included MIT postdoc Frances Hill and graduate student Eric Heubel, was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.(CNN) Thousands of people have been evacuated on the Indonesian island of Bali and on Ambae island in Vanuatu as two volcanoes threaten to erupt.
The entire population of Ambae is being moved from the path of the "increasingly active" Manaro volcano, also known as Lombenben, according to the Pacific nation's government.
On the Indonesian island of Bali, more than 144,000 people have been taken to shelters as authorities warn that Mount Agung, in the island's north, could erupt at any time.
Both volcanoes sit on the Pacific Ring of Fire, an area of intense seismic activity that stretches 40,000 kilometers (25,000 miles) from New Zealand to South America.
That they're showing signs of erupting at the same time is pure coincidence, said Benjamin Andrews, of the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.
Vanuatu volcano
Vanuatu's Ambae island hasn't been evacuated on this scale since an alert in 2005, Minister of Land and Natural Resources Ralph Regenvanu told CNN.
Most of the island's 11,000 residents are being taken away by boat, but some are also being airlifted to evacuation centers on Vanuatu's Pentecost and Maewo islands.
On Wednesday, a New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) aerial survey found "huge columns of smoke, ash and volcanic rocks billowing from the crater of an erupting volcano" on the island, according to a press release from the agency.
The alert level is at 4, the second highest on the scale. "Ambae volcano is in an ongoing moderate eruption state," a statement from Vanuatu Meteorology and Geohazards Department said. People in local villages could experience the danger of flying rocks, volcanic gases and acid rain, the statement added.
"The principal concerns here are that the volcano can eject volcanic rocks to distances of many kilometers from the crater, and that the volcano could erupt ash and/or emit sulfur dioxide," said Andrews, from the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.
Australia had responded to a request for assistance, pledging up to 20.5 million Vatu ($190,000) in "much-needed supplies like food, water, shelter and hygiene kits for affected communities on Ambae," a Vanuatu government statement said Thursday.
Australia was also funding surveillance flights over the volcanoes on Ambae and nearby Ambrym island, it added.
Imagery taken during a New Zealand Defence Force aerial survey showing activity from the Monaro volcano on Vanuatu's Ambae Island.
134,000 evacuated in Bali
In Bali, residents are still being moved outside an exclusion zone that stretches 12 kilometers from the center of Mount Agung.
More than 144,000 are living in evacuation centers, sleeping on floors and waiting for something to happen.
"It's been six days since we are here, we want to go home," said Wayan, 65, who like many Indonesians only goes by one name. He evacuated with this elderly mother, wife, children and young grandchild to the Swecapura sports arena.
Wayan also fled his home back when Mount Agung last erupted in 1963. Back then, there was no evacuation plan, people just "ran to save themselves," he said. More than 1,700 people were killed and many villages destroyed.
Wayan sits with his family at the Swecapura evacuation center in Bali.
This time, 447 temporary shelters have been set up outside the exclusion zone around the volcano, according to the National Disaster Management Agency.
Ngurah Rai International Airport remains open but is on alert in case of ash disruption, and there are plans to bus people to other airports, if needed.
People wait inside an evacuation centre in Klungkung regency, on the Indonesian resort island of Bali on September 25, 2017.
Seismic activity continues in the volcano and the alert level for an eruption has been raised to 4, the highest warning level on the Indonesian scale.Variable Scoping for Try-Catch Blocks in Whiley
A friend of mine was talking about how variable scoping for try-catch blocks in Java really frustrated him sometimes. Specifically, the problem was related to variables declared inside try blocks not being visible in their catch handlers. The example would go something like this:
int val; try { int tmp = f(); // cannot throw MyException val = g(tmp); // throws MyException } catch(MyException e) { log(tmp); throw e; } return h(val);
This code does not compile because tmp is not in scope inside the catch handler. Of course, we can declare tmp outside the catch handler — but this is mildly annoying because it’s only used within that block!
Anyhow, during the discussion I realised that Whiley doesn’t have this problem because it uses flow typing. In fact, there is no real notion of scoping for local variables. The rule is fairly simple: if the variable definitely has a value then it’s in scope. The above example would then look like this in Whiley:
try: tmp = f() // cannot throw MyException var = g(tmp) // throws MyException catch(MyException e): log(tmp) throw e // var is in scope return h(var)
Here, the flow typing system will reason that there is no control-flow branch within the block until after tmp is assigned. Therefore, tmp can be safely used within the catch handler.
Ok, so this particular aspect of flow typing is hardly going to set the world on fire … but I thought it was quite neat!For students of international conflict, 2013 provided plenty to examine. There was civil war in Syria, ethnic violence in China, and riots to the point of revolution in Ukraine. For those working at Duke University’s Ward Lab, all specialists in predicting conflict, the year looks like a betting sheet, full of predictions that worked and others that didn’t pan out.
Guerrilla campaigns intensified, proving out the prediction
When the lab put out their semiannual predictions in July, they gave Paraguay a 97 percent chance of insurgency, largely based on reports of Marxist rebels. The next month, guerrilla campaigns intensified, proving out the prediction. In the case of China's armed clashes between Uighurs and Hans, the models showed a 33 percent chance of violence, even as the cause of each individual flare-up was concealed by the country's state-run media. On the other hand, the unrest in Ukraine didn't start raising alarms until the action had already started, so the country was left off the report entirely.
According to Ward Lab’s staff, the purpose of the project isn't to make predictions but to test theories. If a certain theory of geopolitics can predict an uprising in Ukraine, then maybe that theory is onto something. And even if these specialists could predict every conflict, it would only be half the battle. "It's a success only if it doesn't come at the cost of predicting a lot of incidents that don't occur," says Michael D. Ward, the lab’s founder and chief investigator, who also runs the blog Predictive Heuristics. "But it suggests that we might be on the right track."
If a certain theory of geopolitics can predict an uprising in Ukraine, maybe that theory is onto something
Forecasting the future of a country wasn’t always done this way. Traditionally, predicting revolution or war has been a secretive project, for the simple reason that any reliable prediction would be too valuable to share. But as predictions lean more on data, they’ve actually become harder to keep secret, ushering in a new generation of open-source prediction models that butt against the siloed status quo.
Will this country's government face an acute existential threat in the next six months?
The story of automated conflict prediction starts at the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, known as the Pentagon’s R&D wing. In the 1990s, DARPA wanted to try out software-based approaches to anticipating which governments might collapse in the near future. The CIA was already on the case, with section chiefs from every region filing regular forecasts, but DARPA wanted to see if a computerized approach could do better. They looked at a simple question: will this country's government face an acute existential threat in the next |
place. It’s followed by the crunch of glass and splintering wood, as the remnants of one of the window-frames are rifle-butted or jack-booted open. They never were ones to politely knock first, the Germans.
I tense, waiting for the almost inevitable grenade blast, thinking how little protection these thin wooden walls will offer when it comes.
But providence is on our side. There’s no grenade. Perhaps they’re Wehrmacht, not SS.
“Is there anybody here?” a voice calls out in German. “Is there anybody here?”
Whoever it is then picks his way through the window – lands on the floor of the room we’re hiding in with a loud thump – pauses awhile and then scrunches through the debris of glass and fallen plasterwork towards the front door.
“Ground floor clear,” he calls to his comrades, who surge in moments later. You can hear two or three of them galumphing up the staircase and down into the cellar to inspect the other floors. Several more pairs of boots stomp around the room in which we are hiding.
I scarcely dare breathe. It’s this Dutch girl’s shell shock I’m particularly concerned about, for she seems quite unable to stop her hand brushing against my John Thomas in what, if I didn’t know better, I’d almost believe were caressing motions. Mind you, what was it Price said when this girl first showed an interest in me a week ago? Something like: “I wouldn’t go there, if I were you were. She’s only just escaped from that looney bin up the road.” That was just his sense of humour though. Surely?
More thundering feet, this time on the way down from upstairs.
“Upper floors clear, Herr Hauptmann,”
“Cellar also,” reports another.
“Good. Now piss off somewhere else, why don’t you?” I mentally urge them.
A born telepath, clearly, for almost immediately their Captain replies:
“Excellent.Feldwebel: get this room cleaned up and bring me a table and more chairs. It will serve very well as our interrogation centre.”
Interrogation centre?
I’d like to think that I’d misheard. Or that this was my German playing tricks on me. Unfortunately, it never does, for as you know Jack, I speak the lingo fluently. If I didn’t I’d have died a dozen grisly deaths by now.
“Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann,” says his sergeant, and in less than an instant – God there’ve been times when I wished it could have been German soldiers under my command not British ones – furniture is being shifted, debris swept and further chairs retrieved. One of them, by the sounds of it, has been placed directly in front of our hiding place.
“Christ! We’re in for it now,” I think.
If they’re going to use this room for interrogation purposes, we could be stuck here for hours. Days, even.
We’ve got no food. Nothing to drink. My back and neck are already killing from being in this cramped position – and we can’t have been here more than five minutes. The tiny cracks in the door won’t allow nearly enough air in. And then there’s this girl’s shell shock. If it is shell shock. It seems to be getting worse.
Who is Lieutenant Dick Coward?
Buy Coward at the Bridge by James Delingpole (Simon & Schuster)Brian Moynihan, Chairman of the Board and CEO of Bank of America Corporation attends the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland January 20, 2017. REUTERS/Ruben Sprich
(Reuters) - The head of Bank of America Corp (BAC.N), the United State’s fourth-biggest mortgage lender, said on Thursday banks would be able to supply a bigger share of funding for home purchases if the standard down payment for buyers was cut to 10 percent from 20 percent.
The vast majority of mortgages are underwritten to strict standards set by the U.S. government or quasi-government entities Fannie Mae (FNMA.PK) and Freddie Mac (FMCC.PK). While down payment requirements can vary, they offer fairly little latitude to lenders that do not want to take all the risk themselves. As a result, many prospective homebuyers who cannot come up with a 20 percent down payment are unable to get a loan.
“Our goal - going back to regulatory reform - is should you move the down payment requirement from 20 percent to 10? It wouldn’t introduce that much risk but would actually help a lot of mortgages get done,” Chief Executive Officer Brian Moynihan told CNBC in an interview Thursday.
Bank of America was the top U.S. mortgage lender ahead of the 2008 mortgage crisis, causing it to face greater losses, both from defaults and litigation, than any other bank. Under Moynihan, who took the helm at the start of 2010, the bank has tightened lending standards and executives regularly use the motto “responsible growth” in public speeches.
Bank of America has ceded market share partly because, unlike peers Wells Fargo (WFC.N) and JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), it does not acquire mortgages from other lenders.PoliZette Hillary’s Close, Forgotten Ties to Convicted Iranian-American Investor Business exec offered regrets to Abedin over the arrest of Clinton mega-donor — jailed for massive fraud
The arrest of a wealthy financier accused of fraud might be just the sort of government action that would cheer a crusader against the monied class, as Hillary Clinton sometimes characterizes herself.
But when the target was a top Democratic Party fundraiser in August 2009, it provoked condolences from one Clinton’s top supporters.
“Huma — very too bad about Hassan Nemazee.”
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New York banking executive Ken Miller commented on the arrest of Hassan Nemazee the following month in an email to longtime Clinton confidante Huma Abedin.
“Huma — very too bad about Hassan Nemazee,” wrote Miller, then president and CEO of Ken Miller Capital.
The email was included in a batch of communications that the State Department turned over to the conservative advocacy group Citizens United as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
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Miller’s main area of concern appeared to be the U.S. pavilion at the upcoming Shanghai Expo. There are numerous emails between Miller and Abedin about the event.
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Abedin, who was Clinton’s deputy chief of staff during her tenure as secretary of state, does not appear to have commented on Miller’s Nemazee lament. But Nemazee had deep ties to the Clintons. He had served as her national finance chairman during her failed bid for the White House in 2008 and shifted his focus to Barack Obama after he won the Democratic nomination. He also helped the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee raise $119 million for the 2006 cycle — significantly more than the Democrats managed alone.
The criminal case against Nemazee, an Iranian-American who owned a holding company with investments in private and public companies, involved allegations that he committed fraud to get a loan from Citibank. Prosecutors alleged that he forged documents showing that he held accounts and collateral worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Those accounts either never existed or had long been closed, according to the criminal complaint.
Authorities also contended that Nemazee gave Citibank phone numbers and addresses of various financial institutions that could vouch for his finances. But he actually controlled those numbers, according to the allegations.
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Nemazee ended up pleading guilty in 2010 to a $292-million fraud, and a federal judge sentenced him to 12.5 years in prison.
Even before his run-in with the law, his questionable business dealings scuttled an attempt by President Bill Clinton to name him U.S. ambassador to Argentina.
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As for the Expo in 2010, the United States was the last country to agree to participate and the only one that relied exclusively on private donations to pay for it. Miller, who currently is a Clinton adviser on Asia policy and is a senior adviser at Teneo Holdings — the consulting company founded by former Clinton Foundation executive Doug Band — helped raise money.
Reception to the pavilion was mixed. News reports indicated that many Chinese visitors liked it, but Duke University business professor Liu Kang, then acting as dean of the Institute of Arts and Humanities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, called it the “most disappointing” pavilion at the Expo.
Clinton also seemed underwhelmed by the results.
“It’s fine,” she told The New York Times.Natalie Ierkhova, a blogTO reader and George Brown Art and Design student, sent us a note yesterday regarding what seemed to be some pretty outlandish security measures going down at Union Station. As part of a class project that's been assigned "every year for some time," two groups of about 20 students -- one in the morning (8 a.m. to 11 a.m.) and one in the afternoon (12 p.m. to 3 p.m.) -- visited the station on November 24 to complete architectural renderings and sketches.
The morning session went off without a hitch, but the later group, Ierkhova wrote in an email, "was kicked out by security officers who apparently believe that art and design students can pose a security threat with their drawings." It's understandable why security would have a problem with the students if they congregated in a large group but, as Ierkhova explained, each student "chose their preferred location to sketch" and thus were "not not standing or sitting anywhere in the way of people commuting."
After the students left, "the teacher went to negotiate this issue with the head of security, but it is still unclear what resulted from their talk.... Next Tuesday we are supposed to learn of their decision." That struck me as an odd time frame given that there are surely rules and regulations already in place for how the station handles filming and photography, which should also cover sketching. With regard to the latter, for instance, one is allowed to shoot as long as he or she doesn't use a tripod or pose an obstacle to commuters.
I thus called station security to see if they could clarify the situation. No dice. But, I was directed to City of Toronto communications consultant Alex Mozo, who looked into the matter. According to Mozo, the students are in fact allowed to draw in the station, but only if they have a permit, which the groups on the 24th were not in possession of.
So, while drawing is technically permitted, you have to file the necessary paperwork before doing so. Although there isn't a charge for this type of permission, I wonder if it's not still a bit of overkill. Is there really a need to screen artists and illustration students before they come to do sketches of one of the city's most prominent architectural landmarks? Yes, security measures have tightened pretty much everywhere in the last 10 years, but the relative risk of someone drawing in a train station without formal permission has got to be extremely low, if it really poses a risk at all.
As Ierkhova puts it, "the fact that you cannot come to the station, sit quietly in the corner and draw (or do whatever without violating anyone's rights) seems outrageous."
Photo by tysonwilliams.com in the blogTO Flickr pool.The right-back's current deal was due to finish at the end of June 2017.
But after talks with manager Gianfranco Zola, it was agreed that a parting of the ways was in everyone's interests and the Club was happy to help Caddis get fixed up elsewhere by allowing him to become a free agent.
Blues have brought in Emilio Nsue from Middlesbrough during this transfer window as a major signing and Josh Dacres-Cogley moved up ahead of Caddis in the pecking order for right-back this season.
As Jonathan Spector has also left Blues on a free, for Orlando City in the MLS, it means that Zola's rebuilding of the Blues continues to gather apace - Spector, then Caddis, were Blues' longest-serving players.
Caddis, 28, joined Blues for a second time in August 2013 from Swindon Town, having previously spent a successful loan spell at St. Andrew's the previous season.
During his most recent spell at Blues, Caddis made a total of 131 First Team appearances.
However, he has barely figured this season, with his solitary appearance coming in the 1-0 home defeat to Oxford United in the EFL Cup back in August.
He was also sidelined for several months following surgery on a dislocated shoulder, which he has subsequently recovered from.
The popular Scot also scored 16 times for Blues, the most famous of which came during the dramatic final day of the 2013/14 campaign when he nodded the stoppage-time equaliser in the 2-2 away draw at Bolton Wanderers that kept Blues in the Championship.
The Club wishes Paul all the very best for the future and would like to thank him for his service to Blues over the past three-and-a-half years.Many fans and followers of the LCS have been paying close attention to any inkling of information that makes it through the various grapevines to tell us what to expect from the first year of LCS Franchising in North America. Unfortunately, not all of the teams were destined to make it as not all had the most funding. Even worse is that some of the rumored teams to have not made it through the process are one of the founding teams of NA, Team Dignitas, and a crowd favorite, Immortals. Granted, these are just rumors, but with no one denying these claims, it seems like they might be true.
With teams being kicked out, this means that there will be a lot of new faces coming in, but for the last time, if franchising works out the way Riot and all of the owners want it too. Some of the rumored teams have been OpTic Gaming, Nadeshot’s Cleveland Cavalier backed team, Golden State Warriors owner Joe Lacob, and the Houston Rockets backed team. For OpTic, they already have a massive following from their investments in several other video games, but for the others, they need to make a statement when entering the league. No team wants to enter with such a massive investment just to become the team that replaced IMT or DIG only to finish in last.
LCS Franchising – The Rumoured Departures and Why They Are Possibly Gone
It is important that we talk about the rumors that were just touched upon before anything else because these are significant changes. If you haven’t been paying attention to Reddit or Twitter, the outrage over some of the teams not making it back into the LCS due to LCS Franchising has been monumental. Well, only for Immortals really. While people were a bit upset over DIG, no one really thought much about Team EnVyUs and Phoenix1 getting scrapped.
Why this is so instrumental is that the reaction from the community illustrates what fans and viewers want out of teams. DIG might have been around since the old days, but the lack of success as well as them having been relegated at one point left fans apathetic towards them being in the league or not. P1 was almost relegated just this split. Lastly, NV entered the league after the controversy of Renegades occurred. Each of these teams have one reason or another that they struggled to develop a consistent fan base. One of the recurring themes for these teams was that they failed to have domestic success and then failed to develop enough of a following to seem like a team worthy of a franchise spot.
The only outlier for this train of thought is IMT. Granted, they haven’t been around the scene as long as a team like DIG, but they definitely had a lot more to work with. Since they entered the league, they were able to place high in the standing in NA and this year made it as an NA representative at the League of Legends World Championship 2017. This is a team that had massive success and due to this garnered a lot of popularity from viewers. But they made a massive mistake over the course of the year, and that was upset the owners of the league. Many have their theories about what happened, but it is almost certainly with regards to the Overwatch League. IMT owns one of the two LA spots, which means that they would be direct rivals with the NA LCS for attendance. Had IMT owned any of the other OWL cities, I doubt Riot would have cared much about IMT’s involvement with a competitor similar to their feelings about C9 owning the London OWL slot.
With all of these stated, still remember that it is all rumors about each of these teams not making it in. Until Riot and the teams make official announcements, take all information you hear with a grain of salt. There is still a world where all of the teams make it back in or one where some of the confirmed teams get a last minute message to deny them.
How To BE A Great Team
Like stated before, teams entering the league need to make a statement, especially if they have to fill the void that might be left by IMT departing. This means that they should take similar steps to what made IMT such a quickly famous organization in eSports. Honestly, the steps aren’t too hard. The first is about creating a successful team. Almost all of the teams that gain a fandom rapidly are those that were able to put together a roster with the perfect combination of experience and rookies. Just think back to Origen when they first entered EU and made it from Challenger to Worlds in a single year.
However, success is just one of the steps. A team can succeed but quickly fall apart without an organization that is actively trying to benefit their players. Look at the KOO Tigers or, currently, Longzhu Gaming. Both teams had amazing teams, but failures to pay the players and lack of sponsors made it so the teams fell apart despite being held together by the teams’ pure desire to win.
Yet, there was something to be admired from IMT on how well they treated their players. Being able to put together a team that can succeed is one thing, but having the level of respect to look out for them the way that IMT has is amazing. If you recall, IMT had a contract with Huni that could have stopped him from going to SKT and forced him to stay in NA, but they allowed him to go and pursue his dream. Even now, all of the players love being a part of IMT. Sure the success has been great, but the moment they heard the rumors, all of the players began tweeting about how sad they would be leaving their team, all talking about how well they were treated.
Teams need to make sure to replicate this if they want to slip into the IMT slot with minimal backlash and even grow to the same level they had. While many teams tend to try to be the best team out there, not many of them try to treat their players like they are the best out there. Hopefully, as time goes on and with more money, the players can be handled to the same degree as IMT, but only time will tell.
How To MAKE A Popular/Successful Team
This is something that everyone struggles with, yet all think that they know how to make the best team. Honestly, I don’t think that there is anyone out there that can make a team that will be perfect all year, every year simply because of the ever-changing meta and the growing talent that enters the scene as they get older. However, there are a few things that teams can do in order to gain a bit of popularity or aim for success that not many teams try to strive for.
LCS Franchising – The Popularity Path
Opting to prioritize quick fame for the team isn’t always a terrible idea, but it has to be done right. I feel that this is where a lot of teams seem to fall flat. Obviously, they have to aim for players they can get the right contract with at a price that is right for both the player and themselves. However, there are a lot of amazing players all over the world, let alone in your own region. It just depends on what you want to aim for.
If you look at how some teams gained popularity outside of purely victories in their regions, it was who they brought in. Look at Delta Fox as an amazing example for instant popularity. Not the best example as they couldn’t really win at all. But something better would be to aim for drafting a roster of purely players from NA. Having casted for many of the players in NA on the amateur scene, I can attest to the depth of players out there that it isn’t impossible to make a solid team out of players only from NA. I’ll work on something in the near future to talk about these players more as just a mention here would never do them justice.
Continuing the trend of popular things to do with a roster, imports might not be something that stands out. However, there are several free agents from more than just Korea that are out there that need to be explored by teams to set up a fantastic narrative for themselves. If you want to set yourself apart from a standard strategy, teams might need to look into importing players from more than just EU or LCK because it can make your team seem that much more unique from the rest.
LCS Franchising – Success Route
Success is something all teams strive for in the end. But for some reason, many teams end up making a team that can’t be amazing. Not because the players they picked up are bad, but because they didn’t do the research into all of the players when they created it. Such as drafting a team that has clear communication issues or one that has players that don’t get along. The worst is a team that is full of carry type players or supportive ones.
A team needs to have a great balance of everything. Importing players isn’t bad due to how it can bring in some great talent, it can be difficult if they can’t talk with their teammates. Even if they only have one person that they can communicate through, it is better than nothing at all. But at the end of the day, you also need to make sure that these players can enjoy playing together through victory and defeat. It will make it better for them when they lose to be able to pick themselves up and win the next one more easily.
Finally, you need to craft a roster that can balance each other out. The reason players like Xmithie are preferred to those like Dardoch is that supportive type players can fit into more metas easily. If they are a carry style, but the rest of your team is as well, they won’t be able to slide into a meta that doesn’t favor them as heavily. But this is also similar to a top laner like Khan. He is far better on the carries and struggles into the tanks, which forces the rest of his team to have to adapt to him. It is about getting players that can adapt while having one or two that can be the carries.News? Al Jazeera
“This letter is for Kate who says we don’t need Iraq’s oil. (Previous thread)
Wake up, Kate. I wish it wasn’t so, but our country has put itself on the most hated list of most other countries. No one likes a bully. We have become a big, ignorant, nasty bully.”
This letter is for Kate who says we don’t need Iraq’s oil. (Previous thread)
Kate, pick up a National Geographic. Get educated. Our Texas oilfields are on their way out. We cannot provide ourselves with oil. Were you around way back in the 70s when gasoline was rationed. That was 30 years ago. You know why that happened? Because OPEC stopped the flow of oil. Why do you think the first thing we did was secure the oilfields. Did we worry about the looting and sacking, the museums full of precious artifacts??? Ummm, no. We somehow forgot about that in the planning stages of “project liberate Iraq”. Wake up, Kate. I wish it wasn’t so, but our country has put itself on the most hated list of most other countries. No one likes a bully. We have become a big, ignorant, nasty bully. It saddens my heart to see the USA violating rights like crazy. We used to be appalled by this behavior, now we engage in it. Bush and the USA, shame on you for your crimes against the innocent. Bush, shame on you for your pride and short sightedness. It will take a long time to clean up this mess.
Vincent, USA
http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/news_service/article_full_story.asp?service_id=1962The question:
Is it true that honey is bad for babies? – Valerie, California.
Yes, honey should not be given to babies in any form (including raw, cooked or baked into products). Honey is bad for babies because it can grow botulinum spores, which can secrete a toxin and produce a transient paralysis in young infants.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that botulism is a rare but serious foodborne disease. When infants eat contaminated food, the botulinum bacterium spores grow in the intestines and release toxin. Treatment for infants requires hospitalization and possibly care in an intensive care unit. Antitoxin is not recommended for infants.
By the time infants are over one year of age, their intestines are able to destroy any botulinum spores, so honey is safe for toddlers and older children.Just a tease, Stay tuned:
Part I: How David Chase killed Tony Soprano: A look at the directing and editing in the final scene and the “Never hear it Happen” concept laid out by David Chase. Plus a closer look at why the other theories about the end just don’t hold up.
Part II: What does Tony’s death mean? How the themes of the final season and all 86 hours of the show lead to a family dinner in a small diner in New Jersey.
Part III: The Symbology of Holstens.
Part IV: The final season and “The Godfather”.
Part V: How 9/11, terrorism and the U.S. war in Iraq unlock the keys to the final scene in Holstens.
Part VI: Miscellaneous “Fun Stuff” that could only be created by David Chase.
Part VII: “The Public Enemy” and “Goodfellas” influence on the end of The Sopranos.Jonathan Ferrey | Getty Images
RELATED: FAQ: What you need to know about 2018 rosters
NASCAR announced Wednesday morning that it will standardize at-track team rosters across all three national series in 2018, providing a structure for the number of personnel working on each vehicle during the course of a race weekend.
The biggest competition impact from the rules update is the the number of crewmembers who go over the wall for pit stops moving from six to five.
According to Steve O’Donnell, NASCAR Executive Vice President and Chief Racing Development Officer, the overall objective for standardized rosters is to promote better competition through increased parity, to improve safety and to cast a brighter spotlight on the sport’s team concept.
“As much as we can possibly level the playing field and introduce new winners, that’s really the goal and what we want for the fans,” O’Donnell said. “And so if you look at these initiatives with the over-the-wall crew going to five members, that fits into our overall structure from a roster standpoint. We feel like that again puts the focus on the athletes and also continues down that line of putting the focus on the teams and opening it up to as many teams as possible to continue to win races and therefore put a better product out there for the fans.”
At-track rosters for all three series will fall under three headings: Organizational, Road Crew and Pit Crew. Job descriptions and roster maximums for each category:
• Organizational: Examples include competition director, team managers, technical director, IT specialists. In the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series, teams will be allotted three organizational roster spots for one- and two-car operations, and four spots for three- and four-car outfits. XFINITY and Camping World Truck Series teams will be allowed one organizational roster spot each.
• Road Crew: Examples include crew chief, car chief, mechanics, engine tuners, engineers, specialists (for areas such as tires, aerodynamics and shocks) and spotters. The limits for these personnel by series: Monster Energy Series, 12; XFINITY, 7; Camping World Trucks, 6.
• Pit Crew: This designation refers solely to team members who perform over-the-wall service during pit stops. The maximum is five for all three series.
The exceptions to these numbers are slight. Monster Energy Series teams are allowed one extra road crew position at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the three road courses (Sonoma, Watkins Glen, Charlotte), where teams often use multiple spotters. Also, an additional road crew roster spot will be allowed for XFINITY teams at 10 races and Truck Series teams at five.
It will be left to the teams’ discretion on how to best assemble their team — including the over-the-wall crew — within the roster limits. All rosters will be made public — for fans and media — before each race weekend.
The decrease in pit-crew personnel on an active pit road continues a trend in recent years. NASCAR reduced the number of over-the-wall crewmembers from seven to six in 2011, when advances in fueling systems eliminated the need for a catch-can. NASCAR also instituted a high-tech pit road officiating system in 2015 that made over-the-wall officials unnecessary to monitor pit stops.
“First and foremost, it’s safety, and we’ve taken some steps in our own house in reducing the number of officials on pit road,” O’Donnell said. “We used to have seven crewmembers over the wall for the race teams as well; we’d reduced that to six. And this is just another evolution with five, to make sure that the environment is as safe as possible for the race, and then also, candidly, to continue to focus on the athletes. We’ve got some of the best athletes in the world out there on pit road, so we’ll want to showcase them in as safe an environment as we can.”
From 2011 to 2017, the standard six-person pit-crew configuration included a jackman, a fueler, two tire changers and two tire carriers (one each for front and rear). For routine four-tire stops starting next season, teams could forgo one tire carrier and devise a new framework for servicing their vehicles.
The responsibilities of the fueler will also be narrowed, with other over-the-wall duties such as wrenching out chassis adjustments prohibited in 2018.
“We wanted to get out ahead of it as quickly as we can, and teams are probably practicing right now,” O’Donnell said about the timing of the announcement. “If I know them, they’re already getting ready for Daytona so that’s something we wanted to get out in front of them, working with the industry.”
In another effort to bring further recognition to team members, rostered crew will be assigned letters or numbers worn on their uniforms and on armbands to identify their duties.
“Those are superstars as well in our industry,” O’Donnell said. “The more we can allow fans inside that window and the media, candidly, to have you handed a roster prior to the race weekend opening up to know who’s on each team and what role they’re going to play for that weekend.
“Short-term, it’s going to take some getting used to, but long-term, I think it’ll really help develop some of the other names that have been a part of this sport for a long time and emphasize why you’ve always heard drivers talk about how this is a team sport. I think it’ll help showcase that for the fans.”
As has been the case with many recent developments in the sport, the advent of standardized at-track rosters was achieved through collaboration with race organizations, a process that O’Donnell said produced favorable feedback.
“I think it’s been really positive,” O’Donnell said. “Everybody obviously wants to see it play out on the track, but everyone kept in mind that our goal is to make the racing even better and to allow the possibility for even more teams to win a race and compete on pit road. So the idea in putting this in place has been very much embraced by the race teams, but obviously we want to see it in action and make it a positive thing for our fans going forward.”Two police officers have been killed and 20 other people injured in a suicide bomb attack in a busy shopping area in the heart of the Turkey's largest city, Istanbul.
Thirteen of the injured are reportedly police officers. The target of the attack was a police station in the city's bustling Taksim Square.
We are absolutely devastated... whoever carries out this kind of daring attack will be captured and brought to justice
Erol Cakir, mayor of Istanbul
The Anatolia news agency reported that the bomber was 25-year old Ugur Bulbul, a member of the banned far-left Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C). Police have not confirmed this. Kurdish nationalists, extreme left-wing and Islamic groups, including the DHKP-C, have all carried out bombings in Turkey in the past. Witnesses reported a large explosion with debris strewn across the street. In the aftermath, police sealed off Taksim Square as bomb experts and ambulances arrived. An Australian tourist was also reportedly serious injured. "I was driving along the other side of the road and suddenly there was an explosion... I didn't see much else, but there were many people injured," said taxi driver Kemal Basmaki. "It sounded like thunder, but lasted for just a second... everybody round here heard it," said an American resident, who heard the blast from a few blocks away. 'A treacherous attack' The Mayor of Istanbul, Erol Cakir, described the bombing as "a treacherous attack on the police".Judge Puts Pennsylvania Voter ID Law On Hold Through Election
A judge is basically "postponing Pennsylvania's tough new voter identification requirement, ordering that it not be enforced in the presidential election," The Associated Press writes.
But in a ruling that's rather difficult to follow if you're not very familiar with the case, Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson also says he "will not restrain election officials from asking for photo ID at the polls; rather, I will enjoin enforcement of those parts of Act 18 which directly result in disenfranchisement."
Simpson ruled that a voter's "provisional ballot" cannot be declared invalid because of the lack of an ID and that the state's transitional effort to amend its laws regarding such votes must not take effect before Election Day — Nov. 6.
So, it appears from his ruling, election officials can ask for an ID. But a voter's lack of one will not invalidate his vote.
The ruling can be appealed to the state's Supreme Court.
As the AP wrote before the ruling was released:
"Pennsylvania's new law, among the toughest in the nation, is a signature accomplishment of Republicans in control of Pennsylvania state government who say they fear election fraud. But it is an emotional target for Democrats who call it a Jim Crow-style scheme to make it harder for their party's traditional voters, including young adults and minorities, who might not carry the right kind of ID or know about the law."
Update at 10:20 a.m. ET. Bottom Line Is "Pennsylvanians will not be required to show ID to vote this year."
Harrisburg's The Patriot-News sums up the story this way:
"Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson has ruled that Pennsylvanians will not be required to show ID to vote this year. Simpson is postponing Pennsylvania's tough new voter identification requirement, ordering that it not be enforced in the presidential election.... "The ruling means people will be asked to show ID but will be allowed to vote even if they don't. That was also the policy in effect for the primary this year."
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette explains Simpon's ruling this way:
"The injunction would have the effect of extending the transition period of the law — when voters were asked for identification but could vote without it — through the November election."Few adjectives in the English language arrive on our doorsteps with as little freight as “simple.” Simple is good. Simple is welcome. Simple almost always makes us exhale with relief (assembling that Ikea desk is simple, really). Even the one negative connotation, that of simple-mindedness, produces a stock response of sympathy. After all, Lenny didn’t mean to kill those mice or strangle that poor girl. He was just... simple. So who can argue against a simpler tax code? I can. I hereby wave the flag of complexity, and I do so proudly.
Herman Cain has given us 9-9-9. This week sometime, Rick Perry is going to announce the details of his plan for a flat tax. He keeps nattering on about simplicity. He wants to “scrap the 3 million words of the tax code,” he snarls, to great harrumphs of approval.
The details of Perry’s plan are predictable, with a couple of twists. His flat rate is 20 percent, but he says a taxpayer can decide to pay under the current rates or the flat rate, whichever works out better. That’s his little sop to the working poor, who pay less than 20 percent now. But even with that tiny asterisk, this plan, like all flat-tax plans, is a gussied-up way of stealing money from the working and middle classes and handing it to the rich. Why is all too straightforward. Have a look at this list of current marginal tax rates. You’ll see that rates change at various levels, which everyone knows, but what everyone forgets is that even if you make more, within any given income range, you pay that rate. If you make $100,000, you are in the 28 percent bracket, but you’re not paying 28 cents on every dollar you earned, which is what most media shorthand would lead you to believe. You’re paying in accordance with the rate scale in the above link, each chunk of salary taxed at the appropriate marginal rate.
This means that what a person actually pays can be hard to figure, but this calculator gets us most of the way there. A $50,000 earner (married, filing separately, as all these examples will be) pays 17.25 percent. A $100,000 earner pays 22 percent. A $250,000 earner pays 29 percent. A $500,000 earner pays 32 percent. And a $1 million earner pays 33.5 percent. Remember—I told you I was celebrating complexity!—these dollar figures are taxable income, i.e., after deductions.
So let’s say there were a 20 percent tax on income. A married-filing-separately taxpayer who makes around $74,000 right now pays 20 percent. So under Perry’s plan, people above that figure would |
hammer Trump when he diverges from their political agenda, as it did when opposing the Ryan/Trump health care plan. It’s a pretty extraordinary situation.
Sean Illing
Here’s what I don’t understand about billionaires like Mercer or Peter Thiel or even millionaires like Bannon: They appear to want to blow up the entire system without having really thought about the consequences of that. It’s as though they have no stake in societal stability. What does someone like Mercer think will happen if the “administrative state” is fully deconstructed?
Jane Mayer
I’m not sure you can assume that Bannon hasn’t thought about the consequences. He’s read and spoken about his vision, and it involves the possibility of a cataclysmic clash. I’d very much like to hear more detail from him, but people described him to me as quite a sharp strategist, who has a long-view, big-picture way of thinking.
As for the Mercers, I agree that it’s puzzling. Why are “winners” at least economically, so eager to tear down the system that made them so rich? A frustration when writing about the Mercers is that they don’t consider it their responsibility to explain to the public what they are trying to do to the country where the rest of us happen to also live.
Sean Illing
Where does Steve Bannon fit in Mercer’s orbit? Has Mercer instrumentalized Bannon or is it the other way around?
Jane Mayer
Before Bannon was Trump’s political strategist, he played the same role for the Mercer family. They in turn sponsored him. So the relationship was extremely close, and he has been described as anything from an extra Mercer family member to their Svengali. It’s hard to know for sure, but it seemed from my reporting that Bannon in essence instrumentalized the Mercers by using their cash to transform their inchoate views into a concrete political game plan.
Sean Illing
Bannon believes Trump would not be president without the help of Mercer — do you agree?
Jane Mayer
He didn’t actually say that, quite. What he said was that they, more than any other political donors, provided the platform for the “Trump Revolution.” I think it’s indisputable that no other donors played a comparable role in launching Trump.
What made the Mercers especially important was not just their campaign contributions. It was their willingness to fund institutions that promoted Trump’s message, such as Breitbart News, the Government Accountability Institute, Cambridge Analytica, Citizens United, the Heritage Foundation, and dozens of other nonprofits.
Sean Illing
Did a political operation like Mercer’s become inevitable the moment the Citizens United case was decided?
Jane Mayer
The impact of Citizens United, and the other legal decisions that flowed from it, was in some ways more social than legal. It gave a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to hugely wealthy political donors whose spending had been viewed earlier as suspect, if not downright corrupt.
Suddenly, people with immense amounts of money to spend on politics were celebrated as simply exercising their right to “speech.” The aura of corruption was lifted, and yes, I think it was inevitable that when there was no longer much social opprobrium, the big spenders were going to buy everything they could.
Sean Illing
Have we lost our democracy? And I don’t mean that in the apocalyptic sense, but rather in the sense that a very small group of extraordinarily rich people have used their money to purchase power and manipulate voters to such a degree that they’ve almost lost their agency.
Jane Mayer
I think we’re at a really worrisome tipping point. Economic inequality breeds political inequality, which results in more economic inequality. The cycle has sped up since Citizens United. Or, as Joseph Stieglitz put it, “Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth.” History suggests that there are waves of corruption, scandal, and reform in this country, and if so, I think we’re at a moment when reform is overdue.
Sean Illing
How has the Mercer-Bannon crowd has fundamentally reoriented the Republican Party, in both the immediate and long-term sense?
Jane Mayer
It’s hard to know for sure about the long-term, but Rebekah Mercer’s [Robert’s daughter] people leaked her plan to bankroll an outside independent expenditure group aimed at whipping up public support for Trump’s policies, and at intimidating office-holders who buck Trump’s lead in their home districts, across the country.
The idea that an heiress who has no experience or expertise in politics, no accountability to voters, and no journalistic skills that would ordinarily take her beyond being able to get a cranky letter to the editor published in a newspaper, is now funding a privatized propaganda machine for a president she helped finance, captures how far money has eaten away into the democratic ideal of “one-man, one-vote.”
She and her father don’t believe in global warming, like many far-right businesspeople, so presto, 30 percent of the EPA's budget is gone, even though strong majorities of citizens and scientists in the US and elsewhere in the world believe man-made climate change is an urgent threat to life on earth.
The Mercers’ position on climate issues is in line with the GOP’s previous stance, but on immigration and trade, they, like Bannon, are pushing the GOP in a far more nativist, protectionist direction. In doing so, ironically, they are clashing with their former allies, the billionaire Koch Brothers, who prefer more libertarian policies.
So, it appears that what we can look forward to in the Republican Party is a clash of GOP mega-donors — the Koch Wing — represented by the House Freedom Caucus, against the Mercer Wing, represented by the Trump White House. Is hard to know who will fold first, but either way, big money wins.Model of Europa’s interior, including a global ocean
New research suggests that there is plenty of oxygen available in the subsurface ocean of Europa to support oxygen-based metabolic processes for life similar to that on Earth. In fact, there may be enough oxygen to support complex, animal-like organisms with greater oxygen demands than microorganisms.
The global ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa contains about twice the liquid water of all the Earth’s oceans combined. New research suggests that there may be plenty of oxygen available in that ocean to support life, a hundred times more oxygen than previously estimated.
The chances for life there have been uncertain, because Europa’s ocean lies beneath several miles of ice, which separates it from the production of oxygen at the surface by energetic charged particles (similar to cosmic rays). Without oxygen, life could conceivably exist at hot springs in the ocean floor using exotic metabolic chemistries, based on sulfur or the production of methane. However, it is not certain whether the ocean floor actually would provide the conditions for such life.
Therefore a key question has been whether enough oxygen reaches the ocean to support the oxygen-based metabolic process that is most familiar to us. An answer comes from considering the young age of Europa’s surface. Its geology and the paucity of impact craters suggests that the top of the ice is continually reformed such that the current surface is only about 50 million years old, roughly 1% of the age of the solar system.
Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona has considered three generic resurfacing processes: gradually laying fresh material on the surface; opening cracks which fill with fresh ice from below; and disrupting patches of surface in place and replacing them with fresh material. Using estimates for the production of oxidizers at the surface, he finds that the delivery rate into the ocean is so fast that the oxygen concentration could exceed that of the Earth’s oceans in only a few million years. Greenberg presented his findings at the 41st meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences now under way in Fajardo, Puerto Rico.
Greenberg says that the concentrations of oxygen would be great enough to support not only microorganisms, but also “macrofauna”, that is, more complex animal-like organisms which have greater oxygen demands. The continual supply of oxygen could support roughly 3 billion kilograms of macrofauna, assuming similar oxygen demands to terrestrial fish.
The good news for the question of the origin of life is that there would be a delay of a couple of billion years before the first surface oxygen reached the ocean. Without that delay, the first pre-biotic chemistry and the first primitive organic structures would be disrupted by oxidation. Oxidation is a hazard unless organisms have evolved protection from its damaging effects. A similar delay in the production of oxygen on Earth was probably essential for allowing life to get started here.
Richard Greenberg is the author of the recent book “Unmasking Europa: The Search for Life on Jupiter’s Ocean Moon”, which offers a comprehensive picture of Europa for the general reader.
Via Physorg.comI’m excited to announce that MediaGoblin has hired its second full-time programmer: Jessica Tallon! Those of you who follow MediaGoblin closely may recognize that name: Jessica joined us as part of our Outreach Program for Women participation last year (she wrote about her experiences with the program on this blog). Jessica has been working on federation support in the project.
Since our crowdfunding campaign was a massive success, reaching its second milestone, that was enough funds to bring Jessica on full time. (You may be wondering: what about me (Chris Webber) then? Am I still full time on the project? The answer is “nearly”; I am full time without pay for now, but will be picking up a small amount of contracting to cover the bills so I will be at the status “nearly full time”… thus MediaGoblin will have mostly two full time people on staff at the moment!) You might notice that the number of dedicated resources on the project corresponds with the “number of goblins unlocked”. That’s no coincidence… we made no official announcements because we couldn’t be sure until everything was arranged, but the number of goblins on that page was the number of dedicated resources we hoped to pull in. Luckily, we were able to make an arrangement and pull in Jessica. That’s great news for MediaGoblin!
Already, the results are showing themselves. Jessica only joined a couple of weeks ago and already she has landed the first major milestone for federation (not federation itself, but the upload API… it’ll be in the next release, so more soon!) and has been helping get 0.7.0 out the door. The results speak for themselves!
But even though the results speak so clearly, there’s nothing like hearing right from the source! As such, Deb Nicholson was kind enough to interview Jessica… so without further ado, here is their conversation below!
Deb: You started working on GNU MediaGoblin through an Outreach Program for Women internship. What initially drew you to MediaGoblin, instead of one of the other fine projects that offer paid summer internships?
Jessica: MediaGoblin was a perfect fit for both me and what I wanted to work on. The welcoming community was something which was immediately apparent, I wanted to work on a project which was going to be welcoming and for me to feel like I could continue after OPW had concluded. I also wanted a project which would provide me with any help I might need while getting to grips with the code. It was clear that MediaGoblin was a perfect fit for me in that respect.
Deb: You spent last summer re-writing the PyPump library. Are projects besides GNU MediaGoblin using your work?
Jessica: I’ve seen several projects which are using PyPump as well as interest in helping develop the library itself. Spigot is a program written against PyPump that allows posting to RSS feeds to pump.io. There is also PumpMigrate which migrates data from one account to another, this could be really useful both on pump.io and MediaGoblin to allow someone to move their account to a different instance.
Deb: You’ll be working on GNU MediaGoblin’s federation branch for the next year. What do you think the biggest or most challenging part is going to be?
Jessica: I think that there will be two big and difficult aspects I will encounter over the next year. The first will be across instance subscriptions which would allow you to subscribe to a collection or user and have updates to those be visible on your instance even though they exist and have been uploaded to another instance.
The second and possibly the most difficult but also most rewarding part will be the sharing of media. This will allow you to share some media uploaded from a MediaGoblin instance via your own MediaGoblin account possibly on another server or even a pump.io instance. Permissions on how users will be able to interact with the media by commenting, favoriting or re-sharing will make the problem interesting but brings challenges.
Deb: What do you think GNU MediaGoblin will look like in 3 years time?
Jessica: This is a very difficult, over the last year that I’ve been apart of the project I’ve seen so much happen. I think within 3 years we’ll have mature federation support which will make running your own instance easy without isolating yourself from the social aspects of sharing your media. There’s also lots I see happening from others in the project for easier deployability which will hopefully make deploying a MediaGoblin instance much more achievable for a lot more people.
I am so excited to see what unexpected changes occur over the next 3 years. There are so many contributors and it’s such a wonderful community and project that I know I’m always going to be blown away by what can be achieved by everyone involved.McLeod, Mont.
IN what promises to be the most contentious midterm election since 1994, there is no shortage of passion about big issues facing the country: the place and nature of the federal government in America’s future; public debt; jobs; health care; the influence of special interests; and the role of populist movements like the Tea Party.
In nearly every Congressional and Senate race, these are the issues that explode into attack ads, score points in debates and light up cable talk shows. In poll after poll, these are the issues that voters say are most important to them this year.
Notice anything missing on the campaign landscape?
How about war? The United States is now in its ninth year of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the longest wars in American history. Almost 5,000 men and women have been killed. More than 30,000 have been wounded, some so gravely they’re returning home to become, effectively, wards of their families and communities.
In those nine years, the United States has spent more than $1 trillion on combat operations and other parts of the war effort, including foreign aid, reconstruction projects, embassy costs and veterans’ health care. And the end is not in sight.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
So why aren’t the wars and their human and economic consequences front and center in this campaign, right up there with jobs and taxes?The Abbott government's reshaping of Julia Gillard's education revolution signals "the worst of conservatism starting to show its ugly head again" according to former prime minister Bob Hawke.
In Perth to address a 50th anniversary celebration for Western Australia's union movement, Mr Hawke savaged the decision of Tony Abbott to shelve Labor's four-year Better Schools scheme, signed with the majority of states and territories.
And the former Labor PM said it was not a time for Labor to be "apologetic" about its history, but to tell it louder than ever in the face of a conservative government which intended to cast the unions as "the enemy".
On Sunday, Mr Abbott denied his government was backing away from a pre-election education commitment saying he was determined to "to keep the promise that we made, not the promise that some people thought we made".
Mr Hawke said it was clearly a broken promise.
"Julia Gillard made some mistakes of course, but one of the great contributions she made was to move forward the education revolution, to ensure that what Labor had started over the years in creating equality of opportunity should be strengthened," Mr Hawke said.
"What we are witnessing now at the national level is the blatant breaking of a promise that was made during the election.
"And it is the creation of a situation where we will again have an education system marked by discrimination... where the capacity of a child to have his or her talents developed will depend too much on the size of the parental wallet."
Mr Hawke said he envisaged a country going backwards under Mr Abbott.
"The battles are not finished and we are now faced in this state and nationally with the conservatives who want again to go backwards," Mr Hawke said.
"They want to see this great trade union movement that has made this country what it is, they want to cast it as an enemy."
And Mr Hawke said that meant Labor should increase the volume.
"This is not a time for the Labor movement to be apologetic and go backwards. This is the time when we should be going on the front foot," Mr Hawke said.
"We should be out there telling our story and telling it strongly."
To the delight of the gathered audience, which included ACTU president Ged Kearney and WA's Labor leader Mark McGowan, the 83 year-old then led a rendition of all three verses of "Solidarity".For example, one of the most wide-spread strategies for uncovering the optimal ratio of CPM and number of impressions acquired is automated bid testing. The way it works is straight-forward: automated tools test bids based on user-defined bid increments, bid range, timeframe, and percentage of traffic. In practice, a buyer looks for the optimal ratio of price and amount of impressions inside a $0.05 - $2.00 bid range. She sets up automated bidders to test every bid in this range with $0.05 increments for 10 minutes, for 10% of auctions. In those 10 minutes, 40 different bids will be used to identify the one that generates the optimal number of impressions for the lowest price. The test result will be repeated during the next 10 minutes for 90% of auctions while the test repeats again on the remaining 10%. As a result, testing runs all the time adapting bidding strategies to market conditions every 10 minutes.Amid a criminal case that forced the shutdown of Megaupload, the company has dismissed UMG from a lawsuit over a video that showed many stars endorsing the site. But that doesn't mean the case is over. Instead, Megaupload might be preparing to pick a fight with Google.
In the aftermath of the Justice Department's crackdown on Megaupload, the company has dropped its lawsuit against Universal Music Group over an allegedly unlawful takedown of a video showing many superstars endorsing the troubled file-sharing service.
However, the lawsuit is not quite over just yet. On Friday, Megaupload's lawyers filed a notice in California federal court to dismiss the claims against UMG without prejudice, but also told the judge that that the claims against anonymous John Does who participated in the takedown of the viral video continues. Megaupload also wants to pursue further discovery in the case and is attempting to get Google to cooperate on this front by preserving records.
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A lawsuit that was strange from the very beginning has just taken another twist.
As you'll recall, Megaupload shocked many observers last month by releasing the "Megaupload Mega Song," from Will.i.am, Sean "Diddy" Combs, Kim Kardashian, Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, Kanye West, Lil John, Jamie Foxx, Mary J Blige, Floyd Mayweather, The Game and more. Over a simple electro-beat, the various stars sing how much they love the service. (Some celebrities later denied they had endorsed the site.)
Soon thereafter, just as the video was going viral, the music video was yanked off of YouTube over an apparent takedown notice. Megaupload blamed UMG and sued the company for copyright misrepresentation. For a company that's faced repeated allegations of unlawful behavior, Megaupload had suddenly gone on the legal attack and hired two law firms including giant Fenwick & West to protect its own rights.
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UMG did indeed cause the video to be taken off of YouTube, but the record company said it wasn't a takedown notice that was sent, but rather the exploitation of a contractual agreement with YouTube that permitted use of a "Content Management System" to remove videos from the site, "based on a number of contractually specified criteria."
Megaupload wanted a peek at this agreement.
The video was soon back up on YouTube, which expressed displeasure at the way UMG used its piracy filters, but Megaupload grew increasingly unhappy at YouTube nevertheless.
Just weeks before Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom was arrested in New Zealand, he sent us a message that attacked YouTube for allegedly censoring the video's view count. "UMG knows that the next round of stories will start when the video becomes an online sensation," Dotcom told us. "So the question is, is Youtube helping UMG to keep the view count a secret?"
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Meanwhile, UMG hit back against Megaupload, blasting its "notorious" reputation as a big pirate. In a declaration on Jan. 10, UMG added that it "fully intends to take discovery regarding these matters, which all go to Megaupload’s claimed ‘reputation,’ the harm it says it has suffered, and the types of users it aims to reach, including with its video posting.”
UMG and Megaupload argued about the scope of the discovery process. The latter claimed it needed to figure out which corporate entity within UMG should be the proper defendant. UMG responded that it wasn't necessary and that the plaintiff's lacked "good cause."
On Friday, Megaupload dropped its claims against UMG without prejudice, meaning that it could revive a lawsuit against the company at a later date if it so chose. But on the same day, Megaupload's attorneys told the court that the "dismissal in no way reduces the need for limited discovery."
STORY: Wild Details in the Arrest of Megaupload Founder
In particular, Megaupload's lawyers have singled out Google, which owns YouTube, for not providing assurance that documents would be retained.
To battle criminal charges brought by the government, Megaupload has reportedly hired Hogan Lovells attorney Robert Bennett, one of the top lawyers in the nation who has previously represented Bill Clinton, Enron, and KPMG. Bennett will soon be in court in an effort to defeat one of the largest copyright cases in U.S. history.
But first, Megaupload makes its first appearance in court on Monday in the Oakland courthouse of Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in the ongoing, strange case concerning the "Megaupload Mega Song." A hearing is scheduled on the issue of discovery and the proceeding could provide some clues about the company's future legal efforts.
E-mail: eriqgardner@yahoo.com
Twitter: @eriqgardner“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax... my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives…. The president has been a disappointment. He told you he’d keep unemployment below 8 percent. Hasn’t been below eight percent since. Fifty percent of kids coming out of school can’t get a job. Fifty percent.”
— Mitt Romney, speaking at a private fundraiser in a May 17 video released by Mother Jones magazine.
We will leave aside the politics of this impolitic chat by the GOP nominee. How factual are his statements?
The Facts
Romney appears to conflate a few things — Obama’s approval rating, the percentage of people who do not pay income taxes and people who rely on government assistance.
There may be some overlap between these groups but they really are not the same thing.
First, let’s start with the notion that nearly half of Americans do not pay income tax. Yes, as of 2011, about 46 percent of American households paid no income tax, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. But this is one of these “facts” that is not very informative. “Income taxes” are just one type of tax that people pay, and for most working Americans — about three-quarters — payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare far exceed what they pay in income taxes.
(For people confused about these terms, income taxes are based on your income, minus certain deductions. Payroll taxes represent your contribution to old-age programs, and in the case of Social Security are capped once your income hits $110,100. Your employer also pays an equal amount of payroll taxes, which in effect reduces your wages.)
In other words, substitute the phrase “federal taxes” for “income taxes,” and then the picture changes dramatically. Indeed, when all federal taxes are included, the percentage of people who pay no taxes drops to 10 percent or lower, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Moreover, if some people do not pay income taxes, it is because of policies often advocated by Republicans, such as child tax credits and tax benefits for the working poor. President Richard M. Nixon offered an early version of the earned income tax credit, and it was enacted under Gerald Ford and expanded under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) pushed for the child tax credit — signed into law by Democrat Bill Clinton in 1997 and later expanded by George W. Bush in 2004.
Some 44 percent of those who do not pay income taxes are in that category because they get tax benefits aimed at the elderly, while another 30 percent benefit from tax credits for children or for the working poor, according to a paper published by the Tax Policy Center.
But not all of these people are automatically Obama supporters. In fact, according to a map published by the Tax Foundation, eight of the top 10 states with the lowest income-tax liability are the heart of Romney country — the Deep South. The only exceptions are Florida, a battleground state, and New Mexico, which leans toward Obama. Meanwhile, most of the states with the lowest levels of nonpayers are Obama states.
As for other entitlements, of course Social Security and Medicare are reserved for the elderly — and are generally popular. But it seems simplistic to think these are all Obama voters, especially since polling indicates that the Republican share of the vote among white seniors has increased in each of the last five elections, to 58 percent in 2008.
Two of the other assertions in Romney’s spiel are wrong. When Romney says 50 percent of people can’t get a job, he is greatly simplifying an Associated Press survey earlier this year that concluded that about 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor’s degree holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed. This was the highest level in 11 years, since the dot-com bust in 2000. But underemployed is not the same as not getting a job.
“A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge,” the news agency said. “Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.”
As for the claim that Obama promised that unemployment would be below 8 percent, Romney has already earned Two Pinocchios for that.
The Pinocchio Test
Perhaps it is too much to expect a politician to be entirely accurate in a closed-door speech, but one would think he would have even less need to stretch the truth if he thought the cameras were not rolling. Unfortunately for Romney, at least one camera captured his misleading picture of the electorate.
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Read our biggest PinocchiosLiverpool signed John Arne Riise from Monaco in 2001 and it didn't take the left-back long to endear himself to the Kop. A particular highlight during his debut campaign for the Reds came against Manchester United in November, scoring a glorious thunderbolt of a free-kick on their way to thumping Sir Alex Ferguson's champions 3-1.
The shot was the definition of unstoppable. Receiving a layoff, Riise met the ball perfectly on his run up, with the ball flying off his boot and searing through the air and into Fabien Barthez's top corner, flashing past the Frenchman as he hopelessly attempted to reach it.
"It was just one of those times when things just went the way you hoped they would. I could never have dreamed of scoring that kind of goal," said the Norwegian via Sky Sports, who went on to make 339 appearances for the Reds, scoring 30 goals.
"It was the first time I'd played against Manchester United, a team that had David Beckham and all of their big boys in it. I just told Didi Hamann to push the ball one-and-a-half yards and I smashed it. I didn't even feel like I'd hit it but 15 years later I still get asked about it.
"I used to spend five or six hours a day practising my shooting technique when I was young so it didn't come for free but sometimes things are just meant to be. It was a good goal, it's followed me around ever since and it put me straight into the hearts of the fans."
The goal gave birth to one of the most famous football songs - when the Reds supporters sing Riise's name to the tune of Bruce Channel's 'Hey Baby.'
"It so difficult for me to describe what that feels like," he added.
"I get texts from friends in Liverpool on matchdays when they sing my song in the pubs before the game and at the stadium.
"It's been a long time since I was there, I left eight years ago and I could never have hoped for or dreamt of that. It shows that I did something right in my seven years there and it's one of the reasons why I love - and always will love -Liverpool. It's my club."
"It's one of the biggest games you can play in," he said. "Wherever you go in the world there seem to be more fans of Liverpool and Manchester United than any other team.
"But I think as it stands this game is more important for Jose Mourinho than Jurgen Klopp because he needs to turn things around and show his team are still capable of challenging at the top.
"It's a big game for both teams but for me Mourinho is under more pressure now."As Washington, D.C., gears up for the inauguration, there's one thing that you're not seeing around town. Shoe-checking stations. While one attempted shoe bombing was enough to make all of us wander unshod through the airports of this great nation for years—there will be security check points all over Capitol Hill—shoe checking will not be part of the action.
Why? It's not that the chance of a shoe bombing has somehow been definitively eliminated. It's because the costs (frostbitten toes and long delays) have been weighed against the (low) possible risk of Richard Reid II. We probably should have reached the same conclusion about airports long ago. But this particular brand of cost-benefit analysis often eludes security officials, especially in the public sector.
Security officials at the inauguration are taking one tip from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), though. They're dictating bag sizes. Nothing bigger than 8 inches by 6 inches by 4 inches will be allowed, according to The Washington Post. Basically, we're talking fanny packs here, people. So get ready for Obama's America to look something like this. The Washington City Paper is on the case, trying to figure out what the heck officials thought we were going to be packing our lunches in while we stand (since chairs are banned as well) along the parade route after waiting in a three-hour line to get in.
The TSA, meanwhile, is planning to phase out the small-bag-of-liquids regime this year after realizing that it may have overreacted to the single threat of a liquid-based bomb. New machines will be put in place to detect explosives, allowing the rest of us to pack our saline solution in peace. And so the security merry-go-round whirls on.
Wired columnist and BT chief security technology officer, Bruce Schneier, who started out as a cryptologist and has since expanded his portfolio to all things security, is the TSA's worst nightmare. A lot of what Schneier says sounds like the common sense you'll hear at the far end of the security line in any airport—you know, the stuff people say before they get within earshot of the badged and businesslike men and women who hold the fates of our vacations in their latex-gloved hands. Schneier adds some serious geek street cred and a respect for individualism to that common sense, and comes up with analysis and suggestions guaranteed to drive the TSA up the wall.
Associate Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward interviewed Bruce Schneier last week about his book, Schneier on Security (Wiley), and his thoughts on security, privacy, and profit.
Reason: You coined the phrase "security theater" and you've been critical of the TSA's choices on priorities and tactics. What has the TSA done wrong that's fixable? What has the TSA done right?
Bruce Schneier: The TSA focuses too much on specific tactics and targets. This makes sense politically, but is a bad use of security resources. Think about the last eight years. We take away guns and knives, and the terrorists use box cutters. We confiscate box cutters and knitting needles, and they put explosives in their shoes. We screen shoes, and they use liquids. We take away liquids, and they'll do something else. This is a dumb game; the TSA should stop playing. Some screening is necessary to stop the crazy and the stupid, but it's not going to stop a professional terrorist attack. We don't need more and better screening; we need less. On the other hand, I like seeing the direction they're heading in terms of behavioral profiling, though we need to be careful. Done wrong, it's nothing more than stereotyping; but done right, it can be very effective. It needs more focus on people and less on objects. We can't manage to keep weapons out of prisons; we'll never keep them out of airports. Oh, and stop the ID checking—the notion that there is this master list of terrorists that we can check people off against is just plain silly.
Reason: What would success look like for the TSA? If you were made King of Airport Security tomorrow and given the entire current budget of the TSA to do whatever you wanted, what kind of system would you design?
Schneier: If I were in charge of the TSA's budget, I'd give most of it back. Politically, I wouldn't be able to, of course, but it would be the best thing to do. Spending money on airport/airplane security only makes sense if the bad guys target airplanes. In general, money spent defending particular targets or tactics only makes sense if we can guess them correctly. If tactics and targets are scarce, defending against specific ones makes us safer. If tactics and targets are plentiful—as they are—it only forces the bad guys to pick new ones. Spending money on intelligence, investigation, and emergency response is effective regardless of the tactic or the target. Airport security is a last line of defense, and not a very good one at that. We need to remember that at budget time.
Reason: One theme that comes up in your book and some of the interviews you've done recently is the idea that when money/profit is involved, security operations tend to be tighter and more efficient. Explain to Reason.com readers—or at least speculate on—why that's the case.
Schneier: The person or organization who is subject to the risk needs to be responsible for risk mitigation. In banking, for example, the banks need to be responsible for their own risk. They lose money if the bank is robbed, so they're in the best position to weigh the cost of security measures against the risk of robbery. Customers don't lose money when there's a bank robbery, so they can't balance the risks and costs. Conversely, it makes no sense for bank customers to be penalized for identity theft losses. They're in no position to mitigate the risks—whereas the banks are—so customers shouldn't be responsible for the losses.
This doesn't mean there's no place for government to be responsible for risks. In airline security, the risks are far greater than any one airline. It makes no sense for airlines to hire security screeners—they can't do a proper risk analysis—and a lot of sense for the government to step in to fill that role.
Reason: In Schneier on Security, you emphasize that technology isn't the only (or even the most important part) of a security solution. Why do people tend to systematically discount cultural and economic factors in considering questions of security?
Schneier: We live in a technological world, and it's common for us to believe that technology can solve our security problems. It solves so many of our other problems, so it's a plausible belief. It's also easier to believe that a shiny new piece of technology—a new ID card, a new airport scanner, a new face-recognition system—can solve our problems than boring old concepts like culture and economics. Admitting that technology isn't the answer is admitting that there isn't an answer that will solve the problem, and many people can't do that yet. We've forgotten that risk is an inherent part of life.
Reason: Security and privacy (or, more controversially, security and freedom) are often described as being in opposition. When is that true? When it is untrue?
Schneier: The security vs. privacy dichotomy is a false one. Only identity-based security is in opposition to privacy, and there are limitations to that approach. I believe that approximately two security improvements since 9/11 have made airplane travel safer: reinforcing the cockpit door, teaching passengers they have to fight back, and—maybe—sky marshals. None of those measures has any impact on privacy. It's things like ID cards, and wholesale eavesdropping on telephone calls and Internet conversations, and large government databases that affect privacy, and their security value is minimal. The real dichotomy is liberty vs. control. There might be less crime in a society with strong government controls and police-state-like surveillance, but I don't think anyone would feel safer in that society.
Reason: What's your reaction when you hear people say that we live in a "security state"?Paramount
In March, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) came out with an updated "Worldwide Cost of Living" report, which highlights the most expensive cities to live in across the |
, who did Hobo with a Shotgun. I brought him on – I’m good friends with him – as second-unit director. There’s basically like three good Jason Eisner short films in there and they’re all very gory. I was able to just turn him loose sometime, and just do some crazy stuff.”
It’s interesting to hear that Eisener has been working so closely with Wingard on this film. Hobo with a Shotgun succeeded where so many other films like it have failed specifically because of the sense of invention that permeates throughout even its most gory sequences, of which there are quite a few. Wingard is also remarkable for the sense of imagination that can be felt in each one of his features, and how he gives his films a distinct visual style that most horror films see as frivolous. For these reasons alone, Death Note sounds more enticingly batshit and bloody than ever before.
Netflix will release Death Note sometime in 2017. Look for Steve’s full interview with Wingard and writer Simon Barrett tomorrow.Republican Ralph Norman held off Democrat Archie Parnell in a closer-than-expected race Tuesday to fill the House seat vacated by Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney.
With 99 percent of the precincts in South Carolina's 5th District reporting, Norman led Parnell by 51 percent to 48 percent — a margin of just over 2,900 votes out of more than 86,000 ballots cast.
The South Carolina race garnered far less national attention than Tuesday's other special election — Georgia's 6th District, the most expensive U.S. House contest to date. However, national surrogates found time to stump for both candidates, as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint campaigned with Norman. Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez made the rounds for Parnell, a former Goldman Sachs tax adviser.
As they have in other special election contests across the country this year, Democrats recruited a field of candidates to make a play for the GOP-held seat. But the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee plunked only $275,000 into the South Carolina race, compared with a $5 million investment in the Georgia special election.
Norman, a millionaire real estate developer and state lawmaker, ran a campaign aligning himself with President Donald Trump, who won the district by more than 18 percentage points this past November. He emerged as the top vote-getter from a seven-way GOP primary and defeated state lawmaker Tommy Pope by just more than 200 votes in a runoff.
"Trump is still very popular in our area," Norman said during a recent candidate forum. "His first big decision in putting Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court excited the people we're coming into contact with. He proved his mettle."
The 5th District, which stretches north from Columbia toward the suburbs of Charlotte, N.C., had been in Democratic hands for more than 100 years until Mulvaney defeated longtime incumbent John Spratt in 2010. He'd held the seat until February, when he resigned to join Trump's administration.
David L. O'Neal, a retired Army officer and paratrooper from Tega Cay, backed Norman in the primary and said the Republican earned his general election vote in part because of his stance on veterans' issues.
"As a retired military officer, I feel Ralph is strongest on military issues, wanting a strong defense," O'Neal said Tuesday. "And I know he is 100 percent with the veterans on their issues."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.The brains of most animals that are prone to head banging — these include deer and other antlered mammals, as well as various birds — are relatively small and (unlike a human’s) smooth-surfaced; and they’re bathed in only small amounts of cerebrospinal fluid, leaving little room for the brain to move and be shocked by the sudden decelerations and accelerations of their weaponized heads.
Moreover, both rams and woodpeckers are scrupulous in the precise, single-direction fashion in which they smash their heads into things, whether trees or one another: The aim is such that there’s very little side-to-side torsion exerted on the brain, none of the movement that induces whiplash injury and other kinds of damage.
Gannets have solved a similar problem. These magnificent black-and-white seabirds, with wingspans of as much as six feet, catch fish by spectacular dives into the ocean. Starting from heights of 100 feet or more, they enter the water at 60 miles an hour and hurtle downward far beneath the surface, pursuing their chosen fish underwater, like penguins, using their wings to swim.
It’s an awesome performance — not least because they are so successful as hunters: they are eagle-eyed (if the avian metaphor may be allowed) and they have, unusually for birds, true binocular vision, which helps them lock on target. If lucky, they will consume the fish while still underwater, only eventually bobbing back to the surface to take off, something they do very clumsily, and resume high-altitude patrol.
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However, their fishing success is one thing. Their survival is quite another. To dive into water from 100 feet may not be lethal for a gannet, but it would, or should, get a fearful migraine. Yet that doesn’t seem to happen. Gannets manage to bob to the surface with all their mental faculties intact, their brains entirely unhurt.
And how? Skull modifications, just as with the ram and the woodpecker. In this case, to mitigate the brain-shattering trauma of a 60-mile-an-hour collision with a wall of water, air sacs built into the gannet’s face act as cushion; its extremely long and narrow beak helps the bird enter the water with only a very stealthy kind of impact; and it has no nostrils that would allow water to gush inward and do serious damage to the delicate tissues inside. A gannet’s skull is built like the nose of a Concorde: strong, delicate, unpierced, and able to tilt downward on landing but hold straight ahead when passing at great speed through the water.
Modifications of the skull are many, all produced by evolution to give each animal maximum advantage in adapting to its environment and its lifestyle niche. Some skulls are narrow and delicate — the gazelle’s, say — while others, like that of the lion, are squat and fat and powerful: the owner of one grazes and has the grace to prance away; the owner of the other stays put and waits for chance to bring him the opportunity to crush and to kill.
Invariably the melding of form and function is displayed perfectly in an animal’s skull — so that one can quite easily deduce the manner in which the animal behaves, or the environment in which it lives, by examining, or even by casually glancing at, the skull it leaves behind.
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Compare the massive jaws of a wolf, for instance, with the more modest arrangements of the mouth of a hare; or look at the great ridges along the uppermost part of the skulls of some species — a mountain lion, for example, which has a sail-like arrangement known as a sagittal crest, to which the jaw muscles are anchored to give it even greater crushing power. If you come across an otherwise modest animal with a large sagittal crest — a coati-mundi, for instance — you’d do well to avoid it, or at least to keep it happy: When a coati fights, it bites, and when it bites, the muscles attached to its sagittal crest allow it to come down hard with its canine teeth, the ones that really hurt and do damage. In less threatening territory, the eye orbits on certain skulls can be spectacular — the immense orbits of a tarsier, for example, are often as large as the entire rest of the skull; they provide a classic example of a skull detail that suggests how well or ill an animal can use a certain sense, in this case, its vision.
Similarly, structures called the auditory bullae can show, in bony form, just how well an animal can hear. Springhares and rabbits have very large auditory bullae: it’s said that the chamber enclosed by the bullae resonates perfectly to the whooshing sound of a downward-swooping owl, alerting the rabbit to dive for its burrow and live to enjoy another day.
Until its skull was examined, no one had any idea of how a rabbit was able to do such a thing: the owl flew down, the rabbit vanished — such magic long seemed as mysterious as the butting of rams and the vacant stares that follow.
As always when at a loss, animal behaviorists like to say that the rams carry out their butting for reasons of power, territory or sexual ritual. Their skulls give nothing away, other than being stronger than usual. The rabbit skull, however, is awash with clues as to how this particular animal behaves — which makes it a rather more intellectually satisfying skull to collect, if perhaps not as spectacular to have on display in Mr. Dudley’s upstairs bedroom.Yesterday, Square Enix announced the next entry in the Dragon Quest series of games. It is called Dragon Quest X Mezameshi Itsutsu no Shuzoku and surprised everyone by being a game that requires an online connection to play.
Although not an MMO, DQIX is a game that encourages you to go online, form groups, and explore the world together. It also looks as though that online exploration will come with a monthly charge.
Now there’s another surprise we are finding a little hard to believe. Square Enix isn’t just developing this game for the Wii and Wii U as stated yesterday. Another version is also in the works for the Famicom, otherwise known as the NES in the West.
This long dead 8-bit platform is sure to have a few followers still, but nowhere near enough to warrant a new release. So what’s the deal here? Is this a joke or is Square Enix seriously considering the NES as a worthy platform for a new game in 2012, some 29 years after its original hardware launch?
If this is true, and that has yet to be confirmed officially by Square Enix, it could be a very clever marketing move and additional revenue stream. DQX will have some features that work on the 3DS, but not a full working game. At the same time Nintendo has started releasing NES games through the eShop. Could it be Square Enix plans to release a NES version of DQX in the 3DS eShop?
Fans of the series would certainly jump at the chance to play a Dragon Quest title with 8-bit graphics. You can sign me up right now. If it was priced correctly then there’s potential for it to generate some serious revenue.
The one question that remains is whether Nintendo would allow such a release. The company is emulating and re-releasing old NES games on the 3DS, but would it allow the emulation of a new one?
Read more at AndriasangSomehow no one knows who authorized the secret bank account.
In February, The New York Times reported that agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) established a secret bank fund filled with millions from “a web of shadowy cigarette sales” before it closed in 2013. No one knows for sure how much entered the account because no one tracked it.
New unsealed records revealed to the NYT that the scheme was more than just a few agents. Instead, it grew to “a highly unorthodox merger of an undercover law enforcement operation and a legitimate operation.”
From The New York Times:
For seven years, agents at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives followed an unwritten policy: If you needed to buy something for one of your cases, do not bother asking Washington. Talk to agents in Bristol, Va., who controlled a multimillion-dollar account unrestricted by Congress or the bureaucracy. Need a flashy BMW for an undercover operation? Call Bristol. A vending machine with a hidden camera? Bristol. Travel expenses? Take this credit card. It’s on Bristol.
The agency provided two informants with $6 million. Records show that one ATF agent “steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in real estate, electronics and money to his church and his children’s sports teams, records show.”
The money in this account paid for a $21,000 at a NASCAR race and a trip to Las Vegas.
Backstory
It’s against the law to combine government and private money, but that’s exactly what the ATF did. NYT stated that veteran agent Thomas Lesnak, who specialized in tobacco smuggling, used a government building behind a Burger King in Bristol, VA, which is located “near the intersection of Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee.”
See, states set a tax on tobacco, some of which can be outrageous, which fuels the black market. For some reason, Lesnak decided to “go into business with an existing” real company. NYT explains:
In late 2006, Mr. Lesnak persuaded Jason Carpenter, an established small-time Alabama tobacco distributor, to open a warehouse in Bristol, become an informant and let the A.T.F. operate alongside him. “We basically merged ourselves with a tobacco business,” Mr. Lesnak said last year in a confidential deposition. “The idea was, ‘If you build it, they will come,’” Mr. Carpenter said in a deposition. “And lo and behold,” he said, “they came.” Would-be smugglers appeared, looking to buy untaxed cigarettes. Some offered cash. Others offered to trade stolen property or guns. Mr. Lesnak and Ryan Kaye, one of the agents involved in the operation, worked the floor. “It got to the point where we were, you know, warehouse workers as opposed to criminal investigators,” Mr. Lesnak said.
The ATF hoped this operation would allow Lesnak and Carpenter to capture smugglers. They had no idea what to do with the profits collected by Carpenter, though. So what did they decide? A private account controlled by Carpenter. But no one can remember who authorized this account:
Mr. Kaye testified last year and was asked repeatedly who approved this arrangement and under what authority: “I do not recall exactly who authorized that.” “I wouldn’t call it ‘authorization.’ I would call it an ‘understanding.’” “No authorization was needed.” “I don’t know of a specific law that authorizes those specific activities.” The secret fund became known as a “management account,” and word spread quickly among A.T.F. agents that if you needed something, Mr. Lesnak could get it without red tape. As Mr. Lesnak described it, senior officials in Washington frequently sent agents to him for untraceable license plates, credit cards and more. Automobiles, particularly luxury cars, were hot items. “We had so many vehicles that we actually set up a company just for leasing,” Mr. [Christopher] Small [Carpenter’s business partner] said in a deposition. Agents relied on the management account for routine expenses, and Mr. Small said hotel bills and gas alone could run to $23,000 a month. “We had 14 or 15 agents carrying American Express cards that we paid the bill on,” Mr. Small said.
Small’s and Carpenter’s company Big South Wholesale eventually “became the national warehouse for all of A.T.F.’s smuggling investigations.”
Change of Hands
The records show that the ATF gave Carpenter and Small a part in a case to investigate Paraguayan tobacco magnate Horacio Cates, who owns Tabesca, which is a cigarette producer:
That A.T.F. wanted Tabesa’s tobacco in a “place that they could control,” Mr. Carpenter said. So he said he struck up a relationship with Mr. Cartes, posing as someone who could smuggle cigarettes into foreign countries. The Big South warehouse in Virginia became a major distributor for Palermo cigarettes, a Tabesa brand.
Then Carpenter and Small sold Big South to the farmer-owned cigarette manufacturer U.S. Tobacco Cooperative, but the co-op allowed the two men to stay on the job, “an arrangement that gave them the power to buy and sell on the cooperative’s behalf.” That didn’t work out too well:
U.S. Tobacco now accuses them of using that authority to defraud millions from the company. And documents from this period show Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Small making money in ways that have no obvious connection to A.T.F. investigations. In one such transaction, court records show, U.S. Tobacco sold cigarettes for $3 a carton, then bought back those same cigarettes at nearly $17. Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Small were both buyers and sellers, making nearly $600,000 for the A.T.F. management account. “I smell cash??” Mr. Small wrote in an email. “Ka-Ching!” Mr. Carpenter replied.
That’s where the Paraguay company comes in:
More complicated transactions produced the same result. Court records show that, to keep up the ruse in Paraguay, Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Small bought large amounts of untaxed Palermo cigarettes, then sold them at a markup to their employer. One such sale made $519,000 for the secret A.T.F. account.
Crash in 2013
It all came to an end in 2013 due to the appointment of Stuart Thompson as U.S. Tobacco CFO since he raised questions about the large market size. That’s when Brandon Moore, the warehouse manager, picked up the phone. From The New York Times:
On March 8, 2013, the warehouse manager called Mr. Thompson. “He started telling me that A.T.F. was doing operations in our warehouse,” Mr. Thompson recalled. Company lawyers descended on the warehouse, seizing everything. A tobacco company had just raided the A.T.F. Agents were outraged. They believed the company had no right to search its own warehouse. “I was very, very upset about that,” said William C. Duke, one of the agents involved.
Three years later, the U.S. Cooperative cannot escape the government because now the Treasury Department has started an investigation. All of those sales “should have been taxed.”
The Justice Department
The Justice Department (DOJ), which oversees the ATF, has fought tooth and nail to keep records secret. The NYT began asking questions last summer and wants the courts to make all records public:
Since last summer, The Times has fought to make all the documents public, but the Justice Department has argued successfully in court to keep them secret. Crucial details, however, have been revealed through poor redaction, documents that were filed publicly by mistake and the sheer difficulty of keeping so much a secret for so long.
Big South bookkeeper said she managed the secret account on a QuickBooks file, but hasn’t responded to any correspondence.As I sit here attempting to think of an eloquent way to kick off an article series about the wonderful one off treats and limited time offerings from fast joints and other restaurants bad for the arteries, I realize there is no pretty way to put this. You know why you’re here already. You’re a disgusting individual like myself who has a morbid curiosity with possibly disgusting but possibly delicious food combinations. So what better way to kick off this series of mystifying munchies than the latest offering from Burger King, the Mac N’ Cheetos.
When I was first informed of the Mac N’ Cheetos coming to Burger King a rush of emotions came over me. Excitement and joy combined with fear and visions of what could be. I’m not opposed to trying most anything at least once especially something that sounds like it could be a winning combination so these were a must have as a food fan and luckily for me they are already available in the Phoenix area! So are the Burger King Mac N’ Cheetos frighteningly delicious or just overall frightening?
As I pulled the container from the greasy brown Burger King bag I was delighted to see Burger King has gone all in on the packaging for this bright orange treat. Pleasantly surprising was the smell that quickly permeated the room, these smelled as good as you could hope for and it quickly escalated my excitement to dive in. Upon opening the container we are met with what can only be described as mozzarella sticks with a Cheeto powder coating. It pushed me away yet drew me in at the same time. I was scared but I was ready.
I crunched into the offering and was met with the familiar taste of other Mac N’ Cheese bites, the crunch was nice and the flavor is overall pleasing but the taste of Cheeto is no where to be found. While the consistency matches the perfect crunch with the cheesy chewiness of mac n’ cheese quite well, I can’t help but be overall disappointed in the bland flavor offering. The Cheeto flavor is muted to the point of non-existence compared to the intense burst you will find when eating them from the bag. The mac n’ cheese itself is serviceable at best and barely pushes itself past Kraft’s blue box.
Final Verdict:
As I sit here staring down another three Mac N’ Cheeto’s I can’t help but feel a combination of shame and heartbreak. How did I allow myself to get so excited for something that would ultimately be a disappointment? That may be another article for another day. Burger King Mac N’ Cheetos were a letdown but I would recommend the curious ones to try them at least once as they are a decent mac n’ cheese bite overall, just not one worthy of the Cheeto moniker.
2.5/5As the conversation drifted towards Ohio,
Romney and Ryan shifted their hands into a defensive position
As the conversation drifted towards Ohio,
Romney and Ryan shifted their hands into a defensive position
Do you think the government loans to the American auto industry were mostly a success or mostly a failure? Mostly a success: 62
Mostly a failure: 30
Putting a finer point on the matter, one longtime Ohio GOP strategist called Obama's advantage on the auto bailout "a kick in the balls" for the Romney campaign.
Here's one of the reasons that President Obama is leading Mitt Romney by 10 points in the latest Quinnipiac/New York Times/CBS survey of Ohio: More than twice as many Ohioans think the auto rescue plan was a success than think it was a failure.And while Obama gets credit for saving the auto industry, Mitt Romney's plan was to simply let Detroit go bankrupt. Given that one in eight Ohio jobs are linked to the auto industry, it's not hard to see why the issue plays well for President Obama, a fact lamented by a GOP strategist with this colorful language With all due respect to Mitt Romney's family jewels, if he'd gotten his way, tens if not hundreds of thousands of Ohioans would have gotten far worse than a kick in the balls: They'd have lost the industry upon which they depend for their livelihood. But it is worth remembering that even Republicans realize that good news for America is bad news for Romney.In the future, the sewage and other waste fluids waste from your city could be used to produce hydrogen. A start-up is currently operating refineries using technology that requires far less electricity than more established methods of production.
Florida's MagneGas Corporation has been awarded patents for a method to force liquid through plasma at a high rate of speed and maintain a stable arc. Plasma is gas that is heated to extremely high temperatures and ionized to become electrically conductive. Maintaining a stable arc makes gas production more economical at an average cost of US$24 hour to operate, said MagneGas CFO Luisa Ingargiola.
A low operating cost is significant, because producing hydrogen has typically been inefficient and expensive. MagneGas uses local facilities, so transportation and storage is less of an issue. However, it is not presently focusing on making hydrogen. It is making commercial use of a gas blend that is the result of its process.
The process yields a gas that is the company's namesake, MagneGas. The gas is approximately 65% hydrogen, which can be separated out and sold, Ingargiola said. The company is presently positioning MagneGas as a natural gas alternative and a replacement for acetylene in welding. Acetylene is carcinogenic and produces carbon emissions while it is burnt. It also touts lower greenhouse has emissions than natural gas.
MagneGas already has customers for both uses; the fuel first came to market in 2011 and is produced at small onsite refineries. MagneGas's business plan is to own and operate micro refineries and sell the fuel. It is also generating revenues through equipment sales, and forecasts between 6-8 refineries being in operation with its customers by this time next year. General Motors, the world's second largest automaker, is among them.
GM is its poster child, and is using MagneGas for metal working at a Michigan plant. A converted natural gas fueled Chevy Cavalier also runs on MagneGas. With customers like GM, MagneGas is bullish on its next fiscal year. The metal working industry will be its major target.
MagneGas is a publically listed company, and was founded in 2007 after nearly 25 years of R&D. Equipment finance company Northland Capital has funded its operations. Ingargiola anticipates that MagneGas will break even some time in 2013. "We have virtually no debt and lots of cash," she said.
Its future markets could include the sale of hydrogen, treating municipal waste, and agricultural applications such as sterilizing manure and producing fertilizers as a byproduct of gas creation. It is also exploring converting carbon dioxide into other chemical compounds.
(Image credit: http://www.plasma.inpe.br)
Related on SmartPlanet:
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.comBo Pelini does not throw around comparisons to Ndamukong Suh lightly. So it was notable this week when the Nebraska head coach mentioned his former all-world defensive tackle in the same breath as sophomore defensive end Randy Gregory.
"I’m not throwing him into Suh’s category yet," Pelini said Monday, "but I think he can have that type of impact on our program down the line."
Randy Gregory leads the Big Ten in sacks and tackles for loss. Joe Robbins/Getty Images
While Gregory still has room to grow, he's already having a major impact for the Cornhuskers, who host Michigan State in Saturday's crucial Legends Division showdown.
The 6-foot-6, 255-pounder has been Nebraska's top defensive playmaker and one of the best pass rushers in the Big Ten. He leads the league in sacks (7.5) and tackles for loss (11.5) and turned in his biggest game during last week's 17-13 win at Michigan. Gregory had three sacks, including his chase-down of a scrambling Devin Gardner with a little more than a minute to play.
The obvious question, and one Big Ten schools must be asking themselves, is where did this guy come from?
Gregory was a modest recruit out of high school in Fishers, Ind. ESPN.com ranked him as only the 238th best defensive end in the Class of 2011. He committed to Purdue and had offers from schools like Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Minnesota, but few elite programs came calling on the skinny prospect who never made the summer camp circuit.
"The schools who did offer me saw my athleticism and potential," he said. "But I think everybody else just saw a scrawny, 190-pound kid that could do a few things but needed to hit the weight room a little more."
What they might not have known was Gregory's lifelong connection and passion with the sport.
His father, Kenneth, played linebacker and defensive line for Northwestern in the early 1980s. When Randy was six, his parents drove past a park at night where lights were shining on a pee wee football game. Randy begged his parents to play but found out he was a year too young to sign up. He cried the rest of the night.
Later, he'd star at running back and linebacker. His last two years of high school, Gregory played both defensive tackle and wide receiver. But he neglected his studies and failed to qualify academically.
So Gregory headed off to play junior college football at Arizona Western. From there, his reputation grew quickly.
"Some people might say that he blossomed," Kenneth Gregory said. "I think that the player you see today is really what he always has been. If I had to describe him, it's endless motor and highly disruptive."
Gregory showed that as a freshman at Arizona Western, registering ridiculous numbers: 82 tackles, nine sacks and 21 tackles for loss. He helped lead his team to the junior college national title game.
"We knew he was going to special when he got here." Arizona Western coach Tom Minnick said. "He was coming off blocks, exploding into guy and chasing kids down. He was running kids down from the backside and making plays that make you say, 'This guy's unbelievable.'"
Gregory was so dominant as a freshman that Minnick changed his defense the following winter to a 3-4 so he could move his top pass rusher into a variety of positions. But Gregory broke his ankle in the first game of 2012.
Looking back, Gregory calls the injury "a blessing in disguise." He moved back to his parents' home in Michigan for the spring semester, taking online courses and focusing on adding weight. He put on nearly 35 pounds by eating a diet heavy in salmon, flank steak and yogurt.
"We almost went bankrupt feeding him," Kenneth Gregory joked.
The injury also gave Gregory an extra year of eligibility for four-year schools and a chance to shore up his academics.
"Randy's a very, very smart kid," Minnick said. "He can write an 'A' paper in 40 minutes. But we always said he has to be challenged real quick, to get in four- and five-week classes. He gets bored, I think, with stuff after a while."
Gregory took a longer path to Nebraska, but is now a cornerstone of Bo Pelini's defense. Joe Robbins/Getty Images
He remained committed to Purdue while taking other visits. But Gregory -- who grew up an Ohio State fan and always wanted to play in the Big Ten because of his dad -- was blown away by a trip to Nebraska last October, sitting in the stands when the Cornhuskers beat Michigan. When the Boilermakers fired coach Danny Hope a few weeks later, his decision was sealed.
"I was a really big fan of coach Hope," he said. "When he left, that made it really difficult for me to go there and play for a new coaching staff."
Gregory is still raw in a lot of ways, as you'd expect for someone who's played less than a year at the FBS level. But he makes up for that with his physical gifts and work ethic.
"A lot of people think of me as a real good pass rusher, and I think I am," Gregory said. "But if you sit in our meeting rooms or talk to [defensive line] coach [Rick] Kaczenski, he'll tell you I have a lot of things I need to work on. My instincts are pretty good, but as far as technique and things like that, I need to get a lot better."
He's pretty good right now, and his play is a big reason why Nebraska has turned things around defensively in the past six quarters -- the Huskers have allowed just one touchdown on their opponents' last 25 drives. Minnick compares Gregory to the New York Giants' Jason Pierre-Paul and predicts that "he'll be a top NFL draft pick when it's all said and done." Pelini said Gregory "has a chance to be a force in college football for the next couple years."
Maybe just like another former famous Husker.
"Any time you're mentioned in the same category with Suh, it’s a pretty big deal," Gregory said. "But I don’t want to just settle for that."When a leading Jewish organization complained about "a dangerous trivialization of anti-Semitism," the President of the TV channel responded by saying that the Jewish community had "no sense of humor."
"You show that it is possible to be of the Jewish faith without being completely disgusting." — Standup comedian Sebastian Thoen introducing Elie Semoun on Canal Plus TV.
A few weeks ago, when French Jewish actor Elie Semoun was a prime-time guest on one of the main French television channels, Canal Plus, the words of Sebastian Thoen, a standup comedian who introduced him may have been meant to be to be laudatory, but took quite a different turn: "You never plunged into communitarianism [Jewish activism]... You could have posted yourself in the street selling jeans and diamonds from the back of a minivan, saying 'Israel is always right, f*** Palestine, wallala.' You show that it is possible to be of the Jewish faith without being completely disgusting."
Semoun was obviously ill-at-ease, but did not react. A couple hours after the show, the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) issued a statement denouncing a "dangerous trivialization of anti-Semitism." The President of the TV channel responded by saying that the Jewish community had "no sense of humor." The incident occurred, however, in a context where the French Jewish community has no reason to have a sense of humor.
Comedian Sebastian Thoen delivers his humorous anti-Semitic routine.
At the end of 2012, Jewish France was republished. The book is a tirade of extreme anti-Semitism, originally published in 1886 by the author Edouard Drumont, and reprinted repeatedly until after World War II and the fall of the Vichy regime.
The publishing company sent a press release for the latest book launch: "A classic of French literature is finally available again." When Jewish organizations protested, articles in Le Monde and Le Figaro (the two leading French daily newspapers) said that Jewish organizations had "overreacted." The publishing company that reprinted Jewish France issued or reissued other books at the same time, such as The International Jew by Henry Ford; The Controversy of Zion by Douglas Reed, the first anti-Semitic writer to deny Hitler's extermination of the Jews, and an Anthology of Writings Against Jews, Judaism and Zionism, including excerpts from the most libelous anti-Semitic writings of the last two centuries. These books are now available at all the most popular French bookstores. Thousands of copies of each have been sold. The CEO of the publishing company Kontre Kulture [Counterculture, with a play on words] is a famous French anti-Semitic writer, Alain Soral; his last book, Understanding Empire, purports to explain the "Jewish hold" on the world; it has been on French bestsellers lists for more than two years.
In recent months, an openly anti-Semitic black comedian, Dieudonné, presented a series of shows in the main cities of France and Belgium before large and enthusiastic audiences. One of his greatest hits is a song ridiculing the Holocaust and the "chosen people" : Shoah-Ananas (Holocaust-Pineapple). He popularized a gesture of greeting which he dubbed "quenelle" (a French dumpling), which echoes the Nazi salute. The "quenelle" salute consists of extending the right arm and straightening the hand, but the arm is lowered, and not raised at eye level. "Quenelle" is now used by many young people all over the country when they want to show what they think of Jews and Israel. Recently, pictures of French soldiers stationed outside a Paris synagogue and welcoming visitors with "quenelles" were published on several websites: a military investigation is now under way. The French Minister of Defense said that one should not attach "great importance" to what happened.
At the end of June, a documentary film, Oligarchy and Zionism, was supposed to be released nationwide. The movie poster, with a likeness to editorial cartoons from Nazi magazines at the time of the Third Reich, should have aroused suspicion: it showed a Jew turned into a spider crushing the planet with his crooked legs. The Jew wore a black jacket with the Star of David and the initials of AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] on his shoulders.
The film itself uses all the themes of "classical" anti-Semitism, with a modern twist. It is based on interviews with Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People, and Thierry Meyssan, who wrote 9/11: The Big Lie, a book explaining that the September 11 terrorist attacks were organized by the CIA and Israel's Mossad. The film's director, Beatrice Pignede, had previously made the film Snapping up the Memory, glorifying the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, and she participated in the Fars film festival in Tehran in 2012.
The film was announced in various mainstream magazines as an "important event." It was not released because Jewish organizations threatened to picket movie theaters. It is available, however, on many websites, and has been widely circulated. Beatrice Pignede said she was a "victim of the Jewish lobby" and that the "fate" of her film is "proof" of what she wants to denounce.
To say that the majority of the French population is anti-Semitic would be going too far. Polls show that a favorite public figure this year is popular Jewish singer Jean-Jacques Goldman. But it is clear that anti-Semitism is rapidly gaining ground in France. It is clear there is a real trivialization of anti-Semitism that goes way beyond some ugly sentences uttered by a standup comedian during a prime time TV talk show.
A few years ago, anti-Semitism in France was still hiding behind the mask of "anti-Zionism" and hostility to Israel. It is still true, but more often now, the targets are the Jews themselves, and the mask of "anti-Zionism" has fallen away.
In a recently published book, Demonizing Israel and the Jews, Manfred Gerstenfeld explains that what happens in France is happening all over Europe. "Polls show," he wrote," that well over 100 million Europeans embrace a satanic view of the State of Israel (...) This current widespread...view is obviously a new mutation of the diabolical beliefs about Jews which many held in the Middle Ages, and those more recently promoted by the Nazis and their allies."
Seven decades after Auschwitz, the oldest hatred is slowly regaining its place on the continent, and it is no laughing matter.WICHITA, Kan. (June 5, 2015) – Cessna Aircraft Company, a subsidiary of Textron Aviation Inc., a Textron Inc. (NYSE:TXT) company, today announced that the Citation Latitude business jet has achieved type certification from the U.S |
tr) deep canyon and piers 8 and 9. Image by Grupo Triada / Owner SCT
Una vista del muelle 10 en el lado de Sinaloa.
A view of pier 10 on the Sinaloa side. Image by Grupo Triada / Owner SCT
Image by Peri.dk.
Un limpio pared de roca marca el lugar donde el túnel lateral Durango atravesar la montaña.
A clean rock face marks the spot where the Durango side tunnel will punch through the mountain. Image by Grupo Triada / Owner SCT
Image by Grupo Triada / Owner SCT
Una vista de la construcción temprana antes de que los muelles se había elevado por encima del suelo.
An early construction view before the piers had risen above the ground. Image by Tradeco
Puente Baluarte modelo. Baluarte Bridge model.
Puente Baluarte modelo y Presidente Felipe Calderón.
Baluarte Bridge model and President Felipe Calderón.
Mapa de ruta de la autopista Durango-Mazatlán y el puente sobre el río Baluarte ubicación.
Map of Durango-Mazatlan Highway route and the Baluarte River bridge location.
Imagen topográfico de la carretera Troncal del Diablo original.
Topographic Image of the original Devil's Backbone road.
Imagen de satélite del Baluarte puente.
Satellite image of Baluarte bridge.
Imagen satelital de la ubicación del puente Baluarte antes de la construcción comenzó.
Satellite image of Baluarte bridge location before construction began.
Mapa topográfico de la travesía Baluarte Bridge.
Topographic plan of the Baluarte Bridge crossing.
Mapa de la carretera Durango-Mazatlán que muestra la ubicación de los puentes más altos 7 y 59 de los túneles 61. El Neverías y Río Chico puentes fueron terminados entre 2005 y 2008 y están abiertas al tráfico. El resto de la carretera se abrirá en 2013.
Map of the Durango-Mazatlan highway showing the location of the 7 highest bridges and 59 of the 61 tunnels. The Neverías and Rio Chico bridges were completed between 2005 and 2008 and are open to traffic. The rest of the highway will open in 2013.
The central 44 mile (70 km) stretch of highway will have more than 11 miles (18 kms) of tunnels! The most tunneled U.S. highway - The Pennsylvania Turnpike - has only 4 miles.
Puente Royal Gorge y Puente Baluarte
Puente Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman y Puente Baluarte
Puente Siduhe y Puente BaluarteMy sister and her family came over the other day to watch the Bears game (OK, and to celebrate her birthday). Instead of the usual breakfast-for-lunch menu my wife suggested we make something a little tastier. After spouting menu suggestions like guesses in a game of Pictionary we agreed on a stuffed shells recipe with spinach and ricotta.
Why? Because my sister is a vegetarian who likes lasagna. I thought…I know, but this stuffed shells recipe gives you all the lasagna flavor without the lasagna effort. And if you trust me enough to make ’em I’ll show you what to do.
Before you begin you’re going to need a few things. Get ’em and proceed to the good part.
A Few Things
1 lb fresh spinach
1/2 lb whole milk mozzarella, shredded
1/2 lb whole milk ricotta cheese
1/4 cup sun-dried tomatoes, minced
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 tbsp fresh basil, chopped
Dash of salt and pepper
1 egg, lightly beaten
20 large pasta shells
2 tsp olive oil
2 cups spaghetti sauce
1/2 cup parmesan cheese, grated
The Good Part
Preheat your oven to 375°F. Wash and drain the spinach, and remove the stems. Then cover and cook the spinach until it flattens out (or as the fancy chef’s say “cooks down”). Drain and cool, then squeeze and chop the spinach. WARNING: if your spinach hasn’t cooled down before you start squeezing you will burn your hand.
Mix garlic, basil, spinach, mozzarella, sun-dried tomatoes, ricotta, salt and pepper. When combined stir in the lightly beaten egg and set aside.
Boil pasta shells until they are slightly underdone (about 8 min). Drain and transfer the shells to a bowl, and toss ’em with olive oil.
Spread spaghetti sauce in a baking dish big enough to arrange the shells in a single layer.
Fill each shell with about 1 1/2 tablespoons of the spinach mixture, and arrange the filled shells in your dish filling side up <–duh. Sprinkle each with parmesan cheese.
Cover your dish with aluminum foil and bake for 45 minutes.
I failed to take a photo of the shells straight from the pan (b/c the game was on) so I grabbed a shot the next day before consuming my lunch. My niece said they tasted like little lasagnas. I’d have to agree. She was also able to recognize each ingredient (with the exception of garlic which she mistook for onion). Point is, the ingredients complemented each other. I doubled the recipe and served the shells alongside garlic bread and salad. In the end I had enough for dinner, and a dozen for lunch the next day.
Cooking Deets
Prep time: 45 minutes
Cook time: 45 minutes
Cost: < $10
Difficulty: Easy
Taste: ★★★★☆By Elizabeth Cohen, Senior Medical Correspondent
(CNN) — Despite years of efforts to even out health disparities across the United States, some states are dramatically healthier than others, according to a new report.
Massachusetts, Hawaii, Vermont, Utah and Connecticut rank as the five healthiest states, while West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi rank the least healthy in America’s Health Rankings, according to the report by the United Health Foundation.
The rankings take into account a variety of health factors, such as rates of infectious diseases, obesity, physical inactivity, smoking and infant mortality, as well as air pollution levels and the availability of health care providers.
This is the first time Massachusetts has been named the healthiest state, ending Hawaii’s five-year reign.
The Bay State won the honor in part due to having the lowest percentage of uninsured residents at just 2.7% of the population, plus a low prevalence of obesity and a high number of mental health providers.
Mississippi and Louisiana, ranked 49th and 50th, have major health challenges, according to the report, including a high prevalence of smoking, obesity and children in poverty.
The report, America’s Health Rankings, has been analyzing state health standings for 28 years.
Across the country, health disparities have been noticed not just between states, but even within the same metropolitan area.
For example, neighborhoods just 12 miles apart in the Washington area, have a nine-year difference in life expectancy, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
These “shocking differences in life expectancy” are based on geography, income, education and race, according to the American Public Health Association.
“This is unacceptable. We believe health is a basic human right. It’s a right for all people and all communities,” according to a statement on the association’s website.
Overall, the nation’s health is not improving; in fact, it’s getting worse.
The nation’s premature death rate — the number of years of potential life lost before age 75 — increased for the third straight year. That rate has gone up 3% since 2015, with cardiovascular deaths in particular having gone up 2% in the same time period.
Drug-related deaths have increased 7% in the past year, and even states with high health rankings overall have faced an uphill battle in this area.
According to the new report, three northeastern states that rank toward the top in overall health have experienced large increases in drug deaths. New Hampshire’s rate increased by 118%, Massachusetts’ rate increased by 69%, and Rhode Island’s increased by 56%.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2017 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.Update, May 22: A Lenovo representative just confirmed that the Moto Z2 Play would have a significantly smaller battery compared to the Moto Z Play. The device, expected in the coming weeks, will feature a built-in 3,000 mAh battery, which is 17 percent lower than its predecessor’s.
@AnbhuleAnant Hi Anant. Moto Z2 Play has Non-removable Li-Ion 3000 mAh battery. Auxen_Lenovo — Lenovo (@lenovo) May 20, 2017
Original post, May 5: A couple of weeks ago, a render of what the Moto Z2 Play from Motorola may look like got leaked to the internet. Now a new report claims to have more information on the upcoming mid-range phone, and how it may differ from the original Moto Z Play.
The report comes from VentureBeat and noted gadget leaker Evan “@evleaks” Blass. He claims, based on seeing some unreleased marketing material, that the Moto Z2 Play will only have a 3,000 mAh battery, which will last up to one day and six hours. That’s far smaller than the Moto Z Play’s 3,510 mAh battery pack which could last over two days with a single charge. This difference is apparently due to cutting down the thickness and weight on the Z2 Play.
Blass also claims that the Moto Z2 Play will have Android 7.1.1 Nougat out of the box. It will keep the 5.5-inch 1080p display from the original, and inside there will reportedly be a Qualcomm Snapdragon 626 processor running at 2.2 GHz. It will have 4 GB of RAM, 32 GB of on-board storage, a 12 MP rear-camera with dual auto-focus and a 5 MP front-facing camera. It will be released in Lunar Gray and Fine Gold colors, according to the report.
We should not have long before Motorola, and its parent company Lenovo, officially announce the new members of the Moto Z family of phones. In the meantime, what do you think of the rumors that the Z2 Play will get a big dip in battery life? Let us know in the comments!By By Eileen Kersey Oct 13, 2013 in Business Mao - The small but perfectly formed Balearic Island of Menorca once again offered a chilled-out late summer, early autumn, vacation. Menorca, however, like mainland Spain and other countries of Europe, has financial difficulties. Locals will tell you that work which could help fill the lean days of winter is drying up. Even cleaning jobs will be thin on the ground with too many seasonal workers chasing such jobs. Se Vende, for sale signs, are everywhere. There were always some but more now are tattered having been there for sometime. They adorn broken down homes. It is a buyer's market as house prices drop but buyers are hard to find. Even if you are prepared to cut your losses and sell at any price finding a buyer is not easy. But There is a faint promise of recovery for Spain. It will be fragile and could easily be broken. This week Spain's government sees light at the end of the tunnel with the end to a two-year recession but analysts warn joblessness will continue to weigh down the euro-zone's fourth-largest economy. “The deterioration of the job market has hit bottom,” Budget Minister Cristobal Montoro told public television TVE. “Spain in 2014 will be in condition to grow and create jobs.” Montoro spoke as the government said the number of registered unemployed rose in September by about 25,500 people from the previous month to reach 4.72 million as a summer jobs boom ended. But the government stressed this was the smallest increase in joblessness in the month of September since 2007. The government estimates the Spanish economy emerged this quarter from a double-dip recession brought on by the bursting of a housing bubble in 2008 and will post growth of 0.7 percent next year. Vacations though are a luxury many can ill afford. Fancy buying a property in Spain? If you have the money you can pick up a ramshackle property in Spain, in need of full renovation, for a song or even a half-decent house with a swimming pool for a pittance. Mahon airport was hot and humid with the first rain for two weeks, as we prepared to depart Menorca. Our check-in desk was manned by a worker struggling to keep cool in every sense of the word. The airport was packed with Friday morning tourists either going home or just arriving. Stress for the workers with added heat. Then there was the temperature heat. She managed to a have a laugh with us but woe betide any grumpy or rude travellers. She would have eaten them alive. As she weighed our luggage and queried the allowance we explained we had paid extra for an increased baggage allowance. A Spanish shrug of the shoulders and an "I don't care" statement said it all. As it to illustrate Spain's dire Was she joking? Perhaps not. After all Spain is "Se Vende". On the surface Menorca is open for business, as always. Between the start of May and the end of October each year the island is alive with tourism. Without an influx of visitors, pockets virtually stuffed with Euros, Menorcans would face a tough time. As it is, for many Menorcans each year, as October draws to a close, they face a lean winter.Locals will tell you that work which could help fill the lean days of winter is drying up. Even cleaning jobs will be thin on the ground with too many seasonal workers chasing such jobs.Se Vende, for sale signs, are everywhere. There were always some but more now are tattered having been there for sometime. They adorn broken down homes. It is a buyer's market as house prices drop but buyers are hard to find. Even if you are prepared to cut your losses and sell at any price finding a buyer is not easy.But Menorca is not mainland Spain. The illusion is in tact and wealth is visible. Luxury cruisers line up along the harbour of Mahon, the island's capital, but the rich poor divide is growing.There is a faint promise of recovery for Spain. It will be fragile and could easily be broken. This week The China Post reported Spanish tourism received a welcome boost in 2013. Brits who had taken vacations in Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia, as the currency is not the Euro, opted to visit Spain instead. Middle eastern unrest has hit the tourism industry in those countries but boosted tourism in Spain.Vacations though are a luxury many can ill afford.Fancy buying a property in Spain? If you have the money you can pick up a ramshackle property in Spain, in need of full renovation, for a song or even a half-decent house with a swimming pool for a pittance.Mahon airport was hot and humid with the first rain for two weeks, as we prepared to depart Menorca. Our check-in desk was manned by a worker struggling to keep cool in every sense of the word. The airport was packed with Friday morning tourists either going home or just arriving. Stress for the workers with added heat.Then there was the temperature heat. She managed to a have a laugh with us but woe betide any grumpy or rude travellers. She would have eaten them alive.As she weighed our luggage and queried the allowance we explained we had paid extra for an increased baggage allowance. A Spanish shrug of the shoulders and an "I don't care" statement said it all. As it to illustrate Spain's dire financial straits she pulled out a traditional Spanish hand held fan and waffed herself rapidly......"No electric fan?", we asked. No austerity had put paid to them.Was she joking?Perhaps not. After all Spain is "Se Vende". This opinion article was written by an independent writer. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily intended to reflect those of DigitalJournal.com More about se vende, For sale, Spain, Spain for sale, menorca More news from se vende For sale Spain Spain for sale menorca the Balearics en venta European Crisis Europe tourism in Spain Spanish tourismThor: The Dark World is a vast improvement over Thor. It's deeply engaging and zealously paced, with action set pieces that actually drive the audience to pay attention and care. I often find it too easy to tune out during bloated action sequences, just biding my time until the dialogue and character work starts up again, and that probably says a lot about why I find it hard to care about many superhero movies. I cared about Thor 2. I was invested, occasionally even riveted. There are a lot of reasons that's the case: it's a very funny film that looks cool, it has an original and compelling mythology, the performances are almost entirely great.
And it has interesting female characters with their own agendas. Holy shit, right?
The Bechdel Test is such a weird way to discuss films. The bar is so low for it, you know?
It feels like a ridiculous method for judging movies. It's so reductive...until you take into account how few films pass the Bechdel Test, and then you realize how important it is. The point is this: if a movie passes the Bechdel Test, that hardly makes it some sterling example of female-forward narrative. There are plenty of films that pass this test that should never be held as a paragon of anything.
But the fact that we still have to seek out movies that offer the rare dynamic of two women talking to each other about anything other than a man is crazy. Alison Bechdel wrote the above comic strip in 1985, for chrissakes. Things have scarcely improved, even now that the Bechdel Test has become a common part of the cultural vernacular (and this week four Swedish cinemas actually added a Bechdel rating). We talk about it a lot, but we're still not doing it. I would love for the Bechdel Test to become an obsolete metric for evaluating films, but until more films pass it than not, it still matters.
So while I wish I could say it's no big deal that Thor 2 passes the Bechdel Test, it is a big deal. And while that film and so many others could do a much better job of offering complex female characters with agency and independent motivations, the bar is still so low that all we can do is acknowledge and appreciate the films that at least make the attempt.
I'm really damning this thing with faint praise, aren't I? I don't mean to. Thor: The Dark World certainly tries harder than most tent-poles, particularly big superhero projects. Marvel has always done a better job of this than DC, to be sure, but I think Thor 2 might be their most admirable effort to date on that score. Here we have four interesting women who show complexity and strength and personality. Yes, personality! They're smart and funny, they have presence. They take risks. They're each a memorable part of a movie filled with memorable stuff. None of them is reduced to pretty window dressing.
(slight spoilers below)
Natalie Portman is really great as Jane Foster. She has so much energy and ease in the role, standing surprisingly dynamic next to Hemsworth's Thor. Obviously it's very cool that Foster is a brilliant astrophysicist, but she isn't defined by that one thing. She's wry and quick-thinking and very funny, very human. She comes across as an actual person, and that is rarer than it should be. She's also incredibly brave - not fearless, but courageous. There's a wonderfully touching moment near the end of the film where Jane throws herself over Thor's body to protect him, as if her tiny frame could shelter Thor's acreage of muscles. It doesn't matter that she wouldn't actually be able to protect him - she's just a mortal, and he's a demigod - she's just not about to stand back and do nothing. Foster spends very little time in the film doing nothing. She is a character of purpose and action, and that's important.
Rene Russo's Frigga actually has something to do in this movie! (My husband didn't even remember that she was in the first one.) It's a small but stately role and she inhabits it with grace. While much of her import is assigned to the ways that she inspires Odin and especially Thor and Loki, there is one too-fleeting scene in which we're given a glimpse of Frigga's fire. She protects Jane during a skirmish, showing immediate enterprise and strength as the danger escalates. She tells Jane that she must do what Frigga says, with no questions asked, in order to remain safe, and Jane answers quickly, "Yes ma'am." I loved that moment, that "yes ma'am." Jane recognizes that Frigga is a leader, a powerful woman with Jane's best interests at heart, and Jane - no shrinking violet herself - trusts and defers to her. Later, Thor tells Odin that he hears Frigga behind every decision Odin makes, and while I wish we could have seen more of it, the script certainly allows for all of the ways the matriarch of this powerful family has shaped and guided these ruling men.
I also wish we could have seen more of Jaimie Alexander as Sif. We know that she's a fierce warrior, but in The Dark World we also learn that she's a loyal and brave friend. She goes to great risks to protect Asgard and support Thor in his efforts to do the same. She threatens to kill Loki if he betrays Thor, and we (and he) know she'll do it. She also fights to defend Jane, and the two share a brief moment where they seem to size each other up, and then grant respect to one another.
In fact, I most appreciate the ways that these women interact and support each other. I found Darcy mildly exhausting in Thor, even though I quite like Kat Dennings, but in Thor 2 she's grown into a real character. She's still very funny and dry, but she's also brave and trustworthy. She backs up Jane's play, whatever it is. There's a brief period when Darcy is left to handle the impending Convergence crisis without the help of Jane or Erik (Stellan Skarsgård), and she doesn't hesitate. She has her own story here, a brief one as The Dark World is already packed with action, but one that doesn't feel like an afterthought.
Here's the thing: Thor: The Dark World is still a movie about a man, and the people (including some women) who surround him. If the film does as well at the box office as it's projected to do, no one will say it's because there are valid and provocative female characters - it'll just be one more hot white dude carrying a film. But I'm going to go back and see it again, and I know why I'll be buying that ticket. I suspect I won't be alone, either. All we can do is continue to try and shift the conversation, looking forward to the day that we won't need the Bechdel Test anymore.Many of the 360-degree cameras on the market will only shoot footage on a horizontal plane, which isn't very helpful if a subject sails overhead. Bubl's upcoming, baseball-sized Bublcam should provide a more complete view of the world. The gadget's four cameras are arranged in a tetrahedral layout that captures seamless, spherical images; software for Android, iOS and PCs lets viewers pan anywhere in the shot, much like they would with Google's Street View. It's also relatively internet-savvy thanks to its built-in WiFi, which lets owners both stream to a nearby device and upload their recordings to Dropbox, Google Drive and Younity. Bubl is crowdfunding the project, with pledges starting at $399 CAD ($383 US plus shipping) for those who want a Bublcam to call their own. Should the company reach its $100,000 goal, backers should get their extra-immersive cameras beginning in May. Check out a demo of the playback software after the break.In 'Ascension X: War of Shadows
Stone Blade Entertainment will release the next expansion set for its long-running Ascension deck-building game, Ascension X: War of Shadows, in July.
The theme for the new set is the on-going conflict between Light and Dark forces for control of New Vigil. This conflict plays a direct role on the game, as the balance between the two forces can give players additional powers during Night and Day. A new category of Heroes and Constructs are also introduced: dual-cost cards require players to spend both types of game resources to purchase these powerful cards.
Ascension X: War of Shadows can be played on its own as a 1 to 4 player game. Players can also combine it with other Ascension products to play in games with up to 6 players. This set will include 177 cards, 50 honor tokens, and a game board. MSRP is $39.99.
As an incentive for retailers to support the product, Stone Blade is offering an exclusive promo card, the Chaos Rider, for each copy of the game that a store pre-orders.
Last month, Stone Blade announced that it would once again run Ascension Game Day promotions (see “Stone Blade Relaunches Game Day Program”).
(See five card preview in the gallery below.)Paris St-Germain will not be allowed to bring fans to Lorient on Saturday
French league games this weekend will go ahead, but away fans will not be allowed in for security reasons.
On Friday, 129 people died in attacks across Paris, which included three suicide bombs outside the Stade de France as France were playing Germany.
Many sporting fixtures were postponed at the weekend, but France's friendly with England on Tuesday is going ahead.
French sports minister Patrick Kanner has told BBC Sport that they will definitely host Euro 2016.
Uefa had already announced that the tournament would remain in France next summer, despite the attacks.
Kanner told BBC World Service: "France will host the Euros without any problem. We know that awful events like the ones we experienced a few days ago can lead to concerns but I want to ease those concerns.
"We will be ready, the security will be at the necessary level. Naturally we will adapt the security response to the needs of the time. But really, I say to our European friends, come to France, don't be afraid, you will be safe."
And Kanner also revealed that Ligue 1 and 2 games would be played on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but with no travelling fans attending.
"France is standing and I've asked that all the matches, notably the professional matches which attract big crowds, take place this weekend. Life must resume in our country.
"And here too, our English friends offer a good example. You didn't stop in London after the attacks in 2005 and you were right not to stop.
"We are on the same lines. We are proud of what we are - our values, our freedoms - and nobody will stop France living as it wishes with its way of life and above all its freedoms."By Mark Blumberg, University of Iowa; Alexandre Tiriac, University of Iowa, and Carlos Del Rio-Bermudez, University of Iowa
In recent years scientists have discovered the many ways that the brain is activated during sleep. But we’re also beginning to see ways in which the body is activated during sleep, especially during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and especially when we are young.
Twitching – the thousands of jerky movements that baby mammals, including humans, dogs, cats, and rats, make each day – is one such behaviour. Twitching happens in the arms and legs, fingers and toes, whiskers and tail, and even the eyes (the rapid eye movements that give REM sleep its name). For millennia, humans have thought of twitches as by-products of dreams, an idea encapsulated by the notion that your dog is simply “chasing rabbits” in his sleep. Adults twitch too, of course, but they do so at a much lower rate than do babies.
But what if twitching has a function that goes beyond dreams. In research carried out on infant rats – at ages when they sleep and twitch a lot – we found that the brain processes sensory feedback from twitches and wake movements very differently.
Learning about our limbs
Our work, published in Current Biology, gives new support for the idea that twitching contributes to the process through which we learn about our limbs and how to control them. They may even help us understand if and how twitching affects our sensory and motor systems across the lifespan as our bodies grow, as we gain and lose weight, and as we recover from disease or injury.
Over the last decade, scientists have made great strides in understanding how the brain responds to sensory information flowing back from twitching limbs. Whereas it was once assumed that the brain blocks this sensory feedback, it is now known that the hundreds of thousands of twitches produced each day by a sleeping rat pup trigger similar quantities of brain activity.
Our hypothesis is that twitches are the brain’s way of exploring its body, much like the way sonar is used by submariners: one ping here, one ping there, with the feedback from those pings used to map the outside world. So, too, may twitches help the infant brain to map the body.
Strange phenomenon
All well and good, but we kept confronting a very strange phenomenon that we were unable to explain: whereas twitches reliably triggered a lot of brain activity, similar (or even larger) limb movements while awake didn’t. This seemed paradoxical because we generally associate waking with more brain activity than sleep, not less.
To explain how we resolved this paradox, it is important to understand that all animals, including humans, constantly monitor self-produced movements while awake. In addition to the motor commands that produce limb movements, our brain sends secondary signals that are copies of these motor commands to other parts of the brain so that it can keep track of the information flowing back from the moving limbs.
Simply put, when we produce a limb movement, as when we wave our hand in the air, we expect the sensations that return from the moving limb. In contrast, when someone else moves our hand for us, we don’t expect the resulting sensations. These two kinds of movement – the first self-produced and the second other-produced – feel very different and lie at the heart of what it means to be an autonomous individual.
So, we wondered, what if the sensory feedback from twitching limbs was processed as if no motor copy in the brain was produced? Based on what we know from research with crickets, electric fish and monkeys, we surmised that a lack of the secondary motor copies made by the brain during twitching would allow sensory feedback to activate the brain. And because motor copies would accompany wake movements, we surmised that the system would filter out the sensory feedback from moving limbs.
To really test this idea, we had to devise ways to manipulate the expectations of the rat pups as they moved their limbs. The results were clear: when we tricked the pups into moving their limbs in violation of their expectations, the movements triggered a lot of brain activity – just as we saw with twitches. And when the movements were produced in a way that did not violate the pups’ expectations, very little brain activity resulted – just as we saw with wake movements.
These results help us make sense of how twitches contribute to development. That is, by treating twitches differently from wake movements, the sensations from twitching limbs are not filtered out. Instead, twitches lead directly to brain activity, which is necessary for brain plasticity, that is the brain’s ability to change.
If our findings had turned out differently, it would have been very difficult to believe that twitches played any functional role for the developing brain.
We still have much to learn about the specifics of how twitches contribute to brain development, maintenance, and repair. We also have much to learn about twitching in humans and how it changes across the lifespan. But we do now know that twitches are not simply pale reflections of wake movements. They are something completely different.
The authors do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.When Wendy Murray lived in the Prince's Lodge rotunda on the Bedford Highway in Halifax, she didn't have a whole lot of privacy. But she had access to a beautiful view of Bedford Basin.
She and a group of other local enthusiasts are now calling on the Nova Scotia government to make the circular two-century-old building accessible to the public.
That way, the view can be enjoyed by all.
"Beautiful," said Murray, 68, as she looked out at the water from the back door of the rotunda on a recent day. "It's panoramic, isn't it. Especially when there's boats out sailing."
Wendy Murray was the last person to live at the Prince's Lodge rotunda on the Bedford Highway in Halifax. (CBC)
The rotunda was built by Prince Edward, Duke of Kent when he lived in Halifax in the 1790s.
The land was owned by the lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, Sir John Wentworth, and the idea was to design a decorative building to enhance the duke's English garden.
The three-storey building has curved wooden walls, front and back doors, and it is punctuated by tall windows. Pillars circle the building and hold up the domed roof, which is covered in blue wooden shingles and capped with a golden ball.
Caretaker
Murray worked as the caretaker of the building from 1988 until 2008. Her mother had been the caretaker before her, for 18 years, with only a short break between their tenancies.
Murray said she only moved out when the well stopped working. She was the last person to live there.
Suzanne Rent, contributing editor at Halifax Magazine, started a Facebook group called Save Prince's Lodge Rotunda, after she met Murray and had a chance to tour the interior of the building.
The group, which had 166 members as of Wednesday afternoon, has become a place for people to swap stories and photographs of the historic building.
The Prince's Lodge rotunda was built by Prince Edward, Duke of Kent. (CBC)
Public access proposed
But Rent wants to turn the discussion into action. "There is no other building like this in the country," she said, and we should "make it so people can enjoy it, while it's still here."
She said she wants the province to restore the exterior of the building and build a public access path along the water, from the China Town Restaurant at Birch Cove to the rotunda — a distance of approximately 850 metres.
Murray said she likes that option too, because a pedestrian bridge over the existing CN tracks would be "too dangerous."
She said she is satisfied with the state of the building and that the government has done a good job maintaining it.
Suzanne Rent started a Facebook page called Save Prince's Lodge Rotunda. (CBC)
Province responds
A spokesman for the province, Brian Taylor, said Nova Scotia's Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal spends approximately $10,000 each year for general maintenance on the property, including landscaping and snow removal.
In an email to the CBC, Taylor said Rent's public access plan would be a "costly endeavour" for the province, "and there are no plans at this time of pursuing it."
The wooden pillars surrounding the circular building need to be replaced regularly. (CBC)
Rent acknowledges it would be expensive, and would likely require investment from other levels of government, but "it's a fascinating building," she said, and that's worth celebrating.
"It's the last surviving building of the entire estate of Governor Wentworth," Rent said.
The panoramic view of the Bedford Basin from the rotunda. (CBC)
'Romantic' atmosphere
When she wasn't working to maintain the property or working at her regular job, Murray used to spend her time at the rotunda weaving on a loom, practising her harp, doing Gaelic lessons or Tai Chi on the lawn. She also often gave tours to people interested in seeing the property.
She described the atmosphere as "pretty romantic."
Murray said it was hard to leave. "I think what happens is, you get enthralled, and you hang on with your fingertips."In an interview on CNN on August 24, former Obama advisor David Axelrod discussed Hillary Clinton laughing off the private email server scandal on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
“Well, I don’t know, but I think she should not joke about this. She’s done this a few times. She’s seemed flippant about it,” said Axelrod. “Obviously there are concerns about how she handled these emails, and all these jokes fall flat, and it makes it seem as if she is not taking the issue seriously. And that only exacerbates her problem. So that seemed like a line she was waiting to deliver, and whomever suggested that line did her a disservice.”
Clinton’s line was, “We’ve released 30,000. What’s a few more?”
As with many other issues facing Clinton and her candidacy, she has laughed off the private email server scandal while deflecting and lying when asked about it. She most recently blamed former Secretary of State Colin Powell for her private email server use, a claim which Powell quickly debunked.
Clinton’s smugness and dismissiveness in response to serious issues of corruption exposed throughout her record stem come from the immunity afforded to her by the Democratic establishment. She was, after all, always their candidate.
More Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests pertaining to Clinton’s private email server have yet to be fulfilled. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange recently asserted there will be still more damaging leaks for Clinton prior to the general election, as documents from hacks into the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Clinton campaign, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and New York Times have yet to be released.
Clinton’s disturbingly jovial attitude isn’t a product of her being so close to the Oval Office. Throughout her career, she has laughed in the face of any serious questions about her decisions as a leader.
When asked about the disastrous intervention in Libya preceding an interview with 60 Minutes, Clinton famously—and gleefully—said, “we came, we saw, he died.”
She laughed during an interview in the 1980s while reminiscing about a rapist she defended as a court-appointed attorney in 1975. Clinton helped reduce his sentence, despite strongly suspecting that he was guilty.
In January 2016, when first confronted about whether she would release her transcripts from speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms at a town hall |
even notice bankers turning up in agencies with little role in finance, like the State Department and the U.S. Trade Representative. Though any one appointment may be justified—the Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance should probably have a finance background, for example—the larger mass of Wall Street transplants will create a stubborn level of groupthink. Their skepticism toward policies like a financial transactions tax, aggressive prosecution of financial-market crime, and breaking up the megabanks will ensure they never happen.
In fairness, Clinton’s inner circle isn’t exactly plotting some Wall Street coup. Setting aside what Clinton would actually do as president, she and her aides at least perceive themselves as occupying the liberal ground on most economic and financial issues. “It’s not like the Iraq war, where she was a little bit at odds with party, and more of a hawk,” says one former Clinton aide. “Go back and look at the campaign stuff from ’08. It was pretty progressive—on housing, sovereign wealth funds, derivatives.” The basic governing force here is inertia: Our hypothetical transition is simply the likely outcome given her relationships within the most rarefied slice of society.
Progressives have such an easy time conjuring up this banker-heavy scenario that they’ve given up denying Clinton the nomination—which most consider futile anyway—to focus on the more urgent task of boxing her in as president. According to Adam Green of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, groups like his are planning to spend 2015 badgering candidates about “whether they agree with Warren” when it comes to economic populism. Their plan is, in effect, to deploy the spectral presence of Warren to extract as many concessions as possible.
It’s not a crazy strategy. The mere thought of Warren seems to rattle the Clintons, who are haunted by the debacle of 2008. When Warren’s Senate campaign asked Bill Clinton for help in 2012, he declined to appear in public with her, agreeing only to a photo at a private event that she could distribute. (The former president also recorded a robocall for her and allowed her to send an e-mail to supporters under his name. But the latter was on the condition that she send another e-mail promoting him and the Clinton Foundation after the election.)
Warren herself seems inclined to keep the Clintons on edge. She recently needled Hillary in The Washington Post over her “dead broke” comments and refused to entirely rule out a presidential run. In late April, she wrote an op-ed titled “The Citigroup Clique,” in which she announced her “growing frustration over the concentration of people with ties to the megabank Citigroup in senior government positions.” Though she pegged the piece to the appointment of Stanley Fischer, a prominent economist and former Citigroup executive, as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, it was interpreted on the left as an effort to block Robert Rubin protégés from dominating a future Clinton administration. “We want to know who is Hillary’s team,” says another progressive activist. “There has to be some kind of conversation between the electoral base of the party and the Clinton family over what it is these people stand for, and, more importantly, who is going to work for them.”
There will almost certainly be a conversation—you might even call it a negotiation—and the left will have some leverage. But, in the end, the idea that progressives can dramatically influence Clinton’s economic team is only slightly less of a stretch than believing they can oust her in the primary. Clinton will find a way to appoint most of the people she wants to appoint, and to pursue the agenda she wants to pursue. That, after all, is what many liberals now find so appealing about her. They just shouldn’t be surprised when a candidate who excels at working the system ends up working them, too.Announcing NetBSD 5.1.2
Introduction The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that version 5.1.2 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 5.1.2 is the second critical/security update of the NetBSD 5.1 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons. Please note that all fixes in critical/security updates (i.e., NetBSD 5.0.1, 5.0.2, etc.) are cumulative, so the latest update contains all such fixes since the corresponding minor release. These fixes will also appear in future minor releases (i.e., NetBSD 5.1, 5.2, etc.), together with other less-critical fixes and feature enhancements. Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 5.1.2 are available for download at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, HTTP, AnonCVS, SUP, and other services may be found at http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/. We encourage users who wish to install via ISO images to download via BitTorrent by using the torrent files supplied in the ISO image area. A list of hashes for the NetBSD 5.1.2 distribution has been signed with the well-connected PGP key for the NetBSD Security Officer: http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/security/hashes/NetBSD-5.1.2_hashes.asc NetBSD is free. All of the code is under non-restrictive licenses, and may be used without paying royalties to anyone. Free support services are available via our mailing lists and website. Commercial support is available from a variety of sources. More information on NetBSD is available from our website: http://www.NetBSD.org/
Dedication NetBSD 5.1.2 is dedicated to the memory of Yoshihiro Masuda, who passed away in May 2011. He was a spiritual pillar of the BSD community in Japan. Through an impressive number of books and articles on BSD, he gave courage to BSD developers. We remember his passion and deep love for BSD.
Changes Between 5.1 and 5.1.2 The complete list of changes can be found in the CHANGES-5.1.2 file in the top level directory of the NetBSD 5.1.2 release tree. Note that since 5.1.1 was not announced, the changes below are relative to 5.1, not 5.1.1. An abbreviated list is as follows: Security Advisory Fixes NetBSD-SA2010-012, OpenSSL TLS extension parsing race condition.
NetBSD-SA2011-001, BIND DoS due to improper handling of RRSIG records.
NetBSD-SA2011-002, OpenSSL TLS extension parsing race condition.
NetBSD-SA2011-003, Exhausting kernel memory from user controlled value.
NetBSD-SA2011-004, Kernel stack overflow via nested IPCOMP packet.
NetBSD-SA2011-005, ISC dhclient does not strip shell meta-characters in environment variables passed to scripts.
NetBSD-SA2011-006, BIND DoS via packet with rrtype zero.
NetBSD-SA2011-007, LZW decoding loop on manipulated compressed files.
NetBSD-SA2011-008, OpenPAM privilege escalation.
NetBSD-SA2011-009, BIND resolver DoS. Note: Advisories prior to NetBSD-SA2010-012 do not affect NetBSD 5.1.2. Other Security Fixes Fix a buffer overflow in libtelnet.
OpenSSL: Fix CVE-2010-4180, CVE-2012-0050, CVE-2011-4109, CVE-2011-4109, and CVE-2011-4576.
Postfix: Update to 2.6.9, fixing CVE-2011-0411.
dhcpcd: Fix CVE-2011-0996.
xrdb: Fix CVE-2011-0465.
glob(3): Prevent resource DoS from brace expansion.
OpenSSH: Fix CVE-2012-0814. Kernel wapbl(4): Fix errors that can lead to file system corruption and panics.
Several stability fixes. Networking Clean up setting ECN bit in TOS. PR 44742.
Prevent NFS server hang under load. PR 45093.
gem(4): Fix corrupted packet problem on 100Mb/s half duplex links. Miscellaneous Update and add some TNF ssh keys to /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts.
Update tzdata to 2011n.
Known Problems Using block device nodes (e.g., wd0a) directly for I/O may cause a kernel crash when the file system containing /dev is FFS and is mounted with -o log. Workaround: use raw disk devices (e.g., rwd0a), or remount the file system without -o log. Occasionally, gdb may cause a process that is being debugged to hang when "single stepped". Workaround: kill and restart the affected process. gdb cannot debug running threaded programs correctly. Workaround: generate a core file from the program using gcore(1) and pass the core to gdb, instead of debugging the running program. Statically linked binaries using pthreads are currently broken.
System families supported by NetBSD 5.1.2 The NetBSD 5.1.2 release provides supported binary distributions for the following systems: NetBSD/acorn26 Acorn Archimedes, A-series and R-series systems NetBSD/acorn32 Acorn RiscPC/A7000, VLSI RC7500 NetBSD/algor Algorithmics, Ltd. MIPS evaluation boards NetBSD/alpha Digital/Compaq Alpha (64-bit) NetBSD/amd64 AMD family processors like Opteron, Athlon64, and Intel CPUs with EM64T extension NetBSD/amiga Commodore Amiga and MacroSystem DraCo NetBSD/arc MIPS-based machines following the Advanced RISC Computing spec NetBSD/atari Atari TT030, Falcon, Hades NetBSD/bebox Be Inc's BeBox NetBSD/cats Chalice Technology's CATS and Intel's EBSA-285 evaluation boards NetBSD/cesfic CES FIC8234 VME processor board NetBSD/cobalt Cobalt Networks' MIPS-based Microservers NetBSD/dreamcast Sega Dreamcast game console NetBSD/evbarm Various ARM-based evaluation boards and appliances NetBSD/evbmips Various MIPS-based evaluation boards and appliances NetBSD/evbppc Various PowerPC-based evaluation boards and appliances NetBSD/evbsh3 Various Hitachi Super-H SH3 and SH4-based evaluation boards and appliances NetBSD/ews4800mips NEC's MIPS-based EWS4800 workstation NetBSD/hp300 Hewlett-Packard 9000/300 and 400 series NetBSD/hppa Hewlett-Packard 9000 Series 700 workstations NetBSD/hpcarm StrongARM based Windows CE PDA machines NetBSD/hpcmips MIPS-based Windows CE PDA machines NetBSD/hpcsh Hitachi Super-H based Windows CE PDA machines NetBSD/i386 IBM PCs and PC clones with i486-family processors and up NetBSD/ibmnws IBM Network Station 1000 NetBSD/iyonix Castle Technology's Iyonix ARM based PCs NetBSD/landisk SH4 processor based NAS appliances NetBSD/luna68k OMRON Tateisi Electric's LUNA series NetBSD/mac68k Apple Macintosh with Motorola 68k CPU NetBSD/macppc Apple PowerPC-based Macintosh and clones NetBSD/mipsco MIPS Computer Systems Inc. family of workstations and servers NetBSD/mmeye Brains mmEye multimedia server NetBSD/mvme68k Motorola MVME 68k Single Board Computers NetBSD/mvmeppc Motorola PowerPC VME Single Board Computers NetBSD/netwinder StrongARM based NetWinder machines NetBSD/news68k Sony's 68k-based “ NET WORK STATION ” series NetBSD/newsmips Sony's MIPS-based “ NET WORK STATION ” series NetBSD/next68k NeXT 68k “ black ” hardware NetBSD/ofppc OpenFirmware PowerPC machines NetBSD/pmax Digital MIPS-based DECstations and DECsystems NetBSD/prep PReP (PowerPC Reference Platform) and CHRP machines NetBSD/sandpoint Motorola Sandpoint reference platform NetBSD/sbmips Broadcom SiByte evaluation boards NetBSD/sgimips Silicon Graphics' MIPS-based workstations NetBSD/shark Digital DNARD ( “ shark ” ) NetBSD/sparc Sun SPARC (32-bit) and UltraSPARC (in 32-bit mode) NetBSD/sparc64 Sun UltraSPARC (in native 64-bit mode) NetBSD/sun2 Sun Microsystems Sun 2 machines with Motorola 68010 CPU NetBSD/sun3 Motorola 68020 and 030 based Sun 3 and 3x machines NetBSD/vax Digital VAX NetBSD/x68k Sharp X680x0 series NetBSD/xen The Xen virtual machine monitor NetBSD/zaurus Sharp ARM PDAs Ports available in source form only for this release include the following: NetBSD/amigappc PowerPC-based Amiga boards NetBSD/ia64 Itanium family of processors NetBSD/playstation2 SONY PlayStation2 NetBSD/rs6000 IBM RS/6000 MCA-based PowerPC machines.
Acknowledgments The NetBSD Foundation would like to thank all those who have contributed code, hardware, documentation, funds, colocation for our servers, web pages and other documentation, release engineering, and other resources over the years. More information on the people who make NetBSD happen is available at: http://www.NetBSD.org/people/ We would like to especially thank the University of California at Berkeley and the GNU Project for particularly large subsets of code that we use. We would also like to thank the Internet Systems Consortium Inc., the Network Security Lab at Columbia University's Computer Science Department, and Ludd (Luleå Academic Computer Society) computer society at Luleå University of Technology for current colocation services.
About NetBSD NetBSD is a free, fast, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system. It is available for a wide range of platforms, from large-scale servers and powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices. Its clean design and advanced features make it excellent for use in both production and research environments, and the source code is freely available under a business-friendly license. NetBSD is developed and supported by a large and vivid international community. Many applications are readily available through pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection.
About the NetBSD Foundation The NetBSD Foundation was chartered in 1995, with the task of overseeing core NetBSD project services, promoting the project within industry and the open source community, and holding intellectual property rights on much of the NetBSD code base. Day-to-day operations of the project are handled by volunteers. As a non-profit organization with no commercial backing, The NetBSD Foundation depends on donations from its users, and we would like to ask you to consider making a donation to the NetBSD Foundation in support of continuing production of our fine operating system. Your generous donation would be particularly welcome assistance with ongoing upgrades and maintenance, as well as with operating expenses for The NetBSD Foundation. Donations can be done via PayPal to <paypal@NetBSD.org> and are fully tax-deductible in the US. If you would prefer not to use PayPal, or would like to make other arrangements, please contact <finance-exec@NetBSD.org>.
Back to NetBSD 5.x formal releasesI really loved "Amending Fences", both for its clever and fun use of continuity from the pilot episode, and also for being one of the few Twilight slice-of-life episodes that we've gotten since she's turned into an alicorn. It did a very nice job of bringing Twilight and Spike back to their roots and giving them a friendship issue that was both deeply personal and still very relate-able.
Moondancer was a big part of that... I've seen people drawing parallels between Moondancer and Starlight Glimmer, as both characters have strong reactions to being jilted by an assumed friend in childhood, yet Moondancer's story worked much better for me. It certainly helps that it was the less drastic and more grounded of the two... plenty of people stop putting themselves out there in an effort to avoid being hurt, while relatively few start cults and end up hellbent on time-traveling revenge, so there is that. But I liked the twin components to Moondancer's harsh lesson at her party: It wasn't just that Twilight went off without ever saying goodbye, it was the realization that any connection that Moondancer felt had never really existed at all. In a different kind of story, Moondancer's belief in a non-existing relationship would paint her as a crazy person, a stalker who saw things that weren't there. But the episode keeps a good deal of sympathy and understanding with her instead. It doesn't seem unreasonable that someone with her limited social skills would think she shared a connection with another filly who had her same interests and drive. Unlike Twilight, she needed a friend at that point in her life and thought she had one. To find out that she barely even registered in Twilight's awareness was clearly devastating. It's easy to feel sympathy for her, and it's no surprise that she's been a popular character among the fandom. It was a treat to see her attending Twilight's lecture in the 5th season finale, and I hope that she continues to pop up as the show goes on.PHOENIX — U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Friday he would not vote for the Republican Party’s latest attempt to repeal Obamacare because it was not the result of a bipartisan effort.
“I cannot in good conscience vote for the Graham-Cassidy proposal,” McCain said in a statement. “I believe we could do better working together, Republicans and Democrats, and have not yet really tried.”
The senator also said he objected to the Senate bill because it was not subject to debate, amendments and review by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
“I [could not] support it without knowing how much it will cost, how it will affect insurance premiums, and how many people will be helped or hurt by it,” he said. “Without a full CBO score, which won’t be available by the end of the month, we won’t have reliable answers to any of those questions.”
McCain compared the bill to Obamacare, saying it relied on party lines for passage and would not create a lasting solution.
“Our success could be as short-lived as theirs when the political winds shift, as they regularly do,” he said.
“The issue is too important, and too many lives are at risk, for us to leave the American people guessing from one election to the next whether and how they will acquire health insurance.”
McCain’s decision to not back the bill put him at odds with Gov. Doug Ducey, who supports it.
Two months ago, McCain’s no vote sank another Republican attempt at repealing Obamacare. McCain worked closely with the governor in the days leading up to the vote.
The latest effort to repeal Obamacare was sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), some of McCain’s closest allies in the Senate.
Studies said the bill would hit states that have expanded Medicare, such as Arizona, the hardest. A study from consulting firm Avalere Health estimated the state would receive about $133 billion less in federal funding under the latest health care plan.
The left-leaning Center for American Progress estimated about 511,000 Arizonans would lose health care coverage.
Arizona’s junior senator, Jeff Flake, told “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” earlier this week that he supported the bill. He believed it would be a narrow vote, but thought the bill would pass.
Follow @KTAR923FILE - In this Jan. 13, 2009 file photo, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh talks with guests in the East Room of the White House in Washington. Limbaugh apologized Saturday, March 3, 2012, to a Georgetown University law student he had branded a "slut" and "prostitute" after fellow Republicans as well as Democrats criticized him and several advertisers left his program. The student, Sandra Fluke, had testified to congressional Democrats in support of their national health care policy that would compel her college to offer health plans that cover her birth control. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds, File)
AOL is the eighth advertiser to drop Rush Limbaugh's radio show in reaction to his derogatory comments about a law student.
AOL Inc. said Monday that "one of our core values is that we act with integrity. We have monitored the unfolding events and have determined that Mr. Limbaugh's comments are not in line with our values."
AOL spokeswoman Caroline Campbell said advertising on Limbaugh's show was "not a significant investment for us." She declined to say which products AOL advertised on the show, or whether its ad purchases were recent. AOL is an Internet portal and runs local news websites, the TechCrunch blog, and the Huffington Post.
The other companies to leave have included the flower delivery service ProFlowers, mortgage lender Quicken Loans, and the maker of Sleep Number beds.
Limbaugh called 30-year-old law student Sandra Fluke a "slut" and "prostitute" last week after she testified to congressional Democrats in support of national health care policies that would compel employers and other organizations, including her university, to offer group health insurance that covers birth control for women.
He apologized to Fluke on Saturday after advertisers began leaving the show. On Monday, he joked that he got a busy signal when he called his show because of the advertisers who are abandoning it.
Fluke said Monday that Limbaugh's apology changes nothing and that Americans have to decide whether to support companies that continue to advertise on his program.
Clear Channel's Premiere Radio Networks Inc. hosts Limbaugh's program, one of the country's most popular talk radio shows. The company is supporting Limbaugh, whose on-air contract with Premiere runs through 2016.
"The contraception debate is one that sparks strong emotion and opinions on both sides of the issue," Premiere Networks said in a statement on Sunday. "We respect the right of Mr. Limbaugh, as well as the rights of those who disagree with him, to express those opinions."
Clear Channel Media and Entertainment operates more than 850 radio stations in the U.S., and Premiere says it's the largest radio content provider in the country, syndicating programs to more than 5,000 affiliate stations.
Clear Channel has declined to say how much revenue it stands to lose from advertiser defections. Its parent company was taken private in 2008.
The other advertisers that say they have pulled ads from his show are mattress retailer Sleep Train, software maker Citrix Systems Inc., online data backup service provider Carbonite and online legal document services company LegalZoom.1 of 21 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Redskins get first look at rookies View Photos Washington worked out draft picks and those who were briefly NFL players. Caption Washington worked out draft picks and those who were briefly NFL players. Linebacker Martrell Spaight carries a yoga ball during the Redskins' rookie camp in Ashburn on Saturday. Pete Marovich/For The Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
The Washington Redskins held their rookie minicamp over the weekend, and got their first looks at the players taken in last month’s draft, as well as some other prospects who recently signed.
Meanwhile, the team’s veterans continue their offseason conditioning work, and next week begin the first week of offseason practices.
In today’s mailbag, we discuss how the rookies looked on the field, also take a long, hard look at Robert Griffin III and the offense, and a few other items in between.
Thanks, as always, for taking part in the mailbag. You can send questions for next week’s mailbag to me at mike.jones@washpost.com with the subject line of “Mailbag question.”
Here we go!
Now that you have gotten to see them at the rookie minicamp, who’s your pick as the star of the draft class? Will there be any surprises?
– Jake Beaty
It’s still kind of hard to predict, because until we see them mixed in with the veterans, you can’t get a true feel for where many of the rookies stand as far as talent and development. The majority of the players at the rookie minicamp were there on a tryout basis and will be working 9-to-5 jobs in a couple weeks.
First-round draft pick Brandon Scherff, right, and fourth-rounder Arie Kouandjio work on offensive-line drills at rookie camp. (Luis M. Alvarez/Associated Press)
But, having said that, the players that stood out were the players who should have stood out. Brandon Scherff looked like the best offensive lineman, Preston Smith the best pass rusher, Matt Jones the best running back and Jamison Crowder the best wide receiver. Scherff did a good job of staying in front of pass rushers, and he got his hands on defenders and seemed to move them where he wanted during run blocking. He even pancaked a couple. Smith’s size and length, and the mobility he displayed, were impressive. He wasn’t as fluid in pass coverage as you would probably like, but there’s room for improvement. Jones is a big boy as well. He hits the holes well, and seemed to have good vision. And Crowder looked like a precise and crafty route-runner with great hands and acceleration.
I’m very intrigued by what kind of a showing those four produce against the veterans. You expect that Scherff, as the fifth overall pick, should be able to hold his own. And you would hope that Smith, as a high second-rounder, can as well.
Jones and Crowder could surprise. As Jay Gruden has said repeatedly, Alfred Morris remains the featured back. But Jones will definitely see the field. He impressed as a pass catcher, and given his size and physicality, he also might excel in pass protection. Washington hasn’t really had a back who is great at picking up the blitz since Clinton Portis. Crowder will likely overtake Andre Roberts as the top return man, and you never now, he just might take some snaps away from the veteran at slot receiver as well.
Towards the end of last season, in his last three starts, RGIII looked more poised in his passing, i.e. going through his reads, field scanning, etc. With McCloughan now here, how far does RGIII’s leash extend? We saw Gruden didn’t extend his leash too far, but with a new sheriff in town, will he be allowed to grow and develop more, or more specifically, make and learn from his mistakes? Also, if I could sneak in another question: How do you foresee the offensive line working out in two years, given good health and little turnover?
– Jey Willis
Griffin had some success in those final three games because Gruden in the final three games shifted the game plan to go with more of what he did best. That included moving the pocket more by going with more roll-out passes and things like that, instead of just a heavy dose of straight drop-back passes. The play-action attack with some zone read and bootlegs play to Griffin’s strengths, but in this league, you have to be able to do it all.
McCloughan’s arrival doesn’t really mean the leash gets any longer for Griffin, however. Yes, he believes that the quarterback needs more time, and that everything around him needs improvement. But McCloughan also knows that Griffin has to show improvement as well. If anything, the decision to pick up the option on Griffin’s contract (meaning the team retains his rights through 2016) only shortens the leash. Remember, that option is only fully guaranteed for injury. And so, if he got hurt and was at risk of not being able to pass a physical at the start of the league year, Washington would be on the hook for that full salary (around $16 million). So, Griffin has to produce quickly this season. If he’s playing poorly, taking too many sacks and putting himself at risk of serious injury while losses mount, McCloughan, Gruden & Co. will likely pull the plug.
Bill Callahan, center, coaches Washington’s three offensive-line draft picks. (Pete Marovich/For The Washington Post)
As far as the offensive line, it’s a little early to predict. The team would obviously like to re-sign Trent Williams and have him and Brandon Scherff as their bookends for years to come. But there’s uncertainty over the guard position. You’ve got Chris Chester and Shawn Lauvao as the incumbents, and Spencer Long and Arie Kouandjio both hoping to challenge for starting jobs. And, oh yeah, Josh LeRibeus remains on the roster. But where all those guys fit into the mix remains to be seen. Kouandjio worked at right guard this past weekend, and Long spent all of last year backing up Chester at right guard. Could either Long or Kouandjio contend at left guard?
Ideally, both would overtake the veterans, Williams gets his extension, Scherff pans out as a tackle, and Kory Lichtensteiger remains solid at center. But we need some more time before the clarity comes.
The reports a few years ago were that RG3 didn’t want to run any more read option, etc. … that he wanted to be a drop back passer. Now it seems that he is eager to get into the offense this year because they will tailor it to his strengths (i.e. read option, bootlegs, roll-outs). This just doesn’t make any sense.
– Allen Norris
I think Griffin is eager to get to work regardless of the type of offense the team is running. He knows this is his last shot. He knows he has to master this playbook and all of the things Jay Gruden asks his quarterbacks to do.
Griffin hasn’t said anything in regards to wanting his coaches to go back to the 2012 offense. You’re right, that he and his father lobbied for him to become more of a pocket passer. But I think the idea of avoiding a third major knee injury (which could prove career ending) was driving that, and perhaps Griffin underestimated the complexity of being a pure pocket passer.
It doesn’t mean he can’t do it. But 2013 involved him trying to do so while also working his way back from injury, and 2014 also involved another injury, and learning a new coach’s language. Tons of obstacles involved.
Quarterback Robert Griffin III takes off running in he final game of 2014, but expect that to remain a rare occurrence. (Jonathan Newton / The Washington Post)
What does 2015 have in store? Gruden last week squashed rumors that the team was going back to the 2012 offense. Sure, some of those zone-read elements will remain, but they did last year as well. You will not see a lot of the zone read, at least not to the level of 2012. The offense will likely closely resemble last year’s attack, but with some tweaks. Gruden and his assistants just have to figure out a way to capitalize on Griffin’s strengths while Griffin works to do a better job of executing. If both sides can do that, then success is possible.
There’s all this talk about what the offense will look like. DeSean Jackson said they were going back to 2012. Gruden said they’re not. RGIII said he expects improvement, but did he say what he expects it to look like, or what he wants? Two years ago he didn’t want to run the option, and then last year, it seemed like that was the only thing he did well but he got hurt and then struggled until he got his job back and they put some of that back in. So, my question is, what really is RGIII’s dream offense?
– James Morgan
Are you and Allen Norris buddies? You guys are thinking along similar lines!
You’re right, that Griffin hasn’t weighed in on the offense for 2015. When reporters asked him last week about potential changes, he avoided answering the question. Based on his body of work, however, I imagine that if Griffin were scheming up his own offense for 2015, and fully confident in his body now that he’s healthy for a second straight offseason, it would probably look something like this: The Redskins would spread the defense out, and get the ball to receivers in space. That would also help create more running lanes. There’d be some zone read plays where Griffin would pick his spots and use his running ability to move the ball and to keep pass-rushers off-balance and prevent them from being able to pin back their ears and blitz frequently. There also would be a heavy dose of Alfred Morris to keep the defense honest, and to set up the play-action attack, where Griffin would go over the top and connect with his receivers for big gains.
Think of that Thanksgiving game at Dallas in 2012. Good balance of the run and pass, not a lot of zone read, but just enough. But having said that, Jay Gruden has a different philosophy, and so, Griffin has to get better at getting the ball out quickly; three-step drop and throw, five-step drop and throw. Anticipation is key. If he can do that, the offense will start clicking, and then his legs will only become a necessary weapon when things break down, or on a few designed runs.
Overall, I feel extremely happy about this offseason. It seems we have fixed our right tackle position with Scherff, beefed up our defensive line (Terrence Knighton and Stephen Paea), possibly found a third-down back in Matt Jones, and Jamison Crowder seems promising in the slot and an intriguing return guy. The only area that truly concerns me is the safety position. I personally believe we have too many options that could turn from cornerbacks into excellent safeties. Breeland, Hall, and especially Amerson all seem like good candidates to me. I know you haven’t been permitted to see any practices thus far; but in your opinion do you see any of the three making the switch this year? I would love to see any of the three shoring up our free safety position.
– Rob Fox, Lincolnton, N.C.
Safety definitely represented a pressing need at the start of the offseason. But remember, they signed strong safety Jeron Johnson, and then traded for Dashon Goldson. Those are your potential starting safeties, and Phillip Thomas, Akeem Davis, Duke Ihenacho and Trenton Robinson remain in the mix behind them, as does sixth-round pick Kyshoen Jarrett. So, at least for the immediate future, things appear to have been improved. There’s not as much of a need to try to move Hall or Breeland. (Amerson didn’t receive much consideration from coaches. Remember his struggles when asked to play deep and cover a third of the field?) And, you don’t want to move Breeland, a promising young cover corner, and create another hole. Right now, I’d expect Chris Culliver and Breeland to be your starting cornerbacks. Once Hall is fully recovered from his Achilles’ tendon surgery rehabilitation, he’ll be in the mix as well.
Maybe you can explain why any team did not take a chance on drafting La’El Collins in the seventh round. A seventh-round pick does not have a great chance to make the roster. Collins was projected to go in the first round. So even if he eventually became a suspect and had to be suspended or cut, the loss of that seventh-round pick would not have had a major negative impact on the team. But the upside if Collins is cleared of all suspicions and allegations, would be a real steal in the seventh round. You get a first round pick at the salary of a seventh round pick for four years. Definitely worth the risk. Seems like a no brainer to me. So why wouldn’t any team take that chance?
– Randy Mihalchik
Offensive lineman La’el Collins, during the NFL combine. (Julio Cortez/Associated Press)
Scot McCloughan and Washington’s other decision makers didn’t feel like it was worth the risk. McCloughan didn’t want to sign any players that could potentially cause the franchise any embarrassment or distraction. And also, remember, his agents put up a strong front saying, take him in the second or third rounds, or don’t draft him at all. They claimed that had a team drafted Collins later, he wouldn’t have played and would have re-entered the draft in 2016.
Now, was that a bluff? Possibly. But the Redskins had already decided, they “weren’t going to go down that road,” a person familiar with the situation said.
Collins became a free agent after the draft, but Washington didn’t pursue him because his agent made it clear that they only planned to sign with a team that had a stable quarterback situation. As this excerpt from a story on Collins in Sports Illustrated’s Monday Morning Quarterback explains, they “felt it would be important for a place that had stability at QB, coach, offensive line coach. Not for one year, but the next few years. We wanted a QB that spits the ball out quickly, because we all see QBs who hold on to the ball, take sacks, and then you go blame the young blocker.”
Collins and Kirk Cousins have the same agent, and so he knows the Redskins’ quarterback situation extremely well. And so, the Redskins wouldn’t have ever had a chance.
E-mail a Redskins question to mike.jones@washpost.com, with the subject “Mailbag question,” and it might be answered Tuesday in the Mailbag.
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More NFL: Home page | Sports Bog | Early Lead | Fancy Stats
Follow: @MikeJonesWaPo | @lizclarketweet | @InsiderLanguage is perhaps the single defining factor differentiating the human species from the rest of the animal world. As social beings, we are able to communicate on a massively intimate, precise level thanks to the development of language. As our human cultures evolve, our languages do as well. New words are made official additions to languages every day in regard to things like technology, medicine and pop culture. The growth of vocabulary is only natural in order for us to remain social and to be able to communicate about the modern world. While language has evolved in many ways to reflect new ways of thinking, there are still many changes to be made. However, one country is making a literary change to reflect modern views of gender.
As many official languages do, the Swedish language is adding thousands of new words to its official dictionary, allowing the language to be more accurate in the modern world. One of these new words is a gender-neutral pronoun. This new word will allow someone to be referred to while maintaining gender neutrality. This can be helpful when dealing with circumstances where gender differences may influence opinions or where one does not fit into the traditional gender dichotomy. Gendered pronouns can have profound effects on the way ideas or messages are interpreted, and can lead to stereotyping and personal de |
wouldn't change its position in light of the outcry at the Crown's decision.
The government has asked that the federal inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women look into the allegations of abuse in Val-d'Or.
"The situation in Val-d'Or is exactly the type of situation that the national inquiry will look at," the federal commission of inquiry said in a statement Friday night.
"Policing is a crucial government service that certainly falls under the inquiry's mandate."
The union representing Quebec's provincial police, for its part, encouraged the Quebec government to continue to resist calls to hold a public inquiry of its own.
"We dare to hope that the government won't cede yet again to pressure and won't go so far as to establish a commission of inquiry, or another committee to review the Crown's decision," the Association des policières et policiers provinciaux du Québec said in a news release.
The union also called out Radio-Canada for its reporting on the Val-d'Or scandal. It was a Radio-Canada investigative team that first aired the allegations of police mistreatment in October 2015.
The union referred to the reporting and the ensuing controversy as a "witch hunt." A group of 40 provincial police officers are suing Radio-Canada, claiming the Enquête documentary was biased and defamatory.Shortly before the election in November a story did the rounds that claimed Hillary Clinton and her former campaign manager, John Podesta, ran a child sex ring at a pizzeria in Washington DC. This was an extremely complex conspiracy theory that was based on the fact that Podesta had emailed the owner of the pizzeria regarding fundraising. And it gained a shocking amount of attention on the internet.
Think about that. Millions of people were willing to share this, and numerous other fake news stories and conspiracy theories online. In fact, one of the things that defined this election was the prevalence of such conspiracy theories. Presumably only a minority of people (one hopes) fell for stories as extreme as that above, but their presence in the discourse suggests that something larger has happened. The theories may be a symptom of something else, a change in the way that people think, and it seems that Donald Trump and the Brexiteers have tapped that change to great effect.
What’s going on? Conspiracy theories are undeniably popular. The YouTube channel of Alex Jones, who believes in chemtrails and that 9/11 was an inside job, has had more than a trillion video views (that’s TRILLION, with a T). These are not small numbers of people, and before you scoff and write these people off as crazies, take a minute to think about your own beliefs. Many of you on the left of the political spectrum may suspect that media sources and political parties are pawns of rich capitalists and corporations, whereas those on the right may believe that academics and liberal elites control these very same institutions.
Of course, that is not to say that some of these conspiracies aren’t actually real. From Watergate, to suppression of evidence that smoking causes cancer, to the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, history is littered with examples of real life conspiracies. Indeed generally conspiracy theories have something believable at their core, which is part of their power. Some media outlets are indeed controlled by right-wing business people, and others by left leaning business people. However, when people dismiss everything produced by a large swathe of the media, whose politics they don’t agree with, is when things get worrying.
While beliefs like this about control of the media are nowhere near as extreme as the example I mentioned at the start of the article, they do indicate a specific style of thought (conspiracy thinking) that has become more and more prevalent over the last decade, ultimately contributing to Trump’s victory in November. To be clear, it is not that people all suddenly believe in conspiracies, but they do begin to see some of the same patterns that, in an extreme context, lead to that.
This change in thinking has had immense effects in the last year. I will focus here on the most obvious example of this style of thought: the “that’s what they want you to think” response. A typical hallmark of conspiracy style thinking is that evidence is dismissed as part of the conspiracy. When Trump or his supporters were confronted with evidence or examples of wrongdoing, the first and biggest reaction was to blame “the liberal media”. The actual content of the criticism is ignored or not believed, and the focus is placed on the outlet providing the criticism rather than the criticism itself. It is worth pointing out that this is not something that is unique to Trump and his supporters, and seems to be happening across the spectrum. During the democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders supporters constantly criticised “the mainstream media”, preferring news from blogs and other resources.
It is an extraordinarily effective response, casting doubt on all criticism. Regardless of what outlet it was, Trump’s reaction was the same. Throughout the primaries, Trump threatened to boycott the right wing outlet Fox News, saying their coverage was biased (until they swung around behind him, that is). After Megan Kelly, a Fox News anchor and debate moderator, clashed with him, he repeatedly claimed she was biased and had treated him unfairly. At no point did he respond to the content of the criticism, he instead he focused on casting doubt on her character.
This narrative of a media conspiracy continued during the election, and was repeatedly deployed during the campaign. It successfully reinforced people’s mistrust in these outlets, and when combined with the echo chamber effect of social media, and the proliferation of false news, almost entirely delegitimised the press for a large portion of the electorate.
This distrust extended to specialists of other sorts, driven by a systematic undermining of expertise in topics like climate change. In the brexit campaign we saw the outright dismissal of “experts”, which played to the same narrative. It is clear that this style of thinking and argument has now become mainstream, and presents a huge problem.
In a way it is natural that this happened. We seem to be hard-wired to be attracted to conspiracy theories. It might be that in our past it was a good rule of thumb to see planning and malice rather than circumstance and coincidence. It may also be a coping mechanism of sorts.
Psychologists have studied this type of thinking in the past. It tends to become more prevalent when people feel like they have less control over their lives, which has happened to a large portion of the American electorate as a result of economic and security uncertainties. Wage stagnation, the rise of ISIS, the undermining of knowledge and experts, and to a certain extent the revolution in the moral framework of the country (including LGBTQ rights and the role of men in society), have led to a population that feels that it has lost a certain amount of power over their own lives. This has driven people towards a more conspiratorial style of thinking. However, it is something that should be guarded against, and the recent election is a prime example of the dangers of thinking in this way.
So what can be done? That is a difficult question to answer, and all we can do is guess. Trust is key; if people don’t trust the establishment and power structures, that mistrust will undermine anything that is associated with it, including legitimate enterprise and expertise. However, how you regain the trust of a population that simply doesn’t believe anything you say is anyone’s guess. The next few years will bring much introspection in this regard. Debunking the idea of a single, coordinated “mainstream media” is a good place to start, so somehow emphasising the independence of outlets may be worth doing.
The constant barrage of bad news we consume certainly doesn’t help either. People feel besieged and forget that the world is actually getting better. Extreme poverty, child labour, infant mortality and violent crime are all lower than they have ever been, while education, global literacy rates and female participation in public life are all on the increase. Balance between good and bad news may help ease the sense of anxiety we have. Personally I like to think that some old-fashioned good news may help counter the idea that the world is going to shit, but then, I’m an optimist.
Another tack is often taken when arguing with conspiracy theorists, and is described succinctly in the video below by Trevor Noah. The idea is that while correcting Trump with fact is obviously still important, if his supporters won’t listen to the facts it is futile. Instead you get him to elaborate, and try to get him to expose the absurdity of his claim himself. Easier said than done, but it is worth a try.
Obviously conspiracy style thinking is just one of a multitude of reasons that the political landscape around the world has been changing. Becoming aware of it can only be a step in the right direction.Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey has confirmed controversial talks took place with a top leader of the Palestinian Islamic movement, Hamas.
It comes after Israel strongly criticised a reported meeting in Geneva two weeks ago between diplomats and Mahmoud al-Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas and leader in the Gaza Strip.
"Hamas is an important political actor and must not be left out in discussions over a solution to the Middle East conflict," Calmy-Rey told public radio on Wednesday.
She said Switzerland, unlike the European Union, did not consider Hamas a "terrorist organisation", but condemned any terrorist activities.
Calmy-Rey gave no details of the meetings, but the Israeli ambassador to Switzerland has been invited to the foreign ministry on Thursday.
The Israeli embassy demanded an explanation as to why Switzerland gave the Palestinian delegation, apparently on a tour of several European countries, an entry visa.
"By officially receiving a Hamas delegation, Switzerland is not in line with those who advocate moderation," an embassy statement said.
It added that a large part of the international community shunned Hamas because it was at war with Israel, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority.
Relations between Switzerland and Israel have been strained in recent months after Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz received Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in April at an anti-racism conference in Geneva.
Shortly after that meeting Israel temporarily recalled its ambassador, Ilan Elgar, for consultation and to express the Jewish state's displeasure over the meeting.
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SWI swissinfo.ch on Instagram SWI swissinfo.ch on Instagram— The police have opened a new station at perhaps the most bustling crossroads in the state’s largest city. The new “community policing” mini-precinct at the corner of Broad and Market streets will not only lower crime, but improve quality of life along the corridor, officials said. Today city officials unveiled the new precinct, touting how open doors to the public - and even counselors available at the station - will improve communication and make the area safer. “We work together to better the area and bring crime down,” said Capt. Felipe Gonzalez, the commander of the city police’s metro division. The mini-precinct, which has been in operation since September, has already pushed crime down 17 percent in the metro area, said Samuel DeMaio, the city’s police director. The precinct will allow better coverage of the Ironbound section of the city’s East Ward, and also in the downtown area surrounding the Market and Broad intersection, he added. The mini-precinct is the third to be built in the city over the last year. One was opened on Bergen Street in the South Ward last fall, and another on South Orange Avenue in the West Ward earlier this year, DeMaio said. The visibility of police in the target areas will help with deterrence, response times, and outreach, the police director said. “It really is community policing as it’s supposed to be,” DeMaio said. The city has a homeless population in the area – and their quality of life and safety is one of the concerns, added Anthony McMillan, the chief executive officer of the Newark Downtown District. “There’s a huge social component to this,” he said. “This is a genius of an idea,” added Mayor Cory Booker. Some $175,000 was used to refurbish the formerly-empty Market Street storefront – money which was left over from a $10 million bond for a streetscape project in 2006, said McMillan.
RELATED COVERAGE
•By Barbara Mintzes and Joel Lexchin
A handsome man struts over to the office water cooler with a smirk on his face. When his colleagues ask about his weekend, he replies enthusiastically, with the audio muted. A large blue pill appears with the tagline, "Viagra, Ask Your Doctor." Vibrant, energetic older people are shown swimming, bowling and having a good time. With a twinkle in their eye, they suggest the viewer "ask your doctor" about Celebrex.
These are'made-in-Canada' television commercials for prescription medicines. Although advertising of prescription medicines to the public is generally banned in Canada on public health grounds, shifts in administrative policy have allowed two types of ads since late 2000: "reminder" ads that mention a brand name, but make no health claims; and "help-seeking" ads that mention a condition, but do not state a brand or company name.
In a new study, published this month in the International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine, we examine how these ads are regulated in practice, through a review of a set of complaints over a 10-year period, from 2000 to 2011, and Health Canada's response to these complaints. The results show a consistent lack of effective action to protect public health.
We have identified six main weaknesses in how Health Canada regulates this advertising -- four related to the content of the ads, and two related to how regulation is carried out.
First, Health Canada fails to prevent advertising for "off-label" or unapproved uses. When a medicine is approved for marketing, the company provides evidence to show that it is effective and safe enough for specific approved uses. Companies are not allowed to promote their drugs for unapproved uses, as there is no guarantee of safety or effectiveness.
The drug Xenical (orlistat) is approved for obese patients or very overweight patients with heart disease risks. However, when Hoffman-LaRoche ran the "I am Julie" ad campaign, with a slim woman pictured in a bikini and the tag line, "What would you do with a few pounds less?" Health Canada did nothing to stop this off-label advertising campaign and imposed no fines or sanctions. When Abbott ran ads for its testosterone product, Androgel, with symptoms that included "low sex drive" and "falling asleep after dinner," again Health Canada did nothing to stop the campaign. Testosterone is approved to treat hypogonadism, not getting older.
Letting companies use fear of death to sell a product should not be allowed. But when Pfizer advertised its cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor (atorvastatin) with a toe-tagged corpse, Health Canada did nothing to stop the campaign or levy sanctions. The image and headline suggested treatment prevents death in women without heart disease -- an unsubstantiated claim.
When Safeway Pharmacy offered 100 Air Miles for patients getting a shingles vaccine, Health Canada did nothing because it said this was an issue of the practice of pharmacy, although this is a financial inducement.
Health Canada also failed to act when products with serious safety concerns were heavily advertised, including ads for drugs subjected to repeated safety warnings and boxed warnings of life-threatening harm. Health Canada warned doctors to prescribe Celebrex with caution, at the lowest possible dose and duration, because of risks of heart disease and gastrointestinal bleeding, yet turned a blind eye to television ads with exaggerated promises of effectiveness and no hint of harm.
Complaint letters repeatedly raised concerns about harm. Health Canada's reply was that the ads were legal citing technicalities such as lack of mention of a brand or company name.
When Health Canada did judge ads to be illegal, the agency failed to take effective action. In the case of the acne drug Diane-35, testimony in a court case indicated that the agency repeatedly judged advertising to be illegal, yet did nothing to stop the ads beyond negotiating with the company. There were no fines, sanctions or attempts to prosecute despite Health Canada's claim that prosecution is the next step if compliance cannot be achieved.
This series of complaints and Health Canada's responses is admittedly incomplete. We amassed all the examples we could find. Health Canada does not keep any publicly available list of advertising complaints, list of its decisions and enforcement actions.
What should happen? The administrative policies allowing'reminder' and 'help-seeking' ads should be reversed. These loopholes are inconsistent with protection of public health. They were a "compromise too far" in the face of industry pressure to allow advertising of prescription medicines, introduced without public or parliamentary debate. Second, regulation should be adequately resourced, open and transparent, with fines, other sanctions, and prosecution if needed, to prevent repeat violations.
Prescription medicines can lead to important health benefits and to serious harm. They are too important to allow misinformation that promotes unsafe and ineffective use. Canadians deserve better health protection.
Barbara Mintzes teaches in the School of Population and Public Health at UBC and works with the research group the Therapeutics Initiative.
Joel Lexchin is an advisor with EvidenceNetwork.ca, teaches health policy at York University and works in the emergency department at the University Health Network.Who knew that Archie Comics would end up on the cutting edge of the comics world? Afterlife With Archie has been one of the most incredible horror comics in the last decades, completely redefining the Archie universe and challenging what the company can do. With only having published eight issues in total, this comic uses the regular Riverdale characters to pilot a zombie-themed horror story that avoids campy cliches and instead gives us rich characters that keep us coming back. What has also marked these comics is the moody art from Francesco Francavilla, and the gallery of variant covers for each issue helps to define this.
Below is the complete list of the variant covers for each issue of Afterlife With Archie. Afterlife With Archie Magazine, which is just a larger format of the same issues, will be placed along side the correct number. At the end there will be a gallery for the promos and special releases that do not correlate to specific issue numbers. You will notice on the first issue we include three versions of the same variant cover, which are specific to certain retailers. There are actually quite a few more of these variant covers, but we just included three of them.
Afterlife With Archie #1
Afterlife With Archie #2
Afterlife with Archie #3
Afterlife with Archie #4
Afterlife With Archie #5
Afterlife with Archie #6
Afterlife with Archie #7
Afterlife With Archie #8
Tradepaperback, Previews, Special Releases
AdvertisementsDiageo uses ‘dirty tricks’ to veto BrewDog award win.
Global drinks giant has deliberately abused its position as the principle sponsor for the BII Scotland annual awards to strip selected winners, BrewDog of the title, ‘Bar Operator of the Year 2012’.
Expecting to receive first prize, BrewDog employees attended the awards on Sunday May 6 th and were seated with the judges
and were seated with the judges When the announcement was made and they realised they had not won, one of the judges was mortified, saying; ‘this simply cannot be, the independent judging panel voted for BrewDog as clear winners of the award’
Events took a further twist when the people were given the award refused to accept it, as it clearly had ‘BrewDog’ engraved on the trophy as winners.
BrewDog plans to use its significant online influence to urge craft beer fans to make their views clear to Diageo, asking its thousands of followers to tweet Diageo’s profiles their messages of complaint using the hashtag #andthewinnerisnot.
REPLY FROM DIAGEO:
A Diageo spokesman: “There was a serious misjudgement by Diageo staff at the awards dinner on Sunday evening in relation to the Bar Operator of the Year Award, which does not reflect in anyway Diageo’s corporate values and behaviour. “We would like to apologise unreservedly to BrewDog and to the British Institute of Innkeeping for this error of judgement and we will be contacting both organisations imminently to express our regret for this unfortunate incident.”
Quotations
James Watt, cofounder at BrewDog commented:
“Diageo’s actions are shameless, misguided and embarrassing. This is clear evidence of the dirty tricks used by global corporations to derail young competitors they fear. We are often criticised for suggesting big businesses do not play fair in this industry, yet this is another clear indication that some organisations feel they are big enough to be kingmakers, controllers of everyone else’s fate. As a sponsor, Diageo had no right to interfere with the independent judging process, but they abused their position to make a small and stupid statement like this one.”
He added:
“Two days after the award, I took a phone call from Kenny Mitchell, Chairman of the BII and Award Committee. He told me directly; “We are all ashamed and embarrassed about what happened. The awards have to be an independent process and BrewDog were the clear winner. Diageo, the main sponsor, approached us at the start of the meal and said under no circumstances could the award be given to BrewDog. They said if this happened they would pull their sponsorship from all future BII events and their representatives would not present any of the awards on the evening. We were as gobsmacked as you by Diageo’s behaviour. We made the wrong decision under extreme pressure. We were blackmailed and bullied by Diageo. We should have stuck to our guns and gave the award to BrewDog.’
James Watt continued:
“I guess Diageo were hoping that the BII would not disclose their actions. We have never been afraid of these bullying tactics and we will continue to bring them to light whenever we encounter them. It will take more than changing the name on an award to stop the craft beer revolution.”
James Watt continued:
“Diageo will have to deal with their own stupidity and hopefully the media will take them to task. Once you cut through the glam veneer of pseudo corporate responsibility this incident shows them to be a band of dishonest hammerheads and dumb ass corporate freaks.
Perhaps more tellingly it is an unwitting microcosm for just how the beer industry is changing and just how scared and jealous the gimp-like establishment are of the craft beer revolutionaries.
They are a big company running scared of an industry that is changing. They are a laughable embarrassment.”
Download the full press release and high resolution images below.How we test 200k lines Ember application in <10 minutes. Again!
Mario Kostelac Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 15, 2017
Shipping as a heartbeat
The ability to ship the new version of your application fast has many advantages. Building a new feature is enjoyable — you can split it in more pieces and make sure each works and scales properly. When you’re refactoring, you can refactor a really small piece and test it out. Oops, you made a mistake?! No problem — you can apply a fix and ship it fast. Putting your code into production frequently changes how you work. Every mistake has a shorter (and smaller) impact so fear of mistakes become smaller. The easier it is to fix a mistake, the more eager developers are to change the app. It’s very simple — like drawing with a pen versus a pencil and an eraser! Which one is more suitable for learning how to draw?
Shipping Intercom frontend app in ~40 minutes
The process we’ve established in Intercom looks like PR -> quick review -> test -> merge into master -> test -> deploy! Since it’s cheaper to write tests instead of clicking around the app after every single change, our app is getting more and more tests over time. More tests, longer test time. Longer test time, longer time from my computer to customers. In fact, test phase executes twice, once on feature branch and once on master branch to make sure master is healthy after the merge. That means that every new test increases the time to production by 2 x test_duration. At some point our tests were running for 15 minutes. When we double that, we get 30 minutes waiting time just for testing. On top of that, we have to allow for a few more minutes to create a build, compress assets, minify javascript and whatnot and it’s now taking 40 minutes for our change to hit the production! That’s really slow! If I make a mistake, I have to rollback instead of rolling forward and be really sure I get the fix right.
Test phase breakdown
I am working on our front-end app quite rarely so I know that codebase far less than the backend service, which means I make more mistakes there. Cost of every mistake I make is far higher (time-wise) and I was really annoyed by that. I took the ignorant attitude of “I am going to make that faster” and started digging into our test setup. It’s very common:
Prepare software dependencies (yarn, npm, bower, …)
Check out the code
Build the app
Run tests
I started timing different phases and figured out most phases are heavily cached and take less than a minute, but building the app took 4 minutes! 4 minutes?! When I change a file locally, I can see the change in a matter of few seconds. Why can’t I have the same build time in test environment?
Broccoli cache to the rescue!
Since I had no idea how ember builds work, I started digging into it (1). Turned out the component behind the ember incremental builds is Broccoli.js. It does some magic (it’s not actually magic, it’s a little bit of CS and software engineering) to rebuild just change files and files depending on them, which is usually a file or two and takes far less than four minutes. It also turned out there is environment variable BROCCOLI_PERSISTENT_FILTER_CACHE_ROOT defining where that cache is. Tada! Make sure that directory is shared between your builds so they can be incremental, as experienced in development environment. Many CIs support some sort of caching between builds.
For example, our CircleCI config looks like:
machine:
...
environment:
BROCCOLI_PERSISTENT_FILTER_CACHE_ROOT: "/home/ubuntu/embercom/persisted-cache"
...
dependencies:
cache_directories:
- "/home/ubuntu/embercom/persisted-cache"
Fortunately, CircleCI caches per-branch so cache can’t be used just when dependencies upgrade. In all other cases, it reduces our test time by three and a half minutes — seven minutes in total! Definitely not a bad result for a new guy investing 1 day of his time!
Further improvements
Our infrastructure team started playing with BuildKite (we’re loving it so far!) and has built Docker images in a way that only requires a rebuild of very few layers for a new commit. Very often just copying new files, which saves 2 more minutes on average. I believe they will write a blog post about that soon so stay tuned (I will keep you updated ;)).
Since BuildKite does not offer out of the box cache like CircleCI, we have to implement it ourselves. We use very simple implementation with S3. You can check out buildite-s3-cache (disclaimer: this is not what Intercom uses in production). Example usage:
export BUCKET_PATH="<bucket_name>/<path>"
source set_unique_cache_dir.sh
./download_cache.sh
./run_my_tests.sh ${CACHE_DIR}
./upload_cache.sh
and get all benefits of cached builds!
Have some other suggestions on improving ember tests runtime?! Tell me!
(1) Actually, “digging” started by me and Gavin Joyce drinking in our company bar.Florida nickelback Marcus Maye will miss the next week with a hamstring strain, coach Will Muschamp announced Monday. After spending most of the spring as the starting strong safety, Maye entered fall camp as the starting nickelback. His move to nickel allowed Brian Poole to play on the outside, where he has helped shore up a young group competing for the starting job opposite Vernon Hargreaves III.
"Marcus Maye has a hamstring, I probably won’t get him back until Monday," Muschamp said. "It was a pretty good strain there."
Maye hasn't quite locked up his own starting job at nickelback, either. While he has gotten most of the starting snaps there in fall camp, Muschamp wasn't particularly pleased with his play at the end of last week.
"The nickel right now, Marcus would probably have the advantage I would say," Muschamp said Friday. "But [Thursday] he was really poor in there. He had some opportunities end-of-game situations. We had about four or five one-minute drives to win the game and he had some opportunities to make some plays and didn’t. So we’ve got to continue to coach those guys up and play well."DJI is introducing new features to the DJI AeroScope remote identification system that functions as an “electronic license plate” for drones. The new features allow drone pilots to voluntarily identify their flight operations to authorities while still protecting their privacy.
AeroScope is a system that remotely identifies and tracks airborne drones, allowing law enforcement and aviation safety officials to respond to safety and security concerns about drones. DJI drones locally broadcast their location, speed, heading and serial numbers to AeroScope receivers used by authorities at sensitive locations or in response to complaints. However, they do not broadcast personally identifiable information.
Starting this week, updates to the DJI GO 4 app and DJI drone firmware will allow pilots to choose whether or not to broadcast additional information about their flight operations, if they believe it will be helpful to ease any concerns about their flights. Professional pilots and pilots who fly near sensitive locations may choose to do this routinely.
The DJI GO 4 app now features a “remote identification” menu in the main controller settings. This menu gives pilots the option to broadcast their “UUID,” a unique user identification code tied to each pilot’s DJI GO account, and “Identification & Flight Information,” if a pilot chooses to enter information into them. The default setting for both options is to not broadcast them, and these settings can be changed at any time.
AeroScope addresses the needs of authorities who know that most drone flights are harmless, but who are concerned and must be vigilant about tracking risky or illegal drone activity near airport runways, prisons and other sensitive locations. AeroScope also provides authorities with a tool to respond to complaints about individual drone usage and to investigate further.
DJI developed AeroScope to balance the legitimate needs of authorities against the privacy rights of drone pilots. AeroScope uses the existing communications link between a drone and its remote controller to broadcast identification information up to 5 km such as a registration or serial number, as well as basic telemetry, including location, altitude, speed and direction. Police, security agencies, aviation authorities and other authorized parties can use an AeroScope receiver to monitor, analyze and act on that information.
Because AeroScope relies on drones directly broadcasting their information to local receivers, not on transmitting data to an internet-based service, it ensures most drone flights will not be automatically recorded in government databases, protecting the privacy interests of people and businesses that use drones. This approach also avoids substantial costs and complexities that would be involved in creating such databases and connecting drones to network systems.
DJI is working to expand the broadcast protocol for other drone manufacturers.
Governments around the world have expressed interest in requiring mandatory tracking and identification of drones. DJI has led the drone industry in arguing against proposals to require all drone flights to be tracked and recorded in government databases, many of which would require drones to be modified with special equipment that would add weight to drones, drain battery life and impose costs on drone pilots.John Wall hasn’t rested much this season. (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
In a memo sent to all 30 teams Monday, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said the practice of resting star players has “become an extremely significant issue for our league” and will be discussed at the April 6 Board of Governors meeting in New York. The memo came after the Warriors and Cavaliers rested most of their starters in consecutive Saturday night games on ABC.
Wizards owner Ted Leonsis has one idea for solving the problem.
“I responded immediately to Adam and said just put the Washington Wizards on national television and I’ll make sure our players show up,” Leonsis told CNBC’s Scott Wapner during a Tuesday appearance on the “Fast Money Halftime Report.” “I think it’s an honor to play on national TV.”
[NBA commissioner Adam Silver calls trend of resting stars ‘an extremely significant issue’]
Joking aside, Leonsis, who was in New York for the Sports Business Summit, certainly understands Silver’s concern. He was chairman of the committee that helped negotiate the NBA’s nine-year, media-rights extension with ESPN and Turner in 2014 worth $24 billion.
“I was chairman of the media committee for the NBA and the networks paid a lot of money for the programming and they want to drive ratings and they deserve to have our best product out there and the best players, and so I empathize and support where our commissioner took a stand here,” Leonsis said.
In his memo, Silver said a team’s decision to rest players “can affect fans and business partners, impact our reputation, and damage the perception of our game.” He also reminded owners that league rules require teams to “provide notice to the league office, their opponent, and the media immediately upon a determination that a player will not participate in a game due to rest.” Wapner asked Leonsis whether the NBA should institute a new rule to prevent teams from resting star players.
[Adam Schefter is coming to D.C. for a ‘professional vacation’: Wizards sideline reporting]
“It’s a slippery slope if you put a rule out, because if a player is hurt or a player is banged up, he should be able to sit out,” Leonsis said. “You have all sorts of issues around the CBA and what’s in the best interest of the player. But I do think when you sit out three players, arbitrarily in the main game or the game of the week, that’s probably inappropriate.”
The Wizards, who had one of the worst benches in the NBA for the first half of the season and are 2 1/2 games behind Boston for the No. 2 spot in the Eastern Conference, haven’t had the luxury of resting their star players this season. John Wall has appeared in 68 of 70 games and averaged nearly 37 minutes per game. Teammate Bradley Beal has played in 66 games and averaged nearly 35 minutes per game. Neither player, especially Wall, would need Leonsis’s urging to suit up for a nationally televised game.(BPT) - The Clean Water Act was established 40 years ago with the goal of protecting waterways and ensuring homes and offices receive clean drinking water.
As the legislation marks its 40th anniversary, water officials and water consumers alike are looking back on the accomplishments and planning for new ways to continue water quality improvements.
“The Clean Water Act touches every source of water and establishes a goal for protecting our waterways and systems in the cities and communities where we live and work,” says Mike Musgrave, director of program development for MWH Global, a water-focused engineering consulting firm that has helped organizations and municipalities meet demands of the Clean Water Act.
While the effects of the Clean Water Act are far-reaching, do you realize its impact on your day-to-day water usage? Whether trolling your favorite fishing spot, taking a dip in your local swimming hole or enjoying a glass of tap water, the Environmental Protection Agency and cities around the country are working together to ensure the safest possible standards are applied to water sources.
Here are a few facts:
More than half of the nation’s waterways now meet the standards set forth in the Clean Water Act, despite the population doubling and increasing pressure on the systems. All states are required to establish water quality standards and pollution limits for all water sources in their jurisdiction.
Companies across the country are required to change their pollution habits to preserve the natural aqua-environments in their areas. As a result, those pristine environments will be sustained and kept clean for many more generations to enjoy.
The Clean Water Act resulted in many aging sewers and pipelines across the country getting a facelift. This means more efficient, sustainable water infrastructure around the country. More projects to upgrade aging infrastructure are also planned or underway today.
“Working with cities to implement the Clean Water Act water quality standards will continue to positively impact our nation’s water from origination to treatment to delivery,” Musgrave says. “Every person deserves clean water, and we hope the next 40 years will bring even more improvements to protect our country’s most irreplaceable resource.”Keahu Kahuanui is once again finding himself in the company of werewolves — with a few vampires and hybrids added in for good measure.
The Teen Wolf alum will recur in the upcoming fourth season of The Originals as Josh’s new boyfriend Eddie, TVLine has learned exclusively. Despite being very much aware of the supernatural world around him, Eddie — described as “sweet, funny, sexy and charming, with an encyclopedic knowledge of random facts” — has no desire to be anything other than human. We’ll meet him in the second episode of the season.
Kahuanui joins a growing list of intriguing Season 4 additions, one which includes Christina Moses (Containment) as a fierce werewolf named Keelin and Neil Jackson (Sleepy Hollow) as a mysterious vampire named Alistair.
The Originals‘ fourth season kicks off midseason on The CW.
Your thoughts on Kahuanui’s casting? Drop ’em in a comment below.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Police at the scene of the investigation in Fort Myers
Two people have been killed and up to 16 injured in a shooting at a nightclub in the city of Fort Myers in Florida, police say.
The attack happened at Club Blu, which was hosting a party for teenagers.
Police have arrested three people but said the incident was "not an act of terror".
The two killed were identified as 18-year-old Ste'fan Strawder, a leading local high school basketball player and 14-year-old Sean Archilles.
Jean Archilles, Sean's father, said his son loved football and basketball. "He liked to make people laugh. He's a funny kid. He's always joking."
The victims of the attack were between 12 and 27 years old. A hospital spokeswoman said four people remained in hospital with serious injuries. Police are still investigating the motive behind the attack.
'Dodging bullets'
Shots were fired outside in the club's car park where witnesses described the scene to reporters as a "mad house".
Syreeta Gary, whose daughter was at the club, told the local Fox 4 news channel: "I just thank God that my daughter is OK because she could have been shot," adding that, at one point, her daughter was "dodging bullets and running dropping between cars".
"It's ridiculous that these kids have to go through this, they can't enjoy themselves because you have other people there who have criminalistic minds - they just want to terrorise things. I'm just glad she's OK."
Florida Governor Rick Scott released a statement saying: "I have cancelled my events today to meet with law enforcement and local officials in Fort Myers.
"While we are still learning the details about what happened this |
Texas Institute for Geophysics, tells State Impact that a fluid treatment plant may be the best option.
“If disposal is causing earthquakes you can find a different way of dispose of it. You can dispose of the stuff in a different well, or you can even take it to a fluid treatment plant.”
With Oklahoma recording one of its largest earthquake to date, it seems that the Oklahoma Corporation Commission is preparing to enact some of these suggestions by shutting down wastewater wells located near the most recent quake’s epicenter.
What do you think about the OCC’s response to the massive Oklahoma earthquake? Should the state adopt policies to ensure that wastewater disposal wells are not located near any of the state’s fault lines? Should wastewater disposal be illegal in seismic prone areas? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
[Image by Shutterstock]Manama: Kuwaiti lawmakers have proposed mandatory drug tests for students, employees and military personnel in Kuwait.
The proposal has been submitted by Faisal Al Kindari, Khalid Abdullah, Saud Al Shuwair, Salah Khorsheed and Eisa Al Kindari, according to Kuwaiti daily Al Rai.
“All students in high schools, vocational institutes and universities must undergo the drug test at the end of the academic year,” they said.
“They should not be allowed to continue their studies or register for any courses without the certificate endorsed by a Ministry of Health laboratory.”
Students with high GPAs will be exempt from taking the test.
The lawmakers warned that drug usage in Kuwait could soon turn into an epidemic. There are currently 7,500 people being treated in rehabilitation centres, but lawmakers say they expect the number to increase ten-fold if the problem isn’t addressed.
“All citizens or residents applying for private or public sector jobs and those getting financial aid from the Ministry of Social Affairs should also undergo the test.
“Individuals found guilty of participating in riots or acts of vandalism during rallies must also be subjected to the test before they are referred to the public prosecution.”
They also recommended that drug tests be made available to parents who have suspicions that their children may be using drugs.Conor McGregor’s coach John Kavanagh would "absolute support" the idea of putting "The Notorious" in the Octagon against welterweight champion Robbie Lawler after UFC 196, but welterweight contender Demian Maia is against the idea.
Maia, 7-2 as a welterweight in the UFC, told Ariel Helwani on Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour that he hopes to be the next in line if he's victorious against Matt Brown on May 14 in Brazil. He knows how he would react with the news if McGregor jumped the line to face "Ruthless" if he beats Rafael dos Anjos next.
"Sad, you know, because that’s crazy," Maia said. "We are athletes, and we work very hard in our way to the title. I understand that this fight would make a lot of money, but as an athlete, I don’t agree with that. I can’t disagree more.
"If you think okay, you gotta work, do a couple fights at least to prove that you can fight because it’s a different division. But, at the end of the day, I don’t think he will win against Rafael."
Maia recognizes the featherweight champion’s talent, especially after his 13-second knockout win over Jose Aldo in December, but expects dos Anjos to be too much for him on March 5.
"It’s too much weight difference," he said. "I think it’s a different body type. Rafael is very tough, he proved that in his last fights. I’m sure (Conor) has his chance, of course. He proved that against Aldo.
"Most people that understand the sport didn’t think he was going to win, and he did in a fashion way. It was crazy. I was shocked. I went to the corridor to watch the fight, just relax, and when the things happened I was shocked. I was really, ‘what the f---’."
At the end of the day, Maia hopes McGregor stays at 155 or 145 pounds for his next fight.
"Yeah, I will," said Maia when asked if he would be pissed if McGregor gets a shot at the welterweight title.
"I hope he doesn’t win (against dos Anjos)," he laughed.
Coming off impressive wins over Gunnar Nelson and Neil Magny, the last two of his four-fight winning streak, Maia left a message to UFC president Dana White:
"Give me that title shot if I win," said the Brazilian. "If I win that fight I wanna fight for the title. Forget about McGregor."The Battle of Maida on 4 July 1806 was a battle between the British expeditionary force and a First French Empire division outside the town of Maida in Calabria, Italy during the Napoleonic Wars. John Stuart led 5,200 British troops to victory over about 5,400 French soldiers under Jean Reynier, inflicting significant losses while incurring relatively few casualties. Maida is located in the toe of Italy, about 30 kilometres (19 mi) west of Catanzaro.
In early 1806, the French invaded and overran the Kingdom of Naples, forcing King Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies and his government to flee to Sicily. The Calabrians revolted against their new conquerors and Stuart's expeditionary force tried to exploit the unrest by raiding the coast. While ashore, the British encountered Reynier's division and the two sides engaged in battle. The 19th-century historians presented the action as a typical fight between French columns and British lines. This view of the battle has been called into doubt by at least one modern historian who argued that the French deployed into lines. Nobody questions the result which was a one-sided British tactical victory.
After the battle, Stuart captured some isolated garrisons in Calabria and was transported back to Sicily by the Royal Navy. Two weeks after the battle, the city of Gaeta fell to the French after a long siege. While Stuart succeeded in preventing a French invasion of Sicily and sustained the revolt in Calabria, he missed an opportunity to assist the defenders of Gaeta.
Background [ edit ]
Following the decision by King Ferdinand to side with the Third Coalition against Napoleon I of France, French forces had invaded the Kingdom of Naples in the spring of 1806, after the British and Russian forces supposedly defending the kingdom evacuated Italy altogether: the British to Sicily and the Russians to Corfu. The Neapolitan-Sicilian army was crushed at the Battle of Campo Tenese, forcing Ferdinand to flee to Sicily and concede the Neapolitan crown to the French. Napoleon then installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Neapolitan throne.
By July 1806, the French had crushed all Neapolitan resistance except for the uprising in Calabria and a garrison at Gaeta. There, André Masséna's force become embroiled in a lengthy siege. The British, rather than supporting the defenders or relieving the siege, decided to organise an expedition into Calabria to further the insurrection against the French, and prevent any potential invasion of Sicily.
Battle [ edit ]
Map of the Battle of Maida showing the British march to the battlefield.
A British force of over 5,000 men commanded by Major-General John Stuart sailed from Messina on 27 June, landing in the Gulf of Sant'Eufemia three days later. At the same time a French force under the command of General Jean Reynier, the only French force in Calabria, moved to confront them. The exact size of the French force is unknown.[1] Contemporary French sources range between 5050 and 5450.[1] Some later historians have suggested a force as large as 6400 but the most recent estimates are closer to 5400.[1]
On the morning of 4 July, Reynier broke camp and advanced toward level terrain along the shallow Lomato River. Believing his army superior in numbers, Stuart marched toward the same location nearly parallel to the French column. As both forces deployed from march column, they ended up in echelon formation. On the French side, the left flank was leading, while on the British side the right flank was leading. On the French left, General of Brigade Louis Fursy Henri Compère was echeloned forward, with the 1st Light Infantry Regiment on the left and the 42nd Line Infantry Regiment to its right. The center, commanded by General of Brigade Luigi Gaspare Peyri, included two battalions of Poles and the 4th battalion of the 1st Swiss Regiment. On the right flank, General of Brigade Antoine Digonet trailed the other two formations. Digonet's command comprised the 23rd Light Infantry and 9th Chasseurs à Cheval Regiments and the field guns. Opposing the French was Colonel James Kempt's Advanced Guard on the British right flank, echeloned forward. To Kempt's left rear was Colonel Wroth Palmer Acland's 2nd Brigade. Well to Acland's left rear marched Colonel John Oswald's 3rd Brigade, which formed the center. Colonel Lowry Cole's 1st Brigade deployed on the left flank with the artillery. Cole was closer to the French than Oswald. Off conducting diversionary actions was the 20th Foot, which would be late.[2]
Sir James Kempt
Only when the armies were nearly in contact did Stuart realize that he was outnumbered, but he allowed the battle to commence without changing any orders. Kempt detached the Royal Corsican Rangers and Sicilians as skirmishers. These got into a brawl with Compère's voltigeurs (light companies) and fell back. Kempt sent the flankers of the 35th Foot and the light company of the 20th Foot to help. Once the British troops halted the French skirmishers, they rejoined Kempt. At this time, Compère launched the 1st Light at Kempt, while the 42nd Line aimed to strike Acland. Since it had a head start, 1st Light's attack columns met Kempt's troops first. At 150 yards, the Advanced Guard fired its first volley but the 1st Light continued to advance. Kempt's second volley was fired at a range of 80 yards, wounding Compère, who nevertheless urged his men on. Though disordered by their losses, the French closed to 20 yards, where they absorbed a third volley. This fire completely broke up the 1st Light and its soldiers turned and fled. Compère, who literally rode into the British line, and others were captured in the brief melée that followed.[3]
The 1st Light starts to break (drawing from an English book)
As the 1st Light's attack collapsed, Kempt's men charged their shaken enemies. As the French formation disintegrated, the Advanced Guard went out of control, chasing the fleeing French as far as Maida. Meanwhile, the 42nd advanced on Acland in two battalion columns. The British fired at a range of 300 yards and blazed away until the French attack ground to a halt. Aware that their neighboring regiment was fleeing from the battlefield, the 42nd also decamped.[3] Seeing his left wing in rout, Reynier sent Peyri's brigade to face Acland. After a brisk action, the Poles were routed at bayonet point. The Swiss, however, maintained order and gave a good account of themselves. After Stuart sent reinforcements into the fight, the Swiss battalion fell back to join Digonet's brigade. Acland and Cole now advanced on Digonet and the Swiss. The 9th Chasseurs charged, forcing the British battalions to form square. Oswald's brigade appeared on the scene, but Digonet still held his ground, supported by the cavalry and the guns. Finally, the 20th Foot arrived from the coast and began firing at the exposed right flank of the 23rd Light. At this, Digonet and the Swiss began an orderly retreat and the battle was over.[4]
Stuart's 5,196-man force suffered 45 killed and 282 wounded for a total of 327 casualties. Out of a total of 6,440 soldiers, Reynier lost 490 killed and 870 wounded. In addition, the British captured 722 French soldiers and four cannon.[5] Another authority asserts that the French saved their guns. The 1st Light Infantry lost 50% of its strength between killed, wounded, and prisoners.[4] The action involving the 1st Light Infantry lasted only fifteen minutes.[6]
Aftermath [ edit ]
Admiral Sidney Smith
Stuart ordered Kempt's Advanced Guard to observe Reynier's withdrawal while he and Sidney Smith discussed future actions. On 6 July, they decided to move south and pick off Reynier's garrisons.[4] That day, a half-battalion of the Polish-Italian Legion in the town of Vibo Valentia (Monteleone di Calabria) surrendered to Stuart.[7] On 7 July, three more companies of Poles laid down their arms in Tropea when summoned by Captain Edward Fellowes in the frigate HMS Apollo.[8] Reggio Calabria surrendered on 9 July to Brigadier General Broderick with 1,200 British and Neapolitan troops. The allies were transported from Sicily in the frigate HMS Amphion under Captain William Hoste. On this occasion, 632 soldiers from the 1st Light and 42nd Line Infantry Regiments were captured.[9]
Jean Reynier
Marching south, Stuart reached Reggio on 23 July. Before returning to Sicily, he and Smith mopped up all of Reynier's garrisons in southern Calabria.[10] On 24 July, the fortress of Scilla and 281 soldiers of the 23rd Light Infantry surrendered to Oswald. The British had one battalion each of the 10th Foot, 21st Foot, and Chasseurs Britanniques. The 3rd battalion of the Polish-Italian Legion, 500 strong, surrendered to Captain Hoste in the Amphion and the 78th Foot at Crotone on 28 July.[9] Stuart received the Order of the Bath and an annuity of £1,000 a year from the British crown, and the title Count of Maida from King Ferdinand, for the victory.[6]
The allies suffered a major setback on 18 July when the long Siege of Gaeta ended. After the French siege artillery breached Gaeta's walls, the Neapolitan garrison capitulated. By marching south, Stuart and Smith missed a chance to intervene in the siege or to land at Naples and attempt to overthrow Joseph's government. The surrender freed Masséna's force for operations in Calabria. In Stuart's defence, his expedition had successfully accomplished its main objective, which was to prevent any early invasion of Sicily. He also lengthened the revolt, which the French would not bring under control until 1807.[10]
The political situation in southern Italy would remain unchanged until 1815, with the British and Sicilian troops guarding the Bourbon King Ferdinand in Sicily and the Napoleonic King of Naples controlling the mainland. The British failed to use their naval superiority around Italy and did little to harass the French on the mainland. In 1808, Joachim Murat became the King of Naples after Joseph Bonaparte was sent to govern Spain. Murat made various attempts to cross the Strait of Sicily, which all ended in failure, despite once managing to secure a foothold in Sicily. It was not until Austria defeated Murat in the Neapolitan War in 1815, that King Ferdinand was finally restored to the Neapolitan throne.
Legacy [ edit ]
Maida Hill and Maida Vale in London are both named after this battle.
The Royal Navy named the recently captured Jupiter HMS Maida.
Orders of battle [ edit ]
Historical reanalysis [ edit ]
It is traditionally thought that in the Battle of Maida the British deployed in a line while the French attacked in columns, allowing the British to fire full strength volleys into the French columns, while only the first two ranks of the French could fire, similar to Crossing the T in naval combat. However, modern historians dispute this claim. The military historian James R. Arnold argues that:
"The writings of Sir Charles Oman and Sir John Fortescue dominated subsequent English-language Napoleonic history. Their views [that the French infantry used heavy columns to attack lines of infantry] became very much the received wisdom.... By 1998 a new paradigm seemed to have set in with the publication of two books devoted to Napoleonic battle tactics. Both claimed that the French fought in line at Maida and both fully explored French tactical variety. The 2002 publication of The Battle of Maida 1806: Fifteen Minutes of Glory, appeared to have brought the issue of column versus line to a satisfactory conclusion: "The contemporary sources are...the best evidence and their conclusion is clear: General Compère's brigade formed into line to attack Kempt's Light Battalion." The decisive action at Maida took place in less than fifteen minutes. It had taken 72 years to rectify a great historian's error about what transpired during those minutes."[13][14]
The British fired volleys then charged with the bayonet, and the French, failing to withstand the onslaught, broke and fled, losing heavily in the rout.
References [ edit ]
Sources [ edit ]
Coordinates:President Donald Trump walks on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on Aug. 23, 2017. The president lashed out at Republican leaders in Congress, suggesting efforts to increase the country's borrowing limit to avoid an economic-rattling default on the nation's debt are "a mess!" (Carolyn Kaster/AP)
By KEN THOMAS and CATHERINE LUCEY, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Fanning the flames of GOP discord, President Donald Trump is accusing Republican congressional leaders of botching efforts to avoid an unprecedented default on the national debt. "Could have been so easy-now a mess!" Trump tweeted.
The president's sharp words underscored the perilous state of play as Congress heads into the fall without a clear plan to take care of its most important piece of business: If it does not increase the nation's $19.9 trillion borrowing limit, the government could be unable to pay its bills, jarring financial markets and leading to other harsh consequences.
Trump unleashed his latest criticism of the GOP's congressional leadership in a series of morning tweets Thursday that also included a rebuke of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for his inability to get the Senate to repeal the Obama health care law. The harsh posts were fresh evidence of the president's fraying relations with fellow Republicans just when the White House and Capitol Hill most need to be working in sync.
Critiquing GOP legislative strategy, Trump tweeted that he had asked McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan to attach the legislation increasing the borrowing limit — a toxic vote for many Republicans — to popular military veterans' legislation that he recently signed. The idea was floated in July but never gained steam in Congress.
Trump said that because legislators didn't follow that strategy, "now we have a big deal with Dems holding them up (as usual) on Debt Ceiling approval."
Republicans control both Congress and the White House, placing the burden on them to ensure the government doesn't default. In the past, Democrats largely provided the votes for debt limit increases.
The Treasury Department has said the debt ceiling needs to be raised by Sept. 29 to avoid potential default on government obligations including Social Security and interest payments.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, playing down Trump's notion of a debt limit "mess," said flatly that Congress would "pass legislation to make sure that we pay our debts."
"I'm not worried that's not going to get done because it's going to get done," Ryan said during an appearance in Washington state.
McConnell likewise said earlier in the week that there was "zero chance, no chance, we won't raise the debt ceiling."
The president's latest broadsides against members of his own party came one day after the White House and McConnell issued statements pledging to work together.
After Trump's latest incendiary tweets, both sides tried again Thursday to tamp down talk of escalating tensions
Ryan, speaking to Boeing employees in suburban Seattle, said he and Trump have "different speaking styles" but are in "constant contact" on the policy agenda.
"For me it's really important the president succeeds, because if he succeeds then the country succeeds," Ryan said.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted the president's relationships with GOP leaders "are fine."
For all of that conciliatory talk, the evidence of mounting friction between the president and the Republican Party is growing.
Trump fired back Friday at Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker after the Republican lawmaker questioned the president's "competence" and "stability" last week. Trump tweeted: "Strange statement by Bob Corker considering that he is constantly asking me whether or not he should run again in '18. Tennessee not happy!"
Corker has not yet said whether he'll seek re-election in 2018.
Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake said in an interview with Georgia Public Broadcasting on Wednesday that the president was "inviting" a 2020 presidential primary challenge because he was only cultivating the GOP base of voters. Trump has labeled Flake as "weak" and "toxic" on Twitter.
Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican who has been critical of the president, told MSNBC this week it was "too difficult to say" if Trump would be the party's presidential nominee in 2020.
The growing rift between congressional Republicans and Trump could make it more difficult for the White House to advance its agenda.
The White House and congressional Republicans have yet to engage in serious negotiations to address the debt ceiling or stopgap legislation needed to avert a government shutdown when the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30. Trump is expected to hold meetings with congressional leaders after the Labor Day holiday.
Asked about the debt ceiling, Sanders put the onus on Congress to resolve the matter: "It's our job to inform Congress of the debt ceiling and it's their job to raise it."
She added that the White House was looking for a "clean" debt ceiling bill — without any legislative add-ons. But tea party Republicans and outside conservative groups are demanding spending cuts as the price for increasing the borrowing limit.
Raising the debt ceiling has often confounded Congress. A 2011 standoff between Republicans and the Obama administration over raising borrowing authority led to tighter controls on spending. That standoff was not resolved until the eleventh hour and prompted Standard & Poor's to impose the first-ever downgrade to the country's credit rating.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said raising the debt ceiling and securing the U.S. border was a "good combination" and suggested Republicans force Democrats into difficult votes over the borrowing limit.
"Let's put them in a box when it comes to the debt ceiling. The president is not crazy to attack the Congress. He's not crazy to think of ways to put Democrats in a bad spot regarding the debt ceiling. They do this all the time to us," Graham said in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.
Beyond the challenge of the debt limit, the effort to avoid a government shutdown could be complicated by Trump's long-promised plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The president threatened Tuesday to force a federal shutdown unless Congress provides money for the project. Sanders told reporters the administration would "continue to push forward and make sure the wall gets built."
Appearing at a Louisville breakfast event, McConnell tried to brush aside the tensions with Trump, quipping that running the Senate was "a little bit like being the groundskeeper at a cemetery. Everybody's under you, but nobody's listening."
___
Associated Press writer Adam Beam in Louisville, Kentucky, contributed to this report.Image via Pixabay
Washington Post healthcare reporter Paige Winfield Cunningham recently raised a few serious questions about how the Trump administration planned to manage Obamacare’s fall enrollment season. “The six-week sign-up period will be the first handled exclusively by an administration that’s hostile to the Affordable Care Act,” Cunningham wrote, “and one that hoped by now to see Congress pass legislation unraveling much of the law.”
Any reporter might have asked the questions Cunningham put to the Department of Health and Human Services, some of which she published in her daily Health 202 column:
Will the government contact current enrollees to alert them that sign-ups will last just 45 days, about half as long as in the past three years? Will HHS run call centers for consumers who need help as they look for plans? Will the HealthCare.gov computer system be adjusted to accommodate a possible crush of shoppers given the shorter sign-up period? And how will automatic enrollment be handled?
HHS offered no answers, although a spokesperson for the department’s communications staff did provide Cunningham with a statement: “As open enrollment approaches, we are evaluating how best to serve the American people who access coverage on HealthCare.gov.” Even that statement did not stand for long, reported Cunningham:
An hour later, the spokeswoman, Jane Norris, requested that the statement be withdrawn, saying that she did not have permission to release it. When I asked her again for detailed answers, neither she nor anyone else at HHS responded further.
“Nobody at HHS ever reaches out to me,” Cunningham told CJR during an interview. “More times than not, they don’t respond to emails asking for information.” On the day we spoke, Cunningham asked a spokesperson from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to have coffee. The official said she’d like to, but would have to get back to her. She never did.
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ICYMI: Journalists need to discontinue the genre of reporting known as “inspiration porn”
Cunningham’s troubles reflect the challenge many health reporters are up against as enrollment season approaches. Journalists from mainstream news outlets as well as trade publications are frustrated—by a lack of information from Trump administration health agencies, by their insufficient responses to those questions that do get answers, and by demands from HHS officials to change stories that have already been published. In light of the Trump administration’s plans to cut advertising and programs like local navigator groups that promote enrollment in the Affordable Care Act, such silence can carry devastating consequences for many Americans.
Complaints about access to government sources are nothing new. Journalists squawked about lack of access under the Obama administration, which promised to be the “most transparent” in US history. “The public information model is dead,” a public information officer employed by a federal agency that dealt with science and health told CJR. That model “has now been replaced by a highly message-controlled environment.”
Still, a lot can change in two years.
“Things have gotten worse in the Trump administration,” says Charles Ornstein, a senior reporter at ProPublica. “There’s an outward vitriol from this administration that’s different from previous administrations.”
Dan Diamond, who writes Politico’s health newsletter, shared several instances of unanswered questions with CJR. In one instance, Diamond asked Alleigh Marre, the recently departed national spokesperson for Health and Human Services, to confirm that HHS still sees a link between climate change and risks to American health. Marre didn’t respond.
“My experience,” says Diamond, “has not been great.”
Harris Meyer, a senior reporter for Modern Healthcare, says he always wants to give agencies a chance to respond. But “it’s basically impossible to get an interview with a CMS staffer,” he says. While officials “seem to be fairly responsive to emails, they don’t seem willing or able to provide an interview with the appropriate staffer.” That goes for positive coverage, like this story from Modern Healthcare that placed HHS Secretary Tom Price atop the publication’s annual list of the “50 Most Influential Physician Executives.” Meyer tried for two weeks to snag an interview with Price before he gave up.
Matt Wynn, data reporter for MedPage Today, went public with his troubles prying loose the data underlying a series of maps CMS sent out this summer. One map published in early June identified counties without insurers selling policies on healthcare.gov this fall, and a news release announced “at least 35,000 active Exchange participants live in counties projected to be without coverage in 2018.” Wynn asked CMS to see the numbers supporting those conclusions.
I shot an email to the media relations office in the department, asking for the data behind the map. About an hour later I got a response. No further information would be shared at this time, wrote Shelby Venson-Smith, a public affairs specialist. Adding insult to injury, the non-response was not to be used as a direct quote, the email said.
In his story, Wynn suggested that he had called Venson-Smith “on a bad day.” Wynn believes that line prompted Venson-Smith to contact his editor.
“It became clear she just didn’t like the insinuation that she was having a bad day,” says Wynn, who spoke with Venson-Smith about their exchange and then updated his story to attribute her “bad day” to CMS. “The point wasn’t specific to her, anyway, so I had no problem changing that.”
ICYMI: Why copy editors are still valuable to the news industry
In updating his story, Wynn also cut the description of CMS’ “non-response,” though perhaps that point is still clear enough to some readers. During his reporting, Wynn followed up with CMS and requested the map data once more. “Again, there was no further information to be had,” wrote Wynn. “Again, I was forbidden from quoting the email itself.”
Kathryn Foxhall, a freelance writer who works with the Society of Professional Journalists on freedom of information issues, protested the matter to Jane Norris, the same press contact that The Washington Post’s Cunningham had interacted with. In an email to Foxhall, Norris replied that CMS would not be sharing their data publicly because insurers hadn’t finalized their agreements. (Though, apparently, those agreements were final enough for CMS to put out its maps.) The email said the agency would provide the public “a complete picture” of the insurers prior to open enrollment on November 1. Furthermore, said Norris, “It would be greatly appreciated if you would respect the decision of our office and consider this matter tabled until we get closer to this time-frame.
Noam Levey, Washington health reporter for the LA Times, also had a run-in with Norris, who asked him to retract information included in a piece last spring about potential rate hikes. Levey reported the administration had offered to continue paying the ACA’s cost-sharing subsidies in exchange for insurer support of repeal legislation.
Once the story was out, the department demanded language about the quid pro quo be taken out, Levey told CJR. The offending words stayed, but the paper updated the story to include a comment from Norris, who called the Times’ account of the meeting where the deal was apparently discussed “completely false.”
The experiences of reporters like Wynn and Levey are instructive for journalists covering federal health policy. Even when HHS and CMS share relatively little information with reporters and the public, they retain a great deal of control over what little they give out.
While HHS press officials decline to answer reporters’ questions in satisfying detail, they seem to have plenty to say in their news releases and email blasts, which disparage the health law and sound more like campaign propaganda and GOP talking points than routine communications from a federal agency. The Obama administration was not shy about using the same PR tools to boost the ACA. But messages from HHS now feel substantively different, perhaps because they are aimed at denigrating a law they have a legal responsibility to administer.
An August 21 email blast sent by HHS to select reporters charged that the Affordable Care Act “failed to create a thriving, competitive market.” The email pointed out that Obamacare’s Enrollment Assistance Program had spent more than $1,500 for each one of the 14,500 people it signed up, numbers attributed to reporting by the Washington Free Beacon. There was no consideration for how such support might have helped healthcare shoppers understand complicated insurance options—just the implication that the money spent to help thousands of enrollees wasn’t worth it.
News releases that accompanied the county maps published this summer threw darts at the Affordable Care Act, too—again repeating a familiar theme from the Trump administration. “This is yet another failing report card for the Exchanges,” noted CMS Administrator Seema Verma in one release. In another, Verma said the decline in insurer participation left consumers with “fewer and fewer insurance options,” and she was “deeply concerned about the crisis situation facing the individual market in many states across the nation.” Later releases took on a softer tone but still claimed that millions of participants would have only one choice and “may not be able to receive the coverage they need.”
How reliable is the information the public gets from HHS and CMS? I asked Charles Gaba, the Michigan-based freelance web developer and founder of ACASignups, which has tracked Obamacare enrollment since 2013 and has criticized number crunchers in both the Obama and Trump administrations. “A lot of what they say is misleading, questionable, or in some cases outright wrong,” says Gaba about the Trump administration numbers. For example, a June email from HHS with the subject line “Failing for years…” sent to some reporters asks them to consider “this important market update”—that “average premiums are up 105 percent across the country — an increase of nearly $3,000—since 2013.”
But as Gaba has pointed out, that number is misleading. The calculation includes only 39 states, notes Gaba. (When the other 11 are added, the number drops to 84 percent.) Gaba says it would have been “absurdly easy” to obtain data for the other 11 if the agency “had wanted to present a fuller picture.”
The “105 percent” increase also doesn’t consider tax credits, which reduce premiums for half the buyers in the individual market. And policies sold in 2013 were not the same as those sold for 2017. While the older policies excluded people with preexisting conditions, newer policies did include them, as the ACA requires.
CJR asked HHS about its media communications. This is what the agency said in response:
HHS aims to respond in a timely manner to reporter inquiries. We do make policy experts available to the media and we contact reporters as often as necessary to provide additional context and to seek connections if information reported is inaccurate. On average, we do about 6,000-7,000 media interviews across the dept. each year, which could be about 500-600 interviews every month. Some months are even higher and some may be lower depending on what is happening that month. Calendar year 2017 is consistent with previous years.
The response also includes a link to HHS’ media policy.
What can health-care reporters do when they are denied information? There are workarounds, of course. But, while useful, workarounds effectively give agencies a pass and allow them to continue their information blockades. Reporters have always relied on experts from universities, think tanks, foundations, or businesses to explain complicated stuff. USA Today health reporter Jayne O’Donnell called on researchers at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to help create a map and story that showed the number of counties likely to have only one Obamacare insurer. “The best stories are ones from disgruntled employees. They’re not coming from official channels,” O’Donnell tells CJR. Finding those employees, however, grows harder with each successive administration that cuts off direct access to its experts.
HHS and CMS are powerful agencies that could decide the future of critical programs like Medicaid and Medicare, the Obamacare insurance marketplaces, and whether or not hospitals are considered safe. But when agency press officials avoid interviews and refuse to answer questions, it’s hard to present their positions fairly and understand whose side they are on. Government agencies are supposed to be objective about industry practices under their jurisdiction. But if reporters cannot get honest information about the industries they regulate, where can they go? Outside experts may not be unbiased sources. They may be trying to sell a book, or pursuing a promotion through quotes in the news media. It’s easy to overlook those biases when a reporter needs a comment on deadline.
“I see one administration learning from the last and building on the last administration’s restrictions,” says Foxhall. “I don’t see the administrations ever stopping what they are doing, unless we as journalists pull out all stops and call it the censorship that it is.” There’s been reluctance to do that on the part of journalism professional groups and news outlets themselves.
Foxhall says some journalists are unwilling to fight back for the information they want. “When all the accounting is done,” she says, “we’re more responsible for this than they are.”
CJR’s health care reporting is sponsored in part by a grant from the Commonwealth Fund.
ICYMI: “I’ve never seen lying and obstruction like this.”
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Trudy Lieberman is a longtime contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. She is the lead writer for CJR's Covering the Health Care Fight. She also blogs for Health News Review and the Center for Health Journalism. Follow her on Twitter @Trudy_Lieberman.Could NASA be looking for funding to gear up for a trip to Mars?
Public interest in manned missions to Mars has been a fantasy for decades and is slowly becoming a reality.
Riding the wave of enthusiasm, NASA has tentative plans for missions to Mars and the asteroid belt. But with the government’s $18 trillion pile-up of debt, how will it be paid for? Perhaps by licensing the right to use technology developed by NASA to energetic new companies.
David Miller, NASA’s chief technologist, says:
“The Startup NASA initiative leverages the results of our cutting-edge research and development so entrepreneurs can take that research — and some risks — to create new products and new services.”
The main goal of NASA technology licensing is to propel the technology developed over decades of space flight and from experiments aboard the Space Station into usable products that can improve the lot of mankind. It also may help create a lot of jobs.
Since the days of the Apollo program, moon landers and Tang, it has been known that the government’s research of ways to reach space can be turned into useful everyday items. Even nuclear energy started with a bomb. So, what can the private sector do with rocket science?
That’s what NASA wants to find out.
With the goal of encouraging high-tech businesses, NASA’s Technology Transfer Program offers a diverse portfolio of patented technologies ranging from coatings to sensors to instrumentation and more.
The initial NASA technology licensing is free and there are no minimum fees for three years. This offer is open only for companies that are started for the express purpose of using NASA’s technology to develop new services and products. Royalties on the patents will be collected when the companies start selling a product.
The NASA technology licensing will not be exclusive. The same information may be shared with more than one company.
NASA has put together an online catalog sorting the technology into 15 categories. Entrepreneurs can look through for a promising piece of information, then fill out an online application.
NASA (National Aeronaut |
Marten (2007) and Derek Ross (2002).
Talk to enough folks who study the draft and they'll tell you players selected in the first three rounds will provide the bulk of any draft's best players. Sure, exceptions such as undrafted free agents Tony Romo and Miles Austin exist, as do players selected in the later rounds, such as Jay Ratliff (seventh round) and Doug Free (fourth round).The new Arab city of Rawabi being built in Samaria (Shomron) with Israeli approval refuses to allow "Palestinian refugees" from UNRWA camps to relocate to the city. This, despite past statements to the contrary, and the general impression that the need for a new Arab city was partly because of the suffering of said'refugees', especially those still living in refugee camps.
So reports investigative journalist David Bedein of Israel Resource News Agency.
"The new Palestinian Arab city of Rawabi," writes Bedein, "has publicized in all stages of its development that it would build schools that would promote peace and reconciliation". He quoted Bashar al-Masri, Rawabi's chief developer, as telling the Guardian for a story on Rawabi, “We are not what they are led to believe, a bunch of terrorists…"
And yet, the town refuses to accept refugees – and why? "Because that would violate the PLO doctrine of the 'inalienable right of return' to homes which they left in Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Be'er Sheva, Tzfat, Ashkelon and more," writes Bedein.
This occurred in 1948 at the establishment of the Jewish State when the Arab leadership promised those fleeing that they would return to their homes once the Jews were slaughtered. When that failed to occur, the Arab world refused to resettle those who fled, purposely maintaining the only instance of multi-generational "refugeeism" in the world while Israel resettled and successfully absorbed an equal number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands during the same period.
The first residents of the city moved in nearly a year ago. The city, mostly large and modern apartment buildings, is planned to house 25,000 people, and up to 40,000 if the city expands in the future. It is located just three kilometers north of the small Jewish town of Ateret, and some 20 kilometers north of Ramallah.
The Jewish Federation in Brazil reportedly donated large amounts for the new city, with the understanding that the Rawabi would be founded upon a peace curriculum that would highlight the need to live in peace with Israel. However, Bedein writes, the president of the Brazilian Jewish Federation was "shocked" to learn that Rawabi will not allow UNRWA camp residents to relocate to Rawabi.
This is all the more shocking in view of the willingness of European countries to allow in hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from Syria, even given fears of terrorists among them. In addition, the Palestinian Authority and its supporters perpetually point to the "suffering" of the fourth generation'refugees' as another reason why Israel must cede Judea and Samaria – while the developers of Rawabi, when the opportunity to alleviate the refugees' plight arises, turn the other way.Modi might have said that his Government would not allow any religious group belonging to a majority or a minority to incite hatred, but things in India are far from over. The ban on beef by the Maharashtra government has already kicked off a huge country-wide rage, this was made even worse when Haryana (another BJP ruled state) decided to follow suit. The latest twist into the ban of beef is the following video which has been going viral.
The video allegedly features a muslim cow trader who was trading cows for his hindu employer. It shows him tied to an electric pole and surrounded by a fundamentalist mob which is thrashing him and inciting him to utter Jai Shri Ram.
Please share this, look at how these Hindu terrorist are torching the Muslims to become Hindu. This is wrong, they should be put in jail. Posted by Tehlka on Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Note: Indiatimes does not take responsibility of the authenticity of the video.
Don't Miss 97.3 K SHARES 53.2 K SHARES 66 K SHARES 23.8 K SHARES 11.8 K SHARESRaul Diaz of the Mexican Superintendence of Tax Administration confirmed this week that the Mexican government intends to build a wall along the Mexican/Guatemalan border. Diaz claims that the official purpose of the wall is to prevent the passage of contraband, but has also admitted “It could also prevent the free passage of illegal immigrants.”
Defending the decision to construct the wall, Mexico’s National Commission on Human Rights states that 500,000 people from Central America cross into Mexico illegally every year.
The proposal to construct the wall appears to go against the principles held by Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who, when speaking out against the state of Arizona for its tough immigration measure, remarked, “Criminalizing immigration, which is a social economic phenomena, this way opens the door to intolerance, hate, and discrimination. My government cannot and will not remain indifferent when these kinds of policies go against human rights.”
Apparently, Calderon's views on border control are relative.
Dave Gibson of The Examiner notes the hypocrisy in the Mexican government’s sudden change of heart as the Mexican authorities have long criticized the United States for the construction of a fence along a United States/Mexican border. Likewise, Mexico asserts that the passage of 500,000 people from Central America into Mexico is an appropriate reason for a fence, but that many people annually cross into the state of Arizona alone. Yet, that has not stopped Mexico from criticizing Arizona for the introduction of its immigration law, Senate Bill 1070.
Of course, this is not the first time the American people have encountered hypocrisy from the Mexican government regarding illegal immigration. In an article entitled “How Mexico Treats Its Illegal Aliens,” conservative writer Michelle Malkin outlined Mexico’s treatment of illegal aliens, which could be dubbed “intolerant, hateful, and discriminatory,” in the words of Calderon. Mexico demands a number of things from its illegals, particularly that they contribute to the “economic and social interests” of the country, while not upsetting “the equilibrium of the national demographics.” But can’t that be construed as a form of racial and ethnic profiling — the same over which the Mexican government articulated concerns when Arizona passed its immigration law?
It seems, however, that the old adage “what goes around comes around” is true. Just as Mexico has opposed construction of an American/Mexican border fence, the Guatemalan government is now speaking out against the Mexican government for the same reason and with the same arguments used by the Mexican government against the United States.
Marila de Prince of the National Bureau for Migration in Guatemala contends, “It is not a correct measure taken by the Mexican government.”
“We are watching the Mexican government’s initiative with concern because the migrants are in a situation of highest vulnerability, as demonstrated by the massacre in Tamaulipas, where five Guatemalans died,” adds Erick Maldonado of Guatemala’s National Council on Migrants.
Maldonado also contends that the wall will “make the migrants’ situation worse, because to meet their needs they are always going to find blind points where there are no migration or security controls, which implies greater risks.”
Yet despite the opposition from the Guatemalan authorities to the decision made by the Mexican government, the United States somehow remains the scapegoat. Father Francisco Pellizari, a Catholic priest of the Casa del Migrante (Migrant House) asserts, “The dramatic increase in the cost of [human traffickers] and the corruption of the authorities is the result of the walls the United States plans to build and has built along the border. We can transpose the Guatemala case to this situation and the results will be the same.”
What’s worse is that even as the United States has been elected to assume the responsibility for the issue of illegal immigration in Mexico, the American taxpayers are allegedly footing the bill for the construction of Mexico’s fence. According to the article “Mexico Builds a Fence on Their Own Southern Border,” the United States has provided Mexico with some of the funding to help build the fence on Mexico’s border, by way of the Merida Initiative. The State Department calls the Initiative a demonstration of “the United States’ commitment to partner with governments in Mexico, Central America, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic to confront criminal organizations whose actions plague the region and spill over into the United States." What the Initiative entails, however, is massive amounts of American tax dollars being funneled into Mexico, Central America, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti.
In 2010 alone, the United States has given $450 million to Mexico, with an additional $100 million requested from Congress to be sent to Central America, in order to “provide equipment and training to support law enforcement operations and technical assistance for long-term reform and oversight of security agencies,” says the State Department.
It is disheartening to know that the State Department has placed the needs of other countries over those of the United States. One wonders, however, if Mexico will have better luck completing the construction of its fence than the United States has had.
Photo: Mexico's President Felipe Calderon attends an anti-crime round-table "Dialog for Security" in Mexico City, Aug. 27, 2010.: AP ImagesDodon congratulates Krasnoselski on election victory. President of Moldova Igor Dodon congratulates the elected leader of the unrecognized Transdniestrian Vadim Krasnoselsky with a victory in the elections, inviting him to meet in Tiraspol. This itself Dodon said on Monday, December 12 at on Facebook. "We have accumulated a lot of topics for discussion. I believe that together we can move the Transdniestrian settlement process forward, "- wrote Dodon.
According to the Moldovan leader election Krasnoselski open a new page in the relations between Chisinau and Tiraspol. "On both banks of the river inhabited by representatives of the people. I believe that we share a lot more than the parts, "- said Dodon. As the correspondent. net, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Pridnestrovie Vadim Krasnoselsky won the first round of presidential elections in Transnistria. In Transnistria, the election winner was determined in the first round.
Original article: Moldovan President wants to meet with an elected head of Transnistria.Paul Johnston and Sandie Benitah, CP24.com
Some 6,000 University of Toronto teaching assistants are now on strike after rejecting a tentative offer reached early Friday morning, a representative with CUPE 3902 has confirmed.
In a vote held Friday evening, 1,000 union members voted 90 per cent to reject the contract, according to a release issued by the union shortly before 7 p.m.
“This means that our unit is past our strike deadline and without an agreement,” the release reads.
“We are therefore on strike as of now. Members should cease all bargaining-unit work immediately.”
Picketing is expected to begin at the university Monday, CUPE 3902 spokesperson Kevin Wilson said. No weekend classes will be impacted, he said.
Friday’s vote followed a tentative deal reached at around 3:30 a.m. this morning. Teaching assistants were in a legal strike position as of 12:01 a.m.
Speaking with CP24 Friday night, Philip Baiden, of the University of Toronto Graduate Students’ Union, described the situation as “unfortunate.”
“Grading, teaching and lab work will be affected,” he said. “However, we hope that this will be resolved quickly. We are strongly behind CUPE in this effort, and we hope that they can reach an agreement soon so that students can return to the classroom.”
York University continues to negotiate with its teaching assistants. A three-day long bargaining session is scheduled for Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
In a statement release Thursday morning, York said they hoped to reach a settlement.
"The interests of our students and their success are paramount to us," the statement said.
"York's overarching objective in these collective agreement negotiations is to reach a settlement without a disruption to the academic year. The university is committed to the collective bargaining process and remains confident that a settlement will be reached without a disruption."Now this is not going to be an article where I try to proclaim Fabio was the most strategic person on his season. Anybody who watched him would know that isn’t true. This is an article to highlight the other things Fabio did to clinch his victory because as we were once again reminded last night, strategy is not everything in these game shows.
Going into Survivor: Nicaragua, Fabio was a very self-aware person. He knew that his demeanor and attitude would lead people to think he was stupid. In fact, he welcomed it. As I’ve brought up before, Fabio came up with one of my favorite winner quotes of all-time when he reacted to his tribe deciding to nickname him Fabio.
Dude, I don’t care what they call me. I’m going to win the million dollars. So I guess my nickname’s Fabio.
That kind of laissez-faire attitude would be the cornerstone of Fabio’s game. No matter what, he was always going to go with the flow and he was never going to bother politicking. For better or for worse, Fabio in Nicaragua was just going to see where the waves would take him.
It’s a strategy that I like to call the “mirror strategy”. I call it that because when you’re in front of a mirror, there are no lies. What you see if who you are without any alterations. No Photoshop touch-ups, no Instagram filters. Just you. In Nicaragua, that’s exactly what Fabio brought with him, just Fabio, the same guy he sees in the mirror every day.
Like Matty Whitmore being the unexpected “sane” person in Survivor: Gabon, Fabio becomes Nicaragua’s voice of reason. In any other season, Fabio should be the wacky side character who has fun soundbites but this is Nicaragua and in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Take the first tribal council La Flor attends for example, the infamous Shannon Elkins boot.
At that tribal, things get pretty heated. Shannon starts saying some pretty dumb things in an attempt to save himself. This includes a bizarre non-sequitur to ask Sash Lenahan if he’s gay. Despite being on Shannon’s side, Fabio starts deriding Shannon’s stupid line of questioning. He tries to bring the tribe back to the point at hand but it’s no use because his tribe is filled with a bunch of lunatics.
For much of the pre-merge, most of Fabio’s story is about disliking NaOnka Mixon. Once again, Fabio proves his inability to lie or be fake because whenever NaOnka does something stupid, like steal Fabio’s socks or hide a bunch of food, Fabio just can’t stop himself from calling her out. It’s probably pretty endearing to the rest of his tribe, who are afraid to say anything and mess up their social standing within their alliances but also silently hate NaOnka.
Throughout much of the middle portion of the game, Fabio lays low. That doesn’t mean he isn’t doing things. He forms a tight bond with Marty Piombo before Marty is voted out. He gets into an alliance with Benry Henry that won’t get much power but will help him down the stretch. Throughout this time, Fabio makes friends, never makes anybody angry (except for NaOknka but she doesn’t count) and keeps to himself.
We also see a lot of raw emotion from Fabio at the loved ones visits. It’s a recurring theme of the season that Chase is unable to make a decision without somehow backstabbing and pissing off at least one person. When Chase wins the loved ones reward, he doesn’t take Fabio after explicitly telling him that he would. Fabio is understandably upset at this turn of events and blows up publicly at Chase. It’s not something that would normally be smart to do in the game but Fabio doesn’t care about that. In that moment, he only cares about seeing his mother.
Where Fabio really starts to come alive is down the stretch of the season. Stuck in the minority at the final six, he realizes that to get to the end, he needs to win competitions… which he does. At final five, he makes a strong push to vote out Holly Hoffman instead of the old and nearly crippled Dan Lembo. Sash won’t flip without Chase Rice and Chase isn’t flipping so Fabio’s push falls on deaf ears. Still, Fabio is the only one to make an effort to keep Dan and that buys a lot of credit with the definite mafia boss.
Fabio’s best moment is without a doubt throughout the entire final four round. He once again wins immunity, his third straight and fourth total, and guarantees himself a spot at final tribal council. The safety also allows him to be completely open with the rest of the final three. This makes Fabio impossibly happy because he can now make people squirm knowing their future is in his hands.
Welcome to Fabio’s world bitches.
It starts with Sash. Fabio tells him with a huge shit-eating grin that he isn’t quite sure yet who he wants win him in the final three. Sash, being a total sleazebag, tries to pretend like he was never planning on cutting Fabio and that he was always going to be loyal to him. Fabio sees right through this because Sash is more transparent than a wet t-shirt.
With this information, he goes to Chase and Holly individually. They both confirm to Fabio that they intended on voting him off had he not won immunity. This makes Fabio laugh a hearty guffaw because now they are forced to turn on each other.
The fun continues at tribal council where Fabio might be the most exuberant contestant I have ever seen. He laughs in Sash’s face as Sash tries to pretend like he was going to stay true to Fabio. At this tribal, Fabio makes Sash feel so endangered that Sash fesses up his whole game. He admits to multiple alliances and numerous backstabs. Basically he makes himself completely ineligible to win come final tribal council and becomes an asset for Fabio to keep in the game.
The fun keeps going for Fabio at the other three’s final pleas. He laughs some more when Chase tells him that he was the most open and honest with Fabio, not Sash. Fabio is almost incredulous hearing this and replies,
Yeah, yeah, you know… at the very last second *big laugh* you’re pretty honest with me at the very last second. So yeah I would agree.
At final tribal council, Fabio is once again an open book. He can sit there knowing that he got to the end without ever backstabbing anybody or going back on his word. He can point to competition wins as a manner of self-preservation and his real friendships with the jury as key reasons why they should vote for him.
Sitting next to Sash, the comparisons are shocking. Sash continues to try and sleazy his way through the game. Pretending to be sorry about backstabs and heartbreaks with a smug-ass grin on his face. On the other end of the spectrum, Fabio is asked about his family and has a tearful breakdown about how much they mean to him and why he’s out on Survivor for them. You couldn’t ask for a bigger difference in realness.
To give credit where credit is due, Chase puts together a strong final tribal council performance. He owns up to much of his game and admits to his deceit and lies. It’s the only time in the game that Chase doesn’t appear to be wishy washy. It’s impressive but it’s also too late. Enough of the jurors have no respect for his game and genuinely like Fabio so Chase won’t be getting the majority.
It’s something Jeff Probst always says, Survivor is going to reveal to you who you truly are. Nobody can go on Survivor and keep up a veneer for 39 days under the heavy stress of starvation and sleep deprivation. Sooner or later, the real you will show itself. For Fabio, he never had to reveal anything he didn’t want to because he was always going in as himself. It’s what endeared him to the jury and it’s what got him the win.
Last night in front of the jury, Josh reminded me a lot of Fabio. He was completely honest and himself. At one point, he forgot his speech out of nervousness and it actually made him even more endearing. He may have come off slightly insecure but it was completely genuine. Unlike Fabio, Josh may have made some enemies in the game on the way but at the end of the day, he was real enough to get those people to respect him. More often than not, being authentic means way more than playing a good strategic game. Fabio helped proved that and Josh just reinforced it.The oppressor/oppressed gender dichotomy (OOGD) is a view of gender held by many feminists that sees men as an oppressor class and women as an oppressed class, and looks at gender issues and gender relations in terms of class warfare and class oppression—essentially a “battle of the sexes” with “men keeping women down”. A similar approach has been applied to other demographic traits like race (in social justice), and economic class (in Marxism).
A lot of the seemingly extreme or unexpected behaviour from feminists makes more sense in light of the fact that many of them see the world this way. And a lot of the aversion from people to identifying with feminism comes from not seeing the world this way. (The term was coined by /u/Karmaze on reddit.)
Sections:
Oppressor/Oppressed in Feminism Oppressor/Oppressed in Social Justice Oppressor/Oppressed in Marxism Comparisons Problems with Oppressor/Oppressed in Gender
(Length: 2,100 words)
1. Oppressor/Oppressed in Feminism
Although it’s influential in some other varieties of feminism, the oppressor/oppressed gender dichotomy is especially characteristic of radical feminism. (Radical feminism is an actual type of feminism with specific beliefs, not a generic term for extremist feminism.) Ginette Castro, in her 1984/1990 book American Feminism: A Contemporary History (p69), writes that “[t]he first necessity of any organized protest movement is to identify the oppressor” and that “radical feminists deliberated who was responsible for the oppression of women and came up with the answer: men are the enemy”. She says that this is “aimed not at the genetic individual man but rather at men collectively as an oppressor class” (although one source she quotes says “all men have oppressed women”). For liberal feminists, on the other hand, “the problem of culpability [is] effectively evaded, since blame is vaguely attributed to society or some institution”.
British feminist journalist Laurie Penny addresses the “average male” and says that “while you, individual man, going about your daily business […] may not hate and hurt women, men as a group –men as a structure – certainly do” in a 2013 article in The New Statesman.
Also in The New Statesman, British feminist journalist Suzanne Moore says that “If you are interested in the liberation of women, you’ll find that the biggest barrier to this is men: men as a class” (2016 article).
Steven P. Schacht, associate professor of sociology at State University of New York, Plattsburgh (now deceased), wrote an article in 2001 (published in the journal Men and Masculinities here) called “Teaching About Being An Oppressor: Some Personal and Political Considerations”, where he said that “both in action and mere presence, much of my life has been spent being oppressive to others” and referred to the “oppressive basis of my being” because of being a man (and white, etc.).
British feminist activist Sienna Rodgers writes on her blog that “A class based analysis is used for radical (not liberal) feminist theory. Men are the oppressor class.”
Marilyn Frye, in her article “Oppression” in Gender Basics: Feminist Perspectives on Women and Men (2000), writes that “it is a fundamental claim of feminism that women are oppressed”. She dismisses the argument that men are oppressed too by describing it as saying that “oppressors are oppressed by their oppressing”.
2. Oppressor/Oppressed in Social Justice
The social justice movement more broadly believes that just as men oppress women, it’s also true that whites oppress non-whites, heterosexual people oppress homosexual people, able-bodied people oppress disabled people, etc.
Feminism and the social justice movement shouldn’t really be considered separate because feminism has, since the 80s or 90s, become “intersectional”—which usually means that it looks at areas other than gender and applies oppressor/oppressed to them as well, as in the chart above. This sometimes involves no longer calling our society a “patriarchy” and instead calling it a “kyriarchy” (which includes patriarchy as well as the other “axes of oppression”).
As an example, EverydayFeminism writer Sian Ferguson, in the article “Privilege 101: A Quick and Dirty Guide”, refers to many different power structures in our society: “patriarchy, white supremacy, heterosexism, cissexism, and classism — to name a few”, and says that “[p]rivileged groups have power over oppressed groups”. (She doesn’t specifically use the term “oppressor”, but if one group “has power” and the other group “is oppressed”, it’s clear that the first group is the oppressor.)
3. Oppressor/Oppressed in Marxism
The idea to apply oppressor/oppressed to demographic groups came, in part, from the idea of oppressor and oppressed economic classes in Marxism. Ara Wilson, professor of Women’s Studies at Duke University, says that patriarchy (a term commonly used for the oppressor/oppressed gender dichotomy) “helped feminists think systematically about sex and gender, in ways that borrowed from, but also necessarily separated from, the Marxist analysis of capitalism” (from her article “Patriarchy: Feminist Theory” in the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women: Global Women’s Issues and Knowledge).
Let’s look at what the “original” application of oppressor/oppressed. Marxism and many other types of socialism (e.g. left-anarchism, though not anarcho-capitalism) divide people living in capitalist society into two main classes: labour and capital. Labour is made up of people who make a living primarily by selling their labour to other people (i.e. being employed), while capital is made up of people who make a living primarily by owning the means of production (infrastructure: buildings, machines, land, etc.) and hiring other people to work for them.
They view the employment relationship as exploitative and oppressive. First, the worker does not receive the full value of their labour (the product or service they produced). Part of the money made goes to them, part to expenses (like raw materials and energy), and then the owners skim some (or a lot) off the top for themselves, making them generally much more wealthy than the workers (without doing much more work, or sometimes any work at all outside of investing). Second, the employer is in control of the employment relationship to a much greater extent than the worker is, which includes setting the terms and conditions of employment. A worker can quit, but they generally need a job much more than an employer needs any one employee (for reasons of numbers and finances), so a threat to fire means more than a threat to quit.
Because capitalist society protects private property and this “oppressive” relationship, they see capitalism as a system of class oppression: the capital class is the oppressor and the labour class is the oppressed. Their solution is socialist revolution, where labour breaks free and liberates themselves by taking over the means of production (through workers’ cooperatives or through the government nationalizing industry) in order to get control of the working conditions and the profit of their labour.
For more (from actual Marxists): “What is Class Oppression? Who is the Working Class?”, “Introduction to Marxism”, and “What is Marxism”.
4. Comparisons
Economist Anold Kling offers in his book The Three Languages of Politics (also on his blog) the “three-axis model”. According to him, conservatives look at the world in terms of civilization vs. barbarism, libertarians in terms of freedom vs. coercion, and progressives in terms of oppressor vs. oppressed. He’s clearly onto something because we’ve seen oppressor/oppressed applied to economic class, gender, and then all sorts of other demographic traits too. Let’s look at how these areas compare.
4.1 A Fundamental Difference: Economic Class vs. Others
The application of oppressor/oppressed to economic class is fundamentally different from its application to demographic traits like race and gender. In economics, Marxists judged a certain behaviour to be oppressive (employing other people and making a profit from their labour) and then identified the people who do that thing as the oppressor class. You or I might disagree that what they do is wrong or oppressive, but it’s clearly still something that they do.
On the other hand, social justice advocates identify the oppressor classes based not on actions but on identities. They didn’t say “men who beat their wives are oppressors”, or “men who discriminate against women in hiring are oppressors”, they said “men as a group are oppressors”. That’s inherently worse and we should be skeptical, because it can’t literally be true that men’s (or white people’s, etc.) existence is oppressive. There have to be some oppressive actions that we’re generalizing to these groups. What exactly is the correlation between being in that group and performing the oppressive actions? Is it possible for someone to be in the group but not perform these actions? How common must those actions be to be considered representative of the group?
4.2 Inconsistencies
There are many inconsistencies for who gets the label of oppressor and who gets the label of oppressed. Men are more common than women in positions of political and economic power, which is one fundamental argument behind men having power and being oppressors. Looking at age, old people are substantially more common than young people in these very same positions, but instead young people are put on top of the “privilege, domination, and oppression” line for some reason.
Black people are substantially more likely to be in jail (because of discrimination and other reasons) and to be killed by police. This is a core argument for them being oppressed (see. Black Lives Matter), but if we look at gender it’s men who are in that same position and they’re still on top of the “privilege, domination, and oppression” line.
Men earning more money than women (and whites more than blacks) is a common argument for “patriarchy” gender oppression and “white supremacy” racial oppression. But Asians make approximately $12,000 more a year than whites (in a U.S. context, 2012), even though whites are supposed to be their oppressors (since Asians are “People of Color” and of a non-European origin).
5. Problems with Oppressor/Oppressed in Gender
As Warren Farrell mentions in his book The Myth of Male Power, “[n]owhere in history has there been a ruling class working to afford diamonds they could give to the oppressed in hopes the oppressed would love them more”. A lot of other arguments against oppressor/oppressed accurately describing the state of gender relations and gender issues in the present-day Western world can be found in the Non-Feminist FAQ. Most importantly, it’s not clear that women are much worse off, and the size and the effect of the power imbalance between men and women have been exaggerated. Since the truthfulness of the oppressor/oppressed gender dichotomy is challenged there, here I want to focus on the negative effects of that view.
Class-based analyses are collectivist in the sense that they involve primarily thinking in terms of groups, which can push people too far in the direction of seeing individuals as instances of the group they belong to rather than as the individuals they are. For example, if a mostly male legislative body introduces restrictions on abortion, this will often be held not just against those politicians (or the men and women who elected them) but against men as a group. Or if most of the powerful people are men, they’ll ascribe the trait of “having power” to men as a group, even if a regular man hardly has any more connection to this power than a regular woman does.
One particularly strange example of this collectivist approach to gender is that many feminists dismiss the fact that men face higher levels of many types of violence with “but that’s just other men doing it”. It’s as if they see all men as one person and male-on-male violence is like that person hitting himself, while male-on-female violence is that person hitting someone else, which is much more serious. Similarly, I’ve seen many feminists dismiss the fact that men have almost always been the ones sent away to war (which easily counts as oppression, even though oppression is not a term I use lightly) with “but it’s just other men doing it”. It’s as if genders are teams and that’s just an own-goal, a blunder that doesn’t matter.
Oppressor/oppressed is also an antagonistic world-view in the sense that it looks at these groups as being in conflict with each other. In Marxism the term “class warfare” is commonly used, and in gender a common term for male feminists is “allies” (example), which is also suggestive of warfare. “Gender as class warfare” often leads to approaching men as enemies (albeit ones who might defect), or seeing women who are skeptical about feminism as traitors to their gender rather than people with genuine concerns about feminist ideas and actions. It also leads to differing standards of treatment for men and women (because the oppressors need/deserve much less in terms of courtesy and concern).
For more on the consequences of applying oppressor/oppressed to gender, there’s an excellent (albeit long) post entitled “The simplistic, mono-directional model of oppression and privilege” on the /r/FeMRADebates subreddit.
AdvertisementsYou may recall last October that I made a lengthy post on this subject which covered a few basic areas of where I think the story of the next Halo game is going to go (Halo: Xbox One – What’s Going To Happen?). Time has passed since then, in that time we’ve had quite a bit of new story additions with the release of the final book in the Kilo-5 Trilogy, Mortal Dictata, and the ongoing monthly releases of Halo: Escalation. Not only that, but potential foreshadowing elements have been picked up in the older pieces of fiction as well.
With E3 less than two months around the corner, now seems like a good time to get the speculation mitts on and do a comprehensive study of where the story may go. For this post in particular, it’ll be a comprehensive look at what has simply come to be known as the ‘Ark Theory’. The Ark Theory can be traced back to last year’s E3 Media Briefing when Microsoft unveiled the teaser for Halo: Xbox One, I was among the first people to immediately jump into speculation mode and spearhead the idea that the Master Chief had been guided back to the Lesser Ark. For those who either missed the trailer, need refreshing, or just want to watch something awesome, here it is:
While it is important to keep in mind that the teaser is primarily a symbolic, conceptual piece for where the Master Chief’s journey is being directed, and therefore not necessarily representative of what’s actually going to happen in the game, there is a degree of truth one can draw from it based on Frankie’s comment on NeoGAF.
So, first of all, what is the current state of the Lesser Ark? Last time we actually saw it, we may or may not have detonated a Halo ring over it which tore itself to pieces and crumbled right over the megastructure. That was almost seven years ago now, there’s been a few tidbits of fiction since then which have revisited the Ark and given us some insight into its current state. Of particular note here is the fourth of the five Eleventh Hour Reports, released weekly by 343 in their weekly Bulletins in the lead-up to Halo 4’s release.
We dispatched an isolation contact group [L3-08] to the site. Upon entering the debris field, the group was immediately pinged by a non-standard, heterogenic signal emanating from the structure’s surface – or, at least, what remained of it after the event. Following protocol, the contact group released probes [839] into the debris field. Once it was deemed secure by composite scans conducted over the course of 3.7 days, UNSC RUBICON was deployed from Luna. Aboard were a number of high-risk, remote contact teams [RCT] outfitted for deployment to the construct’s surface. Without the installation’s artificial sun operating at full capacity, navigating the debris field for insertion was difficult – navigating the installation’s surface itself was even more difficult. The damage was… traumatic. Habitability sustainment systems were still active in some locations, but were operating intermittently and in a state of disrepair – a factor that generated extremely volatile weather conditions. Some indigenous [if it can be called that] fauna may have survived the event, but RCTs were strictly advised to avoid all potentially hostile life forms. After 8.4 days, all contact with RCTs was severed. Only one [RCT-06] returned, suffering extensive casualties. They brought back a severely damaged armature, which appeared to be the original source of the signal. Initially, there was a strong suspicion of this armature’s origin, but local science teams undertook an aggressive node cultivation process to withdraw data from the device and determine, with veracity, its actual origin. All communications with the UNSC RUBICON halted within 48 hours of their last notice. Search and rescue teams have been deployed to the site, but have reported no findings yet.
This tells us that the Ark is still a functional installation, at least it’s relatively intact. The artificial sun is still active but not operating at full capacity, the surface of the installation has suffered “traumatic” damage, and there are “volatile weather conditions” sweeping the surface (like… maybe sandstorms?). However, habitability sustainment systems are still active and it is even indicated that life on the Ark remains.
This also ties in with two other pieces of Halo media – The Return from Halo: Evolutions, and Halo: Primordium, the second book of Greg Bear’s Forerunner Saga.
The Return follows the story of a Sangheili Shipmaster who returns to a human colony he once glassed during the events of the Human-Covenant war, the events of this story are primarily |
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